Ivan Klima - No Saints or Angels

She told me I was maybe stupid or naive, but she didn't like spineless people, even though she knew from her own experience that most men would have acted the same way. And one certainly couldn't trust the promises of spineless individuals, of most men, in other words. She knew she'd never be able to trust me again, and what was the point of love if it wasn't based on trust?

I asked her if she would have loved me if I'd denied everything.

'I'd have been able to tell anyway,' she said. 'And then I'd have regarded you as a liar on top of everything else.'

I'm not a liar, I'm a idiot. So now I'm on my own.

6

Whenever the phone rings I get a stabbing pain next to my heart. I'm frightened to breathe until the caller speaks. On the way home from surgery I see children running out of school and I try not to think about the fact that my daughter isn't studying and I don't even know whether she'll return to school or whether she'll even manage to return to normal life. But so far she hasn't tried to run away again. On the contrary, she wrote me two letters in which she sounded repentant and preached to me about

how we did things all wrong in the past. You were terribly impatient with yourself, Mum, so you were unsatisfied with yourself and you couldn't love yourself. I hear the therapist's voice in what she writes. But maybe she's right. Maybe they're both right. I ought to be more patient with other people and myself.

Towards evening the phone rings and an unfamiliar female voice comes on the line. The name she gives means nothing to me either. But it isn't someone from the drug treatment centre. It turns out to be my ex-husband's neighbour. She apologizes and informs me that the postwoman tried unsuccessfully to deliver a registered letter to him. 'Your husband doesn't happen to be in hospital again, does he?'

It's a long time since my husband was my husband, I don't tell her, and I don't know whether he might have been taken to hospital. But if he was, I wouldn't necessarily know about it; nobody would inform me.

'But someone in the house would have been sure to see an ambulance if they'd taken him away,' the neighbour assures me. 'I just wondered if you could take the trouble to come over and unlock the flat in case something has happened to him.'

'But I don't have any keys.'

'You don't? But I thought. .'

'You should have called his last wife. She'd be more likely than me to have them.'

'I don't know her. I've never heard about her. He only spoke about you. And I've also seen you here.'

So my ex-husband was talking to neighbours about me. Whatever could he have told them?

'So what am I to do, if you don't have any keys?'

'I don't know whether anyone else has a set. I've never asked him.' I've never wanted the keys to his flat, even though he offered me a set a long time ago.

'Oughtn't we to call the police? After all, he has been very ill, as you know.'

I promise to call the hospital where he was last treated. And if he's not there, I'll let her know.

'But maybe if you could come over, doctor. You are a doctor and probably the person who is nearest. .'

My ex-husband isn't in the hospital and they have no news of him.

I dropped by to see him three days ago. He was very weak. He drank a little sweetened tea, but refused to eat anything. 'I won't be around much longer,' he announced. 'I know it, but I don't have the strength to fight for my life any more. And in fact it's all the same if one dies now or in a few days' time.'

I felt sorry for him. I knew how much he liked life and winning. I sat down by him, took his gaunt hand and stroked it.

He burst into tears. Then he said he was sorry for how he'd treated us. 'I was a selfish fool. I left you both in the lurch, but now I've paid for it.'

'Don't distress yourself. There is nothing that can be done to change it now anyway.'

'Do you think you could forgive me?'

I told him that the pain had already gone away and that I was grateful to him for all the nice times we had had together. And I was also grateful to him for Jana. And it was not for me to forgive anything. Only God could forgive.

'God! I've been thinking about him,' he said, 'these past few days. God isn't what people thought him to be. God is time, or time is God. He created the sun, the earth and life. He is eternal, infinite and incomprehensible.'

I walk up to his flat and try ringing the bell. But there is no sound from inside. The neighbour who phoned me opens her door. 'Do you think he's inside, doctor?'

As if I knew.

'Maybe he's just had a turn and isn't able to come to the door. He's not been going out at all lately.'

I tell her that the best thing would be to call the police.

'You mean I should?'

'You're his neighbour. You know more about him than I do.'

She asks me to accompany her and stay there with her. I am a doctor after all, and the mother of that lovely little girl.

So I sit here in a stranger's flat while the neighbour calls the police. I sit here and know that it would be wrong to get up and leave now. The woman makes me a coffee and when I ask if I may smoke, she brings me an ashtray. There's nothing we could have a conversation about so instead she tells me about my ex-husband, how he took care of the grass in front of the building, how he once helped her change a tyre on her car, and while he was still fit, he would always help her upstairs with her shopping.

He never helped me up the stairs with the shopping. He didn't want to have a spoiled wife.

There is no sign of the police. The neighbour rings again and they tell her they have no one available at the moment because they have had to go and deal with a case of mugging. We are to be patient.

Even the police are asking me to be patient now.

We drink another coffee. The neighbour offers me a pastry, but I'm not hungry. She asks me whether I mind if she puts the television on.

I don't mind moving pictures, even though I don't watch them at home.

I'm only half a doctor, as I always say, but even if I didn't know the first thing about medicine, I'd know that the man in the flat next door will never come to the door again.

Eventually two policemen turn up, and they have a locksmith with them. They want to know who we are and if we're sure there's someone inside.

We're not sure but it is safe to assume there is.

It's a safety lock, so it will have to be drilled out. The locksmith wants to know who will pay him for the job.

The neighbour looks at me — after all I am his former wife — and I nod.

The older of the policemen has another try at ringing the bell, and lets it ring with bureaucratic perseverance. Then he lets the locksmith take over.

It only takes a few minutes to drill out the lock and then the door opens and I catch sight of the famous certificates hanging on the wall of the front hall. No one feels like going in.

'Maybe you ought to, doctor,' the older of the policemen suggests.

I open the sitting-room door and I see him straightaway. He is half-lying, half-sitting, supported by one of the couch cushions. He looks like a wax cast of himself. My first, only and now forever erstwhile husband. His dead eyes seem to look straight at me. I really didn't think I'd be the one to close his eyelids.

7

Luckily I didn't get my head shaved, they only shaved Monika because she led me on. I had to chop a whole wagonload of wood and I could forget any leave passes. And even so they all acted as if they were showing us mercy by letting us go on rotting here. Monika cried over her lovely black hair every evening when she took off her headscarf and saw how they'd turned her into a skinhead.

'We were stupid cows to have stopped in the stupid pub,' she kept on saying over and over again. 'If only we'd gone straight to my aunt's where we could already be by now.'