Read The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Page 15


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  Goethe was merely smiling at him in silence—he was unable to come up with anything, and so he just smiled back. And then the thought of Kristyna came to his aid.

  "Right now, I'm going out with a girl, I mean a woman. She's married to a butcher."

  That greatly pleased Goethe, who responded with a friendly laugh.

  "She venerates you. She gave me one of your books for you to inscribe."

  "Hand it over," said Goethe, and took the book of his verse from the student. Opening to the title page, he went on: "Tell me about her. What is she like? Is she beautiful?"

  The student could not lie to Goethe's face. He admitted that the butcher's wife was no beauty. On top of that, today she was dressed in a ridiculous outfit. She had gone around Prague all day wearing big beads around her neck and old-fashioned black pumps.

  Goethe listened with sincere interest and said, with a bit of yearning: "That's wonderful."

  Becoming bolder, the student went so far as to admit that the butcher's wife had a gold tooth shining in her mouth like a gilded fly.

  Excited, Goethe laughed and suggested: "Like a ring."

  "Like a lighthouse!" replied the student.

  "Like a star!" said Goethe with a smile.

  The student told him the butcher's wife was really the most ordinary kind of small-town woman, and (hat was exactly what had attracted him to her.

  "I know what you mean," said Goethe. "It's just those

  Goethe Turns Kristyna into a Queen

  The student sat down and Goethe turned to him with a kindly smile: "My boy, you certainly know what poetry is."

  The others were again immersed in their drunken discussions, leaving the student alone with the great poet. He wanted to make the most of the precious opportunity, but suddenly he did not know what to say. Because he was looking hard for a suitable remark—

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  details—poorly chosen clothes, slightly flawed teeth, delightful mediocrity of soul—that make a woman lively and real. The women on posters or in fashion magazines, the ones almost all women nowadays try to imitate, lack charm because they're unreal, because they're merely the sum total of a set of abstract instruc­tions. They're not born of human bodies but of com­puters! I assure you, my friend, your small-town woman is just wrhat a poet needs, and I congratulate you!"

  Then he bent over the title page, took out his pen, and started to write. Enthusiastically, nearly in a trance, his face radiant with love and understanding, he filled the whole page.

  The student took back the book and blushed proudly. What Goethe had written to a woman unknown to him was beautiful and sad, yearning and sensual, lively and wise, and the student was certain that such beautiful words had never before been addressed to any woman. He thought of Kristyna and desired her infinitely. Poetry had cast a cloak woven of the most sublime words over her ridiculous clothes. She had been turned into a queen.

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  time to close up the building. The caretaker was threatening to lock them in for the night.

  He had to repeat this announcement several times, loudly and softly, to all of them collectively and to each one individually, before the poets finally realized that the part about the caretaker was no joke. Petrarch sud­denly remembered his wife in her red bathrobe and got up from the table as if he had been kicked in the pants. Goethe then said, with infinite sadness: "Leave me here, boys. I want to stay here." His crutches were still leaning against the table next to him, and to the poets frying to persuade him to leave with them, he merely responded by shaking his head.

  They all knew his wife, a harsh, spiteful lady. They were all afraid of her. They knew that if Goethe did not come home on time his wife would make a terrible scene in front of all of them. They implored him: "Be reasonable, Johann, you've got to go home!" and they took him shyly by the armpits and tried to lift him from his chair. But the Olympian god was heavy, and their arms were hesitant. He was at least thirty years their elder and their true patriarch; all of a sudden, when they were lifting him and passing him his crutches, they all felt small and embarrassed. And he kept repeating that he wanted to stay there!

  No one agreed with him except Lermontov, who seized the opportunity to be more cunning than the others: "Leave him here, boys, and I'll keep him com­pany till morning. Don't you understand? When he was young, he'd stay away from home whole weeks at

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  Carrying a Poet

  The waiter entered the room, this time with no new bottles. He asked the poets to get ready to leave. It was

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  a time. He's trying to regain his youth! Don't you understand that, you morons? Right, Johann? The two of us are going to lie down on the rug and stay here with this bottle of red wine till morning, and all the rest of them have to get out! Petrarch can go run to his wife, with her red bathrobe and her hair undone!"

  But Voltaire knew it was not nostalgia for his youth that was keeping Goethe there. Goethe was ill and for­bidden to drink. When he drank, his legs refused to carry him. Voltaire seized the crutches and ordered the others to give up their unnecessary hesitancy. And so the tipsy poets' feeble arms took hold of Goethe's armpits and lifted him from his chair. They carried him through the function room to the vestibule, or rather dragged him (sometimes Goethe's feet touched the floor, sometimes they were above it like the feet of a child being swung by its parents). But Goethe was heavy and the poets were drunk: they dropped him in the vestibule, and Goethe moaned and cried out: "Let me die right here, boys!"

  Voltaire got angry and shouted to the poets to pick Goethe up again immediately. This shamed the poets. Some took Goethe by the arms, others by the legs, and they lifted him and carried him through the club door to the staircase. Everyone was carrying him. Voltaire was carrying him, Petrarch was carrying him, Verlaine was carrying him, Boccaccio was carrying him, and even the staggering Yesenin was holding on to Goethe's leg, for fear of falling.

  The student too tried to carry the great poet, know-

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  ing it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But in vain, because Lermontov had become so fond of him. He took him by the arm and could not stop finding things to say to him.

  "Not only are they not subtle, they're also clumsy. They're all spoiled children. Look how they're carrying him! They're going to drop him! They've never worked with their hands. Do you know I worked in a factory?"

  (We should not forget that all the heroes of that time and country did factory work, either voluntarily, out of revolutionary enthusiasm, or under duress, as punish­ment. In either case they were equally proud of it, because it seemed to them that in the factory, Hard Life herself, that noble goddess, had kissed their brows.)

  Holding their patriarch by the arms and legs, the poets carried him downstairs. The stairwell was square, with several right-angle turns that put their strength and agility to a hard test.

  Lermontov went on: "Do you know, my friend, what it is to carry a crossbeam? You've never carried one. You're a student. But these characters have never car­ried one either. Look how stupidly they're carrying him! They're letting him fall!" He shouted at them: "Hold on to him, you idiots, you're letting him fall! You've never worked with your hands!" And clinging to the student's arm, he came slowly down behind the staggering poets carrying the increasingly heavy Goethe with growing anguish. They finally arrived on the sidewalk with their burden and leaned him against a lamppost. Petrarch and Boccaccio kept him propped

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  up while Voltaire went out into the street to try to flag down one of the passing cars.

  Lermontov said to the student: "Do you realize what you're seeing? You're a student, you don't know any­thing about life. But this is a great scene! They're carry­ing a poet. Do you
know what a poem it would make?"

  Goethe, however, had slumped to the ground; Petrarch and Boccaccio tried to prop him up again.

  "Look," said Lermontov to the student, "they can't even lift him up. They have no strength in their arms. They don't have any idea what life is. Carrying a poet. What a magnificent title. Do you understand? Right now I'm putting together two collections of verse. Two entirely different collections. One is in strictly classical form, rhymed and in a definite meter. And the other is in free verse. It's going to be called Accounts Rendered. The last poem in this collection will be 'Carrying a Poet.' It'll be a harsh poem. But honest. Honest."

  That was the third word Lermontov said in italics. The word expressed opposition to everything merely ornamental or witty. It expressed opposition to Petrarch's reveries and Boccaccio's pranks. It expressed the pathos of the worker's labor and a passionate faith in the aforementioned goddess, Hard Life.

  Intoxicated by the night air, Verlaine was standing on the sidewalk, looking up at the stars and singing. Yesenin had sat down against the building wall and fallen asleep. Voltaire, still waving his arm in the street, finally suc­ceeded in getting a taxi. Then, with Boccaccio's help, he settled Goethe in the back seat. He shouted to Petrarch

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  to sit down next to the driver, because Petrarch was the only one with any chance of mollifying Mrs. Goethe. But Petrarch frantically defended himself:

  "Why me? Why me? She scares me!"

  "You see," said Lermontov to the student. "When a friend needs help, he takes off. Not a single one of them is capable of talking to Goethe's old lady." Then, leaning inside the car, where Goethe, Boccaccio, and Voltaire were now crammed together in the back seat, he said; "Boys, I'm coming with you. I'll take care of Mrs. Goethe." And he got into the empty seat next to the driver.

  Petrarch Condemns Boccaccio's Laughter

  The taxi loaded with poets vanished and the student remembered it was time to go back to Kristyna.

  "I have to go home," he said to Petrarch.

  Petrarch nodded, took him by the arm, and went off with him in the opposite direction.

  "You know," he said, "you're a sensitive boy. You're the only one there who was capable of listening to what the others were saying."

  The student took it from there: "That girl standing in the middle of the room like Joan of Arc with her lance—I can repeat everything you said, in your own words exactly."

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  "Besides, those drunks didn't even hear the end of the story! Are they interested in anything other than themselves?"

  "Or when you said your wife was afraid the girl wanted to kill you, and then you approached her and her look radiated a celestial peacefulness, it was like a small miracle."

  "Ah, my friend, you are the one who is a poet! You and not they!"

  Petrarch was holding the student by the arm and leading him to his own distant suburb.

  "And how does the story end?" asked the student.

  "My wife took pity on her and let her stay in the apartment for the night. But imagine this! My mother-in-law sleeps in a kind of storage room behind the kitchen and gets up very early. When she saw the win­dows were all broken, she quickly went to get the glaziers who by chance were working in the building next door, and all the windows were replaced by the time we woke up. There wasn't a trace of the evening's events. I felt I had dreamed them."

  "And the girl?" asked the student.

  "Gone too. She must have left quietly very early in the morning."

  Just then, Petrarch stopped in the middle of the street and looked at the student with an almost stern expression: "You know, my friend, it would pain me greatly if you were to take my story for one of those Boccaccio anecdotes that end up in a bed. You should know this: Boccaccio is a jackass. Boccaccio never

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  understands anyone, because to understand is to merge and to identify with. That is the secret of poetry. We consume ourselves in the beloved woman, we con­sume ourselves in the idea we believe, we burn in the landscape we are moved by."

  The student listened to Petrarch ardently and saw before him the image of his Kristyna, about whose charms he had had his doubts some hours earlier. He was ashamed of those doubts now, because they belonged to the less good (Boccaccian) half of his being; they sprang from his weakness, not his strength: they proved that he did not dare enter into love com­pletely, with all his being, proved that he was afraid of being consumed in the beloved woman.

  "Love is poetry, poetry is love," said Petrarch, and the student resolved to love Kristyna with a love ardent and grand. A short time earlier, Goethe had arrayed her in a royal cloak, and now Petrarch was adding to the fire in the student's heart. The night awaiting him would be blessed by two poets.

  "Laughter, on the other hand," Petrarch went on, "is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude. Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry. That's why I tell you yet again, and want you to keep in mind: Boccaccio doesn't understand love. Love can never be laughable. Love has nothing in common with laughter."

  "Yes," agreed the student enthusiastically. The world seemed to him to be divided in two, the side of love and

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  the side of joking, and he knew that he belonged and would go on belonging to Petrarch's army.

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  sincere, vigorous, ardent, maternal, sisterly, amicable, and passionate embrace. Several times that evening, Lermontov had used the word "honest," and the stu­dent thought Kristyna's embrace well deserved that term, which synthesized an entire cohort of adjectives.

  The student felt that his body was outstandingly well disposed toward love. With a disposition so cer-tain, hard, and durable, he could take his time and do nothing but savor the long, sweet minutes of that motionless embrace.

  She thrust her tongue sensually into his mouth and a moment later showered most sisterly kisses all over his face. With the end of his tongue he felt her gold tooth on the upper left side, remembering what Goethe had said to him: Kristyna was born not of a computer but of a human body! She was just what a poet needed! He wanted to shout for joy. And Petrarch's words rang out in his mind, telling him that love is poetry and poetry is love and that to understand is to merge with the other and burn within her. (Yes, all three poets were here with him, hovering above the bed like angels, singing, rejoicing, and blessing him!) Overflowing with immense enthusiasm, the student decided it was time to transform the Lermontovian honesty of the motion­less embrace into a real work of love. He turned over onto Kristyna's body and tried to open her legs with his knee.

  But what's this? Kristyna is resisting! She is keeping her legs tightly together with the same obstinacy as on their woodland walks!

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  Angels Hover Above the Student's Bed

  She was not pacing tensely in the attic room, she was not angry, she was not sulking, she was not languish­ing at the open window. She was curled up in her nightgown under his blanket. He woke her with a kiss on the lips, and to forestall any reproaches told her with forced loquacity about the unbelievable evening, about the dramatic confrontation between Boccaccio and Petrarch, about Lermontov insulting all the other poets. She was not interested in his explanation and interrupted him suspiciously:

  "I bet you forgot about the book."

  When he handed her the book with Goethe's long inscription, she could not believe her eyes. Again and again she reread those unlikely phrases that seemed to embody all of her equally unlikely adventure with the student, all of last summer with its secret walks on unknown woodland paths, all the delicacy and all the tenderness apparently so alien to her life.

  Meanwhile the student undressed and lay down beside her. She took him firmly in her arms. It was an embrace such as he had never before experienced. A<
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  He wanted to ask her why she was resisting him, but he could not speak. Kristyna was so shy, so delicate, that love's functions lost their names in her presence. He dared use only the language of breathing and touching. Weren't they beyond the heaviness of words? Wasn't he burning within her? They were both burning with the same flame! And so, in stubborn silence, he kept attempting with his knee to force open Kristyna's tightly closed thighs.

  She too was silent. She too was afraid to speak and tried to express everything with kisses and caresses. But finally, on his twenty-fifth attempt to open her thighs, she said: "No, please, no. It would kill me."

  "What?"

  "It would kill me. It's true. It would kill me," Kristyna repeated, and again she thrust her tongue deep into his mouth, yet keeping her thighs very tightly together.

  The student felt despair tinged with bliss. He wildly desired to make love to her and at the same time wanted to weep for joy. Kristyna loved him as no one had before. She loved him so much it would kill her, she loved him to the point of being afraid to make love with him because if she were to make love with him, she would never be able to live without him and she would die of grief and desire. He was happy, he was madly happy, because he had suddenly, unexpectedly, and without having done anything to deserve it attained what he had always desired, the infinite love compared to which all the earth with all its continents and all its seas is as nothing.