Ivan Klima - Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light

'Nearness is the moment at which love climaxes.'

'And anything else?'

'I don't know. Perhaps the willingness to listen.'

'You're looking somewhere outside yourself again. What are you looking for?'

'I don't see that building.'

'Don't think about it.'

'It seems as though a fog has come in.'

'Don't think about it.'

'If the fog comes in, we might get lost.'

'Are you afraid?'

'Sometimes. Ever since they locked me up I'm afraid of falling into a place I can't climb back out of.'

'What is fear?'

'Fear is the touch of death, death reminding us of its existence.'

'Is death touching you now?'

'No, not now. It can't touch me when I'm with you, when I'm so near you.' And he feels something he never knew before — ecstasy, or perhaps true nearness.

The next evening he drops in at his regular bar. Little Ivan is here; he's obviously finished the job without being blown through the roof. The producer, Poštolka, is here too, and so is the crazy pensioner with the beak nose who used to teach history and natural science. He taught something he didn't believe for so long it befuddled his mind. Now he breeds exotic birds and is gradually coming to resemble one himself.

'I knew they were getting ready to shaft you,' says Little Ivan, looking indignant, though he had obviously not been indignant enough to turn down Fuka's job. 'I bet it's the police, because they confiscated your film. They put the word about, and now no one has the guts to let you work. You should definitely do something about it.'

It's the same advice he had heard yesterday from his woman. 'Actually, I couldn't care less.'

'What if they don't let you film any more?' Poštolka interjects; it sounds almost like a threat.

'But you brought it on yourself,' says Little Ivan suddenly.

'How did you work that out?'

'You made it too obvious you couldn't care less. You have a perfect right not to give a shit, but you don't need to tell everyone.'

'Or if you do, you've got to have the right piece of paper,' says the ex-teacher with the beak nose. 'Get certified or get a tame bird. My parrot can say the names of all our presidents, even the ones you don't have to say under your breath.'

'To hell with your parrot.' He takes a draught of beer. In his mind's eye, he sees a grove of mimosas populated by yellow-green parrots with coral beaks. Was he supposed to fly around in circles forever — condemned to live in an aviary from which only death could liberate him? He takes another draught of beer and waits in vain for relief.

Poštolka starts talking about a prediction he's heard about the impending end of the world. They say it will be the consequence of some cosmic catastrophe, but he believes the end will be brought about by people themselves. They will poison the earth and then, in a final gesture, blow it to smithereens.

As usual his opinions are second-hand and banal. The teacher with the beak nose pooh-poohs the predictions, then launches into a ridiculous account of the three possible attitudes a man who wants to remain free can take.

First, he can try to gain the confidence of those who have power over his career. He hides what he really wants to say in his most secret drawer, and puts his heart on ice. But he can never gain their trust, because those who have the power to decide his fate are untrusting as a matter of principle. Still, he may gradually make a career for himself; acquire a car; two women; and a cottage where he goes to make love, get drunk and forget. But the heart he has put on ice suffers, and the man will be prematurely struck down by a heart attack.

'Anyone who takes the opposite position,' the old man goes on, 'puts nothing off and gives no ground to those who have the power to decide his fate. So he keeps his integrity. But those above him never give him a chance, and he achieves nothing of what he had vowed to achieve.

Disappointed, he takes to drink, and will probably end up in a clinic.'

The third position is somewhere in between. He dissimulates, makes concessions to the powerful, while at the same time secretly trying to live and work in harmony with his beliefs. Yet he knows what he has done wrong, and because his heart is still in his body, he torments it with pangs of conscience for so long that he eventually breaks down. He will probably end up in an institute for nervous disorders. An Austrian writer has claimed that before you can do good, you must first impress people. The old man, however, claims — with the air of one offering him the flower of his wisdom — that man must first do evil in order to gain room in which to do good, if he is still capable of doing good.

The old man's ranting angers Fuka. 'Shut up!' he shouts. 'Save the advice for your budgies.'

The bar closes at eleven o'clock. The producer invites Fuka to go on drinking. The former teacher invites him to visit his aviary. Little Ivan promises to put in a good word for him. He certainly means it, at least until he sobers up.

Fuka walks unsteadily back home along an empty street. He notices a drunken woman sprawled on the pavement opposite. Her handbag is in her lap and she is wearing a kerchief. She's probably from the country.

'I just couldn't make it,' he says to Alina when he returns, 'I had the air tickets, but there was an earthquake. You must have read about it.'

'I know,' she replies without looking at him. 'But I was desperate to have you back. When you didn't come, something happened, something inside me.' She'd lost some weight after the occurrence. She was wearing a yellow kerchief and not a hair on her head was visible. She must have had it cut.

He takes out snapshots showing half-demolished houses, the ruins of a bridge, crushed cars, uprooted trees, sunken pavements, cracked walls and cracked earth and even dead bodies arranged in a row beside a pile of rubble. 'It was spooky,' he says. 'I've never experienced anything like it. You don't really know what's going on. If

you could hear an explosion or something — but there was only the sound of things cracking and then shouts and then a moment of silence and then the cracking sounds again, and everything's trembling and you still don't know what's going on. I ran out into the street and at that moment the first building collapsed. . '

She shakes her head, not wanting to hear any more. 'I'm not accusing you of anything,' she says. 'Something happened, and I don't love you any more. It might have happened even if you'd come back. You're different from how I imagined you, from the person I'd like to live with.'

He wants her to tell him how he is different, but she suddenly begins a strange fit of trembling and begs him to leave her alone, never to call her, never again, to forget all about her.

He is dumbstruck, but he manages to nod. He wants to kiss her one more time. He takes her head in his hands and kisses her cold lips. He smells the perfume of her breath, but she does not reciprocate the kiss and tries to wriggle free of his grip. As she does so, the kerchief slips off her head, and he's stunned to see that she has lost not only the child, but her hair as well.

Fuka pulls his camera out of its case, and he even manages to change its lens and photograph the drunken woman, who may or may not have hair but almost certainly has no home to go back to.

What is a home?

A home is something we carry inside us. Those who do not have a home inside them cannot build one, either from defiance or from stone.

II

He finishes his breakfast. Since his wife died he has breakfasted alone. Alone in spacious dining-rooms, at enormous tables spread with bright white tablecloths, served with generous portions of food he hardly touches, for in the mornings he suffers from a feeling of fullness. But he must