by Ivan Klíma
I told him I’d hardly use the car, but that I needed it from time to time, for example, those Sundays when I have two services in close succession.
So don’t have them in close succession, was his advice.
But I shouldn’t just write about him critically. He goes with Alois to visit Fyodor. I asked him why he does it. ‘He hasn’t got anybody else,’ he explained. The operation was successful apparently and Fyodor is happy. He was afraid he would be a cripple.
‘Tell me, please, what’s the Russian for cripple?’ I asked.
‘Kripel, of course,’ he said, with his usual assuredness.
I went to check in the big Russian dictionary. The word doesn’t exist in that language.
At the theological faculty, most of my fellow students came from families with a Protestant tradition. Often they would be children of clergy.
In our home, Dad put up with Mum’s faith because he was tolerant, but he made it plain that God was simply a human invention: man created God and not the other way round.
A lot of what my fellow students took for granted I had to figure out for myself. I would often obstinately silence within me Dad’s sceptical voice. Anyway I was never able to summon up interest in a range of questions that for centuries had agitated the Fathers of the Church and – to my astonishment – a number of my contemporaries. What point was there in arguing over whether fallen angels could atone for their guilt whether mortality was a consequence of original sin, or whether man was subject to a single or a double judgement: judgement of the body and of the soul?
What excited me most of all was the figure of Jesus and his revolutionary message. At one time – I was barely twenty – I was determined to write a book about Jesus and started to seek out literature and study it. I was astounded at the amount of material written on the subject. The handful of facts recorded by the evangelists had given rise to thousands of parallel and quite contradictory interpretations. According to some, Jesus was God; according to others he had a dual nature and was therefore God-man. Some regarded him as a man, but endowed with a prophetic spirit; according to others, he was a messiah, or a leader of an ascetic religious sect, or alternatively a Jewish rebel. And of course I also read elsewhere that he did not live at all, or that the gospels had merged two different figures into one.
I perceived that I would not be capable of writing a real portrait of Jesus – nobody had yet and nobody ever would – and that the books I was reading told me more about their authors than about the subject matter. Only ltter did I realize that this was the fate of all books and films that try to deal with a real person. The essence of another person is unfathomable, and even more so when it is the Son of God, about whom information is not only fragmentary but also affected by prejudice, superstition or outdated beliefs.
For me in my younger years, belief was chiefly an alternative to the depressing lifestyle which then prevailed, an alternative to the miserable planned ‘happiness’ that depended solely on the number of things one could or was allowed to own. In the Bible I found passages that resonated with my own feelings and that filled me with satisfaction and helped me dispel my doubts and scepticism about its message.
When I informed Dad that I wanted to study at the theological faculty, he was stupefied. Then he asked me if I had given it proper thought. ‘Yes,’I replied.
‘If that’s your decision,’ is all he could say. But he went on to add that it was necessary to weigh up one’s decisions very carefully, but once one had taken them it was necessary to follow them through to their conclusion.
I told him that it went without saying.
I went to a lecture by a German psychologist on ‘Esoterica and Reincarnation. In it he maintained that, according to the law of rhythm, which is the fundamental law of the universe, death alternates with life in the same way that waking and sleeping do – being alive and being dead are just two poles of the unbroken stream of life. So death was not unbeing but the opposite pole from being. When you die, you cross the boundary between two worlds, this one and the next. For the person who enters the next world, the next world becomes this world and our world becomes the next world for him until such a time as he again returns to it. Birth, the arrival in our world and hence the departure from that other, astral world, is regarded there as death. The speaker deduced that the soul brought with it from past lives a hidden memory and a knowledge which in this world takes the form of talent or curiosity. The lecturer talked of experiments in which patients had apparently been induced to recall not only what they had felt in their mother’s womb, but also the life of their soul in the other world before their latest reincarnation. He even went so far as to speculate on the probable length of time between successive incarnations (apparently the period is getting shorter all the time and now lasts scarcely ten years) and whether a change of sex is possible in the process.
While I try to keep an open mind as regards the fate of the human soul during this life and after it, and am fully aware that Scripture expects not only the return of Jesus Christ but even of the Prophet Elijah, and that we all believe in the resurrection of the body, which assumes the continued existence of the soul beyond our world, I couldn’t rid myself of the unpleasant feeling that I was listening to a charlatan.
I pray badly. I’m not talking about the prayers that I say aloud during services, but about the silent prayers in which I speak to God on my own behalf. I am incapable of being intimate even with Him. I remain silent about the most important things: my anxieties, my suppressed longings, my backsliding.
I do likewise in these notes. I am afraid that one day if someone reads them (although it’s most unlikely; Dad left heaps of official bumf and notes – I brought home two full boxes when Mum died. I haven’t opened them yet and I don’t know if I ever will) they’ll say to themselves: didn’t anything bother him, did nothing drive him to despair, were there no moments when he was scared of nothingness and his vain attempts to elude it?
I mentioned to Martin my inability to be intimate enough in my prayers. ‘That’s something I’m aware of he said, ‘all too well aware of, in fact. But prayer is itself a deeper level of intimacy.’
‘What level?’ I asked.
‘At least the second, ‘he said and laughed.
‘And which is the first?’
He reflected. ‘When you tell your wife your dreams, say. Even the very intimate ones.’
I don’t tell Hana my dreams. At best I write them in this notebook. I am at the first level of intimacy with my diary.
A dream about my mother. She was already old and infirm. She was lying in bed and I was sitting by her. Suddenly she said, I have to tell you something, Dan.
Go ahead, Mummy.
I’ve not told anyone about this, she said. Then she asked if I remembered how they had once built a new road not far from our cottage. I said I did. (We never lived in a cottage and no such road was ever built.) And did I still remember that young architect who lodged with us in that cottage? I didn’t. It was when they sent Dad to prison, she insisted. I told her I now remembered.
He didn’t want to live in a trailer, Mum explained, and the money came in handy, as it was already Dad’s second year in prison. I took him in even though I knew that people would start rumours. He wasn’t particularly young, but he was a fine man. He had eyes like the gamekeeper who seduced Viktoria. And so I had an affair with him, Dan. You know Dad got ten years, don’t you? It never occurred to me he’d be released earlier. I used to write to him and send parcels, and when they allowed visits I used to travel to see him. But I committed a sin, all the same. And I never told him about it.
He’d forgive you, Mummy, I said in dismay, and the Lord will forgive you too.
He left anyway – that architect. He moved away six months later, and he wrote to me afterwards but I burned the letters.
Don’t distress yourself, Mummy. You know what Christ said to those who brought him the woman caught in adultery and wanted to stone her? He sai
d: Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. And when they heard this they left one by one. And then he asked her: Where are they who condemned you? Has no one condemned you? And she replied, No one, Lord. And what did our Lord say to her? Then neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more!
A peculiar dream. Was it about Mum or rather about me? How did that profession come into it: architect? Is it possible to go through life without betraying trust at least once? That’s why he said: ‘Then neither do I condemn you.’
3
Eva did fairly well in her leaving exams, but none the less Daniel had the feeling that she was changed somehow: dispirited, or more exactly, remote from everything around her.
‘Glad you’ve got it over with?’ he asked when she brought him the results.
‘I suppose so’ She was due to start studying at the Conservatoire in the autumn. Then she added: ‘It means you’ve got something behind you and something ahead of you. At least you know the thing you left behind.’
‘And you’re afraid of what you don’t know?’
‘No, I’m not afraid. I just don’t know whether I’m looking forward to it.’
‘That’s just because you’re tired out.’
She looked at him and said, ‘I’m not tired out, Daddy. I just don’t have anything to look forward to.’
‘You’ll have moments like that in your life. And afterwards you’ll feel quite differently again.’
‘Do you look forward to anything?’
‘Of course. To seeing all of you, when we come together again this evening. To meeting people I like. To the things I have yet to discover in my life.’
‘Yes,’ she admitted, ‘I do too.’
Early that evening, just as they were about to sit down to dinner, Petr arrived with an enormous bunch of roses for Eva.
‘Petr, you’re crazy. All these roses? We don’t even have a vase big enough’
‘I was given them. When I told Mr Houdek they were for you.’
Petr had been working at Houdek’s garden centre for four weeks now and he seemed to be enjoying the work. ‘And I’ve got this too,’ he said, taking from his pocket something wrapped in paper. ‘I tried to make it for you.’
Eva took the gift and blushed. Wrapped in the paper was a little dove cut out of copper and hung on a leather thong.
‘She only got one B,’ Marek boasted on her behalf.
‘If I were to have a leaving certificate.’ Petr said, in an effort to speak grammatically, ‘I would be in quite a different situation.’
‘Exams are not all that important, Petr,’ Hana said. ‘Its possible to be a useful person without going to university.’
‘What sort of job will they let you do these days without university? The best you can hope for is what I’m doing now. Sitting behind a wheel.’
‘What would you like to do?’ Eva asked.
‘Preach. I’d like to tell people how terrible it is when they don’t know Jesus and his love, when they land up in Satan’s power. Do you know, Reverend, I caught a glimpse of him going by yesterday.’
‘Of whom?’
‘He was terribly tall, even taller than you. He had ginger hair like Alois. All of a sudden he appeared on the street when I was on the way to my sister’s. Just under the bridge in Nusle, if you know where I mean. And he said to me: I know you from somewhere, pal. I never saw him in my life, Reverend. I remember everyone I ever met and I wouldn’t have forgotten him, because he had a tattoo on his neck and stank like a kipper.’
‘What did you say to him?’ Eva asked with interest.
‘I told him I didn’t know him, and he starts to laugh and says: ‘Peter, Peter, you may have denied the Lord Jesus, but you can’t deny me.’
‘He said that to you?’ Daniel said, displeased with the story.
‘On my oath, Reverend.’
‘Save your oaths for something more important, Petr!’
‘That was important for me, Reverend. The point is he asked me to go with him, saying he had a job for me, and if I didn’t, I’d regret it. And I said to him: Get behind me, Satan, you monster from hell. And he laughs again. Then all of a sudden he wasn’t there. Really, I swear it, Reverend. The pavement was all dug up for some pipes or other, so I even looked to see if he hadn’t fallen down some hole. But he wasn’t anywhere.’
Daniel noticed that Hana had followed Petr’s story about Satan with interest. It matched her own worst experience. Perhaps that was why he commented, ‘All sorts of strange things happen and sometimes it’s difficult to find a rational explanation, but I wouldn’t say you really met the devil.’
‘So who was it, then?’
‘Someone who’d heard about you from someone else, maybe.’
‘And where did he disappear to?’
‘I don’t know, I wasn’t there. Maybe he had a car parked nearby and got into it without you noticing.’
‘Reverend, you forget where I’ve just come from. A real con has eyes in the back of his head, so I’d hardly miss someone climbing into an old banger right alongside me.’
‘All right,’ said Daniel, ‘and you hadn’t just happened to have had a few drinks?’
‘Even if I had, I know what I saw. And I woke up in the middle of the night and it was as if someone was walking around the bedroom. So I switched the light on. There was nobody there, only I could smell that stink of kippers. And my shirt and trousers that I put on the chair the night before were lying all tangled on the floor. You may think that I dreamed it all up, Reverend, but I’d really love to preach to people about the danger they’re in. Because I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it when someone’s on a trip and he’s in such a mess he thinks he won’t find the way back, and how he’s weak as water when he’s coming out of it. I know what it is when someone has a wild beast inside them that just wants to booze, stuff itself with food and leap on a woman. The stuff they show on the telly, all them horror films and the cops and robbers – they’re only fairy stories to frighten little children, even when they show someone eating a human liver. And I’ve seen someone do that too, but for real.’
The children – and Eva, in particular – were following what Petr said with almost too much attention. Daniel wasn’t sure it was a good thing. He ought to send Magda off somewhere, at least.
Petr was a good speaker and there was no doubt he would be capable of winning people over to his ideas or plans. He’d proved that in the past, when he had been intent on doing evil, and he would no doubt be just as capable of doing it now – now that he had decided to do something useful, now that he had been given grace, as he hoped, to do so.
This gift should not be wasted. Nor should it be abused by people who might think they could use Petr to serve their own ends.
‘We’ll see, Petr,’ he said, interrupting his preaching about evil. ‘We’ll find some way for you to tell people what you want to tell them. It might even be possible to fix something up with the schools.’
‘Thank you, Reverend. But I didn’t mean us to talk about me when we’re celebrating Eva’s exams.’
They all sat down to dinner together. In the middle of the table, in a five-litre gherkin jar, the fifteen roses gave off their scent. Eva hung the little dove around her neck and appeared at that moment contented, even happy.
4
Samuel
Samuel is leaving for Brno in the early evening to attend an important meeting first thing in the morning. There is a multimillion-crown sports complex project up for tender. There are always plenty of people interested in a contract like that, so if you don’t take the initiative and aren’t ready to pay ‘a broker’, then it’s your own bad luck. For that reason, he needs to meet in advance at least some of the people who will be involved in the decision on the contract. Samuel is going reluctantly. He finds bribery distasteful and humiliating, and he begrudges the money, even though he knows he will make a good return on it. Moreover, he has not enjoyed travelling lately. It takes up too much time and exhausts him. Apart f
rom that, he has to leave Bára in Prague and he knows her well enough to imagine what she’ll do with her time the moment she’s sure she won t bump into him wherever she goes and whatever she does with the one she happens to be with.
At least he is taking with him that architect Vondra who seems to him to flirt shamelessly with Bára. Samuel justifies taking him on the grounds that Vondra is a Moravian and knows the officials they will be dealing with. He is also taking his secretary Ljuba, both because she is capable and because he finds her attractive.
As always, Bára packs his overnight case carefully and goes out with him to the car. She gives him a hug and a kiss. Neither the kiss nor the hug have the warmth he used to feel. And she doesn’t even put on a very good show of being sorry he is leaving, despite the fact that acting is her second profession. She cannot completely conceal her pleasure at getting rid of him for a short while at least. Samuel starts the car and takes a last look; Bára is standing on the edge of the footpath waving to him. She is still beautiful, she’s tall and statuesque, and for a moment he feels a sharp pang of regret for something that is irrevocably lost, and sorry for himself that his life is constantly taking a different turn from the one he had imagined.
At the office he picks up the papers he needs and it occurs to him to ring home to see whether Bára picks up the phone, but he decides against it. Not because he would feel abashed but because he fears there would be no reply and the uncertainty – or rather the certainty – would play on his mind so much that he would be unable to concentrate on the negotiations.
He sits Ljuba next to him. She exudes a Gabriela Sabatini perfume (which he had also bought Bára) and youthfulness.
Once on the motorway, Ljuba tries to recount to him the latest episode of M.A.S.H. She wants to please him and has no inkling that he can think of few things that are a greater waste of time than listening to an account of a TV programme. Ljuba then proceeds to impart some bits of news, or rather gossip, about goings-on in the office – Samuel really couldn’t care which of his staff are going out together, sleeping together, speaking together, or not speaking together. With one exception, of course: and about his wife no one will ever say a word, naturally, even if everyone knows what he doesn’t, and might never know.
