by Ivan Klíma
My bus was leaving in the evening. Peter was sorry I had to go so soon, he was off duty until midnight. I asked him what he would do with the rest of the evening. He said he’d go to the cinema or else return to the barracks and listen to the radio or read. I gave him a little spending money, and because it was getting chilly I got on the bus.
My son stood motionless outside, waiting. I noticed that the frosty wind was bending over even the trunks of sturdy poplars, but my son was still waiting. He looked up at the little window behind which he saw my face, he stood there in a strange uniform, cast into a strange world, and waited faithfully for us to move off. Then, because the bus circled the square, he ran over to the other side so that I caught sight of him once more, standing on the stone surround of the fountain, close to the roadway, waving.
Then I was alone. The bus hurtled through the dark of the forest and I closed my eyes, but even in that double darkness I could see the figure of my son carved out of the stony greyness of strange houses, I could see him standing there, separated from me by impervious material, but at least waving to me. At that moment I was gripped with unease at my own doings, at my double life, from, which loyalty had disappeared, to be replaced by pretence and betrayal.
My son was an adult now, and if I left home it shouldn’t have any fatal effect on him. A child remains the child of his parents, even though their paths may divide. But is it conceivable that my departure for good would not strike a blow to his notions of loyalty, his faith in the fellow-feeling of his nearest and dearest, his concept of home?
‘You may wriggle now,’ my daughter said. She was looking quizzically at her production.
‘Did it come out as a deathmask?’ I wanted to know.
‘Somehow it isn’t you at all,’ she complained, and held the sheet out to me.
‘I don’t know. How can I know what I look like when my eyes are closed?’
But for a deathmask there was still too much life in my features.
Dad had never been ill in his life. A year ago he started losing weight and stopped enjoying his food. Then they found a malignant tumour in his colon and decided to operate at once. I took him to hospital the day before his operation. I sought out the surgeon and tried to explain to him that although Dad was nearly eighty his mental faculties hadn’t been affected by age, and his students still came to him for help when they were stumped by some complicated problem.
The surgeon was short and plump. In his white coat and cap he looked more like a chef than a medical man. He listened to me politely, as he must have listened to many similar persuasive speeches, he accepted my envelope with money, and assured me that he’d do anything in his power, I might get in touch with him the following day, about lunchtime.
Lída thought that I should stay at the hospital during the operation. Dad would feel that I was close by, and that would be reassuring for him and would perhaps make waiting easier for me.
I drove over to the hospital first thing in the morning. I was in time to see Dad on the trolley, as he was waiting in the corridor outside the theatre. From the distance it seemed to me that he was smiling and very slightly raising a hand to acknowledge he’d seen me.
Then I sat down a little way beyond reception, in a dim corridor where orderlies were ceaselessly wheeling trolleys to and fro, and new patients were walking past. There was so much bustle there that I couldn’t concentrate on my father.
An hour later I was informed that the operation had not yet begun.
I phoned my wife at work to tell her I was staying on at the hospital, and she tried to reassure me, I shouldn’t worry, the operation would be successful, Dad had a strong constitution – he’d even survived the death march just before the end of the war.
I also rang my lover, just to hear her voice, to tell her where I was, and that most probably there wouldn’t be time for me to come and see her.
Only a short while later I caught sight of her, passing through reception with her rapid step. She kissed me. She brought me a gingerbread angel she’d baked for Saint Nicholas’s, and a twig with yellow witch-hazel flowers. She’d managed to just break it off from somewhere.
The waiting room had emptied after lunchtime and we sat down on a bench. She took my hand in hers and said: He’ll be all right, I can feel it. His time hasn’t come yet.
Then we were silent. I seemed to see a white corridor before me, I couldn’t see all the way down to its end, and a trolley was moving along it. Dad was lying on it, white and unconscious and moving away from me. What does a man feel, what does a man think, when he is firmly convinced that there is no other life than the one that’s just then threatening to slip away from him? What hopes does he have at his age? His own fear got a fierce hold on me. I got up and went to ask if the operation was finished but I was told that it wasn’t, I had to be patient.
I returned to the waiting room. I could see Daria in the distance, but she was taking no notice of me, she sat there as if turned into stone, as if removed from her own body. When I walked over to her she looked up at last and it seemed to me that I could see pain in her features. It’s all right now, she said. It looked bad, but it’s all right now, I can feel it.
She took my hand and led me along the corridor to the exit. Outside large autumnal snowflakes were falling; they lay on the ground only briefly and then melted. We went into the little park behind the hospital, and she was talking to me softly. She said that man spent only an insignificant portion of time in this life, in the shape we know him. What is important is that he should spend it well, and fully develop his potential, because that would decide which way he went on. I was unable to concentrate properly on what she was saying, instead I just took in the timbre of her voice, her comforting, loving presence.
I had told her many times that I loved her. Now I didn’t tell her anything, but that moment entered into me forever: the bedraggled park with a few rain-wet trees, her proximity, her voice, and her hand which was pressing mine. And if we are ever to be so far apart that we can no longer reach out to each other, that our voices are lost in the distance, she is now so firmly embedded in me that if ever she groans in pain or fear I shall hear her, no matter where I am. And if I’m alive I shall go to her to repay her for at least this pressure of her hand.
We returned to the hospital. The surgeon received me. The tumour had been a big one, and neglected, but it was out now. My father was now sleeping.
I spotted the youngster the moment we entered the hall. He was standing below the stage and talking to one of the musicians. He was wearing jeans and a pullover with a Norwegian pattern. Perhaps it was the artificial light but he seemed to me even paler, more drawn, more sick than usual. I introduced him to Lída. She said she was glad to meet him, I’d told her a lot about him. She was also looking forward to the concert, it was good of him to have thought of us.
The youngster unexpectedly blushed and hurriedly rattled off the names of the composers and the compositions we were about to hear, he also told us the names of the clarinettist and the drummer, and we went off to look for our seats.
‘Isn’t he very sick?’ my wife asked as we sat down.
I told her what I knew about his illness and also that there was possibly a drug available abroad that might help him, but that it was too expensive for it to be prescribed.
‘And couldn’t you get it for him?’ she asked in surprise.
The music began. I am a bad listener, I can’t concentrate even on the spoken word let alone on music. Lída, on the other hand, responds to tones with her whole being. I could see the music entering into her and arousing in her a pleasurable astonishment, taking her out of the not-too hospitable tavern’s dance hall.
I too could hear at least the echoes of primordial rhythms and glimpse the reflections of tribal fires around which half-naked dancers of both sexes were whirling.
When the first missionaries in Africa saw those painted and masked savages prancing round their fire they thought they had just glimpsed so
mething akin to a ritual from hell. In reality, of course, what they saw were the last remnants of paradise. Those dancers may have been troubled by evil spirits, hunger or drought, but they were not weighed down by any sinful past or a retributory judgement in the future; the vision of the Apocalypse did not rise before them. They were still in the childhood of mankind.
I have never set foot on the black continent, but when I had some time to spare in St Louis, where I’d been invited for the opening night of a play of mine, I got on a tourist excursion steamer down the Mississippi, and there was a black band playing on board. A colourful company was celebrating something, I don’t know if it was a wedding, the birth of an heir or somebody’s saint’s day, or the fact that a manned spacecraft was then on the way to the moon which their not-too-distant ancestors may have revered as a deity, but I could feel that close to them, and under the influence of their music, I was slipping into another, more carefree and less knowing age.
This mood persisted even the following day when, at the home of the producer who, like me, was a native of Prague, we watched the television screen in the evening and I saw those strange bulky figures bouncing with light steps about the wasteland of the moon, while from the street came delighted cheers; I thought then that man, as he had always longed and as my father had promised me, had really got closer to heaven. It seemed to me that mankind was entering upon a new era full of promise.
During the interval the youngster came over to us, and because my wife knows more about music than I do I let them talk to each other while I went to the bar to get ourselves something to drink.
When I got back towards the end of the intermission the youngster was about to leave for his place just below the stage. My wife took a glass of juice, took a sip, and before the musicians started up again told me what she’d learned from the youngster about his life; needless to say, she’d learned more in those few minutes than I had in several weeks. His father, it appeared, had left his mother before he was even born, and because the mother was a little odd he grew up in children’s homes. His mother was now dead and his only relative was a stepbrother with whom he didn’t get on. She’d guess that the youngster was a sensitive boy but, because of his circumstances, had never completely grown up, almost certainly also because in his life he hadn’t yet met a man with whom he wished to identify. I ought to bear this in mind, maybe he’d attach himself to me.
I couldn’t think why the youngster should want to attach himself to me of all people, but I promised to watch out.
The master of ceremonies announced the next composition, a Gershwin medley. The musicians started up. At one point the clarinettist on the stage made use of a brief pause, held his instruments out: towards the audience, motioned to someone, and a moment later we saw the youngster jumping up onto the stage and taking the clarinet.
‘Surely that’s him,’ Lída said in surprise. She doesn’t see too well at a distance and moreover she has a poor memory for faces.
From his borrowed instrument the youngster conjured up the glissando which opens the first theme of the ‘Rhapsody in Blue’. I could see his pasty face turn red, either with excitement or with the effort.
Winter that year was severe. The sky remained blue and cold, the frozen snow crunched underfoot and the air stank so revoltingly that one regretted not being a fish. I went to see Dad nearly every day, he was picking up rapidly. He was once more working on his calculator. Don’t you go thinking that I’m written off, he said to me, and immersed himself in his world of numbers, where he felt most at home. He no longer designed new motors, he’d come to the conclusion that there were too many in the world already, but he was searching for some new solution, for better machines for that better world which he was perhaps seeing with his mind’s eye. Sometimes he’d put on his fur-lined coat and go out with me to walk down the chilly ugly street. The fate of the world had not ceased to interest him. He confided his fears and disappointments to me. It grieved him that socialism had not brought freedom to the people and that technology had not lightened their drudgery but was instead threatening them with annihilation. We stopped at the dairy. Here Dad thawed out because the pretty girl behind the counter smiled at him pleasantly, asked him how he was getting on and assured him that he was looking wonderful. Dad at any rate still believes that women are good creatures. Sympathetic and worthy of attention and love. He’d have gone on chatting to the dairy girl, but I was in a hurry to get to my own good creature.
We’d had to abandon the attic studio with its view of the palace opposite, and we now met in her basement workshop, where – long, long ago – I’d first set eyes on her. From outside the window came the continuous footsteps of strangers passing by and from the corners came a smell of mildew and mould. On the stone floor stood a storage heater. It was only seven years younger than me and just as stubborn, sometimes it worked and at others, for unfathomable reasons, it didn’t switch itself on at night at all. Fortunately the thick medieval walls stopped the place from freezing up completely.
She is waiting for me. She hasn’t even taken off her coat but her lips are hot. Again she presses herself to the tepid metal shell of the heater and I hurry to make some tea while she tells me her news. Listening to her I feel that the incidents I look for in vain are all homing in on her, all her encounters seem to have a special and higher meaning, something essential to tell her, to open, at least in part, a view into the infinite spaces of other people’s inner lives.
As she speaks I watch a little cloud of her living breath rising from her mouth. The room is in semi-darkness which obliterates even those little lines which I would probably not have seen anyway with my long-sighted eyes. She seems to me tenderly and soulfully beautiful. I know that I still love her and I suspect that she must love me too if she’s staying with me in this inhospitable and cold basement.
She notices my glance and presses herself against me – together we slip into the icy bed. But her body is warm, we cling to each other, ecstasy blots out the outside world, at this moment it doesn’t matter where we are, we are in the seclusion of our love and we know that there isn’t a palace in the world whose solitude we would exchange for this place of joint occupation.
Her slight body ceaseless rears against mine, she trembles with delight, her eyes grow misty. Devoutly she begs me not to leave her, again and again she wants me, she knows no respite in love-making any more than in her work, any more than in anything she undertakes, she sweeps me along like a vortex, she rouses in me a strength I never suspected I had. My head spins, I am in ecstasy, I am on earth solely for this moment, for this action.
Yet even so the moment must come when we are exhausted, when the chill that’s seeping from the floor and the walls gets between us, enters her eyes. I know that she’s asking herself how long I intend to make love to her without giving her any hope, without finding a solution which would bring her out of her icy loneliness. But she only asks what I’m going to do tonight.
I say that I will work, even though I know that my answer will seem unsatisfactory to her if I don’t decide to stay with her. I want to know what she’ll be doing.
Why should I care? I wasn’t going to stay with her anyway, after all, there was my wife waiting for me at home, I have to be with her, act the part of the faithful loving husband, create an atmosphere of home. Yes, of course, I also had to work, make money so I could keep the lady, my wife, in appropriate style. Also I mustn’t forget to buy something for dinner so she needn’t put herself out, and bring her a little present so she should know what a fine model husband she has. All she wants to know now is why she should plunge with me into this sacchariney sticky filthy mess of ours? She curses the moment when I crossed her path. Why didn’t I say something, why didn’t I at least speak up in my defence?
I reached out for my cold shirt and she screamed that I should push off, that I should get back as fast as possible to that sacred cow of mine who has ruined her life. She’ll still try to save herself, to dig herself ou
t of the shit I have dragged her into.
Outside, darkness had fallen, and its icy maw swallowed us up instantly. The snow had turned grey and seemed to collapse under our feet. We got to the metro station and she asked: When shall I see you?
As always, Hope was looking down on us from her stone plinth with her invariably gentle, even warm, smile.
Tomorrow I have to take Dad to the doctor. How about the day after?
She took hold of both my hands: I really won’t see you all day tomorrow?
The youngster finished his part and handed the clarinet back to its owner. Somebody clapped, my wife clapped too, the youngster bowed awkwardly; when he jumped down from the stage his face was back to its usual pallor.
The concert was over. The people around us were pushing towards the exit. It had got cold outside, and a brilliant full moon stood in the cloudless sky.
To us, who’d stayed behind on earth, the astronaut Aldrin said then:
I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her way!
The producer in St Louis casually mentioned to me that eighteen years earlier, after he’d escaped, he’d been sentenced to death in his native country for some fictitious political crimes. Now they wanted to rehabilitate him. When on that memorable day we went to bed at three in the morning he said: A pity, back home they couldn’t even watch this properly, by now they’re at work. And he showed me his watch. To my amazement it was still showing Central European Time.