The Ultimate Intimacy

by Ivan Klíma

They pass the turn-off to the airport and leave the city limits. A nearby village is surrounded by flowering fruit trees. They are blossoming early this year after the warm winter. Only the past few days have been cold and at this moment clouds heavy with rain or snow are billowing along close to the ground.

  ‘Thank you. I’m not used to talking to people like yourself.’

  ‘But there’s nothing particularly special about me.’

  ‘I’m not used to talking to people who have a belief, and actually preach about it,’ she said by way of explanation.

  ‘Everyone believes in something.’

  ‘Yes, I know. In a political programme or an association. Or in their career, like my husband. Or in the nation – there’s nothing particularly wrong with that, is there?’

  ‘What made you come to our church?’

  ‘That’s a good question.’

  They now turn off on to a side road. The trees here are also in bloom and Říp Hill suddenly appears in the distance. It reminds him of driving along a highway over a year ago with Rút at the wheel. The road ran from Oregon to Nevada and he had the impression that everything around him was in bloom, including some trees and bushes that were unfamiliar to him. And on the horizon in place of Říp there loomed the massive, snowy volcano of Mount Rainier as if out of a dream. It was his first trip abroad and he strove to take in every single detail of the landscape, as he did every detail of the lives of the people that he met. His sister was extremely interested in how things were in the Republic and how his status had changed, even though she did not believe in Jesus Christ, and most likely didn’t even believe that he, her younger brother, could truly believe either.

  He really ought to concentrate on his sermon, but the woman at his side distracts him. She is nothing like his sister, more like his first wife. They were born, he realizes, at about the same time. But the image of his first wife has become fixed and unchanging. What would she have looked like if she’d lived to be forty? She’d certainly not have used eye make-up like this one. Or would she? And she would dress more soberly. She was unassuming and even a trifle ascetic. Maybe he was too. What is the point of dressing flamboyantly? Those who care too much for the outer covering are usually trying to conceal emptiness or sterility inside.

  ‘It was most likely fear that brought me,’ she eventually answers.

  ‘Fear of what?’

  ‘Of what? I can’t really say. One doesn’t have to be afraid of anything in particular, just afraid, that’s all. Of people. Or of loneliness. Of life or death. Death mostly. Even though there are days when I don’t feel like living at all.’

  ‘Fear is human, Mrs Musilová.’

  ‘Do you think so? My husband doesn’t accept it. He can’t stand it when I’m not in a good mood. He believes he’s the only one with any right to have the blues.’

  ‘Have you been married long?’

  ‘Wait a second, I’ll have to work it out. It’s nearly fifteen years. With Samuel, that is. My husband has a biblical name. But it’s the only saintly thing about him.’

  ‘Samuel wasn’t a saint. He was a judge and a prophet in ancient Israel.’

  ‘No doubt. I wouldn’t know such things. All I meant was that my husband has a character defect. But I expect I shouldn’t have said anything, it’s not polite to talk about the character defects of someone you don’t know and who isn’t present.’

  A large farm office serves as a prayer room. In front of it there is already a huddle of old women waiting, as well as two men in their Sunday best, looking with some distrust at the luxurious foreign car.

  He gets out. ‘Thank you very much. And don’t wait for me, I’ll get home somehow.’

  ‘I’ll happily wait for you. I’ll come and listen to your sermon, seeing that I’m here. Or are you going to preach the same one as in Prague?’

  The room contains four rows of six chairs each, and even these are not filled. He writes the numbers of the hymns on a blackboard while greeting those who are gradually taking their places in the last two rows. There are nine in the congregation, including his companion, who remains standing by the door. Why? Maybe she feels out of place here. She is not dressed for a village service.

  He sits down at the harmonium and plays a short improvisation. He concentrates. He has prepared an Easter sermon on a text from the Letter to the Romans. ‘If we are united with him because we are involved in his death, we will certainly be involved in his resurrection also.’ Quite unconsciously, he ends up speaking to his recent companion about her anxiety.

  But he speaks less about resurrection, which has always somewhat disconcerted him, than about love that does not falter at any sacrifice, and about Jesus who, out of love for mankind, was crucified.

  We speak of the miracle of resurrection after death, but we ought not to forget that living for love means resurrection during one’s life. Several times during the sermon he looks in the direction of the unknown woman who brought him here. She is standing motionless by the door, cowering slightly, as if trying to protect herself from the cold or from his words.

  When they get back into the car and drive off, she asks him: ‘Do you truly believe that someone who is dead can rise again and walk? Someone who is long dead, I mean.’

  ‘But it’s a …’

  ‘It’s a myth,’ she says. ‘No, please don’t explain anything. Not at the moment, at least. Do you think that the people sitting there understand you. Do they give any thought to what you told them?’

  ‘I don’t know. As far as they are concerned it is a ritual. They grew up with it. Besides, faith is not something you think about. You can reflect on God and many people have, but they’ve still not come up with anything. Even the psalmist complained: “I wondered what to make of it all and it seemed far from easy to me.”’

  ‘And you don’t wonder about him?’

  He hesitates for a moment, and then says, ‘I do, of course.’

  ‘But you know it’s impossible to come up with anything. Is it also chiefly a ritual for you too?’

  ‘No, I didn’t grow up with it.’

  ‘Your parents weren’t believers?’

  ‘My mother was. As for my father, I can’t say. One doesn’t have the right to judge whether or not another person believes, particularly when it is one’s father.’

  ‘My father wasn’t a believer. I told you that already. He was a sort of – what the Russians call a “superfluous man”. He did just one truly good and useful thing in his life: he married my mother and didn’t divorce her, not even during the war. Even though he’s bound to have two-timed her on many occasions afterwards.’

  ‘My father was a doctor. But he spent many years in concentration camps. Under the Nazis and the Communists. What he went through in those camps shattered him. It is truly hard to reconcile those experiences with belief in a just and all-powerful God. Father didn’t believe there was any higher justice. He didn’t believe people have souls either. “Man has a brain,” he used to say. “The brain is nature’s greatest wonder, but it is terribly impermanent. The soul is the brain. When the brain perishes what remains of the soul?”’ He checks himself.

  ‘And in spite of that you chose your present career?’

  ‘Maybe not in spite of but because. My father was a tolerant man. He left it up to me to decide what I believed about the world, about people and their souls.’

  ‘He died a long time ago?’

  ‘Sixteen years ago. But he lived to see …’ He checks himself again. ‘A few days before his death he said to me, “What we have here on earth is neither God’s nor Satan’s creation. Heaven or Hell is what we create ourselves. Most of the time we create Hell.’”

  ‘Did you love him?’

  ‘The way that everyone loves their father.’

  Why is she asking him? Why does it interest her?

  They are nearing Prague. The city is veiled in smoke. Human life veiled in mystery. And God’s existence?

  ‘I didn’t love mine,
’ the woman breaks the silence. ‘He used to come home, put his feet up on the table and demand to be waited on hand and foot by us. My mother, my sister and me. Mother would come in exhausted from work and had to put up with him. Whatever he earned he used to gamble. He seldom won, and when he did it was just used for more gambling. Mother used to support the lot of us. That’s why I married so young. In order to get away from there. His shadow still hangs over me today. But he was tolerant as well, as far as I was concerned, at least. He let me study to be an actress even though I doubt if he’d ever set foot in a theatre in his life. I exaggerate. Apart from that he watched television.’

  ‘And you’re an actress?’

  ‘No, I didn’t finish the course. When I met Sam I switched to study architecture – not at the technical university, though, more the theory than the practical stuff. And these days I work as a kind of high-class secretary in his practice, or I design interiors for his buildings. I must admit, though, that I do act on the odd occasion when one of my former fellow students finds me a bit-part on TV.’

  He notices that her shoulders are trembling as if she is on the verge of tears. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. It’s OK. I’m just cold. I got chilled to the bone there. Feel.’ She is now holding the steering wheel with her left hand and stretching out her right to him. He notices a long reddish scar on her wrist. Petr has a similar one. He noticed it the first time he met him in prison. Petr’s was redder, being more recent no doubt.

  How did it happen?

  Life wasn’t fun any more.

  Life isnít simply fun.

  I thought it could be. And what’s the point of living if it’s not fun?

  The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.

  But Petr lived. And this one is still living. He touches her hand. It really is cold.

  ‘You could try warming it up,’ she suggests. ‘I can manage to drive with my left hand.’

  She is clearly used to company of a different kind and doesn’t realize that it is inappropriate for him to hold hands with a woman he doesn’t really know. But he has no intention of refusing her request and so he holds her hand in his for a moment.

  ‘Maybe I’m stupid,’ the woman says, ‘and you’ll explain to me some time how it is that I will die, that my body will be burned to ashes or chewed to the bone by the larvae of some horrible beetles, but that one day it will be renewed and join with my soul which will never die. Have I got it right?’

  ‘Yes and no.’ He lets go of her hand but it is as if he can still feel the touch of her in his hand. ‘It’s not a question of resurrection of the body in material form. Not even Christ when he appeared to the Apostles had a material form, just a spiritual one.’

  ‘You always manage to come up with some explanation,’ she says. ‘You preachers, I mean. Perhaps it’s because you’re wiser than the rest of us.’

  ‘We certainly aren’t.’ He should never have travelled with this woman, and having accepted the lift should never have touched her at all.

  2

  Diary excerpts

  The money from the house has come. Grandad built the house, Dad inherited it, but they took it away from him. And then when they jailed Dad, we lived in poverty. I remember at the time finding a crown coin in the street and thinking to myself that I could buy myself an ice-cream. It was an awful temptation. I even went as far as the sweet shop, but then I resisted and gave the crown to Mummy. It was enough for three bread rolls.

  The interest on the sum in the bank amounts to more than ten times my pay. I’ve sent 50,000 to the Jerome Fund and Bosnia. I’ve also sent a contribution towards the children’s oncology unit. Cancer took Jitka from me and made Eva lose her mummy. People in my family used to die of heart failure. That’s how Grandad and Dad died anyway, they were still young at the time. I scarcely remember my grandfather. He was a master violin-maker. We used to have a violin at home that Dad would play when he had the time and wasn’t in prison. I probably have Grandad to thank for my musical ear. They say he also used to play beautifully, but they didn’t have tape recorders in those days and gramophone recordings would only be made of the greats: Hubermann, Szigeti or Kubelík.

  The voices of the people and the violin sounds of those days have been engulfed by silence. These days everything can be preserved but will be forgotten anyway, like the tracts of the Middle Ages. Only those who have become symbols of their times will escape oblivion. But even they won’t survive. And besides, what memory preserves are only gross distortions of reality.

  I felt nothing when I sold the house, but I think it meant a lot to Grandad. An ordinary craftsman from a little village near Karlovy Vary, he had given his only son an education and left him a house in Prague. What will I leave my children?

  From the memoirs of Colonel F. about an interrogation at the beginning of the fifties:

  Once they drove me somewhere away from Dejvice. It might have been Ruzyn or somewhere else on the Prague outskirts. They staged a ‘partisan trial’ with me. They led me there as a ‘spy’ with a bag over my head and my hands tied… They put a noose around my neck and told me they’d hang me if I didn’t confess. I didn’t have anything to confess. They put a revolver to my temple. They’d shoot me if I didn’t confess. I had nothing to confess. They fired, but it was only a signal pistol and I survived. It lasted several hours. I could hardly stand and was thirsty and probably had a fever. I asked them for water but they ignored my requests.

  Dad almost never talked about what he went through when the Communists jailed him. He used to say it wasn’t for the ears of women or children. But they used to jail women too, and they even executed one who was entirely innocent. Maybe Dad didn’t want us to regard him as a hero or a victim. Maybe he found it painful to think back on it. And maybe he had other reasons.

  Magda’s class teacher called me in. Apparently Magda and her pal Zuzana had climbed up on to the window-sill during break and poured water on passers-by. She told me she would never have expected it of Magda as she’d always been such a quiet child and she suggested she ought to find another friend.

  I asked Magda what sort of fun she thought it was to pour water over people. She said she hadn’t poured water on anyone, that she’d only thrown spiders out of the window, and anyway they didn’t fall on anyone as they got caught somewhere on the way down.

  But you watched Zuzana tipping water on people.

  She didn’t tip it on people, just on some old woman who’s always swearing at us for making a racket in the street.

  And some old woman isn’t a human being?

  But Daddy, she only poured it from a tiny little tablet bottle.

  And she started to giggle as she remembered.

  I’ve realized that I’ve hardly been paying any attention to the children recently. And the times I’m with them I’m either talking, praying or telling them off. It’s more of a routine. I don’t share their troubles and joys any more the way I still managed to do when Eva was small. I’ve taken on too many responsibilities and I’ve also spent a lot of time with Mummy, but there’s no point in looking for external reasons, when it’s more likely to be as a result of something happening inside me.

  If there ever was any flame burning inside me, and I believe there was, it’s going out now. I ought to do something about myself and I definitely ought to pay greater attention to the children.

  Not long ago I was reflecting on my capacity for intimacy. I’m incapable of taking even my nearest and dearest into my confidence and then all of a sudden I’m telling some strange woman about my father. I’m telling her things I wouldn’t even tell Hana. Did I talk about them out of gratitude for the lift? Or because she reminded me of Jitka?

  There was a moment when I was going to say that Dad lived long enough for me to make Hana’s acquaintance at his hospital, but I stopped myself. Out of fear of taking her into my confidence, or because I didn’t want to mention my wife?

  I feel a need to talk about Dad ev
er since I found his name on the list. I was astounded when I read his name and date of birth among those of informers. My immediate reaction was that it had to be a mistake. How many people who found their close relatives or friends on it thought the same? What do we know of the private distress even of those who are closest to us? I believe he never consciously did anything dishonourable, not in that respect, at least, but I’m not sure that the others share my conviction. I have this idée fixe that they all know about it, that they read the list, noticed his name and are now looking at me and waiting for some explanation. It’s up to me to defend him. But what am I supposed to tell them, when I myself hadn’t suspected anything at all?

  I also found some members of my congregation on the list. They included Brother Kodet who always used to smile at me so affably – just as he still does.

  When I’m home alone

  I finish a prayer

  and cold wafts from the windows

  my stove is old

  I open it’s door

  and in the flames I see

  those dear faces

  I shall see here no more

  my first wife Dad

  and now Mum as well

  I listen to their silence

  until the fire goes out

  and I’m left alone

  in the cold again

  Yesterday I shouted at Hana because she wanted me to take out the rubbish when I happened to be writing my sermon. What’s the point of preaching about God’s love when I’m incapable of showing kindness to those nearest to me? We talk together so seldom nowadays. Maybe it’s tiredness or not having enough time. Or my inability to be intimate? We have nothing to conceal from each other, at least as regards our behaviour. But at the same time it’s as if we avoid mentioning anything fundamental about our lives. As if we never manage to stumble our way to it.

  It took me almost a year before I could bring myself to tell her about finding Dad’s name on the list. Whenever I am overcome with doubts about what I’m doing or what I believe, I never mention it to Hana. Maybe things that are fundamental to me she doesn’t find important. She wants the children to be healthy and she’s always dashing from one doctor to another with Magda on account of her eyes. Marek used to suffer from tonsillitis a lot when he was small and she’d get up and see to him several times a night, and the same thing with Eva whenever she was ill. She’d no doubt get up on account of me if it weren’t for the fact I’m rarely ill. She treated my mother as if she were her own, particularly over this past year when Mum had become infirm, helping me to care for her as much as she possibly could. She brings the children up impeccably, to be hard-working, polite, truthful, modest and say their prayers. The children are the most important thing in her life. And I’m the next maybe. She makes sure I’ve got clean clothes to put on, that I’m never hungry, that I have a healthy diet and that I feel contented. She knows I love music and suggests we go to concerts together, even though she always falls asleep. If she sees me studying some book, she’ll ask me what it’s about, in the same way that she asks me what we talked about on the ministers’ course. When I start to tell her, she hears me out but I get the feeling that she’s not taking it in, that she just grasps individual words and sentences. The substance of what I’m saying doesn’t interest her, it doesn’t concern her, or it concerns her only on account of me. She is pleased when I like something and is distressed when I am distressed, even though she may be unfamiliar with the causes – so I quickly change the subject to something more familiar to her.