by Ivan Klíma
I remained in the box for a moment. My garish vest was brilliantly reflected in the glass. I fished in my pocket for a coin. That other number so vehemently forced itself on my mind that I repeated it in a whisper.
I stopped fishing for that coin. I watched my companions marching slowly uphill to the little park where we’d left our tools in a small shed. Mrs Venus caught sight of me and waved.
Some other time, my love, but I’m not silent because I’m not thinking of you, it’s just that I have nothing new to say to you.
And you think that this silence, the way we live now, is good?
I don’t know if it’s good, but I don’t know anything better.
You don’t know anything better? Just look at yourself, the stuff you’re wearing, this masquerade. Have you gone in for repentance or what?
No, it’s perfectly honest work. I can think while I’m doing it.
You can think, can you? How nice for you. And what about me? Are you at all interested in what’s happening to me? How I’ve been feeling? After all those years I haven’t even merited a single phone call from you.
We had a lot of phone calls with each other. At least a thousand!
Don’t count them up. I don’t want to hear numbers. Anyway, that was before. Afterwards you didn’t ring even once.
We’d said everything to each other. We were exhausted from those conversations. What else was there to say to each other?
You’re asking me? You might at least tell me whether the whole thing meant anything to you.
You know very well what you meant to me.
I don’t know anything after the way you behaved. I always thought . . .
What did you think?
Never mind. I didn’t want to believe it. After all you’d told me when we were together, how could I believe that you’d chase me away like some . . .
Please don’t cry!
Tell me at least, did you love me at all?
You know I did.
I don’t know anything. How am I to know?
An old woman was approaching the box. Perhaps she didn’t even want to telephone, but to be on the safe side I opened the directory and pretended to look for a number.
If you’d loved me you wouldn’t have behaved the way you did!
I was crazy about you.
Don’t be evasive. I asked you if you’d ever loved me. If you’re capable of loving anyone.
Don’t torture me!
Me torturing you? Me you? Tell me, my love, what have you done to me? At least explain to me what was good about it.
I just couldn’t carry on like that. Forgive me, but I couldn’t go on living like that!
And me, how am I to live? You never thought what would happen to me, did you? How can you be silent like this, it isn’t human! Surely you must say something to me, do something. You must do something about us!
At one time I used to write plays. The characters were forever talking, but their words went past each other, their remarks slid past one another like the slippery bodies of fish, without making contact. Did I write that way because I believed we could step out of our loneliness? Or because I needed to find a way of avoiding answers? Where words miss each other, where humans miss each other, real conflict may arise. Or did I suspect that a man cannot successfully defend himself in the eyes of another, and when he is talking he’s doing so only to drown the silence which spreads around him? To conceal from himself the reality of life, a reality which, at best, he perceives only at exceptional moments of awareness?
The man who had alone survived the crash of the aircraft which hit a church tower in Munich was working as a newspaper editor in Belgrade. I was curious to meet a person who had risen from the ashes, but his sister had just died of cancer and he asked me to postpone our meeting for a few days. When I called on him later his other sister was gravely ill with the same disease. ‘The doctors are giving her no more than two months,’ he said to me; ‘they told me this morning. You know what is odd? I went out into the street and I didn’t hear anything. There were trams and cars moving about and people talking, but I didn’t hear any of it. There was the same sudden quiet then, after the crash.’
I caught up with my companions. The youngster passed me my shovel, which he had carried for me on his handcart, and Mrs Venus said: ‘Bet that wasn’t your wife you’ve just phoned.’
Right by the kerb I noticed a dead mouse. I picked it up on my shovel and flung it on the rest of the rubbish.
My wife was amazed by what I told her. She couldn’t believe that I’d lied to her for so long. I said what most men would probably say in such a situation, that I had hoped to spare her needless suffering because I’d believed it would soon come to an end.
But you don’t want to end it? she asked.
I said that I loved the other woman, that I’d never loved any woman the way I loved her.
But I thought you loved me more than anybody else! Tears flooded her eyes. Then she wanted to hear details. Any kind of truth was preferable to silence. I was to tell her where she’d gone wrong and how she could put it right.
I poured out all my complaints and self-exculpating explanations, but after a while we were merely rehearsing who did the shopping, who the cooking, the laundry, the washing up and the floors, until I was horrified by the poverty of my own speech. I fell silent, but my wife wanted to hear something about the other woman and I, suddenly freed by my newly-discovered openness, began to praise the qualities and talents of my lover, to describe the uniqueness of what we were experiencing. But: as I was forcing all this into words I transformed the experiences which had been mine only, and which had seemed inimitable and unique, into something common, categorisable and conventionally melodramatic. Yet I was unable to stop talking, and my wife listened to me with such involvement, such readiness to understand me and maybe even advise me that I fell victim to the foolish idea that she might even share some of my feelings. But she was merely hoping that if only she received my confession and listened to me attentively she might transform my words on how we had drifted apart into the first act of a mutual drawing together. She would confront the urgent attraction of the other woman with her own patient understanding.
When – suddenly not too convinced that this was what I truly and urgently desired – I suggested that I might leave home, at least for a time, she said that if I wished to leave her and the children she wouldn’t stand in my way, but if after a while I decided to return home she couldn’t guarantee that they would be able to have me back. I was far from considering what I would wish to do after a while, but I thought I could see in her eyes so much regret and disappointment, and anguish at the thought of impending loneliness, that I did not repeat my suggestion.
We didn’t go to bed until the early hours. I couldn’t have slept for more than a few minutes because daybreak had not yet come, but when I woke up there were muted sobs by my side.
She was crying, sobbing steadily and persistently, her mouth buried in her pillow so she shouldn’t wake me.
I would have liked to caress her or say something kind to her, to comfort her as I always did when something depressed her, but this time it was me who’d crushed her. Unless I changed my decision I had become the one person who couldn’t comfort her. I suddenly realised that the position I found myself in tormented me rather than gave me a sense of liberation.
In the morning I was awakened by a crash, by the sound of splintering.
I found my wife in the hall: by her feet were fragments which I recognised as those of the only piece of sculpture we’d ever had in our home. The angular bird’s head was shattered and its human eyes had rolled God knows where.
For an instant we were both silent, then my wife said: ‘I’m sorry. I had to do something.’
And I, in a sudden flush of compassion, without reflecting that the previous day I’d been determined to do the opposite, promised her that I wouldn’t leave her, that I’d stay only with her. We had had our children together,
and surely we’d once linked our lives together till death did us part.
Shortly afterwards we went to see our daughter’s art teacher. He was exhibiting his paintings in a small-town gallery. We walked round the pictures, which somehow all seemed to express the loneliness of men, and I tried to suppress my nostalgia. In the evening some visitors arrived. They were nearly all painters and they talked a lot about art, which reminded me of the other woman. They took their observations seriously, and seemed to me to be genuinely seeking a meaning behind their activity, but to me all talk seemed unnecessary at that moment, it was no more than a substitute for life, for movement, for passion. I fled the company and went down to the riverbank. My wife found me there and wanted to know if I was sad, if I felt nostalgic. My wife, that voluntary healer, promised me that things would be good between us, we’d start another life, and I’d be happy in it. She wanted to know what I was planning to write and to hear what was on my mind that instant, she talked about sincerity and about life in truth. I was listening to her and I felt as if something was snapping inside me, as if every word was a blow which cut something in two. I was surprised she couldn’t hear the blows herself, but simultaneously it seemed to me that the despair was fading from her voice. I had always hoped that she would feel comfortable with me, that life’s hardships would not weigh her down too much – her relief gave me at least some satisfaction.
The street was still wet but the air had been cleansed, and as we stepped out of the shade of the residential blocks we even felt the rays of the autumn sun which somehow dispelled our gloomy mood of the morning. The youngster was whistling a Gershwin tune and Mr Rada all of a sudden showed me a slim little book on the cover of which was a street-sweeping truck and a broom, while its title to my surprise promised a critical essay on the personality cult. ‘Do you know it?’
I’d never seen the book before in my life.
‘An interesting reflection on how we used to deify ourselves and physical matter.’ He opened the book and read aloud: ‘Here lies the root of the cult, here is that proton pseudon: that the miserable, mortal, ephemeral human ego declares of itself: Ich bin ich. Das Ich ist schlechthin gesetzt. I am the finest flower of the materialist God!’ He shut the little book again and I caught another glimpse of its cover. On the sweeping truck, as I now noticed, lay a big human head.
‘And what are we really?’ I asked Mr Rada, and at that instant I understood the connection between the cover picture and what I’d just heard.
The youngster was still whistling that familiar tune and I felt irritated at not being able to think of the words that went with it.
‘It’s “The Man I Love”, of course,’ he told me, delighted at my display of interest and my acquaintance with the composer, and immediately he sang to me the four-beat tune: ‘Some day he’ll come along, the man I love.’ He asked: ‘You like Gershwin?’
I told him that thirty years ago a black opera company had come to Prague with Porgy and Bess; it had been the first visit for a long time of any company from the other side of our divided world. Getting tickets required a miracle, but I’d been lucky.
The memory took me away from the swept street. Not that I could recall anything of the performance which had then delighted me, but I could see before me the little street in the suburbs of Detroit, where a lot of black children were shouting on the sidewalk and a white-haired black man sat in a wheelchair in front of a dingy low house. Someone was playing a trumpet, or more likely had put on a record with Louis Armstrong or somebody, there was rubbish everywhere, bits of paper, advertising leaflets and Coca-Cola cans, and in the hot air hung a smell of onions, slops and human bodies.
I was seized by nostalgia for that country. Suddenly I was seeing myself in my orange vest pushing that miserable handcart. Of course I needn’t have worn that particular vest, but they made me wear some garishly coloured jacket to make sure everyone recognised me from afar and gave me a wide berth. This was now happening to me, even though, having been put into a colour-marked jacket in childhood, I longed for nothing more than to get rid of the mark of disinheritance.
‘We used to play him a lot,’ the youngster said. When he saw my surprise he explained: ‘We had a jazz band, you know, before I got my liver all buggered up.’
The captain rolled up the sleeves of his grubby pullover. ‘I may have something useful for your garden,’ he said to the foreman.
‘So long as it isn’t that greenfly spray of yours,’ the foreman was alarmed. ‘Made my greenflies scamper about like squirrels and screwed up my roses completely.’
‘We used to play Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, or Scott Joplin ragtime,’ the youngster said enthusiastically, ‘but we liked George Gershwin best, and he also came across best because people had heard his stuff before.’
‘And now you don’t play at all?’
‘Not a hope. Couldn’t blow now. Know what impressed me most? That he’d never had any special schooling, and look at the music he wrote!’
‘Did you write any yourself?’ I asked.
‘We all did. We just had jam sessions and something or other would come out of them.’
From one of his enormous pockets the captain produced a piece of collapsed rubber fitted to a small bellows. He squeezed the bellows a few times and the rubber swelled up into a small balloon.
Now balloons were something the foreman was interested in.
‘What kind of bird-brained contraption is this then?’ he asked, leaning his broad shovel against the wall of a house. He couldn’t know how appropriately he’d described the device, for it was actually intended, as we were informed, for scaring birds away. The balloon with the bellows also included, on one side, sails like a windmill’s and, on the other, a whistle. The windmill, by means of the bellows, would blow up the balloon, and once the air pressure in it exceeded a certain limit a valve would open and the whistle would emit a short but powerful blast, which would scare away any flying intruder.
Using his hook the captain pulled from a pocket an object reminiscent of a small organ pipe and with his sound fingers he screwed it into a thread at the end of the balloon.
We were all intently watching his antics, but the expected blast did not materialise: there was only the hiss of escaping air.
‘How is this superior to an ordinary rattle?’ the foreman asked doubtfully.
‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that a rattle goes all the time and the little bastards get used to it?’ The captain once more began to squeeze his bellows and we, now all leaning on our tools, were watching the balloon filling up.
‘And if there’s no wind?’ the foreman asked with interest.
At that moment there was a brief sound of bursting, rather like a distant shot, and what had just been a balloon was no more.
‘You know, they let us rehearse at the works club twice a week,’ the youngster reminisced, ‘but we could stay there as long as we needed to. Sometimes we’d fool around till the early hours of the morning, just stretching out on the tables for a moment if we felt like a rest.’
‘Weren’t they waiting for you at home?’ I asked in surprise.
‘At home? But I didn’t live at home!’
‘If there’s no wind,’ the captain replied to the foreman, ‘it works by electricity.’
‘If you felt like it and could spare the time,’ the youngster suddenly remembered, ‘the boys are playing in Radlice this Sunday.’ He fished about in his wallet and pulled out two tickets. ‘Maybe you’d like them.’
I objected that he’d got the tickets for himself, and while we were sweeping up the leaves and conkers which had dropped from a huge horse-chestnut tree he explained to me how to get there.
I sometimes feel nostalgic for America. Even in my dreams I wander among the skyscrapers or drive along highways through endless landscapes, always full of expectation. Yet nearly every one of these dreams ends sadly: I’d stayed on in that country, beyond the sea, I’d never return home again, to the place whe
re I was born and where people, or at least some of them, speak my native language.
They’ve put me in a vest in which I feel restricted. I could take it off, or even with a fine gesture chuck it away and go somewhere where they won’t force one upon me, but I know that I won’t because by doing so I’d also be chucking away my home.
Franz Kafka was certainly one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived and worked in Bohemia. He used to curse Prague and his homeland, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave, he couldn’t make up his mind to tear himself away from them. His seemingly dreamlike plots unroll in an environment which appears to have little connection with any real place. In reality his native city provided him with more than just a backdrop for his plots. It pervaded him with its multiplicity of voices, its nostalgia, its twilight, its weakness. It was the place where the spirit could soar up to any heights, but it was also the place where there was in the atmosphere a barely perceptible smell of decay, which more particularly affected the spirit.
Kafka spoke perfect Czech, perhaps just a trifle stiffly, but he wrote in German. But he was not a German, he was a Jew.
Not a single Czech literary historian has ever found in himself enough generosity, courage or affability to range him among the Czech authors.
The sense of exclusion and loneliness which repeatedly emerges from his prose writings certainly stemmed from his disposition, from the circumstances of his life. In fact he shared it with many of his contemporaries. But Prague greatly intensified it. He longed to escape from it, just as he longed to escape from his old-bachelor loneliness. He failed to do so. He was unable to liberate himself except by his writing.
If he had succeeded in liberating himself in any other way he’d probably have lived longer, and somewhere else, but he wouldn’t have written anything.
Home had become a cage for me. I needed to break out, but whenever I went out while my wife was at home I could see fear in her eyes. She never voiced it, suspicion was not part of her nature, she was trying to trust me as she’d done before, as she trusted strangers, but her eyes would follow me wherever I moved. When I returned she’d run out to meet me, pleased that I was back home again and welcoming me tenderly. And she, who’d never been too concerned about how I spent my time, what I was thinking about, what I ate, would ask if I wasn’t hungry, and during supper she’d shyly reflect on where we might go together so we should enjoy ourselves, and she’d agree in advance with whatever I suggested. She’d never been like this before, she’d known how to pursue her own interests and have her own way, but now, humbled and humiliated, she was trying to live up to her idea of my idea of a good and loving wife, and her slight gaucherie both shamed and touched me.