Love and Garbage

heavy stone, to let myself be lulled to sleep by those sounds, to wake up and find her close to me.

Two days later a small package was delivered. On top of it was a letter and a bag of herbs she’d dried herself. Camomile, horehound and silverweed, our heads in the dry grass, we were lying in a meadow and making love. I was to brew it all up together and gargle with it, but, even more important, I should find peace within myself, so my soul could be in harmony with my body. Although illnesses were seated in the body they really came from the soul, which writhed in spasms unless one learned to listen to it and enclose and restrain it by one’s actions.

I read the letter all the way through, and only then freed a little figure from a protective wrapping of rags. She’d made it for me, two naked bodies leaning against a tree. A man and a woman, Adam and Eve, Eve not ashamed of her nakedness and not offering Adam the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The serpent was also missing. It wasn’t: Adam and Eve, it was the two of us in the Garden of Eden which our love had unlocked for us.

When I was well again she explained to me: I have seven bodies, and the person who, even only once, gets through to the innermost one, will trap me and I’ll belong to him totally and always.

I asked: What does that innermost body look like?

You’re right, that isn’t a body any longer, that’s the last shell of the soul. It’s thin and transparent.

In this way she wanted to tell me about the fragility of that shell. So what is it like inside?

When I was fourteen the first atomic bomb was dropped on the earth. Some time later I read the book of a Hiroshima doctor who’d experienced the explosion: factually and dispassionately he described the destruction which had befallen the city and its people, but understandably enough he didn’t mention any souls. But I was pondering then about what happened to the human soul at the epicentre of an atomic explosion. Even if the soul was non- corpuscular, even if it was only space enveloped by matter, even if it was of an entirely different nature, could it really survive that heat? Who could visualise a soul at the centre of the sun or some other star?

You’re always racking your brain with pointless questions. What’s the use of it?

Tell me at least what you think happens to a soul which cannot stand the pressure of the world around it and bursts or shatters into fragments which no one can ever bring together again?

Don’t worry, it doesn’t perish. Maybe a new soul springs from each fragment, like a tree from a seed. Or else all the fragments combine together again in another time, in another life, coming together like droplets in a fog. Better ask what you should do so the souls around you don’t perish.

I’m asking that one too.

Better still, don’t ask any more questions. Try to be a little less clever. Be with me now and don’t think of anything at all!

She told me about the Kampucheans, who danced, sang and didn’t worry about the future. They knew that God was near, but they didn’t ponder about him. And look at the things they managed to create even in ancient times! She tries to give me an idea of the hundreds of sculptures lining the road to the Victory Arch at Angkor Tham, she even picks up a pencil and from memory draws the likeness of a leper king, his face full of contentment.

A pity, she regretted, you weren’t there with me. But one day we’ll go there together.

I don’t know how we can go anywhere; it’s ten years since they took my passport away.

Don’t be so practical!

Even if I’m not, the men at the frontier will be.

Apply for a passport then. Surely we must go somewhere together someday. There should be a sea there and warmth, so we can stay together all the time.

I’ll apply for a passport so we can travel to Kampuchea together, where the people are happy and carefree, where we’d be so far away that no voice other than hers would reach me.

No voice reaches me anyway.

All around me fog is spreading, what is left of the world loses its outlines. Now and then the fog curtain tears and we catch a glimpse of the landscape bathed in a reddish evening light, in a heavy rain the surface under the windows of the little hotel is ruffled and across the street gleams a plump baroque turret, from a fresco washed pale by time an interceding Holy Virgin is smiling at us, maybe we shan’t be altogether damned, the beeches are donning fresh greenery before our eyes, they turn golden, and red, a leaf floats downwards and we sink down with it, we’re lying in the grass, we’re lying in the moss and in the sand, above our heads flocks of migratory birds are flying, as well as clouds and time, only time stops still for an instant in repeated cries; and we light the gas stove because it is cold in the room, we move the bed right up against its hot body, in our brief intervals we tell one another about the days when we didn’t know each other, about yesterday, about a girlfriend’s exhibition, about our meetings and dreams, we talk about Diane Arbus’s photographs and her ugly world, about ugliness in art, about Hesse’s Steppenwolf and our hidden potentials, about ancient Mexican art and its influence on Henry Moore, and of course about Zadkin and Giacometti, about Camus and Tsvetayeva, about my book of short stories and about books by my friends which I had lent her in manuscript, we fry bits of meat in the only pan, we eat together at the low table, we drink red wine, while the snowflakes swirl outside the window. In the room there is a fragrance of clay, paint and her breath. In the evening we go out to the little park on Kampa island, we still can’t tear ourselves away from each other, we kiss on the swept path under the bare trees. A little old woman with the head of a crow, as if modelled by her fingers, croaks at us: That’s a fine thing, that’s a fine thing! Adding something about our age and we should be ashamed!

And all the time I have my work, there are people in the world whom until quite recently I wanted to see, our daughter Beta wants to draw my portrait, our son Peter has invited me to a concert, my wife has at last found a decent job, but I have no time to celebrate it.

Beta experiences her first love, she is experiencing her second love, a drug addict who adores Pink Floyd and sniffs toluene. My wife is alarmed and asks me to intervene somehow. I talk with my daughter until late at night, she understands everything, she agrees with me, she’ll soon find another love, but I still have the same one, so am I also an addict? I inhale that mist, my blood absorbs those intoxicating droplets which dull my reason and willpower. I see nothing before me or around me, I see only her, I live only for the present moment. Am I to rejoice at the gift that’s been granted to me or am I to despair at my weakness, at being unable to resist the passion which is corroding me?

I can’t make up my mind, I can’t renounce my passion, nor can I draw the consequences from it. I cannot depart altogether nor arrive altogether, I am unable to live in truth. I’ve hedged myself in with excuses, I’m having every sentence I utter examined by a guard dog. I’ve accommodated a whole pack of them within me. I pick my way between them, their barking at times deafens me and their soundless footfall frightens me in my dreams. One of these days one of them will approach me from behind and sink his fangs in my throat and I shan’t even cry out, I’ll remain mute forever, as I deserve to be.

How long can I stand it, how long can it last?

Till death, my darling!

You really believe that?

Or till I leave you because you never make up your mind to do anything. She starts crying. She is crying because I cannot make up my mind, because I am too circumspect, because I put principles above love, because I am shuttered against life like a stone, even more shuttered because a stone can be worked, a stone can be turned into a shape, she is crying because I am harder than if I were made of stone, I’m playing a cruel game with her and I torture her as I have never tortured anyone before, she is crying because I am good, because I stay with her as no one before managed to, she is crying because everything in her life is turning into suffering.

I know that she has surrendered herself to my mercy, and I am terrified by the thought that I might disappoint her.

The spring sun is shining on the little terrace under the wooden steps, from the washing line comes the smell of nappies and over the wall of the house opposite we can see the monastery roof with its ornament of a maple- wood halo.

Daria is sitting alongside me in a freshly-ironed white blouse and a chocolate-coloured velvet skirt, she’s dressed up because this evening we’re going to a concert. She seems to me so beautiful, so precious, as if I’d gone back forty years or so and gazed in adoration at my mother. Except we’re getting up, climbing a few steps, and she is stepping out of her clothes and her exalted untouchability and stepping into my embrace, and I feel as if the thin walls of my veins are bursting from the barely tolerable surge of delight.

We’re lying next to each other in the descending night. Somewhere out of sight beyond the palace and the river the musicians are getting ready for a Beethoven concerto.