‘You must have been a one, Mr Marek,’ Venus said. ‘When my old man came home pissed I made him sleep with the horses or in the garage.’
‘So when did you have your own wheels?’ the foreman asked curiously.
‘When we were in Slovakia, of course. Míla got hold of an old Wartburg. When we went off with the kids on our first outing, just past Topol
č
ianky its exhaust snapped and the thing made a row like a bloody tank. He had to knock back a couple of doubles, he was so worked up about it, then he got down under the car so he could at least hold it up with wire, and when he’d finished we drove downhill again, and he’d cut out the engine so it wouldn’t make such a row, and we were going faster and faster, the kids loved it each time he skidded round the bends, but I was screaming at him: “Mila, d’you want us to end up as mincemeat? Have you lost your marbles?” And he said: “Not my marbles, my brakes!”’
I realised that Mrs Venus was relating this story mainly for my benefit, because I was the new boy, so I asked: ‘And how did the trip end?’
‘He used the engine to brake. He’s always managed to tame any mare yet.’
‘Except you,’ said the foreman. He chuckled and thereby gave the signal for general merriment. The one who enjoyed himself most was the captain, whose vaguely familiar face was still niggling at me. It suggested something, it pointed back to something, only I didn’t know what. The youngster with the girlish face scarcely smiled: it suddenly occurred to me that death was hovering over him. I had that sensation from time to time, more often in my childhood. I’d look at somebody and suddenly I’d be scared that the person would soon be gone. I’m not trying to suggest that I have second sight. I’ve been wrong on numerous occasions. And some people exude the breath of death for years while being alive and well.
During the war my father was living in the same fortress ghetto, within the same ramparts, but I couldn’t see him, a lot of walls and prohibitions divided us. Until one day the door opened and there, unexpectedly, he stood. Grown thin, his hair recently shaved off, wearing a boilersuit, he appeared in that door and his eyes swept the far corners of the dormitory. I cried out and suddenly he saw me and said: Quiet, quiet, I’m only here to repair the wiring. And he laughed at me. Then he took me in his arms, although I was a big boy, hugged me to himself and said: My little boy! And all the time he was smiling, but somehow oddly, his eyes were
moist
, and as I looked up at him I saw with amazement that my big, strong and powerful father was crying.
When I learned after the war that all those I had been fond of, all those I had known, were dead, gassed like insects and incinerated like refuse, I was gripped by despair. Almost every night I would walk by their sides, entering with them into enclosed spaces. We were all naked, and suddenly we were beginning to choke. I tried to scream but was unable to, and I heard the rattle in the others’ throats and I could see their faces turning into grimaces and losing their shape. I awoke in terror, afraid to go to sleep again, and my eyes roamed feverishly through the empty darkness. At that time I slept in the kitchen, near the gas cooker. I’d get up time and again to make sure no gas was escaping. It was clear to me that I had only been spared through some oversight, some omission that might be put right at any moment. In the end I was so crushed by horror and fear that I fell sick. The doctors shook their heads over my disease, unable to understand how a microbe could have got into my heart, but they never thought of the real gateway.
They prescribed bed and absolute quiet. But in that quiet I was able to surround myself with my friends, who had turned into spectres, and spend with them all that slowly passing time, and be drawn into their world, in which time no longer passed at all. I told no one about them but I was with them and they invited me to them, they repeated their invitations so persistently that I understood that I too was to die.
But I was still afraid of death, so much afraid of it I didn’t dare to look in the mirror. Thus I spent weeks in immobility, until one day my mother brought me
War and Peace
in three volumes, put them on my bedside table and told me not to pick them up myself, they were too heavy. I really was weak, I could hardly lift one of the volumes although they were just ordinary books. But when my mother handed me a volume I propped it up against my knees and read lying down. And as I read I was gradually transported into a different society. At times it occurred to me that the people I was reading about were also dead by now, that they had to die even if death did not overtake them on the pages of the book. Yet at the same time, though they were dead, they were living. It was then I realised the amazing power of literature and of the human imagination generally: to make the dead live and to stop the living from dying. I was seized by wonder at this miracle, at the strange power of the author, and there began to spring up within me a longing to achieve something similar.
I asked my mother to buy me some exercise books, and when I was on my own I began to put together my own experiences and to give back their lives to those who were no longer alive. At that moment, as though miraculously, their rigidified, cold and dismal features increasingly began to fade. When the doctor allowed me to get up six months later all the dead faces had dissolved, as though clearing out of my way. I was no longer able to command them, and if anyone had shown me a picture of any of my dead friends I’d have said: I don’t know him. But it was not the oblivion of death, nor the oblivion so common in our day when the dead and even some of the living are concealed forever by a blanket of silence, one which even swallows up speech. Instead it was a different kind of remembrance, one which lifted the incinerated from the ashes and tried to raise them up to new life.
So I lived again, and the doctor was pleased at the miracle wrought by some new tablets he’d prescribed for me. But I knew why I was alive. So long as I was able to write I’d be able to live, I’d be free from my spectres. I know that to this day, and I also know that nothing on earth can disappear, that even the picture of a young girl murdered long ago would remain latently somewhere, maybe in my mind, that it would rise from its depths just as her soul rose above the earth and the waters. And it seemed to me, as I was gazing at the face of the woman whom I had now, nearer the end of my life, met, who seemed familiar to me from the depth of my being, that by some miracle the one who had stood at the very beginning had returned, and as after so many years I again saw that motionless, dreamlike, loving face before me at night I was engulfed by a wave of joy mingled with sadness, even though I worked out with some relief that Daria had already been alive for three years when they gassed the other.
‘Well, you were shooting downhill,’ the foreman turned to Mrs Venus; ‘but what would you say if you were whizzing straight up into the air at the same lick?’ And he pointed to the ceiling with such a commanding gesture that everybody looked up towards it.
Thirty-five years ago the following had happened to him. He’d been stationed at an airfield near St
ř
íbro in Western Bohemia, and there, as well as the splendid S-199s, they’d inherited a training balloon from the Germans. Anyway, his sergeant had ordered him to get the balloon ready, which meant loading a parachute and ballast bags. The sergeant was giving him a hand himself. But just as they were getting the first sand-filled bag on board the anchor cable got loose and they shot up at such a pace that within a few seconds they were above the clouds. ‘I can tell you it was faster than a rocket. We were in shirt-sleeves,’ the foreman was getting carried away by his experience, ‘because down there it was mid-summer, and suddenly we were at the bloody North Pole. “Comrade sergeant,” I said, “Private Marek reporting we’re flying, destination unknown, but most probably we’ll find ourselves in the shit.” He was a fair sort of bloke so he said: “Marek, that was a damn silly order I gave you, to get inside without a parachute. See if you can get out of it alive. I’ll manage somehow.” And he held out his parachute to me, the only one on board. So I said: “Sergeant, you’ve got a wife and kids, if we’re in the shit you’ll jump.” And he said: “You’re a good bloke, Marek, we’ll either be in the shit together or we’ll both be bloody heroes.” By then he had frost on his face!’
‘But why didn’t you try to let out the gas?’ the youngster wondered.
‘Imagine we didn’t think of that? The bloody valve was frozen up, so we couldn’t do nothing.’ The foreman went on for a while to describe the terrible conditions at those freezing altitudes before, three hours later, they came down at Lysá.
‘Thirty-five years ago,’ the man who reminded me of my ear-nose-and-throat specialist joined in, ‘I was in a penal camp near Marianská, a short way from the frontier. At that time the Americans were beginning to send over little balloons with leaflets. Some of them came down near us, but anyone picking them up risked being put inside.’
‘What did they say?’ the youngster wanted to know.
‘Nothing worth a stretch inside. Anyway, what do you expect from a piece of paper?’
‘Balloons and ships may both have a future, but I wouldn’t get into one of your balloons,’ the captain brought the conversation back to appropriate bounds. ‘Or into a plane. If a ship goes down you’ve got a chance, but when a plane comes down . . .’
‘You don’t have to tell me!’ the foreman said, offended. ‘They were goners all right, there wasn’t as much as this left of them.’ He flicked a cigarette stub with his finger. ‘And if by some miracle one of them got out – well, 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.