Ivan Klíma - Love and Garbage

During the war filth descended upon us: literally and figuratively it engulfed us just like death, and sometimes it was difficult to separate the two. They certainly merged in my mother’s mind, death and garbage; she believed that life was tied to cleanliness — literally and figuratively.

The war was over, we were looking forward to living in love and peace, but she was struggling for cleanliness. She wanted to know our thoughts and she was horrified by our boots, our hands and our words. She inspected our library and stripped it of the books which might make our minds unclean, and she bought a large pot in which she boiled our underwear every day. But even so she felt revolted by us and forever sent us back to wash our hands; she would touch other people’s possessions and doorknobs only when wearing gloves.

Sometimes at night I’d hear her sighing and lamenting. She was mourning the relatives she’d lost in the war, but she was surely also lamenting the dirtiness of the world she had to live in. In our home, therefore, cleanliness and loneliness reigned. Dad hardly ever came home, he’d found a job in Plzeň so he could breathe more freely. When he turned up on Sundays, he’d walk barefoot to his study over a path of newspapers, but even that moment of crossing the hall was enough for it to be filled with a smell in which mother recognised the stench of some unknown trollop. In vain did Dad try to wash it off, in vain did he help to cover the carpet with fresh newspapers.

I was quite prepared for father not to come back one day, for him to remain with that strange malodorous woman of his, and I wouldn’t have blamed him for it. But he turned up afresh every weekend, and sometimes he even urged me not to judge mother: she was a good woman, only sick, and not everyone had the strength to come unmarked through what we’d had to endure.

Then they locked Dad up again. The pain inflicted on my mother by others at least partly diverted her from the pain she inflicted upon herself.

A sewage service truck overtook our gang and pulled up a little way in front of us. Its crew exchanged greetings with our foreman and began to examine the nearest drain grating.

‘What can they be looking for?’ I asked Mrs Venus.

‘They’re just making sure their sewer isn’t all blocked up,’ she explained. ‘We’re not allowed to tip anything into the sewer. One day young Jarda here,’ she pointed to the youngster with the girlish face, ‘threw some flowers down and just then their inspector came driving past and wanted to fine him fifty crowns on the spot. And all the time they’re rolling in it, just like the rat-catchers!’

‘Don’t talk to me about rat-catchers,’ the foreman joined in. ‘In Plzeň underneath the slaughterhouse the rats went mad and came up through the sewer gratings at night and ran about the streets like squirrels, squealing. They were desperately looking for a rat-catcher, they were actually ready to give him twenty grand a month, but there were no takers because it was obvious that if a rabid rat bit you, you’d be finished! I’ve a mate in Plzeň, from back in the para corps, and he got annoyed and said: “I’m not going to shit myself over a few mice!” So he got a diving suit and a sheet of asbestos rubber to throw over himself if the rats attacked him.’

‘They’d do that?’ I expressed surprise.

‘Sure they would. I told you they were rabid. You chase after them, but when they’ve nowhere to escape to they’ll turn and go for you. If that happens you lie down, throw the sheet over you, and they’ll run straight over you. So that’s what my mate did. Once he was under that sheet nothing could happen to him, but as those rats trampled over him he shat himself from fear.’

A few days later she sent me a card to say she would come round to see me, giving the clay and the hour, and hoping she’d find me in.

She turned up as promised. Outside the window the autumnal clouds were driving and the room was once again in twilight. I don’t know whether a similar glow issued from me too. A person never sees his own light in another person’s eyes, or only at moments of special grace. But maybe she’d seen something after all, because otherwise she wouldn’t have wished to meet me again, she wouldn’t have voluntarily set out on a pilgrimage which, in moments of anger, she was to proclaim had led her only to pain. I have myself sometimes been amazed that she had come so close to me.

For the first few weeks we’d walked in the countryside, through forests and parks. She knew the names of plants, even the most exotic ones, as well as where they came from. And she led me through those places, as if through the land of the Khmers, and along the majestic river Ganges, through the crowds in stifling streets, she even led me through the jungle and into the ashram so I could listen to what a wise guru had to say about the right way to live. She told me about her family, which included industrialists as well as National Revival schoolmasters, a wanderer who settled on the western slopes of the Andes, and a romantic aunt who, when she failed to keep the lover she longed for, decided to starve herself to death. There was also a highly gifted law student who could reel off the whole statute book by heart but who tired of the law and turned to philosophy and who, when he had irrefutably established the vanity of human endeavour, sat down and wrote his philosophical testament, whose conclusion was that happiness was just a dream and life a chain of suffering, and directly over that philosophical testament he shot himself through the head, so that the blood pouring from his wound put several final stops under his writings.

Everyone on her father’s side of the family, she explained, had a touch of genius, an inflexible will, and clear-sightedness — her father most of all. She often spoke of him to me and, even though I had never seen him, I was reminded of my own father, not only because he was also a graduate engineer but because he too knew no greater happiness than his work, than the calculations in which no one was allowed to disturb him, and because he was strong, healthy and capable of cheerfulness once he decided to set aside that work.

I would have liked to tell her something similar about my ancestors, but I didn’t know their stories. I knew that some of them had come from far away, but I don’t know whether that was two hundred or a thousand years ago. I assume that even then they knew how to read, though it was a different script from the one I can read now, and that they prayed in a language of which I no longer understand a single word. I don’t know what they did for a living. Both my grandmothers had come to Prague and tried to trade there but failed. My grandfathers too came from the country. My father’s father had studied chemistry and worked as an engineer in a sugar refinery down in the Hungarian part of the monarchy. There, when my father was only eleven, he fell under a plough drawn by a rope and was fatally injured. My mother’s father, on the other hand, lived to a ripe old age: he’d been a clerk at the law courts and at the age of eighty he lived to experience the second great war as well as having a yellow star put on him and being forcibly deported to a ghetto. Even of this stocky old man with his grey, slightly tobacco-stained moustache I was unable to report anything remarkable, except possibly that, like his ancestors, he stubbornly believed in the coming of the Messiah, but for him that meant the mirage of the socialist revolution. That mirage helped him survive the blows of fate, the death of his wife, the loss of his home, his humiliation, hunger and the hardships of imprisonment. More and more often in that unhappy place he would preach to anyone who would listen to him, and more and more often I would be the only listener to remain. He too urged me not to believe in a god whom people had invented, whom the masters had fobbed off onto the poor so they should more readily bear their fate. As he grew older his litanies became an unchanging prayer which I knew by heart and to which I no longer had to listen. And then one night I awoke. Everyone else was sleeping, and from the corner of the room where grandfather slept I could hear a strange muttering. I recognised the old man’s voice and the plaintive intonation of a prayer spoken in the language he still knew but of which I no longer understood anything, a prayer addressed to God. I did not stir and listened with amazement to the voice which seemed to come from a great distance, from some long-past time. That was the first time I realised that the depth of the human soul is unfathomable.