The JOKE (33 page)

I threw away my paper cup, and the Ride of the Kings, which had now sufficiently displayed itself to the spectators on the green, set off on a several-hour-long peregrination through the village. I knew it all very well: the last year of the war I myself had ridden as a page (dressed in ceremonial woman's garb, with saber in hand) at the side of Jaroslav, who was then the king. I had no desire to let myself be moved by memories, but (as if the forlornness of the festival had disarmed me) I no longer wanted to force myself to turn my back on this scene; I slowly made my way in the wake of the riders, who had now spread out; in the center of the group was a cluster of three riders: in the middle the king, and on each side a page wearing woman's clothes and carrying a saber. Beside them trotted a few others of the king's escort: the so-called
ministers.
The rest of the procession was split into two independent wings riding on either side of the street; here too the riders' roles were precisely defined: there were the
standard-bearers
(with red flags stuck into their boots and fluttering along the horses' flanks), the
heralds
(reciting before each house their rhymed message about the righteous pauper king who had lost to thieves a thousand head of cattle), and finally the
collectors
(who called out for gifts "For the king, my good woman, for the king!" and held out cane baskets for contributions).

4

Thank you, Ludvik, I've known you for just eight days and I love you as I've never loved anyone else, I love you and trust you, I can think of nothing else, and I trust you because even if my mind deceived me or my emotions or my soul, the body has no deceit, the body is more honest than the soul, and my body knows that it has never experienced anything like yesterday, sensuality, tenderness, cruelty, pleasure, pain, my body has never dreamed of anything like it, our bodies made their vows yesterday, now our heads have only to go obediently along, I've known you just eight days and I thank you, Ludvik.

I thank you too for coming at just the right moment, for saving me. Today the weather had been lovely since early morning, the sky was radiant, I was radiant, everything went well this morning, we went to the house where the boy and his parents live and recorded the summoning of the king, and then suddenly he came up to me, and I was afraid, I didn't know he was here already from Bratislava, and I didn't expect such cruelty, imagine, Ludvik, he had the coarseness to bring her with him!

Fool that I am, I had believed to the last that my marriage was not yet completely ruined, that it could still be saved, fool that I am, I had nearly sacrificed even you for that rotten marriage, I nearly called off our rendezvous here, fool that I am, I nearly let myself be taken in by that sugary voice when he told me he would stop off for me here on his way from Bratislava and that he had a lot he wanted to say to me, that he wanted a heart-to-heart talk, and now he brings her, that kid, that brat, a girl of twenty-two, thirteen years younger than me, it's so degrading to lose simply because of being born earlier, I felt so helpless I could have screamed, but I couldn't scream, I had to smile and shake hands with her politely, thank you, Ludvik, for giving me the strength.

When she moved away a bit, he told me that now we'd have a chance to talk it all over frankly among the three of us and that this would be the most honorable way, honor, honor, I know his honor, two years now he's been angling for a divorce, and he knows that with just the two of us he won't get anywhere, he's counting on my being embarrassed face to face with his girlfriend, he thinks I'll be ashamed to play the role of the obstinate wife, that I'll break down and give in. I hate him, he slips the knife between my ribs when I'm on a job, when I need to be calm, at least he could have some respect for my work, to give it some consideration, but this is the way it's been for years and years, I've always been pushed around, I always lose, I'm always humiliated, but now I'm fighting back, I've felt you and your love behind me, I've felt you still in me and on me, and those fine colorful horsemen were all around me shouting and cheering as if crying out that you exist, that life exists, that the future exists, and I felt pride arise within me, the pride I had almost lost, and this pride flooded over me, and I managed to smile sweetly and tell him: There's no need for me to go to Prague with you, I don't want to intrude, and anyway I have the broadcasting car, and as for the agreement you wanted to discuss, that can be settled very quickly, I can introduce you to the man I want to live with, and I'm sure that we can come to an amicable arrangement.

Maybe this was a crazy thing to do, well, but if it was, too bad, it was worth it for that moment of sweet pride, it was worth it, he immediately became five times more friendly, was obviously glad but afraid I might not really mean it, he asked me to repeat it all and then finally I told him your full name, Ludvik Jahn, Ludvik Jahn, and at the end I said to him explicitly, don't worry, honestly, I'm not going to stand in the way of our divorce, don't worry, I wouldn't want you, even if you wanted me. He replied that he was sure we would remain good friends, and I smiled and said I didn't doubt it.

5

Years ago, when I was still playing the clarinet in the band, we used to wonder just what the Ride of the Kings meant. When the defeated Hungarian king Matthias was fleeing from Bohemia to Hungary, he and his cavalry were forced to hide from their Czech pursuers here in the Moravian countryside and beg their daily bread. The Ride of the Kings is said to be a reminder of that historic event of the fifteenth century, but even a brief perusal of old documents shows that the tradition of the Ride is much older than this. Where, then, did it come from and what does it mean? Does it perhaps date from pagan times, and is it a survival of the rites in which boys were accepted as men? And why are the king and his pages dressed as women? Is it meant to reflect how an armed band (either Matthias' or a much more ancient one) took its leader through enemy country in disguise, or is it a survival of some old pagan superstition according to which transvestism offers protection from evil spirits? And why is the king forbidden to utter a word throughout? And why is it called the Ride of the Kings when there is only one king involved? What does it all mean? No one knows. There are a number of hypotheses, none of them has been proved. The Ride of the Kings is a mysterious rite; no one knows what it means, what it wants to say, but just as Egyptian hieroglyphs are more beautiful to those who cannot read them (and perceive them as mere fanciful sketches), so too, perhaps, the Ride of the Kings is beautiful because the content of its communication has long since been lost and gestures, colors, words come more and more into the foreground, drawing attention to themselves and to their own aspect and shape. And so, to my astonishment, the initial mistrust with which I

watched the straggly departure of the Ride soon vanished, and all at once I was completely enthralled by the colorful cavalcade as it slowly moved from house to house; the loudspeakers had at last fallen silent, and all I could hear (apart from the occasional clatter of vehicles, which I had long been in the habit of filtering out) was the strange music of the heralds' rhymed calls.

I wanted to stand there, to close my eyes and just listen: I realized that here, in the middle of a Moravian village, I was hearing
verse,
verse in the primeval meaning of the word, verse unlike any I could ever hear on the radio or on television or on the stage, verse like a ceremonial rhythmic call on the border between speech and song, verse that moved me solely by the pathos of its meter, as it probably moved the audience when it resounded from the floor of the ancient amphitheaters. It was a music sublime and
polyphonic:
each of the heralds declaimed in a monotone, on the same note throughout, but each on a different pitch, so that the voices combined unwittingly into a chord; moreover, they did not all declaim at once; each started his call at a different moment, at a different house, so that the voices came to the ear from here and there, like a canon for several voices: one would be finishing, another halfway through, a third just beginning its invocation at its own different pitch.

The Ride of the Kings straggled down the main street (continually startled by the traffic), and then, at a corner, it split up, one wing continuing straight ahead while the other turned off into a little street; the first house was a small yellow cottage with a fence and a small garden of colorful flowers. The herald broke into humorous improvisations: the cottage had a pretty
fountain,
and its mistress had a son like a
mountain;
there was in fact only a pump at the entrance, and the heavy-set woman of forty, obviously flattered by the tide bestowed on her son, laughed and handed a banknote to the rider (the collector) calling out "For the king, my good woman, for the king!" No sooner had the collector dropped it in the basket fastened to his saddle than another herald called out to the woman that she was
fine and dandy
but he preferred her
wine and brandy;
making a cup of one hand, he bent his head back and pretended to drink. Everyone laughed, and the woman, both embarrassed and pleased, ran into the house; she must have foreseen it all, for she returned almost at once with a bottle and a glass for the horsemen.

While the king's retinue was drinking and joking, the king himself sat motionless and grave with his two pages a short distance away, as it is a king's lot to be draped in his gravity, to stand aloof in the midst of his clamorous troops. The pages' horses stood on either side of the king's, so close that the boots of all three nearly touched (the horses had large gingerbread hearts on their breasts, studded with tiny mirrors and trimmed with colored sugar; their brows were decked with paper roses and their manes woven with colored crepe paper ribbons). All three mute horsemen were in their women's clothes: wide skirts, starched puckered sleeves, and on the pages' heads richly ornamented bonnets; only the king had, instead of a bonnet, a silver diadem from which hung three long, wide ribbons, blue at the edges and red in the middle, which completely covered his face and gave him a solemn and mysterious appearance.

I was enchanted by this immobile trinity; twenty years ago I myself had sat on a garlanded horse just like them, but because I was seeing the Ride of the Kings
from
within,
I hadn't seen a thing; only now did I really see it, and I couldn't tear my eyes away: the king (a few yards off) sat so straight he looked like a statue under guard, veiled in a flag; maybe, it suddenly occurred to me, maybe it wasn't a king at all, maybe it was a queen; maybe it was Queen Lucie who had come to reveal herself to me in her real form, because her
real
form was actually her
hidden
form.

And at the same moment it occurred to me that Kostka, who combined the obstinacy of reflection with the obstinacy of delusion, was an eccentric, that everything he had told me was possible but not certain; he knew Lucie, of course, he might even know a lot about her, but the main thing had escaped him: that soldier who wanted to have her in the borrowed miner's flat—Lucie really loved him; I could hardly take seriously the story of Lucie gathering those flowers out of some vague religious longing when I remember that she gathered them for me. And if she said not a word of this to Kostka, of this nor of the whole six tender months of our love, then she had kept a secret even from him, and even he did not know her; moreover, it was not clear that she had really moved to this town because of him; it could have been a mere coincidence, but it was also possible that she came here because of me, since she did after all know that it was my hometown.

I felt that the account of that original rape was true, but I now had doubts about the precise circumstances: at times the story was colored by the sanguinary view of a man excited by sin, and at times by a blue so radiantly blue as only a man who keeps looking to heaven is capable of seeing; it was clear: in Kostka's narrative, truth and poetry were mixed, and it was nothing more than a new legend (perhaps closer to the truth, perhaps more beautiful, perhaps more profound) that now overlay the old one. I looked at the veiled king and I saw Lucie riding (unrecognized and unrecognizable) ceremoniously (and mockingly) through my life. Then (in reaction to some odd external compulsion) my gaze slipped to the eyes of a smiling man who had evidently been watching me for some time. "Hello," he said, and came up to me. "Hello," I said. He held out his hand; I shook it. Then he turned and called to a girl I hadn't noticed until then. "What are you waiting for? Come on, I want to introduce you." The girl (tall, good-looking, with dark hair and dark eyes) came up and said: "Broz." She gave me her hand, and I said: "Jahn. Pleased to meet you." Jovially, the man exclaimed: "Well, old boy, it's been years!" It was Zemanek.

6

Fatigue. Fatigue. I couldn't shake it off. The Ride had set off with the king for the village green and I followed slowly after it. I took deep breaths to overcome the fatigue. I stopped several times with the neighbors who'd come out of their cottages to gape.

Suddenly I felt I was just another one of them. That my days of travel and adventure were over. That I was hopelessly bound to the two or three streets where I lived.

By the time I reached the green, the Ride had started down the long main street. I wanted to drag myself after it, but then I saw Ludvik. He was standing by himself on the grassy edge of the road looking thoughtfully at the riders. Damn Ludvik! I wish he'd go to hell!

Up to now, he's been avoiding me, well, today I'm going to avoid him! Turning on my heels, I went over to a bench under an apple tree. I would sit and listen to the distant calls of the horsemen.

So there I sat, listening and watching. The Ride of the Kings gradually drifted away. It clung pitifully to the sides of the street, along which cars and motorcycles passed continually. A group of people were walking after it. A pathetically small group. From year to year fewer people come to the Ride. Though this year Ludvik is here. What is he doing here? Damn you, Ludvik! It's too late now. Too late for everything. You come like a bad omen. A dark omen. Seven crosses. Now of all times, when my Vladimir is king.