Ivan Klima - My Golden Trades

'I don't know. Maybe I could still study literature.'

'Do you think there's a connection?' I said, surprised. 'Or is it because you think that writers are good people too?'

'Don't you think they're good?'

'I prefer not to make judgements about people in advance,' I said.

Not long ago, my friend the priest told me what one of our own chieftains — who had refused to sign the latest solemn treaty of vassalage and protection — had told him just before his death: 'You Christians are making one big mistake. You look on all people as your neighbours and you don't understand that once in a while, you have to deal with the devil.'

I respect that chieftain, because he rejected that ill-fated tendency to which the spirits of our homeland seduce us. At the same time, I would not want the human world to be reduced to angels and devils, to those who have seen truth and those who are in error, to those who are with me and those who go for my throat. Though when I think of all the things I've witnessed in my life, I really don't know why

man thinks he is endowed with qualities that rank him above all other living things.

'I know a few wonderful people,' I said cautiously, 'and they are neither archaeologists nor writers.'

'As a matter of fact there is a connection,' said Masha, returning to my previous question. 'A friend of mine and I went for an outing a little way past Konstantinky. Do you know that area?'

'A little.'

'And we found a fragment of something on a hilltop. They were widening the road. The piece was traced with old-fashioned decoration. It must have been in the ground for a length of time that I could scarcely imagine, and yet, once, someone must have made it. Someone living. Before, in school or in museums, I was never interested in archaeological finds. And now suddenly I felt it was important to find something out about that person, especially since I lived right where he did. So I wrote a story about it.' She blushed.

'What did you call the story?'

'For a long time I couldn't think of a title, and then it came to me: Silence! I tried to imagine what it must have been like back then, and all I could come up with was how awfully silent it must have been everywhere. I got scared just thinking about it. I sent it in to a competition in Cheb magazine. They wrote back and said it was sensitively written, but I didn't know how to work with themes properly. They also said it wasn't contemporary enough.'

'I wouldn't take it too much to heart. Maybe they were afraid of silence too.'

'I don't understand what they meant, working with themes.'

I would like to have told her that I can only imagine with great difficulty something more hopeless than submitting short stories to a competition, or studying in one of our subjugated universities, but I didn't feel like letting on that I had some connections with that massive literary grave-site. Besides, Masha had thrown down her scraper and was plugging her ears because the squadron of fighters was screaming over our heads again. Whether they belonged to the Celts or to the other side, they certainly drowned out all the voices, the secret ones and the obvious ones.

Years ago I travelled through Scotland. Not because I was interested in the progeny of the Celts; I was drawn, rather, by the barren mountains and lakes celebrated in old songs, and modern myths about primeval monsters. At Inverness I checked in at a small hotel and then set off for a walk in the hills that rose over the town. I only got as far as the outskirts where, through the window of a small house, I heard a woman's voice singing a Scottish song. I'd heard Scottish songs and ballads sung in English, but the woman was singing in Gaelic, and I heard the old melodies as they had sounded originally.

I know that music cannot be expressed in words, just as words cannot express eternity, God, infinity or the soul. So I leaned against the stone fence post, listening to the woman singing, and looked at the rocky, barren mountains. Suddenly, the sun emerged from behind a cloud and illuminated a distant hillside. In the sharp light that defined a strip of rocky ground, I saw a white stone structure. It stood alone in a large field of heather. Even at that distance, I could see that the cracks between the stones were overgrown with moss, there was no glass in the windows, and the walls were strangely distorted. Outside a

low doorway, on a bench, sat an old man in a white coat. He was looking towards me. I was overcome with inexpressible excitement: I knew that this house was the place I had been gravitating towards all my life. It was the home I had been looking for. I was expected. I knew that when I stepped over the threshold, the embrace into which I would sink would surround me and fill me with joy once and for ever.

Then the woman came to the end of her song, and everything vanished.

I could have continued my walk into the hills, but I understood that my real reason for coming here had been fulfilled. I could expect nothing more blissful. So I walked back into town, packed my suitcase and went to the station.

Only later did I realize how through the voice, in a land so apparently distant, I had heard the spirit of my true homeland speaking to me. It was a voice that could not reach me at home, for it was drowned out by the shouts and arguments and laughter that fill every homeland. Like Masha, I tried to write about it — several times, in fact — but of course I never found the right words.

'I've just been thinking,' said Vítek, 'that the whole ice age must have been caused by a huge cloud of ashes. What if those people a long time ago were as stupid as we are, and invented everything we have?'

'And you think that they wouldn't have left a trace of themselves behind?' said Lida.

'Why should they? What do you think will be left of all this?' he said, pointing contemptuously at the unfinished structures of iron and steel around him, his own work. 'The rust will eat all this up in a couple of years.'

'Rubbish, Vítek,' said Petra. 'You'll never convince me. How would it be if you just uncover another layer over here for me?' And the foreman obediently took his pick and carefully began to loosen the clay.

The voice through which the spirit of place speaks to those who listen is common to us all; to me and to those people who moved from the backwaters of my homeland more than two millennia ago. By calling it a voice I don't mean anything mystical, a voice of blood and soil. I'm surprised that most people don't hear it, don't feel the natural reasons for affinity with one another. I'm surprised that they invent other reasons, more artificial ones, for sticking together: race, faith or ideas. They are more eager to believe their lives are influenced by the positions of planets than by the shape of the mountains that surround their birthplace, or the height of the heavens above them, or the direction of the winds that bring the clouds.

Is it possible not to feel some affinity for people who have followed every day the meanderings of the same river, climbed the same hills, seen the same flock of birds with each spring, and to whom darkness and light, the cold season and fruitful season, arrived at the same time?

It is probable that very soon we will have altered the courses of all our rivers, cut down all our forests, killed off the migrating birds, and obscured the boundary between day and night; in other words, that we will have broken the ties that bind us to our ancestors, those of our blood and those not of our blood, the tie that binds us to our homeland and therefore to the earth. And then we will have hurled ourselves into the emptiness of the universe.

'Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Look! Come and look!' cried Petra suddenly. And we all rushed out of our graves to see

what she'd found.