by Ivan Klíma
We were drinking wine, myself and my wife just to be polite. Daria spoke of her forthcoming exhibition and then about her travels. She told us about Kampuchea, which she had once visited. She talked of that country as like an Eden of happy and innocent people – this fascinated my wife, who is keen on liberating people of their sense of guilt – and we got on to our own culture, which is based on the knowledge of sin and therefore of metaphysical guilt. Daria maintained that the doctrine of sin was our curse, because it deprived us of freedom and interposed itself between one person and another, and between people and God. My wife made some objection. She believed that freedom should be limited by some kind of inner law, but then the conversation moved on to children and their upbringing. But I was concentrating less and less on what was being said and instead became aware of something different: the unspoken voice of the other woman. It seemed to me that it was addressing me in the expectation that I would hear it and understand it.
The evening shadows were creeping into the room and it seemed to me that the remaining light was focused on her high forehead, which, oddly enough, resembled my wife’s. The strange thing was that the light did not die with the day. It seemed to be emanating from her, from a flame which undoubtedly was burning within her, and I thought that this flame was reaching over towards me and engulfing me with its hot breath.
After she had left I seemed to remain in its field of force. Lída said the sculptress was an interesting woman and suggested we might ask her to come again, perhaps with her husband, but I, either from fear or from a presentiment of a possible conspiracy, did not rise to the idea and turned the conversation to some other subject. My wife went to her room and I tried in vain to do some work. So I turned on the radio, which was broadcasting baroque organ music, but the music did not calm me, I was unable to take it in. Instead I could hear disjointed snippets of sentences: a litany in a strange voice pervaded me like the warmth of a hot bath. What had that voice really been like? I searched for an appropriate word to describe it. It was neither sonorous nor sweet and melodious, neither colourful nor obtrusive – I was unable to say what enthralled me about it.
When I embraced my wife that night, who was gentle and calm in lovemaking, slow as a lowland river in summer, I heard that voice again and suddenly realised the right word for it: it was passionate. I tried to dispel it – at such an inappropriate moment – but I failed.
We had turned a corner and were now moving away from Vyšehrad. I was still using my coalman’s shovel to load scraps of paper, plastic cups and squashed matchboxes onto the cart, also the head of a doll, a torn tennis shoe, an empty tube, a smudged letter, as well as – the most numerous items all over the ground – cigarette butts. All that rubbish I shovelled into the dustbin on the cart, and when that was filled to the brim the captain and I got hold of it and together we tipped it out onto the pavement, where the wind, which was stiffening all the time, scattered the rubbish about again, but it didn’t really matter: rubbish is indestructible anyway.
Rubbish is like death. What else is there that is so indestructible?
Our innkeeper neighbours had five children, the youngest boy had the same name as me and was about my age. We would play together, and his friendship enabled me to penetrate into the hidden parts of the tavern, such as the cellar where, even at the height of summer, huge shimmering blocks of ice were stored, as well as gigantic beer barrels – at least they seemed gigantic to me then – or into the stables, whose walls, even though the horses had been replaced by a black Praga car, still reeked of horse urine and where a large number of cats of varied ages and colours had made their home.
The boy fell ill with diphtheria and within a week he died. At the age of five I did not understand the meaning of death. My parents did not take me along to his funeral. I only saw the innkeeper dressed in black and his weeping wife, and the funeral guests, and I heard the brass band playing incredibly slow march music.
When I asked when my namesake would come back, my mother, after a moment’s hesitation, told me he would never come back, he had gone away. I wanted to know where he had gone but my mother did not reply. But the old serving woman at the tavern, once I had summoned up the courage to ask her, told me that of course he had gone to paradise. His innocent little soul was now dwelling in that delightful garden amidst the flowers, playing with the angels, and if I was a good boy I’d meet him there one day.
I grew up in an environment where no prayer was ever heard, and the only garden I knew was the one outside our windows, and that had no angels in it, although the trains would noisily roar past immediately beyond the fence.
I wanted to find out more about that garden of paradise and about the souls dwelling in it, but my mother dodged my questions and told me to ask Dad.
My sensible father, who I knew had thought up the engines for the fastest trains roaring past under our windows, as well as those of the planes thundering above our heads, and therefore was held in high esteem by people, was astonished at my question. He took me by the hand, led me outside, and there talked to me for a long time: about the origin of the world, about hot gases and cooling matter, about tiny and indeed invisible atoms which were ceaselessly revolving everywhere and in everything. They in fact made up the piles of earth, the stones on the path along which we were walking, and also our legs which were carrying us. We were walking along the railway line, through the sparse suburban wood, climbing up towards the airfield. The trains were now thundering along below us, while military biplanes were roaring overhead. My father also told me that people had always suffered from being tied to the ground, from not being able to detach themselves from it. But they had dreamed of leaving it, and so they had invented the garden of paradise, which had in it everything they yearned for but lacked in their lives, and they had dreamed up creatures similar to themselves but equipped with wings. But what in the past had only been dreamed of was now beginning to materialise, my father said, pointing to the sky. Angels did not exist, but people could now fly. There was no paradise for human souls to dwell in, but one day I would understand that it was more important for people to live well and happily here on earth.
Although I did not fully understand what my father was explaining to me, some inexplicable sadness in his words made me cry. To comfort me, my father promised that he would take me along to Open Day at the airfield the following Sunday, and let me fly in a plane over Prague.
And that Sunday he actually put me inside a roaring machine which bumpily rolled along the grass and then, to my amazement and horror, rose into the air, complete with me, and as it gained height the ground below me began to tilt and everything on it grew smaller and smaller until it had shrunk away to nothing. The first thing to disappear were people, then the horse-drawn vehicles and the cars, and finally even the houses. I closed my eyes and found myself in a thunderous darkness which engulfed me. I was alarmed at the thought that I would never return to earth again, like my namesake who, as they said, had died.
Nothing happened at that time. Daria left and I went back to my work. I was writing some stories about my boyhood loves and I was flooded by memories of a long-past excitement. As I glanced at the darkest corner of my study, at the armchair she’d been sitting in, that ancient excitement seemed to take shape again.
I went out to a telephone box – the telephone in my flat had been disconnected – and dialled her number. I was still feeling an excitement that would be proper at my age only if one accepted that such a state was proper at any age. I enquired how the Budapest show had gone. For a while I listened to her account, which shifted between pictures and wine-cellars, then I said something about my own work and remarked that I had been thinking about her visit and that I should be pleased to see her again some time. But I did not propose anything definite, and she only smiled silently at my words. Even so the conversation had disturbed me, and instead of returning home I drifted through the little streets near where I lived and in my mind continued the conversation, which was
becoming increasingly personal and brittle. I had lost the habit of such conversations, or of conversation generally. I had lost the habit of communicating with anyone.
I had been living in a strange kind of exile for the previous ten years, hemmed in by prohibitions and guarded sometimes by visible, sometimes by invisible, and sometimes only by imagined watchers. I was not allowed to enter into life except as a guest, as a visitor, or as a day-wage labourer in selected jobs. Over those years there grew within me a longing for something to happen, something that would change my life, while at the same time my timidity, which I had inherited from my mother, increased and made me shy away from any kind of change and from all strangers. Thus my home became for me both a refuge and a cage, I wanted to remain in it and yet also to flee from it; to have the certainty that I would not be driven out and also the hope that I’d escape one day. I clung to my children, or at least I needed them more than fathers normally need their children. I similarly needed my wife. The outside world came to me through those nearest and dearest to me, and through them I stepped into that world, from which I’d been excluded.
I don’t think life was easier for any of them. The children, just as I did in my childhood, bore the brand of an inappropriate origin, and my wife spent years looking for a halfway decent job. Weary of queueing at departments charged with the protection of workplaces against the politically non-elect, she accepted the post of opinion researcher for some sociological survey. For a wage which was humiliating rather than an incentive she had to traipse around residential developments and persuade unwilling or even alarmed respondents to answer her questions. She did not complain, but she was sometimes depressed. Then she would shower the children and me with reproaches for some behaviour or action which normally she’d overlook. I didn’t have to go to work. When they had all left in the morning I’d sit down at my desk, with stacks of white paper before me, as well as the boundless expanse of the day and the depth of silence. The telephone couldn’t ring, and the occasional footsteps that echoed through the building usually alarmed me: I was more likely to have unwelcome than welcome visitors.
I wrote. For hours and days and weeks. Plays I would never see staged and novels which I assumed would never be published in the language in which they were written. I was working, but at the same time I was afraid that the silence which surrounded me would eventually invade me, paralyse my imagination and kill my plots. I would sit at my desk and be aware of the weight of the ceiling, the weight of the walls and of the things which might overwhelm me at any moment with their indifference.
Thus I would wait for my wife and my children to return. The moment their footfalls on the stairs shattered the silence I could feel tranquillity return to me – not the tranquillity of silence but the tranquillity of life.
I knew of course that the children would very soon grow up and leave home, that the ring of their footsteps was even more temporary than my own temporariness. I talked to them and shared their joys, but I felt them slipping away and I knew that I must not resist that movement if I was not to resist life.
I was also watching my wife seeking her own space to move in, trying to escape the deadening monotony of the work she had to do and to study in her spare time. She had decided that she’d try to understand what the human soul was, penetrate its secret in the hope of finding a way of alleviating its suffering. To me such an enterprise appeared almost too daring, and besides I was always seeing her as she was when I first met her, too childlike and with too little experience of life to master such an undertaking, but I encouraged her: everybody sets out in the direction from which he hears at least the hint of a calling.
I too followed my own direction. I was less keen now on what used to attract me, things had ceased to excite me. Until not so long before I had collected old maps and books, and now dust was settling on them. I no longer tried to find out what was happening anywhere, or to discover when the conditions, which could be described as not favouring me, might at last begin to improve. I wanted to know if there was anything beyond those conditions, if there was anything that might raise our lives above pointlessness and oblivion, but I wanted to discover it for myself, not accept anything revealed and given shape by others. I wanted to achieve this not out of some kind of pride but because I realise that the most important things in life are non-communicable, not compressible into words, even though the people who believe they have discovered them always to try to communicate them, even though I myself try to do so. But anyone who believes that he has found what is truly enduring and that he can communicate to others the essence of God, that he has discovered the right faith for them, that he has finally glimpsed the mystery of existence, is a fool or a fantasist and, more often than not, dangerous.
I got home late, and as soon as I’d walked in I could sense the tension in the air. My daughter was sitting at the table, rebelliously staring at the window, my wife was washing the dishes rather too noisily, and my son’s cassette player boomed out protest songs. I didn’t feel like asking the reason, but Lída at once flooded me with complaints about the children, who she said were untidy and lazy, and demanded that I do something about it.
It was clear to me that whatever I might say she had already said to them and I was in no mood to engage in peacemaking. I went to my room and tried to work, but the flat (or I myself) was too full of disturbing noises.
It occurred to me that for a long time now I had only moved from one day to the next, from getting up to going to bed, and that, while I composed plots, my own plot had ground to a halt, was not developing, and was beginning to come apart. I should have liked to talk to somebody about it, but when we were at last on our own I sensed her irritation, which instantly separated me from her. I asked if I had done anything to hurt her. She replied that I was hurting the children by refusing to bring them up properly, that I was weak and indulgent towards them, that I didn’t correct their faults, that I tried to curry favour with them. I protested that she was being unfair, but she embarked on one of her monologues composed of criticism, well-intentioned advice and instruction. From time to time she would heap these upon me and the children, and whether justified or not she came up with them invariably at a moment when those to whom they were addressed refused to listen to them or themselves had a need to speak and be listened to.
It was getting on for nine o’clock and our orange procession was moving down Sinkulova Street towards the water tower. The street is cobbled and in the cracks along the kerb clumps of dandelions, plantains and all kinds of weeds had taken root. The youngster with the girlish face was either pulling them out by hand or digging them out with his scraper. Even when he was bending down to the ground his face remained sickly pale.
Under the trees on the pavement some cars were parked. By the wreck of an ancient Volga our party halted. The foreman lifted the bonnet and established with satisfaction that someone had removed the radiator during the week.
A car is also rubbish, a large conglomeration of refuse, and one of them gets in our way at almost every step.
When fifteen years ago I went to see the première of a play of mine in a town not far from Detroit, the president of the Ford company invited me to lunch. As we were sitting on his terrace on the top floor, or more accurately on the roof of the Ford skyscraper, from which there was a view of that hideous huge city through whose streets countless cars were moving, instead of asking about his latest model – a question which would have delighted my father – I wanted to know how he removed all those cars from the world once they’d reached the end of their service. He replied that this was no problem. Anything that was manufactured could vanish without trace, it was merely a technical problem. And he smiled at the thought of a totally empty, cleansed world. After lunch the president lent me his car and his driver. I was taken to the edge of the city, where an incalculable mass of battered and rusty sedans were parked on a vast area. Negroes in brightly-coloured overalls first of all ripped the guts out of the cars with enormous pli
ers, stripped them of their tyres, windows and seats, and then pushed them into gigantic presses which turned the cars into metal parcels of manageable dimensions. But those metal boxes do not vanish from the world, any more than did the glass, the tyres or the spent oil, even if they were all burned in incinerators, nor did the rivers of petrol that were used on all those necessary and unnecessary journeys disappear. They probably melt down the crushed metal to make iron and new steel for new cars, and thus rubbish is transformed into new rubbish, only slightly increased in quantity. If ever I were to meet that self-assured president again I’d say to him: No, this isn’t a mere technical problem. Because the spirit of dead things rises over the earth and over the waters, and its breath forebodes evil.
During the war filth descended upon us: literally and figuratively it engulfed us just like death, and sometimes it was difficult to separate the two. They certainly merged in my mother’s mind, death and garbage; she believed that life was tied to cleanliness – literally and figuratively.
The war was over, we were looking forward to living in love and peace, but she was struggling for cleanliness. She wanted to know our thoughts and she was horrified by our boots, our hands and our words. She inspected our library and stripped it of the books which might make our minds unclean, and she bought a large pot in which she boiled our underwear every day. But even so she felt revolted by us and forever sent us back to wash our hands; she would touch other people’s possessions and doorknobs only when wearing gloves.
Sometimes at night I’d hear her sighing and lamenting. She was mourning the relatives she’d lost in the war, but she was surely also lamenting the dirtiness of the world she had to live in. In our home, therefore, cleanliness and loneliness reigned. Dad hardly ever came home, he’d found a job in Plzeň so he could breathe more freely. When he turned up on Sundays, he’d walk barefoot to his study over a path of newspapers, but even that moment of crossing the hall was enough for it to be filled with a smell in which mother recognised the stench of some unknown trollop. In vain did Dad try to wash it off, in vain did he help to cover the carpet with fresh newspapers.