The JOKE (28 page)

In any case, why this anxiety, brother Christians? Everything that happens happens according to God's will, and I often wonder whether it isn't God's design to let mankind know that man cannot sit on His throne with impunity and that without His participation even the most equitable order of worldly affairs is doomed to failure and corruption.

I remember those years when people here thought they were but a few steps from paradise. How proud they were: it was their paradise, they were on their way to it with no need of anyone in heaven above. And suddenly it melted away before their eyes.

3

Until the February 1948 coup, my being a Christian suited the
Communists quite well.

They enjoyed hearing me expound on the social content of the Gospel, inveigh against the rot of the old world of property and war, and argue the affinity between Christianity and Communism. Their concern, after all, was to attract all major levels of the populace, and they therefore tried to win over believers as well. Soon after February, however, things began to change. As a lecturer at the university I took the side of several students about to be expelled for their parents' political stance. By protesting, I came into conflict with the university administration. And suddenly doubts began to be raised about whether a man of such firm Christian convictions was capable of educating socialist youth. It seemed that I'd have to fight for my very livelihood. Then I heard that the student Ludvik Jahn had stood up for me at a plenary meeting of the Party. He had said that it would be base ingratitude to forget what I'd meant to the Party before February. And when they brought up my Christian beliefs, he said they were just a passing phase in my life, one I would surely outgrow, considering my youth.

I went to see him and thanked him for coming to my defense. I told him, however, that not wishing to deceive him, I wanted to remind him that I was older than he and that there was no hope at all of my "outgrowing" my faith. Soon we were debating the existence of God, the finite and the infinite, Descartes's position on religion, whether Spinoza was a materialist, and many other matters. We came to no agreement. I finally asked Ludvik whether he didn't regret standing up for me now that he saw how incorrigible I was. He told me that

religious faith was my private affair and that all in all it was of no concern to anyone else.

I never saw him at the university again. Our destinies turned out to be all the more similar. About three months after our talk Jahn was expelled from the Party and the university, and six months later I too had to leave the university. Was I thrown out?

Driven out? I can't quite say. All I can say for certain is that doubts about me and my convictions started up again. It is true that some of my colleagues hinted I would do well to make a public statement along atheist lines. And it is true that I had some unpleasant scenes in class when aggressive Communist students tried to insult my faith. My proposed departure was indeed in the air. But I must also say that I had a number of friends among the Communists on the faculty and that they still respected me for my pre-February stance. It would probably have taken very little: a move to defend myself. They would certainly have stood up for me. But I did nothing.

4

Follow me," said Jesus to His disciples, and without demur they left their nets, their boats, their homes and families, and followed him. "No man having put his hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the kingdom of God."

If we hear the voice of Christ's appeal, we must follow it unconditionally. This is clear from the Gospel, but in modern times it sounds like a fairy tale. What does an appeal mean in our prosaic lives? And where shall we go, whom shall we follow once we do leave our nets?

And yet the voice of the appeal can reach us even in today's world if our hearing is keen.

The appeal does not come through the mail like a registered letter. It comes disguised.

And rarely dressed up all rosy and alluring. "Not the deed which you choose, but that which befalls you against your will, your mind, and your desire, that is the path you must tread, thither do I call you, there be you His disciple, that is your time, that is the path your Master trod," wrote Luther.

I had many reasons for being attached to my lectureship. It was relatively comfortable, it left me plenty of time for my own research, and it promised a lifetime career as a university teacher. Yet I was alarmed precisely by my attachment to it. I was alarmed all the more by seeing large numbers of valuable people, teachers and students, forced to leave the universities. I was alarmed by my attachment to a comfortable life whose calm security distanced me more and more from the turbulent fates of my fellow men. I realized that the voices raised against me at the university were an
appeal.
I heard someone calling to me. Someone warning me against a comfortable career that would tie down my mind, my faith, and my conscience.

Of course my wife, with whom I had a five-year-old child, did everything in her power to make me defend myself and stand up for my position at the university. She was thinking of our son and of the future of our family. Nothing else existed for her. When I looked into her already aging face, I was afraid of that eternal anxiety about tomorrow and the coming year, that burdensome anxiety about all tomorrows and all the coming years. I was afraid of this burden, and in my mind I heard Jesus' words: "Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."

My enemies expected me to be tormented with worry, but instead I felt an unexpected insouciance. They thought I would find my freedom restrained, but on the contrary I had just discovered the real meaning of freedom. I realized that man had nothing to lose, that his place was everywhere, everywhere that Jesus went, which means: everywhere among men.

After my initial surprise and regret I went forward to meet the malice of my adversaries. I accepted the wrong they inflicted on me as a coded appeal.

5

Communists suppose, in a manner eminently religious, that a man who is guilty in the face of the Party may gain absolution by doing a stint with the working class in agriculture or industry. During the years after February many intellectuals went off this way to the mines, to factories, to building sites and state farms, so that after a mysterious period of purification they might be allowed to return to offices, schools, and political posts.

When I told the administration that I proposed to leave the university without applying for another scientific position, when indeed I requested to go among the ordinary people, preferably as technical adviser to some state farm, my Communist colleagues, friends and foes alike, interpreted this not in light of my own faith but in light of theirs: as an unprecedented expression of self-criticism. They appreciated it and helped me to find a very good position on a state farm in western Bohemia, a position under a good director and in a beautiful part of the country. They sent me on my way with an unusually favorable letter of recommendation.

I was truly happy in my new situation. I felt reborn. The state farm had been set up in a derelict and scantily populated border village from which the Germans had been expelled after the war. It was surrounded by hills, most of them treeless pastureland. The valleys were dotted with the cottages of widely scattered villages. Frequent mists swirling across the countryside served as a screen between me and the settled land, so that the world was as on the fifth day of creation, when God still seemed undecided about whether to hand it over to man.

The people were closer to that primeval state as well. They stood face to face with nature, endless pastures, herds of cows, flocks of

sheep. I felt at ease among them. I soon had a number of ideas about how to put the vegetation in the hilly countryside to better use, how to introduce fertilizers, new ways of storing hay, experimental fields for medicinal herbs, a greenhouse. The director was grateful to me for my ideas, and I was grateful to him for enabling me to earn my bread by useful work.

6

It was 1951. September was cool, but in the middle of October the weather suddenly warmed up, and there was a wonderful autumn lasting well into November. The haystacks drying along the hillsides spread their perfume far over the land. Delicate meadow saffrons shimmered in the grass. It was then that word of the runaway girl began to go round in the villages.

A group of boys from a neighboring village had gone out into the freshly mown fields. In the midst of their boisterous talk they noticed a girl crawl out of a stack, tousled and with hay in her hair, a girl none of them had ever seen before. Startled, she looked all around and began running towards the woods. She disappeared before they could gather their wits and run after her.

A peasant woman from the same village said that one afternoon, when she was busy with something in the yard, a girl of about twenty in a threadbare coat had appeared out of nowhere and asked, eyes on the ground, for a crust of bread. "Where are you going, girl?"

the woman asked her. The girl replied that she had a long way ahead of her. "On foot?"

"I've lost my money," she replied. The woman asked no more and gave her bread and milk.

A shepherd from our farm added his story. One day up in the hills, he'd put a piece of bread and butter and a jug of milk next to a tree stump. He went off for a minute to his flock, and when he returned, the bread and jug had mysteriously vanished.

The children immediately seized on these reports and eagerly multiplied them with their imaginations. Whenever anyone lost anything, they were quick to take it as proof of her existence. They saw her in the evenings bathing in the pond not far from the village, though it was

early November and the water was already very cold. Another evening they heard a woman's voice singing somewhere off in the distance. The adults said that one of the cottages on the hill had its radio turned up full blast, but the children knew it was she, the wild girl, wandering along the hilltops singing, her hair flowing free.

One evening the children made a fire of potato tops and threw potatoes into the glowing ash. Then they stared into the woods, and one of the girls called out that she saw the runaway peering back at them from the shadows. A boy picked up a lump of earth and hurled it in the direction the girl had indicated. Oddly enough, no cry rang out, but something else happened. The children shouted at the boy and nearly came to blows with him.

Yes, it was so: the customary cruelty of children never arose in the legend of the runaway girl, despite the thefts that were attributed to her. From the beginning she had their mysterious sympathy. Was it perhaps the innocent insignificance of the thefts that won their hearts? Was it her tender age? Or was she protected by an angel's hand?

Whatever it was, the lump of earth had kindled a feeling of love for the runaway in the children. That very evening they left a small pile of baked potatoes near the remains of the fire, covering them with ashes to keep them warm and sticking a broken fir branch on top. They even found a name for the girl. On a piece of paper torn from a notebook they penciled in large letters vagabondella, this is for you. They laid the paper near the pile and weighted it down with a lump of earth. Then they went and hid in the surrounding bushes, waiting for the timid figure to appear. Evening darkened into night, and still no one came. Finally the children had to leave their hiding places and go home. But at the crack of dawn they were back at their posts. It had happened. The potatoes were gone, and with them, the note and the branch.

The girl became the children's own pampered fairy. They left her jugs of milk, bread, potatoes, and messages. And they never put their gifts in the same place twice. They avoided setting out food in a fixed spot, as if it were meant for beggars. They were playing a game with her. A game of hidden treasure. They started from the spot where they had left the first pile of potatoes and moved farther and farther from the village into the countryside. They left their treasures by tree stumps, by a big rock, near a wayside cross, by a wild rosebush. They never betrayed the whereabouts of the hidden gifts to anyone. They never violated the spider-web delicacy of the game, never lay in wait for the girl nor tried to surprise her. They allowed her to maintain her invisibility.

7

The fairy tale was short-lived. One day the director of our farm went deep into the countryside with the chairman of the District National Committee to look over some abandoned cottages and decide whether they could be used as overnight accommodations for farm laborers working a long way from the village. On the way they were overtaken by rain, which quickly became torrential. Nearby there was a low-lying cluster of firs with a gray hut at its edge: a barn. They ran up, opened the door, which was secured only by a wooden stake, and crawled inside. Light filtered through the open door and the cracks in the roof. In the hay they saw an area that had been smoothed over. Stretching out on it, they listened to the raindrops falling on the roof, breathed in the intoxicating scent, and talked about this and that. Suddenly, running his hand through the wall of hay behind him, the chairman felt something hard among the dry wisps. It was a suitcase. An old, ugly, cheap suitcase made of vulcanite. I don't know how long the two men brooded over the mystery. One thing is certain, that they opened the suitcase and found four girl's dresses in it, all of them new and pretty. The fineness of the
dresses,
I am told, contrasted oddly with the rural drabness of the suitcase and aroused suspicions of theft. Under the dresses there were a few articles of girl's underwear, and hidden among these a bundle of letters tied with a blue ribbon. That was all. To this day I know nothing of these letters, and I don't even know whether the director and the chairman read them. All I know is that from the letters they learned the name of the recipient: Lucie Sebetka.