Ivan Klíma - Love and Garbage

I didn’t know, and she said triumphantly: ‘Fifty thousand!’

‘Nonsense,’ came the youngster’s voice from behind me. ‘You’re making it up. That would be several regiments!’

‘But that’s what it was, Jarda dear. And all of them had come to a sticky end!’ Mrs Venus laughed as if she had just said something very funny.

Then one day before Christmas we first made love in a tiny attic room with small windows and thick walls under the roof of a baroque building. Facing it was a noble town house with enormous windows on the sills of which sat some freezing pigeons. There was a smell of oil in the room, as well as the faint odour of gas, and though it was midday the room was quite dark. The small windows were moreover partly obstructed by a statue of Saint Stephen the Martyr. The restoration of the statue was nearly complete, but my lover had stopped working on it, she didn’t like having her hand controlled by someone else’s instructions.

I wanted her to enjoy our love-making. I was thinking of it so much I was trembling with excitement, and she was trembling too. After all, she had a husband at home, and a little girl, but now she curled up in my embrace and let herself be carried to a place from which there would be no return. So I carried her, and at each step I felt her getting heavier until I could scarcely drag her. I was afraid, we were frightened of one another we wanted each other so much. The big surprised bed creaked at every movement and we tried to drown the sound by whispering tender words. We looked each other in the face and I was amazed by the way she was being transformed, she was softening and taking on some ancient, the most ancient, shape. Perhaps it was the forgotten shape of my mother or a recollection of my first visions and dreams of the woman I would love one day.

I got back home late at night and went to bed by my wife’s side. She suspected nothing and snuggled up to me. She was still as trusting as a child. When I closed my eyes I realised that sleep wouldn’t come to me. In the garden a bird was piping, trains were rushing along in the distance, and out of the darkness before me, like a full moon, there rose the face of the other woman: calm, beautiful, as if it had always been concealed within me, and yet motionless like the faces of her statues. Thus she gazed down on me, suspended in space beyond all things and beyond all time, and I felt something like nostalgia, unease, longing and sadness.

There was a lot of snow that winter. She’d take her little girl to her piano lessons. I’d walk behind them, without the child being aware of me. I’d sink into the freshly fallen snow because I wasn’t looking where I was going, I was watching her walking: there was in her walk something of an ill-concealed hurry, or maybe of an eagerness for life. She was holding her little girl’s hand and only occasionally did she glance behind. Even at that distance I could feel her love.

At other times we’d set out across the snow-covered fields not far from the city. Below us was an abandoned farmstead and a forest, above us the sky was frosty under a cover of mist. We stopped, she leaned her back against me, I embraced her — a little plump in her winter coat — and at once we were amidst eternity, lifted out of time, lifted from horrors and joys, from the cold and the blowing wind, and she said softly: Is it possible we love each other so much?

On the pond, just as in a Brueghel painting, children were skating. The inn was almost deserted, a fire was crackling in the huge fireplace, and a picture showed a farmhouse on fire, with gallant firemen fighting it. The innkeeper’s wife brought us some hot whisky, turned a knob, and the fire in the picture was lit from behind by the red flames.

Daria was as pleased as a child: So many fires, not counting the two of us.

I really feel the warmth enveloping me, I feel it inside me, I feel like a seed in the spring soil, bursting and struggling towards the light.

She reads my thoughts and says: You see, now at last you’ll achieve something!

What makes you think so?

Because you’re only now beginning to live.

She believes that I have not lived until now. That I’d been fettered, shaken by frost, that the springs within me produced only a few cold drops. She adds: You’ve only lived with your head, but what you are doing you can’t do with your head alone. Maybe you can control an engine with just your head. She promises to teach me to listen to the hidden voices.

I want to know what I shall teach her.

Surely she’d be listening to those voices with me. Then she says: I’ll be listening to you, I don’t need to learn anything now, I need to be with you!

The innkeeper’s wife switches the lit picture off again and we walk out into the cold dusk. Before parting we kiss; we kiss as if we had nothing ahead of us and nothing behind us, as if we wanted to squeeze our whole lives into those kisses. Then she asks: Have you ever loved anyone truly?

Of course she doesn’t wish to hear about my wife or about my children, or about my father, she doesn’t wish to hear about anyone living, she wants to hear that she alone is the one I have truly loved. But perhaps I am mistaken, perhaps she is asking out of anguish, she is surprised that I am leaving her already, why don’t I take her away with me somewhere, she fears betrayal, she suspects in me spaces which frighten her.

My wife also used to suspect them. During attacks of sudden self-pity she used to maintain that I was unable to get close to her, that in my childhood, when death was ceaselessly hovering all round me, I had suffered an injury to my soul and that I have never recovered from it.

What feelings does a person experience in a place where death spreads his wings more often than birds?

There were a lot of girls in the fortress ghetto, I talked to them, I walked past them, I was scarcely twelve. Amidst all that horror, how could it occur to me that something might happen to alarm her, even though armed guards, hunger and deportations were all around us?

They had only brought her in at the beginning of 1943. I met her, all terrified, in one of the corridors of our barracks: she was lost. She asked me the way, and I — an old inhabitant — effortlessly conducted her to the door of the room she’d been assigned to.

On the way she just managed to tell me where she came from, that she had no father, and that she was afraid there.

I reassured her that there was no need to be afraid, that it was possible to live there — and besides, if she wished, I would protect her.

She said she would never forget my kindness.

The next day I collected her and took her to meet my friends; none of them would have hurt her and there was no need for me to protect her against them — but I realised that she saw things differently, that she needed my presence, that with me she felt safer.

She was the same age as myself, and she differed from all the other girls in that she had fair hair, the colour of rye or wheat. We were never alone together, away from the company of our playmates, but I always tried to get as close to her as possible. We also lent each other the few books we owned, but we dared not go any further, I dared not go any further; and yet everything was suddenly changed, life was moving between different milestones, no longer from morning to evening or from meal to meal, but from meeting to meeting. The fortress ran out of salt, the potatoes were black and rotten and the bread was mouldy, but I didn’t care; they took grandfather to the camp hospital and we guessed that he’d never come back, but I scarcely took it in. The fortress corridors, always so overcrowded, seemed empty when she walked alongside me, and the tiny space allotted to us grew wide, or rather it was enclosed in itself and thus became infinite.