Ivan Klima - No Saints or Angels

These are unwarranted imaginings. He loves me; he wouldn't have brought me here if he were interested in some lanky she-wolf, either here or anywhere else. After all he's surrounded by loads of girls that I know nothing about, such as the secretaries he's bound to have at hand. I've noticed that he almost never mentions his work, as if wanting or having to conceal it from me.

He tells me I'm precious to him. Maybe I'm precious precisely because I'm not a little girl any more.

Johannes Brahms's mother was seventeen years older than her husband. And the same number of years separated Isadora Duncan from Yesenin. When they first met, she was forty-three and he was twenty-six. They actually got married. According to their biographies, she married him. She asked for his hand. After all, she was older and more famous. She died at fifty, while he killed himself aged thirty. Before he hanged himself in that Petrograd hotel he wrote his last poem in the blood from his severed veins. I can remember the lines because they seemed to me plaintively wise:

Goodbye: no handshake to endure. Let's have no sadness — furrowed brow. There's nothing new in dying now Though living is no newer.

They say he went mad. Or had he arrived at the truth? If he hadn't killed himself he'd have been killed by the murderer who ruled his country and who died the day I was born.

But I'm no Isadora Duncan. I'm not famous, I'm simply as old as she was and know how to fix people's teeth. My lover is no poet and I'm sure he won't kill himself; he enjoys life and enjoys playing games. For him life is still a game in which he has accepted me as a fellow player for a while until one day he lets me go again.

The hopeless inevitability of it all and my future loneliness bear down on me. I ought to have stayed home with my little girl: she is in danger and therefore needs me. I've neglected her. At the very moment when I should be there with her, I'm sitting here fretting among strangers, whilst she could be drowning, vainly trying to stay afloat, feet groping for the bottom, calling and waving her arms. Nobody hears her, except for some fiend sitting in a boat who hauls her out and has a syringe with poison waiting in his pocket.

I can see her little arm groping for my breast that is full of milk; her fingers that are like a doll's, except that they are warm, gently touch my skin.

Suddenly I see it, that hand encroaching on my jewellery drawer and taking the chain and the ring away to the one in the boat who pretends he's saving her.

What if my sister is right about me living in fear but refusing to see what she saw at first glance?

I can't bear to be here any longer; I get up and tell Jan I have to go home.

He interrupts the game for a moment and goes out with me to the front hall. 'I expect you found it boring.'

I tell him I wasn't bored but that I'm worried about Jana. I ask him not to be cross with me for leaving.

As if he could be cross with me, he says. I am not to be cross with him for not leaving with me; he doesn't want to spoil the game for the others. He accompanies me out to the stairway, switches on the light, leans towards me and whispers that he'd sooner be with me.

Mum is still up and impatiently asks me how I've enjoyed myself.

I tell her that it was interesting.

'And where have you been exactly?'

Mum feels like a chat. So I go and fetch a bottle of Frankovka and pour us some before trying somehow to describe what I've just experienced, although I know it's not what matters. So I tell her who I was there with. And that maybe he's in love with me. I also tell her how much younger he is and that he's an ideal young man: he doesn't smoke or drink apart from sipping a drop of wine from a glass as a favour to me, he doesn't swear and he brings me flowers. I don't tell her that he investigates the crimes of the people that Dad served.

My mother acts as if she hasn't registered the information about his age; she wants to know if I'm love with him.

I feel silly saying yes like a little girl, but I'm not able to disown my young man, so I say, 'But I'm over forty-five, Mum!'

'So am I,' my mother declares, 'and I have been for a long time.'

'But you've had Dad.' I try to remember the time when Mum was forty-five. I was twenty-three. I had two siblings, one of whom was unknown to us: Mum, my sister and me. I was at university, lounging around in pubs, occasionally getting drunk and not caring a damn about home. I can't picture what Mum looked like then. I can't imagine her falling in love with someone, even if Dad hadn't been there. Forty-five, I used to think in those days, was the age when you wake up in the morning and you can already hear the death knell in the distance.

'How's Jana,' I ask, in order to change the subject.

'She's asleep. But she seems odd to me,' Mum says, accepting the new topic. 'Is she ill?'

'Did she complain of anything?'

'No, not at all.'

'So why do you think she might be ill?'

'She told me she was cold,' my mother said. 'She put on a sweater and huddled as if she had a fever. That's not normal in this heat, is it?'

'Did you ask her why she felt cold?'

'She just said, I'm cold. She sat in the armchair and stared in front of her. As if she could see someone who wasn't there. She even mumbled something to herself. Maybe she's exhausted.'

'What from, for heaven's sake?'

'They make awful demands on them now at school. I heard about it on the radio.'

'They may well make demands but that doesn't bother her in the least.'

'It's just as well it'll be the holidays soon,' Mum says, harping on the same note, 'and she'll get a bit of rest. You both need some rest.'

Yes, it will be the holidays. I've saved up for them. We'll go to the seaside. I've already booked a holiday in Croatia. I'll take my little girl a long way from here. I'll take her across the sea to a desert island where no dealer will find her, and if one did find us I'd throttle him and throw him in the sea, even if it meant a life sentence.

3

I searched the entire flat but I couldn't find my jewellery anywhere. For a week now I've checked my purse morning and evening. This morning I discovered that three hundred crowns had disappeared from it. Overnight.

Jana comes home only slightly late. She tosses her bag under the coat hanger and is making her way to her bedroom to kick up her usual racket. 'Jana!' My tone of voice arouses her vigilance. 'Yes, Mum?'

'I need to talk to you seriously.'

'But you always talk to me seriously.'

'Stop playing the fool. You play truant. .'

'But we had that out ages ago. I've stopped playing truant now.'

'And you steal.'

There is a moment of consternation and then she says, 'That's not true.'

'It is true and you know it.'

'I've never stolen anything from anyone.'

'I don't know about anyone else, but from me you have. You seem to think what's mine is yours.'

'I don't think anything of the sort.'

'And what about my jewellery?'

'I don't know what you're talking about. I expect you mislaid it somewhere.'

'Jana, you know full well what happened to them.'

'Your jewellery is no concern of mine, or any fucking jewellery,' she shouts. She acts so hurt, that I almost waver.

'Last night three hundred crowns disappeared from my purse.'

'I didn't take them.'

'So can you tell me who did, then?'

'You lost them somewhere. Your money's no concern of mine.'

'You forgot to say, your fucking money. It's no concern of yours, you just take it.'

'That's not true!'

'And you lie into the bargain.'

'That's not true!'

'It's obvious to me what you need the money for.'

'I didn't take any money.'

'So I'll take you to the drop-in clinic to have them do a blood test and get some advice about what to do with you.'