Odd Jobs (95 page)

Set forth in paragraphs with white spaces between, and in short chapters titled with the names of the railroad stations on the Moscow-Petushki line, the tale reads speedily and has the feverish, centrifugal verve of Gogol and Bely and that doctrinaire French alcoholic Alfred Jarry. In something of Jarry’s spirit of berserk calculation, Benny offers
cocktail recipes involving calibrated amounts of purified varnish, antiperspirant, verbena, and anti-dandruff shampoo. Weird efforts at precision approximate the spotty perceptions of drunkenness. Of a simpleton encountered on the train it is said, “He didn’t speak with his mouth, because that was always peering and was somewhere at the back of his head. He talked with his left nostril, and with such an effort—as if he had to lift his left nostril with his right nostril to do so.” Though its ambience is intoxication, the little novel has been soberly executed: a brisk pace is maintained, and the implication of an entire society soused and despairing is made to emerge gradually, with a certain force of horror. Everyone on the train accepts and gives drinks. The conductor is bribed with grams of vodka. Russian history is travestied as one immense, morose binge: “No wonder all Russia’s honest citizens were desperate, how could they be anything but! They couldn’t help writing about the lower classes, couldn’t help saving them, couldn’t help drinking in despair. The social democrats wrote and drank, in fact they drank as much as they wrote. But the Muzhiks couldn’t read, so they just drank without reading a word.… All the thinking men of Russia drank without coming up for breath, out of pity for the Muzhiks.” Soviet slogans and the Revolution itself are parodied amid the hazy vacillations of Benny’s consciousness; early in his ride, he ironically echoes the claims for spiritual superiority that Soviet propagandists have adopted from the nineteenth-century Slavophiles:

Yet, though jokingly,
Moscow Circles
shares in that same power—a directness, a fury, a humor, a freedom from self-pity that seem Russian. There is nothing whining about this portrait of self-destructive muddle and descending alcoholic night: a dark exhilaration, rather. If Erofeev has indeed allowed a photograph of himself and biographical facts to be published here, for the KGB to take note of, then we must feel some
exhilaration of our own at such bravado and at the courage still alive after sixty years of the Soviet system.

The picaresque hero—the rogue, the loser—is a traditional vehicle whereby an author conveys subversive thoughts. For Benny Erofeev, there is only a vague, unreachable “they” to blame: “Oh the bastards! They’ve turned my land into a shitty hell. They force people to hide their tears and expose their laughter!” But Ludvik Jahn, the hero of Milan Kundera’s
The Joke
, was a student proponent of Communism when it came to Czechoslovakia in February of 1948, and a youthful Party functionary; so his disillusion with this system, and its with him, are traumatic matters that form a suitable central topic for a thoughtful, intricate, ambivalent novel.
The Joke
was Kundera’s first novel, composed from 1962 to 1965, published in Prague in 1967 without a touch of censorship, and then banned (among many other books) when the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 and crushed Dubček’s brief “Prague spring.” Having made and unmade Kundera’s name in his native land,
The Joke
has enjoyed a considerable career abroad. Louis Aragon wrote a foreword for the French translation, calling it “one of the greatest novels of the century,” and translations appeared not only in all the languages of “free” Europe but in Polish and (though banned as it came off the press) Hungarian as well. The first English translation, in Great Britain, was sufficiently abridged and, in the author’s opinion, “mutilated” to warrant a letter of protest to the
Times Literary Supplement;
in spite of apologies and adjustments, the English versions have remained incomplete until the issue of this new translation, prepared by an American professor and overseen by the author, who since 1975 has been a resident of France.

It is an impressive work, if not altogether great yet with the reach of greatness in it. Like Kundera’s most recent work of fiction, the widely admired
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
, the novel contains a hero “fallen” from a socialist “paradise,” a running imagery of angels (perhaps traceable to the wealth of Counter-Reformation statuary in Czechoslovakia), a robust and subtle eroticism, a fervent and knowledgeable musicality (extending to fugal ingenuities in the narrative’s organization), and a philosopher’s concern with the importance that illusion and forgetting have for man and his systems. Less flashy and etherealized than the later novel,
The Joke
seems to me more substantial—more earnest in its explorations and less distractingly nimble in its counterpoint. Written
within and for a society controlled by Communists,
The Joke
contains none of the frivolous bitterness and nihilism common in the West; its bitterness has been hard-earned and is presented at risk.

Ludvik Jahn, a prize student, gifted musician, and rising Party loyalist, falls from official grace through a joke: he sends a girl he wishes to tease and impress a postcard reading:

Such irreverence on a postcard does not go overlooked; inexorably Ludvik is investigated, summoned, and expelled not only from the Party but from the university. The military is the compulsory option left to him, and he is assigned with other suspect recruits to the penal battalion, which wears a black insignia and mines coal. The process of his disgrace and the life of the penal camp are described with a convincing calm realism, the emphasis laid less on their cruelty than on the victim’s psychological adjustments. Ludvik’s fellow soldiers in the camp of outcasts are given human variety and plausible raisons d’être; even the brutal, histrionic boy commander who heads up the camp is analyzed and excused: “The young can’t help acting: they’re thrust immature into a mature world and must
act
mature.… Youth is a terrible thing: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and fancy costumes mouthing speeches they’ve memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand.” The one camp inmate who gets destroyed is the one fanatic Communist, pathetically determined to prove himself loyal. The others do what they must, slack where they can, and cope with their sexual frustration. They are paid for their labors and allowed some weekend leaves. Ludvik makes the acquaintance of a virtually mute, shabbily dressed girl of the people, Lucie, and his love for her, fed by the gifts of flowers she slips through the barbed wire that usually separates them, is the one pure note of his life. They never consummate this love. They fight when she denies him sex, and Lucie disappears. After five years of laboring, Ludvik manages to resume his studies and eventually rises to a high position in an unspecified research institute. (Kundera himself was a professor at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies.)

Ludvik Jahn’s memory of his expulsion from the Party, of the meeting that decided it—“Everyone present (and there were about a hundred of them, including my teachers and my closest friends), yes, every last one
of them raised his hand to approve my expulsion”—and of the former friend, Zemanek, who delivered the eloquent address recommending expulsion, has poisoned his life and his relation with humanity. “Since then, whenever I make new acquaintances, men or women with the potential of becoming friends or lovers, I project them back into that time, that place, and ask myself whether they would have raised their hands; no one has ever passed the test.” An opportunity arises, after fifteen years, to avenge himself upon Zemanek; Ludvik seizes it, with complex and unforeseen results. All the plot’s threads are wound around a busy three days Ludvik spends in his home town, an unnamed community in Moravia where, as it happens, Lucie has reappeared and the streets are filled with a collective enactment of the Ride of the Kings, an ancient folk ceremony that the Party now administers. The climax of the novel is too crowded, too freighted with symbolization and pronouncement, and aspects of the denouement border too closely on farce. But this terminal congestion testifies to the fullness of the material and the pressure with which it bore upon the author.

Two old friends Ludvik encounters are Jaroslav, first fiddle in the town’s cimbalom ensemble and an ardent folklorist, and Kostka, a doctor in the local hospital and a Christian whose faith has cost him several official posts. Both men, in their individual chapters of monologue, articulate their master passions and relate them to the country’s socialism with striking brilliance. Kostka believes that materialism is unnecessarily linked to socialism; he mentally addresses the atheist Ludvik:

Jaroslav finds the collective essence in folk music, and entertains us with a rapturous evocation of the levels of history he hears in the melodies of southern Moravia: brass-band tunes from the last seventy years, syncopated gypsy czardas from the nineteenth century, the songs of the native
Slav population in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, late-medieval Wallachian shepherd songs “completely innocent of chords and harmony,” four-tone mowing and harvest songs from the great ninth-century Moravian empire, and, finally, songs analogous to ancient Greek music—“the same Lydian, Phrygian, and Dorian tetrachords.” Jaroslav’s dream, unrealized, is to give his beloved folk music the worldwide currency of jazz, for, like jazz, it is a music of improvisation and rhythmic originality. While such fascinating passages of exposition run on, Kundera’s plot stands still, and his Ludvik, Jaroslav, and Kostka speak too much with one voice, so that a single erudite professor seems to be discussing from three angles how Marxism failed him. But the virtue of these passionate digressions, much as with Mann’s spoken lectures in
The Magic Mountain
, lies in their dense enrichment of the novel’s locus and the significant weight they add to its incidents.
The Joke
is not ultimately about Communism, or love, or misanthropy; it is about a patch of land called, in recent times, Czechoslovakia. Most novels that strike us as great, come to think of it, give us, through the consciousness of characters, a geography amplified by history, a chunk of the planet.

Czechoslovakia could well have become another Austria; the last of the satellite countries to fall into Russia’s orbit, and the most progressive and industrialized, it had itself—that is to say, a powerful domestic Communist movement—largely to blame. The ideology in
The Joke
is discussed in a geopolitical vacuum, as an internal debate encapsulated within each thinking citizen. Poland, on the other hand, has for centuries defined itself against the encroachments of the Germans to the west and the Muscovites to the east, and the ideology of Tadeusz Konwicki’s
The Polish Complex
is purely nationalistic. The novel’s hero—who, like the hero of
Moscow Circles
, bears the name of the author—is standing in line in front of a state-owned jewelry store in Warsaw, with dozens of others, waiting for a promised shipment of gold rings from the Soviet Union, the purchase of which will convert their sheaves of thousandzloty bills into something of soldier value. It is the day before Christmas. The rings never arrive; instead, Russia sends Poland a shipment of electric samovars, with a promise of five free trips to the Soviet Union to “customers with lucky sales slips.” But there is time in the waiting line for many conversations and encounters, and many reflections by the fifty-year-old, ailing, depressed author. He reflects that nations, like people, are lucky or unlucky:

The Polish Complex
is as zany as
Moscow Circles
and as intellectual as
The Joke
. Konwicki, born near Wilno, which is now part of Soviet Lithuania, fought as a teen-age Partisan in 1944–45, and in his early writings supported the new Communist order. A screenwriter and director as well as a productive author, he, until
The Polish Complex
, expressed his disillusions obliquely enough not to rouse the censors. Here in this banned novel, which was published in the underground Polish press in 1977, he seems to express a personal crisis as well as political exasperation; the Konwicki persona drinks too many “binoculars” (two tall hundred-gram glasses of vodka), has chronic pain in his chest, suffers a heart attack, and while recovering from the attack in a back room copulates with a voluptuous shop attendant who calls him “old man.” “I’ve been through it all,” he tells her. “I have no curiosity left, my curiosity’s exhausted, or actually, it was never satisfied and now nothing will satisfy it.” He sees himself as “a miserable creature with emphysema of the soul.” He invites a man, who claims to have been on his trail since 1951, to kill him, and steps out on the railing of a ruined balcony to make it easy for his assassin. The invitation is not taken, the night fritters away, and Christmas morn approaches by the glow of the feeble hope that “there is some sense to all this senselessness.”