“Where are you taking me?”

The female nude sprawling in her mass of red hair does not even move. The person has stopped speaking dialect and is once more staring silently at the street in front of him. But then he started yawning so much that the young woman who had been lying down sat up sharply and turned slightly green. Maybe it was because she had been slowly sipping iced mojito. But she had ordered the drink herself! She is sitting with her mother in the cubist café and the waiter is setting two glasses and a cream cake on a little plate in front of them. Naturally, the cream cake is square-shaped – it is a cubist café, after all. Behind the grand piano sits a pianist, and even from here you can hear his joints crack as he wearily runs his fingers over the keys.

“I wanted to talk to you, and now this…” says her mum as the first chords thunder. And I, free of tattoos, sip my mojito and smile because: “Mum, do you hear what he’s playing?” And the worn-out pianist’s voice sentimentally croaks:

Dark eyes, passionate eyes,
Burning and splendid eyes
How I love you so, how I fear you…
Verily, I espied you in an ill-starred moment

And Mum doesn’t believe that it’s just a coincidence, that I hadn’t requested the song from the pianist, and contentedly sinks the spoon into the cream cake…

“Where are you taking me?” She doesn’t shout. She harnesses the roar. She subdues her tone so that she can have a completely ordinary, matter-of-fact, more or less polite conversation between two people. But the ambulanceman was silent. He had even stopped telling jokes about gypsies and poofs to his colleague behind the wheel.

All of a sudden the ambulance stops. A door slammed. For a long time nothing happens.

I dream, though perhaps not about mojito, I wouldn’t dare: they’re going to get me some water to drink. After all, they’re not transporting a thing. A piece of sandstone in slippers. Somewhere in the toilet by the pump they fill a plastic bottle with water and get themselves coffee from a machine, the driver with sugar, the ambulanceman without, and a filled baguette and bacon-flavoured crackers. And now a geyser is gushing from the roadway in front of a car. The cloud bursts above the city and a stream of water goes straight into my mouth. Down at Můstek, three fat, smiling, chattering old Italians lean over to drink on a hot summer’s day, 16 July at 1.15pm in the year 2008. Or some other time? Does it matter?

I place my palms under a gushing spring somewhere high in the mountains – you are with me; I follow your bent, girlish, delicate back and your firm, non-girlish step which says: Christ, stop lazing about all the time in bed with your depression and get up and walk, go, stride, plod, march, slog through the countryside and scramble your way up the hill and run down the hill, breathe deeply, like Mum used to tell you when you were a young girl, Jesus, you’re breathing like you were giving birth, you have to breathe deeply!, inhale the fragrance, look at what’s rustling behind that tree, an animal or a rock, over there’s a dilapidated hide and underneath it is a boletus mushroom, when was the last time you found a real white boletus?, and the wind in the trees and cobwebs between your fingers, and on your shoulder a mosquito sits in a drop of your blood.

And you let me drink from your cupped palm – not much of a success, I just get a wet face. We still have ten kilometres ahead of us and my feet are covered in blisters. Suddenly, down in the valley below us, the landscape forms a dome, glowing in the setting sun. I embrace you as if it were for the last time. Where is that moment? Who could find it in my body, now as stiff as a statue? Where is that moment…who could find it…and your tongue in my mouth, the taste of blackberries, your saliva, life.

Finally. The redhead opened the door and banged it shut again. A man in a leather jacket slid into the seat beside her. Thick plastic glasses jutted out from his face. He looked a bit like Andy Warhol.

“Do you have anything to drink? I’m terribly thirsty,” she whispered when they started off again.

He barely glanced at her. He probably just registered with indifference the sedated monument with purple slippers on whose belly a knapsack had lain since the year dot. In her haste she hadn’t been able to find anything else in the box from Popel. He averted his gaze and didn’t say a word.

Wherever they’re taking me, Rybka, I’ll make up for what I’ve done to you: I’ll roam the hospital corridors and let them shove a hosepipe into my bowels and at night I’ll cover myself up with the mumbling of sick old people and their children by their stinking beds, children sickened by the time wasted in the disgusting hospital stench, I’ll let it all into my head as penance for the unfathomable babbling of the world and the rasping shriek of goblins.

Behold, just see how I come into the prison courtyard, dizzy and tired, and dribble sauce from a mess tin onto my sweatshirt, and how the hungry hands of thieves grope me at night; I throw myself into prayers, as cold as the river Vltava in January, or I will be forever immobilized in a bubble of silence; and then, thrusting, lying down and standing up, standing up and lying down, I walk round Mount Kailash, above which circle vultures and at the foot of which your grandfather wanted to be chopped up when he dies.

Anywhere, just not to the Garden.

And once again they’re rattling their way through the city over the cobbles, over the asphalt, and they stop at the traffic lights. At one point Ema turns onto her side, as far as the straps will allow, and vomits. She vomits under Andy Warhol’s feet. A small jellyfish glistens on the ambulance floor, a cartoon bubble that they forgot to write text in.

“Do you want to play Chinese Whispers with me,” she asks. But Andy doesn’t understand. How could he? It’s impossible to play Chinese Whispers with only two people. And so she starts to play by herself, she whispers and mutters, stutters and then passes it on, and then it suddenly hits her, what if at least once in this game it was the other way round – what if in the end a clear word formed from what had started off as a piece of nonsense: for example –

Garden. She can see it wildly pulsating, as if they had just created it a second ago, that mockery of symmetry, the monstrous cosmos split into a triptych. Around a well, into which clusters of dead birds rain down, naked riders on pigs gallop through a dark landscape shot through with flashes of light; the pope-devil on a magnificent throne devours and then immediately throws up the damned and at that moment there is dancing to hellish music and a goblin with a drum in which an infant is trapped, and over here scorpions and a man crucified on a harp, and over there two ears joined by a needle, from which the handle of a knife sticks out.

“The pope-devil there is devouring…” The glasses turned round to her inquisitively. “Do you know where they’re taking us? Do you have anything to drink?” And surprisingly Andy Warhol says something. “I’ve no idea. I imagine you’re cold.” And Andy Warhol takes off his leather jacket and covers her up to her chin with it.

The ambulanceman says something into the radio. Only then did she realize that the siren wasn’t switched on. Fortunately neither she nor Warhol were at all important. Not acute cases. She should have tried to leave the emergency room at Motol on her own, leave an empty wetsuit there in her place, swim home and fall asleep, without any tablets this time, sleep for twenty-four hours and then wake up, open the blinds and go to work and have lunch with Rybka and light candles in the evening, and put on Nico and wait for Dita to call… And talk to her and laugh and then make love at night. Wake up. Open the blinds. Go to work. Call Rybka, invite Mum for a mojito and a cubist cream cake at the café. Simply keep moving in the safe womb of everydayness.

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)