Suddenly my wife thought of something: 'Did you bring in the laundry basket?'
The basket was still in the car.
It was no longer snowing outside, and stars were shining through ragged, fast flying clouds. The snow sparkled in the light of the streetlamps. In the distance, I could hear a police siren.
I unlocked the garage and pulled the laundry basket out of the car. It seemed unusually heavy and, when I walked up the stairs, something inside it clinked metallically.
I felt like lifting up the laundry to see what was hidden underneath it, but I managed to control my curiosity. I set the basket down on the dining-room table as carefully as possible and went away to read.
The Painter's Story
THIS MORNING, I decided to go to the country. A nice day was forecast, my wife would be at work till evening and, anyway, I didn't feel like writing. Recently, a realization that everything has already been written has made me despondent. All the stories have already been told or filmed or recorded and, even with a hundred heads, I would never discover most of what others have already recounted.
This winter my cousin, who is a painter, offered us the use of her cottage in the town of M. for the year, as she was moving to the other end of the country. My cousin is a beautiful, petite woman, and so is her house. Its one disadvantage is its location: it stands by a busy road where all day long cars and trucks and tractors chase each other up and down. However, the same train that blows its whistle under our window in the city takes us there. All we have to do is pack a book and a sandwich and walk down to the station in time for the next train. The journey takes an hour. The best thing about the cottage, my cousin assured me, were the neighbours. Right next door, for example, an interesting young gypsy couple had moved in.
My cousin's cottage is full of paintings, small paintings, as diminutive as their creator. Most of them depict strange
creatures — monsters, witches and vampires — riding around in fancy aerodynamic cars, crawling through the subway or peering through windows into rooms where terrified lovers cower in each other's arms. Her drawers and shelves are crammed with paints, pencils and charcoal sticks.
As a boy I was determined — that is if I didn't become a doctor or a writer — to learn how to paint. I longed to acquire the skill to represent the world in colour. But my life didn't unfold as I had imagined it would. During the war I wasn't allowed to go to school; the only branches of human activity I learned anything about were penal servitude and mass murder. And this happened to me at the most impressionable age, when one finds mystery wherever one looks. Nevertheless it was during the war, when I was interned by the Nazis, that quartos of paper and a set of watercolour paints first came into my possession. The watercolours were the cheapest kind— twelve different shades in a little tin tray — but I soon discovered that the colours could be mixed to make new ones. I painted what I saw: barrack walls and yards, food lines, trains transporting miserable wretches with suitcases and gunnysacks (stuffed, in vain hope, with feather pillows), wooden shacks where they produced mica, and brick fortifications. I had no idea how to handle perspective, but I noticed that the long barrack walls seemed to converge in the distance, so I drew them that way and they at once looked more realistic. I was so excited by my discovery that I drew only houses and walls until I ran out of paper.
After the war, I still believed I would become a painter. The barracks had vanished from my life, and it was more than buildings that attracted me now; it was the faces of
girls in my school. In social studies classes or during singing lessons — for which I had no talent — I tried, under my desk, to capture the appearance of those graceful creatures who shared the enclosed world of the classroom with me. Word of my talent got around. Soon the girls were even willing to pose for me — clothed, of course — as long as I gave them the finished painting. Portraiture thus brought me close to the beings for whom I longed; could I have dreamed a finer destiny than to be a painter?
It was eight-thirty in the morning, the train would leave in half an hour, but from the moment I made up my mind to go, I was restless. I locked the door and strolled down our long street to the station. About half-way there, I passed the house that Mr Vondrák had been building during the past five years. Mr Vondrák was a remarkable man, for he was a master of all the necessary trades. He performed the role of bricklayer and carpenter, roofer, electrician, plumber and painter. I had watched him from a distance all those years, waiting for the moment when I would see at least one contractor on the site, but he even stuccoed the walls himself. Sometimes his wife would be there, but she seldom worked, and then only as his assistant. Of course he noticed me; we always greeted each other and sometimes exchanged a few sentences. He would usually complain about something that wasn't available.
A short distance from the level crossing a dove was sitting hunched over in the middle of the pavement. There was something strange about where and how it was sitting, and when I got closer I saw that it was dead. I felt saddened by its dismal end on a filthy pavement. The loneliness of its dying — how will that be any different from
the loneliness of my own death? And the pavement — how does that differ from a hospital cell where a priest is not allowed to visit the dying, and relatives are unwelcome?
It is inappropriate to talk of death today. It's as though we're afraid it will threaten the majesty of life. Or is it because there have never been so many desecrated funerals, or so many corpses disposed of with no funeral whatever?
In earlier times, people mourned the animal they had to kill and they shrouded their dead and sent them off with a prayer or at least a ceremony of some kind, for they wished peace to the departing soul. In our century, they have often uncovered the dead and paraded them before the eyes of the mob.
For a decent burial, as for a decent life, you need at the very least some basic human compassion. Antigone gave up her life, but buried her brother with honour. Centuries later, her story still moves us, though we may also feel astonishment at her sacrifice. We no longer see that she died not for the sake of a proper funeral, but for the dignity of human life. How can we understand it, when we have stood by while the bodies of countless brothers and cousins, whom they have tortured, beaten, shot and gassed, have been thrown into common holes in the ground, like garbage? When we have looked on in silence while they scattered the bones and ashes of others over fields and tossed them into rivers? When we have pretended not to hear their voices crying for help?
A dignified funeral and a marked grave express our will to preserve the identity of a person. We erect a stone on which we carve a name and a few numbers, but in fact we are trying to maintain the shape of a former life, a single
unrepeatable story. When compassion and the commandment that life should be lived in dignity have been lost, where awareness of the past is lost, there are no stories, there are only cries of horror.
Apart from my cousin, I have several friends who paint. One of them, Karel, caused me to give up all thought of getting any work done today. Yesterday he showed up unexpectedly with a bottle of Rakije he'd brought back from Yugoslavia, poured himself a drink — I refused one — and at once began telling me the depressing story of his trip.
Karel is a thin, gloomy man with a thick artist's beard, the fanatical look of a visionary who has seen the coming apocalypse, and the pale complexion of those who sleep during the day. When he speaks, his voice has the quiet whine of the winter wind blowing through the garden at night, which accentuates his accusatory tone. 'I've been to a lot of galleries, but it never hit me the way it did down there. Do you know where Montenegro is?'