glimpsed the mystery of existence, is a fool or a fantasist and, more often than not, dangerous.
I got home late, and as soon as I’d walked in I could sense the tension in the air. My daughter was sitting at the table, rebelliously staring at the window, my wife was washing the dishes rather too noisily, and my son’s cassette player boomed out protest songs. I didn’t feel like asking the reason, but Lida at once flooded me with complaints about the children, who she said were untidy and lazy, and demanded that I do something about it.
It was clear to me that whatever I might say she had already said to them and I was in no mood to engage in peacemaking. I went to my room and tried to work, but the flat (or I myself) was too full of disturbing noises.
It occurred to me that for a long time now I had only moved from one day to the next, from getting up to going to bed, and that, while I composed plots, my own plot had ground to a halt, was not developing, and was beginning to come apart. I should have liked to talk to somebody about it, but when we were at last on our own I sensed her irritation, which instantly separated me from her. I asked if I had done anything to hurt her. She replied that I was hurting the children by refusing to bring them up properly, that I was weak and indulgent towards them, that I didn’t correct their faults, that I tried to curry favour with them. I protested that she was being unfair, but she embarked on one of her monologues composed of criticism, well-intentioned advice and instruction. From time to time she would heap these upon me and the children, and whether justified or not she came up with them invariably at a moment when those to whom they were addressed refused to listen to them or themselves had a need to speak and be listened to.
It was getting on for nine o’clock and our orange procession was moving down Sinkulova Street towards the water tower. The street is cobbled and in the cracks along the kerb clumps of dandelions, plantains and all kinds of weeds had taken root. The youngster with the girlish face was either pulling them out by hand or digging them out with his scraper. Even when he was bending down to the ground his face remained sickly pale.
Under the trees on the pavement some cars were parked. By the wreck of an ancient Volga our party halted. The foreman lifted the bonnet and established with satisfaction that someone had removed the radiator during the week.
A car is also rubbish, a large conglomeration of refuse, and one of them gets in our way at almost every step.
When fifteen years ago I went to see the premiere of a play of mine in a town not far from Detroit, the president of the Ford company invited me to lunch. As we were sitting on his terrace on the top floor, or more accurately on the roof of the Ford skyscraper, from which there was a view of that hideous huge city through whose streets countless cars were moving, instead of asking about his latest model – a question which would have delighted my father – I wanted to know how he removed all those cars from the world once they’d reached the end of their service. He replied that this was no problem. Anything that was manufactured could vanish without trace, it was merely a technical problem. And he smiled at the thought of a totally empty, cleansed world. After lunch the president lent me his car and his driver. I was taken to the edge of the city, where an incalculable mass of battered and rusty sedans were parked on a vast area. Negroes in brightly-coloured overalls first of all ripped the guts out of the cars with enormous pliers, stripped them of their tyres, windows and seats, and then pushed them into gigantic presses which turned the cars into metal parcels of manageable dimensions. But those metal boxes do not vanish from the world, any more than did the glass, the tyres or the spent oil, even if they were all burned in incinerators, nor did the rivers of petrol that were used on all those necessary and unnecessary journeys disappear. They probably melt down the crushed metal to make iron and new steel for new cars, and thus rubbish is transformed into new rubbish, only slightly increased in quantity. If ever I were to meet that self-assured president again I’d say to him: No, this isn’t a mere technical problem. Because the spirit of dead things rises over the earth and over the waters, and its breath forebodes evil.
During the war filth descended upon us: literally and figuratively it engulfed us just like death, and sometimes it was difficult to separate the two. They certainly merged in my mother’s mind, death and garbage; she believed that life was tied to cleanliness – literally and figuratively.
The war was over, we were looking forward to living in love and peace, but she was struggling for cleanliness. She wanted to know our thoughts and she was horrified by our boots, our hands and our words. She inspected our library and stripped it of the books which might make our minds unclean, and she bought a large pot in which she boiled our underwear every day. But even so she felt revolted by us and forever sent us back to wash our hands; she would touch other people’s possessions and doorknobs only when wearing gloves.
Sometimes at night I’d hear her sighing and lamenting. She was mourning the relatives she’d lost in the war, but she was surely also lamenting the dirtiness of the world she had to live in. In our home, therefore, cleanliness and loneliness reigned. Dad hardly ever came home, he’d found a job in Plze n so he could breathe more freely. When he turned up on Sundays, he’d walk barefoot to his study over a path of newspapers, but even that moment of crossing the hall was enough for it to be filled with a smell in which mother recognised the stench of some unknown trollop. In vain did Dad try to wash it off, in vain did he help to cover the carpet with fresh newspapers.
I was quite prepared for father not to come back one day, for him to remain with that strange malodorous woman of his, and I wouldn’t have blamed him for it. But he turned up afresh every weekend, and sometimes he even urged me not to judge mother: she was a good woman, only sick, and not everyone had the strength to come unmarked through what we’d had to endure.
Then they locked Dad up again. The pain inflicted on my mother by others at least partly diverted her from the pain she inflicted upon herself.
A sewage service truck overtook our gang and pulled up a little way in front of us. Its crew exchanged greetings with our foreman and began to examine the nearest drain grating.
‘What can they be looking for?’ I asked Mrs Venus.
‘They’re just making sure their sewer isn’t all blocked up,’ she explained. ‘We’re not allowed to tip anything into the sewer. One day young Jarda here,’ she pointed to the youngster with the girlish face, ‘threw some flowers down and just then their inspector came driving past and wanted to fine him fifty crowns on the spot. And all the time they’re rolling in it, just like the rat-catchers!’
‘Don’t talk to me about rat-catchers,’ the foreman joined in. ‘In Plze n underneath the slaughterhouse the rats went mad and came up through the sewer gratings at night and ran about the streets like squirrels, squealing. They were desperately looking for a rat-catcher, they were actually ready to give him twenty grand a month, but there were no takers because it was obvious that if a rabid rat bit you, you’d be finished! I’ve a mate in Plze n, from back in the para corps, and he got annoyed and said: “I’m not going to shit myself over a few mice!” So he got a diving suit and a sheet of asbestos rubber to throw over himself if the rats attacked him.’
‘They’d do that?’ I expressed surprise.
‘Sure they would. I told you they were rabid. You chase after them, but when they’ve nowhere to escape to they’ll turn and go for you. If that happens you lie down, throw the sheet over you, and they’ll run straight over you. So that’s what my mate did. Once he was under that sheet nothing could happen to him, but as those rats trampled over him he shat himself from fear.’
A few days later she sent me a card to say she would come round to see me, giving the clay and the hour, and hoping she’d find me in.
She turned up as promised. Outside the window the autumnal clouds were driving and the room was once again in twilight. I don’t know whether a similar glow issued from me too. A person never sees his own light in another person’s eyes, or only at moments of special grace. But maybe she’d seen something after all, because otherwise she wouldn’t have wished to meet me again, she wouldn’t have voluntarily set out on a pilgrimage which, in moments of anger, she was to proclaim had led her only to pain. I have myself sometimes been amazed that she had come so close to me.
For the first few weeks we’d walked in the countryside, through forests and parks. She knew the names of plants, even the most exotic ones, as well as where they came from. And she led me through those places, as if through the land of the Khmers, and along the majestic river Ganges, through the crowds in stifling streets, she even led me through the jungle and into the ashram so I could listen to what a wise guru had to say about the right way to live. She told me about her family, which included industrialists as well as National Revival schoolmasters, a wanderer who settled on the western slopes of the Andes, and a romantic aunt who, when she failed to keep the lover she longed for, decided to starve herself to death. There was also a highly gifted law student who could reel off the whole statute book by heart but who tired of the law and turned to philosophy and who, when he had irrefutably established the vanity of human endeavour, sat down and wrote his philosophical testament, whose
