Ivan Klima - Lovers for a Day

The phone box is empty. She makes herself comfortable, an elbow resting on the shelf and a foot on the ledge in the wall. I've got quite nice legs, really, the girls envy me them when I undress, but I've got only one twenty-five heller piece. I could try calling you but what's the point — it's just a game; to have you come to the phone and shout, Who's that — Katka? Or is it you, Libuše? How could you have done it to me. You could have let me know, at least. Not that it would make any difference. What if I called Markéta? Have you heard the news? Ota and I have broken up. Would you believe it, he's been carrying on with that PE instructor of theirs for the past two years and I didn't know a thing. That time during the holidays when he said he was canoeing — that was with her. I told him myself: there's no point. I could never do anything like that — we didn't hit it off anyway. You were always amazed that he and I could, that I never seemed myself with him. It's only now that I realize it. I feel great now, believe me, although before. .

There's a man knocking on the door of the booth. Every inch the gentleman. I bet he hits his children. Wait a bit, I'll let you have my twenty-five heller piece, I didn't use it. Sorry.

The thermos flask is half empty. I'll stay out on the platform; it's getting hot. She goes and stands behind the driver and ponders on love for a while. Living without love is not the worst thing: the worst thing is where love has fallen to pieces and is no longer love but a burden. She is pleased with herself for having managed to escape a love that was sure to turn into a burden.

She gets off one stop early and walks past the ugly student residence — his window is closed and the bottom half is stuck over with paper. But she doesn't stop even for a second. She feels fancy-free, liberated: the whole day is spread out in front of her, her whole life is spread out in front of her — days unimaginable, full of promise. But she is not even thinking about that now, just about today, which is also full of promise.

A car soon pulled up for her, a private car, no less. The suede-jacketed driver opened the door and looked her over quickly. Obviously satisfied, he asked, 'Where are you off to?'

'I don't mind.'

'If you don't mind, you don't mind.'

He drove fast and talked non-stop. He was an expert on animal skins, apparently, and bought and sold them all over the world. He was a bit too tall and bony for her taste, and probably too old as well, even though he was under forty. He spoke very slowly and deliberately, which appealed to her. That was the way she imagined people spoke who had seen things and were possibly important in some way too. It had not been very sensible to have spent all her time with Ota recently, as if he were the only person in the world. Love is definitely the greatest happiness, but at the same time it swallows you up and at the very moment you feel you are living to the full you actually

stop living. Countless possible loves, moments and opportunities pass you by and they might be more important and more fulfilling than what you have at that moment, but you're unaware of them.

In the fields the corn was not yet ripe. The man had now fallen silent. The names of unfamiliar villages, the air shimmering above the road's surface, a narrow valley and wooded hilltops. If only I could just keep on going like this: the whole day and again the next day and never return, never return anywhere.

The man asked, 'And you really don't care where you're going?'

'Really!' she exclaimed.

'I'll show you something.'

Then, even though he really ought to have waited for her reaction, he turned sharply off the main road and sped on in a cloud of whitish dust.

She hadn't the slightest idea where he intended to take her and not to know where you were heading or what might happen was quite exciting. The car took another turn and they were now travelling along a rough field track in the direction of three solitary buildings.

The man got out, opened the door and quite unnecessarily offered her his hand, giving hers a squeeze in the process. Only now was his full height apparent — he was a born basketball player: 'I bet this is something you've never seen before.'

They entered a bare and deserted yard containing only a rusting pump and several rolls of barbed wire in one corner. She found the emptiness rather oppressive. It was a farm made for a murder. The man went ahead of her with long — rather ludicrously long — and important strides. They passed under a

low gateway and suddenly found themselves in a strange, incredible township of thousands of wooden cages. 'Wait here a moment!' The stench of animal excrement hung in the air, as well as another smell she could not place.

In front of a building that resembled a garage with an excessively high opening — more like a hangar for a single forgotten aeroplane — stood a grey horse tied to a post with the bark still on it.

She had never before seen a colour like it — like black soil covered in a layer of hoar frost. She wanted to go over to that beautiful creature, but her companion was already returning, taking those ludicrously long and important strides. Actually, she was pleased he was on his way back, because a strange, inexplicable melancholy had settled on the place. Hurrying behind him came a bald fat man with a bunch of keys.

'What marvellous guests. .' said the fat man. 'So the young lady is curious about our mink,' and they passed through the barbed wire entrance between the cages standing on high crossed legs, in which solitary brown creatures ran here and there in confusion.

Her companion was openly delighted at the sight of them and talked about 'those carnivores' ceaselessly — maybe for her benefit, but no doubt also to show off to the other man. And so they wended their way through the maze of solitary cells from which the inmates had no escape, destined to live for just nine months, until they were at their most magnificent, and she felt pity well up within her as it did whenever she saw a captive animal.

They reached a row of cages, each containing a pair of the creatures darting to and fro. This is where we keep the sick ones, her companion explained. They recover quicker in

company than on their own. And the two men continued their rounds. Perhaps they had forgotten about her and so she stayed by the couples that illness had redeemed from solitary confinement. It is often only solitude that drives people into love, and in fact people waver between freedom and solitude — except that most of the time they lose their freedom without escaping solitude. I must have read that somewhere, but now I know it, now I actually feel it.

The two men were now lost in the maze and she retraced her steps to the previous row of stinking animal cages and was suddenly seized by a very powerful feeling — an intuition almost — that this wasn't going to be any ordinary day: it was a day when even love might come her way. She was so convinced of it that if the lanky man in the suede jacket whose name she didn't even know were to approach her at that moment and say, I love you, she would most likely fall in love with him, totally and absolutely — until she came out at the spot where they had entered and she caught sight of the grey horse in front of her.

It stood there, head hanging. And as she approached it — she had never been afraid of large animals, only of spiders, caterpillars and frogs — she noticed that one of its eyes was covered in an opaque film and it struck her that it must be an old horse and that the layer of hoar frost was in fact no more than a sign of age. It was attached by the shortest of ropes, really a long rope but mostly tied round the stake, and its forelegs were bound together with thick twine. It too was a prisoner, but she felt greater pity for it than for the paltry creatures in the cages. There was something human about its remaining eye — though it couldn't be wisdom. Maybe it was sorrow or anxiety; maybe just pain or exhaustion. Exhaustion most likely.