The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Page 2
Milan Kundera
Lost Letters
As Mirek drove past him, the mechanic nodded toward the car parked at the entrance to the service station.
The thick-necked man with the waved hair stood gazing at Mirek beside the open gate. The one behind the wheel was also looking at him. The two men stared at him insolently and shamelessly, and driving by, Mirek tried to look at them the same way.
In the rearview mirror, he saw the man get into the car, which made a U-turn to go on following him.
He thought he really should have gotten rid of his compromising papers earlier. If he had done it the first day after his accident, instead of waiting to reach Zdena on the phone, he might have been able to move them without danger. But all he could think about was this trip to see Zdena. Actually, he had been thinking about it for several years now. But in recent weeks he'd had the feeling he could not wait much longer, because his destiny was rapidly coming to its end and he must do everything to make it perfect and beautiful.
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The mechanic lowered the hood, and Mirek asked how much he owed him.
"Forget it," said the mechanic.
Touched, Mirek got behind the wheel. He had no desire to go on with his trip. He would rather have stayed here with the mechanic and listened to his funny stories. The mechanic leaned into the car and threw him a friendly punch. Then he went over to the gatekeeper's shack to raise the barrier.
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Breaking up with Zdena in those long-ago days (their affair had lasted nearly three years) gave him a tremendous feeling of immense freedom, and suddenly
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The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Lost Letters
His connection to his life was that of a sculptor to his statue or a novelist to his novel. It is an inviolable right of a novelist to rework his novel. If the opening does not please him, he can rewrite or delete it. But Zdena's existence denied Mirek that author's prerogative. Zdena insisted on remaining on the opening pages of the novel and did not let herself be crossed out.
everything began to go well for him. He soon married a woman whose loveliness gave him self-confidence. Then his beautiful wife died, and he was left alone with his son in an alluring solitude that gained him the admiration, interest, and solicitude of many other women.
At the same time, he made a name for himself as a scientist, and that protected him. The state needed him, so he could allow himself to be caustic about it at a time when hardly anyone was daring to. Little by little, as those who were in pursuit of their own act gained influence, he appeared on television more and more, becoming well known. After the Russians arrived, he refused to renounce his convictions, was removed from his job and hounded by the secret police. That didn't break him. He was in love with his destiny, and even his march toward ruin seemed noble and beautiful to him.
Please understand me: I said he was in love with his destiny, not with himself. These are two entirely different things. It is as if his life had freed itself and suddenly had interests of its own, which did not correspond at all to Mirek's. This is how, I believe, life turns itself into destiny. Destiny has no intention of lifting a finger for Mirek (for his happiness, his security, his good spirits, his health), whereas Mirek is ready to do everything for his destiny (for its grandeur, its clarity, its beauty, its style, its intelligible meaning). He felt responsible for his destiny, but his destiny did not feel responsible for him.
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But just why was he so horribly ashamed of her? The easiest explanation is this: Mirek is among those who very soon joined in pursuit of their own act, whereas Zdena has always been loyal to the garden where nightingales sing. Lately she was among the two percent of the nation who joyfully welcomed the arrival of the Russian tanks.
Yes, that's true, but I don't consider this explanation convincing. If her rejoicing at the arrival of the Russian tanks were the only reason, he would have attacked her loudly and publicly, and not denied he knew her. No, Zdena was guilty of something differently serious. She was ugly.
But why did her ugliness matter, when he hadn't made love to her in twenty years?
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Lost Letters
It mattered: even from afar, Zdena's big nose cast a shadow on his life.
Some years earlier, he'd had a pretty mistress. Once, she returned from a visit to the town where Zdena lived and asked with annoyance: "Tell me, how could you possibly have gone to bed with that horror?"
He professed she was only an acquaintance and vehemently denied having had an affair with her.
For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake. Mirek tried hard to sweep away all traces of Zdena, and since the nightingale-lovers hated him more with every passing day, he hoped that Zdena, busy making her career in the party, would swiftly and gladly forget him.
He was mistaken. She talked about him all the time, everywhere and every chance she got. Once by disastrous coincidence they met in public, and she was quick to speak of something that clearly showed they had formerly been very close.
He was furious.
Another time, one of his friends who knew her asked him: "If you hate that woman so, why were you with her in those days?"
Mirek began by explaining that he had been a foolish kid of twenty and she was seven years older. She was respected, admired, all-powerful! She knew everyone on the party Central Committee! She helped him, pushed him, introduced him to influential people!
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"I was a climber, you idiot!" and he started shouting: "That's why I hung on to her, and I didn't give a damn about how ugly she was!"
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Mirek was not telling the truth. Even though she had cried over Masturbov's death, Zdena had no great connections twenty-five years before and no means of making a career for herself or of easing the way to one for others.
Why then had he invented that? Why did he lie?
Driving with one hand, he saw the secret-police car in the rearview mirror and suddenly blushed. A completely unexpected memory had sprung to mind:
When she reproached him, the first time they made love, about his acting too intellectual, he had tried, starting the next day, to correct that impression by showing spontaneous, unbridled passion. No, it's not true that he had forgotten all their coitions! This one he remembered clearly: He moved on her with feigned fierceness, emitting a lengthy growl like a dog struggling with his master's slipper, at the same time observing (with mild astonishment) the very calm, silent, and nearly impassive woman stretched out under him.
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The car resounded with that twenty-five-year-old growl, the unbearable sound of his submissiveness and servile zeal, the sound of his overattentiveness and subservience, of his ridiculousness and misery.
Yes, it was so: Mirek had gone so far as to proclaim himself a climber to avoid confessing the truth: he had made love to an ugly woman because he didn't dare approach pretty ones. He thought himself unworthy of anyone better than a Zdena. That weakness, that deprivation, was the secret he was hiding.
The car resounded with the frenzied growl of passion, and the sound proved to him that Zdena was merely an apparition he wanted to get to in order to destroy his own hated youth.
He parked in front of her apartment building. The car following parked right behind him.
Lost Letters
They tried hard to recapture and tame their own act, and for a while they nearly succeeded. In the sixties, they gained more and more influence, and at the beginning of 1968 their influence was almost complete. That is the period commonly referred to as the "Prague Spring": the guardians of the idyll saw themselves forced to remove microphones from private apartments, the borders were opened, and the notes were escaping fr
om the enormous Bach score for everyone to sing in his own way. It was an unbelievable gaiety, it was a carnival!
Russia, which had composed the enormous fugue for the entire terrestrial globe, could not tolerate the scattering of the notes. On August 21, 1968, she sent an army of half a million men to Bohemia. Soon about one hundred twenty thousand Czechs had left the country, and of those who remained, about five hundred thousand had been forced to leave their jobs, for isolated workshops in the depths of the country, for distant factories, for the steering wheels of trucks—that is to say, for places where no one would ever hear their voices.
And because not even the shadow of a bad memory should distract the country from its restored idyll, both the Prague Spring and the arrival of the Russian tanks, that stain on a beautiful history, had to be reduced to nothing. That is why today in Bohemia the August 21 anniversary goes by silently and the names of those who rose up against their own youth are carefully erased from the country's memory, like mistakes in a schoolchild's homework.
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Historical events mostly imitate one another without any talent, but it seems to me that in Bohemia history staged an unprecedented experiment. There, things did not go according to the old formula of one group of people (a. class, a nation) set against another, but instead, people (a generation of men and women) rebelled against their own youth.
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They effaced Mirek's name too. And as he climbs the steps to Zdena's door, he is really only a white stain, a circumscribed fragment of the void going up the spiral staircase.
Lost Letters
gales. They wanted to compel him to cast his life away and become a shadow, a man without a past, an actor without a role, and to turn even his castaway life, even the role the actor had abandoned, into a shadow. Having turned him into a shadow, they would let him live.
He looks at Zdena: Why is she talking so fast and in such an uncertain tone of voice? Why is she looking at him sideways, why is she averting her eyes?
It's only too obvious: She's set a trap for him. She's acting under instructions from the party or the police. Her task is to convince him to surrender.
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His arm swaying in its sling, he sits facing Zdena. Looking at him sideways, Zdena averts her eyes and speaks glibly:
"I don't know why you've come. But I'm glad you're here. I've been talking to some comrades. It's quite insane for you to end up as a construction worker. It's certain, I know it is, that the party still hasn't closed the door on you. There's still time."
He asks her what he should do.
"Ask for a hearing. You yourself. It's up to you to make the first move."
He saw what was going on. They were letting him know he still had five minutes, the last five minutes, to proclaim loudly that he renounces everything he said and did. He was familiar with this kind of deal. They were ready to sell people a future in exchange for their past. They wanted to force him to appear on television and explain in a choked voice that he had been in error when he spoke against Russia and against nightin-
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But Mirek is mistaken! No one has assigned her to deal with him. Ah no! Nowadays, no one among the powerful would give Mirek a hearing, even if he were to beg. It's too late.
Zdena urges him to do something to save himself and pretends to be transmitting a message from high-ranking comrades only because she feels a confused and futile desire to help him as best she can. And she talks rapidly and averts her eyes not because she has a set trap in hand but because she is empty-handed. Has Mirek ever understood her?
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He always thought Zdena was so frenetically faithful to the party because she was a fanatic.
That was not true. She remained faithful to the party because she loved Mirek.
When he left her, her only desire was to show that faithfulness was a value superior to all others. She tried to show that he was unfaithful in all and that she was faithful in all. What looked like political fanaticism was merely a pretense, a parable, a demonstration of faithfulness, disappointed love's coded reproach.
I imagine her on a beautiful August morning awakening with a start to the terrible din of airplanes. She runs out into the street, where panic-stricken people tell her that the Russian army is occupying Bohemia. She breaks into hysterical laughter! Russian tanks have come to punish all the unfaithful! At last she'll see Mirek's downfall! At last she'll see him on his knees! At last she—the one who knows what faithfulness is—will be able to lean over him and come to his aid.
Mirek has decided to break off abruptly a conversation that is heading in the wrong direction.
"You know I used to write you a lot of letters. I want them back."
She raises her head in surprise. "Letters?"
"Yes, my letters. At the time, I must have written you at least a hundred."
"Yes, your letters, I know," she says, and suddenly ceasing to look away, she fixes her eyes on him. Mirek has the unpleasant impression that she can see into the
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Lost Letters
depths of his soul, that she knows exactly what he wants and why he wants it.
"Your letters, yes, your letters," she repeats. "I reread them a little while ago. I wondered how you could have been capable of such an explosion of feelings."
She repeated the words "explosion of feelings" several times, uttering them not rapidly or with any kind of haste but slowly and reflectively, as though she were aiming at a target she did not want to miss, not taking her eyes off it, making sure that she hit the bull's-eye.
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His arm in its cast is swaying on his chest and his face is flushed: he looks as if he has just been slapped.
Ah yes! undoubtedly his letters were terribly sentimental. He had needed at all costs to prove to himself that it was not his weakness and poverty that bound him to this woman, but love! And only a truly immense passion could justify an affair with such an ugly girl.
"Do you remember writing me that we were comrades in arms in the struggle?"
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If possible, his blush deepens. What an infinitely ridiculous word, this word "struggle"! What was that struggle of theirs? The interminable meetings they went to put blisters on their buttocks, but the moment they stood up to utter some extreme opinions (it was necessary to castigate the class enemy ever more harshly, to formulate this or that idea in ever more categorical terms), they felt like the figures in heroic paintings: he, gun in hand, falling to the ground with a bleeding wound in his shoulder, and she, clutching a pistol, going forward, ahead to where he can no longer go.
At that time, his skin was still covered with youthful acne, and to keep it from showing he wore a mask of rebellion. He told everyone that he had broken permanently with his father, a well-off farmer. He spat, he said, on the age-old rural tradition of attachment to the land and to property. He described the scene of the quarrel and his dramatic departure from the parental home. There was not an ounce of truth to any of this. When he looks back nowadays, he sees only legends and lies.
"At that time, you were a different man," said Zdena.
He imagines taking the parcel of letters away with him. Stopping at the first garbage can, he carefully holds the parcel between two fingers, as if it were besmirched with shit, and drops it in among the filth.
Lost Letters
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"What would you do with these letters?" she asks. "Just why do you want them?"
He couldn't tell her he wanted to throw them in the garbage can. So he put on a melancholy tone of voice and began to tell her he had reached the age when you start to look back at the past.
(He felt uncomfortable saying this, having the impression that his fairy tale was unconvincing, and he was ashamed.)
Yes
, he was looking back, because nowadays he had forgotten who he had been when he was young. He knew he had failed. That is why he wanted to know where he had come from, to understand where he had gone wrong. That is why he wanted to go back to his correspondence with Zdena, to find there the secret of his youth, of his beginnings and of his roots.
She shook her head: "I'll never give them to you."
He lied: "I only want to borrow them."
She shook her head again.
He reflected that somewhere in this apartment were letters of his, which at any time she could give to anyone at all to read. That a piece of his life remained in Zdena's hands was unbearable, and he longed to hit her over the head with the big glass ashtray on the coffee table between them and take away his letters.
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Instead, he again began to tell her he was looking back to find out where he had come from.
