Ignorance (7 page)

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(apparently, intercourse as proof of love counted more for him than the physical act itself) "... but I feel let down: there is no ecstasy in our encounters. It terrifies me to imagine our life together." And farther along: "It's so tiring, faithfulness that does not spring from true passion."

"Ecstasy"; "life together"; "faithfulness"; "true passion." Josef lingers over these words. What could they have meant to an immature person? They were at the same time enormous and vague, and their power lay precisely in their nebulous nature. He was on a quest for sensations he had never experienced, did not understand; he was looking for them in his partner (on the watch for each little emotion her face might reflect), he looked for them in himself (for interminable hours of introspection), but he was always frustrated. At that point he wrote (and Josef has to acknowledge the startling perspicacity of this remark): "The desire to feel compassion for her and the desire to make her suffer are one and the same desire." And indeed he behaved as if he were guided by those words: in order to feel compassion (in order to reach the ecstasy of compassion), he did everything possible to see his

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girlfriend suffer; he tortured her: "I provoked her to doubts about my love. She fell into my arms, I consoled her, I wallowed in her sadness and, for a moment, I could feel a tiny flame of arousal flare up in me."

Josef tries to understand the virgin boy, to put himself in his skin, but he is not capable of it. That sentimentality mixed with sadism, that whole business is completely contrary to his tastes and to his nature. He tears a blank page out of the diary, picks up a pencil, and copies out the sentence "I wallowed in her sadness." He contemplates the two handwritings for a long time: the one from long ago is a little clumsy, but the letters are the same shape as today's. The resemblance is upsetting, it irritates him, it shocks him. How can two such alien, such opposite beings have the same handwriting? What common essence is it that makes a single person of him and this little snot?

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Neither the virgin boy nor the high-school girl had access to an apartment to be alone in; the intercourse she promised him had to be postponed till the summer vacation, which was a long way off. In the meantime they spent their time hand in hand on the sidewalks or the forest paths (young lovers in those days were tireless walkers), sentenced to repetitive conversations and fondlings that led nowhere. There in that desert without ecstasy, he informed her that an unavoidable separation loomed, as he would soon be moving to Prague.

Josef is surprised to read this; moving to Prague? Such a plan was quite simply impossible, for his family had never had any intention of leaving their city. And suddenly the memory rises up out of oblivion, disagreeably present and vivid: he is standing on a forest path, in front of that girl, and he's talking to her about Prague! He is talking about moving away, and he's lying! He recalls perfectly his awareness of lying, he sees himself talking and lying, lying in order to see the high-school girl cry!

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He reads: "Sobbing, she clasped me to her. I was extremely alert to every sign of her pain, and I regret that I no longer remember the exact number of her sobs."

Is this possible? "Extremely alert to every sign of her pain," he counted the sobs! That torturer-accountant! That was his way of feeling, of living, of savoring, of enacting love! He held her in his arms, she sobbed, and he counted!

He goes on reading: "Then she calmed down and told me: 'Now I understand those poets who stayed faithful unto death.' She looked up at me, and her lips twitched." The word "twitched" is underlined in the diary.

Josef recalls neither her words nor her twitching lips. The only vivid recollection is the moment when he was spouting those lies about moving to Prague. Nothing else remains in his memory. He strains to call up the features of that exotic girl who compared herself not to pop singers or tennis players but to poets, poets "who stayed faithful unto death"! He savors the anachronism of the carefully recorded expression, and feels more and more fondness for that girl, so sweetly old-fashioned. The one thing he holds against her is

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her having been in love with a detestable snot whose only desire was to torture her.

Oh, that snot! Josef can see him staring at the girl's lips, those twitching lips—uncontrolled, uncontrollable despite herself! He must have been aroused by the sight, as if he were watching an orgasm (a female orgasm, a thing he would have no idea of!) Maybe he got an erection! He must have!

Enough! Josef turns the pages and learns that the high-school girl was preparing to go off to the mountains for a week of skiing with her class; the little snot protested, threatened to break up with her; she told him the trip was a school requirement; he refused to listen and flew into a rage (another ecstasy! an ecstasy of rage!) "If you go, it's the end between us. I swear—the end!"

What did she answer? Did her lips twitch when she heard his hysterical outburst? Not likely, because that uncontrolled movement of the lips, that virginal orgasm, always aroused him so much that he would certainly have mentioned it. Apparently this time he overestimated his power. For there are no further references to his schoolgirl. There follow a few accounts of vapid dates with another girl (Josef skips over some lines),

and the diary finishes with the closing days of the school year (he has one more to go) just when an older woman (this one he remembers very well) introduced him to physical love and moved his life onto other tracks; he had stopped writing all that down by now; the diary did not outlive its author's virginity; a very brief chapter of his life came to an end, and, having neither sequel nor consequence, was relegated to the dim cupboard of cast-off items.

Josef sets about ripping the diary pages into tiny scraps. The gesture is probably excessive and useless; but he feels the need to give free rein to his aversion; the need to annihilate the little snot so that never (even if only in a bad dream) would he be mistaken for him, be vilified in his stead, be held responsible for his words and his acts!

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At that moment the telephone rang. He remembered the woman from the Paris airport, and picked up the phone.

"You won't recognize me," said a voice.

"I do, sure I do!"

"But you can't know who you're talking to."

No, he was mistaken; it wasn't the woman from the airport. It was one of those blase drawls, those unpleasantly nasal voices. He was disconcerted. She introduced herself: it was the daughter from her previous marriage of the woman he'd divorced after a few months of life together, thirty years back.

"No, you're right, I couldn't know who I was talking to," he said with a forced laugh.

Since the divorce he had never seen them, neither his ex-wife nor his stepdaughter, who in his memory was still a little girl.

"I need to talk to you," she said.

He regretted having begun the conversation so enthusiastically; he was unhappy with her tone of familiarity, but he couldn't do anything about that now: "How did you find out I was here? Nobody knows."

"Well, really."

"What do you mean?"

"Your sister-in-law."

"I didn't know you knew her."

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"Mama does."

Immediately he pictured the alliance that had sprung up spontaneously between those two women.

"So then, you're calling on your mother's behalf?"

The blase voice turned insistent. "I need to talk to you. It's absolutely necessary."

"You, or your mother?"

"Me."

"Tell me first what this is about."

"Do you want to see me or not?"

"I'm asking you to tell me what it's about."

The blase voice turned aggressive: "If you don't want to see me, just say so right out."

He detested her insistence but did not dare put her off. Keeping secret her reason for the meeting was a very effective gambit on his stepdaughter's part: he grew uneasy.

"I'm only here for a couple of days; I'm very busy. I might be able to squeeze in a half hour at most. . .," and he named a cafe in Prague for the day he was leaving.

"You won't be there."

"I'll be there."

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When he hung up he felt a kind of nausea. What could those women want from him? Some advice? People who need advice don't act aggressive. They wanted to make trouble for him. Prove they existed. Take up his time. But then why had he agreed to meet her? Out of curiosity? Oh, come on—it was out of fear! He had given in to an old reflex: to protect himself he always tried to be fully informed in advance. But protect himself? These days? Against what? There was certainly no danger. Quite simply, his stepdaughter's voice enveloped him in a fog of old recollections: intrigues; interfering relatives; abortion; tears; slander; blackmail; emotional bullying; angry scenes; anonymous letters: the whole concierge conspiracy.

The life we've left behind us has a bad habit of stepping out of the shadows, of bringing complaints against us, of taking us to court. Living far from Bohemia, Josef had lost the habit of keeping his past in mind. But the past was there, waiting for him, watching him. Uneasy, Josef tried to think about other things. But when a man has come to look at the land of his past, what can he think about if not his past? In the two days left to him, what should he do? Pay a visit to the town

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where he'd had his veterinary practice? Go and stand, moist-eyed, before the house he used to live in? He hadn't the slightest desire to do that. Was there anyone at all among the people he used to know whom he would—sincerely—like to see? N.'s face emerged. Way back, when the rabble-rousers of the revolution accused the very young Josef of God knows what (in those years everyone, at some time or another, stood accused of God knows what), N., who was an influential Communist at the university, had stood up for him without worrying about Josef's opinions and family background. That was how they'd become friends, and if Josef could reproach himself for anything, it would be for having largely forgotten about the man during the twenty years since his emigration.

"The Red Commissar! Everyone was terrified of him!" his sister-in-law had said, implying that, out of self-interest, Josef had attached himself to a stalwart of the regime. Oh, those poor countries shaken by great historical dates! When the battle is over, everybody stampedes off on punitive expeditions into the past to hunt down the guilty parties. But who were the guilty parties? The

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Communists who won in 1948? Or their ineffective adversaries who lost? Everybody was hunting down the guilty and everybody was being hunted down. When Josef's brother joined the Party so as to go on with his studies, his friends condemned him as an opportunist. That had made him detest Communism all the more, blaming it for his craven behavior, and his wife had focused her own hatred on people like N., who, as a convinced Marxist before the revolution, had of his own free will (and thus unpardonably) helped to bring about a system she held to be the greatest of all evils.

The telephone rang again. He picked it up, and this time he was sure he recognized her: "Finally!"

"Oh, I'm so glad to hear your 'finally!' Were you waiting for my call?"

"Impatiently."

"Really?"

"I was in a hideous mood! Hearing your voice changes everything!"

"Oh, you're making me very happy! How I wish you were with me—right here, where I am."

"How sorry I am that I can't be."

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"You're sorry? Really?"

"Really."

"Will I see you before you leave?"

"Yes, you'll see me."

"For sure?"

"For sure! We'll have lunch together the day after tomorrow!"

"I'll be delighted."

He gave her the address of his hotel in Prague.

As he hung up, his glance fell on the shredded diary, now only a small pile of paper strips on the table. He picked up the whole bundle and merrily tossed it into the wastebasket.

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Three years before 1989, Gustaf had opened an office in Prague for his company, but he only went there for a few visits each year. That was enough for him to love the city and to see it as an ideal place to live; not only out of love for Irena but also (maybe even especially) because there he felt, even more than in Paris, cut off from Sweden,

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from his family, from his past life. When Communism unexpectedly vanished from Europe, he was quick to tout Prague to his company as a strategic location for conquering new markets. He saw to the purchase of a handsome baroque house for office space, and set aside two rooms for himself up under the eaves. Meanwhile Irena's mother, who lived alone in a villa on the city's outskirts, put her whole second floor at Gustaf's disposal; he could thus switch living quarters as the mood struck him.

Sleepy and unkempt during the Communist period, Prague came awake before his eyes: it filled up with tourists, lit up with new shops and restaurants, dressed up with restored and repainted baroque houses. "Prague is my town!" he would exclaim in English. He was in love with the city: not like a patriot searching every corner of the land for his roots, his memories, the traces of his dead, but like a traveler responding with surprise and amazement, like a child wandering dazzled through an amusement park and reluctant ever to leave it. Having learned Prague's history, he would declaim at length to anyone who'd listen about its streets, its palaces, its churches,

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and hold forth endlessly on its stars: on Emperor Rudolf (protector of painters and alchemists), on Mozart (who, says the gossip, had a mistress there), on Franz Kafka (who though miserable throughout his lifetime in this city had, thanks to the travel agencies, turned into its patron saint).

At an unhoped-for speed Prague forgot the Russian language that for forty years all its inhabitants had been made to learn from grade school onward, and now, eager for applause on the world's proscenium, displayed to the visitors its new attire of English-language signs and labels. In Gustaf's company offices the staff, the trading associates, the rich customers all addressed him in English, so Czech was no more than an impersonal murmur, a background of sound against which only Anglo-American phonemes stood forth as human words. And one day when Irena landed in Prague, he greeted her at the airport not with their usual French "Salut!" but with a "Hello!"