Ivan Klima - The Ultimate Intimacy

heaven in which I rejoice in the song of the birds instead of the nearness of God.

I started to write to you because I need to be with you, yet I don't know when I'll see you again in the flesh. On the radio they were just reciting some poem by a Lebanese poet. Among other things it said: if love gives you the signal, obey it; also, love not only crowns you but also nails you to the cross. So I ask myself: is there within me a love that crowns and also crucifies? Do I have the self-discipline and patience to accept from it both the exaltation and the torment?

I had a bad day yesterday and the cross was almost unbearable again. My dear spouse had a headache and declared that it was because of me, that all his ailments were because of me. I wanted to know why. He said he was tired of explaining it to me all the time. I apparently lack any sense of order. I was playing music when he was trying to concentrate. I slammed the door and disturbed him. I splashed the water in the bathroom too loudly (!!). When he needed me to do a transfer of a plan I wasn't home (I'd gone shopping). So many crimes in one day.

I told him that none of it was important. What was important was that I was with him. He started to shout that I didn't understand a thing and one day I'd kill him, unless he killed me — or himself — first.

That's how things have been with us for years now, but every time I shiver like a cur. All it takes is for him to give me a little smile and a look (not a kind one, just a look) and straight away I suck up to him again.

Am I really so terrible? Do I really ruin my husband's life? What am I like, tell me? I have the feeling that you can judge, that you can be a judge of people because you have it all within you: patience, humility, kindness, a yearning for freedom and a sense of duty.

You write about a sense of guilt that pursues you. You ask what will become of us? It will come to an end, because everything on earth comes to an end. But just this once I'm not thinking about the end, I'm not thinking about the consequences of our actions, I don't want to think about what will be, I want to feel what is now. I think about you with tenderness and only wish that you'll be all right, and that I can help you to be, even from a distance.

I also want to tell you something I've never told you. My husband was never concerned about what I felt when we made love, in those far-off days when

we still made love. He was only interested in his own body. With you it's different. With you I've discovered that a man's love doesn't have to be selfish.

Life close to you has meaning because you are able to think about the other person. I'm not just an object for you. You are able to love and listen and also seek an answer. You answer questions like no other man I've ever known. All men are scared of answering questions, committing themselves, stepping out of themselves and their selfishness. They live in fear. Of themselves, of solitude, of death. What kind of man are you? Is it because you were born that way, or because you recognize someone higher than you, the Lord who commanded you to love people? You treat me in a way no one has treated me before and in so doing you give my life another dimension. I want you to be with me always. I know that it won't happen, either today, tomorrow or in the future. If we were both single I would want you as my husband. The tarot card reader predicted that I will be hanging around till I'm eighty-two, which means I've still got half my life ahead of me. And you won't be my husband in the second half either. You're not going to be with me, but perhaps you'll be with me for a little while longer, as long as I deserve — as we deserve. I'm sure you see things differently and when I talk of deserving something you hear in it pride or sacrilege, just as you do in the fact I believe some fortune-teller. I don't really believe her, it's just a game, and I know that I might not be here tomorrow and that I might never see you again.

We're only here for a short moment, the length of a dream, you once wrote to me. And life is a dream, I feel like saying, because from the point of view of an eternal universe and time it lasts less than a millionth of a second. But I want a life in which I've consciously lived millions of seconds, so I don't want life to be just a dream. I want a conscious life, not one that is just dreamily unconscious. Since I've known you I've had dreams every day. I try to decipher them but I just can't. Every morning I'm glad it was just a dream. I don't have beautiful dreams. They must be the outcome of some conflict between my conscious and my unconscious. Or my conscience perhaps? Perhaps they're the outcome of my conflict with God. Or the fact I bring you into conflict with your faith, that I'm harming you, that I'm harming the best person I ever met.

I was writing about heaven. I'm in heaven with you, another heaven than the one you believe in, but a heaven like the way I used to imagine it when

I was a little girl, when I looked forward to my dad coming home and saying: Hello sweetheart, I couldn't wait to see you again. But he never did. That's why I'm so receptive when someone's kind to me like you are. I sense that you wouldn't let me fall. That you would appear wherever I might be in danger of dying. I'm miserable when I think I must live this gift of my life without you. I'm happy that I can live at least a moment of this gift with you. Don't forsake me yet a while. Because when at last you do forsake me I will have an empty space inside me and I don't know what I'll fill it with. Work? Faith? An empty space left by love can't be filled with anything but love and most likely it will remain an empty space till the end.

I haven't started to pray yet. But I know that in every prayer one says: Don't forsake me, Lord! I don't pray, but every evening when I'm falling asleep I repeat in the quiet void: Don't forsake me yet a while, my darling.

Love, Bára

P.S. Now that I've written a litany about myself and my woes I expect you think I don't see anything else and that nothing else interests me. But actually the whole world and its future interests me. In fact, that's one of the few things I can talk to Sam about without fear: how everything around us will collapse one day, leaving only ruins behind!

Dear Reverend,

I was sorry your visit did not prove as successful as you'd hoped. After you had gone I tried to check my memory, particularly regarding the members of the service your father might have been seeing. Some of them came to mind. Even though some of them have gone where I won't meet them again, should I happen to see any of them I'll mention your problem to them. Maybe they'll have a better memory.

Seeing I wrote: I won't meet them again, I'd like to trouble you with a few questions, Reverend. As you maybe know I was dismissed from the service during the screenings back in sixty-nine and did various jobs afterwards to earn a living. I don't deny that in my youth I was a red-hot fighter for the socialist cause and against its enemies. In accordance with my training I regarded them as the enemies of everything progressive and therefore of the working people. For the same reason I regarded religion as opium to turn

the working man away from the just struggle. For me God was something invented by people and particularly the priests.

But now I read lots of other things in the press and I even watch religious broadcasts on the television on the odd occasion. Not that I've entirely changed, though! But it occurs to me that if I could have been misled about the rest I could have been misled about this too. Apart from which I'll be seventy-four this autumn and I have to admit that it's not easy to come to terms with the thought that you've not long to go and that's that.

So my question is this. Do you really believe people have souls and that the soul can live after death, and that it will even be rewarded or punished for what it did, that it will be sent somewhere? There's supposed to be hell, purgatory and heaven. Could you explain to me where they are all supposed to be? On earth or in outer space? Also, you declare that the soul is not a material substance. But can something that's not a material substance exist in the world? God is supposed to be something similar. I just can't imagine it. And also souls are supposed to pass from the dead into the living. But who can testify to it? After all, every baby is born without intelligence.