Ivan Klíma - Love and Garbage

He looked at me in astonishment, and Mrs Venus answered for him: ‘Why, Harry’s off doing his military service now.’

In the dim saloon bar it was getting darker still and the raindrops were beating noisily against the windowpanes. But this was nothing compared to the drops which would beat a tattoo on the roof of the attic studio, where on days like this it got so dark we became invisible to one another, so we could find each other only with our hands and our lips and our bodies. Then, all of a sudden, she’d be overcome by tears, and as we were saying goodbye, as she was kissing me with moist lips in the doorway of the building, she begged me not to be angry with her, that it was only those clouds which had so depressed her, and she promised she’d write me a letter.

I’ve always wanted to get a letter from which I could see that I was being loved, and indeed she sent me one written on a rainy evening, or maybe late at night when the wind had dispersed the clouds.

My darling, my dearest, at this moment I’d leave everything, I wouldn’t take anything with me, and if you said: Come! I’d go wherever you commanded. I realise that one pays for this, but this is right because one should pay for it. But even if I were to die, even if I were to go out of my mind, which to me seems worse still, I’d go…

I was alarmed by these promises and resolutions, but at the same time I was flooded with a happiness, like the warmth of sunbathing.

She also wrote to me that she loved me to the point of feeling anguish and pain, that she experienced a terrible pain because I was not with her at this moment, just now when everything that was good in her was crying out to me.

That’s how she called me to her, and I knew that I had always longed for just such a woman. It gave me so much happiness that the reality of her pain and despair did not impinge on me. Or else I was too old to share her hopes without fear. Was I afraid we would end up like all those whose longing dies away and who can then scarcely bear to lie down by the side of each other night after night? Or was I not so much afraid as simply unable to brush my wife out of my life, my wife of whom I was still fond and who, after all, was supposed to belong to me to the end of my or her days?

If there were a devil, she chose a suitable quotation for me, it wouldn’t be he who decided against God, but he who didn’t find eternity long enough to come to a decision.

How can a person win love if he can’t come to a decision?

My wife suspects nothing, she trusts me. But she has tormented dreams. She is walking with her class across a snow-covered mountain plain, suddenly all of them increase their pace and she can’t keep up with them. She remains alone in the wind and frost, looking in vain for the way. Fog descends. She realises she won’t ever find her way out again. At other times she climbs a rock with her friends, and when she is at the steepest point they all disappear. Rigid with vertigo she presses herself to the rockface. She can’t move up or down, she calls for help, but no one responds.

She tells me her dreams and searches for an interpretation. She goes all the way back to her childhood, when she used to be on her own, unable to be close to anybody.

I know that she is wrong in the interpretation of her dreams, but I keep silent, I leave her at the mercy of her anguished visions.

But how can a man still believe in love if he has no compassion?

The foreman finished his second beer and unbuttoned himself. I realised that he was not so much worried by the change in atmospheric pressure as by the fact that he might lose his bonus. He ordered a third beer and announced that he’d made up his mind: he’d finally teach that Franta a lesson!

Franta is that young idiot with the tic in his face, the one I don’t understand a word of when he speaks. To my amazement he is also a foreman, he even drives a car and it looks as if he is checking on our work, not by official authority but so he can grass on us. Everyone hates him. Whether because he’s a cripple or because he’s a grass I can’t judge.

Mrs Venus told me that he’d recently had an operation. They’d taken his manhood from him. Franta did indeed have big breasts and his incomprehensible talk was in a falsetto. Last week, the foreman was now telling us angrily, that cripple had grassed on him, that he’d gone to have a beer when he’d claimed he was seeing the doctor. ‘I saw that shit at the final stop of the number 19 yesterday, in that bloody refuse truck of his, so I grabbed him by his collar and dragged him out on the pavement and said to him: “You’ll kneel down right here and ask my pardon, you swine, or else bring a pot along to collect up the bits of your bloody face!” He had to get down into the mud and repeat after me: “Mister Marek, I apologise to you, I’ll never say a word about you again.” “Mister,” I made him say to me, because to him, and to him alone, I’m no Comrade!’

The foreman is an ex-NCO who served some time at the airfield; that time he obviously regards as a heroic and happy one, and he is fond of reminiscing about it — which helps me to recollect my own childhood days. I envy him his memory. Not only does he remember a mass of stories and sayings, but he also knows the names of all the streets in our district, and that’s several hundred. He is as expert about the names and closing times of all the taverns as he is about street-cleaning technology. And they put him on an equal footing with that cripple.

‘You should have made him stand a round of beer,’ the captain remarked. ‘He’d remember that all right, having to dip into his own pocket.’

‘I wouldn’t accept one from him,’ Mrs Venus said. ‘I’d sooner stick to water.’

‘He’s a poor wretch,’ Mr Rada cut in from the next table. ‘What do you want from him?’

‘That one?’ the foreman became heated. ‘He’s a cunning little bastard, he knows very well that if they cut my bonus his will go up. Who d’you suppose grassed on us last month, the day we had that downpour, when we left out Lomnického?’

‘He’s a poor wretch all the same,’ I joined in.

‘You didn’t know him,’ Mrs Venus said, her swollen eye flickering between Mr Rada and me, ‘before they did that operation on him. By the time he got down to work it would be midday, and out: in the street the moment he’d catch sight of a skirt he’d whip out that thing of his!’

‘Creatures like him should be done in at birth.’ The foreman knew no pity.

‘How could they do that?’ I objected.

‘And why not? You only bugger about with them all your life, and there’s no time left for normal people. Aren’t I right?’ the foreman turned to the others. ‘And a decent bloke’s got to work till he croaks.’

‘And who’d decide who is normal?’

‘Leave it to the doctors; they can tell pretty well nowadays. Let me tell you,’ the foreman decided to cut short the discussion on euthanasia, ‘that if that damned pervert grasses once more on any one of us, I’ll catch hold of the bastard and kick him all the way down to the Botič stream and there I’ll hold his bloody head under the water till he sees reason.’

Two and a half thousand years ago it is believed that the Greeks in Asia Minor, whenever their community was threatened by the plague or some other disaster, picked a cripple or otherwise deformed person, led him to the place of sacrifice, gave him a handful of dried figs, a loaf of wheat-flour bread and cheese, then struck him seven times on his genitals with a scourge, and to the accompaniment of a flute burnt him to death.

It was another rainy day, but at the beginning of spring. On the window-sill of the noble town house opposite two drenched pigeons were huddling together, and we were also huddling together, exhausted from love-making. I was beginning to get up because I wanted to get home, where my wife and children were expecting me, my unsuspecting and deceived family and my neglected, abandoned work. By now she knew that cautious movement which was the beginning of my moving away from her, but she didn’t, as usual, say: Don’t go yet! She just started to cry.