The Ultimate Intimacy

by Ivan Klíma

  Martin Hájek paid me a visit last week. He was remembering how they had refused to grant him a licence when he graduated from college and how, two years later, he received it for a remote parish in the Moravian Highlands. His fate was similar to mine. He wondered whether it didn’t strike me occasionally that even in those frightful times we felt better than we do now?

  We recalled how on the first Monday of every month we would hold a gathering of young people, some of them coming from very distant congregations. And we would often have discussions with people who were officially ‘non-persons’. We talked for a while about how in those days we had a sense of mission. Or was it just a feeling of pride in our mission and our resistance? ‘Do you know I met Berger in Jihlava?’ Martin said. Berger had been the Secretary for Church Affairs for the two of us until a few years ago, but it seemed to me at that moment as if he belonged to another life altogether. ‘What is he up to?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s bought a pub, but he spent the whole time telling me about his ailments. I was expecting him to make some mention of what he used to do, that he’d maybe try to apologize for the way he treated us, but it didn’t even occur to him to do anything of the sort. He behaved towards me as if we were old acquaintances or friends.’

  ‘Humility is foreign to them, no one taught it to them,’ I said.

  Martin went on to ask about my mother and I told him her soul was growing wearier all the time. Then we talked about our children, and Martin remembered Jitka too. Generally everybody keeps quiet about her. It’s not done to mention the departed, because it might upset those who remain. And the dead move further and further away from us until in the end we are unable to make out their shape.

  I always find being close to death oppressive. I repeat to myself Paul’s words: ‘He has freed us from the very arms of death and will free us …’ And also his message to the Romans: ‘Yet the hope remains that the very Creation will be freed from the thraldom of death and be led into the freedom and glory of the Children of God.’ And yet I feel anxious. More so than most other people perhaps. Most people follow Spinoza’s dictum: Homer liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat.

  But a preacher expounding the Scriptures is in permanent contact with death – the issue of resurrection from the dead is the beginning and end of our message. A thought sometimes occurs to me: it wasn’t just the Holy Spirit that ensured that, in spite of all the oppression, Christianity spread through the world and overcame all the pagan cults; the promise of eternal life also had a powerful effect. The moment we are freed from the clutches of death, from the law which binds all living things without exception, our entire being acquires a different perspective. The anxiety felt by every beast being led to the slaughter, or maybe even by the fly caught in the spider’s web, is banished or at least attenuated. I reproach myself for my doubts. But were not the very apostles who witnessed the wonders that took place themselves prone to doubt sometimes? Didn’t Thomas ask to touch Christ’s wounds in order to believe?

  And why did that wonder take place then, of all times; almost two thousand years ago, when the Jews fervently believed in the coming of the Messiah? Why, since then, has He only looked on in silence?

  The Apostle Paul also wrote: ‘And if Christ has not been raised your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.’ (1 Corinthians 15: 17–19) I have read and even preached those three verses but none the less there is something that strikes me each time I read them. It’s as if the apostle here was not referring to what happened but to how badly off we would be if it had not happened. As if faith ought not to be founded on the event, but that the event should be based on the fact that without it we would be simply wretched mortals like the rest of creation.

  I ought to go to the hospital. I think about my mother all the time, but the awful thing is that even though she is still alive I think about her in the past tense. She was always severe but kind. She seldom kissed or hugged me but she was never unkind. I suppose she was just shy of showing her feelings. I take after her in that respect.

  When they sent my father to prison they sacked her from the school where she was teaching and eventually she found a job with a bookbinder. She once brought me a beautifully bound book – a life of Comenius. She said: ‘Nobody has been to collect this book for over a year. They are either in prison or dead. You can read it for now.’ It was not at all the sort of reading matter that appealed to me – I wasn’t yet nine – but I loved that strange, captivating language. It sounded like music. And that musical language drew me to him. I have a picture of Comenius hanging in my office even though I have an aversion to worshipping saints of any kind.

  I wanted Mother to move in with us but she refused. During the last six months I have visited her at least three times a week and taken care of her. I did her shopping, cooked for her and in the end even fed her. I used to tell her that I was praying for her, but I couldn’t tell her I loved her. It’s something I can’t even say to Hana. It’s as if inside me there is a rock face that I first have to scale. I managed to climb real rock faces with Jitka but this one beats me.

  I am faithful but am incapable of being intimate. With Him still, maybe, but not with people. Not with my mother, nor the children nor with Hana. And intimacy is the first degree of fidelity, surely? Or is it the other way round: fidelity is the first degree of intimacy?

  One of my first memories. A pile of sand that had been tipped in front of the house (at the time we were still living in the villa in Střešovice which they moved us out of when they sent my father to prison). I was happy to have the chance to play in the sand. All of a sudden right in front of me there appeared an enormous cur with jaws half open and teeth bared. I was terror stricken and couldn’t move. I expect I started to cry but I don’t really remember. I just recall that primitive anxiety, a sense of menace that derived not from my own experience but the experience of our species. Then suddenly saving hands appeared – Mother’s – and lifted me up high. Mother’s soothing voice like music, like a prayer, like the song of angels. The assurance of safety and love.

  It’s ages since those hands were capable of lifting me up; on the contrary it is I who have been lifting Mother these past weeks and carrying her to the bathroom, or to her bed, or to the window to let her breathe a bit of fresh air. But even so, those hands – wrinkled and veined beyond recognition – still lived and could still caress. When they cease to live, the assurance of safety and the assurance of love will have gone.

  When my father was near to death he lay in the hospital. Being a doctor he had his own ward and we could visit him whenever we liked. I would go and see him every day. We would talk about trivial things and avoid any mention of death. Father wanted to live but he knew that his heart would give out soon. One day I finally made up my mind and told him that his existence would not end with death, that the soul would not die but would live for ever.

  He stared at me. He had very beautiful dark-blue eyes that age had not affected; not even his imminent death had dimmed them. He said nothing. I actually had the impression he was smiling. At first I assumed it was because, after all, he had heard some note of hope in my words, but then I realized that he was remaining silent simply out of a wish not to hurt me, in order, just before the end came, not to get into an argument with his grown-up son, whose opinions were to be respected.

  I was intending to say something else about God’s mercy but suddenly I became incapable of saying anything at all, so I also remained silent and just took Father’s hand in mine and held it for a while.

  Father closed his eyes and I felt him moving away from me into some unknown region. Then, without warning, he said: ‘Eternity! What is eternity?’

  I fell asleep where I sat. I slept for barely an hour but had a dream. I’ll note it down quickly before I leave for the hospital: I was clambering up a steep rock which was partly
covered in ice. The summit was close and the covering of ice glistened in the sunlight. I halted for a moment, flattened myself against the rock face and glanced back. In the depths I could see the dark-green bands of pine trees penetrating the stony moraine. No sign of life anywhere, I was here alone.

  When I turned back to the rock face once more and looked upwards, it struck me that a strange glow was emanating from there. I carefully drove the ice-axe into the icy snow. I climbed with ease, as if I wasn’t even climbing a rock face, but floating.

  And then I caught sight of a being at the summit. How it had got there I couldn’t tell, from heaven maybe. I had the impression that it was emitting light: so bright that I was unable to make out its features.

  I stepped forward several paces – or rather I leaped the distance that still separated us. ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Daniel, don’t you recognize me?’

  ‘Mother, is that you? But how can you be here?’

  ‘Don’t ask, just believe!’

  By now I could make out her features, but her face was as I remembered it from childhood, unmarked by old age and mental decline. Then she stretched out her arms as if to bless me, and I heard her say softly, ‘You live right and you do right, I am pleased with you.’ A wind suddenly arose and she started to dissolve beneath its gusts. All that remained on the mountain top was …

  At this very moment, in other words at 11.15 p.m., 20 March, Hana phoned from the hospital. Mother passed away ten minutes ago. She lived seventy-eight years. Lord be merciful to her soul. ‘I called you an hour ago,’ Hana told me. ‘Rút and I wanted you to come to the hospital, but no one answered the phone.’

  3

  It was drizzling on the day of the funeral. The suburban cemetery was on a hill and the clouds seemed to tumble and roll just above the pointed tops of the conifers. The freshly dug earth gave off a damp smell. Reverend Martin Hájek was now speaking about his friend Daniel’s mother, how he had known her in the days when he was studying in Prague. He spoke about how he would visit Daniel’s family and it felt as if this was his second home. ‘Sister Vedrová was someone very special. I have known few women as kind or as patient as she was. She travelled through this life, which by our criteria was not an easy one, with a heart untrammelled by hatred or resentment; she travelled with courage and humility, always ready to listen to others, to understand them and lend them a hand.’

  His mother had truly borne her fate with courage and if she had suffered she had done so in silence. Even though in her latter years her vascular illness had virtually prevented her from walking, she had not complained. She would not speak about herself. Usually she would talk about Daniel and his worries and needs, or about the children and their requirements. When she retired sixteen years ago she used to ask him to bring her the manuscripts of samizdat books which she would then bind and with the proceeds she would buy clothes and toys for the children. She had even bought them a television set for his fortieth birthday.

  The final prayer. He uttered the words of the Lord’s Prayer without being aware of them. How many times had he repeated those same words in the course of his life? His kingdom had not come, but her spirit, so he hoped, now dwelt in it.

  He watched as the gravediggers lowered the coffin suspended on thick ropes. For some people, such as his father, death was the last, irrevocable certainty. The certainty of an end. For others it meant the certainty, or at least the hope, that something new would begin for them, something definitely superior and less paltry than was offered by earthly existence. None the less he found both possibilities depressing. That new existence was veiled too thickly by the unknown. Unlike his first wife, he was incapable of envisaging the possibility of a future reunion.

  On their return home they naturally talked together about the departed. Rút recalled experiences he could not have remembered. When the war was coming to an end, their mother had started looking for red and blue cloth as early as April. Not finding any, she dyed an old bed sheet, cut up two pairs of undershorts and sewed them into a Czechoslovak flag several days before the Prague Uprising. His sister also recalled their father’s arrest four years after the war and how their mother had not wanted to let the officers of the state police enter their flat at five o’clock in the morning. She told them they were behaving like the Gestapo and amazingly enough nothing happened to her. ‘You slept through the lot,’ Rút told him. ‘You were just six years old and were due to start in first class.’ Then she reminded him of his schoolboy pranks. On one occasion, before the start of a Russian lesson, he had hidden some sort of letter full of Russian vulgarities in the class register. It had caused an enormous fuss, but he was not found out because he had resolutely denied it. His Russian had come in handy when the Soviets invaded the country ten years later, as it enabled him to write on the wall in Cyrillic: Iditye domoi! He had also tried to persuade the soldiers that they were being duped and manipulated and serving the devil instead of God. The trouble was they were obeying someone else’s orders, not God’s. That was if they had even heard of God.

  ‘They’re sure to have,’ Daniel commented. ‘And even if they hadn’t, every human being has at least an inkling of His existence.’

  ‘Isn’t that awful,’ Rút sighed. ‘It looks as if Dan still believes that, after all he’s been through! And that flag that Mother sewed during the war,’ she recalled once more, ‘Dan found it in the attic and carried it over his shoulder in the demonstration, shouting slogans. What was it we shouted, in fact?’ she said, turning to her brother.

  ‘I can’t remember any more,’ Daniel prevaricated. ‘And yet come to think of it, it was “No traitors as legislators” or “Red brothers, get back to your reservations”. And we pledged loyalty to those who showed no loyalty to us in the end. But that’s the way it goes.’

  His children listened with interest to the stories of their father’s misdemeanours and patriotic deeds, and meanwhile their grandmother’s death receded.

  Rút was to fly home that same day as she had patients already waiting to see her. She refused to let him drive her to the airport, however. It was better to say their farewells here than in the airport departure lounge.

  So he went off with his sister to call for a taxi and they found themselves alone for a moment in the passage. It occurred to him that there were important things they had not found time to talk about yet. They ought to speak about their father, the inheritance and their lives. But none of these were mentioned. There was no time, besides which protracted farewells wreck the slow progression towards intimacy and create a gulf which he, for one, was incapable of bridging. They embraced at least. And when she climbed into the taxi he stayed on the pavement waving until the car disappeared around the corner.

  ‘Daddy, are we going to sing?’ Magda wanted to know when he rejoined the others. ‘Or perhaps we shouldn’t after Granny’s death?’

  Now and again they would sing in the evening whenever there was time, or they would improvise a comedy which they made up themselves. It could be on a historical theme, or from their own everyday lives, or just some nonsense. He enjoyed thinking up absurd repartee and making crazy faces. The children liked it and it made them laugh.

  A comedy was out of the question today, naturally. ‘I’m sure Grandma wouldn’t mind if we sang something. She enjoyed singing, after all.’

  They went into the room where the piano was. He brought his guitar and Marek fetched his violin.

  ‘Granny used to love “Sing the glad tidings!”’ Eva suggested.

  ‘And “By the waters of Babylon”,’ Magda recalled.

  When he was small his mother had sung him lullabies and taught him simple little prayers. His father had most likely scorned them but kept his opinion to himself. Sometimes his parents would go out together in the evening and he would stay at home with his sister, frightened to go to sleep in case a robber came in the night. Death might even creep in.

  By the waters of Babylon

  we laid do
wn and wept, and wept,

  for Thee, Sion

  we remember, we remember, we remember Thee, Sion.

  At nine o’clock he said good-night to his children and went with Hana to the kitchen.

  His wife ran water into the sink. ‘Dan, you ought to go to bed, you look tired.’

  ‘No. I wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway.’

  ‘I know it’s hard on you, but it was the best thing as far as she was concerned. She had nothing but suffering to look forward to.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I will be able to sleep again.’

  ‘We’ve got this journalist on our ward by the name of Volek,’ she said, apparently changing the subject. ‘He has just had a stomach resection and reminds me of someone, though I can’t remember who. From time to time he comes into the nurses’ station and keeps everyone entertained.’ Hana related to him how the man had travelled a good part of the globe, had lived in China and spent time in New Zealand. He had told the nurses about the Maoris, and their belief that everyone who came into contact with the dead, even if only assisting in a burial, was forbidden to associate with people and was treated as a total outcast. Such a person is not even allowed to touch food, and has to be fed or eat without hands like a beast.

  ‘There are some savages who believe that the spirit of the dead person envies them remaining alive,’ Daniel explained, ‘and therefore wants to do them harm. Even the ancient Jews considered the dead unclean, and anyone touching a corpse was forbidden to touch food.’

  ‘But even those savages believe that the soul survives the body.’

  ‘According to them, everything has a soul. Trees and animals alike. They will often beg the soul of a hunted animal to forgive them for what they have done.’

  ‘It was the funeral that brought it back to mind. Here the people shook each other by the hand, whereas there nobody would be allowed to touch you.’