Ivan Klíma - Love and Garbage

In reality nothing was a game to her, to her everything was life, every second we spent together was to be filled with love, when we were not together spectres were creeping out on all sides as in the Apocalypse and many-headed serpents were coiling round her legs. She fought back and asked me for help, asked me not to leave her, to remain with her if I loved her, at least for a while. But I was already escaping, in my , mind I was hurrying home, chasing the tram that was just leaving to make sure I got home before my wife, who suspected nothing, who smiled or frowned according to her mood and not according to what I did. So we parted, kissed once more at the corner of the street, turned back once more, waved to each other, and I could just see her smile freezing on her loving lips and tears flushing the tenderness out of her eyes.

I’d always been devoted to my work, I’d always fought for every extra minute for my writing. Now I was trimming my work minute by minute, and these minutes were adding up to hours and days. I was still determined to rebel, to ask for at least one moment’s respite. Writing, after all, meant life to me.

She said: How can you talk like that? What is art compared to life?

When I can’t write any more I’ll die. But I’ll die loving.

Even though my wartime memories were getting dimmer, I kept returning to them. It was as if I had a duty to those whom I’d survived, and had to repay the benevolent forces which had snatched me from the common fate and allowed me to live.

With that burden I entered life. I was barely eighteen when I began to write a play about a revolt in a women’s concentration camp, about a desperate decision either to live in freedom or to die. Suffering resulting from a life deprived of freedom seemed to me the most important of all themes to think about and to write about. As then in the fortress town, so now, after the war, I felt that my whole being was clinging to freedom. I was able to quote by heart the thoughts of the captured Pierre Bezukhov on the subject of freedom and suffering, which are so close to each other that even a man in the midst of suffering may find freedom.

I didn’t understand Tolstoy, just as I failed to notice that a short distance from my home new camps were being set up, where people again had that final opportunity of seeking freedom in the midst of suffering. I only knew the camps of my childhood.

We walked down the street called V dolinách, which was perfectly clean; we had been preceded by the automatic cleaning machine driven today by Mr Kromholz. It had evidently worked so painstakingly that it hardly seemed to belong to our age at all, and so we approached the monstrous building they’d set up on the Pankrác plateau. Originally they’d wanted to call it the Palace of Congresses, for that was its proper purpose: to create an appropriately grandiose setting for congresses of all kinds of useful and useless organisations, especially the one which ruled over everything and over everybody, but then they called it, rather absurdly, the Palace of Culture.

‘Yeah, they have a different kind of mechanisation here,’ said the foreman, having noticed what I was looking at. ‘They have tiny little automatic refuse machines running along the corridors, parquet cleaners and floor-polishers — all imported stuff. Only for their use. D’you know how many people they have in there?’

‘It’s a monstrosity!’ the captain spoke up. ‘Eats us all out of house and home!’

‘Last week,’ Mrs Venus cut in, ‘some little kid got inside. They thought he’d got lost on Vyšehrad but all the time he was inside there, he’d walked into one of their smaller reception rooms and fell asleep. And when he woke up he kept running round and round the corridors and in the end he got into the boiler-house and by then he was completely lost, wandering around between those coloured pipes and turbines. When they found him in the morning he’d gone completely round the bend.’

Coming up to meet us, in a manner combining clodlike indifference and self-importance, were two policemen. One of them was well-built with a foppish little moustache adorning his pleasant face, while the other seemed to me like a rather tall but sickly fair-haired child with sky-blue eyes. At the sight of them something in me stiffened. Although I hadn’t done anything, my experience as an innocent person with members of the police, whether in uniform or not, had not been happy. It didn’t occur to me that thanks to my orange vest I was now myself on the borderline of being in uniform.

‘Well then, you sweepers,’ the more foppish of the two addressed us, ‘a bloody mess?’

‘Not too bad,’ replied the foreman; ‘we didn’t do the housing estate today — that’s where they live like pigs.’

‘Ah, but we had some fun and games around here, believe me,’ the foppish one put a friendly hand on his shoulder. ‘Right next door,’ he pointed towards Vyšehrad. ‘What with that pervert about, the one who strangles women, some old hag thought he was after her and yelled for help. Some fuss, I can tell you! We combed the whole park, we had five flying squad cars there, all the way from Vršovice HQ, and all we got was one bloke. I could see at once that it wasn’t him, because that pervert is no more than twenty and stands 190 tall, and this fellow was getting on for fifty and the size of a garden gnome, but he didn’t have as much as a tram ticket on him, so why did we bother?’

‘He was some sort of editor,’ his colleague added, ‘kind of taking exercise after a heart attack.’

‘Is it true he’s strangled seven women already?’ asked Mrs Venus.

‘And who told you such rubbish, Missus?’ the foppish one said angrily. ‘We have two murders reported and four attempted rapes, and that’s the lot!’

‘And when are you going to catch him?’ asked Mrs Venus.

‘Don’t you worry.’ The foppish one stroked his pistol holster. ‘We know what to do. We’ve already established that he’s fair and nearly two metres tall, thin, and with blue eyes. So there!’ And he looked at his colleague, whom the description fitted surprisingly well. ‘If you see a bloke like that… Get me?’

‘Sure,’ the foreman promised.

The foppish one then turned to the captain. ‘And what about your trousers,’ he joked, ‘when will you grow into long ones?’

‘In my coffin,’ the captain replied. ‘I’ve got them all ready at home.’

The foppish policeman gave a short chuckle, then raised his right hand in the direction of the peak of his service cap. ‘All clear then. More eyes we’ve got the more we see.’

‘We’ll just have to watch out we don’t sweep up your clues,’ Mrs Venus said when he’d turned away. ‘And for that they get more than a miner!’

By twenty past eleven we had finished cleaning up around the Culture Palace. This completed our assignment for the day. We took our equipment back to the former Sokol gym hall, and we now had only one task left: to wait three hours for the end of the working day and then collect our wages. My companions of course had already marked out the tavern they’d go to. I could have gone with them but I didn’t feel like it. Going to a tavern once in a while is enough for me.

The first story of Franz Kafka I ever read was one of the few longer prose pieces he’d finished. It told the story of a traveller to whom an officer on some island wants to demonstrate, with love and dedication, his own bizarre execution machine. During the demonstration, however, the machine breaks down and the officer feels so disgraced by this that he places himself on the execution block. The author coolly and matter-of-factly describes the details of that dreadful machine, as though by doing so he can shroud the mystery and the incomprehensible paradox of the recorded event.