Love and Garbage Read Free Page B

the past had only been dreamed of was now beginning to materialise, my father said, pointing to the sky. Angels did not exist, but people could now fly. There was no paradise for human souls to dwell in, but one day I would understand that it was more important for people to live well and happily here on earth.
    Although I did not fully understand what my father was explaining to me, some inexplicable sadness in his words made me cry. To comfort me, my father promised that he would take me along to Open Day at the airfield the following Sunday, and let me fly in a plane over Prague.
    And that Sunday he actually put me inside a roaring machine which bumpily rolled along the grass and then, to my amazement and horror, rose into the air, complete with me, and as it gained height the ground below me began to tilt and everything on it grew smaller and smaller until it had shrunk away to nothing. The first thing to disappear were people, then the horse-drawn vehicles and the cars, and finally even the houses. I closed my eyes and found myself in a thunderous darkness which engulfed me. I was alarmed at the thought that I would never return to earth again, like my namesake who, as they said, had died.
    Nothing happened at that time. Daria left and I went back to my work. I was writing some stories about my boyhood loves and I was flooded by memories of a long-past excitement. As I glanced at the darkest corner of my study, at the armchair she’d been sitting in, that ancient excitement seemed to take shape again.
    I went out to a telephone box – the telephone in my flat had been disconnected – and dialled her number. I was still feeling an excitement that would be proper at my age only if one accepted that such a state was proper at any age. I enquired how the Budapest show had gone. For a while I listened to her account, which shifted between pictures and wine-cellars, then I said something about my own work and remarked that I had been thinking about her visit and that I should be pleased to see her again some time. But I did not propose anything definite, and she only smiled silently at my words. Even so the conversation had disturbed me, and instead of returning home I drifted through the little streets near where I lived and in my mind continued the conversation, which was becoming increasingly personal and brittle. I had lost the habit of such conversations, or of conversation generally. I had lost the habit of communicating with anyone.
    I had been living in a strange kind of exile for the previous ten years, hemmed in by prohibitions and guarded sometimes by visible, sometimes by invisible, and sometimes only by imagined watchers. I was not allowed to enter into life except as a guest, as a visitor, or as a day-wage labourer in selected jobs. Over those years there grew within me a longing for something to happen, something that would change my life, while at the same time my timidity, which I had inherited from my mother, increased and made me shy away from any kind of change and from all strangers. Thus my home became for me both a refuge and a cage, I wanted to remain in it and yet also to flee from it; to have the certainty that I would not be driven out and also the hope that I’d escape one day. I clung to my children, or at least I needed them more than fathers normally need their children. I similarly needed my wife. The outside world came to me through those nearest and dearest to me, and through them I stepped into that world, from which I’d been excluded.
    I don’t think life was easier for any of them. The children, just as I did in my childhood, bore the brand of an inappropriate origin, and my wife spent years looking for a halfway decent job. Weary of queueing at departments charged with the protection of workplaces against the politically non-elect, she accepted the post of opinion researcher for some sociological survey. For a wage which was humiliating rather than an incentive she had to traipse