Ivan Klíma - Love and Garbage

She stopped. For a while she stared at me as if I were an apparition. ‘Where have you sprung from?’ she asked, the blood rushing into her face.

I tried to explain that I’d got a drug for someone but that that person had vanished from the surface of the earth, in fact not even his former woman friend knew where I might find him.

‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘one instant a person’s here, and the next instant it’s as if he’d never existed!’ She looked at me. How many reproaches did she have prepared for this moment? Or was she, on the contrary, about to persuade me that I’d made a mistake, that I’d betrayed myself?

‘What about your Dad?’ she asked instead. ‘I prayed for him,’ she said when I told her, and simultaneously her eyes embraced and gently kissed me.

Suddenly I felt the touch of time, the time on the far side of the thin wall. She was sitting with me in the hospital waiting room, then we walked out, snow was falling.

I quickly asked about her daughter and about her work.

Just like me, she said, I was more interested in her work than in her. But she wasn’t doing anything at the moment. She’d discovered the joys of laziness. Sometimes she’d read the cards for friends or she’d botch up some figure from her dreams. Some of them still bore my likeness.

We walked along the little streets where we used to walk so often, and as always she talked to me as we walked. In the summer she’d made the acquaintance of an old woman herbalist and had got a lot of recipes from her. For days on end she’d collected and dried herbs — besides, what was she to do with her time when I hadn’t been in touch even once? If I was ever in pain or if my soul felt heavy I might phone her: she could mix me a tisane — I obviously wasn’t: interested in anything else.

We stopped at the edge of the park. I still had to find a funeral speaker. ‘You’ve never ceased to exist for me!’

She could have asked, as she’d done before, what good that was to her, or what use, or she could have complained about the sorrow I’d caused her, about how I’d hurt her. But she didn’t wish to torment me at that moment. She only said: ‘That’s good!’ And she added: ‘Maybe our souls will meet somewhere. We’ll meet in some future life. Provided you don’t find an excuse at the last moment.’ We briefly embraced and kissed goodbye, and she walked away at her hurried pace.

I couldn’t move. I didn’t even tell her that I’d never intended to hurt her, nor did I ask her if she understood that I hadn’t done anything against her, that it was just that I was unable to return to her in this halfway manner, to be a little and to not be a little, I can only honestly be or honestly not be — like herself.

She stopped at the corner. She looked back, and when she saw me at the spot where she’d left me her hand rose up like the wing of a featherless little bird and from the distance touched my forehead.

At last I moved.

On the path that went to the bank of the Čertovka stream a few figures were busying themselves in their familiar orange vests. With slow, seemingly weary movements, the movements I knew so well, they were sweeping the withered leaves into small heaps.

Down there we stood and kissed in a long embrace.

A fine thing! A fine thing!

It occurred to me that I put on that orange vest for a time because I was longing for a cleansing. Man longs for a cleansing but instead he starts cleaning up his surroundings. But until man cleanses himself he’s wasting his time cleaning up the world around him.

In the middle of the swept path lay the brownish lobed leaf of a horse-chestnut. Perhaps they’d overlooked it or perhaps it had just sailed down from above. I picked it up and for a while studied its wrinkled veins. The leaf trembled in my fingers as if it were alive.

I was still full of that unexpected meeting.

People search for images of paradise and cannot find anything other than objects from this world.

But paradise cannot be fixed in an image, for paradise is the state of meeting. With God, and also with humans. What matters, of course, is that the meeting should take place in cleanliness.

Paradise is, above all else, the state in which the soul feels clean.

I sat down on a bench and took the evening paper from my pocket. I scanned the big headlines, which repeated hundred-year-old untruths, and the lesser headlines, which dealt with yesterday. Needless to say, there was no mention of Dad.

Gently I took the pages apart, and with precise movements, which seemed to come to me automatically, I pleated them into an elaborate aeroplane.

I walked to the river, spread my legs, and aimed the nose of my paper flying machine obliquely at the sky. It rose up, perhaps assisted by the updraught from the water or perhaps just because, thanks to Dad’s instruction, I had made it particularly well, but it was quite a while before it abandoned its upward course, and I, following it with my eyes, saw the blue of the sky and a few seagulls and above them a white cloud gilded by the sun. Then my glider began to lose height and circling down it settled on the water. I watched it slowly and irretrievably floating away into the distance.

Remember that a man never cries, unexpectedly came my father’s voice in the silence around me.

I’m not crying, I said, and from somewhere deep down within me unexpectedly came a sound of laughter like that which, in my childhood, used to make me happy.

1983–1986

Ivan Klíma was born in 1931 in Prague, where he still lives, and was editor of the journal of the Czech Writer’s Union during the Prague Spring. He is the author of many plays and novels including Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light, The Ultimate Intimacy , and, most recently, No Saints or Angels .