Love and Garbage (21 page)

In the last room Daria’s sister, whom I had likewise never seen before, was setting out canapés from cartons on a little table and pouring wine into paper cups. I took a canapé but I declined the wine because I was driving back that evening.

An elderly man whom I knew from somewhere took a drink and said that it was years since he’d seen anything so free and so liberating. He was looking at the sister but I was sure he was talking to me.

That’s what she’s like, her sister agreed. When she was small she’d run away from home and play truant from school.

Her husband was approaching and I beat a hasty retreat. I was unable not to take notice of him, even though, to my own surprise, I looked upon him without jealousy, as if it were no concern of mine that she lay down by his side night after night. I only felt a little embarrassment, shame and perhaps even guilt. That man had never wronged me, whereas I had for several years now secretly and insidiously worked my way into his life.

She guessed my mood and hurried over to comfort me. Her husband was leaving now, he’d be taking the rest of her family with him, the whole circus would be over in a little while, there’d only be a few friends left whom she hadn’t seen for years and whom she’d like to invite for a glass of wine, also the representatives of the gallery, they’d promised to buy one or two of her things, but that too would soon be over and then there’d be just the two of us.

I asked if there was anything I could do, but there wasn’t, her sister had already gone to reserve two tables. I would have liked to tell her how pleased I was that the exhibition had been a success but I was somehow paralysed and she’d run off before I could pull myself together.

Her husband was still not leaving, maybe he needed to demonstrate his satisfaction. I could hear his loud, good-natured, jolly laugh. He might stroll over at any moment, slap me on the back and tell me that in spite of my gaucherie I seemed quite amusing, he’d expected worse. Indeed, he felt some sympathy with me. On top of all my problems I’d landed myself with his wife! Perhaps we should finally settle this business.

I thought I was choking in that close and stuffy space.

Outside I was surprised by the bright lights. I didn’t know the small town; although we’d spent a lot of time here during the past few days we’d had no time for a walk. Now I chose a narrow street which ran steeply downhill. Somewhere in the neighbourhood there was obviously a fair: the wind carried snatches of roundabout music to me and I was meeting children with coloured balloons, hooters and large puffs of candy-floss.

I used to love fairs, the sideshows of conjurers, fire-eaters and tightrope walkers, but I couldn’t recall when I’d last been to one. Over the last few years I’d neglected all my interests except one, all my friends, all my near and dear ones, everybody except one. Most of all I’d neglected my work.

I wasn’t satisfied with the way I was spending my life, but I couldn’t blame anyone for it except myself. I’d come to the end of the little street and below me lay a wide open space. Above the merry-go-round shone a wreath of deceptive but alluring lights and the circus tent was decorated with red and blue pennants. Gigantic white swans made a pretence of noble flight.

For a moment I stopped at my slightly elevated vantage point and watched the crowd milling below me. I longed to mix with it, not to have to worry about anybody, not to think of anything, of my guilt or my lies, even of my love, not to step into anyone else’s life, not to belong to anyone, to move freely and unrecognised in the crowd, to catch snatches of conversation and human faces, to dream up incidents which I would shape according to my will, to have before me something other than perpetual escapes and guilty returns.

My wife maintains that I am unable to forget my wartime experiences. They, she says, are preventing me from getting close to another person: I know I would suffer when I lost that person too, but I cannot believe that I would not lose them. I remain alone, even though I am seemingly by her side. Clearly I would remain alone by anybody’s side.

I ought to be getting back, I wouldn’t like to spoil my lover’s day of success with my moodiness. But I went on to a shooting gallery and asked the dolled-up beauty there for an air rifle. I scored enough to win a little bear on an elastic string and a parrot made of colourful rags and feathers. As I accepted my fairground trophies it struck me that they were more appropriate to me than those fantastic sculptures which I’d just left behind.

One of the rubbish searchers had just caught a red flag with his hook. With a great effort he extricated it from underneath the mass of ashes and other filth, rolled it round his pole, and when he’d got it out eventually waved his wife over and together they unrolled the rag. When they’d opened it out in the wind we could see that it was really a red flag which was now flying above the mountain of garbage.

The Khmer Rouge did not fill the void in their souls with objects or with the money they so despised. They understood that the void in the soul cannot be filled even by all the objects in the world, and that was why they tried to fill that void by human sacrifices. But the emptiness of the soul cannot be filled by anything, not even if the whole of mankind were driven to the sacrificial block: the emptiness would continue, terrifying and insatiable.

Everything on earth is gradually transformed into rubbish, into refuse, which must then, in one way or another, be removed from the earth – except that nothing can be removed from it. Some time ago our jerkish newspapers reported that some Czech inventor had invented a machine for the destruction of old – that is, useless – banknotes, securities and secret documents. Abroad, the article claimed, banknotes were destroyed in crushing mills the height of a two-storey building. The compressed waste mass, however, was so dense that each kilogram of it had to be doused with half a litre of petrol before it would burn; in contrast, the Czech invention did not exceed the dimensions of a medium-sized machine tool. This splendid machine, quite possibly the invention of none other than our captain, produced a shredded mass which could then be fed by pipes into the boiler of a central heating system: thus not only was petrol saved but also a lot of precious hard coal.

Methods and machines for the efficient and economical removal of uncomfortable people from this world have of course been known for a long time.

I watched the items on the carts piling up. Although I couldn’t make out any details at that distance, I suspected that they were old boots and pots, bottles and dolls rather like the ones which had floated on the sea off the Irish coast, and certainly also sacks and old blankets. Where are the days when the poor from the hovels on the outskirts of our cities didn’t even have a sack to call their own, to cover their nakedness? They are behind us and they are before us.

The light breeze rose again and this time it carried to us not only the stench of the garbage but also snatches of hoarse conversation and of delighted childish shrieks. If Brueghel or Hieronymus Bosch were alive now they would surely have sat here and drawn this scene. They might have added a few little figures at various points among that plastic mass, or they might have heightened the mountain so that its peak touched the heavens, and at its foot they might have placed a happy treasure seeker, a woman, a never satiated mad Margareta. What would they have called the picture? ‘The Dance of Death’ or, on the contrary, ‘Earthly Paradise’? ‘Armageddon’ or just ‘Dulle Griet’?

It struck me that any second now a new orange vehicle might arrive and tip out a load of skulls and bones. At just that moment those at the top of the heap were dragging out an old feather mattress and as they were trying to free it from the stranglehold of the rest of the rubbish its cover burst, and because a somewhat stronger gust of wind had just sprung up the feathers began to rise, and along with light scraps of paper and plastic and fine particles of ash began to circle in the air. The dancers underneath almost disappeared in the snowstorm, and I felt a sudden chill. Anxiously I looked at the sky to make sure the megaton cloud was not already sailing over from somewhere, but the sky still seemed clear and clean, though a chill was falling from it that made me shiver.

The Apocalypse can take different forms. The least dramatic, at first sight, is the one in which man perishes under an avalanche of useless objects, emptied words, and excessive activity. Man becomes a volcano which imperceptibly sucks up the heat from below the ground until, in an instant, it trembles and buries itself.

The sweepers in their orange vests go on sweeping, sweeping silently and without interest, while their brothers the dustmen cart off what has been swept into piles and thrown away. They pile those useless objects into heaps which swell, spread and disintegrate, like yeast they rise skywards, like a cancerous tumour they invade their surroundings, human habitations, so that we find it difficult to distinguish between what are still objects of our life and what are objects of our death.

Of all the garbage that swamps us and threatens us by its breath of decay, the most dangerous are the masses of discarded ideas. They tumble about us, they slide down the slopes of our lives. The souls they touch begin to wither and soon no one sees them alive again.

But those without souls do not vanish from the earth either. Their processions move through the world and subconsciously try to reshape it in their own image. They fill the streets, the squares, the stadiums and the department stores. When they burst into cheers over a winning goal, a successful pop song or a revolution it seems as if that roar would go on forever, but it is followed at once by the deathly silence of emptiness and oblivion.

They flee from that silence and seek something that would redeem it, a sacrifice they might cast on the altar of whatever demon they happen to be venerating. Now and then they’ll fire a gun at random, or place a time bomb, or inject some narcotic into their veins and make love, they’ll do anything to survive that dead period before the tremor of the volcano, before the lava fills the void. The void within them.

The images Kafka employs are often obscure, but they also seem to deliberately display a multitude of heterogeneous and disparate elements. We read his strictly logical narration, which often suggests a precise official memorandum, and suddenly we come across a detail or a statement which appears to have drifted in from another world, from another plot, and we are confused. In the story about the execution machine, for instance, why do some ladies’ gloves suddenly appear and, without obvious reason, pass from the condemned man to the executioner and back? Why does the judge in
The Trial
hold a debt book instead of the trial papers? Why does the official in
The Castle
receive the surveyor K. in bed? What is the meaning of his absurd paean in praise of bureaucratic work? The author leads us through a savanna where, in addition to the antelopes and lions we would expect, polar bears and kangaroos are also roaming about as a matter of course.

Surely a writer as logical, as precise and as honest as Kafka must have meant something with his paradoxes, must have intended some hidden communication, must have wanted to create his own myth, his own legend about the world, some great, revolutionary message which perhaps he only surmised and was therefore unable to express clearly; he only adumbrated it, and it is up to us to decipher it and give it precise shape.

I don’t know how many clever people fell into that error, for that mystery-cracking delusion, but they were numerous. I myself am convinced that no writer worthy of that name conceals anything deliberately, that he does not construe or invent any revolutionary messages. He doesn’t even concern himself with them. Most authors, like most people, have their theme: their torments, and these impose themselves on anything they do, think or write.

Kafka with his shyness sought a way of communicating his torment and simultaneously concealing it. Yet it was so personal that it was not enough for him to express it only in hidden form, only in metaphor; time and again he was prompted to make an open confession of the experiences which touched on the essence of his being. As if he were relating an event twice. First he draws his fantastic image: a bizarre and mysterious trial, an execution machine, or a surveyor’s desperate effort to get into an inaccessible castle, and secondly he assembles the fragments of real experiences and events. He writes everything on translucent sheets of paper or on glass and places them one over the other. Some things supplement each other, some things cover each other, some things find themselves in such surprising company that he must surely have been blissfully amazed himself. Behold, he no longer lies fatally exhausted and impotent in bed with his lover who offers him her redeeming and merciful proximity, but he finds himself, as a mortally weary surveyor, in bed with the castle official, and that man offers him his liberating bureaucratic mercy.

We didn’t go to Switzerland, we didn’t even go to Kutná Hora again. The exhibition was over, and all that was left to us was the attic studio, where the view of the window of the palace opposite was still blocked by the statue of Saint Stephen the Martyr. We’d meet, sit by the low table, drink wine and talk in that strange state of enchantment which stems from the knowledge that everything we do and experience takes on new meaning and importance the moment we impart it to the person we love. In the past we loved one another with longing and with an insatiability which seemed to me unchangeable, even though she was seized by impatience now and again. Something’s got to change, surely we can’t spend our entire lives in such immobility, in such hopeless repetition of the same actions, we don’t want to end up as two clowns who are happy if in their old age they can be walk-ons in an amateur circus performance. A bitterness has crept into her conversation. She is angry about people who don’t know how to live, she rails against artists who are betraying their mission, she curses all men who are treacherous and cowardly and unable to pursue anything in their lives to its conclusion. Most frequently she is angry with my wife.