Ignorance (6 page)

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At the end of lunch, sitting over his coffee, Josef thought about his painting. He considered how to take it away with him, and whether it would be too unwieldy in the airplane. Wouldn't it be easier to take the canvas out of the frame and roll it up? He was about to discuss it when the sister-in-law said: "You must be going to see N."

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"I don't know yet."

"He was an awfully good friend of yours."

"He still is my friend."

"In forty-eight everyone was terrified of him. The Red Commissar! But he did a lot for you, didn't he? You owe him!"

The brother hastily interrupted his wife, and he handed Josef a small bundle: "This is what Papa kept as a souvenir of you. We found it after he died."

The brother apparently had to leave soon for the hospital; their meeting was drawing to a close, and Josef noted that his painting had vanished from the conversation. What? His sister-in-law remembers his friend N., but she forgets his painting? Still, although he was prepared to give up his whole inheritance, and his share of the house, the picture was his, his alone, with his name inscribed alongside the painter's! How could they, she and his brother, act as if it didn't belong to him?

The atmosphere suddenly grew heavy, and the brother started to tell a funny story. Josef was not listening. He was determined to reclaim his picture, and, intent on what he wanted to say, his

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distracted glance fell on the brother's wrist and the watch on it. He recognized it: big and black, a little out of style; he had left it behind in his apartment and the brother had appropriated it for himself. No, Josef had no reason to be incensed at that. It had all been done according to his own instructions; still, seeing his watch on someone else's wrist threw him into a strange unease. He had the sense he was coming back into the world as might a dead man emerging from his tomb after twenty years: touching the ground with a timid foot that's lost the habit of walking; barely recognizing the world he had lived in but continually stumbling over the leavings from his life; seeing his trousers, his tie on the bodies of the survivors, who had quite naturally divided them up among themselves; seeing everything and laying claim to nothing: the dead are timid. Overcome by that timidity of the dead, Josef could not summon the strength to say a single word about his painting. He stood up.

"Come back tonight. We'll have dinner together," said the brother.

Josef suddenly saw his own wife's face; he felt a sharp need to address her, talk with her. But he

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could not do that: his brother was looking at him, waiting for his answer.

"Please excuse me, I have so little time. Next visit," and he gave them each a warm handshake.

On the way back to the hotel, his wife's face appeared to him again and he blew up: "It's your fault. You're the one who told me I had to go. I didn't want to. I had no desire for this return. But you disagreed. You said that not going was unnatural, unjustifiable, it was even foul. Do you still think you were right?"

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Back in his hotel room, he opens the bundle his brother gave him: an album of photographs from his childhood, of his mother, his father, his brother, and, many times over, little Josef; he sets it aside to keep. A couple of children's picture books; he tosses them into the wastebasket. A child's drawing in colored pencil, with the inscription "For Mama on her birthday" and his clumsy signature; he tosses that away. Then a notebook.

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He opens it: his high-school diary. How did he ever leave that at his parents' house?

The entries dated from the early years of Communism here, but, his curiosity somewhat foiled, he finds only accounts of his dates with girls from high school. A precocious libertine? No indeed: a virgin boy. He leafs through the pages absently, then stops at these rebukes addressed to one girl: "You told me love was only about bodies. Dear girl, you would run off in a minute if a man told you he was only interested in your body. And you would come to understand the dreadful sensation of loneliness."

"Loneliness." The word keeps turning up in these pages. He would try to scare them by describing the fearsome prospect of loneliness. To make them love him, he would preach at them like a parson that unless there's emotion, sex stretches away like a desert where a person can die of sadness.

He goes on reading, and remembers nothing. So what has this stranger come to tell him? To remind him that he used to live here under Josef's name? Josef gets up and goes to the window. The square is lit by the late-afternoon sun, and the

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image of the two hands on the big wall is sharply visible now: one is white, the other black. Above them a three-letter acronym promises "security" and "solidarity." No doubt about it, the mural was painted after 1989, when the country took up the slogans of the new age: brotherhood of all races; mingling of all cultures; unity of everything, of everybody.

Hands clasping on billboards, Josef's seen that before! The Czech worker clasping the hand of the Russian soldier! It may have been detested, but that propaganda image was indisputably part of the history of the Czechs, who had a thousand reasons to clasp or to refuse the hands of Russians or Germans! But a black hand? In this country, people hardly knew that blacks even existed. In her whole life his mother had never run into a single one.

He considers those hands suspended there between heaven and earth, enormous, taller than the church belfry, hands that shifted the place into a harshly different setting. He scrutinizes the square below him as if he were searching for traces he left on the pavement as a young man when he used to stroll it with his schoolmates.

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"Schoolmates"; he articulates the word slowly, in an undertone, so as to breathe in the aroma (faint! barely perceptible!) of his early youth, that bygone, remote period, a period forsaken and mournful as an orphanage; but unlike Irena in the French country town, he feels no affection for that dimly visible, feeble past; no desire to return; nothing but a slight reserve; detachment.

If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: "The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency."

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But Josef does not feel sick. He feels clearheaded. To his mind the nostalgic insufficiency proves the paltry value of his former life. So I revise my diagnosis: "The patient is suffering from masochistic distortion of memory." Indeed, all he remembers are situations that make him displeased with himself. He is not fond of his childhood. But as a child, didn't he have everything he wanted? Wasn't his father worshipped by all his

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patients? Why was that a source of pride for his brother and not for him? He often fought with his little pals, and he fought bravely. Now he's forgotten all his victories, but he will always remember the time a fellow he considered weaker than himself knocked him down and pinned him to the ground for a loud count of ten. Even now he can feel on his skin that humiliating pressure of the turf. When he was still living in Bohemia and would run into people who had known him earlier, he was always surprised to find that they considered him a fairly courageous person (he thought himself cowardly), with a caustic wit (he considered himself a bore) and a kind heart (he remembered only his stinginess).

He knew very well that his memory detested him, that it did nothing but slander him; therefore he tried not to believe it and to be more lenient toward his own life. But that didn't help: he took no pleasure in looking back, and he did it as seldom as possible.

What he would have other people, and himself, believe is that he left his country because he could not bear to see it enslaved and humiliated. That's true; still, most Czechs felt the same way, enslaved

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and humiliated, and yet they did not run off abroad. They stayed in their country because they liked themselves and because they liked themselves together with their lives, which were inseparable from the place where the lives had been lived. Because Josef's memory was malevolent and provided him nothing to make him cherish his life in his country, he crossed the border with a brisk step and with no regrets.

And once he was abroad, did his memory lose its noxious influence? Yes; because there Josef had neither reason nor occasion to concern himself with recollections bound to the country he no longer lived in; such is the law of masochistic memory: as segments of their lives melt into oblivion, men slough off whatever they dislike, and feel lighter, freer.

And above all, abroad Josef fell in love, and love is the glorification of the present. His attachment to the present drove off his recollections, shielded him against their intrusion; his memory did not become less malevolent but, disregarded and kept at a distance, it lost its power over him.

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The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it. This pronouncement seems to state the obvious, and yet it is false. Men grow old, the end draws near, each moment becomes more and more valuable, and there is no time to waste over recollections. It is important to understand the mathematical paradox in nostalgia: that it is most powerful in early youth, when the volume of the life gone by is quite small.

Out of the mists of the time when Josef was in high school, I see a young girl emerge; she is long-limbed, beautiful; she is a virgin; and she is melancholy because she has just broken off with a boy. It is her first romantic separation and it hurts her, but her pain is less strong than her amazement at discovering time; she sees it as she never saw it before:

Until then her view of time was the present moving forward and devouring the future; she either feared its swiftness (when she was awaiting something difficult) or rebelled at its slowness

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(when she was awaiting something fine). Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past. She sees a young man disconnecting himself from her life and going away, forevermore out of her reach. Mesmerized, all she can do is watch this piece of her life move off; all she can do is watch it and suffer. She is experiencing a brand-new feeling called nostalgia.

That feeling, that irrepressible yearning to return, suddenly reveals to her the existence of the past, the power of the past, of her past; in the house of her life there are windows now, windows opening to the rear, onto what she has experienced; from now on her existence will be inconceivable without these windows.

One day, with her new boyfriend (platonic, of course), she turns down a path in the forest near the town; it is the same path she had walked a few months earlier with her previous boyfriend (the one who, after their break, caused her to feel nostalgia for the first time), and she is moved by the coincidence. Deliberately she heads for a dilapidated little chapel at a crossing of the forest paths,

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because that was where her first boyfriend tried to kiss her. Irresistible temptation draws her to relive the bygone love. She wants the two love stories to come together, to join, to mingle, to mimic each other so that both will grow greater through their fusion.

When the earlier boyfriend had tried to stop at that spot and clasp her to him, happy and abashed she quickened her pace and prevented it. This time, what will happen? Her current boyfriend slows down too, he too prepares to take her in his arms! Dazzled by this repetition (by the miracle of this repetition), she obeys the imperative of the parallel and hurries ahead, pulling him along by the hand.

From then on she succumbs to the charm of these affinities, these furtive contacts between present and past; she seeks out these echoes, these co-respondences, these co-resonances that make her feel the distance between what was and what is, the temporal dimension (so new, so astonishing) of her life; she has the sense of emerging from adolescence because of it, of becoming mature, adult, which for her means becoming a person who is acquainted with time, who has left a frag-

ment of life behind her and can turn to look back at it.

One day she sees her new boyfriend hurrying toward her in a blue jacket, and she remembers that her first boyfriend also looked good in a blue jacket. Another day, gazing into her eyes, he praises their beauty by way of a highly unusual metaphor; she was fascinated by that because her first boyfriend, commenting on her eyes, had used word for word the same unusual phrase. These coincidences amaze her. Never does she feel so thoroughly suffused with beauty as when the nostalgia for her past love blends with the surprises of her new love. The intrusion of the previous boyfriend into the story she is currently living is to her mind not some secret infidelity; it adds further to her fondness for the man walking beside her now.

When she is older she will see in these resemblances a regrettable uniformity among individuals (they all stop at the same spots to kiss, have the same tastes in clothing, flatter a woman with the same metaphor) and a tedious monotony among events (they are all just an endless repetition of the same one); but in her adoles-

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cence she welcomes these coincidences as miraculous and she is avid to decipher their meanings. The fact that today's boyfriend bears a strange resemblance to yesterday's makes him even more exceptional, even more original, and she believes that he is mysteriously predestined for her.

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No, there is no allusion to politics in the diary. Not a trace of the period, except perhaps the puri-tanism of those early years of Communism, with the ideal of romantic love as backdrop. Josef is struck by a confession from the virgin boy: that he easily mustered the boldness to stroke a girl's breasts but he had to battle his own modesty to touch her rump. He had a good sense for exactness: "When we were together yesterday, I only dared to touch D.'s rump twice."

Intimidated by the rump, he was all the more avid for emotions: "She swears she loves me, her promise of intercourse is a victory for me . . ."