Ivan Klíma - Love and Garbage

The youngster had gone and the waters had closed over him. I didn’t know what to do with his medicine. Maybe the woman who used to sit in the office might help, might at least remember the name of the street or the town he’d come from. But I was in no mood to search for her. I began to suspect that by the time I tracked down the youngster the medicine might have become superfluous.

I left the house. It was midday, the low sun lit up the side of the palace, on the window ledge the pigeons were warming themselves as in the past. They were probably different pigeons, but who can tell them apart?

It suddenly occurred to me that I had nowhere to go, no one to see. Except that I had to arrange for a funeral oration. They’d be having their midday break at the Academy, and what then, what afterwards? Here I was with a medicine I had no use for, all round me people were hurrying whom I had no use for either. My net was suddenly swinging, a few threads snapped, and below me I saw darkness.

My daughter told me about her dream of the end of the world. She was walking through a landscape with her husband, it seemed a vast expanse, bordered only by the horizon. It was clear day. Suddenly the light began to turn yellow, until it was sulphurous, and at that moment the left part of the horizon began to move towards the right part, and as the two parts approached one another the light: faded, it was getting dark, and the earth started trembling. The two of them lay down side by side, closed their eyes and began to pray: Shema Yisrael Adonai elohenu Adonai ekhad. When they opened their eyes again she saw above her the entire universe and in it our sun with its planets, including our earth and the moon. Whoever had seen this, she realised, could no longer be alive. She also realised that no life was left on earth. The horizons collided, the land masses burst and the waters flooded everything. Just then she noticed that among the planets a large fiery-red sharp-edged gambler’s die was orbiting, and also revolving, so she could watch the white dots on its sides, and she wondered who had cast the die, whether it had been the humans themselves or the Eternal Holy One, blessed be his name!

I walked round the palace and entered the little square. I walked over the familiar uneven pavement and pushed the heavy door open. In the hallway I was surrounded by a familiar smell. I climbed the wooden stairs. Waving on a line were nappies, the nappies of some new child. Anyway, I never even saw the child, I had no eyes for her. But the roof of the monastery rose up as before, in so far as it is possible to say that anything can be the same at two different moments in time, and I climbed on towards the attic. The door was adorned on the outside by a poster which used to be there, but the smell of oil and gas still came through all the cracks. The name by the bell-push meant nothing to me.

I didn’t ring. There was no point in it. Even if I’d been able to ring a bell into the past, and she really appeared at the door, what would I say to her? I didn’t have a single sentence prepared, not a single new sentence.

In front of the building stood a small group of tourists, gazing with appropriate interest at the wall of the palace. What can they see there, what can they feel? These walls do not speak to them, they don’t remind them of a single breath, of a single cry or a shed tear. After all, I had something that they didn’t.

Slowly I drifted along the little streets, roughly by the same route that the author I am writing about at the moment would take to the Castle.

What used to fascinate me most about literature at one time was that fantasy knows no frontiers, that it is as infinite as the universe into which we may fall. I used to think that this was what fascinated and attracted me in Kafka. For him a human would be transformed into an animal and an animal into a human, dream seemed to be reality for him and, simultaneously, reality was a dream. From his books there spoke a mystery which excited me.

Later I was to understand that there is nothing more mysterious, nothing more fantastic, than life itself. Whoever exalts himself above it, whoever isn’t content with horrors already reached and passions already experienced, must sooner or later reveal himself as a false diver who, out of fear of what he might discover in the depths, descends no further than into a solidly built basement.

Kafka, too, did not portray anything but the reality of his own life. He presented himself as an animal, or he lay down on his bed in his cleverly constructed murdering machine to punish himself for his guilt. He felt guilty about his inability to love, or at least to love the way he wanted to. He was unable to get close to his father or to come together with a woman. He knew that in his longing for honesty he resembled a flier and his life a flight under an infinite sky, where a flier is always lonely and longs in vain for human contact. The longer he flies the more his soul is weighed down by guilt and forced down towards the ground. The flier can jettison his soul and continue his flight without it — or crash. He crashed, but for a moment at least he managed to rise from the ashes in order, second by second, movement by movement, to describe his fall.

Like everyone who hangs on for a moment above the abyss, or who has risen from the ashes and realises how tenuous his net is, Kafka was purged of anger and hate just as his language was of superfluous words. The author is already standing on the edge of the black hole, yet he still longs to look into another’s eyes in truth and in love, to speak to him in a language which his fall has cleansed of all hatreds and of all vanity.

Anyone longing to become a writer, for even a few moments of his life, will vainly weave fantastic events unless he has experienced that fall during which he doesn’t know where or whether it will come to an end, and unless his longing for human contact awakens in him the strength to rise, purged, from the ashes.

A tension was growing in me, tearing up my thoughts. I needed to do something — to talk, to shout, to cry, to write something, at least to chalk up on the wall the names of those I shall never see again.

I was passing a baker’s shop from which the smell of sweet rolls wafted out. These rolls were baked only at this bakery, a little way from the stone bridge, a little way from our palace. The last time I was in there to buy some was the day before I started street-sweeping. Then, as I entered the bakery, I was racked by longing, I was afraid that the time when I was granted the grace of human contact was coming to an end, and I saw only the edge of the precipice before me. My greatest fear was that I had dragged her to that abyss with me.

At the news stand I bought a jerkish evening paper to see if they’d noticed Dad’s death. I pushed the paper into my pocket and leaned against the stone parapet. Below me, above a little ornamental balcony, was the picture of the Virgin Mary which was said to have been carried here on the waves of a great flood. By my side stood Brokoff’s Turk, with his many-buttoned doublet and with a dog guarding his Christian prisoners, above him the three founders of the Order of the Holy Trinity. Observe, darling, how most of the life is in the dog and in the Turk; animals and heathens have no prescribed gestures, they’re alive, they aren’t saints. Saintliness doesn’t belong to life, it was invented by various cripples who were unable, or afraid, to live and therefore wanted to torture those who knew how to live.

The sun was bright on the roofs of the houses and the almost bare branches of the horse-chestnuts cast a filigree of shadows on the ground. From the bridge came the discontinuous click of footfalls. I thought I could even hear the hum of the weir.

I tore myself away from the parapet. Time was moving on and I had to find a funeral speaker. I cast one last glance down into the neighbourhood where we had sometimes walked together to the nearby park, and just then I saw her. I couldn’t, from my height, make out her face clearly, but I recognised her hurried, life-hungry way of walking. I looked after her, I followed her with my eyes as she passed under the arch of the bridge. I could have let her lose herself again in the distance from which she’d appeared, but I ran down the stairs, caught up with her and uttered her name.