The Joke: Definitive Version

by Milan Kundera

"Do you think demolition can be beautiful?" said Kostka, and I smiled inwardly, recognizing in his response (delivered mildly, but conceived as a challenge) the Kostka (at once likeable and ridiculous) I had first met more than fifteen years before. I replied, "I know you're a quiet workman on God's eternal construction site and don't like hearing about demolition, but what can I do? Myself, I'm not one of God's bricklayers. Besides, if God's bricklayers built real walls, I doubt we'd be able to demolish them. But instead of walls all I see is stage sets. And stage sets are made to be demolished."

"A value debased and an illusion unmasked have the same pitiful form; they resemble each other and there is nothing easier than to mistake one for the other."

had to see what she looked like, this keeper (uplifter) of my head, my tender assassin.

I hadn't seen her for fifteen years! During that period, time had superimposed a mask on her true face, but fortunately the mask came with two holes that allowed her real eyes, her true eyes, to shine through, and they were just as I had known them.

it wasn't hate that made me do what I did, it was love, love of love, love of their house and home, love of their children, I wanted to help them, I too have a child, a home, and I tremble for them!

And yet: the men with a woman at home had a thread stretching across that pause in the score; no matter how thin, how agonizingly thin and fragile it might have been, it was still a thread. I had no such thread; I'd broken off all relations with Marketa, and the only letters I received were from my mother.... Well, was that not a thread?

A great deal has been said about love at first sight; I am perfectly aware of love's retrospective tendency to make a legend of itself, turn its beginnings into myth; so I don't want to assert that it was love; but I have no doubt there was a kind of clairvoyance at work: I immediately felt, sensed, grasped the essence of Lucie's being or, to be more precise, the essence of what she was later to become for me; Lucie had revealed herself to me the way religious truth reveals itself.

FROM that evening I was different inside; I was inhabited again; housekeeping had suddenly been set up within me as in a room, and someone was living there. The clock that for months had hung silent on the wall had suddenly begun to tick. This was significant: time, which until then had flowed like an indifferent stream from nothingness to nothingness (for I had been living in the pause!), without articulation, without measure, had begun to wear its human face again; to mark itself off, measure itself out. I came to live for my passes, and each day was a rung on the ladder to Lucie.

You must admit: it's hard to live with people willing to send you to exile or death, it's hard to become intimate with them, it's hard to love them.

yet as is so often the case, the seed of misfortune lay hidden at good fortune's core. The sad events of autumn were conceived in this green-black summer.

The young can't help playacting; themselves incomplete, they are thrust by life into a completed world where they are compelled to act fully grown. They therefore adopt forms, patterns, models—those that are in fashion, that suit, that please—and enact them.

I remember to this day walking home from the station. The way to my village, which borders on the town, lies across the fields. It was autumn, just before twilight. The wind was blowing, and some boys were zigzagging paper kites in the sky from the ends of interminable strings. Papa had once made me a kite. He took me into the field, threw the kite into the air, and ran with it until the wind took hold of the paper and carried it high. I didn't enjoy it much. Papa enjoyed it a lot more. I was touched now by the memory and quickened my pace. The idea crossed my mind that Papa had sent that kite into the air to Mama.

I do see things as they are, but in addition to these visible things I see the invisible. It's not for nothing that fantasy exists. It's what makes homes of our houses. I never knew my mama. So I never wept for her. I've always been pleased that she was young and beautiful and in heaven. None of the other children had a mama as young as mine.

Who lives in eternity knows no sorrow. He knows that life on earth lasts but an instant and reunion is imminent.

Ludvik understood and started asking me all about it. But I remembered right away that Ludvik had yearned to go abroad since he was a child and now his chances of getting out were very slim. At that time and for many years thereafter, people with political blemishes on their records were not allowed out of the country. I saw how different our lives had become, and I tried to avoid saying so. This meant I couldn't talk openly about our tour, because I would be throwing light on the gulf that had suddenly opened between our destinies. I wanted to shroud that gulf in darkness and was afraid of any word liable to throw the least bit of light on it. But I couldn't find a single one that didn't. Everything I said with the slightest bearing on our lives served to remind us that we'd taken separate paths. That we had different opportunities, different futures. That we were being carried off in opposite directions. I tried to talk about trivial and indifferent matters in an attempt to cover up our mutual estrangement.

Only later did I learn that Ludvik had been in prison at the time. His mother was the only one in town who'd known. When she died, the Kouteckys took over the body of an unloved sister-in-law and proclaimed it their own. At last they were avenged on their ungrateful nephew. They had robbed him of his mother. They had covered her up with a heavy marble stone guarded by a white angel with curly hair and a palm frond. I'll never forget that angel. He was soaring above the ravaged life of a friend from whom even the bodies of his parents had been stolen. The angel of robbery.

is! The propaganda apparatus wants a hierarchy in its gallery of dead heroes. They want a chief hero among heroes.

Politicians, writers, scientists, artists. And none of them became symbols. You don't find their pictures hanging in schools and offices. And many left behind important bodies of work. But it's precisely their work that is the difficulty. It can't be touched up, cut down, or reshaped. It's the work that kept them from gaining entrance to the propaganda gallery of heroes.

Because it's not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it's your friends. Since that time I've started taking refuge on a road through the fields. On a road through the fields with a lone wild rose bush on the verge. There I meet the last of the faithful.

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.

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.

Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live comprise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can't rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life.

I took a long look at the poignant pyramid of saints, clouds, and angels that simulated in heavy stone the heavens and their heights, whereas the real heavens were pale (morning) blue and hopelessly removed from that dusty stretch of earth.

It's a well-known phenomenon: when a man waits for a woman, he finds it extremely difficult to think of her and can do little else but pace up and down under her motionless effigy.