Ivan Klíma - Love and Garbage

before a remarkable statue

of dried leaves and blooms…

These verses suddenly came to my mind — as well as the voice of the man who’d spoken them.

‘There’s money to be made in other places too,’ Mrs Venus said. ‘I know a fellow got into a gang that collects the mess in trucks in Slivenec. After all, they shift it from there by the cartload!’

‘Don’t tell me that,’ the foreman got excited. ‘You wouldn’t stand a chance there, it’s the private preserve of the Demeter gang and nobody can winkle that lot out, not even the public prosecutor.’

In the crowded bar at the bottom of the street we were lucky enough to find room at a table from which a gang of bricklayers from a nearby building site was just getting up. Our foreman jerked his head towards them: ‘My girl’s been waiting for a flat for seven years, and she was told at the co-op she’d have to wait at least another seven years. So when I see those pissed malingerers I feel like kicking their teeth in. And who knocked you about like this?’ he turned to Mrs Venus. ‘Don’t you tell me you slipped on the stairs!’

‘But I did,’ said Venus in a voice I still admired. ‘Now and again my legs give way under me.’

‘If I was you, Zoulová, I wouldn’t stand for it. You go to the centre,’ the foreman advised her, ‘get them to confirm it and then go and report it as grievous bodily harm. They’ll throw the book at him, so much he’ll never be able to pay up in full.’

‘But it was my brother-in-law!’ Mrs Venus objected.

‘Which one?’

‘The one from Ostrava, of course, the brother of my Joe that died a couple of years ago. Always turns up at my place like this. Once a year.’

‘Still working down the mines?’ the foreman wanted to know.

‘That’s what it was all about,’ Venus explained; ‘he’s just as stupid as Joe was. His lungs are all shot to hell, full of coal dust. And the same doctor, that murderer that did my Joe in, told him he couldn’t send him to a disabled home, they wouldn’t authorise that, and if he wrote down what the matter really was with him they’d put him on surface jobs where he’d be cleaning lamps for bugger-all, and then he could whistle for his pension. Exactly how that murderer chatted up my Joe. In another year, he promised him, we’ll put you straight into a disabled centre, that’s what that shit promised him when the poor bugger couldn’t even walk up a few steps. Six months later he was past caring whether he was declared disabled or not. I told my brother-in-law: Vince, look at what happened to Joe. Are you stupid or what? What bloody use is money to you when you’re pushing up the daisies? That made him angry. So I said to him: You’re all alike, you men, brave enough to hit a woman all right, but when it comes to standing up to the deputy you’d sooner shit yourself!’

‘Men aren’t all alike,’ the foreman protested.

‘Don’t tell me that! How long were you in the army?’

‘Twenty-five years.’ There was a ring of pride in the foreman’s voice.

‘And how often were you in action?’

‘No one to fight,’ the foreman said dryly.

‘Who told you that?’

‘A soldier fights when he’s ordered to,’ he told her. ‘If there’s no order he can do bugger-all.’

‘Women would fight even without an order,’ Venus snapped. ‘Why d’you think they won’t give women weapons? And what are you grinning about?’ she turned on me. ‘No doubt you were a real Ho Chi Minh!’

‘Now watch your tongue, Zoulová!’ the foreman admonished her. ‘You know that I’ve always stood by you people. There’ll soon be an opportunity for you to realise it.’ We all of us knew that the post of radio dispatcher was soon falling vacant at the office and that the foreman was firmly counting on getting it. ‘You’ll get tired of wielding that broom one day.’

‘So what,’ Mrs Venus snapped. ‘I can just see you letting me drive a carriage with golden wheels!’

I noticed that the captain was enjoying the argument.

The crazy inventor had called on me once more at the newspaper office. That was when foreign soldiers were trampling through Prague. He sat down on a chair. The recent events had led him to concern himself once again with his soot solution. He’d changed the proportions of his seven solvents and added two catalysts. Now he was certain of the result. The ice would turn to water, to whole oceans of water. Did I understand the consequences? Did I realise which countries would be flooded if the ocean levels rose?

My first thought was The Netherlands, but he produced from his pocket a map of Europe on which he’d carefully cross-hatched the territory which would disappear under the sea. True, parts of The Netherlands and the Jutland peninsula would be affected, but worst affected of all would be the lowlands in the east, complete with all their gigantic cities.

I conjured up a vision of only the head of the Bronze Horseman showing above the waves, and even that was slowly disappearing:

‘Here cut’ — so Nature gives command –

‘your window through on Europe; stand

firm-footed by the sea, unchanging!’

Ay, ships of every flag shall come

by waters they had never swum

and we shall revel, freely ranging.

‘Do you understand now?’ he asked, folding his hands as if in prayer.

A siege! The wicked waves, attacking

climb thief-like through the windows; backing

the boats stern-foremost, smite the glass,

trays with their soaking wrappage pass;

and timbers, roofs, and huts all shattered,

the wares of thrifty traders scattered,

and the pale beggars’ chattels small,

bridges swept off beneath the squall,

coffins from sodden graveyards — all

swim in the streets!

I understood. His mind may have been disturbed, but there burned within him the flame which the rest of us, from cunning or from common-sense, were stifling.

I had always hoped that life’s flame would burn pure within me. To live and at the same time have darkness within one, to live and exhale death, what point would there be in that?

But what kind of flame had there been burning within me these past few years? I couldn’t answer my question, I’d lost my judgement. Everything that had surrounded me in the past, everything that had been significant and had filled me with joy or sorrow, had gone flat and like a strip of faded material now drifted at my feet.

In the evenings my son would play to himself the songs of his favourite singers. The words of these songs persistently and vehemently protested against the unhappy state of our society. He was clinging to protest, which was one-sided, as though he wanted subconsciously to make up for the one-sided way in which I had turned my back on any injustices which might keep me from my private region of bliss.

My daughter was now often coming home late, smelling of wine and cigarette smoke and talking cynically about love. Was she not finding the love she was seeking because I had found it, or, on the contrary, because she was seeking it where I remained blind?

My wife went regularly to her psychoanalyst. She too was descending into her depths, looking about herself there, confident that she was accompanied by the light of a wise guide, and she arrived at unexpected conclusions about herself and about me, about her relationship with her mother and about my relationship with mine. She was pleased that she had at last learned to understand herself and therefore to improve herself. She felt sorry that I didn’t wish to do something similar, that I didn’t long for self-understanding, that I persisted in erroneous ideas about myself.

Those I love know how I should run my life, they know what’s right in life, they know their hierarchy of values, only I blunder about in uncertainty.