Lovers for a Day

by Ivan Klíma

  It had never occurred to him to view his possible future employment from such an angle. He had heard so many stories in his lifetime that they had long since ceased to interest him. None the less he took his wife’s opinion into account and remained on the bench.

  As it turned out, the cases tended to be more banal than interesting. In most of them, immature men had married young women who yearned for something that their husbands could not provide, so in time there appeared a third person who disrupted what had never been firmly established in the first place. Even so, his summing up was often met with tears. He would divorce couples on grounds of infidelity or mutual incompatibility. Some of them were husbands and wives who had stopped living together long ago, but in spite of that, he could never rid himself of the conviction that most of the divorces were unnecessary, that people were attempting to escape the inescapable: their own emptiness, their own incapacity to share their lives with another person. At least to the extent he had managed to himself.

  There were so many cases that they soon became indistinguishable and even the people’s faces slipped quickly from his memory – which was beginning to decline with age anyway. Now and then, however, a more interesting case would crop up, and a face, a name or an occupation would stick in his mind.

  After one such a sitting, he emerged from the courtroom to discover the woman he had just divorced sitting opposite him on a bench in the corridor, crying.

  The woman’s name was Lída Vachková, a name that had immediately caught his eye because of its resemblance to his own, quite apart from the fact that the woman’s distinctive, delicate beauty and her timid replies to his questions had held his attention in court. He attributed her delicacy to her profession; she was a violinist. Although it was uncharacteristic of him, he stopped in front of her and said, ‘Don’t cry, Mrs Vachková, no pain lasts for ever.’

  She glanced up at him in surprise and quickly wiped away her tears. ‘Thank you.’ As she got up she started to sway and he was obliged to catch hold of her. ‘Are you feeling unwell?’

  ‘Do forgive me,’ she said, ‘I took some tablets this morning. To calm my nerves.’

  He invited her into his chambers and fetched her a glass of water. He knew not only her name and occupation but also her age. She was twenty years his junior, very young, in his eyes, at least. He also knew the man who until a short while ago had been her husband. He too was older than she was (although at this moment he couldn’t exactly recall how much older) and ran some recently established entertainment agency. A vulgar, unpleasant-looking fellow, he had apparently subjected his wife to rough and domineering treatment and had sought to curb all her interests. There were no children. They had had no problem agreeing on the division of their property – there wasn’t very much anyway. The man had left the flat to his wife and moved in with his mistress.

  ‘Do you really believe no pain lasts for ever?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Did you ever have a pain that went away in the end?’ He was not accustomed to being cross-examined and was taken unawares. He had to stop and think for a moment whether anything had happened in his life that had caused him a pain that had gone away. On the contrary, things in his life had tended to die gradually. Then he recalled the death of his parents. ‘Even the pain of death eventually goes away,’ he said evasively.

  ‘That’s true,’ she conceded, ‘though death is a rather special category.’

  ‘What makes you think so?’

  ‘Death is like the law. There is no escape from it. Whereas love …’ She seemed to be searching for a word to express the meaning of love, but instead burst into tears once again.

  He helped her to her feet and saw her to the door and down the stairs. He then invited her to a nearby wine bar. He wasn’t sure why, with this young woman, he was behaving in this way. There must be something about her that touched him, or that he found attractive. Or maybe there was some other reason that he was unable to put his finger on. He ordered a bottle of wine and let the woman relate her recent tribulations, although he only took in a few details; he was gazing at her hands, her fingers involuntarily toying with the napkin. They were so beautiful he wanted to clasp them or stroke them. So from time to time he would interrupt her and tell her some of the incidents he had heard about in the course of his work to reassure her that she was far from alone in her suffering.

  When they parted an hour later, she invited him to a concert to be performed by the orchestra she played in. She also, naturally, invited his wife, but in the end he went to it alone. He found it impossible to concentrate on the music; his attention was focused on a single member of the orchestra – the flickering movements of her fingers and her fine bowing – and he felt an unwonted emotion. He was astounded at himself and at his feelings, which struck him as inappropriate for someone of his age. But then it occurred to him that he had simply written off feelings from his life too soon.

  He found her address and telephone number in the file.

  They started to meet twice a week, initially in a café or a wine bar, fairly typically. He was aware that because of his profession she regarded him as an expert on matters of love, or rather on those cases where love was foundering, and indeed when questioned he sought to draw more general lessons from the cases that lay hidden in his memory. Even though he had little belief in the possibility of people living together in love, he realized how cautious he was in his comments, and how he could speak about something he had been unable to achieve in his own life: a relationship of mutual admiration and respect out of which tenderness grew. She listened to him with interest and even a sort of growing hopefulness. ‘I expect you’re good at love,’ she said and gave his hand a momentary squeeze. ‘You strike me as someone who can be tolerant and allow the other person some space for themselves.’

  He nodded, pleased that she should think of him in that way.

  Then she invited him home.

  She lived in a tiny attic room and as he walked up the many stairs (the house had no lift) his legs were buckling under him from excitement or maybe anxiety at what was certainly about to happen.

  The little room had sloping walls and almost no furniture, just a wardrobe, a music stand, two chairs and a large divan beneath a skylight. They made love underneath that window.

  She seemed slim and finely built compared to his wife and her skin was smooth, without a single fold or wrinkle. To his surprise, he found tender words for her. She listened to him and he had barely stopped speaking when she said, ‘More please. I want more of those words.’ As he was leaving she asked, ‘Will we see each other again some time?’ And he assured her that he would certainly be back soon.

  And so he would visit her, bringing her flowers, wine and words of tenderness. They never spoke about her former marriage, and he mentioned his wife only occasionally, and always in a way that let her assume that his marriage was not particularly happy. As usually happens when information comes from one side only, she would conclude, had she made the effort, that the fault lay with his wife.

  On one occasion, when they were again lying beneath the skylight onto which the heavy drops of a spring downpour were falling, she asked him, ‘Do you love your wife at all?’

  He said he didn’t, that he hadn’t loved her for many years.

  Then for a long time neither of them said anything. She cuddled up to him as he stroked her flanks and her belly, the softness of her skin exciting him as always.

  ‘What’s the point of such a marriage, Martin?’ she asked abruptly.

  The question caught him unprepared. It had never occurred to him that he might leave his wife after thirty years of living together, not even now, as he lay at the side of a woman he had just made love to. He had long ceased wondering what bound him to his wife Marie. Habit perhaps. So many shared days and nights. Memories that now felt like stories about someone else. Maybe the chairs they sat on, or the familiar odour that wafted towards him the moment he opened the door of
their flat. Maybe the sons they had reared.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe,’ it occurred to him, ‘so that when I come home in foul weather like this I can say to someone, “It’s raining out”.’

  ‘Yes, that’s a good reason,’ she said, drawing away from him slightly.

  As he was leaving she didn’t ask, as she usually did, when they would see each other again. So he asked instead.

  ‘Maybe never,’ she said. Even so she leaned towards him and kissed him.

  On his way downstairs it occurred him that she had been expecting a different response, that he had mistaken the meaning of her question. She had been wanting to hear whether he was prepared to leave his wife for her.

  He was overcome by an almost weary dejection. He could still turn back, ring her doorbell and give her a different answer. But what answer should he give?

  So Judge Martin Vacek went on home.

  When he opened the door of his own flat the familiar odour wafted towards him. Marie came out of the living room and greeted him as usual with the words: ‘I’ll have your dinner ready straight away.’

  He sat down at the table and stared silently ahead of him. He saw nothing. On the radio which his wife had switched on in the adjoining room someone was playing the violin. He found the sound of it so distressing he could hardly move. His wife placed a bowl of hot soup in front of him.

  He knew he ought to say something, but he was filled with an emptiness that engulfed all speech. ‘It’s raining out,’ he said eventually.

  His wife looked out of the window in surprise. It had stopped raining long ago and the room was suffused with the dark red glow of the setting sun.

  It was her custom not to contradict her husband, even though he had seemed to her more and more absent-minded just lately; perhaps old age was beginning to affect his mind.

  ‘That’s good,’ she said, ‘the farmers’ fields could do with a bit of moisture.’

  (1994)

  A BAFFLING CHOICE

  Marie Anna Pavlů was almost twenty-six years old and worked as a nurse in a crèche. There was nothing striking about her appearance or behaviour. She had a pleasant face, a petite figure and a slight, almost deferential, stoop. She used no make-up and dressed simply, choosing darker shades of green and blue. Her most colourful feature was her hair which had a coppery sheen in the sun. Her expression was enlivened with a smile, particularly when dealing with children. The more attentive parents noticed that children tended to cry less when Marie welcomed them.

  She had scarcely reached adulthood when she married Jakub Pavlů, a programmer. They had met at college. He was a good dancer and enjoyed company but drank moderately. He used to sing when he was in the mood – he had an enormous repertoire, as if he had an add-on memory in his head. Before they were married they used to leave every Friday afternoon with a group of his friends and go to a weekend chalet site. The little chalets were huddled together so closely that every word from the neighbouring cabin – every breath – was clearly audible. When she and Jakub made love there – it was the only place they could make love at the time – she uttered no sound at all. He assumed that she was shy because of the lack of privacy: it didn’t occur to him that she was not aroused by him. Subsequently, when they were already living together, her mute passivity might have become more noticeable, but by then he was used to it and accepted the fact that his wife was timid and reserved by nature. Besides, he was not one of those men who think about giving their partner sexual pleasure.

  A son was born two years after their wedding and they named him Matouš. He was a quiet baby who seldom cried, and when Marie spoke to him he seemed to understand what she was saying but was simply unable to reply. However, he did start to speak earlier than little boys usually do. Before he was even three Marie became accustomed to chatting to him as if they were the same age. It seemed to her that he was capable of sensing her mood, so that he would laugh if she was feeling fine and try to humour her when she was miserable. Then he suddenly fell ill with thymic asthma and almost suffocated to death with the first unexpected fit of coughing.

  From that moment Marie lived in fear of another bout returning and killing her little boy while she was asleep. She would often leap out of bed at night and run to listen to his breathing. Afterwards she would find herself weeping inexplicably. She was simply aware of a vague sorrow that life should contain so much alienation, suffering and death. She felt sorry for other people’s children who were brought to her every morning half asleep and crying, and for her own Matouš, whom she too delivered up to strangers even though she knew he would prefer to stay with her.

  She herself had had little contact with her parents as a child. Her mother, a bad reporter on a bad newspaper, was away on assignments most of the time. Her father was a drunkard and a gambler who moved out shortly after Marie was born. She only saw him a few times a year. She was mostly in the care of her maternal grandmother, who also lived alone, but remarried when Marie was ten years old. Although in his sixties, her grandmother’s new husband was still a vigorous man. He was rather boisterous and talked a lot. He also spoke more loudly than other people, so that at first Marie was scared of him. He had barely moved in before he was decorating the living room – her favourite place – to suit himself. He unpacked books from tea chests and decked the walls with glass cases of moths, landscapes in oils by Romantic masters and several antique puppets. The room no longer looked like the one she had been used to. Whenever she was in it she was overcome with a feeling of dejection and slight dread as if in anticipation of some unwelcome surprise.

  Her step-grandfather soon became fond of her and actually seemed to brighten up in her presence. He enjoyed chatting with her and wanted to hear all her news each day. He gave her the impression he was genuinely interested in her prattle. Back in what was for her the inconceivably distant past, he had been a teacher of natural history. He had taught for only a short time – three years after the war they had sacked him on the grounds of political unreliability. Since then, he had earned his living in all sorts of jobs – ending up as a museum attendant. ‘I started with natural history collections and ended with them!’ And he would laugh as if fate had played a clever trick on him. Everything he said seemed to turn into a succession of weird or funny stories and encounters, or homilies and words of wisdom. Often she wouldn’t understand them, but there were sentences or images that stayed in her memory. Sometimes when they went for walks together he would sniff with delight scents she had hardly noticed and point out to her the natural markings in a stone she had been oblivious to. He would encourage her to listen to the scarcely audible sounds of the forest, and at dusk would make her look up at the sky. ‘Stargazing raises the spirits and brings relief at moments of trouble, because it puts everything – all your joys, quarrels and heartache – into proper perspective.’ He would impress on her that one must never despair whatever happens, because life gives everyone a chance to make their mark through some deed or other – to shine, to rise above the seeming futility of human existence. The opportunity might come at any moment, and often it was unremarkable because it could easily involve something small rather than something large. It might be to do with the life of a woman, or the life of a tree; it might mean relieving the suffering of a person, or a bird, or of the water, or the air.

  When she was fifteen, her grandfather suffered a stroke that left his legs paralysed. He would move around the flat on crutches but refused to let her help him. He used to sit in the big wing chair and tell her stories in a faltering voice. A few weeks later he suffered another stroke and lost the power of speech entirely. When she came to visit him in hospital he definitely recognized her, but his mouth was no longer capable of smiling. She leaned over and kissed him and then burst into tears. How much suffering the departure from this life can entail which no one else can relieve, even when the one departing is the person you love best of all.

 
When she first met Jakub, her grandfather was already long dead, but it struck her that the moment her grandfather had spoken of had finally arrived. Something would change in their lives to rid them of triviality and the pathetic striving after ephemera. But nothing of the sort happened.

  It was several years before they moved into a flat of their own. It was on the seventh floor of a thirteen-storey panel-built block. The windows looked out onto equally unprepossessing concrete walls. In place of lawns, the areas in between the blocks of flats were filled with piles of earth, planks and stone. As it was only a few minutes’ walk to the crèche where she worked, she spent her life amidst the half-finished housing estate. She tried to furnish the flat as simply as possible and made up for the lack of belongings with fresh flowers. She took proper care of her husband and her little boy even though it took up most of the time she might have had for herself. She cooked every day and baked home-made bread, buns or tarts for Sundays, the way women did in the old days.

  Her husband just took it all for granted, and showed no sign of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. He was sparing with his affection not because he didn’t love her, but because he was convinced that it was the husband’s role to be reserved and condescending towards his wife.