The JOKE (37 page)

Yes, suddenly I saw it clearly: most people deceive themselves with a pair of faiths: they believe in
eternal memory
(of people, things, deeds, nations) and in
redressibility
(of deeds, mistakes, sins, wrongs). Both are false faiths. In reality the opposite is true: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be redressed. The task of obtaining redress (by vengeance or by forgiveness) will be taken over by forgetting. No one will redress the wrongs that have been done, but all wrongs will be forgotten.

I took another careful look around me, because I knew that the linden tree would be forgotten, and the people at that table, and the waiter (weary after his last stint of running around), and this restaurant, which (uninviting from the street) was on the garden side quite pleasantly overgrown with trellised grapevines. I looked at the open door to the corridor, into which the waiter (the tired heart of the now all but deserted, silent nook) had just vanished, and from which (as soon as the darkness had swallowed him) now emerged a youth in

leather jacket and jeans; he stepped into the garden and looked around; then he saw me and headed in my direction; several seconds passed before I recognized him as Helena's sound technician.

I always experience distress when a loving and unloved woman threatens to come back, so when the youth gave me the envelope ("It's from Mrs. Zemanek"), my first wish was somehow to postpone reading it. I told him to take a seat; he complied (leaning on one elbow and squinting contentedly at the sun-drenched linden tree), and I put the envelope on the table and said: "How about a drink?"

He shrugged his shoulders; I suggested vodka, but he refused, saying that he would be driving; he added that if I wanted one, he would be happy to watch. I didn't, but since the envelope was lying on the table in front of me, and I didn't want to open it, any alternative seemed welcome. I asked the waiter as he went past to bring me a vodka.

"You don't happen to know what Helena wants, do you?" I said.

"How should I know? Read the letter," he replied.

"Anything urgent?"

"Do you think she made me memorize it in case I was attacked?"

I picked up the envelope (it had the official letterhead of the District Committee on it); then I put it back on the table in front of me and, not knowing what to say, remarked,

'Too bad you're not drinking."

"After all, it's for
your
safety too," he said. The hint was clear: the youth wanted to clarify his return trip and his chances of being alone with Helena. He was not unpleasant; on his face (small, pale, and freckled, with a short, turned-up nose) one could read everything going on inside him; perhaps what made it so transparent was its incorrigible childishness (I say incorrigible because its abnormally tiny features were not the type that age makes any more virile, it only makes an old man's face the face of a child grown old). Such a childish appearance can't please a youth of twenty, because at that age it disqualifies him, so that the only thing he can do is to disguise it in every way possible (just as it was disguised by—oh, that eternal theatre of shadows!—the boy commander): by his dress (his leather jacket was broad-shouldered, well-cut, and well-sewn) and by his behavior (he

was self-assured, a trifle rude, at times casually indifferent). Unfortunately for him, he continually betrayed himself in this disguise: he blushed, he couldn't quite control his voice, which at the slightest excitement tended to break (as I'd noticed when we first met), he couldn't even control his eyes and his gestures (he had wanted to indicate his unconcern about whether I was going to Prague with them or not, but when I now assured him I'd be staying here, his eyes too obviously gleamed).

When the waiter brought two vodkas to the table by mistake, the youth waved his hand and said there was no need to take one away. "I wouldn't leave you to drink alone," he said, and raised his glass. 'To your health!"

"And to yours!" I said, and we clinked glasses.

We started talking and I learned that the youth was expecting to leave in about two hours, because Helena wanted to go over the material they had taped and add her commentary where necessary, so that the whole thing could be broadcast tomorrow. I asked what it was like working with Helena. Again he blushed and answered that Helena knew what she was doing but was too tough on her crew, since she was always ready to work overtime and disregarded the fact that others might be in a hurry to get home. I asked him if he was in a hurry to get home. He said he wasn't; he was enjoying himself here. Then, taking advantage of the fact that I had started talking about Helena, he asked with a casual air: "How do you know Helena?" I told him and he pressed on. "She's really great, isn't she?"

Particularly when the conversation turned to Helena, he tried to look happy, which I again ascribed to his wish for a disguise, since his hopeless adoration of Helena was evidently common knowledge and he was obliged to do everything he could to avoid wearing the infamous crown of the unrequited lover. So although I didn't take his serenity altogether seriously, it did something to lighten the load of the letter lying before me, and I finally picked it up and opened it: "body and soul... no reason to live. Farewell..."

I saw the waiter at the other end of the garden and shouted: 'The check, please!" The waiter nodded, but refusing to be deflected from his orbit, he vanished into the corridor.

"Come on. There's no time to lose," I told the youth. I stood up and hurried across the garden; he followed me. We went down the corridor and reached the exit, so that the waiter, like it or not, had to run after us.

"A schnitzel, soup, two vodkas," I dictated.

"What's going on?" asked the youth in a subdued voice.

I paid the waiter and told the youth to take me quickly to Helena. We set off at a brisk pace.

"What's happened?" he asked.

"How far is it?" I asked in return.

He pointed some distance ahead of us, and I broke into a run. The District Committee building was a whitewashed one-story structure with a gate and two windows facing the street. We went inside; we found ourselves in an uninviting sort of office: under the window were two desks drawn close together; on one of them lay the tape recorder, open, next to a pad of paper and a woman's handbag (yes, it was Helena's); there were chairs at both desks and a metal clothes tree in a corner. Two coats were hanging on it: Helena's blue raincoat and a man's dirty trenchcoat.

'This is it," said the youth.

"Is this where she gave you the letter?"

"Yes."

But the office was now hopelessly empty; I called out: "Helena!" and was alarmed to hear how uneasy and apprehensive my voice sounded. There was no response. I called out again: "Helena!" and the youth asked:

"Do you think she's ... ?"

"Looks like it," I said.

"Is that what the letter was about?"

"Yes," I said. "Did they give you any other rooms?"

"No."

"What about the hotel?"

"We checked out this morning."

"She must be here then," I said, and now I heard the youth's voice break as he called anxiously: "Helena!"

I opened the door to the adjacent room; it was another office: desk, wastepaper basket, three chairs, cabinet, and clothes tree (the clothes tree was the same as the one in the first office: a metal pole standing on three legs and spreading upward into three metal branches; because there were no coats hanging on it, it looked human, orphan-like; its metallic nakedness and ridiculously raised arms filled me with anxiety); there was a window over the desk, otherwise just the bare walls; no other door; the two offices were evidently the only rooms in the building.

We went back to the first room; I took the pad off the desk and thumbed through it; there were some almost illegible notes for (judging from the few words I managed to read) a description of the Ride of the Kings; no message, no further parting words. I opened the handbag: there was a handkerchief, a wallet, lipstick, powder, two loose cigarettes, a lighter; no medicine bottle, no poison vial. I tried feverishly to think what Helena could have done, and the likeliest thing seemed to be poison; but in that case there should have been a little bottle somewhere. I went to the clothes tree and rummaged through the pockets of the raincoat: they were empty.

"What about the attic?" the youth said impatiently, having apparently concluded that my search of the room, though it had lasted only a few seconds, was getting us nowhere. We ran into the hallway and saw two doors: one had a glass pane that gave an indistinct view of the back courtyard; we opened the other one, the nearer one, behind which appeared a stone stairway, dark and covered with a layer of dust and soot. We ran up the stairs; we were enveloped in darkness; there was only a single dormer window in the roof (with filthy glass), through which came a dull gray light. All around us we could make out the shapes of every kind of junk (boxes, garden tools, hoes, spades, rakes as well as heaps of documents and an old broken chair); we kept tripping over it.

I wanted to call out "Helena!" but was stopped by fear; I was afraid of the silence that would follow. The youth didn't call out either. We threw the junk around and groped in the dark corners in silence; I could feel how agitated we both were. And the worst source of fear was our silence, by which we were admitting that we no longer expected any answer from Helena, that we were now merely looking for her body, whether hanging or sprawled.

We found nothing, however, and went back down to the office. I checked everything again, desks, chairs, and the clothes tree with her raincoat held by its raised arm, and again in the other room: desk, chairs, the clothes tree with its empty arms raised despairingly. The youth called out (for no reason) "Helena!" and I (for no reason) opened the cabinet, revealing shelves full of documents, writing materials, adhesive tape, and rulers.

"There's got to be somewhere else! A toilet! Or a cellar!" I said, and we went out into the hallway again; the youth opened the door to the courtyard. The courtyard was small; there was a cage of rabbits in one corner; beyond it was an overgrown garden with fruit trees rising from the thick uncut grass (in some remote corner of my mind I was just capable of noticing that the garden was beautiful: bits of blue sky hanging among the green of the branches, the trunks of the trees rough and crooked, and a few bright yellow sunflowers shining between them); at the end of the garden, in the idyllic shade of an apple tree, I saw a wooden shack, a country outhouse. I hurled myself towards it.

The revolving wooden latch, fastened to the narrow frame by a large nail (so that the door could be closed from the outside by turning the latch to the horizontal position), was vertical. I inserted my fingers in the gap between the frame and the door, and, applying gentle pressure, determined that the toilet was locked from inside; this could mean only one thing: Helena was inside. I said quietly: "Helena, Helena!" There was no reply; only the apple tree, stirring in the gentle breeze, rustling its branches against the wooden wall of the shack.

I knew that the silence from the locked shack meant the worst, but I also knew that the only course was to rip the door off and that I was the one who had to do it. Again I inserted my fingers in the gap between the frame and the door and pulled with all my might. The door (fastened not by a hook but, as is often the case in the country, by a mere bit of string) gave way at once and swung wide open. Facing me on the wooden seat, in the stench of the outhouse, sat Helena. She was

pale but alive. She looked up at me with terrified eyes and instinctively tugged at her turned-up skirt, which despite her best efforts hardly came halfway down her thighs; she gripped the hem with both hands and pressed her legs tightly together. "For God's sake, go away!" she cried in anguish.

"What's the matter?" I shouted at her. "What have you taken?"

"Go away! Leave me alone!"

At this point the youth appeared behind my back and Helena cried out, "Go away, Jindra!

Go away!" She lifted herself off the wooden seat and reached out for the door, but I stepped in between her and the door so that she was forced to totter back onto the round opening of the seat.

In a moment she lifted herself off it again and threw herself at me with a desperate strength (really
desperate,
for she seemed to have little strength left after her last exhausting effort). She gripped the lapels of my jacket with both hands and pushed me out; both of us were now over the threshold. "You beast, beast, beast!" she shouted (if one can call this furious effort to force an enfeebled voice a shout), and tried to shake me; then, suddenly, she let go and started to run across the grass towards the courtyard. She wanted to run away but was betrayed: she had rushed from the outhouse in confusion, without being able to arrange her clothes, so that her panties (the same stretch panties I had seen yesterday, which also served as a garter belt) were twisted around her knees and kept her from advancing (her skirt was down, but the silk stockings on her legs had fallen and their dark, upper fringe with the garters hung below her knees and could be seen beneath her hem); she took a few little steps or jumps (in her high-heeled shoes), but before she had gone even ten feet she fell (fell onto the sunny grass, under the branches of a tree, near the tall, gaudy sunflowers); I took her by the hand and tried to help her up; she tore away from me, and when I bent down over her again, she started flailing wildly so that I caught several blows before I could seize her, using all my strength, pull her to me, pick her up, and hold her in my arms as in a straitjacket. "Beast, beast, beast, beast!"

she gasped as she pummeled me on the back with her free hand; and when I said (as gently as possible), "Calm down, Helena," she spat in my face.

Without relaxing my grip, I said: "I'm not letting you go until you tell me what you took."

"Go away, go away!" she repeated frantically, but then she suddenly went quiet, ceased all resistance, and said: "Let me go"; she said it in such a different (weak and weary) voice that I loosened my hold and looked at her; to my horror, her face was lined with some terrible effort, her jaws clamped shut, her eyes unseeing, and her body bending forward, slightly crouched.