The JOKE (29 page)

While they were contemplating their unexpected find, the chairman discovered something else in the hay. A cracked milk jug. The blue

enamel jug whose mysterious loss the shepherd had been retelling in the tavern every evening for the past two weeks.

After this, the whole thing ran along predictable lines. The chairman hid in the trees to wait for her, while the director went down to the village and sent the local policeman back up after the chairman. At dusk the girl returned to her fragrant bower. They let her go in, let her close the door behind her, waited half a minute, and then went in after her.

8

Both the men who trapped Lucie in the barn were decent fellows. The chairman, formerly a poor farmhand, was an honest father of six children. The policeman was naive, coarse, good-natured, and wore an immense mustache. Neither of them would have hurt a fly.

And yet I felt a strange pain when I heard how Lucie was trapped. Even now I can't suppress a twinge in my heart when I imagine the director and the chairman rummaging through her suitcase, fingering the most intimate articles of her private life, the tender secrets of her dirty linen, looking where it is forbidden to look.

And I have the same agonizing feeling whenever I imagine her haylined lair with no means of escape, with a single door blocked by two hefty men.

Later, when I learned more about Lucie, I realized to my astonishment that in both these agonizing images the very essence of her fate was directly revealed to me. These two images represented
the situation of rape.

9

That night Lucie did not sleep in the barn but on an iron bed in a former shop the police had set up as an office. The next day, she was interrogated by the District National Committee. They learned that she had previously worked and lived in Ostrava. She'd run away because she couldn't stand it there anymore. When they tried to find out anything more specific, they were met with stubborn silence.

Why had she chosen to come here, to western Bohemia? She said that her parents lived in Cheb. And why hadn't she gone back to them? She'd left the train long before Cheb because on the way she began to be afraid. Her father had done nothing but beat her.

The District National Committee chairman informed her they would have to send her back to Ostrava since she'd left without the proper permit. Lucie told them she would get off the train at the first stop. They shouted at her for a while but soon saw it wasn't helping matters, so they asked her whether they should send her home, to Cheb. She shook her head vehemently. They tried being strict with her again, but finally the chairman succumbed to his own softheartedness. "What do you want, then?" She asked whether she might not be allowed to stay on and work. They shrugged and said they'd ask at the state farm.

The director was fighting a constant battle with the labor shortage. He agreed to the District National Committee's proposal on the spot. Then he informed me I'd be getting the help in the greenhouse I'd requested for so long. And the same day the chairman of the Committee came to introduce me to Lucie.

I remember it well. It was late November, and after weeks of sun autumn had begun to show its windy and rainy face. It was drizzling.

She stood there in a brown overcoat, suitcase in hand, head bowed bowed, an absent look in her eyes. The chairman, standing by her side and holding the blue jug, announced ceremoniously, "If you've done anything wrong, we forgive you and we trust you. We could have sent you back to Ostrava, but we've let you stay. The working class needs honest men and women everywhere. Don't let it down."

He then went to the office to hand over the shepherd's jug, and I took Lucie to the greenhouse, introduced her to the two girls she'd be working with, and explained to her what she would be doing.

10

In my memory, Lucie overshadows everything I experienced at the time. Despite this, the figure of the District National Committee chairman remains rather clearly outlined. When you were sitting across from me yesterday, Ludvik, I didn't want to offend you. Now that you are with me again in the form in which I know you best, as an image and a shadow, I can say it straight out: that former farmhand who hoped to create a paradise for his suffering neighbors, that honest enthusiast saying his naively high-flown words about forgiveness, faith, and the working class, was much closer to my heart and mind than you, even though he never showed me any personal favor.

You used to declare that socialism grew from the stem of European rationalism and skepticism, a stem both nonreligious and antireligious, and that it was otherwise inconceivable. But can you seriously maintain that it is impossible to build a socialist society without faith in the supremacy of matter? Do you really think that people who believe in God are incapable of nationalizing factories?

I am altogether certain that the line of the European spirit which stems from the teachings of Jesus leads far more naturally to social equality and socialism. And when I think of the most passionate Communists from the first period of socialism in my country—the chairman who put Lucie in my care, for example—they seem to me much more like religious zealots than Voltairean doubters. The revolutionary era from 1948 to 1956 had little in common with skepticism and rationalism. It was an era of great collective faith. A man who kept in step with this era experienced feelings that were akin to religious ones: he renounced his ego, his person, his private life in favor of something higher, something suprapersonal. True, the Marxist teachings were purely

secular in origin, but the significance assigned them was similar to the significance of the Gospel and the biblical commandments. They have created a range of ideas that are untouchable and therefore, in our terminology, sacred.

This was a cruel religion. It did not elevate you or me among its priests; perhaps it injured both of us. Yet despite this the era that has just passed was a hundred times nearer to my heart than the era that seems to be approaching today: an era of mockery, skepticism, and corrosion, a petty era with the ironic intellectual in the limelight, and behind him the mob of youth, coarse, cynical, and nasty, without enthusiasm, without ideals, ready to mate or to kill on sight.

The era now passing or already past had something of the spirit of the great religious movements. What a pity that it was incapable of taking its religious self-knowledge through to the ultimate conclusion. It had religious gestures and feelings but remained empty and godless within. At the time I still believed that God would have mercy, that He would make Himself known, that at last He would sanctify this great secular faith. I waited in vain.

This era finally betrayed its religious nature, and it has paid dearly for its rationalist heritage, swearing allegiance to it only because it failed to understand itself. This rationalist skepticism has been corroding Christianity for two millennia. Corroding it but not destroying it. But Communist theory, its own creation, it will destroy within a few decades. In you, Ludvik, it has already been killed. As well you know.

11

As
long as people can escape to the realm of fairy tales, they are full of nobility, compassion, and poetry. In the realm of everyday life they are, alas, more prone to caution, mistrust, and suspicion. That was how they treated Lucie. As soon as she left the children's fairyland and became a real girl, a fellow worker, a roommate, she was immediately the object of a curiosity not without the malice people reserve for angels cast out from heaven and fairies banished from tales.

Her silent nature didn't help her either. After about a month, her file from Ostrava arrived at the farm. It told us that she'd started off in Cheb as an apprentice hairdresser. As the result of a morals charge she'd spent a year at a reformatory and had then gone to Ostrava. In Ostrava she was known as a good worker. Her behavior in the dormitory was exemplary. Before her flight there had been only one offense, one entirely unusual: she had been caught stealing flowers in a cemetery.

The reports were brief, and instead of unveiling Lucie's mystery, they made it more enigmatic. I promised the director I'd look after her. I found her intriguing. She worked silently and with concentration. She was calm in her timidity. I found in her none of the eccentricities that might be expected in a girl who had lived several weeks alone in the woods. She declared several times that she was happy on the farm and didn't want to leave. Since she was placid and always willing to give way in any argument, she gradually won over the girls who worked with her. Yet there was always something in her taciturnity that betrayed a life of pain and a wounded soul. What I hoped was that she would confide in me, but I also knew she had had enough quizzings and questionings in her life and that she probably associated them with police interrogations. So instead of questioning her, I began talking

myself. I talked to her every day. I told her of my plans to cultivate medicinal herbs on the farm. I told her how in the old days country people used decoctions and solutions of various herbs to cure themselves. I told her about burnet, with which they treated cholera and the plague, and about saxifrage, or breakstone, which actually does break up kidney stones and gallstones. Lucie listened. She liked herbs. But what saintlike simplicity! She knew nothing about them and could hardly name one.

Winter was nearly upon us, and Lucie had nothing to wear but her pretty summer things.

I helped her to budget her salary. I prevailed upon her to buy a raincoat and sweater, and as time went on, things like boots, pajamas, stockings, a new overcoat...

One day I asked her whether she believed in God. She responded in a way I considered peculiar. She said neither yes nor no. She shrugged her shoulders and said, "I don't know." I asked her whether she knew who Jesus Christ was. She said she did. But she didn't know a thing about Him. Only that He was somehow connected with the idea of Christmas, but it was all a haze of some images that made no sense together. Until that time Lucie had known neither belief nor unbelief. I suddenly felt a moment of vertigo, something akin to what a lover must feel when he discovers no male body has preceded his in his beloved. "Do you want me to tell you about Him?" I asked, and she nodded.

The hills and pastures already lay under snow. I talked. Lucie listened. . ..

12

She'd had too much to bear on her slender shoulders. She needed someone to help her, but there was no one capable of it. The help religion offers is simple, Lucie: Give yourself. Give yourself along with the burden you bear. There is a great comfort in giving yourself. I know you've never had anyone to give yourself to, because you've been afraid of people. But there is God. Give yourself to Him. You will feel lighter.

To give yourself means to lay aside your past life. To remove it from your soul. To confess. Tell me, Lucie, why did you run away from Ostrava? Was it because of those flowers in the cemetery?

Partly.

And why did you take the flowers?

She'd been depressed, so she'd put them in a vase in her room at the dormitory. She also picked flowers in nature, but Ostrava is a black town with hardly any nature around it, just dumps, fences, empty lots, and here and there a copse coated with soot. Beautiful flowers were found only in the cemetery. Lofty flowers, majestic flowers. Gladioli, roses, and lilies. Chrysanthemums too, with their voluminous blossoms of fragile petals....

And how did they catch you?

She enjoyed going to the cemetery and went there often. Not only for the flowers she took away with her, but also because it was nice and quiet there and the quiet was comforting to her. Every tomb was like a private little garden, and she liked to spend some time in front of one or another of them, examining the gravestones with their sad inscriptions. So as not to be disturbed, she would imitate the visitors, the elderly ones in particular, and kneel before a stone. Once she took a fancy to a grave nearly fresh. The coffin had been buried there only a few days

before. The earth on the grave was loose and still strewn with wreaths, and in front, in a vase, stood a magnificent spray of roses. Lucie kneeled, and a weeping willow inclined over her like an intimate, whispering heaven. She dissolved into ineffable bliss. Just then an elderly gentleman and his wife approached the grave. Perhaps it was the grave of their son or brother, who knows. They saw an unfamiliar girl kneeling by the tomb. They were astonished. Who was this girl? Her appearance seemed to them to hide a secret, a family secret perhaps, an unknown relative or unknown lover of the deceased. . . . They stopped, not venturing to disturb her. They watched her from a distance. Then they saw the girl stand up, take the beautiful spray of roses they had placed there a few days before, turn, and leave. They ran after her. Who are you? they asked. She was mortified and barely able to stammer out a few words. Finally they realized the girl hadn't known the deceased at all. They called an attendant. They demanded to see her identification papers. They shouted at her, told her there was nothing more abominable than robbing the dead. The attendant confirmed that it wasn't the first flower theft in the cemetery. They called a policeman, she was questioned yet again, and she confessed everything.

13

LET the dead bury their dead," said Jesus. Flowers on graves belong to the living. You didn't know God, Lucie, but you longed for Him. In the beauty of earthly flowers you found the revelation of the unearthly. You didn't need those flowers for anyone. Only for yourself. For the void in your soul. And they caught and humiliated you. But was that the only reason you ran away from the black city?

She was silent. Then she shook her head.

Someone hurt you?

She nodded.

Tell me, Lucie.

It was a very small room. Dangling crookedly from the ceiling was an unshaded, obscenely naked light bulb. A bed was by the wall, a picture hanging over it, and in the picture a handsome man in a blue robe, kneeling. It was the Garden of Gethsemane, but Lucie didn't know it. That was where he had gone with her, and she had fought and screamed. He wanted to rape her, ripped off her clothes, but she eluded him and ran, far away.