have always succeeded in accommodating themselves while others suffered, have always been quick to advocate Truths, for they are indifferent to truth, insidiously forging pain in the hearts of betrayed friends, mauled wives, deserted mistresses, battered children, destroyed competitors who stood in their way, victims of their mean hatred which needs no motive, only blood, only revenge cruel and direct or dressed in the juridical verdict of a juridical society. Yes, they are among us still, more so than Jesus’s poor, like an evil reproach and a derision of our pretty words, like a memento of our conceit, a warning to the peace of our self-satisfaction.
Finally the factory foreman took pity on the schoolteacher, and using his ordinary common sense and patient simplicity led him to the humiliating mark: to the recognition that the object of his quest was himself, that it was his own person that was the inane answer to the collection of idiotic questions he had posed and that cost him the greatest humiliation of his life, or whatever it was he lived. He got off at Pardubice, and didn’t even say goodbye to me.
That was my revenge. But then, when I arrived in Prague and strode with the crowd down the underground corridor of the railway station toward the exit where clusters of girls’ faces awaited me, powdered and delicate, beautiful Prague faces, and when the motley, somber streets took me into their noisy gullets, brightened by the colorful bells of full-skirted summer dresses and hemmed in by the racket of everyday disagreements, when I met again, furtively, with Margit in her blue-and-white striped dress at a discreet booth-table at Myšák’s Café, Margit, who lived on crème caramel and turned to me with tender amorous eyes, when I began again to take part in that great game of petty cruelties, artifices, pretenses and lies born of a longing for a paradise lost, for a different, more perfect Man who might once have been and may once again be but is perhaps only just being born by the great and difficult Caesarean section of socialism (or maybe he is toddling around in diapers already in the wake of the factory foreman, but I don’t know, I can’t tell, I couldn’t say), then Emöke was only a dream again, only a legend that perhaps never was, a distant echo of an alien destiny, and soon I had almost ceased to believe in her existence. I didn’t write to her, I didn’t send her the books I had planned to — philosophy, a short private course in the history of thought from Socrates to Engels — I never went to Košice.
And in time, very quickly, I was permeated with an indifference toward the legend, the indifference that allows us to live in a world where creatures of our own blood are dying every day of tuberculosis and cancer, in prisons and concentration camps, in distant tropics and on the cruel and insane battlefields of an Old World drunk on blood, in the lunacy of disappointed love, under the burden of ludicrously negligible worries, that indifference that is our mother, our salvation, our ruin.
And that is how a story, a legend, comes to pass and no one tells it. And yet, somewhere, someone lives on, afternoons are hot and idle, and the person grows older, is deserted, dies. All that is left is a slab, a name. Maybe not even a slab, not even a name. The story is borne for a few more years by another, and then that person dies too. And other people know nothing, as they never, never, never knew anything. The name is lost. As is the story, the legend. Neither a name nor a memory nor even an empty space is left. Nothing
.
But perhaps somewhere at least an impression is left, at least a trace of the tear, the beauty, the loveliness of the person, the legend, Emöke
.
I wonder, I wonder, I wonder
.
* The hot-shot has used a Czech synonym for “eat” that in polite language refers only to animals.
T O J O E M E D J U C K
A Friend
Kreischend zögen die Geier Kreise
.
Die riesigen
Finally the factory foreman took pity on the schoolteacher, and using his ordinary common sense and patient simplicity led him to the humiliating mark: to the recognition that the object of his quest was himself, that it was his own person that was the inane answer to the collection of idiotic questions he had posed and that cost him the greatest humiliation of his life, or whatever it was he lived. He got off at Pardubice, and didn’t even say goodbye to me.
That was my revenge. But then, when I arrived in Prague and strode with the crowd down the underground corridor of the railway station toward the exit where clusters of girls’ faces awaited me, powdered and delicate, beautiful Prague faces, and when the motley, somber streets took me into their noisy gullets, brightened by the colorful bells of full-skirted summer dresses and hemmed in by the racket of everyday disagreements, when I met again, furtively, with Margit in her blue-and-white striped dress at a discreet booth-table at Myšák’s Café, Margit, who lived on crème caramel and turned to me with tender amorous eyes, when I began again to take part in that great game of petty cruelties, artifices, pretenses and lies born of a longing for a paradise lost, for a different, more perfect Man who might once have been and may once again be but is perhaps only just being born by the great and difficult Caesarean section of socialism (or maybe he is toddling around in diapers already in the wake of the factory foreman, but I don’t know, I can’t tell, I couldn’t say), then Emöke was only a dream again, only a legend that perhaps never was, a distant echo of an alien destiny, and soon I had almost ceased to believe in her existence. I didn’t write to her, I didn’t send her the books I had planned to — philosophy, a short private course in the history of thought from Socrates to Engels — I never went to Košice.
And in time, very quickly, I was permeated with an indifference toward the legend, the indifference that allows us to live in a world where creatures of our own blood are dying every day of tuberculosis and cancer, in prisons and concentration camps, in distant tropics and on the cruel and insane battlefields of an Old World drunk on blood, in the lunacy of disappointed love, under the burden of ludicrously negligible worries, that indifference that is our mother, our salvation, our ruin.
And that is how a story, a legend, comes to pass and no one tells it. And yet, somewhere, someone lives on, afternoons are hot and idle, and the person grows older, is deserted, dies. All that is left is a slab, a name. Maybe not even a slab, not even a name. The story is borne for a few more years by another, and then that person dies too. And other people know nothing, as they never, never, never knew anything. The name is lost. As is the story, the legend. Neither a name nor a memory nor even an empty space is left. Nothing
.
But perhaps somewhere at least an impression is left, at least a trace of the tear, the beauty, the loveliness of the person, the legend, Emöke
.
I wonder, I wonder, I wonder
.
* The hot-shot has used a Czech synonym for “eat” that in polite language refers only to animals.
T O J O E M E D J U C K
A Friend
Kreischend zögen die Geier Kreise
.
Die riesigen
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