Ivan Klima - The Ultimate Intimacy

'If you like.'

'You're very conciliatory. Or you're a doubter yourself.'

'No, a sinner.' He pours her more wine.

'You wrote to me that Jesus will not disappoint or forsake me. How can you tell? After all, he promised he would return during the lifetimes of those who were with him and lead them off to the Kingdom of Heaven. I've got that right, haven't I? And what can be worse than not to come when you promise to? And he's not given any news about himself since then, has he?'

'That expectation was premature. People took too literally one single remark of His. Times were different. People believed in miracles; they were expecting the end of the world. He, and the entire impact He had, is a mystery and will remain so. You can either accept it or reject it. It's a question of faith, the belief that what happened, happened as God's will to free mankind from the eternal law of birth and death. Or, to put it in todays language, God decided that man had reached the stage at which it was necessary to remove him from the effect of that law.'

'Why man, in particular?'

'Because man is made in His image. That is how he differs from all other creatures.'

'But you just have to believe all that. I expect you're happy,' she says, 'happy that you have something you can believe in, something that lasts for ever and ever, whereas for me everything is coming to an end when it's barely started and soon will end for good. But before it does, I'd still like to experience something nice. No, that's not the right word — something perfect. But I know that I'm not entitled to it, that I've lost my entitlement.'

'Why? Life does not end until the last breath — up till then everything is open.'

'Such as?'

'Such as grace and the love of Jesus.'

'Yes, we mentioned that. But what about the human sort?'

'There should be that too.'

'That was nice to hear. Thank you. And here you are sitting with me and listening to my talk.' She drinks up her wine and rises. Before leaving she takes another look around the room. 'You have some beautiful carvings here — I noticed them last time. Are they saints of some kind?'

'We don't venerate saints. No, I just do a bit of carving for fun sometimes.'

'You're a woodcarver as well?'

'No. My grandfather used to work with wood, though. He was a violin-maker. Before he died I used to go to his workshop sometimes and watch him working.'

'The faces on those two women are similar. As a matter of fact, they look more like young girls than grown-up women.'

'My first wife died before she reached twenty-five.'

'And those figures — they're supposed to be her?'

'You could put it that way.'

'You must have loved her a lot, then?'

'I did.'

'Forgive me for asking you like that. I didn't know your wife had died.'

He nodded. What she didn't know about him was a great deal more than she did know.

'Do you think you'll ever be capable of loving that much again?'

'But I remarried.'

And do you carve figures of your second wife?'

He says nothing. This person makes him uneasy.

'Would you have to be deeply in love in order to carve the figure of another woman?'

'I don't know,' and it strikes him that it is fortunate she doesn't know about his latest carving. 'I don't know whether it has anything to do with love.'

'But surely all works of art have something to do with love.'

'I expect you'd know more about that than I.'

'But you know it too, don't you? In fact, you haven't answered my question. What I wanted to know was if it was possible, after losing someone you love a great deal, to experience a similar thing again or something even more powerful.'

'I really have no answer to that. I don't think love can be ranked,

and I actually find the idea of ranking people silly. But there are bound to be people more qualified than I am — you'd better ask them.'

'And you wouldn't manage to?'

'Why does it interest you?'

'Maybe I'd like to know whether you'd be capable of loving me.' She makes a short laugh. 'What will you say now? Don't say that we are each of us married, just imagine for a moment that neither of us are.'

She pours herself some wine. 'Now you're cross and remaining silent. Remaining silent means you don't want to say "No" out loud.'

'Remaining silent means simply remaining silent,' he explains.

She quickly puts her cigarettes and lighter away in her handbag. 'Do you think we'll see each other again? I don't mean in church, but like this.' She stands opposite him, waiting. 'You are remaining silent. Does remaining silent always mean remaining silent with you?'

2

Diary excerpts

Mrs Straková from Kamenice came to Prague and paid us a visit. I hadn't seen her for years but she hasn't changed all that much. It always gives me pleasure when someone turns up from those parts. From those parts and from those days, someone who still remembers Jitka.

I enquired how things were with the congregation. She told me that fewer and fewer people come to church on Sundays. No one's able to give fine sermons like yours any more, she said, flattering me. Then she complained about the decline in moral standards. They had had three divorces in Kamenice in the past year. The men had lost their senses and the women were taking leave of theirs, the young people only thought about money and having fun. Mrs Straková laid the blame mostly at the door of television. I couldn't get to sleep the other night, she said, so I switched on the box, and Reverend, there were women running around naked. It's worse than that Sodom you used to preach to us about and that's a fact.

My visitor brought me a bag of dried apples and home-made buns.When she left, it struck me that the world she had come from, and where

I too had lived for a time, was dying. I felt a twinge of nostalgia for it, in spite of its association for me with such dreadful times.

Shortly afterwards the phone rang. It was very late already, but I wasn't asleep as I was writing my sermon. Some woman's voice, it was a mezzo-soprano, called me by my Christian name and said: I love you. The voice struck me as somehow familiar and yet unknown. Once — it was precisely in those Kamenice days — someone rang me and abused me, calling me a creeping Jesus, a hooligan and— surprisingly enough — a Judas. But that abusive call surprised me less than this last one.

It can happen that someone in the middle of the night, just for their amusement, rings an unknown number and blurts something out. But that woman knew my Christian name. She could have found the number in the phone book, of course, or in the list in the church almanac.

I had a visit last week from Mrs Ivana Pokorná of our congregation. She complained about the fact that there was a boy in her daughter's class who had shot his father. When I expressed astonishment that the lad was at liberty she explained to me that he had committed the murder earlier, when he was under fifteen, and so he had escaped prosecution. He had been placed in a diagnostic institution but still attended school. Worst of all, she told me, the students in his class regarded him as a hero. Even the teachers. Why had he done it? His father used to beat him, she said, and had treated his mother brutally, and he might have had a mistress. So what was wrong with the son bumping him off?

I cited that case at the last meeting of the youth group as an example of moral cynicism. Ivana's daughter confirmed that the lad had no qualms of conscience. He declares that if he hadn't been successful that time he would have happily tried again.

We went on to talk at length about his action. Was it perversion, moral indifference or depravity, or was there perhaps another motive? How was it possible that a lad could kill his father and not even have qualms of conscience? I was surprised to find that the young people's opinions were much less unequivocal than I had expected. They explained that the son had obviously found his father's behaviour so despicable that he felt entitled to intervene. There's so much filth in the world and no justice, are you supposed to just look on all the time? Alois asked.