B. Proudew (Ukázka, strana 99)

tonsillitis if I get it again. But then she probably wouldn’t die of it.

It’s a pity that Secký’s in Germany. He could have given me some advice. These days Míša Španihel keeps following me. He’s another classmate, but he wears glasses and white trousers, and he’s obviously never in all his life heard anything about murdering.

Míša really gets on my nerves, cos he loves me. Sure, I’m pleased that somebody loves me, but I don’t enjoy it very much. Every day he waits for me in the entrance to our courtyard and he won’t let me go home. He always makes a point of taking my schoolbag or the bag for my overshoes or something else like that, so I can’t go home without them.

I have to chase him and try to make him, and in the end I always have to wait until he gets fed up. So when I don’t go home and I just stand there with him, he doesn’t say anything and he just stares. I always ask him: “What do you want, Míša?” And he just goes: “Heh heh heh.” Just like a madman from a madhouse.

When Honza Bezvad from Zákopy fell in love with me last year, we walked up and down in this field and then he suddenly threw me to the ground and slavered all over my face. So I ran off and haven’t spoken to him since.

I’ve fallen in love with people as well—like Squire Dalibor of Kozojedy, who I have in my pencil case, for instance, and I do rather like Luděk Starý from the theatre. And if they fell in love with me, then I certainly wouldn’t do stupid things like that to them—we’d have a nice little chat instead.

Míša Španihel loves me so much that his mum and dad once came to have a look at me, cos he kept telling them

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about me at home. I was sitting in the courtyard between the blocks of flats, on the path where this nice mud forms after it rains, like the clay at the circle, and I was making a statue. That’s where they came for me—Míša, his mum and dad. They all had gold-rimmed spectacles and white bellbottom trousers. I said: “Good morning.” Míša said: “Hi.” And his mum shook her head sadly: “So that’s Helena…” And then they quickly left. They didn’t even invite me to visit. Not that I’d have gone, cos as Grandma from Zákopy says, there’s no telling what they’re about if they won’t be spoken to.

Yesterday I went with Zdena Klímová to the stationer’s to buy drawing triangles, and we met our Sparkies leader Anděla.

She didn’t look herself at all, so we almost didn’t recognize her. But when we did recognize her, we were really glad. The last Sparkies was in spring and then she didn’t go any more, so we were afraid that something had happened to her.

“Hullooo!” we called out to her.

And Zdena immediately added “Ooooh, Anděla, you’re all kind of fat!”

Now I would never have said that, cos I know what it’s like when somebody says that kind of thing to me. But it was true. Anděla had a belly like half a barrel.

“I’m not fat,” she said, “I’m expecting a baby.”

“So you’re married now?” we yelled for joy.

“No,” she said, and left. She didn’t want to talk to us about it at all.

We bought our drawing triangles and sat on the kerb by the fountain.

“How can she be having a baby if she isn’t married?”

Zdena asked. I explained that she didn’t have to be married for that, cos my mum wasn’t married to Freistein either, and

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they had me anyway. I know that for sure. But we weren’t sure how it actually works. Zdena thinks that children are made by kissing, but that’s definitely not right, cos then even children could have children, and old people too, and children and old people don’t have children. One girl who was sent down to our class, but who doesn’t go around with us any more cos she’s been sent down to another class, she told me that people do it the same way as animals. So I asked Kačenka if that was true, and she got cross and said: “You can’t put it that way. Ugh!” But she didn’t actually tell me which way you can put it. She just asked me who’d told me that, but I didn’t tell, cos I could see she’d be off visiting the school again.

So the thing with the animals remained a mystery. In any case I don’t know what they do like animals, so I can’t figure out if it’s true or not.

Whenever I want to talk about this, Kačenka always starts explaining about how a baby is in its mother’s belly like a seed in an apple. But how does it get in there? It’s some kind of big mystery and maybe not even Kačenka’s sure about it, even though she’s had two babies.

During the holidays in Zákopy, I also heard some women talking in front of a block of flats about another woman who lives in there and who has a load of children, but she doesn’t have a husband and she’s sort of untidy. One said “Vošmiková is expecting another,” and the other one said, “You don’t say! Has that trollop been knocked up again?”

And the first one said: “Just so long as it wasn’t your Vláďa.”

Well, that must be totally awful. I’d rather not have any children at all than have somebody knocking me up. I don’t even like being called down, never mind that.

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