Tomáš Zmeškal - A Love Letter in Cuneiform

“Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

“I thought you were going to tell me about faith and all that.”

“Ach. I apologize. I didn’t realize where it would take me. Memories, you know? It’s been a lot of years.”

“I don’t think I want that fish anymore,” Jiří said again.

“So order something else.”

“I really am interested, you know. It’s just that I missed breakfast.”

“Oh, I understand. But you have to eat something. Otherwise your sugar will drop.”

“So then you met up with her later?”

“I went to consult with a colleague about something one day, and the conversation somehow ended up turning to Klára.”

“So what did he tell you?”

“People there are closer to each other, and I think nature is also closer to them. Have you ever seen a wolf? I mean in nature, not just a picture or on TV.”

“Once. At the zoo. Why?”

“My colleague told me what had happened to her. She came from a nearby village, good family, had just finished high school in the district capital. The principal was going to recommend her for college in Bratislava, on the other side of the country, all the way down in the south. Having a college degree doesn’t mean that much anymore, but back then, you know, if you were an ordinary person from a little village, where war blew through once every hundred years and then everyone just forgot about you for the next hundred, it meant a lot. Apparently Klára and her fiancé had been talking about getting married, and that winter they went to a party. Some people say they had a falling-out, that she and her boyfriend had a fight. But I also heard that Klára and her cousin cooked the whole thing up in advance, and then again other people say Klára got mad at her boyfriend for dancing with one of her relatives more than was appropriate.”

“I’m going to switch to the svíčková ,” Jiří said. “How about you?”

“I think I’ll stick with the fish.”

“So how did that woman or girl end up in the hospital?”

“The girl — she was still a girl at the time. Though as I said, people didn’t remember too well what actually happened between Klára and her fiancé. To make a long story short, Klára left the party sometime around midnight. The village she lived in was a few miles away. It was winter, which out there always meant snow. Snow and cold. Bitter cold. People here can’t even imagine. Anyway, sometime after she left, her fiancé found out, so he left too, and went after her. But they never made it home. As midnight came and went, Klára’s mother began to get worried. The only phone in the village belonged to the chairman of the Unified Peasant Cooperative. When Klára’s mother woke him up, he called the pub where the dance was being held, but all they could tell him was that Klára and her fiancé had both already left. Their families and friends organized a search party with the border guards, the forest workers, and the gamekeeper. The soldiers brought machine guns, the workers took blowtorches. Nothing else works on wolves. The only thing they fear is fire. The two groups started down the path, one on each side. In each group there were a few border guards with machine guns and a few men with blowtorches and shotguns. Along the way one of the groups got attacked by a wolf pack in the dark. They fended them off with the blowtorches, spraying flames at them, but the longer the flames, the faster the fuel ran out. Everyone stuck together, and the soldiers went through several rounds of ammunition, firing blindly into the dark. It’s hard to hit a pack of wolves circling you in the dark. There’s always the risk you’ll shoot another man. Flames shed light, but also shadows. Not to mention the confusion, which a pack of wolves knows how to take advantage of. They found Klára up in a tree, clinging to a branch. The bark of the trunk was shredded bare. Her boyfriend, or what was left of him, was under her, at the bottom. Two men climbed up to try to get her down, but she just kept going higher and higher. She wasn’t even screaming, they said. Just grunting. Her knuckles were swollen from the cold and from gripping onto the branches for so long. Her fingernails were torn off. They had to tie her up once they brought her down. She couldn’t tell the difference between people and animals anymore. They made a makeshift stretcher out of branches and tied her onto it. The blowtorches were running low on fuel, so they had to run all the way to the nearest village. When it got light, a section of the border guards returned, more heavily armed, along with the workers and the gamekeeper to collect the remains of Klára’s fiancé, but they found nothing. The wolves had beaten them to it. Later, the boy’s family held a symbolic funeral, burying just a few bloody rags in place of his body. So that girl, that was Klára.”

Jiří set his fork down next to his knife on the plate, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and slid his plate to the edge of the table. Along the way it bumped into the pepper shaker, but he caught it before it could tip over. He picked the plate back up with both hands and slowly set it down at the edge of the table. For a while, neither of them said anything.

“Want some coffee?” Antonín said finally, breaking the silence.

“If I drank alcohol, I’d have a shot, but I guess coffee will have to do.”

“You don’t drink at all?” Antonín said.

“Oh, normally I do, but not today.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a fast day today.”

“That didn’t even occur to me, you know? Everyone thinks that God wears their colors. I’m a Sparta supporter, and I couldn’t stand the thought that God might root for, say, Slavia. When I still believed, I just assumed God was Catholic. It didn’t seem strange to me. But once I found out what I just told you, I stopped believing. It put a crack in my faith.”

“The devil’s main job, after all, is to break our faith,” Jiří said.

“Oh, of course, but from what I’ve read of Ignatius of Loyola, I thought the devil disguised himself as things that were seductive and inviting. Things and situations where it wouldn’t even cross our minds to think about God. And I’m telling you straight out, don’t try to pull the Book of Job on me.”

“So why do you think it happened?”

“I couldn’t come up with a reason, that’s the problem. Not a one. God let it happen and just left them there. I thought about it a lot, but couldn’t come up with an answer. My God had ceased to be benevolent, even slightly, and instead was infinitely merciless.”

“Sometimes we don’t understand the ways of God’s providence.”

“Wrong! We nearly never understand! Trying to reconcile Tertullian of Carthage with Origen the eunuch is a hell of a job, my friend.”

“ Credo quia absurdum , ‘I believe because it is meaningless,’ that was Tertullian,” Jiří replied. “ Credo ut intelligam , ‘I believe so that I may understand,’ was Saint Anselm of Canterbury, not Origen.”

“Really? I can’t keep track anymore,” Antonín said. “Is that right?” he asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “‘And the son of God died; it is believable because it is foolish. And buried, he rose from the dead; it is certain because it is impossible’?”

“Yes: Credo quia absurdum .”

“But literally what it means is, ‘I believe because it is absurd.’ That’s what I’m saying. I was stripped of faith by my God. Absurdly stripped of my absurd belief.”

“Maybe the way you’ve been thinking about it is wrong.”

“What else can it be except wrong … and imperfect? Given that we’re only human.”

“Well, of course, but …”

“In the end, after her life went on, I had to admit your uncle was right.”