At night they had sat in front of the church and in the surrounding meadows, passing the time in prayer and singing. Holy Wenceslas, prince of the Czech realm – the hymn imploring the patron saint not to let his progeny perish – had been sung three times. If I’d heard what the hymn sounded like under the open sky perhaps I too after all would look forward to better days.
We were advancing down the narrow little street which runs round the park by the ramparts. Mr Rada was engrossed by what he was telling me but I couldn’t resist looking up curiously to the window which the artist had turned into his showroom. The hanged man had long disappeared, there had since been a three-legged swan and later a fountain which instead of water spewed dirty sand or ash, letting it rain down on a female head whose plaster features seemed pretty, and down whose cheeks it slid like solidified tears. Now the head and the cloud of ash were gone, there was a manikin sitting on a little horse, made up, as was his steed, of plastic items evidently picked up from a rubbish heap: old containers, motor oil and spray cans, hideous toys for infants and coloured fragments of handbasins and jugs. His open mouth was a red butter-dish, in one of his eyes was a poisonously green pot of paper paste, Koh-i-noor brand, and in the other the dark-haired head of a doll. At first glance it seemed that the horseman was smiling, a mere toy, a present-day Don Quixote riding out into the world in armour, but then I noticed the rider was showing his light polystyrene teeth and I could make out some bare bones. This was not the noble though confused knight but rather the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse, as seen by Durer. ‘And behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him,’ the horseman with the head of the mouth of hell of Brueghel’s ‘Dulle Griet’.
What kind of head,
‘These young people,’ Mr Rada continued enthusiastically, ‘have realised that they’ve had distorted values imposed on them. From childhood they’ve had it drilled into them that hate and struggle are the levers of history. That there is no superior being above man! And they came to pray and to listen to the tidings about Him who is above us and who, despite everything, looks down on us with love.’ It was possible, he concluded, that by the grace of God a period of rebirth was beginning, a new Christian age.
He communicated his joy to me and supposed that I would fully share it with him. It is certainly encouraging to hear that people are not content with the jerkish notion of happiness. But it occurred to me, even while he was reading to me about how man strayed off his path by deifying himself, that man can behave arrogantly not only by deifying his own ego and proclaiming himself as the finest flower of matter and life, but equally when he proudly believes that he has correctly comprehended the incomprehensible or uttered the unutterable, or when he thinks up infallible dogmas and with his intellect, which wants to believe, reaches out into regions before which he should lower his eyes and stand in silence. We might debate for a long time about when that fatal shift occurred (if it occurred) which gave rise to the arrogant spirit of our age, and also about how far we must go back to put matters right, but what point would there be in such an argument when there is no return anyway, either in the individual’s life or in that of humanity?
‘What about your brother?’ it occurred to me to ask. ‘Was he there with you?’
‘Him?’ he made a dismissive gesture. ‘It might cost him his career!’ His own words struck him as too harsh, for he added: ‘He might perhaps just walk along in some Buddhist procession.’
Dad had been in hospital for a week. Lately, even before he was laid so low by fever, he’d complain that he couldn’t sleep at night. I wanted to know why and he didn’t tell me, he made some excuse about some undefined burning pain, an elusive ache. But I suspected that he was suffering from anxiety. His intellect, which all his life had been concerned with quantifiable matter, knew of course that nothing vanished completely from this world, but he also knew that nothing kept its shape and appearance forever, that in this eternal and continuous motion of matter every being must perish just as every machine, even the most perfect, just as the worlds and the galaxies. Dad’s intellect realised that everything was subject: to that law, so why should the human soul alone be exempt from it? Because the Creator breathed life into it? But surely He too, if he existed at all, was subject to that law. But what sense would there be in a God whose existence and likeness were subject to the same laws as everything else, a God who’d be subject to time?
Dad was standing on the frontier which his intellect was able to visualise, the chilling nocturnal fear of the black pit was crushing him – and I was unable to help him. My dear father, how can I help you, how can I shield you from fear of your downfall? I wasn’t even able to burn your fever. I am only your son, I was not given the power to liberate you from darkness, or to liberate anyone.
Dad is lying in a white ward which smells of doctoring and of the sweat of the dying. They have temporarily kept his fever down with antibiotics and they have dulled his fear by antidepressants. They’d given him the middle bed of three. On his left lay a hallucinating fat man who’d been irradiated at night by unknown invaders with hooded faces, on his right a wizened old man, punctured all over by hypodermics, was dying.
Dad was sitting up and welcomed me with a smile. I fed him, then I took out a razor from his bedside table and offered to shave him. He nodded. Lately he’d hardly spoken at all. Maybe he didn’t have the strength, or else he didn’t know what to tell me. He’d never talked to me about personal matters, nor had he ever spoken about anything abstract. In his businesslike world there was no room for speculations which led too far from firm ground. So what was he to talk to me about now that the firm ground itself was receding from him? And what was I to talk to him about?
The dying man on his right emerged for an instant from his unconscious condition and whispered something with a moan.
‘Poor fellow,’ Dad said, ‘he’s all in.’
I helped my father to get up. I took his arm and he moved out into the corridor with small shuffling steps. I should have liked to say something nice and encouraging to him, something meaningful.
‘I have those dreams nowadays,’ he confessed to me. ‘They proclaimed a beet-picking drive, and Stalin was personally in charge. I had to join, and I was afraid he’d notice how badly I was working.’
During the Stalin period they had, with the deliberate intention of hitting him where it would hurt most, found him guilty of bad work.
I might have told him that I’d always admired his ability to concentrate on his work, that I knew what outstanding results he’d achieved, but it would have sounded like empty phrases from a premature funeral oration. He knew better than anyone what he had achieved, and he also knew what I thought of his work.
We were approaching the end of the corridor – everything was spotlessly washed and polished, almost as it used to be in our home. We were on our own, although in the distance we could see a young nurse hurrying from one door to another. Only a few days earlier Dad had been irritated by the nurses, who’d seemed to him disobliging. Now he wasn’t complaining. He sat down on a chair by an open window, his grey-streaked hair was stuck together by sweat. He looked out through the window, where the birches were shedding their yellow leaves in the gusts of wind, but he was probably unaware of them, he’d just witnessed an explosion at a great height and he was alarmed. It’s stupid,’ he said softly, ‘to play about with it. Any piece of machinery will malfunction some time. If they don’t stop it it’ll be the end. You ought to tell them!’
‘Me?’
‘You ought to tell them.’ Dad was still looking out of the window, but he was silent again. A plane roared past overhead, it moved on, it didn’t crash, it only left an unnecessary white trail of poisonous gases behind.
Had he perhaps just uttered the most important thing he’d intended to say to me? Or did he merely wish to confess a further disappointment of his – that the wonderful engines, which he’d invented and designed all his life, while lifting man off the ground, still did not lead him into the Garden of Bliss but would, more probably, prematurely incinerate him.
I helped him get up and we returned to his ward. I sat him up in his bed, straightened his blanket and told him how well he’d walked. I should have asked him, while there was time, if there was anything else he wanted to tell me, anything he hadn’t told me so far, some instruction, advice or message. Was he perhaps leaving a grave behind somewhere that I should visit for him? Or a lonely person whom I should visit? But Dad was certainly not thinking of graves, he regarded it as nonsensical to waste time on the dead, and he wouldn’t venture to give me any advice. He’d been disappointed with so many of his expectations, and if there was a woman somewhere whom he had loved and whom he had never mentioned to me, he had clearly decided not to burden me with her name now. He had nothing left to pass on to me.
Maybe I should have been saying to him that, if anything, I was finding some hope in his disappointments,
