return. Yet I've always enjoyed walking in the countryside with my wife. Because I am, by nature, introverted, I liked to absorb silently the multitude of shapes, sounds, colours and odours, the fragments of accidental conversations and scenes. My wife, on the other hand, would always look for analogies to what we saw. Everything was transformed in her mind into a cluster of images mingling dream and reality. That was her way of leaving the narrow pathways which we, like all walkers, had to keep to.
But we didn't have a landscape of our own outside the city, and we never found it.
The local train took me to a station where I would transfer to a train going to Prague. Here, the platform was crowded with people who, like me, were going home from work: men with leather tool-bags hanging on their shoulders, often wearing only dirty overalls; and young factory girls from the gramophone plants, looking as alike as the products they made.
The windows of this train were so filthy that the countryside seemed to have vanished in a fog. I'd find a seat that was free and, if possible, not broken, and fall asleep immediately from exhaustion.
At home, my wife would be expecting me, glad that we were together again, and already annoyed that I had to leave again on Monday. Why didn't I quit? What sense did it make, wasting my time painting dumb stakes, digging rocks out of the ground and straining my heart, my back or whatever it was that hurt that weekend?
I'd tell her I'd stick with it until we finished the work to be done outside. I didn't tell her I actually enjoyed leaving those pathways that, as an ordinary walker, I would have to follow; that I got pleasure from coming into close touch
with the landscape.
My wife would accuse me angrily of being pig-headed. There's so much work to be done here at home. Our son is redecorating his room, and if I was so keen to work with my hands, why didn't I help him out?
So I would change into my blue overalls and go to chip the plaster off a few bricks.
There is a Greek fable about a giant, Antaeus, the son of Poseidon and Gaia, goddess of the earth. Antaeus would challenge anyone at all to a duel because he knew he was invincible, for whenever he sank to the ground, his mother would renew his strength. He never once lost, until one day he encountered Heracles, who held him up in the air and so was able to strangle him to death. The Greeks, of course, were on Heracles's side; he was, I suppose, their favourite hero. Nevertheless, the unconscious wisdom of this myth warns us not to let any contemporary Heracles hold us away from the earth for too long.
When the bricks were clean, I'd take a pile of letters that had come for me during the week and read them.
From her home in Sweden, my translator sent me this letter:
We have had a magnificent hot summer and after a few lean years we can be delighted with the enormous harvest of fruits, vegetables and mushrooms. But how can we enjoy them when there is radioactivity still lurking in the cultivated parts of Sweden, especially in the most fertile lands? People are ignoring the warnings, and I'm terrified of what the results of their indifference might be. We have a good monitoring system for our air, water and land, and that's why we know that the catastrophe is a fact. Thousands of seals
have died from a virus we have not yet been able to identify. Even our water fowl are affected, and it isn't known whether that was caused by the same virus that struck the seals. The fish population is decreasing. Hunters in the north have been shocked to learn that deer contain more than 45,000 bequerelles, despite all the time that has passed since Chernobyl. Every day there's a new warning, or new facts about the catastrophe. They find, for instance, that they've added thirty chemicals that are harmful to human health, especially children's health, to ice cream in order to make it last in storage. Red peppers imported from Spain are treated with a poison, and their skins are as tough as orange peel. Another panic: tampons contain such a high percentage of dioxin that they are carcinogenic. The news about the decay of the ozone layer, especially around the poles, is terrifying. And nothing is being done to lower the number of cars on the road. This spring we had an excellent exhibition on the destruction of nature and historical buildings, which are almost all damaged beyond recovery. When I come to Prague, I'll bring you a catalogue. .
That evening my wife and I put on our best clothes and went to a reception for an American writer at the US embassy. I was invited as a fellow writer, not as a surveyor's assistant. My new job was too fresh and I'd done it for too short a time to be able to make anything more than small talk out of it. What would my life be like now, I wondered, if I'd been driven into this substitute profession twenty or even forty years ago, like so many others? Who remembers any more that those stokers, window-washers, ditch-diggers or warehouse workers, exhausted by hard
work and monotony, once had other callings and professions: they studied Kant, St Augustine or Paret's theory of the élite; they lectured to students and led discussions on the radio.
We are sitting at a well-laid table tended by waiters in white gloves. My American colleague, having been asked about it, talks of his latest novel. It's about the son of a respectable family who falls in with drug addicts, runs away from home and lives on the street, in abandoned garages or drug dens. His mother goes looking for him, but in order to gain credibility in the drug underworld, she allows someone to shoot her up with heroin. She soon ends up like her son.
The American writer's wife was asked to help distribute aid to the starving children of Ethiopia, and she tells horrific stories about the long march those wretched people had to undertake, and how many of them dropped dead of exhaustion before they could ever reach the places where milk — and salvation — awaited them. The world is full of tragic human stories.
What do I write about?
I'm at a loss, for I'm not writing anything at the moment; I'm doing something else. But, I think, I would like to write about Mother Earth. I can see that my answer is neither complete enough, nor very understandable. The theme doesn't seem attractive enough. It would be more appropriate to write about terrorists, coprophilia and necrophilia, homicidal perverts or, even better, female killers or fugitives from justice or, at the very least, about the suffering of prisoners in the gulag; it would be hard to excite audiences, inured to bloodshed by television, with anything else.
Fortunately, no one asks me what I am writing. They want to know what I think about the idea of Central Europe. Do I expect some kind of intellectual and moral renewal to come from this region?
I reply that I didn't know of any place where people are willing to give up the advantages of technology, so what kind of renewal is possible?
Someone hastily corrects my rather gloomy answer by saying that he believes in the purifying power of a reborn Christianity, and he gives persuasive examples, while I— and I am surprised by this myself — find myself returning to an expansive beet field, moving slowly forward with my little box of paints and brushes. From a thicket of enormous leaves, two slender furry bodies emerge, then disappear, emerge and disappear again, two apparitions that seem to be swimming straight for me through the beet field ocean. I can already hear their wheezing, eager breath. Obedient to a long forgotten reflex, I bend down, tear a clump of soil from the earth, and heave it at the creatures.
And what do I think about my own position and the position of my friends?
I don't want to complain: complete favour from the authorities is as dangerous for an artist as complete disfavour. In the former case, the artist's spirit usually perishes; in the latter, the artist himself.