by Ivan Klíma
‘Almost all the time.’
‘In what way do you think about me?’
‘With love and anxiety.’
Bára doesn’t ask him the source of his anxiety, but as he is sitting opposite her at the table she enquires: ‘Do you really love me enough to compose tunes for me?’
‘They’re only improvisations.’
‘And do you love your wife?’
Daniel doesn’t know how to reply, and that’s all right, it’s better than overwhelming her with a lot of big words that would not be true.
‘Don’t worry,’ she says, ‘I do know you have a wife and children and a congregation. I don’t want to take you away from your family, I just want you to be with me for as long as you feel you love me.’
They eat.
‘I’m sorry I shouted at you earlier on,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t take any more at that moment. Maybe I really have hurt Sam. He must sense how I’ve gone cold inside, that my smiles are forced, that I speak to him out of duty and that I caress him out of sympathy not desire. He must sense it, but he’ll never realize that he was the one who destroyed everything that was alive in me.’ And there is nothing forced about the smile she gives him; it comes from her eyes and her entire being.
‘So long as I lived according to his way of thinking,’ she adds, ‘he was satisfied. But one doesn’t live to fulfil someone else’s notions. You only have one life and that’s your own, and you have to live according to your own way of thinking, at least partly.’
‘So long as you can manage to.’
‘You say that as one who can?’
‘I can’t manage to at all.’
Are you trying to say that I’ve wrecked your notions?’
‘What I feel for you is more powerful than my ideas about how one should live.’
‘You forgot to say: so far.’
Daniel says nothing.
When they finish their meal, Bára gets up and brings a box full of photographs. She puts it on the table and starts to pull out pictures. This is her at the age of seven, and in this one she is sixteen. Her father. He’s quite a snappy dresser – the photo is from the war years. ‘That’s Mum during the war too, a six-pointed star on her coat; it was yellow. Seemingly Jews were always marked out with the colour yellow; in the Middle Ages they made them wear yellow caps. Why yellow, when it’s such a warm, sunny colour? Mum was always sunny, and still is.’ The very young, beautiful woman is Bára’s sister; this is the last photo of her, taken just a few weeks before she had the accident.
She takes out some old yellowing photographs showing her mother’s parents before they were taken to Auschwitz. They are all here: her mother’s two brothers and her sister some time at the beginning of the war.
‘You never told me about them,’ Daniel says.
‘I never knew them. They were all killed before I was born. Only Mum survived and she doesn’t like talking about them, because it’s so terrible. But she still has their photographs on the wall at home. Grandad was a court clerk, Grandma had a tiny little grocery shop, but she gave too much credit and went bankrupt. I find it strange to talk about them as Grandad and Grandma, or about my uncles and aunt, as I never saw them alive. One of my uncles studied to be a doctor and married some girl from an awfully rich banking family. But the other one and his sister were still children and they were gassed straight away.’
‘It was appalling.’
‘For a long time Mum told me nothing about it and I had no inkling that anything of the kind had happened. When I was small I was more afraid of an atom bomb falling on us. Whenever I asked Mum about Grandma or her brothers, she would just say they’d died. Only later did she tell me about them. For me it was like hearing a horror story dreamt up by some totally demented Edgar Allan Poe – I hadn’t heard of Hitchcock then. Only when the truth finally came home to me did I start to cry. I also started to feel really afraid that something similar could happen again.’
‘It was appalling,’ Daniel repeats. ‘I was never able to come to terms with the thought that God could permit such a thing.’
Bára is suddenly filled with accumulated anger. Her husband told her that a soul is something she doesn’t have and poured contempt on her, and now here is Daniel trying to persuade her that everything she has been through, even what preceded it, all happened because of some higher will.
‘What God? What are you talking about?’
Daniel seems to grow uneasy. ‘God. There’s only one God.’
‘God, God,’ Bára says, raising her voice, ‘do you really think someone all-powerful and benevolent still rules over this world and looks on while people massacre each other and the brunt is borne by poor people who can’t defend themselves? If there was any God he’d have to be a real bloody sadist!’
Daniel remains silent and she goes on to ask him if he really can’t grasp that they were simply a triviality that just happened to appear in the universe for a split second.
‘I wasn’t intending to offend you,’ Daniel says. ‘I really wasn’t.’
‘I know you weren’t. You just think that it’s better to have a love that is certain when there is so little of it in the world.’
‘Nothing is certain, either here or there,’ he says.
‘But there can be love here. Here it is in our power. Whereas there, there will most likely be nothing at all.’ She gazes at him and stretches out her arms to him and he hugs her to him.
She leads him into the bedroom, sits him down in one of the small armchairs there, and orders him to wait a moment. In the chest of drawers she finds a night-dress with the inscription ‘Love Me’ in English (love gets written about on walls and on night-shirts) and goes to take a shower. When she returns she is a trifle nervous: although she has made love to Daniel so many times already, it has never been here in the room where for years she used to make love to her husband. So she quickly lights a cigarette and sits down on the edge of the divan opposite Daniel. Daniel gets up with the intention of going to the bathroom too, but she stops him. ‘Don’t go yet, please. Wait with me until I finish my cigarette.’
Daniel looks at her. She seems to sense devotion in his gaze. When was the last time someone looked at her like that?
A large oil painting of her husband hangs on the bedroom wall alongside photos of his buildings. Samuel is omnipresent here but Bára isn’t thinking about that now. ‘Do you really love me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Enough for you never to leave me?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ll leave me anyway. Everything comes to an end one day, doesn’t it!’ She finishes her cigarette and when Daniel goes off to the bathroom she dims the light enough for the shadow to conceal all her wrinkles.
‘I’m glad we’re going to spend a whole night together,’ she says when they are lying down together. ‘Spending the night together is perhaps more than making love.’
7
Next morning, Daniel had to go to Plzeñ to visit Petr.
He found an empty compartment on the train and sat down, full of Bára’s kisses and caresses and the scent of her body.
They had slept for only a short while when he was awoken by her crying. He had asked her what was wrong.
She had had a terrible dream and now she was afraid. Afraid that her husband would die. Afraid that he, Daniel, would die and that she would die too. Life was senseless. It was badly devised. You were either unhappy and suffered or you were happy and afraid that everything would come to an end.
He had taken her in his arms and she had begged him: Stay with me. Hold me tight. Don’t forsake me! Then she had fallen asleep. He had felt an oppressive tiredness. The bridge that led across the dark pit ended on the brink of another dark pit. What was the point of seeking bridges that led nowhere anyway? Was life really just the outcome of a lottery run by nature? Just a cluster of incredibly complex proteins? Would everything come to an end? Our soul, this earth, the entire universe? And he, for most of his life, had me
rely cherished false hopes, and consoled himself and others with the news of the great, miraculous event of resurrection, an occurrence that overturned all the natural laws that had applied up till then?
Death is swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is thy victory?
O death, where is thy sting?
A lamp had been shining weakly in the corner of the bedroom so he had been able to make out that the room he was lying in was not his home and the woman lying at his side was not his wife. He had been gripped by a strange feeling of uncertainty or even angst. As if someone had thrust him into an alien world, a tree in a foreign garden, a landlubber in a wobbly coracle or a sailor in the desert. He had got up and tiptoed out of the room, finding the toilet in the dark. Then he had drifted around the strange house for a while. The emptiness of the universe had stared out at him from the abstract paintings that covered the walls. One of the house’s inhabitants had placed a model of some lofty and extremely concrete hangar in a glass case. A desk was strewn with rough drafts of plans, as well as several journals. He had picked up the topmost one. Discovering Modernist Art in Catalonia.
He had leafed through it nervously, registering in passing the bizarre shapes of buildings in coloured photographs: Casa Vicens, Casa Battló, Palau Güell, Casa Lleó Morera … He had put the journal down again and closed his eyes for a moment.
It was an alien world. Six billion people. Six billion separate worlds. What were the chances that the one he had entered into a relationship with, maybe by accident, maybe by divine guidance, would turn out to be friendly? What if the woman on whose account he was staking everything he had lived by so far had really driven her husband to that desperate action? How could he have agreed to make love to her in a suicide’s bed? How could he believe in the totality of her love, knowing that she was deceiving another man?
Because he is a foolish clergyman, who has more experience of Scripture than of women and childishly believes that his vocation is to believe!
From somewhere a carillon could be heard, no doubt sounding the hour. It was six in the morning.
When had he returned, Bára had been sitting on the bed. ‘Something up?’
‘No, nothing.’ What did it mean that this woman had first appeared at the very moment his mother was leaving the world?
‘Don’t you like being with me any more?’
‘What makes you ask?’
‘You’re looking at me so strangely.’
‘It’s the unfamiliarity, that’s all. I’m not accustomed to seeing you the moment I wake up.’
‘Do you find me frightful in the morning?’
‘I never find you frightful.’
‘I hope not.’ She had let him embrace her but then had pushed him away. ‘You’ve got your prisoner to go and see and I must go to the hospital.’
‘First thing this morning?’
‘I must go to the hospital,’ she had repeated, ‘and sort out lots of other things. You forget I also have a job, and I’m a mother and a wife.’
He couldn’t understand her. She cared for her husband with the selfsame devotion with which she had made love to him a few hours ago. It didn’t perturb her to make love to him while her husband was lying in a mental hospital. Was she callous or just desperate? Perhaps her husband had hurt her so much that she felt free to heed the promptings of her heart. Or perhaps this was natural behaviour, the way that most men and women behave, and it was only that he had never suspected it till now, because he had lived in the artificial, long-abandoned world of biblical commandments?
‘Do you love your husband?’ he had asked, when they were sitting at breakfast.
‘Don’t parrot my questions!’
‘Sorry.’
‘I’ll tell you the dream I had last night.’ She had briskly cut and buttered some bread. ‘Do you like honey?’
‘I’ll have what you have. Are you going to tell me that dream?’
‘Dream? Oh, yes, the one that gave me a fright. Wait a mo, I must try and remember the beginning. Oh, yes. I was walking along a road; it was in the country, where we have our country seat, and all of a sudden I saw an overturned motorcycle at the side of the road and alongside it a headless human body – the head was lying on the ground a little way off. But living eyes were staring at me from that head and when they caught sight of me, the head started to speak, begging me to save it. And I dashed back like a wild thing to the village post office and shouted at them to call for an ambulance, that there was a man lying there in need of help. In the dream I believed that the head could be joined back on to the body, but the women sitting there gossiping weren’t perturbed in the least, they just pushed a telephone in my direction and told me to call whoever I liked. When I managed to get through to the hospital and tell them I’d found a head without a body and a body without a head and they had to come and help quickly, the doctor said to me – and I remember it word for word – “I fear, madam, that it will be too late, we don’t resuscitate the dead.”’
‘A strange dream.’
‘Why strange? All I’ve got left of Sam is his head which has achieved things I have great regard for. And I don’t want to accept that a head without a body is dead and can’t be saved. That’s the way it is with my love for him, seeing that you asked.’
She had accompanied him all the way to the station and on to the platform. ‘So we won’t see each other again today?’ she had asked, as if she had only just realized that he was leaving. They had kissed, but she had stayed waiting on the platform until the train had pulled away.
He opened the window, letting in a gust of cold air full of smoke, soot and poisonous fumes, and leaned out to cool his forehead.
Then he sat back in the corner and closed his eyes. I ought to focus my thoughts on the prison visit: what am I going to tell that lad? Am I to cheer him up or reprimand him for letting me down and tell him he can no longer count on my help? His thoughts didn’t obey him. He was unable to tear himself away from the previous night, from his own promises, from the caresses that his body could still feel.
How long ago was it since he first set eyes on that lad among the inmates? Petr had aroused his interest because of the rapt attention with which he followed his message about a forgiving Lord who calls to Himself all those who are pure in heart.
That time, two years ago, he still had some enthusiasm and strength and could impart it to others. Or perhaps he thought he had some, and thought he could impart it. When he baptized Petr, he believed he had managed to wrest one victim from the clutches of Satan. And he had said as much to the lad, even though for Daniel, Satan was just a pictorial expression of the fall into the void, into the dark pit, where nothingness reigns. When he formally pronounced the words: Petr Koubek, I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, he noticed the lad starting to shake with emotion and saw a tear roll down his cheek.
But apparently he had been wrong about him and about himself.
Perhaps he had only imagined his strength. Perhaps he had only imagined his faith – he had simply needed it to give his actions a goal and lend meaning to his life, to cover up the emptiness that terrified him.
Faith could offer an escape from reality, from the cold indifference of the universe, from the cruelty of the world and from life’s sufferings, in the same way that drugs or love could.
‘He wants to help people,’ his daughter had said about Petr. Help people find an escape from reality. From the cold indifference of the universe. Etcetera.
If I accept that, in what way do I differ from that lad, whom I should console and try to wrest once more from Satan’s grasp? What kind of moral relativism will I end up in?
Less than two hours later he was sitting opposite Petr in the visiting room, where cheap curtains sought to conceal the bars. Daniel passed him a parcel of food and a few books that Eva had chosen for him. But he did not let on who had wrapped the parcel or chosen the books.
Petr was pallid but didn’t
seem to be low in spirits. Everything he had done, he now asserted, he had done in a good cause. Nothing in the world could be achieved without money, not even spreading the faith in the saving power of the Holy Spirit. He had already come to an agreement with some of his new friends – he’d better not mention their names here – that they would start to publish a magazine and he had promised to get them a few thousand at least to get it off the ground, for paper and printing. Once they had started selling the magazine, everything would have been different. He had tried to explain that to the people who interrogated him, but there were so many ex-Communists among them and they hated any mention of God’s work. In fact they enjoyed obstructing it.
‘If you think,’ Daniel interrupted him, ‘that you were doing God’s work, then you’re very much mistaken.’
Petr was ready for that reproach. ‘So what about those who were doing God’s work and were tortured or burnt at the stake as heretics?’
‘You’re not being prosecuted because of your beliefs but because you sold drugs.’
‘That was only a beginning, Reverend. It was necessary if I was to show people they had to believe. Mankind is on the wrong path and Satan is leading it to destruction.’
Daniel said nothing. Petr’s words echoed around the room: as empty, wretched and hollow as this place with its curtain-covered bars.
It was strange how for years he had striven to spread belief in a Saviour who rose from the dead and could resurrect others, and had never before doubted that the belief was good and that therefore he was doing good, and rejoiced over every single person he managed to persuade to listen and reflect. But what if he had been wrong throughout his life and the belief was neither positive nor negative? What if it was conducive to good and evil alike, in the same way that, as so often in the past, what was said in its name could be life-giving or deadly, hollow or meaningful, helpful or despicable. Was it possible to murder in its name and help the sick?
‘But Reverend, you know me, don’t you? You know I’ve taken the path to a new life, and what I did I did to guide to that path everyone who is looking for it.’
