Ivan Klíma - Love and Garbage

‘How is this superior to an ordinary rattle?’ the foreman asked doubtfully.

‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that a rattle goes all the time and the little bastards get used to it?’ The captain once more began to squeeze his bellows and we, now all leaning on our tools, were watching the balloon filling up.

‘And if there’s no wind?’ the foreman asked with interest.

At that moment there was a brief sound of bursting, rather like a distant shot, and what had just been a balloon was no more.

‘You know, they let us rehearse at the works club twice a week,’ the youngster reminisced, ‘but we could stay there as long as we needed to. Sometimes we’d fool around till the early hours of the morning, just stretching out on the tables for a moment if we felt like a rest.’

‘Weren’t they waiting for you at home?’ I asked in surprise.

‘At home? But I didn’t live at home!’

‘If there’s no wind,’ the captain replied to the foreman, ‘it works by electricity.’

‘If you felt like it and could spare the time,’ the youngster suddenly remembered, ‘the boys are playing in Radlice this Sunday.’ He fished about in his wallet and pulled out two tickets. ‘Maybe you’d like them.’

I objected that he’d got the tickets for himself, and while we were sweeping up the leaves and conkers which had dropped from a huge horse-chestnut tree he explained to me how to get there.

I sometimes feel nostalgic for America. Even in my dreams I wander among the skyscrapers or drive along highways through endless landscapes, always full of expectation. Yet nearly every one of these dreams ends sadly: I’d stayed on in that country, beyond the sea, I’d never return home again, to the place where I was born and where people, or at least some of them, speak my native language.

They’ve put me in a vest in which I feel restricted. I could take it off, or even with a fine gesture chuck it away and go somewhere where they won’t force one upon me, but I know that I won’t because by doing so I’d also be chucking away my home.

Franz Kafka was certainly one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived and worked in Bohemia. He used to curse Prague and his homeland, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave, he couldn’t make up his mind to tear himself away from them. His seemingly dreamlike plots unroll in an environment which appears to have little connection with any real place. In reality his native city provided him with more than just a backdrop for his plots. It pervaded him with its multiplicity of voices, its nostalgia, its twilight, its weakness. It was the place where the spirit could soar up to any heights, but it was also the place where there was in the atmosphere a barely perceptible smell of decay, which more particularly affected the spirit.

Kafka spoke perfect Czech, perhaps just a trifle stiffly, but he wrote in German. But he was not a German, he was a Jew.

Not a single Czech literary historian has ever found in himself enough generosity, courage or affability to range him among the Czech authors.

The sense of exclusion and loneliness which repeatedly emerges from his prose writings certainly stemmed from his disposition, from the circumstances of his life. In fact he shared it with many of his contemporaries. But Prague greatly intensified it. He longed to escape from it, just as he longed to escape from his old-bachelor loneliness. He failed to do so. He was unable to liberate himself except by his writing.

If he had succeeded in liberating himself in any other way he’d probably have lived longer, and somewhere else, but he wouldn’t have written anything.

Home had become a cage for me. I needed to break out, but whenever I went out while my wife was at home I could see fear in her eyes. She never voiced it, suspicion was not part of her nature, she was trying to trust me as she’d done before, as she trusted strangers, but her eyes would follow me wherever I moved. When I returned she’d run out to meet me, pleased that I was back home again and welcoming me tenderly. And she, who’d never been too concerned about how I spent my time, what I was thinking about, what I ate, would ask if I wasn’t hungry, and during supper she’d shyly reflect on where we might go together so we should enjoy ourselves, and she’d agree in advance with whatever I suggested. She’d never been like this before, she’d known how to pursue her own interests and have her own way, but now, humbled and humiliated, she was trying to live up to her idea of my idea of a good and loving wife, and her slight gaucherie both shamed and touched me.

She was not endowed with directness. I always felt that she moved more freely in the world of ideas and theorems than among people. In dealing with people she lacked naturalness. And yet she wished she had it, she needed it in her profession, which required her to gain her patients’ confidence. I noticed her trying desperately to achieve what others had received as a gift. I knew that she wanted people to be fond of her. She is happy whenever others appreciate her good qualities or her ability, and she hastens to repay them for it by deeds, or at least by words so eager that she embarrasses them. I’d wanted to help her not to feel isolated among people, and now I had brutally pushed heir back into the corner from which she’d tried to escape.

Of course she had a lot of acquaintances and colleagues who respected her, but she had few real friends. The children were growing up and the day when they’d be leaving us was approaching. If I were to leave her as well, who would look after her as she moved towards her advancing years, who would walk by her side?

But could I still do it?

We are lying next to each other, we embrace. She wants to knew if it was good for me; behind that question I suspect a multitude of suppressed and anxious questions and I ask her not to ask me anything. She says that she loves me, we’ll be happy together yet, and she falls asleep, exhausted, whereas I am sinking into a strange void between dream and wakefulness. I am fighting against sleep, against the state when I shan’t be able to drive away the voice which begins to speak to me.

At one time it was my wife who spoke to me. She’d wait for me at street corners in dream towns, she’d miraculously appear in a moving train, she’d find me in strange houses and in the midst of crowds. By some miracle we’d jointly discover forgotten box rooms, or a ready-made bed in a deserted corridor, or a hidden spot in a garden or a forest, and there we’d whisper tender words and verses to one another, there we’d embrace, and in my dream, as usually happens, we’d make love more passionately and completely than in reality.

Then she began to disappear from my dreams and other women appeared in them, but in their embraces I felt treacherous and unclean, and when I woke up I was relieved to find my wife lying by my side. Sometimes a different dream would recur repeatedly. I was aware of my age, of my approaching old age, and I realised that I’d remained alone in my life, that I’d failed to find a woman with whom I’d beget children, and that depressed me.

What speaks to a man in his dream is the secret or suppressed voice of his soul. This dream, I tried to explain to myself, echoed the memory of the time when I was growing up and when I was afraid I’d never succeed in finding a woman’s love. But had I understood my soul’s voice correctly?

Now I dreamed that I was waiting under my plane tree and I knew that people might come from different directions. I wouldn’t therefore remain alone. Simultaneously I was afraid that the two women I was waiting for might meet. True, they both belonged to me, but they certainly did not belong to each other. It was my lover who arrived first. I hurriedly led her away, then we strayed through ever more deserted regions, looking for a place where we could be together quietly. But each time someone would turn up and watch us intently. In the end, however, we found some place of refuge, we made love in strange and inhospitable surroundings, snatched out of the world around us, the way it can only happen in a dream, intoxicated with each other, but just as the instant of greatest pleasure was approaching my wife suddenly appeared through some hidden or forgotten door and I tried in vain to hide the other woman under a blanket that was too short. Lída stood in the door, staring at me with desperation in her eyes. She didn’t reproach me, she didn’t scream, she just stared.