And me, how am I to live? You never thought what would happen to me, did you? How can you be silent like this, it isn’t human! Surely you must say something to me, do something. You must do something about us!
At one time I used to write plays. The characters were forever talking, but their words went past each other, their remarks slid past one another like the slippery bodies of fish, without making contact. Did I write that way because I believed we could step out of our loneliness? Or because I needed to find a way of avoiding answers? Where words miss each other, where humans miss each other, real conflict may arise. Or did I suspect that a man cannot successfully defend himself in the eyes of another, and when he is talking he’s doing so only to drown the silence which spreads around him? To conceal from himself the reality of life, a reality which, at best, he perceives only at exceptional moments of awareness?
The man who had alone survived the crash of the aircraft which hit a church tower in Munich was working as a newspaper editor in Belgrade. I was curious to meet a person who had risen from the ashes, but his sister had just died of cancer and he asked me to postpone our meeting for a few days. When I called on him later his other sister was gravely ill with the same disease. ‘The doctors are giving her no more than two months,’ he said to me; ‘they told me this morning. You know what is odd? I went out into the street and I didn’t hear anything. There were trams and cars moving about and people talking, but I didn’t hear any of it. There was the same sudden quiet then, after the crash.’
I caught up with my companions. The youngster passed me my shovel, which he had carried for me on his handcart, and Mrs Venus said: ‘Bet that wasn’t your wife you’ve just phoned.’
Right by the kerb I noticed a dead mouse. I picked it up on my shovel and flung it on the rest of the rubbish.
My wife was amazed by what I told her. She couldn’t believe that I’d lied to her for so long. I said what most men would probably say in such a situation, that I had hoped to spare her needless suffering because I’d believed it would soon come to an end.
But you don’t want to end it? she asked.
I said that I loved the other woman, that I’d never loved any woman the way I loved her.
But I thought you loved me more than anybody else! Tears flooded her eyes. Then she wanted to hear details. Any kind of truth was preferable to silence. I was to tell her where she’d gone wrong and how she could put it right.
I poured out all my complaints and self-exculpating explanations, but after a while we were merely rehearsing who did the shopping, who the cooking, the laundry, the washing up and the floors, until I was horrified by the poverty of my own speech. I fell silent, but my wife wanted to hear something about the other woman and I, suddenly freed by my newly-discovered openness, began to praise the qualities and talents of my lover, to describe the uniqueness of what we were experiencing. But: as I was forcing all this into words I transformed the experiences which had been mine only, and which had seemed inimitable and unique, into something common, categorisable and conventionally melodramatic. Yet I was unable to stop talking, and my wife listened to me with such involvement, such readiness to understand me and maybe even advise me that I fell victim to the foolish idea that she might even share some of my feelings. But she was merely hoping that if only she received my confession and listened to me attentively she might transform my words on how we had drifted apart into the first act of a mutual drawing together. She would confront the urgent attraction of the other woman with her own patient understanding.
When – suddenly not too convinced that this was what I truly and urgently desired – I suggested that I might leave home, at least for a time, she said that if I wished to leave her and the children she wouldn’t stand in my way, but if after a while I decided to return home she couldn’t guarantee that they would be able to have me back. I was far from considering what I would wish to do after a while, but I thought I could see in her eyes so much regret and disappointment, and anguish at the thought of impending loneliness, that I did not repeat my suggestion.
We didn’t go to bed until the early hours. I couldn’t have slept for more than a few minutes because daybreak had not yet come, but when I woke up there were muted sobs by my side.
She was crying, sobbing steadily and persistently, her mouth buried in her pillow so she shouldn’t wake me.
I would have liked to caress her or say something kind to her, to comfort her as I always did when something depressed her, but this time it was me who’d crushed her. Unless I changed my decision I had become the one person who couldn’t comfort her. I suddenly realised that the position I found myself in tormented me rather than gave me a sense of liberation.
In the morning I was awakened by a crash, by the sound of splintering.
I found my wife in the hall: by her feet were fragments which I recognised as those of the only piece of sculpture we’d ever had in our home. The angular bird’s head was shattered and its human eyes had rolled God knows where.
For an instant we were both silent, then my wife said: ‘I’m sorry. I had to do something.’
And I, in a sudden flush of compassion, without reflecting that the previous day I’d been determined to do the opposite, promised her that I wouldn’t leave her, that I’d stay only with her. We had had our children together, and surely we’d once linked our lives together till death did us part.
Shortly afterwards we went to see our daughter’s art teacher. He was exhibiting his paintings in a small-town gallery. We walked round the pictures, which somehow all seemed to express the loneliness of men, and I tried to suppress my nostalgia. In the evening some visitors arrived. They were nearly all painters and they talked a lot about art, which reminded me of the other woman. They took their observations seriously, and seemed to me to be genuinely seeking a meaning behind their activity, but to me all talk seemed unnecessary at that moment, it was no more than a substitute for life, for movement, for passion. I fled the company and went down to the riverbank. My wife found me there and wanted to know if I was sad, if I felt nostalgic. My wife, that voluntary healer, promised me that things would be good between us, we’d start another life, and I’d be happy in it. She wanted to know what I was planning to write and to hear what was on my mind that instant, she talked about sincerity and about life in truth. I was listening to her and I felt as if something was snapping inside me, as if every word was a blow which cut something in two. I was surprised she couldn’t hear the blows herself, but simultaneously it seemed to me that the despair was fading from her voice. I had always hoped that she would feel comfortable with me, that life’s hardships would not weigh her down too much – her relief gave me at least some satisfaction.
The street was still wet but the air had been cleansed, and as we stepped out of the shade of the residential blocks we even felt the rays of the autumn sun which somehow dispelled our gloomy mood of the morning. The youngster was whistling a Gershwin tune and Mr Rada all of a sudden showed me a slim little book on the cover of which was a street-sweeping truck and a broom, while its title to my surprise promised a critical essay on the personality cult. ‘Do you know it?’
I’d never seen the book before in my life.
‘An interesting reflection on how we used to deify ourselves and physical matter.’ He opened the book and read aloud: ‘Here lies the root of the cult, here is that proton pseudon: that the miserable, mortal, ephemeral human ego declares of itself:
‘And what are we really?’ I asked Mr Rada, and at that instant I understood the connection between the cover picture and what I’d just heard.
The youngster was still whistling that familiar tune and I felt irritated at not being able to think of the words that went with it.
‘It’s “The Man I Love”, of course,’ he told me, delighted at my display of interest and my acquaintance with the composer, and immediately he sang to me the four-beat tune: ‘Some day he’ll come along, the man I love.’ He asked: ‘You like Gershwin?’
I told him that thirty years ago a black opera company had come to Prague with
The memory took me away from the swept street. Not that I could recall anything of the performance which had then delighted me, but I could see before me the little street in the suburbs of Detroit, where a lot of black children were shouting on the sidewalk and a white-haired black man sat in a wheelchair in front of a dingy low
