Ivan Klíma - Love and Garbage

I asked what was wrong, but she only sobbed and pushed me away from her. It had been getting too much for her, she no longer had the strength for those perpetual goodbyes, for that coming together and breaking apart, she wasn’t cut out to be a two-man woman, she couldn’t bear the deception, the pretence sickened her, she wanted to live according to her conscience, she wanted to be with the one she loved.

But surely we’re almost continually together.

How could I say something so outrageous when every night I was in bed with another woman?

But that is my wife!

How did I dare say this to her? She was shaking with sobs. She’d never wanted to live like that, what had I made of her? A whore who wasn’t even entitled to see me when she felt depressed or when she needed me but who had to come running the moment I felt like it, whenever I could find the time for her.

I didn’t say anything, I was so taken aback by her grief and anger, and she screamed that I should say something, why didn’t I defend myself, why didn’t I try to convince her that she was mistaken, why didn’t I tell her that I loved her, that I cared for her?

Then we made love again, night descended on the palace outside our window, the drenched pigeons had disappeared. She wanted to hear again and again that I loved her. I kept repeating it with a strange kind of obsessiveness. We made love with the same obsessiveness, and she whispered to me that we had been predestined for each other, that we were resisting our fate in vain, that I was resisting in vain when I longed for her so much.

And I didn’t say anything. I embraced her, I melted into her, and I tried to dispel the unease which was growing within me.

But I didn’t want to live like that permanently. When I got home I told my wife about the other woman.

It was getting on for ten o’clock, the time when we normally left our hospitable tavern. The foreman, who was a great one for precision, looked closely at his watch: ‘One more beer,’ he decided, ‘and then we’re off, even if it’s pissing like from a fireman’s hose.’ And to comfort us he related how exactly thirty years ago it had rained just like this all through the summer. He was encamped down beyond Kvilda, at the back of beyond. Luckily he managed on the second day to pick up a pretty dark-haired girl from accounts at the timberyard. He’d stopped at her office in the morning, and within half an hour he’d done all the calculations for her that she’d have spent the whole day on, so that they could get down to the real business.

The foreman was a good raconteur, and the standard of his story-telling rose with the interest of his listeners. In me he found an attentive listener, for which he rewarded me not only by addressing me more often than the rest but also, as a sign of his favour, by occasionally giving me the better and more profitable jobs. His most grateful listener, however, was the youngster, either because at his age he was the most eager to hear other people’s stories or because fate had prevented him from experiencing most of the things the foreman recounted.

I knew by then that he hadn’t been sickly from childhood. As soon as he’d finished school he’d let himself be lured by favourable terms into a chemical plant, where they offered him a flat within a year and special danger pay straight away. That danger pay was not just a lure. He’d hardly been at the plant five months when an incident occurred, which is the term used in the jerkish press for an event which costs the health and even the lives of an appreciable number of workers. There’d been an escape of poison gas. Two women died instantly and the young man was discharged from hospital after six months and pensioned off. His liver and kidneys were damaged, and he’d better forget about women altogether. Nevertheless he’d taken a liking to a tram driver called Dana, admittedly the divorced mother of two girls and his senior by ten years, or maybe it was just because of that that he thought he had a chance. Apparently he’d been courting her for a year and he’d been cleaning the city’s streets for that period in order to earn a little extra money so he wouldn’t come to her as a pauper.

The rain thirty years ago had been an obstacle to the foreman’s intentions until he remembered that a little beyond the airfield there was a rusty old Messerschmitt which had been wrecked during the war. Its innards had of course been torn out, but if you pulled the canopy shut and put a rug on the floor it was almost a hotel. First time they did it the dark-haired girl had hardly taken her skirt off when she let out a terrible shriek because a snake was creeping out from one of the holes in the instrument panel. There was a whole nest of vipers there, and the foreman had to get rid of them all and stuff up the holes with tow before he could get to the most delicious hole of all. ‘Let me tell you,’ the foreman concluded, ‘one thing I’ve learnt in my life more than once: a bed isn’t everything!’

It was nearly a quarter past ten and it was still raining outside. Listening to other people’s tales, whatever they are, I sometimes feel like a debtor, like an eternal dinner guest who never offers any invitations himself, but usually I cannot bring myself to demand the attention of others.

A few years ago my wife’s sister was moving to another flat. She asked if I would help her. The woman who’d let her have her one-room flat was quite mad, she’d piled it high with junk she’d picked up at rubbish dumps, but she was anxious about it and wouldn’t let the removal men touch it, and so she didn’t know how to move her things out.

How many things can you get into a room? I thought my sister-in-law was exaggerating. I took the word rubbish heap figuratively. I promised to move the lady’s things bit by bit in my car. Even outside her door I felt a strange odour wafting from inside. The instant she let me in the smell of rot and mildew hit me violently. The woman, however, was neat and clean, the hand she held out to me was scoured white. She showed me in. I walked a narrow path between crates, boxes and masses of parcels until I reached the window and asked if I might open it. A wave of fresh air full of smoke and exhaust fumes rushed inside, but the atmosphere of decay which persisted here was not to be drowned. Then I helped the woman finish her packing. We tied up children’s copy books and stacked them in a crate together with burnt-out lightbulbs and an unmatching pair of sandals without straps, bits of worn-out cork tiles and armless dolls, old envelopes, the shells of radios, rusty saucepans, a broken chandelier and a glass marble. The woman had clearly spent her life collecting and storing other people’s rubbish, which possibly gave her a sense of hope or security. For five whole days I drove to and fro. She thanked me and promised me eternal salvation for my trouble, a salvation I’d soon experience because the time was nigh when mankind would assemble for judgement in the place called Armageddon. I felt like asking her why in that case she was keeping all those things, but there was no sense in putting this question to a crazy woman when I might just as well ask anyone else or myself.

As I was carrying downstairs what must have been the fiftieth package at least I couldn’t resist the temptation to untie the string and to tip the contents into the nearest dustbin. I covered it up with some empty paper cups and kitchen waste from the bin next to it, and drove off with the rest of the junk to my sister-in-law’s flat.

About an hour later I returned for the next load, but I had to wait a long time for her to let me in. She was standing in the door as if hesitating whether to admit me. ‘You, you…’ she said to me. ‘And I trusted you!’

‘What a hope,’ the foreman spoke up, ‘Let me tell you, I’ve learned this more than once in my life: you won’t get any thanks from a woman!’