She went to Greece with her husband. She was so far away that her voice came to me only as a soft whisper at night, from the region of the stars, her tenderness too was fading over that distance, and I felt easier. As though I were returning from some beautiful exile, descending from mountain heights where I’d felt happy but uneasy. How could I go back to the home that I had needlessly and wilfully left?
I went on holiday with my wife, on the way we stopped at a campsite managed by our son.
We sit together and eat porridge out of billycans, it smells faintly of burnt wood, and in the evening we sing at the campfire. Lida’s voice carries above everybody else’s, there’s tranquillity in it, it drives out everything alien and evil that still clings to my soul. It’s raining, the fire is smoking, we huddle under a single rubber coat, we touch as if embracing, and it seems to me that my lies have disappeared somewhere without trace and I’ll never return to them. And I wish time would not march on, that it would delay the return of my lover whom, surely, I can’t betray either, I can’t just chase her away. And somewhere deep down within me something is stirring, and amidst the raindrops I can hear her rapid footsteps, I can see her emerging from the dark and hurrying down the stony path among the olives, among the fig trees, among the umbrella pines, I can see her alone, even though I know that she is not alone. In my mind, however, she lives separated from all other people, with the possible exception of the swarthy villager who pours her wine. From that great distance there comes to me the muted roar of the Minotaur. I duck under the onrush of longing. In how many days will she come back to me, if she comes back to me at all?
The days have now gone, it is only two hours’ journey now, no frontier to cross, I could embrace her, provided she comes back to me.
The thought of it pushes everything else out of my mind. I walk down a path and she is coming towards me, we run towards each other, again and again we run towards each other in daylight and in darkness. At night she slips into my bed, we make love like people possessed. She moans and caresses me, I whisper tender words in her ear.
I’ll pretend I’m meeting some friends, I’ll get into the car and drive off. I don’t know with whom I’ll find her, or if I’ll find her at all, I don’t know if I’ll make up my mind to knock at the door I’ve never stood before, the door I know only from her account. I’ll arrive at the village which is so remote it hasn’t even got a church, I’ll leave the car under a tall lime tree and set out at random towards where I suspect her temporary place to be.
And there she is, coming towards me, real and alive, tanned by the southern sun, I know her from afar by her rapid life-hungry step. She recognises me, she raises her hand in greeting but we do not run towards each other, we walk towards each other, and she asks in surprise: You’ve come to see me, darling? We don’t kiss, and she says: I’ve brought you a stone from Mount Olympus. And she opens her eyes wide, she embraces me with her eyes till I sigh at the thought of ecstasy to come.
We’d walked through the patch of woodland outside the city, there were even mushrooms and chanterelles growing by the footpath, and through the branches we could see the blue sky.
My wife wanted to know whether street-sweeping wasn’t depressing me too much.
It certainly would depress me if I had to do it for the rest of my life.
What about the people who actually do it for years on end?
I don’t know what to tell her about them. After all, street-sweeping isn’t all that different from lots of other jobs which all have one thing in common: they are not inspiring. Sweepers pass their time just like other people, by talking, by reminiscing about better moments in their lives. Maybe they talk in order to rise above what they are doing, but more probably they just talk to make the time pass more pleasantly.
Didn’t they look to me somehow marked, outcast or humiliated? I consider my answer. But my wife is asking these questions only so she can tell me about her experiences with her patients, whom circumstances had picked on as sacrificial lambs: as a result they were marked for the rest of their lives, most of them had had their self- assurance broken and their mental health had been affected.
I asked her if something like that must inevitably occur, and my wife said it did. In this manner people satisfied their innate need to find someone onto whom they’d transfer their own guilt. Sacrifices to superior powers were age-old, indeed they used to be performed with solemn rituals, and for their victims men chose those whom their society considered the best or the purest.
The ritual of sacrifice no longer existed today – disregarding the symbolical sacrifice of the body of Christ. What had persisted, however, was the need for sacrifice. People now sought their sacrificial victims in their own midst, and mostly they chose the ones who were the weakest and most vulnerable. They no longer spilled their blood, they merely destroyed their souls. The most frequent victims were the children.
Yesterday, as we were moving down the street of the housing estate, the dustbins were overflowing and everywhere on the pavement and in the road rubbish was blowing about. In front of one of the refuse dumpsters was a large red puddle. It might have been human or animal blood, if it was blood at all. On the surface of the puddle dust and dirt had formed an uneven scum in which some bits of greasy paper had been trapped. Mrs Venus turned away. I thought her Red-Indian face had gone yellow. ‘Ugh, can’t look at that. That’s how I found her – my little Annie.’
She told me that before she’d had her three sons she’d had a daughter. Doing her shopping one day she’d left her in the pram outside. She’d already paid for her purchases when there were shrieks outside, then something crashed into the wall and the glass in the shop window was shattered. She rushed out, there was an overturned lorry, two adults lying there, blood everywhere, and nothing left of the pram. ‘I was beside myself then, I’d have killed that drunken pig behind the wheel if they’d let me. But they rushed up from all sides and held me until the doctor who came with the ambulance gave me a jab of something.’
At that time she was still working at the stud in Topol c ianky. And just a few days after her little girl was killed it so happened that her favourite mare Edith, a chestnut with white socks, fell at a fence and broke her right foreleg just at the fetlock. The vet insisted that she’d never race again, in fact she wouldn’t even walk again, and he wanted to put her down. She ran straight to the manager of the stud and begged him to let her look after the filly. The manager knew what she’d just gone through and took pity on her. After that she spent every free moment with Edith. She made splints for her, mixed saltpetre with water parsnip and nasturtium leaves and alternated these applications with an ointment which the vet, in the end, gave her. With that filly she could talk just as she’d talked to her little girl, the animal understood her. At night, when Mrs Venus woke up and saw her little girl all bloody and mangled on that pavement, she’d run to the stable; her filly was never asleep, just as if she knew she’d come to see her. After six months she was riding Edith, they even allowed her to enter her for their local steeplechase and she rode her herself. As she was waiting at the start she forgot for the first time what had happened to her.
‘And did you win?’ I asked.
‘Some hope! We were doing all right as far as the third fence. But I was so excited I got a belly-ache, and then I couldn’t control Edith any more, she just ran as she pleased. We finished last, by ten lengths, but we finished.’
As we walked on through the deserted little wood there was more and more rubbish on the ground, and not only on the ground – even the branches of the trees were festooned with translucent tatters of plastic. At every gust of the wind they touched, interlocked and embraced like a pair of crazy lovers, and in doing so they emitted a rustling sound and with the sound came the smell of rotting, mould and mildew.
Even the road up Mount Olympus, Daria had told me, led through rubbish, and even the way up Fujiyama, which she’d also climbed, was lined with garbage. On Mount Everest, just below its summit, lay drums, abandoned tents and plastic containers. Even a crashed helicopter is said to be rusting there.
My dear Lida is mistaken when she thinks that sweepers must feel ostracised or humiliated. They might, on the contrary, if they cared about such things, regard themselves as the salt of the earth, as healers of a world in danger of choking.
I asked if it was possible to help those who had already borne the brunt of ostracism. My wife, thankful for a question that was seeking for hope, replied that the best chance was psychotherapy. This might help to uncover the causes of their rejection by others and shift their sense of being wronged from their subconscious to their conscious minds.
The main theme of my wife’s life is finding hope for other people. The pain of others hurts her personally, she suffers with every rejected person, she tries to alleviate his lot, to help him see into his own soul and to discover there what he wouldn’t discover otherwise. If she feels she is succeeding she is happy, she knows she isn’t living in vain.
If any theme excites me, it is probably the theme of freedom.
