"Very simple," Bibi answered. "A novel. About the world as I see it."
"A novel?" asked Banaka disapprovingly.
Bibi corrected herself evasively: "It won't necessarily be a novel."
"Just think about what a novel is," said Banaka. "About the multitude of different characters. Are you trying to make us believe that you know all about them? That you know what they look like, what they think, how they're dressed, the kind of family they come from? Admit it, you're not interested in any of that!"
"That's right," Bibi acknowledged. "I'm not."
"You know," said Banaka, "the novel is the fruit of
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a human illusion. The illusion of the power to understand others. But what do we know of one another? "
"Nothing," said Bibi.
"That's true," said Joujou.
The philosophy professor nodded his head in approval.
"All anyone can do," said Banaka, "is give a report on oneself. Anything else is an abuse of power. Anything else is a lie."
Bibi agreed enthusiastically: "That's true! That's absolutely true! I don't really want to write a novel! I didn't make myself clear. I want to do just what you said, write about myself. Give a report on my life. But I don't want to hide that my life is absolutely ordinary, normal, and that I've never experienced anything special."
Banaka smiled: "That's not important! Looked at from the outside, I've never experienced anything special either."
"Yes," cried Bibi, "that's right! Looked at from the outside, I haven't experienced anything. Looked at from the outside! But I have a feeling that my experience inside is worth writing about and could be interesting to everybody."
Tamina refilled the teacups, delighted that the two men, who had descended into her apartment from the Olympus of the mind, were being nice to her friend.
The philosophy professor drew on his pipe, hiding behind the smoke as though he were ashamed.
"Since James Joyce," he said, "we have known that the greatest adventure of our lives is the absence of
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adventure. Ulysses, who fought at Troy, returned home by crisscrossing the seas, he himself steering his ship, and had a mistress on every island—no, that is not the way we lead our lives. Homer's odyssey has been taken inside. It has been interiorized. The islands, the seas, the sirens seducing us, Ithaca summoning us—nowadays they are only the voices of our interior being."
"Yes! That's just how I feel!" Bibi exclaimed, and then she again turned to Banaka. "And that's why I wanted to ask you how to go about doing it. I often have the impression my whole body is filled with the desire to express itself. To speak. To make itself heard. Sometimes I think I'm going crazy, because I'm so bursting with it I have an urge to scream, you certainly must know about that, Mr. Banaka. I want to express my life and my feelings, which I know are absolutely original, but when I sit down in front of a piece of paper, I suddenly don't know anymore what to write. Then I think it must be about technique. Obviously there's something you know that I don't know. You've written such beautiful books. ..."
9
I'll spare you the lecture on the art of writing the two Socrateses gave the young woman. I want to talk about
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something else. Some time ago, I went across Paris in a taxi with a garrulous driver. He couldn't sleep nights. He had chronic insomnia. Had it ever since the war. He was a sailor. His ship sank. He swam three days and three nights. Then he was rescued. He spent several months between life and death. He recovered, but he had lost the ability to sleep.
"I've had a third more of life than you," he said, smiling.
"And what do you do with that extra third?" I asked him.
"I write."
I asked him what he was writing.
He was writing his life story. The story of a man who swam in the sea for three days and three nights, who had struggled against death, who had lost the ability to sleep but kept the strength to live.
"Are you writing it for your children? As a family chronicle?"
He chuckled bitterly: "For my children? They're not interested in that. I'm writing a book. I think it could help a lot of people."
That conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the writer's occupation. We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them.
You might say that the taxi driver is not a writer but a graphomaniac. So we need to be precise about our
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concepts. A woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac. She is a lover. But my friend who makes photocopies of his love letters to publish them someday is a graphomaniac. Graphomaiiia is not a mania to write letters, personal diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one's close relations) but a mania to write books (to have a public of unknown readers). In that sense, the taxi driver and Goethe share the same passion. What distinguishes Goethe from the taxi driver is not a difference in passions but one passion's different results.
Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions:
(1) an elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;
(2) a high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals;
(3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel. Bibi is, moreover, right to say that looked at from the outside, she hasn't experienced anything. The mainspring that drives her to write is just that absence of vital content, that void.)
But by a backlash, the effect affects the cause. General isolation breeds graphomania, and generalized graphomania in turn intensifies and worsens iso-
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lation. The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside.
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easy for Hugo to play the role of conquering sovereign, but behind the person of the underpaid waitress he saw the mysterious experience of the foreigner and widow. He felt intimidated. Tamina's kindness was like a bulletproof vest. He wanted to attract her attention, captivate her, gain entry into her mind!
He did his best to come up with something interesting. On the way, he stopped the car to visit a zoo set up on the grounds of a beautiful country chateau. They walked among monkeys and parrots in a setting of Gothic towers. They were all alone except for a rustic gardener sweeping fallen leaves from the broad paths. Passing a wolf, a beaver, and a tiger, they came to a wire fence surrounding a large field where the ostriches were.
There were six of them. When they caught sight of lamina and Hugo, they ran toward them. Now bunched up and pressing against the fence, they stretched out their long necks, stared, and opened their straight, broad bills. They opened and closed them feverishly, with unbelievable speed, as if they were trying to outtalk one another. But these bills were hopelessly mute, making not the slightest sound.
The ostriches were like messengers who had learned an important message by heart but whose vocal cords had been cut by the enemy on the way; so that when they reached their destination, they could do no more than move their voiceless mouths.
Tamina gazed bewitched, as the ostriches kept on Talking more and more insistently. Then, as she and
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"Tamina," said Hugo one day as they were chatting in the empty cafe, "I know I don't stand a chance with you. So I'm not going to try anything. But just the same, may I invite you to lunch on Sunday?"
The parcel is with her mother-in-law in a provincial town, and Tamina wants to have it sent to her father in Prague, where Bibi could go pick it up. At first sight, nothing could be simpler, but it will take a good deal of time and money to persuade these two capricious old people to do their parts. Telephoning is expensive, and Tamina earns barely enough for food and rent.
"Yes," said Tamina, remembering that Hugo had a telephone.
He came for her in his car, and they went to a restaurant in the country.
Tamina's precarious situation should have made it
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Hugo were moving away, they ran after them along the fence, clacking their bills to warn them about something, but what that could be Tamina did not know.
be simplified. It would have been extremely difficult to explain why that private correspondence and those personal diaries chanced being seized by the police and why she cared about them so much. She said: "Yes, they're political documents."
Next she was afraid Hugo would ask for details about these documents, but her fears were groundless. Had anyone here ever asked her any questions? People would sometimes tell her what they thought about her country, but they were not at all interested in her experiences.
Hugo asked: "Does Bibi know they're political documents?"
"No," said Tamina.
"That's best," said Hugo. "Don't tell her it's something political. She'll get scared at the last moment and won't go and get your parcel. You can't imagine the things people are afraid of, Tamina. Bibi should be made to think it's something completely insignificant and ordinary. Your love letters, for example. That's it—tell her there are love letters in your parcel!"
Hugo chuckled over his idea: "Love letters! Yes! That's her kind of thing! Bibi'll understand that!"
Tamina reflects on Hugo's thinking that love letters are insignificant and ordinary. It never occurs to anyone that she might have loved someone and that it was important.
Hugo added: "If she ends up not going on that trip, you can count on me. I'll go over there and get your parcel." "Thank you," Tamina said warmly.
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"That was a scene from a horror story," said Tamina, cutting her pate. "It was as if they were trying to tell me something very important. But what? What were they trying to tell me?'
Hugo pointed out that they were young ostriches and always behaved this way. The last time he had been in that zoo, all six of them had run up to the fence, just as they did today, and opened their mute bills.
Tamina was still disturbed: "You know, I left something behind in Bohemia. A parcel with some papers in it. If I were to have it mailed to me, chances are the police would confiscate it. Bibi is going to Prague this summer. She's promised to bring it back to me. And now I'm afraid. I wonder whether the ostriches were warning me something's happened to that parcel."
Hugo knew Tamina's husband had had to emigrate for political reasons.
"Are they political documents?" he asked.
Tamina had long been convinced that to make people here understand anything about her life, it had to
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"I'll go and get it even if it gets me arrested." "Come on!" Tamina protested. "Nothing would happen to you!" And she tried to explain that foreign tourists ran no risks in her country. Life there was dangerous only for the Czechs, and they no longer noticed it. Suddenly she was talking excitedly and at length, and as she knew the country inside out, I can confirm that what she said was entirely right.
An hour later, she was pressing Hugo's telephone receiver to her ear. This conversation with her mother-in-law ended no better than the first. "You never gave me the key! You've always hidden everything from me! Why are you forcing me to remember how you've always treated me?"
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By going back to live among them, she thought she too would be betraying him.
When they were transferring him to more and more inferior posts and had finally driven him from his occupation, no one defended him. Not even his friends. Of course, Tamina knew that deep down, people were with her husband. It was fear alone that kept them silent. But just because they were really with him, they were all the more ashamed of their fear, and when they met him in the street they pretended not to see him. The couple started avoiding people in order not to elicit that shame. Soon they felt like lepers. When they left Bohemia, her husband's former colleagues signed a public statement slandering and condemning him. Surely they did that only so as not to lose their jobs as Tamina's husband had lost his job not long before. But they did it. They thus dug a chasm between themselves and the two exiles, which Tamina would never agree to leap over by going back there.
On the first morning after their flight, when they awoke in a small hotel in an Alpine village and realized that they were alone, cut off from the world where all of their lives had been spent, she experienced a feeling of liberation and relief. They were in the mountains, marvelously alone. Around them unbelievable silence reigned. Tamina welcomed that silence as an unexpected gift, leading her to reflect that her husband had left his homeland to escape persecution and she to find silence; silence for her husband and for herself; silence for love.
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If Tamina cares so much about her memories, why doesn't she simply go back to Bohemia? The emigrants who left the country illegally after 1968 have since been amnestied and invited to return. What is Tamina afraid of? She is too insignificant in her country to be in danger!
Yes, she could go back without fear. And yet she cannot.
In that country everyone had betrayed her husband.
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When her husband died, she was gripped by a sudden longing for her native country, where the eleven years of their life together had everywhere left their imprint. In a surge of feeling, she sent death announcements to about ten friends. She did not receive a single response.
A month later, with what was left of her savings, she went to the seashore. She put on her bathing suit and swallowed a tubeful of tranquilizers. Then she swam far toward the open sea. She thought the tablets would make her very tired and she would drown. But the cold water and her athletic stroke (she had always been an excellent swimmer) prevented her from falling asleep, and the tablets most likely were weaker than she had supposed.
She came back to shore, went to her room, and slept for twenty hours. When she awoke, she was calm and at peace. She resolved to live in silence and for silence.
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round, bald old head was being addressed provocatively by an invisible interviewer:
"There are some shocking erotic confessions in your memoirs."
It was a weekly program where a popular journalist conversed with authors of books published the week before.
The big bald head smiled smugly: "Oh no! There's nothing shocking! It's only arithmetic, very exact arithmetic! Let's figure it out together. My sex life started at fifteen." The round old head turned to look proudly at his fellow writers: "Yes, at fifteen. I am now sixty-five. So I have had a sex life of fifty years. I assume—and it's a very modest estimate—that I made love an average of twice a week. That makes a hundred times a year or five thousand in my life. Let's go on with the calculation. If an orgasm lasts five seconds, I have had twenty-five thousand seconds of orgasm. That makes a total of six hours and fifty-six minutes of orgasm. Not bad, eh?"
Everyone in the room nodded seriously except Tamina, who was imagining the bald old man racked by an unremitting orgasm: in contortions, he clutches at his heart,
within fifteen minutes his denture falls out, and five minutes after that he falls down dead. She burst out laughing.
Bibi called her to order: "What's so funny? Six hours and fifty-six minutes of orgasm is a pretty good total!"
Joujou said: "For years I didn't have any idea what
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The silver-blue light of Bibi's television set shone on the people in the room: Tamina, Joujou, Bibi, and her husband, Dede, a traveling salesman who had returned the day before from a four-day trip. A faint odor of urine hung in the air, and on the screen a big,
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an orgasm was. But in the past few years I've been having orgasms very regularly."
While everyone started talking about Joujou's orgasms, a new face, expressing indignation, appeared on the screen.
"Why is he so angry?" asked Dede.
On the screen the writer said:
"It's very important. Very important. I explain it in my book."
"What's so very important?" asked Bibi.
"That he spent his childhood in the village of Rourou," Tamina pointed out.
The character who spent his childhood in the village of Rourou had a long nose so weighing him down that his head bent lower and lower, at times appearing about to fall off the screen into the room. The face weighed down by its long nose was extremely agitated as he said:
"I explain that in my book. All of my writing is bound up with the little village of Rourou, and anyone who fails to understand that will be unable to understand anything about my work. After all, that's where I wrote my first poems. Yes. In my opinion, it's very important."