by Ivan Klíma
‘I am, yes.’
‘I thought I’d just ask you: one of our guests, an old gentleman, has had a bad turn. we’ve already called the doctor but the gentleman also asked for a priest.’
‘But I don’t give extreme unction.’
‘If it wasn’t too much trouble to you, I don’t understand these things, but seeing that he did ask…’
‘Yes, of course,’ he said, and started to get dressed.
4
Matou
Matouš is seized by the demon of activity. He scarcely sleeps and he wrote sixteen articles during the month of September. In fact, though, it was not he who wrote them, but some essentially alien and rather unpleasant being that occasionally worms its way into his mind and, before he can expel it, commits all sorts of indiscretions. He knows by now that when it whispers something into his pen he mustn’t sign it with his own name, and so for at least a year now he has been delivering these inventions under the name of Lukáš Slabý.
Matouš brings a feature about schoolchildren smoking pot to one of the tabloids, and pretends he wrote the article himself. He tells the editor that in these times the only successful stories are about drugs, prostitution, contract killings, and billion-crown scams, or so it seems to him. But he has an advantage over the others who write about the same things: he can enrich his stories with his experiences of the hashish dens in Hong Kong or Singapore, although – to be honest – he felt safer there than here. His colleague nods, Matouš’s articles read well. Then he goes off with Matouš to a cheap wine bar for a drink. After the fourth glass he mentions that MatouSš’s ex-wife Klára spends her time sitting around with foreigners at the Hotel Evropa. Sitting around and lying around, most likely.
Matouš, who makes a practice of referring to Klára as his ex-wife although he is not yet divorced, gives no indication, even now, that this news affects him in any way and simply says, ‘She always was a tart.’ And he concurs with his colleague that women are tarts by nature, although some lack the courage to be so brazenly open about it.
However, when he gets home he feels to his surprise something akin to grief, disappointment or bitterness. That woman still continues to use his name and can even keep it should she cease to be his wife. When he first met her she had seemed to him innocently girlish and he loved her, trusted her and brought her into his home, from which she soon drove out all peace and tranquillity.
He sits down in the armchair placed in front of the television set. As the news is about to start, he switches on and watches the reports with the professional eye of Lukáš Slabý to whom he owes his living. On the screen, they are just carrying away the corpse of a woman covered in blood, another woman tears her hair – a Bosnian or a Serb. It doesn’t register with him anyway. Countless unknown corpses affect one less than one single betrayal close to home.
Matouš watches the flickering colours impassively and he is suddenly seized by torpor. He stares for a moment at the stuffed canary sitting motionless on its perch in the cage. He recalls a park not far from Peking University where the old men would bring their caged birds to give them an airing. Birds flying out of their cages. The scent of jasmine. Bright-coloured kites. Nostalgia. He won’t find the energy or resolve to make any more journeys, he is gradually losing the will to live.
Then he makes up a not particularly successful haiku in his head about his not particularly convincing notion about his own death:
Just dream a sweet dream
Be awoken by no one
Turn into a shade.
He won’t even write it down, but with his last ounce of strength he forces himself to get up from the armchair, puts on a white shirt and the silk tie he brought all the way back from Shanghai years ago, and sets out for the Hotel Evropa.
Klára is indeed sitting there. It is still early, so she is sitting on her own, slowly sipping from a glass containing wine or something purporting to be wine. Her long red nails glitter, her blouse pretends to be embroidered with gold, while from her ears dangle rings that are genuinely gold, like the rings he had given her.
He approaches her and asks if the other chair is free.
Only now does she notice him and gives him a startled look. Then she says, ‘Yeah, for the time being. What are you doing here, for heaven’s sake?’
‘I’m the one who should be asking you that!’ Matouš comments.
‘You’ve no right to ask me anything!’
‘You’re still my wife.’
‘That doesn’t mean I can’t sit where I like. I’m a free person, aren’t I?’
‘I hope you make a decent living, at least.’
‘Don’t be disgusting, Volek!’
‘You’ve not shown up in a long while,’ he says. ‘You’ve still got some things at my place and it’s about time we went to court at last, so you can feel truly free.’
They argue for a while about their mutual relationship, each blaming the other for breach of faith. Klára maintains that the only reason she is sitting here is because he drove her to it, because of his lack of interest in her, his insensitivity and his meanness. ‘Don’t you understand you are impossible to live with?’ she asks.
He asks her why, and she, whose brain was never disturbed by the slightest interesting or original thought, she, who was capable of listening to inane pop music from morning to night or gawping at even more inane television shows, she who has never once in her whole life read one decent book (and probably not even an indecent one either), says to Matouš, who has always prided himself on the breadth of his knowledge and his ability to entertain people: ‘Because you’re insufferably boring!’
‘Does that mean you have no intention of ever coming back?’ he asks pointlessly.
‘I couldn’t give a toss about you.’
‘Or my money?’
‘With the money I get from you, I could hardly afford widow’s weeds.’
Then a group of foreigners arrives in the dining room and Klára tells Matouš he had better clear off.
Matouš instantly suppresses a fit of helpless rage. Most of all he would like to hit her but it goes against the grain to hit a woman. Besides, here in the restaurant it would probably cause a scandal. So he gets up and whispers, ‘Have a good time then, you dirty slut!’ And he knocks over her wine glass with his elbow. Klára leaps up out of her chair just in time to stop the wine running into her lap and kicks Matouš in the shin with the imprecation, ‘Fuck off, you impotent old bastard!’ Matouš does not stop to hear the remaining curses. He limps away across the square as evening falls. He feels dreadful, and is aware of a great number of bizarre-looking individuals and dark faces that look even darker in the night. Whores, pimps, drug dealers and addicts stand around. One of the youngsters loitering in front of the arcade looks familiar, he has the impression that he noticed him at that church he visited not long ago to hear the husband of the motherly looking matron from the hospital. But he was probably mistaken, these people don’t look much like churchgoers – unless they were making a night-time foray. Matouš turns away in disgust. He no longer has the feeling of treading the familiar pavement of pink and slate-blue paving blocks, but is instead groping along a narrow jungle path and has even left his machete behind; maybe the fellow in front will hack a way through, but the fellow suddenly disappears underground and Matouš becomes entangled in some sort of creeper from which he can’t extricate himself. He sits down on the ground to take a little rest, but then he is horrified to see, dropping down from the branch above him, a gold-coloured snake. The boiga drops on to his chest and strikes. The searing pain forces him to rise from the ground. He shakes off the snake; he ought to run away and get first aid or, instead, just lie down here on the ground and wait for death. To be born is to begin to die! Why resist?
Nevertheless he raises himself up and drags himself through the jungle burdened with pain and the weight of his own body.
Back home he takes a few tablets to ease the pain. The tablets make him drowsy but the pain r
emains and sleep refuses to come, even though the exhaustion which now seizes him is almost too much to bear.
The solitude in which he spends his life and the purposelessness of everything weigh on his chest and burn more than the snakebite. When he wakes up the next morning after a brief sleep he doesn’t get up but goes on lying there in his bed, with linen that has not been changed in weeks. He stares up at the ceiling, listening to the din of the cars and trams outside the window, and it occurs to him that he will never again get up, never again write a single line. Besides, everything has already been written and everything wise has been said long ago, and anyone left striving for wisdom prefers to remain silent.
At midday he eats a piece of stale bread and goes back to bed. At last he falls asleep for a while and when he awakes he remembers his mother who has been dead for eight years and he bursts into tears and cannot tell whether from pain or hopelessness.
He writes:
Autumn approaches
The softness of the snow attends
missing tenderness.
It then occurs to him that in fact he should be feeling liberated: that frightful woman with whom he rashly encumbered his life, that creature who hadn’t the first idea about anything that enlivened the spirit, and was solely interested in the pleasures of the flesh, had finally disappeared from his life.
He brews himself a pot of very strong Malabar from Java, takes out the seven tangram dice of yellowing ivory and makes them into a figure carrying a cup of tea. Is it the figure of a man or a woman?
It is a woman, and her features come into focus before his eyes. Dark hair and dark eyes: that matron has something exotic about her, something brought from far, far away. He recalls the kindly smiles of the Chinese women who welcomed him into the humblest of shacks.
Matouš is already drinking his fourth cup; his stomach pain is still there, but instead of dwelling on it he thinks that fate may have sent that foreign-looking yet motherly nurse his way. Alternatively, fate has sent him her way because her husband was coming to the end of his life’s journey and the matron would be left on her own.
Matouš once more dons the white shirt that he wore so briefly yesterday that he didn’t have time to dirty it, then puts on a tie, and sets off for the hospital.
At the hospital, they examine him and give him a prescription for some new medicines, reassuring him that the findings are negative and it is just the scar that is hurting. They advise him not to overdo it and to avoid everything that might over-excite him.
Matouš then glances into the room where the nursing officer sits. The pastor’s wife is there, tidying something in the medicine cupboard. When she sees him she smiles and invites him in.
The surroundings are far from intimate. Moreover, the door is open and he hasn’t the courage to close it behind him. Still, he sits down opposite her and when she asks him the reason for his visit, he tells her how yesterday he was overcome by pain and today by despair, but since then his hope has been renewed. ‘Good fortune follows upon disaster, disaster lurks within good fortune,’ he says, without betraying the source of his wisdom.
‘You certainly do look a bit poorly,’ Hana comments and she too advises him to take care of himself. Then she adds, ‘Whenever you’re feeling downhearted like that you’re welcome to call us or just drop by. My husband might help raise your spirits.’
‘I’d sooner come to visit you, Matron. And talking about visits, it’s your turn to visit me, isn’t it?’
‘Take a seat then.’ It looks as if both his attempt at flattery and his invitation have passed unheeded. She asks him if he’d like a cup of tea and when he accepts her offer, Hana takes two cups from the metal cupboard, and after apologizing that she only has ordinary teabags she goes off somewhere. For a moment, Matouš looks around the room in which everything is coldly white; the refrigerator hums quietly and specks of dust swirl in the rays of sunlight. He then takes out his notebook and spends a moment composing a three-liner.
The pastor’s wife returns with the small teapot from which steam now rises and asks him if he is already back at work.
He explains to her that his work consists of writing something and taking it to an editor. He also tells her that he doesn’t really enjoy journalism and has never particularly enjoyed it.
‘What would you enjoy doing, then?’
He says he once spent a lot of time studying Chinese philosophy. He found it a source of reassurance when the Communists were in power. Things were bad in China too during the rule of the first emperor of the Ching dynasty. For the first time in history they burned books and ownership of them was actually punishable by death. But the emperor died and ying – the spirit of conciliation and love – was restored. He has also translated and written verse, he tells her. He would like to publish his poems, but whereas in the past it wasn’t possible because his poetry was not sufficiently optimistic or politically committed, nowadays no one’s interested in publishing poems, unless he pays them to. He opens his notebook and reads out his newly written tercet:
Even the river
will melt when over the waves
flash flocks of black coots.
Matron Hana nods. She is unlikely to see anything poetical in the statement, let alone realize he wrote the lines to impress her. She used to read poetry, she says, but it was a long time ago, these days she doesn’t have the time.
‘These days nobody has the time,’ Matouš says. ‘Either for poetry or for living. Life rushes on and from the emptiness one knows one falls into the emptiness one doesn’t. And what will one leave behind here? You will leave behind children. But what will remain after me? A bed, a couple of dictionaries and books and a few tattered clothes.’
‘Everyone leaves something behind,’ Hana disagrees, ‘providing they’ve lived decently. And those poems of yours,’ she recalls, ‘I’d like to read them now I know you.’
‘I’ll bring them to you, or I’ll show them to you when you visit me.’
At that moment, some nurses burst into the office and Hana no longer has any time for him, nor, clearly, can she pay him attention.
So Matouš gets up and as he is leaving suggests that he might wait for Hana at the gate.
‘But I won’t be finished for nearly an hour,’ Hana objects. But that is not the sort of objection that would put him off.
‘But just for a moment,’ Hana says when they meet. ‘You know they’re waiting for me at home.’
He escorts her to the same bistro as last time and on this occasion he offers her a glass of wine. Hana declines and just has a coffee.
They chat for a while about Matouš’s health and the tablets that don’t relieve his condition.
‘Once when I was travelling westwards from Peking,’ Matouš recalls, ‘I got a swelling of the knee. There was no doctor in the vicinity so they brought me to the local soothsayer who was also a healer. She tried to find the cause of the illness. Your grandfather on your father’s side, she said to me, suffered from leg trouble, until in the end he was unable to walk. And when he was dying he didn’t have his walking stick with him.’
‘Was it true?’
‘I don’t know whether he had his stick with him or not, I wasn’t born then. But apparently he suffered with his legs and before he died he was unable to walk. So that old woman advised me to cut a walking stick out of paper and burn it at the crossroads at full moon in order to appease the suffering of my grandfather’s spirit, and then I would find relief.’
‘And did you do it?’
‘What harm was there in trying? It happened to be the day before the full moon.’
‘But the spirit of your grandfather … After all, your grandfather didn’t live in China.’
‘I have no particular belief in ghosts, Matron, or in the survival of the spirit, but if ghosts did indeed survive somewhere, then I expect they could accompany us on our travels.’
‘And did it help you?’
‘I don’t know. The swelling went down and
the knee hasn’t hurt me since. Now it’s my stomach that hurts me and I don’t know which of my forebears I’m supposed to appease.’
Then he tells Hana about his troubles with Klára, from whom he is getting a divorce. Hana is sure this is the real cause of his pain.
‘Do you know I never used to have any fear of solitude,’ Matouš confides to her, ‘nor of death, for that matter. I didn’t think about it. While you’re still young, you have the feeling that everything is opening up before you, and in fact you shun any commitments that might bind you. But then the dread of solitude descends upon you. On that point I differ from the sages I have read about. The wisest of them, once they had fulfilled their obligations towards their family and brought up their children, went away to a monastery or to some isolated hermitage and there they devoted themselves to contemplation and to understanding the Order. I haven’t managed the first and I’m not even prepared to do the other. What else can I expect from life now? At best a nursing home.’
‘But you’re not going to stay on your own, are you?’ Hana says. ‘An interesting person like you.’
Matouš objects that no one is interested in what he has experienced or seen, nor the things he knows. Particularly not women.
‘You’re wrong there. Almost all women yearn for something different, for some change.’ She stops short, and then says, ‘I know this from our congregation and from the hospital; I know what the women talk about.’
Maybe she is only consoling him. Maybe she is only passing on the experiences of others. But most likely she is speaking about herself. Matouš would like to stroke her hand, at least, but he is shy to do so here in a bar where there are lots of people. Besides, he is afraid it might startle the pastor’s wife and frighten her away.
It occurs to Hana to ask whether it really costs so much money to get a poetry collection published.
Matouš explains that it depends what one means by a lot of money, but in any event it would have to be at least enough for a publisher, if there was one, not to suffer a loss.
