Ivan Klima - No Saints or Angels

'That's the lot,' Eva suddenly announces and leaves the door to the waiting room open. 'Shall I ring around all the people who have appointments for tomorrow to let them know you won't be here?'

I shrug. I've no idea what I'll be doing tomorrow or whether they'll find Jana by then. 'No, don't call anyone.'

2

Back home, Mum wants to hear some details, but I don't know anything. 'What if Jana came,' it strikes me, 'and instead of coming here went to your place?'

But Mum had already thought of that and pinned a note to her door saying where she was. 'You shouldn't have sent her so far away' she reproaches me. 'She's not used to that way of life.'

'Was I supposed to let her lead the sort of life she was getting used to?' I don't know how I'll get through the rest of the day. I smoke one cigarette after another. I can't even stay sitting down. I dash about the flat tidying things. I have to do something. I call Sunnyside again. The girl's voice tells me they still have no news of the runaways, but the boys of the community have decided to go and look for them.

'Do you think they'll find them?'

'They're the only ones who have any real chance. They already know them and know where they might find them.'

I try calling girlfriends of Jana's that I know but I get no reply anywhere. No one's home. Naturally, it's still the holidays.

I ask Mum to stay in my flat while I go and look for Jana.

'Where?'

'I don't know. Everywhere.'

'When will you get back?'

'I don't know that either.'

'But it's pointless, isn't it?'

What isn't pointless? I don't ask her. Instead I tell her I'd go round the bend just sitting here doing nothing.

'Have some sense, Kristýna, and stop panicking,' she urges me. 'There's no way you'll find her. Instead you'll probably do yourself a mischief. Look how uptight you are.'

'I'm not a little kid any more, Mummy.'

First I drive to Kampa, but in the place where we found her last time there are just a few dogs running around.

I run over to the old millstream on the edge of the park as if intent on fishing Jana out of the water. There is a couple snogging on one of the benches, but they don't notice me.

You don't happen to have seen my Jana — fifteen years old, blue eyes, a high forehead, long legs, a punk hairstyle…? — I don't ask them. I dash back to the car and set off in a southerly direction, upstream, out of the city. I push the poor old banger to such limits that it whines. The countryside flashes past me as splashes of colour.

Where are you heading, Kristýna? You haven't the foggiest idea where you're going, have you?

I'm going to find my little girl.

How do you think you're going to find her in this wide world? And what will you do if you don't find her? How will you go on living?

I turn off the motorway, drive through Příbram and all of a

sudden, here it is: the cemetery wall and the Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.

I pull up and get out of the car. My legs barely support me and there is a flickering in front of my eyes.

It's still daylight. I don't know why I stopped here. After all, Jana is hardly going to visit any of her father's relatives; she doesn't know them anyway. And even if she came this way, why would she hang around here?

I stopped here because I'm afraid to drive to the place she ran away from. I stopped here on my own account. Because of the grave of Jan Jakub Ryba who wrote the Christmas Mass that always makes me want to weep for joy when I hear it, even though I don't believe in a God who lay as a baby in a manger. Because of the composer who decided one morning that he couldn't go on living. He was then only slightly older than I am now, but he was at the end of his tether. And he had a faithful wife and good children.

So he put a razor in his pocket and set off for the wood known as The Crevice. There, they say, he sat down on a boulder, and when there wasn't even a crevice to let through a ray of hope, he slit his throat. That's how my ex-husband related it anyway.

I don't have a razor in my pocket, yet I'm not sure I want to go on living. I have yet to find a faithful man and my only child is on the run.

Women don't generally use a razor; it's usually pills or the gas oven. There's a bottle of analgesics in my handbag that would definitely put an end to my pain and disappointment for good. The wood known as The Crevice still stands, only the trees have changed. They erected a stone monument on the spot where the composer ended his life. My first and only husband took Jana and me to see it while we were still together.

We are not together now; we have fallen apart.

I oughtn't to waste time. I must drive on in search of my little girl. But now that third one has crept up behind me: the eternal

infant, God's messenger, and she's whispering to me that she's my little girl too and I can find her at any moment and she'll hug me and stay with me for ever and we'll be happy together and all the fear and pain will disappear.

The little girl promises to lead me to the wood, and she's so considerate that she even fans me from behind with a little breeze. You'll sit down on a stone, she coaxes me, swallow what you brought, then lie down on the moss and you'll feel fine: no one will ever run away from you again, no one will hurt you or let you down; no one will betray you, no one will want anything from you, not even me; I'll just gently fan you as long as you like, on your journey to that peace that lasts forever.

The little girl has a gentle, enticing voice, and when she waves her hand, mist will surround me and it'll be easier for us, it strikes me.

All right, I'll go with her.

At that moment, the organ starts to play in the church behind me and I recognize the familiar notes. Who could be playing a Christmas Mass at the height of summer? Maybe the dead composer himself chose from the thousand works he composed the very one that refreshes the soul most.

'This is where I was born, on the edge of Rožmitál,' my ex-husband pointed out to us. 'And here I went to school. Can you hear that choir? I used to sing in it: Master, hey! Rise I say! Look out at the sky — splendour shines on high. What are you smirking for, Jana?'

'That you used to go to school too, Daddy. You must have been teensy-weensy.'

My poor little girl, your mother's a head case; she's a sad, desperate individual and she's destroying herself like you. She's teetering over the pit. When she tumbles howling into it, what will become of you?

I go back to the church and stand listening, recalling the time when we all still lived together in love. The little messenger, that

little girl, has lost patience and quietly disappears without hanging around for me.

I make for the church door, intending to go in and thank the organist, but the door is locked. Goodness knows how long it is since someone passed through it. The organ has fallen silent too.

Only now do I notice that there is a telephone box not far from the church.

Yes, my Jana and Monika have already been found. The girls ran away and got drunk. They will be penalized, unless the others decide to expel them altogether.

'Do you think I could drive over? I'm not far away.'

3

It is dusk when I reach Sunnyside. They won't allow me to be alone with Jana.

'Heavens, Mum! What are you doing here?' she exclaims when they bring her. 'It's great you came. I'm bound to be banned visitors. And maybe they'll shave my head too.'

My little girl only thinks about herself. It won't occur to her to ask what I felt when they told me she'd run away, or what I've been going through all the time she has been torturing me like this.

'What came over you to run away like that?'