by Ivan Klíma
‘That’s no reason. No one worries too much about what incenses people.’
‘They have to make some concessions. And even if there was pressure from somewhere else they’ll always use people’s reactions as an excuse.’
‘I’ve never sentenced anyone to hang. They’ll kick me out soon, one way or the other. At least I won’t have that on my conscience.’
‘He’s a killer. Surely you’re not going to sacrifice everything that matters to you just to save a villain who can’t be saved anyway?’
‘What are all those things that are supposed to matter to me?’
‘Ask yourself!’
‘I don’t know what should matter to me enough for me to allow another man to be killed for it.’
‘Oldřich thinks the way I do. He says there’s no point in playing the hero. These days, people prefer those who act with prudence and moderation.’
‘Like Oldřich?’
‘Do you think it’s so bad what he does? What good will it do you? You’ll lose your job and you won’t save the fellow anyway. The prosecution will appeal and make sure he swings. You don’t really expect anyone to be interested in the life of a murderer?’
‘It’s against my principles.’
‘You’re stubborn, Adam. You remind me of an old fellow back home. He made up his mind he wouldn’t let them cut down an old lime tree that was standing in the middle of a field. It wasn’t even his. The field had never belonged to him either. He did it for the principle. He sent letters and protests to all and sundry. Every time I came home he would come and show me all the bumf, because I was studying law.’
‘And did he save the tree?’
‘When the forestry fellows arrived and were cutting it down he went for them and got so steamed up he had a heart attack.’
‘I won’t get steamed up,’ he promised. It crossed his mind to check the drawers of his desk in case he had something in them they might use against him. But it would be better to wait until he was alone in the office.
4
He had managed to phone Alexandra just as she was leaving work and he waited for her by the Powder Tower.
‘I thought you’d forgotten about me.’ She looked extremely sophisticated in her long suede coat. Her face, compared with his wife’s, was full of vitality. ‘A pity you didn’t call me this lunch-time. I had some free time.’
‘I was at an interrogation.’
‘Couldn’t you have postponed it?’
‘Hardly. They came for me.’
‘They were interrogating you? I thought they weren’t allowed to bother people like you.’
‘They’ve bothered bigger fish than me.’
‘Hmm. And then they hanged them, didn’t they?’ She stopped in front of a window display of shoes and stared at them. ‘So they interrogated you. Were they up to your standard?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘That must have got up their noses. Did they beat you up?’
‘Don’t be daft.’
‘Ruml told me that was routine. Nobody’s going to confess unless they’re beaten, are they?’
‘They confess, don’t worry.’
‘And did you?’
‘I had nothing to confess to. It was more of a caution about my friends.’
‘About Ruml?’
‘Why him, do you think?’
‘He can get really wild. When he figures out you started something with me, he might even kill you.’
‘I think their cautions are based on rather different considerations.’
‘Aha. It never struck me they have their own considerations.’ She had stopped again, this time in front of a display of clothes. She found them at least as interesting as his fate.
He watched her with impatience. He ought to take the tram home. If not for Alena’s sake, at least because of the children. But he wanted to tell her what had happened to him, and how there had even been an oblique reference to her.
That was just an excuse. In reality he wanted to see her because she seemed to him the only glint of light in an otherwise dismal day, if not in an otherwise dismal life.
‘What shall we do?’ she asked when she’d torn herself away from the window display. ‘If you feel like it, I’ve got the key to that little flat we were in the first time.’
‘I’m not sure. I ought to get back as soon as possible today.’
‘Get back where?’
‘Home.’
‘Ah, well, it can’t be helped if you have to rush off to cook the supper.’
‘Alena’s not well.’
‘I don’t ever recall Ruml coming home just because I wasn’t feeling well. He would happily leave me to die if he happened to be playing bridge that evening.’
He tried at least to phone home from a call box, but the line was engaged. She was either chatting with her mother or fixing another date with her poisoner. Another possibility was that she was phoning the doctor. Even more likely, the public phone was out of order. He looked through the glass at Alexandra walking up and down a little way off. Anyone could pick her up and she would go off whenever she felt like it. Meanwhile he was striving in vain to discharge his duties and get through to the house of the dead. He hung up. The apparatus jangled loudly and he rushed out of the box.
They had scarcely closed the street door behind them than she pulled him to her in the dark front hall of the house. He put his arms round her and she kissed him. ‘If you’d have gone home to cook the supper I’d have never wanted to see you again.’
As they climbed the stairs, he could detect among the smells of boiled cabbage and musty potatoes, the sweet stench of coalgas. It got stronger and stronger until it became unbearable.
She unlocked the flat, dropped her handbag on the floor, threw her coat across the half-open cupboard door and kicked her shoes into a corner of the lobby. ‘Come on, quickly. You’ve got to leave soon, haven’t you?’ She’d managed to slip out of her clothes even before they entered the room. ‘What are you waiting for? You want me to freeze?’
And he cast everything off him; the day turned to stone and peeled away from his life, came away from his body, and his body ascended unencumbered into the heights where no voices could be heard, where the air was pure and odourless, where neither poisoners nor bloodhounds roamed. Nor was his wife flying to meet him with her head wrapped in a pillow and her hair impregnated with gas.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked. ‘Something on your mind?’
‘No, nothing at all.’
Her naked belly was as smooth and pale as a conch shell. A quivering shellfish amidst moist seaweed. He touched it with his lips and noticed how it opened. The gentle hiss of drying stalks on the border between silence and returning sounds. Breathing and the roar of blood.
I’m here. I thought I had a duty to be elsewhere. I ought to be elsewhere, but I’m here with her and don’t know how I got here. Did I come alone, was I brought, was I carried here by the stretcher-bearers of long ago? What day is it? Spring, summer, autumn, winter? What year? Is the war over?
Here I lie. Breathing and the roar of blood. Somewhere nearby a stretcher, snow, I can still feel how my feet are frozen, my little brother raises his head to look at me. Are you here with me? The hiss of stalks, a forest of yucca trees, a thicket of sumacs, the scent of sage, a warm rock table, nothing breaks the silence of the desert, no one calls, no one wants me to listen to them, the birds of prey have not taken off to hunt yet; I’m here and it must have some meaning, it must conceal some intention in other words. I’m not here because I picked up the phone, because we happened to meet; not because today or three months ago she had the keys and the time; not because there are countless men lying with their heads on damp, brownish thickets that quiver as they breathe. I’m here because it’s someone’s wish that I should be – but who was it that I obeyed? Could it be that I finally listened to myself and therefore cannot be anywhere else but here, naked, just beneath the roof, concealed so far from all eyes, with just a fe
w steps to go to reach the summit. Will I then be free and totally unfettered?
There was the click of a cigarette lighter. He flinched, anticipating an explosion, but the air merely started to fill with smoke.
Individual objects started to emerge from the gloom. White roses in a vase on the windowsill seemed to emit their own light. (Who had ever brought roses here?) The cupboard doors were covered in brightly coloured posters. One of them showed an open-mouthed singer facing a flock of sheep. He couldn’t recall having seen the posters before, but they had most likely been hanging there for a long time and he had been too much on edge to take them in. Just above his head there hung a painting. A tall fellow in a grey double-breasted jacket was walking along a deserted street at night. His pale puffy face had no eyes. Where had he seen that picture before?
‘It’s him,’ she said, seeing the object of his gaze. ‘I painted him when I first met him.’
The death’s head smiled at him with its white toothless mouth and suddenly he saw in it the face of that student, that unrelenting poisoner who had entered his life, or rather the life of his wife. The dead face now goggled at him. What had she seen in him to have pursued him? How had he bewitched her? She wouldn’t have been the first. We could assign any colour to empty eyes, plant our own ideas in an empty head, our own dreams, even. He felt sorry for her, for the way she must have wandered home alone late at night, a lost sheep wagging her fluffy, sweetly pungent, tail. Maybe she really had been looking for him, while he was out of earshot, hidden in the very lap he now caressed.
He should leave! It was not right for him to be absent from home tonight, even if one day this would be his home and not the place that was currently his home. But that wasn’t important now. What was important was that his wife was in distress. Possibly he wasn’t to blame for her situation, but the right thing to do was to be at her side and stop looking for excuses. Anyway it was impossible to make excuses for himself as he had long learned how to see through alibis, even ones that sounded supremely plausible and honourable.
He sat up and reached for his shirt.
‘Are you cold? Shall I get out a blanket?’
And yet he made love to her and she to him so totally that the entire previous day, his entire previous life, fell away from him like a crumbling rock from a cliff-face, and here he was about to get rid of her like shaking a stone out of his shoe. ‘No, stay where you are!’ He still held the shirt in his hands.
‘Do you want to leave already? What is wrong with your wife, as a matter of fact?’
He hesitated.
‘Or was it just an excuse so you wouldn’t get home late?’
‘She tried to gas herself.’
‘Aha. And you turned off the gas.’
‘No, I wasn’t there at the time.’
‘Who turned it off, then?’
He shrugged.
‘Wasn’t it at your place, then? You mean your wife goes to strangers’ houses to gas herself?’
‘It wasn’t exactly a stranger.’
‘She tried to gas herself on account of her lover?’
He said nothing.
‘So why are you so upset? They put on a show for you and you get upset.’
‘I don’t think it was a show.’
‘No? So what was it, if she came home safe?’
He would have liked to tell her she was wrong, but his nerve failed.
‘There’s no sense your worrying. She won’t do it a second time. She’ll wait and see what effect she had on you.’
‘That’s not the point. The children are there and she might be ill.’
‘Buzz off then! I’m not stopping you!’
‘I’m glad I’m with you.’
‘Are you really?’
In a moment he would leave. Then he would find himself in a cage far narrower than this attic room and he would be surrounded by a fine cloud of gas that would gradually stupefy him. In the end he would feel that peculiar, almost drunken, satisfaction at being where he ought to be, at having done his duty at least. But for the time being he was still here, with her, the heights were still open above him, ready to accept him into their pure silence.
‘Yes, I really am.’
‘Why don’t you come closer, then?’
She stubbed out her cigarette and he folded her in his arms.
For a split second it was as if he could see his wife’s jutting chin, the nose projecting sharply from her pallid face. As if from out of the depths somewhere he could hear the sound of lamentation and an icy hand ran down his back. Then he felt the hot touch of the other’s fingers, her long fingers wound round him like membranes, transforming him into a single, dazzling cocoon, in whose soft, dark interior he evidently still rested, though ceasing to be aware of it.
She switched on the lamp above the settee and the room was bathed in dim, purple-coloured light. ‘Darling, if you’d be so kind: there’s a blanket in the cupboard.’
The cupboard contained a jumble of folders with drawing paper and canvases. On one of the shelves, amidst brushes and tubes of paint, he saw a crumpled blanket. He took it out gingerly – it seemed to him to give off a faint odour of turpentine. ‘Those are your paintings?’
‘They’re things I did at school.’
He pulled out a painting at random. Above a forest that appeared orangey-brown in the purple light there shone two scarlet suns and between them flew a twin-tailed comet.
‘Put it back,’ she told him. ‘They’re pathetic daubs.’
‘Why?’
‘I should have chucked them out ages ago – but I would have to come here on my own, and that’s something I don’t fancy.’
He bent over her and covered her carefully.
‘You’re not coming back to me?’
He knelt on the floor by the settee and laid his head on her breast. ‘Did you want to see more suns once?’
‘Why not? You have to live in hopes that something will happen. In heaven, at least, if not here on earth.’
‘Would that help you?’
‘It would be great.’ Her eyes were closed, but she was smiling at the same time, though not at him, most likely. ‘I always wanted to see a comet; one that would suddenly turn night into day. Or see two stars collide. Or see an enormous stone fall from the sky. And I wanted to see a unicorn or something of the sort – it’s all silly nonsense, eh?’
‘Miracles, more like. Or divine manifestations.’
‘I don’t care what you call them. I was waiting.’
‘Aren’t you any more?’
‘I’m too tired these days. Like at this moment. I can’t even open my eyes. Even though I’d like to see you.’
‘Sleep. You’ve a chance to sleep.’
‘I don’t want to sleep. It would be a pity to sleep now I’ve got you here. Now I’m feeling great.’
‘You feel great now?’
‘Yes. I have the feeling I know why I’m alive.’
‘Why are you alive?’
‘So I can be. So I can be now.’ She opened her eyes and stared at him fixedly. ‘Maybe I needed to meet you; you didn’t even have to be a rabbi. To meet you was enough. I’ve just read a book by some Latin American, and in it they’re all trying to find out what they’re living for and they waffle on about it for nights on end and are mad about some writer that none of them has ever met. Then one of them happens to see some unknown old man knocked down by a car and he realises that the old man is all alone so he and a friend go to visit him in hospital, and there they discover that the old man happens to be none other than the writer they are mad about. They chat to him and they’re happy because something they had never believed would ever happen, had happened. And even though he told them nothing and even though meeting him must have lost all its significance by the next day, they were happy anyway.’
‘Do you think one lives in order to meet someone?’
‘I was only telling you something I’d read.’
‘And then to stay with them?�
��
‘Why to stay with them? Didn’t I say that the next day it might not mean a thing any more.’ She sat up. ‘I told you. I’m all right now. I’ll get up and pamper you a bit.’
‘The way I see it, it was I who met you.’
‘I don’t understand. Could you pass me my clothes?’
He gathered up her things and also dressed himself. In a relationship, the one who was on the taking end usually talked about him meeting the one he was doing the taking from. Sometimes it was difficult to tell. But it seemed to him that it was he who had been doing the taking so far. With her he had entered an empty space, a landscape where more than one sun shone, so that even he had started to thaw. And what had he given her? What could one do for another, if one loved them? Not burden them with one’s own problems, be with them when night was falling. Or listen to them, at least?
‘I’ll fix you something to eat,’ she suggested. ‘You must be hungry.’
‘No, don’t. It’s time we went.’
‘You want to go already? You won’t even stop for a drink?’
He put his arms round her. His whole life he had done things because someone else wanted him to and in order to oblige them. No good had come of it.
‘Suit yourself. As I said, I’m not stopping you.’
‘Are you staying here?’
‘There’s no need to bother about me.’
‘I love you.’
‘That’s why you’re rushing off!’
‘It’s for the best.’
‘You’re barmy. They put on a song and dance for you and because of that you leave me in the lurch.’
He tried to kiss her but she turned her head aside.
Downstairs, he mistook the door and rushed out into the backyard instead of the street. He let himself look upwards and made out that strange purplish glow in one of the two attic windows. It couldn’t be enough to live merely on the off-chance of meeting someone. What you needed rather was for someone to want to meet you. Or to live your life in such a way that you would enjoy meeting yourself. Like when a window reflected the rays of the setting sun. Or rising sun? It was odd how he automatically thought of a sun that was about to go down. He spent a few moments looking up at the lighted window and suddenly he wasn’t sure whether he shouldn’t have stayed after all.
