No Saints or Angels

  Praise for No Saints or Angels:

  “Ivan Klíma … for forty years has been chronicling the pursuit of happiness across rubble and shifting sand…. The humanity of these wounded people shines through…. Frail, flawed human beings play[ing] out their volatile longings and their inglorious heroisms.”

  Janet Burroway, The New York Times Book Review

  “The characters Mr. Klíma has created are so believable and convincing–so flawed, so vulnerable, so confused, so very alive–that when they achieve their modest epiphanies or find ways of connecting with one another, we cannot help feeling that something truly important has happened. Like Anton Chekhov, Mr. Klíma is a writer able to show us what’s extraordinary about ordinary life.”

  Merle Rubin, The Washington Times

  “As much as anyone, Klíma has reinvented the novel for the twenty-first century. Combining the strengths of essay and fiction, he creates characters with Shakespearean resonance…. No Saints or Angels is an unassuming masterpiece.”

  —Tom D’Evelyn, The Providence Journal

  “[Klíma] once again introduces characters who illustrate the continuum between life under the repressive old regime and the difficulties and disappointments of the new era of freedom…. Klíma remains focused on the present even as he explores the hold of the past.”

  —Andrew Nagorski, Newsweek

  “An affecting story, affectingly told: Klíma believes in idealists, but he is too good a novelist to be rigid with his own characters.”

  —Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

  “A tale [of] modern lives haunted by the history of the Soviet incursion…. These lives come to have meaning and import, and the reader wants them to find what they are looking for.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Also by Ivan Klíma

  A Ship Named Hope

  My Merry Mornings

  My First Loves

  A Summer Affair

  Love and Garbage

  Judge on Trial

  My Golden Trades

  The Spirit of Prague

  Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light

  The Ultimate Intimacy

  Lovers for a Day

  NO SAINTS

  OR ANGELS

  Ivan Klíma

  Translated by Gerald Turner

  Copyright © 1999 by Ivan Klíma

  Translation copyright © 2001 by Gerald Turner

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  First published in 2001 in Great Britain by Granta Books, London, England

  Originally published in the Czech Republic as Ani svatí, ani andělé

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Klíma, Ivan.

  [Ani svatí, ani andělé. English]

  No saints or angels / Ivan Klíma ; translated from the Czech by Gerald

  Turner.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9666-8

  I. Turner, Gerald. II. Title.

  PG5039.21.L5 A8413 2001

  891.8′6354—dc21

  2001033994

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  CHAPTER ONE

  1

  I killed my husband last night. I used a dental drill to bore a hole in his skull. I waited to see if a dove would fly out but out came a big black crow instead.

  I woke up tired, or more exactly without any appetite for life. My will to live diminishes as I get older. Did I ever have a great lust for life? I’m not sure, but I certainly used to have more energy. And expectations too. And you live so long as you have something to expect.

  It’s Saturday. I have time to dream and grieve.

  I crawl off my lonely divan. Jana and I carried its twin down to the cellar ages ago. The cellar is still full of junk belonging to my ex-husband, Karel: bright red skis, a bag of worn-out tennis balls, and a bundle of old school textbooks. I should have thrown it all out long ago, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I stood a rubber plant where the other divan used to be. You can’t hug a rubber plant and it won’t caress you, but it won’t two-time you either.

  It’s half past seven. I ought to spend a bit of time with my teenage daughter. She needs me. Then I must dash off to my Mum’s. I promised to help her sort out Dad’s things. The things don’t matter, but she’s all on her own and spends her time fretting. She needs to talk about Dad but has no one to talk about him with. You’d think he was a saint, the way she talks about him, but from what I remember, he only ordered her around or ignored her.

  As my friend Lucie says, you even miss tyranny once you’re used to it. And that doesn’t only apply to private life.

  I don’t miss tyranny. I killed my ex-husband with a dental drill last night even though I feel no hatred towards him. I’m sorry for him more than anything else. He’s lonelier than I am and his body is riddled with a fatal disease. But then, aren’t we all being gnawed at inside? Life is sad apart from the odd moments when love turns up.

  I always used to ask why I was alive. Mum and Dad would never give me a straight answer. I expect they didn’t know themselves. But who does?

  You have to live once you’ve been born. No, that’s not true. You can take your life any time, like my grandfather Antonín, or my Aunt Venda, or Virginia Woolf or Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn didn’t kill herself, though; they only said she did in order to cover the tracks of her killer. She apparently took fifty pills of some barbiturate or other even though a quarter of that amount would have been enough. Her murderers were thorough. I myself carry a tube of painkillers; not to kill myself with though, but in case I get a migraine. I’d be capable of taking my life, except that I hate corpses. It was always an awful strain for me in the autopsy room, and I preferred not to eat the day before.

  Why should I make the people I love deal with my corpse?

  They’ll have to one day anyway. Who will it be? Janinka, most likely, poor thing.

  I oughtn’t to call her Janinka, she doesn’t like it. It sounds too childish to her ears. I called my ex-husband Kajínek when I visited him recently on the oncology ward. I thought it might be a comfort to him in his pain to hear the name I used to call him years ago. But he objected, saying it was the name of a hired killer who recently got a life sentence.

  We’ve all got life sentences, I didn’t say to him.

  I can feel my early-morning depression taking hold of me. I had one glass of wine too many yesterday. I won’t try to count the cigarettes. Lucie maintains I don’t have depressions – I’m just ‘moody’.

  Lucie and I got to know each other at medical school, but whereas I passed anatomy at the second attempt, she never mastered it. She dropped out and took up photography and was soon better off than those of us who stayed the course. She and I always hit it off together, most likely because we differ in almost every conceivable way. She’s a tiny little thing and her legs are so thin you’d think they’d snap in a breeze. I’ve never known her to be sad.

  What do photographers know about depression? Mind you, she advises me quite rightly to give up smoking and restrict myself to three small glasses of wine a day, though she drinks as much as she li
kes. I’ll give everything up the day I reach fifty. It’s awful to think that I’m less than five years away from that fateful day, that dreadful age. That’s if I’ll still be alive in four years and eleven months’ time. Or tomorrow for that matter.

  The best cure for depression is activity. At the surgery I have no time to be depressed. I have no time to think about myself. But today’s Saturday: an open day for dreams and grief.

  I peek into Jana’s room and see she is peacefully asleep. Last year she still had long hair, longer than mine, and mine reaches a third of the way down my back. Now she’s had it cut short and looks almost like a boy. The stud in her ear twinkles, but on the pillow alongside her head lies a rag doll by the name of Bimba that she’s had since she was seven and always carries around with her. After she’d wriggled out of her jeans last night she left them lying on the floor, and her denim jacket lies in a crumpled heap on the arm-chair, one sleeve inside out. She hangs out with punks of both sexes because she says they don’t give a damn about property or careers. The last time we went to the theatre she insisted we take the tram. She wants to do her own thing, but what does it mean to do your own thing in a world of billions of people? In the end you always end up getting attached to something or someone.

  There’s an open book on the chair by her bed. It’s not long since she read fairy stories and she loved to hear all about foreign countries, animals and the stars. She was lovely to talk to. She always seemed to me wise for her age and to have a particular understanding of other people. She’d generally sense when I was feeling sad and why, and do her best to comfort me. Now I get the feeling she hardly notices me or simply regards me as someone who feeds and minds her. I tell myself it’s because of her age, but I’m frightened for her all the same. We were watching a TV programme about drugs and I asked her whether she’d been approached by pushers on the street. ‘Of course,’ she answered, almost in amazement. Naturally she had told them to get lost. I told her that if I ever found out she was taking anything of the sort I’d kill her. ‘Of course, Mum, and you’d feed me to the vultures!’ We both laughed, although the laughter stuck in my throat.

  I close her door and go into the bathroom.

  For a moment I look at myself in the hostile mirror. No, the mirror’s not hostile, it’s dispassionately objective; it’s time that’s hostile.

  My former and so far only husband once tried to explain to me that time is as old as the universe. I told him I didn’t understand. Time couldn’t be old, could it? For one thing it was a masculine word.

  Time was feminine in German and Latin, and neuter in English, he told me. He was simply trying to explain that time began along with the universe. It hadn’t existed before. There had been nothing at all, not even time.

  I told him how awfully clever and learned he was, instead of telling him he should get a sense of humour.

  I couldn’t care less what happened billions of years ago and whether time began or not. I only care about my lifetime, and so far time has taken love away and given me wrinkles. It lies in wait for me on every corner. It rushes ahead and heeds none of my pleas.

  It heeds no one’s pleas. Time alone is fair and just.

  Justice is often cruel.

  Still, time has been fairly good to me. So far. My hair is not quite as thick as when I was twenty, and I have to use chemicals to stop the world seeing that I’m going grey. My golden locks – one time I wove them in a braid that reached below my waist. But I still carry myself as well as I did then. My breasts have sagged a bit but they’re still large. Not that there is much point in humping them around with me any more – apart from men’s enjoyment. Selfish bastards. But nothing will save me from time. They say that injections of subcutaneous fat can get rid of wrinkles round the mouth, but I don’t like the idea of it. I don’t have too many wrinkles yet. Just around the eyes. My former husband used to call them sky blue, but what colour is the sky? The sky is changeable and its colour depends on the place, the wind and the time of day, whereas my eyes are permanently blue, morning and night, happy or sad.

  When I step out of the shower I’m shivering all over and it’s not from cold. Even though it is already April, I still have the heating on in the flat. I am shivering from loneliness – what shakes me is the weeping I conceal, weeping over another day when time will simply drain away, a river without water, just a dried riverbed full of sharp stones – and I’m barefoot and naked, my dressing gown lies on the floor and no one looks at my breasts. Abandoned and uncaressed, milk will never flow from them again.

  From the bedroom behind me comes a roar of what is now regarded as music and what my little girl idolizes: Nirvana or Alice in Chains or Screaming Trees, heavy metal, hard rock, grunge, I can’t keep track of it any more. The time when music like that excited me is past. It’s true that when the chair in the surgery happens to fall vacant, Eva dispels the quiet by tuning into some radio station, but I don’t notice it. My assistant is scared of silence, like almost everyone these days. But I like peace and quiet, I yearn for a moment of silence within myself, the sort of silence in which I might hear the rush of my own blood, hear the tears roll down my cheeks, and hear the flames when they suddenly come close.

  But that sort of silence is to be found only in the depths of the grave, such as in the wall of the village cemetery on the edge of Rožmitál where they buried Jan Jakub Ryba. He cut his throat when he could no longer support his seven children. His poor wife! But in that sort of silence you don’t hear anything because the blood and tears have stopped and Master Ryba was never to hear again from the nearby church the words of his folkish Christmas Mass: ‘Master, hey! Rise I say! Look out at the sky – splendour shines on high …’

  For me blood, unlike tears, means life, and when I bleed from a wound in my gum I try to stop it as quickly as possible.

  2

  I’ve given my daughter her breakfast and I’ve reminded her she has homework to do. I’m dashing out to see Mum. Jana wants to know when I’ll be home, and when I tell her I’ll be back around noon, she seems happy enough.

  The street is chock-a-block with cars on weekdays but it’s not so hard to cross on a Saturday morning. And there’s not such a stench in the air. I actually think I can smell the elderflower from the garden in front of the house.

  The houses in our street are sexless, having been built at the end of the thirties. They lack any particular style. It was the time when they started building these rabbit hutches, except that in those days they were built of bricks instead of precast concrete, and most of them had five or six floors instead of thirteen. Mum used to tell me how in summer before the war people would take chairs out in front of the house and sit and chat. In those days this was the city limits and people had more time to talk. Little did they suspect that one day normal human conversation would be replaced by TV chat shows.

  They weren’t afraid of each other yet, I didn’t tell Mum. During the war they were afraid to speak their minds because it could cost them their lives. But Mum knows that all too well from her own experience. People were afraid during the Communist years too, although Mum wasn’t affected so much, thanks to Dad. What happens to people who spend their lives afraid to voice their opinions? They stop thinking, most likely. Or they get used to empty talk.

  During the war Mum’s life was at risk, even though she was only a little girl. Her mother – Grandma Irena, whom Mum never talked about much – was murdered in a gas chamber by the Germans. So were Grandma’s parents, her brothers and sisters and her nieces. Mum didn’t tell me about it until I was almost an adult. All I knew before then was that Grandma died in the war. And it was a long time before Mum told me she was Jewish. Mum wasn’t sent to the camps but spent the war with her father. Even so, throughout the war she had a little suitcase packed ready with essential things just in case, as one never knew. ‘They only gave my mother an hour to pack her things,’ she told me.

  Mum’s father, Grandpa Antonín, had a furniture shop. To avoid be
ing Aryanized, my grandfather made a show of divorcing my grandmother as soon as the Germans invaded. He saved the business – though not for long, because the Communists took it away from him. But by then it was too late to save his wife.

  Mum never forgave him that trade-off and left home as soon as she was eighteen. Two years later she got married. She deliberately married a Communist, who wasn’t a Jew or a Christian but believed religion was the opium of the people.

  Grandpa Antonín also never forgave himself that divorce. When the Communists ordered him to leave the shop they had confiscated from him, he saw no reason to go on living. He went to the storeroom, sat down in a brand-new Thonet armchair and shot himself. But that was long before I was born.

  Mum lives not far away and I can walk to her place through streets of villas. On the way I pass the villa where my favourite writer, Karel Čapek, used to live. He was a good man and a wizard with words. I stop by the fence as if hoping that his free spirit might somehow still be hovering here so many years after his death. No sign of a spirit hovering but the trees have grown up here. They must have grown since he died because they were no longer young when I first saw them. When I was born that green-fingered writer was already fifteen years dead. My darling, he wrote to the only real love of his life, please learn to be happy, for God’s sake. That’s all I wish for you, and apart from your love you can’t give me anything more beautiful than your happiness.

  That’s something Karel would never have written to me, even though he claimed to love me, in the days when perhaps he really did still love me.

  Why do good people die so young, while scoundrels manage to keep going for years?

  Good people suffer more because they take the sufferings of others to heart. I don’t know if I’m a good person, but I’ve had more than my share of suffering.

  I wend my way through the narrow streets until I reach the street that’s been known as Ruská for as long as I remember. The name has survived all regimes, unlike many other street names. Here, in a two-bedroomed flat, in an apartment house with a miniature garden in the front and one only slightly bigger at the back, I came into the world. On the other side of the street there are villas, and between them and the street there is a strip of grass with two rows of lime trees. In those days the treetops were full of the chatter of wagtails and the song of flycatchers, warblers and finches – which was drowned from time to time by the insistent blare of a siren as an ambulance sped past on its way to the nearby hospital. There is only cheap furniture in the flat, the sort made since the war, but at least it’s real wood. There are no pictures on the walls. Dad used to have a coloured portrait of Lenin above the table, and Mum had a framed tinted photograph of her mother from the period when Grandma Irena was a student. In that picture Grandma apparently resembles her famous contemporary Mary Pickford, with her pronounced chin and nose. Her hair in the photo is strawberry blonde. I have never asked my mother whether my grandmother really had auburn hair, but I hope so, as I like redheads.