'I wouldn't bother,' his neighbour chips in. 'The telephone costs you three times as much these days and you don't get through anyway.'
Daniel hung up.
'Even if you are a Protestant,' his neighbour returned to his favourite topic, 'I don't see how you can reject the Virgin Mary. We should all work with her for the salvation of the world.'
We can't work for the salvation of the world unless we work first of all for the salvation of ourselves. Who will help us, seeing that the mother of Christ and her son have long ago rotted in their graves? Will we manage it without the help of someone above us? The starry heaven above us and the moral law within us.
Fortunately, the door opened with a creak. It wasn't Hana but quite a young nurse. 'How are you feeling, Reverend?'
'Not too bad, thanks!'
'In a few more days you'll be out running. .' She stopped short; she was probably about to say: running after the girls, but such encouragement seemed out of place for a clergyman. Clergymen don't run after girls. They try to live according to God's commandments as best they can. And they pray to Almighty God, as long as their faith remains. And when they don't live according to the commandments and their faith dwindles, so that all that remains are empty words? Then they can run after the girls, but they try to conceal them from the rest of the world. When they succeed, they don't
conceal them from their consciences, or their hearts. Then their hearts fail.
Daniel pondered on what had happened to his life. The other woman was now very remote and seemed to him like a dream, as if from another life. It was odd, almost incredible, that just a few days ago they had lain in each others' arms and made love. Had it been bad or just human, the way he had behaved?
One succumbs to a longing for love, for new companionship, for feelings that seem stronger than all other feelings. These then overwhelm the sense of duty and promise of fidelity, putting at risk everything: family, reputation, honour, and in the end, one's life too. But now, as he lay here with only a remote possibility of seeing the other woman, and the illness widening the gulf between them, not only in space but also in time, Daniel was overcome with shame and regret for what he had dissipated, and above all that he had deceived his nearest and dearest. Hana showed him love even though he had betrayed her and that made him feel ashamed. He didn't know whether he would live or how he would live, he only knew that he oughtn't to go on living the way he had been: in deceit and duplicity.
6
Matous
Matouš leaves the courthouse. Even though he feels that the woman judge who has just released him fairly willingly from the shackles of marriage has removed his life's heaviest burden from him, he is overcome by nostalgia. He stops outside the front entrance. Although he won't admit it, he is waiting for Klára.
Finally Klára appears and notices him. She seems to hesitate for a moment, wondering whether to walk past him disdainfully as if he was of less interest than the window display of some boutique, but then she stops and says: 'Ciao then, you poor old devil. Enjoy yourself!'
She then permits Matouš to light her cigarette before walking away on high heels towards a Honda car in which some foreign devil is
waiting for her. She climbs into the seat next to him and then drives out of Matouš's life, probably for good.
Matouš should feel relieved and light-headed at the prospect of a future of calm stretching out before him as well as the fulfilment of his destiny, but instead his legs become heavy.
He walks home, takes off his coat and stretches out on the bed. He lies there for a long time, several hours, gazing up at the ceiling and slowly drags himself through the thicket of hopeless contemplations. On the bedside table there is a jug of wine from the previous day, along with a loaf of bread going stale and a bowl of boiled rice with peanuts. There is no knife to hand so he simply breaks off lumps of bread and slowly chews them. There is also a pile of books by the bed. From time to time he picks up the topmost one and leafs through it for a while before tossing it to one side.
The ceiling is covered in cracks and the dirty threads of cobwebs which flutter in the draught that wafts into the room along with the screech of tram wheels and the din of lorries.
Faces flicker across the greyish surface of the ceiling. Some of them are savage and long forgotten, others are familiar: they are alive, more alive than all the faces of actors and non-actors that move across the television or cinema screens. Women whom he trusted or on whom he even showered love, while knowing they would leave him in the end, scowl and leer at him. He tries to ignore them and to ignore Klára who wantonly tumbles into bed with unknown men.
His thoughts turn to the nurse whom he now takes the liberty of calling Hana. He has already been twice to the church and listened to the confused litanies of her husband, whose aura has already totally disappeared, or possibly Matouš has not been able to concentrate enough to make it out. The time that Matouš was invited to lunch by the minister's wife, he actually had a conversation with the minister. He had felt an unconscious need to take issue with that follower of the resurrected Christ. Did the minister know that the Chinese, the worlds most populated nation, had managed to get by without believing in a god and yet the people did not live any less morally than in those places where they acknowledged a god or gods? The minister was aware of this. In the East, he said, there was less individualism and people were more obedient to an order that had been established over centuries.
Did that mean that concepts of a god or gods and an immortal soul
were simply products of our individualism, of our reluctance to countenance the extinction of our own selves?
The minister said that was not what he had in mind, although anxiety about the extinction of the self certainly played a role in our notions of God.
The minister was either incredibly conciliatory or was consumed with doubts of some kind. Either about himself or about God.
Matous has only spoken to the minister's wife a couple of times since he promised her his poems, and he still hasn't taken them to her. He has been waiting for some more suitable moment: he has the feeling that his poems ought to crown his acquaintance with that woman, rather than be an opening gambit.
But on one occasion, when he was feeling particularly bad and Hana brought him his medicine for the second time, he had recited to her some of his poems and told her that she had been the inspiration for them.
Surely not — she replied in astonishment — how could I have?
Just by being you, he told her. There is something mysterious about you, something oriental and mystical.
That's all in your imagination, she commented.
No. My whole life was meaningless until I met you.
You sound delirious, she laughed in embarrassment, and even touched his forehead to see if he had a fever, but she took her hand away before he had time to press it to his forehead.
Now Matouš thinks about that good woman with particular intensity. He thinks about her not only because his solitariness was officially confirmed today, but also because he has an odd premonition that something bad has befallen Hana and that she might perhaps welcome Matous's attention.
He ought to phone her and offer his help should she require it, but at this moment he lacks the will to do anything.
He who does, loses. All we hold we lose in the end.
Matouš falls asleep.
When he wakes up he can hear the boom of the ocean waves and the murmur of the crowd as they watch condemned prisoners being driven away to execution. Curiosity and indifference in the ant heap. Blazing fires.
Then his mothers voice intrudes upon him: Mattie, why aren't you eating? Stop complaining, Mattie, and pull yourself together,