The JOKE (36 page)

bottle of some sort, yes, it was for headaches, toothaches, sciatica, and neuritis, it wasn't for illness of the soul, but at least it would ease my head.

I found a faucet in a corner of the room next door, put some water in an empty mustard jar, and took two tablets. Two, that's enough, that should help, of course Algena can't help me with the illness of my soul, unless I swallow all the tablets in the bottle, because it's poisonous in massive doses, and Jindra's bottle is nearly full, maybe it would be enough.

It was only an idea, a sudden flash, but it kept coming back to me, and I couldn't help thinking, why am I alive, what good is there in going on, but it's not true really, I didn't think anything of the sort, I was hardly thinking at all, I just imagined myself no longer alive and suddenly I felt such bliss, such strange bliss that I wanted to laugh and maybe really did begin to laugh.

I put two more tablets on my tongue, I had no intention of poisoning myself, I merely squeezed the bottle in my palm and said to myself
I'm holding my death in my hand,
and I was enthralled by so much opportunity, it was like going step by step to an abyss, not to jump into it, just to look down. I refilled the glass with water, swallowed the tablets, and went back to our room, the window was open, and the sound of Hear ye, hear ye was still resonating in the distance, but mixed with the racket of the cars, the trucks, and those filthy motorcycles, they drown out everything beautiful, everything I've believed in and lived for, the racket was unbearable, the helpless feebleness of the voices was unbearable, and so I closed the window and again I felt the long, lingering pain in my soul.

Through all our life together, Pavel never hurt me as you, Ludvik, as you did in a single minute, I forgive Pavel, I understand him, his flame is quickly consumed, he has to seek new pastures and a new audience and a new public, he hurt me, but now through this fresh pain I see him without malice, as a mother might, as a bully, a show-off, I smile at his attempts through the years to wriggle out of my embrace, ah! go then, Pavel, go then, you I understand, but you, Ludvik, I don't understand, you came to me in a mask, you came to resurrect me, and once

resurrected, to destroy me, you I curse, only you, I curse you and at the same time I ask you to come, to come to me and have mercy.

God, maybe it's just some terrible misunderstanding, maybe Pavel told you something when you were alone together, I don't know, I asked you about it, I begged you to explain why you don't love me anymore, I didn't want to let you go, four times I held you back, but you didn't want to listen, you just said it was all over, finished, finished, definitely, irrevocably, all right, finished, in the end I agreed, in a high soprano voice as if it was somebody else talking, some girl before puberty, and I said in this high-pitched voice,
have a good trip then,
it's funny, I don't know why I wished you a good trip, but it kept tumbling off my tongue: have a good trip, have a good trip then... .

Maybe you don't know how much I love you, surely you don't know how much I love you, maybe you think I'm just another married woman looking for an adventure, and you don't understand that you're my destiny, my life, my everything... . Maybe you'll find me here lying under a white sheet and then you'll understand you've killed the most precious thing you ever had in your life ... or you'll come, oh my God, and I'll still be alive, and you'll be able to save me again and you'll be kneeling and crying, and I'll stroke your hands, your hair, and I'll forgive you, I'll forgive you everything... .

15

There was really nothing else to do, I had to sweep away that bad story, that bad joke which, not content with itself, had gone on monstrously multiplying itself into more and more silly jokes, I not only wanted to wipe out the entire day, which came about by inadvertence, simply because I had overslept and missed my train, but I also wanted to wipe out everything leading up to that day, the whole stupid conquest of Helena, which too was based simply on error.

I hurried away as if I could hear Helena's pursuing footsteps behind me, and I thought: even if I were able to wipe these few pointless days out of my life, what good would that do, when the
entire
story of my life was conceived in error, through the bad joke of the postcard, that accident, that nonsense? And I was horrified at the thought that things conceived in error are just as real as things conceived with good reason and of necessity.

How glad I would be to revoke the whole story of my life! Yet how could I do so by my own exertions when the errors it stemmed from were not only
my own? Who,
in fact, made the error when the silly joke of my postcard was taken seriously? Who made the error when Alexej's father (by now long since rehabilitated, but no less dead for it) was arrested and sentenced? The errors were so common and universal that they didn't represent exceptions or faults in the order of things; on the contrary, they constituted that order. What was it, then, that was mistaken? History itself? History the divine, the rational? But why call them history's
errors?
They seem so to my human reason, but if history really has its own reason, why should that reason care about human understanding, and why should it be as serious as a schoolmarm? What if history plays jokes? And then I realized how

powerless I was to revoke my own joke when throughout my life as a whole I was involved in a joke much more vast (all-embracing for me) and utterly irrevocable.

On the deserted village green (now silent because the Ride was making its rounds at the other end of the village), I saw a large sign leaning against a wall and announcing in red letters that today at four in the afternoon a cimbalom band would be giving a concert in the garden of a certain restaurant. Next to the placard was the door to this restaurant, and since it was lunchtime and I had almost two hours before my bus was due to leave, I went inside.

16

I wanted so much to move just an inch nearer the abyss, I wanted to lean over the railing and look down into it, as if it could bring me solace and reconciliation, as if down there, down there at least, if nowhere else, down there at the bottom of the abyss we might find each other and be together, without misunderstandings, without malicious people, without aging, without sorrow, forevermore. ... I went into the other room again, still with only the four tablets inside me, that's nothing, I'm still a long way from the abyss, I can't even touch the railing. I poured the remaining tablets into my palm. Then I heard a door open in the corridor, I was startled and I stuffed the tablets into my mouth and gulped them down, it was too much all at once, and I felt them lumped painfully in my throat, even when I had drunk as much as I could.

It was Jindra, he asked me how the commentary was coming along and suddenly I was another person, the confusion had left me, that high-pitched alien voice was gone, and I was purposeful and decisive. Please, Jindra, I'm glad you're here, I'd like you to do something for me. He blushed and said that he'd do anything for me and that he was glad I felt all right again. Yes, I'm all right now, just wait a minute, I want to write a few words, and I sat down and took some paper, and wrote. Ludvik, my dearest, I loved you body and soul, and now my body and soul have no reason to live. Farewell, I love you, Helena. I didn't even reread what I'd written, Jindra sat facing me, watching me, unaware of what I was writing, I quickly folded the paper and wanted to put it in an envelope, but there were no envelopes anywhere, Jindra, do you have an envelope?

Jindra calmly went over to the cabinet by the table, opened it, and began rummaging in it, at any other time I'd have told him off for rummaging through other people's things, but at that moment I wanted an envelope quickly, he gave me one, it had the District Committee letterhead on it, I put my letter inside, sealed it, and wrote Ludvik Jahn on the front, Jindra, do you remember the man who was with us when my husband and that girl were there, yes, that's right, the dark one, I can't leave now and I'd like you to find him and give him this.

Again he took my hand, poor boy, I don't know what he was thinking, how he interpreted my excitement, he could never have guessed what it was about, he just sensed there was something bad happening to me, he crushed my hand again, and all of a sudden I felt terribly pitiful, and he bent down and took me in his arms and pressed his lips against mine, I wanted to resist him, but he held me tight and it went through my mind that this was the last man I would ever kiss in my life, that this was my last kiss, and suddenly I was frantic and I held him too and clasped him and opened my lips and felt his tongue on my tongue and his hands on my body, and in that moment I had a giddy feeling that now I was completely free and that nothing mattered anymore, because I'd been deserted by everyone and my world had crumbled and that's why I was completely free and could do what I liked, I was free like the girl we threw out of the radio station, there was no longer anything distinguishing her from me, my world was in pieces, I could never put it together again, I no longer had any reason to be faithful, or anybody to be faithful to, suddenly I was completely free, just like that girl from the station, that little whore who was in a different bed every night, if I went on living, I too would be in a different bed every night, I felt Jindra's tongue in my mouth, I was free, I knew I could make love to him, I wanted to make love to him, make love to him anywhere, here on the table or on the bare wooden floor, now, at once and without delay, to make love for the last time, to make love before the end, but Jindra had already drawn back, smiling proudly, and said he was off and would soon return.

17

The waiter dashed around the little room with its five or six tables, thick with smoke and people, bearing on his outstretched arm a large tray heaped with plates, on which I could just make out portions of wiener schnitzel and potato salad (apparently the only Sunday dish), and rudely pushing his way between people and tables, he rushed out of the room and into the corridor. I followed him and found an open door at the end of the corridor leading into the restaurant garden, where people were also eating. At the back, under a linden tree, was an unoccupied table; here I sat down.

The touching Hear ye, hear ye resounded over the village roofs from such a distance now that by the time it reached the garden, surrounded by the walls of the neighboring houses, it sounded only half real. And this seeming unreality made me think that everything around me was not the present but the past, a past fifteen, twenty years old, that Hear ye, hear ye was the past, Lucie was the past, Zemanek was the past, and Helena was just a stone I had wanted to throw at that past; the whole of these three days had been nothing but a theatre of shadows.

What? Just these three days? My entire life, it seemed to me, had always been overpopulated by shadows, and there was little room in it for the present. I imagine a moving walkway (that is, time) and on it a man (that is, myself) who is running in the direction opposite to the direction the walkway takes; the walkway, however, is moving faster than I and is thus slowly taking me farther away from the goal I am heading for; that goal (odd goal, situated in the
back!)
is the past of the political trials, the past of lecture halls where hands are raised, the past of fear, the past of black insignias and of Lucie, the past that bewitches me, that I am trying to decipher, unravel, undo, and that prevents me from living as a man should live, with his head facing forward.

And then there's the bond with which I want to tie myself to the past that hypnotizes me, and this bond is vengeance, but vengeance, as these three days have demonstrated, is just as futile as my running against the moving walkway of time. Yes, it was when Zemanek was reading from Fucik's
Notes from the Gallows
in the lecture hall that I should have gone up to him and punched him in the face, then and only then. When it is postponed, vengeance is transformed into something deceptive, into a personal religion, into a myth that recedes day by day from the people involved, who remain the same in the myth though in reality (the walkway is in constant motion) they long ago became different people: today another Jahn stands before another Zemanek, and the blow that I still owe him can be neither revived nor reconstructed, it is definitely lost.

I cut into the large pancake of schnitzel on my plate, and again the Hear ye, hear ye reached my ears, carrying faintly and nostalgically across the village roofs; I imagined the veiled king and his cavalry, and my heart contracted at the incomprehensibility of human gestures:

For many centuries, just like today, young men have been riding forth in Moravian villages with strange messages in some unknown language that they pronounce with a touching loyalty without understanding it. Some long-dead people certainly had something important to say, and today they are reborn in their descendants like deaf-and-dumb orators speaking to the audience in beautiful and incomprehensible gestures. Their message will never be decoded, not only because there is no key to it, but also because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when the accumulation of messages old and new is such that their voices cancel one another out. Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of paintings and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense. Thousands of deaf-and-dumb Rides of Kings will set out with their piteous and incomprehensible messages, and no one will have the time to hear them out.

I sat in a corner of the garden restaurant over my empty plate, having eaten my schnitzel without realizing it, and I saw that I too (right now, already!) had been included in this inescapable and boundless forgetting. The waiter came, took my plate, stopped to brush a few crumbs off my tablecloth, and hurried to another table. I was seized with regret about this day, not only because it had been futile, but because not even its futility would remain, it would be forgotten along with this table, along with the fly buzzing around my head, along with the yellow pollen scattered on the tablecloth by the flowering linden, along with the slow, indifferent service that is so characteristic of the society I live in, even that society would be forgotten, and even its mistakes and errors and injustices that had hypnotized me, that I had suffered from, that I was consumed by, and that I had vainly attempted to redress, to punish, and to undo—vainly, because what had happened had happened and could never be redressed.