Ivan Klima - No Saints or Angels

'We didn't know about you.'

'Listen,' he then says, 'I ought to warn you about me. I'm strange sometimes. I imagine strange things. Such as I'm a powerful dictator. Or a concentration camp commandant. A concentration camp for women. There are loads of women in front of me and I can do what I like with them. Do you know what I mean? Absolutely anything I like: I can tell them to take their clothes off or I can torture them to make them admit to some crime, and then I imagine it.'

'You're saying it to put the wind up me,' I say, and I really do have a feeling of uneasiness, although it's more like revulsion.

'No, they're just things I imagine. I've never hurt a fly. Maybe when I hit my head on the rock that time something happened inside me, like brain damage. For heaven's sake, a concentration camp commandant in a wheelchair, it doesn't make sense.' He laughs briefly. 'But it would make a great gag in some horror serial. Can you imagine it? The commandant in a wheelchair with a red-hot poker in his hand and he comes up to these women who are standing there naked in a great long line and. .'

'Don't go into any more details,' I request him. 'I don't want to hear.'

'You think I'm crazy or a pervert, don't you?'

I remember Dad's sister Venda. 'Maybe you inherited something,' I say, 'something genetic. It ran in Dad's family.'

'I didn't know that. I thought Dad was normal. Or at least not crazy.'

'No, he wasn't crazy. But he knew how to hurt people. After all, you discovered that for yourself

'Yes, I certainly did. Would you like some more tea? Or a drop of this?' He raises the bottle.

'No, no more, thanks. I just wanted to find out if it was really you. There was nothing definite in Dad's diaries.'

'I apparently look like him.'

'You do. A lot.'

'I was afraid I might.'

'I understand.' I get up.

He accompanies me to the door and when I offer him my hand I have the impression that he has tears in his eyes. Maybe he is moved at finding his half-sister after all these years. But he knew about me before; he found me long ago. More likely he regrets losing the image he had of his enemy.

As I say goodbye I cannot bring myself to repeat my invitation for him to call me if he needs anything. He knows my address well

enough anyway. If he weren't in a wheelchair I'd say to him, Don't send me any more of those letters! To let him know I knew. But I shouldn't think he'll send any more anyway. He'll find another way of exercising his sadistic fantasies.

I don't go back to the metro, but set off in the opposite direction. I don't feel like being among people. The river bank can't be far away, but between me and it they've built a four-lane carriageway fringed by a fence. I cross the road and quickly make my way along by the fence, even though there is maybe no end to it. Cars rush past me. Above the fence there are billboards with inane advertising slogans and above them all there hangs a bluish haze of hot smog.

So I've found my kid brother, who abused me because I had a dad who never visited him. I expect he imagined me standing naked in his concentration camp while he burnt me with a red-hot poker because I enjoyed his father's affection.

I oughtn't to be angry with him. He has inherited Dad's malevolent soul and on top of that, misfortune has consigned him to a wheelchair.

At last a gap in the fence: a prefabricated concrete road promises to lead me to some cash-and-carry. I set off along it and immediately find myself in a different — silent — world. The road winds between walls, whose decrepitude is masked by ivy. Enormous vehicle tyres, plastic sacks and rusting barrels are scattered over the verges. I'm the only person going this way. The glorified warehouse of a shop is closed, maybe because it's Saturday afternoon, but more likely it's never been open, because no one is likely to wander in here. I press onwards: not a living soul. But in the distance I can hear a riverboat siren; perhaps I'll find a way through to the river, after all. I ought to be scared, but I feel intoxicated, as if I was walking in a dismal dream; I don't get scared in dreams, only when I'm wide awake. The road bends sharply round some tall corrugated-iron hangars and I'm suddenly confronted by something very peculiar. In the middle of a

scrapheap, where the road comes to an end, there stands a bizarre structure: two towers that look as if they have been skilfully gnawed away at the top; two towers like two fossilized dinosaurs with intermingled heads. It strikes me that it might be an old fairground tent that was inflated with hot air, or more likely an abandoned film set. But when I come closer I see that it is a concrete ruin with massive walls, most likely the remains of a military bunker built before the war that I don't remember.

The scrapheap stinks and a swarm of flies buzzes above it. I walk round it and finally catch sight of a branch of the Vltava, with its lazy stream of dirty water. I lean against the trunk of an old, half-dead willow and try to light a cigarette. My fingers tremble. Not a soul to be seen. If someone did appear, maybe he'd kill me; death hovers here above the earth and the waters and there isn't a single redeeming feature. I imagine Jana stumbling on this place. I suddenly realize that I understand her; I can understand how she took a fancy to drugs that make the world look different and most likely better or at least more acceptable than it really is.

3

It's Sunday. I could sleep in, but I woke up at five and realized I wouldn't fall asleep again. That meeting with my brother/non-brother is like a weight on my chest. And it's as if I've only now fully realized the awful thing that happened to Jana. I think about her and go back over the past searching for the moment when my little girl started to fall. If such a moment existed.

Maybe my sister is right in believing that I acted foolishly when I decided to terminate the marriage to my unfaithful husband. If I'd managed to control myself and pretended I saw nothing, or that I saw it but was prepared to wait patiently until his highness, my husband, came to his senses and returned to me, things would have been better for my little girl. Or worse, because he started to

be rude to me even in front of her, and sometimes I was unable to bear it and started to cry or row with him.

When love goes, contentment goes too. And so does understanding. But why wasn't I able to hold on to that love?

And yet my little girl needed love. When Karel left me, I tried to give her that love, but it's impossible just to go on giving; well I wasn't able to, at least. There were moments when my loneliness weighed heavily on me; the sand scrunched beneath my feet and I thirsted. I yearned for a loving man; I yearned for him so much that lovers would come to me in my dreams and whisper tender words to me, kiss my breasts and enter me, and in my dreams I would shiver in ecstasy. But I only managed to treat myself to one real lover and it ended tragically. After that I was afraid of another disappointment; what else can I expect from men?

And yet I've yielded to temptation yet again; I know I won't escape disappointment but I try not to think about it, not to think about the future.

Before I fell asleep last night I imagined the one who tempted me wandering somewhere in the mountains. He told me it was a group of men and maybe he was telling the truth. Be mine, my darling, I begged him. Be mine. Don't abandon me, even if you stay only to the end of this summer, only a fraction of a divine blink, don't abandon me.

As Mum said, there is something I lack. A dimension I'm unable to see into. I'm unable to open the door to it. Dad locked it against me and my one and only husband added a padlock. What is behind that door? God? Some love that won't come to nothing, like love between people? Is it peace in one's heart, the peace of life, instead of the peace of death that I most often think of as release when I am feeling low? Is it nobility of spirit that is capable of rising above all the daily distractions? Is it emptiness that would enable me to focus on myself and my soul, something I usually never have the time or the place to do? Or is there the sound of music? Playing music was what used to help me look