The Ultimate Intimacy

by Ivan Klíma

  The way I understood it, what led you to request help were various matters connected with ‘work’. None of us can avoid crises in our lives, nor moments when we are at a loss as to where to turn, when we question everything we do and the way we live. Dan, I’ve always been fond of you and respected you precisely because you never made any secret of your anxieties and misgivings, and yet you managed to live the way you have lived. I believe you’ll manage to cope with things the way you have coped with them in the past. And may the Lord help you in this.

  Yours, Martin

  Dear Bára,

  Don’t go away, don’t go away, don’t go away!

  Dan

  Chapter Eight

  1

  Spring is only just beginning. It is raining and a cold wind is blowing; and there are reports of snow in the mountains.

  An ex-minister and his daughter have been killed in an avalanche in the Tatras. The billboards display an advertisement of a crucified naked woman. A poll has shown that four-fifths of the country’s citizens want euthanasia, and skinheads have been demonstrating for the return of capital punishment. Is a new multi-storey hotel to be built on the embankment and transform the panorama of Old Prague?

  Daniel and Bára are sitting together in the bedsitter at Červený vrch and discussing events that are extraneous or at least have no direct bearing on themselves. Until very recently, their favourite topic of conversation was love, but now they each have their own worries and they try to mask them with talk. In a few days’ time it will be a year since Daniel’s mother died, a year since the day he first set eyes on the woman now sitting opposite him.

  They both try not to think about the bad things or about the difficulties that they face in the world outside this incubator they have created for their meetings.

  Daniel has brought Bára a bunch of roses and an art nouveau glass from which she is now sipping wine.

  ‘Why this goblet?’

  ‘Because you came to see me that time.’

  ‘I came on my own account.’

  ‘But you helped me.’

  ‘How?’

  Yes, how? ‘To think more about life and stop being miserable and brooding on death!’ he says.

  ‘I came because I was miserable and was brooding on death. I found you attractive –’ she then says, ‘– you preached about love and I felt you were searching for it like me.’

  He kisses her for those words but finds himself unable to rejoice in her love as he did only a few weeks ago. Too much has collapsed around them. To get closer to her he has to struggle through the ruins.

  Bára mentions that her friend Helena is getting a divorce.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Her engineer is a drunkard and she couldn’t stand being with him any more. And she has fallen in love.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘It’s immaterial,’ Bára says. ‘She simply wishes to be with the one she loves.’

  Her announcement contains an implicit reproach. ‘Everyone’s divorcing,’ Bára adds.

  ‘Do you think we should too?’

  ‘Maybe we should, but we won’t.’

  They quickly finish off the bottle of wine – they have little time. Then they make love. Making love at least distances them for a moment from the world in which they move for the remainder of the day, for the remaining days, and they may quietly speak words of love.

  Afterwards Bára bursts into tears.

  ‘What’s up, my love?’

  But Bára shakes her head. She doesn’t want to burden him with her concerns, she knows he has enough worries of his own.

  ‘I don’t have any worries when I’m with you.’

  ‘I’m happy too when I’m with you. These are my only moments of happiness.’

  ‘But you’re crying.’

  ‘I’m crying because I have so little time with you. Because I don’t know what to do now … Sweetheart, I’m so disheartened, so miserable and you won’t protect me, all you do is lure me to you, and then you turn me out into the cold wind.’

  Daniel says nothing. Then he asks if there has been any change at home.

  Bára tells him that Sam mostly says nothing. He takes tablets and that calms him slightly. It looks as if he might have got over his insane notion about the reincarnated murderess; Bára has locked the pistol in her own desk and he has not come looking for the weapon, even though he’s sure to have noticed its disappearance. He hasn’t apologized but behaves as if he could remember nothing of that mad scene when he wanted to shoot her. Perhaps he really can’t. But he constantly makes it plain that Bára is his misfortune. She disrupts the order of his life, creates commotion and neglects her duties.

  ‘He’s sick,’ Daniel says.

  ‘Don’t I know it. And he always will be.’

  ‘Shouldn’t he be in an institution?’

  ‘I’m hardly going to send my husband to a loony bin, am I? I’ve seen the inside of one myself and I know what it means. Death would be better than that.’

  ‘Do you want to leave him?’

  ‘Are you, a pastor, advising me to walk out on a sick man?’

  ‘I’m not giving you any advice. I simply asked what you intend to do.’

  ‘You ask me things instead of being with me and saving me. Tell me, why aren’t you with me?’

  Daniel remains silent. He knows that either he ought not to be lying at her side or he ought to be with her completely. He has gone too far in adopting her comforting, and seemingly comfortable, assertion that there is no such thing as either/or in life. In reality there are situations in which people simply find excuses because they can’t make up their minds and such indecision destroys both them and those around them. He has known that since the outset, but he accepted this offer of escape from responsibility because it let him put off the decision, because it allowed him to rejoice in his new love without having to draw the conclusions which he feared.

  ‘I know,’ Bára says as usual, ‘you can’t be with me when I’m with Sam. And I can’t abandon him because he’s mentally ill. And it’ll be like that till the end. Tell me, don’t you think it’s terrible that I’ll have to put up with this torture for the rest of my life? Do you think it can be endured?’

  Daniel says nothing.

  ‘I always thought I could put up with anything because I’m strong, but these days it sometimes occurs to me that it will drive me round the bend. Tell me, will God take into account the fact that I stayed with a tormenting husband solely to nurse him?’

  ‘No,’ he says.

  ‘Why?’ she asks in surprise.

  ‘God has other worries. And anyway you don’t stay with your husband.’

  Bára almost leaps up. ‘That’s rich coming from you! Why don’t you tell me like he does that I torment him and am driving him into his grave!’

  Daniel says nothing.

  ‘You’re like all the rest,’ Bára yells at him. ‘You teach and preach and prattle about love instead of doing something about it. For you, a woman is good for only one thing. Go away, go away, go away, I don’t want you any more.’ And she starts to sob.

  Daniel puts his arms around her and holds her head in his hands, kissing her and telling her he loves her.

  At that moment it strikes him that he has already overstepped the limit anyway. He has been treading a completely different path to those in his entire previous life. It’s simply a matter of acknowledging it and stopping pretending to himself and to his nearest and dearest. Who is the pretence intended for most of all, who does he lie to most of all? He is too attached to this woman, he has steered his course by her for almost a year now and there is no turning back. He says, ‘If you like, I’ll stay with you.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Exactly what I say.’

  ‘You’ll abandon your wife and children?’

  He says nothing, but doesn’t deny it.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ she says. ‘And what will I do with Sam? Am I supposed to kill him, or what
? I told you I can’t walk out on a sick man.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to.’ And he realizes that Bára will never leave her husband. She will stay with Samuel not because he is sick nor because she has a son by him, she’ll stay with him because in a strange way she is bound to him: because of her long years of devotion, because of her fear of him and for him, and because of an unquenchable longing to win back his favour and his love. None of that: will change, not even when she’s in the arms of Daniel. It wouldn’t even change if Samuel were to beat her or shoot at her.

  ‘My poor dear love,’ Bára says. ‘I know I’m awful. I don’t know what I want. No – I know I’d like to be with you, but I know it’s impossible. In the end I’ll ruin everyone’s lives, including yours. You were better off a year ago. You had no need to add my worries to your own.’

  ‘That year of my life has meant more to me than you can ever imagine,’ he says. ‘In spite of all the worries.’

  ‘So don’t forsake me yet. Bear with me for a little while longer.’

  She pulls him down into her abyss, into her dark pit, where the only light comes from her dark eyes. She hugs him, they hug each other and he promises her he’ll never leave her.

  Before they part they make a date for the following Monday as usual.

  Everything is as it was, except that he has the added burden of a promise.

  2

  Diary excerpts

  The house is full of workmen. They are knocking down partition walls, pulling up floors, replacing window frames, making conduits for new wiring. In one of the rooms I pulled up the floor myself and cut out a hole for the cables.

  ‘You don’t want to be doing that, Reverend,’ the foreman told me. ‘That’s our job and they’ll put it on your bill anyway.’

  I told him I was doing it for enjoyment’s sake not to save money.

  In fact I was doing it to take my mind off things and to tire out my body. It’s a relief just to have to think about keeping strictly to the plan when cutting a hole in a wall. And it’s easier to get to sleep at night when your body’s weary.

  I observe Hana who is full of vitality and looking forward to her new work. I realize that I love her. I’m capable of leaving her for a while, but I couldn’t abandon her. I think about the other woman and realize that I am capable of being without her most of the time, but I couldn’t abandon her either.

  The awareness of my duplicity is a constant torment to me, but what if it is simply the human lot? Maybe we have confined our nature with more commandments than we are able to fulfil and then we torment ourselves with feelings of guilt.

  I was surprised to find Eva singing a lot just lately and playing happy tunes on the piano, such as Janáek’s Nursery Rhymes. ‘I’m playing to him, of course,’ she told me, indicating her tummy that is already swelling slightly.

  We have the same conversation over and over again. She believes that as soon as Petr returns from prison he will begin a new life. Petr has promised her. He writes her long letters every week, she even reads out some sentences from them: a whole lot of beautiful phrases, promises and resolutions. Eva thinks Petr will feel responsibility for the child. After all, he suffered so much himself from not having a father and growing up without love.

  Perhaps. What is more likely is that he will take fright at the responsibility and flee from it, either literally or metaphorically. She oughtn’t to forget that drugs weren’t his only escape, he also made several attempts at suicide.

  She explains to me that he was unhappy. Nobody loved him.

  We end up with me trying to persuade her not to marry him, but to wait and see how he’ll behave after his release, when action will be needed, not words. Talking is easy, I told her, it’s living that is terribly difficult sometimes.

  But that goes for everyone, she objected.

  I said nothing. It goes for me too, of course.

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

  Alois announced to me that he would like to marry Marika. ‘What would you say to it, Reverend?’

  I told him it mainly depended on the two of them and I asked him whether they were having to get married. Alois assured me this was not the case, but that they loved each other.

  If you love each other and think you’re old enough, why not?

  He told me the main reason he was asking me was whether it mattered … for a moment he was lost for words, but then remembered what some of his mates from the building site had told him. He said they laughed at him for going with a gypsy girl and prophesied that they would have thieves for children.

  I convinced him that was nonsense. That cheered him up.

  Then I asked him about the date, and he replied: some time next month, but we haven’t agreed on an actual day yet.

  I almost envied him his easy-going, irreproachable love.

  Nietzsche in chapter 42 of Antichrist: ‘The type of the redeemer, the doctrine, the practice, the death, the meaning of the death, even the sequel to the death – nothing was left untouched, nothing was left bearing even the remotest resemblance to reality. Paul simply shifted the centre of gravity of that entire existence beyond this existence – in the lie of the “resurrected” Jesus. In fact he could make no use at all of the Redeemer’s life – he needed the death on the Cross …’ And in chapter 43: ‘If one shifts the centre of gravity of life out of life into the ‘Beyond’ – into nothingness – one has deprived life as such of its centre of gravity. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all rationality, all naturalness of instinct – all that is salutary, all that is life-furthering, all that holds a guarantee of the future of the instincts henceforth excites mistrust.’

  Every lie destroys one’s soul. If everything we believe in is a lie what happens to our soul then?

  My father would have said: The soul? No such thing. All we have is a brain – a higher nervous system. And the brain is the first thing to rot after death.

  Martin called me to ask if I’d heard about the death of Jaroslav Berger, the Secretary for Church Affairs in the district we were both exiled to for a time. I hadn’t heard about his death. From time to time he would call me in for a ticking-off. ‘Reverend Vedra, you are in breach of our laws. You’re welcome to preach the Bible, but don’t go addling people’s brains, and particularly not our youngsters’. Do you think we don’t know how many of them come to your meetings on the first Monday of the month?’ On occasions he was tipsy and once he was totally drunk. ‘Reverend,’ he said to me on that occasion, ‘you’re a fortunate man, you don’t have to be afraid of death. When you die you’ll go somewhere, to heaven or whatever. I, on the other hand, will die just like a dog.’ If I’d heard about his death in time, I would have gone to his funeral, in the same way he came to Jitka’s.

  Magda has reached a beautiful age. She still retains her girlish directness and likes to giggle and play childish tricks, but at the same time she is beginning to assert her individuality. She draws well and writes wittily, and apart from that she seems to have obvious acting talent. Sometimes I catch her standing in front of the mirror making faces.

  The other day I came into her bedroom and noticed a diary lying open on her bedside table.

  ‘You’re not to read it, Daddy!’

  ‘I’m not.’

  She consulted the diary herself. ‘Here’s a bit you can read. There’s nothing in it.’

  On one page there was quite a good caricature of one of her teachers, on the other, a text of some kind.

  The writing was childishly uneven and didn’t manage to stay on the line. Maybe her longsightedness has something to do with it.

  I’ve just hoovered the front hall and the washing-up, Mum tidied the living room. The Partridge is completely loopy, today she wrote in Zuzana’s record book: You daughter was lacqering her nails and was determined to continue with this activity even in my presence. Then I did an imitation of her and mad
e the class laugh. What makes me laugh are words like maggot or worm …

  I said: ‘How many is a maggot to the fifth minus a worm to the two and a halfth?’

  And she burst into merry laughter and for a moment I was happy too. Irreproachably happy, I’d even say.

  An extremely odd thing happened to me. I was sitting in my office writing something. Suddenly there was a loud bang on the window and I just managed to catch sight of a bird’s body dropping to the ground beyond the window pane.

  I ran out in front of the house and saw a blackbird lying paralysed, as I thought, in the grass. I leaned over to pick it up and see what had happened to it, but to my surprise it revived and with some difficulty flew across the lawn and hid behind the blackcurrant bush.

  The following day, almost at the same hour, there came the same bang, even louder than on the previous day.

  This time it wasn’t a blackbird I found in the grass, but a white dove. When I picked it up, it turned out to be dead. I’ve always tried not to fall prey to superstitions, but what explanation can there be for two birds of different kinds colliding with the same pane of glass on two subsequent days, when no bird had even brushed against it before that?

  Various myths and fables featuring birds, and specifically doves, came to mind. Birds have always symbolized messengers between the cosmos and mankind and the souls of saints assumed the form of a white dove. And indeed wasn’t the Holy Ghost portrayed as a white dove? What sort of sign was this and where precisely did it come to me from?

  The damaged blackbird that flew lurchingly away and hid itself in the bushes, that’s me, while the white dove that will never fly away again, that could be my soul.

  A dream: I found myself before some tribunal made up entirely of Catholic dignitaries. Lots of cardinals and bishops. I was to defend myself against the charge of heresy, that I had propagated Archimedes’ Principle and violated the vow of celibacy, and actually ravished women. The entire indictment was brought by one of the cardinals, a small, fat and choleric old man, who demanded that the church excommunicate me and hand me over to secular justice. I answered the charge by stating that I was not a Catholic priest and therefore could not violate the celibacy vow, but the only response to that was surly laughter.