Ivan Klima - No Saints or Angels

We didn't run away, we just went for a bit of a walk.'

'And so you took rucksacks with you,' comments one of the boys who is apparently also here as a client.

'We took things in case it rained, you dumbo,' Jana explained.

'A lot of things in case of rain,' Radek chimes in. 'And anyway you weren't supposed to be going for walks, as well you know.'

'Well OK,' Jana concedes, 'but we really did have second thoughts. It will be up to the community,' she continues, turning

back to me, 'whether they shave my head, expel me or just make me muck out for a month.'

The psychotherapist adopts a conciliatory expression. 'They won't expel you, you'll see,' he says. 'You're good at making soup and playing the guitar. We'd miss you.'

I'd like to ask her whether she realizes that if she doesn't make the grade here, there's nowhere she'll find help, but Radek sends her away. 'We'll sort it all out with her,' he explains and leads me to his office.

He sits me down directly opposite the portrait of the great Freud. Only now do I realize that I almost succumbed to the temptation of eternal peace because I felt that life by now had nothing good to offer me anyway. I can feel the tears running from my eyes and I can't stop them.

'Don't upset yourself,' the psychotherapist says, coming over to me and stroking my hair. 'They almost all try to escape and we always let them off the first time. Some of them abscond for a month, for instance, and then come and ask us to take them back. There are some, of course, who run away and we never see them again.'

I nod to show I understand. I'd like to ask him how satisfied he is with Jana otherwise, but what could he say, seeing that she tried to escape this very day. 'I'm really sorry that Jana has added to your worries,' is all I say.

'Not at all. That's what we're here for. You see, everybody thinks there should be something to show after a week or two, but mostly it takes months. We've no right to be impatient. None of us are saints or angels.'

'I know.'

'Your sister and Jana herself told me you suffer from depressions.'

I nod and say that I can't see the importance.

'Oh, but it is important for Jana.'

'I've always tried to conceal it from her.'

'She sensed it anyway. Maybe she couldn't identify it or explain

it. But when a mother isn't sure whether she's happy to be alive, the child's world loses one of its mainstays and the child then tries to escape it. What we want here is for them to learn to identify and understand what they feel and why they feel it. That's the first step before they eventually stop looking for false means of escape.'

I nod. I realize that this is an indictment of me and I try to stop the tears streaming from my eyes.

'I'm not blaming you for anything,' he says, as if reading my thoughts. 'That insecurity is something deeper and more generalized and involves us all. They,' he adds, pointing to the figures I can glimpse moving about outside the window, 'had no security. They had no idea what direction to take when everything around them seemed to lack any direction. They could have all sorts of possessions but possessions only increased that feeling of emptiness. They are aware of it. They aren't riffraff as those who have learnt to conform and put up with everything think. They are simply sensitive to that emptiness which we close our eyes to. Unless we are able to fill that emptiness we won't cure them.'

I am aware that his words apply to me too. I am also surrounded by an emptiness that I try in vain to fill.

'Of course we engage in therapy,' Radek adds, 'but there is also an effort to ensure that each of them learns to realize their responsibility: to themselves and to life in general. The fact that they look after a goat, pigs and chickens is not in order to save a bit on the food bill but in order to incorporate them into some natural order. It's to remind them that the purpose of what they do is not gratification but the benefit that accrues from the preservation of life. — But most of all we teach them patience. Sometimes you discover in a single lucid moment what you could have been looking for in vain for years. The point is not to destroy ourselves before that moment arrives.'

4

The mornings are already cool and misty and the air stinks. People become more prone to illness — and to toothache. The waiting room is packed all day and Eva and I don't even have time to grab a meal. It's tiring, but at least it's better than being alone at home.

I am unable to put my mind to anything. I don't open a book; I do put on music, but after a while I realize that I'm not listening to it. It feels as if I'm lost in a maze and don't have the strength to find my way out.

I visit my ex-husband almost every other day. He is on his own too and he's a lot lonelier than I am. And he knows he's slowly dying. Now that he knows, he has stopped asking me anxious questions, but I can tell that he is being overtaken by fear. Who wouldn't be afraid? I'm afraid too, although death often seems to me like redemption.

I do his shopping and cook him some tasteless diet meals of which he only eats a few mouthfuls. I peel him an orange and divide it into segments as if he were a child. I make sure he takes his tablets. When I can see that he is totally seized by anxiety, I take his skeletal hand and talk to him. I tell him about the senate elections that he couldn't care less about any more, or about the floods in eastern Bohemia that he will never visit again, or I read him out loud a letter from Jana that he doesn't even take in.

'It's odd to think,' he said last time, 'that the world will continue but I won't see it any more. But where will it continue to?'

I didn't know what to reply. I just looked into his sunken eyes and said nothing.

He remained silent too. Then after a few moments he said that he found it impossible to think that people would still be around in a thousand years, let alone a hundred thousand years. It had nothing to do with the fact that he was reaching the end and that the world would mean nothing to him any more. It seemed to

him that people would be unable to survive the tempo they had set. They would destroy either the earth or themselves. Time would move forward and so would the universe but there would be no one here to perceive it, and that seemed sad to him.

He closed his eyes. He'd exhausted himself with that speech. He apologized for those pointless reflections of a dying man.

When I got home I felt a weariness unlike the weariness I used to feel from time to time. It was as if all the burdens I'd ever borne, all the disappointments I'd suffered, all the wine I'd ever drunk, all the cigarettes I'd ever smoked and all the sleepless nights all fused together. I woke up in the night feeling so tense that I couldn't get back to sleep. I got up and went to the window. I stood there smoking as I stared into the empty street. I tried to think of something pleasant, but instead all I saw were skeletal children begging for food on the pavement; I saw fellows with my father's face roaming the city in wheelchairs brandishing red-hot pokers. In the darkness the red-hot metal shone like a torch. I saw my grandmother standing in some enormous tiled room under a shower from which came the hiss of gas. Grandmother cried out and collapsed. There were people all around her. They cried out and collapsed. I saw a ghostly car and someone inside was throwing tiny white bags and syringes out of its window. I could see my recent boyfriend lying naked in the arms of that leggy whore and hear their cries of ecstasy. I saw thieves leaping walls and quietly scaling the walls of houses. I recalled how my own daughter had stolen jewellery and money from me. The images crowded in on me and I started to suffocate. I could hear the tramp of militiamen and see my father gripping the butt of his rifle and staring at me as if I were an enemy.