The Ultimate Intimacy

by Ivan Klíma

  Wouldn’t you like to come and visit us? A few famous people have been here already, singers mostly. They share our views. You could talk to the people too and let them know you agree with us and that Jesus, if he only had the slightest idea about nuclear power stations, would be here with us too.

  So write to us soon. And pay us a visit. You can sleep in our tent.

  Marek

  Dearest Bára,

  Last night was unusually hot. I couldn’t get to sleep, so I got dressed again and went out into the garden and looked at the stars. My son looks at them almost every evening whenever he’s at home and then asks me questions to try and catch me out. You tried to do the same about the size of the universe. Yes, there are distances that are unimaginable and insuperable, but I was always more interested in the distances that separate people, distances that are infinitesimal compared to the universe but which often seem equally insuperable.

  You write lovely things about me, I’ve told you not to more than once, and you write beautiful things about love. I agree with you, even though I am frightened of what has happened and is happening – between us. At the same time, I am grateful for what happened and is happening. I sense the possibility of a great love between us and through it the intimacy I have yearned for, something I experienced or started to experience with my first wife, but which I only associated with her. I had stopped believing that I could ever experience anything similar ever again. Have I the right? Have we the right?

  Even though I ask these questions, I am grateful to you for the short time you have been in my life. And that gratitude remains, though I shudder to say it. You write ‘nothing that I want to last ever lasts more than a few moments’. It strikes me, on the contrary, that if people so desire there is no such thing as ‘nothing ever’, that it is something that only death can say, and not even death need say it precisely the way you feel it. But human folly is capable of anticipating death by entire decades. Often ‘nothing ever’ is something we create for ourselves, through our weakness, selfishness, or ignorance. Or our desperation.

  What are we going to do?

  I also want to let you know that you are a special, exceptional individual. You have a greater yearning for love and wholeness than I have ever encountered in another human being. I feel near despair because what there is between us can never be whole. Or can it? What would we have to abandon for it to be so? How many people would we have to hurt?

  And so we lurch, you and I, between a yearning for completeness and the anxiety of ‘never ever’. It’s a very imperfect situation and therefore very human.

  I feel an enormous love for you. I couldn’t recant it at this moment, even if I tried.

  Love, Dan

  Dear Reverend,

  I apologize deeply to you for all the bad things I have done. I only told you all those things the time I got drunk because I was miserable, because I had to move out of my sister’s. It’s not true that I could be a dealer. It’s just that I need to earn more money because that’s the way things are nowadays. I am now searching for the truth. About life and about the Lord Jesus, because I’ve found out that everyone sees him differently. Such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Roman Catholics. The way they honour the Virgin Mary, for instance. The other day one of their priests gave me a leaflet with a prayer by St Louis which actually states: it is thy privilege to hold absolute sway over angels, men and demons; it is thy privilege to dispose of all the gifts of God, just as thou wiliest. What do you say about that, Reverend? Isn’t it almost blasphemy against the Lord? Or take the Pentecostals. They maintain that everything of any importance comes from the Holy Spirit and we have to believe in its power and not yield to Satan. That seems to me right, because the Holy Spirit was poured out on the apostles, after all. I’d also like to ask your forgiveness, Reverend, over Eva. I didn’t mean her any harm. I just wanted to get her out of the clutches of those rotten speed dealers. Marijuana doesn’t do you any harm, Reverend. But I ought to have talked to you first, and so I now beg you for forgiveness.

  I prayed that you and the Lord God will forgive me.

  Yours, Petr

  Darling Dan,

  I don’t know what I’m to do with you. A double life destroys one, unless one totally abandons the need to be a complete whole. Forgive me. Forgive me for destroying you. But unless one gives up the need for love, I suppose there is nothing for it, in certain situations, but to lead a double life. In today’s world, at least, and with our morality. One can fool the brain, but not the heart. The heart is a compass, you know that, don’t you? You know how to read it. From the very beginning, from the first moment I heard you, I knew I could trust you, that I could place my head in your jaws and be sure that you would not harm me. Taking a chance with you is not just placing my head in your jaws, it’s also needing completeness without an escape route. But I’m leaving myself an escape route anyway: the way home, back to my husband and my sons. Except that my home is also a place of peril. I’m constantly on my guard here and there is no loving embrace for me. Instead there is a man who demands my embrace while keeping his arms behind his back. Admittedly I try to accommodate him. I look cheerful and smile, but deep down inside me something that can never be renewed is being burnt away. There is something dead inside me, something I can’t bring back to life. My cheerfulness here is awfully superficial, I feel it and so does Sam who is always complaining about me. He distrusts me and suffocates me. I can’t get closer to him and I can’t leave him. I am stuck here and I’m unhappy. The atmosphere here is not one of blissful ignorance that conceals everything. It is an awareness of ruin. It destroys me because I need joy for my life to have meaning. I don’t want to live without joy and without love. I’d sooner not live at all. I don’t want my life to be merely a succession of duties. I don’t want to save the world with duties but with joy. I long to leave, to disappear, to turn my back on everything, free myself, dissolve, be no longer. I talk about myself as if I didn’t think about the others. In my daily life I constantly have to think about others, I have no time to remember myself. It’s thinking about you that has made me remember myself. When I’m with you I feel that I may think about myself too. You are someone who doesn’t intimidate me, or blackmail me, threaten me or ridicule my craziness. You’re someone who really loves me, not because I’m particularly worthy of love but because you’re overflowing with it. I feel an enormous gratitude towards you. I have never really encountered anything like you.

  And now I feel like crying because you’re somewhere far away, all too far away. I don’t have you near me as my salvation, my dearest of all men, my real man, the one I trust, the one who won’t let me perish, to whom I can admit to being weak, incapable and pathetic and yet he won’t reject me.

  And now I lament that I have found the kind-hearted man I longed for and he is not for me, won’t ever be for me. I know it. I have found that man and can thank God that he let me know you at all.

  It surprises you that I write about God and you think I’m doing it to ingratiate myself with you. But I don’t want to go against the Ten Commandments. I understand them and respect them – apart from the one about not coveting my neighbour’s husband. I understand that life requires order and that morality is good so long as it is not hypocrisy.

  I really have made a proper mess of my life, but at this moment I’m happy, so happy in fact, I could easily die. But I don’t want to, I want to be with you for a long, long, long time – at least one whole night.

  I love you so terribly much, that I can’t see how to survive it. We return in three days time, will I see you?

  Bára (with love)

  Dear Marek and Eva,

  I’m glad you like it at the camp. It’s splendid that we now live in a society in which people can say freely what they don’t agree with. That was something I could hardly do when I was your age, and certainly not freely. Thank you also for the invitation but I won’t be coming. The thing is, I’m not sure who is in the right in this ar
gument. I do believe that people ought to live more frugally, and indeed I preach about it often enough. I believe they should show greater consideration towards nature and life and weigh the consequences of their actions. But it’s not easy to convince them. That’s something I’ve discovered. Most people are more attracted to wealth than to frugal living. In that respect, people nowadays would seem to be worse than in centuries past because it’s easier to get rich and anybody who would voluntarily live in poverty risks ridicule. That’s why electricity will be produced. After all, you use it too and life without it is difficult to conceive now. And whether it is better to obtain electricity from coal, oil or nuclear fission is something I am unable to judge. I don’t understand it, in the same way I don’t understand mathematical sets, and don’t know what to make of black holes or quasars. And Marek, I’d only ask you not to fall prey too easily to over-simplified judgements, but instead to weigh up the pros and cons. Now and in the future. Because the moment you stop making up your own mind you risk being taken advantage of. I was taken by your idea that the Lord Jesus would be with you if he were on earth. Jesus would certainly be on the side of those who managed to live frugally, and whose actions were governed by love and humility before the majesty of God. Even so, I don’t think we should draw Him into our own all too mundane – or even political – disputes. Instead, Jesus should open the gate to what is above us, what lends meaning to our lives and its values, what transcends our brief lives. Because without that, all that remains is the cold universe full of the galaxies that you so often speak about. In such a universe it matters little how electricity is made or what from.

  Best wishes to both of you.

  Love, Dad

  Chapter Five

  1

  He was already asleep when the phone rang. ‘It’s me, Dan. You’re not cross with me for calling so late?’

  ‘I’ve no idea of the time. It must be midnight, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know either. I dashed out without my watch. I need to have a talk with you, but I don’t suppose you’d be able to.’

  ‘I’m alone at home. My wife is still in the country.’

  ‘Do you think you could come and meet me somewhere?’

  ‘Are you crying?’

  ‘Maybe. I’m awfully upset.’

  ‘Has something happened? Is it the children?’

  ‘No, the children are asleep. Everyone’s at home in the warm, only I’m out here freezing in the phone-box at the bus stop. It’s like being in a glass coffin. But I’d sooner be in a wooden one. Seeing nothing, knowing nothing and then being pushed into the flames where it would be warm at least.’

  ‘I’ll come then.’

  Half-past midnight. Outside, an unseasonal July chill and the wind chasing clouds across the sky, their edges pallid in the light of the moon.

  He catches sight of her in the distance standing at the bus stop, long after the last bus has gone. She is huddled up in a short blue-and-yellow mottled coat.

  He pulls up right in front of the bus stop and opens the door.

  ‘I’ve got cold hands again,’ Bára says, ‘and feet too. I’m cold all over and you’ve come in spite of that.’

  He asks her what has happened.

  ‘I ran away. He threw a ruler at me.’

  ‘Your husband?’

  ‘Who else? We were having a row. Over Saša. But I don’t want us to sit like this in the car.’

  ‘I don’t know where we could go.’

  ‘So just drive on!’

  ‘All right. Will you tell me what happened?’

  ‘You don’t mind the muck spilling on to you?’

  ‘That’s why I’ve come, isn’t it? So you could tell me what happened.’

  ‘Didn’t you come because you love me?’

  ‘It’s one and the same.’

  ‘I know. So take my hand.’

  Her hand is as cold as that time she drove him. How long ago was that?

  ‘He can’t stand Saša,’ she says of her husband. ‘He’s always bossing him about, forbidding him things. Calling him a good-for-nothing idler who does no studying and comes in late. And today he yelled at him that he needn’t think he’d be going on to university, that he’d maintained him long enough. And I said I’m the one who maintains him anyway, he’s my son, and Sam started yelling at both of us that we’re layabouts. I sent Saša away and told Sam that he mustn’t dare do that to me. It flabbergasted him that I should have the gall to stand up to him, because after all he is someone whereas I am no more than a flea that has crept into his clothes, a dustbin in which he chucks all his foul moods. He grabbed the steel ruler and hurled it at me. If I hadn’t dodged, he could have killed me. Oh God, it’s so vile, forgive me, I dashed out of the flat but I had nowhere to go. I would have gone to Mum’s, but it was too late and she would have had a fright, so I called you.’

  ‘I’m glad you called me.’

  ‘I’ll never forget you came for me, that you didn’t leave me in that phone-box. And now, instead of getting a night’s sleep … Where are you taking me? To the airport?’

  ‘No, I’m just driving along.’

  ‘I’d fly somewhere with you. Somewhere far away. Somewhere overseas. Somewhere that’s warm. Barcelona, say. They’re bound to have warm weather there, and Gaudi too. But wherever I am with you it’s warm, your heart gives out warmth. Don’t worry, I don’t intend to drag you off somewhere or throw myself on you. I’m going home. No, don’t stop. Bear with me for a while still. Drive me somewhere, just for a short while.’

  So at Červený vrch he turns off the main road. He draws up in front of one of the tower blocks. ‘There’s an empty flat up there. It belonged to my mother.’

  ‘Your mum died that same day. I know.’

  When he unlocks the door he looks up and down the passage, as if fearful someone might see him. But they are all asleep at this hour.

  Inside the flat, he is aware of the familiar odour that has still not disappeared even in the five months that his mother has not been here.

  He helps Bára out of her coat and they sit down opposite each other. Bára fixes on him a look of total devotion, or at least that is what it seems like to him and he realizes he is pleased; instead of wasting time sleeping he can spend it with her.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’d have a drop of wine here?’

  ‘There’s not a thing to eat or drink here. Nothing but ketchup.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Why did you sit down so far away from me?’

  ‘I’m sitting quite close.’

  ‘I want you to sit closer.’

  He moves his chair so that their knees touch.

  ‘There was a time when he really did maintain us,’ she said, ‘when Aleš was small. But I was the one who looked after them. He didn’t have to lift a finger at home. And what’s more, in the evenings I would help him with tracing plans. But since the revolution I do as much work as him, maybe more, because I drudge for him at the office, play the occasional bit part on television, and also do the housework. So tell me, what sort of layabout am I? How can he say he maintains my son?’

  ‘I don’t consider you a layabout, do I?’

  ‘But he does.’

  ‘I doubt that even he does, really.’

  ‘So what makes him say it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know him. Maybe he just wanted to hit out at you somehow. The pain of a slap passes quickly, the pain of injustice lasts longer.’

  ‘But tell me why, why he should want to cause me pain? Why?’

  ‘Maybe he’s jealous of your son.’

  ‘Why should he be jealous of my child?’

  ‘You give him love he would like for himself.’

  ‘And don’t you find that horrible?’

  ‘It’s human.’

  ‘And would you be jealous of my Saša too?’

  ‘No. No one has the right to deprive another of his share of love.’

  ‘I know. You definitely wouldn’t tor
ture me.’

  ‘I’ve done all sorts of bad things in my time, but so far I don’t think I’ve been cruel to anyone.’

  ‘You’ve done lots of bad things? There is only one that I know of. Tell me, why didn’t you come for me long ago?’

  ‘How could I come for you when I didn’t know you?’

  ‘Exactly. You weren’t interested in any old Bára. You happily left me to the mercies of a fellow who hurls steel rulers at me.’

  ‘Don’t think about it any more.’

  ‘You’re right. I’m sorry. Here I am with you and I spend the time talking about another man. Tell me, do you still remember your first wife?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Can you still bring her to mind?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Often?’

  ‘It depends what you mean by often. Less now than years ago. But most frequently I remember some situation when we were really happy or, on the contrary, when we hurt each other.’

  ‘You’re able to hurt someone too?’

  ‘Such as when I didn’t do something she wanted or didn’t protect her enough. When we were going out together, we lived a long distance apart, several hours’ journey. There were times when I didn’t bother to make the trip because I didn’t feel like trudging all that way. And once – it was when she was already expecting Eva – she was summoned to an interrogation. And I let her go there and didn’t even wait for her outside the office because there were other things I had to do. Whenever I remember that, I feel regret that I didn’t stand by her then.’

  ‘But it only bothers you because she is dead.’

  ‘Yes, I can’t make up for it any more.’

  ‘You can make up for it with the living.’

  ‘I’ve tried to ever since.’ Then he says, ‘And you remind me of her.’

  ‘Do you think I resemble her?’

  ‘No. It’s more a sense of familiarity, a sort of intimacy.’

  ‘It must have been awful for you when she died. Tell me, did it ever strike you as unjust?’