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“This
small circle contains my whole life,”
[Kafka] told
Thieberger.
Prague had become both cage and refuge, a place that protected him
from the natural world, but also a place that the writer changed
in his dreams.
Kafka,
Mozart, defenestration. The elusive magic of Prague.
Ivan Klima, in his essay
The Spirit
of Prague
says that to him the Charles Bridge is the "material and
spiritual center of the city...emblem of the city’s situation in
Europe, the two halves of which have been seeking each other
out...since the bridge’s foundations have been laid. The West and
the East.” As a child Klima was interned along with
other Jews in the Terezin concentration camp; years later, the
communist regime banned him as a dissident writer. In
Terezin, reading occupied the young Klima’s time. He read
Homer, and titles that speak of the limited libraries of
incarceration: Dicken’s The Pickwick Papers and Jules
Verne’s The Children of Captain Grant. When he was
released, after the war, Klima says he discovered “the beauty and
the delight of reading” and the even more intense pleasure of
writing.
The
Charles Bridge at night(photo:nikonvscanon)
Lovers for
a Day,
Klima’s collection of short stories, is all about the shadow and
light in the interstices of the heart. 12 stories that were
written over a span of 30 years, from 1962 to 1994. The last
story in the collection, The White House, is a delicate
subtle fable that lingered long after we closed the book.
Jakub, a mathematics student, begins to date Alzbeta a blind
musician with hair 'the color of flame', a busker who plays for the tourists in Prague. Her
blindness is alluring, but he knows that the relationship is
limited, will end soon. As if she senses this, she would
often
tell him softly, on parting, ‘Don’t leave me yet!’ Then he takes her on a last
trip, planning to end the relationship soon after, with all the
premeditated arrogance of one who has the advantage
in love. They are lost in the woods. A wild crashing
storm, darkness. Now they are both lost and cannot see.
But here it is Alzbeta who has the advantage, sensing the ‘white
house,’ before they come up to it. And this ‘white house’ is
no fairytale castle, but a cemetery. And then it is Jakub
who says, ‘Don’t leave me!’ And so
Lovers for
a Day
ends with a story where you know the lovers will stay together.
And we, on reading the story, could not help but think about the White House, politics somehow creeping in, meditating on
how it has been a cemetery to some, and also thinking about the
importance of seeing with the heart, and this perhaps our only
redemption, whether it is making the right decisions on education
(before we throw away our money on the wrong charities and
policies, leaving millions of children behind) or on
healthcare....
Equally
compelling are Klima’s essays and feuilleton-style entries in
The Spirit
of Prague
which include remarkable tales of survival in Terezin.
Read:
Lovers for
a Day, Ivan Klima
Read:
The Spirit
of Prague, Ivan Klima
Tags:
literature travel prague
war
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