I saw Lida sitting behind a desk half taken up by a bunch of gerberas. She was examining some sheets of Rorschach blotches.
‘You’ve stopped by to see me? That’s nice of you.’
‘I was walking past.’
‘Are you going straight home?’
‘I thought I might look in on Dad first.’
‘It’s nice of you to have dropped in. Would you like some coffee?’
‘No, thank you.’ My wife had been offering me coffee for the past twenty-five years; I would have been interested to know if she’d noticed that I don’t drink coffee.
The young nurse had disappeared somewhere, I could hear a door shutting quietly. I sat down in the armchair in which normally people would sit with depressions, anxieties, suppressed passions, Oedipus complexes, or even with suicidal tendencies. My feet ached.
‘Have you noticed the flowers I got?’ she pointed to them.
I said they were beautiful and asked who’d given them to her. Her patients liked her. She was pleasant to them and gave them more time than she was obliged to, and in gratitude they brought her flowers. When was the last time I’d brought her flowers?
I used to give the other woman flowers and repeat to her ad nauseam how much I loved her; she aroused a sense of tenderness in me time and again.
I also felt some tenderness towards my wife, but I was afraid to show it, probably because she might begin to talk about such an emotion and even commend me for it.
She’d got her flowers from a woman patient about whom, as a matter of fact, she was worried. A girl of nearly nineteen, but still unable to come to terms with the fact that her parents had separated. She’d stopped studying, she’d stopped caring for herself, I wouldn’t believe how much she’d gone down over the past few weeks.
For a while my wife continued to tell me about the girl whose future was worrying her. My wife always took on the burdens of her patients. She’d try to help them, and she’d torment herself if she failed. Perhaps she was telling me about that girl to make me realise the devastating effect: that the break-up of a marriage might have. Certainly situations like this one touched her most closely.
Today the girl had told her about a dream she’d had: at dusk she was walking along a field path when suddenly, ahead of her, she caught sight of a glow. The glow was coming towards her, and she realised that the ground before her was opening and flames were licking up from the depths. She knew she couldn’t escape them, but she wasn’t afraid, she didn’t try to run away, she simply watched the earth opening up before her eyes.
I am looking at my wife, at her vivid features. She is still pretty, there are no lines as yet on her face, or else I don’t see them. Whether I like it or not, in my eyes her present appearance blends with that of long ago.
‘I’m worried she might do something to herself!’
I stood up and stroked her hair.
‘You want to leave already?’ She half-opened the door and looked into the waiting room. ‘There’s no one there, you don’t have to go yet. You haven’t even told me,’ she suddenly realised, ‘what it was like there… doing that…’ she was vainly looking for a word for my street-sweeping.
‘Tell you about it in the evening.’
‘All right, let’s have a cosy evening.’ She saw me to the door. She said I’d given her pleasure. She’s always pleased when she sees me unexpectedly.
I would have liked to say something similar to her, such as that I always revive in her presence, that I feel warm when I’m with her, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it.
She went back once more, pulled the biggest flower out of her vase and gave it to me, to take to Dad. It was a full bloom, dark yellow with a touch of amber at the tips of the petals.
She didn’t know, she had evidently never noticed, that my father didn’t like unnecessary and useless things such as flowers.
I kissed her quickly and we parted.
‘And the fourth angel sounded,’ I read at home in the Apocalypse, ‘and the third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon and the third part of the stars; so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise… And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.’ And somewhere else I read: ‘And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth… to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea… And fire came down from God out of heaven and devoured them. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone… And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose eyes the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them.’
Throughout the ages, probably ever since they began to reflect on time, and hence on their own past, men have assumed that at the beginning of everything there had been paradise, where humans had lived happily on earth, where
Yet simultaneously they had prophesied the advent of ruin. It was inescapable, because it would happen by the decision of heaven.
In the evening a French woman journalist unexpectedly turned up at our place. She was young, and she radiated French perfume and self-assurance. She smiled at me with a wide sensuous mouth as if we were old friends. She wanted to know how the struggle for human rights would develop in my country, what was the attitude of my fellow-countrymen to her fellow-countrymen, whether they would welcome them if they arrived as liberators. She was also interested to know whether I regarded war as probable, the peace movement as useful, and socialism as practicable.
Perhaps she really believed that any one of her questions could be answered in a form that would fit into a newspaper column. She questioned me as though I was the representative of some movement, or at least of some common fate. She didn’t realise that if I were the representative of anything whatsoever I’d cease to be a writer, I’d only be a spokesman. But then this didn’t bother her, she didn’t need me as a writer, she wasn’t going to read any book of mine anyway.
I recently read an article in an American weekly about how fourteen complete idiots incapable of speech had learned ‘jerkish’. That was the name of a language of 225 words, developed in Atlanta for mutual communications between humans and chimpanzees – and there was no doubt, the author of the article believed, that more and more unfortunate creatures would be able to talk to each other in jerkish. It occurred to me immediately that at last a language had been found in which the spirit of our age could speak, and because that language would spread rapidly from pole to pole, to the east and to the west, it would be the language of the future.
I do not understand or make myself understood by those who recognise only the literature they control themselves and which, because of them, is written in jerkish, and I am afraid that I cannot communicate either with the pretty journalist, even though she assures me that she wishes absolute freedom for me and for my nation just as she wishes it for herself and her nation. I am afraid that we speak in languages which have moved too far apart.
As she was leaving she asked, more out of politeness than anything else, what I was working on at the moment. She was surprised to hear that I wanted to write about Kafka. Clearly she believed that people in my position should be writing about something more weighty – about oppression, about prisons, about the lawlessness practised by the state. Anyway, she asked if I was interested in Kafka’s work because it was forbidden.
But I am writing about him because I like him. I feel that he is speaking to me directly and personally from a distant past. For the sake of accuracy I added that his work was not forbidden; they were merely trying to remove it, from public libraries and from people’s minds.
She wanted to know why they did this to his work in particular. Was it politically so subversive? or was it because Kafka was a Jew?
