Ivan Klima - The Ultimate Intimacy

He stared at me. He had very beautiful dark-blue eyes that age had not affected; not even his imminent death had dimmed them. He said nothing. I actually had the impression he was smiling. At first I assumed it was because, after all, he had heard some note of hope in my words, but then I realized that he was remaining silent simply out of a wish not to hurt me, in order, just before the end came, not to get into an argument with his grown-up son, whose opinions were to be respected.

I was intending to say something else about God's mercy but suddenly I became incapable of saying anything at all, so I also remained silent and just took Father's hand in mine and held it for a while.

Father closed his eyes and I felt him moving away from me into some unknown region. Then, without warning, he said: 'Eternity! What is eternity?'

I fell asleep where I sat. I slept for barely an hour but had a dream. I'll note it down quickly before I leave for the hospital: I was clambering up a steep rock which was partly covered in ice. The summit was close and the covering of ice glistened in the sunlight. I halted for a moment, flattened myself against the rock face and glanced back. In the depths I could see the dark-green bands of pine trees penetrating the stony moraine. No sign of life anywhere, I was here alone.

When I turned back to the rock face once more and looked upwards, it struck me that a strange glow was emanating from there. I carefully drove the ice-axe into the icy snow. I climbed with ease, as if I wasn't even climbing a rock face, but floating.

And then I caught sight of a being at the summit. How it had got there I couldn't tell, from heaven maybe. I had the impression that it was emitting light: so bright that I was unable to make out its features.

I stepped forward several paces — or rather I leaped the distance that still separated us. 'Who are you?' I asked.

'Daniel, don't you recognize me?'

'Mother, is that you? But how can you be here?'

'Don't ask, just believe!'

By now I could make out her features, but her face was as I remembered it from childhood, unmarked by old age and mental decline. Then she stretched out her arms as if to bless me, and I heard her say softly, 'You live right and you do right, I am pleased with you. 'A wind suddenly arose and she started to dissolve beneath its gusts. All that remained on the mountain top was . .

At this very moment, in other words at 11.15p.m., 20 March, Hana phoned from the hospital. Mother passed away ten minutes ago. She lived seventy-eight years. Lord be merciful to her soul. 'I called you an hour ago,' Hana told me. 'Rút and I wanted you to come to the hospital, but no one answered the phone. '

3

It was drizzling on the day of the funeral. The suburban cemetery was on a hill and the clouds seemed to tumble and roll just above the pointed tops of the conifers. The freshly dug earth gave off a damp smell. Reverend Martin Hájek was now speaking about his friend Daniel's mother, how he had known her in the days when he was studying in Prague. He spoke about how he would visit Daniel's family and it felt as if this was his second home. 'Sister Vědrová was someone very special. I have known few women as kind or as patient as she was. She travelled through this life, which by our criteria was not an easy one, with a heart untrammelled by hatred or resentment; she travelled with courage and humility, always ready to listen to others, to understand them and lend them a hand.'

His mother had truly borne her fate with courage and if she had suffered she had done so in silence. Even though in her latter years her vascular illness had virtually prevented her from walking, she had not

complained. She would not speak about herself. Usually she would talk about Daniel and his worries and needs, or about the children and their requirements. When she retired sixteen years ago she used to ask him to bring her the manuscripts of samizdat books which she would then bind and with the proceeds she would buy clothes and toys for the children. She had even bought them a television set for his fortieth birthday.

The final prayer. He uttered the words of the Lord's Prayer without being aware of them. How many times had he repeated those same words in the course of his life? His kingdom had not come, but her spirit, so he hoped, now dwelt in it.

He watched as the gravediggers lowered the coffin suspended on thick ropes. For some people, such as his father, death was the last, irrevocable certainty. The certainty of an end. For others it meant the certainty, or at least the hope, that something new would begin for them, something definitely superior and less paltry than was offered by earthly existence. None the less he found both possibilities depressing. That new existence was veiled too thickly by the unknown. Unlike his first wife, he was incapable of envisaging the possibility of a future reunion.

On their return home they naturally talked together about the departed. Rút recalled experiences he could not have remembered. When the war was coming to an end, their mother had started looking for red and blue cloth as early as April. Not finding any, she dyed an old bed sheet, cut up two pairs of undershorts and sewed them into a Czechoslovak flag several days before the Prague Uprising. His sister also recalled their father s arrest four years after the war and how their mother had not wanted to let the officers of the state police enter their flat at five o'clock in the morning. She told them they were behaving like the Gestapo and amazingly enough nothing happened to her. 'You slept through the lot,' Rút told him. 'You were just six years old and were due to start in first class.' Then she reminded him of his schoolboy pranks. On one occasion, before the start of a Russian lesson, he had hidden some sort of letter full of Russian vulgarities in the class register. It had caused an enormous fuss, but he was not found out because he had resolutely denied it. His Russian had come in handy when the Soviets invaded the country ten years later, as it enabled him to write on the wall in Cyrillic: Iditye domoi! He had also tried to persuade the soldiers that they were being duped and manipulated and serving the devil instead of God. The trouble was they

were obeying someone else's orders, not God's. That was if they had even heard of God.

'They're sure to have,' Daniel commented. 'And even if they hadn't, every human being has at least an inkling of His existence.'

'Isn't that awful,' Rút sighed. 'It looks as if Dan still believes that, after all he's been through! And that flag that Mother sewed during the war,' she recalled once more, 'Dan found it in the attic and carried it over his shoulder in the demonstration, shouting slogans. What was it we shouted, in fact?' she said, turning to her brother.

'I can't remember any more,' Daniel prevaricated. And yet come to think of it, it was "No traitors as legislators" or "Red brothers, get back to your reservations". And we pledged loyalty to those who showed no loyalty to us in the end. But that's the way it goes.'

His children listened with interest to the stories of their father's misdemeanours and patriotic deeds, and meanwhile their grandmother's death receded.

Rút was to fly home that same day as she had patients already waiting to see her. She refused to let him drive her to the airport, however. It was better to say their farewells here than in the airport departure lounge.

So he went off with his sister to call for a taxi and they found themselves alone for a moment in the passage. It occurred to him that there were important things they had not found time to talk about yet. They ought to speak about their father, the inheritance and their lives. But none of these were mentioned. There was no time, besides which protracted farewells wreck the slow progression towards intimacy and create a gulf which he, for one, was incapable of bridging. They embraced at least. And when she climbed into the taxi he stayed on the pavement waving until the car disappeared around the corner.