Ivan Klima - No Saints or Angels

It was interesting and fairly tricky work and my searches were often fruitless. It took me at least a year even to comprehend how the secret brotherhood operated and to learn how to find things that were meant to remain hidden, to locate microfiches that to all appearances had never existed.

Intuition helped me a lot in this. I would sense connections for which no evidence could be found, and occasionally this would lead me to surprising and important discoveries. I am speaking about my work, but it's impossible to divide oneself into homo nascitur ad laborem and homo privatus. I can tell when someone is

concealing their emotions or thoughts, and likewise when they are feigning them. But who, sometimes, doesn't feign emotions in an effort to transcend the void that suddenly looms between them and someone they believed themselves to be on intimate terms with? It looks as if it's only possible to be genuine in a game in which you have more than one life. Or rather it is easier to achieve justice and authenticity in a game than in real life.

My researches into people's recent pasts have taught me distrust. Sometimes, for instance, I come across depressing information about singers who were inciting us to resist while at the same time informing on us. I discover similar things about people who are held in esteem or who are in posts of authority. I pass the information on to my superiors and wait for what will happen. Mostly nothing does. I expect the game being played in those cases is at a higher level and is more complex than I, who regard myself as one of the players, am able to imagine. It is at such a level that it is foolhardy of me to make ripples. One day I'll be garrotted from behind or bumped off one night on the way home. But even though the thought of it sometimes makes me shiver, I still believe I'll find some means of escape; besides I'm doing everything to avoid it happening.

As I go through the old reports of secret police agents I'm amazed how much of them is taken up by accounts of infidelities and deceptions. It's as if they were all being unfaithful to each other.

Only here did I come to realize the logic of the regime I was born into. Very soon only a few people were subjected to real violence, just enough to ensure that everyone else lived in fear and submitted to control and humiliation as the only possible form of existence.

My dad resisted and ended up in prison, where he was beaten and tortured with thirst, hunger and cold. They'd kept him in an underground bunker and didn't give him even a blanket to cover himself with, just a piece of mouldy rag. It's true that Mum defiantly

waited for him, writing him letters and buoying up his spirits with her love, but at the same time she tried not to step out of line, teaching what she had to teach and voting in the sham elections. When I started to understand these things, it rankled with me. She used to say, 'You don't know the way things are in real life.' I didn't. I had no notion. It is only here that I've discovered how they were. Although Mum was an ordinary primary-school teacher, she was under the surveillance of usually two of her colleagues, and one of the neighbours used to inform on her and Dad. I discovered it in the files, in pathetic and humiliating reports in which the informers and fellow teachers shamelessly made use of what Mum's pupils unwittingly said about her.

That was how it was. So now I can understand Mum's caution.

But even though I understand it, I still cannot accept it as the only option available to people. I'm sure that like Dad I'd find the strength to resist if the worst came to the worst.

Vlasta was right in saying I wasn't cut out for politics. I'm not even cut out for the job I'm doing right now, because I can't reconcile myself to the fact that people are the way they are. I'd like to live in a different world — one in which respect is achieved by deeds and actions completely unlike the ones recognized in today s world. And so I occasionally imagine myself in impossible situations; I suddenly think I can hear distant tom-toms; I rush towards them and find myself in a hail of arrows and bullets, but I dodge my way through. I also imagine myself stretching a rope between two peaks and walking across a valley as deep as the Grand Canyon. I've only ever seen it in pictures, of course. In reality I get dizzy just looking down from a bridge.

The stars also entice me. Not that I have any longing to fly to them, but I try to understand the message they send us about our possibilities and destinies. Mum says I'm nuts and that if she didn't keep an eye on me I'd definitely come to a sorry end.

Last week, when I had a moment to spare at work, I had a look at my horoscope on the computer and discovered that I'm about

to experience something that will change my life. So I've started to perceive things around me in sharper focus.

A few days later, I went to visit my old history teacher in hospital. I think he was the person who most influenced me in my life, apart from Dad. When he explained history to us he would often go to the very limits of what was still permitted at the time. I could tell. Revolutions, which were always talked about in our textbooks with wild enthusiasm, were described by him as a bloody conflict followed by terror. And the terror was either the vengeance of those who managed to suppress the revolution or the revenge of those who achieved victory thereby. That remarkable teacher managed to draw my attention not only to history but also to the stars, although not in the sense he intended. I don't know what I did to draw his attention but he showed me favour and occasionally would invite me to his study and discuss with me problems that no one else talked to me about. I had the impression that his thoughts inhabited infinite space and endless time, in other words, stellar time, which was different from the time that history described. In that way he scaled humanity and himself down to a real dimension, i.e., an infinitely tiny dimension. That struck me as wise. He maintained that this new perception of the inconceivable duration of time and the inconceivable extent of the cosmos was the most important discovery of our times. I felt he had revealed to me something fundamental about life. Most likely someone denounced him for his views, because he stopped teaching history and instead was assigned to physics and PE classes. But I don't want to talk about him. His ex-wife also came to visit him in hospital. I immediately noticed that she radiated some sad, unreconciled pain and it touched me. I wanted to console her in some way and told her how years earlier, when I had seen her waiting with her child for her husband, I had envied him her. She blushed. I think the child was a little girl. She must be at least fifteen by now. The woman's name was Kristýna, as I recall. I have a good memory for faces, quotations and dates. I couldn't estimate her age, but she seemed to me just as strikingly beautiful as she had back then.

6

It's gone ten already. The street outside the window is falling silent and the breeze coming through the open window is starting to be almost cool. I've put on some Bach, but I can't pay attention to it. I'm waiting for Jana, although I know she won't be back before midnight. I wait for the doorbell to ring but it doesn't, the phone to ring but it doesn't, a messenger to arrive with good news, but he can't arrive because he hasn't even set out yet.

I open the box of Dad's letters but then close it again. I ought to sort out my own papers first. I always chuck all my letters, including the ones from that anonymous lunatic — of which there have been more and more recently — into the big cardboard box which the vacuum cleaner came in. If I turned it upside down, I'd find right on top letters from my old flames. I had plenty of the latter and even more letters. I'd always look at the greeting first and then at the last sentence. Darling …, I love you, Your. . What came in between seemed to me of secondary importance.