The JOKE (21 page)

Ludvik had been through military service, a prison sentence, and several years in the mines. He was making arrangements in Prague to resume his studies and had come to our town to take care of a few legal formalities. I was nervous about meeting him again. But the man I met wasn't a broken malcontent. Not at all. He was different from the Ludvik I had known. There was a toughness about him, a solidity, and he was perhaps calmer.

Nothing calling for pity. It looked as though we'd have no trouble bridging the gulf I had so feared. To renew old ties, I invited him to a rehearsal of our ensemble. I still thought of it as his ensemble too. What did it matter that the cimbalom, second violin, and clarinet had been taken over by different musicians and I was the only one left of the old crowd?

Ludvik sat next to the cimbalom player and followed the rehearsal from there. First we played our favorite songs, the ones we used to play when we were still in school. Then we ran through a few we'd unearthed in remote mountain villages.

Finally we did a set of those we consider most important. They are not genuine folk songs, but songs we ourselves have composed in the folk art spirit. We sang about plowing up the old border plots to make one immense collective field out of a multitude of private ones, about the poor who were now masters in their own country, about a tractor driver who now lacks nothing. The music was indistinguishable from the music of authentic folk songs, but the words were more up to date than the newspapers. Our favorite was the one about Julius Fucik, the hero tortured by the Nazis during the Occupation.

Ludvik sat and stared at the cimbalom mallets racing from string to string. Every once in a while he poured himself a small glass of wine. I watched him over the bridge of my violin. He was deep in thought and never once looked at me.

Then wives began tiptoeing into the room, a sign that the rehearsal was coming to an end.

I invited Ludvik home. Vlasta made us something to eat and then went to bed, leaving us alone. Ludvik talked about everything under the sun. But I could tell that the real reason he was so talkative was to avoid what I wanted to talk about. And how could I fail to talk to my best friend about our greatest shared possession? So I broke into his idle chatter.

What did you think of our songs? He answered that he liked them. But I wasn't going to let him get off with a cheap politeness. I continued to question him. What did he think of the new songs we'd composed ourselves?

Ludvik didn't want to get into a debate. But step by step I drew him on until finally he started talking. Those few old songs we'd found he thought were truly beautiful.

Otherwise he didn't care for our repertory. We were pandering too much to prevailing tastes. And no wonder. We performed before the widest possible public and wanted to please. So we stripped our songs of everything original. We stripped them of their inimitable rhythms, imposing conventional rhythmic patterns in their place. We chose our songs from the recent past, the csardas and so on, because they were easier to listen to, more accessible.

I protested. We were barely getting started. We wanted folk music to be as popular as possible. That was why we had to make concessions to popular taste. The most important thing was that we'd created our own
contemporary
folklore, new folk songs with something to say about life as we live it now.

He disagreed. It was precisely these new songs that jarred on his ears most of all. What pitiful imitations! And what fakery!

To this day it pains me to think back on it. Who was it who warned us that if we kept looking backwards we'd end up like Lot's wife? Who was it who told us that folk music would spawn the new style of the age? Who was it who urged us to set folk music in motion and make it march along with the history of our time?

That was all a Utopia, said Ludvik.

A Utopia? But the songs are there! They exist!

He laughed in my face. You may sing them, you and your ensemble, but show me one other person who does. Show me one collective farmer who sings your collective farm songs for pleasure. The farmer would make a face. The songs are so unnatural and false.

The propaganda text sticks out from the pseudo-folk music like a badly sewn-on collar. A pseudo-Moravian song about Fucik! What nonsense! A Prague Communist journalist!

What did he have in common with Moravia?

I objected that Fucik belonged to us all and that we had just as much right to sing about him in our own way.

In our own way? You don't sing in our way, you sing the agitprop way! Look at the words. And why a song about Fucik anyway? Was he the only one in the underground?

The only one tortured?

But he's the best known!

Of course he is! The propaganda apparatus wants a hierarchy in its gallery of dead heroes. They want a chief hero among heroes.

Why poke fun at that? Every age has its symbols.

True, but it's interesting to know who has been chosen to serve as a symbol! There were hundreds of people just as courageous at the time, and now they are forgotten. Well-known people too. Politicians, writers, scientists, artists. And none of them became symbols. You don't find their pictures hanging in schools and offices. And many left behind important bodies of work. But it's precisely their work that is the difficulty. It can't be touched up, cut down, or reshaped. It's the work that kept them from gaining entrance to the propaganda gallery of heroes.

None of them wrote
Notes from the Gallows!

That's just it! What about the hero who keeps his mouth shut? What about the hero who doesn't turn his last moments into a spectacle. Into an educational lecture? Fucik, though little known at the time, decided it was of the utmost importance to inform the world of what he thought, felt, and experienced in prison, of what he recommended for mankind.

He scribbled it out on tiny scraps of paper, risking the lives of those who smuggled them out of prison and kept them safe. Think of the opinion he must have had of his own thoughts and impressions! Think of the opinion he must have had of himself!

This was more than I could take. So Fucik was nothing but a self-satisfied windbag?

Ludvik was not to be stopped. No, he replied, that wasn't the main thing that compelled him to write. The main thing was his weakness. Because being brave in solitude, without witnesses, without the reward of others' approbation, face to face with himself, that took great pride and strength. Fucik needed an audience. In the solitude of his cell he created at least a fictitious audience for himself. He needed to be seen! To be nourished by applause! Even if only fictitious applause! To turn his cell into a stage and make his lot bearable not only by living it, but by performing it, exhibiting it!

I was prepared for Ludvik's sadness. Even bitterness. But I hadn't anticipated this venom, this ironical hatred. What had tortured Fucik done to him? I see the worth of a man in his beliefs. I know Ludvik was punished unjustly. But that only makes it worse! Because in that case the motivation for his change of views is all too transparent. Can a man abandon everything he's stood for just because he's been insulted?

I said as much to Ludvik's face. But then something unexpected happened. He didn't respond at all. It was as though the fever of his fury had suddenly subsided. He gave me a quizzical look and then, quite calm and collected, told me not to be upset. He might well be

wrong. He said it in such a strange, cold voice that I knew very well it was not meant sincerely. I didn't want our talk to end on this insincerity. Despite my annoyance I was still guided by my original intention. I still meant to come to terms with Ludvik and renew our old friendship. Even though we'd clashed head on, I hoped that eventually, once our quarrel had died down, we would be able to find our way back to a bit of the common ground where it was once so pleasant and where we could once more live together. But all my attempts to continue the conversation were in vain. Ludvik apologized, saying that he had a tendency to exaggerate and that he had allowed himself to go on as usual. He asked me to forget everything he'd said.

Forget? Why should we forget a serious discussion? Would it not be preferable to continue it? It wasn't until the next day that I grasped the real meaning behind this request. Ludvik stayed overnight and ate breakfast with us. After breakfast we had a half-hour to talk. He told me what a hard time he'd been having getting permission to complete his last two years at the university. How being expelled from the Party had branded him for life. How wherever he went he was distrusted. That it was only thanks to a few friends from before the February coup that he had any chance of going back to school. He talked about other friends in similar positions. He talked about how they were followed and had their every word taken down. How people in their circles were interrogated and how a zealous or malicious piece of testimony could blight their lives for yet a few more years. Then he abruptly changed the subject to something trivial, and when the time came to say good-bye, he told me he was glad to have seen me, and asked me again to forget what he'd said the day before.

The connection between the request and the reference to his friends' experiences was only too clear. I was stunned. Ludvik had stopped speaking to me because he was afraid! He was afraid our talk might not remain private! He was afraid I would denounce him! He was afraid of me! It was awful. And again, completely unexpected. The gulf between us was much deeper than I had thought. It was so deep that it didn't even permit us to finish a conversation.

10

Vlasta is asleep. Poor thing. From time to time, lightly, she
snores. They're all asleep.

And here I lie, long and big, and I think how powerless I am. That talk with Ludvik had really brought it home to me. Until then I'd confidently supposed that the whole thing was in my hands. Ludvik and I had never done anything to hurt each other. With a little good will why couldn't we be friends again?

As it turned out, nothing was in my hands. Neither our estrangement nor our reunion was in my hands. So I hoped that they were in the hands of time. Time has passed. Nine years since our last meeting. Meanwhile, Ludvik has graduated and found an excellent job as a scientist in a field he enjoys. I follow his destiny from afar. I follow it with affection. I can never regard Ludvik as an enemy or a stranger. He is my friend, but he is enchanted.

Like the fairy tale prince's bride when she's changed into a snake or a toad. In fairy tales the prince always saves the day by his faithful patience.

But time hasn't yet wakened my friend from his enchantment. More than once during those years I heard of visits he'd made here. But he never came to see me. Today I saw him and he turned away. Damn Ludvik.

It all began the last time we talked. Year by year I've felt a wasteland growing around me and anguish spreading within. There is more and more fatigue, less and less joy and success. The ensemble used to go on a foreign tour every year, but then the invitations began to dwindle, and now we're hardly invited anywhere. We work all the time, work harder than ever, but we're surrounded by silence. I'm standing in a deserted hall. And I have the feeling it's Ludvik who has ordered me to

be alone. Because it's not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it's your friends.

Since that time I've started taking refuge on a road through the fields. On a road through the fields with a lone wild rose bush on the verge. There I meet the last of the faithful.

There is the deserter with his men. There is the wandering minstrel, and beyond the horizon there is a wooden cottage, and in it Vlasta, the poor servant girl.

The deserter calls me king and has promised me that I may take refuge under his protection at any time. All I have to do is go to the rose bush. There we will always meet.

It would be so simple to find peace in the world of fantasy. But I've always tried to live in the two worlds at the same time without giving up one for the other. I must not give up the real world even though I am losing everything in it. Perhaps it will be enough in the end if I manage one thing. One last thing:

To hand over my life as a clear message to the one person able to understand it and carry it on. Until I have done so, I may not go away with the deserter to the Danube.

The one man of whom I think, my ultimate hope after all my defeats, lies asleep a wall away. The day after tomorrow he will mount his horse. He will wear ribbons across his face. They will call him king. Come, my boy. I am falling asleep. They will call you by my tide. I will sleep. I want to dream of you on your horse.

PART FIVE

Ludvik

1

I slept long and fairly well. I didn't wake up until after eight, didn't remember any dreams, good or bad, didn't have a headache, but simply didn't want to get up; so I stayed in bed; sleep had erected a sort of wall between myself and my Friday-evening encounter; not that Lucie had dropped that morning out of my consciousness but that she had returned to her former abstract state.

To her abstract state? Yes: When Lucie disappeared from Ostrava so mysteriously and cruelly, I had no practical way of going after her. And as time went on (after my release from military service), I gradually lost the desire to do so. I told myself that however much I'd loved her, however
unique
she was, she was inextricably bound up with the
situation
in which we met and fell in love. It seemed to me an error in reasoning for a man to isolate a woman he loves from all the circumstances in which he met her and in which she lives, to try, with dogged inner concentration, to purify her of everything that is not her
self,
which is to say also of the
story
that they lived through together and that gives their love its shape.

After all, what I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns towards me, what she is
for me.
I love her as a character in our common love story. What would Hamlet be without the castle at Elsinore, without Ophelia, without all the concrete situations he goes through, what would he be without the
text
of his part? What would be left but an empty, dumb, illusory essence? Likewise, Lucie without the Ostrava outskirts, without the roses handed through the barbed wire, without the shabby clothes, without my own endless weeks of despair, would probably cease to be the Lucie I'd loved.