by Ivan Klíma
For that reason, too, they looked in his sentences and images for a revolutionary message. But when I read his letters to the two women he loved, or at least tried to love, for whom he yearned and of whom he was afraid, I realised that if I did the same I had no hope of understanding him.
His first love lasted for more than five years. He invited her to him, he drove her away again, he implored her not to leave him unless she wished to destroy him, and he implored her to leave him or they would destroy one another. He got engaged to her and immediately afterwards he fled from her. When she kept silent and failed to answer his letters he lamented his fate and begged for a single word of favour. Encounter, coming close together with a woman he loved was for him a chance of fulfilling his life, a chance he persistently missed. The struggle he was waging with himself totally consumed and exhausted him.
Could a person as honest as that write about anything other than what was shaking his whole being, what occupied him day and night? About anything other than the struggle he was waging, even though that struggle, by comparison to the revolutionary events in the world, was less than trivial? Although he mostly speaks of himself and although his heroes are, even in their names, avowedly himself, he yet concealed the true nature of his struggles. He was not only shy, he was so much an artist that he expressed everything he experienced in images. The torturing machine, which slowly murders the sentenced man, was invented by him at the very moment when, after a bitter inner struggle, he decided to get engaged after all. A few weeks later, when he broke off his engagement, treacherously as he himself felt, he conceived the trial in which the tribunal judges the accused for an offence that is not clear to the reader and has often been interpreted as metaphysical guilt, as a metaphor of original sin.
Even in a revolutionary period there were undoubtedly other writers whose works, without our feeling obliged to search them for hidden messages about the meaning of existence, were full of images and metaphors. But in Kafka’s work there is something more than just a cleverly invented image, something that moves us and grips us, something that lures us fatally on like a sheer drop.
Daria’s exhibition was being set up in three reasonably sized rooms of a Gothic house. The exhibition – including twenty drawings – comprised seventy-three items. She could easily have shown a few items more or less, but that number seemed to her the most suitable. 1973 was the year her daughter was born.
For almost two weeks we packed and heaved crates with figures and paintings. Our faces and hair were covered with a layer of wood-shaving dust.
You’re so kind to me, she said, brushing the dust off her jeans and embracing me. And I’m not devoting myself to you at all. Have a glass of wine at least!
She promised to make it all up to me. We’d travel somewhere that I’d like, there wouldn’t have to be any water there, she knew that I didn’t care for water, she’d come to the mountains with me.
I wasn’t anxious to go either to the water or to the mountains, I didn’t need a rest, I’d much rather work undisturbed. But I behaved like a good boy, I didn’t raise any objections, I unpacked the sculptures we’d brought along, I helped to nail pedestals together and hang cords from the ceiling, I adjusted the lights, and in the evening I drove her back home as fast as I could.
My wife, it seemed to me, still had no suspicion of how I was spending most of my time. Or didn’t she want to suspect? The day before the opening of the exhibition she was leaving for an ethological conference and wanted to know if I minded being left on my own for so long.
I didn’t betray my relief at her going away just: then. I assured her I could look after myself.
If I wished, she suggested, I might come along with her. I was sure to find the people at the conference interesting. For a while she told me earnestly about people who kept snakes or exotic butterflies, about experts on owls, marmosets and white stags. She wanted to provide some diversion for me, some experiences I wouldn’t have in my solitude, and when I declined her offer I felt guilty. I was about to repay her offer of help with betrayal.
It was her husband who drove my lover out to the private view of her exhibition. He’d finally emerged from the darkness. I suggested to her that I stay at home that day, I’d seen her work anyway. But she didn’t want me to leave her at such a moment. I had to overcome a cowardly wish to avoid what would be an awkward encounter, to make the excuse of being ill, or of the car being out of action. There are plenty of excuses a man can invent, but I didn’t wish to lie, at least not to her, so I went.
I knew her husband only from photographs, but I instantly identified his tall athletic figure. The room was crowded by then and I don’t know if he noticed me too. He was talking to a bald-headed, wizened old man, almost certainly her father, whom I hadn’t met either. I didn’t know any of the people in the room, I belonged solely to her, to her who was severed from all ties and relationships. I felt so much out of place that it depressed me.
She came over to me almost instantaneously. Unfamiliar, almost strange in a long poppy-crimson dress. Even her features seemed strange to me, the little lines which I’d so often touched with my lips were skilfully covered by a layer of cream and powder. She kissed me, as no doubt she’d kissed other guests as well, and whispered that she loved me. Then she asked me if I wanted to meet her husband. She declared herself as belonging to me in front of everybody – ‘My lover’ – and I suddenly wasn’t sure whether I was pleased about it or not.
After all, why shouldn’t I shake hands with you? her husband said to me and gave me a slightly injured smile. Although I’m not exactly short, he was a head taller than me, and also ten years younger. At first glance he was one of those men women run after of their own accord. He said that Daria had worked pretty hard these past few weeks, they’d scarcely seen her at home, and he shrugged as if to say: And on top of everything there’s you and that’s really a bit much. But instead he said he’d read my new stories, and this would have been the right moment for me to shrug but he gave me his injured smile again and walked away. I hung about near the door but lacked the courage to make a getaway. I had a feeling that they were all furtively watching me, for the moment I had become one of the exhibits. I might have a little card by my feet: Banned but active in another field. Or: The lover presented. Or simply: That’s him!
In the last room Daria’s sister, whom I had likewise never seen before, was setting out canapés from cartons on a little table and pouring wine into paper cups. I took a canapé but I declined the wine because I was driving back that evening.
An elderly man whom I knew from somewhere took a drink and said that it was years since he’d seen anything so free and so liberating. He was looking at the sister but I was sure he was talking to me.
That’s what she’s like, her sister agreed. When she was small she’d run away from home and play truant from school.
Her husband was approaching and I beat a hasty retreat. I was unable not to take notice of him, even though, to my own surprise, I looked upon him without jealousy, as if it were no concern of mine that she lay down by his side night after night. I only felt a little embarrassment, shame and perhaps even guilt. That man had never wronged me, whereas I had for several years now secretly and insidiously worked my way into his life.
She guessed my mood and hurried over to comfort me. Her husband was leaving now, he’d be taking the rest of her family with him, the whole circus would be over in a little while, there’d only be a few friends left whom she hadn’t seen for years and whom she’d like to invite for a glass of wine, also the representatives of the gallery, they’d promised to buy one or two of her things, but that too would soon be over and then there’d be just the two of us.
I asked if there was anything I could do, but there wasn’t, her sister had already gone to reserve two tables. I would have liked to tell her how pleased I was that the exhibition had been a success but I was somehow paralysed and she’d run off before I could pull myself together.
&nbs
p; Her husband was still not leaving, maybe he needed to demonstrate his satisfaction. I could hear his loud, good-natured, jolly laugh. He might stroll over at any moment, slap me on the back and tell me that in spite of my gaucherie I seemed quite amusing, he’d expected worse. Indeed, he felt some sympathy with me. On top of all my problems I’d landed myself with his wife! Perhaps we should finally settle this business.
I thought I was choking in that close and stuffy space.
Outside I was surprised by the bright lights. I didn’t know the small town; although we’d spent a lot of time here during the past few days we’d had no time for a walk. Now I chose a narrow street which ran steeply downhill. Somewhere in the neighbourhood there was obviously a fair: the wind carried snatches of roundabout music to me and I was meeting children with coloured balloons, hooters and large puffs of candy-floss.
I used to love fairs, the sideshows of conjurers, fire-eaters and tightrope walkers, but I couldn’t recall when I’d last been to one. Over the last few years I’d neglected all my interests except one, all my friends, all my near and dear ones, everybody except one. Most of all I’d neglected my work.
I wasn’t satisfied with the way I was spending my life, but I couldn’t blame anyone for it except myself. I’d come to the end of the little street and below me lay a wide open space. Above the merry-go-round shone a wreath of deceptive but alluring lights and the circus tent was decorated with red and blue pennants. Gigantic white swans made a pretence of noble flight.
For a moment I stopped at my slightly elevated vantage point and watched the crowd milling below me. I longed to mix with it, not to have to worry about anybody, not to think of anything, of my guilt or my lies, even of my love, not to step into anyone else’s life, not to belong to anyone, to move freely and unrecognised in the crowd, to catch snatches of conversation and human faces, to dream up incidents which I would shape according to my will, to have before me something other than perpetual escapes and guilty returns.
My wife maintains that I am unable to forget my wartime experiences. They, she says, are preventing me from getting close to another person: I know I would suffer when I lost that person too, but I cannot believe that I would not lose them. I remain alone, even though I am seemingly by her side. Clearly I would remain alone by anybody’s side.
I ought to be getting back, I wouldn’t like to spoil my lover’s day of success with my moodiness. But I went on to a shooting gallery and asked the dolled-up beauty there for an air rifle. I scored enough to win a little bear on an elastic string and a parrot made of colourful rags and feathers. As I accepted my fairground trophies it struck me that they were more appropriate to me than those fantastic sculptures which I’d just left behind.
One of the rubbish searchers had just caught a red flag with his hook. With a great effort he extricated it from underneath the mass of ashes and other filth, rolled it round his pole, and when he’d got it out eventually waved his wife over and together they unrolled the rag. When they’d opened it out in the wind we could see that it was really a red flag which was now flying above the mountain of garbage.
The Khmer Rouge did not fill the void in their souls with objects or with the money they so despised. They understood that the void in the soul cannot be filled even by all the objects in the world, and that was why they tried to fill that void by human sacrifices. But the emptiness of the soul cannot be filled by anything, not even if the whole of mankind were driven to the sacrificial block: the emptiness would continue, terrifying and insatiable.
Everything on earth is gradually transformed into rubbish, into refuse, which must then, in one way or another, be removed from the earth – except that nothing can be removed from it. Some time ago our jerkish newspapers reported that some Czech inventor had invented a machine for the destruction of old – that is, useless – banknotes, securities and secret documents. Abroad, the article claimed, banknotes were destroyed in crushing mills the height of a two-storey building. The compressed waste mass, however, was so dense that each kilogram of it had to be doused with half a litre of petrol before it would burn; in contrast, the Czech invention did not exceed the dimensions of a medium-sized machine tool. This splendid machine, quite possibly the invention of none other than our captain, produced a shredded mass which could then be fed by pipes into the boiler of a central heating system: thus not only was petrol saved but also a lot of precious hard coal.
Methods and machines for the efficient and economical removal of uncomfortable people from this world have of course been known for a long time.
I watched the items on the carts piling up. Although I couldn’t make out any details at that distance, I suspected that they were old boots and pots, bottles and dolls rather like the ones which had floated on the sea off the Irish coast, and certainly also sacks and old blankets. Where are the days when the poor from the hovels on the outskirts of our cities didn’t even have a sack to call their own, to cover their nakedness? They are behind us and they are before us.
The light breeze rose again and this time it carried to us not only the stench of the garbage but also snatches of hoarse conversation and of delighted childish shrieks. If Brueghel or Hieronymus Bosch were alive now they would surely have sat here and drawn this scene. They might have added a few little figures at various points among that plastic mass, or they might have heightened the mountain so that its peak touched the heavens, and at its foot they might have placed a happy treasure seeker, a woman, a never satiated mad Margareta. What would they have called the picture? ‘The Dance of Death’ or, on the contrary, ‘Earthly Paradise’? ‘Armageddon’ or just ‘Dulle Griet’?
It struck me that any second now a new orange vehicle might arrive and tip out a load of skulls and bones. At just that moment those at the top of the heap were dragging out an old feather mattress and as they were trying to free it from the stranglehold of the rest of the rubbish its cover burst, and because a somewhat stronger gust of wind had just sprung up the feathers began to rise, and along with light scraps of paper and plastic and fine particles of ash began to circle in the air. The dancers underneath almost disappeared in the snowstorm, and I felt a sudden chill. Anxiously I looked at the sky to make sure the megaton cloud was not already sailing over from somewhere, but the sky still seemed clear and clean, though a chill was falling from it that made me shiver.
The Apocalypse can take different forms. The least dramatic, at first sight, is the one in which man perishes under an avalanche of useless objects, emptied words, and excessive activity. Man becomes a volcano which imperceptibly sucks up the heat from below the ground until, in an instant, it trembles and buries itself.
The sweepers in their orange vests go on sweeping, sweeping silently and without interest, while their brothers the dustmen cart off what has been swept into piles and thrown away. They pile those useless objects into heaps which swell, spread and disintegrate, like yeast they rise skywards, like a cancerous tumour they invade their surroundings, human habitations, so that we find it difficult to distinguish between what are still objects of our life and what are objects of our death.
Of all the garbage that swamps us and threatens us by its breath of decay, the most dangerous are the masses of discarded ideas. They tumble about us, they slide down the slopes of our lives. The souls they touch begin to wither and soon no one sees them alive again.
But those without souls do not vanish from the earth either. Their processions move through the world and subconsciously try to reshape it in their own image. They fill the streets, the squares, the stadiums and the department stores. When they burst into cheers over a winning goal, a successful pop song or a revolution it seems as if that roar would go on forever, but it is followed at once by the deathly silence of emptiness and oblivion.
They flee from that silence and seek something that would redeem it, a sacrifice they might cast on the altar of whatever demon they happen to be venerating. Now and then they’ll fire a gun at random, or place a time bomb, or
inject some narcotic into their veins and make love, they’ll do anything to survive that dead period before the tremor of the volcano, before the lava fills the void. The void within them.
The images Kafka employs are often obscure, but they also seem to deliberately display a multitude of heterogeneous and disparate elements. We read his strictly logical narration, which often suggests a precise official memorandum, and suddenly we come across a detail or a statement which appears to have drifted in from another world, from another plot, and we are confused. In the story about the execution machine, for instance, why do some ladies’ gloves suddenly appear and, without obvious reason, pass from the condemned man to the executioner and back? Why does the judge in The Trial hold a debt book instead of the trial papers? Why does the official in The Castle receive the surveyor K. in bed? What is the meaning of his absurd paean in praise of bureaucratic work? The author leads us through a savanna where, in addition to the antelopes and lions we would expect, polar bears and kangaroos are also roaming about as a matter of course.
Surely a writer as logical, as precise and as honest as Kafka must have meant something with his paradoxes, must have intended some hidden communication, must have wanted to create his own myth, his own legend about the world, some great, revolutionary message which perhaps he only surmised and was therefore unable to express clearly; he only adumbrated it, and it is up to us to decipher it and give it precise shape.
I don’t know how many clever people fell into that error, for that mystery-cracking delusion, but they were numerous. I myself am convinced that no writer worthy of that name conceals anything deliberately, that he does not construe or invent any revolutionary messages. He doesn’t even concern himself with them. Most authors, like most people, have their theme: their torments, and these impose themselves on anything they do, think or write.