by Ivan Klíma
You think that’s what we were doing?
You don’t think so?
You are asking me? You who were always ready to sacrifice me? As if I wasn’t a human being at all, as if only she was one. Why don’t you say something? You’re angry now. Wait, wait a moment, surely you admit that you’ve always decided against me.
I didn’t decide against you, I wasn’t free to decide for you.
That didn’t worry you in some respects.
It worried me precisely in the respect you’re talking about.
You’re making excuses, you’ve always only made excuses. You know very well that you never gave me a chance.
A chance of what? Weren’t we together enough?
You were never only with me. Not even a week. Not even a day! You were never with me except secretly. Even by the sea . . .
Don’t cry!
And I believed you. I thought you loved me and would find some way for us to remain together. At least for a time.
I did love you. But there was no way round. Surely people aren’t things which you can move to another place when they seem to have served their purpose. I could only either remain here or join you.
You’re so noble about other people. But you calmly moved me as far away as possible when I’d served my purpose. Wait, wait, tell me one more thing: are you happy at least? Don’t you regret anything? Why aren’t you saying anything? If you’ve no regrets about me don’t you at least have any about yourself?
You think I should have regrets about myself?
Surely it’s sad if a person has loved somebody and then loses him.
I know, but a person can lose something worse.
What is there that’s worse for a person to lose?
Perhaps his soul.
Your soul? You lost your soul with me? You shouldn’t have said that! What do you know about the soul? You’re just a pack of excuses!
III
The morning rises from the autumnal mists and the sky slowly turns blue. On the far bank of the river, ever since dawn, there has been a rapid procession of cars escaping for the weekend from the polluted city. Over breakfast I’d read a poem in the paper by the leading author writing in jerkish:
Chain of Hands
Who knows who knows
where beauty is born
where happiness seeks us
why love trusts us
People people
maybe that day is dawning
when children may play
everywhere is white peace
People people
let’s be ever vigilant
they who sow the wind
must reap the storm
People people
we’re but a chain of hands
we’re but the music of dreams
we’re but the beauty of deeds
For this poem of sixty-nine words, including the title, the author needed a mere thirty-seven jerkish terms and no idea at all, no feeling or image. The substantives – beauty, happiness, love, peace, people, children – are of course interchangeable, the sense or nonsense of the rambling remains unchanged. The obligatory call for hatred of the unworthy and for love of the worthy strikes one by its clichés, even if one allows for the limited scope of the jerkish language. It’s almost as if the author was afraid that among the chimpanzees there might after all be one individual who would not understand him.
Anyone strong enough to read the poem attentively will realise that for a jerkish poet even a vocabulary of 225 words is needlessly large.
On the far side of the river – you have only to cross the bridge – are rocks and woods. We used to go for walks there with the children, now someone said they’d established some huge depôt there. My wife agrees that: we should set out in that direction, she is happy that we’re going on an excursion.
Under the bridge gypsies are playing football, the beds of a nursery patch look like an oriental carpet. My wife is walking ahead, with an energetic step. Her fears have left her, hope has returned to her, hope of a life that can be lived in harmony and love. And I still feel relief at her proximity, relief unblemished by pretence or lies, I am conscious of the lightness of the new day, upon which I am entering full of expectation.
One reason why I like walking in the country is probably that I was never able to do so in my childhood. The first thing I ever wrote in my life – I was eleven at the time and had been in the Terezín fortress ghetto for over a year – was not about love or suffering or my personal fate, but about landscape:
As we climb up the steep slope of Petřín Hill we feel increasingly like birds rising into the air. And then, at one instant, we turn round. We see before us such a multitude of Little City roofs that we catch our breath and regret that we are not really birds and so can never alight on those roofs or see their secrets from close up . . .
At that time I didn’t know yet what I was doing, I had no idea how many books had been written by then, how many minds had spoken in them. I wrote because I was dying from a yearning for freedom, and freedom for me then meant stepping out of my prison, walking through the streets of my native city; I wrote to fortify my hope that outside the fortress walls the world still existed, a world which had seemed to exist then only in dreams and visions.
I still believe that literature has something in common with hope, with a free life outside the fortress walls which, often unnoticed by us, surround us, with which moreover we surround ourselves. I am not greatly attracted to books whose authors merely portray the hopelessness of our existence, despairing of man, of our conditions, despairing over poverty and riches, over the finiteness of life and the transience of feelings. A writer who doesn’t know anything else had better keep silent.
Man goes through the landscape, seeking hope and waiting for a miracle, waiting for someone to answer his questions. Some monk, pilgrim, enlightened Buddha, prophet or at least a talking bird, to tell him if he’s been endowed with a soul, whose existence would not be cut short even by death, of what matter that soul was woven, what there was above man, what order, what creature or being, in what kind of big bang time had its origin and where it was heading; man passes through the landscape, waiting for an encounter, or at least for a sign, without knowing its nature.
My wife stops, she is waiting for me. I catch up with her, I embrace her. She goes rigid in my embrace, I can feel her trembling.
When I’d met her years ago I was happy that someone was interested in me. She was very young then, she probably didn’t understand what I was feeling, or how impatiently I would wait for her, she was regularly late for our dates.
I’d stand on the edge of the little park not far from where she lived, in the shadow of a magnificent plane tree, or in winter under its bare branches, watching the hands of the street clock. Time and again I worried that she wouldn’t come, that something had happened to her, that we’d missed one another or that one of us had made a mistake about the time. When eventually she arrived I was so happy she’d come I couldn’t bring myself 1:0 be angry with her.
No matter where we’d set out for, we felt good. It seemed to me that we were jointly looking for the same signs. For her everything changed into images, as happens to children, savages or the elect among the poets, and I felt buoyed up by her side.
To this day I can feel the joy which pervaded her, her pleasure at everything we met and saw: a little flower whose name she didn’t know, or the roof of the distant estate building, or the little feather lost by a bird of prey, and most of all our being close together. And it struck me that our actions, wherever they might seem to aim, were in fact aimed at just this point, at the close proximity of a person who might become a companion. At the bottom of all our hopes lies a yearning for encounter.
Daria was convinced that we belonged together, that we’d merely not known about one another, or that the right time had not yet come for us to meet in the way we’d now met. And she found this belief confirmed in the stars, in her cards, in the proph
ecies of an old clairvoyant whom she’d sought out on one occasion when, after all, she was overcome by doubts.
She pressed me: Why do you tell lies at home? You’re only wronging me, your wife and yourself. She reminded me of Buddha’s words. Apparently he said: No one’s deed is lost, it comes back to him! I understand those words, I also understand her. She asks me: Why don’t you come all the way to me, why do you resist so? Surely no one else can love you as I do.
Suppose we loved one another just because we do have to part all the time and then find each other anew?
She went to Greece with her husband. She was so far away that her voice came to me only as a soft whisper at night, from the region of the stars, her tenderness too was fading over that distance, and I felt easier. As though I were returning from some beautiful exile, descending from mountain heights where I’d felt happy but uneasy. How could I go back to the home that I had needlessly and wilfully left?
I went on holiday with my wife, on the way we stopped at a campsite managed by our son.
We sit together and eat porridge out of billycans, it smells faintly of burnt wood, and in the evening we sing at the campfire. Lída’s voice carries above everybody else’s, there’s tranquillity in it, it drives out everything alien and evil that still clings to my soul. It’s raining, the fire is smoking, we huddle under a single rubber coat, we touch as if embracing, and it seems to me that my lies have disappeared somewhere without trace and I’ll never return to them. And I wish time would not march on, that it would delay the return of my lover whom, surely, I can’t betray either, I can’t just chase her away. And somewhere deep down within me something is stirring, and amidst the raindrops I can hear her rapid footsteps, I can see her emerging from the dark and hurrying down the stony path among the olives, among the fig trees, among the umbrella pines, I can see her alone, even though I know that she is not alone. In my mind, however, she lives separated from all other people, with the possible exception of the swarthy villager who pours her wine. From that great distance there comes to me the muted roar of the Minotaur. I duck under the onrush of longing. In how many days will she come back to me, if she comes back to me at all?
The days have now gone, it is only two hours’ journey now, no frontier to cross, I could embrace her, provided she comes back to me.
The thought of it pushes everything else out of my mind. I walk down a path and she is coming towards me, we run towards each other, again and again we run towards each other in daylight and in darkness. At night she slips into my bed, we make love like people possessed. She moans and caresses me, I whisper tender words in her ear.
I’ll pretend I’m meeting some friends, I’ll get into the car and drive off. I don’t know with whom I’ll find her, or if I’ll find her at all, I don’t know if I’ll make up my mind to knock at the door I’ve never stood before, the door I know only from her account. I’ll arrive at the village which is so remote it hasn’t even got a church, I’ll leave the car under a tall lime tree and set out at random towards where I suspect her temporary place to be.
And there she is, coming towards me, real and alive, tanned by the southern sun, I know her from afar by her rapid life-hungry step. She recognises me, she raises her hand in greeting but we do not run towards each other, we walk towards each other, and she asks in surprise: You’ve come to see me, darling? We don’t kiss, and she says: I’ve brought you a stone from Mount Olympus. And she opens her eyes wide, she embraces me with her eyes till I sigh at the thought of ecstasy to come.
We’d walked through the patch of woodland outside the city, there were even mushrooms and chanterelles growing by the footpath, and through the branches we could see the blue sky.
My wife wanted to know whether street-sweeping wasn’t depressing me too much.
It certainly would depress me if I had to do it for the rest of my life.
What about the people who actually do it for years on end?
I don’t know what to tell her about them. After all, street-sweeping isn’t all that different from lots of other jobs which all have one thing in common: they are not inspiring. Sweepers pass their time just like other people, by talking, by reminiscing about better moments in their lives. Maybe they talk in order to rise above what they are doing, but more probably they just talk to make the time pass more pleasantly.
Didn’t they look to me somehow marked, outcast or humiliated? I consider my answer. But my wife is asking these questions only so she can tell me about her experiences with her patients, whom circumstances had picked on as sacrificial lambs: as a result they were marked for the rest of their lives, most of them had had their self-assurance broken and their mental health had been affected.
I asked her if something like that must inevitably occur, and my wife said it did. In this manner people satisfied their innate need to find someone onto whom they’d transfer their own guilt. Sacrifices to superior powers were age-old, indeed they used to be performed with solemn rituals, and for their victims men chose those whom their society considered the best or the purest.
The ritual of sacrifice no longer existed today – disregarding the symbolical sacrifice of the body of Christ. What had persisted, however, was the need for sacrifice. People now sought their sacrificial victims in their own midst, and mostly they chose the ones who were the weakest and most vulnerable. They no longer spilled their blood, they merely destroyed their souls. The most frequent victims were the children.
Yesterday, as we were moving down the street of the housing estate, the dustbins were overflowing and everywhere on the pavement and in the road rubbish was blowing about. In front of one of the refuse dumpsters was a large red puddle. It might have been human or animal blood, if it was blood at all. On the surface of the puddle dust and dirt had formed an uneven scum in which some bits of greasy paper had been trapped. Mrs Venus turned away. I thought her Red-Indian face had gone yellow. ‘Ugh, can’t look at that. That’s how I found her – my little Annie.’
She told me that before she’d had her three sons she’d had a daughter. Doing her shopping one day she’d left her in the pram outside. She’d already paid for her purchases when there were shrieks outside, then something crashed into the wall and the glass in the shop window was shattered. She rushed out, there was an overturned lorry, two adults lying there, blood everywhere, and nothing left of the pram. ‘I was beside myself then, I’d have killed that drunken pig behind the wheel if they’d let me. But they rushed up from all sides and held me until the doctor who came with the ambulance gave me a jab of something.’
At that time she was still working at the stud in Topolčianky. And just a few days after her little girl was killed it so happened that her favourite mare Edith, a chestnut with white socks, fell at a fence and broke her right foreleg just at the fetlock. The vet insisted that she’d never race again, in fact she wouldn’t even walk again, and he wanted to put her down. She ran straight to the manager of the stud and begged him to let her look after the filly. The manager knew what she’d just gone through and took pity on her. After that she spent every free moment with Edith. She made splints for her, mixed saltpetre with water parsnip and nasturtium leaves and alternated these applications with an ointment which the vet, in the end, gave her. With that filly she could talk just as she’d talked to her little girl, the animal understood her. At night, when Mrs Venus woke up and saw her little girl all bloody and mangled on that pavement, she’d run to the stable; her filly was never asleep, just as if she knew she’d come to see her. After six months she was riding Edith, they even allowed her to enter her for their local steeplechase and she rode her herself. As she was waiting at the start she forgot for the first time what had happened to her.
‘And did you win?’ I asked.
‘Some hope! We were doing all right as far as the third fence. But I was so excited I got a belly-ache, and then I couldn’t control Edith any more, she just ran as she pleased. We finished last, by ten lengths, but we finished.’
&n
bsp; As we walked on through the deserted little wood there was more and more rubbish on the ground, and not only on the ground – even the branches of the trees were festooned with translucent tatters of plastic. At every gust of the wind they touched, interlocked and embraced like a pair of crazy lovers, and in doing so they emitted a rustling sound and with the sound came the smell of rotting, mould and mildew.
Even the road up Mount Olympus, Daria had told me, led through rubbish, and even the way up Fujiyama, which she’d also climbed, was lined with garbage. On Mount Everest, just below its summit, lay drums, abandoned tents and plastic containers. Even a crashed helicopter is said to be rusting there.
My dear Lída is mistaken when she thinks that sweepers must feel ostracised or humiliated. They might, on the contrary, if they cared about such things, regard themselves as the salt of the earth, as healers of a world in danger of choking.
I asked if it was possible to help those who had already borne the brunt of ostracism. My wife, thankful for a question that was seeking for hope, replied that the best chance was psychotherapy. This might help to uncover the causes of their rejection by others and shift their sense of being wronged from their subconscious to their conscious minds.
The main theme of my wife’s life is finding hope for other people. The pain of others hurts her personally, she suffers with every rejected person, she tries to alleviate his lot, to help him see into his own soul and to discover there what he wouldn’t discover otherwise. If she feels she is succeeding she is happy, she knows she isn’t living in vain.