"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.
"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, 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 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, 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.
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 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.
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 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 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 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."
I was surprised. "Read it, then."
"My eyes are bad," said Mrs. Zaturecky. "I haven't read a single line for five years, but I don't need to read to know if my husband's honest or not. That can be recognized in other ways. I know my husband as a mother knows her children, I know everything about him. And I know that what he does is always honest."
I had to undergo worse. I read aloud to Mrs. Zaturecky paragraphs from various authors whose thoughts and formulations Mr. Zaturecky had taken over. It wasn't a question of willful plagiarism, but rather an unconscious submission to those authorities who inspired in Mr. Zaturecky a feeling of sincere and inordinate respect. It was obvious that no serious scholarly journal could publish Mr. Zaturecky's work.
I don't know how much Mrs. Zaturecky concentrated on my exposition, how much of it she followed and understood; she sat humbly in the armchair, humbly and obediently like a soldier who knows that he may not leave his post. It took about half an hour for us to finish. Mrs. Zaturecky got up from the armchair, fixed her transparent eyes upon me, and in a dull voice begged my pardon; but I knew that she hadn't lost faith in her husband and she didn't reproach anyone except herself for not knowing how to resist my arguments, which seemed obscure and unintelligible to her. She put on her military greatcoat, and I understood that this woman was a soldier in body and spirit, a sad and loyal soldier, a soldier tired from long marches, a soldier who doesn't understand the sense of an order and yet carries it out without objections, a soldier who goes away defeated but without dishonor.
13
"So now you don't have to be afraid of anything," I said to Klara, when later in the Dalmatia Tavern I repeated to her my conversation with Mrs. Zaturecky.
"I didn't have anything to fear anyhow," replied Klara with a self-assurance that astonished me.
"What do you mean, you didn't? If it weren't for you I wouldn't have met with Mrs. Zaturecky at all."
"It's good that you did meet with her, because what you did to them was unnecessary. Dr. Kalousek said that it's hard for a sensible man to understand it."
"When did you see Kalousek?"
"I saw him," said Klara.
"And did you tell him everything?"
"What? Is it a secret, perhaps? Now I know exactly what you are."
"Really?"
"May I tell you what you are?"
"Please."
"A stereotypical cynic."
"You got that from Kalousek."<
br />
"Why from Kalousek? Do you think that I can't figure it out for myself ? You actually think I'm not capable of forming an opinion about you. You like to lead people by the nose. You promised Mr. Zaturecky a review."
"I didn't promise him a review."
"And you promised me a job. You used me as an excuse to Mr. Zaturecky, and you used Mr. Zaturecky as an excuse to me. But you may be sure that I'll get that job."
"Through Kalousek?" I tried to be scornful.
"Certainly not through you! You've gambled so much away, and you don't even know yourself how much."
"And do you know?"
"Yes. Your contract won't be renewed, and you'll be glad if they'll let you into some little provincial gallery as a clerk. But you must realize that all this was only your own mistake. If I can give you some advice: another time be honest and don't lie, because a man who lies can't be respected by any woman."
She got up, gave me (clearly for the last time) her hand, turned, and left.
Only after a while did it occur to me (in spite of the chilly silence that surrounded me) that my story was not of the tragic sort, but rather of the comic variety.
That afforded me some comfort.
Milan Kundera, Nobody Will Laugh
(Series: # )
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