The JOKE (30 page)

Who was he, Lucie?

A soldier.

Did you love him?

No, she didn't love him.

Then why did you follow him into that room with nothing but a bare bulb and a bed?

It was the void in her soul that drew her to him. And all she could find, poor girl, was a raw youth doing his military service.

But there's one thing I still don't understand, Lucie. Since you did go into that room with him, the room with the bed, why then did you run away?

Because he was nasty and brutal, like all the others.

Who are you talking about, Lucie? What others?

She was silent.

Who did you know before the soldier? Speak, Lucie! Tell me!

14

There were six of them and she alone. Six of them between sixteen and twenty. She was sixteen. They called themselves a gang and spoke of the gang with awe, as if it were a pagan sect. On that day they were talking about initiation. They had brought along a few bottles of cheap wine. She took part in the drinking with the blind obedience on which she had lavished all the unrequited daughter's love for a mother and a father. She drank when they drank, laughed when they laughed. Then they ordered her to undress. She had never done that in their presence. But since the leader of the gang took his own clothes off when she hesitated, she realized the command was not directed against her, and complied docilely. She trusted them, trusted even their roughness, they were her shelter and shield, she couldn't imagine losing them. They were her father, they were her mother.

They drank, laughed, and gave her more commands. She spread her legs. She was afraid, she knew what it meant, but she obeyed. Then she screamed, and the blood flowed out of her. The boys roared, raised their glasses, and poured the raw sparkling wine down their leader's back, over her body and between her legs, and shouted something about Christening and Initiation, and then the leader stood up from her and another went to her, they each took their turn in order of seniority until it came time for the youngest of all, who was sixteen like her, and Lucie couldn't take any more, she couldn't stand the pain any more, she wanted to rest, wanted to be by herself, and because he was the youngest she dared to push him away. But just because he was the youngest he refused to be humiliated. He was one of the gang after all, he belonged fully! And to prove it he slapped her across the face, and no one in the gang stood up for her because they all knew that the youngest was in

the right and was merely claiming his due. Lucie shed tears, but she lacked the courage to resist and so she spread her legs for the sixth time.. ..

Where was this, Lucie?

The flat of one of the boys, while his parents were on night shift, there was a kitchen and one room, the room had a table, a couch, and a bed, over the door hung the framed inscription god grant us happiness and over the bed in a frame a beautiful lady in a blue robe holding a child to her breast.

The Virgin Mary?

She didn't know.

And then, Lucie, what happened then?

Then it happened over and over, either in the same flat or in other ones, and out in the fields too. It became a habit with the gang.

And did you like it, Lucie?

She didn't. From that time on they treated her worse, more arro-gandy and coarsely, but there was no way out, forward, backward, anywhere.

And how did it end, Lucie?

One evening in one of those empty flats. The police came and took them all away. The boys had some thefts on their conscience. Lucie was unaware of this, but it was common knowledge that she went around with the gang, common knowledge too that she gave its members everything a young girl could give. She was the shame of all Cheb, and at home they beat her black and blue. The boys got varying sentences, and she was sent to a reformatory. She spent a year there—until she was seventeen. She wouldn't have returned home for anything on earth. That is how she came to live in the black city.

15

I was surprised and somewhat taken aback when Ludvik revealed to me on the phone the day before yesterday that he knew Lucie. Fortunately, he only knew her by sight. He'd apparently had a superficial friendship with a girl who lived in the dormitory with her.

When he asked me about her again yesterday, I told him everything. I had long felt the need to throw off that burden but had never found anyone I could trust with it. Ludvik has some feeling for me and is at the same time sufficiently removed from my life, and even more so from Lucie's. I therefore had no need to fear that I would be putting her secret in jeopardy.

No, I've never repeated a word of what Lucie confided in me to anyone but Ludvik.

Though of course everyone on the farm knew from her file that she'd been to a reformatory and had stolen flowers from a cemetery. They were quite nice to her, but they constantly reminded her of her past. The director spoke of her as "the little grave robber." He meant it in fun, but such talk kept Lucie's past perpetually alive. Lucie was ceaselessly, continuously guilty. And at a time when she needed nothing but total forgiveness. Yes, Ludvik, she needed forgiveness, she needed the mysterious purification that to you is unfamiliar and incomprehensible.

For people, by themselves, don't know how to forgive, and it is not even in their power.

They lack the power to annihilate a sin that has been committed. This exceeds a man's strength. Divesting a sin of its validity, undoing it, erasing it out of time, in other words making it into nothing, is a mysterious and supernatural feat. Only God, because He is exempt from earthly laws, because He is free, because He can work miracles, may wash away sin, transform it into nothing, forgive

it. Man can forgive man only insofar as he founds himself on God's forgiveness.

Nor can you, Ludvik, forgive, because you do not believe in God. You still remember the plenary meeting when everyone raised their hands against you and agreed that your life should be destroyed. You've never forgiven them that. And not only as individuals. There were about a hundred of them there, and that is a quantity which can serve as a sort of miniature model of mankind. You've never forgiven mankind. From that time on you've mistrusted it, you feel rancor against it. I can understand you, but that doesn't alter the fact that such general rancor against people is terrifying and sinful. It has become your curse.
Because to live in a world in which no one is forgiven, where all are irredeemable,
is the same as living in hell.
You are living in hell, Ludvik, and I pity you.

16

Everything on this earth which belongs to God may also belong to the Devil. Even the motions of lovers in the act of love. For Lucie these had become a province of the odious.

She associated them with the bestial adolescent faces of the gang and later with the face of the insistent soldier. Oh, I can see him before me so clearly I feel I know him. He mixes the banal, syrupy words of love with the rough violence of a male caged without women behind the camp wire. And Lucie suddenly discovers that the tender words are nothing but a false mantle over a coarse, wolfish body. The whole universe of love collapses before her eyes into a pit of loathing and disgust.

Here was the source of the disease, here was where I had to begin. A man who walks along the seashore brandishing a lantern in his outstretched hand may well be a madman.

But on a night when the waves have led a ship astray, the same man is a savior. The planet we inhabit is a borderland between heaven and hell. No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad. Even physical love, Lucie, is not in itself either good or bad. If it is in accordance with the order created by God, if it is a true love, then your loving will be good and you will be happy. For God has decreed that "a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife; and the two shall be one flesh."

I spoke to Lucie day after day, each time reassuring her that she was forgiven, that she must not writhe in self-torture, that she must undo the strait jacket of her soul, that she must humbly give herself up to God's order, where everything, even the love of the body, would find its place.

And so the weeks went by.. ..

Then came the first days of spring. Apple trees bloomed on the slopes, and in the gentle wind their crowns looked like swinging bells. I closed my eyes to hear their velvet tones.

And then I opened them and saw Lucie in her blue smock, hoe in hand. She was looking down into the valley, and she was smiling.

I watched her smile, and I read it eagerly. Was it possible? Until then Lucie's soul had been in eternal flight, a flight from both past and future. She had been afraid of everything. Past and future for her were watery depths. In her distress she clung to the leaky boat of the present as to an uncertain refuge.

And now, today, she was smiling. For no apparent reason. Just like that. And that smile told me she'd begun looking to the future with confidence. And in that instant I felt like a mariner sighting a longed-for land after many months at sea. I was happy. I leaned on the gnarled stem of an apple tree and for a moment again closed my eyes. I heard the breeze and velvet bells in the white treetops, I heard the birds trilling, and before my closed eyes their song was transformed into thousands of lanterns carried by invisible hands to a great ceremony. I did not see those hands, but I heard the high-pitched voices, and it seemed to me they were children, a joyous procession of children.. . . And all at once I felt a hand on my cheek. And a voice. "Mr. Kostka, you are so good to me...." I didn't open my eyes.

I didn't move the hand. I still saw the birds' voices transformed into a dance of lanterns, I still heard the ringing of the apple trees. And the voice added, more faintly: "I love you."

Perhaps I should have expected nothing more than that moment and quickly left, knowing I had done my duty. But before I could reflect, I let a giddy weakness take hold of me.

We were completely alone in the wide open country among the pitiful little apple trees; I took Lucie in my arms and sank with her into the bower of nature.

17

What shouldn't have happened happened. When I saw Lucie's calmed soul through her smile, I knew I'd reached my aim and I should have left. But I didn't. With bad consequences. We continued to live on the same farm. Lucie was happy, glowing, she was like the spring, which all around us was gradually changing into summer. But instead of being happy, I was horrified by the great female springtime at my side, which I myself had awakened and which turned all its unfolding blossoms toward me, blossoms that I knew were not mine, must not be mine. I had a son and a wife in Prague who waited patiently for my rare visits home.

I did not wish to break off this beginning of intimacies for fear of wounding Lucie, yet I did not dare go on with them, knowing I was beyond my rights. I desired her, yet at the same time I was afraid of her love, unsure of what to do with it. Only with the greatest effort was I able to maintain the natural tone of our former talks. My doubts had come between us. It seemed to me that the spiritual assistance I'd given Lucie had been shown up for what it was. That I had desired her physically from the moment I'd seen her. That I had been a seducer in priest's robe. That all my talk of Jesus and God was no more than a veil for the most base carnal desires. I felt that the moment I yielded to my sexuality I had soiled the purity of my original intention and been stripped of all my merit before God.

Yet no sooner did I arrive at that conclusion than my reflection made a complete about face: what vanity, I mentally shouted at myself, what presumption to want to be worthy, to be pleasing to God! What do man's merits signify before Him? Nothing, nothing, nothing! Lucie loves me and her health depends on my love! Must I throw her back into despair merely to save my own purity? Will God not despise me all the more? And if my love is sinful, what is more important: Lucie's life or my sinlessness? It will be
my
sin, only
I
will be the one to bear it, only I myself will be lost through my sin!

Then one day these doubts and thoughts were disturbed by outside intervention. The central authorities fabricated political charges against my director. When it became clear that he would defend himself tooth and nail, they tried to strengthen their case by claiming he was surrounded by suspicious elements. I was one of them: a man said to have been expelled from the university for views hostile to the State, and pro-clerical to boot. The director did his best to prove I wasn't pro-clerical and hadn't been expelled from the university. The more he protested the more he demonstrated his close ties with me and the more he harmed himself. My situation was well nigh hopeless.

Injustice, Ludvik? Yes, that's the word you use most often when you hear about this or similar incidents. But I don't know what injustice is. If there were nothing above human affairs and if actions had only the significance ascribed to them by those who perform them, then the concept of injustice would be warranted and I could cite the injustice of being more or less thrown off the state farm where I had worked with devotion. It might even have been logical to defend myself against this injustice and fight furiously for my puny human rights.

But events for the most part have a meaning quite different from the one their blind authors ascribe to them; they are often disguised instructions from above, and the people through whom they occur are merely the unwitting messengers of a higher will whose existence they do not even suspect.

I was certain that was the case here too. So I accepted the developments on the farm with relief. I saw in them a clear instruction: Leave Lucie before it is too late. You have accomplished your task. The fruits of your labors do not belong to you. Your path leads elsewhere.

As a result, I did the same thing I'd done two years earlier at the Natural Sciences Division. I said good-bye to a tearfully disconsolate Lucie and went forth to meet apparent disaster. I offered to leave the farm of my own accord. The director did protest a bit, but I knew he