Ivan Klíma - Love and Garbage

I recognise the forehead, which is as high as her own, and the smile too is familiar. And that bronze youngster hanging his head, in which there is an opening for a long-stemmed flower, was a fellow student who’d committed suicide, she’d told me about him. At that time she’d wanted to make portraits of all the members of her family she knew anything about. Many of them were still in her basement workshop. Then she says: That gallery owner is inviting me to the private view and you’re coming with me.

How can I go to Switzerland?

I don’t know how, she says, but I do know that you’ll see my exhibition.

As I get up to leave she neither holds me back nor sees me out, she wants to get on with her work.

I see her every other day, that’s what she wants. I always find her at work. A new figure would gaze at me out of stone or clay eyes, and in its gaze I’d recognise a familiar passion. My lover goes on working for a little longer, while I fry up something simple for lunch, then she puts down her tools, takes off her stained smock and washes her hands. Now she doesn’t want to think of work any more, only, just before we embrace, she has to tell me what she’s been thinking about, who she’d had a beer with last night, what they’d told her at the agency this morning, the one that is supposed to negotiate her exhibition, and finally she must tell me her dream. Her day is so rich that she will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

I admire her. I’m sure I’d be spending weeks before the stand without finishing more than one or two things.

How can you be so sure?

Because I know how long it takes me to think up a sentence before it more or less satisfies me.

That’s because you’re tense, she explains to me. You try to master everything by your intellect and your strength. You don’t know how to submit to life.

She doesn’t force herself to do anything. What she needs most is a sense that she is free. If she doesn’t feel like work she’ll go out with a girlfriend and they’ll get drunk, or else she comes here, she sits down, she doesn’t want anything, she isn’t driven anywhere by her thoughts or her imagination, she just gazes as if she were gazing at the clear sky, into pure water, into emptiness. She realises that nothing need happen, and that’s also all right by her. Or else some shape suddenly appears before her, a face, a likeness, maybe just a coloured blotch which may take on form or else dissolve. She can’t tell where they come from, these shapes don’t seem to come from within her, she feels she’s only a mediator, the executor of some higher will. She then executes whatever she has to, and she feels good while doing it. She doesn’t reflect on what it will turn into. That, she feels, is not her concern but the concern of whoever put that vision into her. If I could write like that, without torturing myself beforehand about the outcome, without seeing some mission before me, I’d also feel good.

But I can’t work the way you do, I’m different.

You don’t know what you’re like, she says with assurance.

And who does?

I do, because I love you.

So what am I like?

You’re more passionate than rational.

I don’t know whether I am passionate. I know that she is. Her passion will destroy us both one day.

Next time I found her in tears amidst fragments of clay. The stand was empty.

What happened?

Nothing. What should have happened? Better leave again, I’m out of sorts today!

Has anybody hurt you?

Everybody’s hurting me, but that’s not the point.

So what is?

How could I ask? Didn’t I understand, couldn’t I see? All we were doing was pointless, nothing but a self-important and vain playing at art. Nothing but desperate caricaturing and endless repetition of what had already been repeated a thousand times. And if she’d now and then managed to catch something more, to realise some higher clue, who’d detect it, who’d notice it? Why did she have to choose this particular occupation, such a useless, joyless and exhausting drudgery? She hated all art! She didn’t want to exhibit anywhere, she didn’t want to show anyone her fumblings. There was no sense in it!

What about Barlach’s angel?

Yes, Barlach’s angel — but they’d had it removed, hadn’t they? He survived only because angels are immortal. She’s laughing through her tears. If you’d sit for me I’d make you a pair of wings and maybe you’d be immortal too.

I’ll sit for you.

Better lie down with me!

We embrace and she forgets all her sorrow. She looks forward to our love-making on the shores of Lake Geneva.

Three days later the organisation, or rather agency whose task it is to organise, in other words authorise, exhibitions abroad informed her that it would not handle her exhibition.

I want to know why she’s been refused but she only shrugs.

I suspect that it might have been because of me.

It’s possible, darling, they’re envious of me because I have you, they know that nobody loves them so much.

However, we composed a letter of protest to the authorities; she’ll probably not send it off. She then went out to see her fortune-teller friend to discover what the cards had to say about the chances of her appeal. Told that they weren’t too good, she decided to hold an exhibition in Kutná Hora instead of Geneva.

We were still walking in the direction where I expected the depot to be. The trees all round were more and more heavily festooned with tattered pieces of plastic. At the base of the miserable little tree-trunks dirty crumpled bags were tumbling about, and whenever there was a gust of wind the yellowed pages of some jerkish newspaper rose up from the ground like monstrous emaciated birds and weakly flapped their mutilated wings.

Franz Kafka became a sacrificial victim by his own decision. It does not seem as if those around him were as anxious to sacrifice him as he was himself. Time and again he recorded the state of mind experienced by the victim. With few exceptions the victim resists, and even thinks up elaborate means of self-defence, but his tragic end is unalterable. In this respect Kafka certainly anticipated the fate of the Jews in our age of upheaval. His youngest sister met her end in a gas chamber. That is where he would probably have met his end too if he hadn’t been lucky enough to die young.

Jewish authors, such as Kafka’s contemporary Werfel, or later Bellow and Heller, keep returning to the theme of the sacrificial lamb with an obsession that is possibly subconscious and possibly prophetic. The theme of the victim of sacrifice and the person staging sacrifices, of an increasingly random victim and of the victimiser prepared to drag to the altar of his god any number of human beings, if not indeed the whole of mankind, is increasingly becoming the theme of the present-day world, of a mankind that once believed in an earthly paradise and in the beneficial effect of revolutions in leading it there.

At last we emerged from the forest. Before us, behind a high wire fence, we saw a mountain with many ridges, crevices and humps. Its slopes glistened here and there as the fragments of plastic reflected the sun’s rays. Along its long crest a yellow bulldozer was moving, its scoop pushing a multicoloured mass before it. From one side a road led up to the mountain. Access, however, was barred by a red-and-white striped barrier. Just then an orange dumpster came hurtling out of the forest, an invisible guard raised the barrier, and the vehicle entered the enclosure. As it slowly climbed up the slope of the artificial mountain some fat crows rose up from both sides of the path, beating their massive wings. On the crest the garbage truck stopped, its body bright in the sunlight. Then it began to evacuate its entrails. No sooner had it begun to move off than a group of little figures rushed out from some invisible hiding place. I counted thirteen of them — if Daria had been here she’d have said an unlucky number! — men, women and children. The grown-ups had rakes in their hands, and pitchforks and poles fitted with hooks, or else they were pushing discarded prams. They all pounced on the fresh rubbish and began to dig around in it as if in a race; they flung items from one pile onto another, a few items they picked out and put aside for themselves, and others, which were evidently still useful for something or other, i.e. for sale, they flung straight into handcarts or prams.