Ivan Klima - The Ultimate Intimacy

Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead and turned cold; Daniel realized he was beginning to fall. Everything started to rush away from him. And tomorrow he had a date with Bára; how would he get there? He groped around him for something to hold on to.

4

Hana

This is Daniel's fourth day in intensive care, so Hana returns to the hospital, this time as a volunteer nurse. The heart attack was fairly extensive, affecting almost a quarter of the cardiac muscle, but the doctors are satisfied with the progress of his recovery so far.

Hana sits by Daniel's bed holding his hand and trying to appear calm to boost his confidence and strength. Each day she tells him again how everyone is praying for him, at home and in the congregation, how people call the manse asking how he is. Hana smiles at Daniel, strokes his hand and tells him for what must be the hundredth time already that everything will be fine, his heart will have a little scar, but otherwise it will be back to normal and serve him for a long time to come, except that he'll have to take care not to overdo things, and when he comes home he'll have to have a proper rest. After all, he has scarcely had a holiday in recent years.

Daniel gazes at her in silence. It's as if old age has crept into his

blue-grey eyes, or rather, as Hana has come to know so well during her thirty years in the hospital, it's as if an intense weariness stared out of them.

Hana then reports on how the rebuilding work at the manse is progressing; the potter s wheel is already installed and the joiner is putting up shelving. Máša comes to the manse every other day; she has been looking out books and already has several boxes full, most of them for children.

Daniel asks after Masa's children.

There will be a new court hearing next week and Dr Wagner believes Máša will get the children back. She will have to declare that the paper in which she relinquished the children was signed under pressure from her husband. Even a few weeks ago she would have been incapable of declaring anything of the sort, but at least now she has recovered somewhat from the shock of her husbands abandoning her. Hana always makes a point of talking to her about it in order to give her encouragement.

Finally, Hana tells him about Magda and Marek who can't wait for Daniel to be moved on to the general ward where they will be able to visit him. Then she dries up. She is not sure what interests Daniel at this moment. She fears that her concerns may seem remote to him, that other peoples worries must seem preposterous, seeing that his body and particularly his soul are contending with the weariness that Hana can detect in his eyes. She ought to do something to cheer him up but she doesn't know what. So she tells him how much she misses him. She says, 'I love you, Dan. You're the person I'm fondest of. When you come home I'll take care of you and make sure everything's all right. We'll take a trip down to my folks perhaps, or anywhere you like.'

Tears suddenly appear in Daniel's eyes and his lips move silently.

'Were you wanting to say something?' Hana asks. She wipes away the tears and hands him a glass of tea to moisten his lips.

Daniel asks, for the first time, 'How did it happen?'

And Hana tells him how he was a long time coming to lunch and how she went down to the workshop and found him lying by the window, groaning.

'I got an awful fright,' Hana says. Her immediate thought was that it might be his heart so she called the emergency services. 'They brought you here and you've been here ever since.'

'That's what I thought,' Daniel says and closes his eyes.

'I was at your side all the first night, but you didn't know anything about it.'

Before going, Hana pours fresh tea into his glass and changes the water in the vase containing roses that Daniel probably doesn't even notice.

Then she gives Daniel a kiss and promises to come again in the afternoon.

'What's the time now?' Daniel asks her.

Hana says it is nearly noon. She just wants to check that Magda is safely home from school and give the workmen something to eat.

'You don't have to come,' Daniel says. 'They are taking good care of me here and I'm getting better, aren't I? You said so yourself.'

'No, I want to be with you!'

At home she finds everything as it should be. Magda is chatting with the joiner, who is having a beer. Magda is scarcely aware of her mother as she tells the joiner how two boys in her class lay down in the middle of the street and were almost run over by a lorry. 'The driver leapt out of the cab. .'

'Aren't you even going to ask how Dad is?'

'I can tell he's better,' Magda says.

'How can you tell?'

'You'd be crying otherwise. And what did Dad say?'

'He said he was looking forward to seeing you all.'

'So are we,' she says and gets ready to finish her story.

The joiner is looking for some drawings that he was talking to Daniel about, but Daniel hadn't had a chance to give them to him.

Hana promises to try and find them. She goes to Daniel's office; the desk is locked and there is nothing resembling drawings or plans lying on it or on the shelves. Then it dawns on her that Daniel would probably have taken all his things home, since he had handed the office over to Marie on the very Sunday that it happened.

So Hana goes up to Daniel's room. Here too the desk is locked, but a bunch of his keys remains in the flat. One by one Hana unlocks the drawers in which there are stacked dozens of labelled files. Hana has no idea what the drawings are supposed to look like so she looks for a file with a label saying something like DIACONAL CENTRE, but finds nothing of the sort. The best thing will be to ask Daniel in the afternoon.

In the very bottom drawer, beneath all the files, lies a black notebook without a label. Hana opens it almost involuntarily and recognizes Daniels handwriting, and her eye just happens to fall on her own name. She cannot resist the temptation even though she's in a hurry, and she reads how Daniel could not relate his dreams to her. Then she turns over several pages at random and discovers an unfamiliar woman's name.

Hana sits down at the desk and reads Daniel's diary, all about her husband making love to some unknown female. Hana's heart thumps so hard that she feels she is about to suffocate. She tries to persuade herself that Daniel was writing some sort of story, that he had dreamt up a fictional account to use in some article or other, or in a sermon, but as she reads on there can be no doubt that this is Daniel's record of his own life: an incredible double life led behind her back, behind the backs of their children and everyone who trusted him. Hana closes the notebook and puts it back where she found it. She is at a loss as to what to do next. How is she to go to the hospital, how is she to speak to Daniel knowing something that she obviously wasn't supposed to know: that he lied, even to the children, that he had concealed a whole part of his life, possibly the most important part?

Somehow she couldn't grasp the extent of what had happened, as if what she had seen on paper hadn't yet become reality.

Could it really have happened? Could the man she trusted most of all have deceived her? How could he have done it while preaching to others how they should live? If it really had happened, what or whom would she ever dare believe again? Perhaps it was all just a terrible misunderstanding. She needed to talk to Daniel about it.

Tears run down Hana's face. She feels defiled, the way she did the time when that unknown man raped her not far from Písek.

It occurs to her that she should have heeded her conscience and gone off to Bosnia to help the wounded, perhaps a bullet would have found her and she wouldn't have had to live through this moment.