The morning rises from the autumnal mists and the sky slowly turns blue. On the far bank of the river, ever since dawn, there has been a rapid procession of cars escaping for the weekend from the polluted city. Over breakfast I’d read a poem in the paper by the leading author writing in jerkish:
Chain of Hands
Who knows who knows
where beauty is born
where happiness seeks us
why love trusts us
People people
maybe that day is dawning
when children may play
everywhere is white peace
People people
let’s be ever vigilant
they who sow the wind
must reap the storm
People people
we’re but a chain of hands
we’re but the music of dreams
we’re but the beauty of deeds
For this poem of sixty-nine words, including the title, the author needed a mere thirty-seven jerkish terms and no idea at all, no feeling or image. The substantives – beauty, happiness, love, peace, people, children – are of course interchangeable, the sense or nonsense of the rambling remains unchanged. The obligatory call for hatred of the unworthy and for love of the worthy strikes one by its clichés, even if one allows for the limited scope of the jerkish language. It’s almost as if the author was afraid that among the chimpanzees there might after all be one individual who would not understand him.
Anyone strong enough to read the poem attentively will realise that for a jerkish poet even a vocabulary of 225 words is needlessly large.
On the far side of the river – you have only to cross the bridge – are rocks and woods. We used to go for walks there with the children, now someone said they’d established some huge depôt there. My wife agrees that: we should set out in that direction, she is happy that we’re going on an excursion.
Under the bridge gypsies are playing football, the beds of a nursery patch look like an oriental carpet. My wife is walking ahead, with an energetic step. Her fears have left her, hope has returned to her, hope of a life that can be lived in harmony and love. And I still feel relief at her proximity, relief unblemished by pretence or lies, I am conscious of the lightness of the new day, upon which I am entering full of expectation.
One reason why I like walking in the country is probably that I was never able to do so in my childhood. The first thing I ever wrote in my life – I was eleven at the time and had been in the Terezín fortress ghetto for over a year – was not about love or suffering or my personal fate, but about landscape:
As we climb up the steep slope of Pet ř ín Hill we feel increasingly like birds rising into the air. And then, at one instant, we turn round. We see before us such a multitude of Little City roofs that we catch our breath and regret that we are not really birds and so can never alight on those roofs or see their secrets from close up…
At that time I didn’t know yet what I was doing, I had no idea how many books had been written by then, how many minds had spoken in them. I wrote because I was dying from a yearning for freedom, and freedom for me then meant stepping out of my prison, walking through the streets of my native city; I wrote to fortify my hope that outside the fortress walls the world still existed, a world which had seemed to exist then only in dreams and visions.
I still believe that literature has something in common with hope, with a free life outside the fortress walls which, often unnoticed by us, surround us, with which moreover we surround ourselves. I am not greatly attracted to books whose authors merely portray the hopelessness of our existence, despairing of man, of our conditions, despairing over poverty and riches, over the finiteness of life and the transience of feelings. A writer who doesn’t know anything else had better keep silent.
Man goes through the landscape, seeking hope and waiting for a miracle, waiting for someone to answer his questions. Some monk, pilgrim, enlightened Buddha, prophet or at least a talking bird, to tell him if he’s been endowed with a soul, whose existence would not be cut short even by death, of what matter that soul was woven, what there was above man, what order, what creature or being, in what kind of big bang time had its origin and where it was heading; man passes through the landscape, waiting for an encounter, or at least for a sign, without knowing its nature.
My wife stops, she is waiting for me. I catch up with her, I embrace her. She goes rigid in my embrace, I can feel her trembling.
When I’d met her years ago I was happy that someone was interested in me. She was very young then, she probably didn’t understand what I was feeling, or how impatiently I would wait for her, she was regularly late for our dates.
I’d stand on the edge of the little park not far from where she lived, in the shadow of a magnificent plane tree, or in winter under its bare branches, watching the hands of the street clock. Time and again I worried that she wouldn’t come, that something had happened to her, that we’d missed one another or that one of us had made a mistake about the time. When eventually she arrived I was so happy she’d come I couldn’t bring myself 1:0 be angry with her.
No matter where we’d set out for, we felt good. It seemed to me that we were jointly looking for the same signs. For her everything changed into images, as happens to children, savages or the elect among the poets, and I felt buoyed up by her side.
To this day I can feel the joy which pervaded her, her pleasure at everything we met and saw: a little flower whose name she didn’t know, or the roof of the distant estate building, or the little feather lost by a bird of prey, and most of all our being close together. And it struck me that our actions, wherever they might seem to aim, were in fact aimed at just this point, at the close proximity of a person who might become a companion. At the bottom of all our hopes lies a yearning for encounter.
Daria was convinced that we belonged together, that we’d merely not known about one another, or that the right time had not yet come for us to meet in the way we’d now met. And she found this belief confirmed in the stars, in her cards, in the prophecies of an old clairvoyant whom she’d sought out on one occasion when, after all, she was overcome by doubts.
She pressed me: Why do you tell lies at home? You’re only wronging me, your wife and yourself. She reminded me of Buddha’s words. Apparently he said: No one’s deed is lost, it comes back to him! I understand those words, I also understand her. She asks me: Why don’t you come all the way to me, why do you resist so? Surely no one else can love you as I do.
Suppose we loved one another just because we do have to part all the time and then find each other anew?
She went to Greece with her husband. She was so far away that her voice came to me only as a soft whisper at night, from the region of the stars, her tenderness too was fading over that distance, and I felt easier. As though I were returning from some beautiful exile, descending from mountain heights where I’d felt happy but uneasy. How could I go back to the home that I had needlessly and wilfully left?
I went on holiday with my wife, on the way we stopped at a campsite managed by our son.
We sit together and eat porridge out of billycans, it smells faintly of burnt wood, and in the evening we sing at the campfire. Lída’s voice carries above everybody else’s, there’s tranquillity in it, it drives out everything alien and evil that still clings to my soul. It’s raining, the fire is smoking, we huddle under a single rubber coat, we touch as if embracing, and it seems to me that my lies have disappeared somewhere without trace and I’ll never return to them. And I wish time would not march on, that it would delay the return of my lover whom, surely, I can’t betray either, I can’t just chase her away. And somewhere deep down within me something is stirring, and amidst the raindrops I can hear her rapid footsteps, I can see her emerging from the dark and hurrying down the stony path among the olives, among the fig trees, among the umbrella pines, I can see her alone, even though I know that she is not alone. In my mind, however, she lives separated from all other people, with the possible exception of the swarthy villager who pours her wine. From that great distance there comes to me the muted roar of the Minotaur. I duck under the onrush of longing. In how many days will she come back to me, if she comes back to me at all?
The days have now gone, it is only two hours’ journey now, no frontier to cross, I could embrace her, provided she comes back to me.
The thought of it pushes everything else out of my mind. I walk down a path and she is coming towards me, we run towards each other, again and again we run towards each other in daylight and in darkness. At night she slips into my bed, we make love like people possessed. She moans and caresses me, I whisper tender words in her ear.
I’ll pretend I’m meeting some friends, I’ll get into the car and drive off. I don’t know with whom I’ll find her, or if I’ll find her at all, I don’t know if I’ll make up my mind to knock at the door I’ve never stood before, the door I know only from her account. I’ll arrive at the village which is so remote it hasn’t even got a church, I’ll leave the car under a tall lime tree and set out at random towards where I suspect her temporary place to be.
And there she is, coming towards me, real and alive, tanned by the southern sun, I know her from afar by her rapid life-hungry step. She recognises me, she raises her hand in greeting but we do not run towards each other, we walk towards each other, and she asks in surprise: You’ve come to see me, darling? We don’t kiss, and she says: I’ve brought you a stone from Mount Olympus. And she opens her eyes wide, she embraces me with her eyes till I sigh at the thought of ecstasy to come.
We’d walked through the patch of woodland outside the city, there were even mushrooms and chanterelles growing by the footpath, and through the branches we could see the blue sky.
My wife wanted to know whether street-sweeping wasn’t depressing me too much.
It certainly would depress me if I had to do it for the rest of my life.
What about the people who actually do it for years on end?
I don’t know what to tell her about them. After all, street-sweeping isn’t all that different from lots of other jobs which all have one thing in common: they are not inspiring. Sweepers pass their time just like other people, by talking, by reminiscing about better moments in their lives. Maybe they talk in order to rise above what they are doing, but more probably they just talk to make the time pass more pleasantly.
Didn’t they look to me somehow marked, outcast or humiliated? I consider my answer. But my wife is asking these questions only so she can tell me about her experiences with her patients, whom circumstances had picked on as sacrificial lambs: as a result they were marked for the rest of their lives, most of them had had their self-assurance broken and their mental health had been affected.
I asked her if something like that must inevitably occur, and my wife said it did. In this manner people satisfied their innate need to find someone onto whom they’d transfer their own guilt. Sacrifices to superior powers were age-old, indeed they used to be performed with solemn rituals, and for their victims men chose those whom their society considered the best or the purest.
The ritual of sacrifice no longer existed today – disregarding the symbolical sacrifice of the body of Christ. What had persisted, however, was the need for sacrifice. People now sought their sacrificial victims in their own midst, and mostly they chose the ones who were the weakest and most vulnerable. They no longer spilled their blood, they merely destroyed their souls. The most frequent victims were the children.
Yesterday, as we were moving down the street of the housing estate, the dustbins were overflowing and everywhere on the pavement and in the road rubbish was blowing about. In front of one of the refuse dumpsters was a large red puddle. It might have been human or animal blood, if it was blood at all. On the surface of the puddle dust and dirt had formed an uneven scum in which some bits of greasy paper had been trapped. Mrs Venus turned away. I thought her Red-Indian face had gone yellow. ‘Ugh, can’t look at that. That’s how I found her – my little Annie.’
She told me that before she’d had her three sons she’d had a daughter. Doing her shopping one day she’d left her in the pram outside. She’d already paid for her purchases when there were shrieks outside, then something crashed into the wall and the glass in the shop window was shattered. She rushed out, there was an overturned lorry, two adults lying there, blood everywhere, and nothing left of the pram. ‘I was beside myself then, I’d have killed that drunken pig behind the wheel if they’d let me. But they rushed up from all sides and held me until the doctor who came with the ambulance gave me a jab of something.’
At that time she was still working at the stud in Topol č ianky. And just a few days after her little girl was killed it so happened that her favourite mare Edith, a chestnut with white socks, fell at a fence and broke her right foreleg just at the fetlock. The vet insisted that she’d never race again, in fact she wouldn’t even walk again, and he wanted to put her down. She ran straight to the manager of the stud and begged him to let her look after the filly. The manager knew what she’d just gone through and took pity on her. After that she spent every free moment with Edith. She made splints for her, mixed saltpetre with water parsnip and nasturtium leaves and alternated these applications with an ointment which the vet, in the end, gave her. With that filly she could talk just as she’d talked to her little girl, the animal understood her. At night, when Mrs Venus woke up and saw her little girl all bloody and mangled on that pavement, she’d run to the stable; her filly was never asleep, just as if she knew she’d come to see her. After six months she was riding Edith, they even allowed her to enter her for their local steeplechase and she rode her herself. As she was waiting at the start she forgot for the first time what had happened to her.
‘And did you win?’ I asked.
‘Some hope! We were doing all right as far as the third fence. But I was so excited I got a belly-ache, and then I couldn’t control Edith any more, she just ran as she pleased. We finished last, by ten lengths, but we finished.’
As we walked on through the deserted little wood there was more and more rubbish on the ground, and not only on the ground – even the branches of the trees were festooned with translucent tatters of plastic. At every gust of the wind they touched, interlocked and embraced like a pair of crazy lovers, and in doing so they emitted a rustling sound and with the sound came the smell of rotting, mould and mildew.
Even the road up Mount Olympus, Daria had told me, led through rubbish, and even the way up Fujiyama, which she’d also climbed, was lined with garbage. On Mount Everest, just below its summit, lay drums, abandoned tents and plastic containers. Even a crashed helicopter is said to be rusting there.
My dear Lída is mistaken when she thinks that sweepers must feel ostracised or humiliated. They might, on the contrary, if they cared about such things, regard themselves as the salt of the earth, as healers of a world in danger of choking.
I asked if it was possible to help those who had already borne the brunt of ostracism. My wife, thankful for a question that was seeking for hope, replied that the best chance was psychotherapy. This might help to uncover the causes of their rejection by others and shift their sense of being wronged from their subconscious to their conscious minds.
The main theme of my wife’s life is finding hope for other people. The pain of others hurts her personally, she suffers with every rejected person, she tries to alleviate his lot, to help him see into his own soul and to discover there what he wouldn’t discover otherwise. If she feels she is succeeding she is happy, she knows she isn’t living in vain.
If any theme excites me, it is probably the theme of freedom.
How can you write about freedom when you’re unable to act freely, Daria objects. By which she means that I am unable to leave my wife.
I don’t know why leaving someone should be a freer action than staying with them.
All right then, why didn’t I stay with that dreadful woman who battened on other people’s misfortunes, and leave her alone.
Perhaps my theme ought to be not so much the search for freedom as the search for action. Or maybe resolution, or determination, or ruthlessness? I’ll write a novel about a hero who sweeps aside anyone standing in the way of his happiness or satisfaction. He’ll go on sweeping everybody aside until somebody sweeps him aside. Maybe, if he is sufficiently determined, vicious, resolute, ruthless and at the same time circumspect his turn will not come at all: only death will sweep him aside.
A few days ago an aircraft crashed not far from the Irish coast with 325 people aboard. There was no engine failure, no instrument failure, the plane didn’t strike a church tower or a mountain veiled in mist, but a time bomb exploded in it. Not a single passenger survived. Among the victims were eighty children. Floating in the water – wrote the journalists, knowing that people in their secure armchairs love reading moving or harrowing details – were dolls and other toys.
Heroes impose themselves. They’d placed a bomb aboard the plane and they were not only resolute and ruthless, but were no doubt also fighting for someone’s freedom.
A lot of people talk about freedom, those who deny it to others most loudly. The concentration camps of my childhood even had a slogan about freedom inscribed over their gates.
But I am more and more convinced that an action can be free only if it is inspired by humanity, only if it is aware of a higher judge. It cannot be linked to acts of arbitrariness, hatred or violence, nor indeed to personal selfish interest.
The amount of freedom is not increasing in our age, even though it may sometimes seem to be. All that increases is the needless movement of things, words, garbage and violence. And because nothing can vanish from the face of the planet, the fruits of our activity do not liberate us but bury us.
They even held an international conference about the Apocalypse. Scientists have calculated that if less than half of the existing atomic warheads exploded, a firestorm would sweep over the continents and the oceans, igniting anything inflammable on earth. The air would be filled with poisonous vapours, including lethal cyanides from certain plastic materials which we ourselves have manufactured. The heat would destroy not only all living things on the surface of the planet but also the seeds in the ground. The fire would be followed by darkness. For a week after the explosions the air would be filled with such a quantity of black smoke that these clouds would block out 95 per cent of the light that used to reach the earth. If any plants had remained unburnt, they would die in the months-long darkness. During the darkness a prolonged arctic winter would begin, turning the water on the planet’s surface into ice and thus destroying what remnants of life might have survived in the waters.
Between Crete and Rhodes lies the little island of Karpathos, and on it stands the small town of Olimbos. A tiny church and a few dozen houses climbing in terraces up an almost bare mountain flank. The stone houses have flat roofs and huddle together in narrow streets. Here one still finds women in dresses as black as their hair, and there is something age-old in the swarthy faces of the men. Even the silence and the sounds are age-old. This is where we’ll go, the two of us together, it came to her in a flash, and as she was climbing the steep little street to the church she knew for certain that she’d be coming back here, and that I would come with her. Maybe we shall stay there and grow old. She’ll lead me through ruins, among the remains of temples, she’ll lead me through little villages whose names I instantly forget and whose names even she possibly doesn’t know. I inhale the scent of rosemary, tamarisk and lavender, the fragrance of the hot, sun-parched soil, I hear the chirping of the cicadas and the braying of the donkeys and the pealing of bells, wedding bells overhead, and together we are conscious of what others are not conscious of: the spirit of our breath and the breath of our spirits.
I know that she is visualising her future life and that she includes me in it, that she imagines the travels we’ll undertake together, as well as her old age by my side, just as if we now really belonged together forever, as if there were no longer other people alongside us. Perhaps it doesn’t even occur to her that we are wronging anyone, she is convinced that our love justifies everything. Or is she just more genuine than me, does she want to accept the consequences of having decided to love me?
I love her too, I try to dispel my uneasiness, my anxiety to escape from her visions, I want to be with her. At least for a day, at least for some fraction of time.
And so we loved each other with all our strength and passion, out of uneasiness and out of loneliness, out of love, out of longing and out of despair. The fragments of time piled up into weeks, into further months. The winds blew, storms passed over, snow fell, my son began studying management science, he was increasingly interested in programmes for the management of the world in which he had to live, her daughter was growing up and had decided to become an agronomist, a downpour drove us into an abandoned basement where we held each other as tight as if we’d just met after a long separation, we waded through the tinted leaves in the park where the ravens in the tops of the tulip trees again called out their Nevermore to us. Her husband fell ill so that she had virtually no time for me, but she wrote me long letters in which she embraced and caressed and cursed me: Life without you is almost like death! My son celebrated his twentieth birthday, he was told to choose a present that was useful and would also give him pleasure, and after some reflection he asked for a Geigercounter. My wife noticed that I was taciturn, I looked drawn, and she asked me whether I didn’t sometimes feel nostalgic for that other woman. She suggested that I should ask her round some time, and then left for an indoctrination course, and I was able to stay with my lover day and night.
Next spring, she says, something decisive is at last going to happen.
Why next spring?
After twelve years Jupiter would enter the house of life for her.
And indeed in early spring a gallery owner in Geneva expressed interest in her work and offered to stage an exhibition for her.
I’d come to her attic studio as usual, and as soon as I’d opened the door I could see that something out of the ordinary had happened: cupboards and packing cases on which the soot from the little chimney-flue had settled for years now stood open; wherever I looked I saw mountains of her creations and monsters, succubi, witches, little demons, shameless displayers of their sex as well as angelic creatures without any sex, men-jackals, and ordinary drunks from a Little City tavern. Most of them I saw for the first time.
She kissed me, cleared a chair for me, told me her news, and wrung her hands in lamentation: she didn’t know what to do. For a while we continued to unpack some of her earlier work from crates. She placed each on a modelling stand, inspected it carefully for a few minutes, like an archaeologist who’d just unearthed an unexpectedly large fragment, and then put it down with the rest. She didn’t know if she was justified in dredging up and exhibiting such ancient work. She pointed to the head of an old woman: she’d made that while still at school. It was her father’s mother, she’d lived to the age of ninety. With her left eye she was winking while with the other one she was smiling.
I recognise the forehead, which is as high as her own, and the smile too is familiar. And that bronze youngster hanging his head, in which there is an opening for a long-stemmed flower, was a fellow student who’d committed suicide, she’d told me about him. At that time she’d wanted to make portraits of all the members of her family she knew anything about. Many of them were still in her basement workshop. Then she says: That gallery owner is inviting me to the private view and you’re coming with me.
How can I go to Switzerland?
I don’t know how, she says, but I do know that you’ll see my exhibition.
As I get up to leave she neither holds me back nor sees me out, she wants to get on with her work.
I see her every other day, that’s what she wants. I always find her at work. A new figure would gaze at me out of stone or clay eyes, and in its gaze I’d recognise a familiar passion. My lover goes on working for a little longer, while I fry up something simple for lunch, then she puts down her tools, takes off her stained smock and washes her hands. Now she doesn’t want to think of work any more, only, just before we embrace, she has to tell me what she’s been thinking about, who she’d had a beer with last night, what they’d told her at the agency this morning, the one that is supposed to negotiate her exhibition, and finally she must tell me her dream. Her day is so rich that she will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
I admire her. I’m sure I’d be spending weeks before the stand without finishing more than one or two things.
How can you be so sure?
Because I know how long it takes me to think up a sentence before it more or less satisfies me.
That’s because you’re tense, she explains to me. You try to master everything by your intellect and your strength. You don’t know how to submit to life.
She doesn’t force herself to do anything. What she needs most is a sense that she is free. If she doesn’t feel like work she’ll go out with a girlfriend and they’ll get drunk, or else she comes here, she sits down, she doesn’t want anything, she isn’t driven anywhere by her thoughts or her imagination, she just gazes as if she were gazing at the clear sky, into pure water, into emptiness. She realises that nothing need happen, and that’s also all right by her. Or else some shape suddenly appears before her, a face, a likeness, maybe just a coloured blotch which may take on form or else dissolve. She can’t tell where they come from, these shapes don’t seem to come from within her, she feels she’s only a mediator, the executor of some higher will. She then executes whatever she has to, and she feels good while doing it. She doesn’t reflect on what it will turn into. That, she feels, is not her concern but the concern of whoever put that vision into her. If I could write like that, without torturing myself beforehand about the outcome, without seeing some mission before me, I’d also feel good.
But I can’t work the way you do, I’m different.
You don’t know what you’re like, she says with assurance.
And who does?
I do, because I love you.
So what am I like?
You’re more passionate than rational.
I don’t know whether I am passionate. I know that she is. Her passion will destroy us both one day.
Next time I found her in tears amidst fragments of clay. The stand was empty.
What happened?
Nothing. What should have happened? Better leave again, I’m out of sorts today!
Has anybody hurt you?
Everybody’s hurting me, but that’s not the point.
So what is?
How could I ask? Didn’t I understand, couldn’t I see? All we were doing was pointless, nothing but a self-important and vain playing at art. Nothing but desperate caricaturing and endless repetition of what had already been repeated a thousand times. And if she’d now and then managed to catch something more, to realise some higher clue, who’d detect it, who’d notice it? Why did she have to choose this particular occupation, such a useless, joyless and exhausting drudgery? She hated all art! She didn’t want to exhibit anywhere, she didn’t want to show anyone her fumblings. There was no sense in it!
What about Barlach’s angel?
Yes, Barlach’s angel – but they’d had it removed, hadn’t they? He survived only because angels are immortal. She’s laughing through her tears. If you’d sit for me I’d make you a pair of wings and maybe you’d be immortal too.
I’ll sit for you.
Better lie down with me!
We embrace and she forgets all her sorrow. She looks forward to our love-making on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Three days later the organisation, or rather agency whose task it is to organise, in other words authorise, exhibitions abroad informed her that it would not handle her exhibition.
I want to know why she’s been refused but she only shrugs.
I suspect that it might have been because of me.
It’s possible, darling, they’re envious of me because I have you, they know that nobody loves them so much.
However, we composed a letter of protest to the authorities; she’ll probably not send it off. She then went out to see her fortune-teller friend to discover what the cards had to say about the chances of her appeal. Told that they weren’t too good, she decided to hold an exhibition in Kutná Hora instead of Geneva.
We were still walking in the direction where I expected the depot to be. The trees all round were more and more heavily festooned with tattered pieces of plastic. At the base of the miserable little tree-trunks dirty crumpled bags were tumbling about, and whenever there was a gust of wind the yellowed pages of some jerkish newspaper rose up from the ground like monstrous emaciated birds and weakly flapped their mutilated wings.
Franz Kafka became a sacrificial victim by his own decision. It does not seem as if those around him were as anxious to sacrifice him as he was himself. Time and again he recorded the state of mind experienced by the victim. With few exceptions the victim resists, and even thinks up elaborate means of self-defence, but his tragic end is unalterable. In this respect Kafka certainly anticipated the fate of the Jews in our age of upheaval. His youngest sister met her end in a gas chamber. That is where he would probably have met his end too if he hadn’t been lucky enough to die young.
Jewish authors, such as Kafka’s contemporary Werfel, or later Bellow and Heller, keep returning to the theme of the sacrificial lamb with an obsession that is possibly subconscious and possibly prophetic. The theme of the victim of sacrifice and the person staging sacrifices, of an increasingly random victim and of the victimiser prepared to drag to the altar of his god any number of human beings, if not indeed the whole of mankind, is increasingly becoming the theme of the present-day world, of a mankind that once believed in an earthly paradise and in the beneficial effect of revolutions in leading it there.
At last we emerged from the forest. Before us, behind a high wire fence, we saw a mountain with many ridges, crevices and humps. Its slopes glistened here and there as the fragments of plastic reflected the sun’s rays. Along its long crest a yellow bulldozer was moving, its scoop pushing a multicoloured mass before it. From one side a road led up to the mountain. Access, however, was barred by a red-and-white striped barrier. Just then an orange dumpster came hurtling out of the forest, an invisible guard raised the barrier, and the vehicle entered the enclosure. As it slowly climbed up the slope of the artificial mountain some fat crows rose up from both sides of the path, beating their massive wings. On the crest the garbage truck stopped, its body bright in the sunlight. Then it began to evacuate its entrails. No sooner had it begun to move off than a group of little figures rushed out from some invisible hiding place. I counted thirteen of them – if Daria had been here she’d have said an unlucky number! – men, women and children. The grown-ups had rakes in their hands, and pitchforks and poles fitted with hooks, or else they were pushing discarded prams. They all pounced on the fresh rubbish and began to dig around in it as if in a race; they flung items from one pile onto another, a few items they picked out and put aside for themselves, and others, which were evidently still useful for something or other, i.e. for sale, they flung straight into handcarts or prams.
I was reminded of the woman whose things I’d moved. Disease was eating up her soul, she believed in Armageddon, and she took delight in things she’d saved from the dustbins. Here she’d be in her element. She wouldn’t have sold any of the items she found here, she’d have piled them into a heap which would have grown ever higher and wider. She’d have laboured till she dropped, not until nightfall would she have sat down by the base of her own mountain and anxiously rested in its shelter for a while. Like Sisyphus, that woman would never have completed her work, not only because the supply of new garbage will never stop, but also because an inner emptiness cannot be filled even with all the objects in the world.
We soon became aware that nothing that was happening before us was happening without a plan, and that all the running around and exploratory digging was directed by a massive bald-headed fatty in a black suit. Unlike all the rest, he never once bent down to pick up anything, but merely strolled about as their supervisor. And just then his name came to me and I surprised Lída with the information that, to the best of my knowledge, that fellow was called Demeter, and that he’d had to pay a good deal of money for the right to mine the treasures in this mountain, though I didn’t know to whom. Now and again the searchers might dig up a pewter plate, an antique coffee grinder, a discarded television set, or a banknote thrown out by mistake.
When the Kampuchean victim-makers, known as the Khmer Rouge, occupied Phnom Penh they broke into the abandoned bank buildings, burst open the safes, carried out armfuls of banknotes and flung them out of the windows – not only rials but also American dollars, Swiss francs and Japanese yen, the banknotes of every country in the world sailed out of the windows, but none of those who were still alive in the city dared pick any of them up. The coloured pieces of printed paper were gently scattered by the wind. They rose into the air alongside scraps of newspaper, torn posters and blank picture postcards, then settled by the kerbs or in the middle of the streets which nobody came to sweep. The rubbish gradually rotted, unless the monsoon rains washed it away and the waters of the Mekong carried it down to the sea.
What Kafka was longing for most in his life was probably a human encounter. At the same time it represented for him a mysterious abyss whose bottom seemed to him unfathomable. But he lived at a period which, more than anything else, began to exalt revolution. Only what was revolutionary in art, as much as in the social order, seemed worthy of admiration or at least of interest.
For that reason, too, they looked in his sentences and images for a revolutionary message. But when I read his letters to the two women he loved, or at least tried to love, for whom he yearned and of whom he was afraid, I realised that if I did the same I had no hope of understanding him.
His first love lasted for more than five years. He invited her to him, he drove her away again, he implored her not to leave him unless she wished to destroy him, and he implored her to leave him or they would destroy one another. He got engaged to her and immediately afterwards he fled from her. When she kept silent and failed to answer his letters he lamented his fate and begged for a single word of favour. Encounter, coming close together with a woman he loved was for him a chance of fulfilling his life, a chance he persistently missed. The struggle he was waging with himself totally consumed and exhausted him.
Could a person as honest as that write about anything other than what was shaking his whole being, what occupied him day and night? About anything other than the struggle he was waging, even though that struggle, by comparison to the revolutionary events in the world, was less than trivial? Although he mostly speaks of himself and although his heroes are, even in their names, avowedly himself, he yet concealed the true nature of his struggles. He was not only shy, he was so much an artist that he expressed everything he experienced in images. The torturing machine, which slowly murders the sentenced man, was invented by him at the very moment when, after a bitter inner struggle, he decided to get engaged after all. A few weeks later, when he broke off his engagement, treacherously as he himself felt, he conceived the trial in which the tribunal judges the accused for an offence that is not clear to the reader and has often been interpreted as metaphysical guilt, as a metaphor of original sin.
Even in a revolutionary period there were undoubtedly other writers whose works, without our feeling obliged to search them for hidden messages about the meaning of existence, were full of images and metaphors. But in Kafka’s work there is something more than just a cleverly invented image, something that moves us and grips us, something that lures us fatally on like a sheer drop.
Daria’s exhibition was being set up in three reasonably sized rooms of a Gothic house. The exhibition – including twenty drawings – comprised seventy-three items. She could easily have shown a few items more or less, but that number seemed to her the most suitable. 1973 was the year her daughter was born.
For almost two weeks we packed and heaved crates with figures and paintings. Our faces and hair were covered with a layer of wood-shaving dust.
You’re so kind to me, she said, brushing the dust off her jeans and embracing me. And I’m not devoting myself to you at all. Have a glass of wine at least!
She promised to make it all up to me. We’d travel somewhere that I’d like, there wouldn’t have to be any water there, she knew that I didn’t care for water, she’d come to the mountains with me.
I wasn’t anxious to go either to the water or to the mountains, I didn’t need a rest, I’d much rather work undisturbed. But I behaved like a good boy, I didn’t raise any objections, I unpacked the sculptures we’d brought along, I helped to nail pedestals together and hang cords from the ceiling, I adjusted the lights, and in the evening I drove her back home as fast as I could.
My wife, it seemed to me, still had no suspicion of how I was spending most of my time. Or didn’t she want to suspect? The day before the opening of the exhibition she was leaving for an ethological conference and wanted to know if I minded being left on my own for so long.
I didn’t betray my relief at her going away just: then. I assured her I could look after myself.
If I wished, she suggested, I might come along with her. I was sure to find the people at the conference interesting. For a while she told me earnestly about people who kept snakes or exotic butterflies, about experts on owls, marmosets and white stags. She wanted to provide some diversion for me, some experiences I wouldn’t have in my solitude, and when I declined her offer I felt guilty. I was about to repay her offer of help with betrayal.
It was her husband who drove my lover out to the private view of her exhibition. He’d finally emerged from the darkness. I suggested to her that I stay at home that day, I’d seen her work anyway. But she didn’t want me to leave her at such a moment. I had to overcome a cowardly wish to avoid what would be an awkward encounter, to make the excuse of being ill, or of the car being out of action. There are plenty of excuses a man can invent, but I didn’t wish to lie, at least not to her, so I went.
I knew her husband only from photographs, but I instantly identified his tall athletic figure. The room was crowded by then and I don’t know if he noticed me too. He was talking to a bald-headed, wizened old man, almost certainly her father, whom I hadn’t met either. I didn’t know any of the people in the room, I belonged solely to her, to her who was severed from all ties and relationships. I felt so much out of place that it depressed me.
She came over to me almost instantaneously. Unfamiliar, almost strange in a long poppy-crimson dress. Even her features seemed strange to me, the little lines which I’d so often touched with my lips were skilfully covered by a layer of cream and powder. She kissed me, as no doubt she’d kissed other guests as well, and whispered that she loved me. Then she asked me if I wanted to meet her husband. She declared herself as belonging to me in front of everybody – ‘My lover’ – and I suddenly wasn’t sure whether I was pleased about it or not.
After all, why shouldn’t I shake hands with you? her husband said to me and gave me a slightly injured smile. Although I’m not exactly short, he was a head taller than me, and also ten years younger. At first glance he was one of those men women run after of their own accord. He said that Daria had worked pretty hard these past few weeks, they’d scarcely seen her at home, and he shrugged as if to say: And on top of everything there’s you and that’s really a bit much. But instead he said he’d read my new stories, and this would have been the right moment for me to shrug but he gave me his injured smile again and walked away. I hung about near the door but lacked the courage to make a getaway. I had a feeling that they were all furtively watching me, for the moment I had become one of the exhibits. I might have a little card by my feet: Banned but active in another field. Or: The lover presented. Or simply: That’s him!
In the last room Daria’s sister, whom I had likewise never seen before, was setting out canapés from cartons on a little table and pouring wine into paper cups. I took a canapé but I declined the wine because I was driving back that evening.
An elderly man whom I knew from somewhere took a drink and said that it was years since he’d seen anything so free and so liberating. He was looking at the sister but I was sure he was talking to me.
That’s what she’s like, her sister agreed. When she was small she’d run away from home and play truant from school.
Her husband was approaching and I beat a hasty retreat. I was unable not to take notice of him, even though, to my own surprise, I looked upon him without jealousy, as if it were no concern of mine that she lay down by his side night after night. I only felt a little embarrassment, shame and perhaps even guilt. That man had never wronged me, whereas I had for several years now secretly and insidiously worked my way into his life.
She guessed my mood and hurried over to comfort me. Her husband was leaving now, he’d be taking the rest of her family with him, the whole circus would be over in a little while, there’d only be a few friends left whom she hadn’t seen for years and whom she’d like to invite for a glass of wine, also the representatives of the gallery, they’d promised to buy one or two of her things, but that too would soon be over and then there’d be just the two of us.
I asked if there was anything I could do, but there wasn’t, her sister had already gone to reserve two tables. I would have liked to tell her how pleased I was that the exhibition had been a success but I was somehow paralysed and she’d run off before I could pull myself together.
Her husband was still not leaving, maybe he needed to demonstrate his satisfaction. I could hear his loud, good-natured, jolly laugh. He might stroll over at any moment, slap me on the back and tell me that in spite of my gaucherie I seemed quite amusing, he’d expected worse. Indeed, he felt some sympathy with me. On top of all my problems I’d landed myself with his wife! Perhaps we should finally settle this business.
I thought I was choking in that close and stuffy space.
Outside I was surprised by the bright lights. I didn’t know the small town; although we’d spent a lot of time here during the past few days we’d had no time for a walk. Now I chose a narrow street which ran steeply downhill. Somewhere in the neighbourhood there was obviously a fair: the wind carried snatches of roundabout music to me and I was meeting children with coloured balloons, hooters and large puffs of candy-floss.
I used to love fairs, the sideshows of conjurers, fire-eaters and tightrope walkers, but I couldn’t recall when I’d last been to one. Over the last few years I’d neglected all my interests except one, all my friends, all my near and dear ones, everybody except one. Most of all I’d neglected my work.
I wasn’t satisfied with the way I was spending my life, but I couldn’t blame anyone for it except myself. I’d come to the end of the little street and below me lay a wide open space. Above the merry-go-round shone a wreath of deceptive but alluring lights and the circus tent was decorated with red and blue pennants. Gigantic white swans made a pretence of noble flight.
For a moment I stopped at my slightly elevated vantage point and watched the crowd milling below me. I longed to mix with it, not to have to worry about anybody, not to think of anything, of my guilt or my lies, even of my love, not to step into anyone else’s life, not to belong to anyone, to move freely and unrecognised in the crowd, to catch snatches of conversation and human faces, to dream up incidents which I would shape according to my will, to have before me something other than perpetual escapes and guilty returns.
My wife maintains that I am unable to forget my wartime experiences. They, she says, are preventing me from getting close to another person: I know I would suffer when I lost that person too, but I cannot believe that I would not lose them. I remain alone, even though I am seemingly by her side. Clearly I would remain alone by anybody’s side.
I ought to be getting back, I wouldn’t like to spoil my lover’s day of success with my moodiness. But I went on to a shooting gallery and asked the dolled-up beauty there for an air rifle. I scored enough to win a little bear on an elastic string and a parrot made of colourful rags and feathers. As I accepted my fairground trophies it struck me that they were more appropriate to me than those fantastic sculptures which I’d just left behind.
One of the rubbish searchers had just caught a red flag with his hook. With a great effort he extricated it from underneath the mass of ashes and other filth, rolled it round his pole, and when he’d got it out eventually waved his wife over and together they unrolled the rag. When they’d opened it out in the wind we could see that it was really a red flag which was now flying above the mountain of garbage.
The Khmer Rouge did not fill the void in their souls with objects or with the money they so despised. They understood that the void in the soul cannot be filled even by all the objects in the world, and that was why they tried to fill that void by human sacrifices. But the emptiness of the soul cannot be filled by anything, not even if the whole of mankind were driven to the sacrificial block: the emptiness would continue, terrifying and insatiable.
Everything on earth is gradually transformed into rubbish, into refuse, which must then, in one way or another, be removed from the earth – except that nothing can be removed from it. Some time ago our jerkish newspapers reported that some Czech inventor had invented a machine for the destruction of old – that is, useless – banknotes, securities and secret documents. Abroad, the article claimed, banknotes were destroyed in crushing mills the height of a two-storey building. The compressed waste mass, however, was so dense that each kilogram of it had to be doused with half a litre of petrol before it would burn; in contrast, the Czech invention did not exceed the dimensions of a medium-sized machine tool. This splendid machine, quite possibly the invention of none other than our captain, produced a shredded mass which could then be fed by pipes into the boiler of a central heating system: thus not only was petrol saved but also a lot of precious hard coal.
Methods and machines for the efficient and economical removal of uncomfortable people from this world have of course been known for a long time.
I watched the items on the carts piling up. Although I couldn’t make out any details at that distance, I suspected that they were old boots and pots, bottles and dolls rather like the ones which had floated on the sea off the Irish coast, and certainly also sacks and old blankets. Where are the days when the poor from the hovels on the outskirts of our cities didn’t even have a sack to call their own, to cover their nakedness? They are behind us and they are before us.
The light breeze rose again and this time it carried to us not only the stench of the garbage but also snatches of hoarse conversation and of delighted childish shrieks. If Brueghel or Hieronymus Bosch were alive now they would surely have sat here and drawn this scene. They might have added a few little figures at various points among that plastic mass, or they might have heightened the mountain so that its peak touched the heavens, and at its foot they might have placed a happy treasure seeker, a woman, a never satiated mad Margareta. What would they have called the picture? ‘The Dance of Death’ or, on the contrary, ‘Earthly Paradise’? ‘Armageddon’ or just ‘Dulle Griet’?
It struck me that any second now a new orange vehicle might arrive and tip out a load of skulls and bones. At just that moment those at the top of the heap were dragging out an old feather mattress and as they were trying to free it from the stranglehold of the rest of the rubbish its cover burst, and because a somewhat stronger gust of wind had just sprung up the feathers began to rise, and along with light scraps of paper and plastic and fine particles of ash began to circle in the air. The dancers underneath almost disappeared in the snowstorm, and I felt a sudden chill. Anxiously I looked at the sky to make sure the megaton cloud was not already sailing over from somewhere, but the sky still seemed clear and clean, though a chill was falling from it that made me shiver.
The Apocalypse can take different forms. The least dramatic, at first sight, is the one in which man perishes under an avalanche of useless objects, emptied words, and excessive activity. Man becomes a volcano which imperceptibly sucks up the heat from below the ground until, in an instant, it trembles and buries itself.
The sweepers in their orange vests go on sweeping, sweeping silently and without interest, while their brothers the dustmen cart off what has been swept into piles and thrown away. They pile those useless objects into heaps which swell, spread and disintegrate, like yeast they rise skywards, like a cancerous tumour they invade their surroundings, human habitations, so that we find it difficult to distinguish between what are still objects of our life and what are objects of our death.
Of all the garbage that swamps us and threatens us by its breath of decay, the most dangerous are the masses of discarded ideas. They tumble about us, they slide down the slopes of our lives. The souls they touch begin to wither and soon no one sees them alive again.
But those without souls do not vanish from the earth either. Their processions move through the world and subconsciously try to reshape it in their own image. They fill the streets, the squares, the stadiums and the department stores. When they burst into cheers over a winning goal, a successful pop song or a revolution it seems as if that roar would go on forever, but it is followed at once by the deathly silence of emptiness and oblivion.
They flee from that silence and seek something that would redeem it, a sacrifice they might cast on the altar of whatever demon they happen to be venerating. Now and then they’ll fire a gun at random, or place a time bomb, or inject some narcotic into their veins and make love, they’ll do anything to survive that dead period before the tremor of the volcano, before the lava fills the void. The void within them.
The images Kafka employs are often obscure, but they also seem to deliberately display a multitude of heterogeneous and disparate elements. We read his strictly logical narration, which often suggests a precise official memorandum, and suddenly we come across a detail or a statement which appears to have drifted in from another world, from another plot, and we are confused. In the story about the execution machine, for instance, why do some ladies’ gloves suddenly appear and, without obvious reason, pass from the condemned man to the executioner and back? Why does the judge in The Trial hold a debt book instead of the trial papers? Why does the official in The Castle receive the surveyor K. in bed? What is the meaning of his absurd paean in praise of bureaucratic work? The author leads us through a savanna where, in addition to the antelopes and lions we would expect, polar bears and kangaroos are also roaming about as a matter of course.
Surely a writer as logical, as precise and as honest as Kafka must have meant something with his paradoxes, must have intended some hidden communication, must have wanted to create his own myth, his own legend about the world, some great, revolutionary message which perhaps he only surmised and was therefore unable to express clearly; he only adumbrated it, and it is up to us to decipher it and give it precise shape.
I don’t know how many clever people fell into that error, for that mystery-cracking delusion, but they were numerous. I myself am convinced that no writer worthy of that name conceals anything deliberately, that he does not construe or invent any revolutionary messages. He doesn’t even concern himself with them. Most authors, like most people, have their theme: their torments, and these impose themselves on anything they do, think or write.
Kafka with his shyness sought a way of communicating his torment and simultaneously concealing it. Yet it was so personal that it was not enough for him to express it only in hidden form, only in metaphor; time and again he was prompted to make an open confession of the experiences which touched on the essence of his being. As if he were relating an event twice. First he draws his fantastic image: a bizarre and mysterious trial, an execution machine, or a surveyor’s desperate effort to get into an inaccessible castle, and secondly he assembles the fragments of real experiences and events. He writes everything on translucent sheets of paper or on glass and places them one over the other. Some things supplement each other, some things cover each other, some things find themselves in such surprising company that he must surely have been blissfully amazed himself. Behold, he no longer lies fatally exhausted and impotent in bed with his lover who offers him her redeeming and merciful proximity, but he finds himself, as a mortally weary surveyor, in bed with the castle official, and that man offers him his liberating bureaucratic mercy.
We didn’t go to Switzerland, we didn’t even go to Kutná Hora again. The exhibition was over, and all that was left to us was the attic studio, where the view of the window of the palace opposite was still blocked by the statue of Saint Stephen the Martyr. We’d meet, sit by the low table, drink wine and talk in that strange state of enchantment which stems from the knowledge that everything we do and experience takes on new meaning and importance the moment we impart it to the person we love. In the past we loved one another with longing and with an insatiability which seemed to me unchangeable, even though she was seized by impatience now and again. Something’s got to change, surely we can’t spend our entire lives in such immobility, in such hopeless repetition of the same actions, we don’t want to end up as two clowns who are happy if in their old age they can be walk-ons in an amateur circus performance. A bitterness has crept into her conversation. She is angry about people who don’t know how to live, she rails against artists who are betraying their mission, she curses all men who are treacherous and cowardly and unable to pursue anything in their lives to its conclusion. Most frequently she is angry with my wife.
We are lying by each other’s side. It is evening, an autumnal rainy twilight, we are reluctant to tear ourselves away from one another, to get up and flee into discomfort. I kiss her, once more I embrace her. She presses herself to me: suppose we both stayed here until morning?
She’s testing me, and I keep silent.
Anyway, she can’t understand how I can live with that person. She’d heard some things about her, about what she does to her patients, that had made her quite sick.
I don’t wish to end the day with a quarrel, but nevertheless I ask what she’d heard and from whom. But she refuses to give me any details. She’d spoken to somebody who knew my wife well. He’d said that it was criminal to treat people like that.
I try to discover if this is about some drugs my wife has prescribed.
We’re still lying beside one another, but she is so angry she hardly seems to know where she is. Why bring up drugs? She knew nothing about drugs. Perhaps a perverted doctor would also prescribe perverted drugs, but had my wife never told me about that revolting, humiliating play-acting those poor wretches had to go in for? How she compelled them to vomit up their intimate secrets, how she dug about in their beds? Did I really not understand that that woman was a pervert? She’s unable to live for herself, unable to love, to look after a family, keep an eye on her own husband, and so she’s gone in for professional do-goodery. In reality, and in this she was no different from all other do-gooders, she merely got a kick out of the suffering of others, she merely latched on to the lives of those who still managed to have real emotions and were therefore suffering. And, like a leech, she pretended to be helping them. Or did I think that a woman who for ten years or whatever couldn’t tell that her husband had someone on the side, that he was living with her only out of pity, could discover anything about the souls of others?
I tell her it isn’t like that at all, but she starts shouting at me that I shouldn’t stand up for that person. She doesn’t know why, on top of everything that I’m doing to her, she should bother about my wife’s mission. She’d merely like to know if I was really so blind that I couldn’t see that everything those psychologists, psychiatrists and similar psychopaths were doing was perverted, the arrogance of miserable individuals and spiritual cripples who’re telling themselves that they are better than the rest?
Was she still talking about my wife?
We could leave my wife alone now, she didn’t want to waste another second of her time on her. But she begs me to think about what she’s told me, if only for the sake of my writing. I was unlikely to produce anything while by the side of a person who made a living out of dissecting the souls of others, as if they were rats in a laboratory, ripping out all their secrets and then trampling on them.
She has a fit of the shivers, she is transformed before my eyes. Her face which a moment earlier had seemed gentle and loving is now that of a stranger, and it frightens me.
I ought to silence her, somehow douse that flame of hate in her, or flee from it before it singes me too, but how can I flee when that flame is burning because of me?
At last I embrace her to soothe her and she curls up in my arms, she moans in ecstasy, everything drops away from her, the tenderness returns to her features: Do you at least understand that I love you, that I love you more than anything in the world, that I mean you well?
If I don’t do something we’ll both fall into the fire from which there will be no escape.
My darling, she insists, why won’t you realise that we’re made for each other? Tell me, are you happy with me?
I tell her that I am happy with her but I am aware of a tension within me, an unbearable tension pressing on my lungs so I can hardly breathe.
I walk home through the wet streets, as usual at a brisk pace. Always escaping – from whom and to whom? A place with an unmade bed and unswept floors, a place I spend so little time in that dust settles even on my desktop, my home is falling apart and I with it.
My wife enters. I feel I am in a different sphere, where no corrosive flames are flickering.
My wife is neither arrogant nor conceited, nor does she long to take possession of other people’s secrets. If anything she is childishly trusting. She believes hopefully in the perfectibility of things and of people, and her belief has so much determined strength in it that it can perhaps encourage also those who are on the verge of despair.
I walk up to her and embrace her. At that moment my tension vanishes, I can breathe freely.
It’s nice to have you home, she says. I’ve been looking forward to this.
The method of effectively and economically removing human garbage from this world, in a businesslike and precise manner, in the spirit of our revolutionary age, its ideas and aims, is most factually described in his autobiography by the commandant of Auschwitz, Hoess.
The Jews earmarked for liquidation were led away to the crematoria as quietly as possible – the men in one group, the women in another… When the Jews had undressed they stepped into the gas chamber, which was equipped with showers and water pipes, so that they assumed they were entering a bath-house. First the women and children went in, and after them the men… Now and again it would happen that the women, while undressing, suddenly issued bone-chilling shrieks, they would tear their hair and act like persons demented. In that case they were led out quickly and killed by a bullet in the nape of the neck…
The doors were swiftly screwed down and the waiting disinfecters immediately injected cyclon through openings in the roofs. It flowed down to the floor through special tubes, forming the gas instantaneously. Through a little window in the door it was possible to see how those standing nearest to these tubes fell down dead immediately.
Hoess was a victim-maker with a burnt-out soul. He was therefore exchangeable and replaceable, and has indeed been exchanged and replaced a great many times.
The figure of the victim-maker with a burnt-out soul belongs to the world in a revolutionary age. To a world in which the person who in his actions perfectly embodies emptiness and vanity, cruelty and a moral void, is granted the right to regard all those who differ from him as garbage to be swept away, garbage of which he cleanses the world. He is ready to cleanse it of anyone: of Armenians, of kulaks, of gypsies, of counter-revolutionaries, of intellectuals, of Jews, of Ibos, of Kampucheans, of priests, of blacks, of lunatics, of Hindus, of factory owners, of Muslims, of the poor, of prisoners-of-war. One day, perhaps not too far away, they will cleanse it of people altogether. The brooms are becoming ever more efficient. The Apocalypse – that is, the cleansing of the world of human beings and of life altogether – is increasingly becoming a mere technical problem.
Hoess factually describes the flames which licked up to the sky twenty-four hours a day and roasted the corpses of his victims. The flames were so high and so bright that the anti-aircraft command lodged a complaint, and the smoke was so dense and the stench so strong that the population in the whole neighbourhood began to panic. These reasons, he records, led to the rapid design and construction of crematoria. They built two, each with five huge furnaces, and together these were capable of incinerating two thousand murdered units, but that was not enough, so they set up another two incinerators, but even that was not enough. The largest number of persons gassed and incinerated ever achieved in one day, he records, was just under ten thousand.
That was how it was done, and looking at it purely from the technical point of view, it was a very primitive procedure. However, the human spirit has not been idle in this revolutionary age: the flames which the cleaners have at their disposal today are capable of simultaneously incinerating any number of people in their own homes.
Yet nothing has ever disappeared from this world or will disappear. The souls of the murdered, the souls of all those sacrificed, of all those burnt alive, gassed, frozen to death, shot dead, beaten to death with pickaxes, blown to smithereens, hanged or starved to death, of all the betrayed and of those torn from their mothers’ wombs are rising above the land and the oceans and are filling space with their lamentations.
At first I was alarmed at my attempt to knock the great creator down from heaven to earth. But I don’t believe that this can be done. Our heavens, after all, are linked to our earth. How can anyone unable to relate to the person he loves expect to relate to those he does not love? Kafka realised this, and to stand by the side of the woman he loved meant to him standing by the side of people, becoming one of them, participating in their order. He also realised what most of us are concealing from ourselves: that drawing close to another being, accepting another being as well as another order means the surrender of freedom. Man longs to get close to the person he loves, and in doing so hurts and betrays that person and himself, and thereby he commits a crime.
A lawyer by training, he wrote about one single case. He himself prepared the evidence for his own prosecution, he defended himself passionately, and mercilessly found himself guilty. He never abandoned his theme, but by living it through himself, completely and truthfully, he managed to embrace both the heights and the depths of life.
From below the mountain another flock of crows started up, darkening the sky and making the air vibrate with the beat of their wings. The birds alighted around the treasure-hunters who’d by then finished their work. But it didn’t seem that the two groups took any notice of one another.
One of the men looked down towards us and called out something I couldn’t make out. Immediately the others also started shouting at us. I could see my wife was beginning to be afraid. ‘What are they shouting?’
I couldn’t make it out. Most probably they were offering to start trading with us.
‘Do you want to go over to them?’
She was prepared to go over to them with me, even though she was afraid of them. She’d been trying, at least over the past few years, to indulge my wishes and even my eccentric ideas. She raised no objections to my having been an orange-clad street-sweeper for several months now, although she must have wondered uneasily whether some ulterior motive, or at least a wish to escape from home, was not perhaps concealed behind my occupation. Sometimes when I got back home I felt a note of uncertainty in her question of how I was. Suppose she suspected me of doing something different from what I said I was doing? She had plenty of reasons to distrust me, but neither now nor in the past had she dared ask me straight out. She regarded distrust as something unworthy, something that soiled whoever let it enter their minds.
I realised how often I’d betrayed her confidence in the past. I felt a shaming sense of guilt as well as a need to compensate for it somehow. For a start I said that it was a lovely day, that we’d done well to get out into the country. It sounded a little paradoxical, standing as we were below the mountain of garbage.
Back home our daughter and little grand-daughter were waiting for us. Our son, too, sat down to dinner with us. He’d long been trying to find a place of his own and as always he had a multitude of carefully worked-out plans which, he hoped, would lead him to his objective, whereas our daughter, as always, was giving no thought to her future. There were times when she felt that everything, absolutely everything, still lay ahead of her, while at other times she felt that everything, absolutely everything, lay behind her, that there was nothing left to her but to live out her days – as tolerably as possible. For the most part, however, she gave herself joyfully to the moment. After dinner she wanted to draw me. She cut some large sheets out of wrapping paper, pinned one of them to a stiff folder, and made me sit in an armchair for a long time.
From the kitchen came the clatter of plates, there was the muted sound of my son’s tape recorder, and my grand-daughter could be heard through the wall delightedly recounting some feeble-minded incident she’d seen on our jerkish television. I asked if I might close my eyes and my daughter, having warned me that this would make me look like my own deathmask, agreed. At least I wouldn’t fidget.
From outside came the smell of the sea and a wave licked up the sandy beach.
Hold on a little longer!
Her fingers were moving swiftly in the sand. How I love those beautiful fingers which so often touch me with tenderness and which, moreover, know how to turn shapelessness into shape.
I don’t know if this is my likeness, I’m never sure of my own shape. I have an animal body and the wings of a swan, but I look happy.
Because you are happy, she explains. Or aren’t you happy with me?
Aren’t you afraid that the water will carry me away at night?
That’s why I’ve given you wings, so you can fly away. You have wings so you can be free, so you can go wherever you please. By this she meant: so I could get to her at any time. But the water washed me away, complete with wings, and did not carry me to her, and I don’t know if it ever will.
The charcoal swishes across the paper, the tape now sounds louder, my son’s left the door of his room open. The year before we’d visited him in the provincial town where he was then doing his military service; we’d set out on Saturday morning, we’d decided to put up at a hotel and return on Sunday evening, but Lída had a headache and left early on her own, and I stayed on at the hotel alone. On Sunday morning the bus took me to the barracks where our son was waiting for us at the gates. I thought that he looked quite good in uniform, even though I’m not too fond of uniforms.
He asked me where I’d like to go, but I left it to him to decide: he knew his way around here better than me.
So he took me up some hill where T ě snohlídek was reported to have walked, along a cemetery wall with slender yews standing upright behind it, and down a farm track. The weather was cool and windy, around the birches by the track blew small leaves like flakes of coloured snow.
My son spoke about his experiences in the army, then he shyly mentioned that his girlfriend had visited him here too, and hastily returned to military matters. We were in no hurry with our conversation, we had the whole day before us. I couldn’t recall when we had last spent a whole day together, if indeed I ever found that much time in the course of a single day. It seemed to me that my son was suddenly emerging from the dark or returning from a great distance. I’d spent time with so many people, I’d spent days and weeks with my lover, while my son was a fleeting figure in the evening or in the morning or at Sunday lunches. Of course he sat in the room sometimes, along with other guests, listening silently or perhaps coming over for a few words with me – most often about political events or about his classes, never about his personal worries or hopes, and as a rule I’d sit down at my desk after a while and thereby dismiss him. He’d also invite me to listen to protest songs which he’d recorded and which he was sure would interest me, and I’d either decline or else soon doze off while listening to them.
I knew that he had identified with my destiny to such an extent that, even though he’d studied engineering, he was closely – indeed more closely than I – following the fate of literature, at least in the part of the world we lived in, and he’d think up plans for making banned works known to the public, and took delight in any indication, however slight, of a turn for the better.
I regretted that for so long, for whole years on end, I’d never managed to find more time and interest for what made up his life. I now questioned him about his friends, about his girl, and about what he thought about the future. I could see that my interest pleased him, and it occurred to me that he might feel as lonely as I had at his age.
I decided to invite him out for a special meal, but when we got to the tavern all they had was cheap salami, bread and onions. At least I ordered some wine. Our conversation was leaping from one event to another, the most essential things we continued to carry locked up within us. It is difficult to voice the feelings a father and son have for each other. My father had also been unable to do it, we’d never talked about anything too personal. What we did talk about provided no opportunity for him to show any emotions whatever. I knew that he was childishly proud of what he regarded as my literary successes. But he never commented on what I had written, any more than on how I was living.
My bus was leaving in the evening. Peter was sorry I had to go so soon, he was off duty until midnight. I asked him what he would do with the rest of the evening. He said he’d go to the cinema or else return to the barracks and listen to the radio or read. I gave him a little spending money, and because it was getting chilly I got on the bus.
My son stood motionless outside, waiting. I noticed that the frosty wind was bending over even the trunks of sturdy poplars, but my son was still waiting. He looked up at the little window behind which he saw my face, he stood there in a strange uniform, cast into a strange world, and waited faithfully for us to move off. Then, because the bus circled the square, he ran over to the other side so that I caught sight of him once more, standing on the stone surround of the fountain, close to the roadway, waving.
Then I was alone. The bus hurtled through the dark of the forest and I closed my eyes, but even in that double darkness I could see the figure of my son carved out of the stony greyness of strange houses, I could see him standing there, separated from me by impervious material, but at least waving to me. At that moment I was gripped with unease at my own doings, at my double life, from, which loyalty had disappeared, to be replaced by pretence and betrayal.
My son was an adult now, and if I left home it shouldn’t have any fatal effect on him. A child remains the child of his parents, even though their paths may divide. But is it conceivable that my departure for good would not strike a blow to his notions of loyalty, his faith in the fellow-feeling of his nearest and dearest, his concept of home?
‘You may wriggle now,’ my daughter said. She was looking quizzically at her production.
‘Did it come out as a deathmask?’ I wanted to know.
‘Somehow it isn’t you at all,’ she complained, and held the sheet out to me.
‘I don’t know. How can I know what I look like when my eyes are closed?’
But for a deathmask there was still too much life in my features.
Dad had never been ill in his life. A year ago he started losing weight and stopped enjoying his food. Then they found a malignant tumour in his colon and decided to operate at once. I took him to hospital the day before his operation. I sought out the surgeon and tried to explain to him that although Dad was nearly eighty his mental faculties hadn’t been affected by age, and his students still came to him for help when they were stumped by some complicated problem.
The surgeon was short and plump. In his white coat and cap he looked more like a chef than a medical man. He listened to me politely, as he must have listened to many similar persuasive speeches, he accepted my envelope with money, and assured me that he’d do anything in his power, I might get in touch with him the following day, about lunchtime.
Lída thought that I should stay at the hospital during the operation. Dad would feel that I was close by, and that would be reassuring for him and would perhaps make waiting easier for me.
I drove over to the hospital first thing in the morning. I was in time to see Dad on the trolley, as he was waiting in the corridor outside the theatre. From the distance it seemed to me that he was smiling and very slightly raising a hand to acknowledge he’d seen me.
Then I sat down a little way beyond reception, in a dim corridor where orderlies were ceaselessly wheeling trolleys to and fro, and new patients were walking past. There was so much bustle there that I couldn’t concentrate on my father.
An hour later I was informed that the operation had not yet begun.
I phoned my wife at work to tell her I was staying on at the hospital, and she tried to reassure me, I shouldn’t worry, the operation would be successful, Dad had a strong constitution – he’d even survived the death march just before the end of the war.
I also rang my lover, just to hear her voice, to tell her where I was, and that most probably there wouldn’t be time for me to come and see her.
Only a short while later I caught sight of her, passing through reception with her rapid step. She kissed me. She brought me a gingerbread angel she’d baked for Saint Nicholas’s, and a twig with yellow witch-hazel flowers. She’d managed to just break it off from somewhere.
The waiting room had emptied after lunchtime and we sat down on a bench. She took my hand in hers and said: He’ll be all right, I can feel it. His time hasn’t come yet.
Then we were silent. I seemed to see a white corridor before me, I couldn’t see all the way down to its end, and a trolley was moving along it. Dad was lying on it, white and unconscious and moving away from me. What does a man feel, what does a man think, when he is firmly convinced that there is no other life than the one that’s just then threatening to slip away from him? What hopes does he have at his age? His own fear got a fierce hold on me. I got up and went to ask if the operation was finished but I was told that it wasn’t, I had to be patient.
I returned to the waiting room. I could see Daria in the distance, but she was taking no notice of me, she sat there as if turned into stone, as if removed from her own body. When I walked over to her she looked up at last and it seemed to me that I could see pain in her features. It’s all right now, she said. It looked bad, but it’s all right now, I can feel it.
She took my hand and led me along the corridor to the exit. Outside large autumnal snowflakes were falling; they lay on the ground only briefly and then melted. We went into the little park behind the hospital, and she was talking to me softly. She said that man spent only an insignificant portion of time in this life, in the shape we know him. What is important is that he should spend it well, and fully develop his potential, because that would decide which way he went on. I was unable to concentrate properly on what she was saying, instead I just took in the timbre of her voice, her comforting, loving presence.
I had told her many times that I loved her. Now I didn’t tell her anything, but that moment entered into me forever: the bedraggled park with a few rain-wet trees, her proximity, her voice, and her hand which was pressing mine. And if we are ever to be so far apart that we can no longer reach out to each other, that our voices are lost in the distance, she is now so firmly embedded in me that if ever she groans in pain or fear I shall hear her, no matter where I am. And if I’m alive I shall go to her to repay her for at least this pressure of her hand.
We returned to the hospital. The surgeon received me. The tumour had been a big one, and neglected, but it was out now. My father was now sleeping.
I spotted the youngster the moment we entered the hall. He was standing below the stage and talking to one of the musicians. He was wearing jeans and a pullover with a Norwegian pattern. Perhaps it was the artificial light but he seemed to me even paler, more drawn, more sick than usual. I introduced him to Lída. She said she was glad to meet him, I’d told her a lot about him. She was also looking forward to the concert, it was good of him to have thought of us.
The youngster unexpectedly blushed and hurriedly rattled off the names of the composers and the compositions we were about to hear, he also told us the names of the clarinettist and the drummer, and we went off to look for our seats.
‘Isn’t he very sick?’ my wife asked as we sat down.
I told her what I knew about his illness and also that there was possibly a drug available abroad that might help him, but that it was too expensive for it to be prescribed.
‘And couldn’t you get it for him?’ she asked in surprise.
The music began. I am a bad listener, I can’t concentrate even on the spoken word let alone on music. Lída, on the other hand, responds to tones with her whole being. I could see the music entering into her and arousing in her a pleasurable astonishment, taking her out of the not-too hospitable tavern’s dance hall.
I too could hear at least the echoes of primordial rhythms and glimpse the reflections of tribal fires around which half-naked dancers of both sexes were whirling.
When the first missionaries in Africa saw those painted and masked savages prancing round their fire they thought they had just glimpsed something akin to a ritual from hell. In reality, of course, what they saw were the last remnants of paradise. Those dancers may have been troubled by evil spirits, hunger or drought, but they were not weighed down by any sinful past or a retributory judgement in the future; the vision of the Apocalypse did not rise before them. They were still in the childhood of mankind.
I have never set foot on the black continent, but when I had some time to spare in St Louis, where I’d been invited for the opening night of a play of mine, I got on a tourist excursion steamer down the Mississippi, and there was a black band playing on board. A colourful company was celebrating something, I don’t know if it was a wedding, the birth of an heir or somebody’s saint’s day, or the fact that a manned spacecraft was then on the way to the moon which their not-too-distant ancestors may have revered as a deity, but I could feel that close to them, and under the influence of their music, I was slipping into another, more carefree and less knowing age.
This mood persisted even the following day when, at the home of the producer who, like me, was a native of Prague, we watched the television screen in the evening and I saw those strange bulky figures bouncing with light steps about the wasteland of the moon, while from the street came delighted cheers; I thought then that man, as he had always longed and as my father had promised me, had really got closer to heaven. It seemed to me that mankind was entering upon a new era full of promise.
During the interval the youngster came over to us, and because my wife knows more about music than I do I let them talk to each other while I went to the bar to get ourselves something to drink.
When I got back towards the end of the intermission the youngster was about to leave for his place just below the stage. My wife took a glass of juice, took a sip, and before the musicians started up again told me what she’d learned from the youngster about his life; needless to say, she’d learned more in those few minutes than I had in several weeks. His father, it appeared, had left his mother before he was even born, and because the mother was a little odd he grew up in children’s homes. His mother was now dead and his only relative was a stepbrother with whom he didn’t get on. She’d guess that the youngster was a sensitive boy but, because of his circumstances, had never completely grown up, almost certainly also because in his life he hadn’t yet met a man with whom he wished to identify. I ought to bear this in mind, maybe he’d attach himself to me.
I couldn’t think why the youngster should want to attach himself to me of all people, but I promised to watch out.
The master of ceremonies announced the next composition, a Gershwin medley. The musicians started up. At one point the clarinettist on the stage made use of a brief pause, held his instruments out: towards the audience, motioned to someone, and a moment later we saw the youngster jumping up onto the stage and taking the clarinet.
‘Surely that’s him,’ Lída said in surprise. She doesn’t see too well at a distance and moreover she has a poor memory for faces.
From his borrowed instrument the youngster conjured up the glissando which opens the first theme of the ‘Rhapsody in Blue’. I could see his pasty face turn red, either with excitement or with the effort.
Winter that year was severe. The sky remained blue and cold, the frozen snow crunched underfoot and the air stank so revoltingly that one regretted not being a fish. I went to see Dad nearly every day, he was picking up rapidly. He was once more working on his calculator. Don’t you go thinking that I’m written off, he said to me, and immersed himself in his world of numbers, where he felt most at home. He no longer designed new motors, he’d come to the conclusion that there were too many in the world already, but he was searching for some new solution, for better machines for that better world which he was perhaps seeing with his mind’s eye. Sometimes he’d put on his fur-lined coat and go out with me to walk down the chilly ugly street. The fate of the world had not ceased to interest him. He confided his fears and disappointments to me. It grieved him that socialism had not brought freedom to the people and that technology had not lightened their drudgery but was instead threatening them with annihilation. We stopped at the dairy. Here Dad thawed out because the pretty girl behind the counter smiled at him pleasantly, asked him how he was getting on and assured him that he was looking wonderful. Dad at any rate still believes that women are good creatures. Sympathetic and worthy of attention and love. He’d have gone on chatting to the dairy girl, but I was in a hurry to get to my own good creature.
We’d had to abandon the attic studio with its view of the palace opposite, and we now met in her basement workshop, where – long, long ago – I’d first set eyes on her. From outside the window came the continuous footsteps of strangers passing by and from the corners came a smell of mildew and mould. On the stone floor stood a storage heater. It was only seven years younger than me and just as stubborn, sometimes it worked and at others, for unfathomable reasons, it didn’t switch itself on at night at all. Fortunately the thick medieval walls stopped the place from freezing up completely.
She is waiting for me. She hasn’t even taken off her coat but her lips are hot. Again she presses herself to the tepid metal shell of the heater and I hurry to make some tea while she tells me her news. Listening to her I feel that the incidents I look for in vain are all homing in on her, all her encounters seem to have a special and higher meaning, something essential to tell her, to open, at least in part, a view into the infinite spaces of other people’s inner lives.
As she speaks I watch a little cloud of her living breath rising from her mouth. The room is in semi-darkness which obliterates even those little lines which I would probably not have seen anyway with my long-sighted eyes. She seems to me tenderly and soulfully beautiful. I know that I still love her and I suspect that she must love me too if she’s staying with me in this inhospitable and cold basement.
She notices my glance and presses herself against me – together we slip into the icy bed. But her body is warm, we cling to each other, ecstasy blots out the outside world, at this moment it doesn’t matter where we are, we are in the seclusion of our love and we know that there isn’t a palace in the world whose solitude we would exchange for this place of joint occupation.
Her slight body ceaseless rears against mine, she trembles with delight, her eyes grow misty. Devoutly she begs me not to leave her, again and again she wants me, she knows no respite in love-making any more than in her work, any more than in anything she undertakes, she sweeps me along like a vortex, she rouses in me a strength I never suspected I had. My head spins, I am in ecstasy, I am on earth solely for this moment, for this action.
Yet even so the moment must come when we are exhausted, when the chill that’s seeping from the floor and the walls gets between us, enters her eyes. I know that she’s asking herself how long I intend to make love to her without giving her any hope, without finding a solution which would bring her out of her icy loneliness. But she only asks what I’m going to do tonight.
I say that I will work, even though I know that my answer will seem unsatisfactory to her if I don’t decide to stay with her. I want to know what she’ll be doing.
Why should I care? I wasn’t going to stay with her anyway, after all, there was my wife waiting for me at home, I have to be with her, act the part of the faithful loving husband, create an atmosphere of home. Yes, of course, I also had to work, make money so I could keep the lady, my wife, in appropriate style. Also I mustn’t forget to buy something for dinner so she needn’t put herself out, and bring her a little present so she should know what a fine model husband she has. All she wants to know now is why she should plunge with me into this sacchariney sticky filthy mess of ours? She curses the moment when I crossed her path. Why didn’t I say something, why didn’t I at least speak up in my defence?
I reached out for my cold shirt and she screamed that I should push off, that I should get back as fast as possible to that sacred cow of mine who has ruined her life. She’ll still try to save herself, to dig herself out of the shit I have dragged her into.
Outside, darkness had fallen, and its icy maw swallowed us up instantly. The snow had turned grey and seemed to collapse under our feet. We got to the metro station and she asked: When shall I see you?
As always, Hope was looking down on us from her stone plinth with her invariably gentle, even warm, smile.
Tomorrow I have to take Dad to the doctor. How about the day after?
She took hold of both my hands: I really won’t see you all day tomorrow?
The youngster finished his part and handed the clarinet back to its owner. Somebody clapped, my wife clapped too, the youngster bowed awkwardly; when he jumped down from the stage his face was back to its usual pallor.
The concert was over. The people around us were pushing towards the exit. It had got cold outside, and a brilliant full moon stood in the cloudless sky.
To us, who’d stayed behind on earth, the astronaut Aldrin said then:
I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her way!
The producer in St Louis casually mentioned to me that eighteen years earlier, after he’d escaped, he’d been sentenced to death in his native country for some fictitious political crimes. Now they wanted to rehabilitate him. When on that memorable day we went to bed at three in the morning he said: A pity, back home they couldn’t even watch this properly, by now they’re at work. And he showed me his watch. To my amazement it was still showing Central European Time.
‘That was a nice day,’ said my wife, my guide through sunny and nocturnal landscapes. She pressed herself close to me because she was shivering with cold, and I felt comforted by her closeness.