Love and Garbage by Ivan Klíma Read Free Book Online Page A

it was then that Dad said to me: Remember that a man never cries! It was one of the few lessons I ever received from him. He laughed at the heap of rubbish as he picked it up, adding that that was the fate of things, and anyone worrying about it merely harmed himself.
    I ordered tea for myself while the others, without having to ask, were each served a large beer. The youngster drank mineral water. Venus produced her cigarettes, extended the packet to her neighbour on the other side and then to me. I thanked her and said I didn’t smoke.
    ‘Quite a paragon, ain’t you?’ she said. ‘Your wife must be pleased with you.’
    ‘If I hadn’t got drunk,’ the foreman said, ‘I most likely wouldn’t have got married at all. Because I had a fair idea that marriage is the end of life.’
    I didn’t meet Lída until after I’d finished university. There was nothing exceptional about our meeting, it was unaccompanied by any special events or auguries. We just met and found we liked each other. She was only six years younger than me but I felt as if a lifetime lay between us.
    What depressed me were certainly not doubts about the rightness of my choice, but the knowledge that I’d made a decision once and for all. I suspected that for me the most blissful prospect was not so much having the person I loved permanently by my side as a need, from time to time, to reach out to emptiness, to let longing intensify within me to the point of agony, to alternate the pain of separation with the relief of renewed coming together, the chance of escape and return, of glimpsing before me a will-o’-the-wisp, the hope that the real encounter was still awaiting me.
    Man is reluctant to accept that his life has come to a conclusion in that most important respect, that his hopes have been fulfilled. He hesitates to look death in the face, and there is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love.
    For our honeymoon we flew out to the Tatra mountains.
    It was the beginning of windy autumnal weather, the larches were turning golden and the meadows were fragrant with ripe grass. We climbed up to the treeline, to where the forests ended, and above us towered the sharp ridges of bare rock. I lay down in the grass, Lída sang to herself and I felt as if her singing was filling the entire space from the sky down to the base of the rocks, marking out the space in which I would now forever move.
    ‘You must have been a one, Mr Marek,’ Venus said. ‘When my old man came home pissed I made him sleep with the horses or in the garage.’
    ‘So when did you have your own wheels?’ the foreman asked curiously.
    ‘When we were in Slovakia, of course. Míla got hold of an old Wartburg. When we went off with the kids on our first outing, just past Topol č ianky its exhaust snapped and the thing made a row like a bloody tank. He had to knock back a couple of doubles, he was so worked up about it, then he got down under the car so he could at least hold it up with wire, and when he’d finished we drove downhill again, and he’d cut out the engine so it wouldn’t make such a row, and we were going faster and faster, the kids loved it each time he skidded round the bends, but I was screaming at him: “Mila, d’you want us to end up as mincemeat? Have you lost your marbles?” And he said: “Not my marbles, my brakes!”’
    I realised that Mrs Venus was relating this story mainly for my benefit, because I was the new boy, so I asked: ‘And how did the trip end?’
    ‘He used the engine to brake. He’s always managed to tame any mare yet.’
    ‘Except you,’ said the foreman. He chuckled and thereby gave the signal for general merriment. The one who enjoyed himself most was the captain, whose vaguely familiar face was still niggling at me. It suggested something, it pointed back to something, only I didn’t know what. The youngster with the girlish face scarcely smiled: it suddenly occurred to me that death was hovering over him. I had