Ivan Klima - No Saints or Angels

beyond all my suffering and anxieties and fill me with a longing for reconciliation. But I didn't stick with it. I let myself be banished from it and the most I do now is occasionally sing something to myself or listen passively to what others have composed and performed.

What if I went to visit my little girl? She is not guilty for trying to make up for what she's missing in her own way. The trouble is, by pointing at myself, I reassure her she was in the right. She is the one injecting poison into her veins; I'm the one holding the syringe.

Instead, first thing in the morning I set out to visit her father. What I have in mind is reconciliation.

When he opens the door, he shows no surprise at my turning up. 'I dreamt about you last night,' he informs me, after seating me in the armchair.

'How do you feel?'

'A bit better, maybe,' he says. 'I've even put on a little weight.'

'That's gopd.' I unwrap the rest of the apricot tart and put it on a plate that is unfamiliar to me. Our old plates stayed with me even if he didn't. What was in the dream about me?'

'I dreamt that you caught me in the act.'

'Doing what?' As if I didn't know.

'I was with some girl. We were lying in a hotel room with red curtains and a Persian carpet. The hotel lift was out of order and the staircase was blocked off. I thought that if the stairs were blocked off and the lift was out of order you wouldn't be able to reach us. But you climbed the scaffolding.'

'I'm sorry I disturbed you.'

'It's strange how, after all these years, I'm still afraid of you finding me out.'

I don't tell him that there are certain sins that stay with one to the end, but I do inform him that Jana is in therapy.

That takes him aback. The thought of having a daughter undergoing therapy for drug addiction is too much for him, the

athlete and pedagogue, who has always been a shining example of moderation and opponent of all vices, bar infidelity. 'Was it necessary?'

'You don't really think I'd have shoved her in there just for the fun of it, do you? Anyway I don't intend to leave her there. I'm taking her away from Prague.'

'You take major decisions like that and it doesn't occur to you to discuss it with me,' he says reproachfully.

I try to explain that I had to act fast. And anyway it's been a long time since we discussed her together. He lost interest in her; he had other worries. Besides, I didn't want to upset him just after his operation.

He gets up and starts to pace up and down the room. It's what he always used to do when he was getting ready to give me a telling-off. 'That's just excuses and prejudice against me. Of course you should have consulted me,' he says. 'I'm still her father, after all. And I have some understanding of such matters.'

I feel that old sense of uncertainty and fear returning: I've done something wrong, I've botched something, I'm guilty of something in his stern eyes.

Over recent years, he says, whenever he met Jana he noticed how she was coming to resemble me more and more. She must have inherited my genes rather than his. When he first met me, he recalls, I was just like that. I used to hang around with a crowd in pubs and get drunk; drugs were still a rarity then. But I lacked any sense of order or respectability.

I point out that I've changed since then.

But in his view a sense of order is something innate.

'I made a mistake being born at all, then.'

He asks me not to be sarcastic and then launches into a pedagogical lecture on the proper upbringing of children. Of course he names all my failings, of which I'm perfectly well aware: I didn't like cooking, I skimped on shopping, I was no good at managing money and spent a lot on clothes for myself, not to mention my

smoking or the many times I spent the evening with some girlfriends and came home in high spirits. What was our little girl to think? What sort of example did I set her?

I know that litany off by heart. How many times did I listen to it contritely while we were still living together. I would stand up for myself and defend my right to a bit of privacy, a little bit of space for myself and those I chose to allow in. I never won though, and always ended up feeling like a whipped cur. I did try to cut down on my smoking, but it didn't last long, maybe because it was one of the few joys I had in life.

And after all, a good example is far more important than any amount of talking, proscriptions or prescriptions, my former husband continues.

I ought to pull myself together. After all I'm in no way subordinate to him any more. I shouldn't let myself be cowed by a man who abandoned me, who ran away from me and our daughter. Let each of us deal with our problems as best we can.

Even so I don't contradict him but simply get up in the middle of his tirade and leave the room.

Once I'm outside in the street it strikes me he was right about one thing: I behaved like Jana. But I forgot to pick up the plate with the apricot tart and smash it on the floor.

4

The building is a farmhouse built of timber, somewhat the worse for wear, which stands alone on the edge of an upland meadow. The track that leads to it is so narrow that if two cars were to meet head on they wouldn't be able to pass. We pull up just by the front door. A little gypsy girl peeps out of it and then disappears inside again. There is a barn next to the farmhouse, and hens and ducks move here and there in the space between them. We can hear the squeal of hungry pigs from a nearby sty.

'It's beautiful, don't you think?' my sister asks.

'The countryside is splendid,' I say cautiously. 'Now in summer, anyway.'

The head therapist receives us in his office which contains nothing but a table, a chair, a filing cabinet and on the wall a picture of Sigmund Freud alongside a coloured print of some saint or other. Freud, the saint and the therapist all sport beards, but the latter also has a shock of black hair and, unlike the saint and Freud, he wears a T-shirt with the inscription christian youth club. He and Lida are on first-name terms. She addresses him as Radek.

He asks me to tell him in detail about Jana. I make an effort to mention all the details, including those I'm ashamed of, namely, that my daughter seemingly not only lied to me but also stole from me.

Then he wants to know if anyone in my family took drugs or was addicted in any other way.

So I admit my smoking and the fact that I drink wine every day albeit in moderation. When I was young I used to get drunk sometimes, but that's really a long time ago. Her father, on the other hand, was exemplary in that respect. Compared to him I damage my health and he used to criticize me for it.

He makes notes on a pad, nodding his head from time to time as if to say, Yes, that's the way it goes. But in fact he says nothing and simply invites me to see over the home.

The house is spacious and austere. Everything looks shabby; the furniture could easily come from some warehouse of dead stock or discarded junk. I notice that some of the windowpanes are smashed or cracked. But otherwise it is clean — the floors are still damp from mopping, and there is no clutter. But I'm less interested in things than in the people Jana would have to mix with. But how much can one tell during a short visit? One lad — he could be twenty — is grinding something in an antique hand-mill, another is wheeling some dung in a wheelbarrow, the little gypsy

girl is sawing logs with another young man. For a moment they remind me of target figures in a shooting gallery, except that they all wear jeans and T-shirts.

In the kitchen, two girls are preparing the evening meal. We then visit one of the bedrooms. It contains three beds; on one of them, a young woman with drawn features is sitting smoking; she doesn't seem to register our presence.