by Ivan Klíma
‘It was fantastic,’ he said joyfully. Evidently he’d brought back from there the little book from which he’d read a passage to me that afternoon, or at least a taste or enthusiasm for reading from it, if necessary in the street.
We usually went together to draw our pay. I told him what paper I used to work on. I didn’t mention the books I’d written. He in turn confessed to me that all his life he’d had to do something other than what he wished to do. Although he’d studied to be a priest he’d worked as a miner, a boilerman, a storeman, a stage-hand and even a lorry driver. Now, in order to help his mother, he was making some extra money by street-sweeping. What he liked about the job was that it was outdoor work, often indeed among gardens, he was a countryman. He also had a sense of doing something useful. In a city filthy with refuse people might at best find a place to sleep and store their belongings, but never one to establish a home and experience the thrill of belonging to the place, to their neighbours, to God. Today’s people were like nomads, he complained, they moved from one home to another, carrying their little household gods with them. They didn’t establish ties either with their surroundings or with people, often they didn’t even take their children out into the country. They either killed them while still in the womb or they abandoned them in their chase after pleasure. And how were those children going to live when they had known no home? They’d develop into real Huns, they’d move through the world and turn it upside down.
But he didn’t complain about his own fate. He spoke without bitterness about what had happened to him.
‘There were at least thirty thousand of us there, mostly young people.’ He sounded pleased, as if he’d quite forgotten his own gloomy prophecies.
At night they had sat in front of the church and in the surrounding meadows, passing the time in prayer and singing. Holy Wenceslas, prince of the Czech realm – the hymn imploring the patron saint not to let his progeny perish – had been sung three times. If I’d heard what the hymn sounded like under the open sky perhaps I too after all would look forward to better days.
We were advancing down the narrow little street which runs round the park by the ramparts. Mr Rada was engrossed by what he was telling me but I couldn’t resist looking up curiously to the window which the artist had turned into his showroom. The hanged man had long disappeared, there had since been a three-legged swan and later a fountain which instead of water spewed dirty sand or ash, letting it rain down on a female head whose plaster features seemed pretty, and down whose cheeks it slid like solidified tears. Now the head and the cloud of ash were gone, there was a manikin sitting on a little horse, made up, as was his steed, of plastic items evidently picked up from a rubbish heap: old containers, motor oil and spray cans, hideous toys for infants and coloured fragments of handbasins and jugs. His open mouth was a red butter-dish, in one of his eyes was a poisonously green pot of paper paste, Koh-i-noor brand, and in the other the dark-haired head of a doll. At first glance it seemed that the horseman was smiling, a mere toy, a present-day Don Quixote riding out into the world in armour, but then I noticed the rider was showing his light polystyrene teeth and I could make out some bare bones. This was not the noble though confused knight but rather the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse, as seen by Dürer. ‘And behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him,’ the horseman with the head of the mouth of hell of Brueghel’s ‘Dulle Griet’.
What kind of head, I wondered, had that unknown artist? Why and for whom was he staging these exhibitions in a little street into which hardly anyone ever strayed? Why was death so often on his mind?
‘These young people,’ Mr Rada continued enthusiastically, ‘have realised that they’ve had distorted values imposed on them. From childhood they’ve had it drilled into them that hate and struggle are the levers of history. That there is no superior being above man! And they came to pray and to listen to the tidings about Him who is above us and who, despite everything, looks down on us with love.’ It was possible, he concluded, that by the grace of God a period of rebirth was beginning, a new Christian age.
He communicated his joy to me and supposed that I would fully share it with him. It is certainly encouraging to hear that people are not content with the jerkish notion of happiness. But it occurred to me, even while he was reading to me about how man strayed off his path by deifying himself, that man can behave arrogantly not only by deifying his own ego and proclaiming himself as the finest flower of matter and life, but equally when he proudly believes that he has correctly comprehended the incomprehensible or uttered the unutterable, or when he thinks up infallible dogmas and with his intellect, which wants to believe, reaches out into regions before which he should lower his eyes and stand in silence. We might debate for a long time about when that fatal shift occurred (if it occurred) which gave rise to the arrogant spirit of our age, and also about how far we must go back to put matters right, but what point would there be in such an argument when there is no return anyway, either in the individual’s life or in that of humanity?
‘What about your brother?’ it occurred to me to ask. ‘Was he there with you?’
‘Him?’ he made a dismissive gesture. ‘It might cost him his career!’ His own words struck him as too harsh, for he added: ‘He might perhaps just walk along in some Buddhist procession.’
Dad had been in hospital for a week. Lately, even before he was laid so low by fever, he’d complain that he couldn’t sleep at night. I wanted to know why and he didn’t tell me, he made some excuse about some undefined burning pain, an elusive ache. But I suspected that he was suffering from anxiety. His intellect, which all his life had been concerned with quantifiable matter, knew of course that nothing vanished completely from this world, but he also knew that nothing kept its shape and appearance forever, that in this eternal and continuous motion of matter every being must perish just as every machine, even the most perfect, just as the worlds and the galaxies. Dad’s intellect realised that everything was subject: to that law, so why should the human soul alone be exempt from it? Because the Creator breathed life into it? But surely He too, if he existed at all, was subject to that law. But what sense would there be in a God whose existence and likeness were subject to the same laws as everything else, a God who’d be subject to time?
Dad was standing on the frontier which his intellect was able to visualise, the chilling nocturnal fear of the black pit was crushing him – and I was unable to help him. My dear father, how can I help you, how can I shield you from fear of your downfall? I wasn’t even able to burn your fever. I am only your son, I was not given the power to liberate you from darkness, or to liberate anyone.
Dad is lying in a white ward which smells of doctoring and of the sweat of the dying. They have temporarily kept his fever down with antibiotics and they have dulled his fear by antidepressants. They’d given him the middle bed of three. On his left lay a hallucinating fat man who’d been irradiated at night by unknown invaders with hooded faces, on his right a wizened old man, punctured all over by hypodermics, was dying.
Dad was sitting up and welcomed me with a smile. I fed him, then I took out a razor from his bedside table and offered to shave him. He nodded. Lately he’d hardly spoken at all. Maybe he didn’t have the strength, or else he didn’t know what to tell me. He’d never talked to me about personal matters, nor had he ever spoken about anything abstract. In his businesslike world there was no room for speculations which led too far from firm ground. So what was he to talk to me about now that the firm ground itself was receding from him? And what was I to talk to him about?
The dying man on his right emerged for an instant from his unconscious condition and whispered something with a moan.
‘Poor fellow,’ Dad said, ‘he’s all in.’
I helped my father to get up. I took his arm and he moved out into the corridor with small shuffling steps. I should have liked to say something nice and encouraging to him, something meaningful.
‘I have those dreams nowadays,’ he confessed to me. ‘They proclaimed a beet-picking drive, and Stalin was personally in charge. I had to join, and I was afraid he’d notice how badly I was working.’
During the Stalin period they had, with the deliberate intention of hitting him where it would hurt most, found him guilty of bad work.
I might have told him that I’d always admired his ability to concentrate on his work, that I knew what outstanding results he’d achieved, but it would have sounded like empty phrases from a premature funeral oration. He knew better than anyone what he had achieved, and he also knew what I thought of his work.
We were approaching the end of the corridor – everything was spotlessly washed and polished, almost as it used to be in our home. We were on our own, although in the distance we could see a young nurse hurrying from one door to another. Only a few days earlier Dad had been irritated by the nurses, who’d seemed to him disobliging. Now he wasn’t complaining. He sat down on a chair by an open window, his grey-streaked hair was stuck together by sweat. He looked out through the window, where the birches were shedding their yellow leaves in the gusts of wind, but he was probably unaware of them, he’d just witnessed an explosion at a great height and he was alarmed. It’s stupid,’ he said softly, ‘to play about with it. Any piece of machinery will malfunction some time. If they don’t stop it it’ll be the end. You ought to tell them!’
‘Me?’
‘You ought to tell them.’ Dad was still looking out of the window, but he was silent again. A plane roared past overhead, it moved on, it didn’t crash, it only left an unnecessary white trail of poisonous gases behind.
Had he perhaps just uttered the most important thing he’d intended to say to me? Or did he merely wish to confess a further disappointment of his – that the wonderful engines, which he’d invented and designed all his life, while lifting man off the ground, still did not lead him into the Garden of Bliss but would, more probably, prematurely incinerate him.
I helped him get up and we returned to his ward. I sat him up in his bed, straightened his blanket and told him how well he’d walked. I should have asked him, while there was time, if there was anything else he wanted to tell me, anything he hadn’t told me so far, some instruction, advice or message. Was he perhaps leaving a grave behind somewhere that I should visit for him? Or a lonely person whom I should visit? But Dad was certainly not thinking of graves, he regarded it as nonsensical to waste time on the dead, and he wouldn’t venture to give me any advice. He’d been disappointed with so many of his expectations, and if there was a woman somewhere whom he had loved and whom he had never mentioned to me, he had clearly decided not to burden me with her name now. He had nothing left to pass on to me.
Maybe I should have been saying to him that, if anything, I was finding some hope in his disappointments, because he’d been misled only by a self-assured intellect which thought it knew everything and which refused to leave any room for the inexplicable, that is for God, eternity or redemption. Would he even understand me, could he still hear me?
I noticed that his chin had dropped on his chest and that he had slipped down on his side. I slackened the screw behind his bedhead and brought the bed down into the horizontal position. Dad didn’t wake up as I laid him down, he didn’t even open his eyes when I stroked his forehead.
When I got home a young man was waiting for me who, by coincidence, had just arrived from a town near Svatá Hora. About two years ago I’d given a reading of some of my short stories to a few friends of his at his place. Since then he’d turned up occasionally for a chat about literature. He was always well-groomed, his fair hair looked as if it had just been waved with curling tongs and in his grey eyes there was some painful anxiety as if he’d taken on more of life’s burdens and responsibilities than he could bear. He was interested in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Joyce, as well as in the cinema and in art. In one of the stories I’d read that evening there was a mention of Hegedušić; after I’d finished he told me that there was a short film available in our country about him. I was surprised to find a young man, who worked in the mines near Svatá Hora, being interested in a Yugoslav painter. He’d now arrived suspiciously soon after the famous pilgrimage, but he made no mention of it, which reassured me. He’d come to get my advice about his future. He’d decided he wouldn’t stay in the mines any longer. He’d find some unskilled job and would try to study aesthetics, art history or literature by correspondence. The work he was doing, he explained to me, made no sense. The people among whom he moved disgusted him. If only he knew what people he’d have to move among if he succeeded in getting where he wanted to go! But I don’t like imposing my dislikes on others. I merely dug out some recent article by a leading jerkish official who’d been appointed to a university chair to ensure the oblivion of all literature.
From that article I read him just a few introductory sentences on communism, which had become the highest form of freedom of the individual and the human race, and in consequence provided the writer with an unprecedented scope, whereas in the USA, that bastion of unfreedom, the greatest artists, such as Charlie Chaplin, had to escape.
My visitor smiled. He considers it more acceptable to have to listen, voluntarily and for no pay, to jerkish babbling than to destroy and pollute the landscape for good pay, to mine the ore from which others would produce an explosive device capable of turning everything into flames.
What stands at the beginning and what at the end? The word or fire, babbling or explosion?
Speaking of explosions, my visitor was reminded that in his little town some unknown persons recently blew up the monument of the ‘workers’ president’. The president had died more than thirty years ago, my visitor does not remember him. All he knows about him is that he brought upon us all that ‘highest form of freedom of the individual and the human race’, and also that, in its name, he had masses of innocent people liquidated, including his own friends and comrades. My visitor wanted to hear how I felt about the destruction of monuments. It is my impression that people don’t take any notice of monuments, especially the new ones, or if they do there is nothing about those statues that could impress them. After all, what appeal can one expect of shaft-boots, overcoats, trousers and briefcases, with on the top, accounting for less than one-sixth of the whole, a face behind which we detect neither spirit nor soul? What I mind about the monuments of officially proclaimed giants is that they are ugly and mean, in other words that they disfigure their surroundings. But then it would be difficult to imagine different ones, considering whom they have to represent and given the abilities of the artists from whom these statues are commissioned for a fat fee. Besides, there are so many things disfiguring this world! If we were to destroy them all, where should we stop? To destroy is easier than to create, and that is why so many people are ready to demonstrate against what they reject. But what would they say if one asked them what they wanted instead?
The young man nodded. He hoped his studies would help him find what to aim for himself. He apologised briefly for having kept me up so late and vanished into the night.
The Buddhists have their own vision of the apocalypse. Once all our good deeds, love or renunciation no longer offset our crimes, the equilibrium between good and evil in the universe is upset. Then snakes, crocodiles, dragons and many-headed monsters will emerge from all the openings in the earth and from the waters, breathing fire and devouring mankind. This will restore the disturbed equilibrium, and harmony of silence and nothingness will reign once more.
Night and silence and nothingness. In the sleeping city distant people and near ones, friends and strangers are all swallowed up by darkness. Where in all this darkness have we lost our God?
The questioning intellect normally penetrates into the depths of the individual, the world and the universe until it encounters the boundary beyond which mystery begins. There it either stops or else rushes on, failing to realise, or reluctant to realise, that it calls out its questions into
the void.
In his questioning Kafka stopped at the very first step, at himself, because even here he’d entered an impenetrable depth. In a world in which the intellect predominates more and more, the intellect which believes that it knows everything about the world and even more about itself, Kafka rediscovered the mysterious.
Unexpectedly the telephone rang. I ran out to the hall, lifted the receiver and identified myself, but there was silence at the other end. It was listening to me, silently. I replaced the receiver and lifted it again. The silence had gone, the dialling tone was buzzing.
That was you?
You aren’t angry, are you, darling? Were you asleep? I’m here on my own. I was lying in bed, reading, and suddenly I thought this was nonsense: to lie here and read about another person’s life. I’m sad. Aren’t you?
Just now?
Just now . . . And altogether. I do something and then it hits me: why am I doing it, and for whom? Now I’m lying here, everything is quiet, but why should I be lying here? I don’t need any rest when tomorrow I won’t be alive anyway. You assured me that you were happy when you were with me, that you’d never experienced anything so complete. Was that a lie then?
Surely you’d have known if I’d told you a lie at that moment.
So why don’t you come? Tell me what has changed, in what way have I changed that you don’t even ring me? What wrong did I do to you?
You didn’t do me any wrong, but we just couldn’t go on. Neither me nor you. It was impossible to carry on that divided life.
And like this one can live? Don’t tell me you’re living. Tell me, you really believe you’re living?
Surely living doesn’t only mean making love.
It doesn’t? I always thought it meant just that to you. So what, in your opinion, does have any meaning? Eating and sleeping? To botch up some important work, some great piece of art?
What I am trying to say is that one can’t indulge in love at any price. Like at the expense of others.