The JOKE by Milan Kundera

Author:Milan Kundera
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780060995058
Published: 1967-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

PART FIVE

Ludvik

1

I slept long and fairly well. I didn't wake up until after eight, didn't remember any dreams, good or bad, didn't have a headache, but simply didn't want to get up; so I stayed in bed; sleep had erected a sort of wall between myself and my Friday-evening encounter; not that Lucie had dropped that morning out of my consciousness but that she had returned to her former abstract state.

To her abstract state? Yes: When Lucie disappeared from Ostrava so mysteriously and cruelly, I had no practical way of going after her. And as time went on (after my release from military service), I gradually lost the desire to do so. I told myself that however much I'd loved her, however unique she was, she was inextricably bound up with the situation in which we met and fell in love. It seemed to me an error in reasoning for a man to isolate a woman he loves from all the circumstances in which he met her and in which she lives, to try, with dogged inner concentration, to purify her of everything that is not her self, which is to say also of the story that they lived through together and that gives their love its shape.

After all, what I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns towards me, what she is for me. I love her as a character in our common love story. What would Hamlet be without the castle at Elsinore, without Ophelia, without all the concrete situations he goes through, what would he be without the text of his part? What would be left but an empty, dumb, illusory essence? Likewise, Lucie without the Ostrava outskirts, without the roses handed through the barbed wire, without the shabby clothes, without my own endless weeks of despair, would probably cease to be the Lucie I'd loved.

Yes, that was how I saw it, that was how I explained it, and as year followed year, I was almost afraid of meeting her again, because I knew that we'd meet in a place where Lucie would no longer be Lucie and I would be unable to pick up the thread. Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled; on the contrary; in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me; I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.

And since Lucie had become for me a definitive past (which still lives as past and is dead as present), she gradually lost in my mind her corporeal, material concreteness and became more and more a kind of legend, a myth inscribed on parchment and laid in a metal casket at the very foundation of my life.

Perhaps that was why the incredible could happen. I wasn't sure whether the woman in the barbershop was Lucie. And that was also why the next

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