Love and Garbage (30 page)

I might still have caught up with him, but just then the bus came along and he got on. I probably wouldn’t see him again, nor would I meet his brother, unless I found myself in his care.

It occurred to me that I might spend the banknote I’d just earned, my last swept-up fifty crowns, in some festive way, and so I walked down into Nusle, where there are lots of shops.

In a little market they were selling flowers. My daily wage was just sufficient for five chrysanthemums. I chose three butter-yellow ones and two amber ones, colours my wife was fond of. At home I put the bunch in a vase and placed it on her table. I picked up the shopping bag with my lunch, which she had prepared for me in the morning, and set out to visit Dad at the hospital.

He opened his eyes, saw me, slightly moved his lips in an attempted smile, and closed his eyes again. He’d hardly spoken these past few days, either it tired him out too much or else he didn’t think anything was sufficiently important for him to utter aloud. The last time he spoke to me he recalled that my mother used to reproach him for devoting too little attention to me, for not looking after my upbringing enough. But surely you didn’t expect any sermons? he asked. And I said hurriedly that he’d always been a model to me, the way he lived and, above all, the way he worked. After all, I stayed with you lot, Dad said. His eyes misted up with tears. I understood that hidden behind these few words was some long-past difficult decision, perhaps even a sacrifice.

I unscrewed the stopper of the thermos flask and put a little custard on a spoon. Without opening his eyes Dad swallowed a few mouthfuls. Then he said: I had a fall today and couldn’t get up. And the sister, the pretty one, shouted at me to get up at once, she wasn’t going to lift me up. Tell me, how can a woman be so wicked? Dad fell silent for a long time. Suddenly he opened his eyes: D’you remember that hat of mine flying off on that bridge? What a laugh that was! He again closed his eyes. I said I remembered, but he no longer heard me.

As I tidied his things in his bedside table I noticed his little notebook. Day after day he’d entered in it, in an increasingly shaky hand, his temperature and the medication he took. The last entry was three days old and I couldn’t make out the numbers. My throat was constricted by pity. I stroked Dad’s forehead and left the ward. Outside I didn’t make for the main gate but walked down a narrow path to the back entrance. The path wound between overgrown lawns, past the morgue. Immediately behind the morgue was a huge heap of broken bricks, rusty cans and shattered infusion bottles, also a rusting old electric motor, maybe one of those for which Dad had calculated the design. He’d spent whole days and evenings calculating motors. When I visited him I’d be afraid to disturb him in his work. And so we hurriedly covered what news there was in the world, and in our lives, but about the most important thing, about our sojourn here, we talked very little.

Round the bend in the path appeared an orderly, pushing the metal cart into which the dead were placed. I used to push that cart too. I gave him a wide berth, but I couldn’t get rid of the thought that he was making for that refuse heap in order to tip out his load there.

I returned to the wooden footbridge.

The train roared past beneath us, the hat flew off and jerkily sailed down in clouds of smoke.

Dad laughed and I felt happy. It was a moment of total proximity, a touch of something linking our lives, and nothing has effaced it or soiled it over all these years.

Dad was bending down low and fished out his hat, all black with soot and grime. He was not afraid to put it on his head, he gave me one more wave of his hand and walked away still laughing.

V

The alarm went off at six o’clock, my wife and my son had to get up to go to work. I ought to get up too. Dad died two days ago and I should go and see his pupils at the Academy and get one of those he was fond of to speak at his funeral. And yesterday afternoon I received a package with the drug I’d written off for some time ago for that youngster Štycha, I ought to give it to him as soon as possible. I hadn’t written off for any drug for Dad, there was probably no such thing.

By now it was too late to catch my mates in the changing room anyway. If I had any time left, I’d find them at the tavern during their mid-morning break.

On the final day of Dad’s life Peter and I left for the hospital first thing in the morning. It was a Sunday and there were only two nurses on duty in the department. One of them told me that ‘it could happen’ at any moment.

Dad was lying in his bed, his lips slightly open, breathing heavily. The pauses between breaths seemed to me incredibly long. His eyes were firmly shut. He hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for two days, his veins were so torn with punctures that they couldn’t feed him artificially any more. I tried to give him a spoonful of sweetened tea but at first he was unable to swallow it. When he finally managed it I could see that it had taken all his strength, and that another drop might make him choke. The last drop of hope had dried up, vanished in the dust. All I could do was to mop Dad’s lips and tongue with a piece of moistened cotton-wool. Then I sat down by his bed and took his hand, as he used to take mine when I was a little boy and he was taking me for a walk to the airfield. My grown-up son was standing in the door, crying.

Then suddenly Dad breathed out, but he didn’t breathe in again. I could see the terrible effort of his lungs, as they strained to catch another breath, his faced closed up in a grimace of such pain that it went right through me. What kind of son was I if I couldn’t even give him a tiny puff of breath?

I got up and in my mind begged: Lord, receive his soul, you know how good it was! Then I walked out in the corridor, deserted on a Sunday, and all around there were walls, and one more wall, quite thin, transparent but nonetheless impermeable, was slipping between that moment and everything that preceded it.

In the room next door my son was listening to the news. In Colombia, on the very day my father died, a volcano erupted. The red-hot lava melted the snow and ice in the neighbourhood of the crater. The water together with the ash produced a flow of mud which rushed downhill into the valley, where it engulfed human habitations. It was estimated that twenty thousand people remained buried under the mudslide.

My wife bent over me and kissed me goodbye. She whispered that I should sleep on, she’d get home early.

I couldn’t fall asleep again. When I closed my eyes Dad’s face returned to me in its final pain-distorted shape, and his chopped breath came to me from all corners.

A bell rang again, this time the front door.

Early morning visits fill me with foreboding. But standing at the door was only the fair-haired young man from Svatá Hora, and in his features there was even more painful anxiety than usual. It was obvious that something serious had happened, or else he wouldn’t have called at this hour.

He asked me to come with him, he wanted to talk to me outside. In the street he informed me that he and his friends had been pulled in for questioning. In his case the interrogation had gone on for half a day and had touched on my reading two years before, my stories, my opinions, as well as the opinions of other authors who’d refused to write in jerkish language in the society that was accomplishing ‘the greatest freedom of man and the human race’. They also asked him why and how often he visited me, and several times in this context they mentioned the destroyed monument.

Life – and hence also death – went on.

I tried to calm him. Surely they wouldn’t accuse either him or me of blowing up a monument. They merely liked bracketing these two offences – the reading of short stories written in a language comprehensible only to humans, and the destruction of a statue of an officially-proclaimed giant. Even they must realise that the latter was more criminal than the former.

But the young man was in the depths of despair. This was the first time he’d been interrogated and had experienced the stubbornly uncompromising and suspicious jerkish spirit. I’ve been aware of it for years, recording how under its influence living voices were falling silent and language was being lost. It pervades everything, it gets into the water and into the air, it mingles with our blood. Mothers give birth to shrunken cripples and the landscape to dead trees, birds drop in mid-flight and children’s bodies are afflicted by malignant tumours.

He was walking beside me, afraid. He’d already handed in his notice at work, he’d found a job as projectionist in a cinema, and he was hoping to be accepted as a correspondence student of jerkish literature. True, he’d learn there that Charlie Chaplin left the United States, that bastion of unfreedom, but he’d have a little time left over to read books and reflect. But suppose they didn’t accept him now. He wanted to know where he’d find a safety net for himself when the one they’d assigned to him as well as the one offered to him at the department store were so large-meshed that a person fell through at once. Of course, everybody should weave his own net, he knew that. But if they burst in, if they stole into his home and tore it up for him? Fight them or begin to weave a finer mesh from scratch? How often could a person start from scratch?

Only nine o’clock. If I hurried I might be able to catch the youngster in the Božena tavern, hand over the drug, and then go and find a funeral speaker.

The tavern was still half-empty at this early hour, and I didn’t have to search through a crowd: my former companions, apart from the youngster and the captain, were sitting at the table next to the bar. Enthroned at the head of the table, to my surprise, was our foreman, moreover in new overalls.

I entered unobserved and managed to overhear the foreman earnestly recounting how someone was a real show-off, always nose-dived right to the ground and pulled out only when all those who were merely standing and staring had plastered their trousers.

‘And what are you doing here?’ Mrs Venus had spotted me. ‘Come to help us?’

The foreman turned his head irritably, he didn’t like anyone spoiling his heroic episodes. I produced the medicine from my pocket and asked about the youngster; did anyone know where I might find him.

‘This is no kindergarten,’ the foreman informed me. ‘If he comes, he’s here, if he don’t, he ain’t. We haven’t seen him,’ he turned to Mrs Venus as his witness, ‘for at least a week.’

‘This isn’t the weather for him, you remember that sick turn he had. Maybe they’ll give you his address at the office,’ Mrs Venus said. ‘Bound to have it there. Why don’t you sit down?’

I ordered tea with rum.

‘Maybe you don’t know yet,’ Mrs Venus continued, ‘that they’ve locked our Mr Pinz up in the loony bin?’

Obviously I hadn’t heard about what had happened to the captain.

‘Wanted to set fire to the place he was living in. Scraped off the heads of matches, tried to make a bomb from them. Had it all ready, God knows what he’d intended it for. But then that Mary of his turned up, just looked in after all those years, and when he asked her if she’d stay with him she told him he was a nut and she’d sooner string herself up. So he decided to set that bomb off outside his own door.’

‘The stupidity of it,’ the foreman said in disgust; ‘scraping off two hundred thousand match-heads, stuffing them into a metal soda siphon, and then using it on a building like that! But if I was you I wouldn’t put my nose in that office, there’s another idiot sitting there!’ And he returned to his airfield, where his friend didn’t manage to pull out of a spin that time and rammed himself with his MIG so deep into the ground that when they’d put out the fire and cut the wreckage up with a blow-torch they were left with a hole big enough for twenty blokes to hide in.

When the rescue teams arrived in the area of the volcanic disaster they found, in addition to the thousands of dead, a few who’d survived on the roofs of houses or in tree-tops, and also some who were stuck in the mud and couldn’t get out by themselves. Of one little girl only the head was showing. Below the surface her legs were firmly clutched by her drowned aunt. The rescuers spent many hours trying to free the girl, and themselves got stuck in the mud in the attempt. All that time a reporter with a television camera was filming them, so he could bring the fate of the little girl closer to those who were contentedly or perhaps sympathetically bored in their own nets and wanted to be witnesses. After sixty hours the little girl’s sufferings were over and the tired reporter was able to return to his television net. By the time they’d cut the clip they needed from the recorded shots, the little girl’s soul had already risen and was lamenting above the dark waters and the mud, above the red-hot crater of the volcano, and also above a million TV screens which were flickering all over the world in order to show the vain struggle of the rescuers and the touching death of the little girl, who’d never rise from the ashes but who became famous for those few exciting seconds. And who heard the calling of her soul, who was shaken by her sobs? Who at least pictured her features at the moment when her lungs were vainly trying to catch that last breath of air?