He took the gouges from their case and started to hone them on a small oilstone before sitting down to carve.
A few days earlier the gallery owner who had promised him the exhibition had visited him to ask how the preparations were coming along. He had also taken a look at the latest carvings and seemed to be delighted with them. He maintained that they were not just better from a technical point of view, they were also better in terms of expression, in the way that his figures, through each of their details,
expressed a turmoil of mind and emotion that was almost tumultuous.
The gallery owners praise had gratified him although he ought to have told him that the mental and emotional turmoil in the wood reflected a far more passionate and tumultuous agitation in his soul.
He had preached today for the last time. He had told no one, not even himself, but he knew that he would never again return to the pulpit. Was it because of the woman who had entered the chapel unexpectedly and uninvited?
No, he had brought it on himself; the woman simply stood at the end of a path he had embarked on a long time before she appeared. He had been guilty of deception before then, when he had concealed his doubts about the fundamentals, about the message he brought and about the Christ he proclaimed.
His only excuse was that he had deceived himself too. He wanted so much to believe in everything he preached, to believe that God assumed human form, that He suffered, that He died on the cross, that He descended into a vague and unimaginable hell and on the third day rose again from the dead. That He ascended into a heaven that was situated in a vague and unimaginable space, and there sat down at the right hand of His Father, God Almighty, where He will remain until the day He returns to earth to judge the living and the dead. He wished to believe it and so he used to convince himself that everything was just the way he preached it, precisely because it was unbelievable and inconceivable. He wanted to believe it because if nothing he preached was true, then life would be no more than a meaningless cluster of days between the beginning and the end, between the eternity that preceded it and the eternity that would come after.
Previously he had trodden paths that people had followed for centuries and now all of a sudden he found himself in the middle of an immense plain devoid of paths. He could set off in any direction. Admittedly he could not see the end of the plain but he knew that whichever direction he took he would eventually confront an insurmountable, bottomless abyss.
He had done what he could to dispel that image of an open space leading to an abyss that engulfed everything and everyone, but he had not succeeded.
He was conscious of a cold panic, dizziness and gripping heart pain.
He ought to get up and leave this tiny room, go and find his children, his wife, go and make love to Bára. He ought to kneel down here before this unfinished carving of Jesus on a donkey and beg for the gift of faith that alone could dispel the anxiety, bridge the abyss and offer the grace that is denied to all other life.
He didn't kneel down.
The pain in his chest grew.
He got up and walked over to the window. There was a sudden break in the clouds and the heavens were revealed. Beyond them an endless universe. Billions and billions of stars. An infinity of time and space. And astonishingly, there was no place in it any longer — no fitting place in it — for a God who had become man and watched over events on this insignificant planet.
Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead and turned cold; Daniel realized he was beginning to fall. Everything started to rush away from him. And tomorrow he had a date with Bára; how would he get there? He groped around him for something to hold on to.
4
Hana
This is Daniel's fourth day in intensive care, so Hana returns to the hospital, this time as a volunteer nurse. The heart attack was fairly extensive, affecting almost a quarter of the cardiac muscle, but the doctors are satisfied with the progress of his recovery so far.
Hana sits by Daniel's bed holding his hand and trying to appear calm to boost his confidence and strength. Each day she tells him again how everyone is praying for him, at home and in the congregation, how people call the manse asking how he is. Hana smiles at Daniel, strokes his hand and tells him for what must be the hundredth time already that everything will be fine, his heart will have a little scar, but otherwise it will be back to normal and serve him for a long time to come, except that he'll have to take care not to overdo things, and when he comes home he'll have to have a proper rest. After all, he has scarcely had a holiday in recent years.
Daniel gazes at her in silence. It's as if old age has crept into his
blue-grey eyes, or rather, as Hana has come to know so well during her thirty years in the hospital, it's as if an intense weariness stared out of them.
Hana then reports on how the rebuilding work at the manse is progressing; the potter s wheel is already installed and the joiner is putting up shelving. Máša comes to the manse every other day; she has been looking out books and already has several boxes full, most of them for children.
Daniel asks after Masa's children.
There will be a new court hearing next week and Dr Wagner believes Máša will get the children back. She will have to declare that the paper in which she relinquished the children was signed under pressure from her husband. Even a few weeks ago she would have been incapable of declaring anything of the sort, but at least now she has recovered somewhat from the shock of her husbands abandoning her. Hana always makes a point of talking to her about it in order to give her encouragement.
Finally, Hana tells him about Magda and Marek who can't wait for Daniel to be moved on to the general ward where they will be able to visit him. Then she dries up. She is not sure what interests Daniel at this moment. She fears that her concerns may seem remote to him, that other peoples worries must seem preposterous, seeing that his body and particularly his soul are contending with the weariness that Hana can detect in his eyes. She ought to do something to cheer him up but she doesn't know what. So she tells him how much she misses him. She says, 'I love you, Dan. You're the person I'm fondest of. When you come home I'll take care of you and make sure everything's all right. We'll take a trip down to my folks perhaps, or anywhere you like.'
Tears suddenly appear in Daniel's eyes and his lips move silently.
'Were you wanting to say something?' Hana asks. She wipes away the tears and hands him a glass of tea to moisten his lips.
Daniel asks, for the first time, 'How did it happen?'
And Hana tells him how he was a long time coming to lunch and how she went down to the workshop and found him lying by the window, groaning.
'I got an awful fright,' Hana says. Her immediate thought was that it might be his heart so she called the emergency services. 'They brought you here and you've been here ever since.'
'That's what I thought,' Daniel says and closes his eyes.
'I was at your side all the first night, but you didn't know anything about it.'
Before going, Hana pours fresh tea into his glass and changes the water in the vase containing roses that Daniel probably doesn't even notice.
Then she gives Daniel a kiss and promises to come again in the afternoon.
'What's the time now?' Daniel asks her.
Hana says it is nearly noon. She just wants to check that Magda is safely home from school and give the workmen something to eat.
'You don't have to come,' Daniel says. 'They are taking good care of me here and I'm getting better, aren't I? You said so yourself.'