Ivan Klíma - Love and Garbage

Daria is sitting alongside me in a freshly-ironed white blouse and a chocolate-coloured velvet skirt, she’s dressed up because this evening we’re going to a concert. She seems to me so beautiful, so precious, as if I’d gone back forty years or so and gazed in adoration at my mother. Except we’re getting up, climbing a few steps, and she is stepping out of her clothes and her exalted untouchability and stepping into my embrace, and I feel as if the thin walls of my veins are bursting from the barely tolerable surge of delight.

We’re lying next to each other in the descending night. Somewhere out of sight beyond the palace and the river the musicians are getting ready for a Beethoven concerto.

What would you like most of all?

I know what I am expected to reply but I ask: Now or altogether?

Now and altogether, if there’s any difference.

To stay here with you, I answer, to stay with you now.

And altogether?

I’d like to know what happens to the soul.

You’d really like to know that?

I embrace her. She presses herself against me and whispers: You always want to know so much, my darling, do you always have to find out something or other?

It was you who asked.

Be glad that there are things which can’t be known — only surmised.

She holds me so tight I groan. What do you surmise?

Don’t worry, the soul doesn’t perish, somehow it lives on.

In another body?

Why in a body at all? I see your soul as a pillar. It looks stony but it’s made of fire and wind. And it towers so high that from down on the ground you can’t see the top of it. And up there it is smiling.

That pillar?

Your soul, darling. Because you have a smile inside you, even if you think you’ve only got grief, and that’s why I feel good with you. Then she asks: Have you applied for a passport?

In the woods liverwort and anemones are out again, no one but us ever goes there. She makes love to me in a way that blots out my reason. She wants to know: Don’t you feel good with me?

I do feel good with you. I’ve never known anything like it before.

But you’re not entirely with me. And she asks: How can you live like that?

Like what?

So incompletely, so divided.

She is waiting for a sign that I’ve made up my mind at last, but there is no sign. She asks: Are you going away with me somewhere in the summer?

How can I arrange things so that I can go away with her? What lie can I invent? I am gripped by cold fear.

Are you capable of doing anything for me at all?

I’ll apply for a passport but I am tired. Worn down by love-making and by love and by reproaches, by longing and by my own indecision, worn down by my ceaseless escapes, the passion of my lover and the meek trust of my wife.

I can scarcely believe it, I am given a passport, the wild roses are beginning to bloom. Far and wide, no one lies down under them. The petals are soundlessly floating down on our naked bodies and bees are buzzing above us. She asks: Are you also feeling happy, darling?

I am feeling happy with her, and she whispers: Are you going away with me to the sea in the summer?

It has been calculated that if all those murdered in Kampuchea were stacked up on a pyre with a one-hundred-metre base that pyre would be taller than the country’s highest mountain.

I have found another remark by Kafka on the mission of literature: What: we need, he wrote, are books which strike us like the most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, books which would make us feel that we’ve been driven out into the forest far from another human being, like suicide. A book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us.

With his honesty Kafka could write only about what he had himself experienced. He recorded his lonely road into the depths. He descended as far as anyone could descend, and down there came the end, the end of his road and of his writings. He was unable to sever himself from his father, nor did he bring himself to complete adult love — that was his abyss. At its bottom he saw a person he loved, and as he descended that person’s image drew closer and at the same time began to disappear in the dark, and when he was close enough to reach out with his hand he had no breath left and was engulfed by unconsciousness.

His abyss, however, is like the abyss into which we all descend or into which, at least, we gaze with curiosity or fear. We can see in it a reflection of our own destinies, of ourselves endeavouring in vain to reach adulthood, in vain reaching out to another being and to the one who is above us. Except that I don’t know if we are still capable of descending to any depth, whether we are not so pampered or so spoiled that we can no longer recognise honesty when we see it and stand before it in admiration, whether instead we are not trying to diminish it, to question it and to adapt it to our own ideas. Honesty then becomes for us an inability to live or even a source of mental disorder, courage becomes pitiable weakness. Only a weak person, one incapable of living according to our ideas and demands, seems acceptable and comprehensible to us. Indeed, we pity him for his loneliness, his vulnerability or his sick body. For the way he suffered, for being, compared to us, unhappy. We do not even perceive what that painful descent into the depths brings. The lonely diver sees in one instant what most of us who pity him don’t see in a whole lifetime.

The highest mountain in Kampuchea is in the Kardamon range not far from Phnom Penh and is called Ka-kup. It is covered in primeval forest and is 1744 metres high. Our aircraft struck the treetops and crashed into the undergrowth. We managed to jump out of the split fuselage before it caught fire. We tore our way through the dense vegetation and she was looking for a spot where we could lie down safe from snakes and scorpions. But whenever she found one, whenever she found a cleared spot it was full of dead bodies.

I said: We’ll have to find another country for just the two of us to be together.

Just then two soldiers with red tabs on their muddy uniforms emerged from the jungle and one of them said in a language which surprisingly we understood very well: Better find another world.

The two soldiers burst into shrill Khmer laughter, they laughed till they shook, and then they began to shoot at us. At the last moment I realised that in a world where five thousand million people lived, most of them starving, what did anyone care about us two?

By midday we were at the end of our stint. ‘Took us a bit longer today,’ the foreman said, looking up at the sky which was once more hidden by clouds composed of steam and sulphur dioxide. ‘Let me tell you, there are months when I have people coming and going like in a taproom, everybody just out for quick money, and the streets like a pigsty. Everything has to have its — you know. But you lot, hats off! They’ve noticed it even at the office. The other day they went through my whole district without finding a single fault. Only that bloody castrated bastard’s running us down wherever he can.’

We were walking along in a disorderly column — on one side residential blocks, on the other a little park with massive maples and lime trees, from whose tops every gust of wind brought down a shower of tired leaves. The youngster stopped and looked into the park, perhaps walking up the slight hill had tired him or else he’d caught sight of someone he knew on the gravel path, or else he needed to let his eyes linger on something at least a little way above the ground:

And it may happen to a sweeper

as he waves

his dirty broom

about without a hope

among the dusty ruins

of a wasteful colonial exhibition

that he halts amazed