by Ivan Klíma
I can’t make up my mind, I can’t renounce my passion, nor can I draw the consequences from it. I cannot depart altogether nor arrive altogether, I am unable to live in truth. I’ve hedged myself in with excuses, I’m having every sentence I utter examined by a guard dog. I’ve accommodated a whole pack of them within me. I pick my way between them, their barking at times deafens me and their soundless footfall frightens me in my dreams. One of these days one of them will approach me from behind and sink his fangs in my throat and I shan’t even cry out, I’ll remain mute forever, as I deserve to be.
How long can I stand it, how long can it last?
Till death, my darling!
You really believe that?
Or till I leave you because you never make up your mind to do anything. She starts crying. She is crying because I cannot make up my mind, because I am too circumspect, because I put principles above love, because I am shuttered against life like a stone, even more shuttered because a stone can be worked, a stone can be turned into a shape, she is crying because I am harder than if I were made of stone, I’m playing a cruel game with her and I torture her as I have never tortured anyone before, she is crying because I am good, because I stay with her as no one before managed to, she is crying because everything in her life is turning into suffering.
I know that she has surrendered herself to my mercy, and I am terrified by the thought that I might disappoint her.
The spring sun is shining on the little terrace under the wooden steps, from the washing line comes the smell of nappies and over the wall of the house opposite we can see the monastery roof with its ornament of a maple-wood halo.
Daria is sitting alongside me in a freshly-ironed white blouse and a chocolate-coloured velvet skirt, she’s dressed up because this evening we’re going to a concert. She seems to me so beautiful, so precious, as if I’d gone back forty years or so and gazed in adoration at my mother. Except we’re getting up, climbing a few steps, and she is stepping out of her clothes and her exalted untouchability and stepping into my embrace, and I feel as if the thin walls of my veins are bursting from the barely tolerable surge of delight.
We’re lying next to each other in the descending night. Somewhere out of sight beyond the palace and the river the musicians are getting ready for a Beethoven concerto.
What would you like most of all?
I know what I am expected to reply but I ask: Now or altogether?
Now and altogether, if there’s any difference.
To stay here with you, I answer, to stay with you now.
And altogether?
I’d like to know what happens to the soul.
You’d really like to know that?
I embrace her. She presses herself against me and whispers: You always want to know so much, my darling, do you always have to find out something or other?
It was you who asked.
Be glad that there are things which can’t be known – only surmised.
She holds me so tight I groan. What do you surmise?
Don’t worry, the soul doesn’t perish, somehow it lives on.
In another body?
Why in a body at all? I see your soul as a pillar. It looks stony but it’s made of fire and wind. And it towers so high that from down on the ground you can’t see the top of it. And up there it is smiling.
That pillar?
Your soul, darling. Because you have a smile inside you, even if you think you’ve only got grief, and that’s why I feel good with you. Then she asks: Have you applied for a passport?
In the woods liverwort and anemones are out again, no one but us ever goes there. She makes love to me in a way that blots out my reason. She wants to know: Don’t you feel good with me?
I do feel good with you. I’ve never known anything like it before.
But you’re not entirely with me. And she asks: How can you live like that?
Like what?
So incompletely, so divided.
She is waiting for a sign that I’ve made up my mind at last, but there is no sign. She asks: Are you going away with me somewhere in the summer?
How can I arrange things so that I can go away with her? What lie can I invent? I am gripped by cold fear.
Are you capable of doing anything for me at all?
I’ll apply for a passport but I am tired. Worn down by love-making and by love and by reproaches, by longing and by my own indecision, worn down by my ceaseless escapes, the passion of my lover and the meek trust of my wife.
I can scarcely believe it, I am given a passport, the wild roses are beginning to bloom. Far and wide, no one lies down under them. The petals are soundlessly floating down on our naked bodies and bees are buzzing above us. She asks: Are you also feeling happy, darling?
I am feeling happy with her, and she whispers: Are you going away with me to the sea in the summer?
It has been calculated that if all those murdered in Kampuchea were stacked up on a pyre with a one-hundred-metre base that pyre would be taller than the country’s highest mountain.
I have found another remark by Kafka on the mission of literature: What: we need, he wrote, are books which strike us like the most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, books which would make us feel that we’ve been driven out into the forest far from another human being, like suicide. A book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us.
With his honesty Kafka could write only about what he had himself experienced. He recorded his lonely road into the depths. He descended as far as anyone could descend, and down there came the end, the end of his road and of his writings. He was unable to sever himself from his father, nor did he bring himself to complete adult love – that was his abyss. At its bottom he saw a person he loved, and as he descended that person’s image drew closer and at the same time began to disappear in the dark, and when he was close enough to reach out with his hand he had no breath left and was engulfed by unconsciousness.
His abyss, however, is like the abyss into which we all descend or into which, at least, we gaze with curiosity or fear. We can see in it a reflection of our own destinies, of ourselves endeavouring in vain to reach adulthood, in vain reaching out to another being and to the one who is above us. Except that I don’t know if we are still capable of descending to any depth, whether we are not so pampered or so spoiled that we can no longer recognise honesty when we see it and stand before it in admiration, whether instead we are not trying to diminish it, to question it and to adapt it to our own ideas. Honesty then becomes for us an inability to live or even a source of mental disorder, courage becomes pitiable weakness. Only a weak person, one incapable of living according to our ideas and demands, seems acceptable and comprehensible to us. Indeed, we pity him for his loneliness, his vulnerability or his sick body. For the way he suffered, for being, compared to us, unhappy. We do not even perceive what that painful descent into the depths brings. The lonely diver sees in one instant what most of us who pity him don’t see in a whole lifetime.
The highest mountain in Kampuchea is in the Kardamon range not far from Phnom Penh and is called Ka-kup. It is covered in primeval forest and is 1744 metres high. Our aircraft struck the treetops and crashed into the undergrowth. We managed to jump out of the split fuselage before it caught fire. We tore our way through the dense vegetation and she was looking for a spot where we could lie down safe from snakes and scorpions. But whenever she found one, whenever she found a cleared spot it was full of dead bodies.
I said: We’ll have to find another country for just the two of us to be together.
Just then two soldiers with red tabs on their muddy uniforms emerged from the jungle and one of them said in a language which surprisingly we understood very well: Better find another world.
The two soldiers burst into shrill Khmer laughter, they laughed till they shook, and then they began to shoot at us. At the last moment I realised that in a world where five thousand million people lived, most of them starving
, what did anyone care about us two?
By midday we were at the end of our stint. ‘Took us a bit longer today,’ the foreman said, looking up at the sky which was once more hidden by clouds composed of steam and sulphur dioxide. ‘Let me tell you, there are months when I have people coming and going like in a taproom, everybody just out for quick money, and the streets like a pigsty. Everything has to have its – you know. But you lot, hats off! They’ve noticed it even at the office. The other day they went through my whole district without finding a single fault. Only that bloody castrated bastard’s running us down wherever he can.’
We were walking along in a disorderly column – on one side residential blocks, on the other a little park with massive maples and lime trees, from whose tops every gust of wind brought down a shower of tired leaves. The youngster stopped and looked into the park, perhaps walking up the slight hill had tired him or else he’d caught sight of someone he knew on the gravel path, or else he needed to let his eyes linger on something at least a little way above the ground:
And it may happen to a sweeper
as he waves
his dirty broom
about without a hope
among the dusty ruins
of a wasteful colonial exhibition
that he halts amazed
before a remarkable statue
of dried leaves and blooms . . .
These verses suddenly came to my mind – as well as the voice of the man who’d spoken them.
‘There’s money to be made in other places too,’ Mrs Venus said. ‘I know a fellow got into a gang that collects the mess in trucks in Slivenec. After all, they shift it from there by the cartload!’
‘Don’t tell me that,’ the foreman got excited. ‘You wouldn’t stand a chance there, it’s the private preserve of the Demeter gang and nobody can winkle that lot out, not even the public prosecutor.’
In the crowded bar at the bottom of the street we were lucky enough to find room at a table from which a gang of bricklayers from a nearby building site was just getting up. Our foreman jerked his head towards them: ‘My girl’s been waiting for a flat for seven years, and she was told at the co-op she’d have to wait at least another seven years. So when I see those pissed malingerers I feel like kicking their teeth in. And who knocked you about like this?’ he turned to Mrs Venus. ‘Don’t you tell me you slipped on the stairs!’
‘But I did,’ said Venus in a voice I still admired. ‘Now and again my legs give way under me.’
‘If I was you, Zoulová, I wouldn’t stand for it. You go to the centre,’ the foreman advised her, ‘get them to confirm it and then go and report it as grievous bodily harm. They’ll throw the book at him, so much he’ll never be able to pay up in full.’
‘But it was my brother-in-law!’ Mrs Venus objected.
‘Which one?’
‘The one from Ostrava, of course, the brother of my Joe that died a couple of years ago. Always turns up at my place like this. Once a year.’
‘Still working down the mines?’ the foreman wanted to know.
‘That’s what it was all about,’ Venus explained; ‘he’s just as stupid as Joe was. His lungs are all shot to hell, full of coal dust. And the same doctor, that murderer that did my Joe in, told him he couldn’t send him to a disabled home, they wouldn’t authorise that, and if he wrote down what the matter really was with him they’d put him on surface jobs where he’d be cleaning lamps for bugger-all, and then he could whistle for his pension. Exactly how that murderer chatted up my Joe. In another year, he promised him, we’ll put you straight into a disabled centre, that’s what that shit promised him when the poor bugger couldn’t even walk up a few steps. Six months later he was past caring whether he was declared disabled or not. I told my brother-in-law: Vince, look at what happened to Joe. Are you stupid or what? What bloody use is money to you when you’re pushing up the daisies? That made him angry. So I said to him: You’re all alike, you men, brave enough to hit a woman all right, but when it comes to standing up to the deputy you’d sooner shit yourself!’
‘Men aren’t all alike,’ the foreman protested.
‘Don’t tell me that! How long were you in the army?’
‘Twenty-five years.’ There was a ring of pride in the foreman’s voice.
‘And how often were you in action?’
‘No one to fight,’ the foreman said dryly.
‘Who told you that?’
‘A soldier fights when he’s ordered to,’ he told her. ‘If there’s no order he can do bugger-all.’
‘Women would fight even without an order,’ Venus snapped. ‘Why d’you think they won’t give women weapons? And what are you grinning about?’ she turned on me. ‘No doubt you were a real Ho Chi Minh!’
‘Now watch your tongue, Zoulová!’ the foreman admonished her. ‘You know that I’ve always stood by you people. There’ll soon be an opportunity for you to realise it.’ We all of us knew that the post of radio dispatcher was soon falling vacant at the office and that the foreman was firmly counting on getting it. ‘You’ll get tired of wielding that broom one day.’
‘So what,,’ Mrs Venus snapped. ‘I can just see you letting me drive a carriage with golden wheels!’
I noticed that the captain was enjoying the argument.
The crazy inventor had called on me once more at the newspaper office. That was when foreign soldiers were trampling through Prague. He sat down on a chair. The recent events had led him to concern himself once again with his soot solution. He’d changed the proportions of his seven solvents and added two catalysts. Now he was certain of the result. The ice would turn to water, to whole oceans of water. Did I understand the consequences? Did I realise which countries would be flooded if the ocean levels rose?
My first thought was The Netherlands, but he produced from his pocket a map of Europe on which he’d carefully cross-hatched the territory which would disappear under the sea. True, parts of The Netherlands and the Jutland peninsula would be affected, but worst affected of all would be the lowlands in the east, complete with all their gigantic cities.
I conjured up a vision of only the head of the Bronze Horseman showing above the waves, and even that was slowly disappearing:
‘Here cut’ – so Nature gives command –
‘your window through on Europe; stand
firm-footed by the sea, unchanging!’
Ay, ships of every flag shall come
by waters they had never swum
and we shall revel, freely ranging.
‘Do you understand now?’ he asked, folding his hands as if in prayer.
A siege! The wicked waves, attacking
climb thief-like through the windows; backing
the boats stern-foremost, smite the glass,
trays with their soaking wrappage pass;
and timbers, roofs, and huts all shattered,
the wares of thrifty traders scattered,
and the pale beggars’ chattels small,
bridges swept off beneath the squall,
coffins from sodden graveyards – all
swim in the streets!
I understood. His mind may have been disturbed, but there burned within him the flame which the rest of us, from cunning or from common-sense, were stifling.
I had always hoped that life’s flame would burn pure within me. To live and at the same time have darkness within one, to live and exhale death, what point would there be in that?
But what kind of flame had there been burning within me these past few years? I couldn’t answer my question, I’d lost my judgement. Everything that had surrounded me in the past, everything that had been significant and had filled me with joy or sorrow, had gone flat and like a strip of faded material now drifted at my feet.
In the evenings my son would play to himself the songs of his favourite singers. The words of these songs persistently and vehemently protested against the unhappy state of our society. He was clinging to protest, which was one-s
ided, as though he wanted subconsciously to make up for the one-sided way in which I had turned my back on any injustices which might keep me from my private region of bliss.
My daughter was now often coming home late, smelling of wine and cigarette smoke and talking cynically about love. Was she not finding the love she was seeking because I had found it, or, on the contrary, because she was seeking it where I remained blind?
My wife went regularly to her psychoanalyst. She too was descending into her depths, looking about herself there, confident that she was accompanied by the light of a wise guide, and she arrived at unexpected conclusions about herself and about me, about her relationship with her mother and about my relationship with mine. She was pleased that she had at last learned to understand herself and therefore to improve herself. She felt sorry that I didn’t wish to do something similar, that I didn’t long for self-understanding, that I persisted in erroneous ideas about myself.
Those I love know how I should run my life, they know what’s right in life, they know their hierarchy of values, only I blunder about in uncertainty.
I did not doubt that my wife had long surpassed me with her knowledge of the hidden mysteries of the soul and the motivations of human passions and emotions. She was developing an interest in ancient myths, she studied books on the customs and ceremonies of savages whose native countries she’d never seen and most probably never would see, and she tried to convince me that what people, including we two, were lacking, was ritual. For years we hadn’t courted one another much, and as a result a mundane element had invaded our relationship. She asked me if she might read part of her study on sacrifice and self-sacrifice to me, and I told her I’d be glad to listen to it. I lay down on the couch, my head next to the armchair she was sitting in, and tried to listen to her attentively, but I was overcome by fatigue and the sense of the words drifted away. Now and again I looked up at her, at my wife, with whom I’d lived and not lived for nearly twenty-five years. I was aware of her keen involvement and I tried to catch the meaning of at least some of the sentences. At one point she looked up from her paper and asked anxiously if she wasn’t boring me, and I replied hastily: No, the problem of sacrificial lambs interested me – if only because of my own childhood experiences – as did the sacrificial rites of the Ndembas and the Indian Khonds, although I was amazed by the amount of brutality or sadism that was hidden beneath human nature. She seemed satisfied and continued with her reading, her fingers having first tenderly touched my head. I was suddenly conscious of her closeness and I felt depressed by not being able to give her my full concentration and to stay with her. I felt guilty for my inattention. It was a childish sense of guilt: my mother was bending down over me lovingly while I, in order to conceal my feelings, pretended not to notice, pretended to be asleep. I felt tenderness towards her and also regret that I’d let her talk for so long, that I’d let her address me for so long while I wasn’t listening. I would have liked to embrace her and tell her everything that was troubling me: Forgive me and stay with me like this always! And to call on myself: Stay with her, after all she’s your wife. And on my soul: Come to rest! And to ask the other woman: Let me go without anger and without a sense of wrong. And aloud I said: You really did a good job there. And she smiled at me with her old girlish smile.