The woman in the office told me to go to the locker room: I was to wait there. So I set out across the court to a door which bore the notice LOCKERS. The office was grey and dismal, and so was the courtyard, with a pile of broken bricks and rubble in one corner, several two-wheeled handcarts, a lot of dustbins, and not a touch of greenery anywhere. The locker room seemed to me even more depressing. I sat down on a seat by the window which looked out on that dismal yard, clutching a small leather case which contained three small sweet buns, a book, and a notebook in which I was in the habit of jotting down anything that occurred to me in connection with what I was writing. Currently I was finishing an essay on Kafka.
There were two other men sitting in the locker room already. One, tall and greying, reminded me of the specialist who many years before had removed my tonsils; the other, a short, stocky man of uncertain age in very dishevelled and dirty trousers scarcely reaching halfway down his calves and with enormous sewn-on pockets rather like misshapen pistol holsters, wore on his head a sea-captain’s cap with a peak and a gleaming golden anchor above it. From beneath the peak a pair of eyes the colour of shallow coastal waters were watching me curiously. Those eyes, or rather their glance, seemed somehow familiar. He obviously realised that I was new here and advised me to put my identity card on the table. I did as he said, and as he placed his next to mine I noticed that he did not have a right hand; a black hook protruded from his sleeve.
By now my new workmates were beginning to arrive – the sweepers. A squat young idiot with a nervous facial tic sat down next to me, took out a pair of dirty shaft-boots from a locker, and turned them upside down. From one of them there ran out a quantity of liquid which might just have, but most probably did not, come from a tap. He immediately began to scream at us all in a language of which I was unable to make out a single word.
I am not sure myself what made me decide to try this unattractive occupation. Most probably I thought that I would gain from it an unexpected view of the world. Every so often you feel that unless you look at the world and at people from a new angle your mind will get blunted.
As I was waiting for what would happen next there suddenly came to my mind the scene, fifteen years ago, when I was about to return home from my stay in America and the dean there gave a dinner in my honour. The dean was a mathematician, and wealthy. He owned a stableful of horses and a house in the style of a hunting lodge. I had only met him once before and I didn’t really want to go to the dinner: a crowd of strangers tends to depress me. But then, how could I have known anyone properly when I had been teaching at the university for a mere six months? In the event they all turned out to be pleasant to me and full of smiles as Americans are, and with varying degrees of urgency they asked me to explain what on earth possessed me to want to leave their free and wealthy country to return home, to a poor and unfree country, where they’d probably lock me up or send me to Siberia. I tried to be equally pleasant. I conjured up some kind of patriotism, some kind of mission, until I hit on a convincing explanation. I said that back home people knew me. Even if I had to sweep up garbage in the streets I would be for them what I was, what I wanted to be to the exclusion of anything else, a writer, whereas here, even if I could drive around in my little Ford, I would always be just one of those immigrants on whom a great country had taken pity. These were my boastful words. In reality I wanted to return home, to the place where there were people I was fond of, where I was able to speak fluently, to listen to my native language.
Now I knew that if I was a street-sweeper I would, for the majority of the people, be simply a person who swept the streets, a person hardly noticed.
At that moment a woman appeared in the cloakroom. She had a good figure, with slim hips in tight-fitting jeans. Her face was suntanned and wrinkled like that of the old Indian women I had seen in the market of Santa Fe. One of them, the oldest and most Indian-looking, had, to my great delight, a notice above her stall, revealing that her Christian name was Venus. This Mrs Venus here did not even sit down; from her handbag she produced a packet of Start cigarettes, and as she lit up I noticed that her hands were shaking. The match went out before the cigarette was alight, and Venus swore at it. Her voice was so drink-sodden, deep and hoarse, and her intonation so perfectly matched her appearance, that the leading ladies of the foremost theatres, who often have to play common women, could have taken lessons from her.
Then came a few nondescript elderly men. In the background a short plump man with shrewd features began to change into his working clothes. Like the little idiot next to me he had his own locker. From it he pulled out some khaki overalls.
On the dot of six the woman from the office entered and read out the names of those assigned to cleaning our district of the city that day. First she read out those who were to erect the traffic signs, then the team of three whose job it was to empty the public litter bins. Finally she gave the fat man in the overalls a sheet of paper and announced that the following were detailed for the work party: Zoulová, Pinz, Rada, Štych, and finally she read out my name. At the same time she handed me a sweeper’s orange vest. I accepted it, quickly walked round the table and chose the locker nearest the corner. I opened the door, on which Bui dinh Thi was written in chalk, took my identity papers, buns, book and notebook from my case, stuffed everything into my pockets and closed the locker again.
We all walked out into the depressing yard, where some garbage trucks had arrived noisily and where two young men were flinging shovels, brooms, scrapers, wheelbarrows, traffic signs and battered dustbins onto a pick-up. It was only a quarter past six in the morning, and already I could feel the stifling expanse of the day stretching out before me.
The man in the overalls, who’d clearly been assigned to us as our foreman, strode over to the gate and four figures stepped out from the bunch of sweepers, including the only woman, then a youngster with a pale girlish face and a capacious postman’s bag over his shoulder, and the man who reminded me of the ear-nose-and-throat specialist. Also the fellow with the captain’s cap. These people seemed as alien to me as the work which I was about to perform; nevertheless I walked along, just as they did, at a pace which would have been more appropriate to a funeral cortège. With measured tread we strode through the streets of Nusle in our orange uniforms; all around us people were hurrying to work, but we were in no hurry, we were at work already.
This was not a state of mind in which I found myself often: most of my life I had been in a hurry, obsessed by the thought of what I had to accomplish if I wanted to be a good writer. I had wanted to become a writer ever since childhood, and authorship for a long time seemed to me an exalted profession. I believed that a writer should be as wise as a prophet, as pure and rare as a saint, as adroit and fearless as an acrobat on a flying trapeze. Even though I now know that there are no chosen professions, and that what appears to be wisdom, purity, exceptional character, fearlessness and adroitness in one person may seem eccentricity, madness, dullness and uselessness in another, that ancient idea has struck, against my will, in my conscious and subconscious mind, and that is probably why I am afraid to describe myself by the term ‘writer’. When I am asked what I do I try to avoid an answer. Besides, who dare say of himself that he is a writer? At best he can say: I’ve written some books. Now and again I even think that I am unable to define clearly what the subject of my work is, or what distinguishes real literature from mere writing, the kind that anyone is capable of, even if he never went to school to learn his letters.
Now I was able to enjoy a leisurely walk and the reassuring knowledge that I knew exactly what was expected of me. Slowly we passed the National Committee and the Supreme Court building and arrived at what used to be the Sokol gym hall, where our equipment was already waiting for us: brooms, shovels, scrapers and a handcart whose body was half a dustbin. To show my goodwill I took the biggest shovel.
As a child I had lived on the outskirts of Prague, not far from the Kbely airfield, in a villa which stood next door to a tavern patronised by hauliers. Every day, just before noon, the municipal sweeper would arrive. He’d draw up his cart in the open space where the hauliers had pulled up with their horses, take out his shovel and almost ceremonially sweep up the horse droppings, or any other rubbish, and drop it all into his cart. He would then push his cart up against the wall and make for the bar. I liked him: he wore a peaked cap, though not a sailor’s cap, and an upturned moustache in memory of our last emperor. I also liked his occupation, which I thought must surely be one of the most important jobs a man could have, and I believed that street-sweepers therefore enjoyed everyone’s respect. In reality this was not so. Those who cleansed the world of garbage or of rats were never shown any respect. A few days ago I read about a jilted stucco worker who, exactly two hundred years ago, in St George’s church, had slashed the face, mouth and shoulders of his lover, for which he was gaoled, and taken to the place of execution, but was then reprieved and instead sentenced to clean the streets of Prague for three years. Respect as a rule was shown only to those who cleansed the world of human refuse, to bailiffs, judges and inquisitors.
When I wrote a short story twenty years ago about the slaughtering of horses I invented an apocalyptic scene about the incineration of their remains. I tried to get into the Prague incinerator, which as a boy I used to see burning in the distance, reducing everything to one gigantic pile of clinker, but the manager refused to let me inside. He was probably afraid I might wish to uncover some shortcomings in the operation of his crematorium.
Many years later, when I was working as a cleaner at the Kr č hospital, I had to cart all the refuse to the big furnace every morning: blood-soaked bandages, gauze full of pus and hair, dirty rags smelling of human excrement, and of course masses of paper, empty tins, broken glass and plastic. I’d shovel everything into the furnace and watch with relief as the rubbish writhed as if in agony, as it melted in the fierce flames, and listen to the cracking and exploding sounds of the glass and to the victorious roar of the fire. On one occasion, I never discovered why, whether the fire was too fierce or, on the contrary, not hot enough, or whether it was the wind, the rubbish did not burn but the draught in the furnace sucked it up and spewed it out from the high chimney-stack, up towards the sky, and I watched with horror and amazement as all my refuse – rags, paper and tatters of bloody bandages – slowly descended to the ground, as it was caught in the branches of the trees, or sailed towards the open windows of the wards. And at that moment the idiots and imbeciles from the Social Welfare Institute, who were responsible for the upkeep of the hospital grounds, came rushing out howling with delight and pointing to a tall silver birch which was draped like a Christmas tree.
It occurred to me that what had just happened was no more than an instructive demonstration of an everyday occurrence. No matter ever vanishes. It can, at most, change its form. Rubbish is immortal, it pervades the air, swells up in water, dissolves, rots, disintegrates, changes into gas, into smoke, into soot, it travels across the world and gradually engulfs it.
We started in Lomnického Street, Our Venus, whose name was evidently Zoulová, was wielding a broom; she was helped, with a second broom, by the man with the captain’s cap who most of the time chewed silently, now and again spitting out some frothy phlegm. They were sweeping the stuff onto my shovel and I would fling all the filthy mess into the dustbin on our handcart. When the dustbin was full we turned it upside down and tipped everything onto the pavement, all the rubbish in one heap; this would later be picked up and removed by the garbage truck. In this way we marked out our progress with those heaps and slowly advanced to Vyšehrad. I looked at the tinted foliage of the trees, they were waving to me from the distance even though no one was waiting for me under them, even though she was no longer waiting for me. I think of her only as ‘she’. In my mind I mostly do not give her a name. Names get fingered and worn just like tender words. Sometimes in my mind I called her a soothsayer, because she used to foretell people’s futures and she seemed knowing to me. Also she was surrounded by mystery, and made more beautiful by it. When she was christened she was named Daria.
I could not remember if we’d ever been here with each other. Our meetings over the years had blended together, and the years had piled up as in the folksong about the farm labourer. I’d met her as a result of visiting a friend who lived in a caravan; he was training to be a geologist’s assistant. My attention was caught by a little sculpture whose fantastic character set it aside from the spartan interior of the caravan. My friend, who until a little while before had been writing art reviews, told me about the woman artist whose world was bounded by dreams, phantoms, passion and tenderness. He assured me that a visit to her studio was a profound experience, and I made a note of her address. One day when I was out looking for a birthday present for my wife I remembered that address.
Her workshop was in a modest-sized vaulted basement in Prague’s Little City district. A third of the room was taken up by wooden shelves holding her work.
She received me courteously and we chatted for a while; she even told me about her little girl and asked me what I and my wife did. But I thought her interest was due to the fact that I had come to her as a customer.
She moved adroitly among her shelves. As she walked there was a movement of eyes and lips on her long skirt, a pattern of brown eyes and bright red lips. Her own eyes were blue and her lips rather pale. What would happen if I embraced her among her shelves? But I knew that I wouldn’t.
I bought a bird with a slender neck on which sat a sharp-edged little head with small, impish, human eyes. She wrapped my purchase in tissue paper and saw me to the door. After that we didn’t see one another for many months. But on the eve of my forty-seventh birthday she unexpectedly appeared at my front door: she wished to borrow her little sculpture for an exhibition that was to be held in Budapest. I asked her in and introduced her to my wife, who was delighted to make her acquaintance. The three of us sat in my study. Lída, who likes making people happy, said how much she liked her little figurine.
We were drinking wine, myself and my wife just to be polite. Daria spoke of her forthcoming exhibition and then about her travels. She told us about Kampuchea, which she had once visited. She talked of that country as like an Eden of happy and innocent people – this fascinated my wife, who is keen on liberating people of their sense of guilt – and we got on to our own culture, which is based on the knowledge of sin and therefore of metaphysical guilt. Daria maintained that the doctrine of sin was our curse, because it deprived us of freedom and interposed itself between one person and another, and between people and God. My wife made some objection. She believed that freedom should be limited by some kind of inner law, but then the conversation moved on to children and their upbringing. But I was concentrating less and less on what was being said and instead became aware of something different: the unspoken voice of the other woman. It seemed to me that it was addressing me in the expectation that I would hear it and understand it.
The evening shadows were creeping into the room and it seemed to me that the remaining light was focused on her high forehead, which, oddly enough, resembled my wife’s. The strange thing was that the light did not die with the day. It seemed to be emanating from her, from a flame which undoubtedly was burning within her, and I thought that this flame was reaching over towards me and engulfing me with its hot breath.
After she had left I seemed to remain in its field of force. Lída said the sculptress was an interesting woman and suggested we might ask her to come again, perhaps with her husband, but I, either from fear or from a presentiment of a possible conspiracy, did not rise to the idea and turned the conversation to some other subject. My wife went to her room and I tried in vain to do some work. So I turned on the radio, which was broadcasting baroque organ music, but the music did not calm me, I was unable to take it in. Instead I could hear disjointed snippets of sentences: a litany in a strange voice pervaded me like the warmth of a hot bath. What had that voice really been like? I searched for an appropriate word to describe it. It was neither sonorous nor sweet and melodious, neither colourful nor obtrusive – I was unable to say what enthralled me about it.
When I embraced my wife that night, who was gentle and calm in lovemaking, slow as a lowland river in summer, I heard that voice again and suddenly realised the right word for it: it was passionate. I tried to dispel it – at such an inappropriate moment – but I failed.
We had turned a corner and were now moving away from Vyšehrad. I was still using my coalman’s shovel to load scraps of paper, plastic cups and squashed matchboxes onto the cart, also the head of a doll, a torn tennis shoe, an empty tube, a smudged letter, as well as – the most numerous items all over the ground – cigarette butts. All that rubbish I shovelled into the dustbin on the cart, and when that was filled to the brim the captain and I got hold of it and together we tipped it out onto the pavement, where the wind, which was stiffening all the time, scattered the rubbish about again, but it didn’t really matter: rubbish is indestructible anyway.
Rubbish is like death. What else is there that is so indestructible?
Our innkeeper neighbours had five children, the youngest boy had the same name as me and was about my age. We would play together, and his friendship enabled me to penetrate into the hidden parts of the tavern, such as the cellar where, even at the height of summer, huge shimmering blocks of ice were stored, as well as gigantic beer barrels – at least they seemed gigantic to me then – or into the stables, whose walls, even though the horses had been replaced by a black Praga car, still reeked of horse urine and where a large number of cats of varied ages and colours had made their home.
The boy fell ill with diphtheria and within a week he died. At the age of five I did not understand the meaning of death. My parents did not take me along to his funeral. I only saw the innkeeper dressed in black and his weeping wife, and the funeral guests, and I heard the brass band playing incredibly slow march music.
When I asked when my namesake would come back, my mother, after a moment’s hesitation, told me he would never come back, he had gone away. I wanted to know where he had gone but my mother did not reply. But the old serving woman at the tavern, once I had summoned up the courage to ask her, told me that of course he had gone to paradise. His innocent little soul was now dwelling in that delightful garden amidst the flowers, playing with the angels, and if I was a good boy I’d meet him there one day.
I grew up in an environment where no prayer was ever heard, and the only garden I knew was the one outside our windows, and that had no angels in it, although the trains would noisily roar past immediately beyond the fence.
I wanted to find out more about that garden of paradise and about the souls dwelling in it, but my mother dodged my questions and told me to ask Dad.
My sensible father, who I knew had thought up the engines for the fastest trains roaring past under our windows, as well as those of the planes thundering above our heads, and therefore was held in high esteem by people, was astonished at my question. He took me by the hand, led me outside, and there talked to me for a long time: about the origin of the world, about hot gases and cooling matter, about tiny and indeed invisible atoms which were ceaselessly revolving everywhere and in everything. They in fact made up the piles of earth, the stones on the path along which we were walking, and also our legs which were carrying us. We were walking along the railway line, through the sparse suburban wood, climbing up towards the airfield. The trains were now thundering along below us, while military biplanes were roaring overhead. My father also told me that people had always suffered from being tied to the ground, from not being able to detach themselves from it. But they had dreamed of leaving it, and so they had invented the garden of paradise, which had in it everything they yearned for but lacked in their lives, and they had dreamed up creatures similar to themselves but equipped with wings. But what in the past had only been dreamed of was now beginning to materialise, my father said, pointing to the sky. Angels did not exist, but people could now fly. There was no paradise for human souls to dwell in, but one day I would understand that it was more important for people to live well and happily here on earth.
Although I did not fully understand what my father was explaining to me, some inexplicable sadness in his words made me cry. To comfort me, my father promised that he would take me along to Open Day at the airfield the following Sunday, and let me fly in a plane over Prague.
And that Sunday he actually put me inside a roaring machine which bumpily rolled along the grass and then, to my amazement and horror, rose into the air, complete with me, and as it gained height the ground below me began to tilt and everything on it grew smaller and smaller until it had shrunk away to nothing. The first thing to disappear were people, then the horse-drawn vehicles and the cars, and finally even the houses. I closed my eyes and found myself in a thunderous darkness which engulfed me. I was alarmed at the thought that I would never return to earth again, like my namesake who, as they said, had died.
Nothing happened at that time. Daria left and I went back to my work. I was writing some stories about my boyhood loves and I was flooded by memories of a long-past excitement. As I glanced at the darkest corner of my study, at the armchair she’d been sitting in, that ancient excitement seemed to take shape again.
I went out to a telephone box – the telephone in my flat had been disconnected – and dialled her number. I was still feeling an excitement that would be proper at my age only if one accepted that such a state was proper at any age. I enquired how the Budapest show had gone. For a while I listened to her account, which shifted between pictures and wine-cellars, then I said something about my own work and remarked that I had been thinking about her visit and that I should be pleased to see her again some time. But I did not propose anything definite, and she only smiled silently at my words. Even so the conversation had disturbed me, and instead of returning home I drifted through the little streets near where I lived and in my mind continued the conversation, which was becoming increasingly personal and brittle. I had lost the habit of such conversations, or of conversation generally. I had lost the habit of communicating with anyone.
I had been living in a strange kind of exile for the previous ten years, hemmed in by prohibitions and guarded sometimes by visible, sometimes by invisible, and sometimes only by imagined watchers. I was not allowed to enter into life except as a guest, as a visitor, or as a day-wage labourer in selected jobs. Over those years there grew within me a longing for something to happen, something that would change my life, while at the same time my timidity, which I had inherited from my mother, increased and made me shy away from any kind of change and from all strangers. Thus my home became for me both a refuge and a cage, I wanted to remain in it and yet also to flee from it; to have the certainty that I would not be driven out and also the hope that I’d escape one day. I clung to my children, or at least I needed them more than fathers normally need their children. I similarly needed my wife. The outside world came to me through those nearest and dearest to me, and through them I stepped into that world, from which I’d been excluded.
I don’t think life was easier for any of them. The children, just as I did in my childhood, bore the brand of an inappropriate origin, and my wife spent years looking for a halfway decent job. Weary of queueing at departments charged with the protection of workplaces against the politically non-elect, she accepted the post of opinion researcher for some sociological survey. For a wage which was humiliating rather than an incentive she had to traipse around residential developments and persuade unwilling or even alarmed respondents to answer her questions. She did not complain, but she was sometimes depressed. Then she would shower the children and me with reproaches for some behaviour or action which normally she’d overlook. I didn’t have to go to work. When they had all left in the morning I’d sit down at my desk, with stacks of white paper before me, as well as the boundless expanse of the day and the depth of silence. The telephone couldn’t ring, and the occasional footsteps that echoed through the building usually alarmed me: I was more likely to have unwelcome than welcome visitors.
I wrote. For hours and days and weeks. Plays I would never see staged and novels which I assumed would never be published in the language in which they were written. I was working, but at the same time I was afraid that the silence which surrounded me would eventually invade me, paralyse my imagination and kill my plots. I would sit at my desk and be aware of the weight of the ceiling, the weight of the walls and of the things which might overwhelm me at any moment with their indifference.
Thus I would wait for my wife and my children to return. The moment their footfalls on the stairs shattered the silence I could feel tranquillity return to me – not the tranquillity of silence but the tranquillity of life.
I knew of course that the children would very soon grow up and leave home, that the ring of their footsteps was even more temporary than my own temporariness. I talked to them and shared their joys, but I felt them slipping away and I knew that I must not resist that movement if I was not to resist life.
I was also watching my wife seeking her own space to move in, trying to escape the deadening monotony of the work she had to do and to study in her spare time. She had decided that she’d try to understand what the human soul was, penetrate its secret in the hope of finding a way of alleviating its suffering. To me such an enterprise appeared almost too daring, and besides I was always seeing her as she was when I first met her, too childlike and with too little experience of life to master such an undertaking, but I encouraged her: everybody sets out in the direction from which he hears at least the hint of a calling.
I too followed my own direction. I was less keen now on what used to attract me, things had ceased to excite me. Until not so long before I had collected old maps and books, and now dust was settling on them. I no longer tried to find out what was happening anywhere, or to discover when the conditions, which could be described as not favouring me, might at last begin to improve. I wanted to know if there was anything beyond those conditions, if there was anything that might raise our lives above pointlessness and oblivion, but I wanted to discover it for myself, not accept anything revealed and given shape by others. I wanted to achieve this not out of some kind of pride but because I realise that the most important things in life are non-communicable, not compressible into words, even though the people who believe they have discovered them always to try to communicate them, even though I myself try to do so. But anyone who believes that he has found what is truly enduring and that he can communicate to others the essence of God, that he has discovered the right faith for them, that he has finally glimpsed the mystery of existence, is a fool or a fantasist and, more often than not, dangerous.
I got home late, and as soon as I’d walked in I could sense the tension in the air. My daughter was sitting at the table, rebelliously staring at the window, my wife was washing the dishes rather too noisily, and my son’s cassette player boomed out protest songs. I didn’t feel like asking the reason, but Lída at once flooded me with complaints about the children, who she said were untidy and lazy, and demanded that I do something about it.
It was clear to me that whatever I might say she had already said to them and I was in no mood to engage in peacemaking. I went to my room and tried to work, but the flat (or I myself) was too full of disturbing noises.
It occurred to me that for a long time now I had only moved from one day to the next, from getting up to going to bed, and that, while I composed plots, my own plot had ground to a halt, was not developing, and was beginning to come apart. I should have liked to talk to somebody about it, but when we were at last on our own I sensed her irritation, which instantly separated me from her. I asked if I had done anything to hurt her. She replied that I was hurting the children by refusing to bring them up properly, that I was weak and indulgent towards them, that I didn’t correct their faults, that I tried to curry favour with them. I protested that she was being unfair, but she embarked on one of her monologues composed of criticism, well-intentioned advice and instruction. From time to time she would heap these upon me and the children, and whether justified or not she came up with them invariably at a moment when those to whom they were addressed refused to listen to them or themselves had a need to speak and be listened to.
It was getting on for nine o’clock and our orange procession was moving down Sinkulova Street towards the water tower. The street is cobbled and in the cracks along the kerb clumps of dandelions, plantains and all kinds of weeds had taken root. The youngster with the girlish face was either pulling them out by hand or digging them out with his scraper. Even when he was bending down to the ground his face remained sickly pale.
Under the trees on the pavement some cars were parked. By the wreck of an ancient Volga our party halted. The foreman lifted the bonnet and established with satisfaction that someone had removed the radiator during the week.
A car is also rubbish, a large conglomeration of refuse, and one of them gets in our way at almost every step.
When fifteen years ago I went to see the première of a play of mine in a town not far from Detroit, the president of the Ford company invited me to lunch. As we were sitting on his terrace on the top floor, or more accurately on the roof of the Ford skyscraper, from which there was a view of that hideous huge city through whose streets countless cars were moving, instead of asking about his latest model – a question which would have delighted my father – I wanted to know how he removed all those cars from the world once they’d reached the end of their service. He replied that this was no problem. Anything that was manufactured could vanish without trace, it was merely a technical problem. And he smiled at the thought of a totally empty, cleansed world. After lunch the president lent me his car and his driver. I was taken to the edge of the city, where an incalculable mass of battered and rusty sedans were parked on a vast area. Negroes in brightly-coloured overalls first of all ripped the guts out of the cars with enormous pliers, stripped them of their tyres, windows and seats, and then pushed them into gigantic presses which turned the cars into metal parcels of manageable dimensions. But those metal boxes do not vanish from the world, any more than did the glass, the tyres or the spent oil, even if they were all burned in incinerators, nor did the rivers of petrol that were used on all those necessary and unnecessary journeys disappear. They probably melt down the crushed metal to make iron and new steel for new cars, and thus rubbish is transformed into new rubbish, only slightly increased in quantity. If ever I were to meet that self-assured president again I’d say to him: No, this isn’t a mere technical problem. Because the spirit of dead things rises over the earth and over the waters, and its breath forebodes evil.
During the war filth descended upon us: literally and figuratively it engulfed us just like death, and sometimes it was difficult to separate the two. They certainly merged in my mother’s mind, death and garbage; she believed that life was tied to cleanliness – literally and figuratively.
The war was over, we were looking forward to living in love and peace, but she was struggling for cleanliness. She wanted to know our thoughts and she was horrified by our boots, our hands and our words. She inspected our library and stripped it of the books which might make our minds unclean, and she bought a large pot in which she boiled our underwear every day. But even so she felt revolted by us and forever sent us back to wash our hands; she would touch other people’s possessions and doorknobs only when wearing gloves.
Sometimes at night I’d hear her sighing and lamenting. She was mourning the relatives she’d lost in the war, but she was surely also lamenting the dirtiness of the world she had to live in. In our home, therefore, cleanliness and loneliness reigned. Dad hardly ever came home, he’d found a job in Plze ň so he could breathe more freely. When he turned up on Sundays, he’d walk barefoot to his study over a path of newspapers, but even that moment of crossing the hall was enough for it to be filled with a smell in which mother recognised the stench of some unknown trollop. In vain did Dad try to wash it off, in vain did he help to cover the carpet with fresh newspapers.
I was quite prepared for father not to come back one day, for him to remain with that strange malodorous woman of his, and I wouldn’t have blamed him for it. But he turned up afresh every weekend, and sometimes he even urged me not to judge mother: she was a good woman, only sick, and not everyone had the strength to come unmarked through what we’d had to endure.
Then they locked Dad up again. The pain inflicted on my mother by others at least partly diverted her from the pain she inflicted upon herself.
A sewage service truck overtook our gang and pulled up a little way in front of us. Its crew exchanged greetings with our foreman and began to examine the nearest drain grating.
‘What can they be looking for?’ I asked Mrs Venus.
‘They’re just making sure their sewer isn’t all blocked up,’ she explained. ‘We’re not allowed to tip anything into the sewer. One day young Jarda here,’ she pointed to the youngster with the girlish face, ‘threw some flowers down and just then their inspector came driving past and wanted to fine him fifty crowns on the spot. And all the time they’re rolling in it, just like the rat-catchers!’
‘Don’t talk to me about rat-catchers,’ the foreman joined in. ‘In Plze ň underneath the slaughterhouse the rats went mad and came up through the sewer gratings at night and ran about the streets like squirrels, squealing. They were desperately looking for a rat-catcher, they were actually ready to give him twenty grand a month, but there were no takers because it was obvious that if a rabid rat bit you, you’d be finished! I’ve a mate in Plze ň, from back in the para corps, and he got annoyed and said: “I’m not going to shit myself over a few mice!” So he got a diving suit and a sheet of asbestos rubber to throw over himself if the rats attacked him.’
‘They’d do that?’ I expressed surprise.
‘Sure they would. I told you they were rabid. You chase after them, but when they’ve nowhere to escape to they’ll turn and go for you. If that happens you lie down, throw the sheet over you, and they’ll run straight over you. So that’s what my mate did. Once he was under that sheet nothing could happen to him, but as those rats trampled over him he shat himself from fear.’
A few days later she sent me a card to say she would come round to see me, giving the clay and the hour, and hoping she’d find me in.
She turned up as promised. Outside the window the autumnal clouds were driving and the room was once again in twilight. I don’t know whether a similar glow issued from me too. A person never sees his own light in another person’s eyes, or only at moments of special grace. But maybe she’d seen something after all, because otherwise she wouldn’t have wished to meet me again, she wouldn’t have voluntarily set out on a pilgrimage which, in moments of anger, she was to proclaim had led her only to pain. I have myself sometimes been amazed that she had come so close to me.
For the first few weeks we’d walked in the countryside, through forests and parks. She knew the names of plants, even the most exotic ones, as well as where they came from. And she led me through those places, as if through the land of the Khmers, and along the majestic river Ganges, through the crowds in stifling streets, she even led me through the jungle and into the ashram so I could listen to what a wise guru had to say about the right way to live. She told me about her family, which included industrialists as well as National Revival schoolmasters, a wanderer who settled on the western slopes of the Andes, and a romantic aunt who, when she failed to keep the lover she longed for, decided to starve herself to death. There was also a highly gifted law student who could reel off the whole statute book by heart but who tired of the law and turned to philosophy and who, when he had irrefutably established the vanity of human endeavour, sat down and wrote his philosophical testament, whose conclusion was that happiness was just a dream and life a chain of suffering, and directly over that philosophical testament he shot himself through the head, so that the blood pouring from his wound put several final stops under his writings.
Everyone on her father’s side of the family, she explained, had a touch of genius, an inflexible will, and clear-sightedness – her father most of all. She often spoke of him to me and, even though I had never seen him, I was reminded of my own father, not only because he was also a graduate engineer but because he too knew no greater happiness than his work, than the calculations in which no one was allowed to disturb him, and because he was strong, healthy and capable of cheerfulness once he decided to set aside that work.
I would have liked to tell her something similar about my ancestors, but I didn’t know their stories. I knew that some of them had come from far away, but I don’t know whether that was two hundred or a thousand years ago. I assume that even then they knew how to read, though it was a different script from the one I can read now, and that they prayed in a language of which I no longer understand a single word. I don’t know what they did for a living. Both my grandmothers had come to Prague and tried to trade there but failed. My grandfathers too came from the country. My father’s father had studied chemistry and worked as an engineer in a sugar refinery down in the Hungarian part of the monarchy. There, when my father was only eleven, he fell under a plough drawn by a rope and was fatally injured. My mother’s father, on the other hand, lived to a ripe old age: he’d been a clerk at the law courts and at the age of eighty he lived to experience the second great war as well as having a yellow star put on him and being forcibly deported to a ghetto. Even of this stocky old man with his grey, slightly tobacco-stained moustache I was unable to report anything remarkable, except possibly that, like his ancestors, he stubbornly believed in the coming of the Messiah, but for him that meant the mirage of the socialist revolution. That mirage helped him survive the blows of fate, the death of his wife, the loss of his home, his humiliation, hunger and the hardships of imprisonment. More and more often in that unhappy place he would preach to anyone who would listen to him, and more and more often I would be the only listener to remain. He too urged me not to believe in a god whom people had invented, whom the masters had fobbed off onto the poor so they should more readily bear their fate. As he grew older his litanies became an unchanging prayer which I knew by heart and to which I no longer had to listen. And then one night I awoke. Everyone else was sleeping, and from the corner of the room where grandfather slept I could hear a strange muttering. I recognised the old man’s voice and the plaintive intonation of a prayer spoken in the language he still knew but of which I no longer understood anything, a prayer addressed to God. I did not stir and listened with amazement to the voice which seemed to come from a great distance, from some long-past time. That was the first time I realised that the depth of the human soul is unfathomable.
Her father would desert his drawing board from time to time to wander about the mountains and climb rockfaces. He would take her with him, and taught her not to be afraid of heights. My father would only wander through the landscape of numbers into which the visions of his machines turned for him. He even took his calculations with him on holiday, and when he was seized by a new idea, which would happen almost continuously, he would forget about the rest of us. When he then found us at the dinner table or outside his window he’d wonder where we’d sprung from. But they forcibly expelled him from his landscape, put him into convict’s clothes and locked him up behind electric wires whose windings were all too easily calculable. He concentrated all his willpower and strength on surviving, on surviving with dignity, so that he might once more return to his beloved landscape. Apart from numbers and machines, father, as I understood later, also loved pretty women and socialist visions of a better world. Like every man in love he invested the object of his adoration with excessive and deceptive hopes.
Do you think every love indulges in false hopes? she asked.
I realised that she was asking about us, and I dared not say yes, even though I could see no reason why we should be exceptions.
‘Like it was with them cemeteries on the motorway,’ said Mrs Venus. ‘When they destroyed them they had to dig up the corpses and they offered a hundred an hour, plus a bottle of rum a day, and even so everybody told them where they could stick it. They had to send in convicts to do the job and of course they paid them bugger-all!’ She stopped, stretched, leaned her shovel against a wall and lit a cigarette. ‘Corpses ain’t no joke, there’s poison in them that goes right through your rubber gloves, and once it gets in your blood you’ve had it.’ She was smoking and seemed to be gazing into the distance, somewhere only she could see. If I had met her years ago I would certainly have repeated her words to myself, I would have been in a hurry to write them down in order to preserve her speech as faithfully as possible. At that time I believed that anything I saw or heard would come in useful for some story. But I have known for a long time now that I am most unlikely ever to find any events other than those I experience myself. A man cannot gain control over someone else’s life, and even if he could he would not invent a new story. There are nearly five thousand million people living in the world and every one of them believes that his life is good for at least one story. This thought is enough to make your head spin. If a writer emerged, or better still, was produced, who was obsessed enough to record five thousand million stories, and to then cross out all they had in common, how much do you suppose would be left? Scarcely a sentence from each story, from each human fate, a moment like a drop in the ocean, an unrepeatable experience of apprehension or of a meeting, an instant of insight or pain – but who could identify that drop, who could separate it from the flood of the ocean? And why should new stories have to be invented?
Daria, in tears, once accused me of regarding her as some beetle I had impaled on a pin in order to describe it better. But she was mistaken: in her presence I usually forgot that I sometimes tried to invent stories, and I would watch her so closely only because I wished to understand the language in which she spoke to me when she was with me in silence.
‘But I had a great time with those corpses. Got myself a job down there,’ Mrs Venus gestured towards the Vy š ehrad ramparts, ‘on the path lab. That’s where they carted all the stiffs that had had their throats cut or been knifed. Got it through a girlfriend, a dicey job, she said, but with bonus payments, and in the end they gave me bugger-all. Anyway I only did it because of the old boy that gutted the bodies, he was a mad one and crazy about stiffs. “Zoulová,” he’d say to me, “you’ve got some arms. I’d love to have a good look at your humerus one day.”’ And Mrs Venus spread her arms – they really were long and slim.
The sickly smell of decay seemed to engulf me. When I took on the job of a hospital cleaner my colleague could not deny himself the pleasure of taking me to the morgue the very first day in order to show me the corpses on the tables, on the floor and in the refrigerator, and while doing so he was watching me out of the corner of his eye to see if I was turning pale or making for the door. But I was used to dead bodies from childhood, to such quantities of dead bodies that the few solemnly-dressed recent deceased neither frightened me nor turned my insides.
Now I recalled not only that tiled room but principally the wide table, which I saw as clearly as in a dream, and on it lay my father.
My father was gravely ill, the disease was gradually destroying him from within, so that he, who had always been so strong and irrepressibly healthy, was now scarcely able to hold a pen in his hand. When I looked at his notes, which were still swarming with numbers and formulae I didn’t understand, the figures were so shaky I could hardly read them. Whenever I regarded these figures and formulae, I was gripped by sadness. I knew that he had not published his calculations for years, although he was being asked to do so, and I also knew that these numbers were a road to some new knowledge and that knowledge to him meant his life, but from them I could see that father’s life was by now shaky, that these figures were getting ready to accompany him on the road to where there are no numbers.
I would have liked to dispel that unhappy vision, but no matter how intently I fixed my eyes on my cart, my father’s motionless features remained before me. What is the purpose of a life of suffering? It may teach a man to humbly bow to the inevitable, but he will still be crushed by the approaching death of someone dear to him.
But I still tried to reassure myself that my father, who had come through so many trials in his life, would not succumb this time either.
On that day long ago my father had to carry me out of the aircraft when it landed. I was shaking and sobbing and refusing to look up at the sky, where bold aerial acrobats were turning somersaults in their machines, winding their way up into the clouds and diving steeply towards the roofs of the hangars. My father lifted me up on his shoulders. He didn’t even say: Poor little boy, he didn’t reprimand me, he just carried me and on the way showed me the trains which flashed by below us, giving them their names, just as if they were relations or children. He carried me as far as the wooden footbridge over the railway line and said I could spit down into the funnel of a locomotive if one came along. When at last one came, spewing sparks and smoke, he himself leant over the railing to set an example for me, and the powerful rush of smoke and steam emitted by the funnel lifted his hat off his head and all we could do was to watch it sail down to settle on a pile of coal on one of the wagons and disappear with it in the distance. Dad laughed and said his hat was an acrobat too, and I, gazing delightedly after the vanishing hat, forgot the terrors of my flight.
That same evening Dad brought his hat back from somewhere, all black with soot and grime, and to my delight converted it into a bowler, put it on his head, and for a while clowned about with it like Charlie Chaplin. He liked entertaining people, and when he laughed he laughed unrestrainedly and with his whole being. He could laugh at what people normally laugh at, but also at what they are angry about or what they despair over. I have often wished I knew how to be as joyful and relaxed, but I lacked my father’s strength, lightness and concentration.
Mrs Venus tossed some rubbish into my cart. ‘D’you know how many people he’d had on his table?’
I didn’t know, and she said triumphantly: ‘Fifty thousand!’
‘Nonsense,’ came the youngster’s voice from behind me. ‘You’re making it up. That would be several regiments!’
‘But that’s what it was, Jarda dear. And all of them had come to a sticky end!’ Mrs Venus laughed as if she had just said something very funny.
Then one day before Christmas we first made love in a tiny attic room with small windows and thick walls under the roof of a baroque building. Facing it was a noble town house with enormous windows on the sills of which sat some freezing pigeons. There was a smell of oil in the room, as well as the faint odour of gas, and though it was midday the room was quite dark. The small windows were moreover partly obstructed by a statue of Saint Stephen the Martyr. The restoration of the statue was nearly complete, but my lover had stopped working on it, she didn’t like having her hand controlled by someone else’s instructions.
I wanted her to enjoy our love-making. I was thinking of it so much I was trembling with excitement, and she was trembling too. After all, she had a husband at home, and a little girl, but now she curled up in my embrace and let herself be carried to a place from which there would be no return. So I carried her, and at each step I felt her getting heavier until I could scarcely drag her. I was afraid, we were frightened of one another we wanted each other so much. The big surprised bed creaked at every movement and we tried to drown the sound by whispering tender words. We looked each other in the face and I was amazed by the way she was being transformed, she was softening and taking on some ancient, the most ancient, shape. Perhaps it was the forgotten shape of my mother or a recollection of my first visions and dreams of the woman I would love one day.
I got back home late at night and went to bed by my wife’s side. She suspected nothing and snuggled up to me. She was still as trusting as a child. When I closed my eyes I realised that sleep wouldn’t come to me. In the garden a bird was piping, trains were rushing along in the distance, and out of the darkness before me, like a full moon, there rose the face of the other woman: calm, beautiful, as if it had always been concealed within me, and yet motionless like the faces of her statues. Thus she gazed down on me, suspended in space beyond all things and beyond all time, and I felt something like nostalgia, unease, longing and sadness.
There was a lot of snow that winter. She’d take her little girl to her piano lessons. I’d walk behind them, without the child being aware of me. I’d sink into the freshly fallen snow because I wasn’t looking where I was going, I was watching her walking: there was in her walk something of an ill-concealed hurry, or maybe of an eagerness for life. She was holding her little girl’s hand and only occasionally did she glance behind. Even at that distance I could feel her love.
At other times we’d set out across the snow-covered fields not far from the city. Below us was an abandoned farmstead and a forest, above us the sky was frosty under a cover of mist. We stopped, she leaned her back against me, I embraced her – a little plump in her winter coat – and at once we were amidst eternity, lifted out of time, lifted from horrors and joys, from the cold and the blowing wind, and she said softly: Is it possible we love each other so much?
On the pond, just as in a Brueghel painting, children were skating. The inn was almost deserted, a fire was crackling in the huge fireplace, and a picture showed a farmhouse on fire, with gallant firemen fighting it. The innkeeper’s wife brought us some hot whisky, turned a knob, and the fire in the picture was lit from behind by the red flames.
Daria was as pleased as a child: So many fires, not counting the two of us.
I really feel the warmth enveloping me, I feel it inside me, I feel like a seed in the spring soil, bursting and struggling towards the light.
She reads my thoughts and says: You see, now at last you’ll achieve something!
What makes you think so?
Because you’re only now beginning to live.
She believes that I have not lived until now. That I’d been fettered, shaken by frost, that the springs within me produced only a few cold drops. She adds: You’ve only lived with your head, but what you are doing you can’t do with your head alone. Maybe you can control an engine with just your head. She promises to teach me to listen to the hidden voices.
I want to know what I shall teach her.
Surely she’d be listening to those voices with me. Then she says: I’ll be listening to you, I don’t need to learn anything now, I need to be with you!
The innkeeper’s wife switches the lit picture off again and we walk out into the cold dusk. Before parting we kiss; we kiss as if we had nothing ahead of us and nothing behind us, as if we wanted to squeeze our whole lives into those kisses. Then she asks: Have you ever loved anyone truly?
Of course she doesn’t wish to hear about my wife or about my children, or about my father, she doesn’t wish to hear about anyone living, she wants to hear that she alone is the one I have truly loved. But perhaps I am mistaken, perhaps she is asking out of anguish, she is surprised that I am leaving her already, why don’t I take her away with me somewhere, she fears betrayal, she suspects in me spaces which frighten her.
My wife also used to suspect them. During attacks of sudden self-pity she used to maintain that I was unable to get close to her, that in my childhood, when death was ceaselessly hovering all round me, I had suffered an injury to my soul and that I have never recovered from it.
What feelings does a person experience in a place where death spreads his wings more often than birds?
There were a lot of girls in the fortress ghetto, I talked to them, I walked past them, I was scarcely twelve. Amidst all that horror, how could it occur to me that something might happen to alarm her, even though armed guards, hunger and deportations were all around us?
They had only brought her in at the beginning of 1943. I met her, all terrified, in one of the corridors of our barracks: she was lost. She asked me the way, and I – an old inhabitant – effortlessly conducted her to the door of the room she’d been assigned to.
On the way she just managed to tell me where she came from, that she had no father, and that she was afraid there.
I reassured her that there was no need to be afraid, that it was possible to live there – and besides, if she wished, I would protect her.
She said she would never forget my kindness.
The next day I collected her and took her to meet my friends; none of them would have hurt her and there was no need for me to protect her against them – but I realised that she saw things differently, that she needed my presence, that with me she felt safer.
She was the same age as myself, and she differed from all the other girls in that she had fair hair, the colour of rye or wheat. We were never alone together, away from the company of our playmates, but I always tried to get as close to her as possible. We also lent each other the few books we owned, but we dared not go any further, I dared not go any further; and yet everything was suddenly changed, life was moving between different milestones, no longer from morning to evening or from meal to meal, but from meeting to meeting. The fortress ran out of salt, the potatoes were black and rotten and the bread was mouldy, but I didn’t care; they took grandfather to the camp hospital and we guessed that he’d never come back, but I scarcely took it in. The fortress corridors, always so overcrowded, seemed empty when she walked alongside me, and the tiny space allotted to us grew wide, or rather it was enclosed in itself and thus became infinite.
I owned a few coloured crayons and blank sheets of paper, and I tried in the evening to draw her face from memory. But I didn’t succeed. Then it occurred to me that I might compose a poem for her, and I did in fact put together a few verses which, admittedly, dealt more with meteorological phenomena than my feelings, and I took them to her. She said she liked the poem and carved me a little puppet with a smiling face out of conkers. I hung it up on the post of my bunk, right by my head so I could look at it before going to sleep. That was the time of day when I was with her most, because then I was rescuing her from danger. I’d carry her in my arms from the cell into which she’d been thrown naked to be tortured, and which I’d penetrated in disguise to save her. Night after night I thus performed my loyal, heroic deeds until I fell asleep.
She had brought a small porcelain mug with her from home, the porcelain was almost translucent and decorated with Chinese dragons and flowers. Several times she had given me some herb tea from it, we drank from the same mug and she acted solemnly. One day somebody, as was scarcely avoidable in that constant rush and confusion, knocked the little mug to the floor. When she cried over it I asked her for the fragments, cautiously threw them into the hot stove and watched what was happening to them. It looked to me as if the fire was really digesting them, that the fragments glowed in their own particular way, but later, when I cleared out the ashes, I found the fragments unchanged, perhaps a little sooty but otherwise intact. I fished them out of the ashes, carefully wiped them clean, and kept one of them. The rest I returned to her. I felt some attachment to them or admiration that they should have survived their fall into the fire and its heat. Maybe they will help us; maybe we shall one day be dug out of the ashes equally intact.
In my fantasies I defended her against all evil, but in real life I could not save her. She was assigned to a transport, as were nearly all the occupants of our barracks.
She ran out from the room, which was filled with confusion and tears, where the pitiful remains of the inmates’ belongings were being sorted out and packed in a hopeless hurry; she only had a moment, she wanted to be with her mother who was in despair. We knew of a spot in the recess of the ramparts, the slope there was overgrown with grass and shaded by ancient lime trees. It was quieter there than anywhere else in the fortress. That was where we’d most frequently been with the others, but now there was no one else there. We told each other which of our friends had also been listed for deportation and we reassured each other that the war would be over quite soon, that liberation was so near we need not be too much afraid of anything, and then we’d meet again, we’d all of us meet again, we didn’t quite know where we’d meet but that didn’t seem important. Then we were silent. What was there to talk about at such a moment? We walked round the spot and then she said she had to go back. She stopped for a moment, then suddenly she came close up to me and I felt the touch of her lips on mine. Her breath was on my face and I froze. Then she turned and fled. When I caught up with her she asked me not to come with her any further, we’d said goodbye already.
That afternoon she left. I stood by my window, I was not allowed out. I tried to spot her in the crowd which moved down the street, but I didn’t see her. It suddenly occurred to me that she hadn’t left, that it wasn’t possible that she had vanished, that she was no longer there.
I tore myself away from the window and knocked at the door of the next room, and when there was no answer I opened it. The room which a little while ago had been full of people and voices and things now yawned with emptiness. It seemed to me that I was standing on a rock, on a cliff so high and so steep that the land below me was out of sight. And I was seized by vertigo, I realised that I too was falling, that there was no way out, that it was only a question of time. What seemed solid collapsed in a single instant, and what seemed indissolubly linked to the ground was dissolved.
I escaped from that empty room, lay down on my mattress and closed my eyes. At that moment her face rose above me like the moon and looked down on me from the night sky, serene, remote and inaccessible, and I was engulfed by happiness together with pain and despair.
At nine o’clock precisely we sat down in the Boženka Tavern. It was a run-of-the-mill place. Nothing enlivened the blackened walls except some slogans and prohibitions. The table-cloths bore the stains of yesterday’s food. In the corner stood an abandoned and battered pool table, its green cloth long faded and become grey from cigarette ash and smoke.
The hauliers’ tavern of my childhood was full of colour. After my friend’s death I did not go in all that often, only when Dad sent me out for some beer, and he only drank about once in a month. Right behind the door a purple pheasant spread its colourful wings, and on the walls were bright pictures of horses and hauliers’ carts, the work of some local painter of shop signs and fairground rifle targets. And the landlord wore a neat clean check apron. When he’d drawn the beer for me he’d come round from behind the bar to place the jug securely in my hands. In the tavern of my childhood there was still a spirit of freedom.
Dad never tried to bring me up, he never ordered me to do anything or forbade me to do anything. Instead he would now and again set out on a walk, along with mother and me, mostly in the direction of the airfield, because Dad, though he loved woods, parks and any kind of water, was primarily interested in machines, and among these chiefly in machines which could fly. When we got to the airfield he would look at the taxiing aircraft, at the massive biplanes and the lightly-built gliders, and at that moment he certainly forgot that we were there with him, he would even chase after men in overalls and talk to them while we were hanging about the windy field.
Dad was interested in anything that flew. He taught me to make missiles from folded paper, not those ordinary ones that are launched in class as soon as the teacher turns his back, but aerial craft which beautifully and smoothly sailed into the air, some of them even rising before circling down to the ground.
We also made kites, and just before all our playing together came to an end we constructed a large model aeroplane from skewers, balsa wood and soft firm paper. We threaded a rubber band through the fuselage; once wound up this would drive the propeller. Dad promised that it would rise high enough to fly over the tower of the church in Prosek.
And when in fact we had carried it to the end of the airfield one Sunday morning and wound it up by the propeller, the little plane made a leap, hurtled forward and a moment later rose up to the sky, where it began to describe a large circle. But it did not complete it, something must have happened, the plane wobbled and suddenly broke up, spun to the ground and crashed.
When we rushed over all we found was a heap of skewers, balsa wood and pieces of carefully stretched paper.
I lamented and mourned our loss, and it was then that Dad said to me: Remember that a man never cries! It was one of the few lessons I ever received from him. He laughed at the heap of rubbish as he picked it up, adding that that was the fate of things, and anyone worrying about it merely harmed himself.
I ordered tea for myself while the others, without having to ask, were each served a large beer. The youngster drank mineral water. Venus produced her cigarettes, extended the packet to her neighbour on the other side and then to me. I thanked her and said I didn’t smoke.
‘Quite a paragon, ain’t you?’ she said. ‘Your wife must be pleased with you.’
‘If I hadn’t got drunk,’ the foreman said, ‘I most likely wouldn’t have got married at all. Because I had a fair idea that marriage is the end of life.’
I didn’t meet Lída until after I’d finished university. There was nothing exceptional about our meeting, it was unaccompanied by any special events or auguries. We just met and found we liked each other. She was only six years younger than me but I felt as if a lifetime lay between us.
What depressed me were certainly not doubts about the rightness of my choice, but the knowledge that I’d made a decision once and for all. I suspected that for me the most blissful prospect was not so much having the person I loved permanently by my side as a need, from time to time, to reach out to emptiness, to let longing intensify within me to the point of agony, to alternate the pain of separation with the relief of renewed coming together, the chance of escape and return, of glimpsing before me a will-o’-the-wisp, the hope that the real encounter was still awaiting me.
Man is reluctant to accept that his life has come to a conclusion in that most important respect, that his hopes have been fulfilled. He hesitates to look death in the face, and there is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love.
For our honeymoon we flew out to the Tatra mountains.
It was the beginning of windy autumnal weather, the larches were turning golden and the meadows were fragrant with ripe grass. We climbed up to the treeline, to where the forests ended, and above us towered the sharp ridges of bare rock. I lay down in the grass, Lída sang to herself and I felt as if her singing was filling the entire space from the sky down to the base of the rocks, marking out the space in which I would now forever move.
‘You must have been a one, Mr Marek,’ Venus said. ‘When my old man came home pissed I made him sleep with the horses or in the garage.’
‘So when did you have your own wheels?’ the foreman asked curiously.
‘When we were in Slovakia, of course. Míla got hold of an old Wartburg. When we went off with the kids on our first outing, just past Topol č ianky its exhaust snapped and the thing made a row like a bloody tank. He had to knock back a couple of doubles, he was so worked up about it, then he got down under the car so he could at least hold it up with wire, and when he’d finished we drove downhill again, and he’d cut out the engine so it wouldn’t make such a row, and we were going faster and faster, the kids loved it each time he skidded round the bends, but I was screaming at him: “Mila, d’you want us to end up as mincemeat? Have you lost your marbles?” And he said: “Not my marbles, my brakes!”’
I realised that Mrs Venus was relating this story mainly for my benefit, because I was the new boy, so I asked: ‘And how did the trip end?’
‘He used the engine to brake. He’s always managed to tame any mare yet.’
‘Except you,’ said the foreman. He chuckled and thereby gave the signal for general merriment. The one who enjoyed himself most was the captain, whose vaguely familiar face was still niggling at me. It suggested something, it pointed back to something, only I didn’t know what. The youngster with the girlish face scarcely smiled: it suddenly occurred to me that death was hovering over him. I had that sensation from time to time, more often in my childhood. I’d look at somebody and suddenly I’d be scared that the person would soon be gone. I’m not trying to suggest that I have second sight. I’ve been wrong on numerous occasions. And some people exude the breath of death for years while being alive and well.
During the war my father was living in the same fortress ghetto, within the same ramparts, but I couldn’t see him, a lot of walls and prohibitions divided us. Until one day the door opened and there, unexpectedly, he stood. Grown thin, his hair recently shaved off, wearing a boilersuit, he appeared in that door and his eyes swept the far corners of the dormitory. I cried out and suddenly he saw me and said: Quiet, quiet, I’m only here to repair the wiring. And he laughed at me. Then he took me in his arms, although I was a big boy, hugged me to himself and said: My little boy! And all the time he was smiling, but somehow oddly, his eyes were moist , and as I looked up at him I saw with amazement that my big, strong and powerful father was crying.
When I learned after the war that all those I had been fond of, all those I had known, were dead, gassed like insects and incinerated like refuse, I was gripped by despair. Almost every night I would walk by their sides, entering with them into enclosed spaces. We were all naked, and suddenly we were beginning to choke. I tried to scream but was unable to, and I heard the rattle in the others’ throats and I could see their faces turning into grimaces and losing their shape. I awoke in terror, afraid to go to sleep again, and my eyes roamed feverishly through the empty darkness. At that time I slept in the kitchen, near the gas cooker. I’d get up time and again to make sure no gas was escaping. It was clear to me that I had only been spared through some oversight, some omission that might be put right at any moment. In the end I was so crushed by horror and fear that I fell sick. The doctors shook their heads over my disease, unable to understand how a microbe could have got into my heart, but they never thought of the real gateway.
They prescribed bed and absolute quiet. But in that quiet I was able to surround myself with my friends, who had turned into spectres, and spend with them all that slowly passing time, and be drawn into their world, in which time no longer passed at all. I told no one about them but I was with them and they invited me to them, they repeated their invitations so persistently that I understood that I too was to die.
But I was still afraid of death, so much afraid of it I didn’t dare to look in the mirror. Thus I spent weeks in immobility, until one day my mother brought me War and Peace in three volumes, put them on my bedside table and told me not to pick them up myself, they were too heavy. I really was weak, I could hardly lift one of the volumes although they were just ordinary books. But when my mother handed me a volume I propped it up against my knees and read lying down. And as I read I was gradually transported into a different society. At times it occurred to me that the people I was reading about were also dead by now, that they had to die even if death did not overtake them on the pages of the book. Yet at the same time, though they were dead, they were living. It was then I realised the amazing power of literature and of the human imagination generally: to make the dead live and to stop the living from dying. I was seized by wonder at this miracle, at the strange power of the author, and there began to spring up within me a longing to achieve something similar.
I asked my mother to buy me some exercise books, and when I was on my own I began to put together my own experiences and to give back their lives to those who were no longer alive. At that moment, as though miraculously, their rigidified, cold and dismal features increasingly began to fade. When the doctor allowed me to get up six months later all the dead faces had dissolved, as though clearing out of my way. I was no longer able to command them, and if anyone had shown me a picture of any of my dead friends I’d have said: I don’t know him. But it was not the oblivion of death, nor the oblivion so common in our day when the dead and even some of the living are concealed forever by a blanket of silence, one which even swallows up speech. Instead it was a different kind of remembrance, one which lifted the incinerated from the ashes and tried to raise them up to new life.
So I lived again, and the doctor was pleased at the miracle wrought by some new tablets he’d prescribed for me. But I knew why I was alive. So long as I was able to write I’d be able to live, I’d be free from my spectres. I know that to this day, and I also know that nothing on earth can disappear, that even the picture of a young girl murdered long ago would remain latently somewhere, maybe in my mind, that it would rise from its depths just as her soul rose above the earth and the waters. And it seemed to me, as I was gazing at the face of the woman whom I had now, nearer the end of my life, met, who seemed familiar to me from the depth of my being, that by some miracle the one who had stood at the very beginning had returned, and as after so many years I again saw that motionless, dreamlike, loving face before me at night I was engulfed by a wave of joy mingled with sadness, even though I worked out with some relief that Daria had already been alive for three years when they gassed the other.
‘Well, you were shooting downhill,’ the foreman turned to Mrs Venus; ‘but what would you say if you were whizzing straight up into the air at the same lick?’ And he pointed to the ceiling with such a commanding gesture that everybody looked up towards it.
Thirty-five years ago the following had happened to him. He’d been stationed at an airfield near St ř íbro in Western Bohemia, and there, as well as the splendid S-199s, they’d inherited a training balloon from the Germans. Anyway, his sergeant had ordered him to get the balloon ready, which meant loading a parachute and ballast bags. The sergeant was giving him a hand himself. But just as they were getting the first sand-filled bag on board the anchor cable got loose and they shot up at such a pace that within a few seconds they were above the clouds. ‘I can tell you it was faster than a rocket. We were in shirt-sleeves,’ the foreman was getting carried away by his experience, ‘because down there it was mid-summer, and suddenly we were at the bloody North Pole. “Comrade sergeant,” I said, “Private Marek reporting we’re flying, destination unknown, but most probably we’ll find ourselves in the shit.” He was a fair sort of bloke so he said: “Marek, that was a damn silly order I gave you, to get inside without a parachute. See if you can get out of it alive. I’ll manage somehow.” And he held out his parachute to me, the only one on board. So I said: “Sergeant, you’ve got a wife and kids, if we’re in the shit you’ll jump.” And he said: “You’re a good bloke, Marek, we’ll either be in the shit together or we’ll both be bloody heroes.” By then he had frost on his face!’
‘But why didn’t you try to let out the gas?’ the youngster wondered.
‘Imagine we didn’t think of that? The bloody valve was frozen up, so we couldn’t do nothing.’ The foreman went on for a while to describe the terrible conditions at those freezing altitudes before, three hours later, they came down at Lysá.
‘Thirty-five years ago,’ the man who reminded me of my ear-nose-and-throat specialist joined in, ‘I was in a penal camp near Marianská, a short way from the frontier. At that time the Americans were beginning to send over little balloons with leaflets. Some of them came down near us, but anyone picking them up risked being put inside.’
‘What did they say?’ the youngster wanted to know.
‘Nothing worth a stretch inside. Anyway, what do you expect from a piece of paper?’
‘Balloons and ships may both have a future, but I wouldn’t get into one of your balloons,’ the captain brought the conversation back to appropriate bounds. ‘Or into a plane. If a ship goes down you’ve got a chance, but when a plane comes down…’
‘You don’t have to tell me!’ the foreman said, offended. ‘They were goners all right, there wasn’t as much as this left of them.’ He flicked a cigarette stub with his finger. ‘And if by some miracle one of them got out – well, obviously he was no use for anything, ever again.’
With Daria I was moving above the ground and above the waters; day after day, month after month. Even at night, when distance intervened between us, our dreams or visions were often similar to each other’s.
That, she explained to me, was because at night our souls would meet.
You think that the soul can leave a body while it is alive?
She then told me the story of the hundred-year-old sorcerer who disguised his real appearance by means of charms. He lived in a stone house in the middle of the forests which extended all the way to the northern ocean, and he spent his time in solitude. When he got tired of living alone he bewitched a beautiful young girl with his magic charms and tried to make her his wife. But she saw through him and realised his real nature. She was frightened and begged him to let her go: he was an old man, near the end of his days, while she had her whole life before her. The sorcerer replied: I may look old but I shan’t die because my soul does not reside in my body. When she wanted to know where his soul resided he explained to her that it was a long way away. Over the mountains, beyond the rivers, there was a lake, and in the middle of it an island, and on the island a temple, a temple without windows and with just one door, and that door could not be opened. Inside a bird was flying around, and unless someone killed it it would never die, and in it was the sorcerer’s soul. While the bird was alive he too would live.
The girl had a lover, to whom she sent word of her fate. The young man set out to find the island and the temple. With the help of good spirits he opened the door which couldn’t be opened, and caught the bird which could not, of its own, die, and with it he returned to his beloved. She hid them both under the sorcerer’s bed and told the young man to squeeze the bird hard. The young man obeyed and the sorcerer immediately felt sick, and as the young man squeezed harder the old man got worse. That was when he began to suspect something, and looked around the room. ‘Kill it, kill it!’ called the girl. Her lover crushed the bird in his hand and at that moment the sorcerer breathed his last.
I understood that she was telling me this story so I should never forget that her soul was a bird which I held in my fist.
The soul leaves the body after death and enters a different body, an animal or even a tree. That was why she preferred to work with stone or with clay rather than with wood. She could hear a tree groaning when it was cut down. On its journey to a new body the soul could overcome any distance whatever. So why shouldn’t it be able to do so during life? After all, it was not corporeal, so there was no force on earth that could fetter or imprison it when a soul wished to escape, rise up or join someone else.
Another time she told me that once in plain daylight she saw a golden ball moving among rosebeds, the blooms were mirrored in the ball and everything was in motion, free and exalted. A little while later, as she was returning home in the evening, or rather at night, she caught sight of me on the other side of the street, leaning against a lamp post; she’d run over to me but I had dissolved before her eyes. Was that a delusion sent her by some evil power or a sign of love?
Everything that happened had to have some superior cause, and she therefore sought for an explanation in the position of the planets. She established that my strongest and lucky star was the sun, which I had in Virgo and in the tenth house, and it was thanks to my sun that I had survived what I had, and thanks to it I would lead my life happily to the point when I had to leave it. I would not step out of my body until I had accomplished my task and performed the work I had to perform. What fate could be happier?
On Twelfth Night we poured melted lead together, and my figure was a woman covering her face and a beast of prey or perhaps a winged Hermes. In the woman she recognised herself, and in the winged creature, me. I was descending to her to carry her off or to bring her a message from heaven.
And why is the woman covering her face?
Probably because she is afraid of me.
She had a pack of fortune-telling cards of the famous Mademoiselle Lenormand and several times told her own and my past, present and future, the immediate as well as the distant future, and surprisingly the cards foretold an encouraging or even a splendid future for me.
I regarded this fortune-telling as a kind of lovers’ game, but I said to her that everything was bound to turn out right because I had a charmed life like that man who alone survived the crash of the aircraft which some years ago hit a church tower in Munich, or like that girl who survived an air crash in the Andes and then alone, for several days and nights, tore her way through the jungle until with her last strength she reached some human habitation. It so happens that I met that man not long ago and we got on well together; and although I’ve never seen that girl we would surely also agree that what crushes others is for us no more than an unimportant trifle, and the other way about.
In reality nothing was a game to her, to her everything was life, every second we spent together was to be filled with love, when we were not together spectres were creeping out on all sides as in the Apocalypse and many-headed serpents were coiling round her legs. She fought back and asked me for help, asked me not to leave her, to remain with her if I loved her, at least for a while. But I was already escaping, in my , mind I was hurrying home, chasing the tram that was just leaving to make sure I got home before my wife, who suspected nothing, who smiled or frowned according to her mood and not according to what I did. So we parted, kissed once more at the corner of the street, turned back once more, waved to each other, and I could just see her smile freezing on her loving lips and tears flushing the tenderness out of her eyes.
I’d always been devoted to my work, I’d always fought for every extra minute for my writing. Now I was trimming my work minute by minute, and these minutes were adding up to hours and days. I was still determined to rebel, to ask for at least one moment’s respite. Writing, after all, meant life to me.
She said: How can you talk like that? What is art compared to life?
When I can’t write any more I’ll die. But I’ll die loving.
Even though my wartime memories were getting dimmer, I kept returning to them. It was as if I had a duty to those whom I’d survived, and had to repay the benevolent forces which had snatched me from the common fate and allowed me to live.
With that burden I entered life. I was barely eighteen when I began to write a play about a revolt in a women’s concentration camp, about a desperate decision either to live in freedom or to die. Suffering resulting from a life deprived of freedom seemed to me the most important of all themes to think about and to write about. As then in the fortress town, so now, after the war, I felt that my whole being was clinging to freedom. I was able to quote by heart the thoughts of the captured Pierre Bezukhov on the subject of freedom and suffering, which are so close to each other that even a man in the midst of suffering may find freedom.
I didn’t understand Tolstoy, just as I failed to notice that a short distance from my home new camps were being set up, where people again had that final opportunity of seeking freedom in the midst of suffering. I only knew the camps of my childhood.
We walked down the street called V dolinách, which was perfectly clean; we had been preceded by the automatic cleaning machine driven today by Mr Kromholz. It had evidently worked so painstakingly that it hardly seemed to belong to our age at all, and so we approached the monstrous building they’d set up on the Pankrác plateau. Originally they’d wanted to call it the Palace of Congresses, for that was its proper purpose: to create an appropriately grandiose setting for congresses of all kinds of useful and useless organisations, especially the one which ruled over everything and over everybody, but then they called it, rather absurdly, the Palace of Culture.
‘Yeah, they have a different kind of mechanisation here,’ said the foreman, having noticed what I was looking at. ‘They have tiny little automatic refuse machines running along the corridors, parquet cleaners and floor-polishers – all imported stuff. Only for their use. D’you know how many people they have in there?’
‘It’s a monstrosity!’ the captain spoke up. ‘Eats us all out of house and home!’
‘Last week,’ Mrs Venus cut in, ‘some little kid got inside. They thought he’d got lost on Vy š ehrad but all the time he was inside there, he’d walked into one of their smaller reception rooms and fell asleep. And when he woke up he kept running round and round the corridors and in the end he got into the boiler-house and by then he was completely lost, wandering around between those coloured pipes and turbines. When they found him in the morning he’d gone completely round the bend.’
Coming up to meet us, in a manner combining clodlike indifference and self-importance, were two policemen. One of them was well-built with a foppish little moustache adorning his pleasant face, while the other seemed to me like a rather tall but sickly fair-haired child with sky-blue eyes. At the sight of them something in me stiffened. Although I hadn’t done anything, my experience as an innocent person with members of the police, whether in uniform or not, had not been happy. It didn’t occur to me that thanks to my orange vest I was now myself on the borderline of being in uniform.
‘Well then, you sweepers,’ the more foppish of the two addressed us, ‘a bloody mess?’
‘Not too bad,’ replied the foreman; ‘we didn’t do the housing estate today – that’s where they live like pigs.’
‘Ah, but we had some fun and games around here, believe me,’ the foppish one put a friendly hand on his shoulder. ‘Right next door,’ he pointed towards Vyšehrad. ‘What with that pervert about, the one who strangles women, some old hag thought he was after her and yelled for help. Some fuss, I can tell you! We combed the whole park, we had five flying squad cars there, all the way from Vršovice HQ, and all we got was one bloke. I could see at once that it wasn’t him, because that pervert is no more than twenty and stands 190 tall, and this fellow was getting on for fifty and the size of a garden gnome, but he didn’t have as much as a tram ticket on him, so why did we bother?’
‘He was some sort of editor,’ his colleague added, ‘kind of taking exercise after a heart attack.’
‘Is it true he’s strangled seven women already?’ asked Mrs Venus.
‘And who told you such rubbish, Missus?’ the foppish one said angrily. ‘We have two murders reported and four attempted rapes, and that’s the lot!’
‘And when are you going to catch him?’ asked Mrs Venus.
‘Don’t you worry.’ The foppish one stroked his pistol holster. ‘We know what to do. We’ve already established that he’s fair and nearly two metres tall, thin, and with blue eyes. So there!’ And he looked at his colleague, whom the description fitted surprisingly well. ‘If you see a bloke like that… Get me?’
‘Sure,’ the foreman promised.
The foppish one then turned to the captain. ‘And what about your trousers,’ he joked, ‘when will you grow into long ones?’
‘In my coffin,’ the captain replied. ‘I’ve got them all ready at home.’
The foppish policeman gave a short chuckle, then raised his right hand in the direction of the peak of his service cap. ‘All clear then. More eyes we’ve got the more we see.’
‘We’ll just have to watch out we don’t sweep up your clues,’ Mrs Venus said when he’d turned away. ‘And for that they get more than a miner!’
By twenty past eleven we had finished cleaning up around the Culture Palace. This completed our assignment for the day. We took our equipment back to the former Sokol gym hall, and we now had only one task left: to wait three hours for the end of the working day and then collect our wages. My companions of course had already marked out the tavern they’d go to. I could have gone with them but I didn’t feel like it. Going to a tavern once in a while is enough for me.
The first story of Franz Kafka I ever read was one of the few longer prose pieces he’d finished. It told the story of a traveller to whom an officer on some island wants to demonstrate, with love and dedication, his own bizarre execution machine. During the demonstration, however, the machine breaks down and the officer feels so disgraced by this that he places himself on the execution block. The author coolly and matter-of-factly describes the details of that dreadful machine, as though by doing so he can shroud the mystery and the incomprehensible paradox of the recorded event.
I was thunderstruck and fascinated by the seemingly impenetrable mystery of an event which, at the same time, depressed me. But I was able only to comprehend it at its most superficial level. The officer – cruel, pedantic, enthusiastic about his executioner’s task – seemed to me like a prophetic vision of the officers I had encountered, a pre-image of Hoess at Auschwitz, and I was amazed that literature could not only bring back to life those who had died but also predict the features of those who were not yet born.
Suddenly I found myself back on Vyšehrad hill. I walked through the park to the cemetery and to the ancient round church, which was surrounded by scaffolding. I’d never been inside the church although I can see it in the distance from the bluff behind our block and I actually own an old engraving of it: Sacro-Sancta, Regia, et exempta Ecclesia Wissehradensis SS Apostolorum Petri et Pauli ad modum Vaticanae Romanae a Wratislao 1. Bohemiae Rege A.° 1068. aedificata, et prout ante disturbja Hussitica stetit, vere et genujne delineata, et effigiata. A.° 1420. 2. Novembris ab Hussitis destructa, ruinata et devastata .
The building on the print looked different from the one now before me, and not only because it had been destructa, ruinata et devastata by the Hussites, but because the church had been rebuilt several times since the days when my engraving was made, and each time a little for the worse. In our country everything is being forever remade: beliefs, buildings and street names. Sometimes the progress of time is concealed and at others feigned, so long as nothing remains as real and truthful testimony.
As I walked around the little church I noticed that the door was half open. I glanced inside – there was an untidy heap of builders’ requisites, scaffolding and buckets, and some of the pews were covered with a tarpaulin. On one side of the altar I caught sight of my companion of the morning, the one who reminded me of the specialist who took out my tonsils. Now without his orange vest he was evidently engaged in meditation.
I preferred not to enter. I didn’t want to disturb him, nor to start a conversation with him.
He caught up with me in the park. ‘Such nonsense,’ he complained; ‘the time you mess around waiting for your pay.’
I nodded. He told me his name was Rada. He’d taken note of my name first thing in the morning. He’d shared a room at the Litom ěř ice seminary with a man of that name forty years ago.
I said that all my relatives had lost their lives during the war, that the only surviving one was my brother who was a good deal younger than me.
He had two younger brothers. The middle one lived in Toronto and the youngest one was a doctor, a radiologist, apparently a good one, but he would have liked to be a traveller, he really came to life only when he saw some foreign scenery. As a matter of fact he was nearly always somewhere abroad, most recently in Kampuchea. ‘Would you believe it, he actually learned to speak Khmer. To him it’s just a bit of fun, he can learn a language in a few weeks!’
We passed through a brick gateway and approached the areas we’d cleaned that morning. I was glad that my shift was behind me and that I could now walk through the quiet little street onto which, by then, more yellowing leaves had dropped from the adjoining gardens, past the dark eyes of the houses which gazed on me wearily but also contentedly.
Suddenly I froze. In one of the windows I caught sight of a hanged man, his face pressed to the window-pane and his long tongue hanging from his open mouth. From below he was flooded by a blood-red glow.
Mr Rada noticed what I was staring at and said: ‘Let’s see what our artist has put on show for us today.’
I realised that the figure in the window was only a skilfully got-up dummy. As I looked more closely I saw another head, half female and half dog, its teeth dug into the hanged man’s thigh.
‘Oh dear,’ my companion was not happy. ‘He must have got out of bed the wrong side. He usually puts something more entertaining in his window. A little while ago he had some colourful acrobats turning somersaults. I sometimes come here specially to see what he’s thought up. My brother, who came along with me once, declared that they’re the work of a lunatic.’ Mr Rada again returned to the subject of his brother, who seemed to play an important part in his life. ‘To him everybody he can’t fit into a pattern is a lunatic. He actually believes that the whole world is crazy, he says the world needs some terrible shaking-up, some great revolution to equalise the differences between the sated and the hungry. We argue a lot. At least until quite recently, when he came back home and told me about such a revolution that even I wouldn’t credit it. Right next to a hospital a well full to the rim of murdered people. Corpses everywhere, he just couldn’t have imagined it. Maybe he simply saw what any revolution always brings to the people.’ Mr Rada stopped and looked about him, but we were alone in the swept street. ‘The Apocalypse! That was the word he used, even though he never decided to believe in the Last Judgement and regarded Revelations as, at most, a poetic vision.’
My wife’s consulting room was not far from where we were.
Luckily her waiting room was empty. I knocked. After a moment a young nurse put her head round the door, choked back the reproof on the tip of her tongue and asked me to come in.
I saw Lída sitting behind a desk half taken up by a bunch of gerberas. She was examining some sheets of Rorschach blotches.
‘You’ve stopped by to see me? That’s nice of you.’
‘I was walking past.’
‘Are you going straight home?’
‘I thought I might look in on Dad first.’
‘It’s nice of you to have dropped in. Would you like some coffee?’
‘No, thank you.’ My wife had been offering me coffee for the past twenty-five years; I would have been interested to know if she’d noticed that I don’t drink coffee.
The young nurse had disappeared somewhere, I could hear a door shutting quietly. I sat down in the armchair in which normally people would sit with depressions, anxieties, suppressed passions, Oedipus complexes, or even with suicidal tendencies. My feet ached.
‘Have you noticed the flowers I got?’ she pointed to them.
I said they were beautiful and asked who’d given them to her. Her patients liked her. She was pleasant to them and gave them more time than she was obliged to, and in gratitude they brought her flowers. When was the last time I’d brought her flowers?
I used to give the other woman flowers and repeat to her ad nauseam how much I loved her; she aroused a sense of tenderness in me time and again.
I also felt some tenderness towards my wife, but I was afraid to show it, probably because she might begin to talk about such an emotion and even commend me for it.
She’d got her flowers from a woman patient about whom, as a matter of fact, she was worried. A girl of nearly nineteen, but still unable to come to terms with the fact that her parents had separated. She’d stopped studying, she’d stopped caring for herself, I wouldn’t believe how much she’d gone down over the past few weeks.
For a while my wife continued to tell me about the girl whose future was worrying her. My wife always took on the burdens of her patients. She’d try to help them, and she’d torment herself if she failed. Perhaps she was telling me about that girl to make me realise the devastating effect: that the break-up of a marriage might have. Certainly situations like this one touched her most closely.
Today the girl had told her about a dream she’d had: at dusk she was walking along a field path when suddenly, ahead of her, she caught sight of a glow. The glow was coming towards her, and she realised that the ground before her was opening and flames were licking up from the depths. She knew she couldn’t escape them, but she wasn’t afraid, she didn’t try to run away, she simply watched the earth opening up before her eyes.
I am looking at my wife, at her vivid features. She is still pretty, there are no lines as yet on her face, or else I don’t see them. Whether I like it or not, in my eyes her present appearance blends with that of long ago.
‘I’m worried she might do something to herself!’
I stood up and stroked her hair.
‘You want to leave already?’ She half-opened the door and looked into the waiting room. ‘There’s no one there, you don’t have to go yet. You haven’t even told me,’ she suddenly realised, ‘what it was like there… doing that…’ she was vainly looking for a word for my street-sweeping.
‘Tell you about it in the evening.’
‘All right, let’s have a cosy evening.’ She saw me to the door. She said I’d given her pleasure. She’s always pleased when she sees me unexpectedly.
I would have liked to say something similar to her, such as that I always revive in her presence, that I feel warm when I’m with her, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it.
She went back once more, pulled the biggest flower out of her vase and gave it to me, to take to Dad. It was a full bloom, dark yellow with a touch of amber at the tips of the petals.
She didn’t know, she had evidently never noticed, that my father didn’t like unnecessary and useless things such as flowers.
I kissed her quickly and we parted.
‘And the fourth angel sounded,’ I read at home in the Apocalypse, ‘and the third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon and the third part of the stars; so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise… And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.’ And somewhere else I read: ‘And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth… to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea… And fire came down from God out of heaven and devoured them. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone… And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose eyes the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them.’
Throughout the ages, probably ever since they began to reflect on time, and hence on their own past, men have assumed that at the beginning of everything there had been paradise, where humans had lived happily on earth, where
non galeae, non enses erant: sine militis usu
mollia securae peragebant otia gentes…
Yet simultaneously they had prophesied the advent of ruin. It was inescapable, because it would happen by the decision of heaven.
In the evening a French woman journalist unexpectedly turned up at our place. She was young, and she radiated French perfume and self-assurance. She smiled at me with a wide sensuous mouth as if we were old friends. She wanted to know how the struggle for human rights would develop in my country, what was the attitude of my fellow-countrymen to her fellow-countrymen, whether they would welcome them if they arrived as liberators. She was also interested to know whether I regarded war as probable, the peace movement as useful, and socialism as practicable.
Perhaps she really believed that any one of her questions could be answered in a form that would fit into a newspaper column. She questioned me as though I was the representative of some movement, or at least of some common fate. She didn’t realise that if I were the representative of anything whatsoever I’d cease to be a writer, I’d only be a spokesman. But then this didn’t bother her, she didn’t need me as a writer, she wasn’t going to read any book of mine anyway.
I recently read an article in an American weekly about how fourteen complete idiots incapable of speech had learned ‘jerkish’. That was the name of a language of 225 words, developed in Atlanta for mutual communications between humans and chimpanzees – and there was no doubt, the author of the article believed, that more and more unfortunate creatures would be able to talk to each other in jerkish. It occurred to me immediately that at last a language had been found in which the spirit of our age could speak, and because that language would spread rapidly from pole to pole, to the east and to the west, it would be the language of the future.
I do not understand or make myself understood by those who recognise only the literature they control themselves and which, because of them, is written in jerkish, and I am afraid that I cannot communicate either with the pretty journalist, even though she assures me that she wishes absolute freedom for me and for my nation just as she wishes it for herself and her nation. I am afraid that we speak in languages which have moved too far apart.
As she was leaving she asked, more out of politeness than anything else, what I was working on at the moment. She was surprised to hear that I wanted to write about Kafka. Clearly she believed that people in my position should be writing about something more weighty – about oppression, about prisons, about the lawlessness practised by the state. Anyway, she asked if I was interested in Kafka’s work because it was forbidden.
But I am writing about him because I like him. I feel that he is speaking to me directly and personally from a distant past. For the sake of accuracy I added that his work was not forbidden; they were merely trying to remove it, from public libraries and from people’s minds.
She wanted to know why they did this to his work in particular. Was it politically so subversive? or was it because Kafka was a Jew?
I think it would be difficult to find, in our century, many writers who were less interested in politics or public affairs than Kafka. There is no mention in his work of war or revolution, or of the ideas which may have helped to bring them about, just as there is nothing in his work which directly points to his Jewishness. The reasons why Kafka’s work was suppressed in our country were different. I don’t know if they can be simply defined, but I’d say that what was being most objected to in Kafka’s personality was his honesty.
The journalist laughed. Who wouldn’t laugh at such a reason?
She left before midnight. I hurried to get to bed. I was tired after a day which had started for me at five in the morning.
My wife curled up against me in her sleep, but I was unable to lay my thoughts to rest. A heavy paw lay chokingly on my chest.
Long ago, after I’d got well again, I was impatient every evening for the next morning. Night was like an angry dog lying in my way. Almost as soon as I was awake in the morning I’d walk past all the windows of our flat, which looked out to three points of the compass, to enjoy the distant view clothed in fresh green or white with snow. I enjoyed my work and the people at the newspaper office, I looked forward to seeing them and to those unexpected encounters which might occur. I also always opened my letters full of hope: I was forever expecting some good news, some exciting revelation or some declaration of love. And I looked forward to the books I’d read. I would read at every spare moment: in the tram, in the doctor’s waiting room, in the train, and even at mealtimes. I soaked up such a vast number of events and plots that they began to intertwine in my mind and I no longer knew which belonged where. I was enjoying life, and so I rushed from one experience to another, until I became like some obsessive eater who, out of sheer greed for the next course, is unable to savour the one he is eating. I didn’t drink or smoke – not from any puritanism but through fear that I might blunt the edge of my perception and thus be deprived of an exciting experience or a possible encounter. I had known ever since my wartime childhood that we are all living on the edge of an abyss, above a black pit into which we must fall one day, but I felt that its jaws were now receding from me and that I was tied to life by a countless number of threads which together formed a firm net on which I was, for the time being, swinging at life’s vertiginous height.
But the threads were quietly breaking, some gone rotten with age, some snapped by my own clumsiness, and others severed by other people. Or I might say: by the time we live in.
And so, every now and again when I lie down, I feel that heavy paw on my chest. In the morning, when I wake up, I want to shut my eyes again and sleep on.
Some time ago a classmate of my daughter’s came to see me, a youngster who’d already cut his wrists once, and who asked me: Why should a person live?
What could I say to him? We live because that is the law of existence, we live so that we should pass on a message whose significance we cannot quite fathom because it is mysterious and unrevealable. My father, for instance, lived for his work: whenever he’d managed to set some inert matter in motion he’d be so pleased he’d think of virtually nothing else, and for that goal he would give up all other pleasures and even his sleep. But maybe just because of that he was able to be startled when he saw the sun rise or when he heard a Schubert quintet. It also occurs to me that we live because there are a number of encounters ahead of us for the sake of which living is worthwhile. Encounters with people who will emerge when we least expect them. Or else encounters with other creatures whose lives will touch on ours with a single shy glance. What more could I say to him?
Anyway he cut his wrists again one evening, and with his hands bleeding even managed to hang himself on a tree at the northern tip of the Žofín island in the Vltava while his young friends were having a good time in the old dance hall there. My daughter cried bitterly as she told me about it, and in conclusion she said of her dead classmate: ‘But otherwise he was quite normal!’
While I was visiting my father in the afternoon his temperature suddenly began to rise steeply. His teeth were chattering and his eyes grew dim. I soaked a sheet and tried to wrap his emaciated body in the wet cloth, but he resisted, snatched the sheet from my hands and several times shouted: Take it and burn it!
Yes, I replied, I’ll take it and burn it.
Father had been imprisoned twice in his life, two different secret police forces had searched our flat – he was probably talking about some letters or papers. But then I asked after all: What is it that I should take and burn?
He looked at me with a lifeless gaze from his greyish blue eyes, which, when I was a child, were still the colour of blue lichen, and said: This fever, of course!
So I took his fever and made a little fire on the parquet floor from newspapers and some old manuscripts of mine which had been lying in a cupboard here uselessly for some thirty years. And as I was burning that fever I could see its face in the flames, it looked like the face of a pale china doll and I was waiting for it to melt or at least to crack up, but it stood up to the fire, only writhing in agony, and I noticed that the doll was crying, amidst the flames tears were glistening on her pale cheeks.
The flames had died down. I walked up to my father and touched his forehead. It was cool and moist with sweat. Dad opened his ever-seeing eyes and attempted a smile which was almost guilty. He could smile so tenderly and genuinely that even someone seeing him for the first time could not but realise that here was someone special.
I looked about me. The fever lay in ashes, its china-doll face was dry again, parched and greedy.
I wanted to fall asleep but I could feel the night creeping around me softly, like a cat out hunting, nothing mattering to it except its intended prey. I examined the threads by which life was still tying me to itself, still holding me above the black pit, its jaw so close that sometimes I could make out its smooth edge.
What tied me most firmly to life was my writing: anything I experienced would become images for me. At times they would surround me so completely that I felt I was in a different world, and my stay there filled me with happiness or at least with a sense of relief. Years ago, I persuaded myself that I would be able to communicate these images to someone, that there were even people about who were waiting for them in order to share my joys and sorrows. I did all I could to meet their supposed expectations: I was doing this not from pride or any sense of superiority but because I wanted someone to share my world with me.
Later I realised that in an age where so many were obediently and devotedly embracing the jerkish spirit, if only to avoid having to face the horsemen of the Apocalypse, very few people were interested in someone else’s images or someone else’s words.
I am still writing, putting words and sentences together to make incidents and visions. Often I labour for days over a single paragraph, I cover pages with writing, then throw them away, I keep trying to lend the most complete and the most precise expression to what I have on my mind, to avoid any misunderstanding, to make sure none of those I am addressing should feel cheated. Whenever I finish a book or a play my body rebels and punishes me with pains, and all the time I know that when I send my manuscript to the publishers I’ll get a one-sentence reply: We are returning your manuscript because it does not fit into our editorial plans. I then lend it to a few friends, and some who still refuse to submit to the jerkish spirit will probably copy it and lend it to some of their friends. I also send it abroad, provided it doesn’t get lost on the way, and it will be published there. So maybe after all – this is the thread I cling to – there may be a handful of people in the world with whom, despite all my irritations, I make contact.
I kept writing through all those years when not a single line bearing my name was allowed to be published in our country, when some of my recent friends would avoid me because they couldn’t be sure that meeting me might not cast a shadow on their respectability. I wrote stubbornly, although sometimes the weight of my loneliness lay heavily on me. I’d sit at my table and listen to the silence which was swallowing me up. I could hear nothing but a barely perceptible snapping sound as some of the individual threads broke, and I longed to discover some hope I could attach myself to. That was when she appeared. If we had met at some other time we’d probably have passed each other by, but at just that moment I raced after her like a man drugged, and it took years for me to come to again. At the same time I never stopped conducting a silent argument with her. Even when I longed for her most my words died in my throat the moment she looked at me, whenever the night separated me from her embracing and comforting glance I would compose answers to questions, reproaches, wishes and yearnings which until then I had left unanswered.
And now, as the night lazily stretched its back over me, I was continuing, by force of habit, with the silent letter in which I defended myself and tried to prove that I didn’t want to hurt her. Before throwing it into the big box full of unsent letters and wishes, full of promises, requests and half-whispered hopes I tried once more to visualise what she was doing just then, at least to visualise her room. Who knows if she was even there. I no longer knew how she spent her nights. Maybe she was just returning home, her swift footsteps were closing the circle. If I got up now and ran after her, maybe I could cut the circle open, clutch her to myself, within the confines of that circle forget everything outside it, everything that was, that is, and that would inevitably be. But I knew I wouldn’t do it. I’d only get up in the morning to set off for the streets I’d decided to sweep clean. It suddenly occurred to me that this was the reason why I’d found myself in the street with a handcart yesterday morning. I needed to go somewhere in the morning, at least I’d now have a natural objective for a while: set out somewhere, perform whatever kind of activity and listen to whatever kind of talk, just so I don’t have to sit amidst the silence listening to the snapping of the threads.
Perhaps, it occurred to me, I was in some new space. I’d entered the place where oblivion was born. Or despair. And also understanding. Or perhaps even love – not as a mirage but as a space for the soul to move in.