Ivan Klíma - Love and Garbage

‘In case you don’t get his address there,’ Mrs Venus returned to the youngster, ‘you could try that Dana of his. He might be there.’ And she described for me the house where the woman Dana lived. I’ve no idea how she knew. The house was in the Little Quarter.

The tea with rum had warmed me through nicely and I was now able to set out for the office. My way led me through the familiar little street of family homes, and when I got to the artist’s window I gazed in amazement on a vest which, suspended from a cord, shone brilliantly with its orange colour. Set out behind it into the depths of the room were the stems and stalks of exotic plants. They had been arranged by the artist’s hand to suggest human figures. As I stared into the window I could make out individual likenesses, familiar facial features. A woman with a jockey cap on her head undoubtedly represented Mrs Venus, still without her Red-Indian wrinkles, but already with a sorrowful expression around her mouth. At the same time, however, there was something joyous in her attitude, in the gestures of her hands. Perhaps the artist had caught her just at the moment when she was about to mount the filly she’d nursed back to health. A moment later I identified a sculptural likeness of the foreman, carrying a wounded airman out of an imaginary aircraft and, in doing so, very nearly soaring up himself on the wings of his bravery. I also recognised the captain, his stocky, as yet unbowed figure looked good in a naval uniform. Perhaps, after all, there was in him both the eccentric inventor and a great prankster. But at the beginning of his actions probably stood a childlike dream, a mirage of distant voyages. Mr Rada, on the other hand, stood there in ugly brown convict’s garb and was pouring water from a billy-can onto the head of another convict. His face was frozen at the instant of sudden inner illumination, at the touch of bliss. At that moment I heard the notes of Gershwin’s rhapsody. In the youngster’s expression there was so much concentration in his own playing and so much happiness that he seemed transformed. His clarinet was intended to suggest not so much a musical instrument as a conjurer’s wand which caused rocks to part and transported humans into the realm of their own dreams.

I realised then that all these faces were, in their likeness, both real and unreal. They seemed younger and more attractive, as though nothing of the working of time or life had marked them. At the same time I understood that this exhibition had been prepared by a different artist, by a woman artist. The sculptor here had only let her use his exhibition window and she, surmising the direction of my walking, had set out for me her park, a garden where a person might see his own likeness as he himself wished it to appear at moments of grace. Maybe she had done this to remind me of her, or to demonstrate to me her loving and generous vision of what art should represent of life.

I was still looking for myself among the sculptures, but I didn’t see my own face: there was only a tall pillar, as if hewn from stone, but I couldn’t see its top through the window. I remembered, and I wondered if it might have a smile at the top. But I knew that I wouldn’t find a smile — I’d have to be at peace with myself first.

The figures were now slowly beginning to dissolve before my eyes, and I was surprised to find myself in the grip of nostalgia. A person may think that the fate of people who are sufficiently remote does not touch him. Yet all of a sudden he will catch sight of them in an unexpected situation, will recognise their unsuspected likeness to him, whether it be beautiful or terrible, and he realises that not only have they touched him, but they have actually entered into him. This is what happens so long as life isn’t totally extinct in a person. My father, in a dying flash of consciousness, suffered from the thought that a strange woman could be more wicked than he’d thought possible.

Long ago, in my childhood, he had convinced me that paradise was a human invention. And yet he yearned for it, he yearned for human contact and he yearned for eternity. He wanted to cut himself adrift from the earth and to rise to the sky, to get to the edge of the mystery. Did he realise what he was turning down?

Coming along the opposite pavement was the uniformed patrol. The foppish one, however, was accompanied this time by a policeman I hadn’t seen before. I was prepared to pass them without acknowledging them when the fop suddenly changed direction and made straight for me.

I stiffened, as always. Why had my presence in the world annoyed them this time?

The fop carelessly raised his hand to his cap. ‘Day off today?’ he asked.

‘Sort of,’ I answered evasively.

‘What about the one in the high-water trousers then?’

I said I’d heard the captain had been taken to psychiatry.

‘What else could we do, we didn’t really want to,’ the fop explained. ‘We said to him, stop this nonsense, grandad, in the middle of the night. But instead of pissing off he lit that bottle of his. Would have killed him if we hadn’t nabbed him, his fuse was only one metre!’ he added with professional outrage. ‘Anyway, they’ll let him go, everybody’ll testify that he’s screwy, that he walked about in those ridiculous trousers even in the snow — I ask you!’ He turned to his companion, but he had walked on out of earshot. ‘But d’you know that he put on long trousers that evening, real baggy ones, perfect pantaloons, and a tie as well!’ The fop shrugged his shoulders in amazement and raised two fingers to his cap. ‘He was touched all right,’ he said, tapping his forehead, and walked away.

Sitting behind the desk at the office really was the little idiot, and he didn’t know the youngster’s address, or more correctly refused to know it — he might have had to get up from his chair and look up some file. A smile spread over his fleshy lips — the self-assured smile of a man who had been given power. Power over those who swept up garbage, and hence also over the garbage itself, and hence over the world of things. He explained something to me in his jerkish language but I didn’t understand, we lacked an interpreter.

No matter, I thought to myself in an upsurge of spite, I’ll find the youngster without him! I got on a tram which took me to the Little Quarter.

The spot which Mrs Venus had described was well known to me. It was on the other side of the place at the windows of which I used to look from the little attic I’d visited so often.

I’d frequently had to walk round the building but I’d never taken any notice of it. The walls were thick and the staircase dark. I thought I sniffed the familiar smell of gas.

I was lucky at least that the youngster’s lady friend had a split shift and was therefore at home at this hour. She asked me into the hall. I didn’t know if she was on her own, all other sounds were drowned by a noisy military band, and from somewhere came the rattle of a washing machine.

‘But he’s not here,’ she informed me when I’d explained who I was looking for. She was a bulky, powerful woman of mature years. I couldn’t picture her in the youngster’s embrace. ‘And he won’t come again,’ she declared.

I said I’d got him the drug he’d been waiting for. Perhaps I could leave it with her for when he dropped in.

‘But he won’t be dropping in,’ she said with the finality one uses in talking about the dead. ‘I told him not to come again.’

I asked her where I could find him.

‘I’ve no idea where he could be, he never said where he came from.’ Suddenly she remembered: ‘Didn’t he play somewhere? Maybe those musicians of his could tell you.’

I thanked her. I’d got to the door when she added: ‘He was such a poor little thing, if you ever met him. He’d sit down and just look. Couldn’t even eat anything proper, and as for drink only juice. Once he came in from somewhere, all wet through, I made him a grog, he didn’t tell me he wasn’t allowed to, and he nearly died on me.’