It is impossible to see her face for the long, light-brown hair hanging over her cheeks. She keeps her eyes on the ground. Her wet woollen coat is unbuttoned despite the drizzle. She hurries along, walking through puddles and occasionally bumping into passers-by. In one hand she is carrying a plastic bag with a green cross on it, which swings with every step. With the other she drags a small boy behind her. He can barely keep up, even though he is almost running. The boy stumbles over a bump in the pavement, but the woman is holding him so tightly that his knees don’t even touch the ground. A toy rabbit slips out of his hand.

“Mummy, wait, my wabbit,” he calls out, but the woman doesn’t turn round.

The boy pulls away from her and picks up his toy. At that moment he spots a playground on the other side of the road.

“I want to go on the slide!”

Without waiting for an answer, he darts across the empty street. He opens the iron gate and runs to the ladder by the climbing frame.

The woman shrugs, sighs and slowly walks towards the playground. She stands by the gate and crosses her arms, scuffing the sand with her brown shoes.

“It’s amazing kids can have fun in this cold,” smiles a blonde woman in a brown quilted jacket who is sitting on a bench beside the slide. “There’s plenty of room here if you want a seat.”

The woman ignores her. She is watching the boy as he scrambles up the slide for a third time.

“Come on now, before you catch a cold,” she shouts.

The boy shakes his head, goes down the slide again and then runs off to the sandpit in the corner of the playground. He looks around for a toy bucket and finds a broken one in the shape of a frog. He fills it with wet sand and empties it out onto the wooden edge of the sandpit. It doesn’t hold together. Some of the sand remains stuck to the plastic inside. The boy sweeps the deformed frog back into the sandpit and fills the bucket once more.

“I’m going to count to three,” comes the voice from behind him, and he gives a start. “We have to go,” adds the woman more quietly. “It’s time.”

The boy tries again to empty the bucket out onto the edge of the sandpit, but then angrily throws it over the fence onto the lawn. A mother standing nearby shakes her head in disapproval.

The woman grabs the boy’s hand and drags him from the playground. The boy no longer protests and seems resigned to the fact they are leaving. The headless frog is left alone on the wooden edge of the sandpit. They leave the gate open and walk towards a block of houses. The woman clutches the boy’s hand in hers and doesn’t let go of him, even when they are standing in front of a large dark-brown door. She pulls the handle of the plastic bag over her wrist and searches for the key. A transparent plastic case falls from her coat pocket onto the pavement. The woman bends down towards it but then stops midway. Forgetting about the case, she turns the key in the lock and drags the boy indoors. The glass door lights up with a soft yellow glow.

 

Horrifying murder and suicide in Prague. Young Mikuláš (4) strangled by his own mother.

PRAGUE 21.10.99

She had it all going for her. She could have lived happily with her family in a beautiful flat in the centre of Prague. Instead she murdered her son.

 

The relatives of young Mikuláš are utterly distraught. No-one knows why his mother, Kateřina S (37), drugged him with sleeping tablets yesterday before strangling him in cold blood with a vacuum-cleaner cable. Afterwards she slashed her own wrists.

“Yesterday evening we received a report about the discovery of two bodies – that of a woman and a young child. We immediately dispatched a police unit and an ambulance, but unfortunately both individuals were pronounced dead at the scene. No further information will be released while the investigation is ongoing,” announced police spokesperson Petr Štědrý this morning.

The tragedy has left neighbours in shock and disbelief. The family didn’t appear to have any problems and were considered upstanding members of the community. “I just can’t understand it,” said Mrs B, a neighbour from the same floor, shaking her head. “It doesn’t make any sense to me. The woman was a bit quiet, but she always said hello. I just can’t see her doing something like this. I mean, she took the children to after-school clubs – she was a model mum.”

However, we were informed by a source close to the family that Kateřina S had psychological problems and long-running arguments with her husband. This source, who did not wish to be named, even hinted that she had a lover. Nevertheless, the exact motive for the murder remains unknown.

Although the police have imposed a press embargo on the case, there is speculation that the bodies were found by Mikuláš’s sister, Eliška (9).

“Her husband will get over it, he’s always been able to cope,” added Marie B. “It’s the young girl I feel sorry for. She’s going to be tormented by it her whole life.”

 

1

I was born when I was nine years, ten months and seven days old. I remember it exactly. All of a sudden I was sitting on a beige leatherette settee in a small room with a spotted carpet covered in soft toys – enough for a whole primary-school class. Opposite was an empty, sagging armchair. Pictures drawn with crayons hung on the ochre-painted walls. A small house with no door and one window. Standing in front of it was a man with a dog. He had arms and legs but no fingers. His nose was missing too. Beside it was a picture of a girl holding a teddy bear. And then to the right there was a train and carriages, where you could see four faces with messy hair at the windows: a mum, dad, girl and boy. They were speeding away, waving from the windows and smiling. I couldn’t take my eyes off this clumsily drawn picture.

I knew that the wall behind me was painted ochre too, but it seemed to me as though it were as black as coal. A coldness emanated from it. Nothing moved in the room except my fingers, which were fidgeting with my woollen skirt. I didn’t know whose clothes I was wearing. Even though the room was overheated, I still had goose bumps on my arms. A tartan rug lay on the back of the sofa, but I didn’t know if I was allowed to put it over me. From the window I could see the last of the dirty snow on the roofs of the cars parked in the street. Now and again a car would pass by. I could hear the slush spraying from the tyres.

“Yes…she’s here… You can’t…? It would be better… Oh, right… Fine… No, it’s OK.” The words from the telephone conversation I could hear through the closed door made no sense to me. Nothing around me made any sense.

The door slowly opened and in came a petite young woman wearing a black T-shirt, a wide brown skirt and purple tights. All I knew about her was that her name was Tereza and she was in some way responsible for me. Instead of sitting in the armchair in front of me, she bent down on one knee right next to me. She stroked my hand and smiled. Her eyes were red.

“Let’s go, Eli.”

She never said where and I didn’t ask her. I got up from the armchair and the black wall behind me rose up in tandem.

In the hall Tereza helped me put on a quilted jacket, a scarf and a cap that was too big for me and came down in front of my eyes. Tereza smiled and stroked my cold cheeks. I didn’t return the smile. She took my hand and we went out into the street. Soon I could feel my socks getting wet in the tight boots.

We got onto a tram. Tereza pointed to a free seat, stood above me and held onto my shoulder with one hand as though I might fall. It was already getting dark, but I recognised the streets outside. This was my route home from the school I went to every Monday for art lessons. We’d soon be getting off and Tereza would take me round the corner to our four-storey building. We’d go up the stairs to the top floor, where she’d hand me over to my dad. I felt anxious. I couldn’t imagine the two of us, Dad and I, living alone in such an enormous flat.

The name of our stop was announced and I started to get up, but Tereza pushed me back down onto the seat. I looked at her in confusion. She started to open her mouth but then just smiled guiltily. I pressed my forehead to the window and watched the corner of our building disappear from view. The journey seemed endless and I lost all concept of time and place. At some point we switched to a bus which took us along winding streets to a stop in the middle of a steep hill, looking down on the lights of the city trapped under dark-grey felt. From a distance we could hear the sound of passing trains and railway announcements. Tereza looked awkwardly around the dark street. “Where was it?” she muttered to herself. She took a piece of paper with an address from her pocket and held it up to the light of the streetlamp. “That way,” she said uncertainly, pointing with the hand which was holding mine. We stopped in front of a huge grey two-storey house covered with ivy. She pressed the round button on the intercom. There was a name on it: L. Brettschneiderová.

The buzzer sounded, Tereza pushed open the gate and took me up the five steps to the open door of the house. We found ourselves in a dark hallway. A light shone at the end of the hall where a black silhouette stood.

“Welcome to my home,” said the faceless person slightly awkwardly. Tereza helped me out of my coat and waited while I took off my boots. “Come in and sit at the table.” The outline of the person pointed towards the room with the light on. I obediently went in without a backward glance at Tereza in the hall. I heard her call out something, her voice trembling faintly, but I didn’t understand the words.

On the table was a cup of cocoa and a small plate with two slices of cake. I sat down, placed my hands on the embroidered tablecloth and looked out of the window. You couldn’t see anything outside, just the yellow light of the wall lamp reflected in the glass. I could also see my own reflection, but my face was blurred. If it hadn’t been so late, I would have been able to see out to the garden or even down to the valley and perhaps even much further – to where my dad must have been waiting for me. Surely he would be arriving any minute to take me home.

I could hear the two women discussing something from the hallway. Then there was the sound of the door closing and shuffling feet and suddenly I was no longer alone in the kitchen. Sitting opposite me was the woman whose outline I had seen in the hall. Now I recognised her. It was Aunt Leonie, my mum’s older sister.

“You’re going to be here with me from now on, Eli,” said my aunt, passing me the mug of cocoa and blocking my view from the window.

Then she just sat silently watching me as I forced down the dry cake. When I had finished, she told me to get up. She put her hand on my shoulder and led me upstairs.

“So here we are,” she said, pointing to an open door. I looked at her in confusion. “This is your room,” she added by way of explanation. I wanted to say that this was nonsense, that I already had a room with my own bed, a desk and a secret hideaway behind the wardrobe. That was where I kept my box of treasures and the toy cat called Maruška with the soft fur, which I had saved up for all by myself. My home was there on the hill beyond the river. This place was foreign to me – I couldn’t even remember the last time I had been to visit. I wanted to tell my aunt all of this, but I was afraid to open my mouth. My aunt looked like a statue, not moving a muscle, her lips tightly closed and her face unhealthily pale.

I went inside and looked around. A wardrobe, bookcase, chest of drawers, desk, bed and a lamp on a bedside table, which cast strange shapes on the wallpaper with pictures of bears and dolls on it. I brushed my hand against the lightshade and the pictures on the wall danced.

“Make yourself at home,” said my aunt, putting her hand on my shoulder again. I turned round. She reached into the chest of drawers for something and pressed a cloth dog into my hand. “Here, this is for you…” she said awkwardly. “If you need anything, my room is on the floor above, first door on the right.”

She tried to smile. For a moment she seemed to want to say something else, but then she firmly closed her lips, squeezed my shoulder with her bony fingers and went back to the door. She walked gingerly, her back stooped like an old woman’s.

She closed the door behind her and I looked around once more. I opened the wardrobe. Clothes had been laid out carefully on the shelves; toys lay in the chest of drawers. None of it seemed familiar to me. I found fourth-year textbooks in the cupboard under the desk. They were brand new and unopened. I closed the cupboard, pushed the drawers shut and sat down on the bed. The alarm clock on the bedside table said seven o’clock.

I undressed, put on the nightshirt that had been left on the duvet and slipped into bed. I tossed and turned nearly the whole night because I needed to pee. It was only at daybreak that I summoned up the courage to go out into the dark corridor. I opened one door after another to find out which one led to the toilet.

(….)

50

(…)

We got married a year later. David’s parents and sister were delighted. Even Aunt Marta congratulated me enthusiastically on the decision. “A catch like that doesn’t come along every day,” she said, patting me on the shoulder.

In the living room at home, Romana dressed me in the full-skirted, beaded gown. She also helped me with my hair and make-up — I refused to get a professional to do it because all the fuss surrounding the wedding had suddenly become too much for me.

“It’s not too late to run away,” Romana whispered jokingly in my ear as I was getting in the car.

The wedding took place at Průhonice Castle. I walked down the aisle by myself. It didn’t occur to me for a moment to let my father or any other member of my family know. The only one I invited was Aunt Marta. I saw her looking at me from the front row, tears rolling down her cheeks. I would never have believed she could cry from happiness. At least someone did. As I stepped into the passage between the rows of guests and continued walking towards David, who was smiling at me, it crossed my mind for a moment that I really could run away just as Romana had suggested. But my dress weighed a ton and I was wearing high-heeled shoes fastened with a strap that wouldn’t allow me to make any sudden movements. And so I became Mrs Jonášová. David moved in with me and rented out his flat in Petřiny.

I submitted my bachelor’s thesis a year late. I began my master’s course along with the unfortunate Ondra. When we both walked into the same studio in October, we smiled at each other sympathetically. After my finals I joined an architectural firm specializing in renovating old farm buildings. Lots of work, not much money and almost zero chance of an improvement in the situation. But I didn’t know how to do anything else, so I gritted my teeth and didn’t complain. I was glad that David had a decent job, because the allowance from my aunt had dried up. All that was left of her inheritance was a small sum of money that wouldn’t even cover my expenses for a couple of months.

Romana had also managed to complete her degree. Shortly after graduation she got a job at the Jewish Museum and from her modest salary she was able to rent a tiny unrenovated flat in Černý Most. I told her she could come back any time because there was enough room in our house for two families, but she shook her head: “I’ve already given you enough trouble. You need space for yourself now. And for David too.” I think she knew as well as I did that that wasn’t the real reason.

I sometimes went to see her at the weekend or in the evening after work. She lived on the eighth floor of a prefab building. The door to the flat was padded on the inside, there was yellowing wallpaper peeling off the walls, and the worn linoleum was coming unstuck in the corners. But Romana looked relieved to be in her one-bedroom rented flat in one of the grimmest districts of Prague. She didn’t live with anyone and was no longer looking for anyone. She confided in me that the older she got, the less she felt the need to socialize with people. She was happiest on her own somewhere in the archives or at home with Hanička. The bedside table, kitchen table and bench were always covered in books: all weighty nineteenth-century tomes with tattered historical covers — Gogol, Melville or Flaubert. She had totally lost interest in the Czech or modern literature she used to read. When I was playing with Hanička, I noticed that Romana was completely oblivious to us. She was totally immersed in a world in which people travelled in carriages and women were only responsible for looking after the household.

Hanička seemed increasingly strange to me. Her favourite hobby was stamp-collecting. Not the ones with animals or flowers on them, but stamps with portraits of presidents, writers and artists. She called them the “old men” and used tweezers to carefully place them in an album without any apparent logic — Masaryk, Hitler and Zápotocký were all lined up together in the same row. Sometimes I took Hanička to the playground. She usually sat at the side under a tree and leafed through a picture book she had brought with her. Now and then she would get up and take a few steps towards the sandpit or the climbing frame and watch the children playing, but then she would turn around again and sit down in the shade with her book.

For a long time I wasn’t able to get pregnant, even though David was desperate for a child. We underwent a series of tests together, but the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with us. They suggested the problem was psychological and we should go to marriage counselling. In the end we opted for artificial insemination, but a few days before the appointment at the fertility clinic, two lines suddenly appeared on a pregnancy test. When I told David, he whooped like a little boy who’s just been given his first grown-up bike. Although the doctor advised me to go on sick leave due to the high-risk pregnancy, I continued working up until the birth. I was reluctant to abandon my colleagues, who I’d grown accustomed to in the meantime.

In early 2016 I gave birth to a son. David suggested the name Jakub, after his father, and I agreed. He was born prematurely, weighed just over two kilos, and had a bad case of neonatal jaundice. That’s what my mum must have looked like when she came into the world, I thought. He was so weak that they wouldn’t even let me keep him with me. I had to leave my hospital room to go and look at him in the incubator. I stroked the glass and watched him sucking his scaly little yellow hands. His eyes were closed and he had no idea what was going on around him. If he hadn’t had a tag with his name on it, I wouldn’t have known it was my child.

I had the feeling that with childbirth it was the same as with everything in my life up to then. Suddenly there was an earth-shattering change and I wasn’t able to take any joy in it. All those months leading up to the birth I had imagined what it would be like when little Kubík was born, when I held him in my arms for the first time and he looked into my eyes, and now I had officially become a mother without experiencing the corresponding feeling that went along with it. I felt as if someone was sticking all these labels onto me — wife, graduate, mother — from the outside.

After a month I was allowed to take Kubík home. I was afraid he would be a noisy baby like Hanička, but he rarely cried. After coming back from the maternity hospital, he virtually slept through the day as well as the night. I had to wake him up for feeds. Sometimes he slept so long that I started to worry he had suffocated – they had warned me about sudden death syndrome at the hospital. Then I would run into the bedroom only to find Kubík breathing peacefully. The sound of the door opening abruptly didn’t rouse him – he didn’t even squirm in his cot, as if I hadn’t come into the room at all. I would go back into the living room and wait for him to wake up. After all these years of studying and working, suddenly I had nothing to do – once more I had plenty of time for myself.

That was when I started having the dreams again.

 

Translated by Graeme Dibble