Love and Garbage

by Ivan Klíma

  ‘That was a nice day,’ said my wife, my guide through sunny and nocturnal landscapes. She pressed herself close to me because she was shivering with cold, and I felt comforted by her closeness.

  IV

  Autumn is well advanced, the streets are full of dry leaves which add to our work, from the houses fly tired unenthusiastic flags, public buildings are displaying streamers with jerkish slogans which would undoubtedly please any chimpanzees that might happen along. Luckily we don’t have to pick up any of this colourful textile rubbish: flags and slogans are put up and taken down by special motorised squads.

  A little way short of the beflagged Palace of Culture we met our now familiar uniformed pair. The foppish one looked a little wilted, he’d probably come on duty after a heavy night; his companion seemed unchanged.

  ‘Bloody mess, isn’t it?’ the fop addressed us, pointing vaguely ahead.

  ‘People are pigs,’ the foreman agreed. ‘Hey, what about the murderer?’ he remembered. ‘Got him yet?’

  ‘Signed, sealed and delivered,’ the fop said casually; ‘the lads did a good job.’

  ‘Name of George,’ his companion explained.

  ‘George who?’ the foreman asked curiously.

  ‘Would you believe it, he was a juvenile,’ the fop yawned. ‘Introduced himself to a girl he wanted to strangle as George from Kladno. But he made a mistake there; she got away from him.’

  ‘Told her he was a mining apprentice,’ the fair one added.

  ‘Yeah. Our lads chased up all the Georges who were mining apprentices, though they realised it might have been a trick.’

  ‘That’s right,’ our youngster sounded pleased. ‘And was it?’

  ‘Course it wasn’t. The man was simple! Know how many women he raped? Go on, you tell him,’ he encouraged his companion.

  ‘Sixteen!’

  ‘And they identified him beyond any doubt.’

  ‘And he was a mining apprentice?’ the foreman voiced his astonishment.

  ‘I’m telling you he was simple. Fellow like that commits one murder, and then has to go on. Things ain’t what they used to be – mining being an honourable job!’ The fop yawned broadly. ‘Still no pantaloons?’ he turned to the captain.

  ‘After my death!’ the captain snapped. But maybe I misheard him and he really said: ‘Save your breath!’

  The fop didn’t even laugh this time. He nodded to his companion and the two continued down the road.

  Mrs Venus pushed her shovel into my hand and grabbed the cart. With her free hand she immediately produced a cigarette and lit it. Her eyes were wet with tears. As we were tipping the rubbish into the cart I asked if anything had happened to her.

  She looked at me as if deciding what lay hidden behind my inquiry: ‘Happened? Why should anything’ve happened to me? Only the old gent died.’

  It took me a while to work out whom she was talking about. ‘The one on your passage?’

  ‘Well, he was eighty, so he died!’ She flicked her fag-end into the dustbin on the handcart and lit another. To change the subject away from death she pointed to the palace: ‘They say they found a gypsy buried in the concrete there!’

  ‘You’re telling me,’ the foreman was angry; ‘I’ve got a chum working in the garages there. Last month they came along with pneumatic drills and started to knock down the wall. And d’you know who they were looking for? That woman singer from the National Theatre, the one who went missing eight years ago.’

  ‘Did they find her?’ I ask.

  ‘They found bugger-all. Their drills all got screwed up!’

  ‘It’s a monstrosity,’ the captain gave the palace its proper description. ‘They can drive a million people inside, they switch the radiation on and they’ve turned them into a million sheep!’ At the thought of it he spat mightily. ‘One day someone will set fire to it,’ he added prophetically, ‘and good luck to him!’

  At that moment a suspicion grew inside me about the direction of his latest dreams.

  My wife went off to the mountains for a week’s skiing with our daughter and grand-daughter, but I didn’t want to leave Dad for so long and therefore stayed behind at home. Only on one day did I go out into the country with my lover. She led me to some sandstone rocks where an anonymous sculptor had over the decades carved out statues of saints, knights and the Czech kings, as well as a lion which towered massively on a rocky ledge. We climbed up narrow icy chimneys and descended on steeply-cut steps. Half-hidden by the fir trunks and raspberry thickets we discovered ever new sculptures. I could see that she was touched and also amazed by the intensity of the creative will of some unknown person who, either not caring for an audience or, on the contrary, full of confidence in his own work, had imposed his visions on these lonely rocks.

  I was curious whether it would amuse her to create a similar gallery for herself.

  She said she preferred gardens, parks, the sea; and wide open spaces. And she preferred ordinary people to saints.

  And whom did she regard as ordinary people?

  Everybody else. Saintliness had been invented by those who were afraid of life and real emotions. That’s why they elevated ecstatic rapture to something we should look up to, to something we should regard as a model.

  And if she was given the kind of space she wanted, a garden by the seashore, what would she adorn it with?

  She was taken aback by my question. She hadn’t thought about it. Certainly with nothing that might give a person a sense of his own poverty, inadequacy or sinfulness.

  We found a room for the night in a small hotel; it was built before the war and its tall windows reached almost down to the floor.

  Of course there’s something sacred in everyone, she added. She wasn’t thinking of that contrived ecstasy, that baroque gesture, but of something untouchable and unportrayable, the human soul. At moments of enlightenment a person could catch a glimpse of it within himself, he could see his own face as others couldn’t see it. If she were given a garden she’d like to fill it with such shapes that those who came to look at them might see themselves, the way they saw themselves at such an illuminated instant.

  What shapes would they be?

  The most natural ones. As in that: Prévert poem:

  And it may happen to a sweeper

  as he waves

  his dirty broom

  about without a hope

  among the dusty ruins

  of a wasteful colonial exhibition

  that he halts amazed

  before a remarkable statue

  of dried leaves and blooms

  representing we believe

  dreams

  crimes celebrations lightning

  and laughter and again longing

  trees and birds

  also the moon and love and sun and death . . .

  We spent a long time looking for accommodation for the night. The hotels were closed, or full up, or else taken over by children from ‘nature schools’. In the end we found an inn where, for a bribe, they took us in.

  As we stepped into the cold and ill-lit room I tried to embrace her, the way I always embraced her when we found ourselves alone, but she stopped me. She didn’t even let me put our bags in the wardrobe until she had looked into it herself. Then she drew back the discoloured curtains, half-opened the window and sat down in an armchair which groaned even under her slight weight. Can’t you feel something strange here? she asked. But I felt nothing but fatigue.

  She became even more restless. I could see that she was listening to something, that she was concentrating on something that was evidently hidden from me. I sat down in the other armchair. Through the open window came alien sounds, someone was starting up a motorbike and a dog was howling in the distance. A silent, sharp-edged patch of light moved across the wall and I realised that I was being gripped by dejection.

  At last she stood up. She embraced me and quickly kissed me. Then she asked if I’d mind very much if we left again.

  I didn’
t think it wise to leave this refuge, knowing that we wouldn’t find anything else in the neighbourhood.

  She said that if it came to the worst we could always stay in the open, it would be better than this unhappy place.

  I shrugged and picked up the cases again.

  In the car she pressed herself against me and begged me not to be angry, surely I knew that she’d never done anything like this before, but there was something evil, something unclean, in that room. Somebody must have died there in terror, without having made his peace, or else have suffered some other great torment.

  I told her she’d acted correctly, I wouldn’t wish her to be with me in a place she didn’t feel happy in.

  Just before midnight they took pity on us at a mountaineering club hostel. The dormitory was big enough for ten people, but we had it to ourselves. The walls were covered with colour photographs of mountain peaks and outside the window a real mountain towered into the sky. We chose a bed immediately by the window. At last we could embrace.

  All of a sudden she burst into tears.

  I was used to her sudden fits of crying, but each time I wondered afresh if I was responsible for them.

  She kissed me through her tears. No, this time it wasn’t my fault at all, on the contrary, she was grateful to me for showing such understanding and not wishing to stay in that dreadful room. Death had touched her there, and she still couldn’t shake it off. Surely I knew that she was not afraid of dying, she was not clinging to life, never did, but suddenly she’d realised that death would part us.

  She attempted to smile. Even though a fortune-teller had told her she’d live to eighty-seven, and even though the lifeline on my palm was long, one day it was bound to happen and then we wouldn’t be seeing each other again, no matter where our souls would go or what fate they’d meet. I embraced her as if trying to carry her in my arms over that river of oblivion which would inevitably divide us.

  I’m fine now, she whispered. I feel good with you, here I feel good with you. And she added that she could feel strength and calm issuing from me, that at last I was opening up, listening to my own voice and not just to those around me.

  You belong to me regardless, she whispered as she fell asleep; you wouldn’t be here with me if you didn’t belong to me.

  And I said nothing, I didn’t reassure her, even though that evening I wanted to be with her, to stay with her, to shield her from the icy waters whose roar I’d managed to hear myself at a moment of total silence. I gazed through the window at the black mass of the mountain and watched the snowflakes driving in the light of a solitary street lamp.

  It occurred to me that she had really helped to drag me out of a state in which I was not listening to myself, in which I actually longed to escape from my own voice which had once urged me to honesty. She believed that that voice would lead me to her. How could it be otherwise when we are so often and so completely together?

  But I was being called back by that voice to ancient longings which were not linked to her, to a time when my life seemed to me cleaner than it did now.

  I looked at her. She was asleep, she was here with me, I could still touch her, still hold her tight, again submit to her voice, to her power. Feel the ecstasy of her proximity. Instead I was in full flight, I was returning to my wife. For one more attempt to be completely with her as I had never managed before, as neither of us had managed before, but as we had both longed to be at one time.

  Maybe it will be a vain journey with a hopelessly obstinate longing for a return, for a long-past innocence; I shall be wandering blindly through landscapes which will be ever more parched, where not a single human being will be seen, let alone a close and loved being; what I will find eventually will be that majestic inescapable river, but I shan’t be able to stop. At that point I understood that it was not the river that would divide us, but myself.

  She sighed softly in her sleep and I went rigid at the thought that she had been listening to me the whole time. How was I to tell her? If I were the person she wanted to see in me, the person I wanted to be, I’d wake her now and tell her that I was leaving: Farewell, my love, there is no other way, I can’t decide differently even though I love you, you most lovable of all women I’ve ever met. But I didn’t do it, that voice within me was not yet strong enough.

  Shortly before nine – we were just getting ready to put our tools into the dustbin recess by the supermarket and to make for the tavern, as was appropriate at that time of day – a garbage truck pulled up alongside us and out jumped Franta, the little idiot. His forage cap at a rakish angle, a red kerchief round his neck, he treated us all to a smile. The foreman walked up towards him but Franta, before saying anything, produced a packet of Benson & Hedges from his pocket, holding it out first to Mrs Venus, then to the foreman and then, one by one, to the rest of us. Only then did he take the foreman aside and talk to him for a while. I could clearly hear him uttering some barely articulated screeches in his castrato’s falsetto.

  ‘God, he stank like a perfume counter,’ Mrs Venus said the moment Franta had driven off in the direction of the Pankrác prison. ‘Must have done a chemist’s somewhere. And a tobacconist’s too,’ she added, remembering the golden pack.

  ‘I don’t like it!’ The foreman was staring after the vanished garbage truck as if expecting some message from that direction.

  I wanted to know what he didn’t like, but he didn’t like anything: neither the cigarette, nor the kerchief, nor the unexpected visit.

  ‘Did he say anything to you?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘What can he say? D’you think he can talk?’ The foreman retrieved his shovel from the recess. ‘That shit’s getting ready for some hanky-panky. We’d better not go anywhere, we’ll have our beer on the hoof!’

  The youngster set out to get some beer from the supermarket and I joined him, I said I’d get a snack for myself. Mrs Venus asked us to get her her favourite cigarettes, while the captain wanted a box of matches.

  ‘I’m somehow half-croaked,’ the youngster was all hunched up as if shaken by the shivers. ‘But last night, have you heard?’

  There’d been a real New Orleans band performing in Prague, hardly anyone knew about it, it wasn’t a public performance, but he’d managed to get in. ‘You should have heard them! The pianist they had, a real second Scott Joplin, and the stuff they played! At the end they asked us if we’d like to jam with them. Think of it, them and us!’ The youngster’s cheeks were flushed with excitement. He stopped at the entrance to the supermarket and demonstrated how one of his friends had strummed on a dolly-board. ‘I couldn’t stop myself and tried to blow a little, but I had a sick turn. Surely this must stop some time, don’t you think?’

  I said I was sure it would, he just had to be patient.

  ‘I can join the boys whenever I like,’ he said. ‘We were a happy crew. You saw for yourself how they let me play the solo in the Gershwin.’

  ‘You played superbly.’

  ‘You really can’t play it otherwise. I imagine that when he composed it he was thinking of something noble, something . . .’ he was vainly searching for a word which would describe the blissful state of a spirit creating.

  Our daughter told my wife and me about a dream she’d had. She was walking in the forest with her husband when they heard strange soft music. They stepped out onto a clearing and there they saw a tall naked Negro blowing a golden trumpet. The trumpet was so bright it illuminated the whole clearing, filled it with so much light that objects were losing their shadows. Suddenly from all sides brilliantly coloured birds came flying in, perhaps they were humming birds, also parrots and birds of paradise, she’d never seen such birds in the flesh. But her husband noticed that there was a swing hanging between some branches. He sat her on it and then disappeared somewhere. But the swing began to swing on its own accord, the music was still there, a kind of music she’d never heard before. She looked about, trying to discover where it came from, but couldn’t see a single musician. It was th
en that she realised that the music was coming straight out of the ground, that the stones were humming and the trees singing like some gigantic violin. In the clearing stood some naked people, among whom she also recognised us, and on the shoulders, the heads and the extended fingers of everyone those magnificent brightly coloured birds were perching. She was naked too, but she didn’t feel ashamed because she was still quite small. At that moment one of the coloured birds approached and sat on her hand. Its plumage had colours she’d never seen before. She was also aware of a delicious perfume she’d never smelled before, and it was then she understood that she was in paradise.

  ‘And what seemed to you most beautiful in that dream?’ my wife wanted to know.

  Our daughter thought for a moment and then said: ‘That I was a little girl again.’

  Daria attributed my loneliness and reluctance to attach myself to anyone to the stars. I am a saturnian person, my Saturn is in fact retrograde and capricornian, there was a smell of bones coming straight out of it. Love alone could liberate me from my loneliness: real love, embracing my whole being. That was the kind of love she was offering me, to save me. She offered me her proximity, such sharing that I became alarmed. Man is afraid to attain what he longs for, just as subconsciously he longs for what he is afraid of. We are afraid we might lose the person we love. To avoid losing that person we drive him or her away.

  She wanted us, at least once in a while, to be together for a few days. At least some movement, some change to that immobility, she lamented. But I resisted so I shouldn’t have to invent more lies at home – surely we’d been together recently.