Ivan Klíma - Love and Garbage

We are lying by each other’s side. It is evening, an autumnal rainy twilight, we are reluctant to tear ourselves away from one another, to get up and flee into discomfort. I kiss her, once more I embrace her. She presses herself to me: suppose we both stayed here until morning?

She’s testing me, and I keep silent.

Anyway, she can’t understand how I can live with that person. She’d heard some things about her, about what she does to her patients, that had made her quite sick.

I don’t wish to end the day with a quarrel, but nevertheless I ask what she’d heard and from whom. But she refuses to give me any details. She’d spoken to somebody who knew my wife well. He’d said that it was criminal to treat people like that.

I try to discover if this is about some drugs my wife has prescribed.

We’re still lying beside one another, but she is so angry she hardly seems to know where she is. Why bring up drugs? She knew nothing about drugs. Perhaps a perverted doctor would also prescribe perverted drugs, but had my wife never told me about that revolting, humiliating play-acting those poor wretches had to go in for? How she compelled them to vomit up their intimate secrets, how she dug about in their beds? Did I really not understand that that woman was a pervert? She’s unable to live for herself, unable to love, to look after a family, keep an eye on her own husband, and so she’s gone in for professional do-goodery. In reality, and in this she was no different from all other do-gooders, she merely got a kick out of the suffering of others, she merely latched on to the lives of those who still managed to have real emotions and were therefore suffering. And, like a leech, she pretended to be helping them. Or did I think that a woman who for ten years or whatever couldn’t tell that her husband had someone on the side, that he was living with her only out of pity, could discover anything about the souls of others?

I tell her it isn’t like that at all, but she starts shouting at me that I shouldn’t stand up for that person. She doesn’t know why, on top of everything that I’m doing to her, she should bother about my wife’s mission. She’d merely like to know if I was really so blind that I couldn’t see that everything those psychologists, psychiatrists and similar psychopaths were doing was perverted, the arrogance of miserable individuals and spiritual cripples who’re telling themselves that they are better than the rest?

Was she still talking about my wife?

We could leave my wife alone now, she didn’t want to waste another second of her time on her. But she begs me to think about what she’s told me, if only for the sake of my writing. I was unlikely to produce anything while by the side of a person who made a living out of dissecting the souls of others, as if they were rats in a laboratory, ripping out all their secrets and then trampling on them.

She has a fit of the shivers, she is transformed before my eyes. Her face which a moment earlier had seemed gentle and loving is now that of a stranger, and it frightens me.

I ought to silence her, somehow douse that flame of hate in her, or flee from it before it singes me too, but how can I flee when that flame is burning because of me?

At last I embrace her to soothe her and she curls up in my arms, she moans in ecstasy, everything drops away from her, the tenderness returns to her features: Do you at least understand that I love you, that I love you more than anything in the world, that I mean you well?

If I don’t do something we’ll both fall into the fire from which there will be no escape.

My darling, she insists, why won’t you realise that we’re made for each other? Tell me, are you happy with me?

I tell her that I am happy with her but I am aware of a tension within me, an unbearable tension pressing on my lungs so I can hardly breathe.

I walk home through the wet streets, as usual at a brisk pace. Always escaping — from whom and to whom? A place with an unmade bed and unswept floors, a place I spend so little time in that dust settles even on my desktop, my home is falling apart and I with it.

My wife enters. I feel I am in a different sphere, where no corrosive flames are flickering.

My wife is neither arrogant nor conceited, nor does she long to take possession of other people’s secrets. If anything she is childishly trusting. She believes hopefully in the perfectibility of things and of people, and her belief has so much determined strength in it that it can perhaps encourage also those who are on the verge of despair.

I walk up to her and embrace her. At that moment my tension vanishes, I can breathe freely.

It’s nice to have you home, she says. I’ve been looking forward to this.

The method of effectively and economically removing human garbage from this world, in a businesslike and precise manner, in the spirit of our revolutionary age, its ideas and aims, is most factually described in his autobiography by the commandant of Auschwitz, Hoess.

The Jews earmarked for liquidation were led away to the crematoria as quietly as possible — the men in one group, the women in another… When the Jews had undressed they stepped into the gas chamber, which was equipped with showers and water pipes, so that they assumed they were entering a bath-house. First the women and children went in, and after them the men… Now and again it would happen that the women, while undressing, suddenly issued bone-chilling shrieks, they would tear their hair and act like persons demented. In that case they were led out quickly and killed by a bullet in the nape of the neck…

The doors were swiftly screwed down and the waiting disinfecters immediately injected cyclon through openings in the roofs. It flowed down to the floor through special tubes, forming the gas instantaneously. Through a little window in the door it was possible to see how those standing nearest to these tubes fell down dead immediately.

Hoess was a victim-maker with a burnt-out soul. He was therefore exchangeable and replaceable, and has indeed been exchanged and replaced a great many times.

The figure of the victim-maker with a burnt-out soul belongs to the world in a revolutionary age. To a world in which the person who in his actions perfectly embodies emptiness and vanity, cruelty and a moral void, is granted the right to regard all those who differ from him as garbage to be swept away, garbage of which he cleanses the world. He is ready to cleanse it of anyone: of Armenians, of kulaks, of gypsies, of counter-revolutionaries, of intellectuals, of Jews, of Ibos, of Kampucheans, of priests, of blacks, of lunatics, of Hindus, of factory owners, of Muslims, of the poor, of prisoners-of-war. One day, perhaps not too far away, they will cleanse it of people altogether. The brooms are becoming ever more efficient. The Apocalypse — that is, the cleansing of the world of human beings and of life altogether — is increasingly becoming a mere technical problem.

Hoess factually describes the flames which licked up to the sky twenty-four hours a day and roasted the corpses of his victims. The flames were so high and so bright that the anti-aircraft command lodged a complaint, and the smoke was so dense and the stench so strong that the population in the whole neighbourhood began to panic. These reasons, he records, led to the rapid design and construction of crematoria. They built two, each with five huge furnaces, and together these were capable of incinerating two thousand murdered units, but that was not enough, so they set up another two incinerators, but even that was not enough. The largest number of persons gassed and incinerated ever achieved in one day, he records, was just under ten thousand.

That was how it was done, and looking at it purely from the technical point of view, it was a very primitive procedure. However, the human spirit has not been idle in this revolutionary age: the flames which the cleaners have at their disposal today are capable of simultaneously incinerating any number of people in their own homes.