by Ivan Klíma
October again.
Leaves wilt.
From the slate-grey sky, lethargy now falls.
He managed to get several poems printed in magazines, although his efforts to have a collected edition published came to nothing. All the same he regarded himself as an artist; he believed he would make a name for himself one day as a poet. Then he would change his lifestyle, stop going out to work and devote himself to study and meditation, and maybe travel. However, for years he lacked everything necessary for such a lifestyle, namely, status, contacts, total freedom to travel – and money.
His visits to the nurses’ station where he would tell the nurses all about his experiences in foreign parts were motivated more by loneliness than a desire to please. His illness depressed him, that and the fact that his wife Klára had left him.
When he first met her, Klára was a waitress in a little bistro where he would sometimes go for a meal. He found her physically attractive (although she was quite ordinary: bleached hair and varnished nails, and if she spoke for more than a minute it was tediously banal) but she had no sympathy for Chinese philosophy and poetry, and on the one occasion he had tried to explain to her the contrast between the forces of yin and yang she had fallen asleep. All the same, Klára herself set store by the fact that Matouš was a graduate and had seen a lot of the world. She was also taken by his flat, particularly the room in which the blades of a wooden fan rotated slowly beneath the ceiling and where there was a glass case and shelves full of the most unusual objects, such as purple-coloured receptacles for crickets, old-fashioned Chinese tiles or statues of the Buddha, some of them gilded. What most attracted Klára, who handled dozens of cups and saucers made of the cheapest and heaviest china, were the tiny tea cups of translucent porcelain decorated with exotic paintings of flowers and birds. When she first picked them up and felt their fragility, the very touch of them sent a thrill through her. They must have been not only rare but expensive too. Klára came to the conclusion that Matouš was wealthy as well as interesting.
Shortly before their first meeting, his mother had died unexpectedly (unexpectedly from the medical point of view, but as in the case of his father he had previously observed a fading aura above his mother’s head), so he needed someone to take over the household duties and generally to attend to the practical questions of his existence. So he imprudently asked Klára if she would like to be his wife.
The marriage had lasted almost seven years. It continued now, in fact, as Klára had not divorced him and would put in an appearance at least once a month to ask him for money. He was always short of cash, and he could see no reason why he should pay her, as she didn’t live with him and they had no children. The trouble was she would start to yell and heap reproaches on him until, in the end, she extracted some small sum from him.
Although he was nearly fifty, Klára was his first and only wife. He had lived with his mother until her death and during that time had had a few fleeting acquaintances with married women, all of them older than himself. Klára was different from them. Not only was she unmarried, she was also fifteen years his junior. She had been looking for a love affair, whereas he was hoping for a housekeeper rather than a lover. In his view, Klára was typical of the kind of modern women who looked after their own bodies first and foremost and wanted to dominate men. That was why they went after good-hearted fellows or preferably fools. Then they expected to be spoiled and supported, be given expensive gifts and lots of money to spend on new clothes and shoes, and later on with their lovers.
Even though little in Matouš’s life turned out as planned, his marriage had turned out worst of all. But whose marriage ever turns out well anyway? He was determined that once he was divorced – which would definitely happen in the foreseeable future – he would not marry again, unless he happened to come across a woman that resembled his mother (should such a woman exist at all) or one who was rich and sufficiently generous to enable him to fulfil his plans to become an independent artist and philosopher. Never having met such a woman, he was able to talk non-committally to those in whom he had no interest, and even entertain them with interesting stories.
The hospital nurses genuinely enjoyed listening to him. His life seemed to teem with any number of exciting experiences, exotic cities, abrupt reversals of fortune, dust storms, fascinating encounters, Buddhist monasteries, oriental gambling dens, night-time hold-ups and other situations where it was a matter of life or death, or at least honour. Many of the stories in which he himself featured he had only heard or read about, or dreamt up. But he wasn’t a liar, just an inveterate story-teller, and anyway he didn’t attach any great importance to the stories (after all there was little difference between what actually happened and what could have happened) and as soon as he had borrowed them and retold them, he believed them himself. He definitely did not make it all up, however. During his life, he had travelled a good part of the globe and spent a total of more than two years in China. He had lived through the end of the Cultural Revolution, the death of Chairman Mao and the unexpected thaw at the end of the 1970s.
He found that great country quite different from the one he read about in the books of the ancient sages, yet at the same time he found much of what he expected: the Chinese theatre, music and drawing, and the regime and the government seemed to enjoy greater authority than what he was accustomed to back home. He found there curiosity, superstition, immense poverty and hospitality, as well as fanaticism and astonishing licence. There were lots of colourful costumes on festive occasions and drab uniform-like clothes on work days. He saw a good deal of the country: enormous cities, the valleys of great rivers and the mountains of the north, but there was much he did not see because, as a dog-eyed foreigner, he was not allowed to go everywhere, and besides, the country was too vast for anyone to visit the whole of it in a single lifetime.
He also managed to get as far as New Zealand, where he was able to hear the Maori tongue and to experience more than the average citizen of the free world, let alone of a country like Czechoslovakia where every foreign journey was a privilege, or at least an exception. His attitude to life’s problems and to people was particularly influenced by his experiences in those countries where neither modern civilization nor Communist dictatorship had managed to wipe out traditional relationships and rituals.
From his travels he would send back stories to the illustrated magazines. In them he would argue that when civilization reached as far as the little islands in the South China Sea, it broke down traditional values without offering anything new in their place. Oriental thinking had always stressed that man was part of nature and was distrustful of theories that sought to separate man from the natural cycle. Christianity and Islam were seen to be retrograde steps in that respect, particularly since what vanquished the local traditions were not the values of the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount or the Sura of the Nocturnal Path, but the false values of consumerism. While missionaries, whether Christian or Muslim, arguably brought a spiritual message (though often they would have done better to accept it themselves rather than force it on others), the traders who came with them, or even preceded them, offered more attractive commodities – strictly for this life not the hereafter: transistor radios, televisions, cars and medicines that cured people the witch doctors or traditional medicine couldn’t help. Admittedly all that was available only to a few, but the possibility was open to everyone. And the people paid for it with their countries’ natural wealth and the traditions by which they had lived for thousands of years. Superficially it looked as if prosperity had come to those parts, whereas in fact they had been overrun by poverty, both material and spiritual.
His articles were cut and sentences were added, changing the sense of his message. He wrote about civilization violating old cultures but the editors substituted ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialist interests’ for ‘civilization’.
His hospitalization and stomach operation (his doctor had told him he had stomach ulcers but he
suspected they were concealing the true diagnosis from him) had alarmed him. He had previously regarded death as part of life; dying was a force within us heading towards its goal. A person who died was simply someone who had returned. True life fulfilment could only be achieved by returning to the beginning. The living would never discover, Lao Tzu conjectured, what it was to be dead, and the dead would never know what it was to be alive. We had not known the thousands of generations who went before us, nor would we know those who came after. So what was the point of getting worked up about something we could not know?
So long as one has health and strength, it was possible to pride oneself on achieving discernment and peace of mind and self-knowledge. But when illness came, one realized one’s mistake and saw that one was still wedded to the physical self. Anyway, Matouš had never achieved the equanimity he sometimes wrote about in his poems. In reality, he fluctuated between a state in which he possibly came close to seeing what was concealed from others, and one of hectic activity. In the first of them, which would sometimes last several days, he would abandon himself to inactivity or write his short poems, then he would throw himself into activity – travelling, writing articles and dreaming more about physical than spiritual pleasures.
What was bad about death, whichever way he looked at it, was that it would extinguish his self, the very thing that mattered most to him. Death would thereby deprive him of the chance to discover what direction the world would take subsequently, what the future would bring.
The thought of returning home filled him with desolation. Where was he to find someone who would chat to him in the evening and have a hot meal ready for him so he wouldn’t have to traipse around pubs, or hold his hand when he was gripped by the fear that a malignant tumour was spreading in his stomach? There was nothing waiting for him at home that in the least resembled a living being, apart from the stuffed canary that his mother had left him.
The matron in the surgical ward where they had removed three-eighths of his stomach reminded him at least slightly of his mother on account of her kindness. On one occasion – it was when he had a particular attack of anxiety – she had appeared in the ward at his bedside and said to him: ‘Don’t be afraid, you’ll be as right as rain again in a few days.’ She had actually leant over and stroked his thinning hair. That touch remained fixed in his memory and it occurred to him that he would like to spend some time with such a woman occasionally, or at least converse with her.
7
Brother Kodet, who owned a real-estate company and was an elder of the church, shook Daniel vigorously by the hand. ‘Please accept once more my deepest sympathy, Reverend.’
‘Thank you for coming to pay your respects to my mother.’
‘It was the least I could do. After all she was known and loved by everyone here. And she didn’t have an easy life. I just regret she didn’t live to see what we managed to obtain,’ the real-estate agent said, coming to the point.
‘Mother didn’t want it. But you know that anyway.’
‘She would have been pleased all the same, if only on your account.’ He went to the filing cabinet and took out a file bearing the name of the street and the number of the house. He leafed through it for several moments and then began to discuss the situation and the offer. For a house that wasn’t in the best condition and, furthermore, was full of tenants paying fixed rents – not enough, in other words, to cover the most essential costs – a German company was willing to pay him five and a half million crowns. While it was true that the price of apartment houses would rise when rents were deregulated, that moment was still far off, so it might be better to assume that prices would fall slightly for some time. But even if they remained unchanged, the condition of the house would deteriorate because repairs would require a lot of money, which Daniel did not have, and a house in disrepair would naturally fall in value.
Daniel listened in silence and could not bring himself to believe that it was his property and his money that was being discussed. Throughout his adult life he had been used to having to decide whether he could afford a new pair of shoes or to have his old pair resoled for the third time. He wore darned socks and grew his own lettuces, tomatoes and even mangolds in the manse garden. From early spring he and Hana would pick nettles which made an excellent soup. A million crowns had always been beyond his imagination, just like a million light years.
‘So what do you say, Reverend?’
He had no yearning for property but it was true that his father had been attached to the house and the fact that he was a house-owner was one of the reasons why he had been regarded as a class enemy and fit for a show trial. He should hold on to the house on his father’s account, but what would he do with it? On the other hand, what would he do with the money? ‘And what about my sister, are you sure she has no right to it?’
‘Not from the legal point of view. She is now a foreign national and has permanent residence abroad. But should you wish to compensate her in some way, no one can stop you.’
‘Yes, of course.’ He wanted to add that he didn’t need it for himself, not even a fraction of that sum, but it struck him that it would be tactless to say it to this man, who was clearly proud of having found him a good buyer.
Should he agree, he could sign the purchase contract straight away. There were a few further formalities to attend to, but the firm’s representative had left a small deposit which the minister could take charge of.
So he received a wad of thousand-crown notes in an envelope; the deposit alone was the biggest sum he had ever held in his hand. He thanked Kodet and put the money away in his breast pocket, causing it to bulge somewhat. He could leave now, but feeling rather sheepish that his purpose in coming had been entirely unspiritual, he steered the conversation around to church matters and also talked for a while about the prisoners he visited, one or two of whom seemed to be making a genuine effort to understand what was said to them. Most of them, though, had grown up in surroundings where there was never any mention of God, or of anything else that transcended the most basic interests for that matter and they probably only came to hear him because he offered them a slight change from the tedium of their daily routine. But in what respect did the ones behind bars differ from those who guarded them, or from those who were free to go where they liked?
And then at last he rose and took his leave.
It was only a short walk to the tram stop but he was unable to pay attention to where he was going. Then he realized he had been tapping the outside of his coat to make sure the money was still in his pocket.
They sold flowers at the kiosk by the tram stop. Although he had never been in the habit of bringing his wife flowers, he now asked for three dark-red roses, and as the bunch looked rather paltry, he asked for two more.
In the window of the boutique, he saw the green sweater with white lilies. The price took him aback, but then he realized how ludicrously little it was compared to the sum he had been talking about a moment ago, and he entered the shop.
When Simon saw that the spirit was given at the laying on of the apostles’ hands, he offered them money and said, ‘Give me also this ability so that everyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit.’ Peter answered: ‘May your money perish with you because you thought you could buy the gift of God with money! You have no part or share in this ministry, because your heart is not right before God … ‘ (Acts 8: 18–21)
He not only had perfect pitch, he also had almost perfect recall: the text that he had read many times was etched into his memory.
When he was almost home, it occurred to him that presents and flowers were usually offered for a birthday or some other celebratory occasion. But unearned gains were no cause for celebration.
So he went back and took a tram. He then changed on to a bus which took him out to the cemetery. The trees between the graves were still bare; only a solitary sallow by the cemetery wall was covered in silvery catkins.
He reached the family grave. The freshly
turned earth was fragrant. The tombstone still bore only the names of his father and his first wife. The date of her death preceded even that of his father’s. It was a long time ago, almost eighteen years. In recent times, cancer had become a more frequent cause of death, of young children as well, but in those days it was regarded as an old person’s illness. He had found it almost impossible to believe when the doctor in the hospital told him his wife had an incurable disease. ‘But we’ve got a little baby,’ had been his totally illogical response at the time.
‘That might have caused the tumour to come more quickly,’ the doctor had replied, not understanding his comment on their fate, ‘but it would most likely have happened anyway.’
Old people die and however distressing it is, it is part of the order which God has established for human life. But another component of that order is that none of the living ever knows the hour of his death. It is only pride that makes us think we have the right to some preordained number of days.
A large jam-jar full of rainwater stood by the gravestone. His mother’s body was still lying there, but what remained of the body that he had embraced twelve years before? And where do your souls now dwell, my loved ones?
He ought to buy a decent vase. He placed the jar in front of the gravestone and arranged the roses in it in such a way that their heads rested against the marble. He then prayed for a long time in silence.