The JOKE (23 page)

There was another short pause, and a new figure appeared at the door unaccompanied, and advanced directly to the long table covered in red on the dais. He was a middle-aged man without a hair on his head. He walked with dignity, his back straight; he wore a black suit and carried a bright red portfolio; halfway along the table, he stopped and turned to the audience, bowing to them slightly. As he did so he revealed a bloated face and a broad red, white, and blue ribbon around his neck and a large gold medal dangling from it in the vicinity of his stomach and bobbing up and down as he leaned forward.

All of a sudden one of the boys standing in front of the dais began (without formally requesting permission) to speak in a loud voice. He said spring had come and all papas and mamas were rejoicing and the whole earth was rejoicing. He went on in that vein until one of the girls broke in and said something similar, with no clear meaning but with frequent repetitions of the words mama, papa, spring and several times the word rose.

Then she was cut short by another of the boys, who was

in turn cut short by another of the girls, but one could hardly say that they were at odds, because they were all saying more or less the same thing. One boy, for instance, proclaimed that children were peace. The girl who came after him said that children were flowers. Whereupon all the children were united by this idea, repeated it once more in unison, and stepped forward, stretching out the hand holding the bouquet. Because there were eight of them and eight women sitting in the semicircle, each woman received a bouquet. The children went back to their places in front of the dais and didn't say another word.

Next, the man standing above them on the dais opened his red portfolio and began to read. He too spoke of spring, of flowers, of mamas and papas, he also spoke of love, which according to him bore fruit, but suddenly his vocabulary was transformed and the words duty, responsibility, the State, and citizen appeared; suddenly there was no more papa and mama, but father and mother, and he was enumerating all the blessings the State offered them (the fathers and mothers) and reminding them that it was their duty in return to bring up their children to be model citizens. Then he called on all parents present to affirm this ceremonially with their signatures, and indicated a thick leather-bound volume lying on a corner of the table.

At that point, the woman in brown came up behind the mother sitting at one end of the semicircle and touched her on the shoulder. The mother turned her head, and the woman took her baby. Then the mother stood and walked over to the table. The man with the ribbon around his neck opened the book and handed the mother a pen. The mother signed and returned to her chair, where the woman in brown gave her baby back. The husband went over to the table and signed; then the woman in brown took the next mother's child and sent the mother over to the table; then her husband signed, then the next mother, the next husband, and so on until they were all done. Then the strains of the harmonium wafted through the hall again, and the people around me in the audience rushed up to the mothers and fathers to shake their hands. I too was on my way forward (as if wanting to shake someone's hand) when suddenly the man with the ribbon around his neck called me by name and asked me whether I recognized him.

Of course I hadn't recognized him, even though I'd watched him all through his speech.

To avoid answering his vaguely unpleasant question in the negative, I asked him how he was. Not too bad, he said, and all at once I knew him: of course, it was Kovalik, a schoolmate of mine; it had just taken some time to recognize his features, which were blurred by his fleshy new face; in any case, Kovalik had been one of the less memorable students: neither well-behaved nor rowdy, neither sociable nor solitary, mediocre in his studies—in short, he was inconspicuous. In those days he'd had a shock of hair across his brow, and it was now missing: I had an easy excuse for not recognizing him right away.

He asked me what I was doing here, whether I had any relatives among the mothers. I said no, I hadn't, I'd come out of idle curiosity. He gave me a contented smile and began to explain that the National Committee had done a great deal to imbue civil ceremonies with dignity, adding with modest pride that he, as the official in charge of citizen affairs, could take some of the credit and had even been commended at the district level. I asked him whether what I'd seen was a christening. He told me no, it wasn't a christening, it was a
welcoming of new citizens to life.
He was clearly glad to have a chance to expand on the subject. He said there were two great opposing institutions involved: the Catholic Church with its traditional thousand-year-old rites and the civil institutions that must supplant the thousand-year-old rites with their own. He said that people would stop going to church to have their children christened or to get married only when our civil ceremonies had as much dignity and beauty as the church ceremonies.

I told him this was obviously no easy matter. He agreed and said he was glad that citizen affairs officials like himself were finally getting a little support from our artists and it was about time artists saw their duty and gave our people real socialist burials, weddings, and christenings (here he immediately corrected himself and said "welcomings of new citizens to life"). He added that the verses the young Pioneers had just recited were really beautiful. I nodded and asked whether there might not be a more effective way of weaning people away from religious ceremonies, to give them the option of avoiding
any
sort of ceremony whatsoever.

He said that people would never give up their weddings and funerals. And that from our point of view (he emphasized the word "our" as if to make it clear to me that he too had joined the Communist Party) it would be a pity not to use them to bring people closer to our ideology and our State.

I asked my old classmate what he did with people who didn't want to take part in his ceremonies, whether there were any such people. He said of course there were, since not everybody had come round to the new way of thinking yet, but if they didn't attend, they kept receiving invitations, and most of them came in sooner or later, after a week or two.

I asked him whether attendance at such ceremonies was compulsory. He replied with a smile that it wasn't, but that the National Committee used attendance as a touchstone for evaluating people's sense of citizenship and their attitude towards the State, and in the end people realized that and came.

In that case, I said, the National Committee was stricter with its believers than the Church was with theirs. Kovalik smiled and said that could not be helped. Then he asked me up to his office. I said that unfortunately I was a little pressed for time because I had to meet someone at the bus station. He asked me whether I'd seen any of the "boys" (meaning our classmates). I said that I hadn't, but I was glad for the chance to see at least him, because as soon as I had a child to christen I'd know where to go. He laughed and gave me a punch on the shoulder. We shook hands, and I went out into the square again, aware that in fifteen minutes the bus would arrive.

Fifteen minutes is not a long time. I crossed the square, walked past the barbershop, peered through the window (although I knew that Lucie wouldn't be there till the afternoon), and then strolled in front of the bus station imagining Helena: her face under pancake makeup, her reddish, obviously dyed hair; her figure, far from slim, though retaining the basic rapport of proportions necessary to perceive a woman as a woman; I imagined everything that placed her on the exciting borderline between the repellent and the attractive, her voice, too loud to be pleasant, her excessive gestures involuntarily betraying an impatient anxiety to
continue
still to please.

I had seen Helena only three times in my life, too little to fix her image exactly in my mind. Whenever I tried to conjure it up, one or another of her features stood out to such an extent that she would turn into a caricature of herself. But no matter how inaccurate my imagination was, precisely by its very distortions it had managed to capture something essential of Helena's existence, something hidden beneath her outward form.

This time I was particularly unable to rid myself of the image of Helena's flabbiness, her flaccidity, signs not only of her age and her motherhood but above all, of her psychic or erotic defenselessness (undisguised by her self-importance), her vocation as sexual prey.

Did this image really derive from her essence, or only from my own attitude to her? Who can tell? The bus was due any minute, and I longed to see Helena just as my imagination had interpreted her to me. I hid in a doorway to observe her for a while, to watch her look around
power-lessly,
not seeing me and suddenly wondering whether she'd made the trip in vain.

The large express bus pulled into the square, and Helena was one of the first to alight.

She wore a blue raincoat (with turned-up collar and belt pulled tight) that gave her a young, sporty look. Yes, she looked good in it. She surveyed the square, took a few steps forward to check the area obscured by the bus, then, far from standing defenselessly, she turned without hesitation and headed in the direction of my hotel, where she had booked a room for the night.

Once more I verified that my imagination offered me only a deformed Helena.

Fortunately she was always more attractive in the flesh than in my mind, something I realized anew looking at her back as she made her way to the hotel in her high heels. I set off after her.

When I entered the lobby, she was leaning against the reception desk, registering with the listless clerk. She was telling him her name: "Helena Zemanek, Ze-ma-nek." I stood behind her, listening to her. As soon as the clerk was through, she asked, "Is there a Comrade Jahn staying here?" The clerk mumbled that there wasn't. I stepped up to her and laid my hand on her shoulder.

2

Everything that had happened between myself and Helena was part of a precise and deliberate plan. No doubt, even at our first meeting, Helena already had some designs of her own, but they did not go far beyond the vagueness of female desire, which wants to preserve its spontaneity and sentimental poetry and therefore doesn't try to arrange and stage-manage the course of events in advance. I, on the other hand, had from the start acted as a meticulous stage manager of the story I was about to experience, and had left nothing to the whims of inspiration, neither choice of words and proposals, nor choice of a room for our time together. I was wary of the slightest risk, afraid to bungle an opportunity that meant so much to me, not because Helena was particularly young, particularly nice, or particularly attractive, but purely and simply because her name was Zemanek and her husband was a man I hated.

That day at the institute when they informed me that a woman named Zemanek from the radio was coming to see me and that I was to give her some information about our research, I did think of my former friend for a moment, but I quickly dismissed this coincidence of names as a mere trick of chance, and if I was annoyed by their sending her to me, it was for entirely different reasons.

I don't like journalists. They are for the most part shallow, verbose, and insolent. The fact that Helena worked for radio rather than a newspaper only increased my aversion. In my view newspapers have one extenuating attribute: they make no noise. Their tediousness is silent; they can be put aside, thrown into the wastebasket. The tediousness of radio lacks that extenuating attribute; it persecutes us in cafes, restaurants, trains, even during our visits to people who have

become incapable of living without nonstop feeding of the ears.

But I was irritated even by the way Helena spoke. It was clear to me that before coming to the institute she'd thought her whole report through and that all she needed from me was a few facts and figures, a few examples to prove her hackneyed points. I did my very best to make things tough for her; I deliberately spoke in complex and confusing sentences and tried to upset the preconceived notions she'd brought with her. When at one point she came dangerously close to understanding what I was saying, I put her off the track by becoming familiar; I told her how well red hair suited her (though I thought the exact opposite), asked her how she liked her work at broadcasting and what she liked to read. And in a quiet reflection far below the surface of our conversation, I came to the conclusion that the coincidence in names was not necessarily a coincidence. There seemed to be a family resemblance between this phrase-mongering, loudmouthed, pushy woman and the man I remembered as phrase-mongering, loudmouthed, and pushy. So in the light, almost flirtatious tone the conversation had assumed, I asked her about her husband. I was on the right track; a few further questions identified Zemanek beyond a doubt. I must say that at that moment I didn't as yet want to come to know her as I later did. On the contrary: the revulsion I had felt when she entered the room was only intensified by the discovery. My first reaction was to look for a pretext to cut the interview short and pass her on to another member of the institute; I even had a blissful image of throwing this incessantly smiling woman out the door, and I regretted that it was impossible.

But at the very moment I felt I couldn't stand it anymore, Helena, stirred by my intimate questions and remarks (unaware of their purely investigative function), with some gestures revealed herself as so naturally feminine that my rancor suddenly took on a new complexion: behind the veil of Helena's journalistic playacting I saw a
woman,
a woman capable of functioning as a woman. Just the kind of woman Zemanek deserved, I said to myself with a private little sneer, and quite adequate punishment; but I had to correct myself immediately: I was too quick to make this contemptuous judgment: it was too subjective, too forced; in fact, she must have been rather pretty once, and there was no reason to suppose that Pavel Zemanek no longer enjoyed using her as a woman. I kept up the light tone of the conversation without giving any indication of what was on my mind. Something was forcing me to find out as much as I could about the
feminine
side of the journalist sitting opposite me, and this compulsion automatically governed the direction of the conversation.