obviously he was no use for anything, ever again.’
With Daria I was moving above the ground and above the waters; day after day, month after month. Even at night, when distance intervened between us, our dreams or visions were often similar to each other’s.
That, she explained to me, was because at night our souls would meet.
You think that the soul can leave a body while it is alive?
She then told me the story of the hundred-year-old sorcerer who disguised his real appearance by means of charms. He lived in a stone house in the middle of the forests which extended all the way to the northern ocean, and he spent his time in solitude. When he got tired of living alone he bewitched a beautiful young girl with his magic charms and tried to make her his wife. But she saw through him and realised his real nature. She was frightened and begged him to let her go: he was an old man, near the end of his days, while she had her whole life before her. The sorcerer replied: I may look old but I shan’t die because my soul does not reside in my body. When she wanted to know where his soul resided he explained to her that it was a long way away. Over the mountains, beyond the rivers, there was a lake, and in the middle of it an island, and on the island a temple, a temple without windows and with just one door, and that door could not be opened. Inside a bird was flying around, and unless someone killed it it would never die, and in it was the sorcerer’s soul. While the bird was alive he too would live.
The girl had a lover, to whom she sent word of her fate. The young man set out to find the island and the temple. With the help of good spirits he opened the door which couldn’t be opened, and caught the bird which could not, of its own, die, and with it he returned to his beloved. She hid them both under the sorcerer’s bed and told the young man to squeeze the bird hard. The young man obeyed and the sorcerer immediately felt sick, and as the young man squeezed harder the old man got worse. That was when he began to suspect something, and looked around the room. ‘Kill it, kill it!’ called the girl. Her lover crushed the bird in his hand and at that moment the sorcerer breathed his last.
I understood that she was telling me this story so I should never forget that her soul was a bird which I held in my fist.
The soul leaves the body after death and enters a different body, an animal or even a tree. That was why she preferred to work with stone or with clay rather than with wood. She could hear a tree groaning when it was cut down. On its journey to a new body the soul could overcome any distance whatever. So why shouldn’t it be able to do so during life? After all, it was not corporeal, so there was no force on earth that could fetter or imprison it when a soul wished to escape, rise up or join someone else.
Another time she told me that once in plain daylight she saw a golden ball moving among rosebeds, the blooms were mirrored in the ball and everything was in motion, free and exalted. A little while later, as she was returning home in the evening, or rather at night, she caught sight of me on the other side of the street, leaning against a lamp post; she’d run over to me but I had dissolved before her eyes. Was that a delusion sent her by some evil power or a sign of love?
Everything that happened had to have some superior cause, and she therefore sought for an explanation in the position of the planets. She established that my strongest and lucky star was the sun, which I had in Virgo and in the tenth house, and it was thanks to my sun that I had survived what I had, and thanks to it I would lead my life happily to the point when I had to leave it. I would not step out of my body until I had accomplished my task and performed the work I had to perform. What fate could be happier?
On Twelfth Night we poured melted lead together, and my figure was a woman covering her face and a beast of prey or perhaps a winged Hermes. In the woman she recognised herself, and in the winged creature, me. I was descending to her to carry her off or to bring her a message from heaven.
And why is the woman covering her face?
Probably because she is afraid of me.
She had a pack of fortune-telling cards of the famous Mademoiselle Lenormand and several times told her own and my past, present and future, the immediate as well as the distant future, and surprisingly the cards foretold an encouraging or even a splendid future for me.
I regarded this fortune-telling as a kind of lovers’ game, but I said to her that everything was bound to turn out right because I had a charmed life like that man who alone survived the crash of the aircraft which some years ago hit a church tower in Munich, or like that girl who survived an air crash in the Andes and then alone, for several days and nights, tore her way through the jungle until with her last strength she reached some human habitation. It so happens that I met that man not long ago and we got on well together; and although I’ve never seen that girl we would surely also agree that what crushes others is for us no more than an unimportant trifle, and the other way about.
In reality nothing was a game to her, to her everything was life, every second we spent together was to be filled with love, when we were not together spectres were creeping out on all sides as in the Apocalypse and many-headed serpents were coiling round her legs. She fought back and asked me for help, asked me not to leave her, to remain with her if I loved her, at least for a while. But I was already escaping, in
I’d always been devoted to my work, I’d always fought for every extra minute for my writing. Now I was trimming my work minute by minute, and these minutes were adding up to hours and days. I was still determined to rebel, to ask for at least one moment’s respite. Writing, after all, meant life to me.
She said: How can you talk like that? What is art compared to life?
When I can’t write any more I’ll die. But I’ll die loving.
Even though my wartime memories were getting dimmer, I kept returning to them. It was as if I had a duty to those whom I’d survived, and had to repay the benevolent forces which had snatched me from the common fate and allowed me to live.
With that burden I entered life. I was barely eighteen when I began to write a play about a revolt in a women’s concentration camp, about a desperate decision either to live in freedom or to die. Suffering resulting from a life deprived of freedom seemed to me the most important of all themes to think about and to write about. As then in the fortress town, so now, after the war, I felt that my whole being was clinging to freedom. I was able to quote by heart the thoughts of the captured Pierre Bezukhov on the subject of freedom and suffering, which are so close to each other that even a man in the midst of suffering may find freedom.
I didn’t understand Tolstoy, just as I failed to notice that a short distance from my home new camps were being set up, where people again had that final opportunity of seeking freedom in the midst of suffering. I only knew the camps of my childhood.
We walked down the street called V dolinach, which was perfectly clean; we had been preceded by the automatic cleaning machine driven today by Mr Kromholz. It had evidently worked so painstakingly that it hardly seemed to belong to our age at all, and so we approached the monstrous building they’d set up on the Pankrac plateau. Originally they’d wanted to call it the Palace of Congresses, for that was its proper purpose: to create an appropriately grandiose setting for congresses of all kinds of useful and useless organisations, especially the one which ruled over everything and over everybody, but then they called it, rather absurdly, the Palace of Culture.
‘Yeah, they have a different kind of mechanisation here,’ said the foreman, having noticed what I was looking at. ‘They have tiny little automatic refuse machines running along the corridors, parquet cleaners and floor-polishers – all imported stuff. Only for their use. D’you know how many people they have in there?’
‘It’s a monstrosity!’ the captain spoke up. ‘Eats us all out of house and home!’
‘Last week,’ Mrs Venus cut in, ‘some little kid got inside. They thought he’d got lost on Vy s ehrad but all the time he was inside there, he’d walked into one of their smaller reception rooms and fell asleep. And when he woke up he kept running round and round the corridors and in the end he got into the boiler-house and by then he was completely lost, wandering around between those coloured pipes and turbines. When they found him in the morning he’d gone completely round the bend.’
Coming up to meet us, in a manner combining clodlike indifference and self-importance, were two policemen. One of them was well-built with a foppish little moustache adorning his pleasant face, while the other seemed to me like a rather tall but sickly fair-haired child with sky-blue eyes. At the sight of them something in me stiffened.
