The sheep was still grazing on the withered grass, and with a sigh Jan repeated: "Daphnis, Daphnis ..."
"Are you calling to Daphnis?"
"Yes," he said, "I'm calling to Daphnis."
"That's good," said Edwige. "We need to go back to him. To go back to the time before Christianity crippled mankind. Is that what you mean?"
"Yes," said Jan, though he had meant something entirely different.
"Back then, there might still have been a bit of nat-
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eled. Jan realized with melancholy that, next to young breasts, not only do old ones not seem younger, but, contrarily, the young breasts seem older, and all of them together were equally bizarre and meaningless.
And once again he was assailed by that vague, mysterious idea of the border. He felt he was right on the line, crossing it. And he was gripped by a strange sadness, and from that sadness as from a fog an even stranger thought emerged: it was in a crowd and naked that Jews went to the gas chambers. He neither understood just why that image kept coming back to him nor just what it meant. Maybe it meant that at that moment the Jews had also been on the other side of the border and thus that nakedness is the uniform worn by men and women on the other side. That nakedness is a shroud.
The sadness induced in Jan by the naked bodies scattered all over the beach became more and more unbearable. He said: "It's so peculiar, all these naked bodies here. . . ."
Edwige nodded: "Yes. And what's even more peculiar is that all the bodies are beautiful. Look, even old bodies, even sick bodies are beautiful as soon as they're only bodies, bodies without clothes. They're as beautiful as nature. An old tree is no less beautiful than a young one, and a sick lion is still king of the beasts. Human ugliness is the ugliness of clothes."
They never understood each other, Edwige and he, yet they always agreed. Each interpreted the other's words in his or her own way, and there was wonderful
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The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
ural paradise left," Edwige went on. "Sheep and shepherds. People belonging to nature. Freedom of the senses. Isn't that what Daphiiis means to you?"
Again he assured her that that was just what he meant, and Edwige asserted: "Yes, you're right, it's Daphnis Island!"
And because he enjoyed expanding their agreement based on misunderstanding, Jan added: "And our hotel should be called On the Other Side."
"Yes," cried Edwige enthusiastically. "On the other side of that jail, our civilization!"
Some small groups of naked people came near; Edwige introduced Jan to them. They shook his hand and proclaimed their status and their pleasure at meeting him. Then they dealt with various topics: the temperature of the water, the hypocrisy of a society that cripples body and soul, the beauties of the island.
On the latter subject, Edwige said: "Jan was just saying that it's Daphnis Island. I think he's right."
All of them were delighted by that stroke of inspiration, and a man with an extraordinary paunch developed the idea that Western civilization is going to perish and that humanity will finally be liberated from the enslaving burden of the Judeo-Christian tradition. These were phrases Jan had heard ten, twenty, thirty, a hundred, five hundred, a thousand times before, and those few meters of beach soon turned into a lecture hall. The man spoke, all the others listened with interest, and their bare genitals stared stupidly and sadly at the yellow sand.
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Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
(Series: # )
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