Ignorance

by Milan Kundera

  To be willing to die for one's country: every nation has known that temptation to sacrifice. Indeed, the Czechs' adversaries also knew it: the Germans, the Russians. But those are large nations. Their patriotism is different: they are buoyed by their glory, their importance, their universal mission. The Czechs loved their country not because it was glorious but because it was

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  unknown; not because it was big but because it was small and in constant danger. Their patriotism was an enormous compassion for their country. The Danes are like that too. Not by chance did Josef choose a small country for his emigration.

  Much moved, he gazes out over the landscape and reflects that the history of his Bohemia during this past half century is fascinating, unique, unprecedented, and that failing to take an interest in it would be narrowminded. Tomorrow morning, he'll be seeing N. What kind of life did the man have during all the time they were out of touch? What had he thought about the Russian occupation of the country? And what was it like for him to see the end of the Communism he used to believe in, sincerely and honorably? How is his Marxist background adjusting to the return of this capitalism that's being cheered along by the entire planet? Is he rebelling against it? Or has he abandoned his convictions? And if he's abandoned them, is that a crisis for him? And how are other people behaving toward him? Josef can hear the voice of his sister-in-law who, huntress of the guilty, would certainly like to see N. handcuffed in court. Doesn't N. need Josef to tell him that

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  friendship does exist despite all of history's contortions?

  Josef's thoughts return to his sister-in-law: she hated the Communists because they disputed the sacred right of property. And then, he thought, she disputes my sacred right to my painting. He imagines the painting on a wall in his brick house in Copenhagen, and suddenly, with surprise, he realizes that the working-class suburb in the picture, that Czech Derain, that oddity of history, would be a disruption, an intrusive presence on the wall of that place. How could he ever have thought of taking it back with him? That painting doesn't belong there where he lives with his dear deceased. He'd never even mentioned it to her. That painting has nothing to do with her, with the two of them, with their life.

  Then he thinks: if one little painting could disrupt his life with the dead woman, how much more disruptive would be the constant, unrelenting presence of a whole country, a country she never saw!

  The sun dips toward the horizon; he is in the car on the road to Prague; the landscape slips away around him, the landscape of his small

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  country whose people were willing to die for it, and he knows that there exists something even smaller, with an even stronger appeal to his compassionate love: he sees two easy chairs turned to face each other, the lamp and the flower bowl on the window ledge, and the slender fir tree his wife planted in front of the house, a fir tree that looks like an arm she'd raised from afar to show him the way back home.

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  When Skacel locked himself into the house of sadness for three hundred years, it was because he expected his country to be engulfed forever by the empire of the East. He was wrong. Everyone is wrong about the future. Man can only be certain about the present moment. But is that quite true either? Can he really know the present? Is he in a position to make any judgment about it? Certainly not. For how can a person with no knowledge of the future understand the meaning of the present? If we do not know what future the pres-

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  ent is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or our hatred? In 1921 Arnold Schoenberg declares that because of him German music will continue to dominate the world for the next hundred years. Twelve years later he is forced to leave Germany forever. After the war, in America, laden with honors, he is still convinced that his work will be celebrated forever. He faults Igor Stravinsky for paying too much attention to his contemporaries and disregarding the judgment of the future. He expects posterity to be his most reliable ally. In a scathing letter to Thomas Mann he looks to the period "after two or three hundred years," when it will finally become clear which of the two was the greater, Mann or he! Schoenberg dies in 1951. For the next two decades his work is hailed as the greatest of the century, venerated by the most brilliant of the young composers, who declare themselves his disciples; but thereafter it recedes from both concert halls and memory. Who plays it nowadays, at the turn of this century? Who looks to him? No, I don't mean to make foolish fun of his presumptuousness and say he overesti-

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  mated himself. A thousand times no! Schoenberg did not overestimate himself. He overestimated the future.

  Did he commit an error of thinking? No. His thinking was correct, but he was living in spheres that were too lofty. He was conversing with the greatest Germans, with Bach and Goethe and Brahms and Mahler, but, however intelligent they might be, conversations carried on in the higher stratospheres of the mind are always myopic about what goes on, with no reason or logic, down below: two great armies are battling to the death over sacred causes; but some minuscule plague bacterium comes along and lays them both low.

  Schoenberg was aware that the bacterium existed. As early as 1930 he wrote: "Radio is an enemy, a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward, and any resistance is hopeless"; it "force-feeds us music . . . regardless of whether we want to hear it, or whether we can grasp it," with the result that music becomes just noise, a noise among other noises.

  Radio was the tiny stream it all began with. Then came other technical means for reproduc-

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  ing, proliferating, amplifying sound, and the stream became an enormous river. If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, "regardless whether we want to hear it," it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don't know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can't tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying.

  Schoenberg saw the bacterium, he was aware of the danger, but deep inside he did not grant it much importance. As I said, he was living in the very lofty spheres of the mind, and pride kept him from taking seriously an enemy so small, so vulgar, so repugnant, so contemptible. The only great adversary worthy of him, the sublime rival whom he battled with verve and severity, was Igor Stravinsky. That was the music he charged at, sword flashing, to win the favor of the future.

  But the future was a river, a flood of notes where composers' corpses drifted among the fallen leaves and torn-away branches. One day Schoenberg's dead body, bobbing about in the raging waves, collided with Stravinsky's, and in a shamefaced late-day reconciliation the two of them journeyed on together toward nothingness (toward the nothingness of music that is absolute din).

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  To recall: when Irena stopped with her husband on the embankment of the river running through a French provincial town, she had seen felled trees on the far bank and at the same moment was hit by a sudden volley of music loosed from a loudspeaker. She had clapped her hands over her ears and burst into tears. A few months later she was at home with her dying husband. From the next apartment music thundered. Twice she rang the doorbell and begged the neighbors to turn off the sound system, and twice in vain. Finally she

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  shouted: "Stop that hideous racket! My husband is dying! Do you hear? Dying! Dying!"

  During her first few years in France, she used to listen a lot to the radio, for it acquainted her with French language and life, but after Martin died, because of the music she had come to dislike, she no longer took pleasure in it; the news did not follow in sequence as it used to, instead the reports were
set apart by three seconds, or eight or fifteen seconds, of that music, and year by year those little interludes swelled insidiously. She thereby grew intimately acquainted with what Schoenberg called "music become noise."

  She is lying on the bed alongside Gustaf; overexcited at the prospect of her rendezvous, she fears for her sleep; she already swallowed one sleeping tablet, she drowsed off and, waking in the middle of the night, she took another two, then out of despair, out of nervousness, she turned on a little radio beside her pillow. To get back to sleep she wants to hear a human voice, some talk that will seize her thoughts, carry her off to another place, calm her down, and put her to sleep; she switches from station to station, but only music pours out from everywhere, sewage-

  water music, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, and it's a world where she can't talk to anybody because everybody's singing and yelling, a world where nobody talks to her because everybody's prancing around and dancing.

  On the one side the sewage-water music, on the other a snore, and Irena, besieged, yearns for open space around her, a space to breathe, but she stumbles over the pale inert body that fate has dropped into her path like a sack of sludge. She is gripped by a fresh surge of hatred for Gustaf, not because his body is neglecting hers (Ah, no! she could never make love with him again!) but because his snores are keeping her awake and she's in danger of ruining the encounter of her life, the encounter that is to take place soon, in about eight hours, for morning is coming on, but sleep is not, and she knows she's going to be tired, edgy, her face made ugly and old.

  Finally the intensity of her hatred acts as a narcotic, and she falls asleep. When she wakes, Gustaf has already gone out, while the little radio by her pillow is still emitting the music become noise. She has a headache and feels worn out. She would willingly stay in bed, but Milada said she

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  would be coming by at ten o'clock. But why is she coming today? Irena hasn't the slightest desire to be with anyone at all!

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  Built on a slope, the house showed just one of its stories at street level. When the door opened Josef was assailed by the amorous onslaught of a huge German shepherd. Only after a while did he catch sight of N., laughing as he quieted the dog and led Josef along a hallway and down a long stairway to a two-room garden apartment where he lived with his Wife; she was there, friendly, and she offered her hand.

  "Upstairs," N. said, pointing to the ceiling, "the apartments are much roomier. My daughter and son live there with their families. The villa belongs to my son. He's a lawyer. Too bad he's not home. Listen," he said, dropping his voice, "if you want to come back here to live, he'll help you, he'll take care of things for you."

  These words reminded Josef of the day forty

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  years earlier when, in that same voice lowered to indicate secrecy, N. had offered his friendship and his help.

  "I told them about you," N. went on, and he shouted toward the stairwell several names that must have belonged to his progeny; when Josef saw all those grandchildren and great-grandchildren coming down the stairs, he had no idea whose they were. Anyhow, they were all beautiful, stylish (Josef couldn't tear his eyes off a blond, the girlfriend of one of the grandsons, a German girl who spoke not a word of Czech), and all of them, even the girls, looked taller than N.; among them he was like a rabbit caught in a tangle of weeds visibly springing up around and above him.

  Like fashion models strutting a runway, they smiled wordlessly until N. asked them to leave him alone with his friend. His wife stayed indoors, and the two men went out into the garden.

  The dog followed them, and N. remarked: "I've never seen him so excited by a visitor. It's as if he knows what you do for a living." Then he showed Josef some fruit trees and described his labors laying out the grassy plots set off by narrow pathways, so that for some time the conversation

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  stayed distant from the subjects Josef had vowed to raise; finally he managed to interrupt his friend's botanical lecture and ask him about his life during the twenty years they had not seen each other.

  "Let's not talk about it," said N., and in answer to Josef's inquiring look, he laid an index finger on his heart. Josef did not understand the meaning of the gesture: was it that the political events had affected him so profoundly, "to the heart?" or had he gone through a serious love affair? or had a heart attack?

  "Someday I'll tell you about it," he added, turning aside any discussion.

  The conversation was not easy; whenever Josef stopped walking to shape a question better, the dog took it as permission to jump up and set his paws on Josef's belly.

  "I remember what you always used to say," N. remarked. "That a person becomes a doctor because he's interested in diseases; he becomes a veterinarian out of love for animals."

  "Did I really say that?" Josef asked, amazed. He remembered that two days earlier he had told his sister-in-law that he'd chosen his profession as

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  a rebellion against his family. So had he acted out of love, and not rebellion? In a single vague cloud he saw filing past him all the sick animals he had known; then he saw his veterinary clinic at the back of his brick house, where tomorrow (yes, in exactly twenty-four hours!) he would open the door to greet the day's first patient; a slow smile spread across his face.

  He had to force himself back to the conversation barely begun: he asked whether N. had been attacked for his political past; N. said no; according to him, people knew he had always helped those the regime was giving trouble. "I don't doubt it," Josef said (he really didn't), but he pressed on: how did N. himself see his whole past life? As a mistake? As a defeat? N. shook his head, saying that it was neither the one nor the other. And finally Josef asked what N. thought of the very swift, harsh reestablishment of capitalism. Shrugging, N. replied that under the circumstances there was no other solution.

  No, the conversation never managed to get going. Josef thought at first that N. found his questions indiscreet. Then he corrected himself: not so much indiscreet as outdated. If his sister-

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  in-law's vindictive dream should come true and N. were indicted and tried in court, maybe he would reassess his Communist past to explain and defend it. But in the absence of any such trial, that past was remote from him these days. He didn't live there anymore.

  Josef recalled a very old idea of his, which at the time he had considered to be blasphemous: that adherence to Communism has nothing to do with Marx and his theories; it was simply that the period gave people a way to fulfill the most diverse psychological needs: the need to look nonconformist; or the need to obey; or the need to punish the wicked; or the need to be useful; or the need to march forward into the future with youth; or the need to have a big family around you.

  In good spirits, the dog barked and Josef said to himself: the reason people are quitting Communism today is not that their thinking has changed or undergone a shock, but that Communism no longer provides a way to look nonconformist or obey or punish the wicked or be useful or march forward with youth or have a big family around you. The Communist creed no longer answers any need. It has become so unusable that everyone drops it easily, never even noticing.

  Still, the original goal of his visit was unfulfilled: to make it clear to N. that in some imaginary courtroom he, Josef, would defend him. To achieve this he would first show N. that he was not blindly enthusiastic about the world that had sprung up here since Communism, and he described the big advertisement on the square back in his hometown, in which an incomprehensible acronym-agency proposes its services to the Czechs by showing them a white hand and a black hand clasped together: "Tell me," he said. "Is this still our country?"

  He expected to hear a sarcastic response about worldwide capitalism homogenizing the planet, but N. was silent. Josef went on: "The Soviet empire collapsed because it could no longer hold down the nations that wanted their independence. But those nations—they're less independent th
an ever now. They can't choose their own economy or their own foreign policy or even their own advertising slogans."

  "National independence has been an illusion for a long time now," said N.

  "But if a country is not independent and doesn't even want to be, will anyone still be willing to die for it?"

  "Being willing to die isn't what I want for my children."

  "I'll put it another way: does anyone still love this country?"

  N. slowed his steps: "Josef," he said, touched. "How could you ever have emigrated? You're a patriot!" Then, very seriously: "Dying for your country—that's all finished. Maybe for you time stopped during your emigration. But they—they don't think like you anymore."

  "Who?"

  N. tipped his head toward the upper floors of the house, as if to indicate his brood. "They're somewhere else."

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  During these remarks the two friends came to a halt; the dog took advantage of it: he reared up and set his paws on Josef, who petted him. N. contemplated this man-dog couple for a time, increasingly touched. As if he were only just now taking full account of the twenty years they hadn't seen each other: "Ah, I'm so happy you came!"

  He tapped Josef on the shoulder and drew him over to sit beneath an apple tree. And at once Josef knew: the serious, important conversation he had come for would not take place. And to his surprise, that was a comfort, it was a liberation! After all, he hadn't come here to put his friend through an interrogation!

  As if a lock had clicked open, their conversation took off, freely and agreeably, a chat between two old pals: a few scattered memories, news of mutual friends, funny comments, and paradoxes and jokes. It was as if a gentle, warm, powerful breeze had taken him up in its arms. Josef felt an irrepressible joy in talking. Ah, such an unexpected joy! For twenty years he had barely spoken Czech. Conversation with his wife was easy, Danish having turned into a private jargon for themselves. But with other people he was always conscious of choosing his words, constructing a sentence, watching his accent. It seemed to him that when Danes talked they were running nimbly, while he was trudging along behind, lugging a twenty-kilo load. Now, though, the words leaped from his mouth on their own, without his having to hunt for them, monitor them. Czech was no longer the unknown language with the