The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Read online

  The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second home­land, for more than twenty years. He is the author of the novels The Joke. Life Is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story col­lection Laughable Loves—all originally in Czech. His most recent novels. Slowness and Identity, as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were origi -nally written in French.

  BOOKS BY MILAN KUNDER A

  Milan Kundera

  The

  Book of Laughter

  and Forgetting

  The Joke Laughable Lores Life Is Elsewhere

  Farewell Waltz (Earlier TRANSLATION: The Farewell Party

  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  The Unbearable Lightness of Being

  Immortality

  Slowness

  Identity

  Jacques and His Master (Play)

  The Art of the Novel (Essay) Testaments Betrayed (Essay)

  Translated from the French by Aaron Asher

  PERENNIAL CLASSICS

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint from previously published material. Editions Gallimard: excerpts from Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco, copyright © Editions Gallimard, 1959; excerpts from "Le Visage de la Paix," taken from Oeuvres Completes, Volume 2, by Paul Eluard, copyright © Editions Gallimard, 1968. Editions Bernard Grasset: excerpts from Parole de Femme (1976) by Annie Leclerc.

  THE BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING. KNIHA SMICHU A ZAPOMNENI copyright ©

  1978 by Milan Kundera. LE LIVRE DU RIRE ET DE L'OUBLI copyright © 1979 by Edi­tions Gallimard; an English-language translation was first published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1980. French translation revised by Milan Kundera copyright © 1985 by Editions Gallimard. Author's Note copyright © 1996 by Milan Kundera. New English-language translation copyright © 1996 by Aaron Asher. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any man­ner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

  HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales pro­motional use. For information please write: Special Markets Department, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

  First HarperPerennial edition published 1994.

  First HarperPerennial edition of the new English translation published 1996.

  First Perennial Classics edition published 1999.

  Perennial Classics are published by HarperPerennial, a division of HarperCollins

  Publishers.

  Designed by Caitlin Daniels

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the 1996 HarperPerennial edition as

  follows:

  Kundera, Milan.

  [Kniha smichu a zapomneni. English]

  The book of laughter and forgetting / Milan Kundera ; translated from the French by Aaron Asher.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-06-092608-2 I. Asher, Aaron. II. Title PG5039.21.U6K613 1996 891.8'635—dc20 96-33823

  ISBN 0-06-093214-7 (Perennial Classics) 03 ♦/RRD 10 9

  CONTENTS

  Author's Note

  vii

  PART ONE

  Lost Letters

  1

  PART TWO

  Mama

  35

  PART THREE

  The Angels

  75

  PART FOUR

  Lost Letters

  107

  PART FIVE

  Litost

  161

  PART SIX

  The Angels

  213

  PART SEVEN

  The Border

  263

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was written in Czech between 1976 and 1978. Between 1985 and 1987, I revised the French translations of all my nov­els (and stories) so deeply and completely that I was able to include, in the subsequent new editions, a note affirming that the French versions of these works "are equal in authenticity to the Czech texts." My interven­tion in these French versions did not result in variants of my original texts. I was led to it only by a wish for accuracy. The French translations have become, so to speak, more faithful to the Czech originals than the originals themselves.

  Two years ago, when Aaron Asher and I reread the English language version of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, we agreed on the need for a new transla­tion. I suggested translating from the authentic French edition and urged Aaron to take it on himself. Following his work very closely, I had the pleasure of seeing my text emerge in his translation as from a miraculous bath. At last I recognized my book. I thank Aaron for that with all my heart.

  Paris, December 1995

  PART ONE

  Lost Letters

  1

  In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square. That was a great turning point in the history of Bohemia. A fate­ful moment of the kind that occurs only once or twice a millennium.

  Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing close to him. It was snowing and cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald's head.

  The propaganda section made hundreds of thou­sands of copies of the photograph taken on the balcony where Gottwald, in a fur hat and surrounded by his comrades, spoke to the people. On that balcony the history of Communist Bohemia began. Every child knew that photograph, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums.

  Four years later, Clementis was charged with trea­son and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history and, of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on

  3

  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  the balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald's head.

  Lost Letters

  friends. The constitution did indeed guarantee free­dom of speech, but the laws punished anything that could be considered an attack on state security. One never knew when the state would start screaming that this word or that was an attempt on its security. So he decided to put his compromising papers in a safe place.

  But first he wanted to settle the Zdena business. He had phoned her in the town where she lived, but was unable to reach her. That cost him four days. He got through to her only yesterday. She had agreed to see him this afternoon.

  Mirek's seventeen-year-old son protested: Mirek would be unable to drive with his arm in a cast. And he did have trouble driving. Powerless and useless in its sling, the injured arm swayed on his chest. To shift gears, Mirek had to let go of the steering wheel.

  2

  It is 1971, and Mirek says: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

  With this he is trying to justify what his friends call carelessness: meticulously keeping a diary, preserving his correspondence, compiling the minutes of all the meetings where they discuss the situation and ponder what to do. He says to them: We're not doing anything that violates the constitution. To hide and feel guilty would be the beginning of defeat.

  A week before, at work with his crew on the roof of a building under construction, he looked down and was overcome by vertigo. He l
ost his balance, and his fall was broken by a badly joined beam that came loose; then they had to extricate him from under it. At first sight, the injury seemed serious, but a little later, when it turned out to be only an ordinary fracture of the forearm, he was pleased by the prospect of some weeks of vacation and the opportunity finally to take care of things he had never found the time for.

  He ended up agreeing with his more prudent

  4

  3

  He had had an affair with Zdena twenty-five years earlier, and all that remained from that time were some memories.

  One day, she had appeared for a date wiping her eyes with a handkerchief and sniffling. He asked her what was wrong. She told him that a Russian states-

  5

  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  man had died the day before. A certain Zhdanov, Arbuzov, or Masturbov. Judging by the abundance of her tears, the death of Masturbov had moved her more strongly than the death of her own father.

  Could that really have happened? Isn't it merely his present-day hatred that has invented those tears over Masturbov's death? No, it had certainly happened. But of course it's true that the immediate circumstances which had made these tears real and believable baffled him now, and that the memory had become as implau­sible as a caricature.

  All his memories of her were like that: They had come back together by streetcar from the apartment where they first made love. (Mirek noted with dis­tinct satisfaction that he had completely forgotten their coitions, that he was unable to recall even a sin­gle moment of them.) She sat on a corner bench in the jolting streetcar, her face sullen, closed, surpris­ingly old. When he asked her why she was so silent, she told him she had not been satisfied with their lovemaking. She said he had made love to her like an intellectual.

  In the political jargon of those days, the word "intel­lectual" was an insult. It indicated someone who did not understand life and was cut off from the people. All the Communists who were hanged at the time by other Communists were awarded such abuse. Unlike those who had their feet solidly on the ground, they were said to float in the air. So it was fair, in a way, that as punishment the ground was permanently

  6

  Lost Letters

  pulled out from under their feet, that they remained suspended a little above the floor.

  But what did Zdena mean by accusing him of mak­ing love like an intellectual?

  For one reason or another, Zdena was displeased with him, and just as she was capable of imbuing the most abstract relationship (the relationship with Masturbov, whom she didn't know) with the most con­crete feeling (embodied in a tear), so she was capable of giving the most concrete of acts an abstract signifi­cance and her own dissatisfaction a political name.

  4

  In the rearview mirror, he noticed a car persistently staying behind him. He had never doubted he was being followed, but up to now they had behaved with model discretion. Today a radical change had taken place: they wanted him to know they were there.

  Out in the country, about twenty kilometers from Prague, there was a high fence with a service station and auto-repair shop behind it. He had a pal working there who could replace his defective starter. He stopped the car in front of a red-and-white-striped barrier blocking the entrance. Beside it stood a heavy woman. Mirek waited for her to raise the barrier, but

  7

  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  she just stood there staring at him. He honked his horn, in vain. He stuck his head out of the open win­dow. "Didn't; they arrest you yet?" asked the woman.

  "No, they haven't arrested me yet," answered Mirek. "Could you raise the barrier?"

  She stared absently at him for some more long moments, then yawned and went back to her gate­keeper's shack. She sat down there behind a table, no longer looking his way.

  So he got out of the car, walked around the barrier, and went into the repair shop to find the mechanic he knew. The mechanic came back with him and raised the barrier himself (the heavy woman was still sitting in the gatekeeper's shack, staring absently), allowing Mirek to drive in.

  "You see, it's because you showed up too much on TV," said the mechanic. "All those dames know who you are."

  "Who is she?" asked Mirek.

  The mechanic told him that the invasion of Bohemia by the Russian army, whose occupation of the country had affected everything, had been for her a signal of a new life, out of the ordinary. She saw that people whq ranked above her (and everyone ranked above her) were being deprived, on the slightest allegation, of their powers, their positions, their jobs, and their bread, and that excited her; she started to denounce people herself.

  "So why is she still a gatekeeper? Why wasn't she promoted?"

  8

  Lost Letters

  The mechanic smiled. "She can't count to ten. They can't find another job for her. All they can do is let her go on denouncing people. For her, that's a promotion!"

  He raised the hood and looked at the engine.

  Mirek suddenly became aware of a man standing near him. He turned: the man was wearing a gray jacket, a white shirt with tie, and brown trousers. Above the thick neck and puffy face was a head of gray hair in a permanent wave. He had planted him­self there to watch the mechanic leaning under the raised hood.

  After a moment, the mechanic noticed him too, and he straightened up and said: "Looking for somebody?"

  The thick-necked man with the permanent wave answered: "No. I'm not looking for anybody."

  The mechanic leaned over the engine again and said: "In Wenceslaus Square, in Prague, a guy is throwing up. Another guy comes up to him, pulls a long face, shakes his head, and says: 'I know just what you mean.'"

  5

  The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be

  9

  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgot­ten everything.

  At a time when history still made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator's tale but rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the over-familiar banality of private life.

  Since there is not a single historic event we can count on being commonly known, I must speak of events that took place a few years ago as if they were a thousand years old: In 1939, the German army entered Bohemia, and the Czech state ceased to exist. In 1945, the Russian army entered Bohemia, and the country once again was called an independent repub­lic. The people were enthusiastic about the Russia that had driven out the Germans, and seeing in the Czech Communist Party its faithful arm, they became sym­pathetic to it. So the Communists took power in February 1948 with neither bloodshed nor violence, but greeted by the cheers of about half the nation. And now, please note: the half that did the cheering was the more dynamic, the more intelligent, the better.

  Lost Letters

  Yes, say what you will, the Communists were more intelligent. They had an imposing program. A plan for an entirely new world where everyone would find a place. The opponents had no great dream, only some tiresome and threadbare moral principles, with which they tried to patch the torn trousers of the established order. So it's no surprise that the enthusiasts, the spir­ited ones, easily won out over the halfhearted and the cautious, and rapidly set about to realize their dream, that idyll of justice for all.

  I emphasize: idyll and for all, because all human beings have always aspired to an idyll, to that garden where nightingales sing, to that realm of harmony wher
e the world does not rise up as a stranger against man and man against other men, but rather where the world and all men are shaped from one and the same matter. There, everyone is a note in a sublime Bach fugue, and anyone who refuses to be one is a mere use­less and meaningless black dot that need only be caught and crushed between thumb and finger like a flea.

  There were people who immediately understood that they did not have the right temperament for the idyll and tried to go abroad. But since the idyll is in essence a world for all, those who tried to emigrate showed themselves to be deniers of the idyll, and instead of going abroad they went behind bars. Thousands and tens of thousands of others soon joined them, including many Communists like the foreign minister, Clementis, who had lent his fur hat to Gottwald. Timid lovers held

  10

  11

  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  hands on the movie screens, adultery was harshly sup­pressed by citizens' tribunals of honor, nightingales sang, and the body of Clementis swung like a bell ring­ing in the new dawn of humanity.

  And then those young, intelligent, and radical peo­ple suddenly had the strange feeling of having sent out into the world an act that had begun to lead a life of its own, had ceased to resemble the idea it was based on, and did not care about those who had created it. Those young and intelligent people started to scold their act, they began to call to it, to rebuke it, to pur­sue it, to give chase to it. If I were to write a novel about that gifted and radical generation, I would call it In Pursuit of an Errant Act.