by Ivan Klíma
The church was standing to this day and Matěj promised to show it to us when we returned from Slovakia.
Afterwards, he and Magdalena reminisced about their childhood and he enthused about the days when loudspeakers did not blare through the village at six in the morning, when folk in their part of the world used to cut cellars out of a rock face instead of installing electrical boxes for making ice, when only people and animals walked the roads and people lived in harmony with an age-old rhythm, when the calendar still retained its ancient astrological significance. And they sang together:
Now is Eastertide
The keys where did she hide . . .
When he departed the next day, I felt a sense of loss as if a close friend had left me.
5
In the way that prisoners talk most of all about freedom, Magdalena most of all enjoyed talking about travel. She would relive in words her one and only trip abroad. Shortly after the war, her father had taken her with him to Rome where he was to attend some doctors’ congress. Afterwards, they had gone on a sea cruise and anchored several times on the coast of Africa. She had viewed the mouth of the Nile, the temples, the pyramids and the sphinxes and had also seen the desert. Astonishingly enough, it was the desert which had made the greatest impression on her. She voiced the opinion that I, too, would be different if I were to find myself even once in a landscape resigned to death. Maybe then I would discover true humility and realise the need for meditation. She would also talk about how one day we would go off together on a European journey, visiting the Thomaskirche in Leipzig where Bach had been the organist, and the art galleries in Madrid and Bern. Then we would travel together right down to the south of France, as far as Provence, and walk the streets of Aries; we would take a steamer up the Rhine which Heine and Broch had written about. She knew lots of places she had never actually set eyes on and I expect she would be disappointed if she ever saw them as they really are – criss-crossed with motorways and befouled by motor cars. But life never gave her the opportunity.
Her holidays were longer than mine, besides which I squandered my own allocation on occasional trips home (two days’ journey by bus and train, a day sitting at home with Mother and Father and a day rushing around Prague visiting friends and bookshops, before managing to snatch an evening in the theatre and wearily observing scenes from a life very different from my own) so I was only left with five days in the summer. It wasn’t enough for a journey to Provence, or to the Czech lands, but I wanted to give my girlfriend a treat. I bought myself a large rucksack, and packed it with spare clothes, boots and a billy can. She had a small army knapsack made from calf-skin, and apart from her spare clothes took a flute, some music and a camera, and we set off for the Beskid Mountains.
I recall us walking along a deserted fieldpath with the sun rising over us; we pass by villages scattered over the hillsides, herds of cattle that look like brown patches, and shepherds’ huts (we sat in one of them and ate bread with ewe’s milk cheese) while the fragrance of distant fires reaches our nostrils and we catch the sound of barefoot children yodelling; we are walking on moss among mountain thyme and Carthusian pinks, and along dry-stone walls that radiate heat, and along a valley up which the sound of bells is carried. I can see Magdalena in her light flowered dress; for the first time I saw her happy; she laughed and remembered her childhood and people she had never mentioned before.
We spent the night in an old farmhouse. The farmer’s wife gave us the marriage bed and we couldn’t get to sleep in the unaccustomed surroundings, in the strangely heavy, musty air of that low-ceilinged room. We cuddled and chatted and lay silent, waiting for sleep, and then chatted again, but about things we had never talked about before. It was as if we had never spent a single day together before, as if we’d only just met and had started to love each other that day.
And I really did love her that night. More than at any other time, I felt a great sense of pleasure at having her close to me. It occurred to me that we should leave The Hole together. I might find a post as a lawyer with a commercial enterprise or there was the possibility of taking less qualified (though also less dubious) work. At least I ought to make an effort to return to the city I had been sent: away from. We might even be happy there.
And once more we spent a whole day rambling along lengthy ridges in a desolate landscape far from the works of human hands and full of peace. That evening we found lodging in a small inn with only two bedrooms. We booked both rooms. The innkeeper insisted on it as we were not married.
We had our supper in a room crowded with drinkers. They were singing at the table next to ours. I wanted to leave as soon as possible, so as to retain the sense of inner peace our rambling had given me. But when our meal was over Magdalena wanted to stay. She made me order a bottle of wine. She was not used to drinking and alcohol went quickly to her head. She got up and asked them at the next table if she might join them, and made me move tables too. She sang along with them, while resentment began to grow in me that she had not sensed my need to leave and instead got drunk and preferred the company of drunken strangers to my own. She noticed I wasn’t singing and asked me to join in too. But I didn’t know how to sing, or how to enjoy myself.
Around midnight, the pub closed. At last everyone got up, the strangers said goodbye and Magdalena hung on to me drunkenly. I was obliged to unlock her room for her. She put her arms round me as soon as we were inside. She wanted to know if I loved her, and why I never sang, why I could never relax and have a good time. She wanted to know if it was because my mind was always on saving the world. And she begged me, while she was taking off her clothes, to sing with her, at least, now we were alone. She pulled out the flute from her knapsack and started to play on it. The scene etched itself in my memory: her slim, almost white body, which seemed to shine in the darkness, the black flute in her big fingers, and behind her the country bed with its striped quilt. When at last we were lying next to each other, she cuddled up to me in that creaky inn bed and started to kiss me and whisper tender words. She was tender to me as never before or afterwards, that young woman who virtually became my first wife, my unbetrothed wife.
I started to feel ill in the train on the way back to The Hole. I shook with fever and was sick several times in the foul toilet. I tried to conceal my sickness but there was no fooling Magdalena. She took me home with her on the bus, and in spite of my protests and assurances that I would be fine by evening, she summoned the doctor. The doctor prescribed me penicillin and Magdalena went off to fetch it from the chemist’s. A stifling silence reigned in the room, broken only by the buzz of flies. I wasn’t used to illness any more, or to having nothing to do. I got up and wandered round the room. On the table by Magdalena’s bed lay a book that she had apparently started to read before our departure. I leafed through the first pages: it was about some anarchists who were sentenced to death, about the fear of those condemned to die. I put the book back down. Why had she been reading it? Probably on account of me. I would ask her what made her read such depressing books.
There was a roaring in my head and I closed my eyes. I picked up my pack and set off once more for the summit. But my legs ached too much. I realised I was once more sentenced to death and was fleeing my gaolers. I was running away, straining to lift leaden feet that sank into the muddy path, and I could hear them coming after me, the stamping of their feet.
I opened my eyes and tried to work out what decade I was in and expel my inordinate fear, but I couldn’t. What if they came, rang the doorbell and took me away? Who? I tried to persuade myself that nobody of the kind existed, but deep down I knew I was only trying to console myself. Nothing has changed. I know them personally, those bailiffs and catchpolls, I’ve sat around with them in the inn, haven’t I? When, where? I can’t say, but I do know them and they know me; they know my faith has been shaken and I have nothing to use as a defence. There is no defence when it comes to matters of faith. There is just faith and rebellion against faith. And with horror
I listened as the door downstairs banged and someone came stamping up the stairs.
Magdalena returned, bringing me the medicine and several letters that had arrived for me at my digs while I’d been away. She put a bunch of carnations in a vase and set the vase on the table by the couch where I lay. They were the first flowers I had ever received in my life. I was touched. I would love to have said something tender to that young woman with the big hands, the only person I could look forward to seeing there. But I felt too wretched and it was humiliating to be tender at that particular moment. So I listened to her words with my eyes closed. I said that I definitely felt much better and would get up tomorrow, but for the time being would eat nothing. She sat down by me and talked about how I would soon be leaving, that we would both be going off somewhere where we’d be happier; we’d walk along the sea shore and lie in the sand. I asked where it would be. In Provence, she replied and I said wearily: Never! She fell silent, but I felt her fingers rest for a few moments more on the back of my hand, and then she went off somewhere again.
I picked up the letters from the side-table. One was from my mother, one from my brother and the third bore the letterhead of the Law Faculty. In it Professor Lyon informed me that the academy was advertising for an academic assistant in the field of penal law and he advised me to apply for the job. He asked me to send my curriculum vitae and a list of my articles, both my published ones and the ones I was working on, to him, Professor Lyon.
I put the letter down on the table. Magdalena must have found it there when she came back, because she asked me whether I was pleased.
I couldn’t understand what I had to be pleased about.
Because I would be able to leave, to get away from here. She stared at me; it seemed to me there was something wistful in her gaze and it retreated rapidly from me as if I was already sitting in a departing bus while she remained abandoned at the deserted bus stop.
That evening I could still force no food down me, but I told her not to call the doctor and refused a thermometer, a compress, and all other attention; all I wanted was for her to put on a record and I lay and dozed to the sound of the organ.
And I recall that when, the next day, I was unable to touch anything apart from a little tea, I was suddenly gripped by a realisation of the possibility of death, inescapable death, whether immediately, or in the near future. I strove with my exhausted mind to grasp the void out of which I had emerged and to which I must return, but I was unable to concentrate sufficiently. I also thought about the fact that I had not achieved anything, that I had not managed to put into practice any of the things I’d dreamed of, and that if I were to go now, there would be no trace of me left behind, no memory, nothing apart from a stone with my name on it. And that would soon be overgrown and before long it would fall and sink into the earth. And then I felt a sudden affinity with all those in the world who were dying and it struck me that the worst death of all must be when one is fully conscious and one’s senses are not dulled in any way. And my thoughts went back to my friends who had so recently stood on the tiles of the gas chambers; I thought also about the soldiers who were herded into the final assault and the condemned prisoner being led to the scaffold, and it seemed to me those faces were coming back to life before my eyes. I saw them so vividly that they were more real than real faces. I saw shaven scalps and bloody holes in foreheads and moving jaws that were trying in vain to say some word or other. And I thought about my forebears, my ancient unknown forebears, who once upon a time had also had to live and die though I did not know how. It was certain, however, that many of them had suffered terribly. It seemed to me that I was able to perceive that suffering as a whole: wars from which my great-grandfathers had never returned; escapes during which they had perished; crucifixions and executions and exile in foreign lands, and death on the journey to foreign lands; and I was filled with a growing sorrow about the human lot. I think I must have groaned out loud; I was still in a fever. Magdalena called the doctor again and he gave me an injection.
And I really did feel better straight away. I don’t know if it was the injection or whether the illness simply receded, but I was suddenly seized by the conviction, the blissful premonition, that it was in my power to do something to redeem myself. I tried to communicate my feeling to Magdalena. I know now what I’m going to do!
Yes, she said. You’re going to leave.
Chapter Seven
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1
IT WAS STILL light when he arrived home on Sunday. The place seemed unusually empty and untidy. The quilts were still spread out to air over the backs of chairs and several pairs of shoes were scattered around the front hall. On his desk he found a letter from his brother. Cups from their last breakfast lay unwashed in the kitchen sink and there was a stale, half-eaten slice of bread on the work top.
He had a shower. The water washed off all the unfamiliar smells and caresses that still adhered to him. Alexandra had gradually receded, though had he wanted he could have held on to her. He could, if he wanted, conjure up every detail of her body, could hear her speaking to him, repeating the words that drew him to her and took his breath away, he could embrace her, return those touches that aroused delight in him: such ecstasy that for a moment, at least, he forgot to speculate on the consequences of his actions and his situation, he forgot about past and future. But he let her recede.
He dried himself, put on some old trousers and went into his room.
His brother was writing to him from Edinburgh. That was a city he had never managed to visit, although many people had told him of its charms. But his brother was hardly concerned with the charm of the place. He had flown here, he wrote, to a ‘congress of mad scientists’ who (purely in the abstract) discussed imaginary relationships and hypothetical phenomena, which would then be put to use by equally mad technicians, but mad in a different way, to construct something that would undoubtedly annihilate us all. ‘And in fact it crossed my mind when we were taking off from Heathrow that we ought to have left flying to the birds and the angels. By trying to displace them from the sky as we once took the waters away from the fish and the land from the other creatures, we have overstepped the bounds and our punishment is inevitable.
‘The hotel where the congress is being held is extremely posh. The conference room is all headphones, buttons and air-conditioning, with a projection screen in place of a blackboard. We drink excellent coffee and the local fire-water. The topics, as I was saying, are purely theoretical: A new method for calculating the configurational centring of Green’s function in random systems. Or: A contribution to the theory of multi-particulate phenomena in absorptional and emissive X-ray spectra. Sometimes it crosses my mind that sitting somewhere else in a hotel just like this is a similar little group of happy gentlemen totally dedicated to science listening to a strictly theoretical paper about rays that will end up slicing the earth in two, or about methods to unleash a chain reaction incorporating water-bonded hydrogen. The paper will assume, naturally, that nothing of the kind will ever happen, because who would want to destroy the earth on which they live? The trouble is it’ll happen anyway, either by mistake or some nutter somewhere will decide to do it on a mad whim or out of perversity. Our father always used to say (and I expect he still does) that every major discovery finds some application. Another thing he said, and he is the most thorough and reliable person I could ever imagine, is that everyone makes a fateful error at least once in his life. And while I’m recalling his words of wisdom (though maybe he didn’t lavish them on you to the same extent – you were engaged in something which was scarcely worthy of attention in his eyes) he also used to say that there was no such thing as infallible technical equipment. I was thinking about him as I sat there hearing about translational asymmetrical systems. It just had to happen one of these days and in a split second it’d be the end of this comfortable hall, of posh hotels everywhere, here and in the antipodes. At last there’d be a levelling of the rich and
poor, white and coloured, Hiltons and slums and that flawless levelling which would also be flawlessly entropic was something I’d have on my conscience too. So the lecture started to get on my nerves and I picked up my things and went out of the hotel. And in the very next street I found a magnificent pub with a games room. There were lots of gambling machines that would quickly rob you of all your money, without giving you any fun, but also a fantastic car circuit on which the miniature cars raced non-stop. You could bet on one of four cars: the red one paid out 1.5 pence for every penny staked, the blue returned double the stake, the green five times and the white one fifty times the stake. Seemingly everything was run by computer; even the pay-outs were automatic. You could stake from a penny to a shilling. I was utterly absorbed watching those little cars belting round their tracks, and there was no way of telling which would be first. Just at the very last moment one of them would always shoot ahead – most often the red one, as you can imagine – and overtake the rest just before the end. I calculated that the white one should win at least once every eighty races. I managed to sit and just watch fifty-five races and I was terrified I’d enter the game too late, but the white didn’t win once. Then, bro, I started to bet. I bet on fifty races: first a penny, then twopence, then fivepence and when it got to the hundred-and-fifth race, I bet a whole shilling and gave up. Brother of mine, that white car proceeded to win in the hundred-and-eighth, hundred-and-tenth and hundred-and-eleventh races. At that moment I thought it best to leave. My fingers still shake at the thought that I could have had seven pounds and a couple of shillings plus that incredible excitement. I don’t think I should tempt fate – maybe it’s a warning for me. Actually I was intending to say something else about Father. When he was my age he had great hopes, though they were just a big excuse, more likely. For him there existed a higher authority. He exempted his socialism from all laws. It was the only machine that was not supposed to fail because it had the capacity to repair itself. That gave Father the strength to go on zealously making his machines. The world is full of false hopes. But none of them appeal to me. The most I’m prepared to do is bet on a white car and get carried away for an hour with hopes of winning. Apart from that, as you know, I am interested in quite hopeless matters such as amorphous materials, particularly glass. I go on doing my sums the way Father did his, and there really are moments when I feel I’m moving through my own private universe. I am its master and no one may enter it. Then suddenly I sense an enormous pressure on my universe, a pressure so great that it is compressed into a single, solitary ray – which could slice the earth in half with no problem. And I get me such a fright that I say to myself: what’s it for, then? What I’m lacking, bro, is satisfaction and a goal. And I ask myself: what do I possess, what do I have left? Where is my home, where is my universe?’