He escorts her to the same bistro as last time and on this occasion he offers her a glass of wine. Hana declines and just has a coffee.
They chat for a while about Matouš s health and the tablets that don't relieve his condition.
'Once when I was travelling westwards from Peking,' Matouš recalls, 'I got a swelling of the knee. There was no doctor in the vicinity so they brought me to the local soothsayer who was also a healer. She tried to find the cause of the illness. Your grandfather on your fathers side, she said to me, suffered from leg trouble, until in the end he was unable to walk. And when he was dying he didn't have his walking stick with him.'
'Was it true?'
'I don't know whether he had his stick with him or not, I wasn't horn then. But apparently he suffered with his legs and before he died he was unable to walk. So that old woman advised me to cut a walking stick out of paper and burn it at the crossroads at full moon in order to appease the suffering of my grandfather's spirit, and then I would find relief.'
And did you do it?'
'What harm was there in trying? It happened to be the day before the full moon.'
'But the spirit of your grandfather. . After all, your grandfather didn't live in China.'
'I have no particular belief in ghosts, Matron, or in the survival of the spirit, but if ghosts did indeed survive somewhere, then I expect they could accompany us on our travels.'
'And did it help you?'
'I don't know. The swelling went down and the knee hasn't hurt me since. Now it's my stomach that hurts me and I don't know which of my forebears I'm supposed to appease.'
Then he tells Hana about his troubles with Klára, from whom he is getting a divorce. Hana is sure this is the real cause of his pain.
'Do you know I never used to have any fear of solitude,' Matouš confides to her, 'nor of death, for that matter. I didn't think about it. While you're still young, you have the feeling that everything is opening up before you, and in fact you shun any commitments that might bind you. But then the dread of solitude descends upon you. On that point I differ from the sages I have read about. The wisest of them, once they had fulfilled their obligations towards their family and brought up their children, went away to a monastery or to some isolated hermitage and there they devoted themselves to contemplation and to understanding the Order. I haven't managed the first and I'm not even prepared to do the other. What else can I expect from life now? At best a nursing home.'
'But you're not going to stay on your own, are you?' Hana says. 'An interesting person like you.'
Matouš objects that no one is interested in what he has experienced or seen, nor the things he knows. Particularly not women.
'You're wrong there. Almost all women yearn for something different, for some change.' She stops short, and then says, 'I know this from our congregation and from the hospital; I know what the women talk about.'
Maybe she is only consoling him. Maybe she is only passing on the experiences of others. But most likely she is speaking about herself. Matouš would like to stroke her hand, at least, but he is shy to do so here in a bar where there are lots of people. Besides, he is afraid it might startle the pastor's wife and frighten her away.
It occurs to Hana to ask whether it really costs so much money to get a poetry collection published.
Matouš explains that it depends what one means by a lot of money, but in any event it would have to be at least enough for a publisher, if there was one, not to suffer a loss.
'I'll ask my husband,' Hana promises. 'Perhaps we could give you something towards it.'
'I couldn't possibly ask you to do such a thing.'
'Why not? People should help each other.'
'You're an angel, Matron.'
Hana waves her hand as if to ward off his words.
'No,' Matouš says, you're completely different from other women.'
'Different?'
'Better.'
Hana blushes, then says it is time she was going. So Matouš pays the bill and then before they part he repeats his invitation. Hana should come and see his collections. She says she's not sure that her husband will have the time, but Matouš may visit them whenever he likes. She will be pleased to see him and looks forward to the poems. The manse is there for people to come to whenever they feel low in spirits.
When Matouš gets home, he realizes that his stomach pain has gone. He makes himself another pot of tea and lies down fully dressed on the unmade bed. He makes up his mind to get rid of Klára once and for all, and when the pastor dies, he'll marry his widow.
5
Daniel was to write an article on the theme of Advent. The Bethlehem story had excited him ever since his youth: the Son of God appearing as a needy, even persecuted, human being; God arriving from somewhere other than people expected and not arriving as a bolt of thunder, not descending from the heavens, but being born of a woman — helpless and defenceless, just as we all arrive in the world. By accepting our fate from beginning to end, God made known that He accepted us and loved us, receiving us exactly as He made us, i.e. as His children whose death would grieve him.
Now Daniel sits at his computer and is incapable of finding within himself the requisite certainty of faith in God's birth.
Years ago, he had known a country doctor who had converted from Judaism to Catholicism. He was an outstanding doctor, a man who made a genuine effort to believe. The greatest problem for him was accepting the virgin birth. Perhaps his medical training proved an obstacle. One day he had come running to Daniel with an epic piece of news. He had just read in a specialized American journal that something of the sort was possible, that in one in a trillion cases self-induced
conception could occur and a sort of human clone was produced. That would explain Mary's immaculate conception. Except that, as he himself pointed out, it would entirely eliminate Jesus s divine origin and His identity as the Son of God would only be symbolic, as would His resurrection from the dead in that case. 'Or am I mistaken, Reverend?'
At the time, Daniel had told him that God's actions were one single mystery and it made no sense to try to explain them by some scientific hypothesis or other. That was what he himself believed or strove to believe then. For him, faith had represented a path that led from inhuman conditions towards humanity: Jesus embodied the spirit at a time when matter was invoked on every hand and science was proclaimed as the all-powerful conqueror of truth. Jesus represented love that had to be defended, when hatred was proclaimed as the driving force of history. The language of Scripture had sounded like music amidst the cacophonous caterwauling of the political leaders' speeches from every radio and television set. The hatred showered on Jesus's teaching by those who embodied violence, hypocrisy and treason, and who despised the free or independent spirit, had seemed to confirm the truth of those who then stood by Him — persecuted and mocked as in the early days of Christianity. The world seemed divided between good and evil by a clear and straight boundary.
The boundaries were now crumbling, both within people and outside them. The doubts that Daniel had thrust deep into his subconscious suddenly surfaced. The words that until recently he had solemnly proclaimed — aware of the greatness of the message they carried — now stuck in his throat.
The event at Bethlehem had probably occurred quite differently from the way he had so far expounded it, and therefore its significance was also different. It was mankind who, in their age-old longing to escape the inevitability with which life always ended in death, and in the spirit of the ancient myths and archetypes, had thought up both a royal and a divine origin for the crucified Christ, and devised His birth and hence His divine nature which they then proceeded to debate in subsequent centuries.