by Ivan Klíma
‘Here they share your pain and distress, there they share your anxiety.’
‘I share everything with you, Dan. The sadness, the distress and that anxiety.’ She came over for him to hug her.
‘Now you’re all I have!’ and he realized his oppressive loneliness. He consoled others in a similar situation with the thought that they had Jesus, who remained with them always, and he added quickly, ‘As my nearest and dearest, I mean.’
In his workshop he had an unfinished carving of a woman covering her breasts with her hands. He had not touched the figure for at least a month. If it was successful, he was intending to call it ‘Dignity’.
He had first taken the knife, chisel and limewood block in his hands on his return from Gustrow where he had seen Barlach’s statues. Perhaps it was neither wise nor useful, but generally, whenever he set eyes on some work of art that enchanted or astounded him, he would fall prey to the temptation to try his hand at it also. And so he had tried painting, composing, and had even written poetry at one time. He played not only the piano and harmonium but also the guitar. So eventually he attempted to produce a human form from a piece of wood. For someone who was self-taught, the work exceeded all his expectations. Having seen some of the carvings, a gallery owner had recently offered him an exhibition, and after hesitation, Daniel had accepted. In fact, the offer had inspired him to work with greater concentration and responsibility.
He mostly carved female figures, giving his creations such names as ‘Love’, ‘Sorrow’, ‘Longing’ or ‘Motherhood’, but again and again the faces of those carved figures resembled the face of his first wife as it remained fixed in his memory from moments of love-making, when she would seem utterly transformed and more beautiful. Maybe that was why no one but he was able to recognize her in those carved faces.
From the waist downwards the figure would be covered only by a slightly gathered piece of cloth. That was how his first wife used to come to him every night, with a towel tied around her waist and covering her breasts with her arm. She never stopped being ashamed of her nakedness and always wanted to cuddle him in the dark or at least with the blinds down, and when she then spoke tender words to him she would whisper them as if fearing that someone else might hear her.
Perhaps she would have lost her shyness with the passage of years, but God had only granted them four years of life together – three years of health and one year of gradual dying which had been particularly cruel when the tumour painfully ate away her insides. So young, so kind, so considerate, so incapable of harming anyone. Why she of all people? But who has the right to judge God’s will? Our earthly existence is no more than a blinking of His eye. The important thing is what comes after. Because what comes ‘after’ lasts for all eternity. All eternity close to Him – what meaning can any earthly delight have compared to that? Why then are we so attached to this earthly life? Is it because all that reaches us from over there is dogged silence? And the numbers of the doggedly silent swell all the time. It was curious how thinking about the death of his first wife, which had always dispirited him, seemed to take his mind off this fresh pain.
For a while he tried to make the shapes more precise but his hand shook and he felt too tired and unable to concentrate. Hana was right, he ought to go to bed.
At that moment he realized that light was still shining from another window on to the lawn outside.
Eva’s small room was up in the attic.
He tapped on her door but entered too quickly and discovered his daughter trying to conceal a sheet of writing in the pages of a book.
‘Who are you writing to?’
‘No one in particular.’
‘And I’m not supposed to see it?’
‘No, it’s not like that.’
‘It’s ages since we’ve talked together.’
‘I don’t like wasting your time. And you’ve been preoccupied with Grandma.’
‘Grandma will have no more need of me now, besides which you’d hardly be wasting my time.’
‘Mum said you had a lot on your mind. And then there were the prisoners.’
‘The prisoners are important but not so important that we can’t find time for each other.’
‘We all have so little time. Mummy, Marek, and me too. All of us are rushing somewhere or chasing something. I sometimes get the feeling things are odd round here.’
‘Odd in what way?’
She said nothing. Then she drew from her book the sheet of paper she had tried to conceal from him when he came in and handed it to him. It was a poem:
Somewhere inside us holy delusions flower
We snatch the blooms whose scent overpowers.
Somewhere inside us are flowers as pure as snow
In our dreams, at least, they are our pillow.
It struck him that there was something of his own nostalgia in the poem. His eldest daughter had inherited her mother’s looks: the same colour hair and eyes, the long neck and the narrow shoulders. But in character she took after him: a fear of intimacy and therefore a sense of solitariness too. He stroked her hair. ‘Tell me, is there something you’d really like?’ He stopped short, realizing that what she wanted most of all she had just shown to him in the poem. ‘I meant some thing, something nice.’
‘You mean something to wear, for instance?’
‘For instance.’
She brightened up. ‘I did see this sweater, but it was awfully expensive.’
‘Where did you see it?’
‘You know that little boutique by the tram stop? But not now, not while we’re in mourning.’
‘I’m sure Grandma would like to give you a treat. What did the sweater look like?’
‘It was green and had this design on it – white lilies. I don’t really want it. It’s only because you asked me.’
‘Fine.’ He stroked the hair again that reminded him so much of her mother. ‘Any time you’re feeling a bit sad and think I could help, do come and see me however busy you think I might be.’
He had converted the closet next to Eva’s room into a study for himself with a small desk, a chair, a bookshelf and a filing cabinet full of old magazines, letters, newspaper cuttings and photographs.
He ought to sort out his letters. He took several bundles of envelopes out of the filing cabinet. Then he noticed one that was tied up with a red ribbon. They were letters he had written to Jitka in hospital and the ones she had written to him from there. He had not read them since it happened. He hesitated a moment, before putting the envelope one side and getting on with sorting his correspondence.
4
Hana
Hana was born in the last year but one of the war in a village not far from Litomyšl. She was named after her mother.
She could not remember the war, not for that matter, the collectivization of agriculture that had struck their village before she even started to go to school. The village had two churches, one Catholic, the other Protestant, but the age-old quarrels were now forgotten: believers were out of favour if they chose to acknowledge any other church but the Communist one.
Hana’s parents used to attend the Protestant church, but not very regularly. Matters of faith were never discussed at home, grace was no longer said before meals and she had no one to encourage her to pray. When she tried asking how the world was made her father evaded her question, saying that it was something even people cleverer than he didn’t know. Nevertheless as a child she regarded the pastor as the most venerable person walking the earth.
One was also required to respect one’s teachers. At the primary school there was a kind woman comrade who taught her pupils not only to read and write and honour the working class and its vanguard, the Communist Party, but also took them on nature walks and picked the herbs they found and told them how to make their own herbarium. Hana enjoyed that and she learnt to draw flowers so well that they looked real and the teacher praised her for it. She even told her parents that Hana could study to be a painter.
&n
bsp; Her parents considered it too outlandish an occupation and, above all, not practical enough, apart from the fact that Hana drew nothing but flowers and her gift was soon forgotten. She was the eldest of three children, although only one year older than her brother, who died when she was twelve. From early childhood Hana always looked older than her years, and this encouraged her parents to leave her in charge of her younger siblings at a time when she was still in need of someone to take care of her. She was not particularly attractive to look at, but she was well proportioned, and she let her dark hair grow as long as possible. Her most interesting feature was her eyes: they were large and dark, and in combination with her dusky complexion they seemed to suggest foreign forebears – Spanish, French or maybe Romany, although there was no mention of anything of the sort in the family history.
She was kind-hearted by nature and from a very young age she was brought up to be modest and taught that one came into the world chiefly to work. Her life was subject to the rhythms of village life – a rhythm dictated by the seasons of the year. Summer was the busiest time of all, even though it was the school holidays. It became less busy from autumn onwards. Best of all was the winter when the days were really short and they celebrated Christmas and skated on the village pond.
Once when she was skating, the ice cracked beneath her. Fortunately she was near the bank, so the icy water only reached up to her shoulders and they were able to pull her and two boys from her class out of the pond. A third boy disappeared beneath the ice and was not found until spring when the ice melted. She had not seen the corpse but they said it had been eaten away by the fish. It might not have been true, but the thought of lying helpless at the bottom of the pond, having her body eaten by fish that someone would then catch and eat, bedevilled her for years afterwards. She never went skating again and would not go near the pond even during the summer. She also refused to eat fish.
When she was finishing elementary school, she fell in love with a boy in her class. He lived in the neighbouring village and was half a head shorter than her. His figure seemed altogether shrunken, which probably explained why he was nicknamed Little Joe. He was not handsome by any means and his pale face was covered in freckles and pimples. In class he was ignored rather than admired by the other pupils. That might have been what attracted Hana to him. She always felt sympathy for the outcast, the weak or the handicapped.
Whenever they were standing together in some quiet corner (Hana made sure it was not too remote), Little Joe would say nothing at first, but then he would start to entertain her by telling her the plots of the stories he had been reading. They were few in number and mostly about Red Indians. Little Joe became so wrapped up in these stories it was almost as if he had been there himself. He would tell her how wild the mountains were and how broad the prairies. He would describe the beauty of the totem poles and the bravery of the chiefs, reciting their poetic names with affection. At home he made himself a bow and arrows that could actually hit a target. Hana did not find the Red Indian stories exciting but she was attracted to Little Joe’s enthusiasm and his voice.
Their love did not go beyond kissing and cuddling. And now and then Little Joe would give her a ride on a tractor and bring her gingerbread hearts from the fair. Once he gave her a bunch of irises. Afterwards she drew them and framed the picture for him. She also baked him a cake and darned a rip in his shirt.
But in the summer holidays the tractor overturned with Little Joe in it and a few days later the lad died from his injuries. People came to his funeral from the surrounding villages; an accidental death always attracts greater attention than a natural one. Unless they belonged to the family of the deceased, children generally walked at the very end of the cortège, far from the grief and out of earshot of the weeping of relatives and friends. Hana, however, walked just behind Little Joe’s nearest family and sobbed out loud.
Shortly afterwards she went off to Písek to study nursing. She was not entirely sure that she wanted to become a nurse but she knew of no other career she wanted to follow. After all, she had been brought up to regard helping others as the supreme meaning of life. She enjoyed life in the nurses’ home even though she rather missed her village and her parents, and above all little Pavel, her youngest brother, a chubby five-year-old with straw-coloured hair and an eternally grubby face, who would run after her as if she were his mother. (Little did she imagine that one day her son would have the same hair and the same chubby figure.)
She still carried around Little Joe’s photo in her purse, but the sight of it brought back fewer and fewer memories. In the end she left it where it was only because almost all of her fellow students carried photos of their boyfriends in their purses.
Water in any form seemed destined to be the cause of dreadful experiences in her life. Once when she was coming to the end of her second year at the school, she agreed to go swimming in the Otava River. Her friends left without her so she set off after them. Halfway there, a dirty, unkempt fellow leapt out at her from behind a tree. He put his hand over her mouth and dragged her off to nearby bushes. There he took his hand away from her mouth but hissed at her not to make a sound or he would strangle her.
She had often heard tell of such assaults and was even afraid to walk along the street on her own at night, but it had never occurred to her that something of the sort could really happen to her. Rapists were to be found only in stories, she had never met one in real life. She was so astounded and terrified in those first moments that she was scarcely able to resist. Then she tried with all her might to get free and even tore off the attacker’s sleeve and scratched his face. But he was much stronger and twisted her arms until the tears sprang to her eyes. She stopped defending herself and then ceased to be fully aware of what was happening to her.
It all took only a few minutes. After telling her that if she spoke to anyone about it he would find her and kill her, the fellow ran off. For a while she remained lying half-naked in the flattened grass and then she started to groan aloud. A short while ago her principal fear was that she might die; now she had no notion of how she would go on living. She gathered up the tattered pieces of her clothing that lay scattered all around and returned to town.
She told no one what had happened. Not because she believed the rapist’s threats but because she was terrified of people discussing how she had been dishonoured. And were it to reach the ears of her parents, the shame might be more than they could bear.
The fellow’s unshaven face haunted her for many years afterwards. She would catch sight of it whenever she found herself in a crowd. Also from that time on she would dream again and again of being surrounded by a crowd of naked men with repulsively pink skin and hairy chests. They would dance around her and scream in rhythm at the orders of one unshaven one who would wave his enormous pink genitals. She realized that this was Satan himself trying to have power over her. She would resist him, but in the dream she would be aware of Satan’s superior strength, so it wasn’t a question of him overcoming her physically so much as taking possession of her soul and filling it with evil.
She toyed with the idea of taking vengeance on people for what one of their number had done to her, but this was foreign to her nature. Instead she simply turned against men from then on and shunned their touch. And when she went for her first job she asked to work on the gynaecology ward.
She was twenty-two and already living in Prague, when in spite of everything she fell in love with a doctor in the ward where she worked. He was seven years her senior and loved her too, or so he said, telling her all sorts of beautiful things and even reciting poetry while caressing her with the experienced touch of a man who had loved many women – something that was not apparent to her. But even though she enjoyed his caresses she never experienced real pleasure. They went out together for over a year and were already talking about getting married when out of the blue he announced to her he was going to marry another woman; that he had to because she was expecting his baby. At that moment she s
wore she would never again have anything to do with men. Nothing at all. If it had been possible she would have entered a convent.
So her life wore on between the hospital and the nurses’ home where she lived. Lacking any distractions, she used to spend much more time at work than the others and usually did more than was required of her. Only on Sundays, unless she was on duty, she would go to church, though by no means regularly, and if she happened to have a few days off she would make the trip to see her parents and younger siblings. At that time she noticed that her father had started to become dangerously thin, losing all appetite for food. She urged him to see the doctor but her father, either from stubbornness or fear, refused to go, saying there was nothing wrong with him. When at last he let himself be persuaded, it was too late to operate. For a long time afterwards, she blamed herself for not having warned him forcefully enough, even though she had suspected the malignancy of the illness he refused to acknowledge.
When she was thirty-two, she met Daniel, who was the son of a doctor on her ward. It was shortly after Daniel’s wife had died and Hana knew that he was now alone with a young daughter. One day when he brought his little girl to see his father in the hospital, Hana took the child to the nurses’ station and looked after her there. The little girl had straw-coloured hair like her own youngest brother, and it touched her. As Daniel was leaving he thanked her and she told him truthfully how much she had enjoyed looking after the little girl.
In that case, he had said, I will bring her again. And he had indeed, leaving Eva in Hana’s care several times after that and almost always chatting with her at each visit. He had asked Hana about her life and invited her to come to one of his church services. The following Sunday she had actually gone and when Daniel was saying goodbye to her at the end of the service and thanking her for coming, Hana had the feeling he shook her hand with particular warmth.
