Free Love and Garbage by Ivan Klíma

suppressed passions, Oedipus complexes, or even with suicidal tendencies. My feet ached.
    ‘Have you noticed the flowers I got?’ she pointed to them.
    I said they were beautiful and asked who’d given them to her. Her patients liked her. She was pleasant to them and gave them more time than she was obliged to, and in gratitude they brought her flowers. When was the last time I’d brought her flowers?
    I used to give the other woman flowers and repeat to her ad nauseam how much I loved her; she aroused a sense of tenderness in me time and again.
    I also felt some tenderness towards my wife, but I was afraid to show it, probably because she might begin to talk about such an emotion and even commend me for it.
    She’d got her flowers from a woman patient about whom, as a matter of fact, she was worried. A girl of nearly nineteen, but still unable to come to terms with the fact that her parents had separated. She’d stopped studying, she’d stopped caring for herself, I wouldn’t believe how much she’d gone down over the past few weeks.
    For a while my wife continued to tell me about the girl whose future was worrying her. My wife always took on the burdens of her patients. She’d try to help them, and she’d torment herself if she failed. Perhaps she was telling me about that girl to make me realise the devastating effect: that the break-up of a marriage might have. Certainly situations like this one touched her most closely.
    Today the girl had told her about a dream she’d had: at dusk she was walking along a field path when suddenly, ahead of her, she caught sight of a glow. The glow was coming towards her, and she realised that the ground before her was opening and flames were licking up from the depths. She knew she couldn’t escape them, but she wasn’t afraid, she didn’t try to run away, she simply watched the earth opening up before her eyes.
    I am looking at my wife, at her vivid features. She is still pretty, there are no lines as yet on her face, or else I don’t see them. Whether I like it or not, in my eyes her present appearance blends with that of long ago.
    ‘I’m worried she might do something to herself!’
    I stood up and stroked her hair.
    ‘You want to leave already?’ She half-opened the door and looked into the waiting room. ‘There’s no one there, you don’t have to go yet. You haven’t even told me,’ she suddenly realised, ‘what it was like there . . . doing that . . .’ she was vainly looking for a word for my street-sweeping.
    ‘Tell you about it in the evening.’
    ‘All right, let’s have a cosy evening.’ She saw me to the door. She said I’d given her pleasure. She’s always pleased when she sees me unexpectedly.
    I would have liked to say something similar to her, such as that I always revive in her presence, that I feel warm when I’m with her, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it.
    She went back once more, pulled the biggest flower out of her vase and gave it to me, to take to Dad. It was a full bloom, dark yellow with a touch of amber at the tips of the petals.
    She didn’t know, she had evidently never noticed, that my father didn’t like unnecessary and useless things such as flowers.
    I kissed her quickly and we parted.
    ‘And the fourth angel sounded,’ I read at home in the Apocalypse, ‘and the third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon and the third part of the stars; so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise . . . And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.’ And somewhere else I read: ‘And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and