The JOKE (7 page)

I stood in a courtyard with the other conscripts of my unit, strangers all; in the gloom of initial mutual unfamiliarity, the harshness and the strangeness of others comes sharply to the fore; that is how it was for us; the only human bond we had was our uncertain future, and conjecture was rampant. Some claimed we were to be given black insignia, others denied it, still others didn't know what it meant. I did know, and that possibility horrified me.

Then a sergeant came and took us to an outbuilding; we poured into a corridor and along the corridor into a large room hung all around with enormous posters, photographs, and clumsy drawings; pinned to the far wall, the large letters cut out of red paper, was the inscription WE are building socialism, and under that inscription stood a chair, and beside the chair a little old man. The sergeant pointed at one of us and told him to go sit in the chair. The old man tied a white cloth around the young fellow's neck, dug into the briefcase that was leaning against a chair leg, pulled out an electric haircutter, and plunged it into his hair.

The barber's chair inaugurated a production line designed to turn us into soldiers: after being deprived of our hair, we were hustled into the next room, where we were made to strip to the skin, wrap our clothes in a paper bag, tie them up with string, and pass them in at a window;

then, naked and shorn, we proceeded across the hall to another room, where we were issued nightshirts; in our nightshirts we went on to the next door, where we received our army boots; in boots and nightshirts we marched across the courtyard to another building, where we got shirts, underpants, socks, a belt, a uniform (there were the black insignia!); and finally we came to the last building, where a noncommissioned officer read out our names, divided us into squads, and assigned us rooms and bunks.

That same day still, we formed ranks again, went to supper, then to bed; in the morning we were wakened, taken out to the mines, and, at the pit head, divided by squads into work gangs and presented with tools (drill, shovel, and safety lamp) that almost none of us knew how to use; then the cage took us below ground. When we surfaced again with aching bodies, the waiting noncoms assembled us and marched us to the barracks; after the midday meal we went out to drill, and after drill we cleaned up and had political instruction and compulsory singing; and for private life, a room with twenty bunks. And so it went, day after day.

During those first days the depersonalization that had overwhelmed us seemed utterly opaque to me; the impersonal prescribed functions we carried out took the place of all manifestations of humanity; the opacity was, of course, merely relative; it stemmed not only from the situation itself, but also from the difficulty we had in adjusting our sight (it was like entering a dark room from broad daylight); with time our sight improved, and even in this
penumbra of depersonalization
we began to see the human in human beings.

I must admit, however, that I was one of the last to adjust his vision to the altered light.

The reason was that my entire being refused to accept its lot. The soldiers with black insignia, the soldiers whose lot I shared, went through only the most perfunctory drills and were given no weapons; their main job was to work in the mines. They were paid for their work (in which respect they were better off than other soldiers), but I found that a poor consolation; after all, they consisted entirely of elements that the young socialist republic was unwilling to entrust with arms and regarded as its enemies. Obviously this led to rougher treatment and

the threat that their period of service would be extended beyond the compulsory two years; but what horrified me more than anything was being condemned (once and for all, definitively and by my own Comrades) to the company of men I considered my sworn enemies. I spent the early days among the black insignia as a hardheaded recluse; I refused to associate with my enemies, I refused to accommodate myself to them. Passes were hard to come by at the time (no soldier had a
right
to a pass; he received a pass only as a
reward,
which meant he was allowed out once every two weeks—on Saturday), but even when the soldiers surged out in gangs to the bars and after girls, I preferred to be alone; I would lie on my bunk and try to read or even study, feeding on my unadaptability. I believed I had only one thing to accomplish: fight for my right "not to be an enemy," for my right to get away.

I paid several visits to the unit's political commissar in an attempt to convince him that my presence there was a mistake; that I had been expelled from the Party for intellectualism and cynicism, not as an enemy of socialism; once again (for the umpteenth time) I recounted the ridiculous story of the postcard, a story that now was by no means ridiculous and that in the context of my black insignia sounded more and more suspicious, appearing to harbor something I was suppressing. In all fairness I must note that the commissar heard me out patiently and showed a somewhat unexpected understanding of my desire for justification; he actually did make inquiries about my case somewhere higher up (O inscrutable topography!), but when he finally called me in, it was to say, with unconcealed resentment, "Why did you try to fool me? They told me all about you. A known Trotskyite!"

I came to realize that there was no power capable of changing the image of my person lodged somewhere in the supreme court of human destinies; that this image (even though it bore no resemblance to me) was much more real than my actual self; that I was its shadow and not it mine; that I had no right to accuse it of bearing no resemblance to me, but rather that it was I who was guilty of the non-resemblance; and that the non-resemblance was my cross, which I could not unload on
anyone else, which was mine alone to bear.

And yet I didn't want to capitulate. I really wanted to
bear
my non-resemblance; to be the person it was decided I was not.

It took me about two weeks to become more or less accustomed to hard labor in the mines, to the pneumatic drill, whose vibrations I felt pulsating through my body even as I slept. But I worked hard, with a sort of frenzy. I wanted my output to be exceptional, and before long I was on my way.

The trouble was that no one took it as an expression of my political convictions. Since we were all paid piece rates (true, they deducted room and board, but there was still quite a bit left over), many others, no matter what their politics, worked with considerable energy to wrest at least something worthwhile from all those wasted years.

Even though everyone looked on us as sworn enemies of the regime, we were required to maintain all the forms of public life characteristic of socialist collectives: we, the enemy, took part in discussions of current events under the watchful eye of the political commissar, we went to daily political pep talks, we covered the bulletin boards with pictures of socialist statesmen and slogans about the happy future. At first I volunteered almost ostentatiously for these tasks. But nobody saw that as a sign of my political conscientiousness either: the others volunteered too, when they needed to attract the company commander's attention for an evening's leave. None of them thought of this political activity as political; it was an empty gesture that had to be offered up to those in power over us.

I finally understood that my rebellion was illusory, that my non-resemblance was perceptible only to me, that it was invisible to others.

Among the noncoms who had us at their mercy was a dark-haired Slovak, a corporal whose mild manners and utter lack of sadism set him off from the others. He was generally well liked, though there were some who claimed maliciously that his kind heart sprang only from his stupidity. Unlike us, of course, the noncoms carried arms, and from time to time they would go off for target practice. Once the dark-haired corporal came back from practice basking in the glory of a first in marksmanship. A number of us were particularly boisterous in our congratulations (half sympathetic, half mocking); the corporal blushed with pride.

Later that day, finding myself alone with him, I asked him, just for something to say:

"How come you're such a good shot?"

The corporal gave me a quizzical glance and said, "It's this trick I've worked out for myself. I pretend the bull's-eye is an imperialist, and I get so mad I never miss."

And before I could ask him what his imperialist looked like, he added in a serious, pensive voice, "I don't know what you're all congratulating me for. If there was a war on, you're the ones I'd be shooting at."

Hearing those words from the mouth of that good-hearted fellow, so incapable of shouting at us that he was later transferred, I realized that the line tying me to the Party and the Comrades had irrevocably slipped through my fingers. I had been thrown off my life's path.

6

Yes. All the lines were cut.

Broken off, my studies, my participation in the movement, my work, my friendships; broken off, love and the quest for love; in short, everything meaningful in the course of life, broken off. All I had left was time. Time I came to know intimately as never before.

It was not the time with which I had previously had dealings, a time metamorphosed into work, love, effort of every kind, a time I had accepted unthinkingly because it so discreetly hid behind my actions. Now it came to me stripped, just as it is, in its true and original form, and it forced me to call it by its true name (for now I was living sheer time, sheer empty time) so as not to forget it for a moment, keep it constantly before me, and feel its weight.

When music plays, we hear the melody, forgetting that it is only one of the modes of time; when the orchestra falls silent, we hear time; time itself. I was living in a pause. Not in an orchestra's general pause (whose length is clearly determined by a specific sign in the musical score), but in a pause without a determined end. We could not (as they did in other units) shave slivers off a tailor's measure to show the two-year stint shrinking day by day: men with black insignia could be kept on indefinitely. Forty-year-old Ambroz from the Second Company was in his fourth year.

Doing military service at that time and having a wife or fiancee at home was bitter: it meant vainly keeping constant long-distance guard over her unguardable existence; it meant living in constant fear that the company commander would cancel the leave he had promised for one of her rare visits and that she would wait at the camp gates in vain.

With a humor as black as their insignia, the men would tell stories of officers lying in ambush for those frustrated women and reaping the benefits that should have belonged to the soldiers confined to barracks.

And yet: the men with a woman at home had a thread stretching across that pause in the score; no matter how thin, how agonizingly thin and fragile it might have been, it was still a thread. I had no such thread; I'd broken off all relations with Marketa, and the only letters I received were from my mother.... Well, was that not a thread?

No, it was not; if home is only the parental house, it is no thread; it is only the past: letters written by your parents are messages from a shore you are forsaking; worse still, these letters recalling the port you sailed away from incessantly repeat that you strayed, leaving an environment so decently and so laboriously put together; yes, such letters tell you, the port is still there, unchanging, secure and beautiful in its old setting, but
the bearing, the
compass bearing is lost!

Little by little I grew used to the idea that my life had lost its continuity, that it had been taken out of my hands, and that it only remained for me finally to begin to exist, even in my heart of hearts, in the reality in which I inescapably found myself. And so my eyes gradually adjusted to the
penumbra of depersonalization,
and I began to notice the people around me; later than the others, but fortunately not so late as to alienate myself from them altogether.

The first to emerge from the penumbra was Honza from Brno (he spoke the almost incomprehensible patois of that city), who had been issued his black insignia for assaulting a policeman. The beating resulted from a personal argument with the man, an old schoolmate, but the court didn't see it that way, and he had come to us straight from six months in jail. He was a skilled metalworker but it was clearly all the same to him whether he would one day regain his vocation or do something else; he had no attachments, and as for the future, he displayed an indifference that gave him a carefree, insolent feeling of freedom.

The only other one of us with this rare feeling of inner freedom was Bedrich, the most eccentric occupant of our twenty-bunk room. Bed-rich came to us two months after the usual September influx, having originally been assigned to an infantry unit where he had stubbornly

refused to bear arms on strict religious grounds; then the authorities intercepted letters he'd addressed to Truman and Stalin, passionately appealing for the disbanding of all armies in the name of socialist brotherhood; in their confusion they let him take part in drill, and though he was the only man without a weapon, he went through the manual of arms perfectly, with empty hands. He also took part in political sessions, inveighing enthusiastically against imperialist warmongers. But when on his own initiative he made a poster calling for total disarmament and hung it in the barracks, he was court-martialed for insubordination. The judges, disconcerted by his pacifist harangues, had ordered him examined by a team of psychiatrists, and after a good deal of temporizing, had withdrawn their charges and transferred him to us. Bedrich was delighted: he was the only one who had deliberately earned his black insignia and took pleasure in wearing it. That was why he felt free—though unlike Honza, he expressed his independence by means of quiet discipline and contented industry.

All the others were plagued by fear and despair: Varga, a thirty-year-old Hungarian from southern Slovakia, who, oblivious of national prejudices, had fought successively in several armies and been in and out of prisoner of war camps on both sides of the front; Petran the carrot top, whose brother had slipped out of the country, shooting a border guard on the way; Stana, a twenty-year-old dandy from a Prague working-class district, on whom the local council had passed a savage sentence for getting drunk in the May Day parade and
deliberately
urinating on the curb in full view of the cheering citizens; Pavel Pekny, a law student, who at the time of the February Communist coup had demonstrated against the Communists with a handful of his fellow students (he soon discovered I belonged to the camp of those who had kicked him out of the university after the coup, and he alone showed a malicious satisfaction at the thought that we had both ended up in the same boat).