by Ivan Klíma
She was not endowed with directness. I always felt that she moved more freely in the world of ideas and theorems than among people. In dealing with people she lacked naturalness. And yet she wished she had it, she needed it in her profession, which required her to gain her patients’ confidence. I noticed her trying desperately to achieve what others had received as a gift. I knew that she wanted people to be fond of her. She is happy whenever others appreciate her good qualities or her ability, and she hastens to repay them for it by deeds, or at least by words so eager that she embarrasses them. I’d wanted to help her not to feel isolated among people, and now I had brutally pushed heir back into the corner from which she’d tried to escape.
Of course she had a lot of acquaintances and colleagues who respected her, but she had few real friends. The children were growing up and the day when they’d be leaving us was approaching. If I were to leave her as well, who would look after her as she moved towards her advancing years, who would walk by her side?
But could I still do it?
We are lying next to each other, we embrace. She wants to knew if it was good for me; behind that question I suspect a multitude of suppressed and anxious questions and I ask her not to ask me anything. She says that she loves me, we’ll be happy together yet, and she falls asleep, exhausted, whereas I am sinking into a strange void between dream and wakefulness. I am fighting against sleep, against the state when I shan’t be able to drive away the voice which begins to speak to me.
At one time it was my wife who spoke to me. She’d wait for me at street corners in dream towns, she’d miraculously appear in a moving train, she’d find me in strange houses and in the midst of crowds. By some miracle we’d jointly discover forgotten box rooms, or a ready-made bed in a deserted corridor, or a hidden spot in a garden or a forest, and there we’d whisper tender words and verses to one another, there we’d embrace, and in my dream, as usually happens, we’d make love more passionately and completely than in reality.
Then she began to disappear from my dreams and other women appeared in them, but in their embraces I felt treacherous and unclean, and when I woke up I was relieved to find my wife lying by my side. Sometimes a different dream would recur repeatedly. I was aware of my age, of my approaching old age, and I realised that I’d remained alone in my life, that I’d failed to find a woman with whom I’d beget children, and that depressed me.
What speaks to a man in his dream is the secret or suppressed voice of his soul. This dream, I tried to explain to myself, echoed the memory of the time when I was growing up and when I was afraid I’d never succeed in finding a woman’s love. But had I understood my soul’s voice correctly?
Now I dreamed that I was waiting under my plane tree and I knew that people might come from different directions. I wouldn’t therefore remain alone. Simultaneously I was afraid that the two women I was waiting for might meet. True, they both belonged to me, but they certainly did not belong to each other. It was my lover who arrived first. I hurriedly led her away, then we strayed through ever more deserted regions, looking for a place where we could be together quietly. But each time someone would turn up and watch us intently. In the end, however, we found some place of refuge, we made love in strange and inhospitable surroundings, snatched out of the world around us, the way it can only happen in a dream, intoxicated with each other, but just as the instant of greatest pleasure was approaching my wife suddenly appeared through some hidden or forgotten door and I tried in vain to hide the other woman under a blanket that was too short. Lída stood in the door, staring at me with desperation in her eyes. She didn’t reproach me, she didn’t scream, she just stared.
At the last house, just where the slope of Vyšehrad hill begins to drop steeply, our foreman glanced up at the closed windows and reassured himself with satisfaction that there was no sign of life behind them. ‘They’re all in gaol!’ he informed us. Then he told us the name of the owner of the place and that the fellow had worked in long-distance haulage and had smuggled precious metals. When they’d nabbed him they’d found two kilograms of gold and half a million dollars in cash at his place.
‘Half a million?’ the youngster squealed. ‘You’re exaggerating!’
‘I got it rock-bottom reliably from a mate in the Criminal Branch,’ the foreman said, offended. ‘They found three and a half tons of silver alone. From all over the place, from Poland to Vienna. And everything for dollars.’
‘Wish you’d told me about him sooner!’ The youngster was leaning on his scraper, red with excitement. ‘My doctor was saying . . . Fact is, in Switzerland they’ve got some drug, dearer than Legalon even. If I had that, the doctor says, I might get my liver right again.’
‘And why,’ Mrs Venus asked, ‘can’t they get it for you at the centre?’
‘The doctor said I’d have to be at least a National Artist.’
‘That’s how it is,’ the foreman agreed; ‘those who’re entitled to Sanops treatment can get any kind of pills; if they swallow them they can stuff themselves and booze at their receptions as long as they like. But people like us don’t stand a chance. I can tell you from personal experience: if you’re an ordinary person no one gives a monkey’s fart for you! Mortally ill? Well then, die! At least they save money on you!’
‘I only thought,’ the youngster said, ‘if I’d really known sooner . . .’
‘What then?’ the foreman snapped. ‘A crook like that would have shown you his arse!’
Our days passed relentlessly. Sometimes I’d ring Daria and we’d talk until the freezing cold drove me out of the telephone box, or we’d walk in the Šárka hills, climbing up the dusty slopes together, and she’d urge me to tell her what was going to happen to our lives, and she’d complain that I’d treacherously abandoned her.
Then she phoned one day and asked me to come to the studio at once. Her voice sounded so urgent that I was alarmed.
Come in quickly, she welcomed me, I’ve been waiting for you. She told me she’d had a dream, a dream like a vision about the two of us, and she realised that we belonged to each other, that it was fate, and that there was no point in resisting it.
When we embraced, when we embraced again, I didn’t think of what would happen, of what I’d do, of what I’d say, where I’d return to or where we’d go together; I was only conscious of her proximity, of the bliss of her proximity.
I returned to lies once more. There is nothing by which a person can justify a lie. It corrodes the soul just as much as indifference or hate.
Night after night I lay awake for hours on end, reflecting on how to save myself. If I did fall asleep I’d wake up after a few hours and at once I’d hear that fine sand which was corroding me internally. In desperation I composed defence pleas and explanations, but I never uttered them, knowing full well that I had no defence. Man doesn’t live to defend himself, there are moments when he has to act or at least to admit his helplessness and keep quiet.
For action I lacked the necessary hardness or blindness, and I also lacked the requisite self-love. I know that to remain with one’s past partner when one has come to like another person is considered weakness or even a betrayal of ourselves and the person we now love.
We remove discarded articles to a dump, and these dumps grow sky-high. And so do the dumps of discarded people who, as they grow old, are no longer visited by those dear to them, or by anyone except perhaps others who have themselves been discarded. They still try to conjure up a smile and to fan some hope inside them, but in reality they already exude the musty smell of being discarded.
And you’d discard me like that? Daria would ask. At other times she’d say: It’s their own fault. Everyone is responsible for his fate and also for his own downfall, no one else can save him.
By writing, Kafka not only escaped his torments, but only thus was he able to live at all. In his notes, letters and diaries we find that he never tried to put into words what he thought of literature. People normally express themselves about the worl
d around them, but for Kafka literature was not external, not something that he could explore or separate from himself. Writing to him was prayer – this is one of the few statements he ever made about what literature meant to him. He switched the question to another sphere: what was prayer? What did it mean to him, who had so little faith in any revealed or generally accepted God? Most probably it was a way of personal and sincere confession of anything on a person’s mind. We turn to someone whose existence and hence also whose language we can scarcely surmise. Perhaps just that is the essence or the meaning of writing: we speak about our most personal concerns in a language which turns equally to human beings as to someone who is above us and who, in some echo or reflection, also resides within us. If a person does not glimpse or hear within himself something that surpasses him, that has cosmic depth, then language will not make him respond anyway. Literature is not intended for him. Such a definition has the advantage of including both the author and the reader. Literature without those who receive it is nonsensical anyway, as would be a world where no other language was heard than jerkish, where language could no longer make anyone respond, not even someone above human beings.
The winter was barely over when I developed some strange illness. My lips, tongue, palate and the entire inside of my mouth were covered by sore blisters, so that I couldn’t swallow anything without pain. I was feverish, I lay in a silence not penetrated by a voice all day long. My wife came home in the evening, she was kind to me, cooked me some porridge and told me about a seminar she’d attended and where they’d commended her paper.
On the third day I got up, dressed and set out to the telephone box. It was a clear and mild morning, and through the deserted street wafted the fragrance of spring flowerbeds.
I got through to my lover.
You’re ill? she asked in surprise. I was afraid you’d made a clean breast of everything again and you weren’t allowed to see me any more.
She wanted to know how much my mouth hurt, what I did all day when I couldn’t do anything, if I was thinking of her. As for her, she’d received a commission, at least she’d be able to complete it undisturbed. She had such a chunk of stone at her studio she couldn’t even move it, that stone was almost like me, except that with the stone a girlfriend could give her a hand. She went on for a while to talk about her rocky burden, i.e. about me. Suddenly she was afraid I might catch cold in the box, promised to write me a letter and ordered me back to bed.
Her voice was coming to me softly from a distance, her lips settled lightly on my aching mouth, her tongue was touching my sick tongue, and I was shaken by shivers. I wanted to be with her, to watch her hammering into her heavy stone, to let myself be lulled to sleep by those sounds, to wake up and find her close to me.
Two days later a small package was delivered. On top of it was a letter and a bag of herbs she’d dried herself. Camomile, horehound and silverweed, our heads in the dry grass, we were lying in a meadow and making love. I was to brew it all up together and gargle with it, but, even more important, I should find peace within myself, so my soul could be in harmony with my body. Although illnesses were seated in the body they really came from the soul, which writhed in spasms unless one learned to listen to it and enclose and restrain it by one’s actions.
I read the letter all the way through, and only then freed a little figure from a protective wrapping of rags. She’d made it for me, two naked bodies leaning against a tree. A man and a woman, Adam and Eve, Eve not ashamed of her nakedness and not offering Adam the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The serpent was also missing. It wasn’t: Adam and Eve, it was the two of us in the Garden of Eden which our love had unlocked for us.
When I was well again she explained to me: I have seven bodies, and the person who, even only once, gets through to the innermost one, will trap me and I’ll belong to him totally and always.
I asked: What does that innermost body look like?
You’re right, that isn’t a body any longer, that’s the last shell of the soul. It’s thin and transparent.
In this way she wanted to tell me about the fragility of that shell. So what is it like inside?
When I was fourteen the first atomic bomb was dropped on the earth. Some time later I read the book of a Hiroshima doctor who’d experienced the explosion: factually and dispassionately he described the destruction which had befallen the city and its people, but understandably enough he didn’t mention any souls. But I was pondering then about what happened to the human soul at the epicentre of an atomic explosion. Even if the soul was non-corpuscular, even if it was only space enveloped by matter, even if it was of an entirely different nature, could it really survive that heat? Who could visualise a soul at the centre of the sun or some other star?
You’re always racking your brain with pointless questions. What’s the use of it?
Tell me at least what you think happens to a soul which cannot stand the pressure of the world around it and bursts or shatters into fragments which no one can ever bring together again?
Don’t worry, it doesn’t perish. Maybe a new soul springs from each fragment, like a tree from a seed. Or else all the fragments combine together again in another time, in another life, coming together like droplets in a fog. Better ask what you should do so the souls around you don’t perish.
I’m asking that one too.
Better still, don’t ask any more questions. Try to be a little less clever. Be with me now and don’t think of anything at all!
She told me about the Kampucheans, who danced, sang and didn’t worry about the future. They knew that God was near, but they didn’t ponder about him. And look at the things they managed to create even in ancient times! She tries to give me an idea of the hundreds of sculptures lining the road to the Victory Arch at Angkor Tham, she even picks up a pencil and from memory draws the likeness of a leper king, his face full of contentment.
A pity, she regretted, you weren’t there with me. But one day we’ll go there together.
I don’t know how we can go anywhere; it’s ten years since they took my passport away.
Don’t be so practical!
Even if I’m not, the men at the frontier will be.
Apply for a passport then. Surely we must go somewhere together someday. There should be a sea there and warmth, so we can stay together all the time.
I’ll apply for a passport so we can travel to Kampuchea together, where the people are happy and carefree, where we’d be so far away that no voice other than hers would reach me.
No voice reaches me anyway.
All around me fog is spreading, what is left of the world loses its outlines. Now and then the fog curtain tears and we catch a glimpse of the landscape bathed in a reddish evening light, in a heavy rain the surface under the windows of the little hotel is ruffled and across the street gleams a plump baroque turret, from a fresco washed pale by time an interceding Holy Virgin is smiling at us, maybe we shan’t be altogether damned, the beeches are donning fresh greenery before our eyes, they turn golden, and red, a leaf floats downwards and we sink down with it, we’re lying in the grass, we’re lying in the moss and in the sand, above our heads flocks of migratory birds are flying, as well as clouds and time, only time stops still for an instant in repeated cries; and we light the gas stove because it is cold in the room, we move the bed right up against its hot body, in our brief intervals we tell one another about the days when we didn’t know each other, about yesterday, about a girlfriend’s exhibition, about our meetings and dreams, we talk about Diane Arbus’s photographs and her ugly world, about ugliness in art, about Hesse’s Steppenwolf and our hidden potentials, about ancient Mexican art and its influence on Henry Moore, and of course about Zadkin and Giacometti, about Camus and Tsvetayeva, about my book of short stories and about books by my friends which I had lent her in manuscript, we fry bits of meat in the only pan, we eat together at the low table, we drink red wine, while the snowflakes swirl outside the window. In the room there is a fragrance
of clay, paint and her breath. In the evening we go out to the little park on Kampa island, we still can’t tear ourselves away from each other, we kiss on the swept path under the bare trees. A little old woman with the head of a crow, as if modelled by her fingers, croaks at us: That’s a fine thing, that’s a fine thing! Adding something about our age and we should be ashamed!
And all the time I have my work, there are people in the world whom until quite recently I wanted to see, our daughter Beta wants to draw my portrait, our son Peter has invited me to a concert, my wife has at last found a decent job, but I have no time to celebrate it.
Beta experiences her first love, she is experiencing her second love, a drug addict who adores Pink Floyd and sniffs toluene. My wife is alarmed and asks me to intervene somehow. I talk with my daughter until late at night, she understands everything, she agrees with me, she’ll soon find another love, but I still have the same one, so am I also an addict? I inhale that mist, my blood absorbs those intoxicating droplets which dull my reason and willpower. I see nothing before me or around me, I see only her, I live only for the present moment. Am I to rejoice at the gift that’s been granted to me or am I to despair at my weakness, at being unable to resist the passion which is corroding me?