Ivan Klíma - Love and Garbage

I was thunderstruck and fascinated by the seemingly impenetrable mystery of an event which, at the same time, depressed me. But I was able only to comprehend it at its most superficial level. The officer — cruel, pedantic, enthusiastic about his executioner’s task — seemed to me like a prophetic vision of the officers I had encountered, a pre-image of Hoess at Auschwitz, and I was amazed that literature could not only bring back to life those who had died but also predict the features of those who were not yet born.

Suddenly I found myself back on Vyšehrad hill. I walked through the park to the cemetery and to the ancient round church, which was surrounded by scaffolding. I’d never been inside the church although I can see it in the distance from the bluff behind our block and I actually own an old engraving of it: Sacro-Sancta, Regia, et exempta Ecclesia Wissehradensis SS Apostolorum Petri et Pauli ad modum Vaticanae Romanae a Wratislao 1. Bohemiae Rege A.° 1068. aedificata, et prout ante disturbja Hussitica stetit, vere et genujne delineata, et effigiata. A.° 1420. 2. Novembris ab Hussitis destructa, ruinata et devastata .

The building on the print looked different from the one now before me, and not only because it had been destructa, ruinata et devastata by the Hussites, but because the church had been rebuilt several times since the days when my engraving was made, and each time a little for the worse. In our country everything is being forever remade: beliefs, buildings and street names. Sometimes the progress of time is concealed and at others feigned, so long as nothing remains as real and truthful testimony.

As I walked around the little church I noticed that the door was half open. I glanced inside — there was an untidy heap of builders’ requisites, scaffolding and buckets, and some of the pews were covered with a tarpaulin. On one side of the altar I caught sight of my companion of the morning, the one who reminded me of the specialist who took out my tonsils. Now without his orange vest he was evidently engaged in meditation.

I preferred not to enter. I didn’t want to disturb him, nor to start a conversation with him.

He caught up with me in the park. ‘Such nonsense,’ he complained; ‘the time you mess around waiting for your pay.’

I nodded. He told me his name was Rada. He’d taken note of my name first thing in the morning. He’d shared a room at the Litoměřice seminary with a man of that name forty years ago.

I said that all my relatives had lost their lives during the war, that the only surviving one was my brother who was a good deal younger than me.

He had two younger brothers. The middle one lived in Toronto and the youngest one was a doctor, a radiologist, apparently a good one, but he would have liked to be a traveller, he really came to life only when he saw some foreign scenery. As a matter of fact he was nearly always somewhere abroad, most recently in Kampuchea. ‘Would you believe it, he actually learned to speak Khmer. To him it’s just a bit of fun, he can learn a language in a few weeks!’

We passed through a brick gateway and approached the areas we’d cleaned that morning. I was glad that my shift was behind me and that I could now walk through the quiet little street onto which, by then, more yellowing leaves had dropped from the adjoining gardens, past the dark eyes of the houses which gazed on me wearily but also contentedly.

Suddenly I froze. In one of the windows I caught sight of a hanged man, his face pressed to the window-pane and his long tongue hanging from his open mouth. From below he was flooded by a blood-red glow.

Mr Rada noticed what I was staring at and said: ‘Let’s see what our artist has put on show for us today.’

I realised that the figure in the window was only a skilfully got-up dummy. As I looked more closely I saw another head, half female and half dog, its teeth dug into the hanged man’s thigh.

‘Oh dear,’ my companion was not happy. ‘He must have got out of bed the wrong side. He usually puts something more entertaining in his window. A little while ago he had some colourful acrobats turning somersaults. I sometimes come here specially to see what he’s thought up. My brother, who came along with me once, declared that they’re the work of a lunatic.’ Mr Rada again returned to the subject of his brother, who seemed to play an important part in his life. ‘To him everybody he can’t fit into a pattern is a lunatic. He actually believes that the whole world is crazy, he says the world needs some terrible shaking-up, some great revolution to equalise the differences between the sated and the hungry. We argue a lot. At least until quite recently, when he came back home and told me about such a revolution that even I wouldn’t credit it. Right next to a hospital a well full to the rim of murdered people. Corpses everywhere, he just couldn’t have imagined it. Maybe he simply saw what any revolution always brings to the people.’ Mr Rada stopped and looked about him, but we were alone in the swept street. ‘The Apocalypse! That was the word he used, even though he never decided to believe in the Last Judgement and regarded Revelations as, at most, a poetic vision.’

My wife’s consulting room was not far from where we were.

Luckily her waiting room was empty. I knocked. After a moment a young nurse put her head round the door, choked back the reproof on the tip of her tongue and asked me to come in.

I saw Lída sitting behind a desk half taken up by a bunch of gerberas. She was examining some sheets of Rorschach blotches.

‘You’ve stopped by to see me? That’s nice of you.’

‘I was walking past.’

‘Are you going straight home?’

‘I thought I might look in on Dad first.’

‘It’s nice of you to have dropped in. Would you like some coffee?’

‘No, thank you.’ My wife had been offering me coffee for the past twenty-five years; I would have been interested to know if she’d noticed that I don’t drink coffee.

The young nurse had disappeared somewhere, I could hear a door shutting quietly. I sat down in the armchair in which normally people would sit with depressions, anxieties, suppressed passions, Oedipus complexes, or even with suicidal tendencies. My feet ached.

‘Have you noticed the flowers I got?’ she pointed to them.

I said they were beautiful and asked who’d given them to her. Her patients liked her. She was pleasant to them and gave them more time than she was obliged to, and in gratitude they brought her flowers. When was the last time I’d brought her flowers?

I used to give the other woman flowers and repeat to her ad nauseam how much I loved her; she aroused a sense of tenderness in me time and again.

I also felt some tenderness towards my wife, but I was afraid to show it, probably because she might begin to talk about such an emotion and even commend me for it.

She’d got her flowers from a woman patient about whom, as a matter of fact, she was worried. A girl of nearly nineteen, but still unable to come to terms with the fact that her parents had separated. She’d stopped studying, she’d stopped caring for herself, I wouldn’t believe how much she’d gone down over the past few weeks.

For a while my wife continued to tell me about the girl whose future was worrying her. My wife always took on the burdens of her patients. She’d try to help them, and she’d torment herself if she failed. Perhaps she was telling me about that girl to make me realise the devastating effect: that the break-up of a marriage might have. Certainly situations like this one touched her most closely.

Today the girl had told her about a dream she’d had: at dusk she was walking along a field path when suddenly, ahead of her, she caught sight of a glow. The glow was coming towards her, and she realised that the ground before her was opening and flames were licking up from the depths. She knew she couldn’t escape them, but she wasn’t afraid, she didn’t try to run away, she simply watched the earth opening up before her eyes.