by Ivan Klíma
Nam played us the accordion again. Eva sang something with her head resting on my shoulder and Nimmrichter went on reminiscing. Some of them didn’t even have to be made to walk, it had been enough to make them stand with their hands above their heads and submit to ‘Nimmrichter’s Luck’. He decided he would give us a demonstration of the technique which bore his name, and asked us all to stand up with our arms in the air – just for a moment; there was nothing to fear. He came up behind me and tried to grip me under the shoulders, and I could feel hot breath on the back of my neck. At that moment a wave of revulsion welled up within me and I slipped out of his grip and thrust back my elbow. I caught him right in the face. He lurched back and caught his head on the corner of a cupboard. I could see the blood rush to his face and realised that the next moment he would leap on me and start to beat me; maybe to death. I swiftly retreated several paces so that there was now a table – still covered in food – between the two of us. But at that moment Eva came up to Nimmrichter, put her arm round his shoulders and pushed her glass to his lips, before slowly leading him away.
A few minutes later he came to find me. He fixed his goggle eyes on me and said that he had never liked me, that he knew all about me anyway, including the things I would rather no one knew anything about, so I should be sure to watch my step, because he had his eye on me. Clumsily I asked him to explain to me what he meant, but he only went on repeating that I should just watch my step, and sat down again on a chair, mumbling orders: Attention, on your feet, flat on the floor, up and down and walk, and no stopping, all the while staring at me with his bloodshot eyes and giving me the order: No stopping!
Eva leaned towards me and whispered in my ear that it would be best if we left now.
Outside it was snowing and the street and pavement had the appearance of a perfectly unsullied white plain. She linked her arm in mine and we defiled the plain with heavy steps. As we passed by the cemetery, the trees beyond the wall seemed to me to be painfully spreading snow-white branches, while the gravestones thrust upwards like dark threatening fingers.
4
Eva unlocked the door and we entered a dark hallway. It stank of cigarette smoke and something like fish oil. She told me that the light bulb had gone in the hallway, opened the door to the sitting room and switched on the light.
Whether there was a chair in the room I do not know. I expect there was, but it must have been covered up with things, like the armchair which I do remember. So I sat down on the settee. She sat down next to me and said she fancied something else to drink. But she neither got up to fetch any nor told me where I could fetch some from. She laid her head on my shoulder and asked whether I minded the mess.
I said I didn’t.
She wanted to know whether I had already had lots of girls, and without looking at her, I told her I hadn’t.
Then she asked if I’d ever been really deeply in love, and I hesitated for a moment before saying I hadn’t.
She knew I was lying, like they all did, but thought I suited her, if only because I was Adam, and she put her arms round me. I kissed her, or rather she kissed me, and as we were kissing each other in a firm embrace she sank lower and lower until we were lying on that settee whose colour I have forgotten. For the moment I was only aware of my own increasing ardour, an ardour which I’d never known before and which took control of my senses. Then she abruptly pushed me away. She stood up and ordered me to stand up too. There was no call for us to act like little children, she said.
So I stood up and she took off the cushions and took out sheets and a heavy country-style eiderdown from inside the settee. I stared at her in amazement, having no idea what I was supposed to do next, whether I was being invited to a night of passion or being shown the door. Then she asked me whether I was going to go for a wash or not.
The wash-basin was in the hallway. In reality it was only a tiny sink beneath a tap, and to one side, an iron washstand.
I did not go out of any desire to wash, but because I suddenly wanted to delay the moment for as long as possible.
I stood there barefoot and half-naked (I’d only taken off my shirt) in the near-dark hallway, and while the water splashed into the sink, I worried in case I didn’t manage to act the man, or that I might become a father, and that what we were about to do together was going to bind us together for the rest of our lives, even though we didn’t even love each other. I also fretted in case I caught one of those loathsome diseases which, so far, I had read about with the reassuring awareness that I had nothing to fear from those afflictions at least.
She called to me from the next room asking where I had got to, so I wet my hand quickly under the tap for show’s sake and splashed my trousers. I turned off the water and returned to the room. I hesitated once again, this time mostly because it seemed improper to me to climb into a bed that someone was already lying in. It was only when she lifted the bedclothes slightly that I took off my trousers too, and with feelings more of shame and anxiety than passion I climbed in beside her.
Oddly enough, the details which have remained in my memory are the less important ones: the intrusive perfume she wore; how she evaded me for a long time, though laughing the while; how she wanted to touch my genitals; how I then recoiled from her in a sudden fit of modesty and stayed her hand. But the act itself has gone from my memory entirely. I was most likely too agitated to concentrate on my own (let alone her) feelings.
I do remember how she got up afterwards and, to my astonishment, fetched some water in that enamel washing bowl (so there must have been a stool of some kind for her to stand the bowl on), and a towel, and asked me whether I’d like to rinse myself.
It struck me as discourteous not to agree after she had gone to such trouble and so – this time to her astonishment – I washed my face.
I woke up just as it was getting light. What had woken me was the feeling I was suffocating. Someone was stamping up the stairs, a door slammed and through the wall could be heard the sound of brass band music. I had no idea who might come in, who might draw back the grubby curtain that separated the room I was lying in from the hallway, and shout out in surprise. My trousers lay crumpled on the floor amidst dirty cups. I was frightened to turn my head towards her, though I could feel the warmth of her naked body which, as I regained my senses, started to arouse me once more. It was cold there and I crouched back under the covers. Alongside my head there lay the face of a stranger: the thick upper lip smeared with lipstick, the mouth slightly open, showing over-large teeth; unkempt hair on the unlaundered pillow. It was so unfamiliar and unexpected, quite different from anything I had ever imagined, that I closed my eyes again and at that moment I could see in my mind’s eye those naked figures marching in the darkness on swollen feet, endlessly walking. Now at that very moment, maybe in the very cellar of the house next door, their tortured footsteps resounded in the silence in which here was I lying alongside a stranger, a silence in which millions of bodies unknown to me were lying next to each other, and still more bodies were lying in the soil, silence in which someone’s fingers had once sowed poisonous crystals in order to increase the number of motionless bodies. A silence broken by orders. Up on your feet! On the ground! A sudden desire for escape led me to stretch out my arm and draw that unfamiliar body to me. She opened her puffy eyelids slightly and, half-asleep, she snuggled up to me and we again made love in a desperate, passionless spasm.
The next day, during our very first class, Nimmrichter came up to me in the lecture theatre with a broad grin on his face, though his eyes searched my face fearfully. He said he had told me all sorts of nonsense that evening, and that there was no truth in any of those stories; he had only thought them up to amuse us.
I felt relieved and said that I had thought so from the very start and hadn’t really believed him. Then I asked him if the story about his sister being raped and the tales about the monastery were also made up. He froze, and his gaze became fixed. And I realised that he had made up those stories about
his sister and those dreadful orgies, either that or he had heard or read about them, but what he had told me two nights ago had been true.
I didn’t see Eva for several days. The whole time I wrestled with the question of what I was going to do. What if I became a father? What if she said I was the father and it wouldn’t be my baby at all? How old was she, in fact? I didn’t want to marry an older woman; I didn’t want to get married at all, and I didn’t want a woman I didn’t love. But then why had I done those things with a woman I didn’t love? I was degenerate. I had betrayed myself and all my ideals! Worst of all, I was beginning to miss the thing we had done that night.
When at last I saw her in the lecture theatre, I rushed over to her. She said she didn’t know when she would have the time again; at the moment she had lots of work, but she’d certainly let me know.
The same afternoon, I caught sight of her in front of the faculty, hanging on the arm of a stranger. I was overcome with disappointment, or maybe jealousy, even. At home I started to write a letter. I had been prepared to love her, but she hadn’t been able to find time for me, whereas she apparently had time for others; now I was sad and longing for her. I went off to bed full of hope that my message would have the desired effect and she would answer: Come!
The next day I put the letter into my correspondence folder and never took it out again.
5
One spring afternoon, my father decided we would all go on an outing together. I looked forward to the trip as a rare opportunity to talk to Father. We got into our car (the car, a nineteen-year-old Tatra, was Father’s only luxury, the only thing he could bequeath us if hard times should come – not counting, that is, one still camera, a film projector and a screen).
I was sitting next to Father and noticed (in those days of sparse traffic, it was not difficult to notice) that the whole time we were followed by a black limousine. Father said he knew about it, that it was most probably the State Security.
Why were they following us? Father’s assumption was that his rivals in the factory had most likely denounced him again. On what grounds? Father couldn’t say. Nobody would ever tell him what their actual complaints were. When they finally plucked up the courage to speak out openly, it would become clear where the truth lay; which employees had the interests of society at heart, and which were only interested in their careers.
They came a few days later. They rang the doorbell before six o’clock in the morning: four men. Two others were standing guard outside the house in case the criminal absconded (though who was a criminal and who an innocent party among those assembled?). They burst into the flat, emboldened by the fact that they were fully dressed, which gave them an advantage over people who were only just waking up, and commenced their search.
What were they looking for? Even a tracking dog knows whether the trail it follows belongs to a fleeing hare or to a fox; but what trail were they following? What guilt were they assuming and what evidence were they looking for to prove it? Books were all they found. But they were mostly written in some foreign language, and if that were not enough, they were filled with mysterious figures and Father’s own notes in the margins. The snoopers picked up the books gingerly, as if handling unexploded bombs. They required explanations throughout their visit. Who had written this comment here? And why? Why had he written his comments in German? Why had he underlined this particular sentence and that number?
My father stood ashen-faced in their midst, almost at attention. He had simply wanted to emphasise a sentence he’d found interesting. Why? Because the author had come up with an original solution. Did he know the author personally? No; after all he had died when Father was eight years old. They’d check it out anyway.
I don’t know where they were intending to check out those tens of thousands of underlined sentences and figures, any one of which might have been the cipher they expected, and longed for. But more likely, as I realised later, they knew that they wouldn’t be checking anything really. Their methods were rather different.
None the less, those four men leafed through volume after volume: dozens of books in all. They rifled our family albums, lifted the carpets, went through my writing desk, asked where our money was hidden, ordered Father not to pretend he had none, ransacked my mother’s chest of drawers, and tapped the floors and the walls, already disgusted at what they suspected would be a futile search. In the end they fetched a typewriter from their car and wrote a receipt for the confiscated objects. The list was a short one: just a few books and articles (I never understood why those in particular, and not other ones), a letter from Father’s brother Gustav, a Meopta film projector, a screen and a silent film about the Danube salmon, an Underwood typewriter and a vintage Tatra car. The latter they sealed in the garage for the time being. Thus, with no trouble, they stripped us of all our valuables. We owned neither gold, silver, nor porcelain; not even a cut crystal vase. If we had ever owned anything of the sort it had been snatched by other intruders not so many years before. The process steered its way towards its pre-determined conclusion, but we were ignorant of it and still believed that the house-search had only confirmed my father’s innocence. But Father was apparently better informed, because when they finally ordered him to accompany them, he asked if he might be allowed to take his leave, and they magnanimously permitted him to do so, although in their presence, of course. So Father stepped up to my mother with tears in his eyes. Once again he was leaving for the unknown, except now there was no war whose end might bring liberation. Then, after they had hugged each other, Father turned to me and said that I was now a grown-up man and could be counted on to care for Mother and Hanuš if he didn’t return for a long time. Mother snapped at him that he would be sure to return the following day, seeing that he had done nothing wrong. Father managed to say that sometimes it took a long time to establish one’s innocence. One of the men opened the door and the one who played the good cop role said goodbye to us. Then they left.
We stood at the window and watched them get into the car. Father, dressed in his one and only decent suit, made from black cloth with a light-blue stripe, took a last look up at the window and nodded to us. At my side, Mother sobbed and in a fit of weeping repeated over and over again: Oh my God, this is no life, this is no life! The car drove off and I froze as the thought struck me that, on the contrary, this was precisely what life was.
On that day my brother Hanuš emerges from the obscurity all of a sudden. We had lived side by side, for a long time even shared the same bedroom, but somehow till then he had eluded me. I know that he did well at maths and used to go with a group of his friends to play ping-pong and billiards at a pub, where he also drank beer and occasionally behaved so wildly that – much to my horror – he came home with his clothes torn and covered in blood. He was also a good skier, refused to read the newspapers or listen to anything on the radio apart from music. His interests and lifestyle differed totally from my own. I didn’t know his friends, let alone his loves, or his attitudes to the world he was obliged to live in and about which I, like Father, had such definite ideas. I cannot even recall a single one of our conversations or rows – except for the one that particular morning. Shortly after they took Father away, we were both doing our best to console Mother. I maintained that it was bound to be an error, a false accusation that would be exposed by the next day, because after all, it was against the law to even accuse people unjustly in our country, let alone convict them. Everyone would be bound to testify to Father’s services and convictions. And all of a sudden my brother broke in and started to abuse me, calling me a dolt and simpleton who was guilty of everything that was happening because I refused to see or understand anything. He shouted about rigged elections and crooked trials, about people from our own building who had been sent to prison even though they were decent folk. I expect I tried to contradict him because he suddenly leapt at me: my younger brother, who – I thought – looked up to me, who was no more than a boy and therefore incapable of serious op
inions. Now he was punching me with his fists as if I was personally responsible for all the evil in our country.
That afternoon, Uncle Gustav arrived. First of all he brought best wishes from Uncle Karel, who warned us not to make any telephone calls, send any letters, especially abroad, and above all, to visit no one. My uncle agreed with me that it was an appalling miscarriage of justice, and gave us a sermon (happily, my brother Hanuš had gone out) about the incredible complexity of the class struggle, when, after losing the decisive battle, the enemy sought to sneak in everywhere. Hence it was necessary to investigate even the most devoted comrades, and even, of course, those pursuing the enemy. Meanwhile, skirmishes with the enemy were becoming sharper all the time and he was employing all sorts of shrewd tactics such as pretending to be a friend while trying to label true friends as enemies. All this was undermining the most valuable and noble gains of our revolution: the mutual trust and the new relations of comradeship. As a result it was impossible and unthinkable to trust people absolutely. He, however, put his trust in the Party, which would eventually discover the truth. In the end Viktor would obtain satisfaction, though it might take a little time. In the meantime, we all had to wait patiently and have faith, wait and not make any phone calls, wait and write to no one but the authorities. And we could trust the family as well, of course: he and Uncle Karel would look after us until we could stand on our own feet, if the case should happen to go on longer or the enemy’s intrigues succeed for a while. Suddenly my uncle lowered his voice, his dark eyes became moist and he told us that he believed Father was innocent; he was sure of it. Viktor was the most remarkable man he had ever met. And even though it was not possible to trust anyone absolutely, he did trust his brother implicitly and dared to make an exception in his case. And I realised with dismay that suspicion had taken root in my uncle, that the unremitting logic of his thinking was sapping his belief in his own brother.
