The JOKE (31 page)

was doing it only out of decency and in the depths of his soul he was glad.

Only this time the voluntary nature of my departure made no impression whatever. I had no pre-February Communist friends to strew my path with good advice and flattering recommendations. I left the farm a man who himself admits that he is unfit to carry out work of any significance in this State. And so I became a construction worker.

18

IT was an autumn day in 1956. I saw Ludvik for the first time in five years, in the dining car of the Prague-Bratislava express. I was on my way to a factory construction site in eastern Moravia. Ludvik had just finished his stint in the Ostrava mines and had gone to Prague for permission to resume his studies. Now he was returning home to Moravia. We scarcely recognized each other. And when we did, we were amazed by the resemblance of our fates.

I still remember the sympathy in your eyes, Ludvik, as you listened to my tale about leaving the university and about the state farm intrigues that led to my becoming a bricklayer. I thank you for that sympathy. You were furious, you spoke of injustice, of stupidity. You blew up at me too: you reproached me for not standing up for myself, for surrendering without a fight. We should never leave anywhere voluntarily, you said. Let our opponents do the dirty work themselves! Why make their consciences any easier?

You a miner, I a bricklayer. Our stories so similar, and the two of us so different. I forgiving, you irreconcilable; I peaceful, you rebellious. How outwardly near we were, how inwardly distant!

You were far less aware of this inward distance between us than I was. When you gave me the full details of why you'd been expelled from the Party, you took it for granted that I was on your side and equally indignant about the bigotry of the Comrades who punished you for making fun of what they held sacred. What was it that made them so angry? you asked, sincerely astonished.

Let me tell you something: In Geneva, at the time when Calvin ruled, there lived a boy not too different from yourself, an intelligent boy always game for a laugh. One day they found a notebook of his

filled with jeering at Jesus Christ and the Gospel. What was it that made them so angry?

he must have thought, that boy not so different from yourself. He'd done nothing wrong, it was all just a joke. He had very little hatred in him. Only mockery and indifference. He was executed.

Please don't think I approve of such cruelty. All I'm trying to say is that no great movement designed to change the world can bear sarcasm or mockery, because they are a rust that corrodes all it touches.

Only examine your own attitude, Ludvik. They expelled you from the Party, from the university, put you in among the politically dangerous soldiers, then kept you down in the mines for another two or three years. And you? You became bitter to the depths of your soul, convinced of the great injustice done you. That sense of injustice still determines every step you take. I don't understand you! How can you speak of injustice? They sent you to a black insignia battalion among the enemies of Communism. Granted. But was that an injustice? Wasn't it more like a great opportunity? Think of what you could have accomplished among the enemy! Is there any greater mission? Didn't Jesus send His disciples "as sheep in the midst of wolves"? 'They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick," Jesus said. "For I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners.. .."

But you had no desire to go among the sinners and the sick!

You will argue that my comparison is invalid. That Jesus sent His disciples "in the midst of wolves" with His blessing, whereas you were first excommunicated and damned and only then sent among the enemies as an enemy, among wolves as a wolf, among the sinners as a sinner.

But do you want to deny you were a sinner? Don't you feel any guilt with regard to your community? Where do you get your pride? A man devoted to his faith is humble and must humbly bear even an unjust punishment. The humiliated shall be raised up. The repentant shall be purified. They who are wronged have the opportunity to test their fidelity. If the only reason you turned bitter towards your community was that it placed too great a burden on your shoulders, then your faith was weak and you failed the test that was set you.

I am not on your side in your quarrel with the Party, Ludvik, because I know that great things on this earth can be created only by a community of infinitely devoted men who humbly give up their lives to a higher design. You are not, Ludvik, infinitely devoted. Your faith is fragile. How can it be otherwise, when you always refer to yourself alone and to your own miserable reason?

I am not ungrateful, Ludvik. I know what you've done for me and for many others who have been hurt in one way or another by today's regime. I know you use your pre-February connections with high-ranking Communists and your present position to intervene, intercede, assist. I like you for it. But I tell you again for the last time: Look deep into your soul! The deepest motive for your good deeds
is
not love, but hatred!

Hatred towards those who once hurt you, towards those who raised their hands against you in that hall! Your soul knows no God, and therefore knows no forgiveness. You long for retribution. You identify those who hurt you then with those who hurt others now, and you take your revenge on them. Yes, revenge! You are full of hatred even when you help people. I feel it oozing from you. I feel it in your every word. But what are the fruits of hatred if not hatred in return, a chain of further hatreds? You are living in hell, Ludvik, I repeat this, you are living in hell, and I pity you.

19

Had Ludvik heard my soliloquy, he might have said that I was ungrateful. I know he's helped me a great deal. That time in fifty-six when we met on the train he was distressed by the life I was leading and immediately set to thinking of ways to find me work I would enjoy and derive satisfaction from. I was amazed by his speed and efficiency. He had a few words with a friend of his in his hometown. He hoped to find me a job teaching natural science at a local school. This was quite daring. Antireligious propaganda was still going strong, and it was almost impossible to hire a Christian as a schoolteacher.

That was the opinion of Ludvik's friend, who did come up with another idea. That's how I came to obtain my position in the virological department of the local hospital, where for the last eight years I've been breeding viruses and bacteria in mice and rabbits.

That's how it is. If it weren't for Ludvik, I wouldn't be living here, and Lucie wouldn't be living here either.

Several years after I left the farm she got married. She couldn't stay on the farm because her husband wanted to work in a city. They didn't quite know where they wanted to settle. In the end she prevailed on him to move here, to the town where I was living.

I have never received a greater gift, a greater reward. My little lamb, my little dove, the child I had healed and nurtured with my soul is returning to me. She wants nothing of me.

She has a husband. But she wants to be near me. She needs me. She needs to hear my voice now and then. To see me at Sunday services. To meet me in the street. I was happy, and at that moment I felt I was no longer young, that I was older than I thought, and that Lucie was perhaps the only achievement of my life.

Is that too little, Ludvik? Not at all. It is enough, and I am happy. I am happy. I am happy.. . .

20

Oh, how I delude myself! How stubbornly I try to convince
myself I've taken the right path! How I parade the power of my faith before the unbeliever!

Yes, I did manage to bring Lucie to faith in God. I managed to calm and heal her. I rid her of her disgust for the things of the flesh. In the end I stepped out of her path. Yes, but what good did I do her?

Her marriage hasn't turned out well. Her husband is a brute, he's openly unfaithful to her, and rumor has it he mistreats her. Lucie has never said a word about it to me. She knows the pain it would cause me. She's made her life out to be a model of happiness. But we live in a small town where nothing remains secret.

Oh, how I delude myself! I interpreted the political intrigues against the director of the state farm as a coded sign from God that I should leave. But how to recognize God's voice among so many other voices? What if the voice I heard was only the voice of my own cowardice?

For I had a wife and child in Prague. I wasn't much devoted to them, but I couldn't part from them either. I was afraid of getting into a situation I couldn't get out of. I was afraid of Lucie's love and didn't know what I should do with it. I was afraid of the complications it might bring me.

I set myself up as the angel of her salvation when in fact I was merely another of her seducers. I loved her once, a single time, then turned away. I acted as though I were offering her forgiveness when she actually should have forgiven me. She wept in despair when I left, and several years later she came and settled in my town. She talked to me.

Turned to me as to a friend. She has forgiven me. Besides, it's all clear. It hasn't happened often in my life, but that girl loved me. I had her life

in my hands. I had her happiness within my power. And I ran away. No one has ever wronged her as I did.

And suddenly the idea comes to me that I invoke supposed divine appeals as mere pretexts to extract myself from my human obligations. I am afraid of women. I am afraid of their warmth, I am afraid of their constant presence. I was terrified of a life with Lucie just as I am terrified by the thought of moving permanently into the teacher's two-room flat in the neighboring town.

And what was the real reason behind my voluntary resignation from the university fifteen years ago? I didn't love my wife, who was six years older than I. I could no longer stand her voice or her face or the monotonous tick-tock of the family clock. I couldn't live with her, but neither could I inflict a divorce on her, because she was good and had never done anything to hurt me. And so all of a sudden I heard the saving voice of an appeal from on high. I heard Jesus calling me to forsake my nets.

O God, is it truly so? Am I so wretchedly laughable? Tell me it is not so! Reassure me!

Make yourself heard, God, louder, louder! In this chaos of confused voices I cannot seem to hear You.

PART SEVEN

Ludvik, Jaroslav, Helena

1

When I got back to the hotel from Kostka's place late that evening, I was determined to leave for Prague first thing in the morning, since I had nothing more to do here: my deceitful mission to my hometown was over. Unfortunately, my head was in such a whirl that I spent half the night tossing and turning on my bed (my creaky bed) unable to sleep; when I finally did drop off, I kept waking up, and it wasn't until early morning that I fell into a deep sleep. As a result, I didn't get up until nine, when the morning buses and trains had already gone and there was no way to leave for Prague till two in the afternoon.

When I realized that, I was almost in despair. I felt like a man who has been shipwrecked, and suddenly I was nostalgic for Prague, for my work, for the desk in my flat, for my books. But there was nothing I could do; I had to grit my teeth and go down to the dining room for breakfast.

I entered with caution, as I was afraid of meeting Helena. But she wasn't there (evidently she was already scurrying around the neighboring village with a tape recorder over her shoulder, bothering the pass-ersby with a microphone and silly questions); the room was, however, packed with noisy people sitting and smoking over their beers, black coffees, ryes, and cognacs. I saw that once again my hometown would begrudge me a decent breakfast.

I went out into the street; the blue sky, the ragged little clouds, the gathering heaviness of the air, the dust rising slightly, the street opening into the broad, flat square with its spire (yes, the one that looks like a soldier in a helmet), all this washed over me with the gloom of emptiness. In the distance I could hear the drunken plaint of a drawn-out Moravian song (in which it seemed to me were enthralled the

nostalgia of the steppe, of the long rides of the mercenary Uhlans), and suddenly Lucie emerged in my mind, the story of long ago that at this moment. resembled the drawn-out song and spoke to my heart, through which (as through the steppe) so many women had passed without leaving a trace, just as the rising dust leaves no trace on that flat, broad square, settles between the cobblestones and rises again to fly off on a gust of wind.

I strode across those dusty cobblestones and felt the oppressive lightness of the void that lay over my life: Lucie, the goddess of mists, had first deprived me of herself, then yesterday turned my carefully calculated revenge to nothing, and soon after transformed even my memories of herself into something hopelessly ridiculous, into a grotesque mistake: what Kostka told me testifies that all those years I had in fact remembered another woman, because I never knew who Lucie was.

I had always liked to tell myself that Lucie was something abstract, a legend and a myth, but now I knew that behind the poetry of these words hid an entirely unpoetic truth: that I didn't know her; that I didn't know her as she really was, as she was in and to herself. I had been able to perceive (in my youthful egocentricity) only those aspects of her being that were turned directly to me (to my loneliness, my captivity, my yearning for tenderness and affection); she had never been anything to me but
a function of my own
situation;
everything that went beyond that concrete situation, everything that she was in herself, had escaped me. But if she was really a mere function of my situation, it was logical that when that situation altered (when another situation succeeded it, when I grew older and changed),
my Luck
vanished with it, because from then on she was only what had escaped me in her, what had not concerned me, what was beyond me. And so it was also logical that after fifteen years I had not recognized her. She had long been to me (and I had never thought of her except as being "to me") a different person, a stranger.