by Ivan Klíma
I tried to foster the impression in her that I was educated, successful and amusing. Subconsciously I started to imitate my colleague Oldřich. I became loquacious, tossing around aphorisms, boasting of my knowledge and the people I knew, complaining about all the duties I had. But then it dawned on me there was no sense in blowing my own trumpet this way, as she had a different scale of values. She was not interested in whom I knew or even what I knew. What she wanted was for the person she loved to be kind, sensitive, sincere and attentive, and to love his own family the way she loved hers.
She talked about her family from the very first day we met and wanted me to meet them. Even before we went to the pictures together or were on first-name terms, I found myself standing in their dark front hall, full of enormous cupboards, hangers, buckets, ropes, paddles and bicycles. My ears were assailed by an assortment of noises that seemed to come from every corner of the flat. My wife-to-be had chosen for my visit a moment when all the family would be there together. ‘The family’ meant Mother, Father, Grandad, brother Robert, his wife Sylva and their daughter Lucie, Auntie Mařka, and Sandor the tom-cat. The place was pervaded by a pungent smell of boiled sauerkraut, soapy water and tobacco smoke; the child was crying; somewhere in the bowels of the flat a piano was being played; and from the kitchen came the hiss of a pressure-cooker and the blare of a radio. I suppressed a desire to turn and run. I looked upwards and noticed that hanging from the smoke-blackened ceiling among the fine threads of dusty cobwebs was a banner which proclaimed: WELCOME TO ALL WHO COME IN FRIENDSHIP.
And then out of the kitchen came Mother: monumentally buxom, her thick hair, which was still dark, combed into a bun. She smiled at me and extended to me a large, almost masculine, hand (so unlike her daughter’s), while summoning the family to her in a deep voice, and I realised that in this family, matriarchy survived untouched by time.
Then we all sat around an enormous table and ate goose with cabbage and dumplings (the goose was in my honour, in honour of a potential new member of the family and I was immediately horror-stricken at the very thought of it), drank beer, ate a dessert and sipped coffee from mocha cups. My future sister-in-law Sylva carried the infant back and forth and my brother-in-law-to-be started arguing with the grandfather about some motor-car problems. My wife-to-be then slipped as she was carrying away the dirty dishes and the awful sound of breaking china drowned the surrounding din. Brought up in the rather fastidious surroundings of our household, I sat with bated breath wondering what would happen next, but nothing did; my wife-to-be and her sister-in-law merely brought a dustpan and brush and swept up the pieces while her mother, now that the lunch was finally behind us, sat me down in an armchair and asked me if I liked music, telling me straight away that they all loved music. Music brought some measure of tranquillity to people’s lives in the hectic modern world and helped one discover that necessary inner peace and serenity. The most important things in people’s lives, she stressed, were harmony and mutual understanding. Then she asked me what my work actually consisted of, but I had hardly managed to utter a few sentences when she interrupted me and sent the remaining female family members off to wash the rest of the unbroken dishes. Then she told me that what she really wanted to know was if my employment did not take up too much time. In the current rat-race for money and success people no longer had any free time left for themselves, let alone their families. She could not accept such an attitude.
She also wanted to know whether my profession was not rather risky. I could not understand what she meant by the question. Only later did it dawn on me that she had been afraid that if there were a change in the status quo (not that she found the present status quo particularly unbearable, but because she had lived through too many sudden, abrupt changes in her lifetime) my existence might be in jeopardy and they might send me to prison, or even the gallows.
I also had to explain to her how things had been for me during the war, and all about my mother’s illness. She decided that she would send my mother some herbal teas which were excellent for the heart, the nerves and the digestion. And at once she stood up – monumental in her wide dark skirt – and strode into the front hall, where she opened one of the many cupboards. After turning out a pile of rags, a whole bundle of old-fashioned straw hats and several boxes – I could not see their contents but they gave out a tinkle like glass – followed by a cellophane bag of pheasant’s feathers, she at last found what she was looking for: an old Van Houten’s cocoa tin. In a single breath she blew a cloud of dust off it and after removing the lid – in the process, releasing several moths which flew noiselessly up to the ceiling – placed before me in yellowing bags (the work of her late mother-in-law who had collected the herbs herself) the miraculous teas.
It struck me that although this household differed utterly from my own ordered and restrained home, where everyone worked, where most of the time they were all ensconced in their hideouts, and where one spoke quietly and only about essentials, this too was a home, or rather that collection of people, that place of constant bustle, shouts, crying, laughter and non-committal words, was a home.
4
The spring of that year was cold and rainy – Alena and I would go for walks together, taking a train or a bus a little way out of the city. Then we would wade through wet meadows and tramp along muddy footpaths. Leaning against the mighty trunk of some rare fir tree in the Průhonice Game Park, we kissed and cuddled while flakes of late snow blew all around us.
Often we would be caught out in the dark and I would suggest to Alena that I might be able to find somewhere for us to stay the night, but she always refused. It would not be proper. And what would Mother say? We would therefore make a dash for the last train, huddling together under the eaves of the station building while enormous drips fell alongside us from the holes in the guttering above.
She also refused to come and see me at our flat except for visits when the whole family was present.
But we would have to remain together one day. Just the two of us! Why was I so impatient? One day we would go off on a journey and stay somewhere together. And when would it be? I probably didn’t love her enough if I was so impatient.
Then Oldřich offered to lend me his flat. All right, she would go there with me if that was what I wanted. Was I certain there would be no one in the flat? I assured her there wouldn’t, that Oldřich and his wife were the only people living in the flat and they were out at work, and their little girl went to nursery. What if one of them were to be taken ill and return unexpectedly? I told her it was unlikely.
So we found ourselves in a small room which supposedly served as a joint bedroom, but clearly belonged to Alexandra. The furniture in it was white; a chair with red and purple seat covers, a wardrobe and a dressing table cluttered with trinkets. A skirt lay strewn over an arm of the armchair and a pair of women’s slippers peeped out from under the bed. An artificial scent of jasmine hung in the air.
And that was where we first made love. In the silence of a strange room; just the sound of rain outside and at one moment the loud chime of a clock from the room next door, which made us jump.
She wanted me to tell her over and over again that I loved her, and so I did. In reply, she whispered that she loved me too. She also wanted me to tell her I wouldn’t leave her, so I promised her I would never leave her. She whispered that she wouldn’t leave me either. And she wanted to hear that I would never love another woman, and I repeated that I would never again love anyone but her.
Then we carefully removed all traces of our presence but she ended up leaving her glasses there and we had to go back for them. We looked high and low. As she was kneeling looking under the couch I knelt at her side, her large breasts almost touching me. Then we made love again on a strange rug that gave off a scent of jasmine.
In the end she found the glasses hidden, quite improbably, underneath a skirt that neither of us had touched before.
It was her mother, of course, who came to the conclusion,
one day in midsummer when I had persuaded Alena to spend the night with me, that it was improper for us to live together like that in unconsecrated union. Her subsequent pressure on me to commit myself cut short that most beautiful period of our courting.
We decided that the wedding day would be at the end of October. We were rewarded with her mother’s kisses and blessing, as well as her consent for us to go off together on a prenuptial journey that summer.
Towns beyond the frontiers of our country still remained as closed to us as deserts and sea coasts: the all-powerful authorities had not yet taken into account the change which my wife-to-be had wrought by her choice of partner. Alena wanted me to show her The Hole, to sleep in the dismal inn where I had spent two years of my life. But I feared we might bump into Magdalena there, and besides I had no wish to meet any of my erstwhile colleagues.
In the end we set off for somewhere in that part of the country at least. We rambled all over a plain through which – enclosed by almost absurdly high embankments – a murky summer stream flowed quietly and sluggishly.
We put up in an old farm that had once belonged to the local count, situated not far from the river. The farm, which was in fact more of a manor house, had been transformed into a school, and the principal gave us permission to sleep in a room belonging to ornithologists from the Academy of Sciences. It contained five beds, a refrigerator and a sideboard with stuffed bustards, teals and wild geese. We would make love there every morning while the children, separated from us only by a thin partition and a door whose hasp could have been opened from the other side by a single push, practised pioneer songs. Three days later, we set off again through that semi-steppe, hiking upstream along the river bank, observing flocks of ducks and storks who were just gathering ready to migrate.
We ate fragrant white bread with pork fat and onions and she would tell me about her mother, her brother or her friends, sometimes stopping to ask if she was boring me. Certainly not, I would reply, I wanted to hear as much as possible about her. I knew that my reply would please her and anyway I was glad she was chatty, as I was afraid of the silence that could settle between the two of us, realising that my world and my interests were so alien to her. Then somewhere by the side of a dike we took off our rucksacks and I laid out a blanket in the shade of a hazel bush whose branches sighed in the wind. She knelt on the ground and gathered brown hazel-nuts among the fallen leaves. I coaxed her to come and lie down by me and we cuddled there. But not here, for heaven’s sake – what if someone came?
In Snina we spent the night in a tiny room containing six wooden bunks. The bed linen could not have been changed more than once a week and the walls were covered in dirty rhymes. Drunkards urinated right under the window, gypsies played and sang outside under the vast night sky while we lay and talked about how we would organise our life, how many children we would have (it had never occurred to me that I might need to have children) and when the night was so far gone that even the drunkards were too tired and the gypsies had wandered off to their miserable hovels on the edge of town, we snuggled up together and she asked me to say something nice to her. I tried to find words that would sound tender enough, all the while longing for her body. Which was so close, so near to me that it seemed absurd to waste time talking.
5
Two years later, we managed to obtain a flat with the help of Oldřich whose contacts inevitably included a housing cooperative chairman.
Subconsciously, I expected our new home to resemble in some way the home I had been accustomed to. My mother had always gone to the verge of extremes in her care of me and was always there ready to listen to me and share the events of my life and my attitudes to the world. My wife cared as little about what I ate as what I thought. She seemed to me like a child: still totally absorbed in herself, her own world and her own needs. She was incapable of concerning herself with anyone else’s world and needs.
At first I put it down to reluctance and tried being obstreperous. I deliberately kept myself to myself and refrained from talking to her about things I considered important or interesting. But then I realised that she didn’t notice my taciturnity in the same way that she didn’t notice when I wiped off the layer of dust that had settled on the furniture. All she required was for me to be there, to be near her and ever ready to listen to her.
It is also possible that I failed to find a way through to her; that the things I talked about seemed too remote to her. What she wanted from me was tenderness; what I offered was news of the world. But I was unaware of the disparity, being too taken up with outside events. I needed to be involved in them, to think about how to reform society, to reflect on new laws. I spent more and more time with friends who felt the same need. We had all spent a large part of our lives in intellectual deprivation, during a period when tyranny and violence reigned; now, it seemed, we were going to have the chance to remedy matters at least in part.
The thinkers of the Enlightenment were fascinated by reason, having been brought up to regard the Church as the supreme authority. Revolutionaries, brought up in an irredeemably class-divided society, were fired with a vision of egalitarianism. We, in similar fashion, were attracted by a vision of freedom, or freedom of thought, at least.
We used to go on arguing late into the night. I longed to be allowed to speak, to share my conclusions with the others. I can’t tell whether that need was innate in me. When confronted by idiotic rulers and stupid laws, almost everyone feels enlightened and discovers within himself the capacity for useful counsel. Maybe if I had lived under a different regime or in another country I would have channelled my disquiet in simpler and more sensible directions. Perhaps I would have calculated motor winding like my father, or become a wandering monk or rabbi, or have presided in a dignified way in a law court, wearing a wig and judging in accordance with my conscience, aware that each of my judgements was also helping to construct the complex edifice of the Law.
I started to write articles, at least. Most of them had only a tenuous connection with my speciality – I wrote about Montesquieu in order to quote his views on the independence of the judiciary, I wrote about juvenile vandals in order to demonstrate the link between their cynicism and the cynicism of society as a whole – I certainly said nothing that was not common knowledge to anyone concerned with those matters: in the murky depths from which I was only gradually emerging there was little scope for real wisdom to develop.
I was so preoccupied with my activity that when my wife announced she was expecting a baby, I felt apprehension rather than joy or gratitude.
I scarcely recall the period of her pregnancy. She would complain about being tired all the time and negotiated shorter working hours at the library. She also wanted me to go with her to choose clothes for the yet-unborn baby. Minute smocks and bootees would arouse in her an enthusiasm that I found irritating as it made no sense to me and struck me as artificial. And at night she would put my hand on her swelling belly for me to feel how our child already lived. She must have longed for me to feel the same way that she did about it, for me to look forward to it like she did, but it was beyond me.
She felt the first contractions in the small hours of the first day of February. I telephoned my father and he came for us in the same old car.
It was still wintry and there had been a fresh fall of snow during the night so the car proceeded very slowly through the deserted streets. We finally got out in front of a dismal barrack-like building of unrendered brick and slowly trudged through the snow. I supported her with one hand while carrying a bag with her things and clothes for the baby in the other. Several early rooks were hopping about in front of the closed gates. Then the gates slowly opened as they had done on that far-off night; only the armed guard was missing, and there was I following the stretcher. At that moment I realised I had to leave her there, alone in her pain. I hugged her and told her I would be with her in spirit, and she told me not to worry about anything.
Someone took the bag from me, and her as
well. She turned once more and waved, and it struck me that that moment would most probably bind me to her ever after.
Chapter Eight
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1
MANDA WANTED HIM to help her choose a present for her grandmother’s birthday. They arranged to meet at lunch-time under the St Wenceslas statue. She couldn’t miss the statue. Otherwise she would be bound to fret about not getting off the tram at the right stop. She had inherited his tendency to worry.
It was an odd feeling to be waiting for his daughter. During the previous three weeks – wary and full of longing – he had grown used to waiting for Alexandra. Sometimes they had managed to drive to the Vyšehrad attic room during the lunch-hour and make love there. Most days, he had also waited for her after work. They would have dinner together and if she had the time, would go back once more to the small room where they could make love. Once they had actually managed to get off work early in the afternoon and driven out of town. On the way, they were able to see autumn settling in on the hillsides along the River Vltava: some slopes were yellow, some turning red and others were already flame-red, and he would never have noticed their colourfulness but for her. They had a meal in a country pub and then made love in the woods, which still exhaled a summer warmth. On the return journey she told him about the books she had been reading recently: he found her way of recounting them made even the most boring stories seem interesting, like the autumn trees they were passing.
He caught sight of his daughter in the tram as it passed, her nose pressed to the glass of the door. She saw him too, and waved.
Previously he had always carefully weighed up his conduct, accepting too much responsibility for actions for which he was not answerable. He had been used to perceiving the world around him in all its distressing and wounding details; now it was beginning to be lost in mists. He would spend his nights in one place and go to work in another; people moved about him and sometimes required his presence, or his views or his answers. They cried, remonstrated with him, implored him, relied on him, prevaricated, tried to pull the wool over his eyes or win him over, while all the time he lived between two encounters, between the last embrace and the next. For how much longer?