2
If Franz Kafka is the prophet of a world without memory, Gustav Husak is its builder. After T. G. Masaryk, who was called the Liberator President (every last one of his monuments has been destroyed), after Benes, Gottwald, Zapotocky, Novotny, and Svoboda, he is the seventh president of my country, and he is called the President of Forgetting.
The Russians put him in power in 1969. Not since 1621 has the Czech people experienced such a devas-tation of culture and intellectuals. Everyone every -
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where thinks that Husak was merely persecuting his political enemies. But the struggle against the political opposition was instead the perfect opportunity for the Russians to undertake, with their lieutenant as intermediary, something much more basic.
I consider it very significant from this standpoint that Husak drove one hundred forty-five Czech historians from the universities and research institutes. (It's said that for each historian, as mysteriously as in a fairy tale, a new Lenin monument sprang up somewhere in Bohemia.) One day in 1971, one of those historians, Milan Hubl, wearing his extraordinarily thick-lensed eyeglasses, came to visit me in my studio apartment on Bartolomejska Street. We looked out the window at the towers of Hradcany Castle and were sad.
"You begin to liquidate a people," Hiibl said, "by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write other books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is and what it was. The world at large forgets it still faster."
"And the language?"
"Why bother taking it away? It will become a mere folklore and sooner or later die a natural death."
Was that just hyperbole dictated by excessive gloom?
Or is it true that the people will be unable to survive crossing the desert of organized forgetting?
None of us knows what is going to happen. One thing, however, is certain. In moments of clear- sight-
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edness, the Czech people can see the image of its own death near at hand. Neither as a fact nor as an inescapable future, but nonetheless as a quite concrete possibility. Its death is right there with it.
Six months later, Hubl was arrested and sentenced to many years in prison. My father was dying at the time.
During the last ten years of his life, he gradually lost the power of speech. At first there were some words he either could not recall or replaced with similar-sounding ones that immediately made him laugh at himself. But in the end he could utter only a very small num-ber of words, and every attempt to define his thoughts resulted in the same sentence, one of the last sentences remaining to him: "That's strange."
He said "That's strange," and his eyes showed the immense astonishment of knowing everything and being able to say nothing. Things had lost their names and were merged into single, undifferentiated being. I was the only one who by talking to him could momen-larily retrieve from that wordless infinitude the world of entities with names.
The huge blue eyes in his handsome face still expressed wisdom as before. I often took him for
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walks. We always walked once around the block, because it was all Papa had the strength for. He walked poorly, taking tiny steps, and when he became at all tired, his body would bend forward and he would lose his balance. We often had to stop so he could rest, his brow leaning against a wall.
During these walks we talked about music. When Papa could speak normally, I had asked him very few questions. Now I wanted to make up for lost time. So we talked about music, but it was a strange conversation, between someone who knew nothing but a great many words and one who knew everything but not a single word.
Throughout the ten years of his illness, Papa worked on a big book about Beethoven's sonatas. He probably wrote a little better than he spoke, but even while writing he had more and more trouble finding words, and finally his text had become incomprehensible, consisting of nonexistent words.
He called me into his room one day. Open on the piano was the variations movement of the Opus 111 sonata. "Look," he said, pointing to the music (he could no longer play the piano), and again, "Look," and then, after a prolonged effort, he succeeded in saying: "Now I know!" and kept trying to explain something important to me, but his entire message consisted of unintelligible words, and seeing that I did not understand him, he looked at me in surprise and said: "That's strange."
I know of course what he wanted to talk about,
The Angels
because it was a question he had been asking himself for a long time. Variation form was Beethoven's favorite toward the end of his life. At first glance, it seems the most superficial of forms, a simple showcase of musical technique, work better suited to a lacemaker than to a Beethoven. But Beethoven made it a sovereign form (for the first time in the history of music), inscribing in it his most beautiful meditations.
Yes, all that is well known. But Papa wanted to know how it should be understood. Why exactly choose variations? What meaning is hidden behind it?
That is why he called me into his room, pointed to the music, and said: "Now I know!"
4
The silence of my father, from whom all words slipped away, the silence of the hundred forty-five historians, who have been forbidden to remember, that multiple silence resounding through Bohemia, forms the background of the picture I am painting of Tamina.
She continued to serve coffee in a cafe in a small town in the west of Europe. But she had lost the sparkle of solicitous concern, which used to attract the customers. The desire to offer them her ear had gone away.
One day, when Bibi was sitting on a barstool while
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her child crawled around on the floor, howling, Tamina, after giving Bibi some time to restore order, finally lost patience and said: "Can't you make your brat shut up?"
In a huff, Bibi retorted: "Why do you hate children so?"
There is no reason to think that Tamina hated children. Yet it didn't escape her that Bibi's voice betrayed an entirely unexpected hostility. Without Tamina's knowing why, they had ceased to be friends.
Then one day Tamina did not come to work. That had never happened before. The owner's wife went over to her place to see what was wrong. She rang at her door, but no one opened it. She went back the next day and again rang in vain. She called the police. They forced the door open, but found only a carefully tidied apartment with nothing missing, nothing suspicious.
Tamina did not come back the following days. The police continued to take an interest in the case but discovered nothing new. Tamina's disappearance was filed with the unsolved cases.
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man ordered a Coke and sipped it slowly. He looked at Tamina, and Tamina looked out into space.
After a while, he said: "Tamina."
If he was trying to impress her, he failed. It was not very hard to learn her name; all the customers in the neighborhood knew it.
"I know you're sad," the young man went on.
Tamina was not particularly won over by that remark. She knew that there were many ways to conquer a woman and that one of the surest roads to her flesh led through her sadness. Even so, she looked at the young man with greater interest than before.
They got into a conversation. What intrigued Tamina were his questions. Not their content, but the simple fact that he was asking them. My God, it had been so long since anyone had asked her about anything! It seemed like an eternity! Only her husband had kept asking her questions, because love is a con-tinual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love.
(In that case, my friend Hubl would have pointed out to me, no one loves us more than the police. That's true. Just as every height has its symmetrical
depth, so love's interest has as its negative the police's curiosity. We sometimes confuse depth with height, and I can easily imagine lonely people hoping to be taken to the police station from time to time for an interrogation that will enable them to talk about themselves.)
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5
On the fateful day, a young fellow in jeans sat down at the bar. Tamina was alone in the cafe. The young
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The Angels
And as in a tale, as in a dream (of course it's a tale! of course it's a dream!), Tamina comes out from behind the bar where she has spent several years of her life and leaves the cafe with the young man. A red sports car is parked at the curb. The young man sits down at the wheel and invites Tamina to get in beside him.
6
The young man looks into her eyes, he listens to her and then tells her that what she calls remembering is really something entirely different: Under a spell, she watches her forgetting.
Tamina nods in agreement.
The young man goes on: Her looking back sadly is no longer the expression of her faithfulness to a dead man. The dead man has disappeared from her field of vision, and she is only looking behind her into space.
Into space? But then what is it that renders her look so heavy?
It is not heavy with memories, the young man explains, but heavy with remorse. Tamina will never forgive herself for forgetting.
"So what should I do?" asks Tamina.
"Forget your forgetting," says the young man.
Tamina smiles bitterly: "Tell me how you manage that."
"Haven't you ever felt like going away?"
"Yes," admits Tamina. "I want terribly to go away. But where?"
"Some place where things are as light as the breeze. Where things have lost their weight. Where there's no remorse."
"Yes," says Tamina dreamily. "Where things weigh nothing at all."
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7
I understand Tamina's self-reproaches. When Papa died, I did the same. I could not forgive myself for asking him about so little, for knowing so little about him, for allowing myself to lack him. And it is just that very remorse which suddenly made me realize what he most likely wanted to tell me when he was pointing to the Opus 111 sonata.
I am going to try to explain it with a comparison. A symphony is a musical epic. We might say that it is like a voyage leading from one thing to another, farther and farther away through the infinitude of the exterior world. Variations are also like a voyage. But that voyage does not lead through the infinitude of the exterior world. In one of his pensees, Pascal says that man lives between the abyss of the infinitely large and the abyss of the infinitely small. The voyage of variations leads
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The Angels
cerned about the infinitude our papa has within him. It is not surprising that in his later years variations became the favorite form for Beethoven, who knew all too well (as Tamina and I know) that there is nothing more unbearable than lacking the being we loved, those sixteen measures and the interior world of their infinitude of possibilities.
into that other infinitude, into the infinite diversity of the interior world lying hidden in all things.
Beethoven thus discovered in variations another area to be explored. His variations are a new "invitation to the voyage."
Variation form is the form in which concentration is brought to its maximum; it enables the composer to speak only of essentials, to go straight to the core of the matter. A theme for variations often consists of no more than sixteen measures. Beethoven goes inside those sixteen measures as if down a shaft leading into the interior of the earth.
The voyage into that other infinitude is no less adventurous than the voyage of the epic. It is how the physicist penetrates into the wondrous depths of the atom. With every variation Beethoven moves farther and farther away from the initial theme, which resembles the last variation as little as a flower its image under a microscope.
Man knows he cannot embrace the universe with its suns and stars. Much more unbearable is for him to be condemned to lack the other infinitude, that infinitude near at hand, within reach. Tamina lacked the infinitude of her love, I lacked Papa, and all of us are lacking in our work because in pursuit of perfection we go toward the core of the matter but never quite get to it.
That the infinitude of the exterior world escapes us we accept as natural. But we reproach ourselves until the end of our lives for lacking that other infinitude. We ponder the infinitude of the stars but are uncon-
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8
This book is a novel in the form of variations. The various parts follow each other like the various stages of a voyage leading into the interior of a theme, the interior of a thought, the interior of a single, unique situation, the understanding of which recedes from my sight into the distance.
It is a novel about Tamina, and whenever Tamina goes offstage, it is a novel for Tamina. She is its principal character and its principal audience, and all the other stories are variations on her own story and meet with her life as in a mirror.
It is a novel about laughter and about forgetting, about forgetting and about Prague, about Prague and about the angels. So it is not at all by chance that the young man sitting at the wheel is named Raphael.
The landscape became more and more of a waste-
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land, with less and less green and more and more ocher, fewer and fewer plants and trees and more and more sand and clay. Then the car left the road and turned onto a narrow lane that came abruptly to an end at a steep slope. The young man stopped the car. They got out. They stood at the edge of the slope; some ten meters below them was a thin strip of clayey shore, and beyond it, a body of murky brownish water extended as far as the eye could see.
"Where are we?" asked Tamina, with a lump in her throat. She wanted to tell Raphael that she wished to go back, but she did not dare: she was afraid he would refuse, and she knew that his refusal would heighten her anguish.
They were at the edge of the slope, the water in front of them and nothing but clay, clay sodden and plant-less all around them as though the clay had been extracted right here. And in fact there was an abandoned dredge not far off.
This landscape took Tamina back to the area of Bohemia, about one hundred kilometers from Prague, where her husband, after being driven from his occupation, had found his last job, as a bulldozer operator. During the week, he lived in a trailer at the site, coming to Prague to see Tamina only on Sundays. She once went out there to visit him, and they took a walk through a landscape very much like this one: wet, treeless, and plantless ground, squeezed between ocher and yellow underfoot and heavy gray clouds up above. They walked side by side in rubber boots that slipped and sank in the
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mud. They were alone in the world, filled with anguish, love, and despairing concern for each other.
The same despair now penetrated her, and she was thrilled suddenly, surprisingly, to find in it a lost fragment of her past. The memory had been completely lost, it was coming back to her for the first time. She should write it down in her school notebook! She even knew the exact year!
She wanted to tell the young man that she wished to go back. No, he was wrong when he said that her sadness was only form without content! No, no, her husband was still alive in that sadness, he was merely lost and she must go search for him! Search the whole world for him! Yes, yes! At last she knew! Whoever wishes to remember must not stay in one place, waiting for the memories to come of their own accord! Memories are scattered all over the immense world, and it takes voyaging to find them and make them leave their refuge!
She wanted to say all that to the young man and ask him to drive her back. But just then, down at the edge of the water, someone whistled. r />
9
Raphael seized Tamina by the arm. It was a strong grip from which there could be no thought of escape.
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A narrow, slippery path zigzagged down the slope. He led Tamina down it.
On the shore, where moments before there had been not the slightest sign of life, a boy of about twelve stood waiting. In his hand was the line of a rowboat that rocked gently at the edge of the water, and he was smiling at Tamina.
She turned to Raphael. He too was smiling. She looked from one to the other, then Raphael burst out laughing and so did the boy. It was strange laughter, because nothing funny had happened, but also pleasant and infectious: it invited her to forget her anguish and promised her something vague—perhaps it was joy, perhaps it was peace—so that Tamina, who wanted to get away from her anguish, obediently started laughing with them.
"You see?" said Raphael. "There's nothing to be afraid of."
When Tamina stepped into the boat, it began to roll under her weight. She sat down on the seat in the stern. The seat was wet. She was wearing a light summer dress and felt the wetness on her buttocks. That slimy contact with her skin revived her anguish.
The boy pushed off and started rowing, and Tamina turned her head around: on shore, Raphael was watching them go, and he was smiling. Tamina saw something odd about that smile. Yes! He was smiling and slightly shaking his head! Smiling and shaking his head very, very slightly.