Ignorance (11 page)

By now she's been walking for a good two or three hours in those leafy neighborhoods. She reaches a parapet at the end of a little park above Prague: the view from here is of the rear of Hrad-cany Castle, the secret side; this is a Prague whose existence Gustaf doesn't suspect; and instantly there come rushing the names she loved as a young girl: Macha, poet at the time when his

135

nation, a water sprite, was just emerging from the mists; Jan Neruda, the storyteller of ordinary Czech folk; the songs of Voskovec and Werich from the 1930s, so loved by her father, who died when she was a child; Hrabal and Skvorecky, novelists of her adolescence; and the little theaters and cabarets of the sixties, so free, so merrily free, with their sassy humor; it was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France.

Leaning on the parapet, she looks over at the Castle: it's no more than fifteen minutes away. The Prague of the postcards begins there, the Prague that a frenzied history stamped with its multiple stigmata, the Prague of tourists and whores, the Prague of restaurants so expensive that her Czech friends can't set foot in them, the belly-dancer Prague writhing in the spotlight, Gustaf's Prague. She reflects that there is no place more alien to her than that Prague. Gustaftown. Gustafville. Gustafstadt. Gustafgrad.

Gustaf: she sees him, his features blurred through the clouded windowpane of a language she barely knows, and she thinks, almost joyfully,

136

that it's fine this way because the truth is finally revealed: she feels no need to understand him or to have him understand her. She pictures his jovial figure, dressed up in his T-shirt, shouting that Kafka was born in Prague, and she feels a desire rising through her body, the irrepressible desire to take a lover. Not to patch up her life as it is! But to turn it completely upside down. Finally take possession of her own fate.

For she has never chosen any of her men. She was always the one being chosen. Martin she came to love, but at the start he was just a way to escape her mother. In her liaison with Gustaf she thought she was gaining freedom. But now she sees that it was only a variant of her relation with Martin: she seized an outstretched hand, and it pulled her out of difficult circumstances that she was unable to handle.

She knows she is good at gratitude; she has always prided herself on that as her prime virtue; when gratitude required it, a feeling of love would come running like a docile servant. She was sincerely devoted to Martin; she was sincerely devoted to Gustaf. But was that something to be proud of? Isn't gratitude simply another name for

137

weakness, for dependency? What she wants now is love with no gratitude to it at all! And she knows that a love like that has to be bought by some daring, risky act. For she has never been daring in her love life, she didn't even know what that meant.

Suddenly, like a gust of wind: the high-speed parade of old emigration-dreams, old anxieties: she sees women rush up, surround her and, waving beer mugs and laughing falsely, keep her from escaping; she is in a shop where other women, salesgirls, dart over to her, put her into a dress that, once on her body, turns into a straitjacket.

For another long while she goes on leaning on the parapet, then she straightens up. She is suffused with the certainty that she will escape; that she will not stay on in this city; neither in this city nor in the life this city is weaving for her.

She moves on, and she reflects that today she is finally carrying out the farewell walk she failed to take last time; she is finally saying her Great Farewells to the city that she loves more than any other and that she is prepared to lose once again, without regret, to be worthy of a life of her own.

138

38

When Communism departed from Europe, Josef's wife kept pressing him to go see his country again. She intended to go with him. But she died, and from then on all he could think about was his new life with the absent woman. He tried hard to persuade himself that it was a happy life. But is "happiness" the right word? Yes; happiness like a frail, tremulous ray gleaming through his grief, a resigned, calm, unremitting grief. A month ear-Her, unable to shake the sadness, he recalled the

words of his deceased wife: "Not going would be unnatural of you, unjustifiable, even foul"; actu-

ally, he thought, this trip she had so urged on him might possibly be some help to him now; might divert him, for a few days at least, from his own life, which was giving him such pain.

As he prepared for the trip, an idea tentatively crossed his mind: what if he were to stay over there for good? After all, he could be a veterinarian as easily in Bohemia as in Denmark. Till then the idea had seemed unacceptable, almost like a betrayal of the woman he loved. But he wondered:

139

would it really be a betrayal? If his wife's presence is nonmaterial, why should she be bound to the materiality of one particular place? Couldn't she be with him in Bohemia just as well as in Denmark?

He has left the hotel and is driving around in the car; he has lunch in a country inn; then he takes a walk through the fields; narrow lanes, wild roses, trees, trees; oddly moved, he gazes at the wooded hills on the horizon, and it occurs to him that twice in his own lifetime, the Czechs were willing to die to keep that landscape their own; in 1938 they wanted to fight Hitler; when their allies, the French and the English, kept them from doing so, they were in despair. In 1968 the Russians invaded the country, and again they wanted to fight; condemned to the same capitulation, they fell back into that same despair again.

To be willing to die for one's country: every nation has known that temptation to sacrifice. Indeed, the Czechs' adversaries also knew it: the Germans, the Russians. But those are large nations. Their patriotism is different: they are buoyed by their glory, their importance, their universal mission. The Czechs loved their country not because it was glorious but because it was

140

unknown; not because it was big but because it was small and in constant danger. Their patriotism was an enormous compassion for their country. The Danes are like that too. Not by chance did Josef choose a small country for his emigration.

Much moved, he gazes out over the landscape and reflects that the history of his Bohemia during this past half century is fascinating, unique, unprecedented, and that failing to take an interest in it would be narrowminded. Tomorrow morning, he'll be seeing N. What kind of life did the man have during all the time they were out of touch? What had he thought about the Russian occupation of the country? And what was it like for him to see the end of the Communism he used to believe in, sincerely and honorably? How is his Marxist background adjusting to the return of this capitalism that's being cheered along by the entire planet? Is he rebelling against it? Or has he abandoned his convictions? And if he's abandoned them, is that a crisis for him? And how are other people behaving toward him? Josef can hear the voice of his sister-in-law who, huntress of the guilty, would certainly like to see N. handcuffed in court. Doesn't N. need Josef to tell him that

141

friendship does exist despite all of history's contortions?

Josef's thoughts return to his sister-in-law: she hated the Communists because they disputed the sacred right of property. And then, he thought, she disputes my sacred right to my painting. He imagines the painting on a wall in his brick house in Copenhagen, and suddenly, with surprise, he realizes that the working-class suburb in the picture, that Czech Derain, that oddity of history, would be a disruption, an intrusive presence on the wall of that place. How could he ever have thought of taking it back with him? That painting doesn't belong there where he lives with his dear deceased. He'd never even mentioned it to her. That painting has nothing to do with her, with the two of them, with their life.

Then he thinks: if one little painting could disrupt his life with the dead woman, how much more disruptive would be the constant, unrelenting presence of a whole country, a country she never saw!

The sun dips toward the horizon; he is in the car on the road to Prague; the landscape slips away around him, the landscape of his small

142

country whose people were willing to die for it, and he knows that there exists something even smaller, with an even stronger appeal to his compassionate love: he sees two easy chairs turned to face each other, the lamp and the flower bowl on the window ledge, and the slender fir tree his wife planted in front of the house, a fir tree that looks like an arm she'd raised from afar to show him the way back home.

39

When Skacel locked himself into the house of sadness for three hundred years, it was because he expected his country to be engulfed forever by the empire of the East. He was wrong. Everyone is wrong about the future. Man can only be certain about the present moment. But is that quite true either? Can he really know the present? Is he in a position to make any judgment about it? Certainly not. For how can a person with no knowledge of the future understand the meaning of the present? If we do not know what future the pres-

143

ent is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or our hatred? In 1921 Arnold Schoenberg declares that because of him German music will continue to dominate the world for the next hundred years. Twelve years later he is forced to leave Germany forever. After the war, in America, laden with honors, he is still convinced that his work will be celebrated forever. He faults Igor Stravinsky for paying too much attention to his contemporaries and disregarding the judgment of the future. He expects posterity to be his most reliable ally. In a scathing letter to Thomas Mann he looks to the period "after two or three hundred years," when it will finally become clear which of the two was the greater, Mann or he! Schoenberg dies in 1951. For the next two decades his work is hailed as the greatest of the century, venerated by the most brilliant of the young composers, who declare themselves his disciples; but thereafter it recedes from both concert halls and memory. Who plays it nowadays, at the turn of this century? Who looks to him? No, I don't mean to make foolish fun of his presumptuousness and say he overesti-

144

mated himself. A thousand times no! Schoenberg did not overestimate himself. He overestimated the future.

Did he commit an error of thinking? No. His thinking was correct, but he was living in spheres that were too lofty. He was conversing with the greatest Germans, with Bach and Goethe and Brahms and Mahler, but, however intelligent they might be, conversations carried on in the higher stratospheres of the mind are always myopic about what goes on, with no reason or logic, down below: two great armies are battling to the death over sacred causes; but some minuscule plague bacterium comes along and lays them both low.

Schoenberg was aware that the bacterium existed. As early as 1930 he wrote: "Radio is an enemy, a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward, and any resistance is hopeless"; it "force-feeds us music . . . regardless of whether we want to hear it, or whether we can grasp it," with the result that music becomes just noise, a noise among other noises.

Radio was the tiny stream it all began with. Then came other technical means for reproduc-

145

ing, proliferating, amplifying sound, and the stream became an enormous river. If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, "regardless whether we want to hear it," it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don't know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can't tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying.

Schoenberg saw the bacterium, he was aware of the danger, but deep inside he did not grant it much importance. As I said, he was living in the very lofty spheres of the mind, and pride kept him from taking seriously an enemy so small, so vulgar, so repugnant, so contemptible. The only great adversary worthy of him, the sublime rival whom he battled with verve and severity, was Igor Stravinsky. That was the music he charged at, sword flashing, to win the favor of the future.

But the future was a river, a flood of notes where composers' corpses drifted among the fallen leaves and torn-away branches. One day Schoenberg's dead body, bobbing about in the raging waves, collided with Stravinsky's, and in a shamefaced late-day reconciliation the two of them journeyed on together toward nothingness (toward the nothingness of music that is absolute din).

40

To recall: when Irena stopped with her husband on the embankment of the river running through a French provincial town, she had seen felled trees on the far bank and at the same moment was hit by a sudden volley of music loosed from a loudspeaker. She had clapped her hands over her ears and burst into tears. A few months later she was at home with her dying husband. From the next apartment music thundered. Twice she rang the doorbell and begged the neighbors to turn off the sound system, and twice in vain. Finally she

146

147

shouted: "Stop that hideous racket! My husband is dying! Do you hear? Dying! Dying!"

During her first few years in France, she used to listen a lot to the radio, for it acquainted her with French language and life, but after Martin died, because of the music she had come to dislike, she no longer took pleasure in it; the news did not follow in sequence as it used to, instead the reports were set apart by three seconds, or eight or fifteen seconds, of that music, and year by year those little interludes swelled insidiously. She thereby grew intimately acquainted with what Schoenberg called "music become noise."