How can you write about freedom when you’re unable to act freely, Daria objects. By which she means that I am unable to leave my wife.
I don’t know why leaving someone should be a freer action than staying with them.
All right then, why didn’t I stay with that dreadful woman who battened on other people’s misfortunes, and leave her alone.
Perhaps my theme ought to be not so much the search for freedom as the search for action. Or maybe resolution, or determination, or ruthlessness? I’ll write a novel about a hero who sweeps aside anyone standing in the way of his happiness or satisfaction. He’ll go on sweeping everybody aside until somebody sweeps him aside. Maybe, if he is sufficiently determined, vicious, resolute, ruthless and at the same time circumspect his turn will not come at all: only death will sweep him aside.
A few days ago an aircraft crashed not far from the Irish coast with 325 people aboard. There was no engine failure, no instrument failure, the plane didn’t strike a church tower or a mountain veiled in mist, but a time bomb exploded in it. Not a single passenger survived. Among the victims were eighty children. Floating in the water – wrote the journalists, knowing that people in their secure armchairs love reading moving or harrowing details – were dolls and other toys.
Heroes impose themselves. They’d placed a bomb aboard the plane and they were not only resolute and ruthless, but were no doubt also fighting for someone’s freedom.
A lot of people talk about freedom, those who deny it to others most loudly. The concentration camps of my childhood even had a slogan about freedom inscribed over their gates.
But I am more and more convinced that an action can be free only if it is inspired by humanity, only if it is aware of a higher judge. It cannot be linked to acts of arbitrariness, hatred or violence, nor indeed to personal selfish interest.
The amount of freedom is not increasing in our age, even though it may sometimes seem to be. All that increases is the needless movement of things, words, garbage and violence. And because nothing can vanish from the face of the planet, the fruits of our activity do not liberate us but bury us.
They even held an international conference about the Apocalypse. Scientists have calculated that if less than half of the existing atomic warheads exploded, a firestorm would sweep over the continents and the oceans, igniting anything inflammable on earth. The air would be filled with poisonous vapours, including lethal cyanides from certain plastic materials which we ourselves have manufactured. The heat would destroy not only all living things on the surface of the planet but also the seeds in the ground. The fire would be followed by darkness. For a week after the explosions the air would be filled with such a quantity of black smoke that these clouds would block out 95 per cent of the light that used to reach the earth. If any plants had remained unburnt, they would die in the months-long darkness. During the darkness a prolonged arctic winter would begin, turning the water on the planet’s surface into ice and thus destroying what remnants of life might have survived in the waters.
Between Crete and Rhodes lies the little island of Karpathos, and on it stands the small town of Olimbos. A tiny church and a few dozen houses climbing in terraces up an almost bare mountain flank. The stone houses have flat roofs and huddle together in narrow streets. Here one still finds women in dresses as black as their hair, and there is something age-old in the swarthy faces of the men. Even the silence and the sounds are age-old. This is where we’ll go, the two of us together, it came to her in a flash, and as she was climbing the steep little street to the church she knew for certain that she’d be coming back here, and that I would come with her. Maybe we shall stay there and grow old. She’ll lead me through ruins, among the remains of temples, she’ll lead me through little villages whose names I instantly forget and whose names even she possibly doesn’t know. I inhale the scent of rosemary, tamarisk and lavender, the fragrance of the hot, sun-parched soil, I hear the chirping of the cicadas and the braying of the donkeys and the pealing of bells, wedding bells overhead, and together we are conscious of what others are not conscious of: the spirit of our breath and the breath of our spirits.
I know that she is visualising her future life and that she includes me in it, that she imagines the travels we’ll undertake together, as well as her old age by my side, just as if we now really belonged together forever, as if there were no longer other people alongside us. Perhaps it doesn’t even occur to her that we are wronging anyone, she is convinced that our love justifies everything. Or is she just more genuine than me, does she want to accept the consequences of having decided to love me?
I love her too, I try to dispel my uneasiness, my anxiety to escape from her visions, I want to be with her. At least for a day, at least for some fraction of time.
And so we loved each other with all our strength and passion, out of uneasiness and out of loneliness, out of love, out of longing and out of despair. The fragments of time piled up into weeks, into further months. The winds blew, storms passed over, snow fell, my son began studying management science, he was increasingly interested in programmes for the management of the world in which he had to live, her daughter was growing up and had decided to become an agronomist, a downpour drove us into an abandoned basement where we held each other as tight as if we’d just met after a long separation, we waded through the tinted leaves in the park where the ravens in the tops of the tulip trees again called out their Nevermore to us. Her husband fell ill so that she had virtually no time for me, but she wrote me long letters in which she embraced and caressed and cursed me: Life without you is almost like death! My son celebrated his twentieth birthday, he was told to choose a present that was useful and would also give him pleasure, and after some reflection he asked for a Geigercounter. My wife noticed that I was taciturn, I looked drawn, and she asked me whether I didn’t sometimes feel nostalgic for that other woman. She suggested that I should ask her round some time, and then left for an indoctrination course, and I was able to stay with my lover day and night.
Next spring, she says, something decisive is at last going to happen.
Why next spring?
After twelve years Jupiter would enter the house of life for her.
And indeed in early spring a gallery owner in Geneva expressed interest in her work and offered to stage an exhibition for her.
I’d come to her attic studio as usual, and as soon as I’d opened the door I could see that something out of the ordinary had happened: cupboards and packing cases on which the soot from the little chimney-flue had settled for years now stood open; wherever I looked I saw mountains of her creations and monsters, succubi, witches, little demons, shameless displayers of their sex as well as angelic creatures without any sex, men-jackals, and ordinary drunks from a Little City tavern. Most of them I saw for the first time.
She kissed me, cleared a chair for me, told me her news, and wrung her hands in lamentation: she didn’t know what to do. For a while we continued to unpack some of her earlier work from crates. She placed each on a modelling stand, inspected it carefully for a few minutes, like an archaeologist who’d just unearthed an unexpectedly large fragment, and then put it down with the rest. She didn’t know if she was justified in dredging up and exhibiting such ancient work. She pointed to the head of an old woman: she’d made that while still at school. It was her father’s mother, she’d lived to the age of ninety. With her left eye she was winking while with the other one she was smiling.
I recognise the forehead, which is as high as her own, and the smile too is familiar. And that bronze youngster hanging his head, in which there is an opening for a long-stemmed flower, was a fellow student who’d committed suicide, she’d told me about him. At that time she’d wanted to make portraits of all the members of her family she knew anything about. Many of them were still in her basement workshop. Then she says: That gallery owner is inviting me to the private view and you’re coming with me.
How can I go to Switzerland?
I don’t know how, she says, but I do know that you’ll see my exhibition.
As I get up to leave she neither holds me back nor sees me out, she wants to get on with her work.
I see her every other day, that’s what she wants. I always find her at work. A new figure would gaze at me out of stone or clay eyes, and in its gaze I’d recognise a familiar passion. My lover goes on working for a little longer, while I fry up something simple for lunch, then she puts down her tools, takes off her stained smock and washes her hands. Now she doesn’t want to think of work any more, only, just before we embrace, she has to tell me what she’s been thinking about, who she’d had a beer with last night, what they’d told her at the agency this morning, the one that is supposed to negotiate her exhibition, and finally she must tell me her dream. Her day is so rich that she will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
I admire her. I’m sure I’d be spending weeks before the stand without finishing more than one or two things.
