by Ivan Klíma
Kafka with his shyness sought a way of communicating his torment and simultaneously concealing it. Yet it was so personal that it was not enough for him to express it only in hidden form, only in metaphor; time and again he was prompted to make an open confession of the experiences which touched on the essence of his being. As if he were relating an event twice. First he draws his fantastic image: a bizarre and mysterious trial, an execution machine, or a surveyor’s desperate effort to get into an inaccessible castle, and secondly he assembles the fragments of real experiences and events. He writes everything on translucent sheets of paper or on glass and places them one over the other. Some things supplement each other, some things cover each other, some things find themselves in such surprising company that he must surely have been blissfully amazed himself. Behold, he no longer lies fatally exhausted and impotent in bed with his lover who offers him her redeeming and merciful proximity, but he finds himself, as a mortally weary surveyor, in bed with the castle official, and that man offers him his liberating bureaucratic mercy.
We didn’t go to Switzerland, we didn’t even go to Kutná Hora again. The exhibition was over, and all that was left to us was the attic studio, where the view of the window of the palace opposite was still blocked by the statue of Saint Stephen the Martyr. We’d meet, sit by the low table, drink wine and talk in that strange state of enchantment which stems from the knowledge that everything we do and experience takes on new meaning and importance the moment we impart it to the person we love. In the past we loved one another with longing and with an insatiability which seemed to me unchangeable, even though she was seized by impatience now and again. Something’s got to change, surely we can’t spend our entire lives in such immobility, in such hopeless repetition of the same actions, we don’t want to end up as two clowns who are happy if in their old age they can be walk-ons in an amateur circus performance. A bitterness has crept into her conversation. She is angry about people who don’t know how to live, she rails against artists who are betraying their mission, she curses all men who are treacherous and cowardly and unable to pursue anything in their lives to its conclusion. Most frequently she is angry with my wife.
We are lying by each other’s side. It is evening, an autumnal rainy twilight, we are reluctant to tear ourselves away from one another, to get up and flee into discomfort. I kiss her, once more I embrace her. She presses herself to me: suppose we both stayed here until morning?
She’s testing me, and I keep silent.
Anyway, she can’t understand how I can live with that person. She’d heard some things about her, about what she does to her patients, that had made her quite sick.
I don’t wish to end the day with a quarrel, but nevertheless I ask what she’d heard and from whom. But she refuses to give me any details. She’d spoken to somebody who knew my wife well. He’d said that it was criminal to treat people like that.
I try to discover if this is about some drugs my wife has prescribed.
We’re still lying beside one another, but she is so angry she hardly seems to know where she is. Why bring up drugs? She knew nothing about drugs. Perhaps a perverted doctor would also prescribe perverted drugs, but had my wife never told me about that revolting, humiliating play-acting those poor wretches had to go in for? How she compelled them to vomit up their intimate secrets, how she dug about in their beds? Did I really not understand that that woman was a pervert? She’s unable to live for herself, unable to love, to look after a family, keep an eye on her own husband, and so she’s gone in for professional do-goodery. In reality, and in this she was no different from all other do-gooders, she merely got a kick out of the suffering of others, she merely latched on to the lives of those who still managed to have real emotions and were therefore suffering. And, like a leech, she pretended to be helping them. Or did I think that a woman who for ten years or whatever couldn’t tell that her husband had someone on the side, that he was living with her only out of pity, could discover anything about the souls of others?
I tell her it isn’t like that at all, but she starts shouting at me that I shouldn’t stand up for that person. She doesn’t know why, on top of everything that I’m doing to her, she should bother about my wife’s mission. She’d merely like to know if I was really so blind that I couldn’t see that everything those psychologists, psychiatrists and similar psychopaths were doing was perverted, the arrogance of miserable individuals and spiritual cripples who’re telling themselves that they are better than the rest?
Was she still talking about my wife?
We could leave my wife alone now, she didn’t want to waste another second of her time on her. But she begs me to think about what she’s told me, if only for the sake of my writing. I was unlikely to produce anything while by the side of a person who made a living out of dissecting the souls of others, as if they were rats in a laboratory, ripping out all their secrets and then trampling on them.
She has a fit of the shivers, she is transformed before my eyes. Her face which a moment earlier had seemed gentle and loving is now that of a stranger, and it frightens me.
I ought to silence her, somehow douse that flame of hate in her, or flee from it before it singes me too, but how can I flee when that flame is burning because of me?
At last I embrace her to soothe her and she curls up in my arms, she moans in ecstasy, everything drops away from her, the tenderness returns to her features: Do you at least understand that I love you, that I love you more than anything in the world, that I mean you well?
If I don’t do something we’ll both fall into the fire from which there will be no escape.
My darling, she insists, why won’t you realise that we’re made for each other? Tell me, are you happy with me?
I tell her that I am happy with her but I am aware of a tension within me, an unbearable tension pressing on my lungs so I can hardly breathe.
I walk home through the wet streets, as usual at a brisk pace. Always escaping – from whom and to whom? A place with an unmade bed and unswept floors, a place I spend so little time in that dust settles even on my desktop, my home is falling apart and I with it.
My wife enters. I feel I am in a different sphere, where no corrosive flames are flickering.
My wife is neither arrogant nor conceited, nor does she long to take possession of other people’s secrets. If anything she is childishly trusting. She believes hopefully in the perfectibility of things and of people, and her belief has so much determined strength in it that it can perhaps encourage also those who are on the verge of despair.
I walk up to her and embrace her. At that moment my tension vanishes, I can breathe freely.
It’s nice to have you home, she says. I’ve been looking forward to this.
The method of effectively and economically removing human garbage from this world, in a businesslike and precise manner, in the spirit of our revolutionary age, its ideas and aims, is most factually described in his autobiography by the commandant of Auschwitz, Hoess.
The Jews earmarked for liquidation were led away to the crematoria as quietly as possible – the men in one group, the women in another . . . When the Jews had undressed they stepped into the gas chamber, which was equipped with showers and water pipes, so that they assumed they were entering a bath-house. First the women and children went in, and after them the men . . . Now and again it would happen that the women, while undressing, suddenly issued bone-chilling shrieks, they would tear their hair and act like persons demented. In that case they were led out quickly and killed by a bullet in the nape of the neck . . .
The doors were swiftly screwed down and the waiting disinfecters immediately injected cyclon through openings in the roofs. It flowed down to the floor through special tubes, forming the gas instantaneously. Through a little window in the door it was possible to see how those standing nearest to these tubes fell down dead immediately.
Hoess was a victim-maker with a burnt-out soul. He was therefore exchangeable and replaceable, and
has indeed been exchanged and replaced a great many times.
The figure of the victim-maker with a burnt-out soul belongs to the world in a revolutionary age. To a world in which the person who in his actions perfectly embodies emptiness and vanity, cruelty and a moral void, is granted the right to regard all those who differ from him as garbage to be swept away, garbage of which he cleanses the world. He is ready to cleanse it of anyone: of Armenians, of kulaks, of gypsies, of counter-revolutionaries, of intellectuals, of Jews, of Ibos, of Kampucheans, of priests, of blacks, of lunatics, of Hindus, of factory owners, of Muslims, of the poor, of prisoners-of-war. One day, perhaps not too far away, they will cleanse it of people altogether. The brooms are becoming ever more efficient. The Apocalypse – that is, the cleansing of the world of human beings and of life altogether – is increasingly becoming a mere technical problem.
Hoess factually describes the flames which licked up to the sky twenty-four hours a day and roasted the corpses of his victims. The flames were so high and so bright that the anti-aircraft command lodged a complaint, and the smoke was so dense and the stench so strong that the population in the whole neighbourhood began to panic. These reasons, he records, led to the rapid design and construction of crematoria. They built two, each with five huge furnaces, and together these were capable of incinerating two thousand murdered units, but that was not enough, so they set up another two incinerators, but even that was not enough. The largest number of persons gassed and incinerated ever achieved in one day, he records, was just under ten thousand.
That was how it was done, and looking at it purely from the technical point of view, it was a very primitive procedure. However, the human spirit has not been idle in this revolutionary age: the flames which the cleaners have at their disposal today are capable of simultaneously incinerating any number of people in their own homes.
Yet nothing has ever disappeared from this world or will disappear. The souls of the murdered, the souls of all those sacrificed, of all those burnt alive, gassed, frozen to death, shot dead, beaten to death with pickaxes, blown to smithereens, hanged or starved to death, of all the betrayed and of those torn from their mothers’ wombs are rising above the land and the oceans and are filling space with their lamentations.
At first I was alarmed at my attempt to knock the great creator down from heaven to earth. But I don’t believe that this can be done. Our heavens, after all, are linked to our earth. How can anyone unable to relate to the person he loves expect to relate to those he does not love? Kafka realised this, and to stand by the side of the woman he loved meant to him standing by the side of people, becoming one of them, participating in their order. He also realised what most of us are concealing from ourselves: that drawing close to another being, accepting another being as well as another order means the surrender of freedom. Man longs to get close to the person he loves, and in doing so hurts and betrays that person and himself, and thereby he commits a crime.
A lawyer by training, he wrote about one single case. He himself prepared the evidence for his own prosecution, he defended himself passionately, and mercilessly found himself guilty. He never abandoned his theme, but by living it through himself, completely and truthfully, he managed to embrace both the heights and the depths of life.
From below the mountain another flock of crows started up, darkening the sky and making the air vibrate with the beat of their wings. The birds alighted around the treasure-hunters who’d by then finished their work. But it didn’t seem that the two groups took any notice of one another.
One of the men looked down towards us and called out something I couldn’t make out. Immediately the others also started shouting at us. I could see my wife was beginning to be afraid. ‘What are they shouting?’
I couldn’t make it out. Most probably they were offering to start trading with us.
‘Do you want to go over to them?’
She was prepared to go over to them with me, even though she was afraid of them. She’d been trying, at least over the past few years, to indulge my wishes and even my eccentric ideas. She raised no objections to my having been an orange-clad street-sweeper for several months now, although she must have wondered uneasily whether some ulterior motive, or at least a wish to escape from home, was not perhaps concealed behind my occupation. Sometimes when I got back home I felt a note of uncertainty in her question of how I was. Suppose she suspected me of doing something different from what I said I was doing? She had plenty of reasons to distrust me, but neither now nor in the past had she dared ask me straight out. She regarded distrust as something unworthy, something that soiled whoever let it enter their minds.
I realised how often I’d betrayed her confidence in the past. I felt a shaming sense of guilt as well as a need to compensate for it somehow. For a start I said that it was a lovely day, that we’d done well to get out into the country. It sounded a little paradoxical, standing as we were below the mountain of garbage.
Back home our daughter and little grand-daughter were waiting for us. Our son, too, sat down to dinner with us. He’d long been trying to find a place of his own and as always he had a multitude of carefully worked-out plans which, he hoped, would lead him to his objective, whereas our daughter, as always, was giving no thought to her future. There were times when she felt that everything, absolutely everything, still lay ahead of her, while at other times she felt that everything, absolutely everything, lay behind her, that there was nothing left to her but to live out her days – as tolerably as possible. For the most part, however, she gave herself joyfully to the moment. After dinner she wanted to draw me. She cut some large sheets out of wrapping paper, pinned one of them to a stiff folder, and made me sit in an armchair for a long time.
From the kitchen came the clatter of plates, there was the muted sound of my son’s tape recorder, and my grand-daughter could be heard through the wall delightedly recounting some feeble-minded incident she’d seen on our jerkish television. I asked if I might close my eyes and my daughter, having warned me that this would make me look like my own deathmask, agreed. At least I wouldn’t fidget.
From outside came the smell of the sea and a wave licked up the sandy beach.
Hold on a little longer!
Her fingers were moving swiftly in the sand. How I love those beautiful fingers which so often touch me with tenderness and which, moreover, know how to turn shapelessness into shape.
I don’t know if this is my likeness, I’m never sure of my own shape. I have an animal body and the wings of a swan, but I look happy.
Because you are happy, she explains. Or aren’t you happy with me?
Aren’t you afraid that the water will carry me away at night?
That’s why I’ve given you wings, so you can fly away. You have wings so you can be free, so you can go wherever you please. By this she meant: so I could get to her at any time. But the water washed me away, complete with wings, and did not carry me to her, and I don’t know if it ever will.
The charcoal swishes across the paper, the tape now sounds louder, my son’s left the door of his room open. The year before we’d visited him in the provincial town where he was then doing his military service; we’d set out on Saturday morning, we’d decided to put up at a hotel and return on Sunday evening, but Lída had a headache and left early on her own, and I stayed on at the hotel alone. On Sunday morning the bus took me to the barracks where our son was waiting for us at the gates. I thought that he looked quite good in uniform, even though I’m not too fond of uniforms.
He asked me where I’d like to go, but I left it to him to decide: he knew his way around here better than me.
So he took me up some hill where Těsnohlídek was reported to have walked, along a cemetery wall with slender yews standing upright behind it, and down a farm track. The weather was cool and windy, around the birches by the track blew small leaves like flakes of coloured snow.
My son spoke about his experiences in the army, then he shyly mentioned that his gi
rlfriend had visited him here too, and hastily returned to military matters. We were in no hurry with our conversation, we had the whole day before us. I couldn’t recall when we had last spent a whole day together, if indeed I ever found that much time in the course of a single day. It seemed to me that my son was suddenly emerging from the dark or returning from a great distance. I’d spent time with so many people, I’d spent days and weeks with my lover, while my son was a fleeting figure in the evening or in the morning or at Sunday lunches. Of course he sat in the room sometimes, along with other guests, listening silently or perhaps coming over for a few words with me – most often about political events or about his classes, never about his personal worries or hopes, and as a rule I’d sit down at my desk after a while and thereby dismiss him. He’d also invite me to listen to protest songs which he’d recorded and which he was sure would interest me, and I’d either decline or else soon doze off while listening to them.
I knew that he had identified with my destiny to such an extent that, even though he’d studied engineering, he was closely – indeed more closely than I – following the fate of literature, at least in the part of the world we lived in, and he’d think up plans for making banned works known to the public, and took delight in any indication, however slight, of a turn for the better.
I regretted that for so long, for whole years on end, I’d never managed to find more time and interest for what made up his life. I now questioned him about his friends, about his girl, and about what he thought about the future. I could see that my interest pleased him, and it occurred to me that he might feel as lonely as I had at his age.
I decided to invite him out for a special meal, but when we got to the tavern all they had was cheap salami, bread and onions. At least I ordered some wine. Our conversation was leaping from one event to another, the most essential things we continued to carry locked up within us. It is difficult to voice the feelings a father and son have for each other. My father had also been unable to do it, we’d never talked about anything too personal. What we did talk about provided no opportunity for him to show any emotions whatever. I knew that he was childishly proud of what he regarded as my literary successes. But he never commented on what I had written, any more than on how I was living.
