The JOKE (16 page)

She put on her coat and left.

Then I lay down on the bed with a void in my heart and I wanted to call her back, because I already missed her the moment I told her to go, because I knew that it was a thousand times better to be with a dressed and recalcitrant Lucie than to be without Lucie; because to be without Lucie meant living in absolute solitude.

All this I knew, and yet I did not call her back.

I lay there naked on the bed in that borrowed room for a long time because I couldn't face going back to the house the way I felt, joking with the miners, answering their cheerfully lewd questions.

Finally (very late in the night) I dressed and went out. The street-lamp still shone opposite the house I was leaving. I circled the camp, tapped on the window (now dark) of the cottage, waited about three minutes, undressed in the presence of the yawning miner, made some noncommittal answer to his inquiry about the success of my venture, and (once more in nightshirt and longjohns) headed for camp. I was in a state of despair and total indifference. I didn't pay a bit of attention to where the dog patrol or the beam of the spotlight might be. I crawled under the wire and started off quietly in the direction of the barracks. I had just reached the wall of the infirmary when I heard: "Halt!" I stopped. A flashlight shone on me. I heard a dog snarling.

"What are you doing there?"

"Puking, Comrade Sergeant," I replied, leaning against the wall with one hand.

"Get on with it, man, get on with it," said the sergeant, and went back to his rounds with the dog.

14

I soon got to bed without any further complications (the corporal was fast asleep), but I couldn't even shut my eyes, and so I was glad when the noncom's harsh voice (yelling

"Rise and shine!") put an end to that bad night. I slipped into my boots and ran to the washroom to splash some cold, refreshing water over myself. When I got back, I found a group of half-dressed men clustered around Alexej's bed trying hard to muffle their laughter. I immediately guessed what was going on: Alexej (lying on his stomach under the blanket) was still sound asleep. It reminded me of Franta Petrasek, from the Third Company, who, to get even with his commander, had simulated a sleep so sound that three consecutive superiors had failed to shake him awake; it wasn't until they'd carried him out into the yard in his bed and turned the fire hose on him that he started lazily rubbing his eyes. But with Alexej insubordination was out of the question, and his heavy sleep could only be a consequence of his physical weakness. While I was thinking a corporal (the one in charge of our room) came in from the hall with a gigantic pail of water in his arms; he was surrounded by a few soldiers who had obviously been egging him on in this imme-morially stupid prank, so dear to the minds of noncoms of all eras and regimes.

I was irritated by this pathetic reconciliation between the men and the corporal (usually so despised); I was irritated that a common hatred for Alexej had suddenly erased all old scores between them. They had obviously interpreted the commander's speech yesterday about Alexej's informing in such a way as to confirm their own suspicions, and felt a sudden surge of solidarity with the commander's cruelty. I was overcome with rage, a blinding rage aimed at the entire lot of them, at their

unthinking eagerness to believe every accusation, at their readily available cruelty, and so I quickly interposed myself between the corporal and Alexej's bed and said in a loud voice: "Get up, Alexej! Get up, you idiot!"

At this someone twisted my arm from behind and forced me to my knees. I looked around and saw Pavel Pekny. "Who asked you to butt in, you Commie bastard!" he hissed at me. I wrenched my arm away and smacked him in the face. There would have been a fight then and there if the others hadn't quieted us down: they were afraid we'd wake Alexej prematurely. Meanwhile, the corporal was there with his pail. He stepped up to Alexej, roared out "Rise and shine!" and poured the entire contents of the pail, a good three gallons of water, all over him.

But a strange thing happened: Alexej remained lying exactly as before. For a moment the corporal was at a loss. Then he bawled, "On your feet, soldier!" But the soldier didn't stir.

The corporal bent over and shook him (the blanket was soaking wet, the whole bed was soaked through, and pools of water were forming on the floor). He managed to turn Alexej over so that we could see his face: it was sunken, pale, immobile.

The corporal shouted: "Doctor!" No one moved: everybody was staring at Alexej in his sodden nightshirt. "Doctor!" the corporal shouted again, pointing at a soldier who ran out immediately.

(Alexej lay there motionless, he was smaller and frailer than before, he was much younger, he was like a child, only his lips were locked together the way a child's never are, and the drops kept dripping from him. Someone said: "It's raining.") Then the
medical officer arrived, took Alexej's wrist, and said, "I see." He removed the drenched blanket and we could see Alexej lying before us at full (small) length, in his soaking wet longjohns with the bare feet sticking out at the end. The doctor looked around and picked up two vials from the table next to his bed; he peered into them (they were empty) and said, "Enough for two." Then he pulled a sheet off the nearest bed and covered Alexej with it.

All this had put us behind schedule, so that we ate breakfast on the double, and three-quarters of an hour later we were on our way under-

ground. Then came the end of the shift, and drill and political instruction, and compulsory singing, and cleanup, and lights out, and all the time I thought of how Stana had gone, my best friend Honza had gone (I never saw him again, but I did hear that after completing military service, he'd managed to escape across the border into Austria), and now Alexej was gone too; he assumed his mad role blindly and bravely, and it wasn't his fault that he was suddenly unable to go on with it, that he lacked the strength to
remain in
the ranks,
in his
dog's mask.
He had never been a friend of mine, the virulence of his faith was alien to me, but his fate made me feel closer to him than to any of the others; I felt that his death concealed a reproach to me, as if he had wished to let me know that the moment the Party banishes a man from its ranks, that man has no reason to live. I suddenly felt guilty for not having liked him, because now he was dead, irrevocably dead, and I'd never done anything for him, although I was the only one here who could have done something for him.

But I had lost more than Alexej and the unique opportunity to save a fellow man.

Looking back on it today, from a distance, I see it was then I lost the warm sense of solidarity and companionship I'd had with my fellow black insignias, and with it any chance of resurrecting my trust in men. I began to have doubts about the value of our solidarity, which was based solely on the force of circumstance and an urge for self-preservation that compressed us into a densely packed flock. And I began to think that the black insignia group was as capable of bullying a man (making him an outcast, hounding him to death) as the group raising their hands in the university lecture hall that day in the past, or perhaps as capable as any group.

I felt at the time that I'd been overrun by a desert, I was a desert within a desert, and I wanted to call out to Lucie. Suddenly I could not understand why I'd desired her body so compulsively; now it seemed to me that she was not a corporeal woman but only a transparent pillar of warmth striding through a land of never-ending frost, a pillar of warmth that was receding from me, was driven away by me.

During drill the next day, my eyes never left the fence waiting for her to come. But the entire time the only person who stopped was an old

woman, who pointed us out to her snot-nosed little grandchild. That evening I wrote a letter, long and sorrowful, begging Lucie to come back; I said I had to see her, I didn't want anything from her, I just wanted her to be there for me to see and know that she was with me, that she was there at all....

As if to mock me, the weather suddenly turned warm, the sky was blue, and there was a glorious October. The leaves were a blaze of color, and nature (that pitiful Ostrava nature) celebrated autumn's farewell with mad ecstasy. I felt mocked because my desperate letters went unanswered and the people who stopped at the fence (under the alluring sun) were all horribly irrelevant. After about two weeks one of my letters came back; the address had been crossed out, and someone had written in pencil: Moved.

Forwarding address unknown.

I was terror-stricken. A thousand times since my last meeting with Lucie I had turned over in my mind everything I'd said to her, everything she'd said to me, a hundred times I had cursed myself, a hundred times justified myself, a hundred times I had convinced myself I'd driven her away for good, a hundred times reassured myself she'd understand and forgive me. But the note on the envelope had the ring of a verdict.

I could not contain my distress, and the very next day I embarked on another of my harebrained schemes. I say "harebrained," but it was no more dangerous than my previous escape, so that the epithet "harebrained" emphasizes in retrospect its lack of success rather than the risks involved. I knew that Honza had carried it off several times during the summer when he was seeing a Bulgarian woman whose husband was away at work in the morning, and I based my scheme on his. I arrived at the pithead with everyone else, picked up my number and safety lamp, smudged my face with coal dust, and made a quiet getaway. I ran straight to Lucie's dormitory and questioned the woman at the desk. All I learned was that Lucie had left about two weeks before with a suitcase containing all her possessions; no one knew where she'd gone, she didn't tell anybody. I was frightened: had anything happened to her? The woman looked at me and said rather airily, "What can you expect? They don't have real jobs. They come and they go. They keep

everything to themselves." I went to the place where she'd worked, and asked the personnel department about her; but I didn't find out a thing. I wandered through Ostrava until the shift was almost over and got back in time to mingle with the men as they surfaced. But I must have missed something in Honza's escape technique; the whole thing backfired. In two weeks' time I was hauled before a court-martial and given ten months for desertion.

Yes, it was here, at the moment when I lost Lucie, that the long period of hopelessness and emptiness began, the period evoked by the muddy outskirts of my hometown when I arrived on this short visit. Yes, that was when it all began: my mother died while I was in jail, and I couldn't even go to her funeral. After serving out the ten months, I went back to the black insignia in Ostrava for my final year of military service. Then I signed up for another three years in the mines, because rumor had it that anyone who didn't would have to stay on a year with the battalion. And so I spent the next three years mining coal as a civilian.

I take no pleasure in thinking back on all this or talking about it; in fact, I don't like to hear men cast out like myself from a movement they had trusted boast of their destinies.

True, there was a time when I too glorified my outcast destiny as something heroic, but it was false pride. I've had to keep reminding myself that I wasn't assigned to the black insignia for having been courageous or for having fought, for sending my idea out to do battle with the ideas of others; no, my fall was not preceded by any real drama; I was more the object than the subject of my story, and (unless one considers suffering, sadness, or defeat values) I have nothing whatsoever to boast of.

Lucie? Oh, yes: for fifteen years I had not set eyes on her, and it was a long time before I even had news of her. After my discharge I heard she was somewhere in western Bohemia. But by that time I had ceased inquiring after her.

PART FOUR

Jaroslav

1

I see a road winding through the fields. I see the dirt in that road rutted by the narrow wheels of peasant carts. And I see verges flanking the road, grassy verges so green I cannot help stroking their smooth slopes.

All around, the fields are small, not the vast agglomerations of our collectives. How can that be? Is this not today's landscape I am passing through? What sort of land is this?

I walk on and a wild rose bush appears before me on the verge. It is covered with tiny roses. I stop and I am happy. I sit down in the grass beneath the bush and in a while I lie down. I can sense my back touching the grassy earth. I feel it with my back. I support it on my back and beg it not to be afraid of being heavy and resting its full weight on me.

Then I hear a clattering of hoofs. In the distance a small cloud of dust appears. It comes nearer, growing more transparent and sparse. Horses emerge from it. Astride the horses sit young men in white uniforms. But the closer they come, the clearer the carelessness of their dress. Some jackets are fastened with gleaming buttons, others hang open, and there are men in shirtsleeves as well. Some wear caps, others are bareheaded. No, this is no army, they are deserters, turncoats, outlaws! They are
our
cavalry! I raise myself from the ground and watch their approach. The first horseman unsheathes his saber and thrusts it in the air. The cavalry comes to a halt.

The man with the drawn saber has leaned down over his horse's neck and is staring at me.

"Yes, it is I," I say.

"The king!" says the man in wonderment. "I recognize you."

I bow my head, happy at being recognized. They have ridden thus for centuries, and still they know me.

"How do you fare, my king?" asks the man.

"I am fearful, my friends."

"Are they pursuing you?"

"No. It is worse than any pursuit. Something is being prepared against me. I
do
not know the men who surround me. I enter my house and within is a different room, a different wife, and everything is different. I think I am mistaken and rush out, but outside it is indeed my house! Mine without, a stranger's within. And so it is wherever I turn.