by Ivan Klíma
I was quite prepared for father not to come back one day, for him to remain with that strange malodorous woman of his, and I wouldn’t have blamed him for it. But he turned up afresh every weekend, and sometimes he even urged me not to judge mother: she was a good woman, only sick, and not everyone had the strength to come unmarked through what we’d had to endure.
Then they locked Dad up again. The pain inflicted on my mother by others at least partly diverted her from the pain she inflicted upon herself.
A sewage service truck overtook our gang and pulled up a little way in front of us. Its crew exchanged greetings with our foreman and began to examine the nearest drain grating.
‘What can they be looking for?’ I asked Mrs Venus.
‘They’re just making sure their sewer isn’t all blocked up,’ she explained. ‘We’re not allowed to tip anything into the sewer. One day young Jarda here,’ she pointed to the youngster with the girlish face, ‘threw some flowers down and just then their inspector came driving past and wanted to fine him fifty crowns on the spot. And all the time they’re rolling in it, just like the rat-catchers!’
‘Don’t talk to me about rat-catchers,’ the foreman joined in. ‘In Plzeň underneath the slaughterhouse the rats went mad and came up through the sewer gratings at night and ran about the streets like squirrels, squealing. They were desperately looking for a rat-catcher, they were actually ready to give him twenty grand a month, but there were no takers because it was obvious that if a rabid rat bit you, you’d be finished! I’ve a mate in Plzeň, from back in the para corps, and he got annoyed and said: “I’m not going to shit myself over a few mice!” So he got a diving suit and a sheet of asbestos rubber to throw over himself if the rats attacked him.’
‘They’d do that?’ I expressed surprise.
‘Sure they would. I told you they were rabid. You chase after them, but when they’ve nowhere to escape to they’ll turn and go for you. If that happens you lie down, throw the sheet over you, and they’ll run straight over you. So that’s what my mate did. Once he was under that sheet nothing could happen to him, but as those rats trampled over him he shat himself from fear.’
A few days later she sent me a card to say she would come round to see me, giving the clay and the hour, and hoping she’d find me in.
She turned up as promised. Outside the window the autumnal clouds were driving and the room was once again in twilight. I don’t know whether a similar glow issued from me too. A person never sees his own light in another person’s eyes, or only at moments of special grace. But maybe she’d seen something after all, because otherwise she wouldn’t have wished to meet me again, she wouldn’t have voluntarily set out on a pilgrimage which, in moments of anger, she was to proclaim had led her only to pain. I have myself sometimes been amazed that she had come so close to me.
For the first few weeks we’d walked in the countryside, through forests and parks. She knew the names of plants, even the most exotic ones, as well as where they came from. And she led me through those places, as if through the land of the Khmers, and along the majestic river Ganges, through the crowds in stifling streets, she even led me through the jungle and into the ashram so I could listen to what a wise guru had to say about the right way to live. She told me about her family, which included industrialists as well as National Revival schoolmasters, a wanderer who settled on the western slopes of the Andes, and a romantic aunt who, when she failed to keep the lover she longed for, decided to starve herself to death. There was also a highly gifted law student who could reel off the whole statute book by heart but who tired of the law and turned to philosophy and who, when he had irrefutably established the vanity of human endeavour, sat down and wrote his philosophical testament, whose conclusion was that happiness was just a dream and life a chain of suffering, and directly over that philosophical testament he shot himself through the head, so that the blood pouring from his wound put several final stops under his writings.
Everyone on her father’s side of the family, she explained, had a touch of genius, an inflexible will, and clear-sightedness – her father most of all. She often spoke of him to me and, even though I had never seen him, I was reminded of my own father, not only because he was also a graduate engineer but because he too knew no greater happiness than his work, than the calculations in which no one was allowed to disturb him, and because he was strong, healthy and capable of cheerfulness once he decided to set aside that work.
I would have liked to tell her something similar about my ancestors, but I didn’t know their stories. I knew that some of them had come from far away, but I don’t know whether that was two hundred or a thousand years ago. I assume that even then they knew how to read, though it was a different script from the one I can read now, and that they prayed in a language of which I no longer understand a single word. I don’t know what they did for a living. Both my grandmothers had come to Prague and tried to trade there but failed. My grandfathers too came from the country. My father’s father had studied chemistry and worked as an engineer in a sugar refinery down in the Hungarian part of the monarchy. There, when my father was only eleven, he fell under a plough drawn by a rope and was fatally injured. My mother’s father, on the other hand, lived to a ripe old age: he’d been a clerk at the law courts and at the age of eighty he lived to experience the second great war as well as having a yellow star put on him and being forcibly deported to a ghetto. Even of this stocky old man with his grey, slightly tobacco-stained moustache I was unable to report anything remarkable, except possibly that, like his ancestors, he stubbornly believed in the coming of the Messiah, but for him that meant the mirage of the socialist revolution. That mirage helped him survive the blows of fate, the death of his wife, the loss of his home, his humiliation, hunger and the hardships of imprisonment. More and more often in that unhappy place he would preach to anyone who would listen to him, and more and more often I would be the only listener to remain. He too urged me not to believe in a god whom people had invented, whom the masters had fobbed off onto the poor so they should more readily bear their fate. As he grew older his litanies became an unchanging prayer which I knew by heart and to which I no longer had to listen. And then one night I awoke. Everyone else was sleeping, and from the corner of the room where grandfather slept I could hear a strange muttering. I recognised the old man’s voice and the plaintive intonation of a prayer spoken in the language he still knew but of which I no longer understood anything, a prayer addressed to God. I did not stir and listened with amazement to the voice which seemed to come from a great distance, from some long-past time. That was the first time I realised that the depth of the human soul is unfathomable.
Her father would desert his drawing board from time to time to wander about the mountains and climb rockfaces. He would take her with him, and taught her not to be afraid of heights. My father would only wander through the landscape of numbers into which the visions of his machines turned for him. He even took his calculations with him on holiday, and when he was seized by a new idea, which would happen almost continuously, he would forget about the rest of us. When he then found us at the dinner table or outside his window he’d wonder where we’d sprung from. But they forcibly expelled him from his landscape, put him into convict’s clothes and locked him up behind electric wires whose windings were all too easily calculable. He concentrated all his willpower and strength on surviving, on surviving with dignity, so that he might once more return to his beloved landscape. Apart from numbers and machines, father, as I understood later, also loved pretty women and socialist visions of a better world. Like every man in love he invested the object of his adoration with excessive and deceptive hopes.
Do you think every love indulges in false hopes? she asked.
I realised that she was asking about us, and I dared not say yes, even though I could see no reason why we should be exceptions.
‘Like it was with them cemeteries on the motorway,’ said Mrs Venus. ‘When they destroyed them they
had to dig up the corpses and they offered a hundred an hour, plus a bottle of rum a day, and even so everybody told them where they could stick it. They had to send in convicts to do the job and of course they paid them bugger-all!’ She stopped, stretched, leaned her shovel against a wall and lit a cigarette. ‘Corpses ain’t no joke, there’s poison in them that goes right through your rubber gloves, and once it gets in your blood you’ve had it.’ She was smoking and seemed to be gazing into the distance, somewhere only she could see. If I had met her years ago I would certainly have repeated her words to myself, I would have been in a hurry to write them down in order to preserve her speech as faithfully as possible. At that time I believed that anything I saw or heard would come in useful for some story. But I have known for a long time now that I am most unlikely ever to find any events other than those I experience myself. A man cannot gain control over someone else’s life, and even if he could he would not invent a new story. There are nearly five thousand million people living in the world and every one of them believes that his life is good for at least one story. This thought is enough to make your head spin. If a writer emerged, or better still, was produced, who was obsessed enough to record five thousand million stories, and to then cross out all they had in common, how much do you suppose would be left? Scarcely a sentence from each story, from each human fate, a moment like a drop in the ocean, an unrepeatable experience of apprehension or of a meeting, an instant of insight or pain – but who could identify that drop, who could separate it from the flood of the ocean? And why should new stories have to be invented?
Daria, in tears, once accused me of regarding her as some beetle I had impaled on a pin in order to describe it better. But she was mistaken: in her presence I usually forgot that I sometimes tried to invent stories, and I would watch her so closely only because I wished to understand the language in which she spoke to me when she was with me in silence.
‘But I had a great time with those corpses. Got myself a job down there,’ Mrs Venus gestured towards the Vyšehrad ramparts, ‘on the path lab. That’s where they carted all the stiffs that had had their throats cut or been knifed. Got it through a girlfriend, a dicey job, she said, but with bonus payments, and in the end they gave me bugger-all. Anyway I only did it because of the old boy that gutted the bodies, he was a mad one and crazy about stiffs. “Zoulová,” he’d say to me, “you’ve got some arms. I’d love to have a good look at your humerus one day.”’ And Mrs Venus spread her arms – they really were long and slim.
The sickly smell of decay seemed to engulf me. When I took on the job of a hospital cleaner my colleague could not deny himself the pleasure of taking me to the morgue the very first day in order to show me the corpses on the tables, on the floor and in the refrigerator, and while doing so he was watching me out of the corner of his eye to see if I was turning pale or making for the door. But I was used to dead bodies from childhood, to such quantities of dead bodies that the few solemnly-dressed recent deceased neither frightened me nor turned my insides.
Now I recalled not only that tiled room but principally the wide table, which I saw as clearly as in a dream, and on it lay my father.
My father was gravely ill, the disease was gradually destroying him from within, so that he, who had always been so strong and irrepressibly healthy, was now scarcely able to hold a pen in his hand. When I looked at his notes, which were still swarming with numbers and formulae I didn’t understand, the figures were so shaky I could hardly read them. Whenever I regarded these figures and formulae, I was gripped by sadness. I knew that he had not published his calculations for years, although he was being asked to do so, and I also knew that these numbers were a road to some new knowledge and that knowledge to him meant his life, but from them I could see that father’s life was by now shaky, that these figures were getting ready to accompany him on the road to where there are no numbers.
I would have liked to dispel that unhappy vision, but no matter how intently I fixed my eyes on my cart, my father’s motionless features remained before me. What is the purpose of a life of suffering? It may teach a man to humbly bow to the inevitable, but he will still be crushed by the approaching death of someone dear to him.
But I still tried to reassure myself that my father, who had come through so many trials in his life, would not succumb this time either.
On that day long ago my father had to carry me out of the aircraft when it landed. I was shaking and sobbing and refusing to look up at the sky, where bold aerial acrobats were turning somersaults in their machines, winding their way up into the clouds and diving steeply towards the roofs of the hangars. My father lifted me up on his shoulders. He didn’t even say: Poor little boy, he didn’t reprimand me, he just carried me and on the way showed me the trains which flashed by below us, giving them their names, just as if they were relations or children. He carried me as far as the wooden footbridge over the railway line and said I could spit down into the funnel of a locomotive if one came along. When at last one came, spewing sparks and smoke, he himself leant over the railing to set an example for me, and the powerful rush of smoke and steam emitted by the funnel lifted his hat off his head and all we could do was to watch it sail down to settle on a pile of coal on one of the wagons and disappear with it in the distance. Dad laughed and said his hat was an acrobat too, and I, gazing delightedly after the vanishing hat, forgot the terrors of my flight.
That same evening Dad brought his hat back from somewhere, all black with soot and grime, and to my delight converted it into a bowler, put it on his head, and for a while clowned about with it like Charlie Chaplin. He liked entertaining people, and when he laughed he laughed unrestrainedly and with his whole being. He could laugh at what people normally laugh at, but also at what they are angry about or what they despair over. I have often wished I knew how to be as joyful and relaxed, but I lacked my father’s strength, lightness and concentration.
Mrs Venus tossed some rubbish into my cart. ‘D’you know how many people he’d had on his table?’
I didn’t know, and she said triumphantly: ‘Fifty thousand!’
‘Nonsense,’ came the youngster’s voice from behind me. ‘You’re making it up. That would be several regiments!’
‘But that’s what it was, Jarda dear. And all of them had come to a sticky end!’ Mrs Venus laughed as if she had just said something very funny.
Then one day before Christmas we first made love in a tiny attic room with small windows and thick walls under the roof of a baroque building. Facing it was a noble town house with enormous windows on the sills of which sat some freezing pigeons. There was a smell of oil in the room, as well as the faint odour of gas, and though it was midday the room was quite dark. The small windows were moreover partly obstructed by a statue of Saint Stephen the Martyr. The restoration of the statue was nearly complete, but my lover had stopped working on it, she didn’t like having her hand controlled by someone else’s instructions.
I wanted her to enjoy our love-making. I was thinking of it so much I was trembling with excitement, and she was trembling too. After all, she had a husband at home, and a little girl, but now she curled up in my embrace and let herself be carried to a place from which there would be no return. So I carried her, and at each step I felt her getting heavier until I could scarcely drag her. I was afraid, we were frightened of one another we wanted each other so much. The big surprised bed creaked at every movement and we tried to drown the sound by whispering tender words. We looked each other in the face and I was amazed by the way she was being transformed, she was softening and taking on some ancient, the most ancient, shape. Perhaps it was the forgotten shape of my mother or a recollection of my first visions and dreams of the woman I would love one day.
I got back home late at night and went to bed by my wife’s side. She suspected nothing and snuggled up to me. She was still as trusting as a child. When I closed my eyes I realised that sleep wouldn’t come to me. In the garden a bird was piping, trains were rushi
ng along in the distance, and out of the darkness before me, like a full moon, there rose the face of the other woman: calm, beautiful, as if it had always been concealed within me, and yet motionless like the faces of her statues. Thus she gazed down on me, suspended in space beyond all things and beyond all time, and I felt something like nostalgia, unease, longing and sadness.
There was a lot of snow that winter. She’d take her little girl to her piano lessons. I’d walk behind them, without the child being aware of me. I’d sink into the freshly fallen snow because I wasn’t looking where I was going, I was watching her walking: there was in her walk something of an ill-concealed hurry, or maybe of an eagerness for life. She was holding her little girl’s hand and only occasionally did she glance behind. Even at that distance I could feel her love.
At other times we’d set out across the snow-covered fields not far from the city. Below us was an abandoned farmstead and a forest, above us the sky was frosty under a cover of mist. We stopped, she leaned her back against me, I embraced her – a little plump in her winter coat – and at once we were amidst eternity, lifted out of time, lifted from horrors and joys, from the cold and the blowing wind, and she said softly: Is it possible we love each other so much?
On the pond, just as in a Brueghel painting, children were skating. The inn was almost deserted, a fire was crackling in the huge fireplace, and a picture showed a farmhouse on fire, with gallant firemen fighting it. The innkeeper’s wife brought us some hot whisky, turned a knob, and the fire in the picture was lit from behind by the red flames.
Daria was as pleased as a child: So many fires, not counting the two of us.
I really feel the warmth enveloping me, I feel it inside me, I feel like a seed in the spring soil, bursting and struggling towards the light.