Love and Garbage (11 page)

But surely we’re almost continually together.

How could I say something so outrageous when every night I was in bed with another woman?

But that is my wife!

How did I dare say this to her? She was shaking with sobs. She’d never wanted to live like that, what had I made of her? A whore who wasn’t even entitled to see me when she felt depressed or when she needed me but who had to come running the moment I felt like it, whenever I could find the time for her.

I didn’t say anything, I was so taken aback by her grief and anger, and she screamed that I should say something, why didn’t I defend myself, why didn’t I try to convince her that she was mistaken, why didn’t I tell her that I loved her, that I cared for her?

Then we made love again, night descended on the palace outside our window, the drenched pigeons had disappeared. She wanted to hear again and again that I loved her. I kept repeating it with a strange kind of obsessiveness. We made love with the same obsessiveness, and she whispered to me that we had been predestined for each other, that we were resisting our fate in vain, that I was resisting in vain when I longed for her so much.

And I didn’t say anything. I embraced her, I melted into her, and I tried to dispel the unease which was growing within me.

But I didn’t want to live like that permanently. When I got home I told my wife about the other woman.

It was getting on for ten o’clock, the time when we normally left our hospitable tavern. The foreman, who was a great one for precision, looked closely at his watch: ‘One more beer,’ he decided, ‘and then we’re off, even if it’s pissing like from a fireman’s hose.’ And to comfort us he related how exactly thirty years ago it had rained just like this all through the summer. He was encamped down beyond Kvilda, at the back of beyond. Luckily he managed on the second day to pick up a pretty dark-haired girl from accounts at the timberyard. He’d stopped at her office in the morning, and within half an hour he’d done all the calculations for her that she’d have spent the whole day on, so that they could get down to the real business.

The foreman was a good raconteur, and the standard of his story-telling rose with the interest of his listeners. In me he found an attentive listener, for which he rewarded me not only by addressing me more often than the rest but also, as a sign of his favour, by occasionally giving me the better and more profitable jobs. His most grateful listener, however, was the youngster, either because at his age he was the most eager to hear other people’s stories or because fate had prevented him from experiencing most of the things the foreman recounted.

I knew by then that he hadn’t been sickly from childhood. As soon as he’d finished school he’d let himself be lured by favourable terms into a chemical plant, where they offered him a flat within a year and special danger pay straight away. That danger pay was not just a lure. He’d hardly been at the plant five months when an incident occurred, which is the term used in the jerkish press for an event which costs the health and even the lives of an appreciable number of workers. There’d been an escape of poison gas. Two women died instantly and the young man was discharged from hospital after six months and pensioned off. His liver and kidneys were damaged, and he’d better forget about women altogether. Nevertheless he’d taken a liking to a tram driver called Dana, admittedly the divorced mother of two girls and his senior by ten years, or maybe it was just because of that that he thought he had a chance. Apparently he’d been courting her for a year and he’d been cleaning the city’s streets for that period in order to earn a little extra money so he wouldn’t come to her as a pauper.

The rain thirty years ago had been an obstacle to the foreman’s intentions until he remembered that a little beyond the airfield there was a rusty old Messerschmitt which had been wrecked during the war. Its innards had of course been torn out, but if you pulled the canopy shut and put a rug on the floor it was almost a hotel. First time they did it the dark-haired girl had hardly taken her skirt off when she let out a terrible shriek because a snake was creeping out from one of the holes in the instrument panel. There was a whole nest of vipers there, and the foreman had to get rid of them all and stuff up the holes with tow before he could get to the most delicious hole of all. ‘Let me tell you,’ the foreman concluded, ‘one thing I’ve learnt in my life more than once: a bed isn’t everything!’

It was nearly a quarter past ten and it was still raining outside. Listening to other people’s tales, whatever they are, I sometimes feel like a debtor, like an eternal dinner guest who never offers any invitations himself, but usually I cannot bring myself to demand the attention of others.

A few years ago my wife’s sister was moving to another flat. She asked if I would help her. The woman who’d let her have her one-room flat was quite mad, she’d piled it high with junk she’d picked up at rubbish dumps, but she was anxious about it and wouldn’t let the removal men touch it, and so she didn’t know how to move her things out.

How many things can you get into a room? I thought my sister-in-law was exaggerating. I took the word rubbish heap figuratively. I promised to move the lady’s things bit by bit in my car. Even outside her door I felt a strange odour wafting from inside. The instant she let me in the smell of rot and mildew hit me violently. The woman, however, was neat and clean, the hand she held out to me was scoured white. She showed me in. I walked a narrow path between crates, boxes and masses of parcels until I reached the window and asked if I might open it. A wave of fresh air full of smoke and exhaust fumes rushed inside, but the atmosphere of decay which persisted here was not to be drowned. Then I helped the woman finish her packing. We tied up children’s copy books and stacked them in a crate together with burnt-out lightbulbs and an unmatching pair of sandals without straps, bits of worn-out cork tiles and armless dolls, old envelopes, the shells of radios, rusty saucepans, a broken chandelier and a glass marble. The woman had clearly spent her life collecting and storing other people’s rubbish, which possibly gave her a sense of hope or security. For five whole days I drove to and fro. She thanked me and promised me eternal salvation for my trouble, a salvation I’d soon experience because the time was nigh when mankind would assemble for judgement in the place called Armageddon. I felt like asking her why in that case she was keeping all those things, but there was no sense in putting this question to a crazy woman when I might just as well ask anyone else or myself.

As I was carrying downstairs what must have been the fiftieth package at least I couldn’t resist the temptation to untie the string and to tip the contents into the nearest dustbin. I covered it up with some empty paper cups and kitchen waste from the bin next to it, and drove off with the rest of the junk to my sister-in-law’s flat.

About an hour later I returned for the next load, but I had to wait a long time for her to let me in. She was standing in the door as if hesitating whether to admit me. ‘You, you . . .’ she said to me. ‘And I trusted you!’

‘What a hope,’ the foreman spoke up, ‘Let me tell you, I’ve learned this more than once in my life: you won’t get any thanks from a woman!’

Wisps of fog were drifting outside, rising from the pavements and the sodden lawns. In the telephone box outside the tavern a girl was smiling prettily down the instrument at someone.

I too used to smile. I thought that I was really seeing the woman I loved and that I could touch with my eyes what she was seeing just then. She told me: outside my window a raven is freezing on a branch, he’s telling me something but I can’t hear him. I was freezing as much as that raven. I had to breathe on the glass to see out. On a rime-covered tree there actually sat a raven. What could he say? Nevermore, nevermore. I thought I understood him: we’d never find anyone to love so much again.

The girl stepped out of the phone box. My companions were still lazily hanging about the tavern door. I lifted the receiver. I hesitated for a moment, but I so needed to hear a familiar voice that I dialled. Lída said she was pleased to hear me and wanted to know where I was calling from, what I had just been doing and if I wasn’t cold. She was looking forward to my coming home. I would have liked to say something nice to her, to my wife, to address her tenderly as I used to: Lída darling, or at least Lída dear, at least ask her what she was doing, what she was thinking about, but I was unable to say anything other than that I’d come straight home after visiting Dad at the hospital.

I remained in the box for a moment. My garish vest was brilliantly reflected in the glass. I fished in my pocket for a coin. That other number so
vehemently
forced itself on my mind that I repeated it in a whisper.

I stopped fishing for that coin. I watched my companions marching slowly uphill to the little park where we’d left our tools in a small shed. Mrs Venus caught sight of me and waved.

Some other time, my love, but I’m not silent because I’m not thinking of you, it’s just that I have nothing new to say to you.

And you think that this silence, the way we live now, is good?

I don’t know if it’s good, but I don’t know anything better.

You don’t know anything better? Just look at yourself, the stuff you’re wearing, this masquerade. Have you gone in for repentance or what?

No, it’s perfectly honest work. I can think while I’m doing it.

You can think, can you? How nice for you. And what about me? Are you at all interested in what’s happening to me? How I’ve been feeling? After all those years I haven’t even merited a single phone call from you.

We had a lot of phone calls with each other. At least a thousand!

Don’t count them up. I don’t want to hear numbers. Anyway, that was before. Afterwards you didn’t ring even once.

We’d said everything to each other. We were exhausted from those conversations. What else was there to say to each other?

You’re asking me? You might at least tell me whether the whole thing meant anything to you.

You know very well what you meant to me.

I don’t know anything after the way you behaved. I always thought . . .

What did you think?

Never mind. I didn’t want to believe it. After all you’d told me when we were together, how could I believe that you’d chase me away like some . . .

Please don’t cry!

Tell me at least, did you love me at all?

You know I did.

I don’t know anything. How am I to know?

An old woman was approaching the box. Perhaps she didn’t even want to telephone, but to be on the safe side I opened the directory and pretended to look for a number.

If you’d loved me you wouldn’t have behaved the way you did!

I was crazy about you.

Don’t be evasive. I asked you if you’d ever loved me. If you’re capable of loving anyone.

Don’t torture me!

Me torturing you? Me you? Tell me, my love, what have you done to me? At least explain to me what was good about it.

I just couldn’t carry on like that. Forgive me, but I couldn’t go on living like that!

And me, how am I to live? You never thought what would happen to me, did you? How can you be silent like this, it isn’t human! Surely you must say something to me, do something. You must do something about us!

At one time I used to write plays. The characters were forever talking, but their words went past each other, their remarks slid past one another like the slippery bodies of fish, without making contact. Did I write that way because I believed we could step out of our loneliness? Or because I needed to find a way of avoiding answers? Where words miss each other, where humans miss each other, real conflict may arise. Or did I suspect that a man cannot successfully defend himself in the eyes of another, and when he is talking he’s doing so only to drown the silence which spreads around him? To conceal from himself the reality of life, a reality which, at best, he perceives only at exceptional moments of awareness?

The man who had alone survived the crash of the aircraft which hit a church tower in Munich was working as a newspaper editor in Belgrade. I was curious to meet a person who had risen from the ashes, but his sister had just died of cancer and he asked me to postpone our meeting for a few days. When I called on him later his other sister was gravely ill with the same disease. ‘The doctors are giving her no more than two months,’ he said to me; ‘they told me this morning. You know what is odd? I went out into the street and I didn’t hear anything. There were trams and cars moving about and people talking, but I didn’t hear any of it. There was the same sudden quiet then, after the crash.’

I caught up with my companions. The youngster passed me my shovel, which he had carried for me on his handcart, and Mrs Venus said: ‘Bet that wasn’t your wife you’ve just phoned.’

Right by the kerb I noticed a dead mouse. I picked it up on my shovel and flung it on the rest of the rubbish.

My wife was amazed by what I told her. She couldn’t believe that I’d lied to her for so long. I said what most men would probably say in such a situation, that I had hoped to spare her needless suffering because I’d believed it would soon come to an end.

But you don’t want to end it? she asked.

I said that I loved the other woman, that I’d never loved any woman the way I loved her.

But I thought you loved me more than anybody else! Tears flooded her eyes. Then she wanted to hear details. Any kind of truth was preferable to silence. I was to tell her where she’d gone wrong and how she could put it right.

I poured out all my complaints and self-exculpating explanations, but after a while we were merely rehearsing who did the shopping, who the cooking, the laundry, the washing up and the floors, until I was horrified by the poverty of my own speech. I fell silent, but my wife wanted to hear something about the other woman and I, suddenly freed by my newly-discovered openness, began to praise the qualities and talents of my lover, to describe the uniqueness of what we were experiencing. But: as I was forcing all this into words I transformed the experiences which had been mine only, and which had seemed inimitable and unique, into something common, categorisable and conventionally melodramatic. Yet I was unable to stop talking, and my wife listened to me with such involvement, such readiness to understand me and maybe even advise me that I fell victim to the foolish idea that she might even share some of my feelings. But she was merely hoping that if only she received my confession and listened to me attentively she might transform my words on how we had drifted apart into the first act of a mutual drawing together. She would confront the urgent attraction of the other woman with her own patient understanding.