career I'd chosen for myself (it took me a while to realize how privileged a career it was), my change of attitude was brought about only by reason and will, and therefore could not dry the internal tears I shed over my lost destiny. These internal tears Lucie stilled as if by magic.
All I needed was to feel her close to me, feel the warm circumference of her life, a life in which there was no room for questions of cosmopolitanism and internationalism, political vigilance and the class struggle, controversies over the definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat, politics with its strategy and tactics.
These were the concerns (so much a part of the times that their vocabulary will soon be incomprehensible) which had led to my downfall, and yet I could not let go of them. I had all kinds of answers ready for the commissions that called me in and asked me what had made me become a Communist, but what had attracted me to the movement more than anything, dazzled me, was the feeling (real or apparent) of standing near the wheel of history. For in those days we actually did decide the fate of men and events, especially at the universities; in those early years there were very few Communists on the faculty, and the Communists in the student body ran the universities almost single-handed, making decisions on academic staffing, reaching reform, and the curriculum. The intoxication we experienced is commonly known as the intoxication of power, but (with a bit of good will) I could choose less severe words: we were bewitched by history; we were drunk with the thought of jumping on its back and feeling it beneath us; admittedly, in most cases the result was an ugly lust for power, but (as all human affairs are ambiguous) there was still (and especially, perhaps, in us, the young), an altogether idealistic illusion that we were inaugurating a human era in which man (all men) would be neither outside history, nor under the heel of history, but would create and direct it.
I was convinced that far from the wheel of history there was no life, only vegetation, boredom, exile, Siberia. And suddenly (after six months of Siberia) I'd found a completely new and unexpected opportunity for life: I saw spread before me, hidden beneath history's
soaring wings, a forgotten meadow of everyday life, where a poor, pitiful, but lovable woman was waiting for me—Lucie.
What did Lucie know of the great wings of history? When could she have heard their sound? She knew nothing of history, she lived beneath it; it held no attraction for her, it was alien to her; she knew nothing of the great and contemporary concerns; she lived for her small and eternal concerns. And suddenly I'd been liberated; Lucie had come to take me off to hex gray paradise, and the step that such a short time before had seemed so formidable, the one I would take in getting out of history, was suddenly a step toward release. Lucie held me shyly by the elbow, and I let myself be led....
Lucie was my gray usherette. But who was she in more concrete terms?
She was nineteen, though in fact much older, as women tend to be when they've led a hard life and been catapulted headfirst from childhood to adulthood. She said she was from western Bohemia and had finished school before becoming an apprentice. She didn't enjoy talking about home and wouldn't have said anything if I hadn't pressed her. She had been unhappy there. "My parents never liked me," she said, and as proof she told me about how her mother had remarried and her stepfather drank and was cruel to her and how once they'd accused her of hiding some money from them and how they always beat her. When their disagreements reached a certain pitch, Lucie took the first opportunity and left for Ostrava; she had been there a whole year; she had some girlfriends there, but she preferred keeping to herself; her friends went out dancing and brought boys back to the dormitory, and Lucie was against that; she was serious: she preferred
All I needed was to feel her close to me, feel the warm circumference of her life, a life in which there was no room for questions of cosmopolitanism and internationalism, political vigilance and the class struggle, controversies over the definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat, politics with its strategy and tactics.
These were the concerns (so much a part of the times that their vocabulary will soon be incomprehensible) which had led to my downfall, and yet I could not let go of them. I had all kinds of answers ready for the commissions that called me in and asked me what had made me become a Communist, but what had attracted me to the movement more than anything, dazzled me, was the feeling (real or apparent) of standing near the wheel of history. For in those days we actually did decide the fate of men and events, especially at the universities; in those early years there were very few Communists on the faculty, and the Communists in the student body ran the universities almost single-handed, making decisions on academic staffing, reaching reform, and the curriculum. The intoxication we experienced is commonly known as the intoxication of power, but (with a bit of good will) I could choose less severe words: we were bewitched by history; we were drunk with the thought of jumping on its back and feeling it beneath us; admittedly, in most cases the result was an ugly lust for power, but (as all human affairs are ambiguous) there was still (and especially, perhaps, in us, the young), an altogether idealistic illusion that we were inaugurating a human era in which man (all men) would be neither outside history, nor under the heel of history, but would create and direct it.
I was convinced that far from the wheel of history there was no life, only vegetation, boredom, exile, Siberia. And suddenly (after six months of Siberia) I'd found a completely new and unexpected opportunity for life: I saw spread before me, hidden beneath history's
soaring wings, a forgotten meadow of everyday life, where a poor, pitiful, but lovable woman was waiting for me—Lucie.
What did Lucie know of the great wings of history? When could she have heard their sound? She knew nothing of history, she lived beneath it; it held no attraction for her, it was alien to her; she knew nothing of the great and contemporary concerns; she lived for her small and eternal concerns. And suddenly I'd been liberated; Lucie had come to take me off to hex gray paradise, and the step that such a short time before had seemed so formidable, the one I would take in getting out of history, was suddenly a step toward release. Lucie held me shyly by the elbow, and I let myself be led....
Lucie was my gray usherette. But who was she in more concrete terms?
She was nineteen, though in fact much older, as women tend to be when they've led a hard life and been catapulted headfirst from childhood to adulthood. She said she was from western Bohemia and had finished school before becoming an apprentice. She didn't enjoy talking about home and wouldn't have said anything if I hadn't pressed her. She had been unhappy there. "My parents never liked me," she said, and as proof she told me about how her mother had remarried and her stepfather drank and was cruel to her and how once they'd accused her of hiding some money from them and how they always beat her. When their disagreements reached a certain pitch, Lucie took the first opportunity and left for Ostrava; she had been there a whole year; she had some girlfriends there, but she preferred keeping to herself; her friends went out dancing and brought boys back to the dormitory, and Lucie was against that; she was serious: she preferred
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