Four weeks later, again at nine in the morning, we were once more, the same team, sitting in the same tavern as on my first day.
When I’d put on my orange vest then I wasn’t sure how often I’d decide to repeat the experience, but to begin with I would come to work at least every other day. I was curious about what parts of Prague my work would take me to, what narrow little streets that otherwise I’d never venture into.
I am fond of my native city, not only of the part through which the tourist crowds stroll, but also of the outskirts, where, among blocks of flats from the Secession period, a few little rural houses have remained standing, either forgotten or, more probably, already sentenced to death in some development plans, where unexpectedly an avenue of ancient poplars has survived or a little wooded hill, or fences bearing appeals and announcements whose bright colours I was aware of but whose texts as a rule I didn’t read. More than once, as I pushed my cart with the dustbin I discovered a faded plaque on some familiar and usually dingy wall, a bust, or even a memorial huddling in some recess. These were meant to remind us that here, years ago, was born, lived or died some artist, thinker, scientist or national figure, in other words a spirit of whom it might be presumed that he rose above the rest of us. But more often, in one of those little streets or among the fading gardens, I remembered that here lived someone I knew, an artist, a thinker, a scientist or a national figure, someone who was here no more, someone beyond the hills and beyond the rivers, though mostly not over the river Styx, which would be sad but the common human lot, but someone now a refugee, someone driven out to our common shame. The walls of these houses, needless to say, did not bear plaques or a bust or even a visiting card to remind us that here lived a human spirit that had endeavoured to rise to higher things. I would glance at my companions at those moments, but they suspected nothing, except possibly Mr Rada, if he was one of our party, who might nod his head.
Thus I moved in my orange vest through the little streets and lanes of my native city which was slowly giving up its spirit, my companions at my side as witnesses. We were cleaning the town on which refuse had fallen and soot and ashes and poisoned rain and oblivion. We strode along in our vests like flamingoes, like angels of the dying day, sweeping away all rubbish and refuse, angels beyond life, beyond death, beyond our time, beyond all time, scarcely touched by the jerkish. Our speech resembled our age-old brooms, it came from a long way back and it moved along age-old paths. But behind us others are moving up: already the jerkish sweepers are arriving on their beflagged vehicles, pretending that they are completing the great purge, sweeping away all memories of the past, of anything that was great in the past. And when, with delight, they halt in the space which appears to them to be cleaned up, they’ll summon one of their jerkish artists and he’ll erect here a monument to oblivion, an effigy of shaft-boots, an overcoat, trousers and a briefcase, and above these an unforgettable face behind which we feel neither spirit nor soul but which, by official decree, will be proclaimed to be the face of an artist, a thinker, a scientist or a national figure.
There has been a slight drizzle since early morning, maybe it isn’t even real rain but just condensation of the fog which covers the city with grime and helps to submerge it in oblivion.
On days like this Daria would positively choke and life would seem unbearable to her, her stone or wood incapable of being worked on, and as the droplets fell inexhaustibly from the clouds so the tears began to drip from her eyes, no matter how I tried to console her.
My companions aren’t in a good mood either. I hardly recognised Mrs Venus this morning. Her right eye was swollen and below it was a purplish bruise. The captain’s face had lost its tan over the past few days and had gone grey. Even the foreman in his freshly laundered and pressed overalls walked along in silence.
I ordered some hot tea and the captain, instead of his usual beer, ordered a grog. ‘Tell me, who gave you that monocle?’ he turned to Mrs Venus.
‘A better man than you,’ she snapped. ‘One like you I’d have torn apart before he even raised his hand!’
Mrs Venus liked to make out how tough she was, but I believe she was good-natured, and she’d paid the price for it all her life. There were clearly many men she’d loved, or at least lived with, but they’d all left her, or else she’d run away from them. She’d raised three sons, even though she probably hadn’t had much time for raising them. When we were young, the order of the day was that women must devote themselves to more important duties than looking after their children. Now she lived on her own. Her flat, as I understood it, was reached by an open upstairs passage; the term flat meant a single room with a cooker. Her eldest son, who was a steelworker in Vítkovice, had given her a television set on which she could follow our jerkish programmes in colour. So for those evenings when she preferred home to the company at the bar, she had a reliable companion. Besides, at the far end of the passage lived, or rather slowly died, a lonely widower who’d been incapacitated by a stroke some years back, and now and then she’d go and clean up for him and bake him a cake – so he shouldn’t be left alone like an abandoned dog.
‘Yeah, maybe if two other blokes were holding me down,’ the captain growled.
Normally there was nothing eccentric about his speech. Mostly he’d conceal the oddity of his thoughts. He wasn’t a real captain, he’d merely worked in the shipyards before he lost his hand. But his real interest was not ships but inventions. That’s what he softly told me on the second day we were sweeping alongside each other: he’d think up machines which would improve people’s lives. Unfortunately, he’d so far not met with any understanding. Wherever he turned with his inventions, there were blinkered people behind desks, instructed to block real progress and prosperity. He offered to demonstrate some of his inventions to me.
I hadn’t been mistaken when I’d felt his face seemed familiar to me.
It was when I was still working in newspapers. One day the editor received a letter from an inventor who’d had his idea turned down. He had devised a way of utilising waste materials, especially soot, for the removal of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps. The editor passed the letter on to me for answering. I wrote that in this matter we were unable to help him. A few days later, however, the writer turned up at the editorial office. He was quite a pleasant and amusing fellow. I couldn’t see anything odd in his appearance, anything that might make me doubt his sincerity. He merely had a deeper tan than would be usual for that time of the year, but he told me he’d just returned from the shores of Africa. Out there, even at night-time when he couldn’t sleep because of the heat, he had reflected on the curious and dangerous imbalance of the planet. In some places it would offer warmth and in others humidity, and elsewhere nothing but sand or ice. During those nights he’d thought a lot about abolishing that imbalance, but his head buzzed with more crazy ideas than were found in the Academy. In the end, however, he’d discovered the fundamental mistake which nature and mankind had committed. They’d come to dislike black! Was there anything in nature that was truly black? And mankind, with the possible exception of the Chinese, regarded black as the colour of mourning. Yet black was in fact the colour which combined most completely with the basic life force, that is with warmth, whereas white, allegedly the colour of innocence, the colour of wedding dresses, repulsed heat; it was the colour of snow and of most of the poisons. Those immense white areas had to be removed from the surface of the earth, and life would then establish itself where deserts had been before, and warmth would invade the areas which until now had been frosty. It had taken him a long time to discover the right means and the right method. The means was a mixture he’d invented, a solution of soot in seven solvents and three catalysts, and the method was the melting of the polar ice. As soon as the ice caps were sprayed with his mixture they’d lose their deadly whiteness, they’d begin to soak up heat and to melt.
I realised of course that I was talking either to a madman or to a joker with a magnificent, elaborate joke. Or he might be both. A crazy inventor pulling his own leg. But I found his exposition so entertaining that I continued to listen to his vision of the world of the future, when oranges and rice would be cultivated beyond the Arctic and Antarctic circles, while in our country there would be two harvests, and breadfruit trees and date palms would thrive.
I heard him out to the end but I told him I didn’t have the time to go along with him then to see how his machine for the spraying of the mixture worked. He shrugged and left, and as a farewell gift handed me a few colour photographs which showed an array of strangely shaped objects arranged on the grass. I have no technical memory, so I’m unable after all these years to recall their shapes, and the photographs were lost when I was forced to leave the paper.
A few days later he turned up again. Had I noticed that there’d been a fresh fall of snow? He’d borrowed his neighbour’s car solely for the purpose of convincingly demonstrating his equipment to me. Once I’d seen it I’d realise its revolutionary significance and would maybe write an article about it after all.
The elderly Tatra car took us all the way to Kralupy. There, on the outskirts, immediately behind the railway crossing, we stopped. It was a small house, and evidently a bachelor establishment. On the wall facing the front door hung a framed photograph of a white-haired man: unless I was mistaken it was a picture of Edison, and below it in large letters the inventor’s statement: ‘My work is the work of peace!’ A desk below the window was covered with cartridge paper with drawings on it and with some rolled-up plans; on the shelves stood several skilfully-made model ships. I hurriedly drank a cup of coffee and then we went out by the back door into his yard.
I noticed that the snow which had fallen that morning had none of the usual deathly whiteness about it, but was dirty grey. My guide didn’t even look about him but hurried to a shed behind the house, opened its wide double door, and wheeled out his machinery. Unlike the house itself this was an object of impressive appearance. It reminded me of an ancient fire engine: all brass and gleaming metal parts. It might equally well have been a perfect artefact for some exhibition of op art. The long hose was fitted with a nozzle.
He wheeled the assembly into the garden, uncoiled the hose and began to pump some handles. A smelly mist issued from the nozzle. I watched the mist settling on the snow, but that dirty snow, instead of getting blacker, seemed to be getting lighter. No doubt there was some chemical reaction between the artificial mist and that chemical mess that had dropped from the sky. Thus we found ourselves in the middle of a near-white island while all around lay black clods of snow. I didn’t say anything, and he too was silent. In his eyes I saw neither disappointment nor the joy of a perfectly played practical joke. After a while he stopped pumping, coiled up the hose, and wheeled his shining equipment back into the shed. I seized oh the moment when he was inside and quickly walked along the railway line to the station. As I walked through the black snow I thought to myself that even if that man was crazy, he was no crazier than the rest of humanity which, in its eagerness for comfort, was spraying the world with a black mist in the belief that this was the direct road to the Garden of Eden.
It would have been embarrassing if he’d recognised me too, but he didn’t seem to remember me. He had been too obsessed with his own mission at the time to take note of the face of someone who served him, at best, as an intermediary.
I promised him I’d come and look at his inventions as soon as I had some time, and he did not press me any further.
‘For all you know your Harry may have been with me,’ Mrs Venus said. Her face seemed even more swollen than in the morning and she was gazing at us with her right eye like an owl. ‘He’s not like you, he doesn’t only go in for machines!’
‘He can do better than you, you old hag!’ The captain took a swig of grog, pulled out his pipe and filled it with his good hand.
Last Monday it rained even harder than today. We had to stop work before time was up, and as we were only a short distance from where the captain lived this seemed a suitable moment for a visit.
He led me to a house which looked even more dilapidated than the one where, years ago, he had demonstrated his equipment to me. He unlocked the door and hung up his captain’s cap on a rusty nail behind it. The walls of the hall were damp and hadn’t been painted for a long time; everywhere lay heaps of dusty objects and scattered pieces of clothing. The room’s appearance and dimensions suggested a ship’s cabin. Over his bunk hung various drawings, mostly of windmills. Nowhere did I see anything that suggested our first encounter. Perhaps I was the victim of some fixed idea and the captain had nothing in common with that young man years ago. No doubt the number of unsuccessful inventors in the world was increasing like that of unsuccessful poets.
He opened the bottom drawer and took out some folders of plans. He’d lately concerned himself with the most effective way of using wind power. He unrolled the first sheet and I saw a dreamlike ship whose deck was taken up by turrets carrying windmill sails, five turrets in all. He showed me further drawings, among them a windmill bus and a flying windmill, all these craft driven by wind. The drawings were meticulously done, the individual parts all bearing letters and numbers: I recognised the drive assembly, the transmission gears and the blades of the propellers as I knew them from childhood from my father’s drawings. Other drawings had landscapes dotted with wooden turrets towering picturesquely above the tops of the trees.
It struck me that the captain was not so much a madman, not so much a joker, as a poet at heart. What else could a real poet do when he realised that crowds of jerkish wordmongers and image-mongers had already flooded the world with their rubbish? What else could he do in the face of the monstrous palatial blocks choking the earth but build his windmills which rise up silently and leave behind neither noise nor smell?
I asked him how much time he spent on his inventing. He said not so much now. He was usually too tired. At one time his head used to buzz with so many ideas that there weren’t enough days and nights to put them down. Then he’d got married. He’d thought his wife would support him in his endeavours, but what woman could work up an enthusiasm for something that brought her no practical advantage? She’d begun to nag him, she even threw out his drawings and models. Finally, when their son was three, she’d run off. The captain spat towards the corner of his cabin and opened a cupboard which was full of strange objects. He’d wanted to go back to his old drawings but he’d suddenly discovered that there were stones rattling in his head. He was going downhill. One day, when he was cutting a sheet of metal with a welding torch, he’d handled it so awkwardly that the cut strip fell and crushed his hand. They had to amputate it at the wrist. So he’d been transferred to storekeeping. There, now and again, some idea would come to him. He hadn’t heard from his ex-wife for many years, but she’d not had a good time either. The fellow she’d run off with beat her, he knew that from his son. Maybe she’d come back some day. He wouldn’t drive her out, she’d find her bed all ready. He pointed to the upper part of the bunk, and it was only then that I noticed that the check bedcover had a thick layer of dust on it.
‘How old is your son now?’ it occurred to me to ask.
He looked at me in astonishment, and Mrs Venus answered for him: ‘Why, Harry’s off doing his military service now.’
In the dim saloon bar it was getting darker still and the raindrops were beating noisily against the windowpanes. But this was nothing compared to the drops which would beat a tattoo on the roof of the attic studio, where on days like this it got so dark we became invisible to one another, so we could find each other only with our hands and our lips and our bodies. Then, all of a sudden, she’d be overcome by tears, and as we were saying goodbye, as she was kissing me with moist lips in the doorway of the building, she begged me not to be angry with her, that it was only those clouds which had so depressed her, and she promised she’d write me a letter.
I’ve always wanted to get a letter from which I could see that I was being loved, and indeed she sent me one written on a rainy evening, or maybe late at night when the wind had dispersed the clouds.
My darling, my dearest, at this moment I’d leave everything, I wouldn’t take anything with me, and if you said: Come! I’d go wherever you commanded. I realise that one pays for this, but this is right because one should pay for it. But even if I were to die, even if I were to go out of my mind, which to me seems worse still, I’d go…
I was alarmed by these promises and resolutions, but at the same time I was flooded with a happiness, like the warmth of sunbathing.
She also wrote to me that she loved me to the point of feeling anguish and pain, that she experienced a terrible pain because I was not with her at this moment, just now when everything that was good in her was crying out to me.
That’s how she called me to her, and I knew that I had always longed for just such a woman. It gave me so much happiness that the reality of her pain and despair did not impinge on me. Or else I was too old to share her hopes without fear. Was I afraid we would end up like all those whose longing dies away and who can then scarcely bear to lie down by the side of each other night after night? Or was I not so much afraid as simply unable to brush my wife out of my life, my wife of whom I was still fond and who, after all, was supposed to belong to me to the end of my or her days?
If there were a devil, she chose a suitable quotation for me, it wouldn’t be he who decided against God, but he who didn’t find eternity long enough to come to a decision.
How can a person win love if he can’t come to a decision?
My wife suspects nothing, she trusts me. But she has tormented dreams. She is walking with her class across a snow-covered mountain plain, suddenly all of them increase their pace and she can’t keep up with them. She remains alone in the wind and frost, looking in vain for the way. Fog descends. She realises she won’t ever find her way out again. At other times she climbs a rock with her friends, and when she is at the steepest point they all disappear. Rigid with vertigo she presses herself to the rockface. She can’t move up or down, she calls for help, but no one responds.
She tells me her dreams and searches for an interpretation. She goes all the way back to her childhood, when she used to be on her own, unable to be close to anybody.
I know that she is wrong in the interpretation of her dreams, but I keep silent, I leave her at the mercy of her anguished visions.
But how can a man still believe in love if he has no compassion?
The foreman finished his second beer and unbuttoned himself. I realised that he was not so much worried by the change in atmospheric pressure as by the fact that he might lose his bonus. He ordered a third beer and announced that he’d made up his mind: he’d finally teach that Franta a lesson!
Franta is that young idiot with the tic in his face, the one I don’t understand a word of when he speaks. To my amazement he is also a foreman, he even drives a car and it looks as if he is checking on our work, not by official authority but so he can grass on us. Everyone hates him. Whether because he’s a cripple or because he’s a grass I can’t judge.
Mrs Venus told me that he’d recently had an operation. They’d taken his manhood from him. Franta did indeed have big breasts and his incomprehensible talk was in a falsetto. Last week, the foreman was now telling us angrily, that cripple had grassed on him, that he’d gone to have a beer when he’d claimed he was seeing the doctor. ‘I saw that shit at the final stop of the number 19 yesterday, in that bloody refuse truck of his, so I grabbed him by his collar and dragged him out on the pavement and said to him: “You’ll kneel down right here and ask my pardon, you swine, or else bring a pot along to collect up the bits of your bloody face!” He had to get down into the mud and repeat after me: “Mister Marek, I apologise to you, I’ll never say a word about you again.” “Mister,” I made him say to me, because to him, and to him alone, I’m no Comrade!’
The foreman is an ex-NCO who served some time at the airfield; that time he obviously regards as a heroic and happy one, and he is fond of reminiscing about it – which helps me to recollect my own childhood days. I envy him his memory. Not only does he remember a mass of stories and sayings, but he also knows the names of all the streets in our district, and that’s several hundred. He is as expert about the names and closing times of all the taverns as he is about street-cleaning technology. And they put him on an equal footing with that cripple.
‘You should have made him stand a round of beer,’ the captain remarked. ‘He’d remember that all right, having to dip into his own pocket.’
‘I wouldn’t accept one from him,’ Mrs Venus said. ‘I’d sooner stick to water.’
‘He’s a poor wretch,’ Mr Rada cut in from the next table. ‘What do you want from him?’
‘That one?’ the foreman became heated. ‘He’s a cunning little bastard, he knows very well that if they cut my bonus his will go up. Who d’you suppose grassed on us last month, the day we had that downpour, when we left out Lomnického?’
‘He’s a poor wretch all the same,’ I joined in.
‘You didn’t know him,’ Mrs Venus said, her swollen eye flickering between Mr Rada and me, ‘before they did that operation on him. By the time he got down to work it would be midday, and out: in the street the moment he’d catch sight of a skirt he’d whip out that thing of his!’
‘Creatures like him should be done in at birth.’ The foreman knew no pity.
‘How could they do that?’ I objected.
‘And why not? You only bugger about with them all your life, and there’s no time left for normal people. Aren’t I right?’ the foreman turned to the others. ‘And a decent bloke’s got to work till he croaks.’
‘And who’d decide who is normal?’
‘Leave it to the doctors; they can tell pretty well nowadays. Let me tell you,’ the foreman decided to cut short the discussion on euthanasia, ‘that if that damned pervert grasses once more on any one of us, I’ll catch hold of the bastard and kick him all the way down to the Boti č stream and there I’ll hold his bloody head under the water till he sees reason.’
Two and a half thousand years ago it is believed that the Greeks in Asia Minor, whenever their community was threatened by the plague or some other disaster, picked a cripple or otherwise deformed person, led him to the place of sacrifice, gave him a handful of dried figs, a loaf of wheat-flour bread and cheese, then struck him seven times on his genitals with a scourge, and to the accompaniment of a flute burnt him to death.
It was another rainy day, but at the beginning of spring. On the window-sill of the noble town house opposite two drenched pigeons were huddling together, and we were also huddling together, exhausted from love-making. I was beginning to get up because I wanted to get home, where my wife and children were expecting me, my unsuspecting and deceived family and my neglected, abandoned work. By now she knew that cautious movement which was the beginning of my moving away from her, but she didn’t, as usual, say: Don’t go yet! She just started to cry.
I asked what was wrong, but she only sobbed and pushed me away from her. It had been getting too much for her, she no longer had the strength for those perpetual goodbyes, for that coming together and breaking apart, she wasn’t cut out to be a two-man woman, she couldn’t bear the deception, the pretence sickened her, she wanted to live according to her conscience, she wanted to be with the one she loved.
But surely we’re almost continually together.
How could I say something so outrageous when every night I was in bed with another woman?
But that is my wife!
How did I dare say this to her? She was shaking with sobs. She’d never wanted to live like that, what had I made of her? A whore who wasn’t even entitled to see me when she felt depressed or when she needed me but who had to come running the moment I felt like it, whenever I could find the time for her.
I didn’t say anything, I was so taken aback by her grief and anger, and she screamed that I should say something, why didn’t I defend myself, why didn’t I try to convince her that she was mistaken, why didn’t I tell her that I loved her, that I cared for her?
Then we made love again, night descended on the palace outside our window, the drenched pigeons had disappeared. She wanted to hear again and again that I loved her. I kept repeating it with a strange kind of obsessiveness. We made love with the same obsessiveness, and she whispered to me that we had been predestined for each other, that we were resisting our fate in vain, that I was resisting in vain when I longed for her so much.
And I didn’t say anything. I embraced her, I melted into her, and I tried to dispel the unease which was growing within me.
But I didn’t want to live like that permanently. When I got home I told my wife about the other woman.
It was getting on for ten o’clock, the time when we normally left our hospitable tavern. The foreman, who was a great one for precision, looked closely at his watch: ‘One more beer,’ he decided, ‘and then we’re off, even if it’s pissing like from a fireman’s hose.’ And to comfort us he related how exactly thirty years ago it had rained just like this all through the summer. He was encamped down beyond Kvilda, at the back of beyond. Luckily he managed on the second day to pick up a pretty dark-haired girl from accounts at the timberyard. He’d stopped at her office in the morning, and within half an hour he’d done all the calculations for her that she’d have spent the whole day on, so that they could get down to the real business.
The foreman was a good raconteur, and the standard of his story-telling rose with the interest of his listeners. In me he found an attentive listener, for which he rewarded me not only by addressing me more often than the rest but also, as a sign of his favour, by occasionally giving me the better and more profitable jobs. His most grateful listener, however, was the youngster, either because at his age he was the most eager to hear other people’s stories or because fate had prevented him from experiencing most of the things the foreman recounted.
I knew by then that he hadn’t been sickly from childhood. As soon as he’d finished school he’d let himself be lured by favourable terms into a chemical plant, where they offered him a flat within a year and special danger pay straight away. That danger pay was not just a lure. He’d hardly been at the plant five months when an incident occurred, which is the term used in the jerkish press for an event which costs the health and even the lives of an appreciable number of workers. There’d been an escape of poison gas. Two women died instantly and the young man was discharged from hospital after six months and pensioned off. His liver and kidneys were damaged, and he’d better forget about women altogether. Nevertheless he’d taken a liking to a tram driver called Dana, admittedly the divorced mother of two girls and his senior by ten years, or maybe it was just because of that that he thought he had a chance. Apparently he’d been courting her for a year and he’d been cleaning the city’s streets for that period in order to earn a little extra money so he wouldn’t come to her as a pauper.
The rain thirty years ago had been an obstacle to the foreman’s intentions until he remembered that a little beyond the airfield there was a rusty old Messerschmitt which had been wrecked during the war. Its innards had of course been torn out, but if you pulled the canopy shut and put a rug on the floor it was almost a hotel. First time they did it the dark-haired girl had hardly taken her skirt off when she let out a terrible shriek because a snake was creeping out from one of the holes in the instrument panel. There was a whole nest of vipers there, and the foreman had to get rid of them all and stuff up the holes with tow before he could get to the most delicious hole of all. ‘Let me tell you,’ the foreman concluded, ‘one thing I’ve learnt in my life more than once: a bed isn’t everything!’
It was nearly a quarter past ten and it was still raining outside. Listening to other people’s tales, whatever they are, I sometimes feel like a debtor, like an eternal dinner guest who never offers any invitations himself, but usually I cannot bring myself to demand the attention of others.
A few years ago my wife’s sister was moving to another flat. She asked if I would help her. The woman who’d let her have her one-room flat was quite mad, she’d piled it high with junk she’d picked up at rubbish dumps, but she was anxious about it and wouldn’t let the removal men touch it, and so she didn’t know how to move her things out.
How many things can you get into a room? I thought my sister-in-law was exaggerating. I took the word rubbish heap figuratively. I promised to move the lady’s things bit by bit in my car. Even outside her door I felt a strange odour wafting from inside. The instant she let me in the smell of rot and mildew hit me violently. The woman, however, was neat and clean, the hand she held out to me was scoured white. She showed me in. I walked a narrow path between crates, boxes and masses of parcels until I reached the window and asked if I might open it. A wave of fresh air full of smoke and exhaust fumes rushed inside, but the atmosphere of decay which persisted here was not to be drowned. Then I helped the woman finish her packing. We tied up children’s copy books and stacked them in a crate together with burnt-out lightbulbs and an unmatching pair of sandals without straps, bits of worn-out cork tiles and armless dolls, old envelopes, the shells of radios, rusty saucepans, a broken chandelier and a glass marble. The woman had clearly spent her life collecting and storing other people’s rubbish, which possibly gave her a sense of hope or security. For five whole days I drove to and fro. She thanked me and promised me eternal salvation for my trouble, a salvation I’d soon experience because the time was nigh when mankind would assemble for judgement in the place called Armageddon. I felt like asking her why in that case she was keeping all those things, but there was no sense in putting this question to a crazy woman when I might just as well ask anyone else or myself.
As I was carrying downstairs what must have been the fiftieth package at least I couldn’t resist the temptation to untie the string and to tip the contents into the nearest dustbin. I covered it up with some empty paper cups and kitchen waste from the bin next to it, and drove off with the rest of the junk to my sister-in-law’s flat.
About an hour later I returned for the next load, but I had to wait a long time for her to let me in. She was standing in the door as if hesitating whether to admit me. ‘You, you…’ she said to me. ‘And I trusted you!’
‘What a hope,’ the foreman spoke up, ‘Let me tell you, I’ve learned this more than once in my life: you won’t get any thanks from a woman!’
Wisps of fog were drifting outside, rising from the pavements and the sodden lawns. In the telephone box outside the tavern a girl was smiling prettily down the instrument at someone.
I too used to smile. I thought that I was really seeing the woman I loved and that I could touch with my eyes what she was seeing just then. She told me: outside my window a raven is freezing on a branch, he’s telling me something but I can’t hear him. I was freezing as much as that raven. I had to breathe on the glass to see out. On a rime-covered tree there actually sat a raven. What could he say? Nevermore, nevermore. I thought I understood him: we’d never find anyone to love so much again.
The girl stepped out of the phone box. My companions were still lazily hanging about the tavern door. I lifted the receiver. I hesitated for a moment, but I so needed to hear a familiar voice that I dialled. Lída said she was pleased to hear me and wanted to know where I was calling from, what I had just been doing and if I wasn’t cold. She was looking forward to my coming home. I would have liked to say something nice to her, to my wife, to address her tenderly as I used to: Lída darling, or at least Lída dear, at least ask her what she was doing, what she was thinking about, but I was unable to say anything other than that I’d come straight home after visiting Dad at the hospital.
I remained in the box for a moment. My garish vest was brilliantly reflected in the glass. I fished in my pocket for a coin. That other number so vehemently forced itself on my mind that I repeated it in a whisper.
I stopped fishing for that coin. I watched my companions marching slowly uphill to the little park where we’d left our tools in a small shed. Mrs Venus caught sight of me and waved.
Some other time, my love, but I’m not silent because I’m not thinking of you, it’s just that I have nothing new to say to you.
And you think that this silence, the way we live now, is good?
I don’t know if it’s good, but I don’t know anything better.
You don’t know anything better? Just look at yourself, the stuff you’re wearing, this masquerade. Have you gone in for repentance or what?
No, it’s perfectly honest work. I can think while I’m doing it.
You can think, can you? How nice for you. And what about me? Are you at all interested in what’s happening to me? How I’ve been feeling? After all those years I haven’t even merited a single phone call from you.
We had a lot of phone calls with each other. At least a thousand!
Don’t count them up. I don’t want to hear numbers. Anyway, that was before. Afterwards you didn’t ring even once.
We’d said everything to each other. We were exhausted from those conversations. What else was there to say to each other?
You’re asking me? You might at least tell me whether the whole thing meant anything to you.
You know very well what you meant to me.
I don’t know anything after the way you behaved. I always thought…
What did you think?
Never mind. I didn’t want to believe it. After all you’d told me when we were together, how could I believe that you’d chase me away like some…
Please don’t cry!
Tell me at least, did you love me at all?
You know I did.
I don’t know anything. How am I to know?
An old woman was approaching the box. Perhaps she didn’t even want to telephone, but to be on the safe side I opened the directory and pretended to look for a number.
If you’d loved me you wouldn’t have behaved the way you did!
I was crazy about you.
Don’t be evasive. I asked you if you’d ever loved me. If you’re capable of loving anyone.
Don’t torture me!
Me torturing you? Me you? Tell me, my love, what have you done to me? At least explain to me what was good about it.
I just couldn’t carry on like that. Forgive me, but I couldn’t go on living like that!
And me, how am I to live? You never thought what would happen to me, did you? How can you be silent like this, it isn’t human! Surely you must say something to me, do something. You must do something about us!
At one time I used to write plays. The characters were forever talking, but their words went past each other, their remarks slid past one another like the slippery bodies of fish, without making contact. Did I write that way because I believed we could step out of our loneliness? Or because I needed to find a way of avoiding answers? Where words miss each other, where humans miss each other, real conflict may arise. Or did I suspect that a man cannot successfully defend himself in the eyes of another, and when he is talking he’s doing so only to drown the silence which spreads around him? To conceal from himself the reality of life, a reality which, at best, he perceives only at exceptional moments of awareness?
The man who had alone survived the crash of the aircraft which hit a church tower in Munich was working as a newspaper editor in Belgrade. I was curious to meet a person who had risen from the ashes, but his sister had just died of cancer and he asked me to postpone our meeting for a few days. When I called on him later his other sister was gravely ill with the same disease. ‘The doctors are giving her no more than two months,’ he said to me; ‘they told me this morning. You know what is odd? I went out into the street and I didn’t hear anything. There were trams and cars moving about and people talking, but I didn’t hear any of it. There was the same sudden quiet then, after the crash.’
I caught up with my companions. The youngster passed me my shovel, which he had carried for me on his handcart, and Mrs Venus said: ‘Bet that wasn’t your wife you’ve just phoned.’
Right by the kerb I noticed a dead mouse. I picked it up on my shovel and flung it on the rest of the rubbish.
My wife was amazed by what I told her. She couldn’t believe that I’d lied to her for so long. I said what most men would probably say in such a situation, that I had hoped to spare her needless suffering because I’d believed it would soon come to an end.
But you don’t want to end it? she asked.
I said that I loved the other woman, that I’d never loved any woman the way I loved her.
But I thought you loved me more than anybody else! Tears flooded her eyes. Then she wanted to hear details. Any kind of truth was preferable to silence. I was to tell her where she’d gone wrong and how she could put it right.
I poured out all my complaints and self-exculpating explanations, but after a while we were merely rehearsing who did the shopping, who the cooking, the laundry, the washing up and the floors, until I was horrified by the poverty of my own speech. I fell silent, but my wife wanted to hear something about the other woman and I, suddenly freed by my newly-discovered openness, began to praise the qualities and talents of my lover, to describe the uniqueness of what we were experiencing. But: as I was forcing all this into words I transformed the experiences which had been mine only, and which had seemed inimitable and unique, into something common, categorisable and conventionally melodramatic. Yet I was unable to stop talking, and my wife listened to me with such involvement, such readiness to understand me and maybe even advise me that I fell victim to the foolish idea that she might even share some of my feelings. But she was merely hoping that if only she received my confession and listened to me attentively she might transform my words on how we had drifted apart into the first act of a mutual drawing together. She would confront the urgent attraction of the other woman with her own patient understanding.
When – suddenly not too convinced that this was what I truly and urgently desired – I suggested that I might leave home, at least for a time, she said that if I wished to leave her and the children she wouldn’t stand in my way, but if after a while I decided to return home she couldn’t guarantee that they would be able to have me back. I was far from considering what I would wish to do after a while, but I thought I could see in her eyes so much regret and disappointment, and anguish at the thought of impending loneliness, that I did not repeat my suggestion.
We didn’t go to bed until the early hours. I couldn’t have slept for more than a few minutes because daybreak had not yet come, but when I woke up there were muted sobs by my side.
She was crying, sobbing steadily and persistently, her mouth buried in her pillow so she shouldn’t wake me.
I would have liked to caress her or say something kind to her, to comfort her as I always did when something depressed her, but this time it was me who’d crushed her. Unless I changed my decision I had become the one person who couldn’t comfort her. I suddenly realised that the position I found myself in tormented me rather than gave me a sense of liberation.
In the morning I was awakened by a crash, by the sound of splintering.
I found my wife in the hall: by her feet were fragments which I recognised as those of the only piece of sculpture we’d ever had in our home. The angular bird’s head was shattered and its human eyes had rolled God knows where.
For an instant we were both silent, then my wife said: ‘I’m sorry. I had to do something.’
And I, in a sudden flush of compassion, without reflecting that the previous day I’d been determined to do the opposite, promised her that I wouldn’t leave her, that I’d stay only with her. We had had our children together, and surely we’d once linked our lives together till death did us part.
Shortly afterwards we went to see our daughter’s art teacher. He was exhibiting his paintings in a small-town gallery. We walked round the pictures, which somehow all seemed to express the loneliness of men, and I tried to suppress my nostalgia. In the evening some visitors arrived. They were nearly all painters and they talked a lot about art, which reminded me of the other woman. They took their observations seriously, and seemed to me to be genuinely seeking a meaning behind their activity, but to me all talk seemed unnecessary at that moment, it was no more than a substitute for life, for movement, for passion. I fled the company and went down to the riverbank. My wife found me there and wanted to know if I was sad, if I felt nostalgic. My wife, that voluntary healer, promised me that things would be good between us, we’d start another life, and I’d be happy in it. She wanted to know what I was planning to write and to hear what was on my mind that instant, she talked about sincerity and about life in truth. I was listening to her and I felt as if something was snapping inside me, as if every word was a blow which cut something in two. I was surprised she couldn’t hear the blows herself, but simultaneously it seemed to me that the despair was fading from her voice. I had always hoped that she would feel comfortable with me, that life’s hardships would not weigh her down too much – her relief gave me at least some satisfaction.
The street was still wet but the air had been cleansed, and as we stepped out of the shade of the residential blocks we even felt the rays of the autumn sun which somehow dispelled our gloomy mood of the morning. The youngster was whistling a Gershwin tune and Mr Rada all of a sudden showed me a slim little book on the cover of which was a street-sweeping truck and a broom, while its title to my surprise promised a critical essay on the personality cult. ‘Do you know it?’
I’d never seen the book before in my life.
‘An interesting reflection on how we used to deify ourselves and physical matter.’ He opened the book and read aloud: ‘Here lies the root of the cult, here is that proton pseudon: that the miserable, mortal, ephemeral human ego declares of itself: Ich bin ich. Das Ich ist schlechthin gesetzt . I am the finest flower of the materialist God!’ He shut the little book again and I caught another glimpse of its cover. On the sweeping truck, as I now noticed, lay a big human head.
‘And what are we really?’ I asked Mr Rada, and at that instant I understood the connection between the cover picture and what I’d just heard.
The youngster was still whistling that familiar tune and I felt irritated at not being able to think of the words that went with it.
‘It’s “The Man I Love”, of course,’ he told me, delighted at my display of interest and my acquaintance with the composer, and immediately he sang to me the four-beat tune: ‘Some day he’ll come along, the man I love.’ He asked: ‘You like Gershwin?’
I told him that thirty years ago a black opera company had come to Prague with Porgy and Bess ; it had been the first visit for a long time of any company from the other side of our divided world. Getting tickets required a miracle, but I’d been lucky.
The memory took me away from the swept street. Not that I could recall anything of the performance which had then delighted me, but I could see before me the little street in the suburbs of Detroit, where a lot of black children were shouting on the sidewalk and a white-haired black man sat in a wheelchair in front of a dingy low house. Someone was playing a trumpet, or more likely had put on a record with Louis Armstrong or somebody, there was rubbish everywhere, bits of paper, advertising leaflets and Coca-Cola cans, and in the hot air hung a smell of onions, slops and human bodies.
I was seized by nostalgia for that country. Suddenly I was seeing myself in my orange vest pushing that miserable handcart. Of course I needn’t have worn that particular vest, but they made me wear some garishly coloured jacket to make sure everyone recognised me from afar and gave me a wide berth. This was now happening to me, even though, having been put into a colour-marked jacket in childhood, I longed for nothing more than to get rid of the mark of disinheritance.
‘We used to play him a lot,’ the youngster said. When he saw my surprise he explained: ‘We had a jazz band, you know, before I got my liver all buggered up.’
The captain rolled up the sleeves of his grubby pullover. ‘I may have something useful for your garden,’ he said to the foreman.
‘So long as it isn’t that greenfly spray of yours,’ the foreman was alarmed. ‘Made my greenflies scamper about like squirrels and screwed up my roses completely.’
‘We used to play Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, or Scott Joplin ragtime,’ the youngster said enthusiastically, ‘but we liked George Gershwin best, and he also came across best because people had heard his stuff before.’
‘And now you don’t play at all?’
‘Not a hope. Couldn’t blow now. Know what impressed me most? That he’d never had any special schooling, and look at the music he wrote!’
‘Did you write any yourself?’ I asked.
‘We all did. We just had jam sessions and something or other would come out of them.’
From one of his enormous pockets the captain produced a piece of collapsed rubber fitted to a small bellows. He squeezed the bellows a few times and the rubber swelled up into a small balloon.
Now balloons were something the foreman was interested in.
‘What kind of bird-brained contraption is this then?’ he asked, leaning his broad shovel against the wall of a house. He couldn’t know how appropriately he’d described the device, for it was actually intended, as we were informed, for scaring birds away. The balloon with the bellows also included, on one side, sails like a windmill’s and, on the other, a whistle. The windmill, by means of the bellows, would blow up the balloon, and once the air pressure in it exceeded a certain limit a valve would open and the whistle would emit a short but powerful blast, which would scare away any flying intruder.
Using his hook the captain pulled from a pocket an object reminiscent of a small organ pipe and with his sound fingers he screwed it into a thread at the end of the balloon.
We were all intently watching his antics, but the expected blast did not materialise: there was only the hiss of escaping air.
‘How is this superior to an ordinary rattle?’ the foreman asked doubtfully.
‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that a rattle goes all the time and the little bastards get used to it?’ The captain once more began to squeeze his bellows and we, now all leaning on our tools, were watching the balloon filling up.
‘And if there’s no wind?’ the foreman asked with interest.
At that moment there was a brief sound of bursting, rather like a distant shot, and what had just been a balloon was no more.
‘You know, they let us rehearse at the works club twice a week,’ the youngster reminisced, ‘but we could stay there as long as we needed to. Sometimes we’d fool around till the early hours of the morning, just stretching out on the tables for a moment if we felt like a rest.’
‘Weren’t they waiting for you at home?’ I asked in surprise.
‘At home? But I didn’t live at home!’
‘If there’s no wind,’ the captain replied to the foreman, ‘it works by electricity.’
‘If you felt like it and could spare the time,’ the youngster suddenly remembered, ‘the boys are playing in Radlice this Sunday.’ He fished about in his wallet and pulled out two tickets. ‘Maybe you’d like them.’
I objected that he’d got the tickets for himself, and while we were sweeping up the leaves and conkers which had dropped from a huge horse-chestnut tree he explained to me how to get there.
I sometimes feel nostalgic for America. Even in my dreams I wander among the skyscrapers or drive along highways through endless landscapes, always full of expectation. Yet nearly every one of these dreams ends sadly: I’d stayed on in that country, beyond the sea, I’d never return home again, to the place where I was born and where people, or at least some of them, speak my native language.
They’ve put me in a vest in which I feel restricted. I could take it off, or even with a fine gesture chuck it away and go somewhere where they won’t force one upon me, but I know that I won’t because by doing so I’d also be chucking away my home.
Franz Kafka was certainly one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived and worked in Bohemia. He used to curse Prague and his homeland, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave, he couldn’t make up his mind to tear himself away from them. His seemingly dreamlike plots unroll in an environment which appears to have little connection with any real place. In reality his native city provided him with more than just a backdrop for his plots. It pervaded him with its multiplicity of voices, its nostalgia, its twilight, its weakness. It was the place where the spirit could soar up to any heights, but it was also the place where there was in the atmosphere a barely perceptible smell of decay, which more particularly affected the spirit.
Kafka spoke perfect Czech, perhaps just a trifle stiffly, but he wrote in German. But he was not a German, he was a Jew.
Not a single Czech literary historian has ever found in himself enough generosity, courage or affability to range him among the Czech authors.
The sense of exclusion and loneliness which repeatedly emerges from his prose writings certainly stemmed from his disposition, from the circumstances of his life. In fact he shared it with many of his contemporaries. But Prague greatly intensified it. He longed to escape from it, just as he longed to escape from his old-bachelor loneliness. He failed to do so. He was unable to liberate himself except by his writing.
If he had succeeded in liberating himself in any other way he’d probably have lived longer, and somewhere else, but he wouldn’t have written anything.
Home had become a cage for me. I needed to break out, but whenever I went out while my wife was at home I could see fear in her eyes. She never voiced it, suspicion was not part of her nature, she was trying to trust me as she’d done before, as she trusted strangers, but her eyes would follow me wherever I moved. When I returned she’d run out to meet me, pleased that I was back home again and welcoming me tenderly. And she, who’d never been too concerned about how I spent my time, what I was thinking about, what I ate, would ask if I wasn’t hungry, and during supper she’d shyly reflect on where we might go together so we should enjoy ourselves, and she’d agree in advance with whatever I suggested. She’d never been like this before, she’d known how to pursue her own interests and have her own way, but now, humbled and humiliated, she was trying to live up to her idea of my idea of a good and loving wife, and her slight gaucherie both shamed and touched me.
She was not endowed with directness. I always felt that she moved more freely in the world of ideas and theorems than among people. In dealing with people she lacked naturalness. And yet she wished she had it, she needed it in her profession, which required her to gain her patients’ confidence. I noticed her trying desperately to achieve what others had received as a gift. I knew that she wanted people to be fond of her. She is happy whenever others appreciate her good qualities or her ability, and she hastens to repay them for it by deeds, or at least by words so eager that she embarrasses them. I’d wanted to help her not to feel isolated among people, and now I had brutally pushed heir back into the corner from which she’d tried to escape.
Of course she had a lot of acquaintances and colleagues who respected her, but she had few real friends. The children were growing up and the day when they’d be leaving us was approaching. If I were to leave her as well, who would look after her as she moved towards her advancing years, who would walk by her side?
But could I still do it?
We are lying next to each other, we embrace. She wants to knew if it was good for me; behind that question I suspect a multitude of suppressed and anxious questions and I ask her not to ask me anything. She says that she loves me, we’ll be happy together yet, and she falls asleep, exhausted, whereas I am sinking into a strange void between dream and wakefulness. I am fighting against sleep, against the state when I shan’t be able to drive away the voice which begins to speak to me.
At one time it was my wife who spoke to me. She’d wait for me at street corners in dream towns, she’d miraculously appear in a moving train, she’d find me in strange houses and in the midst of crowds. By some miracle we’d jointly discover forgotten box rooms, or a ready-made bed in a deserted corridor, or a hidden spot in a garden or a forest, and there we’d whisper tender words and verses to one another, there we’d embrace, and in my dream, as usually happens, we’d make love more passionately and completely than in reality.
Then she began to disappear from my dreams and other women appeared in them, but in their embraces I felt treacherous and unclean, and when I woke up I was relieved to find my wife lying by my side. Sometimes a different dream would recur repeatedly. I was aware of my age, of my approaching old age, and I realised that I’d remained alone in my life, that I’d failed to find a woman with whom I’d beget children, and that depressed me.
What speaks to a man in his dream is the secret or suppressed voice of his soul. This dream, I tried to explain to myself, echoed the memory of the time when I was growing up and when I was afraid I’d never succeed in finding a woman’s love. But had I understood my soul’s voice correctly?
Now I dreamed that I was waiting under my plane tree and I knew that people might come from different directions. I wouldn’t therefore remain alone. Simultaneously I was afraid that the two women I was waiting for might meet. True, they both belonged to me, but they certainly did not belong to each other. It was my lover who arrived first. I hurriedly led her away, then we strayed through ever more deserted regions, looking for a place where we could be together quietly. But each time someone would turn up and watch us intently. In the end, however, we found some place of refuge, we made love in strange and inhospitable surroundings, snatched out of the world around us, the way it can only happen in a dream, intoxicated with each other, but just as the instant of greatest pleasure was approaching my wife suddenly appeared through some hidden or forgotten door and I tried in vain to hide the other woman under a blanket that was too short. Lída stood in the door, staring at me with desperation in her eyes. She didn’t reproach me, she didn’t scream, she just stared.
At the last house, just where the slope of Vyšehrad hill begins to drop steeply, our foreman glanced up at the closed windows and reassured himself with satisfaction that there was no sign of life behind them. ‘They’re all in gaol!’ he informed us. Then he told us the name of the owner of the place and that the fellow had worked in long-distance haulage and had smuggled precious metals. When they’d nabbed him they’d found two kilograms of gold and half a million dollars in cash at his place.
‘Half a million?’ the youngster squealed. ‘You’re exaggerating!’
‘I got it rock-bottom reliably from a mate in the Criminal Branch,’ the foreman said, offended. ‘They found three and a half tons of silver alone. From all over the place, from Poland to Vienna. And everything for dollars.’
‘Wish you’d told me about him sooner!’ The youngster was leaning on his scraper, red with excitement. ‘My doctor was saying… Fact is, in Switzerland they’ve got some drug, dearer than Legalon even. If I had that, the doctor says, I might get my liver right again.’
‘And why,’ Mrs Venus asked, ‘can’t they get it for you at the centre?’
‘The doctor said I’d have to be at least a National Artist.’
‘That’s how it is,’ the foreman agreed; ‘those who’re entitled to Sanops treatment can get any kind of pills; if they swallow them they can stuff themselves and booze at their receptions as long as they like. But people like us don’t stand a chance. I can tell you from personal experience: if you’re an ordinary person no one gives a monkey’s fart for you! Mortally ill? Well then, die! At least they save money on you!’
‘I only thought,’ the youngster said, ‘if I’d really known sooner…’
‘What then?’ the foreman snapped. ‘A crook like that would have shown you his arse!’
Our days passed relentlessly. Sometimes I’d ring Daria and we’d talk until the freezing cold drove me out of the telephone box, or we’d walk in the Šárka hills, climbing up the dusty slopes together, and she’d urge me to tell her what was going to happen to our lives, and she’d complain that I’d treacherously abandoned her.
Then she phoned one day and asked me to come to the studio at once. Her voice sounded so urgent that I was alarmed.
Come in quickly, she welcomed me, I’ve been waiting for you. She told me she’d had a dream, a dream like a vision about the two of us, and she realised that we belonged to each other, that it was fate, and that there was no point in resisting it.
When we embraced, when we embraced again, I didn’t think of what would happen, of what I’d do, of what I’d say, where I’d return to or where we’d go together; I was only conscious of her proximity, of the bliss of her proximity.
I returned to lies once more. There is nothing by which a person can justify a lie. It corrodes the soul just as much as indifference or hate.
Night after night I lay awake for hours on end, reflecting on how to save myself. If I did fall asleep I’d wake up after a few hours and at once I’d hear that fine sand which was corroding me internally. In desperation I composed defence pleas and explanations, but I never uttered them, knowing full well that I had no defence. Man doesn’t live to defend himself, there are moments when he has to act or at least to admit his helplessness and keep quiet.
For action I lacked the necessary hardness or blindness, and I also lacked the requisite self-love. I know that to remain with one’s past partner when one has come to like another person is considered weakness or even a betrayal of ourselves and the person we now love.
We remove discarded articles to a dump, and these dumps grow sky-high. And so do the dumps of discarded people who, as they grow old, are no longer visited by those dear to them, or by anyone except perhaps others who have themselves been discarded. They still try to conjure up a smile and to fan some hope inside them, but in reality they already exude the musty smell of being discarded.
And you’d discard me like that? Daria would ask. At other times she’d say: It’s their own fault. Everyone is responsible for his fate and also for his own downfall, no one else can save him.
By writing, Kafka not only escaped his torments, but only thus was he able to live at all. In his notes, letters and diaries we find that he never tried to put into words what he thought of literature. People normally express themselves about the world around them, but for Kafka literature was not external, not something that he could explore or separate from himself. Writing to him was prayer – this is one of the few statements he ever made about what literature meant to him. He switched the question to another sphere: what was prayer? What did it mean to him, who had so little faith in any revealed or generally accepted God? Most probably it was a way of personal and sincere confession of anything on a person’s mind. We turn to someone whose existence and hence also whose language we can scarcely surmise. Perhaps just that is the essence or the meaning of writing: we speak about our most personal concerns in a language which turns equally to human beings as to someone who is above us and who, in some echo or reflection, also resides within us. If a person does not glimpse or hear within himself something that surpasses him, that has cosmic depth, then language will not make him respond anyway. Literature is not intended for him. Such a definition has the advantage of including both the author and the reader. Literature without those who receive it is nonsensical anyway, as would be a world where no other language was heard than jerkish, where language could no longer make anyone respond, not even someone above human beings.
The winter was barely over when I developed some strange illness. My lips, tongue, palate and the entire inside of my mouth were covered by sore blisters, so that I couldn’t swallow anything without pain. I was feverish, I lay in a silence not penetrated by a voice all day long. My wife came home in the evening, she was kind to me, cooked me some porridge and told me about a seminar she’d attended and where they’d commended her paper.
On the third day I got up, dressed and set out to the telephone box. It was a clear and mild morning, and through the deserted street wafted the fragrance of spring flowerbeds.
I got through to my lover.
You’re ill? she asked in surprise. I was afraid you’d made a clean breast of everything again and you weren’t allowed to see me any more.
She wanted to know how much my mouth hurt, what I did all day when I couldn’t do anything, if I was thinking of her. As for her, she’d received a commission, at least she’d be able to complete it undisturbed. She had such a chunk of stone at her studio she couldn’t even move it, that stone was almost like me, except that with the stone a girlfriend could give her a hand. She went on for a while to talk about her rocky burden, i.e. about me. Suddenly she was afraid I might catch cold in the box, promised to write me a letter and ordered me back to bed.
Her voice was coming to me softly from a distance, her lips settled lightly on my aching mouth, her tongue was touching my sick tongue, and I was shaken by shivers. I wanted to be with her, to watch her hammering into her heavy stone, to let myself be lulled to sleep by those sounds, to wake up and find her close to me.
Two days later a small package was delivered. On top of it was a letter and a bag of herbs she’d dried herself. Camomile, horehound and silverweed, our heads in the dry grass, we were lying in a meadow and making love. I was to brew it all up together and gargle with it, but, even more important, I should find peace within myself, so my soul could be in harmony with my body. Although illnesses were seated in the body they really came from the soul, which writhed in spasms unless one learned to listen to it and enclose and restrain it by one’s actions.
I read the letter all the way through, and only then freed a little figure from a protective wrapping of rags. She’d made it for me, two naked bodies leaning against a tree. A man and a woman, Adam and Eve, Eve not ashamed of her nakedness and not offering Adam the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The serpent was also missing. It wasn’t: Adam and Eve, it was the two of us in the Garden of Eden which our love had unlocked for us.
When I was well again she explained to me: I have seven bodies, and the person who, even only once, gets through to the innermost one, will trap me and I’ll belong to him totally and always.
I asked: What does that innermost body look like?
You’re right, that isn’t a body any longer, that’s the last shell of the soul. It’s thin and transparent.
In this way she wanted to tell me about the fragility of that shell. So what is it like inside?
When I was fourteen the first atomic bomb was dropped on the earth. Some time later I read the book of a Hiroshima doctor who’d experienced the explosion: factually and dispassionately he described the destruction which had befallen the city and its people, but understandably enough he didn’t mention any souls. But I was pondering then about what happened to the human soul at the epicentre of an atomic explosion. Even if the soul was non-corpuscular, even if it was only space enveloped by matter, even if it was of an entirely different nature, could it really survive that heat? Who could visualise a soul at the centre of the sun or some other star?
You’re always racking your brain with pointless questions. What’s the use of it?
Tell me at least what you think happens to a soul which cannot stand the pressure of the world around it and bursts or shatters into fragments which no one can ever bring together again?
Don’t worry, it doesn’t perish. Maybe a new soul springs from each fragment, like a tree from a seed. Or else all the fragments combine together again in another time, in another life, coming together like droplets in a fog. Better ask what you should do so the souls around you don’t perish.
I’m asking that one too.
Better still, don’t ask any more questions. Try to be a little less clever. Be with me now and don’t think of anything at all!
She told me about the Kampucheans, who danced, sang and didn’t worry about the future. They knew that God was near, but they didn’t ponder about him. And look at the things they managed to create even in ancient times! She tries to give me an idea of the hundreds of sculptures lining the road to the Victory Arch at Angkor Tham, she even picks up a pencil and from memory draws the likeness of a leper king, his face full of contentment.
A pity, she regretted, you weren’t there with me. But one day we’ll go there together.
I don’t know how we can go anywhere; it’s ten years since they took my passport away.
Don’t be so practical!
Even if I’m not, the men at the frontier will be.
Apply for a passport then. Surely we must go somewhere together someday. There should be a sea there and warmth, so we can stay together all the time.
I’ll apply for a passport so we can travel to Kampuchea together, where the people are happy and carefree, where we’d be so far away that no voice other than hers would reach me.
No voice reaches me anyway.
All around me fog is spreading, what is left of the world loses its outlines. Now and then the fog curtain tears and we catch a glimpse of the landscape bathed in a reddish evening light, in a heavy rain the surface under the windows of the little hotel is ruffled and across the street gleams a plump baroque turret, from a fresco washed pale by time an interceding Holy Virgin is smiling at us, maybe we shan’t be altogether damned, the beeches are donning fresh greenery before our eyes, they turn golden, and red, a leaf floats downwards and we sink down with it, we’re lying in the grass, we’re lying in the moss and in the sand, above our heads flocks of migratory birds are flying, as well as clouds and time, only time stops still for an instant in repeated cries; and we light the gas stove because it is cold in the room, we move the bed right up against its hot body, in our brief intervals we tell one another about the days when we didn’t know each other, about yesterday, about a girlfriend’s exhibition, about our meetings and dreams, we talk about Diane Arbus’s photographs and her ugly world, about ugliness in art, about Hesse’s Steppenwolf and our hidden potentials, about ancient Mexican art and its influence on Henry Moore, and of course about Zadkin and Giacometti, about Camus and Tsvetayeva, about my book of short stories and about books by my friends which I had lent her in manuscript, we fry bits of meat in the only pan, we eat together at the low table, we drink red wine, while the snowflakes swirl outside the window. In the room there is a fragrance of clay, paint and her breath. In the evening we go out to the little park on Kampa island, we still can’t tear ourselves away from each other, we kiss on the swept path under the bare trees. A little old woman with the head of a crow, as if modelled by her fingers, croaks at us: That’s a fine thing, that’s a fine thing! Adding something about our age and we should be ashamed!
And all the time I have my work, there are people in the world whom until quite recently I wanted to see, our daughter Beta wants to draw my portrait, our son Peter has invited me to a concert, my wife has at last found a decent job, but I have no time to celebrate it.
Beta experiences her first love, she is experiencing her second love, a drug addict who adores Pink Floyd and sniffs toluene. My wife is alarmed and asks me to intervene somehow. I talk with my daughter until late at night, she understands everything, she agrees with me, she’ll soon find another love, but I still have the same one, so am I also an addict? I inhale that mist, my blood absorbs those intoxicating droplets which dull my reason and willpower. I see nothing before me or around me, I see only her, I live only for the present moment. Am I to rejoice at the gift that’s been granted to me or am I to despair at my weakness, at being unable to resist the passion which is corroding me?
I can’t make up my mind, I can’t renounce my passion, nor can I draw the consequences from it. I cannot depart altogether nor arrive altogether, I am unable to live in truth. I’ve hedged myself in with excuses, I’m having every sentence I utter examined by a guard dog. I’ve accommodated a whole pack of them within me. I pick my way between them, their barking at times deafens me and their soundless footfall frightens me in my dreams. One of these days one of them will approach me from behind and sink his fangs in my throat and I shan’t even cry out, I’ll remain mute forever, as I deserve to be.
How long can I stand it, how long can it last?
Till death, my darling!
You really believe that?
Or till I leave you because you never make up your mind to do anything. She starts crying. She is crying because I cannot make up my mind, because I am too circumspect, because I put principles above love, because I am shuttered against life like a stone, even more shuttered because a stone can be worked, a stone can be turned into a shape, she is crying because I am harder than if I were made of stone, I’m playing a cruel game with her and I torture her as I have never tortured anyone before, she is crying because I am good, because I stay with her as no one before managed to, she is crying because everything in her life is turning into suffering.
I know that she has surrendered herself to my mercy, and I am terrified by the thought that I might disappoint her.
The spring sun is shining on the little terrace under the wooden steps, from the washing line comes the smell of nappies and over the wall of the house opposite we can see the monastery roof with its ornament of a maple-wood halo.
Daria is sitting alongside me in a freshly-ironed white blouse and a chocolate-coloured velvet skirt, she’s dressed up because this evening we’re going to a concert. She seems to me so beautiful, so precious, as if I’d gone back forty years or so and gazed in adoration at my mother. Except we’re getting up, climbing a few steps, and she is stepping out of her clothes and her exalted untouchability and stepping into my embrace, and I feel as if the thin walls of my veins are bursting from the barely tolerable surge of delight.
We’re lying next to each other in the descending night. Somewhere out of sight beyond the palace and the river the musicians are getting ready for a Beethoven concerto.
What would you like most of all?
I know what I am expected to reply but I ask: Now or altogether?
Now and altogether, if there’s any difference.
To stay here with you, I answer, to stay with you now.
And altogether?
I’d like to know what happens to the soul.
You’d really like to know that?
I embrace her. She presses herself against me and whispers: You always want to know so much, my darling, do you always have to find out something or other?
It was you who asked.
Be glad that there are things which can’t be known – only surmised.
She holds me so tight I groan. What do you surmise?
Don’t worry, the soul doesn’t perish, somehow it lives on.
In another body?
Why in a body at all? I see your soul as a pillar. It looks stony but it’s made of fire and wind. And it towers so high that from down on the ground you can’t see the top of it. And up there it is smiling.
That pillar?
Your soul, darling. Because you have a smile inside you, even if you think you’ve only got grief, and that’s why I feel good with you. Then she asks: Have you applied for a passport?
In the woods liverwort and anemones are out again, no one but us ever goes there. She makes love to me in a way that blots out my reason. She wants to know: Don’t you feel good with me?
I do feel good with you. I’ve never known anything like it before.
But you’re not entirely with me. And she asks: How can you live like that?
Like what?
So incompletely, so divided.
She is waiting for a sign that I’ve made up my mind at last, but there is no sign. She asks: Are you going away with me somewhere in the summer?
How can I arrange things so that I can go away with her? What lie can I invent? I am gripped by cold fear.
Are you capable of doing anything for me at all?
I’ll apply for a passport but I am tired. Worn down by love-making and by love and by reproaches, by longing and by my own indecision, worn down by my ceaseless escapes, the passion of my lover and the meek trust of my wife.
I can scarcely believe it, I am given a passport, the wild roses are beginning to bloom. Far and wide, no one lies down under them. The petals are soundlessly floating down on our naked bodies and bees are buzzing above us. She asks: Are you also feeling happy, darling?
I am feeling happy with her, and she whispers: Are you going away with me to the sea in the summer?
It has been calculated that if all those murdered in Kampuchea were stacked up on a pyre with a one-hundred-metre base that pyre would be taller than the country’s highest mountain.
I have found another remark by Kafka on the mission of literature: What: we need, he wrote, are books which strike us like the most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, books which would make us feel that we’ve been driven out into the forest far from another human being, like suicide. A book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us.
With his honesty Kafka could write only about what he had himself experienced. He recorded his lonely road into the depths. He descended as far as anyone could descend, and down there came the end, the end of his road and of his writings. He was unable to sever himself from his father, nor did he bring himself to complete adult love – that was his abyss. At its bottom he saw a person he loved, and as he descended that person’s image drew closer and at the same time began to disappear in the dark, and when he was close enough to reach out with his hand he had no breath left and was engulfed by unconsciousness.
His abyss, however, is like the abyss into which we all descend or into which, at least, we gaze with curiosity or fear. We can see in it a reflection of our own destinies, of ourselves endeavouring in vain to reach adulthood, in vain reaching out to another being and to the one who is above us. Except that I don’t know if we are still capable of descending to any depth, whether we are not so pampered or so spoiled that we can no longer recognise honesty when we see it and stand before it in admiration, whether instead we are not trying to diminish it, to question it and to adapt it to our own ideas. Honesty then becomes for us an inability to live or even a source of mental disorder, courage becomes pitiable weakness. Only a weak person, one incapable of living according to our ideas and demands, seems acceptable and comprehensible to us. Indeed, we pity him for his loneliness, his vulnerability or his sick body. For the way he suffered, for being, compared to us, unhappy. We do not even perceive what that painful descent into the depths brings. The lonely diver sees in one instant what most of us who pity him don’t see in a whole lifetime.
The highest mountain in Kampuchea is in the Kardamon range not far from Phnom Penh and is called Ka-kup. It is covered in primeval forest and is 1744 metres high. Our aircraft struck the treetops and crashed into the undergrowth. We managed to jump out of the split fuselage before it caught fire. We tore our way through the dense vegetation and she was looking for a spot where we could lie down safe from snakes and scorpions. But whenever she found one, whenever she found a cleared spot it was full of dead bodies.
I said: We’ll have to find another country for just the two of us to be together.
Just then two soldiers with red tabs on their muddy uniforms emerged from the jungle and one of them said in a language which surprisingly we understood very well: Better find another world.
The two soldiers burst into shrill Khmer laughter, they laughed till they shook, and then they began to shoot at us. At the last moment I realised that in a world where five thousand million people lived, most of them starving, what did anyone care about us two?
By midday we were at the end of our stint. ‘Took us a bit longer today,’ the foreman said, looking up at the sky which was once more hidden by clouds composed of steam and sulphur dioxide. ‘Let me tell you, there are months when I have people coming and going like in a taproom, everybody just out for quick money, and the streets like a pigsty. Everything has to have its – you know. But you lot, hats off! They’ve noticed it even at the office. The other day they went through my whole district without finding a single fault. Only that bloody castrated bastard’s running us down wherever he can.’
We were walking along in a disorderly column – on one side residential blocks, on the other a little park with massive maples and lime trees, from whose tops every gust of wind brought down a shower of tired leaves. The youngster stopped and looked into the park, perhaps walking up the slight hill had tired him or else he’d caught sight of someone he knew on the gravel path, or else he needed to let his eyes linger on something at least a little way above the ground:
And it may happen to a sweeper
as he waves
his dirty broom
about without a hope
among the dusty ruins
of a wasteful colonial exhibition
that he halts amazed
before a remarkable statue
of dried leaves and blooms…
These verses suddenly came to my mind – as well as the voice of the man who’d spoken them.
‘There’s money to be made in other places too,’ Mrs Venus said. ‘I know a fellow got into a gang that collects the mess in trucks in Slivenec. After all, they shift it from there by the cartload!’
‘Don’t tell me that,’ the foreman got excited. ‘You wouldn’t stand a chance there, it’s the private preserve of the Demeter gang and nobody can winkle that lot out, not even the public prosecutor.’
In the crowded bar at the bottom of the street we were lucky enough to find room at a table from which a gang of bricklayers from a nearby building site was just getting up. Our foreman jerked his head towards them: ‘My girl’s been waiting for a flat for seven years, and she was told at the co-op she’d have to wait at least another seven years. So when I see those pissed malingerers I feel like kicking their teeth in. And who knocked you about like this?’ he turned to Mrs Venus. ‘Don’t you tell me you slipped on the stairs!’
‘But I did,’ said Venus in a voice I still admired. ‘Now and again my legs give way under me.’
‘If I was you, Zoulová, I wouldn’t stand for it. You go to the centre,’ the foreman advised her, ‘get them to confirm it and then go and report it as grievous bodily harm. They’ll throw the book at him, so much he’ll never be able to pay up in full.’
‘But it was my brother-in-law!’ Mrs Venus objected.
‘Which one?’
‘The one from Ostrava, of course, the brother of my Joe that died a couple of years ago. Always turns up at my place like this. Once a year.’
‘Still working down the mines?’ the foreman wanted to know.
‘That’s what it was all about,’ Venus explained; ‘he’s just as stupid as Joe was. His lungs are all shot to hell, full of coal dust. And the same doctor, that murderer that did my Joe in, told him he couldn’t send him to a disabled home, they wouldn’t authorise that, and if he wrote down what the matter really was with him they’d put him on surface jobs where he’d be cleaning lamps for bugger-all, and then he could whistle for his pension. Exactly how that murderer chatted up my Joe. In another year, he promised him, we’ll put you straight into a disabled centre, that’s what that shit promised him when the poor bugger couldn’t even walk up a few steps. Six months later he was past caring whether he was declared disabled or not. I told my brother-in-law: Vince, look at what happened to Joe. Are you stupid or what? What bloody use is money to you when you’re pushing up the daisies? That made him angry. So I said to him: You’re all alike, you men, brave enough to hit a woman all right, but when it comes to standing up to the deputy you’d sooner shit yourself!’
‘Men aren’t all alike,’ the foreman protested.
‘Don’t tell me that! How long were you in the army?’
‘Twenty-five years.’ There was a ring of pride in the foreman’s voice.
‘And how often were you in action?’
‘No one to fight,’ the foreman said dryly.
‘Who told you that?’
‘A soldier fights when he’s ordered to,’ he told her. ‘If there’s no order he can do bugger-all.’
‘Women would fight even without an order,’ Venus snapped. ‘Why d’you think they won’t give women weapons? And what are you grinning about?’ she turned on me. ‘No doubt you were a real Ho Chi Minh!’
‘Now watch your tongue, Zoulová!’ the foreman admonished her. ‘You know that I’ve always stood by you people. There’ll soon be an opportunity for you to realise it.’ We all of us knew that the post of radio dispatcher was soon falling vacant at the office and that the foreman was firmly counting on getting it. ‘You’ll get tired of wielding that broom one day.’
‘So what,,’ Mrs Venus snapped. ‘I can just see you letting me drive a carriage with golden wheels!’
I noticed that the captain was enjoying the argument.
The crazy inventor had called on me once more at the newspaper office. That was when foreign soldiers were trampling through Prague. He sat down on a chair. The recent events had led him to concern himself once again with his soot solution. He’d changed the proportions of his seven solvents and added two catalysts. Now he was certain of the result. The ice would turn to water, to whole oceans of water. Did I understand the consequences? Did I realise which countries would be flooded if the ocean levels rose?
My first thought was The Netherlands, but he produced from his pocket a map of Europe on which he’d carefully cross-hatched the territory which would disappear under the sea. True, parts of The Netherlands and the Jutland peninsula would be affected, but worst affected of all would be the lowlands in the east, complete with all their gigantic cities.
I conjured up a vision of only the head of the Bronze Horseman showing above the waves, and even that was slowly disappearing:
‘Here cut’ – so Nature gives command -
‘your window through on Europe; stand
firm-footed by the sea, unchanging!’
Ay, ships of every flag shall come
by waters they had never swum
and we shall revel, freely ranging.
‘Do you understand now?’ he asked, folding his hands as if in prayer.
A siege! The wicked waves, attacking
climb thief-like through the windows; backing
the boats stern-foremost, smite the glass,
trays with their soaking wrappage pass;
and timbers, roofs, and huts all shattered,
the wares of thrifty traders scattered,
and the pale beggars’ chattels small,
bridges swept off beneath the squall,
coffins from sodden graveyards – all
swim in the streets!
I understood. His mind may have been disturbed, but there burned within him the flame which the rest of us, from cunning or from common-sense, were stifling.
I had always hoped that life’s flame would burn pure within me. To live and at the same time have darkness within one, to live and exhale death, what point would there be in that?
But what kind of flame had there been burning within me these past few years? I couldn’t answer my question, I’d lost my judgement. Everything that had surrounded me in the past, everything that had been significant and had filled me with joy or sorrow, had gone flat and like a strip of faded material now drifted at my feet.
In the evenings my son would play to himself the songs of his favourite singers. The words of these songs persistently and vehemently protested against the unhappy state of our society. He was clinging to protest, which was one-sided, as though he wanted subconsciously to make up for the one-sided way in which I had turned my back on any injustices which might keep me from my private region of bliss.
My daughter was now often coming home late, smelling of wine and cigarette smoke and talking cynically about love. Was she not finding the love she was seeking because I had found it, or, on the contrary, because she was seeking it where I remained blind?
My wife went regularly to her psychoanalyst. She too was descending into her depths, looking about herself there, confident that she was accompanied by the light of a wise guide, and she arrived at unexpected conclusions about herself and about me, about her relationship with her mother and about my relationship with mine. She was pleased that she had at last learned to understand herself and therefore to improve herself. She felt sorry that I didn’t wish to do something similar, that I didn’t long for self-understanding, that I persisted in erroneous ideas about myself.
Those I love know how I should run my life, they know what’s right in life, they know their hierarchy of values, only I blunder about in uncertainty.
I did not doubt that my wife had long surpassed me with her knowledge of the hidden mysteries of the soul and the motivations of human passions and emotions. She was developing an interest in ancient myths, she studied books on the customs and ceremonies of savages whose native countries she’d never seen and most probably never would see, and she tried to convince me that what people, including we two, were lacking, was ritual. For years we hadn’t courted one another much, and as a result a mundane element had invaded our relationship. She asked me if she might read part of her study on sacrifice and self-sacrifice to me, and I told her I’d be glad to listen to it. I lay down on the couch, my head next to the armchair she was sitting in, and tried to listen to her attentively, but I was overcome by fatigue and the sense of the words drifted away. Now and again I looked up at her, at my wife, with whom I’d lived and not lived for nearly twenty-five years. I was aware of her keen involvement and I tried to catch the meaning of at least some of the sentences. At one point she looked up from her paper and asked anxiously if she wasn’t boring me, and I replied hastily: No, the problem of sacrificial lambs interested me – if only because of my own childhood experiences – as did the sacrificial rites of the Ndembas and the Indian Khonds, although I was amazed by the amount of brutality or sadism that was hidden beneath human nature. She seemed satisfied and continued with her reading, her fingers having first tenderly touched my head. I was suddenly conscious of her closeness and I felt depressed by not being able to give her my full concentration and to stay with her. I felt guilty for my inattention. It was a childish sense of guilt: my mother was bending down over me lovingly while I, in order to conceal my feelings, pretended not to notice, pretended to be asleep. I felt tenderness towards her and also regret that I’d let her talk for so long, that I’d let her address me for so long while I wasn’t listening. I would have liked to embrace her and tell her everything that was troubling me: Forgive me and stay with me like this always! And to call on myself: Stay with her, after all she’s your wife. And on my soul: Come to rest! And to ask the other woman: Let me go without anger and without a sense of wrong. And aloud I said: You really did a good job there. And she smiled at me with her old girlish smile.
‘I once got on a ship that was skippered by a woman,’ the captain reminisced. ‘In the Baltic it was.’
‘What was her name?’ the foreman wanted to know.
‘The woman’s? I don’t know. The ship’s name was the Dolphin , she belonged to the fishing combine. We had put her engine through sea trials after a general overhaul, so we took her out without cargo, only about six fellows, that woman and myself.’
‘She was the only woman with six fellows aboard?’ the foreman asked, hoping for a story of erotic entanglements. But the captain had other things to relate. They’d left Warnemünde on a northerly course, then they’d turned east by thirty degrees because otherwise they would have soon found themselves in the Danish port of Gedner. There was a north-westerly blowing and it was raining, visibility was down to about 300 metres. After an hour or so they spotted something floating in the sea. It seemed incredible, fifteen miles off shore, but it was two people, a man and a woman on rubber mattresses, both of them only in swimsuits.
‘Carried out by the wind?’ asked the youngster.
‘I just told you the wind was onshore. They wanted to skidaddle to Denmark. They’d got through the cordon at night, the foul weather helped them.’ Whenever he left the realm of his poetry the captain was logical and matter-of-fact.
‘As soon as they spotted the ship they paddled away from us like people possessed, but the woman captain ordered the boat to be lowered and had them brought aboard. The poor wretches were frozen stiff, but even so they begged to be left in the water, all they needed now was half a day, but the old woman decided she had to hand them over.’
‘What happened to them?’ I asked.
‘How should I know?’ the captain replied. ‘If I was those people I’d build myself a boat that no one could keep up with. Except that that sort haven’t got a clue about engineering. They just try to swim across: backstroke, breaststroke. And they’re never seen again, unless the sea throws them up on the beach, all gnawed.’ The captain pushed his cap back and took a swig. No doubt among his designs there was the blueprint of a small submarine driven by compressed air or a propane-butane bottle.
‘Well, we none of us have a written guarantee for our lives,’ the foreman remarked in an attempt to regain the centre of the stage.
‘I wonder they even try it,’ the youngster sounded surprised, ‘when they must know it’s useless.’
‘Because they’re idiots,’ the foreman again intervened: ‘Everyone thinks he can make it. Stupid!’
‘Maybe they’re not the only stupid ones!’
‘Who then?’ The foreman seemed surprised at my remark.
‘If they were allowed to board a ship they wouldn’t try that kind of thing.’
‘Can’t have just anyone boarding a ship and sailing wherever he pleases, can we now?’ he turned to the others. ‘When I saw they weren’t going to let me out I’d sit tight on my arse and wait.’
By a miracle we got a little room with a two-tier bunk in a small brick house at the spot where the neck of the Dar peninsula was narrowest. From the little garden, where blackcurrants were ripening, you could see the surface of the inland sea, above its surface coloured masts and sails, above them seagulls, and above them the sky which, for most of the days we stayed in this normally rainy area, was cloudlessly blue; on the other side, immediately beyond the road, was a gently rising field of wheat. If you climbed up to the nearby ridge you could see the sea proper. We took a brightly-coloured bus to a stop called Three Oaks and walked down a sandy path to the beach, which was as spotlessly clean as everything else here. There we rammed into the ground a few sticks we’d collected which had been leached out and bleached by the sea. On them we spread a piece of yellow material, which was soon covered by small metallically shiny black beetles. We buried a bottle of lemonade, spread a blanket on the sand and lay down on it. Thus we lay there hours, in immobility and mutual proximity. I had never before been able to stay by the water for even a few hours, I was frightened by the void of laziness. I could not be totally lazy, just as I could not love totally or surrender to work totally, though this last perhaps more than the rest. I always had to escape from the reach of the black pit which I invariably saw before me as soon as I was quietly relaxing anywhere, but here I saw only the sea, only the sky, only her loving features. Time here was slowed down. Sometimes during its retarded flow I read Kierkegaard or the story of Adrian Leverkühn as the ageing Thomas Mann had invented it and was telling it at the same slow and leisurely pace. Sometimes I read to her aloud and she listened with the concentration of a person who did everything she did in life with total completeness. But when, in that sun-scorched wasteland, where countless naked bodies were indulging in total inactivity, I read to her that action and decision in our – that is Kierkegaard’s – age was just as rare as the intoxication with danger felt by someone swimming in shallow water, the rule that a man stands or falls with his action no longer applies, I observed in her concentration an almost excessively attentive and enthusiastic agreement, and I realised that these sentences I was reading told against me, that I was merely continuing her silent, ceaseless and scarcely disguised evidence for the prosecution. We argued about the philosopher’s theses, pretending that we were not talking about ourselves or about our conflict. We argued until the moment when I shook the sand grains out of my book and put it back in my bag. Then we just lay, our naked bodies touching each other, and gazed on the white crests of the waves which managed to touch each other without causing each other pleasure and pain. Not until evening did we get up, climb the sand dune along the line of dustbins towering there, metallic, among the flowering wild roses, and return to the road.
The evenings were long northern evenings. When we’d eaten we went back down to the.beach, which by then was deserted. She sat down cross-legged on a rock, gazing at the seemingly cooling sun, while I looked at the dark surface of the water, noticing the menacing cordon of ships on the distant horizon, a cordon designed to block even here the freest and most unfettered area of water, and I also looked at her sitting there statue-like, perceiving how in the silence of the sea, in this marine solitude, she was receding, changing into an unfamiliar being that lived in inaccessible regions, and I couldn’t decide if I was feeling sadness or relief.
We also borrowed bikes and set out early in the morning, not along the road but along sandy paths, along the footpaths which intertwined on the narrow ridge which rises above the sea.
The waves roar and the wind howls, we stop to embrace, to sit down and look across to the distant shores. Then we continue in a westerly direction and our bikes sink so deep into the sand that we have to carry them. Before us lies a dark green expanse of heather, we turn into it; the soil here is black, our path is blocked by an ever thicker tangle of roots, the air is full of whining mosquitoes, our little path has almost disappeared, we don’t know where we are, whether to turn back or go on, path or no path. Our bikes are useless now, we wheel them along, I try to discover the way ahead while she sees the shapes of spirits in the twisting branches and hears the whispering of the dead in the sighing of the wind, the last breaths of suicides and the vain shouts of the drowning, there is a wizard crouching in the undergrowth whose body lacks a soul, and over the treetops the carrion crows circle, soundless and dark. We circumvent pools from which gas bubbles rise up and eventually reach the road. Now she is riding in front of me, her hair, which would be almost grey by now if she didn’t give it a blonde rinse, shines around her head. We are approaching Bad Müritz, where half a century ago our fellow countryman, the unsuccessful lover Franz Kafka, was preparing for his fall into the black pit, where his brittle soul concurred with his sick lungs that they would give up the exhausting struggle.
We are riding through the streets from which they haven’t yet driven out the fin de siècle spirit as they have done so thoroughly from our native city, thirstily we drink beer at a pavement stall, hungrily we sit down at a battered table in a shabby café. We sit opposite each other, far from our near and dear ones, in a strange café in a strange town, we eat cakes, we are silent, we look at one another, and I can see in her eyes a devotion I didn’t believe I’d ever find anywhere, I can feel it invading me deeply, pervading me, settling into every cell of my body. I don’t know how or when I’ll end my struggle, but at that moment my soul is still capable of rising up, of making one last flight to where it belongs, to the place of its longings, to the regions of blissful paralysis from the proximity of a loved being; after that it will fly out to this battered and by now deserted little table, for a last time briefly smile with sudden relief, and then accept its fate.
Later we stand in the cathedral of Güstrow before Barlach’s rising angel. I can see my lover going rigid, rising up to those exalted shapes, moving away from me into heights which I cannot conceive, which my vision cannot reach, where only angels and perhaps the souls of great artists reside. I move away, unnoticed, and sit down in a pew in a corner of the cathedral and wait for her to come back to me.
Nach der Rede des Führers am Tage der Deutschen Kunst in München haben die zuständigen Stellen nunmehr beschlossen, das von dem Bildhauer Ernst Barlach im Jahre 1926 geschaffene Ehrenmal für die Gefallenen des Weltkriegs aus dem Dom in Güstrow entfernen zu lassen. Die Abnahme wird in den nächsten Tagen erfolgen. Das Ehrenmal soll einen schwebenden Engel darstellen und war schon seit langem ein Gegenstand heftigster Angriffe .
(Following the Führer’s speech on the Day of German Art in Munich the appropriate authorities have now decided to remove from the cathedral in Güstrow the memorial created by the sculptor Ernst Barlach in 1926 for the fallen of the World War. The removal will take place during the next few days. The memorial, designed to represent a hovering angel, has long been the object of fierce attacks.)
When eventually she returns to me she has tears in her eyes.
Do you think you could manage an angel like that?
I don’t know. I’m probably not sufficiently obsessed – by stone or by wood.
I don’t ask her what she is possessed by, I know. But I also suspect that there is a burning ambition in her, at the price of exhaustion if need be, to ensure that those who view her work go rigid.
The next day she walks down to the edge of the beach, where the sand has soaked up the seawater, and her fingers, used to creating shapes out of shapeless matter, there create a sand relief of a creature resembling a winged centaur rather than an angel. That creature has my features, except that perhaps it smiles more in all directions. Small groups of sunbathers gather around her and with admiration watch her work taking shape, but she pretends not to notice them, she only wants to know if I like her sand sculpture.
I like it and it’s like me, I answer, in order to amuse her with my pun. My only regret is that this strange creature with my face will not survive the next tide.
What does it matter? Tomorrow, if we feel like it, we’ll make something different. At least we aren’t burdening the world with another creation. This is something we are both aware of: that the world is groaning, choking with a multitude of creations, that it is buried by objects and strangled by ideas which all pretend to be necessary, useful or beautiful and therefore lay claim to perpetual endurance.
We don’t need either objects or creations, she says lovingly, for us it is enough to have one another.
We are together while the day ascends, while the night descends, we are so totally together that it saps our strength, that the fire consumes us, that the heat consumes her till I am alarmed: suppose we are buried in ashes from which we won’t rise again?
I have never been as close to anyone, I have never known a person capable of being so close to me, capable of such passion, of such intensity.
Maybe both of us have been gathering strength all our lives for just this moment, for just this meeting, maybe we have gravitated here in our dreams, to this small room, to this coastal spot, where water, sand and sky blend into each other, where time trickles softly and cleanly, this is where unconsciously we have wanted to come at moments of loneliness. And when our bodies are finally exhausted, when only a few last breaths are left of the northern summer’s night, when I am about to climb down to my bunk, she begs me not to go yet, to stay with her at least here, and so I persevere in immobility, even though I now long to be alone, so many days of absolute proximity have exhausted me and I am longing for a moment of isolation; in the midst of a strange world into which I was snatched I now long for the undemanding routine of home. But have I got a home left? After all, I’m breaking it up myself. My daughter has left, she is a mother now, and my son is leaving very soon. And as for my wife, even if she smiles at me, where is she really at home? What is left of our love?
My yearning is growing within me, a nonsensical regret because it is backward-facing, a regret that my life, against which I want to rebel just now, is running away.
The other woman is lying by my side. She’s asleep. Her breath has gone quieter, her spirit has calmed down. I try to make out her features, I bend down over her, I do not kiss her, I just look at her, at a remote creature whom, despite everything, I have not managed to absorb fully into myself, to accept fully. I climb quietly down and lie on the lower bunk, I gaze into the blackness before me. Outside a tomcat is noisily complaining and the wind is driving a thunderstorm before it. I get up and open the window wide, on the dark sky a soundless flash of lightning now and then lights up the huge plane tree in the garden.
And suddenly I see her – my wife. The lightning illuminates her, she is sitting on a bench, waiting for me. We are walking down a little path in the park, I am pushing a pram whose wheels keep coming off but we haven’t got the money to buy a new one, I am pushing it along the Prokop valley.
A nonsensical yearning directed backwards, but what am I to do? There remain in me, rooted, countless days and nights together, from which time has gradually eroded everything that was not solid, leaving behind boulders on an autumnal field, boulders which can’t be rolled away, even if I walk around them I can’t get rid of them, I only have to turn my head and I see them: towering there like immovable milestones, they regard me like some monstrous stony eyes of the night, motionless, they wait for me to give up everything. I take a few more steps but I can feel their stony stare on my back, my legs are growing heavy, and I come to a halt. I am not going back and I am not going forward, I am standing in a void, I am standing between two fields, at the meeting point of two calls which intersect each other, I am nailed to the cross, how can I move?
And the other woman, the one I’ve come here with, the one I followed from weakness, from longing, from loneliness, from mental confusion, from passion, from prodigality, from the hope that I might forget my mortality for a while, now complains about my immobility, she curses it and my wife, instead of cursing me.
So here I stand, she is asleep behind me while I am waiting by the window for my wife to look up and see me. But she doesn’t see me. Suddenly I am conscious that between us lie mountains and rivers, life and death, betrayal and lies, years of unfulfilled longing and vain hopes. I see my wife beginning to tremble like an image on the surface of water when the first raindrop strikes it, in a sudden surge of longing I reach out towards the window to hold her, to save her, to draw her to me from that distance, but it is in vain, the rain is getting heavier, and I become aware of the other woman looking at me from behind. What are you doing, dearest, why aren’t you asleep?
I’m just shutting the window, I answer, it’s beginning to rain.
I got up from the table simultaneously with Mr Rada. No sooner were we out in the street than he could no longer restrain himself from telling me what, clearly, he’d wanted to keep from the others. ‘I got back from Svatá Hora yesterday. Have you heard about it?’
The fact that there had been a great pilgrimage and rally of believers had been mentioned even in our jerkish press, probably to enable the rally of believers to be portrayed as a peace festival.
‘It was fantastic,’ he said joyfully. Evidently he’d brought back from there the little book from which he’d read a passage to me that afternoon, or at least a taste or enthusiasm for reading from it, if necessary in the street.
We usually went together to draw our pay. I told him what paper I used to work on. I didn’t mention the books I’d written. He in turn confessed to me that all his life he’d had to do something other than what he wished to do. Although he’d studied to be a priest he’d worked as a miner, a boilerman, a storeman, a stage-hand and even a lorry driver. Now, in order to help his mother, he was making some extra money by street-sweeping. What he liked about the job was that it was outdoor work, often indeed among gardens, he was a countryman. He also had a sense of doing something useful. In a city filthy with refuse people might at best find a place to sleep and store their belongings, but never one to establish a home and experience the thrill of belonging to the place, to their neighbours, to God. Today’s people were like nomads, he complained, they moved from one home to another, carrying their little household gods with them. They didn’t establish ties either with their surroundings or with people, often they didn’t even take their children out into the country. They either killed them while still in the womb or they abandoned them in their chase after pleasure. And how were those children going to live when they had known no home? They’d develop into real Huns, they’d move through the world and turn it upside down.
But he didn’t complain about his own fate. He spoke without bitterness about what had happened to him.
‘There were at least thirty thousand of us there, mostly young people.’ He sounded pleased, as if he’d quite forgotten his own gloomy prophecies.
At night they had sat in front of the church and in the surrounding meadows, passing the time in prayer and singing. Holy Wenceslas, prince of the Czech realm – the hymn imploring the patron saint not to let his progeny perish – had been sung three times. If I’d heard what the hymn sounded like under the open sky perhaps I too after all would look forward to better days.
We were advancing down the narrow little street which runs round the park by the ramparts. Mr Rada was engrossed by what he was telling me but I couldn’t resist looking up curiously to the window which the artist had turned into his showroom. The hanged man had long disappeared, there had since been a three-legged swan and later a fountain which instead of water spewed dirty sand or ash, letting it rain down on a female head whose plaster features seemed pretty, and down whose cheeks it slid like solidified tears. Now the head and the cloud of ash were gone, there was a manikin sitting on a little horse, made up, as was his steed, of plastic items evidently picked up from a rubbish heap: old containers, motor oil and spray cans, hideous toys for infants and coloured fragments of handbasins and jugs. His open mouth was a red butter-dish, in one of his eyes was a poisonously green pot of paper paste, Koh-i-noor brand, and in the other the dark-haired head of a doll. At first glance it seemed that the horseman was smiling, a mere toy, a present-day Don Quixote riding out into the world in armour, but then I noticed the rider was showing his light polystyrene teeth and I could make out some bare bones. This was not the noble though confused knight but rather the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse, as seen by Dürer. ‘And behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him,’ the horseman with the head of the mouth of hell of Brueghel’s ‘Dulle Griet’.
What kind of head, I wondered, had that unknown artist? Why and for whom was he staging these exhibitions in a little street into which hardly anyone ever strayed? Why was death so often on his mind?
‘These young people,’ Mr Rada continued enthusiastically, ‘have realised that they’ve had distorted values imposed on them. From childhood they’ve had it drilled into them that hate and struggle are the levers of history. That there is no superior being above man! And they came to pray and to listen to the tidings about Him who is above us and who, despite everything, looks down on us with love.’ It was possible, he concluded, that by the grace of God a period of rebirth was beginning, a new Christian age.
He communicated his joy to me and supposed that I would fully share it with him. It is certainly encouraging to hear that people are not content with the jerkish notion of happiness. But it occurred to me, even while he was reading to me about how man strayed off his path by deifying himself, that man can behave arrogantly not only by deifying his own ego and proclaiming himself as the finest flower of matter and life, but equally when he proudly believes that he has correctly comprehended the incomprehensible or uttered the unutterable, or when he thinks up infallible dogmas and with his intellect, which wants to believe, reaches out into regions before which he should lower his eyes and stand in silence. We might debate for a long time about when that fatal shift occurred (if it occurred) which gave rise to the arrogant spirit of our age, and also about how far we must go back to put matters right, but what point would there be in such an argument when there is no return anyway, either in the individual’s life or in that of humanity?
‘What about your brother?’ it occurred to me to ask. ‘Was he there with you?’
‘Him?’ he made a dismissive gesture. ‘It might cost him his career!’ His own words struck him as too harsh, for he added: ‘He might perhaps just walk along in some Buddhist procession.’
Dad had been in hospital for a week. Lately, even before he was laid so low by fever, he’d complain that he couldn’t sleep at night. I wanted to know why and he didn’t tell me, he made some excuse about some undefined burning pain, an elusive ache. But I suspected that he was suffering from anxiety. His intellect, which all his life had been concerned with quantifiable matter, knew of course that nothing vanished completely from this world, but he also knew that nothing kept its shape and appearance forever, that in this eternal and continuous motion of matter every being must perish just as every machine, even the most perfect, just as the worlds and the galaxies. Dad’s intellect realised that everything was subject: to that law, so why should the human soul alone be exempt from it? Because the Creator breathed life into it? But surely He too, if he existed at all, was subject to that law. But what sense would there be in a God whose existence and likeness were subject to the same laws as everything else, a God who’d be subject to time?
Dad was standing on the frontier which his intellect was able to visualise, the chilling nocturnal fear of the black pit was crushing him – and I was unable to help him. My dear father, how can I help you, how can I shield you from fear of your downfall? I wasn’t even able to burn your fever. I am only your son, I was not given the power to liberate you from darkness, or to liberate anyone.
Dad is lying in a white ward which smells of doctoring and of the sweat of the dying. They have temporarily kept his fever down with antibiotics and they have dulled his fear by antidepressants. They’d given him the middle bed of three. On his left lay a hallucinating fat man who’d been irradiated at night by unknown invaders with hooded faces, on his right a wizened old man, punctured all over by hypodermics, was dying.
Dad was sitting up and welcomed me with a smile. I fed him, then I took out a razor from his bedside table and offered to shave him. He nodded. Lately he’d hardly spoken at all. Maybe he didn’t have the strength, or else he didn’t know what to tell me. He’d never talked to me about personal matters, nor had he ever spoken about anything abstract. In his businesslike world there was no room for speculations which led too far from firm ground. So what was he to talk to me about now that the firm ground itself was receding from him? And what was I to talk to him about?
The dying man on his right emerged for an instant from his unconscious condition and whispered something with a moan.
‘Poor fellow,’ Dad said, ‘he’s all in.’
I helped my father to get up. I took his arm and he moved out into the corridor with small shuffling steps. I should have liked to say something nice and encouraging to him, something meaningful.
‘I have those dreams nowadays,’ he confessed to me. ‘They proclaimed a beet-picking drive, and Stalin was personally in charge. I had to join, and I was afraid he’d notice how badly I was working.’
During the Stalin period they had, with the deliberate intention of hitting him where it would hurt most, found him guilty of bad work.
I might have told him that I’d always admired his ability to concentrate on his work, that I knew what outstanding results he’d achieved, but it would have sounded like empty phrases from a premature funeral oration. He knew better than anyone what he had achieved, and he also knew what I thought of his work.
We were approaching the end of the corridor – everything was spotlessly washed and polished, almost as it used to be in our home. We were on our own, although in the distance we could see a young nurse hurrying from one door to another. Only a few days earlier Dad had been irritated by the nurses, who’d seemed to him disobliging. Now he wasn’t complaining. He sat down on a chair by an open window, his grey-streaked hair was stuck together by sweat. He looked out through the window, where the birches were shedding their yellow leaves in the gusts of wind, but he was probably unaware of them, he’d just witnessed an explosion at a great height and he was alarmed. It’s stupid,’ he said softly, ‘to play about with it. Any piece of machinery will malfunction some time. If they don’t stop it it’ll be the end. You ought to tell them!’
‘Me?’
‘You ought to tell them.’ Dad was still looking out of the window, but he was silent again. A plane roared past overhead, it moved on, it didn’t crash, it only left an unnecessary white trail of poisonous gases behind.
Had he perhaps just uttered the most important thing he’d intended to say to me? Or did he merely wish to confess a further disappointment of his – that the wonderful engines, which he’d invented and designed all his life, while lifting man off the ground, still did not lead him into the Garden of Bliss but would, more probably, prematurely incinerate him.
I helped him get up and we returned to his ward. I sat him up in his bed, straightened his blanket and told him how well he’d walked. I should have asked him, while there was time, if there was anything else he wanted to tell me, anything he hadn’t told me so far, some instruction, advice or message. Was he perhaps leaving a grave behind somewhere that I should visit for him? Or a lonely person whom I should visit? But Dad was certainly not thinking of graves, he regarded it as nonsensical to waste time on the dead, and he wouldn’t venture to give me any advice. He’d been disappointed with so many of his expectations, and if there was a woman somewhere whom he had loved and whom he had never mentioned to me, he had clearly decided not to burden me with her name now. He had nothing left to pass on to me.
Maybe I should have been saying to him that, if anything, I was finding some hope in his disappointments, because he’d been misled only by a self-assured intellect which thought it knew everything and which refused to leave any room for the inexplicable, that is for God, eternity or redemption. Would he even understand me, could he still hear me?
I noticed that his chin had dropped on his chest and that he had slipped down on his side. I slackened the screw behind his bedhead and brought the bed down into the horizontal position. Dad didn’t wake up as I laid him down, he didn’t even open his eyes when I stroked his forehead.
When I got home a young man was waiting for me who, by coincidence, had just arrived from a town near Svatá Hora. About two years ago I’d given a reading of some of my short stories to a few friends of his at his place. Since then he’d turned up occasionally for a chat about literature. He was always well-groomed, his fair hair looked as if it had just been waved with curling tongs and in his grey eyes there was some painful anxiety as if he’d taken on more of life’s burdens and responsibilities than he could bear. He was interested in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Joyce, as well as in the cinema and in art. In one of the stories I’d read that evening there was a mention of Hegeduši ć; after I’d finished he told me that there was a short film available in our country about him. I was surprised to find a young man, who worked in the mines near Svatá Hora, being interested in a Yugoslav painter. He’d now arrived suspiciously soon after the famous pilgrimage, but he made no mention of it, which reassured me. He’d come to get my advice about his future. He’d decided he wouldn’t stay in the mines any longer. He’d find some unskilled job and would try to study aesthetics, art history or literature by correspondence. The work he was doing, he explained to me, made no sense. The people among whom he moved disgusted him. If only he knew what people he’d have to move among if he succeeded in getting where he wanted to go! But I don’t like imposing my dislikes on others. I merely dug out some recent article by a leading jerkish official who’d been appointed to a university chair to ensure the oblivion of all literature.
From that article I read him just a few introductory sentences on communism, which had become the highest form of freedom of the individual and the human race, and in consequence provided the writer with an unprecedented scope, whereas in the USA, that bastion of unfreedom, the greatest artists, such as Charlie Chaplin, had to escape.
My visitor smiled. He considers it more acceptable to have to listen, voluntarily and for no pay, to jerkish babbling than to destroy and pollute the landscape for good pay, to mine the ore from which others would produce an explosive device capable of turning everything into flames.
What stands at the beginning and what at the end? The word or fire, babbling or explosion?
Speaking of explosions, my visitor was reminded that in his little town some unknown persons recently blew up the monument of the ‘workers’ president’. The president had died more than thirty years ago, my visitor does not remember him. All he knows about him is that he brought upon us all that ‘highest form of freedom of the individual and the human race’, and also that, in its name, he had masses of innocent people liquidated, including his own friends and comrades. My visitor wanted to hear how I felt about the destruction of monuments. It is my impression that people don’t take any notice of monuments, especially the new ones, or if they do there is nothing about those statues that could impress them. After all, what appeal can one expect of shaft-boots, overcoats, trousers and briefcases, with on the top, accounting for less than one-sixth of the whole, a face behind which we detect neither spirit nor soul? What I mind about the monuments of officially proclaimed giants is that they are ugly and mean, in other words that they disfigure their surroundings. But then it would be difficult to imagine different ones, considering whom they have to represent and given the abilities of the artists from whom these statues are commissioned for a fat fee. Besides, there are so many things disfiguring this world! If we were to destroy them all, where should we stop? To destroy is easier than to create, and that is why so many people are ready to demonstrate against what they reject. But what would they say if one asked them what they wanted instead?
The young man nodded. He hoped his studies would help him find what to aim for himself. He apologised briefly for having kept me up so late and vanished into the night.
The Buddhists have their own vision of the apocalypse. Once all our good deeds, love or renunciation no longer offset our crimes, the equilibrium between good and evil in the universe is upset. Then snakes, crocodiles, dragons and many-headed monsters will emerge from all the openings in the earth and from the waters, breathing fire and devouring mankind. This will restore the disturbed equilibrium, and harmony of silence and nothingness will reign once more.
Night and silence and nothingness. In the sleeping city distant people and near ones, friends and strangers are all swallowed up by darkness. Where in all this darkness have we lost our God?
The questioning intellect normally penetrates into the depths of the individual, the world and the universe until it encounters the boundary beyond which mystery begins. There it either stops or else rushes on, failing to realise, or reluctant to realise, that it calls out its questions into the void.
In his questioning Kafka stopped at the very first step, at himself, because even here he’d entered an impenetrable depth. In a world in which the intellect predominates more and more, the intellect which believes that it knows everything about the world and even more about itself, Kafka rediscovered the mysterious.
Unexpectedly the telephone rang. I ran out to the hall, lifted the receiver and identified myself, but there was silence at the other end. It was listening to me, silently. I replaced the receiver and lifted it again. The silence had gone, the dialling tone was buzzing.
That was you?
You aren’t angry, are you, darling? Were you asleep? I’m here on my own. I was lying in bed, reading, and suddenly I thought this was nonsense: to lie here and read about another person’s life. I’m sad. Aren’t you?
Just now?
Just now… And altogether. I do something and then it hits me: why am I doing it, and for whom? Now I’m lying here, everything is quiet, but why should I be lying here? I don’t need any rest when tomorrow I won’t be alive anyway. You assured me that you were happy when you were with me, that you’d never experienced anything so complete. Was that a lie then?
Surely you’d have known if I’d told you a lie at that moment.
So why don’t you come? Tell me what has changed, in what way have I changed that you don’t even ring me? What wrong did I do to you?
You didn’t do me any wrong, but we just couldn’t go on. Neither me nor you. It was impossible to carry on that divided life.
And like this one can live? Don’t tell me you’re living. Tell me, you really believe you’re living?
Surely living doesn’t only mean making love.
It doesn’t? I always thought it meant just that to you. So what, in your opinion, does have any meaning? Eating and sleeping? To botch up some important work, some great piece of art?
What I am trying to say is that one can’t indulge in love at any price. Like at the expense of others.
You think that’s what we were doing?
You don’t think so?
You are asking me? You who were always ready to sacrifice me? As if I wasn’t a human being at all, as if only she was one. Why don’t you say something? You’re angry now. Wait, wait a moment, surely you admit that you’ve always decided against me.
I didn’t decide against you, I wasn’t free to decide for you.
That didn’t worry you in some respects.
It worried me precisely in the respect you’re talking about.
You’re making excuses, you’ve always only made excuses. You know very well that you never gave me a chance.
A chance of what? Weren’t we together enough?
You were never only with me. Not even a week. Not even a day! You were never with me except secretly. Even by the sea…
Don’t cry!
And I believed you. I thought you loved me and would find some way for us to remain together. At least for a time.
I did love you. But there was no way round. Surely people aren’t things which you can move to another place when they seem to have served their purpose. I could only either remain here or join you.
You’re so noble about other people. But you calmly moved me as far away as possible when I’d served my purpose. Wait, wait, tell me one more thing: are you happy at least? Don’t you regret anything? Why aren’t you saying anything? If you’ve no regrets about me don’t you at least have any about yourself?
You think I should have regrets about myself?
Surely it’s sad if a person has loved somebody and then loses him.
I know, but a person can lose something worse.
What is there that’s worse for a person to lose?
Perhaps his soul.
Your soul? You lost your soul with me? You shouldn’t have said that! What do you know about the soul? You’re just a pack of excuses!