The JOKE (19 page)

We didn't take him too seriously, but a few days after the war ended he did what he had promised. Of course, he mortally offended the Kouteckys. He didn't care. He was only too happy to break all ties with them. He went to lectures the Communists sponsored. He bought the books they published. Our region was solidly Catholic, our school particularly so. Yet we were willing to forgive Ludvik his Communist eccentricities. We allowed him his rights.

In 1947 we finished school. That autumn we enrolled at the university, Ludvik in Prague, I in Brno. I didn't see him again until the following year.

6

The year was 1948. Everything was upside-down. When Ludvik came home for the summer, we didn't quite know how to greet him. For us the February Communist coup meant a reign of terror. Ludvik brought his clarinet but never touched it. We spent the whole night in debate.

Was that when the friction between us began? I don't think so. In fact, he nearly won me over that night. He steered clear of political arguments and stuck to our group. He said we had to look at our work in a broader context. What was the point of merely reviving a lost past? If we looked back, we'd end up like Lot's wife.

Well, what do you propose we do? we cried.

Of course, he replied, we must cherish our heritage of folk art, but that wasn't enough.

We were in a new age now. Wide horizons were opening. We needed to purge the everyday musical culture of hit-tune cliches, cliched tunes, of the kitsch that the bourgeois had used to force-feed the people. We needed to replace them with an original and genuine art of the people.

Strange. What Ludvik was calling for was nothing but the old Utopia of the most conservative Moravian patriots. They too went on eternally about the godless depravity of urban culture. They heard the pipes of Satan in the strains of the Charleston. But that didn't matter much. It only made his words more comprehensible to us.

At any rate, his next point sounded more original. He was talking about jazz. Jazz had grown out of Negro folk music and conquered the whole Western world. It could serve us as encouraging proof that folk music had miraculous powers. That it could engender the dominant musical style of an entire period.

We listened to Ludvik with a mixture of admiration and revulsion. We were irritated by his certainty. He had the look all Communists had at the time. As if he'd made a secret pact with the future and had thereby acquired the right to act in its name. Another reason we found him so offensive was that all of a sudden he was completely different from the Ludvik we had known. With us he'd always been one of the boys, full of mockery. Now he was talking pompously, shamelessly using the most grandiose words. And of course, we were also annoyed at the free and easy way he associated the fate of our band with the fate of the Communist Party even though not one of us was a Communist. Yet his words did have a kind of attraction for us. His ideas corresponded to our innermost dreams.

They elevated us to a historic greatness.

In my mind I call him the Pied Piper. A little trill on his flute and we all flocked after him. Where his arguments were too sketchy, we rushed to his aid. I remember my own reflections. I was reviewing the evolution of European music from the Baroque on. After the impressionist era it had grown weary of itself. It had exhausted almost all its sap in its sonatas and symphonies as well as in its cliched tunes. That was why jazz had had such a miraculous effect
on it. Above thousand-year-old roots, fresh sap now began to rise. Jazz captured more than European nightclubs and dance halls. It captured Stravinsky, Honegger, Milhaud, who opened their compositions to its rhythms. But take note. At the same time, or about ten years earlier, European music was infused with new blood, the ancient Old World folklore that had nowhere else remained so alive as here among us in Central Europe. Janacek and Bartok! So the parallel between ; folk music and jazz derived directly from the evolution of European music. They had each made an equal contribution to the formation of serious modern music in the twentieth century. However, with music for the masses, it was different. The old European folk music had left almost no imprint on it. Here, jazz remained in complete command of the field. And here was where our mission began.
Hie Rhodus, hie salta!

Yes, right, we said: the same strength was concealed in the roots of our folk music as in the roots of jazz. Jazz had its own melodic specificity, which still bore traces of the basic six-tone scale of early Negro songs. But our folk songs also had their own melodic specificity, and were even more varied in tonality. Jazz had an original rhythm that owed its prodigious intricacies to an African drum culture dating back tens of centuries. But our music was rhythmically original too. Finally, jazz grew from the principle of improvisation. But the remarkable ensemble work of our village fiddlers, who can't read a note, also depends on improvisation.

Yes, but there is one thing, Ludvik added, that differentiates us from jazz. Jazz is quick to develop and change. Its style is in constant motion. It had traveled a precipitous road from early New Orleans counterpoint to swing, bop, and beyond. The New Orleans variety had never dreamed of the harmonies used in today's jazz. Our folk music, in contrast, is a motionless princess from bygone centuries. We have to awaken it. It must merge with the life of today and develop along with it. It must develop like jazz: without ceasing to be itself, without losing its melodic and rhythmic specificity, it must create its own new and newer phases of style. It isn't easy. It is an enormous task. A task that can be carried out only under socialism.

What did it have to do with socialism? we protested.

He explained it to us. The ancient countryside had lived a collective life. Communal rites marked off the village year. Folk art knew no life outside those rites. The romantics imagined that a girl cutting grass was struck by inspiration and immediately a song gushed from her like a stream from a rock. But a folk song is born differently from a formal poem. Poets create in order to express themselves, to say what it is that makes them unique. In the folk song, one does not stand out from others but joins with them.

The folk song grew like a stalactite. Drop by drop enveloping itself in new motifs, in new variants. It was passed from generation to generation, and everyone who sang it added something new to it. Every song had many creators, and all of them modestly disappeared behind their creation. No folk song existed purely for its own sake. It had a function.

There were songs sung at weddings, songs sung at harvesting, songs sung at Carnival, songs for Christmas,

for haymaking, for dancing, for funerals. Even love songs did not exist outside certain customs. The rural evening promenade, the song under the maiden's window, courtship, all were part of a collective rite in which song had its established place.

Capitalism had destroyed this old collective life. And so folk art had lost its foundations, its reason for being, its function. It would be useless to try to resurrect it while social conditions were such that man lived cut off from man, everyone for himself. But socialism would liberate people from the yoke of their isolation. They would live in a new collectivity. United by a common interest. Their private and public lives would merge. They would be connected by a host of rituals. Some they would take from the past: harvest festivals, folk dances, customs bound up with their daily work. Others they would create anew: May Day, meetings, the Liberation anniversary, rallies. In all of these folk art would find its place. Here it would develop, change, and be renewed. Did we finally understand?

And before long it was apparent that the unbelievable was coming true. No one had ever done so much for folk art as the Communist government. It earmarked enormous amounts for setting up new ensembles. Folk music, fiddle and cimbalom, resounded daily from the radio. Moravian folk songs inundated the universities, May Day celebrations, youth festivities, and dances. Jazz not only disappeared from the face of our country but became a symbol of Western capitalism and its decadence. Young people stopped dancing the tango and boogie-woogie. They grabbed one another's shoulders and danced circle dances. The Communist Party went all out to create a new way of life. It based its efforts on Stalin's famous definition of the new art: socialist content in national form.

And national form in music, dance, and poetry could come from nowhere but folk art.

Our band rode the exhilarating waves of that policy. It soon gained national fame. It took on singers and dancers and became a great ensemble, performing on hundreds of stages and making annual tours abroad. And we didn't sing only the traditional lays about brigands slitting their beloveds' throats, we wrote new pieces all our own, songs about Stalin or about the plowed fields or the harvest or cooperative farms. No longer was our song just a memory of the past. It was alive. It was part of contemporary history. It accompanied it.

The Communist Party supported us. So our political reservations quickly melted away. I myself joined the Party at the beginning of forty-nine. And the others from the ensemble soon followed me.

7

But in those days Ludvik and I were still close. When did the first shadow fall between us?

Of course I know. I know very well. It was at my wedding.

I'd been studying violin at the conservatory and musicology at the university. My third year in Brno, I started feeling uneasy. At home Papa was going from bad to worse. He had a stroke. He came out of it, but from then on he had to be very careful. I kept worrying about his being by himself and thinking that if anything happened to him, he couldn't even send me a telegram. Every Saturday I'd come home with my heart in my mouth, and every Monday morning I'd leave for Brno with a new anxiety. One day the anxiety overwhelmed me. It had tortured me on Monday, tortured me more on Tuesday, and on Wednesday I threw all my clothes into my bag, paid off my rent, and told the landlady not to expect me back.

I remember to this day walking home from the station. The way to my village, which borders on the town, lies across the fields. It was autumn, just before twilight. The wind was blowing, and some boys were zigzagging paper kites in the sky from the ends of interminable strings. Papa had once made me a kite. He took me into the field, threw the kite into the air, and ran with it until the wind took hold of the paper and carried it high. I didn't enjoy it much. Papa enjoyed it a lot more. I was touched now by the memory and quickened my pace. The idea crossed my mind that Papa had sent that kite into the air to Mama.

From childhood on I've always pictured Mama in heaven. Oh, it's been years since I believed in God or life eternal or anything like that. I'm not talking about faith. I'm talking about fantasy. And I don't see

why I should have to give it up. I'd feel orphaned without it. Vlasta rebukes me for being a dreamer. She says I don't see things as they are. I do see things as they are, but in addition to these visible things I see the invisible. It's not for nothing that fantasy exists.

It's what makes homes of our houses.

I never knew my mama. So I never wept for her. I've always been pleased that she was young and beautiful and in heaven. None of the other children had a mama as young as mine.

I like to think of Saint Peter perched on a stool looking down on earth through a tiny window. Mama often visits him there. Peter will do anything for her because she is pretty. He lets her look out too. And Mama sees us. Myself and Papa.

Mama's face was never sad. Quite the opposite. When she looked down at us through the window in Peter's gatehouse, she often used to laugh. Who lives in eternity knows no sorrow. He knows that life on earth lasts but an instant and reunion is imminent. But when I was living in Brno and leaving Papa alone, Mama's face began to look sad and reproachful. And I wanted to live in peace with Mama.

So I hurried home and saw the kites suspended in the heavens. I was happy. I had no regrets about what I'd left behind. Of course I liked my violin and my musicology. But I had no career ambitions. Nothing, not even the most promising success, could replace the joy of coming home.

When I told Papa I wouldn't be going back to Brno, he was terribly angry. He didn't want me to ruin my life for his sake. So I told him that I'd been expelled for poor marks. He finally believed me and got even angrier. But I didn't let it bother me. I hadn't come home to waste my time. I went on playing first fiddle in our band and found a job as violin teacher in the local music school. I could devote myself to the things I loved.

One of them was Vlasta. She lived in the neighboring village, which today, like my own village, has been incorporated into the town. She danced with our ensemble. I met her when I was studying in Brno, and I was glad that I was able to see her almost every day after my return. But I didn't fall in love with her until somewhat later, unexpectedly, when she took such a spill during a rehearsal that she broke her leg. I carried her in my arms to the hastily summoned ambulance. I felt her brittle, frail body in my arms. Suddenly I realized, with astonishment, that I was six feet two and weighed well over two hundred pounds, that I could have been a lumberjack, and that she was weak, so weak.

It was a moment of illumination. In Vlasta's wounded frame I suddenly saw another, more familiar figure. How could I have failed to notice it before? Vlasta was the
poor
servant girl,
a figure of so many folk songs! The poor girl who had nothing on earth but her honor, the poor girl who was humiliated, the poor girl in rags, the poor orphan girl.

Literally, of course, that was not the case. She had both her parents, and they were anything but poor. But precisely because they had been well-to-do farmers, the new era was pushing them to the wall. Vlasta would come to rehearsals in tears. Heavy delivery quotas had been levied on the family. The authorities had proclaimed her father a kulak.

They had requisitioned his tractor and implements. They had threatened him with arrest. I felt sorry for her and comforted myself with the idea that I would take care of her. Of the poor servant girl.