Ignorance

by Milan Kundera

  Could she not see a blatant disproportion between the triviality of the cause and the hugeness of the act? Did she not know that her project was excessive? Of course she did, but the excess was precisely what appealed to her. She did not want to be reasonable. She did not want to behave in a measured way. She did not want to measure, she did not want to reason. She admired her passion, knowing that passion is by definition excessive. Intoxicated, she did not want to emerge from intoxication.

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  Then comes the appointed day. She leaves the hotel. Beside the door hangs a thermometer: minus ten degrees Celsius. She sets out and realizes that her intoxicated state has been succeeded by anxiety; in vain she seeks her previous enthrallment, in vain she calls for the ideas that had surrounded her dream of death; in vain, but nonetheless she keeps walking the trail (her schoolmates are meanwhile taking their required siestas) as if she were performing a chore she'd set herself, as if she were playing a role she'd assigned herself. Her soul is empty, without emotion, like the soul of an actor reciting a text and no longer thinking about what he's saying.

  She climbs a trail glistening with snow and soon reaches the crest. The sky above is blue; the many clouds—sun-drenched, gilded, lively—have moved down, settled like a great diadem on the broad ring of the encircling mountains. It is beautiful, it is mesmerizing, and she has a brief, very brief, sensation of happiness, which makes her forget the purpose of her walk. A brief, very brief, too brief sensation. One after the other she swallows the tablets and, following her plan, walks down from the crest into a forest. She steps along

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  a footpath; in ten minutes she feels sleep coming on, and she knows the end has come. The sun is overhead, brilliant, brilliant. As if the curtain were suddenly lifting, her heart tightens with stagefright. She feels trapped on a lighted stage with all the exits blocked.

  She sits down beneath a fir tree, opens her bag, and takes out a mirror. It is a small round mirror; she holds it up to her face and looks at herself. She is beautiful, she is very beautiful, and she does not want to part from this beauty, she does not want to lose it, she wants to carry it away with her, ah, she is already weary, so weary, but even weary she rejoices in her beauty because it is what she cherishes most in this world.

  She looks in the mirror, then she sees her lips twitch. It is an involuntary movement, a tic. She has often registered that reaction of hers, she has felt it happening on her face, but this is the first time she is seeing it. At the sight she is doubly moved: moved by her beauty and moved by her lips twitching; moved by her beauty and moved by the emotion wracking that beauty and distorting it; moved by her beauty that her body laments. An enormous pity overtakes her, pity for

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  her beauty that will soon cease to be, pity for the world that will also cease to be, that already does not exist, that is already out of reach, for sleep has come, it is carrying her away, flying off with her, high up, very high, toward that enormous blinding brilliance, toward the blue, brilliantly blue sky, a cloudless firmament, a firmament ablaze.

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  When his brother said, "You got married over there, I believe," he answered "Yes" with no further remark. His brother might merely have used some other turn of phrase, and rather than saying, "You got married," asked, "Are you married?" In that case Josef would have answered, "No, widowed." He hadn't meant to mislead his brother, but the way the query was phrased allowed him, without lying, to keep silent about his wife's death.

  During the conversation that followed, his brother and sister-in-law avoided any mention of her. That must have been out of embarrassment:

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  for security reasons (to avoid being questioned by the police) they had denied themselves the slightest contact with their emigre relative and never even realized that their forced caution had soon turned into authentic lack of interest: they knew nothing about his wife, not her age or her given name or her profession, and by keeping their silence now they hoped to disguise that ignorance, which showed up the terrible poverty of their relations with him.

  But Josef took no offense; their ignorance suited him fine. Since the day he buried her, he had always felt uncomfortable when he had to inform someone of her death; as if by doing so he were betraying her in her most private privacy. By not speaking of her death, he always felt he was protecting her.

  For the woman who is dead is a woman with no defenses; she has no more power, she has no more influence; people no longer respect either her wishes or her tastes; the dead woman cannot will anything, cannot aspire to any respect or refute any slander. Never had he felt such sorrowful, such agonizing compassion for her as when she was dead.

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  Jonas Hallgrimsson was a great romantic poet and also a great fighter for Iceland's independence. In the nineteenth century all of small-nation Europe had these romantic patriot-poets: Petofi in Hungary, Mickiewicz in Poland, Preseren in Slovenia, Macha in Bohemia, Shevchenko in Ukraine, Wergeland in Norway, Lonnrot in Finland, and the like. Iceland was a colony of Denmark at the time, and Hallgrimsson lived out his last years in the Danish capital. All the great romantic poets, besides being great patriots, were great drinkers. One day, dead drunk, Hallgrimsson fell down a staircase, broke a leg, got an infection, died, and was buried in a Copenhagen cemetery. That was in 1845. Ninety-nine years later, in 1944, the Icelandic Republic declared its independence. From then on events hastened their course. In 1946 the poet's soul visited a rich Icelandic industrialist in his sleep and confided: "For a hundred years now my skeleton has lain in a foreign land, in the enemy country. Is it not time it came home to its own free Ithaca?"

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  Flattered and elated by this nocturnal visit, the patriotic industrialist had the poet's skeleton dug out of the enemy soil and carried back to Iceland, intending to bury it in the lovely valley where the poet had been born. But no one can stop the mad course of events: in the ineffably exquisite landscape of Thingvellir (the sacred place where, a thousand years ago, the first Icelandic parliament gathered beneath the open sky), the ministers of the brand-new republic had created a cemetery for the great men of the homeland; they ripped the poet away from the industrialist and buried him in the pantheon that at the time contained only the grave of another great poet (small nations abound in great poets), Einar Benediktsson.

  But again events rushed on, and soon everyone learned what the patriotic industrialist had never dared admit: standing at the opened tomb back in Copenhagen, he had felt extremely disconcerted: the poet had been buried in a paupers' field with no name marking his grave, only a number and, confronted with a bunch of skeletons tangled together, the patriotic industrialist had not known which one to pick. In the presence of the stern, impatient cemetery bureaucrats, he

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  did not dare show his uncertainty. And so he had transported to Iceland not the Icelandic poet but a Danish butcher.

  In Iceland people had initially tried to hush up this lugubriously comical mistake, but events continued to run their course, and in 1948 the indiscreet writer Halldor Laxness spilled the beans in a novel. What to do? Keep quiet. Therefore Hallgrimsson's bones still lie two thousand miles away from his Ithaca, in enemy soil, while the body of the Danish butcher, who although no poet was a patriot as well, still lies banished to a glacial island that never stirred him to anything but fear and repugnance.

  Even hushed up, the consequence of the truth was that no one else was ever buried in the exquisite cemetery at Thingvellir, which harbors only two coffins and which thereby, of all the world's pantheons, those grotesque museums of pride, is the only one capable of touching our hearts.

  A very long time ago Josef's wife had told him that story; they thought it was funny, and a moral lesson seemed easily drawn from it: nobody much cares where a dead person's bones wind up.

  And yet Josef changed his mind when his wife's

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  death became imminent and inevitable. Suddenly t
he story of the Danish butcher abducted to Iceland seemed not funny but terrifying.

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  The idea of dying when she did had been with him for a long time. It was due not to romantic grandiosity but rather to a rational consideration: if ever his wife should be struck by a fatal illness, he had determined he would cut short her suffering; to avoid being indicted for murder, he planned to die as well. Then she actually did fall gravely ill, and suffered terribly, and Josef no longer had a mind for suicide. Not out of fear for his own life. But he found intolerable the idea of leaving that very beloved body to the mercy of alien hands. With him dead, who would protect the dead woman? How could one corpse keep another one safe?

  Long ago in Bohemia, he had watched over his mother's dying agony; he loved her very much, but once she was no longer alive, her body ceased

  to interest him; to his mind her corpse was no longer she. Besides, two doctors, his father and his brother, took care of the dying woman, and in the order of importance he was just the third family member. This time everything was different: the woman he saw dying belonged to him alone; he was jealous for her body and wanted to watch over its posthumous fate. He even had to admonish himself: here she was still alive, lying in front of him, she was speaking to him, and he was already thinking of her as dead; she was gazing up at him, her eyes larger than ever, and his mind was busy with her casket and her grave. He scolded himself for that as if it were a shocking betrayal, an impatience, a secret wish to hasten her death. But he couldn't help it: he knew that after the death, her family would come to claim her for their family vault, and the idea horrified him.

  Contemptuous of funeral concerns, in writing their wills sometime earlier he and she had been too offhand; their instructions on disposing of their possessions were very rudimentary, and they hadn't even mentioned burial. The omission obsessed him while she was dying, but since he

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  was trying to convince her that she would beat death, he had to hold his tongue. How could he confess to the poor woman who still believed she would recover, how could he confess what he was thinking about? How could he talk about the will? Especially since she was already slipping into spells of delirium, and her thinking was muddled.

  His wife's family, a prominent and influential family, had never liked Josef. It seemed to him that the struggle ahead for his wife's body would be the toughest and most important he would ever fight. The idea that this body would be locked into an obscene promiscuity with other bodies, unknown and meaningless, was unbearable to him, as was the idea that he himself, when he died, would end up who knew where and certainly far away from her. To let that happen seemed a defeat as huge as eternity, a defeat never to be forgiven.

  What he feared came about. He could not avoid the shock. His mother-in-law railed against him: "It's my daughter! It's my daughter!" He had to hire a lawyer, hand over a bundle of money to pacify the family, hastily buy a cemetery plot,

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  act more quickly than the others to win this final combat.

  The feverish activity of a sleepless week fended off his suffering, but something even stranger occurred: when she was in the grave that belonged to them (a grave for two, like a two-seat buggy), in the darkness of his sorrow he glimpsed a feeble, trembling, barely visible ray of happiness. Happiness at not having let down his beloved; at having provided for their future, his and hers both.

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  An instant earlier she had been drenched in the radiant blue! She was immaterial, transmuted into brilliance!

  And then, abruptly, the sky went black. And she, fallen back onto the earth, turned into heavy dark matter. Scarcely understanding what had happened, she could not tear her gaze away from up there: the sky was black, black, implacably black.

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  One part of her body chattered with cold, the other was numb. That frightened her. She stood up. After several long moments she remembered: a hotel in the mountains; classmates. Dazed, her body shaking, she looked for the path. At the hotel they called an ambulance, and it took her away.

  Over the next days in her hospital bed, her fingers, her ears, her nose, which at first were numb, gave her terrific pain. The doctors reassured her, but one nurse took delight in reciting all the conceivable effects of freezings: a person could end up with his fingers amputated. Stricken with terror, she imagined an ax; a surgeon's ax; a butcher's ax; she imagined her fingerless hand and its severed fingers lying beside her on an operating table, for her to see. At night, for supper, they brought her meat. She could not eat. She imagined chunks of her own flesh on the plate.

  Her fingers came painfully back to life, but her left ear turned black. The surgeon, an elderly, sorrowful, compassionate man, sat on her bed to tell her it must be amputated. She screamed. Her left ear! My God, how she screamed! Her face, her lovely face, with an ear cut off! No one could calm her.

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  Oh, everything had gone the opposite of what she'd intended! She had meant to become an eternity that would abolish the whole future, and instead, the future was back again, invincible, hideous, repugnant, like a snake writhing in front of her and rubbing against her legs and slithering ahead to show her the way.

  At school the news spread that she had got lost and had come back covered with frostbite. People blamed her as a headstrong girl who skipped the required program and went wandering stupidly off with not even an elementary sense of direction for finding her way back to the hotel, which could actually be seen from a distance.

  Home from the hospital, she refused to go outdoors. She was terrified of running into people she knew. In despair her parents arranged a quiet transfer to another high school, in a nearby town.

  Oh, everything had gone the opposite of what she'd intended! She had dreamed of dying mysteriously. She had done her best so no one could tell whether her death was an accident or a suicide. She had meant to send him her death as a secret sign, a sign of love transmitted from the beyond, comprehensible to no one but him. She

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  had anticipated everything except, perhaps, the number of sleeping tablets; except, perhaps, the temperature, which as she was drowsing off had gone up. She had expected that the freeze would plunge her into sleep and into death, but the sleep was too weak; she had opened her eyes and seen the black sky.

  Those two skies had divided her life into two parts: blue sky, black sky. The second sky was the one she would walk beneath to her death, her true death, the faraway and trivial death of old age.

  And he? He was living beneath a sky that had nothing to do with her. He no longer sought her out, she no longer sought him out. Recalling him awakened neither love nor hatred in her. At the thought of him, she was as if anesthetized—with no ideas, no emotions.

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  A human lifetime is 80 years long on average. A person imagines and organizes his life with that span in mind. What I have just said everyone

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  knows, but only rarely do we realize that the number of years granted us is not merely a quantitative fact, an external feature (like nose length or eye color), but is part of the very definition of the human. A person who might live, with all his faculties, twice as long, say 160 years, would not belong to our species. Nothing about his life would be like ours—not love, or ambitions, or feelings, or nostalgia; nothing. If after 20 years abroad an emigre were to come back to his native land with another hundred years of life ahead of him, he would have little sense of a Great Return, for him it would probably not be a return at all, just one of many byways in the long journey of his life.

  For the very notion of homeland, with all its emotional power, is bound up with the relative brevity of our life, which allows us too little time to become attached to some other country, to other countries, to other languages.

  Sexual relations can take up the whole of adult life. But if that life were a lot longer, might not staleness stifle the capacity for arousal well before one's physical powers declined? For
there is an enormous difference between the first and the

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  tenth, the hundredth, the thousandth, or the ten-thousandth coitus. Where lies the boundary line beyond which repetition becomes stereotyped, if not comical or even impossible? And once that boundary is crossed, what would become of the erotic relationship between a man and a woman? Would it vanish? Or, on the contrary, would lovers consider the sexual phase of their lives to be the barbaric prehistory of real love? Answering these questions is as easy as imagining the psychology of the inhabitants of an unknown planet.

  The notion of love (of great love, of one-and-only love) itself also derives, probably, from the narrow bounds of the time we are granted. If that time were boundless, would Josef be so attached to his deceased wife? We who must die so soon, we just don't know.

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  Memory cannot be understood, either, without a mathematical approach. The fundamental given is the ratio between the amount of time in the

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  lived life and the amount of time from that life that is stored in memory. No one has ever tried to calculate this ratio, and in fact there exists no technique for doing so; yet without much risk of error I could assume that the memory retains no more than a millionth, a hundred-millionth, in short an utterly infinitesimal bit of the lived life. That fact too is part of the essence of man. If someone could retain in his memory everything he had experienced, if he could at any time call up any fragment of his past, he would be nothing like human beings: neither his loves nor his friendships nor his angers nor his capacity to forgive or avenge would resemble ours.

  We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice