The Ultimate Intimacy

by Ivan Klíma

  ‘What made you think of a crocodile of all creatures?’

  ‘Actually it was a dragon that I first thought of. In the legends, dragons used to have maidens thrown to them.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I wouldn’t want you if you made love to me like a crocodile! Tell me, are you happy to be with me?’

  ‘I couldn’t be happier with anyone else.’

  ‘So why aren’t you with me always?’

  ‘You said yourself …’

  ‘No, you don’t have to explain anything. I have a husband who is my son’s dad. It would be hard for him to lose him and me. And you have a wife and children, apart from which you are a pastor who is required to set an example to others.’

  ‘Do you really think I lead an exemplary life?’

  ‘You lead your life as best you can. That’s why you’re with me now. I also think I lead my life the best way I can. That’s why I’m here with you now, and why I will never be with you for ever. When I was getting divorced I thought that it was all or nothing in this life. Either fidelity or infidelity. Love or indifference. Truth or lie. Either I’m with someone one hundred per cent or not at all. But in reality nothing is either or. With one exception.’

  ‘Are you thinking about death again?’

  ‘Yes. I can see you really don’t like what I say.’

  ‘I have so often preached and defended the text that our yes should be yes and our no be no. Anything beyond that comes from evil.’

  ‘And do you think that always applies in life?’

  ‘I definitely thought so when I preached it.’

  ‘You’ll leave me anyway,’ she says, ‘as soon as you grow weary of me. Or until it occurs to you that there are better ways for you to spend your time. In order to save your soul. In order for you to be sure once more what is good and what is evil. Because I come from evil. I have no written permission to have you!’

  ‘I won’t leave you.’

  ‘Until when?’

  ‘Until death.’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘I’m speaking of my own.’

  ‘I’d like you to be with me when I’m dying.’

  ‘I won’t be alive by then.’

  ‘I would like you to be with me and hold my hand. Because I’ll be frightened. But when you’re with me, nothing frightens me. Even death wouldn’t frighten me. Tell me you’ll come.’

  ‘I’d come if I were still alive.’

  ‘Do you promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘I believe you. I believe everything you say.’

  ‘What shall we do?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘In order to be together.’

  ‘Nothing,’ she replies quickly. ‘We can’t do anything except what we’re doing. We can go and make love now, and know that we’re as together as it’s possible to be.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Here. Have you never made love in a park?’

  ‘What if someone sees us?’

  ‘Who would see us? There’s no one here, is there?’

  They find a spot that is separated from the path by a none too thick bush.

  They lie half-undressed in the autumnally withered grass with scattered dry leaves and a smell of sulphur dioxide. The branches of the trees now shield the sun, so they feel the cool of the shade on their naked legs. ‘My love,’ he whispers to her, ‘my dear little girl, you came to find me and now you’re with me.’

  ‘Danny, you’re making love to me in my own park. I bet you’ve never made love in the woods before. You’re a servant of God, but now you’re mine. You are the Lord’s compensation for all my suffering. You’re my divine compensation, my boy.’

  All of a sudden they catch the sound of children’s voices apparently just nearby.

  ‘Oh, God,’ Bára whispers, ‘he begrudges me it.’ For a moment she grips him even more firmly before suddenly releasing him. ‘Fear not, my darling, they’re only gnomes!’

  They manage to get dressed and return to the footpath before the first childish figures emerge from behind the trees. Her mother’s dark hair and Eva’s old skirt. It’s Magda! What is she doing here?

  His immediate instinct is to dash back into the bushes, but at that moment several other little red figures hobble into the open on short legs.

  His sight really must be failing, or perhaps his bad conscience is beginning to distort the world and people.

  A young nun approaches, pushing a wheelchair containing a handicapped child. ‘Children,’ she calls, ‘let’s not forget our manners!’

  ‘Lord Jesus Christ be praised!’ the handicapped children chorus somewhat erratically.

  ‘It turned out fine,’ the nun says, ‘so we decided to take a trip and let our darlings have a chance to enjoy the last of the sun.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Bára, ‘we enjoyed it too.’

  I am filled with disgrace and look upon my affliction … (Job 10:15), comes to mind but he remains silent. It’s too late for him to save his soul anyway.

  2

  Diary excerpts

  Invisible chimneys spew smoke and sulphur

  on to the neo-classical summer-houses.

  The brook no longer flows through the Egyptian pavilion

  Leaves fall in drops from the trees

  never to grow again maybe.

  From the bushes squint the eyes of twofold death.

  Gazing with love on a noble lady

  as she walks through her allotted park

  I am suffused with the fateful tenderness of her eyes

  and the anguish falls in drops from my soul.

  Upon the lovers blinded by their love

  from the bushes squint the eyes of crooked gnomes.

  I gave Bára these few lines to read when we met in Mum’s flat. ‘You’re crazy,’ was her appraisal. ‘You’re a lovely lunatic. You see what others can’t see and hear things that are beyond the hearing of others.’

  Afterwards, when she was lying beside me, she asked me whether I still loved her and I said yes, as she expected. I was suddenly overcome with the falseness of the situation. The strangeness of the body that I was touching. It occurred to me at that moment that Bára had come to me to take revenge on her husband. But she was not vengeful. No, she had come to obtain something she felt cheated of. Maybe it was belief in some higher power, maybe just kindliness or words of love. She had come on her own account, of course, not mine. And one day she’ll leave the same way.

  How did I come to be lying alongside a woman who didn’t belong to me, telling her that I love her and having congress with her as with my wife?

  ‘Dan, my love,’ she said to me at that moment, ‘why are you looking at me like that from so far away?’

  ‘I’m looking at you from right close up.’

  ‘Don’t make excuses. And don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean!’ She put her arms around me and hugged me to her. ‘Yes, it’s me. I’m here with you.’

  When we were saying goodbye she told me that for All Souls she usually went all the way to Boskovice in Moravia to lay flowers on the grave of her maternal grandparents, even though they were Jews and hadn’t, of course, observed All Souls’ Day or laid flowers on graves. Her husband, for his part, travelled to South Bohemia to lay flowers on the grave of his forebears. She generally stayed in Moravia overnight at an old aunt’s. Were I to go with her we could stay that night together somewhere.

  Magda came down with tonsillitis. She tends to exaggerate her feelings. When she is happy she is wildly joyful, when she is sad, one would think she was the most miserable person on earth, when she has a pain, it always hurts terribly. Perhaps she really was feeling very bad – the antibiotic hadn’t had time to take effect yet and she would groan and be wanting something at every moment: tea, or a book, or another blanket because she was shivering with the fever. Then she wanted me to sit and talk to her about something.

  I asked her what she wanted me to talk about. She said, ‘About Jitka, for instan
ce.’

  For a moment I wasn’t sure who she meant, and I asked her why she wanted to hear about her.

  ‘Because she had a pain too. And because you’ve never talked to me about her.’

  I told her instead about how I had been ill when I was a little boy, and then about how I trained to be a bookseller. Then I recalled the beginning of the revolution and how I had gone to meetings at the theatre and taken part in demonstrations. ‘Do you remember I took you with me to the one on Letná Plain?’ For a moment, I relived my feelings of that day: the enthusiasm, the expectation, and the hope for a life of greater truth and freedom.

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ she said, ‘but it was no fun for me. It was awfully cold and the people just stood there and there were terribly long speeches that were no fun at all.’

  ‘And there were all the flags.’

  ‘Flags are no fun either.’

  ‘What’s your idea of fun, then?’

  She pondered for a moment and then asked, ‘That time, or in general?’

  ‘That time or in general.’

  ‘My idea of fun would be to fly. Not in a plane, but to actually have wings. To be a flamingus, say.’

  ‘A what?’ I said, baffled.

  ‘You know, a bird of some kind,’ she explained. ‘A beautiful bird that flies where it likes. And I shouldn’t think it suffers from sore throats and it doesn’t have to go to a stupid school,’ she added prosaically.

  I gave her another cold compress and spread her some bread and butter. Then I told her I had to pop out for a while, but that her mother would be back in an hour.

  She asked me where I was going.

  I told her I had a meeting with the moderator but actually I had a date with Bára. We had arranged it when Magda was still well and I hadn’t had a chance to call her and cancel it.

  I knew that Magda would survive on her own for an hour; most fathers are out at work during the day and are therefore unable to sit with their sick children, but I also knew that if I left her I would be taking one more step towards the destruction of myself and my family. ‘A home that is divided inside cannot survive.’ I went anyway.

  There was an autumnal storm in the night. The sky lit up and went dark and the thunder gradually got louder. I love storms. Maybe because they signify change, or more precisely a change that does not disturb order but on the contrary happens in harmony with it. Suddenly I recalled a storm in the distant past: the centre of it seemed to come to rest right over where we were living at the time. The lightning flashed again and again and the thunder roared without stopping. Mum was visibly scared, though she scarcely ever showed her feelings and certainly never fear. She was so scared that she made Rút and me move into the middle of the room and say a prayer with her.

  So I relived the moment when my mother, still young at the time, stood next to me asking Almighty God for protection. I could still hear her voice that was lovelier and more powerful than any other sound and truly drowned the thunder.

  I was overcome with nostalgia. How cruel is the law that God has imposed on all life. Death takes one’s dearest and there is no appeal.

  ‘Remember,’ John Hus writes in The Daughter, ‘that God created thee eternal and wants to dwell in thee for ever: eternal, to wit, immortal, for thou wilt never die. And in order that, immortal, thou shouldst be in eternal joy, God the Father gave His only begotten Son, true God, His own equal, and for you the Son submitted himself to a most loathsome and most cruel death, so that thou shouldst never die, He the best, the most beautiful, the most wise, the most rich and the most honoured!’

  Half a millennium later, the Czech – or more accurately, Moravian – philosopher Šafařík wrote: ‘We can thank Darwin for having brought nature into history and thereby thrown light on the nature of “success” as a historical phenomenon: in “survival of the fittest” he distinguished success as an animal category and demonstrated that a live dog is more successful than a dead saviour … In this respect, Jesus’s life was a total failure. In historical terms, Golgotha is a place of execution and Jesus is dead. The gallows are history, the cross mythology. Science and technology represent the hangover of a Christian world woken and sobered up after a mythical dream about the magical giver of cheap immortality … It is an irony of the “history of salvation” that whereas salvation was supposed to put paid to history, history, on the contrary, has put paid to salvation.’

  In Prague almost every second marriage ends in divorce. That doesn’t apply to our church and even less so to married clergy. I know only a few divorced clergymen. They are condemned by their congregations and in most cases the pastor is obliged to leave. Does a man have a right to fall in love once he is married? Has he the right to look for intimacy with another person when he is unable to find it with those nearest to him?

  The trouble is it is hard to recognize rights in love. It happens when one doesn’t want it and even when one resists it. One tries to suppress that illegitimate feeling, but the more one suppresses it, the more it grows.

  I don’t want to excuse myself or find excuses. I have acted irresponsibly. Certainly I acted irresponsibly that time, at the very beginning. When I held the hand of a woman who was still a stranger at the time. When I invited her into a house where I was alone and asked her not to leave yet. When I first embraced her. And I’ve only myself to blame that I wasn’t able to confide in my wife.

  The last time we met I put the following suggestion to her: What if I told my wife about you and you told your husband about me?

  How old is your little girl? she asked.

  I told her she was just twelve.

  And you want to abandon her?

  I said nothing.

  Do you want to leave your wife?

  I said nothing.

  So why do you want to hurt them?

  But it’s just not possible to go on deceiving forever the people you live with.

  Nothing lasts forever, she said.

  I wanted to know what she meant.

  Everything comes to an end one day. Even the tallest skyscraper has a roof. Life isn’t a television serial.

  You mean our love will end?

  I mean everything will end. Life too.

  I tried to persuade her that lying corrodes the soul. By doing things in secret we did more harm than if we acted openly.

  No, she stuck to her guns: it wouldn’t change anything, people would only suffer more. Then she added: Maybe it would change something, after all.

  For a moment I fell for the hope that she knew of some solution, but she said: We’d stop seeing each other, because they would give us an ultimatum.

  Then she burst into tears. You want to leave me. You’re only thinking about it because you want to leave me! Then she said: There’s nothing to stop you leaving me and no reason not to hurt me because I contravene the Ten Commandments!

  I don’t want to hurt her or Hana, but there’s nothing for it but to hurt someone now. Either that or live a lie and destroy my soul. Can someone preach the Gospel to others, knowing that he is going to hurt another, or when he is living a lie?

  Oh, Lord … you are not a God who takes pleasure in evil;

  with you the wicked cannot dwell.

  The arrogant cannot stand in your presence;

  you hate all who do wrong.

  You destroy those who tell lies.

  (Psalm 5)

  On the way home I decided I would make a clean breast of it to Hana. The moment I decided, I felt a sense of relief. I also considered each of the sentences I would say and their possible consequences.

  When Hana came home from the hospital in the evening, she sat down as usual and made herself a coffee. I went to her but instead of asking her what was new at work I told her there was something I would like to speak to her about.

  She glanced in my direction. Has something happened? she asked.

  Her face, so familiar to me, reflected her tiredness, but in her look I saw total unsuspecting trust and I suddenly fel
t like a criminal lying in wait for his victim and raping her, thereby depriving her of any belief she had in love, in people, in God, in life in general. Oh my God, I realized, she’s been through that once already!

  She waited expectantly for what I would say, but I could not bring myself to say any of the things I had prepared. So I told her I had been thinking about the Soukups, and beginning to wonder whether divorce might not be better than living together when there is no love.

  But it’s up to individuals, she answered, whether they were capable of keeping their love.

  I nodded and left quickly, because I was ashamed. Ashamed of my cowardice, my dishonesty and my faithlessness. Unless I find the courage to tell Hana everything, there is nothing for it but to break it off with the other one. To put an end to our relationship. Or to myself?

  We had a seminar up in Hejnice. It was also attended by several professors who were at the faculty in my time. The theme was predestination and the meaning of good works. It’s an eternal theme about which, as with most themes, everything has been said that could be said. In the evening I went for a walk with Martin and his wife Marie, and we were joined by a few other friends. Martin spoke on his favourite topic, saying we oughtn’t to lay such stress on the supernatural passages of the scriptures. I pointed out that the moment we abandoned them, we abandoned the divinity of Christ, and all that we would be left with would be the original Judaism or some mishmash of philosophical opinions several thousand years old.

  Martin said: ‘But he wasn’t God, though. He wasn’t even the Son of God in the sense we preach it. His mother and father were ordinary people. We all know that, don’t we?’ We all glanced at him in surprise, but amazingly enough nobody voiced any objection.

  At the end of the youth meeting, Marika talked about the mysterious forces that inexplicably manifest themselves in her surroundings.

  She was on her own at home one day, for instance, and all of a sudden the doorbell rang, not just a little ring, but ringing like mad. She rushed to the door and when she opened it there was no one there. And there wasn’t even any movement on the staircase.