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

It was just a rough idea, he said.

'I'd still like to hear it. As a way of saying goodbye.'

'It's not a story to say goodbye with.'

'Why not?'

'It's about something else.' He put his arms around her. 'I don't remember ever mentioning it to you.'

'I'd like to hear it.'

'In fact, it's not really a story, it's just a bunch of images. I enjoy coming up with images. Maybe one day I'll string them together into a story, and that will be for you.'

'So, come on, tell me. Don't make me twist your arm.' She was lying beside him and he could caress her body, touch her breasts, as he spoke. 'Who's the story about?'

'You know, I don't even have a name for him. He's just called 'he'. Sometimes I think that he's really me, but then we split again, because I'm different. I'm sorry, I'm not being very clear. This person is a carpenter like my father. But that's not important. He's successful and rich and famous for his carvings. Then he has a bad accident and loses his right hand.'

'How old is he when this happens?'

'Not very old, but by that time he was already famous. He doesn't want this to stop him working, so he tries to carve with his left hand, but when he does manage to finish something, it's as though it had been made by someone else. That crushes him. He feels as though he's lost himself.'

'Doesn't he have a family?'

'He has two sons, but they don't live with him. Their

mother took them away when they were still small. After the accident, they come to see him in his studio where he has a lot of carvings, some finished, some not. There's a bird taking flight, a tiger getting ready to jump. Icarus, and Prometheus bound. His sons want to know what he's going to do now. He replies that they needn't worry, he's already done enough in this life and that he is simply going to live and think.

'He really tries. He walks about the city and the countryside beyond, but the things he sees demand that he give them a shape, and he has to reply that he can't, and that depresses him.

'He stops going out of doors. He drives things and people out of his mind, until he finds himself in a state of emptiness, one that bears no resemblance to any countryside or any space. It is true emptiness.'

'And what about God?'

'He doesn't believe in God.'

'But God exists.'

'No one knows that. But he's not waiting for God. If he's waiting for anything, it's for death, and he's curious about what the face of death will look like. Will it be like an old woman who creeps about the world with a scythe, or will it be a beautiful young girl who approaches him with open arms?

'One day he gets an invitation to visit an old uncle of his whom everyone in the family thinks is crazy. He has nothing better to do, so he accepts the invitation. After all, he's living in emptiness. I imagine the emptiness of this particular day as a yellowish fog through which the occasional outline of a house becomes visible. Suddenly, however, a black raven emerges out of this yellow fog. It stands on the rim of a fountain and stares at him. Then it spreads its wings as if it were getting ready to fly away, but it doesn't. It merely watches him through its small, clever eyes as he enters his uncle's block.

'The uncle has an interesting face that reminds him a little of Spencer Tracy. The one thing that gives the uncle's life meaning is drawing up family trees. He looks for direct ancestors and, as far as his strength will permit, searches

through other branches of the family as well. The uncle tells him that he's managed to get as far back as the sixteenth century and has found unknown soldiers, surgeons, impoverished gentry, martyrs tortured by the Inquisition, village magistrates and many generations of serfs. He has discovered a branch that once lived in Burgundy. In his cupboard there are piles of maps and reams of graph paper on which he had drawn the different branches of his genealogical charts. The uncle announces that he intends to leave all this to him.

'He objects that he's never been interested in such things. The uncle, however, brings out a box full of documents: among them are the originals of birth certificates, purchase agreements, faded letters, ribbons, dried flowers, funeral notices, copies of parish registers. The meaning of my work, he says, was to know where I came from and therefore where I'm going.

'What can a few dates and names of long-dead people possibly tell you?' he asks his uncle. His uncle leans close to him and whispers, "They speak to me. They're not dead, they just move in a different space."

'The following week he hires a taxi to take all the documents away. When they are carrying out the last carton and he's getting ready to pay the driver, he notices an enormous raven perched on a pile of dirt and paving- stones, observing him. He understands that he is being given a sign but he doesn't understand what it means. Am I boring you?'

'How could you possibly bore me?'

'In any case, it was you who led me to do this story.'

'Me?'

'By being the way you are.'

'What is the way I am?'

'Mysterious.'

She kissed him.

'It's only after the uncle dies that he starts work. He finds his uncle's final piece of paper, the one that brings him closest to some kind of beginning, although twelve generations means nothing in the history of any family. On the tip of the tree is the name Agrippa Sever, born on the fourth of November in the hamlet of Chiliene, in the region

of Ellis. He copies this information down. He doesn't know what country to look for the region of Ellis in, but he can imagine the era. A Gothic castle perched on an inaccessible rocky promontory, a stony road along which a pair of oxen are pulling a heavy wagon.

'The hamlet of Chiliene, as he discovers by checking old maps, is now called Kyllene, and is situated on a northwestern promontory of the Péloponnèse. He will have to go there if he wants to continue his investigation. When he arrives, he tries to make enquiries at the parish church but he draws a blank. The priest no longer has the register from that period. He takes him out to the cemetery, but he can't find a single grave older than one hundred and fifty years, not a single headstone that suggests the name he is looking for. The priest sends him to the district town on the edge of the sea.'

'You've seen it?'

'Perhaps, in a movie. Or I dreamt about it. Stone buildings, cobbled streets, everything white, pink oleander blooming in the gardens, figs and olives ripening. Dark-skinned, black-haired children are playing in the narrow streets. A donkey is pulling a two-wheeled cart to the top of a hill.

'He asks about the archives, but no one understands him. They take him into a bar where several sailors and some young women are sitting. They offer him wine. Then he's astonished to see the carving of a raven sitting on a ledge beside the door. He realizes his trip will not be in vain. And sure enough, the next day in the archives, he finds the name he's been looking for. He also discovers that the grandfather of this man came here with the army of the Venetian doge.'

'So he has to go to Italy?'

'Yes. Suddenly, he gets the fever. He aches to discover more ancestors. The Italian soldier's name was Severus. What if this man was related to the dynasty of Roman emperors? The idea obsesses him. Not so much because he longs to be the descendant of a line of unremarkable emperors, but he sees something that he can hold on to. But how is he to bridge a gap of thousands of years? Back to a time when barbarians were rampaging through Europe,

devastating towns and countries, when even kings and princes seemed to emerge from darkness, and their descendants seemed to vanish into it once more?

'He continues his journey backwards in time, though it becomes more and more difficult. He chats up unknown archivists. He talks his way into monasteries, rectories, libraries. He writes letters. Some of his correspondents treat him as an eccentric; others think that they might be able to get something out of him, if not money then at least something valuable.