by Ivan Klíma
In addition, a message from his colleague Alice: Adam, a woman called just after you left. She didn’t say who she was and left no message.
Honza had departed mid-day Saturday. Alena had made him two large sandwiches for the journey (when had she last made him a packed lunch?) and then they all drove with him to the bus stop.
There had been something obsessive about the way the young fellow had looked at his wife after he boarded the bus. Had it not seemed ludicrous to Adam (the fellow being ten years younger than her) he would have said he was in love with her. But he had no wish to be prejudiced against Honza; he didn’t want to think about him at all. He just couldn’t stand people who turned up in places he wanted to keep for himself – and where he had hoped to find a bit of peace.
That was one thing he didn’t need at a time when he was stuck in court from morning to night: someone visiting the cottage, carving his children boats and taking overdoses in front of them like a hysterical wife who’d just been jilted by a husband or lover.
His bad mood started to come back.
His brother Hanuš apologised for having been too talkative on the phone (no doubt he was about to atone for it by repeating the error in the letter), saying he had merely chanced to be in that kind of mood. Now and then he suffered an attack of homesickness and couldn’t even say what for exactly. For instance, he would be walking along a street named after some lord or admiral he had never heard of and he would suddenly long for the red signs at the street corners. Incredible sentimentality. You were talking about freedom, his brother continued, and you’re bound to have some fantastic, classic definition. I, of course, never forget the morning when they rang our doorbell (how they came during the war, I fortunately don’t remember) and took our father away, and I know that something of the kind is most unlikely to happen to me here, and I’m grateful for the fact. But I can’t go into the woods, they’re fenced in, and a week ago a landowner was going to shoot me for straying on to his river bank. People here can think freely about whatever they like, but their brains are assailed by the advertising slogans that are drummed into our heads from dawn till dusk: Hennessy was in vogue when Wellington was still in bootees. Generation gap? Jim Beam never heard of it. Now birth control is as easy as the tampon. There is no way of shaking them out of your mind, except by escaping to the Sahara or a desert island. But who’s going to run away? What, in fact, is essential to a feeling of freedom? People will always lack something and have to make do with what they’ve got. Who knows the right scale of values? It struck me not long ago that freedom is in fact an infinite set. If I try and compare your freedom with my freedom, for example, I am comparing two infinite sets. Or if I try and compare the limits of my freedom here with the limits of my freedom back home: if I call the original factor of my limits here LF, then the limits of my freedom back home start at about LF + 20, or some such figure. Do you see what I mean?
He didn’t particularly see. He hoped that it would be no less mystifying to any possible censor and didn’t feel that the letter’s importance justified his seeking out an expert on set theory to explain it to him.
I am therefore comparing an infinite set with its sub-set, his brother continued, and they are, as everyone knows, equivalent. At first sight it struck me as a beautifully absurd paradox. But that’s what the comparison of any infinite set with its sub-set looks like at first sight. It made me wonder whether I was really in the thrall of some commonly shared prejudices. Only the joke is, I suppose, that freedom cannot be expressed in mathematical terms.
The phone rang. It was Alexandra. ‘I’m not disturbing you, Adam?’
‘No, it turns out that my court hearing has been cancelled.’
‘Why can’t I be that lucky? Why do they never dismiss one of our cartoons for lack of evidence, and set us all free? But I’d like your advice on something.’
‘So long as I’m up to it.’
‘I’m sure you are. It concerns a flat.’
‘I’m not really an expert on flats. Oldřich is bound to know more than me.’
‘If it was something I fancied asking Ruml about, I wouldn’t be asking you, would I?’
‘Fine. Do you want to come here, or would you rather I came to see you?’
‘It’s not as urgent as all that.’ She hesitated a moment. ‘Maybe I’ll drop by after work. I’ll call you from the front desk. You do have a front desk there, don’t you?’
3
She walked up the stairs ahead of him. In her bright clothes, which covered her as little as possible, she seemed to him like a migrant from a southern clime. Right at the top of the building, where he expected there to be nothing but a loft, they stopped and she searched for the right key. The advice she was looking for concerned this flat. It belonged to her mother, but the lady had already lived outside Prague for several years and was apparently afraid it would be taken from her. He could have given her the answers to her questions in five sentences, and he certainly had no need to see the flat in order to advise her.
The lobby was spick and span and the smell of a familiar perfume hung in the air. ‘There is only this room,’ she indicated, ‘and the kitchen next to it, if you fancy having a look.’ She opened the glass door. The motor of the refrigerator came to life, noisily. ‘It’s fairly tolerable at the moment; it doesn’t get hot in here. But it’s not so good in winter. The sun doesn’t reach it from one end of the year to the other.’ She showed him round the flat casually as if he was one of many people interested in a flat-exchange, while he was unable to think of anything but the fact that he now found himself – at her behest – alone with her in an enclosed space, which, he assumed, no one ever entered but those she brought here.
‘Did you live here once?’
‘After Dad died.’ She opened the refrigerator. ‘Shall we have a drink?’ She reached inside blindly and brought out a bottle. Then she took some glasses from the battered sideboard.
The walls of the attic room slanted inwards. The furniture seemed shabby to him and the carpet threadbare. A vase of wilting carnations stood on the window ledge. A number of pictures hung on the walls, but he was unable to register their details. He walked over to a low window and tried unsuccessfully to see something from it. From far below he could hear the sound of sheet metal being beaten and the faint whine of some machine or other. He oughtn’t really to be sitting here, and certainly not drinking wine. He shouldn’t stay longer. At last he noticed the slender spire of the Emaus church towering behind the houses opposite.
‘Open the window, would you, so we can breathe. And take off that jacket, for heaven’s sake.’ She poured the wine into the glasses. ‘Or are you in a hurry?’
He wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry. He leaned out of the window. In the backyard two fellows were bashing a sheet of tin while coloured rags blew about above their heads.
‘You can sit on the chair or the armchair, or stretch out on the settee.’ She slipped off her shoes and sat down on a corner of the settee with her legs crossed beneath her. ‘It’s a nice place, isn’t it? It’d be a pity to lose it.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘When I was a little girl we lived in the country – near Cáslav. Dad was the local policeman. When the comrades took everything over in February ’48, he shot himself. But he made a bad job of it and just shot a hole in his lungs, and then went through the most terrible suffering for the next three years till he died. Then we moved here. Different fellows would move in from time to time, but Mum would always kick them out again in the end. One of them had studied to be a priest and he always used to tell me the kinkiest stories about the saints: fantastic horror stories. He also carved me a great big nativity with really weird figures. All the animals had human heads. They’re still in a box up in the loft. Another one of them was a railwayman, he used to spend his evenings at home making locomotives out of wooden skewers and coloured paper. I slept in the kitchen and I was desperate for somewhere to put my paints and paper and a bit of space for myself, but there were his model
s everywhere. But they were pretty good, and I even helped him paint some of them. He used to bring me loads of paper and gave me a box of Pelican oil pastels. I can’t think how he came by them; I expect he pinched them. In the end they arrested him along with a gang of fellows who were stealing from railway wagons. We chucked all his models into a box, but I packed them in wood shavings first so they wouldn’t get squashed, otherwise he’d be sad when he came for them. He didn’t come for them anyway; he kicked the bucket inside. It wasn’t you who sent him down by any chance, was it?’
‘What was his name?’
‘Well now you ask me, I can’t remember. We used to call him Joey. After he landed up inside, Mum didn’t have any other lodgers. But then she started going out with some gent. I never set eyes on him as he never came here. He must have been well heeled, because he used to buy Mum lovely clothes. He was probably married and could only manage to see her once a week and then she would come home after midnight. She was so regular I could even invite my David here every Wednesday evening. He was two years above me in school and used to make fantastic sculptures, with long bodies like he had himself. He also used to make some real weird things from old sheets of tin. He would paint them with car enamel and other sorts of paint and then fire them. They had a kiln at home because his dad was a blacksmith. Once he got dreadfully burnt and spent almost a month in hospital. He said that if ever he decided to end his life, he’d jump in a furnace. But he didn’t burn himself to death, that was left for someone else.’
He tried to concentrate on what she was saying but it was impossible: her presence distracted him. Why had she invited him here? Why was she confiding in him? ‘How old were you at the time?’
She reflected for a moment. ‘I must have been at least fifteen. And one of my teachers was in love with me too. He was always terrified in case someone saw us. When he first came here, he was shaking all over because he’d bumped into some woman on the way in. He always had to get drunk first. Then he used to tell me all about how he fought in a foreign army, how his wife took all his money, and also about his beautiful daughter who was the only reason why he couldn’t leave his family, otherwise he would have married me. I never understood why he said it because I naturally had no desire to marry him. He assured me I had talent and would go far with it. I just enjoyed painting: daubing on paint. In those days I hadn’t the faintest idea colours had numbers, or that one day I’d be issued with an industrial-sized bottle of pink to do five hundred dogs’ muzzles. I thought it was so fantastic that in a world where everything was precisely regulated and planned, I could paint what I wanted. Trees growing roots upwards, for instance. Or a girl walking naked along the street with everyone enjoying it and no one going after her, because in my world there’s no such thing as police.’
‘You’d like to walk along the street naked?’
‘Why not, if I felt like it? I remember once we got terribly drunk and climbed out on the roof and stripped off. We were still at school. I bet you wouldn’t like that, would you?’
‘I don’t know, but I’ve never run about a roof naked in my life.’
‘That’s a pity; you might have turned out differently.’
‘Do you think it would have improved me?’
‘You’d have started to relax a bit and not think so much about your paragraphs all the time.’
‘I don’t think about them at all, except when I really have to.’
‘Who are you kidding? You’re always thinking about what you ought to be doing, or not doing. Right now you’re thinking about whether it’s right for you to be sitting here listening to this crap I’m spouting. Have a drink, at least!’ She pushed the glass towards him. ‘I like people who jump off a bridge, say, just because they feel like it. And I can’t stand people who have to weigh it all up beforehand and then live accordingly. Like Ruml, for instance.’
‘Your criteria are a bit one-sided.’
‘You’re bound to think that way. Or you wouldn’t be in that job you’re in.’
‘There’s nothing particularly bad about what I do, is there?’
‘You don’t think so? You can’t see anything dreadful about helping them sustain their disgusting system? Doesn’t it turn your stomach?’
An unexpected note of anger suddenly entered her voice, or of personal interest, more likely. He didn’t know she had some experience of the courts. But what did he know about her?
‘Ruml told me they put you in prison when you were small, and it was something I liked about you, the fact you’d been through something – unlike him, who used to get taken to school by car. But I just couldn’t fathom out how you could then go and send some other poor devil to a lousy, dirty hole somewhere.’
‘That was different, though, wasn’t it?’
‘What? Just because they weren’t children? Or because you didn’t get sent down with them this time?’
‘Why are you getting so hot under the collar? All over the world they have laws, and someone has to try people under them.’
‘All over the world they have laws that say it’s a crime to want to live like people and not slaves? That’s news to me. And why should it be you who does it?’
‘And what should I do, according to you?’
‘Something that would allow you to be free.’
‘Not everyone can be an artist. We’d all die of hunger.’
‘We’ll die anyway.’
‘It’s too late, I don’t know how to do anything else.’
‘Maybe you’re wrong; maybe you just haven’t hit on it yet. You could be a rabbi, for instance,’ she suggested. ‘No, I don’t mean a rabbi, I mean the one who does the singing. I happened to be by the synagogue not long ago and there was a fellow there with a big nose just like yours and he sang so wonderfully he mesmerised me. Afterwards I caught sight of him outside chatting to some girl and she was completely knocked out by him too. Or you could be a mendicant friar. You could wander around the villages in the Bohemian Forest preaching to the people. I bet you’d enjoy that – preaching. They’d give you bread and wine in return and a place to sleep for the night. And you would creep into some girl’s bed, have a fantastic time and the next morning you’d be gone with the wind. You could be a sailor, outward bound from Hong Kong to Honolulu, and there’d be beautiful native girls waiting for you everywhere.’
‘You talk as if I didn’t think about anything but girls.’
‘You struck me as one of those – though I’m not sure any more. I doubt if I’d get to Hawaii with you.’
The wine was finished and she took away the empty bottle; as she passed him he finally made up his mind and took her in his arms.
4
Even though he had given them advance notice of his visit and arrived on time, the prisoner hadn’t been brought to the interview room yet. The tiny room was stiflingly hot, which increased the depressing emptiness of the place.
He was sleepy. Although it had only just gone midnight when he arrived home and he had been physically exhausted from lovemaking, it was dawn before he fell asleep. And even then he could not stop hearing it, a woman’s voice he did not know by heart yet. Passionate moans, which excited and terrified him, drowned out all other sounds, cutting him off from the world he had so far inhabited, a world that rang to the voices of other people, the voices of his wife and children. When he woke up, he had been incapable of telling whether it was despair, fear or desire that dominated his emotions. He had a heavy head, that was certain, and he could sense the grains of sand trickling through it in a constant, silent stream.
At last the first member of the escort entered and behind him he saw his prisoner for the first time.
‘You can take a seat, Kozlík,’ he said when the warders had left.
The young man was on the small side; he had large ears that stuck out either side of his high cranium. He seemed to have a cataract in one eye, while the other stared straight at him.
‘You requested an interview.’
&
nbsp; ‘I did, your honour. I want to withdraw the statement I made during the investigation.’
‘Why did you confess, then, if now you want to withdraw everything?’
‘I wanted to get the investigation over as quick as possible. What other option have you got, once they’ve got you in their hands!’
‘Do you intend to file a complaint against any aspect of the investigation into your case?’
‘No, that’s not it. It’s not so easy to get out of it once they decide to drown you. That’s all I meant.’
‘Are you trying to say that you did not commit the deed you’re charged with?’
‘I didn’t commit it, your honour.’
‘So who do you think did? How do you explain it?’
‘I’ve no idea, your honour. After all, it’s not my duty to know.’
‘No, you’re right there. So what is it you want to tell me?’
‘I didn’t do it, your honour. I know nothing about it. It didn’t have to be anyone else’s fault. She could have done it herself.’
‘Someone wiped the tap and put a saucepan of water on the gas.’
‘But she could have done that herself. She never stopped wiping the taps. She couldn’t stand dirt.’
‘You think the water put out the flame?’
‘I don’t know, your honour.’
‘It’s more likely that the gas under the saucepan was never lit, don’t you think?’
‘That’s possible, your honour. She was getting confused. It was something she done several times before: turn the gas on and forget to light it.’
‘Did she? And weren’t you worried she’d poison you as well?’
‘I always used to go in and check before going to bed.’
‘And you didn’t go in that evening?’
‘I wasn’t there that evening!’
‘I thought you were seen leaving the flat.’
‘No one could have seen me, your honour, because I wasn’t there!’