The JOKE (11 page)

Then how is it I was able to love Lucie? Fortunately, the observations I have just made date from a later period, and so (a mere adolescent and more prone to sorrow than reflection) I was still able to accept Lucie with open arms and a trusting heart, accept her as a gift, a gift from heaven (a heaven of benevolent gray skies). That was a happy time for me, the happiest in my life, perhaps: I was run down, worn out, harassed half to death, but day by day I felt a growing sense of inner peace. It's funny: if the women who now hold my conceit against me and suspect me of considering everybody a fool—if those women knew about Lucie, they'd call
her
a fool and completely fail to understand how I loved her. And I loved her so much I couldn't conceive of ever parting from her; true, we never talked about marriage, but I at least was absolutely serious about marrying her one day. And if it did enter my mind that the match was an unequal one, the inequality of it attracted more than repelled me.

For those few happy months I can be grateful to my commanding officer as well; the noncoms pushed us around as much as they could, searching for specks of dirt in the folds of our uniforms, tearing apart

our beds if they found the slightest crease in them; but the commanding officer was a good man. He was beginning to show his age and had been transferred to us from an infantry regiment—a step down, it was rumored. In other words, the fact that he too had been through the mill may have disposed him in our favor. Not that he didn't require order, discipline, and an occasional voluntary Sunday shift (to give his superiors evidence of his political activism), but he never assigned us back-breaking busy work, and he issued our biweekly Saturday passes without reluctance; I even believe I managed to see Lucie as often as three times a month that summer.

When I wasn't with her, I wrote to her; I wrote her innumerable letters and cards.

Looking back, I can't quite picture what I put in them. But that's not the point, what my letters were like; the point is that I wrote Lucie any number of letters and Lucie never wrote me one.

I could not get her to write to me; perhaps I intimidated her with my own letters; perhaps she felt she had nothing to write about or would make spelling mistakes; perhaps she was ashamed of the awkward penmanship I knew only from the signature on her identity card.

It was not within my power to make her see that it was precisely her awkwardness, her ignorance, that made me so fond of her, not that I valued primitiveness for its own sake, but because it bore witness to Lucie's purity and gave me the hope of imprinting myself in her more deeply, more inextricably.

At first, Lucie merely thanked me shyly for my letters; soon she found a way to repay me: since she did not write, she chose to give me flowers. It all began like this: we were strolling through a wooded area when Lucie suddenly bent down, picked a flower, and handed it to me. I was touched; it didn't surprise me in the least. But when she stood waiting with a whole bunch of them the next time we met, I began to feel a little embarrassed.

I was twenty-two and painstakingly careful to avoid anything liable to cast doubts on my virility or maturity; I was ashamed of having to walk along the street carrying flowers; I did not like buying them, still less receiving them. In my embarrassment I pointed out to Lucie that it was men who gave flowers to women, not women to men, but when I saw the tears well up in her eyes, I hastened to add how beautiful they were, and accepted them.

There was nothing to be done. From then on, there were flowers waiting for me every time we met, and in the end I gave in, because I was disarmed by the spontaneity of giving and understood that Lucie cared for it; perhaps her tongue-tied state, her lack of verbal eloquence, made her think of flowers as a form of speech; not in the sense of heavy-handed conventional flower symbolism, but in a sense still more archaic, more nebulous, more instinctive, prelinguistic; perhaps, having always been sparing of words, she longed for that mute stage of evolution when there were no words and people communicated by simple gestures, pointing at trees, laughing, touching one another....

Whether or not I grasped the essence of Lucie's flower-giving, I was finally moved by it and wanted to give her something, too. Lucie had exactly three dresses, which she wore in regular alternation, so that our rendezvous followed one another in three-four time. I liked all her clothes, precisely because they were worn and not very tasteful; I liked her brown overcoat too (short and threadbare at the cuffs), which, after all, I'd stroked before stroking her face. Yet I took it into my head to buy Lucie a dress, a beautiful dress, many dresses. And one day I suggested we go to a department store.

At first, she thought it was just for fun, to watch the people streaming up and down the stairs. On the second floor I stopped at a long rack of tightly packed dresses, and Lucie, seeing me eye them with interest, came closer and began to comment on some of them.

"That's a nice one," she said, pointing at a dress with a busy red floral pattern. There were very few good-looking dresses, but some were a bit more presentable than others; I pulled one out and called over to the salesman, "Could the young lady try this one on?"

Lucie may have wanted to resist but didn't dare in front of the salesman, a stranger, and so, before she knew what had happened, she found herself behind the curtain.

I gave her some time, then pulled open the curtain slightly to see how she looked; although the dress she was trying on was not particularly attractive, I was flabbergasted: its more or less modern cut had completely transformed her. "May I have a look?" I heard the salesman

asking behind me, whereupon he went into an extended paean to Lucie and the dress.

Then he turned, looked straight at my insignia, and (knowing full well the answer in advance) asked if I was a political. I nodded. He gave me a wink and said with a smile, "I may have a few things in a better line to show you. Would you care to see them?" and he immediately produced an assortment of stylish summer dresses and a dazzling evening gown. Lucie tried on one after the other; they all looked good on her, and she looked different in each; in the evening gown I didn't recognize her at all.

Turning points in the evolution of love are not always the result of dramatic events; they often stem from something that at first seems completely inconsequential. In the evolution of my love for Lucie the dresses were just that. Until that day at the dress department Lucie had been many things to me: a child, a source of comfort, a balm, an escape from myself; she was literally
everything
for me but a woman. Our love in the physical sense of the word had proceeded no further than the kissing stage. And even the way she kissed was childish (I'd fallen in love with those kisses, long but chaste, with dry closed lips counting each other's fine striations as they touched in emotion).

In short, until then I had felt tenderness for Lucie, but no sensual desire; I'd grown so accustomed to its absence that I wasn't even conscious of it; my relationship with Lucie seemed so beautiful that I could never have dreamed anything was missing. Everything fit so harmoniously together: Lucie, her monastically gray clothes, and my monastically chaste relation with her. The moment she put on another dress, the equation failed to balance; all at once Lucie departed from my images of Lucie; I realized that possibilities and forms other than the touchingly rustic were available to her. I suddenly saw her as an attractive woman with a graceful, well-proportioned figure and legs alluringly outlined under the well-cut skirt, a woman whose dull modesty dissolved instantly in the bright, elegant clothes. I was bowled over by the
revelation of her body.

Lucie shared her room at the dormitory with three other young women. Visitors were permitted two days a week for three hours only, from five to eight; they were required to sign in when they arrived,

hand over their identity cards, and sign out when they left. In addition, each of Lucie's roommates had her own boyfriend (or boyfriends), and each of them needed the intimacy of the room for trysts, which meant they were involved in constant bickering and backbiting and kept careful record of every minute one stole from the others. It was all so unpleasant that I'd never once tried to visit Lucie there. But I happened to know that in about a month's time all three were going off on an obligatory agricultural brigade. I told Lucie I wanted to take advantage of the situation and see her in her room. She was far from overjoyed; she told me sadly that she preferred meeting me out of doors. I told her I was longing to spend some time with her where no one and nothing could disturb us and we could concentrate entirely on each other; and that I wanted to see how she lived. She was powerless to refuse, and I remember to this day how excited I was when she finally agreed.

10

BY that time I had been in Ostrava nearly a year, and military service, so unbearable at first, had become habitual and ordinary; it was still unpleasant and exhausting, of course, but I had found a way to live with it, make a few friends, and even be happy; for me the summer was radiant (the trees were coated with soot, but they seemed a rich, deep green when I gazed on them with my coal-mine eyes); yet as is so often the case, the seed of misfortune lay hidden at good fortune's core. The sad events of autumn were conceived in this green-black summer.

It all started with Stana. Within several months of his March marriage he'd begun to hear rumors that his wife was hanging around the bars; he was terribly upset and wrote her letter after letter; her replies calmed him down for a while, but then (about the time it started getting warm) he had a visit from his mother; he spent an entire Saturday with her and came back to the barracks pale and tight-lipped; at first he was too ashamed to tell anyone anything, but the next day he opened up to Honza, then to others, and soon we all knew; and when Stana saw that we all knew, he talked about it even more, all the time; it became an obsession: his wife had been sleeping around, and he was going to go and wring her neck. He tried to get a two-day pass from the company commander, but found him none too willing: he had been getting nothing but complaints about Stana from both the mines and the barracks, complaints about his absentmindedness and irritability. So Stana asked for a twenty-four-hour pass. The commander took pity on him and granted it.

Stana left and we never saw him again. All I know about what happened I know from hearsay:

As soon as he got to Prague, he pounced on his wife (I call her his wife, but she was actually just another nineteen-year-old girl), and she admitted everything brazenly (perhaps even eagerly); he started beating her; she fought back; he started choking her and smashed a bottle over her head; she fell to the floor and lay there motionless. He panicked and fled; somehow or other he found an empty summer cottage in the mountains and holed up there in terrified anticipation of being caught and hanged for murder. They found him two months later and put him on trial, not for murder but for desertion. His wife, it turned out, had regained consciousness shortly after he ran off and had nothing to show for the adventure but a bump on the head. While he was in the military prison, she divorced him, and today she is the wife of a famous Prague actor whose shows I see now and then just to remind myself of Stana and his sad end: after he completed his army service, he stayed on in the mines; an accident cost him a leg, and then the botched amputation cost him his life.

That woman, who continues to glitter in artistic circles, it's said, was the downfall of more than Stana; she was the downfall of us all. At least that's the way it seemed to us, though, of course, we can never be certain whether (as everyone assumed) there was a causal connection between the scandal surrounding Stana's disappearance and the ministerial commission's visit to our barracks shortly thereafter. Nonetheless, our commander was given his walking papers and replaced by a young officer (he couldn't have been more than twenty-five); from the day he arrived, everything changed.

I say he was about twenty-five, but he looked younger, he looked like a boy; and he was all the more determined to make an impression. We used to say among ourselves that he rehearsed his speeches in front of the mirror, that he learned them by heart. He didn't like to shout, he spoke drily, and with the utmost composure he let us know that he regarded us all as criminals. "I know you'd be happy to see me strung up," the boy commander told us the first time he addressed us, "but if anybody is hanged around here, it's going to be you, not me."

The first clashes were not long in coming. The incident with Cenek has stuck in my memory most, perhaps because we found it so amusing. During his first year of military service Cenek had done a large number of murals, which under the previous commanding officer had always received their due. As I've said before, Cenek was partial to the Hussite warriors and their leader Jan Zizka; to please his friends he
always liked to throw in a few naked women, justifying them to the commander as symbols of liberty or the motherland. The new com-mander, also wishing to make use of Cenek's services, called him in and asked him to do something for the room where political instruction classes were given. He took the opportunity to tell him to forget about all those Zizkas and "pay more attention to the present," to show the Red Army and its alliance with our working class and also its role in the victory of socialism in February 1948. Cenek said

"Will do!" and set to work; after several afternoons spent on the floor painting, he tacked up the large sheets of paper along the far wall of the room. When we first saw the finished picture (it was a good five feet high and twenty-five feet long), we were dumbstruck: in the center stood a heroically posed, warmly clad Soviet soldier with a submachine gun slung over his shoulder, a shaggy fur cap pulled down over his ears, and about eight naked women crowding round him. The two standing on either side were gazing up at him coquettishly; he had an arm around the shoulders of each and was laughing a jubilant laugh; the other women paid court to him, extending their arms to him or simply standing there (one was lying down), showing off their pretty figures.