The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  "There are men," said Joujou, "I've never had an orgasm with."

  "Don't forget," said the writer, his face more and more agitated, "it was in Rourou that I first rode a bike. Yes, I tell about it in detail in my book. And you all know what the bicycle signifies in my work. It's a symbol. For me, the bicycle is the first step taken by

  136

  Lost Letters

  humanity out of the patriarchal world and into the world of civilization. The first flirtation with civiliza­tion. The flirtation of a virgin before her first kiss. Still virginity and already sin."

  "That's true," said Joujou. "Tanaka, a girl I worked with, had her first orgasm riding a bicycle when she was still a virgin."

  Everyone started discussing Tanaka's orgasm, and Tamina asked Bibi: "May I make a telephone call?"

  14

  The urine smell was stronger in the next room. It was Bibi's daughter's room.

  "I know the two of you aren't on speaking terms," whispered Tamina. "But unless you do it I'll never get my parcel back. The only way is for you to go there and take it from her. If she doesn't find the key, make her force open the drawer. They're things of mine. Letters and such. I have a right to them."

  "Tamina, don't make me talk to her!"

  "Papa, just take it upon yourself and do it for me. She's afraid of you and won't dare refuse you."

  "Listen, if your friends come to Prague, I'll give them a fur coat for you. That's more important than some old letters."

  137

  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  Lost Letters

  "But I don't want a fur coat. I want my parcel!"

  "Speak louder! I can't hear you!" said her father, but his daughter was purposely speaking in an under­tone because she did not want Bibi to hear the Czech words, which would reveal that the call was interna­tional and each of its seconds expensive.

  "I said I want my parcel, not a fur!" Tamina repeated.

  "You're always interested in foolishness!"

  "Papa, this telephone call is horribly expensive. Really, would you please go see her?"

  The conversation was difficult. Her father kept making her repeat things and obstinately refusing to go see her mother-in-law. He ended by saying:

  "Phone your brother and ask him to go see her! He's got nothing better to do! And then he can bring me your parcel!"

  "But he doesn't even know her!"

  "That's the point," said her father, and laughed. "If he did, he'd never go near her."

  Tamina thought swiftly. It wasn't such a bad idea to send her energetic and brusque brother to her mother-in-law. But Tamina did not want to telephone him. They had not exchanged a single letter since she had gone abroad. Her brother had a well-paying job he was able to keep by cutting all ties with his emigre sis­ter.

  "Papa, I can't phone him. Maybe you could explain it to him yourself. Please, Papa!"

  15

  Papa was short and puny, and long ago, when he walked down the street holding Tamina by the hand, he would be puffed up as if he were showing the whole world a monument to the heroic night when he created her. He had never liked his son-in-law and waged an endless war against him. When he offered to

  send Tamina a fur coat (most likely gotten from a deceased relative), he had in mind that old rivalry, not his daughter's health. He wanted her to choose her father (the fur coat) over her husband (the parcel of letters).

  Tamina was horrified by the idea that the fate of her letters was in the hostile hands of her father and her mother-in-law. For some time now she had been imag­ining more and more often that her notebooks were being read by outsiders, and she thought that the gaze of those outsiders was like rain obliterating inscrip­tions on walls. Or like light falling too soon on photo­graphic paper immersed in the fixing bath and ruining the picture.

  She realized that what gave her written memories their meaning and worth was that they were intended for her alone. As soon as they lost that quality, the inti­mate tie binding her to them would be cut, and she would be able to read them no longer with her own eyes but only with the eyes of readers perusing a doc-

  138

  139

  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  Lost Letters

  ument about some other person. Then even she who had written them would become for her some other person, an outsider. The striking similarity that would nonetheless remain between her and the author of the notes would have the effect of parody, of mockery. No, she would never be able to read her notes if they had been read by outsiders.

  That is why she was bursting with impatience and wanted to recover those notebooks and letters as swiftly as possible, while the picture of the past fixed in them was not yet ruined.

  to serve the other customers. When she came back, Bibi told her:

  "I can't stand Dede anymore. When he comes home from one of his selling trips, he stays in bed two whole days. Two days in pajamas! Would you put up with that? And the worst is when he wants to fuck. He can't understand that I don't enjoy fucking, absolutely not a bit. I should leave him. He spends all his time planning his stupid vacation. In bed in his pajamas and holding an atlas. First he wanted to go to Prague. Now he never mentions it. He found a book about Ireland, and he wants to go there no matter what."

  "So you're going to Ireland on vacation?" asked Tamina with a lump in her throat.

  "Are we? We're not going anywhere. Me, I'm going to stay right here and I'm going to write. He's not going to make me go anywhere. I don't need Dede. He's not a bit interested in me. I'm writing, and would you believe he's still not even asked me what I'm writ­ing about? I realize now that we have nothing more to say to each other."

  Tamina wanted to ask: "So you're not going to Prague anymore?" But she had that lump in her throat and could not speak.

  Just then Joujou, the little Japanese woman, came into the cafe and hopped onto the barstool next to Bibi's. She said: "Would you be able to make love in public?"

  "What do you mean?" asked Bibi.

  "Here, for instance, on the floor of the cafe, in front

  141

  16

  Bibi appeared suddenly in the cafe and sat down at the bar: "Hello, Tamina! Give me a whisky!"

  Bibi usually had coffee or, in exceptional circum- stances, some port. By ordering whisky, she was show- ing she was in an unusual frame of mind.

  "How's your book going?" asked Tamina, pouring the drink into a glass.

  "I need to be in a better mood," said Bibi. She emp­tied her glass in one gulp and ordered another.

  Some more customers came into the cafe. Tamina asked them what they wanted, returned behind the bar to get her friend another whisky, and then went off

  140

  lil;:

  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting of everybody. Or at the movies during the intermis-

  Lost Letters

  denly a phrase comes back to me: "a faint, clear, metallic tone—like a golden ring falling into a silver basin."

  When he was very young, Thomas Mann wrote a naively entrancing story about death: in that story death is beautiful, as it is beautiful to all those who dream of it when they are very young, when death is still unreal and enchanting, like the bluish voice of dis­tances.

  A mortally ill young man gets on a train and, descending at an unknown station, enters a town whose name he does not know and rents rooms in an ordinary house from an old woman with a mossy growth on her brow No, I'm not going to relate what happens then in that rented lodging, I only wish to recall a single trivial occurrence: passing through the front room, the ill young man "believed he heard, in between the thud of his footsteps, a sound coming from next door, a faint, clear, metallic tone—but per­haps it was only an illusion. Like a golden ring falling into a silver basin, he thought. ..."

  In the story, that small acoustical detail remains inconsequential and unexplained. From the action's standpoint alone, it could have been omitted without loss. The sound
simply happens; all by itself; just like that.

  I think Thomas Mann sounded that "faint, clear, metallic tone" to create silence. He needed that silence to make beauty audible (because the death he was speaking of was death-beauty), and for beauty to be

  143

  sion.

  "Be quiet!" Bibi shrieked down to the foot of her barstool, where her daughter was making a racket. Then she said: "Why not? It's natural. Why should I be ashamed of something natural?"

  Again Tamina prepared herself to ask Bibi if she was going to Prague. But she realized the question was superfluous. It was all too obvious. Bibi was not going to Prague.

  The owner's wife came out of the kitchen and, smil­ing at Bibi, said: "How are you?"

  "We need a revolution," said Bibi. "Something's got to happen! Something's finally got to happen!"

  That night Tamina dreamed about the ostriches. They were standing against the fence, all talking to her at once. She was terrified. Unable to move, she watched their mute bills as if she were hypnotized. She kept her lips convulsively shut. Because she had a golden ring in her mouth, and she feared for that ring.

  17

  Why do I imagine her with a golden ring in her mouth?

  I can't help it, that's how I imagine her. And sud-

  142

  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  perceptible, it needs a minimal degree of silence (of which the precise measure is the sound made by a golden ring falling into a silver basin).

  (Yes, I realize you don't know what I'm talking about, because beauty vanished long ago. It vanished under the surface of the noise—the noise of words, the noise of cars, the noise of music—we live in constantly. It has been drowned like Atlantis. All that remains of it is the word, whose meaning becomes less intelligible with every passing year.)

  The first time Tamina heard that silence (as pre­cious as the fragment of a marble statue from sunken Atlantis) was when she woke up in a mountain hotel surrounded by forests on the morning after she had fled her country. She heard it a second time when she was swimming in the sea with a stomach full of tablets that brought her not death but unexpected peace. She wanted to shelter that silence with her body and within her body. That is why I see her in her dream standing against the wire fence; in her convulsively shut mouth she has a golden ring.

  Facing her are six long necks topped by tiny heads with straight bills opening and closing soundlessly. She does not understand them. She does not know whether the ostriches are threatening her, warning her, exhort­ing her, or imploring her. And because she does not know, she feels immense anguish. She fears for the golden ring (that tuning fork of silence) and keeps it convulsively in her mouth.

  Tamina will never know what those great birds

  144

  Lost Letters

  came to tell her. But I know. They did not come to warn her, scold her, or threaten her. They are not at all interested in her. Each one of them came to tell her about itself. Each one to tell her how it had eaten, how it had slept, how it had run up to the fence and seen her behind it. That it had spent its important child­hood in the important village of Rourou. That its important orgasm had lasted six hours. That it had seen a woman strolling behind the fence and she was wearing a shawl. That it had gone swimming, that it had fallen ill and then recovered. That when it was young it rode a bike and that today it had gobbled up a sack of grass. They are standing in front of Tamina and talking to her all at once, vehemently, insistently, aggressively, because there is nothing more important than what they want to tell her.

  18

  A few days later, Banaka turned up in the cafe. Staggering drunk, he fell off a barstool twice before managing to stay on it, order a calvados, and put his head down on the counter. Tamina noticed he was cry­ing-

  "What's the matter, Mr. Banaka?" she asked him.

  Banaka looked up at her tearfully and pointed to his

  145

  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  Lost Letters

  chest: "I'm nothing, do you understand? I'm nothing! I don't exist!"

  Then he went to the toilet and from the toilet straight out into the street, without paying.

  When Tamina told Hugo what had happened, he showed her, by way of explanation, a newspaper page with book reviews, among them a sarcastic four-line note on Banaka's entire output.

  The episode of Banaka's pointing to his chest and crying because he did not exist reminds me of a line from Goethe's West-East Divan: "Is one alive when other men are living?" Hidden within Goethe's ques­tion is the mystery of the writer's condition: By writing books, a man turns into a universe (don't we speak of the universe of Balzac, the universe of Chekhov, the universe of Kafka?), and it is precisely the nature of a universe to be unique. The existence of another uni­verse threatens it in its very essence.

  Provided their shops are not on the same street, two cobblers can live in perfect harmony. But if they start writing books on the cobbler's lot, they are soon going to get in each other's way and ask: "Is a cobbler alive when other cobblers are living?"

  Tamina has the impression that a single outsider's glance can destroy the entire worth of her intimate notebooks, and Goethe is convinced that a single glance of a single human being which fails to fall on lines writ­ten by Goethe calls into question Goethe's very exis­tence. The difference between Tamina and Goethe is the difference between human being and writer.

  146

  Someone who writes books is either everything (a unique universe in himself and to all others) or noth­ing. And because it will never be given to anyone to be everything, all of us who write books are nothing. We are unrecognized, jealous, embittered, and we wish the others dead. In that we are all equals: Banaka, Bibi, I, and Goethe.

  The irresistible proliferation of graphomania among politicians, taxi drivers, childbearers, lovers, murder­ers, thieves, prostitutes, officials, doctors, and patients shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout: "We are all writers!"

  For everyone is pained by the thought of disappear­ing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.

  One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.

  19

  Now Hugo was her only hope. He invited her to din­ner, and this time she accepted immediately.

  147

  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  Facing her across the restaurant table, he has only one thought: Tamina continues to elude him. He lacks confidence with her and does not dare to make a frontal attack. And the more he suffers from being unable to hit so modest and determinate a target, the greater his wish to conquer the world, that immensity of the indeterminate. He takes a magazine out of his pocket, opens it, and hands it to Tamina. On the opened spread is the beginning of a long article signed with his name.

  He launches into a long speech. He talks about the review he has just given her: yes, at the moment its cir­culation is mainly local, but it's a solid theoretical review, the people who put it out are courageous and will go far. Hugo talks and talks, and his words attempt to be a metaphor for his erotic aggressiveness, a parade of his strength. There is in these words the beautiful maneuverability of the abstract rushing in to replace the intractability of the concrete.

  Tamina is looking at Hugo and rectifying his face. This spiritual exercise has become a habit. She no longer knows how else to look at a man. It takes an effort, mobilizing all the power of her imagination, but Hugo's brown eyes then really do change color, suddenly turning blue. Tamina fixes her eyes on him, because to prevent the blue from vanishing, she must keep it in Hugo's eyes with all the strength of her stare.

  That stare disturbs Hugo, and so he talks and talks s
till more, his eyes a beautiful blue and his brow gen-

  148

  Lost Letters

  fly widening on both sides until the only hair remain­ing in front is a narrow triangle pointing down.

  "I've always directed my criticisms exclusively against our Western world. But the injustice that pre­vails here has led us to a mistaken indulgence toward other countries. Thanks to you, you know, thanks to you, Tamina, I've realized that the problem of power is the same everywhere, in your country and in ours, in the East as well as in the West. We should not try to replace one type of power with another, we should repudiate the very principle of power and repudiate it everywhere."

  As Hugo leans over the table toward Tamina, the sour smell of his breath so disrupts her spiritual exer­cises that Hugo's thick hair once again grows low over his brow. Hugo starts to repeat that he realizes all this thanks to her.

  "How can that be?" Tamina breaks in. "We've never talked about it!"

  There is now only one blue eye left on Hugo's face, and then it too slowly turns brown.

  "I didn't need you to talk to me about it, Tamina. It was enough for me to think a lot about you."

  The waiter leans over to serve their appetizers.