Ivan Klíma - Love and Garbage

I am looking at my wife, at her vivid features. She is still pretty, there are no lines as yet on her face, or else I don’t see them. Whether I like it or not, in my eyes her present appearance blends with that of long ago.

‘I’m worried she might do something to herself!’

I stood up and stroked her hair.

‘You want to leave already?’ She half-opened the door and looked into the waiting room. ‘There’s no one there, you don’t have to go yet. You haven’t even told me,’ she suddenly realised, ‘what it was like there… doing that…’ she was vainly looking for a word for my street-sweeping.

‘Tell you about it in the evening.’

‘All right, let’s have a cosy evening.’ She saw me to the door. She said I’d given her pleasure. She’s always pleased when she sees me unexpectedly.

I would have liked to say something similar to her, such as that I always revive in her presence, that I feel warm when I’m with her, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

She went back once more, pulled the biggest flower out of her vase and gave it to me, to take to Dad. It was a full bloom, dark yellow with a touch of amber at the tips of the petals.

She didn’t know, she had evidently never noticed, that my father didn’t like unnecessary and useless things such as flowers.

I kissed her quickly and we parted.

‘And the fourth angel sounded,’ I read at home in the Apocalypse, ‘and the third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon and the third part of the stars; so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise… And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.’ And somewhere else I read: ‘And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth… to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea… And fire came down from God out of heaven and devoured them. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone… And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose eyes the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them.’

Throughout the ages, probably ever since they began to reflect on time, and hence on their own past, men have assumed that at the beginning of everything there had been paradise, where humans had lived happily on earth, where

non galeae, non enses erant: sine militis usu

mollia securae peragebant otia gentes…

Yet simultaneously they had prophesied the advent of ruin. It was inescapable, because it would happen by the decision of heaven.

In the evening a French woman journalist unexpectedly turned up at our place. She was young, and she radiated French perfume and self-assurance. She smiled at me with a wide sensuous mouth as if we were old friends. She wanted to know how the struggle for human rights would develop in my country, what was the attitude of my fellow-countrymen to her fellow-countrymen, whether they would welcome them if they arrived as liberators. She was also interested to know whether I regarded war as probable, the peace movement as useful, and socialism as practicable.

Perhaps she really believed that any one of her questions could be answered in a form that would fit into a newspaper column. She questioned me as though I was the representative of some movement, or at least of some common fate. She didn’t realise that if I were the representative of anything whatsoever I’d cease to be a writer, I’d only be a spokesman. But then this didn’t bother her, she didn’t need me as a writer, she wasn’t going to read any book of mine anyway.

I recently read an article in an American weekly about how fourteen complete idiots incapable of speech had learned ‘jerkish’. That was the name of a language of 225 words, developed in Atlanta for mutual communications between humans and chimpanzees — and there was no doubt, the author of the article believed, that more and more unfortunate creatures would be able to talk to each other in jerkish. It occurred to me immediately that at last a language had been found in which the spirit of our age could speak, and because that language would spread rapidly from pole to pole, to the east and to the west, it would be the language of the future.

I do not understand or make myself understood by those who recognise only the literature they control themselves and which, because of them, is written in jerkish, and I am afraid that I cannot communicate either with the pretty journalist, even though she assures me that she wishes absolute freedom for me and for my nation just as she wishes it for herself and her nation. I am afraid that we speak in languages which have moved too far apart.

As she was leaving she asked, more out of politeness than anything else, what I was working on at the moment. She was surprised to hear that I wanted to write about Kafka. Clearly she believed that people in my position should be writing about something more weighty — about oppression, about prisons, about the lawlessness practised by the state. Anyway, she asked if I was interested in Kafka’s work because it was forbidden.

But I am writing about him because I like him. I feel that he is speaking to me directly and personally from a distant past. For the sake of accuracy I added that his work was not forbidden; they were merely trying to remove it, from public libraries and from people’s minds.

She wanted to know why they did this to his work in particular. Was it politically so subversive? or was it because Kafka was a Jew?

I think it would be difficult to find, in our century, many writers who were less interested in politics or public affairs than Kafka. There is no mention in his work of war or revolution, or of the ideas which may have helped to bring them about, just as there is nothing in his work which directly points to his Jewishness. The reasons why Kafka’s work was suppressed in our country were different. I don’t know if they can be simply defined, but I’d say that what was being most objected to in Kafka’s personality was his honesty.

The journalist laughed. Who wouldn’t laugh at such a reason?

She left before midnight. I hurried to get to bed. I was tired after a day which had started for me at five in the morning.

My wife curled up against me in her sleep, but I was unable to lay my thoughts to rest. A heavy paw lay chokingly on my chest.

Long ago, after I’d got well again, I was impatient every evening for the next morning. Night was like an angry dog lying in my way. Almost as soon as I was awake in the morning I’d walk past all the windows of our flat, which looked out to three points of the compass, to enjoy the distant view clothed in fresh green or white with snow. I enjoyed my work and the people at the newspaper office, I looked forward to seeing them and to those unexpected encounters which might occur. I also always opened my letters full of hope: I was forever expecting some good news, some exciting revelation or some declaration of love. And I looked forward to the books I’d read. I would read at every spare moment: in the tram, in the doctor’s waiting room, in the train, and even at mealtimes. I soaked up such a vast number of events and plots that they began to intertwine in my mind and I no longer knew which belonged where. I was enjoying life, and so I rushed from one experience to another, until I became like some obsessive eater who, out of sheer greed for the next course, is unable to savour the one he is eating. I didn’t drink or smoke — not from any puritanism but through fear that I might blunt the edge of my perception and thus be deprived of an exciting experience or a possible encounter. I had known ever since my wartime childhood that we are all living on the edge of an abyss, above a black pit into which we must fall one day, but I felt that its jaws were now receding from me and that I was tied to life by a countless number of threads which together formed a firm net on which I was, for the time being, swinging at life’s vertiginous height.