Ignorance

by Milan Kundera

  was to die in a few months, took her by the hand and led her away.

  The gigantic invisible broom that transforms, disfigures, erases landscapes has been at the job for millennia now, but its movements, which used to be slow, just barely perceptible, have sped up so much that I wonder: Would an Odyssey even be conceivable today? Is the epic of the return still pertinent to our time? When Odysseus woke on Ithaca's shore that morning, could he have listened in ecstasy to the music of the Great Return if the old olive tree had been felled and he recognized nothing around him?

  Near the hotel a tall building exposed its bare side, a blind wall decorated with a gigantic picture. In the twilight the caption was unreadable, and all Josef could make out was two hands clasping, enormous hands, between sky and earth. Had they always been there? He couldn't recall.

  He was dining alone at the hotel restaurant and all around him he heard the sound of conversations. It was the music of some unknown language. What had happened to Czech during those two sorry decades? Was it the stresses that had

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  changed? Apparently. Hitherto set firmly on the first syllable, they had grown weaker; the intonation seemed boneless. The melody sounded more monotone than before—drawling. And the timbre! It had turned nasal, which gave the speech an unpleasantly blase quality. Over the centuries the music of any language probably does change imperceptibly, but to a person returning after an absence it can be disconcerting: bent over his plate, Josef was listening to an unknown language whose every word he understood.

  Then, in his room, he picked up the telephone and dialed his brother's number. He heard a joyful voice inviting him to come over right away.

  "I just wanted to tell you I'm here," said Josef. "Do excuse me for today, though. I don't want you to see me like this after all these years. I'm knocked out. Are you free tomorrow?"

  He wasn't even sure his brother still worked at the hospital.

  "I'll get free," was the answer.

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  15

  He rings, and his brother, five years older than he, opens the door. They grip hands and gaze at each other. These are gazes of enormous intensity, and both men know very well what is going on: they are registering—swiftly, discreetly, brother about brother—the hair, the wrinkles, the teeth; each knows what he is looking for in the face before him, and each knows that the other is looking for the same thing in his. They are ashamed of doing so, because what they're looking for is the probable distance between the other man and death or, to say it more bluntly, each is looking in the other man's face for death beginning to show through. To put a quick end to that morbid scrutiny, they cast about for some phrase to make them forget those few grievous seconds, some exclamation or question, or if possible (it would be a gift from heaven) a joke (but nothing comes to their rescue).

  "Come," the brother finally says and, taking Josef by the shoulders, leads him into the living room.

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  16

  "We've been expecting you ever since the thing collapsed," the brother said when they sat down. "All the emigres have already come home, or at least put in an appearance. No, no, that's not a reproach. You know best what's right for you."

  "There you're wrong," said Josef with a laugh. "I don't know that."

  "Did you come alone?" the brother asked.

  "Yes."

  "Are you thinking of moving back for good?"

  "I don't know."

  "Of course you'd have to take your wife's feelings into consideration. You got married over there, I believe."

  "Yes."

  "To a Danish woman," said his brother, hesitantly.

  "Yes," Josef said, and did not go on.

  The silence made the brother uncomfortable, and just to say something, Josef asked, "The house belongs to you now?"

  In the old days the apartment had been part of

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  a three-story income property belonging to their father; the family (father, mother, two sons) lived on the top floor and the other two were rented out. After the Communist revolution of 1948 the house was expropriated, and the family stayed on as tenant.

  "Yes," answered the brother, visibly embarrassed. "We tried to get in touch with you, but we couldn't."

  "Why was that? You do know my address!" After 1989 all properties nationalized by the revolution (factories, hotels, rental apartments, land, forests) were returned to their former owners (or more precisely, to their children or grandchildren); the procedure was called "restitution": it required only that a person declare himself owner to the legal authorities, and after a year during which his claim might be contested, the restitution became irrevocable. That judicial simplification allowed for a good deal of fraud, but it did avoid inheritance disputes, lawsuits, appeals, and thus brought about, in an astonishingly short time, the rebirth of a class society with a bourgeoisie that was rich, entrepreneurial, and positioned to set the national economy going.

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  "There was a lawyer handling it," answered the brother, still embarrassed. "Now it's already too late. The proceedings are closed now. But don't worry, we'll work things out between us and with no lawyers involved."

  Just then the sister-in-law came in. This time that collision of gazes never even occurred: she had aged so much that the whole story was clear from the moment she appeared in the doorway. Josef wanted to drop his eyes and only look at her later, secretly, so as not to upset her. Stricken with pity, he stood up, went to her, and embraced her.

  They sat down again. Unable to shake free of his emotion, Josef looked at her; if he had met her in the street, he would not have recognized her. These are the people who are closest to me in the world, he told himself, my family, all the family I have, my brother, my only brother. He repeated these words to himself as if to make the most of his emotion before it should dissipate.

  That wave of tenderness caused him to say: "Forget the house business completely. Listen, really, let's be pragmatic—owning something here is not my problem. My problems aren't here."

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  Relieved, the brother repeated: "No, no. I like equity in everything. Besides, your wife should have her say on the subject."

  "Let's talk about something else," Josef said as he laid his hand on his brother's and squeezed it.

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  They took him through the apartment to show him the changes since he had left. In one room he saw a painting that had belonged to him. When he'd decided to leave the country, he had to act quickly. He was living in another town at the time, and since he needed to keep secret his intention to emigrate, he could not give himself away by doling out his possessions to friends. The night before he left, he had put his keys in an envelope and mailed them to his brother. Then he'd phoned him from abroad and asked him to take anything he liked from the apartment before the state confiscated it. Later on, living in Denmark and happy to be starting a new life, he hadn't the slightest desire to find out

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  what his brother had managed to salvage and what he had done with it.

  He gazed for a long while at the picture: a working-class suburb, poor, rendered in that bold welter of colors that recalled the Fauve artists from the turn of the century, Derain for example. And yet the painting was no pastiche; if it had been shown in 1905 at the Salon d'Automne together with works by the Fauves, viewers would have been struck by its strangeness, intrigued by the enigmatic perfume of an alluring visitor come from some faraway place. In fact the picture was painted in 1955, a period when doctrine on socialist art was strict in its demand for realism: this artist, who was a passionate modernist, would have preferred to paint the way people were painting all over the world at the time, which is to say in the abstract manner, but he also wanted his work to be exhibited; therefore he had to locate the magic point where the ideologues' imperatives intersected with his own desires as an artist; the shacks evoking workers' lives were a bow to the ideologues, and the violently unrealistic colors were his gift to himself. />
  Josef had visited the man's studio in the 1960s,

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  when the official doctrine was losing some of its force and the painter was already free to do pretty much whatever he wanted. In his naive sincerity Josef had liked this early picture better than the recent ones, and the painter, who looked on his own proletarian Fauvism with a slightly condescending affection, had cheerfully made him a gift of it; he'd even picked up his brush and, alongside his signature, written a dedication with Josef's name.

  "You knew this painter well," remarked the brother.

  "Yes. I saved his poodle's life for him."

  "Are you planning to go see him?"

  "No."

  Shortly after 1989 a package had arrived at Josef's house in Denmark: photographs of the painter's latest canvases, created now in complete freedom. They were indistinguishable from the millions of other pictures being painted around the planet at the time; the painter could boast of a double victory: he was utterly free and utterly like everybody else.

  "You still like this picture?" asked the brother.

  "Yes, it's still very fine."

  The brother tilted his head toward his wife: "Katy loves it. She stops to look at it every day." Then he added: "After you left, you told me to give it to Papa. He hung it over the table in his office at the hospital. He knew how much Katy loved it, and before he died he bequeathed it to her." After a little pause: "You can't imagine. We lived through some dreadful years."

  Looking at the sister-in-law, Josef remembered that he had never liked her. His old antipathy (she'd returned it in spades) now seemed to him stupid and regrettable. She stood there staring at the picture with an expression of sad impotence on her face, and in pity Josef said to his brother: "I know."

  The brother began an account of the family's story: the father's lingering death, Katy's illness, their daughter's failed marriage, then on to the cabals against him at the hospital, where his position had been gravely compromised by the fact of Josef's emigrating.

  There was no tone of reproach to that last remark, but Josef had no doubt of the animosity with which the brother and sister-in-law must have discussed him at the time, indignant at the

  paltry reasons Josef might have alleged to justify his emigration, which they certainly considered irresponsible: the regime did not make life easy for the relatives of emigres.

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  In the dining room the table was set for lunch. The conversation turned lively, with the brother and sister-in-law eager to inform him of everything that had happened during his absence. The decades hovered above the dishes, and his sister-in-law suddenly attacked him: "You had some fanatical years yourself. The way you used to talk about the Church! We were all scared of you."

  The remark startled him. "Scared of me?" His sister-in-law held her ground. He looked at her: on her face, which only minutes earlier had seemed unrecognizable, her old features were coming out.

  To say that they'd been scared of him was nonsense, actually, since the sister-in-law's recollection could only concern his high-school years,

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  when he was between sixteen and nineteen years old. It is entirely possible that he used to make fun of believers back then, but his taunts couldn't have been anything like the government's militant atheism and were meant only for his family, who never missed Sunday Mass and thereby incited Josef to be provocative. He had graduated in 1951, three years after the revolution, and when he decided to study veterinary medicine it was that same taste for provocation that inspired him: healing sick people, serving humanity, was his family's great pride (already two generations back, his grandfather had been a doctor), and he enjoyed telling them all that he liked cows better than humans. But nobody had either praised or deplored his rebellion; because veterinary medicine carried less social prestige, his choice was interpreted simply as a lack of ambition, an acceptance of second rank within the family, below his brother.

  Now at the table he made a garbled effort to explain (to them and to himself both) his psychology as an adolescent, but the words had trouble getting out of his mouth because the sister-in-law's set smile, fastened on him,

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  expressed an immutable disagreement with everything he was saying. He understood that there was nothing he could do about it; it was practically a law: People who see their lives as a shipwreck set out to hunt down the guilty parties. And Josef was doubly guilty: both as an adolescent who had spoken ill of God and as an adult who had emigrated. He lost the desire to explain anything at all, and his brother, subtle diplomat that he was, changed the subject.

  His brother: as a second-year medical student, he had been barred from the university in 1948 because of his bourgeois background; so as not to lose hope of resuming his studies later on and becoming a surgeon like his father, he had done all he could to demonstrate his support for Communism, to the point where one day, sore at heart, he wound up joining the Party, in which he stayed until 1989. The paths of the two brothers diverged: first ejected from school and then forced to deny his convictions, the elder felt himself a victim (he would feel that way forever); at the veterinary school, which was less coveted and less tightly monitored, the younger brother had no need to display any particular loyalty to the

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  regime: to his brother he seemed (and forever would seem) a lucky little bastard who knew how to get away with things; a deserter.

  In August 1968 the Russian army had invaded the country; for a week the streets in all the cities howled with rage. The country had never been so thoroughly a homeland, or the Czechs so Czech. Drunk with hatred, Josef was ready to hurl himself against the tanks. Then the country's statesmen were arrested, shipped under guard to Moscow, and forced to conclude a slapdash compromise, and the Czechs, still enraged, went back indoors. Some fourteen months later, on the fifty-second anniversary of Russia's October Revolution, imposed on the country as a national holiday, Josef had climbed into his car in the town where he had his animal clinic and set off to see his family at the other end of the country. Arriving in their city, he slowed down; he was curious to see how many windows would be draped with red flags which, in that year of defeat, were nothing else but signals of submission. There were more of them than he expected: perhaps the people displaying them were doing so against their actual convictions, out of prudence, with some

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  vague fear; still, they were acting voluntarily, no one was forcing them, no one was threatening them. He had pulled up in front of his family home. On the top floor, where his brother lived, there blazed a large flag, hideously red. For a very long moment Josef contemplated it from inside his car; then he turned on the ignition. On the trip home he decided to leave the country. Not that he couldn't have lived here. He could have gone on peacefully treating cows here. But he was alone, divorced, childless, free. He reflected that he had only one life and that he wanted to live it somewhere else.

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  At the end of lunch, sitting over his coffee, Josef thought about his painting. He considered how to take it away with him, and whether it would be too unwieldy in the airplane. Wouldn't it be easier to take the canvas out of the frame and roll it up? He was about to discuss it when the sister-in-law said: "You must be going to see N."

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  "I don't know yet."

  "He was an awfully good friend of yours."

  "He still is my friend."

  "In forty-eight everyone was terrified of him. The Red Commissar! But he did a lot for you, didn't he? You owe him!"

  The brother hastily interrupted his wife, and he handed Josef a small bundle: "This is what Papa kept as a souvenir of you. We found it after he died."

  The brother apparently had to leave soon for the hospital; their meeting was drawing to a close, and Josef noted that his painting had vanished from the conversation. What? His sister-in-law remembers his friend N., but she forgets his painting? Still, although he was prepared to give up his whole inheritance, and his share of
the house, the picture was his, his alone, with his name inscribed alongside the painter's! How could they, she and his brother, act as if it didn't belong to him?

  The atmosphere suddenly grew heavy, and the brother started to tell a funny story. Josef was not listening. He was determined to reclaim his picture, and, intent on what he wanted to say, his

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  distracted glance fell on the brother's wrist and the watch on it. He recognized it: big and black, a little out of style; he had left it behind in his apartment and the brother had appropriated it for himself. No, Josef had no reason to be incensed at that. It had all been done according to his own instructions; still, seeing his watch on someone else's wrist threw him into a strange unease. He had the sense he was coming back into the world as might a dead man emerging from his tomb after twenty years: touching the ground with a timid foot that's lost the habit of walking; barely recognizing the world he had lived in but continually stumbling over the leavings from his life; seeing his trousers, his tie on the bodies of the survivors, who had quite naturally divided them up among themselves; seeing everything and laying claim to nothing: the dead are timid. Overcome by that timidity of the dead, Josef could not summon the strength to say a single word about his painting. He stood up.

  "Come back tonight. We'll have dinner together," said the brother.

  Josef suddenly saw his own wife's face; he felt a sharp need to address her, talk with her. But he

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  could not do that: his brother was looking at him, waiting for his answer.