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the letter, but it took me a while to realize that it was from R. The handwriting was entirely different. She must have been very agitated when she wrote that letter. She had tried so hard to phrase it in terms only 1 could understand that even I understood only half of it. The only thing I really grasped was that/after a year, my identity as author had been discovered.
At that time I had a studio apartment on Bartolomejska Street in Prague. It's a short but famous street. All but two of the buildings (one of which I lived in) belong to the police. When I looked out of my large fifth-floor window, I saw, up above the rooftops, the towers of Hradcany Castle and, down below, the police courtyards. Up above paraded the glorious history of the Bohemian kings, down below unfolded the history of renowned prisoners. They had all passed through there, Kalandra and Horakova, Slansky and Clementis, and my friends Sabata and Hubl.
The young man (everything about him indicated he was R.'s fiance) looked around with great caution. He clearly thought the police had hidden microphones in my apartment. With silent nods we agreed to go outside. We walked at first in continuing silence, and only when we entered the din of Narodni Avenue did he tell me that R. wished to see me and that a friend of his, whom I didn't know, had offered to lend his apartment in a suburb for this secret meeting.
So the next day, I took a long streetcar ride, my hands freezing in the December cold, to the outskirts of Prague, to the dormitory towns that were entirely empty at that midmorning hour. Finding the right building
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thanks to the young man's description, I took the eleva-for to the fourth floor, looked at the calling cards fas-tened to the doors, and rang the bell at one of them. The apartment was silent. I rang again, but no one came to the door. I went back down to the street and walked around in the freezing cold for half an hour, thinking R. had been delayed and we would meet on the deserted sidewalk on her way from the streetcar stop. But no one came. I took the elevator up again to the fourth floor. I rang once more. A few seconds later, I heard the sound of water flushing from inside the apartment. In that instant it was as though someone had dropped an ice cube of anguish into me. Inside my own body I felt the fear of the young woman unable to open the door because her anxiety was upsetting her bowels.
When she opened the door, she was pale but smiling, trying hard to be as pleasant as always. She joked awkwardly about our being alone at last in an empty apartment. We sat down, and she told me she had recently been summoned by the police. They had interrogated her for a whole day. The first two hours, they asked her about a lot of unimportant things, making her feel so in control of the situation that she joked with them and insolently asked if they expected her to miss lunch over such foolishness. Just then they asked her: So who is it, dear Miss R., that writes the astrology articles for your magazine? She blushed and tried to say something about a well-known physicist whose name she couldn't reveal. They asked her: Do you know Mr. Kundera? She said she knew me. Was there anything wrong with that? They replied:
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The Angels
There's nothing wrong with that, but do you know that Mr. Kundera is interested in astrology? I don't know anything about it, she said. You don't know anything about it? they asked, laughing. All Prague is talking about it, and you don't know anything? She spoke again for a few moments about the nuclear physicist, and then one of the cops started shouting at her: Just stop lying!
She told them the truth. The editorial board wanted to have an interesting astrology column but didn't know anybody who could write one, and R. knew me and so she asked me to help out. She was certain she hadn't violated any law. They said she was right. She hadn't violated any law. She had only infringed the internal administrative regulations that prohibited working with persons guilty of having abused the confidence of the party and the state. She pointed out that nothing very serious had occurred: Mr. Kundera's name had remained hidden under a pseudonym and thus couldn't have offended anyone. As for the fees Mr. Kundera was paid, they weren't even worth mentioning. Again they said she was right: nothing serious had happened, that was true, and they were merely going to draw up a statement about what actually had happened and she was going to sign it and would have nothing to worry about.
She signed the statement and two days later the editor in chief called her in and told her she was dismissed, effective immediately. The same day she went to the radio offices, where she had friends who had long been offering her a job. They greeted her happily, but when she came the next day to fill out the forms,
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the head of personnel, who liked her very much, met her with a look of distress: "What a stupid thing you've done, my dear! You've messed up your life. There's absolutely nothing I can do for you."
Initially she hesitated to talk to me, because she had to promise the police not to breathe a word about the interrogation to anyone. But when she was again summoned by the police (she was due there the next day), she decided it would be best to meet me in secret to agree on a story and avoid contradicting each other if I too was summoned.
Please understand that R. was not fearful but young and unworldly. She had just sustained her first unexpected, incomprehensible blow, and she would never forget it. I realized I had been chosen to be the mailman who delivers warnings and punishments to people, and I began to be afraid of myself.
"Do you think," she asked me with a lump in her throat, "they know about the thousand crowns you got for the horoscope?"
'Don't worry. Someone who spent three years in Moscow studying Marxism-Leninism wouldn't dare admit he had his horoscope cast."
She laughed, and though the laugh lasted barely half a second, it rang in my ears like a tentative promise of salvation. For it was just this laughter I wanted to hear when I wrote those silly little articles on Pisces, Virgo, and Aries, it was just this laughter I imagined as my reward, but it never reached me, not from anywhere, because in the meantime throughout the world the angels had occu-pied all positions of authority, all the general staffs, had
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taken over the left and the right, the Arabs and the Jews, the Russian generals and the Russian dissidents. They stared at us icily from all sides, that stare stripping us of the amiable costume we wear as playful hoaxers and unmasking us as pathetic impostors who work at a socialist youth magazine while believing neither in youth nor in socialism, who cast a horoscope for an editor in chief while making fun of both editor in chief and horoscopes, who busy ourselves with paltry things when all those around us (left and right, Arabs and Jews, generals and dissidents) are fighting for the future of the human race. We felt the weight of their stares turning us into insects to be crushed underfoot.
Overcoming my anguish, I tried to come up with the most sensible plan for R. to follow in her replies to the police the next day. Several times during our conversation she got up to go to the toilet. Each time, she came back to the sound of water flushing and with a look of embarrassed panic. That brave girl was ashamed of her fear. That woman of taste was ashamed of her bowels raging in front of a stranger.
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Gabrielle, who were standing tensely before the dais where Madame Raphael sat. Both were holding several sheets of paper, covered with the text of their talk, and an odd cardboard object fitted with a rubber band.
"We're going to talk about the Ionesco play Rhinoceros" said Michelle, and bent her head to place the cardboard cone, decorated with multicolored pieces of glued-on paper, over her nose and fasten it around the back of her head with the rubber band, Gabrielle did the same. Then they looked at each other and emitted high-pitched, short, spasmodic sounds.
The class swiftly enough understood that the two girls were showing, one, that a rhinoceros has a horn instead of a nose and, two, that I
onesco's play is comic. They had decided to express these two ideas not only in words but most of all with their own bodies' actions.
The long cones swayed on their faces, and the class fell into a kind of embarrassed compassion, as if someone had stood up in front of their desks to display his amputated arm.
Only Madame Raphael admired her young favorites' inspiration, responding to their shrill, spasmodic sounds with similar shrieks of her own.
Satisfied with that, the girls nodded their long noses and Michelle started to read her share of their talk.
One of the students was a Jewish girl named Sarah. A few days before, she had asked the two American girls to let her have a look at their notes (everybody knew they took down every one of Madame Raphael's words), but they had refused: "You cut class and went
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Twenty or so young people of various nationalities sat at their desks looking inattentively at Michelle and
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to the beach." Ever since, Sarah had heartily detested them, and now she was delighted to see them making fools of themselves.
Michelle and Gabrielle took turns reading their analysis of Rhinoceros, the long cardboard cones extending from their faces like futile supplications. Sarah realized that it would be a pity to let such an opportunity go by. During the pause when Michelle signaled Gabrielle to take over, Sarah got up from her seat and headed toward the two girls. Instead of continuing with her part, Gabrielle fixed the gaze of the astonished orifice of her false nose on Sarah and stood there gaping. When she reached the two students, Sarah went around them (as if the added noses were weighing down their heads, the American girls did not even turn to see what was happening) and, taking a running start, gave Michelle a kick in the buttocks, then, with another running start, booted Gabrielle's behind. Then she calmly, indeed with dignity, returned to her seat.
For a moment there was absolute silence.
Then Michelle's tears began to flow, and a moment later Gabrielle's.
Then the whole class exploded in tremendous laughter.
Then Sarah sat down again.
Then Madame Raphael, who had initially been caught off guard and was stupefied, realized that Sarah's intervention was an episode devised for a carefully prepared student prank whose aim was to shed light on the subject of their analysis (the inter-
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pretation of a work of art cannot be limited to the traditional theoretical approach; a modern approach is needed, reading by means of praxis, of action, of a happening), and unable to see her favorites' tears (facing the class, they had their backs to her), she tilted her head backward and burst into acquiescent laughter.
Hearing their beloved teacher laughing behind them, Michelle and Gabrielle felt betrayed. Now the tears flowed from their eyes as from a faucet. The humiliation was so painful they began to writhe as if with stomach cramps.
Madame Raphael thought her favorite students' convulsions were a dance, and all at once a force more powerful than her professorial gravity flung her out of her chair. She laughed until she cried, and she spread her arms and wiggled her body so hard that her head was thrown back and forth on her neck like an upside-down bell in the hand of the sexton vigorously ringing it. Approaching the convulsively writhing girls, she took Michelle by the hand. Now all three of them were in front of the student desks, all three of them writhing and in tears. Madame Raphael took two steps in place, raised her left leg to one side, then the right leg to the other, and the two girls in tears started timidly to imitate her. The tears ran along their cardboard noses, and they writhed and hopped in place. Then Madame le professeur seized Gabrielle's hand; now they formed a circle in front of the desks, all three, hand in hand, taking steps in place and to each side and turning in a ring on the classroom floor.
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They threw the right and then the left leg forward, and imperceptibly Gabrielle and Michelle's grimace of sobbing became the grimace of laughter.
The three women danced and laughed, the cardboard noses jiggled, and the class looked at them in mute horror. But by now the three dancing women were unaware of the others, they were concentrating entirely on themselves and on their sensual pleasure. Suddenly Madame Raphael stamped her foot harder and rose a few centimeters above the floor and then, with the next step, was no longer touching the ground. She pulled her two companions after her, and in a moment all three were revolving above the floor and rising slowly in a spiral. When their hair touched the ceiling, it started little by little to open. They rose higher and higher through that opening, their cardboard noses were no longer visible, and now there were only three pairs of shoes passing through the gaping hole, but these too finally vanished, while from on high, the dumbfounded students heard the fading, radiant laughter of three archangels.
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that I had become a bearer of ill tidings and could not go on living among the people I loved if I wished them no harm, and that the only thing remaining for me to do was to leave my country.
But I have yet another reason to recall that last meeting with R. I had always been very fond of the young woman, in the most innocent, least sexual way possible.
It was as if her body were always perfectly concealed
nehind her radiant intelligence and, as well, behind the modesty of her behavior and the tastefulness of her clothes. She had never offered me the smallest gap
through which I could have caught sight of a glimmer of her nakedness. And now, like a butcher knife, fear had suddenly cut her open. I had the impression of see-* ing her before me like the carcass of a heifer hanging from a hook in a shop. We were sitting side by side on the daybed in that borrowed apartment, hearing the slosh of water refilling the toilet tank, and suddenly I felt a wild desire to make love to her. More exactly: a wild desire to rape her. To throw myself on her and seize her in a single embrace along with all her unbearably exciting contradictions, with her perfect clothes and her rebellious intestines, with her reason and her fear, with her pride and her shame. And it seemed to me that lying hidden in these contradictions was her very essence, that treasure, that nugget of gold, that diamond concealed in her depths. I wanted to pounce on her and tear it out of her. I wanted to contain her entirely, with her shit and her ineffable soul.
But I saw two anguished eyes fixed on me (anguished
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My meeting with R. in the borrowed apartment was decisive for me. Only then did I understand definitively
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eyes in an intelligent face), and the more anguished those eyes, the greater my desire to rape her—and all the more absurd, idiotic, scandalous, incomprehensible, and unachievable.
When I left the borrowed apartment that day and was once more on the deserted suburban dormitory-town street (R. stayed in the apartment for a time, fearing to be seen with me), I could think of nothing for a long while but the immense desire I had felt to rape my lovely friend. That desire has remained with me, captive like a bird in a sack, a bird that from time to time awakens and flutters its wings.
It may be that the insane desire to rape R. was merely a desperate effort to grab at something in the midst of falling. Because ever since they expelled me from the ring dance, I have not stopped falling, I am still falling, and all they have done now is push me once again to make me fall still farther, still deeper, farther and farther from my country into the deserted space of a world where the fearsome laughter of the angels rings out, drowning all my words with its jangle.
I know that Sarah exists somewhere, Sarah the Jewish girl, Sarah my sister, but where will I find her?
PART FOUR
L o s t L e t t e r s
(Quotations are from the following works: Annie Leclerc, Parole de femme, 1976; Paul Eluard, Le visage de la paix
, 1951; Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros, 1959.)
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I calculate that two or three new fictional characters are baptized here on earth every second. That is why I am always hesitant about joining that vast crowd of John the Baptists. But what can I do? After all, my characters need to have names. This time, to make clear that my heroine is mine and only mine (I am more attached to her than to any other), I am giving her a name no woman has ever before borne: Tamina. I imagine her as tall and beautiful, thirty-three years old, and originally from Prague.
I see her walking down a street in a provincial town in the west of Europe. Yes, you're right to have noticed: I refer to faraway Prague by name, while leaving anonymous the town where my story takes place. That breaks all the rules of perspective, but you'll just have to make the best of it.
Tamina works as a waitress in a small cafe belonging to a married couple. The cafe brings in so little, the husband had to take the first job he could find, and Tamina was hired to replace him. The difference between the pitiful amount the owner earns at his new job and the still more pitiful amount they pay Tamina accounts for their slender profit.
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Lost Letters
Tamina serves coffee and calvados to the customers (there aren't all that many, the room being always half empty) and then goes back behind the bar. Almost always there is someone sitting on a barstool, trying to talk to her. Everyone likes Tamina. Because she knows how to listen to people.