Flagged Victor (6 page)

In one particular file from 1950, the young Milan Kundera had been referred to as a police informant. According to the
bureaucratic notes, Kundera had given information to the secret police about the identity of a citizen who’d become a spy for the West. As a result of Kundera’s statement, the accused man served fourteen years of hard labour and narrowly escaped execution.

The news was a shock, which some refused to believe and others savoured. There were many Czechs who resented Kundera for being an intellectual and an emigrant, but in the public record, and certainly internationally, he had long been viewed as a noble opponent of totalitarianism. After all, he’d written novels critical of the insidious malignancy of the Communist government before and after abandoning his homeland in 1975.

Kundera himself had always denied he was a dissident or a communist or a leftist or a rightist. He was a novelist. His stories were not about right and wrong or good and evil but about love, laughter, forgetting, beauty, and lightness as well as weight and the other opposites. But given the new information that surfaced in his old file, it was possible to interpret Kundera’s abandonment of Czechoslovakia as psychological rather than political, a personal expediency rather than a moral stance. After all, in the eighties, he’d even ceased writing in his native language. Perhaps the need to sever himself from the oppression of his country had not been the driving force. Perhaps he’d escaped from a more internalized oppression as well—the weight of old connections, of guilty memories, of a distasteful or even shameful past, you name it.

Accused sixty years later of being an informant, Kundera denied it utterly, and many great writers came instantly and indignantly to his defence. Even the imprisoned man’s wife
believed Kundera was innocent. The accusation seemed like a deliberately cruel and malicious stain on his reputation, a nasty, degrading, provincial kind of revenge. Yet, the amateur psychologist cannot help but wonder. There are aspects of Kundera’s early novels that tangentially resemble the details of the long-buried report. Likewise, in several later works, there are passages that depict the pressures of interrogation and forced confession so keenly, the reader understands the complicit guilt of the good person who succumbs.

Did Kundera write those passages to manage his own convoluted shame and pre-emptively argue his innocence? Did he leave his country and abandon his native language because he wanted to escape an unbearable weight?

Mr. Kundera, please rise and defend your work.

It seems possible, even likely, that Kundera’s insights came from his observations of people who did inform on others. With his personal understanding of the pressure of a repressive society, it would not be difficult for him to imagine and depict such inner turmoil. It also seems entirely plausible that Kundera was set up, that the files themselves were bogus, the information planted by some crafty plotter. In any event, regardless of speculation, there is also the sombre truth that he was only twenty-one at the time of the alleged incident. As Kundera himself argued in an essay many years later, how could it be fair to judge anyone for the moral choices they made in the fog of an opaque and youthful moment? A half century on, Kundera was more or less a different person. And, ultimately, his writing is so remarkable that it begs the question: Shouldn’t any crimes (real, imagined, or speculated) that went into the making of it
be forgiven? Shouldn’t we even thank the youthful Kundera for making such real or imagined mistakes?

Nevertheless, if there’s a shred of accuracy to the report, then it is at least biographically interesting—in the way that gossip or therapy is interesting—that his work served in part as an elaborate, obtuse, artfully woven confession, written in the guise of fiction. Kundera himself could hardly have come up with a better plot, a better elaboration of lightness and weight, a better illustration of the personal cost of institutional oppression and the social cost of secret, double lives, than by constructing such a meta-metanarrative.

I think every novel, at some level, is a confession. And every account contains its share of betrayals.

In
the weeks that followed the tree fort incident, we all wondered how the cops had gotten there so fast. Chris figured he had the answer. Near Paul’s house, in the Horseshoe, the cul-de-sac that had once been barren and served as our street hockey arena, there were now several new houses, and a number of young families, one of them a cop family. The cop’s name was Drury, and though he was local police, not RCMP, he was a friend of Chris’s father through some brotherhood of the badge thing. Chris suspected Drury had the cruiser home that night when the call came in to the dispatcher. Maybe Paul’s parents called Officer Drury as soon as they heard noise outside. Or maybe they’d even consulted him in advance about the gang of kids who were trying to vandalize their property. Drury must have taken it personally. Three cruisers patrolled the streets of our
neighbourhood that night looking for us, catching no one. We were proud of that escape, and I tried not to allow the extreme heroic lengths Chris and I went to in order to avoid capture be diminished by the fact that everyone got away no matter what route they took.

Here’s
the truth: I didn’t run into Chris down by the lock. He clung to the edge by himself and stayed hidden and dry until he decided to swim across the lake on his own. I did not know he was there. In my panic, I fled by myself through the swamp. At one point, I lost my footing and fell hard, splitting my chin on a tree root or rock. I stumbled up, dizzy and teary-eyed, and tried to slow down, but I was afraid—I felt like something dark and evil was trying to stop me from getting away. Believing that I needed to get out of the woods immediately, I fought my way through tree branches to the street that cupped Oathill Lake.

I was covered in mud, I’d been flayed by branches, and I was holding my bleeding chin. The whole thing had been a game of hide-and-seek gone terribly wrong. Despite the seriousness of the trouble we’d summoned, in my mind, I was dismissing all consequence by simply giving up, the way you do when you decide you no longer want to play something. That’s a decision fraught with weight when you’re a child. When you play with other kids, there’s a tacit assumption that rules are not to be trifled with, that they’re sacred. When you give up—because the game has gotten too rough or you’re not being treated fairly or you’re insufficiently in command—you’re doing violence to
the shared fantasy world, destroying it in a way, and betraying everyone else who wants it to continue. But I didn’t give a shit anymore. I was going home.

I didn’t see the police car parked in the shadows until I was halfway up the street. It bleeped its siren and burst its blue and reds. I stood there, paralyzed, sick with the sudden understanding that some acts do indeed have consequences, that the real world will intrude on the world of delusion. I also realized in that moment that there was something wrong with me, some mental defect that had allowed my brain to ignore reality, to consider real life just another version that could be dismissed or embraced at my choosing. I raised my trembling hands into the air as you are supposed to, at least according to all the movies I’d ever seen, and a policeman in the front seat shined a flashlight on me. He saw the mess I was in and told me to get into the back. I think he was going to cuff me until he decided I needed a free hand to hold a pile of tissues.

That was Officer Drury. He spoke quietly into his radio and told whoever was listening that he had picked one up. Meaning one of us. Meaning me. A voice mumbled something back. Officer Drury didn’t say much for a long time after that. We sat in the car, him in the driver’s seat, me in the cage, and waited for another lost idiot to wander out of the woods. But no one did. I was the only one. I began to shake, as if very cold, and my nose ran and I sniffed and fought to keep my crying sounds quiet. I knew my life was over. Officer Drury knew it too, but he had clearly seen lives end before.

Then he broke the silence and spoke to me as directly and honestly as anyone had ever done. The conversation has never
left my brain. Not the words, exactly. But the inquisition. The stark assessment of my worth. It’s still in there, rattling around, working its way through many otherwise unrelated moments of conscience and shame.

What’s your name?

I told him.

Where do you live?

I told him.

You realize how stupid it was to operate a chainsaw in the woods in the middle of the night?

I said yes. Because I did realize it now, acutely.

How many of you were there?

I told him.

What are the names of the other boys?

I told him.

You all live around here?

I said, No. Some of us do.

I’m going to take you home. Your parents need to drive you to the hospital to get that chin stitched up.

I begged him not to.

He told me that my father would understand. I knew that he wouldn’t.

All grim and businesslike, my father thanked Officer Drury for bringing me home. My mother took me inside and looked at my chin under the bright kitchen light. Then, as I waited for my father to appear, I heard a strange sound. After a minute of strained listening, I realized to my horror that my father was sobbing in the hallway. That sound was the worst thing about the whole night, perhaps my whole life.

I was devastated, naturally. Until you’ve made your father cry, you do not know the disappointment a child can bring to a parent. But I was also angry. I was furious. I knew suddenly that I got caught because my father was the kind of father who would cry in the hallway when his son was brought home by the police. I also knew I was destined to be the kind of kid who didn’t have the grace and moxie to escape trouble, who lacked ease or competence in a crisis, because my father cried. My father was devastated by my failure. And I was devastated by his.

None of the other boys, as far as I know, were picked up. My parents, in the stern quiet of morning, decided I would apologize to Paul’s parents and to Paul. But they let it slide. I felt sick to my stomach all weekend waiting to be told to walk down the street and explain myself. But the order never came. As a result, I escaped further public shame, and I was able to play off the events lightly with my friends. I kept vague about my own path to freedom, dismissed the eight stitches on my chin as only a flesh wound, and laughed all the harder at Chris’s ordeal. The swim had not been such a brilliant idea. His clothes got soaked and he lost a shoe. He hobbled home, half naked and freezing, hiding occasionally behind hedges and parked cars, too exhausted to think clearly. Chris carried his own buffoonery off effortlessly and made it seem cool. The others of us, who’d been relatively unscathed by the experience, felt gypped in comparison. At least that’s the disappointment I projected. Inside, I was terrified of the consequences still to come. I waited for Officer Drury to visit each of my friends’ houses in turn, to round them up based on my information. When that didn’t happen, I began to doubt my own sanity. I came down with a fever because of the
stress, unable to think about anything else. Had I been picked up at all? Had I sat in Drury’s car and answered his questions? The only proof, even to me, was the scar on my chin and the shame of my father crying.

When
I fled Halifax and travelled Southeast Asia, the other book that I carried with me was
Lord Jim
by Joseph Conrad. In retrospect, it’s easy to understand why I was attracted to it.
Lord Jim
is also a meditation on lightness and weight, in this case, on the alluring lightness of youthful fantasy for a life of adventure, and on the naive but understandable desire to be tested by the worst this world can throw at you, followed by the sodden weight of shame you bear when you find yourself wanting. Lugging my backpack, contemplating the freedom and lightness of travellers in general, a participant-observer in the subculture of do whatever the fuck you want with or to whomever you want, I saw myself as another Jim. I was an exile in the same tropical ports. I had acquired a similar ease with my surroundings, the kind you get when you’ve travelled a long time and seen many strange things and have no particular plans or limits. Moreover, I was not readily knowable by the backpackers I met, and had a mysterious air. The reason was simple. In contrast to most others, I rarely talked about myself and the places I’d been and seemed, as a result, to possess dark secrets, maybe even a dark past. This was appealing to women as well as to men, and I’m sure it was not entirely surprising when, after any long and partially revelatory conversations over the course of an evening, or a reckless fuck one night, I would be gone the next day, without
a message left behind. You were permitted to be rootless, taciturn, and cavalier about the feelings of others when you were a backpacker. Lightness was practically demanded of you, even, or especially, when you trafficked in weight.

I understood why Jim wanted to go to sea in the first place, how he could imagine that such a life would be one way—filled with adventure, dangerous tests, and honourable triumphs—and I could relate to his disappointment when that life turned out another way entirely—soaked in boredom, banal duty, and the pettiness of others, interrupted by brief moments of contentment and unexpected bursts of humiliation and fear. I had seen and done a fair bit myself by this point in my life, but the incident with the tree fort struck me in retrospect as having marked an unheeded warning of the many disappointments to come. Of course, I know my experience then was insignificant compared with the perils of some listing ship or violent storm, but I had been tested and found horribly wanting. I had been betrayed by my own weakness and I had betrayed others in turn. The fact that my shame was not made public, that I could disguise, cover up, and ignore the evidence of it, allowed me to rationalize such failure. I assumed at the time that the incident would not be characteristic of my entire life and personality but was only an aberration. Better yet, I told myself, it was a gift. It was a lesson that allowed me to prepare for a real test, when I would not be found wanting.