Ivan Klíma - Love and Garbage

We didn’t go to bed until the early hours. I couldn’t have slept for more than a few minutes because daybreak had not yet come, but when I woke up there were muted sobs by my side.

She was crying, sobbing steadily and persistently, her mouth buried in her pillow so she shouldn’t wake me.

I would have liked to caress her or say something kind to her, to comfort her as I always did when something depressed her, but this time it was me who’d crushed her. Unless I changed my decision I had become the one person who couldn’t comfort her. I suddenly realised that the position I found myself in tormented me rather than gave me a sense of liberation.

In the morning I was awakened by a crash, by the sound of splintering.

I found my wife in the hall: by her feet were fragments which I recognised as those of the only piece of sculpture we’d ever had in our home. The angular bird’s head was shattered and its human eyes had rolled God knows where.

For an instant we were both silent, then my wife said: ‘I’m sorry. I had to do something.’

And I, in a sudden flush of compassion, without reflecting that the previous day I’d been determined to do the opposite, promised her that I wouldn’t leave her, that I’d stay only with her. We had had our children together, and surely we’d once linked our lives together till death did us part.

Shortly afterwards we went to see our daughter’s art teacher. He was exhibiting his paintings in a small-town gallery. We walked round the pictures, which somehow all seemed to express the loneliness of men, and I tried to suppress my nostalgia. In the evening some visitors arrived. They were nearly all painters and they talked a lot about art, which reminded me of the other woman. They took their observations seriously, and seemed to me to be genuinely seeking a meaning behind their activity, but to me all talk seemed unnecessary at that moment, it was no more than a substitute for life, for movement, for passion. I fled the company and went down to the riverbank. My wife found me there and wanted to know if I was sad, if I felt nostalgic. My wife, that voluntary healer, promised me that things would be good between us, we’d start another life, and I’d be happy in it. She wanted to know what I was planning to write and to hear what was on my mind that instant, she talked about sincerity and about life in truth. I was listening to her and I felt as if something was snapping inside me, as if every word was a blow which cut something in two. I was surprised she couldn’t hear the blows herself, but simultaneously it seemed to me that the despair was fading from her voice. I had always hoped that she would feel comfortable with me, that life’s hardships would not weigh her down too much — her relief gave me at least some satisfaction.

The street was still wet but the air had been cleansed, and as we stepped out of the shade of the residential blocks we even felt the rays of the autumn sun which somehow dispelled our gloomy mood of the morning. The youngster was whistling a Gershwin tune and Mr Rada all of a sudden showed me a slim little book on the cover of which was a street-sweeping truck and a broom, while its title to my surprise promised a critical essay on the personality cult. ‘Do you know it?’

I’d never seen the book before in my life.

‘An interesting reflection on how we used to deify ourselves and physical matter.’ He opened the book and read aloud: ‘Here lies the root of the cult, here is that proton pseudon: that the miserable, mortal, ephemeral human ego declares of itself: Ich bin ich. Das Ich ist schlechthin gesetzt . I am the finest flower of the materialist God!’ He shut the little book again and I caught another glimpse of its cover. On the sweeping truck, as I now noticed, lay a big human head.

‘And what are we really?’ I asked Mr Rada, and at that instant I understood the connection between the cover picture and what I’d just heard.

The youngster was still whistling that familiar tune and I felt irritated at not being able to think of the words that went with it.

‘It’s “The Man I Love”, of course,’ he told me, delighted at my display of interest and my acquaintance with the composer, and immediately he sang to me the four-beat tune: ‘Some day he’ll come along, the man I love.’ He asked: ‘You like Gershwin?’

I told him that thirty years ago a black opera company had come to Prague with Porgy and Bess ; it had been the first visit for a long time of any company from the other side of our divided world. Getting tickets required a miracle, but I’d been lucky.

The memory took me away from the swept street. Not that I could recall anything of the performance which had then delighted me, but I could see before me the little street in the suburbs of Detroit, where a lot of black children were shouting on the sidewalk and a white-haired black man sat in a wheelchair in front of a dingy low house. Someone was playing a trumpet, or more likely had put on a record with Louis Armstrong or somebody, there was rubbish everywhere, bits of paper, advertising leaflets and Coca-Cola cans, and in the hot air hung a smell of onions, slops and human bodies.

I was seized by nostalgia for that country. Suddenly I was seeing myself in my orange vest pushing that miserable handcart. Of course I needn’t have worn that particular vest, but they made me wear some garishly coloured jacket to make sure everyone recognised me from afar and gave me a wide berth. This was now happening to me, even though, having been put into a colour-marked jacket in childhood, I longed for nothing more than to get rid of the mark of disinheritance.

‘We used to play him a lot,’ the youngster said. When he saw my surprise he explained: ‘We had a jazz band, you know, before I got my liver all buggered up.’

The captain rolled up the sleeves of his grubby pullover. ‘I may have something useful for your garden,’ he said to the foreman.

‘So long as it isn’t that greenfly spray of yours,’ the foreman was alarmed. ‘Made my greenflies scamper about like squirrels and screwed up my roses completely.’

‘We used to play Duke Ellington, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, or Scott Joplin ragtime,’ the youngster said enthusiastically, ‘but we liked George Gershwin best, and he also came across best because people had heard his stuff before.’

‘And now you don’t play at all?’

‘Not a hope. Couldn’t blow now. Know what impressed me most? That he’d never had any special schooling, and look at the music he wrote!’

‘Did you write any yourself?’ I asked.

‘We all did. We just had jam sessions and something or other would come out of them.’

From one of his enormous pockets the captain produced a piece of collapsed rubber fitted to a small bellows. He squeezed the bellows a few times and the rubber swelled up into a small balloon.

Now balloons were something the foreman was interested in.

‘What kind of bird-brained contraption is this then?’ he asked, leaning his broad shovel against the wall of a house. He couldn’t know how appropriately he’d described the device, for it was actually intended, as we were informed, for scaring birds away. The balloon with the bellows also included, on one side, sails like a windmill’s and, on the other, a whistle. The windmill, by means of the bellows, would blow up the balloon, and once the air pressure in it exceeded a certain limit a valve would open and the whistle would emit a short but powerful blast, which would scare away any flying intruder.

Using his hook the captain pulled from a pocket an object reminiscent of a small organ pipe and with his sound fingers he screwed it into a thread at the end of the balloon.

We were all intently watching his antics, but the expected blast did not materialise: there was only the hiss of escaping air.