by Ivan Klíma
We stopped at the edge of the park. I still had to find a funeral speaker. ‘You’ve never ceased to exist for me!’
She could have asked, as she’d done before, what good that was to her, or what use, or she could have complained about the sorrow I’d caused her, about how I’d hurt her. But she didn’t wish to torment me at that moment. She only said: ‘That’s good!’ And she added: ‘Maybe our souls will meet somewhere. We’ll meet in some future life. Provided you don’t find an excuse at the last moment.’ We briefly embraced and kissed goodbye, and she walked away at her hurried pace.
I couldn’t move. I didn’t even tell her that I’d never intended to hurt her, nor did I ask her if she understood that I hadn’t done anything against her, that it was just that I was unable to return to her in this halfway manner, to be a little and to not be a little, I can only honestly be or honestly not be – like herself.
She stopped at the corner. She looked back, and when she saw me at the spot where she’d left me her hand rose up like the wing of a featherless little bird and from the distance touched my forehead.
At last I moved.
On the path that went to the bank of the Čertovka stream a few figures were busying themselves in their familiar orange vests. With slow, seemingly weary movements, the movements I knew so well, they were sweeping the withered leaves into small heaps.
Down there we stood and kissed in a long embrace.
A fine thing! A fine thing!
It occurred to me that I put on that orange vest for a time because I was longing for a cleansing. Man longs for a cleansing but instead he starts cleaning up his surroundings. But until man cleanses himself he’s wasting his time cleaning up the world around him.
In the middle of the swept path lay the brownish lobed leaf of a horse-chestnut. Perhaps they’d overlooked it or perhaps it had just sailed down from above. I picked it up and for a while studied its wrinkled veins. The leaf trembled in my fingers as if it were alive.
I was still full of that unexpected meeting.
People search for images of paradise and cannot find anything other than objects from this world.
But paradise cannot be fixed in an image, for paradise is the state of meeting. With God, and also with humans. What matters, of course, is that the meeting should take place in cleanliness.
Paradise is, above all else, the state in which the soul feels clean.
I sat down on a bench and took the evening paper from my pocket. I scanned the big headlines, which repeated hundred-year-old untruths, and the lesser headlines, which dealt with yesterday. Needless to say, there was no mention of Dad.
Gently I took the pages apart, and with precise movements, which seemed to come to me automatically, I pleated them into an elaborate aeroplane.
I walked to the river, spread my legs, and aimed the nose of my paper flying machine obliquely at the sky. It rose up, perhaps assisted by the updraught from the water or perhaps just because, thanks to Dad’s instruction, I had made it particularly well, but it was quite a while before it abandoned its upward course, and I, following it with my eyes, saw the blue of the sky and a few seagulls and above them a white cloud gilded by the sun. Then my glider began to lose height and circling down it settled on the water. I watched it slowly and irretrievably floating away into the distance.
Remember that a man never cries, unexpectedly came my father’s voice in the silence around me.
I’m not crying, I said, and from somewhere deep down within me unexpectedly came a sound of laughter like that which, in my childhood, used to make me happy.
1983–1986
Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
About the Author
Also by Ivan Klíma
Love and Garbage
Copyright
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
