Ivan Klima - The Ultimate Intimacy

'Have you played yet today?' he asked Marek as soon as Petr left.

'How could I when we had visitors?' Marek said, shaking his head in astonishment at this question until his long blond hair hung over his face.

'Well, go and play now then!'

'Anyway my G string broke yesterday.'

'Paganini was capable of finishing a concerto on a single string.'

'I'm not Paganini, Dad.'

'But you've got three strings left.'

'Dad, we were told in physics today,' Marek said, changing the subject, 'that they recently discovered a quasar that shines like a thousand galaxies. And each of those has a hundred billion stars.'

And you believe that?'

Marek shrugged. 'That's what the principal told us. He believes it. And each time he says "Just try to grasp how tiny we are!"'

And you know what quasars are?'

Marek was very interested in astronomy. Maybe he also liked to be posed questions he couldn't answer. So that he could search in that infinite space for another God in place of the one who assumed human form.

'They are quasi-stellar radio sources,' his son informed him. 'They are moving away from us at almost the speed of light.'

'They must be a long way away already.'

At least twelve billion light years.'

Are you able to imagine that?'

'There are loads of things that people are unable to imagine,' Eva rose to her half-brother s defence.

'Is there anything else you want to know about quasars, Dad?'

'No, thank you. I don't know what use I'd have for the information.' Perhaps Marek was indeed interested in something that seemed unimportant or — more accurately — inconceivable to Daniel, something one simply had to take on faith, and he already had his faith. 'Or maybe some other time,' he added.

'Alois and I are going to make a telescope,' Marek went on to inform him.

'Where will you put it?'

'In the attic, of course!'

'Anyway, we haven't got a mirror,' Alois pointed out. 'We haven't got anything. Just two lenses and a plan of how to put it together.'

Then Eva wanted to know for her part whether Petr would be living with them like Alois, but Daniel said he had already arranged for Petr to stay at his older sister's.

'He'd be better off here,' Eva objected. 'His old gang could find him there.'

'Evička, if he takes it into his head to return to his former associates, nothing will stop him.'

Eva merely shrugged and he registered a kind of subconscious anxiety. No, it would be better not to have that lad in the house.

That evening, Daniel and his wife went for a walk.

The street was deserted. The cars by the kerb shone dully in the light of the street lamps and the clusters of forsythia glowed yellow in people's gardens. Hana linked her arm in his. 'I was dying for some fresh air. I feel I'm constantly indoors somewhere, like that lad who was in prison. And it's one problem after another at the hospital these days. There's no money for medicines, or blood, or even for bandages.' And then, as if she suddenly felt ashamed of complaining, she started to tell him again about the journalist who had a habit of visiting the nurses' station and telling them stories about China and other exotic countries he had lived in. In spite of her years in the city, Hana had remained a country woman. She loved stories. She would watch television sometimes, but she would get upset at the cruelty of almost everything that was broadcast. 'It must be interesting to see so many totally different countries and customs.'

'Would you like to see them too?'

'No, not really. No, it just crossed my mind when I was listening to those stories in the nurses' station.'

'We could take a trip together as a family.'

'Somewhere far away, you mean?'

'Why not? You said yourself that it must be interesting.'

'You're talking about it because now we can afford it?'

'And we've also the freedom to.'

'We'd better not. It wouldn't be deserved.'

'What makes you think you wouldn't have deserved it?'

'I wouldn't have done anything for it.'

'It could be instead of a present, say. Your birthday's coming up. And Eva's sitting her leaving exams in a few days' time. It would be an experience for the children too.'

'But the children don't even know their own country yet.'

'One never gets to know everything. But it's good for young people to get the chance at least once to take a look at their homeland from a distance.'

'Dan, you're crazy. You mean it seriously! Let the children go off when they're old enough to organize it themselves.'

'It needn't be China. I've always wanted to have a look at Jerusalem.'

'All right, Dan, if you think so, if you'd enjoy it, maybe yes, one day. But Eva hasn't yet done her leaving exams and I might never see my fiftieth birthday.'

He realized that he was irritated by her down-to-earth attitude that resisted any dreaming, any deviation from the daily routine. He gave her a hug so as to banish the feeling of annoyance and she held him close to her for a moment before quickly slipping out of his embrace. 'Not here on the street,' she whispered. 'What if someone saw us?'

4

Bára

Bára had gone to the church on the advice of her friend Ivana. She had been suffering from occasional bouts of depression. Although she

had only just turned forty, she put it down to her age, as well as to her less-than-successful second marriage and the feeling that on the whole her life seemed an aimless slog.

The fact was she had suffered from mood swings and sporadic feelings of desperate hopelessness from early adolescence. When she was seventeen she slashed her right wrist in the bathroom at home. She didn't do it because of an unhappy love affair or for any precisely definable reason. Fortunately, her sister Katka found her while she still had a drop of blood in her veins. When they asked her at the mental hospital why she had done it she was unable to reply. She simply could see no reason for living when life led nowhere but to death, and there was no way of attaining the things one believed worthwhile. What do you consider of greatest worth? the psychiatrist had asked her. She had wanted to reply 'love', but the word was so hackneyed, so devalued by pop songs of all kinds, that it no longer corresponded to her conception of it. So she said nothing. But she promised the doctors and her mother that she would never do anything like it again, and she kept her word. Another spell in mental hospital, she maintained, and she definitely would go mad.

She really made the promise only to the doctors and her mother; she promised nqthing to her father. She had no love for her father and in the last years of his life she scarcely talked to him. She considered her father ordinary: he wore grey clothes, worked as an insurance clerk, told silly risqué jokes, and if he read anything at all, it was detective stories. When she was still small, his relationship with her alternated between two extremes: either bringing her chocolate bars and custard puffs, or using death to scare her. Death would come for Bára if she was naughty, if she didn't clean her teeth, if she climbed on the window-sill, if she didn't look both ways before crossing the road, or if she cried because she didn't want to go to nursery.

'What's death?'

'Death is like the darkness,' her father explained. 'When death comes for you, you'll never see the sunrise again, the moon won't shine for you, not even a single star.'

'And can I really die?'

'We must all die,' her father said, visibly pleased that he had managed to frighten her.

'But you'll die before me,' she had told him, 'because you're old.' To her surprise, her prediction made her father laugh.

Apart from a feeling of aimlessness, Bára also suffered from a sense of her own inadequacy, and the paltriness of her pointless existence. There were no real reasons for her feelings: she was an exceptional woman to look at; her tall build and large breasts were the envy of most of her fellow pupils as far back as primary school. She had her father's fine hair which was of a fairly restrained blonde hue, but which, when the light caught it, acquired a deep coppery tint. She had her mother's eyes: set wide apart and the colour of forest honey. She had acting talent, a beautiful soprano voice, wit and a distaste for anything that could be regarded as humdrum and ordinary, whether in conversation, dress or art. She adored whimsical and outlandish pranks, like the time when she and her friends dressed themselves up in winter clothes on a sweltering summer day and, with woollen bobble caps jammed on their heads, they paraded through Prague with skis over their shoulders to the astonishment of passers-by. The very next day they were sunbathing half-naked by the windows of the classroom. She also enjoyed drinking. When she was hard up she made do with beer; as soon as she could afford it she preferred cheap wine, such as Portugal or Kadárka.