Ivan Klima - The Ultimate Intimacy

'I'll happily wait for you. I'll come and listen to your sermon, seeing that I'm here. Or are you going to preach the same one as in Prague?'

The room contains four rows of six chairs each, and even these are not filled. He writes the numbers of the hymns on a blackboard while greeting those who are gradually taking their places in the last two rows. There are nine in the congregation, including his companion, who remains standing by the door. Why? Maybe she feels out of place here. She is not dressed for a village service.

He sits down at the harmonium and plays a short improvisation. He concentrates. He has prepared an Easter sermon on a text from the Letter to the Romans. 'If we are united with him because we are involved in his death, we will certainly be involved in his resurrection also.' Quite unconsciously, he ends up speaking to his recent companion about her anxiety.

But he speaks less about resurrection, which has always somewhat disconcerted him, than about love that does not falter at any sacrifice, and about Jesus who, out of love for mankind, was crucified.

We speak of the miracle of resurrection after death, but we ought not to forget that living for love means resurrection during one's life. Several times during the sermon he looks in the direction of the

unknown woman who brought him here. She is standing motionless by the door, cowering slightly, as if trying to protect herself from the cold or from his words.

When they get back into the car and drive off, she asks him: 'Do you truly believe that someone who is dead can rise again and walk? Someone who is long dead, I mean.'

'But it's a. .'

'It's a myth,' she says. 'No, please don't explain anything. Not at the moment, at least. Do you think that the people sitting there understand you. Do they give any thought to what you told them?'

'I don't know. As far as they are concerned it is a ritual. They grew up with it. Besides, faith is not something you think about. You can reflect on God and many people have, but they've still not come up with anything. Even the psalmist complained: "I wondered what to make of it all and it seemed far from easy to me.'"

'And you don't wonder about him?'

He hesitates for a moment, and then says, '1 do, of course.'

'But you know it's impossible to come up with anything. Is it also chiefly a ritual for you too?'

'No, I didn't grow up with it.'

'Your parents weren't believers?'

'My mother was. As for my father, I can't say. One doesn't have the right to judge whether or not another person believes, particularly when it is one's father.'

'My father wasn't a believer. I told you that already. He was a sort of— what the Russians call a "superfluous man". He did just one truly good and useful thing in his life: he married my mother and didn't divorce her, not even during the war. Even though he's bound to have two-timed her on many occasions afterwards.'

'My father was a doctor. But he spent many years in concentration camps. Under the Nazis and the Communists. What he went through in those camps shattered him. It is truly hard to reconcile those experiences with belief in a just and all-powerful God. Father didn't believe there was any higher justice. He didn't believe people have souls either. "Man has a brain," he used to say. "The brain is nature's greatest wonder, but it is terribly impermanent. The soul is the brain. When the brain perishes what remains of the soul?"' He checks himself.

And in spite of that you chose your present career?'

'Maybe not in spite of but because. My father was a tolerant man.

He left it up to me to decide what I believed about the world, about people and their souls.'

'He died a long time ago?'

'Sixteen years ago. But he lived to see…' He checks himself again. 'A few days before his death he said to me, "What we have here on earth is neither God's nor Satan's creation. Heaven or Hell is what we create ourselves. Most of the time we create Hell."'

'Did you love him?'

'The way that everyone loves their father.'

Why is she asking him? Why does it interest her?

They are nearing Prague. The city is veiled in smoke. Human life veiled in mystery. And God's existence?

'I didn't love mine,' the woman breaks the silence. 'He used to come home, put his feet up on the table and demand to be waited on hand and foot by us. My mother, my sister and me. Mother would come in exhausted from work and had to put up with him. Whatever he earned he used to gamble. He seldom won, and when he did it was just used for more gambling. Mother used to support the lot of us. That's why I married so young. In order to get away from there. His shadow still hangs over me today. But he was tolerant as well, as far as I was concerned, at least. He let me study to be an actress even though I doubt if he'd ever set foot in a theatre in his life. I exaggerate. Apart from that he watched television.'

And you're an actress?'

'No, I didn't finish the course. When I met Sam I switched to study architecture — not at the technical university, though, more the theory than the practical stuff. And these days I work as a kind of high-class secretary in his practice, or I design interiors for his buildings. I must admit, though, that I do act on the odd occasion when one of my former fellow students finds me a bit-part on TV.'

He notices that her shoulders are trembling as if she is on the verge of tears. Are you all right?'

'Yes. It's OK. I'm just cold. I got chilled to the bone there. Feel.' She is now holding the steering wheel with her left hand and stretching out her right to him. He notices a long reddish scar on her wrist. Petr has a similar one. He noticed it the first time he met him in prison. Petr's was redder, being more recent no doubt.

How did it happen?

Life wasn't fun any more.

Life isn't simply fun.

I thought it could be. And what's the point of living if it's not fun?

The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.

But Petr lived. And this one is still living. He touches her hand. It really is cold.

'You could try warming it up,' she suggests. 'I can manage to drive with my left hand.'

She is clearly used to company of a different kind and doesn't realize that it is inappropriate for him to hold hands with a woman he doesn't really know. But he has no intention of refusing her request and so he holds her hand in his for a moment.

'Maybe I'm stupid,' the woman says, 'and you'll explain to me some time how it is that I will die, that my body will be burned to ashes or chewed to the bone by the larvae of some horrible beedes, but that one day it will be renewed and join with my soul which will never die. Have I got it right?'

'Yes and no.' He lets go of her hand but it is as if he can still feel the touch of her in his hand. 'It's not a question of resurrection of the body in material form. Not even Christ when he appeared to the Apostles had a material form, just a spiritual one.'

'You always manage to come up with some explanation,' she says. 'You preachers, I mean. Perhaps it's because you're wiser than the rest of us.'

'We certainly aren't.' He should never have travelled with this woman, and having accepted the lift should never have touched her at all.

2

Diary excerpts

The money from the house has come. Grandad built the house, Dad inherited it, but they took it away from him. And then when they jailed Dad, we lived in poverty. I remember at the time finding a crown coin in the street and thinking to myself that I could buy myself an ice-cream. It was an awful temptation. I even went as far as the sweet shop, but then I resisted and gave the crown to Mummy. It was enough for three bread rolls.

The interest on the sum in the bank amounts to more than ten times my pay. I've sent 50,000 to the Jerome Fund and Bosnia. I've also sent a contribution towards the children's oncology unit. Cancer took Jitka from me and made Eva lose her mummy. People in my family used to die of heart failure. That's how Grandad and Dad died anyway, they were still young at the time. I scarcely remember my grandfather. He was a master violin-maker. We used to have a violin at home that Dad would play when he had the time and wasn't in prison. I probably have Grandad to thank for my musical ear. They say he also used to play beautifully, but they didn't have tape recorders in those days and gramophone recordings would only be made of the greats: Hubermann, Szigeti or Kubelik.