The Poetry of Waiting : LOVERS FOR A DAY: New and Collected Stories; By Ivan Klima; Grove Press; 230 pp.; $24

Waiting. In a century that has given birth to more utopias and more graves than any other, is there a word that describes better the state of man? Is there a more active word to describe man’s activity (perhaps, following Beckett, man’s only activity) or man’s hope?

The Czech writer Ivan Klima is best known in this country for his novel “Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light,” the story of Czechoslovakia’s passage through the Velvet Revolution of 1989, from a Communist past to an uncertain future. Klima films the book through the eyes of Pavel, a cameraman for the party’s television station, a man of dreams who is forced to act when the country awakes after its long sleep. Like Pavel, Klima’s latest book, “Lovers for a Day,” passes from the early 1960s through the brief radiance of the Prague Spring of 1969, to the bruising disappointment of the following two decades and into the uncertain light of the 1990s. And perhaps it would surprise no one, least of all Pavel, to conclude that the early stories--stories of waiting--are the true gems of the collection, sparkling introductions to yet another Czech genius produced by the crush of Hapsburgs and Stalins.

These early stories are all painted in the black and white of art-film memory, with the millions of complex grays that make the plays of Vaclav Havel or the “Closely Watched Trains” of Bohumil Hrabal so vivid. “The Execution of a Horse” follows a schoolgirl on an afternoon of truancy, during which she watches the slaughter of a horse at a mink factory and loses her virginity. “The Assembly Line” follows a Walter Mitty of an auto worker moving from the romantic dreams that help him survive the assembly line of daytime work to the romantic dreams that help him survive the assembly line of nighttime romance.

“Honeymoon” is the story of a man and a woman, lovers for a year, he older, she younger, who have carried on their affair on car trips “across half of Europe.” Although they’ve been on lots of “honeymoons,” this night is special--she has finally married, although she wed someone else. She wants this night to be more than the quiet dinners, the trip upstairs to a room in the inn for immediate undressing and sex. She wants a wedding feast, she wants guests. And so, with the patience that comes to all of Klima’s heroes, the man invites to their table the other inhabitants of the dining room--three country bumpkins, a soldier and his girl, who “looked like a sheep that had been given eye makeup and artificial lashes.” They eat, the woman plays a tune on the jukebox and dances with the soldier. The man waits.

“For a split second he saw himself. He saw himself sitting here with weary eyes, weighed down by his whole long life, waiting. He still had something to wait for, which was why he was sitting here impatiently, waiting for the girl to finish dancing and come and sit by him.” Finish dancing she does. Yet it is only after replacing the “wedding bed” with a haystack, only after replacing the word “hate” for “love,” that the pair can consummate their odd marriage.

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The most haunting of these early stories, “Lingula,” features yet another Klima brand of heroine--a distant, world-weary, extraordinarily beautiful woman. There is an eerie black and white quality to Lingula, a worker in a film archive, watching four films a day of “departing trains. Street lights at night. The world through a wet windowpane. The poetry of solitude. The poetry of rain. The poetry of great plains. The poetry of mountains. The poetry of discord. The poetry of war ruins. The poetry of sun between branches. The poetry of the first kiss that ends the film--or starts it. Everything. . . . She knew everything. She knew precisely why it was worth living. She knew precisely why it was not worth living.”

She refuses to respond to the biology student, Tomas, who is chosen from among his fellows to attempt her seduction, because “Tomas was at the time the only one of them to have any free moments.” She refuses even to tell him her name. Yet she allows Tomas to lead her, first for a drink and then onto a train and out into the country, with the ornery passivity of a Catherine Deneuve in “Repulsion.” Her most active response is a shrug as Tomas baptizes her with the name Lingula, from a genus of worm he is studying for his exams. While Tomas struggles to prod her into some kind of biological reaction, Lingula struggles to find something new in him, something that will approach her cinematic vision of novelty, developed from months of looking through a locked window onto the West. And yet, as they part from each other at dawn, comically unfulfilled, each of them smiles with the hope of a Beckett tramp.

These tales of interrupted freedom paint a Czechoslovakia where the hotels have bottle openers but no bottles, washbasins with two taps that run either both hot or both cold, in which just enough movement is possible to allow hope and just enough is forbidden to deny satisfaction. No wonder that until 10 years ago, Klima’s writings were banned in his own country.

“A Baffling Choice” from 1987 is the best of the later stories, the story of a young woman who leaves her husband and child for an elderly cripple in the apartment below. “The White House” (1994), the story of the relationship of a young law student and a blind red-haired musician he picks up on the street, has moments of Grimm intensity, as the two lose themselves in stormy woods, before fading into sentimentality.

But there is a naked earnestness to the characters and their conversations in the more recent stories that supports the contention that silence, cunning and the shadows of a foreign language are the best friends a writer can hope for. One wonders like Pavel, “What was the point of replaying the same old images and the same old stories? He should be inventing new ones. But he was too tired for that now. Whenever he began a new story these days, he tired of it before he had finished.”

It could be, to invoke a tired cliche, that the Velvet Revolution has softened Klima’s edge, has dulled his vibrant black and white into a monochromatic color. But it could also be that there is something intrinsically more dramatic about waiting than talking, about waiting than departing. While I wait, after all, I hope.