by Ivan Klíma
‘So you don’t intend to operate on him?’
‘We can’t afford to, Reverend. The fellow who hired him as slavelabour should be locked up. But in this country they spend time badgering doctors to keep their costs down while villains like him do what they like. OK, let him pay the air fare, at least. In a couple of days he could be in a hospital in Kiev.’
‘And can the operation be put off?’
‘That’s not the point; we’ve pinned his leg for the time being. It’s more a question of what they’ll do to him there. Have you any idea what medical care is like over there? Do you think they care whether or not he’ll be a cripple for the rest of his days? They’ll straighten it up a bit and slap it in plaster. And even then he’ll be lucky.’
‘And here you would operate on him so he could walk normally afterwards?’
‘We’d do the maximum.’
‘And what if someone were to pay for the operation?’
‘I doubt that anyone would.’
‘What if I were to pay for it, for instance?’
The doctor stared at him in amazement. ‘Why would you do that for someone you don’t even know?’
‘You also help people you don’t know.’
‘But that’s my job, Reverend. All right, I know what you’re going to say: it’s your job too. But just let me tell you something. Not long ago we had a fellow in here, about your age, with gangrene in his leg. Abroad they have a drug to treat it that we don’t have yet. It’s expensive. About three thousand marks a shot. And you have to have a repeat dose every year. Here there are only two options. Amputation or death. That fellow didn’t want to believe it and begged me to save his leg. So I told him about that drug and that he’d have to obtain it himself, and fast. He agreed. Then I told him the price and he burst into tears. He could never find that much.’
‘So you amputated the leg?’
‘There was no other way; he’d have died before he’d managed to get that amount of money together. The only reason I’m telling you this, Reverend, is so you understand that trying to play the good Samaritan in our business would break a Rothschild.’
The doctor was right, of course. It would take no more than a couple of minutes to give away all the money he had received out of the blue. It was enough to take a look round. People were suffering all over the world, all around them. All the same he said: ‘I believe the right thing to do is for you to operate on him here, if you’ll agree.’
‘We always prefer to fix people up rather than kick them out somewhere else.’ He added, ‘I can’t take it from you. Some of it maybe. We’ll have to find the rest from somewhere.’
‘We’ll agree on the details later, but I wouldn’t like anyone to know about it. Not even the lad concerned.’
The doctor shrugged. ‘That will be no problem. No one would believe it anyway.’
6
Samuel
The architect Samuel Musil regarded himself as a capable and decent man, a good husband and even a good father to the children of his three marriages – or the last two, at least. The majority of people in his field had no doubts about his qualities as a professional, even though a number of his opponents branded his most famous and prestigious projects as crimes perpetrated on the capital. Lately, people had been blaming him for the skilful way he had operated under the old regime, but few had said so to his face and he was convinced that he had behaved no worse than most people would have done in his position and that he had never produced anything that was in any way at odds with his ‘professional or human conscience’ – or so he had claimed in a newspaper interview.
He had spent most of his life under the Communist regime. He used to start the biographical appendix to his personnel form with the sentence: ‘I was born into the family of a poor peasant factory worker towards the end of the great economic crisis; after the war I joined the Union of Czech Youth and always sympathized with the policy of the Communist Party.’ Admittedly, that sentence, covering the first eighteen years of his life, was not untrue, but in an interview with a newspaper on the occasion of his fifty-fifth birthday he did not repeat a single detail of it, but instead he recalled his years as a boy scout and the fact that his family never joined a co-operative and that his uncle was wounded in the battles on the Western Front. Fortunately, when he was setting up a practice after the fall of the old regime, nobody investigated either his origins or his convictions. All that was required was money, and it really didn’t matter where it came from.
Samuel had no brothers or sisters. His mother had a tendency to depression and excessive mistrust, and even one child was an inordinate burden for her. There were days when she refused to speak to him, let alone caress or cuddle him. His father spent little time at home. He used to spend a lot of time at work and found little to entice him home; even in his looks, his son resembled too closely the wife who had embittered his life.
Samuel’s schools had been terrible; he started primary school under the Protectorate and attended grammar school during the Stalinist years.
He graduated from university several years after Stalin’s death, but even at that time the Kreshchatik in Kiev or the Lomonosov University in the Lenin Hills in Moscow were still regarded as notable achievements of progressive architecture. When he looked at them, however, the only thing that struck him was their bumptious ugliness. He wrote his thesis on the pre-war Soviet avant-garde. He emphasized the principles of the post-revolutionary Association of New Architects who had called for large unadorned surfaces and the construction of abstract geometric forms. These requirements, he maintained, had been the inspiration for Le Corbusier’s purism.
He was also taken by the notion that whereas for the baroque the essential stylistic feature was the circle, in the case of revolutionary architecture it ought to be the spiral, as a form moving upwards to the Communist future of mankind. In his view, the avant-gardists had created a genuine revolutionary art which could be looked to for inspiration.
At first–like others of his generation – he had sincerely believed in progress and socialism. He had taken part in two youth building projects, and unlike most of the other participants he had managed to draw some benefit from them in career terms: not only was he able to try his hand at most building work but he also became familiar with architectural practice and soon realized the yawning gulf that existed in his profession between the reality on the ground and what was officially proclaimed.
At the second youth project he made the acquaintance of Katarína. She was a medical student from Slovakia. He managed to get her pregnant so soon that they were married four months after their return from the project. They never set up home together. For three years they barely saw each other twice a month except during the holidays, part of which they were able to spend together. When he got his first job with a design office he was assigned a flat and hoped that his wife would finally join him. She refused, having found another man in the meantime.
His second wife was called Kateřina and worked as a draughtsman. They were ill-matched socially. His wife was aware of it and tried to show her gratitude by her almost maternal care of him and unreserved recognition of his male supremacy. This suited him well and led him to regard his second marriage as successful.
As he grew older his tendency towards pedantry became more pronounced. He demanded order – from his employees at work and from his wife and daughter at home. Order in his terms meant punctuality and strict observance of all his instructions. He could not abide carelessly sketched plans, or to find a towel hung up sloppily in the bathroom in the morning – even a speck of cigarette ash on the table would spoil his mood for the remainder of the day. The sorts of things that ran counter to his idea of order were unplanned events, daydreaming, unexpected guests, dawdling and actions with unconsidered or even dangerous consequences.
Preserving this order enabled him to become an excellent organizer. He could be relied on totally and because of this quality the directors of the design firm
s where he worked overlooked the fact that from time to time he would act with too much independence, and that he would always refuse jobs that he felt were beneath him.
Unlike many of his colleagues, who soon realized that nothing was required of an architect other than to build cheaply and not be inspired by anything that might come from the decadent West, he did not sit back but got hold of foreign journals and although he could not put any of the things he read into practice, at least he retained an awareness of what was being built around the world. As soon as the political thaw set in in the sixties, he managed to push through a number of interesting designs for exhibition pavilions.
When he met Bára, his first daughter had just married and the daughter from his second marriage was sixteen. By that time he had achieved recognition as a prominent architect who would be commissioned to design arts centres, Communist Party secretariats, experimental schools, and luxury holiday centres, or for the reconstruction of important historical buildings, rather than housing estates. At the age of only forty-three, he had already received a number of awards and even a state prize.
Although working within the regime, he never identified with it in spirit. Disillusioned with a government that had fulfilled so little of what it had once promised, he would read with unconcealed satisfaction articles in the foreign press unmasking its deceit and above all criticizing the government’s uncreative and mostly hideous architecture. He skilfully contrived to avoid taking any post of political responsibility – not only because he was not sure how long the regime would survive, but also because he was afraid it might take him away from his work.
He was rich but lived abstemiously, not smoking and only taking the occasional drink, always remaining sober, since to get drunk would affect his competence at work the next day. He played tennis, and in the summer he would take a seaside holiday with his wife and daughter – in earlier years with both his daughters. Though of smallish build, he gave the impression of being bulky and even at the age of forty his hair had not started to go grey. His eyes were his most interesting feature: deep-set beneath thick eyebrows, and with golden-brown foxy irises. He had the ability to gaze at an interlocutor fixedly, so that he seemed to be listening intently, even when his mind was elsewhere. As a result, women who found him attractive, or who wanted to appeal to him, could be given the impression that he found them so captivating that he couldn’t take his eyes off them, that his look actually betrayed his feelings for them. In reality nothing of the sort occurred to him.
Whereas he felt himself to be at the peak of his powers, his wife had aged prematurely. She had never shone intellectually, but as time went by she started to lose interest in anything that interested him or the society in which he moved. Whenever she spoke he felt ashamed of her. He preferred not to take her to social occasions where the majority of his colleagues and contemporaries had much younger and more interesting wives. And she genuinely made no objection.
But it was not he who first made a play for Bára. Bÿra herself was aroused by the thrill of the chase when she first chanced to meet him at the Architects’ Club. And as she was interesting, beautiful and young, as well as game for anything, Samuel yielded. He exchanged a wife-mother for a wife-daughter in a move that was so radical it must have been the only significant change in his life that he never managed to come to terms with.
7
Daniel bought Hana a gold bracelet for her fiftieth birthday.
‘But there’s no way I can wear it,’ she said when she opened its case.
‘Why not?’
‘So much gold. It doesn’t suit me and I don’t have any occasion to wear it.’
‘You can wear it this evening. You know I’ve booked a table at the Chinese restaurant.’
‘So you said, but it wasn’t necessary. We could have had a lovely dinner at home.’
‘We have dinner at home every evening.’
‘Precisely, and restaurants are so expensive now.’
Hana refused to take their new-found wealth into account. He liked that about her, but at the same time he found her reluctance to accept change irritating.
‘I’m looking forward to the restaurant,’ Marek piped up.
‘I don’t want to go anywhere,’ Magda grumbled. ‘I’ve got to study. We’ve got a maths test tomorrow.’
‘You’re stupid. They give you fortune cookies after the meal.’
‘Marek, fortune cookies are superstitious and stupid,’ he rebuked his son.
‘And now on top of everything else we’re doing algorithms. If somebody doesn’t explain them to me I won’t be able to calculate a single row.’
‘Algorithms? What are they?’ Daniel asked, expressing interest.
‘That’s just what I’d like to know.’
‘An algorithm is a procedure for solving specific problems by carrying out a precisely determined sequence of steps,’ Marek quoted the definition. ‘It’s what computer programs are all based on,’ he added.
‘And you’ve got a computer in your office, Dad.’
‘Indeed I do have a computer, but I haven’t the foggiest idea what goes on inside it.’
‘That’s your loss.’
In the meantime Magda had rummaged out her textbook. ‘That’s what I have to calculate: make an algorithm to determine the numerical sum of the given natural number a. In determining each of the numerals you may use only arithmetical operations and whole-number division to determine the share and remainder.’
‘I don’t understand that at all.’
‘You see, Daddy. Not even you understand it.’
‘I don’t have to, I don’t go to school any more. It’s curious that Eva never needed anyone to explain things to her. Not even now that she’s about to take her final exams.’
‘Because Eva’s clever. Because Eva’s always the best. Because her mother was …’
‘Magda!’ he snapped at her.
‘I’ll work through it with her,’ Marek suggested. ‘Even someone so utterly thick is bound to grasp it in half an hour.’
Hana had got changed in the meantime. She had put on the black dress she had last worn at his mother’s funeral. It was plain and very old. She wore no make-up. She never did wear make-up, not even lipstick. Her shoes were carefully polished, that was true, but there was no hiding the fact that they pre-dated the Velvet Revolution. It struck him that gold genuinely didn’t suit what his wife was wearing, maybe it didn’t suit her at all. He’d wanted to please her, but had only disconcerted her.
‘Isn’t that dress a bit funereal?’ he wondered.
‘Everyone wears black nowadays,’ she said. ‘Even very young girls go around in black. Haven’t you noticed?’
‘No, I expect I don’t look at the girls enough.’
He was left alone in the room. He realized that he did not feel at all pleased with himself. He had neglected his children, he didn’t know what algorithms were and Magda had the feeling that he favoured Eva. He gave his wife jewellery instead of giving her love. And even his attempt to restore the health of some unknown Russian displeased him. It struck him that the action had not come from the heart, that there had been something ostentatious about it: a gesture intended to convince an unknown doctor about Christian love, or more likely it had been a gesture intended for himself, to prove how he disdained money and how easily he could part with it.
Was it possible for one to uphold order in a world that was so disordered?
The telephone rang. He picked up the receiver reluctantly.
‘Good afternoon, Reverend, this is Bára.’ The woman’s voice was slightly harsher on the phone than in real life. ‘I’m not sure whether you’ll remember me.’
‘My memory’s not that bad, even at my age.’
‘Age is an awful thing. It horrifies me when I realize which year I was born in and I’m pleased when everyone immediately forgets it. I hope you’re not offended that I didn’t come last Sunday.’
‘Church attendance is not compulsory
for anyone. Besides, as you said, you are not of our faith.’
‘Did I put it as stupidly as that? I apologize. At this time of year my husband is raring to go down to our country house. I don’t know when I’ll next manage to escape on a Sunday.’
‘Is there no local church near your country place?’
‘I’ve no idea. I’ve never enquired.’ Then she said, ‘There are plenty of churches everywhere, but it’s your sermons that interest me.’
‘Thank you. I’m pleased that you got something out of my sermons.’
‘Sundays are not going to be easy from now on,’ she said. ‘But what I actually called you for was to let you know that I have a small role in a television play tonight. It’s being shown on Channel One at ten past eight. But maybe you don’t watch television.’
‘Not usually, but I would certainly watch you. But I won’t be home this evening.’
‘Please don’t be offended – I don’t know what came over me. I just had the feeling I was somehow indebted to you.’
‘I’m sure you aren’t. On the contrary, I’m the one indebted to you – for that lift. I regret we won’t be able to watch it, but we’re having a birthday celebration today.’
‘It’s your birthday today?’
‘No, my wife’s.’
‘So, do please wish her from me lots of love in her life. I expect it’s just as well you won’t be watching – it might have put you off me. You see, it’s not a particularly attractive little role. Anyway, I’m sorry for taking up your time.’
‘You haven’t. And I look forward to your finding a moment to come and join us some Sunday.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’ll do my best, I truly will!’
8
Letters
Dear Reverend Vedra,
Everyone is asleep here at home, except that you don’t know where my home is (where else but Hanspaulka?). I can’t get to sleep, I’m down in the dumps. It could be the rotten weather or the fact that Samuel told me that I ruin his life, even though I do everything I can to make him feel contented at home. Samuel is my husband, in case you’d forgotten.