Ivan Klíma - Love and Garbage

‘What about your brother?’ it occurred to me to ask. ‘Was he there with you?’

‘Him?’ he made a dismissive gesture. ‘It might cost him his career!’ His own words struck him as too harsh, for he added: ‘He might perhaps just walk along in some Buddhist procession.’

Dad had been in hospital for a week. Lately, even before he was laid so low by fever, he’d complain that he couldn’t sleep at night. I wanted to know why and he didn’t tell me, he made some excuse about some undefined burning pain, an elusive ache. But I suspected that he was suffering from anxiety. His intellect, which all his life had been concerned with quantifiable matter, knew of course that nothing vanished completely from this world, but he also knew that nothing kept its shape and appearance forever, that in this eternal and continuous motion of matter every being must perish just as every machine, even the most perfect, just as the worlds and the galaxies. Dad’s intellect realised that everything was subject: to that law, so why should the human soul alone be exempt from it? Because the Creator breathed life into it? But surely He too, if he existed at all, was subject to that law. But what sense would there be in a God whose existence and likeness were subject to the same laws as everything else, a God who’d be subject to time?

Dad was standing on the frontier which his intellect was able to visualise, the chilling nocturnal fear of the black pit was crushing him — and I was unable to help him. My dear father, how can I help you, how can I shield you from fear of your downfall? I wasn’t even able to burn your fever. I am only your son, I was not given the power to liberate you from darkness, or to liberate anyone.

Dad is lying in a white ward which smells of doctoring and of the sweat of the dying. They have temporarily kept his fever down with antibiotics and they have dulled his fear by antidepressants. They’d given him the middle bed of three. On his left lay a hallucinating fat man who’d been irradiated at night by unknown invaders with hooded faces, on his right a wizened old man, punctured all over by hypodermics, was dying.

Dad was sitting up and welcomed me with a smile. I fed him, then I took out a razor from his bedside table and offered to shave him. He nodded. Lately he’d hardly spoken at all. Maybe he didn’t have the strength, or else he didn’t know what to tell me. He’d never talked to me about personal matters, nor had he ever spoken about anything abstract. In his businesslike world there was no room for speculations which led too far from firm ground. So what was he to talk to me about now that the firm ground itself was receding from him? And what was I to talk to him about?

The dying man on his right emerged for an instant from his unconscious condition and whispered something with a moan.

‘Poor fellow,’ Dad said, ‘he’s all in.’

I helped my father to get up. I took his arm and he moved out into the corridor with small shuffling steps. I should have liked to say something nice and encouraging to him, something meaningful.

‘I have those dreams nowadays,’ he confessed to me. ‘They proclaimed a beet-picking drive, and Stalin was personally in charge. I had to join, and I was afraid he’d notice how badly I was working.’

During the Stalin period they had, with the deliberate intention of hitting him where it would hurt most, found him guilty of bad work.

I might have told him that I’d always admired his ability to concentrate on his work, that I knew what outstanding results he’d achieved, but it would have sounded like empty phrases from a premature funeral oration. He knew better than anyone what he had achieved, and he also knew what I thought of his work.

We were approaching the end of the corridor — everything was spotlessly washed and polished, almost as it used to be in our home. We were on our own, although in the distance we could see a young nurse hurrying from one door to another. Only a few days earlier Dad had been irritated by the nurses, who’d seemed to him disobliging. Now he wasn’t complaining. He sat down on a chair by an open window, his grey-streaked hair was stuck together by sweat. He looked out through the window, where the birches were shedding their yellow leaves in the gusts of wind, but he was probably unaware of them, he’d just witnessed an explosion at a great height and he was alarmed. It’s stupid,’ he said softly, ‘to play about with it. Any piece of machinery will malfunction some time. If they don’t stop it it’ll be the end. You ought to tell them!’

‘Me?’

‘You ought to tell them.’ Dad was still looking out of the window, but he was silent again. A plane roared past overhead, it moved on, it didn’t crash, it only left an unnecessary white trail of poisonous gases behind.

Had he perhaps just uttered the most important thing he’d intended to say to me? Or did he merely wish to confess a further disappointment of his — that the wonderful engines, which he’d invented and designed all his life, while lifting man off the ground, still did not lead him into the Garden of Bliss but would, more probably, prematurely incinerate him.

I helped him get up and we returned to his ward. I sat him up in his bed, straightened his blanket and told him how well he’d walked. I should have asked him, while there was time, if there was anything else he wanted to tell me, anything he hadn’t told me so far, some instruction, advice or message. Was he perhaps leaving a grave behind somewhere that I should visit for him? Or a lonely person whom I should visit? But Dad was certainly not thinking of graves, he regarded it as nonsensical to waste time on the dead, and he wouldn’t venture to give me any advice. He’d been disappointed with so many of his expectations, and if there was a woman somewhere whom he had loved and whom he had never mentioned to me, he had clearly decided not to burden me with her name now. He had nothing left to pass on to me.

Maybe I should have been saying to him that, if anything, I was finding some hope in his disappointments, because he’d been misled only by a self-assured intellect which thought it knew everything and which refused to leave any room for the inexplicable, that is for God, eternity or redemption. Would he even understand me, could he still hear me?

I noticed that his chin had dropped on his chest and that he had slipped down on his side. I slackened the screw behind his bedhead and brought the bed down into the horizontal position. Dad didn’t wake up as I laid him down, he didn’t even open his eyes when I stroked his forehead.

When I got home a young man was waiting for me who, by coincidence, had just arrived from a town near Svatá Hora. About two years ago I’d given a reading of some of my short stories to a few friends of his at his place. Since then he’d turned up occasionally for a chat about literature. He was always well-groomed, his fair hair looked as if it had just been waved with curling tongs and in his grey eyes there was some painful anxiety as if he’d taken on more of life’s burdens and responsibilities than he could bear. He was interested in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Joyce, as well as in the cinema and in art. In one of the stories I’d read that evening there was a mention of Hegedušić; after I’d finished he told me that there was a short film available in our country about him. I was surprised to find a young man, who worked in the mines near Svatá Hora, being interested in a Yugoslav painter. He’d now arrived suspiciously soon after the famous pilgrimage, but he made no mention of it, which reassured me. He’d come to get my advice about his future. He’d decided he wouldn’t stay in the mines any longer. He’d find some unskilled job and would try to study aesthetics, art history or literature by correspondence. The work he was doing, he explained to me, made no sense. The people among whom he moved disgusted him. If only he knew what people he’d have to move among if he succeeded in getting where he wanted to go! But I don’t like imposing my dislikes on others. I merely dug out some recent article by a leading jerkish official who’d been appointed to a university chair to ensure the oblivion of all literature.