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premises. All these, of course, are isolated facts; but just look at them in the light of your present offense, and they suddenly unite into a totality of significant testimony about your character and attitude."
"But what sort of offense! I'll explain publicly what happened. If people are human they'll have to laugh.7'
"As you like. But you'll learn either that people aren't human or that you don't know what humans are like. They won't laugh. If you put before them everything as it happened, it will then appear that not only did you fail to fulfill your obligations as they were indicated on the schedule?that you did not do what you should have done?but on top of this, you lectured secretly?that is, you did what you shouldn't have done. It will appear that you insulted a man who was asking for your help. It will appear that your private life is not in order, that you have some unregistered girl living with you, which will make a very unfavorable impression on the female chairman of the union. The issue will become confused, and God knows what further rumors will arise. Whatever they are they will certainly be useful to those who have been provoked by your views but were ashamed to be against you because of them."
I knew that the professor wasn't trying to alarm or deceive me. In this matter, however, I considered him a crank and didn't want to give myself up to his skepticism. The scandal with Mr. Zaturecky made me go cold all over, but it hadn't tired me out yet. For I had sad-
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dled this horse myself, so I couldn't let it tear the reins from my hands and carry me off wherever it wished. I was prepared to engage in a contest with it.
And the horse did not avoid the contest. When I reached home, there in the mailbox was a summons to a meeting of the local committee.
10
The local committee, which was in session in what had been a store, was seated around a long table. The members assumed a gloomy expression when I came in. A grizzled man with glasses and a receding chin pointed to a chair. I said thank you, sat down, and this man took the floor. He informed me that the local committee had been watching me for some time, that it knew very well that I led an irregular private life; that this did not produce a good impression in my neighborhood; that the tenants in my apartment house had already complained about me once, when they couldn't sleep because of the uproar in my apartment; that all this was enough for the local committee to have formed a proper conception of me. And now, on top of all this, Comrade Mrs. Zaturecky, the wife of a scholar, had turned to them for help. Six months ago I should have written a review of her husband's scholarly work, and I
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hadn't done so, even though I well knew that the fate of the said work depended on my review.
"What do you mean by scientific work?" I interrupted the man with the little chin. "It's a patchwork of plagiarized thoughts."
"That is interesting, comrade." A fashionably dressed blonde of about thirty now joined the discussion; on her face a beaming smile was permanently glued. "Permit me a question: What is your field?"
"I am an art historian."
"And Comrade Zaturecky?"
"I don't know. Perhaps he's trying something similar."
"You see," the blonde turned enthusiastically to the other members, "Comrade Lecturer sees a worker in the same field as a competitor and not as a comrade. This is the way almost all our intellectuals think these days."
"I shall continue," said the man with the receding chin. "Comrade Mrs. Zaturecky told us that her husband visited your apartment and met a woman there. It is said that this woman accused Mr. Zaturecky of wanting to molest her sexually. Comrade Mrs. Zaturecky has in her hand documents that prove her husband is not capable of such a thing. She wants to know the name of this woman who accused her husband, and to transfer the matter to the disciplinary section of the people's committee, because she claims this false accusation has damaged her husband's good name."
I tried again to cut this ridiculous affair short. "Look here, comrades," I said, "it isn't worth all the trouble.
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The work in question is so weak that no one else could recommend it either. And if some misunderstanding occurred between this woman and Mr. Zaturecky, it shouldn't really be necessary to call a meeting."
"Fortunately, it is not up to you to decide about our meetings, comrade," replied the man with the receding chin. "And when you now assert that Comrade Zatur-ecky's work is bad, then we must look upon this as revenge. Comrade Mrs. Zaturecky gave us a letter to read, which you wrote after reading her husband's work."
"Yes. Only in that letter I didn't say a word about what the work is like."
"That is true. But you did write that you would be glad to help him; in this letter it is clearly implied that you respect Comrade Zaturecky's work. And now you declare that it's a patchwork. Why didn't you say it to his face?"
"Comrade Lecturer has two faces," said the blonde.
At this moment an elderly woman with a permanent joined the discussion; she went at once to the heart of the matter. "We would need to know, comrade, who this woman is whom Mr. Zaturecky met at your home."
I understood unmistakably that it wasn't within my power to remove the senseless gravity from the whole affair, and that I could dispose of it in only one way: to blur the traces, to lure them away from Klara, to lead them away from her as the partridge leads the hound away from its nest, offering its own body for the sake of its young.
"Unfortunately I don't remember her name," I said.
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"How is it that you don't remember the name of the woman you live with?" questioned the woman with the permanent.
"Comrade Lecturer, you have an exemplary rela-tionship with women," said the blonde.
"Perhaps I could remember, but I'd have to think about it. Do you know when it was that Mr. Zaturecky visited me?"
"That was . . . wait a moment," the man with the receding chin looked at his papers, "the fourteenth, on Wednesday afternoon."
"On Wednesday . . . the fourteenth . . . wait ..." I held my head in my hand and did some thinking. "Oh, I remember. That was Helena." I saw that they were all hanging expectantly on my words.
"Helena who?"
"Who? I'm sorry, I don't know. I didn't want to ask her that. As a matter of fact, speaking frankly, I'm not even sure that her name is Helena. I only called her that because her husband is red-haired like Menelaus. But anyway, she very much liked being called that. On Tuesday evening I met her in a wineshop and managed to talk to her for a while, when her Menelaus went to the bar to drink a cognac. The next day she came to my place and was there the whole afternoon. Only I had to leave her in the evening for a couple of hours, I had a meeting at the university. When I returned she was disgusted because some little man had molested her and she thought that I had put him up to it. She took offense and didn't want to know me anymore. And so,
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you see, I didn't even manage to learn her correct name." "Comrade Lecturer, whether you are telling the truth or not," the blonde went on, "it seems to me to be absolutely incomprehensible that a man like you can educate our youth. Does our life really inspire in you nothing but the desire to carouse and abuse women? Be assured, we shall transmit our opinion about this to the proper places."
"The porter didn't speak about any Helena," broke in the elderly woman with the permanent, "but he did inform us that some unregistered girl from the dressmaking establishent has been living with you for a month. Don't forget, comrade, that you are in lodgings. How can you imagine that someone can live with you like this? Do you think that your house is a brothel?"
There flashed before my eyes the ten crowns Id given the porter a couple of days ago, and I understood that the encirclement was complete. And the woman from the local committee continued: "If you don't want to tell us her name, the police
will find it out."
11
The ground was slipping away beneath my feet. At the university I began to sense the malicious atmosphere the professor had told me about. For the time being I wasn't summoned for questioning again, but here and
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there I caught an allusion, and now and then Marie let something out, for the teachers drank coffee in her office and didn't watch their tongues. In a couple of days the selection committee, which was collecting evidence on all sides, was to meet. I imagined that its members had read the report of the local committee, a report about which I knew only that it was secret and that I couldn't refer to it.
There are moments in life when a man retreats defensively, when he must give ground, when he must surrender less important positions in order to protect the more important ones. It seemed to me that this single, most important position was my love. Yes, in those troubled days I suddenly began to realize that I loved my fragile and unfortunate seamstress, that I really loved her.
That day I met Klara in a church. No, not at home. Do you think that home was still home? Is home a room with glass walls? A room observed through binoculars? A room where you must keep your beloved more carefully hidden than contraband?
Home was not home. There we felt like housebreakers who might be caught at any minute; footsteps in the corridor made us nervous; we kept expecting someone to start pounding on the door. Klara was commuting from Celakovice and we didn't feel like meeting in our alienated home for even a short while. So I had asked an artist friend to lend me his studio at night. That day I had the key for the first time.
And so we found ourselves beneath a high roof, in an enormous room with one small couch and a huge,
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slanting window, from which we could see all the lights of Prague; amid the many paintings propped against the walls, the untidiness, and the carefree artist's squalor, a blessed feeling of freedom returned to me. I sprawled on the couch, pushed in the corkscrew, and opened a bottle of wine. I chattered gaily and freely, and was looking forward to a beautiful evening and night.
However, the pressure, which I no longer felt, had fallen with its full weight on Klara.
I have already mentioned that Klara without any scruples and with the greatest naturalness had lived at one time in my attic. But now, when we found ourselves for a short time in someone else's studio, she felt put out. More than put out: "It's humiliating," she said.
"What's humiliating?" I asked her.
"That we have to borrow an apartment."
"Why is it humiliating that we have to borrow an apartment?"
"Because there's something humiliating about it," she replied.
"But we couldn't do anything else."
"I guess so," she replied, "but in a borrowed apartment I feel like a whore."
"Good God, why should you feel like a whore in a borrowed apartment? Whores mostly operate in their own apartments, not in borrowed ones."
It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female soul is made. From the beginning our conversation was ill-omened.
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I told Klara what the professor had said, I told her what had happened at the local committee, and I was trying to convince her that in the end we would win if we loved each other and were together.
Klara was silent for a while, and then she said that I myself was responsible for everything.
"Will you at least help me get away from those seamstresses?"
I told her that this would have to be, at least temporarily, a time of forbearance.
"You see,'' said Klara, "you promised, and in the end you do nothing. I won't be able to get out, even if somebody else wants to help me, because my reputation will be ruined because of you."
I gave Klara my word that the incident with Mr. Zaturecky couldn't harm her.
"I also don't understand," said Klara, "why you won't write the review. If you'd write it, then there'd be peace at once."
"It's too late, Klara," I said. "If I write this review they'll say that I'm condemning the work out of revenge and they'll be still more furious."
"And why do you have to condemn it? Write a favorable review!"
"I can't, Klara. This article is thoroughly absurd."
"So what? Why are you being truthful all of a sudden? Wasn't it a lie when you told the little man that they don't think much of you at Visual Arts? And wasn't it a lie when you told the little man that he had tried to seduce me? And wasn't it a lie when you invented
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Helena? When you've told so many lies, what does it matter if you tell one more and praise him in the review? That's the only way you can smooth things out."
"You see, Klara," I said, "you think that a lie is a lie, and it would seem that you're right. But you aren't. I can invent anything, make a fool of someone, carry out hoaxes and practical jokes?and I don't feel like a liar and I don't have a bad conscience. These lies, if you want to call them that, represent me as I really am. With such lies I'm not simulating anything, with such lies I'm in fact speaking the truth. But there are things I can't lie about. There are things I've penetrated, whose meaning I've grasped, that I love and take seriously. I can't joke about these things. If I did I'd humiliate myself. It's impossible, don't ask me to do it, I can't."
We didn't understand each other.
But I really loved Klara, and I was determined to do all I could so that she would have nothing to reproach me for. The following day I wrote a letter to Mrs. Zaturecky, saying that I would expect her in my office the day after tomorrow at two o'clock.
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12
True to her terrifying thoroughness, Mrs. Zaturecky knocked precisely at the appointed time. I opened the door and asked her in.
Then I finally saw her. She was a tall woman, very tall with a thin peasant face and pale blue eyes. "Take off your things," I said, and with awkward movements she took off a long, dark coat, narrow at the waist and oddly styled, a coat that God knows why evoked the image of an old military greatcoat.
I didn't want to attack at once; I wanted my adversary to show me her cards first. After Mrs. Zaturecky sat down, I got her to speak by making a remark or two.
"Lecturer," she said in a serious voice, but without any aggressiveness, "you know why I was looking for you. My husband has always respected you very much as a specialist and as a man of character. Everything depended on your review, and you didn't want to do it for him. It took my husband three years to write this article. His life has been harder than yours. He was a teacher, he commuted every day sixty kilometers away from Prague. Last year I forced him to stop that and devote himself to research."
"Mr. Zaturecky isn't employed?" I asked.
"No."
"What does he live on?"
"For the time being I have to work hard myself. This
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research, Lecturer, is my husband's passion. If you only knew how much he's studied. If you only knew how many pages he's rewritten. He always says that a real scholar must write three hundred pages so as to keep thirty. And on top of it, this woman. Believe me, Lecturer, I know him; I'm sure he didn't do it, so why did this woman accuse him? I don't believe it. Let her say it before me and before him. I know women, perhaps she likes you very much and you don't care for her. Perhaps she wanted to make you jealous. But you can believe me, Lecturer, my husband would never have dared!"
I was listening to Mrs. Zaturecky, and all at once something strange happened to me: I ceased being aware that this was the woman for whose sake I would have to leave the university, and that this was the woman who caused the tension between me and Klara, and for whose sake I'd wasted so many days in anger and unpleasantness. The connection between her and the incident,
in which we'd both played a sad role, suddenly seemed vague, arbitrary, accidental, and not our fault. All at once I understood that it had only been my illusion that we ourselves saddle events and control their course; the truth is that they aren't our stories at all, that they are foisted on us from somewhere outside; that in no way do they represent us; that we are not to blame for the strange paths they follow; that they are themselves directed from who knows where by who knows what strange forces.
When I looked at Mrs. Zaturecky's eyes it seemed to
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me that these eyes couldn't see the consequences of my actions, that these eyes weren't seeing at all, that they were merely swimming in her face; that they were only stuck on.
"Perhaps you're right, Mrs. Zaturecky," I said in a conciliatory tone. "Perhaps my girl didn't speak the truth, but you know how it is when a man's jealous; I believed her and was carried away. That can happen to anyone."
"Yes, certainly," said Mrs. Zaturecky, and it was evident that a weight had been lifted from her heart. "When you yourself see it, it's good. We were afraid that you believed her. This woman could have ruined my husband's whole life. Pm not even speaking about the shadow this casts upon him from the moral point of view. We could handle that. But my husband is relying on your review. The editors assured him that it depended on you. My husband is convinced that if his article were published he would finally be allowed to do scholarly work. I ask you, now that everything has been cleared up, will you write this review for him? And can you do it quickly?"
Now came the moment to avenge myself on everything and appease my rage, only at this moment I didn't feel any rage, and when I spoke it was only because there was no escaping it: "Mrs. Zaturecky, there is some difficulty regarding the review. I shall confess to you how it all happened. I don't like to say unpleasant things to people's faces. This is my weakness. I avoided Mr. Zaturecky, and I thought that he would figure out
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why I was avoiding him. His paper is weak. It has no scholarly value. Do you believe me?"
"I find it hard to believe. I can't believe you," said Mrs. Zaturecky.
"Above all, this work is not original. Do you understand? A scholar must always arrive at something new; a scholar can't copy what we already know, what others have written."
"My husband definitely didn't copy."
"Mrs. Zaturecky, you've surely read this article?" I wanted to continue, but Mrs. Zaturecky interrupted me: "No, I haven't."