because he’d been misled only by a self-assured intellect which thought it knew everything and which refused to leave any room for the inexplicable, that is for God, eternity or redemption. Would he even understand me, could he still hear me?
I noticed that his chin had dropped on his chest and that he had slipped down on his side. I slackened the screw behind his bedhead and brought the bed down into the horizontal position. Dad didn’t wake up as I laid him down, he didn’t even open his eyes when I stroked his forehead.
When I got home a young man was waiting for me who, by coincidence, had just arrived from a town near Svata Hora. About two years ago I’d given a reading of some of my short stories to a few friends of his at his place. Since then he’d turned up occasionally for a chat about literature. He was always well-groomed, his fair hair looked as if it had just been waved with curling tongs and in his grey eyes there was some painful anxiety as if he’d taken on more of life’s burdens and responsibilities than he could bear. He was interested in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Joyce, as well as in the cinema and in art. In one of the stories I’d read that evening there was a mention of Hegedusi c; after I’d finished he told me that there was a short film available in our country about him. I was surprised to find a young man, who worked in the mines near Svata Hora, being interested in a Yugoslav painter. He’d now arrived suspiciously soon after the famous pilgrimage, but he made no mention of it, which reassured me. He’d come to get my advice about his future. He’d decided he wouldn’t stay in the mines any longer. He’d find some unskilled job and would try to study aesthetics, art history or literature by correspondence. The work he was doing, he explained to me, made no sense. The people among whom he moved disgusted him. If only he knew what people he’d have to move among if he succeeded in getting where he wanted to go! But I don’t like imposing my dislikes on others. I merely dug out some recent article by a leading jerkish official who’d been appointed to a university chair to ensure the oblivion of all literature.
From that article I read him just a few introductory sentences on communism, which had become the highest form of freedom of the individual and the human race, and in consequence provided the writer with an unprecedented scope, whereas in the USA, that bastion of unfreedom, the greatest artists, such as Charlie Chaplin, had to escape.
My visitor smiled. He considers it more acceptable to have to listen, voluntarily and for no pay, to jerkish babbling than to destroy and pollute the landscape for good pay, to mine the ore from which others would produce an explosive device capable of turning everything into flames.
What stands at the beginning and what at the end? The word or fire, babbling or explosion?
Speaking of explosions, my visitor was reminded that in his little town some unknown persons recently blew up the monument of the ‘workers’ president’. The president had died more than thirty years ago, my visitor does not remember him. All he knows about him is that he brought upon us all that ‘highest form of freedom of the individual and the human race’, and also that, in its name, he had masses of innocent people liquidated, including his own friends and comrades. My visitor wanted to hear how I felt about the destruction of monuments. It is my impression that people don’t take any notice of monuments, especially the new ones, or if they do there is nothing about those statues that could impress them. After all, what appeal can one expect of shaft-boots, overcoats, trousers and briefcases, with on the top, accounting for less than one-sixth of the whole, a face behind which we detect neither spirit nor soul? What I mind about the monuments of officially proclaimed giants is that they are ugly and mean, in other words that they disfigure their surroundings. But then it would be difficult to imagine different ones, considering whom they have to represent and given the abilities of the artists from whom these statues are commissioned for a fat fee. Besides, there are so many things disfiguring this world! If we were to destroy them all, where should we stop? To destroy is easier than to create, and that is why so many people are ready to demonstrate against what they reject. But what would they say if one asked them what they wanted instead?
The young man nodded. He hoped his studies would help him find what to aim for himself. He apologised briefly for having kept me up so late and vanished into the night.
The Buddhists have their own vision of the apocalypse. Once all our good deeds, love or renunciation no longer offset our crimes, the equilibrium between good and evil in the universe is upset. Then snakes, crocodiles, dragons and many-headed monsters will emerge from all the openings in the earth and from the waters, breathing fire and devouring mankind. This will restore the disturbed equilibrium, and harmony of silence and nothingness will reign once more.
Night and silence and nothingness. In the sleeping city distant people and near ones, friends and strangers are all swallowed up by darkness. Where in all this darkness have we lost our God?
The questioning intellect normally penetrates into the depths of the individual, the world and the universe until it encounters the boundary beyond which mystery begins. There it either stops or else rushes on, failing to realise, or reluctant to realise, that it calls out its questions into the void.
In his questioning Kafka stopped at the very first step, at himself, because even here he’d entered an impenetrable depth. In a world in which the intellect predominates more and more, the intellect which believes that it knows everything about the world and even more about itself, Kafka rediscovered the mysterious.
Unexpectedly the telephone rang. I ran out to the hall, lifted the receiver and identified myself, but there was silence at the other end. It was listening to me, silently. I replaced the receiver and lifted it again. The silence had gone, the dialling tone was buzzing.
That was you?
You aren’t angry, are you, darling? Were you asleep? I’m here on my own. I was lying in bed, reading, and suddenly I thought this was nonsense: to lie here and read about another person’s life. I’m sad. Aren’t you?
Just now?
Just now… And altogether. I do something and then it hits me: why am I doing it, and for whom? Now I’m lying here, everything is quiet, but why should I be lying here? I don’t need any rest when tomorrow I won’t be alive anyway. You assured me that you were happy when you were with me, that you’d never experienced anything so complete. Was that a lie then?
Surely you’d have known if I’d told you a lie at that moment.
So why don’t you come? Tell me what has changed, in what way have I changed that you don’t even ring me? What wrong did I do to you?
You didn’t do me any wrong, but we just couldn’t go on. Neither me nor you. It was impossible to carry on that divided life.
And like this one can live? Don’t tell me you’re living. Tell me, you really believe you’re living?
Surely living doesn’t only mean making love.
It doesn’t? I always thought it meant just that to you. So what, in your opinion, does have any meaning? Eating and sleeping? To botch up some important work, some great piece of art?
What I am trying to say is that one can’t indulge in love at any price. Like at the expense of others.
You think that’s what we were doing?
You don’t think so?
You are asking me? You who were always ready to sacrifice me? As if I wasn’t a human being at all, as if only she was one. Why don’t you say something? You’re angry now. Wait, wait a moment, surely you admit that you’ve always decided against me.
I didn’t decide against you, I wasn’t free to decide for you.
That didn’t worry you in some respects.
It worried me precisely in the respect you’re talking about.
You’re making excuses, you’ve always only made excuses. You know very well that you never gave me a chance.
A chance of what? Weren’t we together enough?
You were never only with me. Not even a week. Not even a day! You were never with me except secretly. Even by the sea…
Don’t cry!
And I believed you. I thought you loved me and would find some way for us to remain together. At least for a time.
I did love you. But there was no way round. Surely people aren’t things which you can move to another place when they seem to have served their purpose. I could only either remain here or join you.
You’re so noble about other people. But you calmly moved me as far away as possible when I’d served my purpose. Wait, wait, tell me one more thing: are you happy at least? Don’t you regret anything? Why aren’t you
