'Thank you. I expect you're right.'
'Your see, people these days over-dramatize everything. They've got the idea that it was only scoundrels, brutes and fanatics who worked with us. But we were normal people. At the beginning we believed, like a lot of others, that socialism would bring something better than what we had. Anyone who resisted it seemed to us like an enemy. But when you started to analyse things, you soon lost your enthusiasm. We only did as much as we had to.'
'I also had some encounters with some of your people,' said Daniel. 'It's possible that the people who dealt with me only did what they had to, but it was plenty, I assure you. But that is neither here nor there at this moment.'
'Yes, you're a pastor. The way the church was treated was crazy, absolutely mindless. We are all reaping the dire consequences of that now. People nowadays only believe in property, money and their careers.'
He was unable to fathom whether the man was putting it on, or whether he was saying what he truly felt.
Then Daniel realized that this man had once sat at a desk with portraits of the murderer Stalin and his local Czech satrap on the wall behind him, while his father had sat facing him, the indelible experience of eight years in the camps imprinted on his mind, and an understandable feeling of tension. His father would have known he had to give some sort of answer, and whether he left the room a relatively free person was entirely up to the person who now sat opposite his son Daniel with a friendly expression on his face, talking to him as if they were jointly engaged in the struggle against present-day materialism. The man could not recall his father, he had just been one of the many they had summoned whenever they needed them. Whereas his father, if he were still alive, would certainly have remembered him. This captain had been one of just a few of those who had attached themselves like leeches to his father's life. Later this man had disgraced himself and maybe then some other captains had latched on to him, so
that he now felt justified in bemoaning his reduced state. Any sense of humility, let alone repentance, was foreign to such people. And by coming to see him, he, Daniel, had bolstered the man's feelings that he was one of the just, one of the victims, someone worthy of honour, praise and trust.
Suddenly he felt disgusted at his action in coming here and the fact that he was meekly sitting and listening and scarcely taking issue. He stood up, saying he had no wish to stay any longer, thanked him and prepared to leave.
'Should you ever need any advice,' said the erstwhile captain, or just feel like dropping in for a chat, you'll be very welcome!'
6
Matous
Matous Volek is not in particularly good form. His appetite is not returning and his stomach hurts from time to time. He can't go to the pub or to any of the offices of the journals he works for. This is the third day he has been entirely alone and to cap it all it is Sunday morning and holy days have always depressed him. He spends a little while playing with the seven tangram dice but fails to build any interesting picture. So he tries to call up a number of friends but nobody answers the phone. They are probably at their weekend country places or at the seaside.
It's hot. Matouš gets up and puts on the big ceiling fan. The fan whines, which Matouš finds irritating, but at the same time its noise and the movement of the hot air remind him of cheap hotels in China or Singapore. He searches among his CDs for the one with Chinese music with its sense of the unusual that always soothes him. While listening to the 'Moon Mirrored in the Waters' he makes himself a pot of red tea and then goes to sit in the old armchair with its worn leather cover.
A white screen and behind it the lively gestures of the puppets. Gongs and Mongolian fiddles. Wooden clappers. The somersaults of the actors in their pure silk costumes. Wu-tan in a red robe and wielding a sword.
Pagodas in parks, the red walls of the Imperial Palace, gates with yellow roofs. The fish market and bicycles flashing past like a shoal of fish. Those under sentence of death being hauled off to execution on a cart; rebellious intellectuals and con men, smugglers, corrupt officials and murderers. The ever-curious crowd goggling at those who are about to die. When the crowd becomes enraged, it hurls books into the flames. Brainwashed children burn the works of old Chinese masters along with those of foreign devils, or goad an old man along: they thrust a four-sided hat on his head and hang a sign around his neck saying 'STINKING TEACHER CHANG PREACHING THE CAPITALIST ROAD'. They make him kneel before a portrait of Mao and recite from memory some of the dictators articles. Then they dance the Dance of Loyalty and hang a wall-poster of loyalty on the wall. They all sing The East is Red'; all in the name of some senseless, self-destructive revolution, all in a country where until recently the old were esteemed as nowhere else in the world.
The Yellow River and in it Mao, the fat, ugly and cruel unifier of the country. Even on the day before he died millions of brainwashed children and old people were shouting: May he live a thousand years!
How many years, how many months, how many days does Matouš have left? He would like to leave his burrow behind, leave behind the world of screeching tramcars, a world well-disposed to con men, loose women, cancer and bad poets, whose works mostly did not get burned, and find a place of silence wherein he would hear nothing but his own breathing. But the fan whines and the solitude presses on his brain and all he can see and hear are mindlessly roaring crowds.
If only his bad wife were to look in; she regularly drops by for money. It is two months since she was last here. She was probably too ashamed to come to the hospital, or else she knew he had no money there. But at this moment he would give her whatever she asked for, provided he had enough. Maybe she would make it up with him and stay till the end.
Matouš believes he is endowed with a special gift of perceiving the aura that surrounds every individual, so that at moments of clairvoyance he is able to discern when the aura is so weakened that the person no longer has enough strength to live. But he is incapable of seeing his own aura and this fact does not help his peace of mind.
He knows he ought to rise above all the cares that flow from his awareness of his own self, cut the umbilical cord that connects him to
the outside world. Instead of succumbing to anxiety, he ought to advance with equanimity towards the Great Coalescence. Except that he spent the whole of yesterday gawping at the television in order to dispel his loneliness, distract his thoughts and not miss what life had to offer for the brief moment that fate still granted him. But on Sunday mornings there are only children's programmes on television. So he pours himself a glass of wine and some lines of poetry come to him:
Drink wine, anyway, do nothing
Float away Fathomless longing.
In his stomach the wine is instantly transformed into boiling lead that rises back into his throat.
The eyes of a jade Buddha stare at him from the glass case opposite his bed. Oh, monks, this, then, is the noble truth about suffering: birth is suffering old age is suffering sickness is suffering, death is suffering, contact with unpleasant things is suffering when one does not attain what one wishes it is suffering. .
Suddenly he makes up his mind. It's Sunday, he'll go and hear the husband of that motherly matron preach. Maybe his sermon will cheer him up.
He enters the chapel after the service has started. The place seems half-empty to him. Perhaps it's always like this, or perhaps it's because the holidays are beginning. All the same, Matous does not sit down but stands behind the last row of pews trying to make out whether the pastor's wife is also in church.