(pp. 18-28)
Jana walks aimlessly here and there around her large flat. She goes across the spacious hall that she never managed to make homely no matter what she did, to the south-west half of the flat with another five windows onto the inner courtyard. Two in what was to be the nursery, which is completely empty apart from an old-fashioned rocking horse in the middle that Jana bought in an antiques shop. Two in the kitchen along with the glass doors to the balcony, and one in the pre-war maid’s room, which she turned into a study. The free walls are covered in books from floor to ceiling, and between them is a desk, a computer and a window opening onto the balcony.
The south-west is the most unsuitable compass direction for vegetation on a balcony. Every time she and Alek went on holiday, the fiery heat of a summer’s afternoon scorched everything Jana planted. Tomatoes, basil, rosemary, chives, sage, thyme, cucumbers, thuya and juniper. When she went on external archaeological research trips outside Prague, the balcony flora suffered the same misfortune. Alek never watered it. He smoked on the balcony, drank coffee and observed the glass staircase of the adjacent hotel. Reflected in the glass was the Church of Our Lady of the Snows – pure Gothic. He hadn’t noticed it until she pointed it out to him. He feasted his eyes on the impressive reflection, which could only be conjured up by Prague with its medieval gems, and neglected the watering. Following Jana’s desperate rebukes, he only promised that next time he definitely wouldn’t forget. He was capable of looking at withering flowers while drinking deeply from his cup. He knew how to make money. And keep Jana in the lap of luxury. Tick-tock. Jana always looked forward to autumn. The sun moved in a lower arc and lost its intense heat, and she decked the balcony out with shop-bought heather. In the evening she poured herself a glass of wine, settled down among the flower boxes, pots and candle holders and talked to the only star in the sky, the Evening Star, a white pearl that fought its way tenaciously through the city smog and neon signs. Hotel guests drifted back up the stairs and waved to her while she waited for Alek to come back from the bank and sipped red wine from a replica medieval goblet. And stroked the heather around her. Tick-tock. And fixed up that grand, half-empty flat. She had the strange feeling that there were more people living in it. The ghosts of her Jewish ancestors, deprived of human dignity, floated down from dark corners for her to comfort them, feed them and conjure up the warmth of home for them. And she believed in the final sentence of fairy tales: and they all lived happily ever after. Tick-tock.
Jana is a city girl at heart. She loves going out into the streets of Prague, the crowds of tourists, the noise of trams, shoes worn down by the cobblestones. She awaits the bells from the church towers as eagerly as an essential drug; she knows all the statues, and in the stone lions from Prague’s sculptures and house signs – in their lazy movements and readiness to leap – she sees a reflection of herself. A lioness.
The day she brought home the little urn with the ashes, she had a strange dream. She was lying in her bed, breastfeeding a newborn baby. The bed was covered by a koutnice – a cloth that protected newborn babies against evil spirits in the olden days. It was decorated with red embroidered motifs of stylized blossoming trees growing out of a heart, and outside the window crowded vague dark figures without faces, without features, without form. They hammered on the glass for her to let them in, and Jana knew it was the baby that had summoned them. She woke up frightened and yet fortified by the embrace from beyond the grave, like a fish having food sprinkled into its aquarium or the stagnant water oxygenated. Like the roots of a withering plant being watered by an unknown person. Since then she can no longer get to sleep. She no longer sleeps at all. She hears strangers’ voices; they are always whispering: Let us in. And she listens as the round metal clock in the hall stands still. It has stopped and won’t start again. It happened the day she was cleaning the window. At the precise moment when the tear appeared on her amniotic sac and irritated the uterus. The very next day she got a cannula in her wrist, a drip on a stand, steroids so the foetus’s lungs would grow properly, something against infection, something to calm the uterus. She didn’t tell anyone except Alek; she lay in the maternity hospital for a week, trying to keep the child inside her, and while the baby boy played with the umbilical cord, she counted the snowflakes outside the window and the drops trickling down into the cannula.
When she met Alek for the first time, he had a gold chain from his girlfriend around his neck. Despite that, he asked Jana if she would stir his champagne with her finger, since he hated bubbles. When they met again by chance in company, he no longer had the gold chain around his neck. In his forties, he was neither married nor divorced, nor was he short of money. But he was in demand. Women deliberately brushed against his well-built body, nuzzling up to him like cats with their masters’ legs when they suddenly decide to favour them, as if it were nothing, as if there were no more space around them, as if they couldn’t help but move closer, make contact, retract their claws. But Alek had a weakness for redheads. When he asked her out, she felt like the winner of a contest she hadn’t even entered. He took her to the bank, to his office, dialled the number of his boss in Germany, walked from corner to corner and showed off his flawless German to her. Shortly before, she had read an anthropological study about the brain which said that the development of the brain is primarily stimulated by sexual selection. Females preferred men they could talk to, and that time in his posh office she felt like a prehistoric female assessing the communication skills of a potential partner.
She told Tinka about it in a restaurant with views over Prague, her eyes surveying the fragments of her life with him. They were scattered all across snow-covered Prague. The unfinished Gothic church of Our Lady of the Snows rose high above the surrounding modern buildings. It had been designed on a grand scale – the nave was supposed to have been forty metres high and a hundred metres long. The new coronation church of Charles IV would have rivalled St Vitus Cathedral, but the Hussite Wars and resulting poverty put a stop to the grand project. All that remained of the Emperor’s plans was the high chancel flooded with light, as a reminder that life will always deal you a blow. An unfinished cathedral, a mere presbytery functioning as a church, but impressive nonetheless, testifying to the human spirit which is fixed on the stars and the hidden darkness where the true field of battle is to be found. The ticking of the clock marks out the moment of extinction and everything eventually ends against a background of the most intense radiance. The thirty-metre-high chancel with the highest altar in Bohemia, full of light and sunshine, looks like a shipwrecked argosy pulled ashore, restored and preserved. Prepared for lovers of lofty ideas and as a warning.
“What are you going to do?” Tinka lifted her watch arm to her eyes energetically, overturning her cup of coffee. She cleaned the puddle of coffee from the saucer with a napkin without it occurring to her that she could read her fortune in it the way you can in coffee grounds. “Anyway, he’s a bastard. Leaving a woman when she’s just lost a child!”
Jana found herself in the devil’s kitchen; all the gargoyles on the roof of St Vitus Cathedral, all those life-size demonic creatures, turned towards her and shrieked: Tell her the truth! She knew that with her silence she was probably hurting Alek and Tinka even more. A lie can kill, but what if the truth can too?
“Tinka, since I came back from the hospital, everything has changed. The dead speak to me more than the living.”
“It’s all still too raw. It’ll pass, don’t worry,” she said, crossing one leg restlessly over the other. “Just don’t tell anyone, or they’ll cart you off to the funny farm.” Tinka didn’t look behind her, didn’t look inside herself, didn’t hunt for volatile sequences somewhere in the unconscious. She was here for the others, for the living. Although Viktor was currently in Africa, Makeda was waiting at nursery school. She had to go and get her. She knew that with the certainty of a woman who didn’t read, didn’t dream, didn’t build castles in the air, didn’t have doubts and gave her family as much as she got. She wasn’t searching for her place or her purpose – she was living it. She couldn’t care less about some guardian of the threshold in her mind that ran the menagerie of beasts, predators and reptiles from which she had emerged. She lived every minute as if it was her last. She had inherited African genes from her Ethiopian father, and the more she denied and tried to hide the Africa in her blood, the more it shone outwardly. Today was today, and anyone who said it was tomorrow was a liar.
Jana loved her family and treated them as her own; she went to see them and absorbed the spirit of family happiness, but since coming back from the holiday in Kenya she only visited Tinka when Viktor was away, and in her mind she secretly placed a little dish of milk and honey on the threshold of their flat – for the house snake, the guardian spirit, just to be on the safe side.
Over the years they’d known each other, Tinka had established herself as a renowned photographer in the world of fashion and modelling and had brought Makeda into the world. She looked after her without ceasing to take photographs – she carried her everywhere with her in a sling on her back, her career flourishing, while her partner Viktor, a graduate of African studies, globetrotter and world-renowned photographer, undertook a number of scientific and private expeditions to the dark continent.
“What are you going to do with that enormous flat? It’s brought you nothing but bad luck,” Tinka called to her as she left the restaurant and waved goodbye to Jana. “Call me any time, OK?” she said, turning round in the doorway. She always turned round. On the stairs of houses, the steps of trains, buses and planes; she leaned out of the window when guests were leaving her house, and in the metro when they announced, “Please stand clear of the closing doors” she inevitably stood between them and had the last word.
Jana realized how different the two of them were. Unlike Tinka, she was ruthlessly introspective; she went deep into her mind and soul, and just as in archaeology she gradually uncovered one settlement layer after another until only the last one, the oldest, was left, so she uncovered all the layers of her own self until she hit upon the instincts inherited from animal ancestors. She also surveyed everything around her in the same way. Constantly flashing through her head were disturbing thoughts, painful experiences and events, her own and others’ emotions; she was also able to mentally plunge into the heads of others – and, what was worse, that included those long dead.
What are you going to do with that enormous flat? …bad luck! All the way home, the relentless echo of Tinka’s words weighed heavily upon her, gliding down the escalator to the metro, resonating in the carriage and in her head and vying with the painful, still-raw memories from the maternity hospital. Chase them away, force them into a corner and kill them. The only cure is time. It will colour them, distort them, help. It always does. But at home, time has not just stopped for her but is actually beginning to run backwards.
The walls of the buildings are like a sponge, absorbing everything around them, which is then drawn out again by the siphons. In her flat, Jana often senses someone’s anxiety from long ago that you could cut with a knife.
It’s the same with illnesses. When they originate in broken human relationships, they extend across generations. Even victims of the Holocaust and war crimes are born again in their own descendants – it isn’t over. The game goes on. Blood doesn’t die but is born again and again in future generations. Blood contains everything, even the value of a life.
The original owners of the building where Jana lives and the occupants of the entire third floor were her ancestors on her father’s side – a successful family of lawyers. During the Protectorate the last to leave him with a yellow star on their coats and a suitcase in hand were two women.
Rút and Erna.
They got dressed at dawn. By twelve o’clock they had to be out of the flat, leaving everything in place. Some impatient SS man came twice more during the morning to give them a firm reminder. The wild and rebellious Erna deliberately left the sleeve of her mother’s leopard fur coat, which she had failed to turn in with the others out of defiance, caught in the wardrobe door. To show off. They set their cases down in the middle of the hall on the large marble tiles imitating a chess board and then went through the flat for the last time – the modern Brazilian palisander furniture standing on the polished parquet floors mingled with Art Nouveau furnishings, decorated with flowers and the obligatory dragonfly motif, magnificent chandeliers with pink, yellow and white shades, with floral tendrils all around, crystal and ebony, ivory candelabra and marble lamps. Rút, her platinum hair in an elaborate chignon that had become slovenly and dishevelled of late, bid farewell to her book collection. Erna drew the heavy velvet and brocade curtains in her father’s posh study. In the drawing room, her eyes caressed the hanging family portraits and photographs and her unhappy grandmother, who had sat down on the sofa in resignation. In the empty legal office they breathed in the male scent that still lingered there and, thus fortified, they sat down at the kitchen table. They still had time. Rút’s attention was drawn to the blue and white cement floor tiles – for a long time they hadn’t had a maid to do the cleaning and raspberry jam had been trodden into the curves of the plant design. She sighed and looked her granddaughter in the eye. Erna got up, pulled a small, ivory-handled knife out of the drawer, kneeled down and began to scrape the jam off the tiles. Somebody knocked timidly on the door. The former maid had come to say goodbye. Erna went to open the door, all three women were moved to tears and then the grandmother’s second sight dissolved in the glass panel of the kitchen door – Rút passed through the etched poppies and sunflowers like a ghost.
Jana broke the etched panel in one wing of the bedroom door when she was pregnant and carrying a ladder over to that blasted window. People don’t pay much heed to bad omens – a slip of the tongue, a trip, a fall, breaking something, clockwork stopping and, in the worst-case scenario, a bell cracking in a church tower. Then she cried over the broken shards that were more than a century old, holding onto her belly and dipping a cloth in vinegar solution. She heard footsteps, the cracking of the shards underfoot. Again she had the feeling that she wasn’t alone in the flat. She waited to see if someone would come into the bedroom, hug her and say not to worry, that it didn’t matter, that shards bring good luck. Maybe Rút, maybe Erna with the orange flames in her eyes.
She is still waiting.
The cornicing on the ceiling extends all the way around the hall with the exception of the partition wall adjoining the next-door flat. This irregularity offends the aesthetic sense. There is the same problem with the former drawing room with its leather First Republic suite. After the war the flats were reduced in size and the grand pre-war drawing rooms cut off, and the land was divided up or surrounded by walls with barbed wire. Later someone stuck linoleum on the coloured titles in the kitchen. At her request Alek laboriously peeled it off, removing a thick layer of glue and leaving Jana with the painstaking work with knives and scrapers. Bit by bit, she recovered the tiles with the plant design from the encumbrance of the latter half of the twentieth century. She is an archaeologist and fiddly work with palette knives, trowels and whisk brooms is second nature to her. In one place she discovered traces of jam, and a little further on there were several cracked tiles. It gave her the same thrill as when a human bone or a shard of pottery peeped out at her during an archaeological dig. Every thing dug up from the earth has its own story, which at a certain point ran out of one of the human inventions: causal time.
But the clock in the hall is silent. Time isn’t ticking away; the hands have gone into spasm. In one of the flats on the third floor of the Neo-Baroque building, everything has come to a standstill.
And yet there is some movement in the windows high above the tree-lined avenue: above the pedestrians and behind a cream-coloured curtain, Jana is going round in circles like one of the wooden apostles on the Old Town astronomical clock. She is all in black and absorbs light like a black hole. She is able to switch off the world around her. Delve inside herself, fall through the centuries. She is an archaeologist and the distant past, all those centuries gone by, the millions of skeletons she has navigated through every day – those are the pillars she can lean on. She lives more in what has been than what is. What’s more, she is a new mother without a new baby and has the impression that she has lost her mind. She sips her hot coffee, the fifth of the day, and looks down on Wenceslas Square. In the Middle Ages it was called the Horse Market, seen from the periphery of Prague’s New Town. During the quiet, frosty days of her unfulfilled confinement she can hear the hot breath of the horses by her ear and the neighing and whinnying of the poorly treated animals. It is snowing ever so softly. Golden dust is falling through the lamplight and a pigeon alights on the sill. A dirty plastic bag stuck in a bare treetop sways in the wind. Jana gets a fright, and so does the pigeon. It spreads its wings and flies away. Jana is hypnotized by the disgusting plastic thing, but when she stops concentrating, squints a little and screws up her eyes, it looks like an ornamental ceramic duck hanging there, like a medieval vessel on a banqueting table for guests to wash their fingers in. She glances towards Jindřišská Street with the postpartum eyes of an archaeologist and sees stone wayside shrines with carvings on them, and nearby a gallows. And although it isn’t quite dusk yet, she perceives a dangerous darkness from long-past ages – on the corners of the low, rough buildings, resinous wood glows in iron braziers and a lone passer-by is carrying their own lantern…
She swallows another mouthful of coffee.
The best coffee she’s had was in Kenya. The coffee pot, milk jug, sugar bowl and tray were made of silver and the waiter assigned to their table was called Charlie. She and Alek had a table for two. They sat on the beach under a canopy of palm leaves, with the Indian Ocean playing its game of tides and crabs of varying sizes clambering over a large rock rising out of the waves. Alek had deliberately ordered nuts and was watching to see how quickly the monkeys would appear and how resourceful the little long-tailed thieves would be this time. He was like a kid. In Africa, however, his innate playfulness ceased to impress her after she had spent a night making love under a starry sky with the brooding Viktor. A night from which they had struck an unplanned spark, a new life, while the unsuspecting Alek was asleep in the hotel.
It wasn’t possible to go from Viktor’s arms back to Alek’s. It occurred to her that Alek was one of the shaky parts that prevented her from discovering the precious things in life, that their relationship was anaemic, trivial, that there had never been a spark between them, they had never quarrelled, never upset each other, that the relationship between a man and a woman needed shadows as well as bright light in order to appear three-dimensional. She had gone off him, and when she found out she was pregnant, she told him there was another man’s child growing inside her in the calm tone of voice she might have used to inform him that her wisdom tooth was growing in.
“Jana, whose is it?” he asked when sober.
“You bitch, whose is it? Tell me!” he assailed her when drunk.
She didn’t say.
She didn’t throw him out and he didn’t leave. They lay down next to each other and waited for something to happen. He took her to the maternity hospital when she didn’t like the look of the wet spot on her pants and he left his own phone number at the nurses’ station. The corpulent, energetic nurse addressed him as Dad… He felt a wrench inside him, but he didn’t protest. It was only when the little urn with the ashes was placed on the cabinet that Alek took fright, packed his things and left.
Translated by Graeme Dibble