The JOKE (20 page)

From the moment I saw her in the light of folk song lyrics, I felt as if I were reliving a love experienced a thousand times over. As if I were playing it from an ancient score. As if the songs were singing me. I gave myself up to the resonant stream, I dreamed of my wedding and looked forward to it.

Two days before the ceremony Ludvik appeared out of nowhere. I greeted him warmly. I immediately told him the great news of my marriage and said that as my best friend he was bound to be my witness. He promised to come. And he did.

My friends from the ensemble staged a real Moravian wedding for me. They came for us early in the morning, playing and singing and wearing folk costumes. A fifty-year-old cimbalom player had taken on the duty of "patriarch," the leader of the celebration. First Papa regaled them all with slivovitz, bread, and fatback. Then the patriarch signaled for silence and recited in a sonorous voice:

Right honored guests, maidens and masters,

Ladies and gentlemen!

I have summoned you all to this abode

Because the youth who here abideth hath made bold

To ask that we with him might wend our way to the father
of Vlasta Netahal, Which gentle maid he hath now chosen for his bride....

The patriarch is the heart, the soul, the director of the entire ceremony. That is how it has always been. That is how it has been for a thousand years. The groom was never the subject of the wedding. He was its object. He was not getting married. He was being married. The marriage seized him and carried him as on a giant wave. He was not to act or speak. The patriarch acted and spoke for him. But not even the patriarch. It was age-

old tradition that men experienced one after the other, inspiriting them with its comforting flow.

Led by the patriarch, we set off for the neighboring village. We walked across the fields, and my friends played as we went. In front of Vlasta's house a group of people from the bride's side awaited us in folk costume. The patriarch recited:
We are weary travelers

And do beseech you

To grant us entry to this humble abode,

For we are thirsty and hungry.

An elderly man stepped forward from the group standing in front of the gate: "If you are worthy people, you are welcome!" And he invited us to enter. Silently we crowded in.

We were only weary travelers, as the patriarch had called us, and so did not at first disclose our true intent. But then the old man, who was spokesman for the bride's family, challenged us: "If you have a burden upon your hearts, speak now!"

The patriarch began to speak, first obliquely and in parables, and the old man answered him in kind. Only after many such detours did the patriarch reveal why we had come.

Whereupon the old man put the following question:

I ask you, dear friend,

Why does this honest groom desire to take this honest

maid to wife? Is't for the flower or for the fruit?

And the patriarch replied:

To each it is well known that the flower blooms in beauty and in grace, causing our joy
to flourish.

But the flower fades

And fruits do ripen.

Thus do we take this bride not for the flower, but for the fruit, which does our bodies
nourish.

The responses continued until the bride's spokesman brought them to an end: "Let us then call the bride to hear whether she gives her consent." He went into the next room and returned leading a woman. She was tall, thin, bony, and her face was veiled by a scarf.

"Here is your bride!"

But the patriarch shook his head, and with loud murmurs we all corroborated his disagreement. The old man tried to talk us into accepting her but finally had to take the masked woman back. Only then did he bring out Vlasta. She was wearing black boots, a red apron, and a multicolored bolero. On her head was a garland of rosemary. She looked beautiful. He placed her hand in mine.

Then the old man turned to the bride's mother and called out to her in a doleful voice: "O

mother dear!"

At those words my bride withdrew her hand from mine, knelt on the ground before her mother, and bowed her head. The old man continued:

Mother dear, forgive me all the wrongs which I have done you! Mother dearest, I beg
you, forgive me all the wrongs which I have done you!

Mother most beloved, I beg you by the five wounds of Christ, forgive me all the wrongs
which I have done you!

We were no more than mimes for an age-old text. And the text was beautiful, it was exciting, and everything was true. Then the music started up again, and we proceeded to town. The civil ceremony took place at the town hall, but the music didn't stop there either. Then came dinner. After dinner there was dancing.

In the evening, the bridesmaids removed the garland of rosemary from Vlasta's head and ceremonially handed it to me. They made a pigtail of her loose hair, wound it round her head, and clapped a bonnet over it. This was the rite that symbolized the step from virginity to womanhood. Of course, it had been a long time since Vlasta was a virgin. So she wasn't entitled to the symbol of the garland. But that didn't seem to me important. At some higher and more binding level, she was losing her virginity now, and only now, when the bridesmaids handed me her garland.

Lord, why is it that the memory of that garland of rosemary affects me more than our first embrace, more than Vlasta's real virgin blood? I don't know why, but it does. The women sang songs, and in the songs, the garland floated off across the water and the current untied its red ribbons. It made me want to weep. I was drunk. I saw before my eyes the floating garland and the brook passing it on to the stream, the stream to the river, the river to the Danube, and the Danube to the sea. I saw before my eyes the garland going, never to return. Yes, never to return. All the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. Drink it to the dregs. No cheating allowed. No making believe it's not there. Modern man cheats. He tries to get around all the milestones on the road from birth to death. The man of the people is more honest. Singing on his way, he goes to the core of every basic situation.

When Vlasta's blood stained the towel I'd placed beneath her, I had no idea I was dealing with never-to-return. But at this moment of the ceremony and the songs, the never-to-return was there. The women were singing songs of farewell. Stay, stay, my gallant swain, and grant me leave to

part with my dear mother. Stay, stay, restrain your whip, and grant me leave to part with my dear father. Stay, stay, rein in your horse, for I have yet a sister dear and do not wish to leave her. Farewell, my maiden friends, for they are taking me from you, nor will they suffer my return.

Then it was night, and the guests accompanied us home.

I opened the gate. Vlasta paused on the threshold and turned again to the cluster of friends gathered in front of the house. Suddenly one of them intoned the final song:
On the threshold she stood,

Budding fair maidenhood,

The fairest rose of all.

Then the threshold she crossed,

All her beauty she lost,

Lost her beauty beyond recall.

Then the door closed behind us, and we were alone. Vlasta was twenty, I a bit older. But I was thinking that she'd crossed the threshold and from that magic moment onward her beauty would fall from her like leaves from a tree. I saw in her the imminent fall of the leaves. The fall that had already begun. I was thinking that she was not only a flower, but that at that moment, the future moment of fruition already existed within her. I felt the inexorable order in it, an order I accepted and merged with. I thought in that moment of Vladimir, whom I could not know then and whose features I had not even a premonition of. And yet I did think of him, and past him to his children. Then Vlasta and I climbed into the high-piled bed, and it seemed to me that the wise infinitude of the human species took us into its soft embrace.

8

What did Ludvik do to me at the wedding? Nothing really. He was tight-lipped and strange. When the dancing began in the afternoon, the boys in the ensemble tried to give him a clarinet. They wanted him to play. He refused. Not long after that he left altogether.

Luckily I was pretty far gone by then and didn't pay much attention to the matter. The next day, though, I realized his departure had left a blot on the day before. The alcohol diluting in my blood increased this blot to considerable proportions. And Vlasta even more than the alcohol. She had never liked Ludvik.

When I told her Ludvik would be my witness, she had been less than pleased. The morning after, she was quick to remind me of his behavior. She said he'd gone around all day looking as if we were putting him to great inconvenience. She had never seen anyone so conceited.

But that same day Ludvik came to see us. He brought Vlasta some gifts and made his apologies. Would we forgive him for acting as he had yesterday? He told us what had happened. He'd been kicked out of both the Party and the university. He didn't know what to expect next.

I couldn't believe my ears and hardly knew what to say. Besides, Ludvik didn't want anybody's pity and quickly changed the subject. The ensemble was leaving in two weeks for a major foreign tour. Provincials that we were, we could hardly wait for it to begin.

Ludvik understood and started asking me all about it. But I remembered right away that Ludvik had yearned to go abroad since he was a child and now his chances of getting out were very slim. At that time and for many years thereafter, people with political blemishes on their records were not allowed out of the country. I saw how different our lives had become, and I tried to avoid saying so. This meant I couldn't talk openly about our tour, because I would be throwing light on the gulf that had suddenly opened between our destinies. I wanted to shroud that gulf in darkness and was afraid of any word liable to throw the least bit of light on it. But I couldn't find a single one that didn't. Everything I said with the slightest bearing on our lives served to remind us that we'd taken separate paths. That we had different opportunities, different futures. That we were being carried off in opposite directions. I tried to talk about trivial and indifferent matters in an attempt to cover up our mutual estrangement. But that was worse still. The willful insignificance of the conversation became unbearably painful.

Ludvik soon said good-bye and left. He had volunteered for a labor brigade somewhere, and I went abroad with the ensemble. I did not see him for several years. I wrote him a few letters when he was in the army in Ostrava. Each time I mailed one I was left with the same sense of dissatisfaction I'd had after our last talk. I was unable to face Ludvik's fall. I was ashamed of the success I'd made of my life. I found it intolerable to dole out words of encouragement or sympathy to Ludvik from the heights of my contentment.

Instead I tried to pretend that nothing had changed between us. I went on about what we were doing, what was new in the ensemble, about the new cimbalom player, about our latest adventures. I tried to make it sound as though my world were still our common world.

Then one day Papa received an obituary announcement. Ludvik's mother had died. None of us had even known she was ill. When Ludvik disappeared from my horizon, she had disappeared with him. Holding the announcement in my hand, I realized how indifferent I had become to people even slightly removed from the path my life had taken. My successful life. I felt guilty without actually having done anything wrong. And then I noticed something that gave me a shock. The announcement had been signed by the Kouteckys. There was no mention at all of Ludvik.

The day of the funeral arrived. From early morning I felt nervous at the prospect of meeting Ludvik again. But Ludvik never came. Only a handful of people followed the coffin. I asked the Kouteckys where Ludvik was. They shrugged their shoulders and said they didn't know.

The procession stopped at a large tomb with a heavy marble stone and the white statue of an angel.

The property of the rich builder's family had been confiscated and they were living on a meager income. All they had left was this large family vault with a white angel. I knew all this, but I couldn't understand why the coffin was being interred there.

Only later did I learn that Ludvik had been in prison at the time. His mother was the only one in town who'd known. When she died, the Kouteckys took over the body of an unloved sister-in-law and proclaimed it their own. At last they were avenged on their ungrateful nephew. They had robbed him of his mother. They had covered her up with a heavy marble stone guarded by a white angel with curly hair and a palm frond. I'll never forget that angel. He was soaring above the ravaged life of a friend from whom even the bodies of his parents had been stolen. The angel of robbery.

9

Vlasta doesn't like extravagance. Sitting out in the garden at
night is an extravagance. I heard a vigorous tapping at the win-dowpane. Behind the window loomed the severe shadow of a woman's figure in a nightdress. I am obedient. I can never say no to those weaker than myself. And because I am six feet two and can lift a two-hundred-pound sack with one hand, in all my life I have yet to find anyone I can resist.

So I went in and lay down beside Vlasta. To break the silence, I mentioned seeing Ludvik earlier in the day. "And so?" she said with a display of indifference. There's nothing I can do about it. She can't stomach him. All this time, and she can't stand him. Not that she has anything to complain about. Since our wedding she's seen him exactly once. In fifty-six.

By then I could no longer gloss over the gulf dividing us, not even to myself.