The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Page 3

  She raised her eyes, silencing him with a look: "I'll never give them to you. Never."

  Lost Letters

  got behind the wheel of his car. In the rearview mirror, he saw the secret-police car pulling out behind him. He did not see Zdena. He did not want to see her. He never wanted to see her again.

  And so he did not know she stood on the sidewalk, following him with her eyes, for a long while. She looked terrified.

  No, it was not cynicism on Zdena's part to refuse to see secret police in the two men who were pacing up and down on the opposite sidewalk. She was panic-stricken by things that were beyond her. She had wanted to hide the truth from him, and to hide it from herself.

  15

  When they came out of Zdena's apartment building together, the two cars were still parked, one behind the other, right in front of the door. The secret-police men were pacing up and down the opposite sidewalk. They stopped now to look.

  He pointed at them: "These two gentlemen followed me the whole way."

  "Really?" she said incredulously, with forced irony. "Is everyone persecuting you?"

  How could she be so cynical as to maintain that the two men opposite, who were conspicuously and inso­lently looking them over, were only chance passersby?

  There was only one explanation. She was playing their game. The game that consisted of pretending the secret police did not exist and no one was being perse­cuted.

  Now the secret-police men crossed the street and, in full view of Mirek and Zdena, entered their car.

  "Goodbye," said Mirek, not even looking at her. He

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  16

  A speeding red sports car suddenly cut in between Mirek and the secret-police car. Mirek stepped on the gas. They were entering a built-up area. Then there was a curve in the road. Realizing that his pursuers were momentarily unable to see him, Mirek turned off into a small street. His tires squealed, and a kid start­ing to cross the street jumped back just in time. In the rearview mirror, Mirek saw the red car going by on the main road. But the secret-police car had not yet appeared. A moment later, he managed to turn into

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  another street and disappeared for good from their field of vision.

  He left the town by a road going in an entirely dif­ferent direction. He looked in the rearview mirror. No one was following him, the road was empty.

  He imagined the unlucky secret-police men looking for him, afraid of being lambasted by their superior. He burst out laughing. Slowing down, he started to look at the scenery. Actually, he had never before looked at the scenery. He had always driven toward a goal, to arrange or discuss something, and for him the world's space had become a negative, a waste of time, an obstacle slowing down his activity.

  Not far ahead, two red-and-white-striped crossing barriers were slowly coming down. He came to a stop.

  All at once, he felt immensely tired. Why had he gone to see her? Why did he want the letters back?

  He felt assailed by everything absurd, ridiculous, and childish about his trip. It was not reasoning or a plan that had led him to this trip but an irre­sistible desire. The desire to extend his arm far back to the past and hit it with his fist. The desire to slash the painting portraying his youth. A passion­ate desire he could not control and that was going to remain unsatisfied.

  He felt immensely tired. Now he could probably no longer remove the compromising papers from his apartment. The secret police were on his heels and would not let him go. It was too late. Yes, it was too late for everything.

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  Lost Letters

  He heard the distant chugging of a train. A woman wearing a red kerchief on her head stood in front of the crossing keeper's house. The slow local train came by, with a sturdy countryman, pipe in hand, leaning out a window to spit. Then a bell rang and the woman in the red kerchief walked over to the grade crossing and turned a crank. The barriers rose up, and Mirek moved forward. He came to a village that was just a long street ending at the railroad station: a small, white, one-story house with a wooden fence through which you could see the platform and the rails.

  17

  The railroad station's windows are decorated with flowerpots filled with begonias. Mirek has stopped the car. He sits behind the wheel, looking at the house with red flowers at its windows. From a long-forgotten time the image comes to him of another white house with the red glow of begonia petals on its windowsills. It is a small hotel in a mountain village where he spends his summer vacations. At the window, among the flowers, a very big nose appears. Mirek is twenty; he looks up at that nose and feels immense love.

  He wants to step quickly on the gas so as to escape

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  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  that memory. But this time I am not going to let myself be fooled, and I call on that memory to linger awhile. And so I repeat: at the window, among the begonias, there is Zdena's face, with its gigantic nose, and Mirek feels immense love.

  Is that possible?

  Yes. And why not? Can't a weak boy feel true love for an ugly girl?

  He told her he was in rebellion against his reac­tionary father, she inveighed against intellectuals, they got blisters on their buttocks, and held hands. They went to meetings, denounced their fellow citizens, told lies, and were in love. She cried over Masturbov's death, he growled over her body like a dog, and nei­ther one could live without the other.

  He wanted to efface her from the photograph of his life not because he had not loved her but because he had. He had erased her, her and his love for her, he had scratched out her image until he had made it dis­appear as the party propaganda section had made Clementis disappear from the balcony where Gottwald had given his historic speech. Mirek rewrote history just like the Communist Party, like all political par­ties, like all peoples, like mankind. They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it's not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its counte­nance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the

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  Lost Letters

  past. We fight for access to the labs where we can retouch photos and rewrite biographies and history.

  How long did he stay in front of the railroad station?

  And what did this stop mean?

  It meant nothing.

  He immediately wiped it from his mind, so that now he no longer remembers the small white house with the begonias. Again the world's space was merely an obstacle slowing down his activity.

  18

  The car he had succeeded in shaking off was parked in front of his house. The two men were a short distance away from it.

  He pulled up behind their car and got out. They smiled at him almost cheerfully, as though his escape were a prank that had greatly amused them. As he passed in front of them, the man with the thick neck and waved hair started laughing and nodded at him. Mirek was gripped by anguish at this familiarity, which meant that now they were going to be still more intimately connected.

  Not batting an eye, Mirek entered the house. He opened the door to the apartment with his key. First he saw his son, a look of suppressed emotion on his face.

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  A stranger wearing glasses approached Mirek and identified himself. "Do you want to see the prosecu­tor's search warrant?"

  "Yes," said Mirek.

  There were two more strangers in the apartment. One was standing at the worktable, on which papers, notebooks, and books were piled. He was picking up items from it one after the other. Sitting at the desk, the second man was taking dictation from the first man.

  The man with the glasses took a folded piece of paper out of his breast pocket and offered it to Mirek. "Here, this is the search warrant, and over there"—he indicated the two m
en—"they're making a list for you of the items we're seizing."

  Papers and books were scattered all over the floor, the cupboard doors were open, the furniture had been pushed away from the walls.

  His son leaned over toward Mirek and said: "They came five minutes after you left."

  At the worktable, the two men drew up the list of seized items: letters from Mirek's friends, documents from the earliest days of the Russian occupation, analyses of the political situation, minutes of meetings, and some books.

  "You don't have much consideration for your friends," said the man with the glasses, nodding toward the seized items.

  "There's nothing here that violates the constitution,"

  Lost Letters

  said his son, and Mirek recognized his own words.

  The man with the glasses replied that it was up to the court to decide what does or does not violate the constitution.

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  Those who have emigrated (one hundred twenty thou­sand people) and those who were reduced to silence and driven from their jobs (half a million people) are disappearing like a procession moving away into the fog, invisible and forgotten.

  But a prison, even though entirely surrounded by walls, is a splendidly illuminated scene of history.

  Mirek had known this for a long time. For all of the past year, he had been drawn irresistibly to the idea of prison. It was probably the way Flaubert was drawn to Madame Bovary's suicide. No, Mirek could not imag­ine a better ending for the novel of his life.

  They wanted to efface hundreds of thousands of lives from memory and leave nothing but an unstained age of unstained idyll. But Mirek is going to land his whole body on that idyll, like a stain. He'll stay there just as Clementis's hat stayed on Gottwald's head.

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  They made Mirek sign the list of seized items and then asked him and his son to come along with them. The trial took place after a year of preventive deten­tion. Mirek was sentenced to six years, his son to two years, and ten of their friends to one to six years in prison.

  PART TWO

  Mama

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  1

  There was a time when Marketa disliked her mother-in-law. That was when she and Karel were living with her in-laws (her father-in-law was still alive) and Marketa was exposed daily to the woman's resentment and touchiness. They couldn't bear it for long and moved out. Their motto at the time was "as far from Mama as possible." They had gone to live in a town at the other end of the country and thus could see Karel's parents only once a year.

  Then one day Karel's father died and Mama was

  alone. They saw her at the funeral; she was subdued

  and miserable and seemed smaller to them than

  before. The same words ran through both their heads:

  Mama, you can't stay here alone, come live with us."

  The words resounded in both their heads, but nei-ther one could say them. Especially because, on a sad walk together the day after the funeral, Mama, thor­oughly miserable and diminished as she was, reproached them with misplaced vehemence for all the wrongs they had done her. "Nothing will ever change her," Karel said to Marketa later, once they were on the train. "It's sad, but I think it'll always have to be 'far from Mama.'"

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  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  Though as the years passed Mama did indeed stay the same, Marketa probably changed, because she suddenly had the impression that whatever her moth­er-in-law had done to them was actually innocuous and that it was she, Marketa, who had committed the real offense in giving such importance to her grum­bling. She had seen Mama at the time the way a child sees an adult, but now the roles were reversed: Marketa was the adult and, from that great distance, Mama appeared to her small and defenseless as a child. Marketa felt an indulgent patience toward her, and had even started to write to her regularly. The old woman very swiftly became used to this, replying conscientiously and demanding more and more let­ters from Marketa, for these letters, she maintained, were the only thing that enabled her to bear her lone­liness.

  Some time ago, the words that had taken shape at Karel's father's funeral had begun to run through their heads again. And again it was the son who suppressed the daughter-in-law's kindness, so that instead of say­ing "Mama, come live with us," they invited her to stay for a week.

  It was the Easter holiday, and their ten-year-old son was away. Eva was expected on the following week­end. They were willing to spend all week with Mama, all but Sunday. "Come and spend a week with us," they said to her. "From this Saturday to next Saturday. We're busy next Sunday. We have to go somewhere."

  Mama

  So as not to have to talk about Eva, they told her noth­ing more precise. On the telephone, Karel said it twice more: "From this Saturday to next Saturday. We're busy next Sunday, going somewhere." And Mama said: "Yes, children, you're very nice, and I'll certainly leave whenever you want me to. All I ask is to get away a bit from my loneliness."

  But on Saturday evening, when Marketa asked her what time tomorrow morning she wanted to be taken to the railroad station, Mama unhesitatingly and bluntly announced that she would not be leaving until Monday. When Marketa looked at her, surprised, Mama went on: "Karel told me you'll be busy on Monday, going somewhere, and I should leave on Monday morning."

  Of course, Marketa could have replied: "Mama, you're mistaken, it's tomorrow that we're going," but she lacked the courage. She was unable, on the spur of the moment, to invent the place where they were going. Realizing they had been very careless in prepar­ing their lie, she said nothing and resigned herself to I he idea that her mother-in-law would stay with them through Sunday. She reassured herself that since the boy's room, where her mother-in-law was sleeping, was at the other end of the apartment, Mama wouldn't be disturbing them. And she said to Karel reproach­fully:

  "Please, don't be nasty to her. Look at the poor woman. Just looking at her breaks my heart."

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  Mama

  moved out, taking the memory of her pettiness with them.

  But are tanks really more important than pears? As lime went by, Karel realized that the answer to this question was not as obvious as he had always thought, and he began to feel a secret sympathy for Mama's perspective, which had a big pear tree in the fore­ground and somewhere in the distance a tank no big­ger than a ladybug, ready at any moment to fly away out of sight. Ah yes! In reality it's Mama who is right: tanks are perishable, pears are eternal.

  In the past, Mama wanted to know everything about her son and became angry when he hid any­thing about his life. And so now, to please her, they talked about what they were doing, what was hap­pening to them, about their plans. But they soon noticed that Mama was listening to them mainly out of politeness, breaking into their account by talking about her poodle, which she had left with a neighbor while she was away.

  Before, Karel would have considered that behavior self-centered or petty; but now he knew that it was nothing of the kind. More time had passed than he had realized. Mama had relinquished the marshal's baton of her motherhood and gone into a different world. On another walk with her, they had been caught in a storm. They held her by the arm, one on either side, literally carrying her to keep the wind from sweeping her away. Karel was moved by the pathetic lightness of the burden in his hand, and he realized that his

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  Karel shrugged his shoulders in resignation. Marketa was right: Mama had really changed. She was pleased with everything, grateful for everything. Karel had been expecting in vain a quarrel over some little thing.

  On a walk a day or two before, she had gazed into the distance and asked: "What is that pretty little white village over there?" It wasn't a village, just boundary stones. Karel took pity on his mother, whose sight was dimming.

  But her faulty vision seemed to express som
ething more basic: what appeared large to them, she found small; what they took for boundary stones, for her were distant houses.

  To tell the truth, that was not an entirely new trait of hers. The difference was that at one time it had annoyed them. One night, for instance, their country was invaded by the tanks of a gigantic neighboring country. That had been such a shock and brought such terror that for a long time no one could think of any­thing else. It was August, and the pears in their garden were ripe. A week earlier, Mama had invited the phar­macist to come and pick them. But the pharmacist nei­ther came nor even apologized. Mama was unable to forgive him, which infuriated Karel and Marketa. They reproached her: Everyone else is thinking about tanks, and you're thinking about pears. Then they

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  Mama

  mother belonged to a realm of other creatures: small­er, lighter, more easily blown away.

  through a personal ad trying hard to compress into the very first letter to their future partner who and what they are.

  Who then is Eva, in Eva's own words? Eva is a cheerful man-chaser. But she doesn't chase them to marry them. She chases them the way men chase women. Not love but only friendship and sensuality exist for her. So she has many friends: men are not afraid she wants to marry them, and women have no fear she is seeking to deprive them of a husband, besides, if she ever married, her husband would be a friend she would allow everything to and demand nothing from.