Hana Andronikova is one of the best known younger Czech writers and has won considerable acclaim for her epic novel with the poetic title, "The Sound of the Sundial". It tells the story of a Czech family through the traumatic years of the mid-20th century. But here Hana recalls a very ordinary, everyday experience from her own life. It was nothing more than a short walk, but during that walk something occurred that carried a far deeper significance. Hana Andronikova found the child within her.
"It was on a sunny day in May, when I took a walk, taking my reading - Carl Gustav Jung's book about the "inner child" - with me - God knows why. I strolled around places I know, and all of a sudden I was at a playground - there were some benches and I realized that I'd never been to that place before. I say down on the bench and started to read my book about the inner child. I tried to imagine how the inner child - my own inner child - would look, and I couldn't come up with any image. And all of a sudden I saw him. There was a figure, a tiny little figure, approaching and walking clumsily. I couldn't see his feet, but there was obviously something wrong with them. It was a little boy. As he came closer I could see his black eyes and he must have been Chinese or Vietnamese. He was wearing white pyjamas, and then I could also see his feet in big boots, very heavy boots, ten sizes too large for his small feet. So he could hardly walk. But he was aiming at the playground, smiling, all the time looking at me, and then I just looked around hoping to see his mother somewhere around. But there was no-one there. And so I approached him and I asked him where his mother was. He said nothing, just kept on smiling, and then I asked him where he was from - where do you live? - and he just stretched his hand towards me and opened his fist, and there on the palm of his hand was a little key. So I stared at him and at the key and I found it very surreal, and I felt - what am I going to do? I cannot leave him alone here. At that moment I saw another figure - his father - approaching, and the boy just went towards him, and the father picked him up in his arms and went away with the boy. The boy still smiled at me, and I just realized that I saw my inner child, and the most precious thing was that the boy had a key."
