Ivan Klíma - Love and Garbage

I was curious whether it would amuse her to create a similar gallery for herself.

She said she preferred gardens, parks, the sea; and wide open spaces. And she preferred ordinary people to saints.

And whom did she regard as ordinary people?

Everybody else. Saintliness had been invented by those who were afraid of life and real emotions. That’s why they elevated ecstatic rapture to something we should look up to, to something we should regard as a model.

And if she was given the kind of space she wanted, a garden by the seashore, what would she adorn it with?

She was taken aback by my question. She hadn’t thought about it. Certainly with nothing that might give a person a sense of his own poverty, inadequacy or sinfulness.

We found a room for the night in a small hotel; it was built before the war and its tall windows reached almost down to the floor.

Of course there’s something sacred in everyone, she added. She wasn’t thinking of that contrived ecstasy, that baroque gesture, but of something untouchable and unportrayable, the human soul. At moments of enlightenment a person could catch a glimpse of it within himself, he could see his own face as others couldn’t see it. If she were given a garden she’d like to fill it with such shapes that those who came to look at them might see themselves, the way they saw themselves at such an illuminated instant.

What shapes would they be?

The most natural ones. As in that: Prévert poem:

And it may happen to a sweeper

as he waves

his dirty broom

about without a hope

among the dusty ruins

of a wasteful colonial exhibition

that he halts amazed

before a remarkable statue

of dried leaves and blooms

representing we believe

dreams

crimes celebrations lightning

and laughter and again longing

trees and birds

also the moon and love and sun and death…

We spent a long time looking for accommodation for the night. The hotels were closed, or full up, or else taken over by children from ‘nature schools’. In the end we found an inn where, for a bribe, they took us in.

As we stepped into the cold and ill-lit room I tried to embrace her, the way I always embraced her when we found ourselves alone, but she stopped me. She didn’t even let me put our bags in the wardrobe until she had looked into it herself. Then she drew back the discoloured curtains, half-opened the window and sat down in an armchair which groaned even under her slight weight. Can’t you feel something strange here? she asked. But I felt nothing but fatigue.

She became even more restless. I could see that she was listening to something, that she was concentrating on something that was evidently hidden from me. I sat down in the other armchair. Through the open window came alien sounds, someone was starting up a motorbike and a dog was howling in the distance. A silent, sharp-edged patch of light moved across the wall and I realised that I was being gripped by dejection.

At last she stood up. She embraced me and quickly kissed me. Then she asked if I’d mind very much if we left again.

I didn’t think it wise to leave this refuge, knowing that we wouldn’t find anything else in the neighbourhood.

She said that if it came to the worst we could always stay in the open, it would be better than this unhappy place.

I shrugged and picked up the cases again.

In the car she pressed herself against me and begged me not to be angry, surely I knew that she’d never done anything like this before, but there was something evil, something unclean, in that room. Somebody must have died there in terror, without having made his peace, or else have suffered some other great torment.

I told her she’d acted correctly, I wouldn’t wish her to be with me in a place she didn’t feel happy in.

Just before midnight they took pity on us at a mountaineering club hostel. The dormitory was big enough for ten people, but we had it to ourselves. The walls were covered with colour photographs of mountain peaks and outside the window a real mountain towered into the sky. We chose a bed immediately by the window. At last we could embrace.

All of a sudden she burst into tears.

I was used to her sudden fits of crying, but each time I wondered afresh if I was responsible for them.

She kissed me through her tears. No, this time it wasn’t my fault at all, on the contrary, she was grateful to me for showing such understanding and not wishing to stay in that dreadful room. Death had touched her there, and she still couldn’t shake it off. Surely I knew that she was not afraid of dying, she was not clinging to life, never did, but suddenly she’d realised that death would part us.

She attempted to smile. Even though a fortune-teller had told her she’d live to eighty-seven, and even though the lifeline on my palm was long, one day it was bound to happen and then we wouldn’t be seeing each other again, no matter where our souls would go or what fate they’d meet. I embraced her as if trying to carry her in my arms over that river of oblivion which would inevitably divide us.

I’m fine now, she whispered. I feel good with you, here I feel good with you. And she added that she could feel strength and calm issuing from me, that at last I was opening up, listening to my own voice and not just to those around me.

You belong to me regardless, she whispered as she fell asleep; you wouldn’t be here with me if you didn’t belong to me.

And I said nothing, I didn’t reassure her, even though that evening I wanted to be with her, to stay with her, to shield her from the icy waters whose roar I’d managed to hear myself at a moment of total silence. I gazed through the window at the black mass of the mountain and watched the snowflakes driving in the light of a solitary street lamp.

It occurred to me that she had really helped to drag me out of a state in which I was not listening to myself, in which I actually longed to escape from my own voice which had once urged me to honesty. She believed that that voice would lead me to her. How could it be otherwise when we are so often and so completely together?

But I was being called back by that voice to ancient longings which were not linked to her, to a time when my life seemed to me cleaner than it did now.

I looked at her. She was asleep, she was here with me, I could still touch her, still hold her tight, again submit to her voice, to her power. Feel the ecstasy of her proximity. Instead I was in full flight, I was returning to my wife. For one more attempt to be completely with her as I had never managed before, as neither of us had managed before, but as we had both longed to be at one time.

Maybe it will be a vain journey with a hopelessly obstinate longing for a return, for a long-past innocence; I shall be wandering blindly through landscapes which will be ever more parched, where not a single human being will be seen, let alone a close and loved being; what I will find eventually will be that majestic inescapable river, but I shan’t be able to stop. At that point I understood that it was not the river that would divide us, but myself.

She sighed softly in her sleep and I went rigid at the thought that she had been listening to me the whole time. How was I to tell her? If I were the person she wanted to see in me, the person I wanted to be, I’d wake her now and tell her that I was leaving: Farewell, my love, there is no other way, I can’t decide differently even though I love you, you most lovable of all women I’ve ever met. But I didn’t do it, that voice within me was not yet strong enough.

Shortly before nine — we were just getting ready to put our tools into the dustbin recess by the supermarket and to make for the tavern, as was appropriate at that time of day — a garbage truck pulled up alongside us and out jumped Franta, the little idiot. His forage cap at a rakish angle, a red kerchief round his neck, he treated us all to a smile. The foreman walked up towards him but Franta, before saying anything, produced a packet of Benson & Hedges from his pocket, holding it out first to Mrs Venus, then to the foreman and then, one by one, to the rest of us. Only then did he take the foreman aside and talk to him for a while. I could clearly hear him uttering some barely articulated screeches in his castrato’s falsetto.