After several weeks, when his condition improved and then worsened again, he was taken to the hospital and placed in a room with two other patients. The doctors were able to reduce his fever, but I was told his fever was coupled with the cancer, which had spread to his kidneys and other parts of his body. We had to assume he had only a few days left. Nevertheless, especially after a transfusion, Father felt better and, suddenly lucid, said he was looking forward to going home and seeing Mother and — something more enticing — his computer. He mentioned the poor fellow in the next bed who coughed throughout the night and was probably on his last legs. Then Father’s state worsened and he started complaining that he couldn’t sleep because of his neighbor’s cough.
I offered the doctor some money and asked if Father could be moved to a private room. And so for his final days, Father received his own room with a bathroom.
I went to see him every day at the hospital. Although he was extremely weak, he still believed his health would improve, and just before the end, he told me he would fight his illness. He really didn’t feel so old.
The day before he died, he complained he had fallen on the way to the bathroom and couldn’t get up. When he called the nurse, she started shouting at him to pick himself up off the floor; she had enough work without having to get him back into bed. He asked me how people could be so insensitive to someone who had lost his strength.
In his final hours, I sat by the bed holding his hand. I don’t know if he sensed I was there, but I hoped at least part of him registered that someone was trying to hold him from departing, that he was not alone. His breathing became more and more intermittent; a few seconds would pass between the individual breaths, and I knew the moment was approaching when they would cease altogether.
Certainly I had witnessed too many deaths in my childhood, but I had never been present when someone close to me was dying. I had never experienced firsthand the moment of the irrevocable leap from the last breath to eternal nonexistence.
That moment kept coming back to me, and I knew there was only one way to overcome its morbid insistency.
Perhaps it was the final impulse for me to start writing the litany I called Love and Garbage.
I had filled various notebooks with fragments of love declarations, letters, and unhappy meditations about our precipitous and self-destructive civilization. I had noted down a word or two about Father’s death, but now I could think of little else. I loved my father, and nothing could tarnish or impugn this love — it would endure for as long as I lived, perhaps even longer, since things in this world cannot vanish entirely. Angels or some other ethereal beings carry scales in their hands upon which are weighed all the love and hatred in this world, and life inclines to that which predominates.
*
The news came that Václav Havel was seriously ill in the prison where he was being held for defending the unjustly persecuted from despotism. Finally, fearing that the world-famous author might die from pneumonia in a cell, the custodians of power commuted the few months remaining of his sentence and released him. He lay in the hospital near Petřín Hill, and as soon as he was doing a little better, we went to see him. I don’t think this tiny hospital had ever had a patient so besieged with visitors.
Václav was pale and thin, but otherwise it seemed his long stay in prison had neither broken him nor dulled his interest in public affairs.
When they released him into home care a few days later, we invited him to a meeting where we were composing our journal Contents. We told him about the events that had unfolded since the last time he had met with us — who had allowed himself be exiled abroad, who had written something new, what we thought about the political situation after the change of the Moscow potentate. He listened attentively and then, with a certain matter-of-factness, gave us his assessment of the situation. In his opinion, changes were happening beneath the apparently unvarying surface of society. The Communists, who assumed they were destined to remain in power here and in every other country in which they had seized power, were demoralized and so intellectually barren that they were gradually losing the ability to alter anything. Without change, no future was possible, and so the heterogeneous society of those who refused to accept the current state of affairs would become more important. The Communists had already lost the majority of their ardent followers, and even though they lived with a certain self-deception, they knew well enough that all the Socialist euphoria was feigned, and they were supported by the people less and less. They remained in power only owing to the police force, but at the same time they did not dare resort to their previous violence. Havel also discussed the international situation, the attempt to suppress Solidarity in Poland and the alternation of old men in Russia. His “lecture” lasted about thirty minutes. When we expressed our collective surprise that a person who had just returned from three and a half years in prison possessed such an overview of events, he explained that it was quite simple. All you had to do was read Rudé právo thoroughly. You don’t read it, he admonished us, and have no idea that everything is right there between the lines — what’s happening, what rankles those at the top, and what kind of miracle they are still hoping for.
*
I wrote to Jürgen Braunschweiger that I had something resembling a novel in my head, and a large part of it on paper. Also, I had unexpectedly obtained my passport. Then I explained to him the limited number of countries I was allowed to travel to. I immediately received a proposal that all of his authors — the ones who had passports, at least — meet somewhere in Hungary. He had purchased an old castle in the town of Motovun in Slovenia, which he had converted to a summer residence where he spent almost every weekend. From there, it wasn’t far to Hungary, and he’d almost certainly be allowed into Hungary. First off, he didn’t publish any Hungarian authors, and, second, the Hungarian authorities behaved much more civilly than ours.
With Wolfgang’s help, Jürgen and I agreed in writing on a place and time to meet. In the end, only three of Jürgen’s authors attended the meeting — Kohout and Gruša were already living in Austria and Germany; Ludvík Vaculík was refused a passport; and my former boss at Literární noviny, Jiří Šotola, had gone so far as to be published officially. I was somewhat alarmed by the idea that, like Pavel Kohout, I could be deprived of my citizenship and thereby exiled from my country, but I didn’t think it probable that the authorities would allow me to go to Hungary with such perfidious intentions.
We decided to gather at a small summer resort near Lake Balaton, and after a span of ten years I saw my publisher and my friend Gruša again. My friends consumed a great deal of truly superb wine (I was rather abstemious as far as wine was concerned) and discussed the possibilities of further publications. Some time ago, Jürgen had left the publishing house that had brought out our works and established his own company, which published illustrated books — studies, for example, about the history of flags or a pictorial devoted to different countries or nature reserves. Publishing any sort of imaginative literature did not fit into his plans, but he was prepared to continue working with us as a literary agent. He lacked experience, of course, in publishing books other than in the German language, but he promised to help us as much as he could. If we found a better agent, he would have no objections. He also said that the worst was behind us. We had successfully gained access to the book market — we were now known and he had no doubt we would become established. I saw that he would have been relieved to be released from the burden of his friendly duty to help us.