Ivan Klima - The Ultimate Intimacy

'I'll come and see you again in the morning,' Bára promises. 'Now go and get some rest. Don't think about the bills any more, think of something pleasant.'

'Like what, for instance?' and this time there is a note of genuine, unfeigned despair in Samuel's voice. And she realizes that this man, her husband, truly doesn't know of anything pleasant to think about, and she has no advice to give him, nor has she the strength, at this moment, to reassure him of her love. She brings the call to an end, then quickly slices some bread and prepares a cold supper. There is the sound of the piano from the lounge; the video must have finished. Those phone calls have taken up too much of Bara's time. For a moment she remains in the doorway listening to Daniel's playing.

Then she enters the lounge and starts to set out the plates and cutlery. 'What was that you were playing?' she asks.

'Nothing much, just some tunes that come to me when I'm thinking about you.'

'You think about me when you're at home?'

'Almost all the time.'

'In what way do you think about me?'

'With love and anxiety.'

Bára doesn't ask him the source of his anxiety, but as he is sitting opposite her at the table she enquires: 'Do you really love me enough to compose tunes for me?'

'They're only improvisations.'

'And do you love your wife?'

Daniel doesn't know how to reply, and that's all right, it's better than overwhelming her with a lot of big words that would not be true.

'Don't worry,' she says, 'I do know you have a wife and children and a congregation. I don't want to take you away from your family, I just want you to be with me for as long as you feel you love me.'

They eat.

'I'm sorry I shouted at you earlier on,' she says. 'I couldn't take any more at that moment. Maybe I really have hurt Sam. He must sense how I've gone cold inside, that my smiles are forced, that I speak to him out of duty and that I caress him out of sympathy not desire. He must sense it, but he'll never realize that he was the one who destroyed everything that was alive in me.' And there is nothing forced about the smile she gives him; it comes from her eyes and her entire being.

'So long as I lived according to his way of thinking,' she adds, 'he was satisfied. But one doesn't live to fulfil someone else's notions. You only have one life and that's your own, and you have to live according to your own way of thinking, at least partly.'

'So long as you can manage to.'

You say that as one who can?'

'I can't manage to at all.'

Are you trying to say that I've wrecked your notions?'

'What I feel for you is more powerful than my ideas about how one should live.'

'You forgot to say: so far.'

Daniel says nothing.

When they finish their meal, Bára gets up and brings a box full of

photographs. She puts it on the table and starts to pull out pictures. This is her at the age of seven, and in this one she is sixteen. Her father. He's quite a snappy dresser — the photo is from the war years. 'That's Mum during the war too, a six-pointed star on her coat; it was yellow. Seemingly Jews were always marked out with the colour yellow; in the Middle Ages they made them wear yellow caps. Why yellow, when it's such a warm, sunny colour? Mum was always sunny, and still is.' The very young, beautiful woman is Bara's sister; this is the last photo of her, taken just a few weeks before she had the accident.

She takes out some old yellowing photographs showing her mothers parents before they were taken to Auschwitz. They are all here: her mothers two brothers and her sister some time at the beginning of the war.

'You never told me about them,' Daniel says.

'I never knew them. They were all killed before I was born. Only Mum survived and she doesn't like talking about them, because it's so terrible. But she still has their photographs on the wall at home. Grandad was a court clerk, Grandma had a tiny little grocery shop, but she gave too much credit and went bankrupt. I find it strange to talk about them as Grandad and Grandma, or about my uncles and aunt, as I never saw them alive. One of my uncles studied to be a doctor and married some girl from an awfully rich banking family. But the other one and his sister were still children and they were gassed straight away.'

'It was appalling.'

'For a long time Mum told me nothing about it and I had no inkling that anything of the kind had happened. When I was small I was more afraid of an atom bomb falling on us. Whenever I asked Mum about Grandma or her brothers, she would just say they'd died. Only later did she tell me about them. For me it was like hearing a horror story dreamt up by some totally demented Edgar Allan Poe — I hadn't heard of Hitchcock then. Only when the truth finally came home to me did I start to cry. I also started to feel really afraid that something similar could happen again.'

'It was appalling,' Daniel repeats. 'I was never able to come to terms with the thought that God could permit such a thing.'

Bára is suddenly filled with accumulated anger. Her husband told her that a soul is something she doesn't have and poured contempt on her, and now here is Daniel trying to persuade her that everything she

has been through, even what preceded it, all happened because of some higher will.

'What God? What are you talking about?'

Daniel seems to grow uneasy. 'God. There's only one God.'

'God, God,' Bára says, raising her voice, 'do you really think someone all-powerful and benevolent still rules over this world and looks on while people massacre each other and the brunt is borne by poor people who can't defend themselves? If there was any God he'd have to be a real bloody sadist!'

Daniel remains silent and she goes on to ask him if he really can't grasp that they were simply a triviality that just happened to appear in the universe for a split second.

'I wasn't intending to offend you,' Daniel says. 'I really wasn't.'

'I know you weren't. You just think that it's better to have a love that is certain when there is so little of it in the world.'

'Nothing is certain, either here or there,' he says.

'But there can be love here. Here it is in our power. Whereas there, there will most likely be nothing at all.' She gazes at him and stretches out her arms to him and he hugs her to him.

She leads him into the bedroom, sits him down in one of the small armchairs there, and orders him to wait a moment. In the chest of drawers she finds a night-dress with the inscription 'Love Me' in English (love gets written about on walls and on night-shirts) and goes to take a shower. When she returns she is a trifle nervous: although she has made love to Daniel so many times already, it has never been here in the room where for years she used to make love to her husband. So she quickly lights a cigarette and sits down on the edge of the divan opposite Daniel. Daniel gets up with the intention of going to the bathroom too, but she stops him. 'Don't go yet, please. Wait with me until I finish my cigarette.'

Daniel looks at her. She seems to sense devotion in his gaze. When was the last time someone looked at her like that?

A large oil painting of her husband hangs on the bedroom wall alongside photos of his buildings. Samuel is omnipresent here but Bára isn't thinking about that now. 'Do you really love me?'

'Yes.'

'Enough for you never to leave me?'

'Yes.'

'You'll leave me anyway. Everything comes to an end one day,

doesn't it!' She finishes her cigarette and when Daniel goes off to the bathroom she dims the light enough for the shadow to conceal all her wrinkles.

'I'm glad we're going to spend a whole night together,' she says when they are lying down together. 'Spending the night together is perhaps more than making love.'