Ivan Klíma - Love and Garbage

Wisps of fog were drifting outside, rising from the pavements and the sodden lawns. In the telephone box outside the tavern a girl was smiling prettily down the instrument at someone.

I too used to smile. I thought that I was really seeing the woman I loved and that I could touch with my eyes what she was seeing just then. She told me: outside my window a raven is freezing on a branch, he’s telling me something but I can’t hear him. I was freezing as much as that raven. I had to breathe on the glass to see out. On a rime-covered tree there actually sat a raven. What could he say? Nevermore, nevermore. I thought I understood him: we’d never find anyone to love so much again.

The girl stepped out of the phone box. My companions were still lazily hanging about the tavern door. I lifted the receiver. I hesitated for a moment, but I so needed to hear a familiar voice that I dialled. Lída said she was pleased to hear me and wanted to know where I was calling from, what I had just been doing and if I wasn’t cold. She was looking forward to my coming home. I would have liked to say something nice to her, to my wife, to address her tenderly as I used to: Lída darling, or at least Lída dear, at least ask her what she was doing, what she was thinking about, but I was unable to say anything other than that I’d come straight home after visiting Dad at the hospital.

I remained in the box for a moment. My garish vest was brilliantly reflected in the glass. I fished in my pocket for a coin. That other number so vehemently forced itself on my mind that I repeated it in a whisper.

I stopped fishing for that coin. I watched my companions marching slowly uphill to the little park where we’d left our tools in a small shed. Mrs Venus caught sight of me and waved.

Some other time, my love, but I’m not silent because I’m not thinking of you, it’s just that I have nothing new to say to you.

And you think that this silence, the way we live now, is good?

I don’t know if it’s good, but I don’t know anything better.

You don’t know anything better? Just look at yourself, the stuff you’re wearing, this masquerade. Have you gone in for repentance or what?

No, it’s perfectly honest work. I can think while I’m doing it.

You can think, can you? How nice for you. And what about me? Are you at all interested in what’s happening to me? How I’ve been feeling? After all those years I haven’t even merited a single phone call from you.

We had a lot of phone calls with each other. At least a thousand!

Don’t count them up. I don’t want to hear numbers. Anyway, that was before. Afterwards you didn’t ring even once.

We’d said everything to each other. We were exhausted from those conversations. What else was there to say to each other?

You’re asking me? You might at least tell me whether the whole thing meant anything to you.

You know very well what you meant to me.

I don’t know anything after the way you behaved. I always thought…

What did you think?

Never mind. I didn’t want to believe it. After all you’d told me when we were together, how could I believe that you’d chase me away like some…

Please don’t cry!

Tell me at least, did you love me at all?

You know I did.

I don’t know anything. How am I to know?

An old woman was approaching the box. Perhaps she didn’t even want to telephone, but to be on the safe side I opened the directory and pretended to look for a number.

If you’d loved me you wouldn’t have behaved the way you did!

I was crazy about you.

Don’t be evasive. I asked you if you’d ever loved me. If you’re capable of loving anyone.

Don’t torture me!

Me torturing you? Me you? Tell me, my love, what have you done to me? At least explain to me what was good about it.

I just couldn’t carry on like that. Forgive me, but I couldn’t go on living like that!

And me, how am I to live? You never thought what would happen to me, did you? How can you be silent like this, it isn’t human! Surely you must say something to me, do something. You must do something about us!

At one time I used to write plays. The characters were forever talking, but their words went past each other, their remarks slid past one another like the slippery bodies of fish, without making contact. Did I write that way because I believed we could step out of our loneliness? Or because I needed to find a way of avoiding answers? Where words miss each other, where humans miss each other, real conflict may arise. Or did I suspect that a man cannot successfully defend himself in the eyes of another, and when he is talking he’s doing so only to drown the silence which spreads around him? To conceal from himself the reality of life, a reality which, at best, he perceives only at exceptional moments of awareness?

The man who had alone survived the crash of the aircraft which hit a church tower in Munich was working as a newspaper editor in Belgrade. I was curious to meet a person who had risen from the ashes, but his sister had just died of cancer and he asked me to postpone our meeting for a few days. When I called on him later his other sister was gravely ill with the same disease. ‘The doctors are giving her no more than two months,’ he said to me; ‘they told me this morning. You know what is odd? I went out into the street and I didn’t hear anything. There were trams and cars moving about and people talking, but I didn’t hear any of it. There was the same sudden quiet then, after the crash.’

I caught up with my companions. The youngster passed me my shovel, which he had carried for me on his handcart, and Mrs Venus said: ‘Bet that wasn’t your wife you’ve just phoned.’

Right by the kerb I noticed a dead mouse. I picked it up on my shovel and flung it on the rest of the rubbish.

My wife was amazed by what I told her. She couldn’t believe that I’d lied to her for so long. I said what most men would probably say in such a situation, that I had hoped to spare her needless suffering because I’d believed it would soon come to an end.

But you don’t want to end it? she asked.

I said that I loved the other woman, that I’d never loved any woman the way I loved her.

But I thought you loved me more than anybody else! Tears flooded her eyes. Then she wanted to hear details. Any kind of truth was preferable to silence. I was to tell her where she’d gone wrong and how she could put it right.

I poured out all my complaints and self-exculpating explanations, but after a while we were merely rehearsing who did the shopping, who the cooking, the laundry, the washing up and the floors, until I was horrified by the poverty of my own speech. I fell silent, but my wife wanted to hear something about the other woman and I, suddenly freed by my newly-discovered openness, began to praise the qualities and talents of my lover, to describe the uniqueness of what we were experiencing. But: as I was forcing all this into words I transformed the experiences which had been mine only, and which had seemed inimitable and unique, into something common, categorisable and conventionally melodramatic. Yet I was unable to stop talking, and my wife listened to me with such involvement, such readiness to understand me and maybe even advise me that I fell victim to the foolish idea that she might even share some of my feelings. But she was merely hoping that if only she received my confession and listened to me attentively she might transform my words on how we had drifted apart into the first act of a mutual drawing together. She would confront the urgent attraction of the other woman with her own patient understanding.

When — suddenly not too convinced that this was what I truly and urgently desired — I suggested that I might leave home, at least for a time, she said that if I wished to leave her and the children she wouldn’t stand in my way, but if after a while I decided to return home she couldn’t guarantee that they would be able to have me back. I was far from considering what I would wish to do after a while, but I thought I could see in her eyes so much regret and disappointment, and anguish at the thought of impending loneliness, that I did not repeat my suggestion.