Free Love and Garbage by Ivan Klíma Page A

shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth . . . to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea . . . And fire came down from God out of heaven and devoured them. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone . . . And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose eyes the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them.’
    Throughout the ages, probably ever since they began to reflect on time, and hence on their own past, men have assumed that at the beginning of everything there had been paradise, where humans had lived happily on earth, where
    non galeae, non enses erant: sine militis usu
    mollia securae peragebant otia gentes . . .
    Yet simultaneously they had prophesied the advent of ruin. It was inescapable, because it would happen by the decision of heaven.
    In the evening a French woman journalist unexpectedly turned up at our place. She was young, and she radiated French perfume and self-assurance. She smiled at me with a wide sensuous mouth as if we were old friends. She wanted to know how the struggle for human rights would develop in my country, what was the attitude of my fellow-countrymen to her fellow-countrymen, whether they would welcome them if they arrived as liberators. She was also interested to know whether I regarded war as probable, the peace movement as useful, and socialism as practicable.
    Perhaps she really believed that any one of her questions could be answered in a form that would fit into a newspaper column. She questioned me as though I was the representative of some movement, or at least of some common fate. She didn’t realise that if I were the representative of anything whatsoever I’d cease to be a writer, I’d only be a spokesman. But then this didn’t bother her, she didn’t need me as a writer, she wasn’t going to read any book of mine anyway.
    I recently read an article in an American weekly about how fourteen complete idiots incapable of speech had learned ‘jerkish’. That was the name of a language of 225 words, developed in Atlanta for mutual communications between humans and chimpanzees – and there was no doubt, the author of the article believed, that more and more unfortunate creatures would be able to talk to each other in jerkish. It occurred to me immediately that at last a language had been found in which the spirit of our age could speak, and because that language would spread rapidly from pole to pole, to the east and to the west, it would be the language of the future.
    I do not understand or make myself understood by those who recognise only the literature they control themselves and which, because of them, is written in jerkish, and I am afraid that I cannot communicate either with the pretty journalist, even though she assures me that she wishes absolute freedom for me and for my nation just as she wishes it for herself and her nation. I am afraid that we speak in languages which have moved too far apart.
    As she was leaving she asked, more out of politeness than anything else, what I was working on at the moment. She was surprised to hear that I wanted to write about Kafka. Clearly she believed that people in my position should be writing about something more weighty – about oppression, about prisons, about the lawlessness practised by the state. Anyway, she asked if I was interested in Kafka’s work because it was forbidden.
    But I am writing about him because I like him. I feel that he is speaking to me directly and personally from a distant past. For the sake of accuracy I added that his work was not forbidden; they were merely trying to remove it, from public libraries and from people’s minds.
    She wanted to know why they did this to his work in particular. Was it politically so subversive? or was it because Kafka was a Jew?
    I think it would be difficult to find, in our century, many writers who