'I just wondered whether they might cope for a while without you.'
'That's not the point. You've already given me these flowers. It wouldn't be right for me to accept an invitation from you as well.'
'But I'm only inviting you for a coffee.'
Hana cannot understand the reason for the invitation but it will help take her mind off things. He is an entertaining man, and in spite of his profession he seems quite trustworthy.
The little bar is right next door to the hospital. There are only a few people seated at the small round tables, but the background music is a bit too loud. She doesn't feel at all at ease but she will have to put up with it, having accepted the invitation.
The journalist orders two Turkish coffees.
'That's not really the best thing for your stomach,' she scolds him.
'There you go; I didn't realize you knew my case notes.'
'People mostly take the advice we give them with a pinch of salt. We discharge them and they're back in a twinkling.'
'Actually I don't like coffee,' he admits. 'At home I only drink tea, but real tea, not the sort of thing they offer you in a pub here. When you go into a tea-house out east,' he says, indicating with his arm somewhere a long way off, 'it is not just a ceremony, but something else as well, something for you to taste and smell and see. For instance, they can drop in your teapot a small ball that some dear little Chinese ladies have woven from tea leaves up on some plantation in the
mountains. And that ball starts to swell and turn into a flower that unfolds while at the same time imparting to the water the taste and scent of tea, such as you'll never encounter here. Whenever I'm abroad I stock up on teas. Should you ever happen to have the time or inclination to call on me, I would make you Dragon's Fountain, say, or Snowflake.'
'And you make tea all by yourself?' Hana asks, disregarding his invitation and realizing that she has never seen his wife during visiting hours, though from his notes she saw he was married.
'Yes. I would never entrust anyone else with tea-making.' And for a while he describes the proper way to make tea. Water may be poured on the tea three times: the first time for strength, the second time for taste, the third time for thirst. But in China when you arrive in the evening for a tea session, they just sprinkle tea in the pot and then simply pour on hot water. 'You see, it's my conviction,' he adds, 'that the person who knows how to drink tea also knows how to forget the din and bustle of everyday life.'
Hana then asks about his wife and what she does, but the journalist brushes the question aside. Klára works in a bar, finishing quite late at night and sleeping through the day, so they scarcely see each other.
Apparently he does not enjoy talking about his wife; maybe there's something not quite as it should be between them and that was why she did not even come to see him. Perhaps that was the reason for his illness; Hana recognized long ago that most illnesses have their origin in mental not physical pain.
And what does her husband do, the journalist wants to know.
Her husband is a pastor.
'I've never taken coffee with a pastors wife. Nor with a pastor, for that matter. My people were unbelievers and I take after them. I must have been in more pagodas than churches. But I only visited them because I was interested in statues of the Buddha.'
'Do you think it's possible to live without a faith? Live well, I mean.'
'The way I see it, Matron, what is more important than faith is to have a good heart. I met a lot of people like that in China. They had no faith, just a good heart. And you're exactly that sort of person, and that's why you are able to take loving care of total strangers.'
'We are all carers.' Hana is at a loss; she is not used to chatting with men.
'Of course. But you're different. I'm sure you're kind to good and
bad alike. Because you can't help being kind. You remind me a bit of my mother. When she was still very young,' he quickly adds. 'She was the best person in the world.'
'That's what everyone thinks about their mother.'
'But she really was an exceptional woman. And I have known both exceptional and selfless women.' Again he recalls some Chinese women he once met when he first arrived in that country. Their husbands had been jailed or had been sent for re-education to some commune a thousand kilometres away and everything had fallen on those women: caring for their families and earning a living so that their children did not die of hunger. And in China, particularly for women, that meant working until they dropped. But they did not complain and bore their fate with humility and courage.
'Maybe they were ashamed of complaining in front of you, a foreigner.'
'Maybe,' he concedes. 'But all the same, their patience and composure was remarkable. And they waited loyally for their husbands.'
He then goes on to tell her about a massive flood he once witnessed on the Yellow River. The water got into the houses and barns, carrying away livestock, chattels and even people. The women behaved just like the men. They would carry a hundredweight of earth in baskets on their backs, those little women, to help repair the dikes and save what could be saved. It was impossible to save anything anyway, as water is such a mighty element and in that plain there wasn't even the tiniest mound you could climb up above the water.
Hana listens to him with interest. She likes the way he speaks nicely about women, even if they were women from a country she will never set eyes on.
And weren't you afraid?' she asks him and says that she is afraid of water; water has always played a baneful role in her life, and almost killed her once.
Matouš starts to apologize for bringing water into his narrative but China is all water: rivers, enormous rivers flowing across the plains and between weird-shaped cliffs. And canals and rice paddies. In their paintings and songs, the surface of the water glistens in the moonlight. The trigram 'k'an' denotes water, rain and also danger. As to whether he was afraid, at such a moment one thinks of what one ought to do, not about the danger. The same thing applies to an earthquake. But during an earthquake everything happens so fast that one doesn't even
have time to be afraid. One either lives or not. Perhaps if he were trapped somewhere under rubble he might be afraid. He goes on to tell Hana about a volcanic eruption he witnessed during his one and only visit to Washington State. The volcano had a beautiful name — Helena — but what he saw was terrifying. It looked just like an atomic explosion. The entire mountain top blew off. He just stared at it and in those first seconds it didn't even occur to him that his life was at risk. It looked like a fantastic film effect. It finally came home to him when the cloud of ash and smoke started to drift towards him. All of a sudden he realized he couldn't breathe. And it started to turn dark in the middle of the day.
While Matouš is telling stories, he draws in the air with his finger: the plain, the water, the river winding through the rocks, and the mountain top flying off. Hana notices he has a pretty hand with fine, almost feminine fingers.
'But do you know what I found most astonishing of all was not the darkness at noon, nor the solidifying lava, nor the burning trees, but the silence. Not the cheep of a bird, not the chirp of a cricket — not even the buzz of a fly. Most of the people around me found it horrifying but for me it brought back the words of the Chinese sage: In the sky symbols arise, on the earth shapes are formed. And also: What first rises to the sky must fall to earth. And instead of being horrified, I was aware of the greatness of nature.' Matouš relates terrible experiences yet smiles all the while at Hana. When Hana expresses surprise at his smile, he explains that when he experiences something of that kind he is actually happy: that he survived and that he has enriched his life, his experience. And that was something he always longed for, particularly while he was young — to experience something, to understand something and then tell people about it.