At 3.37am you’re woken by the phone.

Your mother’s voice is quiet and yet you can hear every syllable clearly.

“Marek, your grandad’s dead.”

You fail to detect anything unusual or urgent in this sentence, so you don’t come to your senses quickly enough. Your mother hangs up before you can say anything. You sit up and rub your eyes.

For a while the darkness on the walls seems uniform, but gradually you discover places punctuated by twisted bands of golden light from the street. Patches you can’t focus on.

It occurs to you that there are things you haven’t told anyone about yet. For example, in the eighth grade at school, Filip didn’t throw you down the stairs. You fell because of your own stupidity, and when you came to, you wanted to use the situation to your advantage. Surprisingly, it all went pretty smoothly. Just a couple of weeks later you were sitting in the headmaster’s office in a new school, listening to a greying man with a glint in his eye. He was shouting: “I will not tolerate any bullying here, mark my words!”

You’d been given a second chance, at least according to your mother.

“Try not to stand out too much, OK?” she urged you as the two of you walked along the corridor towards the classroom. You were determined to fit in. Not to be different, not to talk to anyone about what was on your mind. Not to give any sign of who you were. You had learned to watch your every step, not to sway your pelvis too much, not to stare at others for too long. Before you went into the room, you cleared your throat and tried out a new, deeper voice, and since then no-one has known the real you. You kept your head down whenever the guys started talking about girls. You’d laugh and pretend to go along with it, and then later you copied them by using a naked woman as the wallpaper on your mobile.

But the truth is that you couldn’t bear to look at her. Whereas you remember how a few days later your grandad snatched the mobile out of your hand. You were visiting him at the psychiatric hospital in Kroměříž when he reached out and grabbed the phone, nearly falling out of bed. He looked at the screen for a long time, nodding approvingly.

Why didn’t you tell anyone about that?

Grandad’s dead, but time marches on. Time flows, and in the streams of light from the street you search for a memory, for something that will take you back. In the darkness you can hear another body breathing; Jakub grunts in his sleep and rolls over onto his other side. It’s night-time, but the city still echoes with lots of noises. Through the open window come the sounds of cars, a group of men shouting in the street as they leave the pub at closing hour. Occasionally you catch snatches of a foreign language, laughter. You can’t seem to sense any sadness in all of this. For a while you wait for something to change, sitting with your head slightly bowed, your fingers absentmindedly tapping on the screen of your mobile.

What’s missing around you is also missing within you. Instead of sadness you discover a silent, wordless space. You find it slightly odd that suddenly you can’t picture your grandad’s face. Instead of his actual appearance, all you see is the faces from old photographs.

You try to picture him again. There’s absolutely nothing left of him.

You dial your mother’s number because you realize you didn’t even ask her how she was.

She answers the phone so quickly you barely have time to put it to your ear.

“I was supposed to go and see him in the morning.”

The device transmits her voice into the gloom, where it bounces off the walls and comes back to you faintly from across the room.

“I had a bag all packed for him with everything he asked for.”

But you can remember other things pretty well. Other faces and feelings. Other stories.

It’s probably because your grandad’s story was passed on to you by your mother. Your own memories are relegated to the background, like characters not involved in the plot. Characters who have seemingly played their part and are now waiting, locked in rooms lost in memory. He became the grandad you know – knew – because of her.

With just a few exceptions, he spent the final years of his life in a psychiatric hospital. One day he simply went mad, started seeing things no-one else could see. The doctors at the hospital in Kroměříž put it down to his illness, too much alcohol and smoking. And those lungs too. Ruined, coated in tar. They could no longer support his memory and it began to fall apart along with him.

Your mother talked about him a lot. When you were young, she told you what it meant to grow up with someone like that, what alcohol did to Grandad, how many times she and Grandma had spent hours waiting patiently outside the pub just so they didn’t have to go in after him.

She usually ended up talking about one night in particular. The one that changed everything. She kept coming back to it, equally shaken and confused each time, as though it might open up another path, the door to a room that had been locked until then, and she’d understand something that had eluded her before.

Your first memory of your grandad is shrouded in a peculiar haze; sometimes you feel as if you must have made it up. You weren’t even five years old, and the two of you were standing on the hill above Hotel Jana, watching the River Bečva, which had burst its banks and spilled out over the school playground as far as the car park. You held your grandad’s hand while the frothy brown water below you lapped at the walls of the tower blocks. Your grandad watched all of this in silence, then suddenly pointed to a flock of birds circling in the sky and said: “See them? They’re confused cos they’ve got nowhere to land. Normally they don’t have a problem flying over water. They’re smart cookies – they manage to come back to the exact same place year after year.” You stared at him open-mouthed, hanging on his every word. “Just imagine what it’s like for a swallow – suddenly it finds that everything below it’s different. You see, nature’s kitted them out with their very own compass, a tiny bit of metal right here in their beak, and that means they can cover huge distances even when they’re flying blind. But they’ve still got to be able to see to land.” He moved his finger to a black blur that was swooping down at regular intervals, letting out a long, desperate cry. “There, look. They’re definitely trying to find the place where they usually land.”

You swallow, your throat dry. Today you perceive the reverberation of this memory differently, more sharply. You’re pretty sure that back then it hadn’t occurred to either of you that everything Grandad said could be applied to people as well: we too are always trying to get back to ourselves, back to places that haven’t been the same for a long time.

 

You’re ten years old. Apart from the number of books you’ve read and the fact that you don’t really talk to anyone, there’s nothing strange about you. However, you can’t say the same for Marián, a boy who joined your class halfway through the school year. Marián was quiet, wore strangely tapered jeans and had long, dark hair. In fact, you immediately came to associate him with a description of Professor Snape. With greasy black hair, a hooked nose, and sallow skin. But instead of being sallow, his skin was dark and flecked with tiny white spots. He sat with his legs crossed and spent all his time in school alone. He had a strange perfumey smell, and from your desk his long neck looked like a girl’s. So at this point the whole class’s attention was focused on Marián. The other boys would regularly empty the contents of the bin into his schoolbag, deliberately barge into him in gym class. Later, in the changing room, you’d notice bruises all over his body. He was a poof and a faggot and walked like a spaz and was a black cunt. “You’re worse than a girl,” they shouted at him at breaktime, while the teachers headed to the staff room and pretended not to hear anything. You bandied the same words around, hoping no-one would notice your crossed legs, your glances at the sweaty bodies in the changing rooms. Because you still remembered. You still knew what it was like to be on the other side. Until recently, you too had been the target of similar words. You too had been a poof. A swot. And lots of other things. You too had returned home with the strap of your schoolbag torn off, your t-shirt ruined.

Within that memory, you’re sitting at your desk, staring absently out of the window. Marián is walking back from the blackboard, where the teacher had probably been testing him for too long. The strong scent of fabric softener from his clothes still lingers in your memory. He’s about to sit down when Filip, who sits behind him, pulls the chair out from under him. Time doesn’t stop. Time speeds up; Marián flings his arms into the air and hits his head against the edge of the desk. The hollow thud is followed by the clatter of the chair. A muffled thump. Silence. Everything happened too fast for your brain to process. It’s the sequence of sounds you remember more than the movement itself. More than the others’ reaction, you remember the pool of blood oozing out of the boy’s body. A fragile body that deviated from the norm, just like yours.

You’re ashamed of yourself; these are images you return to reluctantly, only when you’re surrounded by silence and darkness and have no choice. Were you aware at the time how much the whole thing affected you?

Grandad used to be fond of saying that the only thing Hitler did right was to put the gypsies and poofs in concentration camps. In his world, words had no impact on the bodies he aimed them at; it was all just about him finally being able to speak the truth out loud. “It’s a free fucking country, isn’t it?!” he would yell angrily at the television whenever he didn’t like something, as soon as someone protested. He was oblivious to the pain caused by language, an impact comparable to a blow to the head. Words couldn’t make life unbearable or leave scars in the memory. “He’s just talking rubbish,” Mum would say, mostly to reassure herself. Grandad never once connected what he said with the fist in his grandson’s face.

Now you know that violence can replace language just as easily as words can become weapons. A fist is often just a sentence that is intelligible to everyone.

Back then Marián was taken away and the whole class was left in a state of shock. No-one spoke, no-one dared move from their seat. But the next day everything went on at the usual pace. You didn’t even pause by the empty desk, pretended not to hear the shouting from the headmaster’s office, where the boy’s mother wanted an explanation of what exactly had happened.

A few months after that, Filip – who by some miracle had managed to get off scot-free – knocked the wind out of you in gym class. Marián was back by then; at first everyone tiptoed around him and Filip was furious. The class teacher had deliberately sat him at the desk next to Marián’s. “You have to learn to respect one another,” she’d said, refusing to discuss the matter any further. Filip needed to find another outlet for his pent-up anger and the frustration born of boredom. You were all doing the long jump, it was your turn, you started running, counting the steps, three more, two, you stretched out your arms – and just before you took off, Filip tripped you up. The blood from your split lip was the same colour as the blood freshly stored in your memory. There was less of it and yet its aftertaste still makes your body shudder to this day.

You remember the summer when it all came crashing down. The darkness behind the window of someone else’s flat, the fall a while before that; the way some things are related to each other, even though you might not see it yourself. Everything is connected. Even Grandad’s seizure and Mum’s angry, miserable face. You remember the days before and the days after and once again it occurs to you: There are things you haven’t told anyone about yet.

You’ve never trusted stories that rely on a single point of view. If I had asked you yesterday, you would have answered that nothing good would come of remembering your grandad – there are simply too many things you have no idea about. There’s so much you don’t remember. And, anyway, not everything is about him. Missing memories, gaps in the memory. But what if the answer lies elsewhere? What if the key actually lies in those gaps, and all you need to do is insert unrelated images into them and show that even seemingly disconnected stories are interwoven with each other.

It was your mother who made your grandad human again. She was the only one in the family who was willing to take care of him. To understand that people can change. To give him a second chance. The same one you were given back then, the same one you’ve been given so many times and will be given so many more times in your life. She sacrificed a part of herself for the two of you, and you still can’t understand why.

 

In the morning you wake up tired and confused; you have a single question, a single sentence in your head. You no longer remember where you read it. But who am I to myself, that I have to remember it and return to it so often? You open your eyes and the space in front of you is a white wall – solid, with no shadows, lacking dimensions and depth. You close your eyes. Something other than this, you reply quietly and open them again. The sounds from the street are already battering against the windowpane. Somewhere below you the city is ticking along – there are always cars stopping at junctions, always trams and the sound of traffic lights. Their intermittent rhythm disrupts the pounding of your heart, something you’ve had a problem with since you were a child – the contractions are suddenly irregular, the intervals between beats get longer. Jakub says you should see a doctor about it.

At night the traffic lights are silent, but their sound carries on in the memory.

You reach for your mobile on the bedside table and call your mum. In the gaps that follow the words, you can hear the noise in the workshop.

“They won’t let me go home till the afternoon,” she whispers, her voice breaking slightly.

You can picture your mother’s face. Your grandfather had tormented her most of her life. She rarely remembered anything good about her childhood.

“I’ve got stuff I need to finish anyway. I know the world doesn’t stop because of him.”

You sit up and turn on the lamp, even though it’s already light outside. This early in the day, the language you think with doesn’t remind you of a restless, dangerous instrument. Of something you can use to deal out blows, let alone something you could use to describe the feeling that your grandad is gone and you are unable to say what he meant to you, just as sometimes you are unable to express who you are or describe the presence of another body beside you, the warm glow from that strange certainty that this body will be here for some time to come.

Breathing out, breathing in, the bed frame creaking.

That certainty spills over into the images and sounds around you. It’s similar to the way the rhythm of the traffic lights affects your heartbeat and the regular pattern of shouts from the street interrupts the flow of your thoughts. If the things you can’t utter can only be hinted at, their presence guessed at behind the cover of words – is it at all possible to express a thing in a way that doesn’t make it seem different, broken up into several incomplete parts?

You look around the room to convince yourself of this. To get closer to the truth. But all you do is trigger another series of memories. They appear suddenly, disjointedly, some only vaguely linked to your grandad, others not at all.

You’re five years old and your dad has taken you out on a pedalo on Plumlov reservoir. You see the whole scene from a distance; you’re standing on the bank, watching the child version of you gliding over the water.

The you-child is hypnotized by the sight of a giant shark hanging from the roof of the pedalo hire shop. In the darkness, two figures set off across the motionless expanse of water in the middle of the reservoir. The you-child watches the shark disappear, while the images in your mind produce other sharks. They swim below the surface, and each time the pedalo judders the you-child imagines their snouts ramming the hull. Your father stretches out an arm to point at the silhouette of the nearby castle and his watch flies off his wrist. Its trajectory leads directly beneath the darkened surface into the realm of imaginary sharks, where after a few kilometres it will come to rest on the sandy bottom. The scene where the Heart of the Ocean stirs up the marine sediment. Cut to Rose’s face, cut to the team of archaeologists, cut to Father with a fanatical expression as he strips off his t-shirt and, with the words stay here, jumps into the water.

When your father resurfaced, he didn’t have the watch. Your mother has told you about it so many times that you can no longer recall how the whole thing happened, and perhaps that’s why you can’t see this memory with your own eyes. Over time her version has become the model for the real events and you have effectively stopped differentiating between your mother’s story and the original situation.

You often come back to this scene. You remember the panic, feel the waves of anger coursing through your body even after all the time that’s elapsed. It felt as though your father had been underwater for hours. Days passed, centuries passed, you imagined all kinds of scenarios: a shark with a man’s leg in its jaws; your father’s motionless face sinking into the darkness. But your father managed to claw his way up from the depths and back onto the pedalo, where he found you, your face purple with anger and tears.

The strange thing about this memory is how many different versions exist. You’re the only one who remembers the shark on the roof of the hire shop; the only one who stood on the pedalo in the middle of that mass of water with all the weight of a child’s world bearing down on him. Your father denies there ever was a watch; instead he dived in after a phone, a wallet, whatever he considers the most essential commodity in a person’s life at that particular moment. He’s not sure if it was a pedalo or a rowing boat. And in the end perhaps it really is your mother, who got the whole thing second-hand, who is closest to the original version. Her account has only been eroded by the flow of time, plucked out of memory, because for her the whole thing never actually happened.

What are memories but stories? I bring them up again in the belief that they belong to the same person you once were. You spin them into a web, sit within them as though they were the things keeping you afloat. But the truth is that with each re-telling they turn into something different, something distant.

A few months after the scene on the pedalo, another fragment. You’re with your father in the hotel where he used to work. Your dad’s in the shower while you’re watching the Cartoon Network. You don’t have this channel at home, so you can’t take your eyes off the screen. There’s a terrible smell in the room. Your dad comes out of the bathroom and you shout at him that it stinks in here, can you please wash your feet again. You remember that afterwards he had to go off somewhere and you kept on watching TV until the picture gave way to grainy static. But the boundaries of this memory are no more real than the intersection between all the other versions you have stored away – you know it more as a text which you recite aloud, altering the individual scenes, small and bigger details, according to who your audience is.

You immediately recall another one: You’re standing with your dad beside the sink – you on a stool, he with his feet firmly on the floor. You both have white foam on your faces which you scrape off in long strips with your razors. Yours doesn’t have a blade, but that doesn’t stop you from copying the careful movements of the man beside you. Once you’re finished, you rinse the foam off in the sink and your dad wipes your face with a towel. Then he puts your razor in the cup next to his. The whole ritual fills you with happiness.

The problem occurs when you fast-forward a few years and, in a pile of photos your anxious self takes with you when you go away to university, you find the scene by the sink faithfully captured.

Whatever the photo is supposed to show, what you see is a memory.

Now you’re trying to work out when it was that someone – presumably your mum – took the photo, and you can no longer remember anything else. What led up to it? At most you can still sense the movement of the plastic across your smooth face, the foam in the sink diluted by the water. The condensation on the mirror.

Somehow that photo became the model for reality, the template for a false memory. You first saw it when you were a bit older; someone must have shown it to you, or maybe you sneaked into the wardrobe and secretly carried stacks of albums through to your room. Aren’t you remembering it all wrong? All warped? Perhaps your father was right and you’ve linked several memories together. The result doesn’t make sense to anyone else.

 

Even before you moved to Prague, finished university and then severed all ties with the place where you grew up and with your family, you thought you had nothing in common with your mother. We’ve got nothing to say to each other. You roll that sentence around on your tongue, invoke it like a spell so you can tear yourself away – from the pain, the shame, from everything you’re still afraid of even now.

You stand up, grab your t-shirt off the floor and pull it over your head. In the kitchen you start making coffee, and while you’re waiting for at least enough for a cup to drip through into the pot, you sit on the wooden ledge by the window and lean against the wall. In front of you, you can see the back yard: a large inner courtyard divided into a grid of gardens and concrete parking spaces. From here you can see the tips of the church spires and, above all, more and more windows.

When you were young, every window, every reflection in the glass, even the reflection of your own window in the window of the building opposite, represented a new opportunity for escape. Looking inside meant looking into the lives of strangers and not thinking about your own life, at least for a while. Now you know that if you look closely enough, somewhere inside every story and every window, you’ll always find a distorted and twisted reflection of yourself. You think something doesn’t concern you and yet there’s always at least your shadow rising up towards you from behind the glass.

You remember how one summer’s day in 2007 an ambulance took your grandad away from his flat on the top floor of a hostel in Přerov for the first time, and you looked out of the window in someone else’s darkened kitchen, and in the reflection of the light from the streetlamps you studied your own face. It didn’t even occur to you that the events of the previous weeks had led up to this very place, and that the noises which bounced off the walls and made their way to you through the open window and a series of open doors could convey something more than just sound.

 

Translated by Graeme and Suzanne Dibble