Ivan Klíma - Love and Garbage

People people

let’s be ever vigilant

they who sow the wind

must reap the storm

People people

we’re but a chain of hands

we’re but the music of dreams

we’re but the beauty of deeds

For this poem of sixty-nine words, including the title, the author needed a mere thirty-seven jerkish terms and no idea at all, no feeling or image. The substantives — beauty, happiness, love, peace, people, children — are of course interchangeable, the sense or nonsense of the rambling remains unchanged. The obligatory call for hatred of the unworthy and for love of the worthy strikes one by its clichés, even if one allows for the limited scope of the jerkish language. It’s almost as if the author was afraid that among the chimpanzees there might after all be one individual who would not understand him.

Anyone strong enough to read the poem attentively will realise that for a jerkish poet even a vocabulary of 225 words is needlessly large.

On the far side of the river — you have only to cross the bridge — are rocks and woods. We used to go for walks there with the children, now someone said they’d established some huge depôt there. My wife agrees that: we should set out in that direction, she is happy that we’re going on an excursion.

Under the bridge gypsies are playing football, the beds of a nursery patch look like an oriental carpet. My wife is walking ahead, with an energetic step. Her fears have left her, hope has returned to her, hope of a life that can be lived in harmony and love. And I still feel relief at her proximity, relief unblemished by pretence or lies, I am conscious of the lightness of the new day, upon which I am entering full of expectation.

One reason why I like walking in the country is probably that I was never able to do so in my childhood. The first thing I ever wrote in my life — I was eleven at the time and had been in the Terezín fortress ghetto for over a year — was not about love or suffering or my personal fate, but about landscape:

As we climb up the steep slope of Petřín Hill we feel increasingly like birds rising into the air. And then, at one instant, we turn round. We see before us such a multitude of Little City roofs that we catch our breath and regret that we are not really birds and so can never alight on those roofs or see their secrets from close up…

At that time I didn’t know yet what I was doing, I had no idea how many books had been written by then, how many minds had spoken in them. I wrote because I was dying from a yearning for freedom, and freedom for me then meant stepping out of my prison, walking through the streets of my native city; I wrote to fortify my hope that outside the fortress walls the world still existed, a world which had seemed to exist then only in dreams and visions.

I still believe that literature has something in common with hope, with a free life outside the fortress walls which, often unnoticed by us, surround us, with which moreover we surround ourselves. I am not greatly attracted to books whose authors merely portray the hopelessness of our existence, despairing of man, of our conditions, despairing over poverty and riches, over the finiteness of life and the transience of feelings. A writer who doesn’t know anything else had better keep silent.

Man goes through the landscape, seeking hope and waiting for a miracle, waiting for someone to answer his questions. Some monk, pilgrim, enlightened Buddha, prophet or at least a talking bird, to tell him if he’s been endowed with a soul, whose existence would not be cut short even by death, of what matter that soul was woven, what there was above man, what order, what creature or being, in what kind of big bang time had its origin and where it was heading; man passes through the landscape, waiting for an encounter, or at least for a sign, without knowing its nature.

My wife stops, she is waiting for me. I catch up with her, I embrace her. She goes rigid in my embrace, I can feel her trembling.

When I’d met her years ago I was happy that someone was interested in me. She was very young then, she probably didn’t understand what I was feeling, or how impatiently I would wait for her, she was regularly late for our dates.

I’d stand on the edge of the little park not far from where she lived, in the shadow of a magnificent plane tree, or in winter under its bare branches, watching the hands of the street clock. Time and again I worried that she wouldn’t come, that something had happened to her, that we’d missed one another or that one of us had made a mistake about the time. When eventually she arrived I was so happy she’d come I couldn’t bring myself 1:0 be angry with her.

No matter where we’d set out for, we felt good. It seemed to me that we were jointly looking for the same signs. For her everything changed into images, as happens to children, savages or the elect among the poets, and I felt buoyed up by her side.

To this day I can feel the joy which pervaded her, her pleasure at everything we met and saw: a little flower whose name she didn’t know, or the roof of the distant estate building, or the little feather lost by a bird of prey, and most of all our being close together. And it struck me that our actions, wherever they might seem to aim, were in fact aimed at just this point, at the close proximity of a person who might become a companion. At the bottom of all our hopes lies a yearning for encounter.

Daria was convinced that we belonged together, that we’d merely not known about one another, or that the right time had not yet come for us to meet in the way we’d now met. And she found this belief confirmed in the stars, in her cards, in the prophecies of an old clairvoyant whom she’d sought out on one occasion when, after all, she was overcome by doubts.

She pressed me: Why do you tell lies at home? You’re only wronging me, your wife and yourself. She reminded me of Buddha’s words. Apparently he said: No one’s deed is lost, it comes back to him! I understand those words, I also understand her. She asks me: Why don’t you come all the way to me, why do you resist so? Surely no one else can love you as I do.

Suppose we loved one another just because we do have to part all the time and then find each other anew?

She went to Greece with her husband. She was so far away that her voice came to me only as a soft whisper at night, from the region of the stars, her tenderness too was fading over that distance, and I felt easier. As though I were returning from some beautiful exile, descending from mountain heights where I’d felt happy but uneasy. How could I go back to the home that I had needlessly and wilfully left?

I went on holiday with my wife, on the way we stopped at a campsite managed by our son.

We sit together and eat porridge out of billycans, it smells faintly of burnt wood, and in the evening we sing at the campfire. Lída’s voice carries above everybody else’s, there’s tranquillity in it, it drives out everything alien and evil that still clings to my soul. It’s raining, the fire is smoking, we huddle under a single rubber coat, we touch as if embracing, and it seems to me that my lies have disappeared somewhere without trace and I’ll never return to them. And I wish time would not march on, that it would delay the return of my lover whom, surely, I can’t betray either, I can’t just chase her away. And somewhere deep down within me something is stirring, and amidst the raindrops I can hear her rapid footsteps, I can see her emerging from the dark and hurrying down the stony path among the olives, among the fig trees, among the umbrella pines, I can see her alone, even though I know that she is not alone. In my mind, however, she lives separated from all other people, with the possible exception of the swarthy villager who pours her wine. From that great distance there comes to me the muted roar of the Minotaur. I duck under the onrush of longing. In how many days will she come back to me, if she comes back to me at all?