The JOKE (13 page)

We sat down side by side (crushing the poor sprays under our buttocks) and began to make conversation. After a few minutes (the conversation languished) I tried again to take Lucie in my arms, but she resisted; I began struggling with her but soon realized that this was not a playful amorous tussle but a real fight, that it was turning our loving relationship into something ugly, that Lucie was resisting in earnest, furiously, almost desperately. I soon gave up the battle.

I tried to persuade her with words; I began to talk; I suppose I told her that I loved her and that loving meant giving yourselves to each other, fully; I didn't say anything original, of course (my goal wasn't particularly original either); but if it was unoriginal, my argument was irrefutable; nor did Lucie try to refute it. Instead, she remained silent or said, "Don't, please, no," or "Not now, not today ..." and tried (with rather touching ineptitude) to change the subject.

I began again: Are you one of those girls who excite a man only to make fun of him? Are you so callous, so spiteful?.. . and again I put my arms around her, again we had a brief, depressing struggle, harsh and without an ounce of love to it, and again it left an aftertaste of ugliness.

I stopped; suddenly it came to me, the reason why she was putting up such resistance; God, why hadn't I thought of it before? She was just a child, afraid of love, a virgin, frightened, frightened of the unknown; I determined to camouflage my urgency, which must have terrified her, to be gentle, delicate, and make the act of love no more than an extension of the gentle, delicate caresses we had known together. So I stopped insisting and began to coax. I kissed her (so terribly long that I found no pleasure in it), fondled her (insincerely), and tried as surreptitiously as possible to work her into a reclining position. I finally succeeded; I stroked her breasts (Lucie never resisted this); I told her I wanted to be tender to her whole body, because her body was she and I wanted to be tender to all of her; I even managed to raise her skirt a little and kiss her eight or nine inches above the knee; but I didn't get any farther; when I tried to put my head in her lap, she jerked away from me in terror and jumped off the bed. Her face had a convulsive look about it I'd never seen before.

Lucie, Lucie, is it the light that makes you so ashamed? Would you rather it was dark?

She clutched at my question as if it were a life preserver. Yes, she was ashamed of the light. I went over to the window to pull the blinds, but Lucie shouted out, "No, don't do it! Don't draw the blinds!" "Why not?" I asked. "Because I'm afraid," she said. "What are you afraid of, the light or the dark?" Instead of answering, she burst into tears.

Her resistance aroused no pity in me whatsoever; it seemed senseless, unmerited, unjust; it tortured me, I couldn't comprehend it. I asked her whether she was resisting because she was a virgin, whether she was afraid of the pain. She answered all of my questions with an obedient nod of the head, seeing in each a reason for her refusal. I told her how wonderful it was that she was a virgin and would find out everything with me, the man who loved her. "Aren't you looking forward to being mine and all that goes with it?" Yes, she was, she said. I put my arms around her again, and again she resisted. I could hardly control my anger. "Why do you keep fighting me?" She said: "Please, next time, I do want it, but next time, please, some other time, not this evening." "And why not?" She answered: "Not this evening." "But why?" She answered: "Please, not now!" "But when?

You know very well this is our last chance to be alone together. Tomorrow your roommates are coming back. Where else can we be alone?" "You'll find a place," she said. "All right," I said, "I'll find a place. But promise you'll come with me. It's not likely to be as nice a room as this one." "That doesn't matter," she said. 'That doesn't matter. It can be wherever you like." "All right then,

but promise you'll become my woman there, promise you won't put up a fight." "All right," she said. "Promise?" "Yes."

I realized that this promise was the most I would get out of Lucie that evening. It wasn't much, but it was something. I suppressed my indignation, and we spent the rest of the time talking. When I left, I shook my uniform free of asparagus fern, stroked Lucie's face, and told her I'd be thinking of nothing but our next time together (and I wasn't lying).

12

A few days after that meeting with Lucie (it was a rainy autumn afternoon), we were marching in a column from the mines to the barracks; the road was rutted with deep puddles; we were muddy, drenched, and yearning for a rest. Most of us hadn't had a single Sunday off all month. But as soon as lunch was over we were called out by the boy commander and informed that during the inspection of our quarters he had uncovered certain irregularities. He then handed us over to the noncoms and ordered them to drill us for an extra two hours as punishment.

Since we had no weapons, our military exercises were particularly nonsensical; their only purpose was to waste our time. I remember that under the boy commander we once spent a whole afternoon hauling heavy boards from one end of the camp to the other; the next afternoon we hauled them back; and we went on alternating for ten more days.

Everything we did in camp after a day in the mines was a sort of board-hauling. This time, instead of boards, we were hauling our bodies back and forth; we turned them about face and right face, we flung them to the ground and picked them up again, we ran here and there with them and dragged them through the mud. Three hours later the commander showed up and motioned to the noncoms to take us off for physical training.

Behind the barracks was a small field that could be used for soccer or drill or running.

The noncoms decided to stage a relay race; our company was made up of nine squads often men each, so we formed nine ten-man teams. The noncoms needed no excuse to run us into the ground, but because they were mostly between eighteen and twenty and had the ambitions of their age, they wanted to run too, in order to prove that we were worthless; they decided to pit themselves against us and put together their own team.

It took a long time for them to explain what they had in mind and for us to understand it: the first ten men would sprint from one end of the field to the other, where each would find a man waiting for him, and those men would sprint back to where the first men had started off from, by which time another ten men would be waiting for them, and so on.

Then they counted us off laboriously and dispatched us to opposite ends of the field.

We were dead tired after the mines and the drills, and furious at the thought of having to run a race besides; and then I confided a primitive idea to one or two friends: let's all run very slowly! The idea caught on at once and was passed from mouth to mouth, until the weary mass of soldiers began to stir with stifled laughter.

At last we were in place and ready for a race whose entire concept was a pure absurdity: although we would be racing in our uniforms and heavy boots, we had to kneel down at the starting line; although we would be passing the baton in a most unorthodox manner (the runner we handed it to would be facing us), we had real batons to do it with and a real pistol shot to start us off. The corporal in the tenth position (the first runner for the noncoms) shot out at breakneck speed, while we (I was in the first heat) straightened up slowly and started off in a slow jog; after twenty yards we were hard put to keep from laughing, because the corporal had nearly reached the other end while we jogged along improbably abreast, not far from the starting line, huffing and puffing in a simulated excess of effort; the crowd of soldiers at each end of the field began egging us on:

"Faster, faster, faster . . ."At the midpoint we met the second runner for the noncom team tearing towards the line we had left. At last we reached the other end and handed on our batons as the third noncom darted out with his baton behind us.

Today I look back on that relay race as the last great parade of my companions of the black insignia. Their ingenuity knew no bounds: Honza limped terribly, but we cheered him on with all our might, and he scored a hero's victory (to great applause) by coming in two steps before the others; Matlos the Gypsy fell to the ground eight or nine times; Cenek lifted his knees to his chin with each step (which must have tired him much more than running at top speed). No one spoiled the game: not Bedrich, the disciplined (and resigned) drafter of peace manifestos, who trotted along at the same pace as the others but with great dignity; nor Pavel Pekny, who disliked me; nor old Ambroz, who ran bolt upright, his hands clasped behind his back; nor redheaded Petran, who gave out a high-pitched screech; nor Varga the Hungarian, who shouted "Hurrah!" as he ran—not one of them spoiled this admirable and simple stage production that had us all holding our sides.

Then we saw the boy commander walking towards the field from the barracks. One of the corporals saw him too and went over to report. The commander heard him out, then went up to the edge of the field to watch the race for himself. The noncoms (whose anchorman had long since crossed the finish line) started getting nervous and shouting, "Get a move on! Faster! Hurry it up!" but our cheers completely drowned them out. The noncoms didn't know whether to stop the race or not; they ran back and forth to confer, keeping an eye on the commander, but the commander never even glanced in their direction; he was watching the race with an icy stare.

The time had finally come for our last group of runners; Alexej was one of them; I was very curious to see how he would run; I was not mistaken: he wanted to spoil the game; he ran ahead full force, he gained five meters in the first twenty. But then something peculiar happened: his pace slowed and he ceased to gain on the others; I realized in a flash that Alexej couldn't spoil the game even if he wanted to: he was such a puny young man that after two days they had to assign him to light work, like it or not, because he had neither muscles nor wind! And so it seemed to me that his run was the highlight of the entire farce; however hard Alexej flogged himself, he was indistinguishable from the boys idling along five steps behind him at the same speed. The noncoms and the commander must have been convinced that Alexej's brisk start was as much a part of the comedy as Honza's feigned limp, Matlos's tumbles, and our cheering. Alexej's fists were clenched as hard as those of the runners behind him; they strained and wheezed every bit as much as Alexej. The difference was that Alexej felt
real
pain and his efforts to overcome it sent
real
sweat pouring down his face; in mid-course Alexej slowed down even more, and a row of clowning runners gradually overtook him; thirty yards from the end, they passed him; at twenty yards, he stopped running altogether and hobbled his way to the finish line, one hand clutching his left side.

Then the commander ordered us to fall in. He asked why we'd run so slowly. "We were tired, Comrade Captain." He told everyone who was tired to raise his hand. We raised our hands. I looked over at Alexej (who was standing in the row in front of me); he was the only one who didn't raise his hand. But the commander didn't notice him. He said, "I see, all of you." "No," came the reply. "Who wasn't tired?" Alexej said: "I wasn't." "You weren't?" asked the commander, staring at him. "How is it you weren't tired?" "Because I'm a Communist," answered Alexej. The company half grumbled, half laughed. "Are you the one who finished last?" asked the commander. "I am," said Alexej. "And you weren't tired," said the commander. "No," answered Alexej. "If you weren't tired, then you sabotaged the training exercise on purpose. That's two weeks for attempted mutiny. The rest of you were tired, you have an excuse. But since your output in the mines is so low, you must be using up all your energy on your days off. In the interest of your health, there will be no leaves in the company for two months."

Before he went to the guardhouse, Alexej had a talk with me. He reproached me for not behaving like a Communist and asked me with a stern look whether I was for socialism or not. I replied that I was for socialism, but that in the black-insignia camp, it made no difference, because here there was another line of demarcation: on one side, those who had lost their own destinies, and on the other side, those who had taken them away and could do with them as they pleased. But Alexej did not agree: according to him, the line between socialism and reaction held everywhere and our barracks were simply a means of defending socialism against its enemies. I asked him how the boy commander was defending socialism against its enemies by sending him, Alexej, to the guardhouse for two weeks and by treating all the men in such a way as to make them socialism's most confirmed enemies. Alexej admitted that he disliked the commander. But when I said that if our barracks were a

means of defending socialism against its enemies, he, Alexej, should not have been sent here, he replied brusquely that this was exactly where he should be. "My father was arrested for espionage. Do you understand what that means? How can the Party trust me?

It is the Party's
duty
not to trust me."

A few days later I had a talk with Honza; I was bemoaning (with Lucie in mind) our two months without leave. "Don't you worry, Ludvik old boy," he said. "We'll be out more than ever."

Among my companions, the good-natured sabotage of the relay race strengthened our feeling of solidarity and led to a flurry of activity. Honza put together a small council to make a rapid review of the possibilities of going absent without leave. Within two days everything was ready; a bribery fund had been set up; the two noncoms in charge of our bunkrooms had been bought off; several strands of wire had been unobtrusively cut at a well-chosen point in the fence, where the camp ended near the infirmary, only five yards from the nearest cottages. The closest cottage was occupied by a miner we knew from the pit; it didn't take long for the boys to get him to leave his gate unlocked; the escaping soldier had only to make his way unnoticed to the fence, crawl quickly under, and sprint the fifteen feet to the cottage gate; once inside, he was safe: he walked through the house and emerged on the suburban street on the other side.