‘Do you have to do it?’
‘They’ve cut back my pension – any convict on costume jewellery gets more!’ He turned white as the pain gripped him.
I am sure that at his age I’d have felt humiliated by having to be a street-sweeper. It would humiliate me even now if I had no other choice and if I had to be a regular sweeper like him.
All of a sudden it came to me how little in fact I had in common with what I pretended to be. What does my fate really have in common with the fate of those with whom I work? What was a desperate choice to the youngster was to me, at best, a rather grim game, which tested my perseverence, of which I was actually proud, and which moreover afforded entertaining and unexpected insights. I felt ashamed. I too took off my sweeper’s vest, rolled it up beside me and decided never again to put it on.
He mopped his face again.
‘Aren’t you thirsty?’ it occurred to me to ask.
‘I wouldn’t mind a drink, that’s a fact.’
I went off in search of a glass.
Ten years ago I worked in the next block. I’d come in three times a week, and put on white trousers and a white jacket, on which as a rule at least one button was missing, but I never became a genuine hospital orderly.
When does a person genuinely become what he otherwise only pretends to be? Most probably when he finds himself in a spot from which he cannot or doesn’t want to escape, the place of his torture. Genuineness is always associated with torture because it closes all doors of escape, because it leads a person to the edge of the precipice into which he can crash at any moment.
The nurse in reception lent me a jam jar and herself filled it with water. But when I returned to the waiting room the youngster was already in the consulting room.
I sat down and put the glass of water on the chair next to me.
Even a person who manages to lie his way through his whole life cannot escape that one moment of truth, the moment from which there is no escape, from which he cannot lie or buy his way out.
I recalled the day when I was sitting in another, similar, hospital waiting room. If I phoned you now, would you come again?
You’re waiting at the hospital again? Has anything happened to your dad?’
He’s not well, but now I’m here with someone else. We were sweeping together and he was taken ill in the street.
And you’ve taken him to hospital. You see what a good person you are? You haven’t changed at all over the years.
He was really in need of help. His liver’s all gone. I’ve written abroad for some drug but so far it hasn’t arrived.
I’ve often been ill. So ill I thought it was the end.
I didn’t know.
How could you have known? You’d have had to phone me, at least. But of course you had no time left for that while you were comforting the sick. Must be a great feeling to help others. Especially the poor and needy. That was your wife’s idea, about that drug?
I’m sorry you were ill.
No need for you to grieve. I was very ill, but you’re probably worse if you’ve taken up good deeds. What are you trying to make yourself believe about yourself? Doesn’t it seem a little cheap to lie your way out of everything?
I’m not lying my way out of anything. You can’t simply judge me from your own viewpoint.
So how am I to judge you? Do you remember sometimes what you used to say to me when we were together? I thought it also meant something to you, something real, something one can’t just walk away from. And now you’re trying to exchange me for a few good deeds! Why don’t you say something? Hasn’t it occurred to you at all that you’ve betrayed me?
Kafka endeavoured to be honest in his writing, in his profession and in his love. At the same time he realised, or at least suspected, that a person who wants to live honestly chooses torture and renunciation, a monastic life devoted to a single God, and sacrifices everything for it. He could not, at the same time, be an honest writer and an honest lover, let alone husband, even though he longed to be both. For a very brief instant he was deluded into believing that he could manage both, and that was when he wrote most of his works. Every time, however, he saw through the illusion, he froze up, and stopped motionless in torment. He’d then either lay his manuscript aside and never return to it, or sever all his ties and ask his lovers to leave him.
Only fools – with whom our revolutionary and non-monastic age abounds – believe they can combine anything with anything else, have a little of everything, take a small step back and still create something, experience something complete. These fools reassure each other, they even reward each other with decorations which are just as dishonest as they are themselves.
I too have behaved foolishly in my life in order to relieve my own torture. I have been unable either to love honestly or to walk away or to devote myself entirely to my work. Perhaps I have wasted everything I’ve ever longed for in life, and on top of it I have betrayed the people I wanted to love.
At last the youngster appeared in the door. ‘Have you been waiting for me with that water all this time?’ He’d had an injection and the doctor had ordered two days’ rest. I offered to see him home, but he declined. If I didn’t mind, he’d like to sit down for a little while, after which we might rejoin the others.
‘When I was a little boy,’ he reminisced, ‘my grannie would sometimes wait for me at the school. She’d always take me to the fast-food buffet, the Dukla in Libe n, a little way beyond the Sokol gym if you know the neighbourhood. She’d have a beer and I’d get an ice-cream. And if she had another one, I got another one too, she was fair all right. And how she could play the accordion!’ The youngster sighed. I preferred not to ask what had happened to her, it seemed to me that everything connected with him would be touched by tragedy.
Outside, a fine rain had begun to fall. The youngster put on his orange vest but I, faithful to the vow I’d just taken, carried mine rolled up under my arm.
Everything in life tends towards an end, and anyone rebelling against that end merely acts foolishly. The only question is what the end actually means, what change it makes in a world from which nothing can disappear, not a speck of dust, not a single surge of compassion or tenderness, not a single act of hatred or betrayal.
I had to leave for the mountains, on doctor’s orders, and my lover also needed a break. Her work was tiring her out, she complained of being permanently exhausted. To work her material, often hammering into stone for hours on end, was enough to wear out even a strong man, but I knew that she had a different kind of weariness in mind. She reproaches me for her having to remain in the border region between love and betrayal, between meeting and partings, in a space which, she claims, I have set out for her and where strength is quickly consumed, exhausted by hopeless yearnings and pointless rebellion.
We could go somewhere together. I know that she wants to be with me completely just once in a while. I mention the possibility to her. She agrees, and a moment later I wonder if I really want that joint trip, if I wouldn’t have preferred to remain on my own. And suppose my wife offers to come with me? I am alarmed at the mere thought. What excuses, what lies would I invent? I am terrified like a habitual criminal who knows that he’s bound to be caught in the end.
But my wife suggests nothing of the kind, she doesn’t suspect me. She says a stay in the mountains will do me good. Everybody needs a change of scene from time to time. She’ll visit Dad for me, I’m not to worry about him, he’s doing well now anyway.
I know that my wife is immersed in her own world, which, as happens in work which brings one face to face with the sorrow and suffering produced by sick minds, is unlike the real world. In it no one wishes to hurt anyone else, evil appears in it only as suppressed, unawakened or misdirected good, and betrayal is as incomprehensible as murder.
Who does she see in me when she lies down by my side, when she nestles up against me and whispers that she feels good with me? What justifies her reasserted and ever newly betrayed trust? Or does she believe that one day I will, after all, prove myself worthy of that trust?
My lover observes my embarrassment: Do you actually want me to come with you?
I don’t answer quickly enough, I don’t say yes convincingly enough, my uncertainty can be read in my eyes, and she cries. She suspected that I’d be scared at the last moment, she knows me now, I’ve lost the notion of freedom,
