We are riding through the streets from which they haven’t yet driven out the
fin de siècle
spirit as they have done so thoroughly from our native city, thirstily we drink beer at a pavement stall, hungrily we sit down at a battered table in a shabby café. We sit opposite each other, far from our near and dear ones, in a strange café in a strange town, we eat cakes, we are silent, we look at one another, and I can see in her eyes a devotion I didn’t believe I’d ever find anywhere, I can feel it invading me deeply, pervading me, settling into every cell of my body. I don’t know how or when I’ll end my struggle, but at that moment my soul is still capable of rising up, of making one last flight to where it belongs, to the place of its longings, to the regions of blissful paralysis from the proximity of a loved being; after that it will fly out to this battered and by now deserted little table, for a last time briefly smile with sudden relief, and then accept its fate.
Later we stand in the cathedral of Güstrow before Barlach’s rising angel. I can see my lover going rigid, rising up to those exalted shapes, moving away from me into heights which I cannot conceive, which my vision cannot reach, where only angels and perhaps the souls of great artists reside. I move away, unnoticed, and sit down in a pew in a corner of the cathedral and wait for her to come back to me.
Nach der Rede des Führers am Tage der Deutschen Kunst in München haben die zuständigen Stellen nunmehr beschlossen, das von dem Bildhauer Ernst Barlach im Jahre 1926 geschaffene Ehrenmal für die Gefallenen des Weltkriegs aus dem Dom in Güstrow entfernen zu lassen. Die Abnahme wird in den nächsten Tagen erfolgen. Das Ehrenmal soll einen schwebenden Engel darstellen und war schon seit langem ein Gegenstand heftigster Angriffe
.
(Following the Führer’s speech on the Day of German Art in Munich the appropriate authorities have now decided to remove from the cathedral in Güstrow the memorial created by the sculptor Ernst Barlach in 1926 for the fallen of the World War. The removal will take place during the next few days. The memorial, designed to represent a hovering angel, has long been the object of fierce attacks.)
When eventually she returns to me she has tears in her eyes.
Do you think you could manage an angel like that?
I don’t know. I’m probably not sufficiently obsessed – by stone or by wood.
I don’t ask her what she is possessed by, I know. But I also suspect that there is a burning ambition in her, at the price of exhaustion if need be, to ensure that those who view her work go rigid.
The next day she walks down to the edge of the beach, where the sand has soaked up the seawater, and her fingers, used to creating shapes out of shapeless matter, there create a sand relief of a creature resembling a winged centaur rather than an angel. That creature has my features, except that perhaps it smiles more in all directions. Small groups of sunbathers gather around her and with admiration watch her work taking shape, but she pretends not to notice them, she only wants to know if I like her sand sculpture.
I like it and it’s like me, I answer, in order to amuse her with my pun. My only regret is that this strange creature with my face will not survive the next tide.
What does it matter? Tomorrow, if we feel like it, we’ll make something different. At least we aren’t burdening the world with another creation. This is something we are both aware of: that the world is groaning, choking with a multitude of creations, that it is buried by objects and strangled by ideas which all pretend to be necessary, useful or beautiful and therefore lay claim to perpetual endurance.
We don’t need either objects or creations, she says lovingly, for us it is enough to have one another.
We are together while the day ascends, while the night descends, we are so totally together that it saps our strength, that the fire consumes us, that the heat consumes her till I am alarmed: suppose we are buried in ashes from which we won’t rise again?
I have never been as close to anyone, I have never known a person capable of being so close to me, capable of such passion, of such intensity.
Maybe both of us have been gathering strength all our lives for just this moment, for just this meeting, maybe we have gravitated here in our dreams, to this small room, to this coastal spot, where water, sand and sky blend into each other, where time trickles softly and cleanly, this is where unconsciously we have wanted to come at moments of loneliness. And when our bodies are finally exhausted, when only a few last breaths are left of the northern summer’s night, when I am about to climb down to my bunk, she begs me not to go yet, to stay with her at least here, and so I persevere in immobility, even though I now long to be alone, so many days of absolute proximity have exhausted me and I am longing for a moment of isolation; in the midst of a strange world into which I was snatched I now long for the undemanding routine of home. But have I got a home left? After all, I’m breaking it up myself. My daughter has left, she is a mother now, and my son is leaving very soon. And as for my wife, even if she smiles at me, where is she really at home? What is left of our love?
My yearning is growing within me, a nonsensical regret because it is backward-facing, a regret that my life, against which I want to rebel just now, is running away.
The other woman is lying by my side. She’s asleep. Her breath has gone quieter, her spirit has calmed down. I try to make out her features, I bend down over her, I do not kiss her, I just look at her, at a remote creature whom, despite everything, I have not managed to absorb fully into myself, to accept fully. I climb quietly down and lie on the lower bunk, I gaze into the blackness before me. Outside a tomcat is noisily complaining and the wind is driving a thunderstorm before it. I get up and open the window wide, on the dark sky a soundless flash of lightning now and then lights up the huge plane tree in the garden.
And suddenly I see her – my wife. The lightning illuminates her, she is sitting on a bench, waiting for me. We are walking down a little path in the park, I am pushing a pram whose wheels keep coming off but we haven’t got the money to buy a new one, I am pushing it along the Prokop valley.
A nonsensical yearning directed backwards, but what am I to do? There remain in me, rooted, countless days and nights together, from which time has gradually eroded everything that was not solid, leaving behind boulders on an autumnal field, boulders which can’t be rolled away, even if I walk around them I can’t get rid of them, I only have to turn my head and I see them: towering there like immovable milestones, they regard me like some monstrous stony eyes of the night, motionless, they wait for me to give up everything. I take a few more steps but I can feel their stony stare on my back, my legs are growing heavy, and I come to a halt. I am not going back and I am not going forward, I am standing in a void, I am standing between two fields, at the meeting point of two calls which intersect each other, I am nailed to the cross, how can I move?
And the other woman, the one I’ve come here with, the one I followed from weakness, from longing, from loneliness, from mental confusion, from passion, from prodigality, from the hope that I might forget my mortality for a while, now complains about my immobility, she curses it and my wife, instead of cursing me.
So here I stand, she is asleep behind me while I am waiting by the window for my wife to look up and see me. But she doesn’t see me. Suddenly I am conscious that between us lie mountains and rivers, life and death, betrayal and lies, years of unfulfilled longing and vain hopes. I see my wife beginning to tremble like an image on the surface of water when the first raindrop strikes it, in a sudden surge of longing I reach out towards the window to hold her, to save her, to draw her to me from that distance, but it is in vain, the rain is getting heavier, and I become aware of the other woman looking at me from behind. What are you doing, dearest, why aren’t you asleep?
I’m just shutting the window, I answer, it’s beginning to rain.
I got up from the table simultaneously with Mr Rada. No sooner were we out in the street than he could no longer restrain himself from telling me what, clearly, he’d wanted to keep from the others. ‘I got back from Svatá Hora yesterday. Have you heard about it?’
The fact that there had been a great pilgrimage and rally of believers had been mentioned even in our jerkish press, probably to enable the rally of believers to be portrayed as a peace festival.
‘It was fantastic,’ he said joyfully. Evidently he’d brought back from there the little book from which he’d read a passage to me that afternoon, or at least a taste or enthusiasm for reading from it, if necessary in the street.
We usually went together to draw our pay. I told him what paper I used to work on. I didn’t mention the books I’d written. He in turn confessed to me that all his life he’d had to do something other than what he wished to do. Although he’d studied to be a priest he’d worked as a miner, a boilerman, a storeman, a stage-hand and even a lorry driver. Now, in order to help his mother, he was making some extra money by street-sweeping. What he liked about the job was that it was outdoor work, often indeed among gardens, he was a countryman. He also had a sense of doing something useful. In a city filthy with refuse people might at best find a place to sleep and store their belongings, but never one to establish a home and experience the thrill of belonging to the place, to their neighbours, to God. Today’s people were like nomads, he complained, they moved from one home to another, carrying their little household gods with them. They didn’t establish ties either with their surroundings or with people, often they didn’t even take their children out into the country. They either killed them while still in the womb or they abandoned them in their chase after pleasure. And how were those children going to live when they had known no home? They’d develop into real Huns, they’d move through the world and turn it upside down.
But he didn’t complain about his own fate. He spoke without bitterness about what had happened to him.
‘There were at least thirty thousand of us there, mostly young people.’ He sounded pleased, as if he’d quite forgotten his own gloomy prophecies.
At night they had sat in front of the church and in the surrounding meadows, passing the time in prayer and singing. Holy Wenceslas, prince of the Czech realm – the hymn imploring the patron saint not to let his progeny perish – had been sung three times. If I’d heard what the hymn sounded like under the open sky perhaps I too after all would look forward to better days.
We were advancing down the narrow little street which runs round the park by the ramparts. Mr Rada was engrossed by what he was telling me but I couldn’t resist looking up curiously to the window which the artist had turned into his showroom. The hanged man had long disappeared, there had since been a three-legged swan and later a fountain which instead of water spewed dirty sand or ash, letting it rain down on a female head whose plaster features seemed pretty, and down whose cheeks it slid like solidified tears. Now the head and the cloud of ash were gone, there was a manikin sitting on a little horse, made up, as was his steed, of plastic items evidently picked up from a rubbish heap: old containers, motor oil and spray cans, hideous toys for infants and coloured fragments of handbasins and jugs. His open mouth was a red butter-dish, in one of his eyes was a poisonously green pot of paper paste, Koh-i-noor brand, and in the other the dark-haired head of a doll. At first glance it seemed that the horseman was smiling, a mere toy, a present-day Don Quixote riding out into the world in armour, but then I noticed the rider was showing his light polystyrene teeth and I could make out some bare bones. This was not the noble though confused knight but rather the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse, as seen by Dürer. ‘And behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him,’ the horseman with the head of the mouth of hell of Brueghel’s ‘Dulle Griet’.
What kind of head,
I
wondered, had that unknown artist? Why and for whom was he staging these exhibitions in a little street into which hardly anyone ever strayed? Why was death so often on his mind?
‘These young people,’ Mr Rada continued enthusiastically, ‘have realised that they’ve had distorted values imposed on them. From childhood they’ve had it drilled into them that hate and struggle are the levers of history. That there is no superior being above man! And they came to pray and to listen to the tidings about Him who is above us and who, despite everything, looks down on us with love.’ It was possible, he concluded, that by the grace of God a period of rebirth was beginning, a new Christian age.
He communicated his joy to me and supposed that I would fully share it with him. It is certainly encouraging to hear that people are not content with the jerkish notion of happiness. But it occurred to me, even while he was reading to me about how man strayed off his path by deifying himself, that man can behave arrogantly not only by deifying his own ego and proclaiming himself as the finest flower of matter and life, but equally when he proudly believes that he has correctly comprehended the incomprehensible or uttered the unutterable, or when he thinks up infallible dogmas and with his intellect, which wants to believe, reaches out into regions before which he should lower his eyes and stand in silence. We might debate for a long time about when that fatal shift occurred (if it occurred) which gave rise to the arrogant spirit of our age, and also about how far we must go back to put matters right, but what point would there be in such an argument when there is no return anyway, either in the individual’s life or in that of humanity?
‘What about your brother?’ it occurred to me to ask. ‘Was he there with you?’
‘Him?’ he made a dismissive gesture. ‘It might cost him his career!’ His own words struck him as too harsh, for he added: ‘He might perhaps just walk along in some Buddhist procession.’