Ivan Klima - The Ultimate Intimacy

Our desires and expectations are often disappointed, however. Instead of striving once again to find love and put it into practice we invent all sorts of alternative goals. We build careers for ourselves and compete with each other, or on the contrary we waste time and fail to fill it with something that reaches out beyond ourselves. We often look for someone to blame for our dissatisfaction with our lives, not looking inside ourselves, but outside ourselves. We fetter our hearts with many injunctions, taboos and prejudices. Often they are so choked with these things that when an opportunity arises to fulfil something we've yearned for, we don't even notice it. So we just live, become cold, and replace love with apathy or even rancour.

You write about a world that is full of selfishness, money-grubbing, violence;ind male arrogance. That's what the world looks like to me sometimes. I've noticed that when people start a conversation with me it is in order to express some bitterness, not to say something kind. If I offer to carry a woman's shopping bag she becomes alarmed. She thinks that I want to rob

her not lend a hand. But these are only superficial observations. Sometimes we can become outraged with those who are actually suffering.

I have no illusions about how difficult it is to live in today's world. Life has never been easy for those who expect it to fulfil their desires. Therefore every morning I try to reflect on what is really important for my life. If it continues to be a life of love then I will have to act and behave accordingly. It is not easy to enter the hearts of others. But wanting to love and to live in love means trying to do precisely that. Whether or not we try is solely a matter of our own determination, and this is precisely where our inalienable freedom lies: our inner freedom to determine our own actions.

I see I've gone on a bit — it's a preacher's failing, and yet I doubt whether I've said anything you didn't know already. I ought to add that real love should reach out somewhere. To Jesus, as I believe. That splendid theologian Karl Barth once wrote that "human life has no meaning without belief in transcendental truth, justice and love which mankind is incapable of creating alone…'

My wish is that you will manage to live the way you would wish.

With best regards, Daniel Vedra

Dear Reverend Vedra,

You can't know how pleased I was to receive your letter and how much it helped me. For me, love has always been the most important thing in my life even though I have seldom received much of it from others. No, that's unjust. My mother has always been marvellous and maybe the others would have treated me better if I hadn't messed things up myself.

I married my husband, who is successful and highly respected, out of love. I so earnestly wanted that love to last for ever, and still do, and want to remain true to this wish, true to my husband. And yet I watch with horror as that love fades and is replaced by recriminations, quarrels or cold silence. All that remains is a fixed routine: breakfast, shopping, cooking, housework and visiting people together, or even receptions with feigned smiles and bonhomie. I have two sons. Because of my own irresponsibility I deprived Saša of a father when he was very small. And I now know I must not deprive my little Aleš of his father.

Sometimes I wake up at night with a feeling of anxiety that I have difficulty in describing to you. It is a sense of wasting my life, my only life, my days, each of which is unrepeatable. Yet I spend them emptily, engaged in some duty or other which I mostly don't recognize as such, in a life without love and without devotion, even though I have long conversations about them at home with my husband.

There are times when I'd just like to take myself off somewhere or cuddle up to my husband and beg him to be with me, be mine, do something, save me. But he is asleep and if I did wake him he would tick me off for bothering him. I only interest him as a component. A component of the home where he takes refuge, where he needs me to look after and listen to him, as well as tidy and cook for him. But am I directing my request to the right person at this moment? You are happy because you have prayer and someone who listens to you, or at least so you believe. That's a comfort. That is hope.

There is also hope in what you wrote to me and the advice you gave, although I get the feeling that to live according to your advice one definitely needs enormous strength, patience and perseverance.

You have been so kind to me that I take the liberty to ask whether I might be able to come and talk to you about these things some time — whether I'm allowed to if I'm not a member of your church. I know that time is the most precious commodity that we have and were you to spare me a few minutes I would be eternally grateful.

Yours, Bára M.

Penned just before midnight on Wednesday in our fair, royal city which neither the Communists nor my husband have managed to disfigure.

Vedra, you gypsy mouthpiece,

I watched your antics on television and it made me want to throw up. You literally called on us to be kind to 'poor' criminals and even gypsies! But do you share a house with them? I do. No sooner do you meet them than they're reaching for their knives. They get drunk and yell beneath your window. If it wasn't for the skinheads they'd have cut the throats of the lot of us. They will one day, anyway, when they outnumber us, and that won't

be long. The only reason they haven't done it so far is because someone has to feed and clothe them. Have you already forgotten what you Christians have on your consciences? How many people did you burn at the stake just for saying the world was round, for instance? And what about when you used to bless weapons? Take your bloody love and stick it up your arse and don't come spreading it on the television where nobody could give a damn about you.

A viewer from Usti

Dear Rút,

You know how terrible I am about writing letters. You're so far away that it seems inappropriate to let you know all the little details of our lives. And that leaves only the major events. One important event that affects both of us I've been keeping from you. Some time ago — it must be about two years already — a magazine here published a list of secret police informers. The list was obtained illegally and published without any official authentication. It contained over a hundred thousand names of people living and dead, some who signed to advance their careers and others who were forced to in prison. I found our father's name on the list: his real name, his code name and his date of birth. That's all. 1 have no other information and only the people on the list have the right to have it checked. If they died in the meantime, it can't be helped. You can imagine my feelings when I discovered Dad's name on the list. I wanted to spare you them. Besides, I've heard all sorts of conflicting reports about the matter over the past two years that I really don't know what to think. There is talk about people who found themselves mistakenly on the list because they happened to sign a bit of paper which they didn't think important and subsequently did nothing dishonourable. Now it seems to me that we ought to try to clear Dad's name if he was innocent, and knowing him and remembering him as I do, I just can't bring myself to believe he was capable of harming anyone in order to gain some advantage for himself or to spare himself some hardship. It struck me that you, as the older one, might know a bit more about him in those years when he returned from prison, that you might have noticed something that I was oblivious to, or even have heard something from him that he didn't feel he could tell me. This is the reason why I'm writing to you about it so belatedly.

I'm thinking of you. It's a pity we had to meet in the shadow of death and there was no opportunity for us really to spend some time together.