by Ivan Klíma
‘I once got on a ship that was skippered by a woman,’ the captain reminisced. ‘In the Baltic it was.’
‘What was her name?’ the foreman wanted to know.
‘The woman’s? I don’t know. The ship’s name was the Dolphin, she belonged to the fishing combine. We had put her engine through sea trials after a general overhaul, so we took her out without cargo, only about six fellows, that woman and myself.’
‘She was the only woman with six fellows aboard?’ the foreman asked, hoping for a story of erotic entanglements. But the captain had other things to relate. They’d left Warnemünde on a northerly course, then they’d turned east by thirty degrees because otherwise they would have soon found themselves in the Danish port of Gedner. There was a north-westerly blowing and it was raining, visibility was down to about 300 metres. After an hour or so they spotted something floating in the sea. It seemed incredible, fifteen miles off shore, but it was two people, a man and a woman on rubber mattresses, both of them only in swimsuits.
‘Carried out by the wind?’ asked the youngster.
‘I just told you the wind was onshore. They wanted to skidaddle to Denmark. They’d got through the cordon at night, the foul weather helped them.’ Whenever he left the realm of his poetry the captain was logical and matter-of-fact.
‘As soon as they spotted the ship they paddled away from us like people possessed, but the woman captain ordered the boat to be lowered and had them brought aboard. The poor wretches were frozen stiff, but even so they begged to be left in the water, all they needed now was half a day, but the old woman decided she had to hand them over.’
‘What happened to them?’ I asked.
‘How should I know?’ the captain replied. ‘If I was those people I’d build myself a boat that no one could keep up with. Except that that sort haven’t got a clue about engineering. They just try to swim across: backstroke, breaststroke. And they’re never seen again, unless the sea throws them up on the beach, all gnawed.’ The captain pushed his cap back and took a swig. No doubt among his designs there was the blueprint of a small submarine driven by compressed air or a propane-butane bottle.
‘Well, we none of us have a written guarantee for our lives,’ the foreman remarked in an attempt to regain the centre of the stage.
‘I wonder they even try it,’ the youngster sounded surprised, ‘when they must know it’s useless.’
‘Because they’re idiots,’ the foreman again intervened: ‘Everyone thinks he can make it. Stupid!’
‘Maybe they’re not the only stupid ones!’
‘Who then?’ The foreman seemed surprised at my remark.
‘If they were allowed to board a ship they wouldn’t try that kind of thing.’
‘Can’t have just anyone boarding a ship and sailing wherever he pleases, can we now?’ he turned to the others. ‘When I saw they weren’t going to let me out I’d sit tight on my arse and wait.’
By a miracle we got a little room with a two-tier bunk in a small brick house at the spot where the neck of the Dar peninsula was narrowest. From the little garden, where blackcurrants were ripening, you could see the surface of the inland sea, above its surface coloured masts and sails, above them seagulls, and above them the sky which, for most of the days we stayed in this normally rainy area, was cloudlessly blue; on the other side, immediately beyond the road, was a gently rising field of wheat. If you climbed up to the nearby ridge you could see the sea proper. We took a brightly-coloured bus to a stop called Three Oaks and walked down a sandy path to the beach, which was as spotlessly clean as everything else here. There we rammed into the ground a few sticks we’d collected which had been leached out and bleached by the sea. On them we spread a piece of yellow material, which was soon covered by small metallically shiny black beetles. We buried a bottle of lemonade, spread a blanket on the sand and lay down on it. Thus we lay there hours, in immobility and mutual proximity. I had never before been able to stay by the water for even a few hours, I was frightened by the void of laziness. I could not be totally lazy, just as I could not love totally or surrender to work totally, though this last perhaps more than the rest. I always had to escape from the reach of the black pit which I invariably saw before me as soon as I was quietly relaxing anywhere, but here I saw only the sea, only the sky, only her loving features. Time here was slowed down. Sometimes during its retarded flow I read Kierkegaard or the story of Adrian Leverkühn as the ageing Thomas Mann had invented it and was telling it at the same slow and leisurely pace. Sometimes I read to her aloud and she listened with the concentration of a person who did everything she did in life with total completeness. But when, in that sun-scorched wasteland, where countless naked bodies were indulging in total inactivity, I read to her that action and decision in our – that is Kierkegaard’s – age was just as rare as the intoxication with danger felt by someone swimming in shallow water, the rule that a man stands or falls with his action no longer applies, I observed in her concentration an almost excessively attentive and enthusiastic agreement, and I realised that these sentences I was reading told against me, that I was merely continuing her silent, ceaseless and scarcely disguised evidence for the prosecution. We argued about the philosopher’s theses, pretending that we were not talking about ourselves or about our conflict. We argued until the moment when I shook the sand grains out of my book and put it back in my bag. Then we just lay, our naked bodies touching each other, and gazed on the white crests of the waves which managed to touch each other without causing each other pleasure and pain. Not until evening did we get up, climb the sand dune along the line of dustbins towering there, metallic, among the flowering wild roses, and return to the road.
The evenings were long northern evenings. When we’d eaten we went back down to the.beach, which by then was deserted. She sat down cross-legged on a rock, gazing at the seemingly cooling sun, while I looked at the dark surface of the water, noticing the menacing cordon of ships on the distant horizon, a cordon designed to block even here the freest and most unfettered area of water, and I also looked at her sitting there statue-like, perceiving how in the silence of the sea, in this marine solitude, she was receding, changing into an unfamiliar being that lived in inaccessible regions, and I couldn’t decide if I was feeling sadness or relief.
We also borrowed bikes and set out early in the morning, not along the road but along sandy paths, along the footpaths which intertwined on the narrow ridge which rises above the sea.
The waves roar and the wind howls, we stop to embrace, to sit down and look across to the distant shores. Then we continue in a westerly direction and our bikes sink so deep into the sand that we have to carry them. Before us lies a dark green expanse of heather, we turn into it; the soil here is black, our path is blocked by an ever thicker tangle of roots, the air is full of whining mosquitoes, our little path has almost disappeared, we don’t know where we are, whether to turn back or go on, path or no path. Our bikes are useless now, we wheel them along, I try to discover the way ahead while she sees the shapes of spirits in the twisting branches and hears the whispering of the dead in the sighing of the wind, the last breaths of suicides and the vain shouts of the drowning, there is a wizard crouching in the undergrowth whose body lacks a soul, and over the treetops the carrion crows circle, soundless and dark. We circumvent pools from which gas bubbles rise up and eventually reach the road. Now she is riding in front of me, her hair, which would be almost grey by now if she didn’t give it a blonde rinse, shines around her head. We are approaching Bad Müritz, where half a century ago our fellow countryman, the unsuccessful lover Franz Kafka, was preparing for his fall into the black pit, where his brittle soul concurred with his sick lungs that they would give up the exhausting struggle.
We are riding through the streets from which they haven’t yet driven out the fin de siècle spirit as they have done so thoroughly from our native city, thirstily we drink beer at a pavement stall, hungrily we sit down at a battered table in a shabby café. We sit
opposite each other, far from our near and dear ones, in a strange café in a strange town, we eat cakes, we are silent, we look at one another, and I can see in her eyes a devotion I didn’t believe I’d ever find anywhere, I can feel it invading me deeply, pervading me, settling into every cell of my body. I don’t know how or when I’ll end my struggle, but at that moment my soul is still capable of rising up, of making one last flight to where it belongs, to the place of its longings, to the regions of blissful paralysis from the proximity of a loved being; after that it will fly out to this battered and by now deserted little table, for a last time briefly smile with sudden relief, and then accept its fate.
Later we stand in the cathedral of Güstrow before Barlach’s rising angel. I can see my lover going rigid, rising up to those exalted shapes, moving away from me into heights which I cannot conceive, which my vision cannot reach, where only angels and perhaps the souls of great artists reside. I move away, unnoticed, and sit down in a pew in a corner of the cathedral and wait for her to come back to me.
Nach der Rede des Führers am Tage der Deutschen Kunst in München haben die zuständigen Stellen nunmehr beschlossen, das von dem Bildhauer Ernst Barlach im Jahre 1926 geschaffene Ehrenmal für die Gefallenen des Weltkriegs aus dem Dom in Güstrow entfernen zu lassen. Die Abnahme wird in den nächsten Tagen erfolgen. Das Ehrenmal soll einen schwebenden Engel darstellen und war schon seit langem ein Gegenstand heftigster Angriffe.
(Following the Führer’s speech on the Day of German Art in Munich the appropriate authorities have now decided to remove from the cathedral in Güstrow the memorial created by the sculptor Ernst Barlach in 1926 for the fallen of the World War. The removal will take place during the next few days. The memorial, designed to represent a hovering angel, has long been the object of fierce attacks.)
When eventually she returns to me she has tears in her eyes.
Do you think you could manage an angel like that?
I don’t know. I’m probably not sufficiently obsessed – by stone or by wood.
I don’t ask her what she is possessed by, I know. But I also suspect that there is a burning ambition in her, at the price of exhaustion if need be, to ensure that those who view her work go rigid.
The next day she walks down to the edge of the beach, where the sand has soaked up the seawater, and her fingers, used to creating shapes out of shapeless matter, there create a sand relief of a creature resembling a winged centaur rather than an angel. That creature has my features, except that perhaps it smiles more in all directions. Small groups of sunbathers gather around her and with admiration watch her work taking shape, but she pretends not to notice them, she only wants to know if I like her sand sculpture.
I like it and it’s like me, I answer, in order to amuse her with my pun. My only regret is that this strange creature with my face will not survive the next tide.
What does it matter? Tomorrow, if we feel like it, we’ll make something different. At least we aren’t burdening the world with another creation. This is something we are both aware of: that the world is groaning, choking with a multitude of creations, that it is buried by objects and strangled by ideas which all pretend to be necessary, useful or beautiful and therefore lay claim to perpetual endurance.
We don’t need either objects or creations, she says lovingly, for us it is enough to have one another.
We are together while the day ascends, while the night descends, we are so totally together that it saps our strength, that the fire consumes us, that the heat consumes her till I am alarmed: suppose we are buried in ashes from which we won’t rise again?
I have never been as close to anyone, I have never known a person capable of being so close to me, capable of such passion, of such intensity.
Maybe both of us have been gathering strength all our lives for just this moment, for just this meeting, maybe we have gravitated here in our dreams, to this small room, to this coastal spot, where water, sand and sky blend into each other, where time trickles softly and cleanly, this is where unconsciously we have wanted to come at moments of loneliness. And when our bodies are finally exhausted, when only a few last breaths are left of the northern summer’s night, when I am about to climb down to my bunk, she begs me not to go yet, to stay with her at least here, and so I persevere in immobility, even though I now long to be alone, so many days of absolute proximity have exhausted me and I am longing for a moment of isolation; in the midst of a strange world into which I was snatched I now long for the undemanding routine of home. But have I got a home left? After all, I’m breaking it up myself. My daughter has left, she is a mother now, and my son is leaving very soon. And as for my wife, even if she smiles at me, where is she really at home? What is left of our love?
My yearning is growing within me, a nonsensical regret because it is backward-facing, a regret that my life, against which I want to rebel just now, is running away.
The other woman is lying by my side. She’s asleep. Her breath has gone quieter, her spirit has calmed down. I try to make out her features, I bend down over her, I do not kiss her, I just look at her, at a remote creature whom, despite everything, I have not managed to absorb fully into myself, to accept fully. I climb quietly down and lie on the lower bunk, I gaze into the blackness before me. Outside a tomcat is noisily complaining and the wind is driving a thunderstorm before it. I get up and open the window wide, on the dark sky a soundless flash of lightning now and then lights up the huge plane tree in the garden.
And suddenly I see her – my wife. The lightning illuminates her, she is sitting on a bench, waiting for me. We are walking down a little path in the park, I am pushing a pram whose wheels keep coming off but we haven’t got the money to buy a new one, I am pushing it along the Prokop valley.
A nonsensical yearning directed backwards, but what am I to do? There remain in me, rooted, countless days and nights together, from which time has gradually eroded everything that was not solid, leaving behind boulders on an autumnal field, boulders which can’t be rolled away, even if I walk around them I can’t get rid of them, I only have to turn my head and I see them: towering there like immovable milestones, they regard me like some monstrous stony eyes of the night, motionless, they wait for me to give up everything. I take a few more steps but I can feel their stony stare on my back, my legs are growing heavy, and I come to a halt. I am not going back and I am not going forward, I am standing in a void, I am standing between two fields, at the meeting point of two calls which intersect each other, I am nailed to the cross, how can I move?
And the other woman, the one I’ve come here with, the one I followed from weakness, from longing, from loneliness, from mental confusion, from passion, from prodigality, from the hope that I might forget my mortality for a while, now complains about my immobility, she curses it and my wife, instead of cursing me.
So here I stand, she is asleep behind me while I am waiting by the window for my wife to look up and see me. But she doesn’t see me. Suddenly I am conscious that between us lie mountains and rivers, life and death, betrayal and lies, years of unfulfilled longing and vain hopes. I see my wife beginning to tremble like an image on the surface of water when the first raindrop strikes it, in a sudden surge of longing I reach out towards the window to hold her, to save her, to draw her to me from that distance, but it is in vain, the rain is getting heavier, and I become aware of the other woman looking at me from behind. What are you doing, dearest, why aren’t you asleep?
I’m just shutting the window, I answer, it’s beginning to rain.
I got up from the table simultaneously with Mr Rada. No sooner were we out in the street than he could no longer restrain himself from telling me what, clearly, he’d wanted to keep from the others. ‘I got back from Svatá Hora yesterday. Have you heard about it?’
The fact that there had been a great pilgrimage and rally of believers had been mentioned even in our jerkish press, probably to enable the rally of believers to be portrayed as a peace festival.
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