Ignorance Read online

  Ignorance

  By Milan Kundera

  "By far his most successful [novel] since The Unbearable Lightness of Being."

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  Irena and Josef meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence "their memories no longer match."

  'Erudite and playful___An impassioned account of the emigre as a character on the stage of European history."

  —Maureen Howard, New York Times

  'Haunting...thunderclaps of insight, absurd metaphors and characters who haplessly misunderstand one another collide in his hypnotically repetitive and bitingly humorous prose."

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  'A voice still masterful in its antennae for'the human condition.'... For Milan Kundera, life is plainly elsewhere and where it has always been: in the eye of its fiercely intelligent, endlessly ruminative beholder."

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  IGNORANCE

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  "What are you still doing here?" Her tone wasn't harsh, but it wasn't kindly, either; Sylvie was indignant.

  "Where should I be?" Irena asked.

  "Home!"

  "You mean this isn't my home anymore?"

  Of course she wasn't trying to drive Irena out of France or implying that she was an undesirable alien: "You know what I mean!"

  "Yes, I do know, but aren't you forgetting that I've got my work here? My apartment? My children?"

  "Look, I know Gustaf. He'll do anything to help you get back to your own country. And your daughters, let's not kid ourselves! They've already got their own lives. Good Lord, Irena, it's so fascinating, what's going on in your country! In a situation like that, things always work out."

  "But Sylvie! It's not just a matter of practical things, the job, the apartment. I've been living here for twenty years now. My life is here!"

  "Your people have a revolution going on!"

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  Sylvie spoke in a tone that brooked no objection. Then she said no more. By her silence she meant to tell Irena that you don't desert when great events are happening.

  "But if I go back to my country, we won't see each other anymore," said Irena, to put her friend in an uncomfortable position.

  That emotional demagognery miscarried. Sylvie's voice warmed: "Darling, I'll come see you! I promise, I promise!''

  They were seated across from each other, over two empty coffee cups. Irena saw tears of emotion in Sylvie's eyes as her friend bent toward her and gripped her hand: "It will be your great return." And again: "Your great return."

  Repeated, the words took on such power that, deep inside her, Irena saw them written out with capital initials: Great Return. She dropped her resistance: she was captivated by images suddenly welling up from books read long ago, from films, from her own memory, and maybe from her ancestral memory: the lost son home again with his aged mother; the man returning to his beloved from whom cruel destiny had torn him away; the family homestead we all carry about within us;

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  the rediscovered trail still marked by the forgotten footprints of childhood; Odysseus sighting his island after years of wandering; the return, the return, the great magic of the return.

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  The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express that fundamental notion most Europeans can utilize a word derived from the Greek (nostalgia, nostalgie) as well as other words with roots in their national languages: anoranza, say the Spaniards; saudade, say the Portuguese. In each language these words have a different semantic nuance. Often they mean only the sadness caused by the impossibility of returning to one's country: a longing for country, for home. What in English is called "homesickness." Or in German: Heimweh. In Dutch: heimwee. But this reduces that great notion to just its spatial element. One of the oldest European languages, Icelandic (like English)

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  makes a distinction between two terms: soknudur: nostalgia in its general sense; and heimpra: longing for the homeland. Czechs have the Greek-derived nostalgie as well as their own noun, stesk, and their own verb; the most moving Czech expression of love: styska se mi po tobe ("I yearn for you," "I'm nostalgic for you"; "I cannot bear the pain of your absence"). In Spanish anoranza comes from the verb anorar (to feel nostalgia), which comes from the Catalan enyorar, itself derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss). In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there. Certain languages have problems with nostalgia: the French can only express it by the noun from the Greek root, and have no verb for it; they can say Je m 'ennuie de toi (I miss you), but the word s'ennuyer is weak, cold—anyhow too light for so grave a feeling. The Germans rarely use the Greek-derived term Nostalgie, and tend to say Sehnsucht in speaking of the desire for an absent thing. But

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  Sehnsucht can refer both to something that has existed and to something that has never existed (a new adventure), and therefore it does not necessarily imply the nostos idea; to include in Sehnsucht the obsession with returning would require adding a complementary phrase: Sehnsucht nach der Vergangenheit, nach der verlorenen Kindheit, nach der ersten Liebe (longing for the past, for lost childhood, for a first love).

  The dawn of ancient Greek culture brought the birth of the Odyssey, the founding epic of nostalgia. Let us emphasize: Odysseus, the greatest adventurer of all time, is also the greatest nostalgic. He went off (not very happily) to the Trojan War and stayed for ten years. Then he tried to return to his native Ithaca, but the gods' intrigues prolonged his journey, first by three years jammed with the most uncanny happenings, then by seven more years that he spent as hostage and lover with Calypso, who in her passion for him would not let him leave her island.

  In Book Five of the Odyssey, Odysseus tells Calypso: "As wise as she is, I know that Penelope cannot compare to you in stature or in beauty. . . . And yet the only wish I wish each day is to be

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  back there, to see in my own house the day of my return!" And Homer goes on: "As Odysseus spoke, the sun sank; the dusk came: and beneath the vault deep within the cavern, they withdrew to lie and love in each other's arms."

  A far cry from the life of the poor emigre that Irena had been for a long while now. Odysseus lived a real dolce vita there in Calypso's land, a life of ease, a life of delights. And yet, between the dolce vita in a foreign place and the risky return to his home, he chose the return. Rather than ardent exploration of the unknown (adventure), he chose the apotheosis of the known (return). Rather than the infinite (for adventure never intends to finish), he chose the finite (for the return is a reconciliation with the finitude of life).

  Without waking him, the Phaeacian seamen laid Odysseus, still wrapped in his bedding, near an olive tree on Ithaca's shore, and then departed. Such was his journey's end. He slept on, exhausted. When he awoke, he could not tell where he was. Then Athena wiped the mist from his eyes and it was rapture; the rapture of the Great Return; the ecstasy of the known; the music that sets the air vibrating between earth and

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  heaven: he saw the harbor he had known since childhood, the mountain overlooking it, and he fondled the old olive tree to confirm that it was still the same as it had been twenty years earlier.

  In 1950, when Arnold Schoenberg had been in the United States for seventeen years, a journalist asked hi
m a few treacherously innocent questions: Is it true that emigration causes artists to lose their creativity? That their inspiration withers when it no longer has the roots of their native land to nourish it?

  Imagine! Five years after the Holocaust! And an American journalist won't forgive Schoenberg his lack of attachment to that chunk of earth where, before his very eyes, the horror of horrors started! But it's a lost cause. Homer glorified nostalgia with a laurel wreath and thereby laid out a moral hierarchy of emotions. Penelope stands at its summit, very high above Calypso.

  Calypso, ah, Calypso! I often think about her. She loved Odysseus. They lived together for seven years. We do not know how long Odysseus shared Penelope's bed, but certainly not so long as that. And yet we extol Penelope's pain and sneer at Calypso's tears.

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  Like blows from an ax, important dates cut deep gashes into Europe's twentieth century. The First World War, in 1914; the second; then the third— the longest one, known as "the Cold"—ending in 1989 with the disappearance of Communism. Beyond these important dates that apply to Europe as a whole, dates of secondary importance define the fates of particular nations: the year 1936, with the civil war in Spain; 1956, with Russia's invasion of Hungary; 1948, when the Yugoslavs rose up against Stalin; and 1991, when they set about slaughtering one another. The Scandinavians, the Dutch, the English are privileged to have had no important dates since 1945, which has allowed them to live a delightfully null half century.

  The history of the Czechs in the twentieth century is graced with a remarkable mathematical beauty owing to the triple repetition of the number twenty. In 1918, after several centuries, they achieved their independence, and in 1938 they lost it.

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  In 1948 the Communist revolution, imported from Moscow, inaugurated the country's second twenty-year span; that one ended in 1968 when, enraged by the country's insolent self-emancipation, the Russians invaded with half a million soldiers.

  The occupier took over in full force in the autumn of 1969 and then, to everyone's surprise, took off in autumn 1989—quietly, politely, as did all the Communist regimes in Europe at that time: and that was the third twenty-year span.

  Our century is the only one in which historic dates have taken such a voracious grip on every single person's life. Irena's existence in France cannot be understood without first analyzing the dates. In the fifties and sixties, emigres from the Communist countries were not much liked there; the French considered the sole true evil to be fascism: Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, the dictators in Latin America. Only gradually, late in the sixties and into the seventies, did they come to see Communism, too, as an evil, although one of a lesser degree—say, evil number two. That was when, in 1969, Irena and her husband emigrated to France. They soon realized that com-

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  pared with the number one evil, the catastrophe that had befallen their country was not bloody enough to impress their new friends. To make their position clear, they took to saying something like this:

  "Horrible as it is, a fascist dictatorship will disappear when its dictator does, and therefore people can keep up hope. But Communism, which is sustained by the enormous Russian civilization, is an endless tunnel for a Poland, a Hungary (not even to mention an Estonia!). Dictators are perishable, Russia is eternal. The misery of the countries we come from lies in the utter absence of hope."

  This was the accurate expression of their thinking, and to illustrate it, Irena would quote a stanza from Jan Skacel, a Czech poet of the period: he describes the sadness surrounding him; he wants to take that sadness in his hands, carry it far off somewhere and build himself a house out of it, he wants to lock himself inside that house for three hundred years and for three hundred years not open the door, not open the door to anyone!

  Three hundred years? Skacel wrote those lines in the 1970s and he died in 1989, in autumn, just

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  a few days before those three hundred years of sadness he saw stretching ahead crumbled in just a few days: people filled the Prague streets, and the key rings jangling in their lifted hands rang in the coming of a new age.

  Did Skacel have it wrong when he spoke of three hundred years? Of course he did. All predictions are wrong, that's one of the few certainties granted to mankind. But though predictions may be wrong, they are right about the people who voice them, not about their future but about their experience of the present moment. During what I call their first twenty-year span (between 1918 and 1938), the Czechs believed that their republic had all infinity ahead of it. They had it wrong, but precisely because they were wrong, they lived those years in a state of joy that led their arts to flourish as never before.

  After the Russian invasion, since they had no inkling of Communism's eventual end, they again believed they were inhabiting an infinity, and it was not the pain of their current life but the vacuity of the future that sucked dry their energies, stifled their courage, and made that third twenty-year span so craven, so wretched.

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  In 1921, convinced that with his twelve-tone system he had opened far-reaching prospects to musical history, Arnold Schoenberg declared that thanks to him, predominance (he didn't say "glory," he said Vorherrschaft, "predominance") was guaranteed to German music (he, a Viennese, didn't say "Austrian," he said "German") for the next hundred years (I quote him exactly, he spoke of "a hundred years"). A dozen years after that prophecy, in 1933, he was forced, as a Jew, to leave Germany (the very Germany for which he sought to guarantee Vorherrschaft), as was all music based on his twelve-tone system (which was condemned as incomprehensible, elitist, cosmopolitan, and hostile to the German spirit).

  Schoenberg's prognosis, however mistaken, is nonetheless indispensable for anyone seeking to understand the meaning of his work, which he considered not destructive, hermetic, cosmopolitan, individualistic, difficult, or abstract but, rather, deeply rooted in "German soil" (yes, he spoke of "German soil"); Schoenberg believed he was writing not a fascinating epilogue to the history of Europe's great music (which is how I tend to see his work) but the prologue to a glorious future stretching farther than the eye could see.

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  From the very first weeks after emigrating, Irena began to have strange dreams: she is in an airplane that switches direction and lands at an unknown airport; uniformed men with guns are waiting for her at the foot of the gangway; in a cold sweat, she recognizes the Czech police. Another time she is strolling in a small French city when she sees an odd group of women, each holding a beer mug, run toward her, call to her in Czech, laugh with fake cordiality, and in terror Irena realizes that she is in Prague. She cries out, she wakes up.

  Martin, her husband, was having the same dreams. Every morning they would talk about the horror of that return to their native land. Then, in the course of a conversation with a Polish friend, an emigre herself, Irena realized that all emigres had those dreams, every one, without exception; at first she was moved by that nighttime fraternity of people unknown to one another, then somewhat irritated: how could the very private experience of a dream be a collective event? what was unique about her soul, then? But that's

  enough of questions that have no answers! One thing was certain: on any given night, thousands of emigres were all dreaming the same dream in numberless variants. The emigration-dream: one of the strangest phenomena of the second half of the twentieth century.

  These dream-nightmares seemed to her all the more mysterious in that she was afflicted simultaneously with an uncontrollable nostalgia and another, completely opposite, experience: landscapes from her country kept appearing to her by day. No, this was not daydreaming, lengthy and conscious, willed; it was something else entirely: visions of landscapes would blink on in her head unexpectedly, abruptly, swiftly, and go out instantly. She would be talking to her boss and all at once, like a flash of lightning, she'd see a path through a field. She would be jostled on the Metro and suddenly, a narrow lane in some leafy Prague neighborhood would ris
e up before her for a split second. All day long these fleeting images would visit her to assuage the longing for her lost Bohemia.

  The same moviemaker of the subconscious who, by day, was sending her bits of the home

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  landscape as images of happiness, by night would set up terrifying returns to that same land. The day was lit with the beauty of the land forsaken, the night by the horror of returning to it. The day would show her the paradise she had lost; the night, the hell she had fled.

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  Loyal to the tradition of the French Revolution, the Communist countries hurled anathema at emigration, deemed to be the most odious treason. Everyone who stayed abroad was convicted in absentia in their home country, and their compatriots did not dare have any contact with them. Still, as time passed, the severity of the anathema weakened, and a few years before 1989, Irena's mother, an inoffensive pensioner recently wid-owed, was granted an exit visa for a weeklong trip to Italy through the government travel agency; the following year she decided to spend five days in Paris and secretly see her daughter. Touched, and full of pity for a mother she imagined had

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  grown elderly, Irena booked her a hotel room and sacrificed some vacation time so she could be with her the whole while.

  "You don't look too bad," the mother said when they first met. Then, laughing, she added: "Neither do I, actually. When the border policeman looked at my passport, he said: 'This is a false passport, Madame! This is not your date of birth!'" Instantly Irena recognized her mother as the person she had always known, and she had the sense that nothing had changed in those nearly twenty years. The pity she'd felt for an elderly mother evaporated. Daughter and mother faced off like two beings outside time, like two timeless essences.

  But wasn't it awful of the daughter not to be delighted at the presence of her mother who, after seventeen years, had come to see her? Irena mustered all her rationality, all her moral discipline, to behave like a devoted daughter. She took her mother to dinner at the restaurant up in the Eiffel Tower; she took her on a tour boat to show her Paris from the Seine; and because the mother wanted to see art, she took her to the Musee Picasso. In the second gallery the mother stopped