Where Was the Angel Going?

Introduction-2

Anyone of Balabán’s generation who remembers what the world behind the Iron Curtain was like, during the decade preceding the great upheavals begun in Poland and resulting in the sametová revoluce that swept all the Husáks of the old Czechoslovak Socialist Republic away, will comprehend these sentiments perfectly. But the work has a wider resonance, too. Eva Topolská frames her sense of displacement — which began when she was a child, at her parents’ divorce — as something we all experience: the exile from the security and bliss of early childhood:

That’s what these mobile phones do. You can be anywhere. That’s no advertising slogan, that’s the truth. You ring somebody up just because a friend in common gave you his number. Because you have this feeling, or maybe somebody told you, that he’d be in England, or, rather, no, you didn’t suppose that; he has to be at home after all. Somewhere in northern Moravia, among the collieries, somewhere in northern Czechia, amidst the exhausted quarries, somewhere in some unreal land, where everything is disappearing. Buried in ash like the shadow of years one recalls with sweetness, because they no longer exist. Because you are no longer a young freckled girl in his embrace, but a damnably independent woman, who does little more these days than ride around in taxis and ring people up. So you pick a number, you can be anywhere. And he’s not sitting there amidst the exhausted quarries, he’s here, on the other side of the river, and makes a date with you at a train station (34).

And so it seems that those landlocked Czechs know quite a bit about those oceans metaphysical after all. Ask not for whom the ship whistle toots — it toots for thee.

Displacement, disenfranchisement, or exile, however one chooses to term it, is an unnatural state, if universal to all men and women. In chapter 25 Martin meditates on man’s unique loneliness and abandonment in all of creation:

Since the strawy fairy stories of fated encounters of people destined for each other have long ago been ground to dust. Dust that can give rise to nothing except allergies. People are not fated to one another, people are condemned to their fate. They can’t belong to one another, they can’t belong to themselves, they belong nowhere. Has he not lived through enough already to understand that this not-belonging is the only home left to a person beneath these dangerous heavens? Unlike the unconscious creatures with their safe dens and cosy nests, man alone must stop deluding himself that he belongs somewhere, that someday he’ll discover that other half from whom he was once separated, and that their souls will flow together and re-meld, like it’s some kind of romantic movie.

And yet, despite all the divorces and broken families that litter the pages of Where Was the Angel Going?, Martin is continually in need of someone. This Leitmotif by itself puts the lie to the bitter words just cited, suggesting that the true nature of humanity is communion, community. Martin’s deep-seated need of this, whether we choose to refer to the Judeo-Christian myth of a return to Eden, or the pagan Greek myth of our originally composite nature which he refers to above, does find its fulfilment toward the end of Martin’s story.

After Martin’s horrific accident, his father, with whom he could find no common ground during the daily grind, sits patiently by his son’s bedside, praying for his return, ‘ben[ding] down over Martin, strok[ing] his head and [speaking] to him, as if his son were able to hear him’ (46). Even more telling is Monika’s decision to move into Martin’s flat after all. She knows there are good reasons for not aligning her fate with that of this very imperfect man:

Suddenly, she realised that she was afraid of him. She wanted to be afraid for him, but she was afraid of him. With her eyes closed, she rolled over under his blanket and waited for him. For that dreadful man to come along and wound her. To throw her beneath the wheels of a car and then look on as her blood flowed, and then feel sorry for her and say that things like that can happen. She saw his dreadful hands, so often unwashed and with broken nails, his face, on which his beloved, boyish features gave way to hard, pitiless edges. His stomach, which would only swell larger with time, his s*x, that weapon of his, with which he wounded other women, when, faithlessly, he procured himself pleasure and others — pain. He was unfaithful to his wife, unfaithful to that Eva of his, unfaithful to everybody. Ah, Martin, you’re the guy who buttons his trousers and goes off on his own roguish way. Right now, in hospital, you have no feelings for anyone. You’re a dreadful, dreadful person. What dreadfulness you carry around inside yourself! I can understand each and every woman who runs off as soon as she catches sight of you. I can understand each and every wife who runs off from her husband, who doesn’t want anything to do with him, with that unshaven mug, scratchy beneath the neck, with those sly glances that pierce to the very heart (44).

And yet something, something more than mere sentiment, overrides her reason and impels her to take that very step. And thus, the end of Martin’s story is, actually, its beginning.

This may come as a surprise. But ‘surprises’ are at the very heart of the work. One of the most frequently encountered words in Where Was the Angel Going? is najednou — ‘suddenly.’ Suddenly, something happens, and life takes a diametrical turn from its wonted path, setting off in a new direction. The sharpest of these sudden turns happens, of course, when Martin steps off the kerb and is slammed by the car. At any rate, the Leitmotif of sudden shifts is a warning against resignation, or despair, which, as any good Protestant lad should know, is the one unforgivable sin — the sin against the Holy Ghost. That He will in, at any time, as long as one is receptive to His coming, is apparent from Martin’s story of spending Pentecost at home. Contemplating a Gothic image of the flames of the Holy Ghost descending upon the Disciples,

Martin gazed at those motionless flames above the heads of the saints and felt an endless peace in contemplating their ecstasy — just like the arrow ever fixed in its target. Not striving for anything, not twitching and jerking — being, belonging to God.

And in this way that good son Martin compensated for so impiously refusing to participate in Whitsunday evensong (7).

The painting in question is a relic of the Middle Ages and — like the gold-flaked icons from which it ultimately derives — a window onto a different dimension. An eternal reality, the eloquence of which — it is so difficult to speak here without being misunderstood — is dependent on the receptivity of the beholder. The same picture, purchased (so sacrilegiously) at an antique store liquidating the furnishings of some gutted church, laicised and transformed into a community centre or apartments, perhaps hanging over the liquor cabinet in one of the nooks of just such a flat which had once been a chancel, would be a mute, lifeless composition of colour and volume, easily replaceable by a Petr Lik reproduction of Antelope Canyon, once the lady of the house tired of funky faux-religiosity. For a believer like Martin, it is an unbroken, living continuum of power that links the apostolic age with that of the cosmonauts.

For Christianity is not merely a culture, like a mother tongue or an ethnicity. It is a manner of dealing with existence, which is often so difficult to deal with. ‘Honey and dust, that’s what life tastes like in this city,’ muses Martin at the very beginning of the book (19). As he nears its almost catastrophic end, it seems that there is more grime in the aftertaste than sweetness:

The bare earth and the bushes along the railway line were covered with litter. So many crumpled plastic wrappers, bottles, cinders, fag-ends and piles of dog s**t. What’s going on here? Here in this subway beneath the rumbling corpus of the railway — what is this greasy filth, with which the water is clogged, ankle-deep?

Who makes us live here? Here amidst these bushes, from the bare branches of which tatters of plastic flutter? Here, where iron plates crumble to rust, where even iron is exhausted, handrails sag, tracks are empty, buildings shuttered, windows grim and grimy with poisoned perspectives and retrospectives on the low sky from which this dreadful April drizzle is seeping. Who was it fixed these sights before our eyes? How am I to walk off my despair, how do I get rid of this dreadful hunger? (41)

After meditating on the hopeless reality of neighbouring Poland, ‘N.N.,’ the anti-hero of Stanisław Barańczak’s Sztuczne oddychanie [Artificial Respiration], composes a suicide note on an empty cigarette packet before opening the window and climbing out onto the ledge: ‘No one is to blame for what has happened. / No one but myself.’ The double-entendre is obvious: N.N. is taking responsibility for his own suicidal act and — for what drove him to it, the state of his society. Why is it that Martin does not do the same? Does he not bear some guilt, too? Yes, Christianity answers — but it is the guilt of Adam, who is ultimately responsible for the fallen state of all creation; it is this guilt which Martin, and all of us, have inherited from our parents like a spiritual syphilis, to use St Augustine’s colourful term. But that guilt was washed away by the waters of baptism, and, although this fact absolves none of us from the responsibility of doing what we can do ameliorate a bad situation, it prevents despair by pointing at the wider context. Here, we are not merely speaking of the world ‘beyond,’ which we may be made to enter at any moment, but the renewal of all things at the end of time, in the eternal moment.

It is this attitude that informs the prayer of that ancient happy virgin, Marie, who arrives to help Martin clean the chapel on his free day:

‘And now, Martinku,’ said sister Marie, taking him by the elbow, ‘let’s lift up a petition to the Lord together.’ She knelt down and her gaunt hand, suddenly full of strength, pulled Martin down to his knees as well. They folded their hands and Marie prayed. And that prayer was to remain with Martin for the rest of his life. Amen. (39)

Marie, as Martin points out, is a girl, despite her years, because of her perpetual virginity (no allusion necessarily implied). A girl, and therefore a child, and, as we know, one needs to become like a child in order to enter into the Kingdom of God. It is perhaps for this reason that children are so often mentioned in the pages of Where Was the Angel Going? They are not merely symbols of innocence, they are sage emissaries from that other world — the titular angels, perhaps. Children see things in a simple, direct manner, and offer simple, real solutions to complicated problems: love, compassion. ‘You told me how your daughter crawled beneath the table in fear when you were quarrelling,’ Monika reminds Martin, ‘about your son, who ran out into the corridor after you when your wife was screaming that she hated you. How that helpless little fellow wanted to soothe you’ (36).

Children are wise with the wisdom of eternity, which is to say: goodness; they can be, in this respect, more mature than their elders. As Martin is leading his son back home after a visit in Chapter 31, he stops at the door and says:

‘You know, boy, even though we don’t live together, that doesn’t mean that…’

‘I know.’ The boy was suddenly older than Martin was. Martin was ashamed of the tears that he somehow fought back (31).