by Ivan Klíma
If any theme excites me, it is probably the theme of freedom.
How can you write about freedom when you’re unable to act freely, Daria objects. By which she means that I am unable to leave my wife.
I don’t know why leaving someone should be a freer action than staying with them.
All right then, why didn’t I stay with that dreadful woman who battened on other people’s misfortunes, and leave her alone.
Perhaps my theme ought to be not so much the search for freedom as the search for action. Or maybe resolution, or determination, or ruthlessness? I’ll write a novel about a hero who sweeps aside anyone standing in the way of his happiness or satisfaction. He’ll go on sweeping everybody aside until somebody sweeps him aside. Maybe, if he is sufficiently determined, vicious, resolute, ruthless and at the same time circumspect his turn will not come at all: only death will sweep him aside.
A few days ago an aircraft crashed not far from the Irish coast with 325 people aboard. There was no engine failure, no instrument failure, the plane didn’t strike a church tower or a mountain veiled in mist, but a time bomb exploded in it. Not a single passenger survived. Among the victims were eighty children. Floating in the water – wrote the journalists, knowing that people in their secure armchairs love reading moving or harrowing details – were dolls and other toys.
Heroes impose themselves. They’d placed a bomb aboard the plane and they were not only resolute and ruthless, but were no doubt also fighting for someone’s freedom.
A lot of people talk about freedom, those who deny it to others most loudly. The concentration camps of my childhood even had a slogan about freedom inscribed over their gates.
But I am more and more convinced that an action can be free only if it is inspired by humanity, only if it is aware of a higher judge. It cannot be linked to acts of arbitrariness, hatred or violence, nor indeed to personal selfish interest.
The amount of freedom is not increasing in our age, even though it may sometimes seem to be. All that increases is the needless movement of things, words, garbage and violence. And because nothing can vanish from the face of the planet, the fruits of our activity do not liberate us but bury us.
They even held an international conference about the Apocalypse. Scientists have calculated that if less than half of the existing atomic warheads exploded, a firestorm would sweep over the continents and the oceans, igniting anything inflammable on earth. The air would be filled with poisonous vapours, including lethal cyanides from certain plastic materials which we ourselves have manufactured. The heat would destroy not only all living things on the surface of the planet but also the seeds in the ground. The fire would be followed by darkness. For a week after the explosions the air would be filled with such a quantity of black smoke that these clouds would block out 95 per cent of the light that used to reach the earth. If any plants had remained unburnt, they would die in the months-long darkness. During the darkness a prolonged arctic winter would begin, turning the water on the planet’s surface into ice and thus destroying what remnants of life might have survived in the waters.
Between Crete and Rhodes lies the little island of Karpathos, and on it stands the small town of Olimbos. A tiny church and a few dozen houses climbing in terraces up an almost bare mountain flank. The stone houses have flat roofs and huddle together in narrow streets. Here one still finds women in dresses as black as their hair, and there is something age-old in the swarthy faces of the men. Even the silence and the sounds are age-old. This is where we’ll go, the two of us together, it came to her in a flash, and as she was climbing the steep little street to the church she knew for certain that she’d be coming back here, and that I would come with her. Maybe we shall stay there and grow old. She’ll lead me through ruins, among the remains of temples, she’ll lead me through little villages whose names I instantly forget and whose names even she possibly doesn’t know. I inhale the scent of rosemary, tamarisk and lavender, the fragrance of the hot, sun-parched soil, I hear the chirping of the cicadas and the braying of the donkeys and the pealing of bells, wedding bells overhead, and together we are conscious of what others are not conscious of: the spirit of our breath and the breath of our spirits.
I know that she is visualising her future life and that she includes me in it, that she imagines the travels we’ll undertake together, as well as her old age by my side, just as if we now really belonged together forever, as if there were no longer other people alongside us. Perhaps it doesn’t even occur to her that we are wronging anyone, she is convinced that our love justifies everything. Or is she just more genuine than me, does she want to accept the consequences of having decided to love me?
I love her too, I try to dispel my uneasiness, my anxiety to escape from her visions, I want to be with her. At least for a day, at least for some fraction of time.
And so we loved each other with all our strength and passion, out of uneasiness and out of loneliness, out of love, out of longing and out of despair. The fragments of time piled up into weeks, into further months. The winds blew, storms passed over, snow fell, my son began studying management science, he was increasingly interested in programmes for the management of the world in which he had to live, her daughter was growing up and had decided to become an agronomist, a downpour drove us into an abandoned basement where we held each other as tight as if we’d just met after a long separation, we waded through the tinted leaves in the park where the ravens in the tops of the tulip trees again called out their Nevermore to us. Her husband fell ill so that she had virtually no time for me, but she wrote me long letters in which she embraced and caressed and cursed me: Life without you is almost like death! My son celebrated his twentieth birthday, he was told to choose a present that was useful and would also give him pleasure, and after some reflection he asked for a Geigercounter. My wife noticed that I was taciturn, I looked drawn, and she asked me whether I didn’t sometimes feel nostalgic for that other woman. She suggested that I should ask her round some time, and then left for an indoctrination course, and I was able to stay with my lover day and night.
Next spring, she says, something decisive is at last going to happen.
Why next spring?
After twelve years Jupiter would enter the house of life for her.
And indeed in early spring a gallery owner in Geneva expressed interest in her work and offered to stage an exhibition for her.
I’d come to her attic studio as usual, and as soon as I’d opened the door I could see that something out of the ordinary had happened: cupboards and packing cases on which the soot from the little chimney-flue had settled for years now stood open; wherever I looked I saw mountains of her creations and monsters, succubi, witches, little demons, shameless displayers of their sex as well as angelic creatures without any sex, men-jackals, and ordinary drunks from a Little City tavern. Most of them I saw for the first time.
She kissed me, cleared a chair for me, told me her news, and wrung her hands in lamentation: she didn’t know what to do. For a while we continued to unpack some of her earlier work from crates. She placed each on a modelling stand, inspected it carefully for a few minutes, like an archaeologist who’d just unearthed an unexpectedly large fragment, and then put it down with the rest. She didn’t know if she was justified in dredging up and exhibiting such ancient work. She pointed to the head of an old woman: she’d made that while still at school. It was her father’s mother, she’d lived to the age of ninety. With her left eye she was winking while with the other one she was smiling.
I recognise the forehead, which is as high as her own, and the smile too is familiar. And that bronze youngster hanging his head, in which there is an opening for a long-stemmed flower, was a fellow student who’d committed suicide, she’d told me about him. At that time she’d wanted to make portraits of all the members of her family she knew anything about. Many of them were still in her basement workshop. Then she says: That gallery owner is inviting me to the private view and you’re coming wit
h me.
How can I go to Switzerland?
I don’t know how, she says, but I do know that you’ll see my exhibition.
As I get up to leave she neither holds me back nor sees me out, she wants to get on with her work.
I see her every other day, that’s what she wants. I always find her at work. A new figure would gaze at me out of stone or clay eyes, and in its gaze I’d recognise a familiar passion. My lover goes on working for a little longer, while I fry up something simple for lunch, then she puts down her tools, takes off her stained smock and washes her hands. Now she doesn’t want to think of work any more, only, just before we embrace, she has to tell me what she’s been thinking about, who she’d had a beer with last night, what they’d told her at the agency this morning, the one that is supposed to negotiate her exhibition, and finally she must tell me her dream. Her day is so rich that she will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
I admire her. I’m sure I’d be spending weeks before the stand without finishing more than one or two things.
How can you be so sure?
Because I know how long it takes me to think up a sentence before it more or less satisfies me.
That’s because you’re tense, she explains to me. You try to master everything by your intellect and your strength. You don’t know how to submit to life.
She doesn’t force herself to do anything. What she needs most is a sense that she is free. If she doesn’t feel like work she’ll go out with a girlfriend and they’ll get drunk, or else she comes here, she sits down, she doesn’t want anything, she isn’t driven anywhere by her thoughts or her imagination, she just gazes as if she were gazing at the clear sky, into pure water, into emptiness. She realises that nothing need happen, and that’s also all right by her. Or else some shape suddenly appears before her, a face, a likeness, maybe just a coloured blotch which may take on form or else dissolve. She can’t tell where they come from, these shapes don’t seem to come from within her, she feels she’s only a mediator, the executor of some higher will. She then executes whatever she has to, and she feels good while doing it. She doesn’t reflect on what it will turn into. That, she feels, is not her concern but the concern of whoever put that vision into her. If I could write like that, without torturing myself beforehand about the outcome, without seeing some mission before me, I’d also feel good.
But I can’t work the way you do, I’m different.
You don’t know what you’re like, she says with assurance.
And who does?
I do, because I love you.
So what am I like?
You’re more passionate than rational.
I don’t know whether I am passionate. I know that she is. Her passion will destroy us both one day.
Next time I found her in tears amidst fragments of clay. The stand was empty.
What happened?
Nothing. What should have happened? Better leave again, I’m out of sorts today!
Has anybody hurt you?
Everybody’s hurting me, but that’s not the point.
So what is?
How could I ask? Didn’t I understand, couldn’t I see? All we were doing was pointless, nothing but a self-important and vain playing at art. Nothing but desperate caricaturing and endless repetition of what had already been repeated a thousand times. And if she’d now and then managed to catch something more, to realise some higher clue, who’d detect it, who’d notice it? Why did she have to choose this particular occupation, such a useless, joyless and exhausting drudgery? She hated all art! She didn’t want to exhibit anywhere, she didn’t want to show anyone her fumblings. There was no sense in it!
What about Barlach’s angel?
Yes, Barlach’s angel – but they’d had it removed, hadn’t they? He survived only because angels are immortal. She’s laughing through her tears. If you’d sit for me I’d make you a pair of wings and maybe you’d be immortal too.
I’ll sit for you.
Better lie down with me!
We embrace and she forgets all her sorrow. She looks forward to our love-making on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Three days later the organisation, or rather agency whose task it is to organise, in other words authorise, exhibitions abroad informed her that it would not handle her exhibition.
I want to know why she’s been refused but she only shrugs.
I suspect that it might have been because of me.
It’s possible, darling, they’re envious of me because I have you, they know that nobody loves them so much.
However, we composed a letter of protest to the authorities; she’ll probably not send it off. She then went out to see her fortune-teller friend to discover what the cards had to say about the chances of her appeal. Told that they weren’t too good, she decided to hold an exhibition in Kutná Hora instead of Geneva.
We were still walking in the direction where I expected the depot to be. The trees all round were more and more heavily festooned with tattered pieces of plastic. At the base of the miserable little tree-trunks dirty crumpled bags were tumbling about, and whenever there was a gust of wind the yellowed pages of some jerkish newspaper rose up from the ground like monstrous emaciated birds and weakly flapped their mutilated wings.
Franz Kafka became a sacrificial victim by his own decision. It does not seem as if those around him were as anxious to sacrifice him as he was himself. Time and again he recorded the state of mind experienced by the victim. With few exceptions the victim resists, and even thinks up elaborate means of self-defence, but his tragic end is unalterable. In this respect Kafka certainly anticipated the fate of the Jews in our age of upheaval. His youngest sister met her end in a gas chamber. That is where he would probably have met his end too if he hadn’t been lucky enough to die young.
Jewish authors, such as Kafka’s contemporary Werfel, or later Bellow and Heller, keep returning to the theme of the sacrificial lamb with an obsession that is possibly subconscious and possibly prophetic. The theme of the victim of sacrifice and the person staging sacrifices, of an increasingly random victim and of the victimiser prepared to drag to the altar of his god any number of human beings, if not indeed the whole of mankind, is increasingly becoming the theme of the present-day world, of a mankind that once believed in an earthly paradise and in the beneficial effect of revolutions in leading it there.
At last we emerged from the forest. Before us, behind a high wire fence, we saw a mountain with many ridges, crevices and humps. Its slopes glistened here and there as the fragments of plastic reflected the sun’s rays. Along its long crest a yellow bulldozer was moving, its scoop pushing a multicoloured mass before it. From one side a road led up to the mountain. Access, however, was barred by a red-and-white striped barrier. Just then an orange dumpster came hurtling out of the forest, an invisible guard raised the barrier, and the vehicle entered the enclosure. As it slowly climbed up the slope of the artificial mountain some fat crows rose up from both sides of the path, beating their massive wings. On the crest the garbage truck stopped, its body bright in the sunlight. Then it began to evacuate its entrails. No sooner had it begun to move off than a group of little figures rushed out from some invisible hiding place. I counted thirteen of them – if Daria had been here she’d have said an unlucky number! – men, women and children. The grown-ups had rakes in their hands, and pitchforks and poles fitted with hooks, or else they were pushing discarded prams. They all pounced on the fresh rubbish and began to dig around in it as if in a race; they flung items from one pile onto another, a few items they picked out and put aside for themselves, and others, which were evidently still useful for something or other, i.e. for sale, they flung straight into handcarts or prams.
I was reminded of the woman whose things I’d moved. Disease was eating up her soul, she believed in Armageddon, and she took delight in things she’d saved from the dustbins. Here she’d be in her element. She wouldn’t have sold any of the items she found here, she’d have piled them into a heap whi
ch would have grown ever higher and wider. She’d have laboured till she dropped, not until nightfall would she have sat down by the base of her own mountain and anxiously rested in its shelter for a while. Like Sisyphus, that woman would never have completed her work, not only because the supply of new garbage will never stop, but also because an inner emptiness cannot be filled even with all the objects in the world.
We soon became aware that nothing that was happening before us was happening without a plan, and that all the running around and exploratory digging was directed by a massive bald-headed fatty in a black suit. Unlike all the rest, he never once bent down to pick up anything, but merely strolled about as their supervisor. And just then his name came to me and I surprised Lída with the information that, to the best of my knowledge, that fellow was called Demeter, and that he’d had to pay a good deal of money for the right to mine the treasures in this mountain, though I didn’t know to whom. Now and again the searchers might dig up a pewter plate, an antique coffee grinder, a discarded television set, or a banknote thrown out by mistake.
When the Kampuchean victim-makers, known as the Khmer Rouge, occupied Phnom Penh they broke into the abandoned bank buildings, burst open the safes, carried out armfuls of banknotes and flung them out of the windows – not only rials but also American dollars, Swiss francs and Japanese yen, the banknotes of every country in the world sailed out of the windows, but none of those who were still alive in the city dared pick any of them up. The coloured pieces of printed paper were gently scattered by the wind. They rose into the air alongside scraps of newspaper, torn posters and blank picture postcards, then settled by the kerbs or in the middle of the streets which nobody came to sweep. The rubbish gradually rotted, unless the monsoon rains washed it away and the waters of the Mekong carried it down to the sea.
What Kafka was longing for most in his life was probably a human encounter. At the same time it represented for him a mysterious abyss whose bottom seemed to him unfathomable. But he lived at a period which, more than anything else, began to exalt revolution. Only what was revolutionary in art, as much as in the social order, seemed worthy of admiration or at least of interest.