The JOKE (14 page)

Thus, the exit route was relatively secure, but we had to be careful not to abuse it; if too many men sneaked out of camp on the same day, their absence would easily be spotted, so Honza's council had to regulate the escapes and establish a long-term schedule.

But before I ever had my turn, the whole enterprise came to grief. One night the commander made a personal inspection of our quarters and discovered three men missing. He cornered the noncom in charge, who hadn't reported the men's absence, and asked him, as if he knew everything, how much we had paid him. The corporal, assuming the commander knew the whole story, made no attempt to hide it. When the commander confronted him with Honza, he confirmed that Honza was the one who had given him the money.

The boy commander had checkmated us. The corporal, Honza, and the three soldiers who had left that night were sent away for court-martial. (I didn't even have time to say good-bye to my best friend; it happened during a single morning, while we were in the mines; not until years later did I learn they'd all been convicted and Honza got a year in prison.) The commander announced to the assembled men that the ban on leaves was extended for a further two months and that the entire company would come under a special disciplinary regime. He had also requested the construction of two watchtowers, searchlights, and two characters with wolfhounds to guard the barracks.

The commander's attack was so sudden and successful that we all believed someone had squealed on Honza's operation. Not that informing particularly flourished among the black insignia; we all had contempt for it, but we knew the possibility was always there; it was the most effective means at our disposal for improving our conditions, getting discharged without delay, receiving good character references, and ensuring ourselves some sort of future. We had succeeded (the great majority of us) in not falling into that ultimate baseness, but we couldn't resist suspecting others of it.

On this occasion suspicion spread rapidly, turned into collective conviction (though other explanations of the commander's attack were possible), and settled unconditionally on Alexej. He was in the guardhouse serving out his sentence; he still had to put in his time down in the mines and spent a good part of the day with us, so everyone asserted he'd had ample opportunity ("with those cop's ears of his") to pick up something of Honza's scheme.

Poor bespectacled Alexej went through the mill: the foreman (one of us) started giving him the toughest jobs; his tools suddenly began vanishing, and he had to pay for replacements out of his wages; he was the constant butt of insults and insinuations, had to put up with hundreds of minor inconveniences; and the day he returned to the barracks someone had written on the wooden wall above his bunk, in big, black, greasy letters, beware of the rat.

Several days after Honza and the other four delinquents were led off under escort, I looked into our platoon bunkroom late in the afternoon; it was empty except for Alexej, who was bent over making his bunk. I

asked him why he had to remake it. He told me the boys messed up his bunk several times a day. I told him they were all convinced he'd informed on Honza. He protested almost tearfully that he knew nothing about it and would never inform on anybody. "How can you say you wouldn't inform?" I said. "You regard yourself as an ally of the commander. It's only logical that you would give him information." "I'm not the commander's ally! The commander is a saboteur!" he said, his voice breaking. Then he told me the conclusions he'd come to while thinking things over during his solitary confinement: Black insignia were created by the Party for men it could not trust with arms, but whom it wanted to re-educate. But the class enemy never sleeps, and it wants at all costs to prevent the re-education process from being successful; it wants the black-insignia soldiers sustained in their violent hatred for Communism, as a reserve force for the counterrevolution. The way the commander treated the men, the way he kept provoking them, it was all clearly part of the enemy's plan. You never knew where the enemy might be lurking. The commander was definitely an enemy agent. Alexej knew his duty and had drafted a detailed account of the commander's activities. I was stunned.

"What's that? You've written what? And who have you sent it to?" He replied that he'd sent a complaint about the commander to the Party.

We went outside. He asked me if I wasn't afraid of being seen with him. I told him he was a fool for asking and a bigger fool if he thought his letter was going to reach its destination. He replied that he was a Communist and was required to act at all times in a manner he need not be ashamed of. And again he reminded me that
I
was a Communist (even though I'd been expelled from the Party) and should behave accordingly. "As Communists we are responsible for everything that goes on here." I thought this laughable; I told him that responsibility was unthinkable without freedom. He replied that he felt free enough to act like a Communist; that he must and would prove that he was a Communist. As he said this his jaw trembled; today, after all these years, I can still remember that moment clearly and am more aware now than I was then that Alexej was not much more than twenty at the time, that he was an adolescent, a boy, and that his destiny hung on him like a giant's clothes on a tiny body.

I remember that not long after my conversation with Alexej, Cenek asked me (just as Alexej had feared) what I was doing talking to that rat. I told him Alexej might be a fool but he was no rat; and I told him about Alexej's complaint about the commander. Cenek was unimpressed. "I don't know if he's a fool or not," he said, "but I'm absolutely positive he's a rat. Anyone who can publicly renounce his father is a rat." I didn't understand at first; he was surprised I hadn't heard; after all, the political commissar himself had shown us the newspapers from a few months back in which Alexej's statement had appeared: he had renounced his father for betraying and defiling the most sacred things his son knew.

That evening the searchlights on the watchtowers (constructed during the last few days) made their debut and illuminated the darkened camp; a guard with a dog patrolled the barbed wire. I felt terribly alone: I was without Lucie and knew I would not see her for two whole months. The same evening I wrote her a long letter; I wrote that I wouldn't be seeing her for a long time, that we weren't allowed out of camp, and that I was sorry she'd denied me what I desired, the memory of which would have helped me to live through these gloomy weeks.

The day after I sent the letter off, we were doing our endless attentions, forward marches, hit-the-dirts. I was following the prescribed movements automatically and hardly noticed the corporal giving his orders or my companions marching or throwing themselves onto the ground; I was no longer aware of my surroundings: the barracks on three sides, barbed wire on the fourth, and beyond it the road. Now and then someone would walk past outside the wire; now and then someone would stop (mainly children, alone or with their parents, who would explain that the men behind the wire were soldiers and that they were drilling). All that was lifeless scenery to me, a painted backdrop (everything on the other side of the barbed wire was a painted backdrop); so I was scarcely conscious of the fence until someone called softly in that direction, "Hey there, girl, what're you staring at?"

Then I saw her. It was Lucie. She was standing by the fence, wearing her shabby brown overcoat (it occurred to me that when we were buying clothes in the summer we had forgotten that summer would end and cold weather come) and the fashionable black high-heeled shoes (my gift). She was standing motionless by the wire, watching us. The soldiers commented on her strangely patient air with rising interest, loading their remarks with the desperation of men kept in forced celibacy. The corporal noticed that the men's attention was wandering, and soon realized the cause; he was evidently enraged by his powerlessness; he couldn't order the girl away from the fence; outside the wire was a realm of relative freedom to which his jurisdiction did not extend. He therefore ordered the men to keep their comments to themselves, then stepped up the volume of his voice and the pace of the drill.

She began walking back and forth, and for a while I would lose sight of her, but she always returned to the spot where we could see each other. Then the drill was over, but I couldn't go up to her, as we were marched off to an hour of political instruction; we listened to sentences about the camp of peace and imperialist warmongers, and only after the lesson was I able to slip out (it was almost dark by then) and see whether Lucie was still by the fence; she was, and I ran over to her.

She told me not to be angry with her, that she loved me, and that she was sorry if she'd made me sad. I told her I didn't know when I could see her again. She said it didn't matter, she'd come and see me here. (At this point a few of the men walked past and yelled something obscene at us.) I asked her whether she would mind having soldiers shout at her like that. She said that she wouldn't, that she loved me. She handed me a rose through the wire (the bugle sounded, calling us to assembly); we kissed through a gap in the barbed wire.

13

Lucie came to the fence almost every day when I was on the morning shift in the mines and spent the afternoons in camp; every day I received a small bunch of flowers (once during inspection the sergeant threw them on the floor) and exchanged a few words with her (always the same, because we actually had nothing to say to each other; we didn't exchange news or ideas; we simply wished to reassure each other of a single constantly reiterated truth); at that time, I wrote her almost daily; it was the most intensive period of our love. The searchlights on the watchtowers, the dogs barking at the approach of evening, the cocky boy reigning over it all took up very little room in my mind, which was concentrated only on Lucie's visits.

I was actually very happy in those barracks, surrounded by dogs, and in the mines, wielding my pneumatic drill. I was happy and proud, for in Lucie I possessed a prize vouchsafed neither to my fellow soldiers nor to our officers: I was loved, I was loved publicly and demonstratively. Even if Lucie wasn't my companions' idea of the perfect woman, even if the way she showed her love was—from their point of view—rather odd, it was still the love of a woman and it aroused wonder, nostalgia, and envy.

The longer we were cut off from the world and women, the more women dominated our talk with their every particular, every detail. We recalled birthmarks, outlined (pencil on paper, pick in clay, finger in sand) breasts and backsides; we argued over which absent buttock had the most perfect curves; we gave exact renditions of words and sighs uttered during intercourse; this was all discussed again and again, always with new details. I too was interrogated, and my companions were all the more curious about my girl as they saw her every day

and so were easily able to tie her actual appearance into my narrative. I couldn't disappoint my friends; I couldn't not tell them; so I described Lucie's nakedness, which I'd never seen, our lovemaking, which I'd never known, and as I spoke, a precise, detailed picture of her quiet passion rose before my eyes.

What was it like, the first time I made love to her?

It was in her room at the dormitory; she undressed in front of me, docile, devoted, but unwilling, as she was after all a country girl and I was the first man to see her naked. And it was this obedience mingled with shyness that drove me wild; when I approached her, she shrank back and covered her crotch with her hands....

Why does she always wear those black high heels?

I said I'd bought them for her to wear when she was naked; she was shy about it but did everything I asked of her; I kept my clothes on till the last possible moment, and she would walk up and down in front of me naked in those heels (how I enjoyed seeing her naked when I was dressed!) and then go over to the cupboard, where she kept the wine, and naked, fill my glass.. ..

So when Lucie came up to the fence, I wasn't the only one looking at her; I was joined by ten or so of my fellow soldiers, who knew precisely what she was like when she made love, what she said, how she moaned, and who would make all kinds of innuendos about the black heels she had on again, and picture her walking naked in them around her tiny room.

Each of my friends could conjure up one or another woman and share her with the rest of us, but I was the only one who could offer a
look
at this woman; only my woman was real, alive, and present. The feeling of comradely solidarity that had led me to paint so detailed a picture of Lucie's nakedness and erotic behavior had the effect of painfully intensifying my desire for her. I was not upset by the obscenities my companions used each time she appeared; they could never take her away (the barbed wire and dogs protected her from all of us, myself included); on the contrary, they gave her to me: they
brought into focus
a stirring image of her, painted a picture of her and me together in a frenzied seduction; I succumbed to my companions, and

all of us succumbed to desire for Lucie. Whenever I went up to her at the fence, I could feel myself tremble; I was tongue-tied with desire; I couldn't understand how for six months, like a timid student, I had failed to see the woman in her; I was willing to give anything for a single act of copulation with her.

I do not say that my attitude towards her had become coarse or superficial or that it had lost its tenderness. I would even say that it was the only time in my life I experienced
total desire for a woman
in which everything was involved: body and soul, lust and tenderness, grief and frenzied vitality, desire for vulgarity and desire for consolation, desire for the moment of pleasure as well as for eternal possession. I was totally involved, totally intense, totally concentrated, and I now think of those days as a paradise lost (an odd paradise guarded by a dog patrol and echoing with a corporal's commands).

I resolved to arrange a meeting with Lucie at all costs; I had her promise that she wouldn't put up a fight and would meet me anywhere I chose. She'd confirmed this promise many times during our brief talks through the fence. All I had to do was to dare a dangerous act.