by Ivan Klíma
It struck him she had asked him once already, but he replied, ‘They’re fine. And Martin’s learned a new song.’ He couldn’t recall at this particular moment what the song was about and he never remembered tunes. When he glanced at her he noticed that she wasn’t listening anyway. ‘What’s the matter?’ But he knew there was nothing, that she had had a couple of exciting and seemingly exhausting days and now she was overcome with tiredness. The best thing to do was to leave her alone, help her to bed as soon as possible and not take too much notice of her.
‘They reminded me awfully of America, the time we were in that commune outside Taos. They’re different. They travel to famine-stricken countries and help in hospitals, while we . . .’
‘What about us?’
‘We do nothing. We stuff ourselves, go to the cottage, sit around chatting, and most of all: nothing.’ After a while, she added: ‘I’d like to live among people like that. Go back. Or go off to a kibbutz.’
‘You know it’s out of the question!’
‘Why?’
‘We’ll never get out of here. And besides: I don’t want to live in a commune.’
‘But I do.’
‘You’re tired.’
She closed her eyes. ‘I’d like to live with people who care about me. Nobody here cares about anyone.’
‘How about all our friends here?’
‘We only mix with your friends. And they only care about legal stuff or politics.’
‘You know that’s not true.’
‘And they’re old.’
‘You should have married someone younger!’
‘There you are, I’ve only just come home and you already want an argument. You never manage to be pleasant.’
He controlled himself and said nothing.
‘I invited them round this evening.’ On this announcement she brightened up slightly.
‘Who?’
‘Jim and Jean. Honza as well.’
‘Listen,’ he tried to object, ‘what do you want to go inviting people straight away this evening for? You’re tired and we’ve not seen each other for nearly a week. The children are looking forward to you. And so am I!’
‘But they’re only here today!’
And he really had been looking forward to her. He had been looking forward to her embrace. But she wasn’t thinking about that.
‘I thought we should invite some of our friends too.’
‘Won’t they be too old?’
‘You see! You’re always so cantankerous.’
5
It was two hours after midnight when the last guest left. The room was filled with smoke. Adam was quickly opening all the doors and windows. Her head ached slightly. She felt nostalgia creeping over her inexorably. She knew that this mood invariably came on whenever she got overtired or felt off-colour, but knowing its cause did nothing to lessen her misery. She carried the dirty plates out to the kitchen and made an effort not to cry. Such a mountain of washing-up. She ought to do it now or the food would dry on by morning. And she would have to start packing in the morning, because the children had to have a holiday. Adam would be chivvying her, he did nothing but rush her all the time. He himself drove onward like a tank, capable of everything, except treating her with a little tenderness. Nobody treated her tenderly. Or rather, she corrected herself, no one had till now.
She returned to the living room. The carpet covered in cigarette ash, the chairs all over the place, the remains of a glass of wine with a cigarette-end floating in it. She felt sick. If only he’d come and tell her he loved her or he’d missed her. She opened the door to the bedroom slightly. He was kneeling, making the bed. There were bags under his eyes and his shirt-tail was half out. She realised how fat he was, not very maybe, but compared with the other, his backside was so enormous, she shuddered with aversion. In a moment they would go to bed and he would want to make love to her. It was something he always took for granted, whenever he’d not seen her for a long time, like having a meal when he was hungry. He hadn’t the patience to woo her afresh each time. His love was monotonous and it hid not a trace of fantasy or poetry.
‘You haven’t even asked me what sort of time I had.’
‘When did I get a chance to?’
‘How did you like Honza?’ And immediately she was ashamed of her clumsiness.
‘I don’t know! He talked a lot. What about him?’
What about him? Nothing. He ought to be of no interest, though he was. Anyway she couldn’t talk to Adam about it. She turned back the bedding from a corner of the divan and sat down. The objects in the bedroom started to swim like a painting when the brush was too wet. ‘Yesterday we held a farewell party; we organised a fancy dress ball.’ The objects became dim. Her eyes started to close. ‘He came as a pirate! He’s still a little boy.’
‘Listen,’ he’d clearly not been listening to anything she had said, ‘you oughtn’t to sit there like that. You look tired to me. You should come to bed.’
She roused herself: ‘You haven’t asked what I went as.’
‘Well, sorry, but it does happen to be half past two in the morning.’
‘You wouldn’t ask me even if it was noon!’
‘So what did you go as?’
‘A snowflake,’ and she realised immediately how silly it sounded. At any rate to someone who’d never wanted to go to a fancy dress ball in his life.
‘And were you a success?’
‘I don’t know! Success,’ she repeated, ‘why do you measure everything by success?’ She stood up and went off to the kitchen. The water running into the washing-up bowl at two thirty in the morning didn’t murmur but roar; her ears rang.
He came after her. ‘Leave the washing-up, for goodness sake!’
‘I can’t stand it staying here overnight.’
‘I’ll wash it,’ he offered. ‘I’ll see to it in the morning.’
‘Would you really?’
The roar of the water ceased. She put her head on his shoulder. ‘Do you love me?’
When she finally got to bed, she hesitated a moment, but then snuggled up to him as she had done almost every evening for ten years already. At that moment she was overcome with a blissful sense of security and belonging.
‘It’s gone three, already,’ he said reproachfully as if the passage of time were her responsibility. He tried to cuddle her.
‘Wait a sec,’ she told him, ‘couldn’t you open the window? It’s very smoky from next door.’
‘The window is open.’
‘Wider, then!’
He got up and opened both windows fully.
‘And he had an awful life, you know,’ she said suddenly.
‘Who?’
‘The one I was telling you about.’
‘Who were you telling me about?’
‘Honza. They sent his dad to prison. You know, when they were gaoling everybody.’
‘My father went to prison too.’
‘But you were older. He was only six when it happened.’
‘Oh, yes?’ he said without interest. ‘Shouldn’t we get some sleep?’
‘Why do you always talk about sleep when I’m trying to tell you something?’
‘It’s just that it’s about time. I have a hearing in the morning and you ought to be packing. The children are looking forward to getting away.’
‘We didn’t sleep either. We hardly slept at all the past two nights.’
‘Precisely!’
‘I can’t help it. I’m always so het up. I can never get to sleep.’
‘So tell me how it was with his father.’
‘Honza was terribly attached to him,’ she said gratefully. ‘The whole time his father was in prison he thought about him and dreamed about him as the best person in the world. But when his father came back after eight years, things looked quite different. But don’t you want to get to sleep?’
‘Not any more. Talk away.’
‘They’d done something to his father; broken him som
ehow. He came back full of bitterness, hating his wife and Honza. He used to beat him and humiliate him.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He told me about it.’
‘Maybe he wasn’t being impartial. People are incapable of telling the truth about themselves.’
‘But that’s how it felt to him. He was only thirteen by then. It completely broke him up. He skipped on his school work and started getting into mischief, fighting and breaking windows. It was all to try and get his father’s attention. But instead, his father stopped talking to him. Just imagine, more than two years without a single word. He pretended not to see him. They’d be sitting together in the same room but his father would behave as if he was alone. When he was dying and Honza came to visit him in hospital, he didn’t speak to him. Honza went home and tried to commit suicide. He slashed his wrists: I’ve seen the scars.’
‘You shouldn’t think about it. You’re too worked up.’
‘And do you love me?’
‘You know I love you.’
‘I love you too.’ She might have cuddled him if she had had enough strength left.
The next day she didn’t wake until eleven thirty. She found a note on a chair at her bedside: ‘The children are at your mother’s. Get some sleep. The washing-up’s done! You can give me a call. Have a good sleep.’
Again no expressions of affection. It was his way of punishing her for having been so tired yesterday and because he’d done the washing-up.
It annoyed him that she was usually tired, even though she didn’t have a full-time job. As if six hours in the library, as if travelling to and fro in a packed tramcar weren’t enough in themselves to drain her of energy. As if in addition she didn’t look after him and the children. In the old days women didn’t have to go to work and they’d have a maid to help them as well. So of course they could be sprightly whenever their husbands remembered them.
She got up and went to the kitchen. Her head ached and her limbs felt weak. This was the start of her holiday. He could have written: I love you. Or added some kisses. But he had done the washing-up, even though he’d left the sink dirty and she would need to wash half the plates again. And he’d taken the children to her mother’s, got up early and done things surprisingly quietly, not even woken her up.
She had a drink of milk (he’d done some shopping too). Her eyes smarted so much she had to keep blinking. She climbed back into bed and draped a scarf over her face. Next day she was leaving, she realised; she would be alone with the children in the hills. What if he came after her? But she was known there, her brother would be there with his family. It didn’t bear thinking about.
What did bear thinking about then? What was there to look forward to? There weren’t even any nice books being published, and it was her job to withdraw the nice ones that had come out before from circulation. It was such a humiliating task. Maruš had been thrown out so she was ashamed to go and see her because she herself had not yet been sacked. She had had only two friends in the library and they had both fled abroad. She didn’t even know where they were now. What was left for her?
When she was six years old, during the last year of the war, everyone expected Prague would be bombed and her parents had sent her to an auntie in the uplands on the Moravian border. The auntie wasn’t a real relation – she had been in service with her parents before she got married. She had a cottage with tiny windows, and the kitchen, which smelt of bread and buttermilk and boiled potatoes, was hung with coloured prints: the Virgin Mary and Child, St Anne with the Mother of God, a Guardian Angel. Her auntie had taught her a prayer – the only one she had ever said in her life. She could remember the way it ended: people may love me or hate me, but I shall not neglect Thee, and shall pray for my enemies, and commend their spirits and mine own into Thy hands. On Sunday she would go with her aunt to church where the portly priest in his robe would say mass. When they met him on the way out after mass he would hold out his pudgy hand to her smelling of incense and she would have to touch it with her lips. In those days she made up her own picture of God. He sat in the middle of a white cloud on a rocking chair (like the one her father sat in when he came home from work), clutching a crosier tight in His hand, and smiling with toothless gums. (She couldn’t explain why, but the idea of God having teeth seemed undignified to her.) He was tall, even massive (reminding her of His Majesty the King of Brobdingnag from the illustration in the children’s edition of Gulliver’s Travels), and invisible. Even so, she had no trouble seeing Him clearly: each evening, the moment she whispered ‘their spirits and mine own into Thy hands’, He would sail out all-powerful on His shining white cloud, motionless and smiling toothlessly, high above her head, and she would be overwhelmed with a sense of security such as she had possibly never known since.
She went on praying for some time after the war, but He never appeared again: maybe it was because the clear stars no longer shone outside the window, or because the perfect stillness of the country no longer reigned, or maybe she didn’t need Him so much any more once she was back at home.
Now she was totally stuck in Adam’s world, which had no room for God or prayer, the forgiveness of enemies, reconciliation or love, only for lovemaking, work, success and constant rush.
She opened her eyes again. She could hear a jumble of voices in her head and a pinwheel of faces spun before her eyes. She had always wanted to be surrounded by lots of people, as she had been when she was still living at home. She still yearned for a wider family: life in a kibbutz or a commune. There, she believed, people were closer to each other, nobody lorded it over anyone else, or bullied others for the sake of success.
‘Were you a success?’ Why had he asked her that, what had he meant? And yet she had been a success precisely in the sense he had asked her, and in fact it had made her happy. But now as she lay in her bed a train-journey away from the voices and faces of all those strangers and from his voice, she was gripped with anxiety at the thought of the future. She couldn’t imagine how she could continue what she had begun, but on the other hand, she couldn’t just stop it all at once, when he loved her and she loved him.
It was imperative that she should not hurt him in any way after all he had suffered in his life already. She didn’t want to hurt Adam either. He too had known suffering, which was why he was so unbalanced, obsessed with a burning need to be doing something. If only she knew of someone who might advise her, but she couldn’t see how she could confide in anyone, how she could overcome the shyness that distanced her from other people. Only to Tonka was she able to open herself. Her onetime fellow-student had abounded in the qualities she herself lacked. Although Tonka’s life had been marked by tragedy (her mother had divorced her Jewish husband during the war so as not to lose her doctor’s practice, and her father, sacrificed so shamefully, was taken off to Auschwitz where he died), she had somehow always seemed well-balanced, content, open to pleasures and joy. Tonka was only fourteen when she first necked with a boy in the actual entranceway of her own house. She herself would never have dared do anything like that. When she was striving desperately to reconcile her longing for independence with her desire to be a kind and obedient daughter, her friend had already parted company with her mother and stepfather.
Tonka believed in an odd mixture of Judaism, Christianity and spiritualism. The dead dwelled and lingered in invisible form on this earth and they were able to reveal their presence to particularly sensitive souls. She was able to conjure up her father not only in dreams but also in moments of concentration and solitude, and she could converse with him and receive messages, advice and encouragement from him.
Alena could never share Tonka’s belief, though. It struck her as running counter to all her experience – no one had ever manifested himself to her and she had never undergone anything that might be described as a mystical experience – but even so, Tonka had squeezed a promise out of her: whichever of them died first would try to manifest herself to her friend and report on the way
the dead lived. She gave the promise, not because she believed there was the slightest possibility of its coming true, but because she loved her friend. Then, even though she was convinced the vow could not be fulfilled, it terrified her and she was tormented by a fear that she would be punished by the very power whose existence and influence on this earth she doubted.
In the final year of secondary school, Tonka was caught up by a passing lorry as she stood waiting for a tram. The lorry dragged her many yards along the street before crushing her to death.
That death confirmed all Alena’s foreboding. She became frightened of walking along the street, convinced that punishment was going to seek her out as well. She was frightened of going to sleep, because scarcely were her eyes closed than she saw two dazzling points rushing at her, and no escape. She waited with horror and hope for a message from beyond the grave, convinced no longer of its impossibility. But apart from appearing to her in a number of confused dreams, her friend disappeared irrevocably and irreparably from this world.
Just before she left school she became friendly with a girl who did not resemble her dead friend in the least. Maruška was tall and plain, and invariably in a ratty mood. She had grown up poor and she seemed embittered against the whole world. They were united by desolation. Or more likely she felt a need even then to help those whom fate had hurt.
They prepared together for their final exams, and immediately afterwards they made a trip to the Beskid Mountains together. They spent the week hiking in the mountains, sleeping in strangers’ houses, eating only bread, cheese and dry salami and drinking the ewe’s milk whey known as žinčica. They chatted a great deal about books, their teachers and their fellow-students, and tried to imagine the kind of man they could bear to live with. In fact they came to the conclusion that no one of the sort existed and they’d be better off on their own. They also recited Latin verse to each other, which for reasons unknown made them laugh. There was no doubt her friendship had helped the other girl find some self-confidence, because she married as soon as she left school.
She had never managed to find a real girlfriend since. Even before she finished university she met Adam and adopted his friends along with him, as well as their wives. The latter were older than she was, with the exception of Oldřich Ruml’s wife Alexandra, but she struck Alena as superficial and only interested in where or how she could obtain Italian boots, French perfumes or English fabrics. She had most in common with Matěj’s Anka, a wise, level-headed person whose calm and energy and even looks recalled her own mother. But wasn’t that precisely a very good reason not to explain to her what she’d just been through? Anka would never understand her. She had her own attitude to the family. In fact their attitudes to their families were not very different; the difference lay in their husbands. Matěj was calm, wise, sensitive and balanced, and was capable of giving others support and guidance. Lacking self-assurance, Adam was unable to guide himself, let alone anyone else. He would slave away constantly without knowing why or what for, and criticise her for not doing enough, being slow and wasting time sleeping. Frequently, however, she only feigned sleep: both to him and to herself, because she was reluctant to wake up, rouse herself to a world in which she wasn’t at ease and where she felt deprived of support and tenderness. If he were different she would have had at least five children, a big family; perhaps she would have adopted some child from a broken home, or a little gypsy. If Adam had been different she wouldn’t have had to go looking elsewhere for love, love and a mouth that didn’t need searching for, its touch, the warmth of a stranger’s lips and a stranger’s arms, that . . .