Ivan Klima - No Saints or Angels

'Don't think about it,' I say and it strikes me that it's not really the best way to finish my visit. So I ask him, 'Do you remember when I last visited you in hospital? There was a young man with you; you introduced him to me.'

'I don't recall.'

'You told me it was a former student of yours.'

'Oh, yes, now I remember. Why do you mention it?'

'He called me and asked how you were.'

'That was nice of him.'

'He seems like a nice person,' I say, trying to make my voice sound as disinterested as possible.

'Why not? Young people tend to be less spoiled. Some of them, at least. He was a quiet young fellow, a trifle erratic, but he was interested in history and the stars. We talked together about time. He once let on to me that he was interested in astrology and I tried to explain to him that it was obscurantism.'

'Maybe it isn't,' I countered in his defence.

'I know you believe in it too. I tried to explain to him that it was pseudo-science. I'm sorry to see that you as a doctor attach any importance to such heresies, but I'm hardly going to convince you now.'

'I'm glad you don't intend to convince me,' I say, and as I bid him goodbye I tell him I hope he'll get well soon.

But being a doctor, I don't fool myself that he'll ever get well.

4

Saturday morning. It was a hot night and I slept badly. I've been sleeping worse and worse lately. And yet I'm tired. I'm so tired that in the evening I collapse into insensibility. But no sooner do I overcome that deathly torpor than I'm awake again and trying in vain to get back to sleep. I am too weary to fall asleep; everything aches, my body, my back and my legs, as well as my thoughts. I need a rest. I need a seaside holiday.

The sea enthralled me from the very first moment I set eyes on it.

Water is my element.

Virginia Woolf loved water too. There one might have sat clock round lost in thought. Thought — to call it by a prouder name than it deserved — had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds. . she wrote. And she also ended her own life in water. The river was called the Ouse.

Nadya, the wife of the Soviet tyrant, shot herself. They say that

outside the room where they found her, a rose lay on the floor; it had just fallen from her hair.

Four years ago I went to the seaside with Charles the Second. We had a room booked in a pension and the sea was just beyond some low dunes. Our room was small and clean, with fresh flowers on the table and painted flowers on the walls. We lay down side by side and even made love. His treatment of me was as always kindly and loving, but I was obsessed with the thought that the way he treated me was the way he must have treated some other woman just a few days before, that he had no difficulty in declaring his love to two different women. When, one evening, he started to talk about our future and about how we'd get married, I finally broached the subject. But I did so in the hope that he would deny everything, that he'd tell me I was crazy and that he loved only me.

But instead he said, 'Eva's been spilling the beans, I see.'

I told him it didn't matter who told me.

He hung his head and without looking at me asked me if I wanted to know the details.

That was something I really didn't want.

He asked me if I could forgive him.

I told him I could forgive him, but I didn't want to live with him.

He remained motionless for a moment, then got up and left the room. From the place where I sat I could see him climbing the dune. The sea was rough and a ban on bathing had been in force since that morning. Charles the Second was an epileptic and he hadn't taken his tablets yet that day. I don't know whether he reached the sea. Had it been a few years earlier, I might have thought he had simply taken the opportunity to stay in the West. But for the past five years there had no longer been any need to flee to freedom, he could only be fleeing from me. But why should he flee from me, seeing that I'd just told him I didn't want him? He could also have been fleeing from his conscience, from

despair or from loneliness. Or he was drawn by the sea and death. That's something I'd have understanding for. Whenever I've stood alone on some isolated spot overlooking the sea I have imagined myself swimming further and further from the shore until I don't have the strength to return. I found the thought of sinking to the bottom both terrifying and enticing. But anyway I know it won't be water that kills me, because I'm a Piscean. If I'm to perish or choose my own death, it will be a fiery one.

It's strange how they didn't find even his clothes on the shore. For a long time afterwards I had qualms about whether I'd been too severe with him. But then in the same way that he disappeared without trace, all traces of him started to disappear from my memory. It's possible that he's still alive and he just disappeared to spite me for rejecting him.

It looks as if Dad not only went out with V.V. alias W. but also had a child by her. W. refused to apply to the medical board or even see my friend Dr H. She got angry and told me she wasn't a rabbit. We had a row but she didn't change her mind. V.V. then left town and found a job in Chrudim. She virtually disappeared from Dad's life but not from the world. Years later he complained in his notebook that the regular monthly allowance he had to pay her to keep alive something that oughtn't to have been was draining him.

He always spoke about that child as 'it', so I can't tell whether it was a son or his third daughter.

I suddenly realized I might have another sibling — a half-brother or half-sister. It stunned me and I was staggered at the thought that something like that could happen without any of us suspecting: either Mum, my sister, or me. The deception that Dad practised on us all! And I stupidly believed that at least towards us he acted honourably.

I go and take a shower. I let it run full blast: maybe I'll manage to wash away all that nastiness, my fatigue and my sins real and imagined.

I find my daughter in the kitchen already dressed and already having had her breakfast.

'Are you planning to go somewhere?'

'We're going to an anti-racism demo on Old Town Square.'

I ask her who the 'we' consists of and she reels off a string of names that mean nothing to me.

I commend her concern for the fate of her fellow citizens but voice my doubt that they would be demonstrating so early in the morning.

No, the demonstration is planned for the afternoon but they have to make preparations and discuss a plan of action because there is likely to be an attack by the skinheads.

I imagine my little girl being beaten up by some enraged shaven-headed lout, but I quell my anxiety and refrain from asking her to stay home.

'What time are you intending to come home?'

She hesitates for a moment. 'I was thinking I might spend the night at Katya's cottage.'

'You said you were going to a demonstration.'

'Yeah, we are, but afterwards I'd. .'

'Afterwards you come home.'

'But Mum, it's so nice out. You can't really want me to moon around in Prague when the weather's so great.'

'I don't want you spending the night goodness knows where with goodness knows who.'

'But I told you I'll just be with Katya at her cottage.'

'And who else?'

'Her mum will be there too.'

'And no one else?'

'It's only a tiny cottage. Really teeny-weeny.'

'And you'll be going there with Katya's mum?'

'Of course. We're hardly going to kick her out.'

'And what about study?'

'But Mum, I can't study in this heat!'

'Whereas you could when it was cold.'

'Yeah, I did slack, I agree,' she concedes, 'but it's too late now anyway; I'll never catch up.'