The Ultimate Intimacy

by Ivan Klíma

  She didn’t know whether she loved him, but she felt compassion for his situation, as well as a sense of security in his presence. This seemingly frail man with an honourable profession would never harm her, it occurred to her. All of a sudden she found herself considering the possibility of living with a man, taking care of him, having a family and maybe even having children of her own.

  5

  Even though Daniel used to visit the prison at least twice a month, he never managed to rid himself of a most unpleasant feeling each time the prison gate swung open in front of him. The guards always treated him in an obliging and even kindly fashion but in spite of that, the memories of his own recent interrogations would begin to come flooding back. The faces of the warders were so strongly reminiscent of the expressions of the officials and Secretaries for Church Affairs with whom he had been forced to endure lengthy and humiliating interviews.

  The situation had changed, but not the people – or only slightly. And where there had been a change, he wasn’t entirely sure if it was for the better. In fact he wasn’t sure even in his own case.

  Petr was brought in shortly after Daniel had taken a seat in the interview room.

  ‘How are you, Petr?’

  ‘Welcome to this cool place, Reverend.’ The lad smiled. Whenever he smiled he looked almost childlike. Only the long scar on his left cheek testified to the fact that his past had not been so innocent. He also had a scar on his wrist, self-inflicted. ‘I’ve tried killing myself at least five times,’ he had told Daniel on their first meeting. ‘With a razor, with pills, with water and with rum, and I also tried freezing myself to death. I went and lay down in the snow just in my pants and socks. But nothing worked!’

  At that time he had been quite emaciated, with a sickly grey complexion; only his eyes had shown any real sign of life. But he had put on weight over the past three months and it struck Daniel that this lad who had never worked and had certainly never taken any exercise – who on the contrary had abused his body – had quite an athletic physique.

  ‘Whenever you come it’s like the sun coming out.’

  ‘Come on, Petr, where did you read that?’

  ‘In the Bible, of course, the one you left here for me: “His face shone like the sun”, or something like that.’

  ‘Everyone sends you greetings,’ Daniel said, ignoring Petr’s comparison of him with the Saviour. ‘Alois too. He’s earning money now. He’s got a job with a building firm as a bricklayer.’

  ‘Yeah. It’s wicked how time flies. On the outside, at least.’

  ‘I brought you some fruit. And my wife baked you a cake.’

  ‘You are angels, the pair of you, Reverend.’

  ‘Give the poetry a rest, Petr, you know I don’t like it. It’s quite possible that you won’t even get a chance to eat it in here.’

  ‘I bet I will. My lawyer told me they’re postponing the hearing again. The court went and lost some papers apparently.’

  ‘They’ve postponed the hearing?’

  ‘For at least a month. They won’t get here any sooner.’

  ‘You’ll put up with it for another month, seeing that you’ve put up with it for two years already.’

  ‘I will, of course, but Reverend you have no idea what it’s like when you’re all ready to leave and then the moment is put off. Every day drags by and you suddenly feel what a hell hole this place is.’

  ‘It’s also up to us to decide whether we live in hell or not.’

  ‘And also up to those who are with you here from morning to night. This place is swimming in evil as if you’d kicked over a bucket of it. And when you behave any differently they start to hate you. When they notice you praying, for instance, they either laugh at you or want to beat you up.’

  ‘I know, Petr. I’ll ask the lawyer if there is any way of speeding up the hearing.’

  ‘And what if they don’t release me?’

  ‘They will. And if they don’t, you’ll have to put up with it.’

  ‘With your help, I would.’

  ‘You’d cope with it even without my help. If you have really changed inside you’ll manage it because you know that the Lord Jesus will help you.’

  ‘I tend to believe in your help, Reverend. The Lord Jesus is too far away.’

  ‘He isn’t, Petr. You only need to open the Bible.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. But I haven’t even got my copy any more. I lent it to that bright spark who shares my cell. He’s half gypsy, or says he’s only half. He’s never read anything like it, but he’s quite taken with the way Jesus performed miracles.’

  ‘Petr, the miracles aren’t the most important thing in scripture. What’s more important is the message of love.’

  ‘I know, Reverend. But what would a gypsy like him know about love?’

  ‘So you tell him then.’

  ‘Me? Hold on, Reverend … After all, I’ve lived like an animal all my life. An animal among animals. I can recall every kind word that was ever said to me, there were so few of them.’

  ‘But there were some. Anyway it’s good you’re thinking this way. That you’re thinking about yourself and not blaming everyone around you.’

  ‘You’re the one who taught me that, Reverend. Before then I used to do the same as everyone around me. I saw the splinter in other people’s eyes but didn’t notice the beam in my own.’

  ‘Petr, I also wanted to tell you I’m trying to find you a job. Mr Houdek from our congregation has a garden centre and he’s bound to have some kind of job for you.’

  ‘Thank you, Reverend.’ He didn’t seem too enthusiastic at the prospect of a job in a garden centre. ‘I’ve also done something for you.’ He pulled out a large sheet of paper. On it was drawn a head with a crown of thorns. The face was so deformed that it looked almost cubist. ‘I drew this for you. And for your wife.’

  Daniel took the picture and thanked him for it. Then he wished him patience and strength. ‘Christ can be with you anywhere,’ he said to him as they parted. ‘There is no place His love can’t reach.’

  On the way home, it occurred to him to call in at his mother’s small flat at Červený vrch and collect a picture. His mother had moved there after his father’s death. There had only been room for a few pieces of furniture from the old flat, and some pictures, most of which had been given to his father by women artists he had treated. There was one picture that Daniel liked. It depicted a young gypsy girl with a basket of flowers. She had a sweet face and big breasts that were just partly revealed. The painting wasn’t signed but he didn’t mind that; he liked the flower-girl. She had represented for him – during his adolescence at least – an ideal of beauty: dark eyes, a dusky complexion and big breasts. Maybe that was what he found attractive about Hana when he first set eyes on her.

  He gazed at the picture for a while but could not make up his mind to take it down from the wall. Instead he opened the window. On the lawn below, someone had set up a low metal pylon and fixed vanes on top of it. It might have been a work of art, a child’s construction or even part of a wind generator. He watched the vanes revolving quietly for a moment and then went back into the room and opened the wardrobe. All his mother’s clothes were hanging there: her jumper with the darned sleeves, her worn overcoat and a few dresses, only one of which was worthy of the name of Sunday best. His mother wore it only on family birthdays, or for church on Sundays.

  He was touched by the shabbiness of the things, even though possessions meant little to him. His mother couldn’t afford to buy clothes and he didn’t earn enough to give her anything towards them. It was only now that he could afford it, now that it was too late.

  He wandered around the flat a little longer. He opened the refrigerator, which contained nothing but a half-empty bottle of ketchup and a tube of some ointment that had to be kept cool. It looked as if Hana had already taken away any food that might have gone bad.

  On the armchair by the bed there lay a black-bound Bible in the Kralice translation; his mo
ther had refused to abandon the language she had grown up with. There was a bookmark in the third chapter of John’s Gospel and he noticed that his mother had drawn a faint line alongside three of the verses.

  And this is the condemnation, that light came into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.

  For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.

  But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.

  His mother strove to live in truth as revealed in scripture and as required by it, and she had brought him up to do likewise. She had believed he would manage it; she believed he would achieve something important, that he would leave his mark on this world.

  When he failed to get into the grammar school because his father happened to be in prison at the time, branded as an enemy of the state and of the rotten system that held sway then, Daniel became despondent at the thought of having to become a trainee somewhere. At the time, his mother consoled him and assured him that everything that befell him would prove useful one day, and that as long as it was God’s will that he should achieve something good and useful, there was no power on earth that could prevent it, and there was no reason why he should slacken his resolve.

  In those days, he really did believe he was pre-destined for great deeds. Since he had no interest in technology, travel or politics, those deeds would have to be performed in other spheres. He used to have dreams – they might have been daydreams, but it was impossible to tell so many years on – in which he would appear dressed in a toga like a Greek philosopher, or a prophet even, and at such moments of enlightenment he would come up with all sorts of sentences that struck him as both wise and significant.

  So he was enrolled on a booksellers’ training course, but he didn’t have a chance to qualify, as a year later his father returned home from eight years in prison, and strangely enough, Daniel was accepted into the grammar school.

  Daniel naturally grew out of his adolescent dreams, but he always regarded his work as a mission and for a long time believed that moments of enlightenment would come again and that he would discover what was ‘the truth’ and find the answer to the most secret questions of being and non-being. And sometimes when he was talking to his first wife – who was capable of listening to him as no one had since – it would seem to him that he really would manage to get to the root of the mystery that veiled the manifestations of divine action in the world and discover the cause of human failings.

  But when Jitka died, he seemed to dry up inside. He still strove to discharge conscientiously what he regarded as his mission; the question was what had he really accomplished – what, in retrospect, was there to show for it?

  He had married several dozen couples, made sure the dead had a decent burial, and possibly given some of the living encouragement by convincing them that life had some purpose. During his period in the Moravian Highlands, there had been some Catholics who came to his sermons as well as some ‘non-believers’ on the odd occasion, but even so, the church – built in the eighteenth century, when the anti-Protestant laws were repealed – remained very empty, as most people in the village and its environs had no interest in his message.

  Since the Velvet Revolution, he had suddenly been allowed to appear on television and visit prisons, and yet this wasn’t quite what his mother had expected of him, or what he himself had once dreamt about. Moreover, he was no longer convinced that there existed any ideas that were sufficiently wise, noble or significant to influence people’s behaviour. People’s behaviour tended to be influenced by ideas that lacked both wisdom and nobility.

  On the lowest shelf there stood some boxes full of papers. The outside of the boxes bore inscriptions in his mother’s elegant schoolmistress’s hand: Richard’s letters. Letters to me. Letters from the children. Official correspondence. Miscellaneous. Photographs.

  What was he to do with these writings? Would he read them? Eva would most likely move into the flat. Before that happened, he would have to take away the letters. He would take them away unread and store them away somewhere in the cellar, where his children would find them after his death and dump them.

  The photographs were also sorted into a whole lot of envelopes. He pulled one out. In a very amateurish, grey snapshot his mother was leaning against the fence of their villa in Střešovice holding a baby in her arms. The baby must have been him. The back of the photo bore the date: summer 1944. His mother was wearing a summer dress, which he could not recall, of course. The dress was shabby looking – it was the last year of the war. His father was in a concentration camp, his mother had been left on her own with the two children. Their father had returned only to be imprisoned again several years later. Their mother remained alone once more. No one even visited them. Only the old minister from their congregation called in from time to time and pressed a thousand-crown note on their mother towards the housekeeping. That minister was also long dead but he now discovered a photograph of him standing among a confirmation group. Daniel scarcely recognized himself, he was even thinner in those days and his forehead was partly obscured by hair.

  And there were wedding photos of Jitka. They all stood there together. Only Rút was missing – she was already over the hills and far away. He turned over the photographs absentmindedly and returned them to their envelope: himself with Jitka with mountaineering ropes round their waists; his father; a coloured snap of Rút at the Yosemite Falls; the manse in Kamenice; a wedding photo with Hana. Another one with his mother sitting in her armchair bent slightly over some sewing. The armchair still stood here by the bed. He recalled how when his mother did any sewing she would generally prick her fingers until they bled. The blood would distress him, or maybe it was his mother’s clumsiness that upset him. He became aware of the tears burning his throat. As if he only now realized that he would never again set eyes on his mother, either here in her armchair or anywhere else on this earth.

  He stuffed the box back into the wardrobe and tried to dispel his gloom by thinking of their next meeting which had to occur one day, although there was no telling when, where or how. But no sense of relief came. When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, ‘We want to hear you again on this subject.’ (Acts 17:32)

  6

  Matou

  Matouš Volek was born and grew up in Michle. His father had been a tailor’s assistant – a very quiet and mild-mannered man. He died of belatedly diagnosed tuberculosis when Matouš was thirteen. A few days before his death, Matouš had observed above his father’s head a strange glow that quickly grew pale before disappearing entirely. It had frightened the boy but he never told anyone what he had seen.

  Matouš inherited his father’s scrawny and rather stunted body, as well as his long-sightedness, diligence and meditative tendencies, not to mention pathological mood swings and a fear of women.

  Matouš’s mother had not remarried and the devotedness that was her main character trait was transferred from the ailing husband to the healthy son. She worked as a postwoman and her daily duties entailed doing the rounds of dozens of streets which at the time were mostly made up of low, temporary dwellings. In spite of this, she would manage to return home in time to prepare her son’s lunch and chat to him about his problems. She even tried helping him with his studies by testing him on his school homework after quickly reading up the subject beforehand in his textbook. She wanted him to go to university so that he could be educated and learned, and respected by all, preferably becoming a doctor, or a civil engineer at least.

  Matouš indeed went on to university, but to study something else entirely, namely, oriental languages at the Arts Faculty. Having a gift for languages and virtually no other interests (he didn’t go out with girls, or rather none of them felt inclined to go out with him), he made full use of the opportunity and learnt Chinese. He acquainted himse
lf with Chinese thinking, being attracted most of all to Taoism at that time, although, like the majority of Europeans, he only selected certain elements from it for his own lifestyle; he certainly proved incapable of freeing himself totally from his own self.

  When, in 1968, Soviet troops invaded the Republic, Matouš was in his third year at university and like most of his fellow students he joined the street demonstrations to protest against the invasion. As the political situation deteriorated, however, he had to decide whether to go on protesting and thereby lose the opportunity to make his mark in the profession for which he had prepared himself, or to take the chance then offered for someone with no past. The prospect of losing his career didn’t appeal to him. One of the wise sayings of Lao Tzu stressed that only the person capable of adapting to everyone would emerge the victor over all. ‘Reserve your judgments and words and you maintain your influence.’

  He therefore decided to coexist with the revamped ancien régime. This entailed joining the prescribed organizations, voting in the sham elections and not taking part in anything that might cast doubts on his loyalty, but also not getting involved in anything that would offend his own conscience. After all, the sage relies on the hidden life and non-action, in other words he argues with no one and thus avoids unnecessary quarrels. His best teachers were forced to leave the faculty but those who had reached the same decision as Matouš remained. There was no great change in the language teaching, but the associate professor purged the history syllabus of the most stimulating and also the most significant epochs in favour of the most recent Communist period. This did not worry him too much as he tended to seek knowledge in books which he had either acquired earlier, before they were removed from the libraries, or which he borrowed from the professors who had fallen out of favour.

  He had counted on remaining in the faculty after graduating, or going to work at the Oriental Institute, but there was no vacancy for him in either place, and he was offered a job in the press agency instead. He regarded it as demotion, but in spite of his liking for Lao Tzu’s teachings, the outside world held a deep attraction for him and he enjoyed travelling, observing and discovering, so he took the job. He also translated poetry and wrote verse himself: not about love, but about nature – the mood of a rainy day, about nostalgia and loneliness, about equanimity and spiritual calm. He wrote it in the style of ancient Chinese poetry or of the Japanese haiku: