by Ivan Klíma
I’ve decided to write to you because you strike me as wise and kind, and I have the impression that you’re someone who is capable of listening sympathetically not because it is in your job description but because you really are someone fired by the love that you preach about so fervently in your sermons. Of course it’s possible just to talk about love and most people are capable of jabbering on about it ad nauseam. But one can feel that you mean it, which is why I looked forward to hearing you every Sunday. Now I miss your words and your voice. There are so many things I’d like to ask you about. Such as what one must do to live in love and freedom, when one is surrounded on every side by something else entirely: the pursuit of money, self-advancement and an awful lot of violence or at least selfishness, as well as male conceit and vanity, and men’s craving to assert their own ego at the expense of their closest companions?
Now I’m astonished at my own effrontery, not only in writing to you but in burdening you with these questions, as a result of which I’m actually taking up your time. As if I couldn’t make do with hearing you in church.
But if you could spare me a couple of lines I’d be eternally grateful.
Best wishes,
Yours admiringly,
Bára Musilová
Dear Mr Houdek,
Regarding our recent conversation about that young lad Petr Koubek, who has just been released from prison where he was baptized and who, I firmly believe, underwent a profound change of heart. You were so kind as to mention that he might be able to work in your splendid garden centre. He will therefore be coming to see you about a job next Monday. Working outdoors will do him good, after spending almost two years cooped up in prison. I am sure he’ll show willingness, but I would entreat you none the less to be patient with him, in the beginning at least. When someone is in prison for such a lengthy period, his personality is bound to be affected, his reactions are often unpredictable and above all unreasonable. It is sometimes hard to take, but it is understandable when we consider the sort of surroundings he has moved in and the sort of people he could not help mixing with.
I do hope that Petr won’t create any difficulties for you, but should any arise, don’t hesitate to call me and I will try to intervene.
Please convey my best wishes to your wife and accept once again my thanks for your singular readiness to assist someone in need.
Yours sincerely, Daniel Vedra
Dear Mrs Musilová,
I do not merit the praise you heap on me. When I speak about love I do no more than pass on the most important thing about Christ’s message.
The aim of what we do is to find real love. This was said most beautifully by St Paul: ‘Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. These three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.’
What is one to do, you ask, in order to live in love and freedom, when there is so little of it around one? Do not expect me to speak as one possessed of understanding or capable of handing out prescriptions for how to live.
A life of love is, I suppose, the desire of anyone whose heart is in the right place. What was so terrible about the old regime was that hatred and struggle were regarded as so fundamental to life. To many this seemed to make sense because at first glance a life of love seems virtually unattainable. It is enough to turn on the television or read the newspaper headlines: terrorism, robbery, fraud, and all those killed in Bosnia or the Caucasus. And that is leaving aside our everyday life. Could we really hurt each other and quarrel the way we do every day if we lived in love? Could we hate people just because they have a different faith, or look different?
Our desires and expectations are often disappointed, however. Instead of striving once again to find love and put it into practice we invent all sorts of alternative goals. We build careers for ourselves and compete with each other, or on the contrary we waste time and fail to fill it with something that reaches out beyond ourselves. We often look for someone to blame for our dissatisfaction with our lives, not looking inside ourselves, but outside ourselves. We fetter our hearts with many injunctions, taboos and prejudices. Often they are so choked with these things that when an opportunity arises to fulfil something we’ve yearned for, we don’t even notice it. So we just live, become cold, and replace love with apathy or even rancour.
You write about a world that is full of selfishness, money-grubbing, violence and male arrogance. That’s what the world looks like to me sometimes. I’ve noticed that when people start a conversation with me it is in order to express some bitterness, not to say something kind. If I offer to carry a woman’s shopping bag she becomes alarmed. She thinks that I want to rob her not lend a hand. But these are only superficial observations. Sometimes we can become outraged with those who are actually suffering.
I have no illusions about how difficult it is to live in today’s world. Life has never been easy for those who expect it to fulfil their desires. Therefore every morning I try to reflect on what is really important for my life. If it continues to be a life of love then I will have to act and behave accordingly. It is not easy to enter the hearts of others. But wanting to love and to live in love means trying to do precisely that. Whether or not we try is solely a matter of our own determination, and this is precisely where our inalienable freedom lies: our inner freedom to determine our own actions.
I see I’ve gone on a bit – it’s a preacher’s failing, and yet I doubt whether I’ve said anything you didn’t know already. I ought to add that real love should reach out somewhere. To Jesus, as I believe. That splendid theologian Karl Barth once wrote that ’human life has no meaning without belief in transcendental truth, justice and love which mankind is incapable of creating alone...’
My wish is that you will manage to live the way you would wish.
With best regards, Daniel Vedra
Dear Reverend Vedra,
You can’t know how pleased I was to receive your letter and how much it helped me. For me, love has always been the most important thing in my life even though I have seldom received much of it from others. No, that’s unjust. My mother has always been marvellous and maybe the others would have treated me better if I hadn’t messed things up myself.
I married my husband, who is successful and highly respected, out of love. I so earnestly wanted that love to last for ever, and still do, and want to remain true to this wish, true to my husband. And yet I watch with horror as that love fades and is replaced by recriminations, quarrels or cold silence. All that remains is a fixed routine: breakfast, shopping, cooking, housework and visiting people together, or even receptions with feigned smiles and bonhomie. I have two sons. Because of my own irresponsibility I deprived Sasa of a father when he was very small. And I now know I must not deprive my little Ales of his father.
Sometimes I wake up at night with a feeling of anxiety that I have difficulty in describing to you. It is a sense of wasting my life, my only life, my days, each of which is unrepeatable. Yet I spend them emptily, engaged in some duty or other which I mostly don’t recognize as such, in a life without love and without devotion, even though I have long conversations about them at home with my husband.
There are times when I’d just like to take myself off somewhere or cuddle up to my husband and beg him to be with me, be mine, do something, save me. But he is asleep and if I did wake him he would tick me off for bothering him. I only interest him as a component. A component of the home where he takes refuge, where he needs me to look after and listen to him, as well as tidy and cook for him. But am I directing my request to the right person at this moment? You are happy because you have prayer and someone who listens to you, or at least so you believe. That’s a comfort. That is hope.
There is also hope in what you wrote to me and the advice you gave, although I get the feeling that to live according to your advice one definitely needs enormous strength, patience and perseverance.
You have been so kind to me that I take the liberty to ask whether I might be able to come and talk to you about these things some time – whether I’m allowed to if I’m not a member of your church. I know that time is the most precious commodity that we have and were you to spare me a few minutes I would be eternally grateful.
Yours, Bÿra M.
Penned just before midnight on Wednesday in our fair, royal city which neither the Communists nor my husband have managed to disfigure.
Vedra, you gypsy mouthpiece,
I watched your antics on television and it made me want to throw up. You literally called on us to be kind to ‘poor’ criminals and even gypsies! But do you share a house with them? I do. No sooner do you meet them than they’re reaching for their knives. They get drunk and yell beneath your window. If it wasn’t for the skinheads they’d have cut the throats of the lot of us. They will one day, anyway, when they outnumber us, and that won’t be long. The only reason they haven’t done it so far is because someone has to feed and clothe them. Have you already forgotten what you Christians have on your consciences? How many people did you burn at the stake just for saying the world was round, for instance? And what about when you used to bless weapons? Take your bloody love and stick it up your arse and don’t come spreading it on the television where nobody could give a damn about you.
A viewer from Ustí
Dear Rút,
You know how terrible I am about writing letters. You’re so far away that it seems inappropriate to let you know all the little details of our lives. And that leaves only the major events. One important event that affects both of us I’ve been keeping from you. Some time ago – it must be about two years already – a magazine here published a list of secret police informers. The list was obtained illegally and published without any official authentication. It contained over a hundred thousand names of people living and dead, some who signed to advance their careers and others who were forced to in prison. I found our father’s name on the list: his real name, his code name and his date of birth. That’s all. I have no other information and only the people on the list have the right to have it checked. If they died in the meantime, it can’t be helped. You can imagine my feelings when I discovered Dad’s name on the list. I wanted to spare you them. Besides, I’ve heard all sorts of conflicting reports about the matter over the past two years that I really don’t know what to think. There is talk about people who found themselves mistakenly on the list because they happened to sign a bit of paper which they didn’t think important and subsequently did nothing dishonourable. Now it seems to me that we ought to try to clear Dad’s name if he was innocent, and knowing him and remembering him as I do, I just can’t bring myself to believe he was capable of harming anyone in order to gain some advantage for himself or to spare himself some hardship. It struck me that you, as the older one, might know a bit more about him in those years when he returned from prison, that you might have noticed something that I was oblivious to, or even have heard something from him that he didn’t feel he could tell me. This is the reason why I’m writing to you about it so belatedly.
I’m thinking of you. It’s a pity we had to meet in the shadow of death and there was no opportunity for us really to spend some time together.
Love, Dan
Dear Mrs Bára Musilová,
Thank you for your frank letter. I welcome anyone who feels a need to talk to me about ‘such things’. I enclose a card with the times you can catch me in my office – it is situated in the same building as the chapel.
And please don’t speak in advance about gratitude before knowing what you’ll receive.
Yours sincerely,
Daniel Vedra
Dear Reverend,
I thought I’d make it to church, but you know what we pagans are like – in the end we would rather do something else than help our souls. So I’m writing to you instead. I expect you can guess it is to do with that young man Petr Koubek that I hired on your recommendation and gave the job of driving the garden tractor. I’ve no complaints about the young man, it’s just that he worries me a bit. To put it in a nutshell, he tries to do the job properly but his heart isn’t in it. He has other ambitions. I suppose you might call them spiritual, but they seem to me inappropriate. As you know, he’s a good-looking young fellow with an interesting face and a murky past. I mostly employ women, some of whom are still very young. Don’t get the idea that he is tempting them to do anything wrong, anyway it would be quite normal if he happened to fancy some of them. No, he preaches to them, while they’re hard at work and you can imagine that we have more than enough to do in the gardens at this time of year. He turns off the motor and, job or no job, he starts to tell them all about the life of the Holy Spirit in love and fellowship, saying that all people should be transformed. He feels that he is called on to start that transformation. The girls listen to him transfixed, and he enjoys that. But in the meantime the borders are overgrown with weeds and the carnations go unwatered. Maybe it would be a good idea for you to have a word with him, Reverend, and explain to him that he’s in the garden to work and not to preach to the girls about the Holy Spirit.
Wishing you all the best,
Yours truly, Břetislav Houdek
Chapter Three
1
Brother Soukup has been sitting in his office for almost an hour and the conversation is getting nowhere. ‘You condemn me, Reverend!’
‘I never condemn anyone.’
‘I know. But you think I’m behaving badly.’
‘Irresponsibly perhaps.’
‘Towards the children, you mean?’
‘Towards everyone.’
‘But you know I’m not an irresponsible person.’ He has recently been elected chairman of the board of a printing company and he sets rather too much store by it. He wears only white shirts these days and even on this hot June day he has come dressed in a jacket and tie.
‘It’s possible to act responsibly at work and less so towards one’s nearest and dearest.’
‘If you only knew the sleepless nights I’ve had over it, Reverend Brother. You wouldn’t believe how much soul-searching I’ve gone through before reaching this decision.’
‘I believe you.’
‘Máša was my first woman. I knew nothing about life.’
‘At that time maybe, but now you’re the father of four children.’
‘But what am I supposed to do, Reverend Brother, now I don’t love her any more?’
‘It’s up to oneself whom one does or doesn’t love.’
‘No, I can’t any more. I simply can’t stand her. When I see her looking shattered every morning, with tears in her eyes, it spoils my whole day.’
‘But she’s shattered because of you.’
‘She’s shattered on her own account. She’s not built for today’s world. Or any world, for that matter. She’s like an old rag, if you’ll excuse me, Reverend, for using the expression about the mother of my children.’
‘Maybe you didn’t give her enough support.’
‘That’s not true. I gave her everything she ever asked for.’
‘Love too?’
‘Love, too, while I could.’
‘Don’t you feel even a tiny bit of sympathy?’
‘I did – while I could. But all I feel now is anger. That she’s standing in the way of my life.’
‘Those are very wicked words.’
‘You’re driving me to say them, Reverend. Because I feel you privately condemn me.’
‘I never condemn anyone. And what about the children?’
‘The children go around crying. And they’re fearful of what’s going to happen. The youngest one, the little mite, is always begging us not to quarrel! Do you think that’s any sort of home for them? They’ll be better off when I’ve taken them with me.’
‘Without their mother?’
‘She wasn’t a good mother. Someone like her can’t be good at anything.’
&nbs
p; The phone rings. ‘Excuse me,’ he says to Soukup.
‘This is Bára. Bára Musilová. Do you still remember me?’
‘Of course.’
‘You wrote that I could come and see you on Mondays or Wednesdays.’
It occurs to him that the woman is raising her voice needlessly; even the person sitting opposite him must hear every word. ‘Of course,’ he says, in as official a manner as possible.
‘So that means today too?’
‘How soon?’ He glances at his watch.
‘As long as it takes me to get from here to you.’
‘All right, you’d better come then.’ He hangs up before she has a chance to reply.
‘I’ll be going, Reverend. You won’t understand me whatever I say.’
‘Understanding is not the same as approving.’
‘You condemn me.’
‘I never condemn anyone,’ he repeats wearily.
‘I’m a home-breaker in your eyes. I’ve broken several commandments in one go.’
‘We all break the commandments from time to time, but you can’t expect me to be thrilled about it.’
‘There are commandments that are worse to break.’
‘It is not up to us to judge.’
‘Yes, I know. But there are people capable of killing someone who gets in their way. Surely it is better to separate peacefully.’
‘Certainly. And the best thing of all is to live in peace’.
‘I can’t any longer’.
‘All right. Act according to your conscience. But be aware of one thing: this action is capable of turning against you one day.’
The man opposite thanks him and gets up from the armchair. He is pale and his thin lips are pursed so tightly that they are almost invisible.