by Ivan Klíma
‘Anyway, I could have got more out of it,’ the lad admitted, ‘but I found it impossible to concentrate. It’s the same with all subjects, apart from geography. I enjoy geography because it’s about real things.’
‘Would you like to travel?’
‘Everyone would. But I’ll have to wait for the time being because the Big Boss won’t let me: I don’t behave well enough at school or at home. But anyway I wouldn’t like to travel to big cities and go sightseeing around monuments. I prefer it where there are fewer people, such as in the forests or mountains. People in cities are like ants. Thousands of ants all over the place, in cars and walking down the street. I’m not just getting at the rest. I’m an ant too, and a lazy one at that.’
Báara said, ‘It’s not surprising he has an aversion to monuments and buildings in general, seeing his stepfather and mother are architects. I haven’t a clue how he’s going to make a living.’
‘So what that you haven’t a clue,’ the boy commented. ‘What’s more disturbing is that I haven’t got one. But if the worst comes to the worst I’ll be a hunter.’
‘What would you hunt?’
‘That’s the problem: I wouldn’t kill a frog, or even a butterfly.’
‘Castles in the air are the most he’d ever hunt!’ Bára said.
‘I’m no worse than you, Mummy!’
When dinner was over, the lad got up, and after rather profuse thanks – he was his mother’s son, after all – he left.
‘You have a splendid son,’ Daniel told her.
‘Did you like him? He made a real effort. He’s not usually that talkative. Most times he’s a fairly quiet boy. He’s a bit lazy but his heart’s in the right place.’
‘Definitely.’ He recalled the lad’s remark about the lazy ant. Once, when he himself was still a boy, he had observed an ant that had fallen into the cleverly constructed pit of an ant-lion. He had watched its vain efforts to free itself. He had watched it fulfil its destiny. He could picture it so clearly that he shuddered involuntarily.
She noticed and asked, ‘What’s the matter? Is something wrong?’
8
Letters
Dear Bara,
This is a letter for your birthday. Although I know but a modest six months out of your forty-one years I feel as if I’ve known you longer than people I’ve known for many years.
I think I knew true love with my first wife – and I love Hana. I never thought I’d be able to love another woman. I genuinely had no wish to. I don’t know whether I secretly yearned to in some corner of my soul, but if I did it was so secret I didn’t even discover it. And then you appeared. For me, every moment with you is special and beautiful (even though it also fills me with a sense of guilt – guilt towards Hana, towards you, guilt towards God who, while I believe He is merciful, could hardly approve of deceit).
Birthdays are times for wishes. So I wish you first of all, that wherever you go, you should dwell in mercy, understanding, freedom and kindliness. I wish you moments of peace and a faith that will overcome your anxieties. I wish you the love of your sons. I wish that everything of importance that happens in your life will be better than what went before. I wish (and pray) that death, of which you so often speak, should stay away from your door. I wish that your eyes should see what the eyes of others cannot, that your fingers should work wonders, that your plans should find fulfilment and that your words should be heard, that your heart should find love and your dreams peace.
I ask God to forgive us for yielding to love.
My sweet dove in the cleft of the rock
concealed above the ravine
grant that I see my own face
allow me to hear your voice.
Thinking of you,
Love, Daniel
My love,
I still feel you to be a miracle. (How long can one live with a miracle?) It’s as if you were wanting to demonstrate to me everything that is unbelievable. You surprise me again and again, either with something new or with something that endures.
I read your birthday wishes over and over again and each time they thrill me and move me. No one has ever said so many beautiful things to me. What I find most fascinating of all is that I believe every word, that I trust you, that I believe things can last. The possibility of things lasting dumbfounds me because it is something so rare, so difficult and even unseemly. That love could last – I don’t mean the everyday kind, but the love that is a celebration – is something I had ceased to believe in when I realized the weakness and weariness of the poor little human creature and it’s inability to stick at anything.
I think of that first day I entered the church where you were preaching and it was the day when your mum died, which was something I didn’t suspect and in fact at that moment you didn’t yet know about it. Such fateful coincidences have been written about. Who arranges them? But in order for one to obey that mysterious command it is necessary to have a very special sort of perceptiveness. You summoned me to you and I know of no boundary I wouldn’t want to cross with you. I’m not afraid of you. I trust you. When I’m with you the only feeling I have is one of security. I’m not afraid of you and I’m not afraid of myself with you. I’m happy, I’m unhappy that one day I’ll discover it’s the last day. I feel I’m morbid the way I’m often thinking about death, but most of all about the end. One day it will be adieu instead of au revoir. At every beginning I’ve always sensed the end and known that life only has meaning because it has an end. Like every embrace, every day, every joy, every pain.
I’d like to be with you now and instead I’m going away. With a husband who isn’t nice to me, and with my children. They need me. I am their mother after all and I want to be a good one. At least that. I’ll try and write you a letter if they leave me a few moments to myself.
I’ll be back in Prague on Monday. Will you phone? Or write?
I’m thinking of you. I love you. Don’t leave!
Love, Bára
Dearest,
Again I haven’t seen you for several days. You’re not sitting opposite me. You’re not asking me questions. You’re silent. But I know that for most of the time you’ll be with me only in spirit. I can’t tear myself away from you. It looks as if I – or we – might have crossed some inner barrier beyond which it is impossible to tear oneself away. Is that good? I don’t know, but it is only beyond that barrier that real intimacy begins.
People oughtn’t to lie to each other, they shouldn’t lie about their feelings. One often forces oneself to have certain feelings on account of the children, or out of cowardice, or from a sense of duty, or out of sympathy (that’s a feeling too), or from inertia, or anxiety, or from fear of being left on one’s own or even of losing property. The two of us share neither children nor property, nor any duty to each other. All we have is love and I will never lie to you about it, I promise you, so you will be able to say: ‘I believe everything you say’. Loveless love-making is humiliating and soul-destroying. Sometimes when I realize that’s the way it is with most people (or so I believe and I have some knowledge from my experience as a clergyman), I say to myself: What hells people create instead of homes.
I read your letters and I’m almost afraid to believe them: they contain so much tenderness, anxiety, pain, longing, determination and despair. We have so little time and yet it flies at it’s age-old speed and we don’t even manage to tell each other what has happened over the past hours let alone what has happened in the course of our lives. But love is not measured in minutes. What is it measured in? Completeness? Or devotion? Or the extent of longing? Or intimacy? What is completeness? How far does devotion extend? Giving one’s life for another. Being frank with them. Standing by them in suffering. Not abandoning them even at moments when they seem quite distant. Thinking about them every moment. Saying not a single word to hurt them. Having patience. Knowing how to listen. Knowing how to understand what seems incomprehensible. Knowing how to wait. How to forgive. What is intimacy? There mus
t be several degrees of intimacy and which of them is the highest degree, the most special, I am not able to say.
Something else occurs to me: the fact that you yearn to live in love means you are closer to Jesus than those who pray every day yet call for revenge or harbour hatred in their hearts.
I’m talking like a preacher again. But I love you so much that I lose for a few seconds at least the feeling of guilt that pursues me almost unceasingly.
What will become of us?
Love, Dan
Dear Dannie,
We’re having an Indian summer out here in Oregon and it’s our second year fighting for the survival of the salmon. I’ve had loads of work as we’ve been repairing the house and changing the heating system, apart from which we’ve taken in my mother-in-law. She is eighty-five (see, there are even older grannies than me) and a bit confused. The other day she took the old pendulum clock off the wall, weights and all, and started to fiddle about with it. When I asked her what she was doing, she told me she was changing the batteries. I told her that that was something we all needed – to have our batteries changed – but unfortunately (for the time being anyway) it’s not possible. So I have to shoulder everything here. My Bob can just about manage to trim branches and mow the lawn, but he’s helpless in the house, even though it’s his mother and he loves her.
Re. what you told me about Dad: I don’t know what to think, I’ve been away for twenty-five years (a quarter of a century, brrr!). As far as his moral conduct is concerned I don’t think he had too many scruples. He two-timed our mother. He thought Mum didn’t know, but she did and she let me in on it (though probably not you), and she actually used to write to me about those women. She used to call them ‘Daddy’s tarts’. But I don’t condemn Dad. In fact, I might have a teeny bit of understanding for him. He was a good-looking guy and women were crazy about him. I noticed it in the hospital. Mum was from another world, he must have had to live like a hermit with her. I don’t think he and she hit it off too well, but since he was basically a nice guy, he never abandoned her. On the other hand, he lost a lot of years of his life. Maybe you don’t know, but when they arrested him they held him for eight months in solitary. Can you imagine how horrific that was? And they beat him up. But seemingly they didn’t manage to beat anything out of him, which is why they jailed him afterwards. What happened after I’ve no idea, but I can understand that when he got back from there he wanted to make up for everything he’d missed. Or to experience something really powerful that would exorcize the horror of it. I expect I’m talking about something other than what you wanted to know, but then again, maybe not entirely. I don’t know what’s worse: to betray people you don’t know, or betray your own folks. I understand your desire to clear Dad’s name insofar as it’s in jeopardy. I’ve always been pragmatic to a fault and it seems to me that when someone is that long dead, it’s best to let him rest in peace. Those who loved him will go on loving him as long as they live. Those who didn’t are not going to be swayed by you anyway. And in the end We’ll all be forgotten, along with all the good and the bad things we did on earth.
I wrote that Dad was a good guy and like you I don’t believe he wanted to hurt anyone, or ever did.
Do you remember how they stopped you from attending grammar school when the poor guy was in jail? And how they admitted you when he was released. Maybe the two things were connected. The best thing is to say: it’s a closed book.
There goes the mother-in-law ringing for me again. She rings for me at least twice a day, but at least it’s cheaper than when she calls her friends on the East Coast or in London. She does that all the time, unless she happens to be eating, sleeping or ringing for me.
We’re planning a trip to Europe next year so maybe We’ll see each other. What’s new in my dear homeland? Have our films, hamburgers, chewing gum and tourists reached you yet? Poor country!
Give my love to Hana and the kids.
And a big kiss for you, saintly man!
Love, Rut
Dear Dan,
It’s Sunday morning, the sun is not yet fully awake and the rest are still asleep so I’m actually all alone. The garden is beneath my window. The grass is full of leaves that give off a scent of mould. There is music playing. Heaven must be something like this. Forgive me for such a banal image of heaven in which I rejoice in the song of the birds instead of the nearness of God.
I started to write to you because I need to be with you, yet I don’t know when I’ll see you again in the flesh. On the radio they were just reciting some poem by a Lebanese poet. Among other things it said: if love gives you the signal, obey it; also, love not only crowns you but also nails you to the cross. So I ask myself: is there within me a love that crowns and also crucifies? Do I have the self-discipline and patience to accept from it both the exaltation and the torment?
I had a bad day yesterday and the cross was almost unbearable again. My dear spouse had a headache and declared that it was because of me, that all his ailments were because of me. I wanted to know why. He said he was tired of explaining it to me all the time. I apparently lack any sense of order. I was playing music when he was trying to concentrate. I slammed the door and disturbed him. I splashed the water in the bathroom too loudly (!!). When he needed me to do a transfer of a plan I wasn’t home (I’d gone shopping). So many crimes in one day.
I told him that none of it was important. What was important was that I was with him. He started to shout that I didn’t understand a thing and one day I’d kill him, unless he killed me – or himself – first.
That’s how things have been with us for years now, but every time I shiver like a cur. All it takes is for him to give me a little smile and a look (not a kind one, just a look) and straight away I suck up to him again.
Am I really so terrible? Do I really ruin my husband’s life? What am I like, tell me? I have the feeling that you can judge, that you can be a judge of people because you have it all within you: patience, humility, kindness, a yearning for freedom and a sense of duty.
You write about a sense of guilt that pursues you. You ask what will become of us? It will come to an end, because everything on earth comes to an end. But just this once I’m not thinking about the end, I’m not thinking about the consequences of our actions, I don’t want to think about what will be, I want to feel what is now. I think about you with tenderness and only wish that you’ll be all right, and that I can help you to be, even from a distance.
I also want to tell you something I’ve never told you. My husband was never concerned about what I felt when we made love, in those far-off days when we still made love. He was only interested in his own body. With you it’s different. With you I’ve discovered that a man’s love doesn’t have to be selfish.
Life close to you has meaning because you are able to think about the other person. I’m not just an object for you. You are able to love and listen and also seek an answer. You answer questions like no other man I’ve ever known. All men are scared of answering questions, committing themselves, stepping out of themselves and their selfishness. They live in fear. Of themselves, of solitude, of death. What kind of man are you? Is it because you were born that way, or because you recognize someone higher than you, the Lord who commanded you to love people? You treat me in a way no one has treated me before and in so doing you give my life another dimension. I want you to be with me always. I know that it won’t happen, either today, tomorrow or in the future. If we were both single I would want you as my husband. The tarot card reader predicted that I will be hanging around till I’m eighty-two, which means I’ve still got half my life ahead of me. And you won’t be my husband in the second half either. You’re not going to be with me, but perhaps you’ll be with me for a little while longer, as long as I deserve – as we deserve. I’m sure you see things differently and when I talk of deserving something you hear in it pride or sacrilege, just as you do in the fact I believe some fortune-teller. I don’t really believe her, it’s just a ga
me, and I know that I might not be here tomorrow and that I might never see you again.
We’re only here for a short moment, the length of a dream, you once wrote to me. And life is a dream, I feel like saying, because from the point of view of an eternal universe and time it lasts less than a millionth of a second. But I want a life in which I’ve consciously lived millions of seconds, so I don’t want life to be just a dream. I want a conscious life, not one that is just dreamily unconscious. Since I’ve known you I’ve had dreams every day. I try to decipher them but I just can’t. Every morning I’m glad it was just a dream. I don’t have beautiful dreams. They must be the outcome of some conflict between my conscious and my unconscious. Or my conscience perhaps? Perhaps they’re the outcome of my conflict with God. Or the fact I bring you into conflict with your faith, that I’m harming you, that I’m harming the best person I ever met.
I was writing about heaven. I’m in heaven with you, another heaven than the one you believe in, but a heaven like the way I used to imagine it when I was a little girl, when I looked forward to my dad coming home and saying: Hello sweetheart, I couldn’t wait to see you again. But he never did. That’s why I’m so receptive when someone’s kind to me like you are. I sense that you wouldn’t let me fall. That you would appear wherever I might be in danger of dying. I’m miserable when I think I must live this gift of my life without you. I’m happy that I can live at least a moment of this gift with you. Don’t forsake me yet a while. Because when at last you do forsake me I will have an empty space inside me and I don’t know what I’ll fill it with. Work? Faith? An empty space left by love can’t be filled with anything but love and most likely it will remain an empty space till the end.
