Love and Garbage by Ivan Klíma Read Free Book Online

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    That afternoon she left. I stood by my window, I was not allowed out. I tried to spot her in the crowd which moved down the street, but I didn’t see her. It suddenly occurred to me that she hadn’t left, that it wasn’t possible that she had vanished, that she was no longer there.
    I tore myself away from the window and knocked at the door of the next room, and when there was no answer I opened it. The room which a little while ago had been full of people and voices and things now yawned with emptiness. It seemed to me that I was standing on a rock, on a cliff so high and so steep that the land below me was out of sight. And I was seized by vertigo, I realised that I too was falling, that there was no way out, that it was only a question of time. What seemed solid collapsed in a single instant, and what seemed indissolubly linked to the ground was dissolved.
    I escaped from that empty room, lay down on my mattress and closed my eyes. At that moment her face rose above me like the moon and looked down on me from the night sky, serene, remote and inaccessible, and I was engulfed by happiness together with pain and despair.
    At nine o’clock precisely we sat down in the Boženka Tavern. It was a run-of-the-mill place. Nothing enlivened the blackened walls except some slogans and prohibitions. The table-cloths bore the stains of yesterday’s food. In the corner stood an abandoned and battered pool table, its green cloth long faded and become grey from cigarette ash and smoke.
    The hauliers’ tavern of my childhood was full of colour. After my friend’s death I did not go in all that often, only when Dad sent me out for some beer, and he only drank about once in a month. Right behind the door a purple pheasant spread its colourful wings, and on the walls were bright pictures of horses and hauliers’ carts, the work of some local painter of shop signs and fairground rifle targets. And the landlord wore a neat clean check apron. When he’d drawn the beer for me he’d come round from behind the bar to place the jug securely in my hands. In the tavern of my childhood there was still a spirit of freedom.
    Dad never tried to bring me up, he never ordered me to do anything or forbade me to do anything. Instead he would now and again set out on a walk, along with mother and me, mostly in the direction of the airfield, because Dad, though he loved woods, parks and any kind of water, was primarily interested in machines, and among these chiefly in machines which could fly. When we got to the airfield he would look at the taxiing aircraft, at the massive biplanes and the lightly-built gliders, and at that moment he certainly forgot that we were there with him, he would even chase after men in overalls and talk to them while we were hanging about the windy field.
    Dad was interested in anything that flew. He taught me to make missiles from folded paper, not those ordinary ones that are launched in class as soon as the teacher turns his back, but aerial craft which beautifully and smoothly sailed into the air, some of them even rising before circling down to the ground.
    We also made kites, and just before all our playing together came to an end we constructed a large model aeroplane from skewers, balsa wood and soft firm paper. We threaded a rubber band through the fuselage; once wound up this would drive the propeller. Dad promised that it would rise high enough to fly over the tower of the church in Prosek.
    And when in fact we had carried it to the end of the airfield one Sunday morning and wound it up by the propeller, the little plane made a leap, hurtled forward and a moment later rose up to the sky, where it began to describe a large circle. But it did not complete it, something must have happened, the plane wobbled and suddenly broke up, spun to the ground and crashed.
    When we rushed over all we found was a heap of skewers, balsa wood and pieces of carefully stretched paper.
    I lamented and mourned our loss, and