by Ivan Klíma
We drank tea and ate apple strudel. Uncle Karel lit his pipe, the smoke from which irritated me. Father got into an argument with his brother, declaring that nothing in our country was as they claimed it to be, that leading posts had been taken over by incompetent careerists who would soon stifle all technical development, and his brother shouted at him that he was embittered and alienated from the people, and rapidly turning into a reactionary. Uncle Karel would smile indulgently when they addressed him. He said that Father was exaggerating slightly, but one could not deny that there was a lot of truth in what he said. The Party could never again afford to ignore the voices of conscientious specialists.
In spirit I was still back in The Hole beneath the gaze of drunkards and the windows of gypsy dens, hearing the clash of brawlers’ knives and the sound of nocturnal vehicles distributing bags of stolen cement and bricks; all that seemed more real to me than this room and their arguments. I wanted to say that everything looked quite different from what they imagined, but maybe precisely because their argument seemed so remote to me, I said nothing.
I thought about Magdalena. She had stood facing me while my cases lay in the dust at the edge of the footpath. She had not been looking into my eyes but gazing beyond me somewhere. Yes, the bus was there ready to leave. I asked her if she was intending to join me. She answered that we had already discussed it, and anyway it was time I went to load my cases; I didn’t want to miss my bus, did I.
I had repeated my question. She told me in reply that I knew very well she wasn’t. Whatever would she do in Prague?
I said that we would be together.
What would the two of us do together, you loony?
I had wanted to say that I loved her, after all; but the bus driver was already looking in my direction enquiringly and she urged me to go or I’d miss the train. I picked up my cases, and at the last minute she told me that I would forget her, that I would forget everything here. I was someone who quickly forgot, since I was always looking forward and never backwards. And the bus had moved off. I had scrambled through to the back window and could see her standing at the bus stop like a statue or like an abandoned child. I had waved but I was no longer visible as the bus steered out of the square.
Father turned to me, requesting me to corroborate that corruption was rife in the republic and I replied reluctantly.
I suddenly felt at a loss. Why was I sitting here? I was almost thirty and no longer belonged here. But where did I belong? Where was my home?
That night I could not get to sleep, aware all the time of the sound of the astronomical clock in the Old Town Square and the bell rung by Death for us, the living. I was afraid that the moment I fell asleep I would be transported back to my recent existence. And indeed that night I did depart in style from the godforsaken Hole. The band paraded up and down the square and the captain of the guard of honour reported to me. I was seated in a coach with tall gilded wheels, nodding genially to the crowd. At that moment I heard a screech. Magdalena was rushing towards me from the door of some house, shouting for me to stop. I called out to the coachman, but he wasn’t on the box. The horses were galloping and I didn’t have the strength to stop them. When I turned to look I could see my lover running behind us, casting off her clothes to help her run more easily. And then I noticed that her body was covered in fur and there was a long red tongue protruding from her mouth. The horses were galloping at full pelt and I wasn’t braking any more but laying on the whip for them to go faster. But it was useless. I could feel hot breath on the back of my neck and sharp fangs dug into my throat. I could feel the blood running down my neck and realised that I would never reach my destination.
The next day I started my new job. I was assigned a desk in an office whose occupant was announced on the doorplate as Dr Oldřich Ruml.
Accustomed to the strict routine in The Hole, I arrived at work at the same time as the secretaries. I unpacked my things and set them out on the desk top and then started to study the titles of the books on the bookshelf while listening attentively to the noises from the corridor (compared with my old corridor, the silence here was uncanny and even depressing), and then the phone rang. I lifted the receiver with suspense-filled expectation, even though the call couldn’t possibly be for me. A woman’s voice asked the whereabouts of Dr Ruml. (I was astonished to be addressed as ‘sir’, a form of address never used in The Hole.) The phone rang several more times. Men’s and women’s voices asking for a man I had never met in my life, asking for more precise details of where he might be and when I was expecting him to arrive. Towards noon he finally appeared, a well-built fellow with a thick mop of short blond hair. He flung a parcel of journals on to the desk, thereby indicating he belonged there. He wore an immaculately cut suit (including a waistcoat, which I considered snobbishly old-fashioned), and his tie was transfixed by a tie-pin in the shape of a snake. He declared that they had already told him about me and was sure we would get on like Castor and Pollux. He listened to my account of telephone calls and personal callers and explained to me that I would have to learn to spend as little time as possible in those premises or I’d never get anything done. Then he asked me several discreet questions in an effort to ascertain to which clique or power group I belonged, to whom I owed my appointment, who my powerful protector was, and what my immediate ambitions were. He must have concluded I really was entirely uninformed in such matters (or artfully pretending to be) and declared that he would have to clue me up without delay or I’d be bound to commit irreparable gaffes.
His speciality was economic law, but he was far more interested in politics, or what went under that name here and which in reality consisted entirely of intrigues and scarcely visible movements and shifts within the ruling circles. He classified his colleagues into influential, promising and insignificant. With people in the first two categories his aim was to maintain good relations and he therefore spent his time attending a plethora of meetings, consultations, social evenings and seminars, where his interest was never the subject under discussion but who was taking part.
I never fully understood what place in his hierarchy I could have occupied, nor how I came to be promoted to be his virtual protégé. Could he have overestimated the importance of my family connections and mistakenly placed me among the influential? Or was it that he needed someone who could help him sort out his ideas and in front of whom he could rehearse his power games? Or maybe he simply took a liking to me, and out of a need to have someone like-minded and also useless around (he had lots of acquaintances but no real friends) decided that I would do?
He used to invite me to his parties – which he called garden-parties (and indeed they did take place in the garden when the weather was fine) – even though I was in no position to pay him back in kind.
He had just got married. His wife didn’t attract me. She seemed to me like a child who had grown up too soon and was trying to conceal the immaturity of her features under layers of face powder. I never knew what I could, or should, talk to her about. On one occasion, I arrived at a party some time before the other guests and we were compelled to spend several minutes together. She was probably making a conscientious attempt at conversation. She asked me whether I was interested in pictures and brought me a book about abstract painting, and then proceeded to tell me something about Chagall and Miró. I told her truthfully that I had little interest in art. At that moment I noticed something incongruously unshapely about her slender, girlish figure and asked her whether she was expecting a baby. In three months’ time, she said, and expressed surprise at my ignorance; Oldřich had told her I knew. Then the other guests started arriving, interrupting a conversation which was not to resume until many years later.
2
The more I studied, the more I realised the inadequacy of my previous education. I did not have the faintest notion about real sociology or real political science, had never penetrated any of the foreign legal systems and possessed a knowledge of jurisprudence so biased as to be non
-existent. Half a century of modern thinking had remained concealed from me. Philosophers and lawyers whose names were familiar to grammar-school children elsewhere in the world were utterly unknown to me. I had not even mastered a single foreign language. As I began to realise the extent of my ignorance I started to panic. Would I ever manage to make up for all those wasted years?
Sometimes I got carried away, mostly to the detriment of my work. I started to study sociology and logic. I discovered that I lacked the fundamentals of maths and statistics and bought myself several text-books which I started on, but abandoned as soon as they demanded more time and concentration than I could afford to give them, having decided in the meantime to improve my English. There was a growing pile of unread journals, scholarly reports and new books on my desk. And I had seen nothing of modern art and not been to an exhibition of any kind for years. I bought myself a transistor radio and had it on while I was studying (if only Magdalena could have seen me) and used it to deafen my restive spirit. Sometimes I was overcome with a sense of the futility of all my efforts. Knowledge was meaningless of itself: I needed to link it to some goal, to some living person. I wrote to Magdalena telling her I was missing her, but received no reply.
My brother gave me a tennis racquet for my birthday. The accompanying comment was that he could not stand to watch me getting fat and turning into a misery. We used to go twice a week, weather permitting, always early in the morning, to bumpy tennis courts situated terrace fashion under the windows of the institute where he worked. It could be that I showed a certain aptitude for the game since we were soon well-matched opponents. Occasionally, he would bring some of his mathematician colleagues with him and, even more often, female colleagues and friends – who were not required to understand mathematics or even play tennis – and we would form mixed doubles. After our match we would drink cheap lemonade, though my brother’s female colleagues were happy to accept an invitation to something better and rather stronger. But I was always in a rush to get back to my institute and anyway they didn’t appeal to me – I lacked Hanuš’s free-and-easy way of enjoying himself, not to mention his apparent gifts for making love.
At the beginning of spring, our institute played host to a visitor from London University with the Scots name of Patrick MacKellar. He was my age and specialised in juvenile delinquency, a subject I was assigned to at the time. They therefore decided that I should act as a guide for our visitor. I was quite unsuited to such a role. What I knew of Prague was two or three wine bars and a couple of churches, apart of course from a comprehensive grasp of the Old Town street plan. At a pinch I could have put together a programme for two or three evenings, but my charge was due to spend a whole month in Prague. In order to fill the time, I invited him on a trip to the town where I had spent the other part of my childhood. On a sunny Sunday morning we boarded a bus and set off in the direction of Litoměřice.
Oddly enough, I did not feel I knew the landscape, and even the fortress town itself seemed unfamiliar. (I had not been there since the day my cousin came for us in the gas-powered lorry.) I walked through the straight lanes with my guest and pointlessly drew his attention to the long out-of-date names on the barracks and tried unsuccessfully to find something that recalled the atmosphere of those years. We set off along the road in the direction of the Small Fortress where we joined a group of tourists. They were Jews in dark clothes and black hats. In schoolgirl English – though faultless, as far as I could tell – their guide endeavoured to acquaint them with events that she herself must have been too young to remember. We accompanied them up to the museum as well. And here you can see pictures from the neighbouring ghetto (yes, that was it, at last I recognised what I had been in) where most of the people died. One hundred to one hundred and fifty victims every day. Each person had a maximum floor space of one and a half square metres and the people had to work ninety hours a week, and that included children from fourteen years of age.
I stood next to her. I guessed that she was not a professional guide because she was clearly moved by what she was telling them. Fifteen thousand children in total passed through here, some of them babies. They all died in the gas chambers. She took off her glasses for a moment. She had blue eyes set far apart. She wiped her glasses and then wiped her eyes. There were loud expressions of horror from among the tourists and I turned to her – though I don’t know what made me do it, as it was tactless towards her (but it did concern me, after all, having been important for my existence) – and said that some of the children had survived.
She gave me a severe look. How did I know? I told her that there were very few of us who survived, though I appreciated that for other people or for history, the numbers were not significant. She asked me whether it was true that I had been there and then told me that her group were members of a Hasidic community from America and were deeply interested in the fate of European Jews. Would I be willing to tell them something about what it was like to be there? I told her I would be pleased to but that I had almost forgotten everything. Would I at least be prepared to answer any questions which they might have? I replied that I would rather not. She was sorry if she had offended me in any way and asked me to forgive her if she had. I assured her that this was not the case and said that it was I, rather, who owed her an apology for butting into her talk. There was nothing more to be said. I nodded to my charge and we both left the museum. We bought ourselves postcards and then, at a kiosk which made the place look even more like a mere tourist attraction, we treated ourselves to lemonade and sat down on a bench by the entrance to the fortress. My visitor wrote one postcard after another, using his knee to lean on (to all the world as if sitting beneath the Great Pyramid), while tourists walked past us. Then I caught sight of her again. She was leading her charges to the waiting coach. The coach was a roomy one and they were scarcely twenty in number. I jumped up from the bench and went to ask her if she had room for two more passengers.
She remained standing in the doorway until we climbed aboard, then directed us to one of the double seats over the rear wheels, told the driver to start and came and sat down opposite me: my future wife.
3
She was in the final year of a librarianship course while also studying at the language school, which was how she was able to earn herself some extra cash interpreting. (Her parents were civil servants and she also had a brother; ever since she started university, she had managed to earn enough to buy her own clothes.)
At the age of nineteen, she had interpreted at a student congress where she came to know the Israeli delegate, Menachem. He was an engineer from a kibbutz and was thirteen years her senior. Compared to the youths she had gone out with previously, this was a mature man. He had been wounded twice, first by the English, then by the Arabs. He lived on the edge of the Negev Desert which he was helping to irrigate. After ten days’ acquaintance he proposed marriage to her and a life together on a kibbutz. She took off her glasses and cleaned the lenses while she was telling us this. She did not once look at me. Maybe she was shy, or was afraid that the glasses spoiled her looks, but at this moment she turned her face away from me so that I wouldn’t see her crying. He would certainly have kept his promise. He had already started to see to the formalities in his own country and written to her to say that everyone in the kibbutz was looking forward to her arrival; and it did not matter at all that she wasn’t a Jewess. (That comment had hurt her feelings as she was half-Jewish, but they apparently did not recognise it there, as it was on her father’s side.)
She had also applied for permission to marry a foreigner but the application dragged on and on. She wrote to him complaining about it. He wrote back to say she would have to be patient. He would be too. He would go on waiting until she arrived. She promised to be patient and never to stop loving him; only death could end their love.
In his letters he would tell her about the kibbutz-members as if they were relations. Sometimes he would include photos of them and before long she knew them and could imag
ine the various little houses, the hall where they all ate together and held celebrations, and the paths that led to the stables or the orange groves. Her passport application was turned down, as well as her appeal. In desperation, she wrote to him to say she would try to enter one of the neighbouring countries and get to him from there. That letter was probably opened by the authorities and she had never been allowed anywhere abroad since.
He continued to vow love and devotion. She now made a conscious effort to win the confidence of the authorities. She joined a youth ensemble in the hope that she would eventually travel abroad with them. She wrote and told him her plan. When her ensemble made a trip to Hungary she alone was banned from going, even though she sang solo in two of their songs.
And then – it had happened only a few weeks before I met her – she received the announcement of his wedding, together with a long rambling letter in which he explained that he had not been able to endure waiting any longer. (How could he possibly not endure? What sort of love was it that was unable to withstand separation!) And most horrifying of all, it appeared that he had lured away the wife of one of his friends in the kibbutz. Surely no decent man could do something of that sort? Could she have been totally deceived in him?
I was touched not so much by the story itself as by her show of feeling. Had I been wiser, I would have realised that it concealed the danger of romantic notions, and a tendency towards categorical demands and judgements. But at that moment I found her childlike earnestness touching.
From the very first she aroused my sympathy. Her cheap spectacles with their thick old-fashioned frames, her tiny hands, almost like a child’s, with stubby fingers, her disproportionately high forehead, and her complexion so pale that the bluish pattern of the veins clearly showed through, not to mention her habit of laughing too loudly in order to conceal her shyness or emotion.
