by Ivan Klíma
‘In case you don’t get his address there,’ Mrs Venus returned to the youngster, ‘you could try that Dana of his. He might be there.’ And she described for me the house where the woman Dana lived. I’ve no idea how she knew. The house was in the Little Quarter.
The tea with rum had warmed me through nicely and I was now able to set out for the office. My way led me through the familiar little street of family homes, and when I got to the artist’s window I gazed in amazement on a vest which, suspended from a cord, shone brilliantly with its orange colour. Set out behind it into the depths of the room were the stems and stalks of exotic plants. They had been arranged by the artist’s hand to suggest human figures. As I stared into the window I could make out individual likenesses, familiar facial features. A woman with a jockey cap on her head undoubtedly represented Mrs Venus, still without her Red-Indian wrinkles, but already with a sorrowful expression around her mouth. At the same time, however, there was something joyous in her attitude, in the gestures of her hands. Perhaps the artist had caught her just at the moment when she was about to mount the filly she’d nursed back to health. A moment later I identified a sculptural likeness of the foreman, carrying a wounded airman out of an imaginary aircraft and, in doing so, very nearly soaring up himself on the wings of his bravery. I also recognised the captain, his stocky, as yet unbowed figure looked good in a naval uniform. Perhaps, after all, there was in him both the eccentric inventor and a great prankster. But at the beginning of his actions probably stood a childlike dream, a mirage of distant voyages. Mr Rada, on the other hand, stood there in ugly brown convict’s garb and was pouring water from a billy-can onto the head of another convict. His face was frozen at the instant of sudden inner illumination, at the touch of bliss. At that moment I heard the notes of Gershwin’s rhapsody. In the youngster’s expression there was so much concentration in his own playing and so much happiness that he seemed transformed. His clarinet was intended to suggest not so much a musical instrument as a conjurer’s wand which caused rocks to part and transported humans into the realm of their own dreams.
I realised then that all these faces were, in their likeness, both real and unreal. They seemed younger and more attractive, as though nothing of the working of time or life had marked them. At the same time I understood that this exhibition had been prepared by a different artist, by a woman artist. The sculptor here had only let her use his exhibition window and she, surmising the direction of my walking, had set out for me her park, a garden where a person might see his own likeness as he himself wished it to appear at moments of grace. Maybe she had done this to remind me of her, or to demonstrate to me her loving and generous vision of what art should represent of life.
I was still looking for myself among the sculptures, but I didn’t see my own face: there was only a tall pillar, as if hewn from stone, but I couldn’t see its top through the window. I remembered, and I wondered if it might have a smile at the top. But I knew that I wouldn’t find a smile – I’d have to be at peace with myself first.
The figures were now slowly beginning to dissolve before my eyes, and I was surprised to find myself in the grip of nostalgia. A person may think that the fate of people who are sufficiently remote does not touch him. Yet all of a sudden he will catch sight of them in an unexpected situation, will recognise their unsuspected likeness to him, whether it be beautiful or terrible, and he realises that not only have they touched him, but they have actually entered into him. This is what happens so long as life isn’t totally extinct in a person. My father, in a dying flash of consciousness, suffered from the thought that a strange woman could be more wicked than he’d thought possible.
Long ago, in my childhood, he had convinced me that paradise was a human invention. And yet he yearned for it, he yearned for human contact and he yearned for eternity. He wanted to cut himself adrift from the earth and to rise to the sky, to get to the edge of the mystery. Did he realise what he was turning down?
Coming along the opposite pavement was the uniformed patrol. The foppish one, however, was accompanied this time by a policeman I hadn’t seen before. I was prepared to pass them without acknowledging them when the fop suddenly changed direction and made straight for me.
I stiffened, as always. Why had my presence in the world annoyed them this time?
The fop carelessly raised his hand to his cap. ‘Day off today?’ he asked.
‘Sort of,’ I answered evasively.
‘What about the one in the high-water trousers then?’
I said I’d heard the captain had been taken to psychiatry.
‘What else could we do, we didn’t really want to,’ the fop explained. ‘We said to him, stop this nonsense, grandad, in the middle of the night. But instead of pissing off he lit that bottle of his. Would have killed him if we hadn’t nabbed him, his fuse was only one metre!’ he added with professional outrage. ‘Anyway, they’ll let him go, everybody’ll testify that he’s screwy, that he walked about in those ridiculous trousers even in the snow – I ask you!’ He turned to his companion, but he had walked on out of earshot. ‘But d’you know that he put on long trousers that evening, real baggy ones, perfect pantaloons, and a tie as well!’ The fop shrugged his shoulders in amazement and raised two fingers to his cap. ‘He was touched all right,’ he said, tapping his forehead, and walked away.
Sitting behind the desk at the office really was the little idiot, and he didn’t know the youngster’s address, or more correctly refused to know it – he might have had to get up from his chair and look up some file. A smile spread over his fleshy lips – the self-assured smile of a man who had been given power. Power over those who swept up garbage, and hence also over the garbage itself, and hence over the world of things. He explained something to me in his jerkish language but I didn’t understand, we lacked an interpreter.
No matter, I thought to myself in an upsurge of spite, I’ll find the youngster without him! I got on a tram which took me to the Little Quarter.
The spot which Mrs Venus had described was well known to me. It was on the other side of the place at the windows of which I used to look from the little attic I’d visited so often.
I’d frequently had to walk round the building but I’d never taken any notice of it. The walls were thick and the staircase dark. I thought I sniffed the familiar smell of gas.
I was lucky at least that the youngster’s lady friend had a split shift and was therefore at home at this hour. She asked me into the hall. I didn’t know if she was on her own, all other sounds were drowned by a noisy military band, and from somewhere came the rattle of a washing machine.
‘But he’s not here,’ she informed me when I’d explained who I was looking for. She was a bulky, powerful woman of mature years. I couldn’t picture her in the youngster’s embrace. ‘And he won’t come again,’ she declared.
I said I’d got him the drug he’d been waiting for. Perhaps I could leave it with her for when he dropped in.
‘But he won’t be dropping in,’ she said with the finality one uses in talking about the dead. ‘I told him not to come again.’
I asked her where I could find him.
‘I’ve no idea where he could be, he never said where he came from.’ Suddenly she remembered: ‘Didn’t he play somewhere? Maybe those musicians of his could tell you.’
I thanked her. I’d got to the door when she added: ‘He was such a poor little thing, if you ever met him. He’d sit down and just look. Couldn’t even eat anything proper, and as for drink only juice. Once he came in from somewhere, all wet through, I made him a grog, he didn’t tell me he wasn’t allowed to, and he nearly died on me.’
The youngster had gone and the waters had closed over him. I didn’t know what to do with his medicine. Maybe the woman who used to sit in the office might help, might at least remember the name of the street or the town he’d come from. But I was in no mood to search for her. I began to suspect that by the time I tracked down the youngster the medicine might ha
ve become superfluous.
I left the house. It was midday, the low sun lit up the side of the palace, on the window ledge the pigeons were warming themselves as in the past. They were probably different pigeons, but who can tell them apart?
It suddenly occurred to me that I had nowhere to go, no one to see. Except that I had to arrange for a funeral oration. They’d be having their midday break at the Academy, and what then, what afterwards? Here I was with a medicine I had no use for, all round me people were hurrying whom I had no use for either. My net was suddenly swinging, a few threads snapped, and below me I saw darkness.
My daughter told me about her dream of the end of the world. She was walking through a landscape with her husband, it seemed a vast expanse, bordered only by the horizon. It was clear day. Suddenly the light began to turn yellow, until it was sulphurous, and at that moment the left part of the horizon began to move towards the right part, and as the two parts approached one another the light: faded, it was getting dark, and the earth started trembling. The two of them lay down side by side, closed their eyes and began to pray: Shema Yisrael Adonai elohenu Adonai ekhad. When they opened their eyes again she saw above her the entire universe and in it our sun with its planets, including our earth and the moon. Whoever had seen this, she realised, could no longer be alive. She also realised that no life was left on earth. The horizons collided, the land masses burst and the waters flooded everything. Just then she noticed that among the planets a large fiery-red sharp-edged gambler’s die was orbiting, and also revolving, so she could watch the white dots on its sides, and she wondered who had cast the die, whether it had been the humans themselves or the Eternal Holy One, blessed be his name!
I walked round the palace and entered the little square. I walked over the familiar uneven pavement and pushed the heavy door open. In the hallway I was surrounded by a familiar smell. I climbed the wooden stairs. Waving on a line were nappies, the nappies of some new child. Anyway, I never even saw the child, I had no eyes for her. But the roof of the monastery rose up as before, in so far as it is possible to say that anything can be the same at two different moments in time, and I climbed on towards the attic. The door was adorned on the outside by a poster which used to be there, but the smell of oil and gas still came through all the cracks. The name by the bell-push meant nothing to me.
I didn’t ring. There was no point in it. Even if I’d been able to ring a bell into the past, and she really appeared at the door, what would I say to her? I didn’t have a single sentence prepared, not a single new sentence.
In front of the building stood a small group of tourists, gazing with appropriate interest at the wall of the palace. What can they see there, what can they feel? These walls do not speak to them, they don’t remind them of a single breath, of a single cry or a shed tear. After all, I had something that they didn’t.
Slowly I drifted along the little streets, roughly by the same route that the author I am writing about at the moment would take to the Castle.
What used to fascinate me most about literature at one time was that fantasy knows no frontiers, that it is as infinite as the universe into which we may fall. I used to think that this was what fascinated and attracted me in Kafka. For him a human would be transformed into an animal and an animal into a human, dream seemed to be reality for him and, simultaneously, reality was a dream. From his books there spoke a mystery which excited me.
Later I was to understand that there is nothing more mysterious, nothing more fantastic, than life itself. Whoever exalts himself above it, whoever isn’t content with horrors already reached and passions already experienced, must sooner or later reveal himself as a false diver who, out of fear of what he might discover in the depths, descends no further than into a solidly built basement.
Kafka, too, did not portray anything but the reality of his own life. He presented himself as an animal, or he lay down on his bed in his cleverly constructed murdering machine to punish himself for his guilt. He felt guilty about his inability to love, or at least to love the way he wanted to. He was unable to get close to his father or to come together with a woman. He knew that in his longing for honesty he resembled a flier and his life a flight under an infinite sky, where a flier is always lonely and longs in vain for human contact. The longer he flies the more his soul is weighed down by guilt and forced down towards the ground. The flier can jettison his soul and continue his flight without it – or crash. He crashed, but for a moment at least he managed to rise from the ashes in order, second by second, movement by movement, to describe his fall.
Like everyone who hangs on for a moment above the abyss, or who has risen from the ashes and realises how tenuous his net is, Kafka was purged of anger and hate just as his language was of superfluous words. The author is already standing on the edge of the black hole, yet he still longs to look into another’s eyes in truth and in love, to speak to him in a language which his fall has cleansed of all hatreds and of all vanity.
Anyone longing to become a writer, for even a few moments of his life, will vainly weave fantastic events unless he has experienced that fall during which he doesn’t know where or whether it will come to an end, and unless his longing for human contact awakens in him the strength to rise, purged, from the ashes.
A tension was growing in me, tearing up my thoughts. I needed to do something – to talk, to shout, to cry, to write something, at least to chalk up on the wall the names of those I shall never see again.
I was passing a baker’s shop from which the smell of sweet rolls wafted out. These rolls were baked only at this bakery, a little way from the stone bridge, a little way from our palace. The last time I was in there to buy some was the day before I started street-sweeping. Then, as I entered the bakery, I was racked by longing, I was afraid that the time when I was granted the grace of human contact was coming to an end, and I saw only the edge of the precipice before me. My greatest fear was that I had dragged her to that abyss with me.
At the news stand I bought a jerkish evening paper to see if they’d noticed Dad’s death. I pushed the paper into my pocket and leaned against the stone parapet. Below me, above a little ornamental balcony, was the picture of the Virgin Mary which was said to have been carried here on the waves of a great flood. By my side stood Brokoff’s Turk, with his many-buttoned doublet and with a dog guarding his Christian prisoners, above him the three founders of the Order of the Holy Trinity. Observe, darling, how most of the life is in the dog and in the Turk; animals and heathens have no prescribed gestures, they’re alive, they aren’t saints. Saintliness doesn’t belong to life, it was invented by various cripples who were unable, or afraid, to live and therefore wanted to torture those who knew how to live.
The sun was bright on the roofs of the houses and the almost bare branches of the horse-chestnuts cast a filigree of shadows on the ground. From the bridge came the discontinuous click of footfalls. I thought I could even hear the hum of the weir.
I tore myself away from the parapet. Time was moving on and I had to find a funeral speaker. I cast one last glance down into the neighbourhood where we had sometimes walked together to the nearby park, and just then I saw her. I couldn’t, from my height, make out her face clearly, but I recognised her hurried, life-hungry way of walking. I looked after her, I followed her with my eyes as she passed under the arch of the bridge. I could have let her lose herself again in the distance from which she’d appeared, but I ran down the stairs, caught up with her and uttered her name.
She stopped. For a while she stared at me as if I were an apparition. ‘Where have you sprung from?’ she asked, the blood rushing into her face.
I tried to explain that I’d got a drug for someone but that that person had vanished from the surface of the earth, in fact not even his former woman friend knew where I might find him.
‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘one instant a person’s here, and the next instant it’s as if he’d never existed!’ She looked at me. How many reproaches did she have prepa
red for this moment? Or was she, on the contrary, about to persuade me that I’d made a mistake, that I’d betrayed myself?
‘What about your Dad?’ she asked instead. ‘I prayed for him,’ she said when I told her, and simultaneously her eyes embraced and gently kissed me.
Suddenly I felt the touch of time, the time on the far side of the thin wall. She was sitting with me in the hospital waiting room, then we walked out, snow was falling.
I quickly asked about her daughter and about her work.
Just like me, she said, I was more interested in her work than in her. But she wasn’t doing anything at the moment. She’d discovered the joys of laziness. Sometimes she’d read the cards for friends or she’d botch up some figure from her dreams. Some of them still bore my likeness.
We walked along the little streets where we used to walk so often, and as always she talked to me as we walked. In the summer she’d made the acquaintance of an old woman herbalist and had got a lot of recipes from her. For days on end she’d collected and dried herbs – besides, what was she to do with her time when I hadn’t been in touch even once? If I was ever in pain or if my soul felt heavy I might phone her: she could mix me a tisane – I obviously wasn’t: interested in anything else.
