Yarostan’s last letter

Dear Sophia,

I don’t deserve your pity. I’ve been blind. For over twenty years I’ve been nothing more than an apologist for a repressive ideology. You tell me you don’t have a vantage point from which to criticize my attitudes. The events I experienced here yesterday convinced me I never had a vantage point from which to debunk what I called your “illusions,” or Luisa’s for that matter. I parted with my own illusions far more stubbornly than you parted with yours. Jasna and I had to experience one shock after another before either of us were willing to admit we were wrong, and had always been wrong, about Titus Zabran. The extent to which we were wrong went far beyond Mirna’s or Yara’s dreams. I can now answer all the questions you and Sabina have been asking for the past few months. I can now tell you why Titus didn’t mention to me the letter you sent us during the Magarna uprising and why Titus wasn’t arrested with the rest of the carton plant crew twenty years ago.

From the time I sent you my last letter until yesterday, Yara treated me as an “enemy.” Her hostility toward me during the entire two weeks was as intense as the hostility she had briefly expressed toward me the last time she visited me in prison, shortly after Vesna’s death. She made it a point not to be home when I was; she left a room whenever I entered it. A few days after our trip to the clearing, when she was still wearing a bandage over her jaw, we were both in the kitchen at the same time; I told her I was sorry about the blow I had given her.

Yara’s response to my apology was, “I’m sorry I have to share this house with you. You’re hateful!” She turned her back to me and stormed out of the kitchen.

During the entire past two weeks, Yara’s attitude toward me remained what Mirna’s had been on the night after our outing to the clearing. Yara wanted me to move to the shed where Mirna had once housed her sick mother. I tried to make myself “understand” Yara’s attitude as a healthy rebellion against her father. But I couldn’t make myself understand the specific cause for her rebellion, namely her hysterical attempt to copulate with her own father. Consequently, although I did try to apologize for having hit her, I did not make a serious attempt to be her friend. On occasions when she didn’t turn her back to me, I turned mine to her. One result of our mutual hostility was that I failed to observe what Yara and Mirna were doing during those two weeks, and when their “plot” started to unfold I was taken completely by surprise.

Because of my antagonism. I gave the worst possible interpretation to the few things I did see. For example, early one morning, after she had removed the bandage from her jaw, Yara left the house wearing the same costume she had worn to the dance at Mirna’s plant and to the outing to Mirna’s clearing. I asked Mirna, “For whose benefit is she performing her Sabina role this time?”

“She’s going to a lecture being given by the famous Vera Krena,” Mirna told me.

“In that costume?”

“And why not in that costume? Haven’t you repeatedly written Sophia that we were all acting under the influence of what we learned from her letters?” Mirna asked me, hypocritically sweet, but barely disguising her sarcasm.

“You don’t mean to tell me Yara is acting on what we’ve learned about Vera’s infatuation with Sabina twenty years ago!”

“Why else would she be wearing that costume?” Mirna asked, irking me with the playfulness of her tone.

I was furious. I immediately drew the worst possible conclusion. “You’re a genuine maniac, Mirna! How can you put your own daughter up to something so vile? I suppose you’ll send her looking for a narcotics dealer next!”

“Yarostan, you’re a genuine saint,” she told me with the same exaggerated sweetness. “Just like my mother. But my own daughter, it turns out, has a mind of her own and doesn’t need me to put her up to anything. Are you forgetting you called her my doctor?”

Of course I now see that Mirna’s sarcasm was perfectly justified. I was an absolute hypocrite. When I had read the letters in which you had described your experiences in the garage, I had been unreservedly sympathetic to Sabina, Tissie and “their world.” Yet when I imagined that Mirna as well as twelve-year old Yara were beginning their “careers” as prostitutes, I reacted the same way Mirna’s mother had reacted to her “devils.”

Mirna’s behavior during the past two weeks was even more incomprehensible to me than Yara’s. The day after Yara’s departure in her “Sabina costume,” both were out when I came home from the carton plant. Mirna returned about an hour after I finished a lonely supper. I could barely recognize her. I stared at her, speechless, fascinated and repelled. She had transformed herself into a phenomenon I had never seen on the streets of this city, a phenomenon I had seen only in foreign motion pictures: a human body for sale, a sensual commodity. As soon as she saw my expression, she did all she could to provoke and deepen my shocked disbelief. She paraded herself in front of me imitating the postures, the walk and the gestures of professional “high class” prostitutes we had seen in movies. Instead of the usual bag hanging on a shoulder-strap, she carried a small leather purse; she wore shoes with high heels and nylon stockings, neither of which she’d ever worn before; her bright skirt ended above her knees; between her waist and her shoulders she wore a tight-fitting sweater that accentuated the contours of her large breasts; her hair was exotically stacked on her head in the shape of a cake. I convinced myself that Mirna, once having rejected her mother’s repressive caution, had taken it into her head to relive every experience in Sabina’s life and to invent additional possibilities of her own. I had admired Sabina, I had written you that I considered her world to be mine, when you had described her life’s experiences to me. Yet I stared at Mirna with revulsion. I knew I was being a hypocrite; I knew I couldn’t justify my revulsion, even to myself. I went to our bedroom with tears in my eyes, saying nothing to Mirna, ignoring her until she joined me in bed, at which time I turned my back to her.

Because of the false conclusions I drew, I felt like a stranger in my own house. I thought both Mirna and Yara were setting out on “liberated” careers as courtesans or prostitutes, and I didn’t have the nerve to ask either of them any questions. After our recent outing and our unsuccessful confrontation with Titus, I felt as estranged from Mirna and Yara as I had felt after my release from prison three years ago. At that time Mirna had rushed to work and back, tended to the sick old woman, and slept, indifferent to my presence, perhaps even resentful about the fact that I represented yet another burden. And Yara had avoided me after she had ascertained that I would not have been less willing than Titus to give Vesna to the doctors. My sympathy for Yara’s “political” activities in her school had put an end to her disappointment in me, but my behavior in the clearing revived and deepened her disappointment and transformed it to hostile distrust. From her own point of view she was perfectly justified. I had been repelled by the possibility of incestuous love with my own daughter. Such a possibility had never crossed my mind, and my whole being rejected it as alien and repulsive. But Yara is Mirna’s daughter; she’s known for years that Mirna at Yara’s age had shared her bed with her brother and had desired him; to Yara this seemed perfectly understandable and normal; she’s also heard Mirna express her love for her own father, and even her desire for sexual intercourse with him. I’ve also been familiar with Mirna’s expressed desires; I learned about some of them from Jan as long as twenty years ago. I’ve also learned to take them for granted as perfectly normal. I’ve known that Mirna never actually realized her incestuous wishes, and I took them for granted only as the sexual fantasies of a little girl. But when Mirna communicated her desires to her two daughters, she frightened the older into a puritanical hysteria while creating in the younger an unquenchable desire to realize all of Mirna’s unfulfilled wishes.

I felt estranged from my companions, and I made no attempt to communicate with them. During the past week and a half I dragged myself to work and back. I transferred my life’s interests to the activity taking place in the carton plant, to the contacts being created by workers along the production line in order to explore ways of decreasing the amount of time we spent working. As soon as the workday ended I lost all my enthusiasm, dragged myself to a house which I knew would be empty, and waited with apprehension for one or the other “courtesan” to return. I even considered the possibility of renting a room, letting my companions develop their new selves without me. I felt I no longer had anything to contribute with my presence in the house. I told myself that Mirna, twenty-nine years old and fresh out of a condition of drudgery that was maiming her, would then be completely free to satisfy every conceivable passion and drama in her exquisitely constructed settings. And I started to doubt that Yara and I could continue to live under the same roof. I wanted to apologize for having hit her, for having kicked Zdenek, but not for having “disappointed” her. Sabina’s motto, “Everything is allowed,” no longer roused my unqualified enthusiasm. I was not able to engage in sexual intercourse with my own daughter, and I felt that my continued presence in the house was a provocation to a daughter obsessed by the desire for such an experience, and to a mother who wanted to be present during the act so as to experience vicariously an act which she considered the highest peak of enjoyment. I was afraid that the “revolution” of my two companions had parted ways with mine. Yesterday all of that changed.

Yesterday was Sunday, the day of Jasna’s and Titus’ celebration of their coming marriage. In the morning I felt extremely irritable and apprehensive, and I was ready to talk myself out of going to the event. I remembered Jasna’s having begged Mirna and Yara not to attend her celebration if they still retained their hostility toward Titus, and as far as I could see nothing had changed in their outlook. I became even more apprehensive when, after the three of us ate lunch in silence, Yara ran to her room and returned to the living room wearing her “Sabina costume.” A few minutes later Mirna turned up in the living room in her short bright skirt, high-heeled shoes and seductive sweater and announced, “We’re ready.”

I accompanied them out of the house only to avoid making a scene. I walked between two complete strangers who, with their “secrets” and “plots” and costumes, inhabited a world completely unfamiliar to me. Mirna looked odd. In one hand she carried the exquisite little leather purse while in the other she lugged a peasant’s basket filled with the food she and Yara had spent the morning preparing; Yara earned another basket. They didn’t ask me to help carry anything.

My apprehension turned to anger as soon as we arrived at Jasna’s. I had forgotten when the “celebration” was to begin, but I remembered as soon as Jasna asked why we had come an hour early; I knew that our early arrival was part of Mirna’s “plot.” Jasna was in an apron and had her hair in a towel; she, too, was angry about the fact that we were an hour early, and her suspicion was aroused. “What in the world are you wearing?” she asked Mirna as soon as we walked in.

“Isn’t she positively stunning?” Yara asked Jasna excitedly.

Jasna’s face fell. She rushed to the kitchen, then upstairs.

Mirna shouted to her, “Yara and I can finish whatever still has to be done in the kitchen and dining room; you just go up and get yourself ready,”

Jasna hesitantly accepted Mirna’s offer. Mirna and Yara carried an extra table from the kitchen to the dining room, after which they set the table, counting the places as if they knew exactly how many guests were coming. They then proceeded to unpack the food from the baskets they had brought. When Jasna came down she exclaimed, “Good grief, Mirna! Did you invite all the people in your plant?”

“No, Jasna. I invited all the people in yours,” Mirna told her cryptically. Jasna ran back up without responding, clearly becoming as apprehensive as I had been since that morning.

We didn’t have to wait long before we started to learn what Mirna meant. Fifteen minutes after our arrival, another early guest knocked at the door. Yara ran to open it and in the doorway I recognized Comrade Vera Krena.

Yara eagerly extended both hands to the People’s Representative and begged her, “Please do come in, Vera.”

The woman stepped inside without once glancing at me or at the house. She embraced Yara and said, “I’m enchanted to see you again! I can’t thank you enough for inviting me.”

Yara placed her lips near the woman’s ear and whispered, “The enchantment is all mine.” I was certain I had been right about the function of Yara’s “Sabina costume,” her black hair and eyebrows, her slightly exotic jacket and slacks, her studied cat-like gestures.

Jasna ran down to see who else had arrived and stopped before she reached the bottom of the staircase, glaring at the couple embracing by the doorway. “Vera Neis!” she exclaimed with surprise, almost with indignation.

Vera abruptly let go of Yara and looked around for the first time, “Jasna Zbrkova!” she shouted. Glancing from Jasna to the living room and back to the staircase, she exclaimed, “But this isn’t Sabina Nachalo’s house! There’s some mistake!” She backed up toward the door like a cornered animal and reached for the knob.

Yara blocked the door and whispered to her, “It’s not a mistake, Vera.”

Jasna started to grin as if she had caught on. She ran toward Vera and pulled her hand away from the doorknob. “Aren’t you going to embrace me too, Vera? I’m also Sabina Nachalo’s friend!”

Vera, on the verge of tears, hesitated briefly before she put her arm around her former housemate. “I’m terribly sorry, Jasna. I didn’t know where I was. It was such a shock.”

Jasna, still grinning, embraced Vera warmly and told her, “I’m so glad you remember me, Vera! Please do stay. You’re more than welcome, no matter what Yara made you think in order to get you to come.”

Freeing herself of Jasna’s embrace, Vera turned suspiciously to Yara and asked, “Then it’s not true that your mother is here?”

“It is true! She’s right here!” Yara shouted. She took Vera’s hand and pulled Vera toward Mirna.

Vera cautiously took both of Mirna’s hands in hers. “It’s not possible. So young, so beautiful, yet so transformed. I’m charmed to see you again, Sabina —”

Mirna, gleaming with pride, grinned wickedly. “The pleasure is all mine, I assure you. I’ve looked forward to this meeting for a long time. I’m Yara’s mother —”

“But you’re not Sabina,” Vera at last ascertained. I felt called on to contribute, “Yara is a terrible liar —”

Mirna, holding on to Vera’s hands, obviously defended her coconspirator. “Yara wasn’t exactly lying; She’s my daughter only physically. In spirit she’s Sabina’s daughter, just as in spirit I’m Sabina’s sister —”

“Then you’re —”

“I’m not anyone you’ve ever met; I’m Jan Sedlak’s sister.” Vera grabbed Yara’s shoulder and said, without bitterness, “Why you little devil!”

“Everything I told you is true in a way,” Yara pleaded. “I so wanted you to come! Would you have come if I’d told you the actual truth?”

“No I wouldn’t,” Vera admitted. Then Vera turned to me and guessed, “So you must be Jan; you’ve changed so —”

“Jan died in prison,” I told her. “I’m Yarostan.” We shook hands.

“Yarostan Vochek! How stupid of me!” Vera turned to Mirna and told her, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

“Twenty years is a long time,” I told her, “Yara is our daughter.”

Vera was amazed. “Your daughter! But why did she bring me here? What’s the occasion?”

“Neither Jasna nor I knew she’d bring you here,” I told her.

Jasna told her, “The occasion is a celebration of my engagement to Titus Zabran. Surely you remember him?”

“Titus? Of course I remember him! But this is all so strange’. I suppose I should congratulate you.”

Jasna explained to her, “Mirna had promised to invite certain of Titus’ old friends. But I never expected you to come!”

Yara, putting on the expression of a begging dog, told Vera, “I hope you aren’t terribly offended.”

“No, I suppose I’m not,” Vera said. “I’ve never had a prank like this played on me. I’m starting to understand that everything you told me was true, in a way.”

The next arrivals were Titus and Zdenek. I was surprised to see them together. “Here’s the groom!” Zdenek announced as he entered.

“Zdenek, how nice of you to come,” Jasna said; then she told Titus, “You’re just in time; Mirna apparently misunderstood the time and got here an hour early. And one of the guests she promised is already here.”

Titus noticed Vera, turned stiffly to her and said, without extending his hand, “I take it you’re the guest, Comrade Krena. I hadn’t imagined you’d be interested in coming here to listen to my political views. I’ve heard many of yours on the radio.”

“And you don’t agree with them?” Vera asked.

“I’ve never believed a revolution could be launched by the top of the bureaucracy,” Titus told her.

“Don’t you think it can at least be lubricated from there?” Vera asked him.

“I don’t think I’d call that lubrication,” Titus told her. Then he remembered he was at least partly a host, “Do you know each other? Comrade Tobarkin, Comrade Krena.”

Zdenek, shaking hands with Vera, told her, “Unfortunately I only listen to the radio when I’m drunk.”

I hadn’t seen Zdenek since our outing to Mirna’s clearing. At that time I had thought him too drunk to be aware of what he was doing, but I was wrong. As he shook Vera’s hand, he turned his face so that neither Vera nor Titus saw him, and he winked to Yara and Mirna. That wink gave me my first clue that Zdenek was “in” on Mirna’s and Yara’s game, that he had in fact been acting as their confederate since that outing. My suspicion was confirmed by the way Zdenek started the next conversation.

He turned to me and said, “This world is amazingly small, Yarostan. Do you remember when you and I ran into each other at the political prisoners’ club five or six months ago?”

Thinking that I was spoiling the “surprise” he was about to reveal, I told him, “Jasna and I already know that you also ran into Titus at the political prisoners’ club. Mirna and Yara told us.”

“Zabran and I didn’t only run into each other there.” he told me. “It so happens we ran into each other the same day you and I did. Isn’t that a coincidence? The first time I saw Zabran at the club was about half an hour before I saw you. As a matter of fact, I was still talking to him when I noticed you —”

Mirna commented, “That certainly is a coincidence!”

“I thought you didn’t believe in coincidences,” I said to her.

Zdenek continued, “On our way here I was trying to remind Zabran of that day. Zabran and I are practically neighbors, you know. He doesn’t remember that day. Of course six months ago I had no idea you and Zabran knew each other. I rushed to greet you. When I turned to introduce you to each other, Zabran was gone.”

I was irritated by Zdenek’s suggestion that Titus had seen me at that meeting and avoided me. “There were a lot of people at that meeting, Zdenek, and I’m not surprised he didn’t see me there; I didn’t see him there either,”

Zdenek asked me, “Wouldn’t you have turned to look if someone had shouted his name?”

I remembered the occasion. Zdenek had shouted “Yarostan!” very loudly. I looked toward Titus for a clue, but he was helping Jasna set the table and seemed indifferent to Zdenek’s “coincidence.” I reminded Zdenek, “Almost all the people in that room were shouting the names of acquaintances they recognized.” I felt uneasy. I was glad when Zdenek’s attention turned away from me.

Vera and Yara were talking quietly to each other in a corner of the living room. I wouldn’t have noticed the extremely flirtatious character of their exchange if Sabina hadn’t “reminded” me of Vera’s flirtation with her twenty years ago. In Jasna’s living room the initiative was not exclusively Vera’s. Yara, doing an excellent imitation of the little gypsy I remembered, made no effort to hide her admiration for the woman who had been the central topic of her gossip with Julia for the past year. Apparently Yara’s esteem grew when Vera became the tribune of the reformist wing of the government. Mirna, who had been pacing impatiently between the kitchen clock and the front door, sat down on the edge of a couch near Vera and Yara. Zdenek also turned to listen to them.

Vera was asking Yara, “But why did you introduce yourself as Sabina Nachalo’s daughter? Of all the people in this room, you and your mother are the only ones who didn’t know Sabina!”

“Oh, but Mirna did know Sabina!” Yara protested.

“I do remember that Sabina and Jan were good friends —”

Mirna interrupted Vera. “Sabina and I were more than good friends. We were almost sisters, and in some ways much more than sisters —”

Vera seemed embarrassed by Mirna’s tone. “But when did you know Sabina? Forgive me for doubting you, but you seem so young, and I had thought Sabina had emigrated twenty years ago —”

Mirna, looking past Vera with her distant look, told her, “Sabina and I were together for a day or two when the revolution started to break out —”

“You mean when that owner was ousted from the carton plant?” Vera asked. Suddenly she blushed intensely and turned her face away from Mirna’s; she probably assumed Sabina had at that time told Mirna about Vera’s secret passion. For an instant Vera seemed very embarrassed. Abruptly changing the subject, she asked Yara politely, “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

Yara told her, “I had a sister, but she was the exact opposite of Sabina. Her name was Vesna.”

“Why do you say ‘was’?”

“She died three years ago,” Yara told her.

Vera reached for Yara’s hand as she said, “How awful!” She turned to Mirna and told her, “I’m so sorry. How did she die?”

Looking in Titus’ direction, Yara said, “Mr. Zabran knows how Vesna died. He helped her.”

Jasna intervened in the conversation. “Titus took Vesna to the hospital. He did what everyone would have done.”

Mirna, who was again pacing impatiently, said, “Yes, everyone would have done it except the girl’s own mother and sister. No one would have believed that the girl’s sister understood more about the illness than the doctors did.”

Jasna gave Mirna a pleading look and asked her. “Did you really come to bring that up —”

Titus entered the conversation; he commented, without a trace of hostility, “It is to be expected that when a patient dies, the doctors are blamed and not the disease —”

Jasna tried to object to this formulation. “Yara and Mirna did know —”

But Titus continued, “Of course, given the doctors’ failure to diagnose the disease in time, anyone’s guess seemed equally good. But this reasoning is incorrect. The doctors proceeded on the basis of the most advanced science available to them, on the basis of objective and not instinctive analysis, with exact procedures for analyzing, isolating, neutralizing and removing the disease. Thus all guesses were not equally valid. Only the doctors’ diagnosis was capable of restoring the child’s health.”

Yara protested, “The only thing Mr. Zabran and the doctors didn’t know was that there was nothing wrong with Vesna. It was the hospital and the doctors that made her sick. They killed her!”

Mirna hurriedly pulled Yara to the opposite comer of the living room, near where I was standing with Zdenek, and whispered, “Don’t start that yet, Yara! Wait until they’re all here!”

Yara whispered, “I couldn’t help it; he started it.”

Meanwhile Vera was asking Titus, “What was wrong with the child? I don’t understand!”

Jasna told her, “There was nothing wrong with her; unfortunately no one believed Yara.”

Titus seemed irritated by Jasna’s comment. “Are we to believe, three years after the fact, that an eight-year old child was more knowledgeable in medicine than the staffs of two hospitals? If nothing was wrong with the girl, this was for the doctors to determine, not for lay people unfamiliar with medicine, and certainly not an eight-year old!”

Jasna objected meekly, “That’s not always true, Titus. In this case —”

Titus cut her short. “Excuse me Jasna, but it’s true in every case. The responsibility of any reasonable adult is to get a sick person to a hospital, not to consult a seer or a child as to whether the person’s condition warrants a doctor’s intervention. A reasonable person’s responsibility begins and ends with putting a sick person in the care of people who are experts in disease. It is the responsibility of the experts to diagnose the disease and prescribe the cure. Unfortunately the experts are not omniscient; they’re limited by the present state of development of medical knowledge. But within this limit it is obvious that two competent staffs of doctors understood Vesna’s condition infinitely better than Yara! It is of course conceivable, but extremely unlikely, that Vesna’s death may have been caused by a mistake on their part. I’m convinced Vesna was in a condition which couldn’t be cured.”

Jasna persisted. “You admit the doctors could have made a mistake. I’m convinced they made a terrible mistake. Vesna would still be alive today if you had listened to Yara —”

Titus said angrily, “It is inconceivable to me that Mirna or Yara or Vesna herself could have been better informed about Vesna’s health than people who specialize in the field of health!”

Vera asked, “Am I to understand a perfectly healthy child was taken to the hospital and died there?”

Jasna told her, “I’m sorry this came up because it’s far too complicated to explain. What Titus did was what almost every reasonable person would have done. I’m the one who told Titus that Vesna was ill. She had been absent from school. Yarostan was still in prison. Mirna worked all day and supported not only her two daughters but a paralyzed mother as well. Titus rushed to Mirna’s house as soon as I told him. What he found there would have alarmed anyone; it certainly alarmed me when he described it. Vesna was in her paralyzed grandmother’s bed and seemed deathly ill; she didn’t eat, she had a high temperature and she became hysterical whenever anyone threatened to remove her from the old woman’s room —”

Vera said with conviction, “It seems perfectly obvious to me that the right thing to do was to have the child see a doctor as soon as possible.” I stared at Yara (with intense satisfaction, I have to admit) while Vera Krena said these words. Yara’s eyes looked at Vera with a hostility that had long been familiar to me; the romance was over.

I tried to take up Jasna’s argument. “I wasn’t home at the time, as Jasna told you. If I had been, I would probably have insisted that Vesna be taken to the hospital. But Yara and Mirna have both convinced me that the doctors did not in fact know better, that Vesna would have recovered, in her own strange way, if she’d been left in the old woman’s room. I’m convinced she’d be among us today —”

Yara seemed surprised; she looked into my eyes with gratitude. She was probably surprised that I was “convinced,” since I had only recently been ready to throw Mirna to the doctors to save her from the same “sickness.”

But Titus was infuriated by my intervention. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Yarostan! Questions of health and disease are in the domain of science, not subjects for children’s fairy tales or uninformed speculation!”

To which Vera added, “I must say I emphatically agree with Titus! I simply can’t imagine a sick child being left without medical care because her eight-year old sister affirmed that she wasn’t sick. I find your arguments strange, to say the least!”

Jasna still protested, “You don’t understand the specific condition Vesna was in —”

Jasna was interrupted by a knock on the door. Mirna ran to the door; this was the knock she had been waiting for. All eyes were on her as she stopped before opening the door, straightened her hair, pulled her sweater down tightly. She took on a relaxed pose and turned to look at us with a provocative smile before she finally reached for the doorknob. I would never have imagined her capable of such sensuous gestures, of acting like such a courtesan. But my righteous shock quickly gave way to quiet laughter. The scene in the doorway became comical. A chauffeur-driven limousine of the type reserved for diplomats and high government officials was visible in the street, although the doorway itself was almost completely blocked by a short, extremely heavy man. He was dressed in a checkered “sports” jacket and white shoes which seemed completely inappropriate on such a large man; I forget what color pants he wore; it was obvious that all his clothes had been made in the most expensive tailoring establishment, or abroad. With a “chivalry” that made him look grotesque, he raised Mirna’s hand to his lips. I almost laughed out loud when the man bestowed a kiss on the rough hand of the woman who had not in fact spent her life as a courtesan but as a factory worker.

Mirna said to him, in her best cinema-learned manner, “How exquisite! Please do come in!”

Holding on to Mirna’s hand as he followed her into the room, the man glanced hastily from Mirna’s bosom to the feet of the other people standing in the room. He dropped Mirna’s hand abruptly and whispered, with evident surprise, “I had expected to find you alone.”

“Oh please don’t be offended!” Mirna begged. “Every one of the people in the room is a good friend of Luisa’s.” I was startled; so was everyone else except Yara, who grinned mischievously.

The man said to Mirna, still in a whisper but with the authoritative tone of someone used to commanding, “I had looked forward to a tête-à-tête with you, my dear. If you will do me the honor of accompanying me to a cafe —”

Mirna placed both her hands on his. “I’m flattered beyond words! I’d like nothing better than a tête-à-tête with you, and afterwards we could go to a cafe, just the two of us. But please wait a while. When I told Luisa’s other friends how charming you were, they all insisted I introduce them to you, and they’d simply be heartbroken if I kept you all to myself —”

The man started moving back toward the door. “I assure you I’m not in a mental or physical condition to meet Luisa’s friends. If you could arrange to extend your stay, at least by one day, I’m sure we could find another occasion —”

Mirna lifted one of his hands, pressed it tightly between her breasts, and told him with an irresistibly seductive tone, “I’ll do anything, anything at all, if you’ll only do me the honor of letting me introduce you. Tomorrow will be too late. This is the last day we’ll all be together, since I have a reservation. Please do me that favor.”

The man seemed defeated. He looked at the other people in the room for the first time. His face expressed shocked disbelief when his eyes focused on Vera Krena. Pulling his hand away from Mirna’s bosom, he exclaimed, “You!”

Vera burst out laughing. “Of course! Wasn’t I one of Luisa’s best friends?”

Narrowing his eyes, he asked Vera suspiciously, “Are you and the so-called reform party behind this?”

“I only wish we were!” Vera told him.

Just then Titus pulled me to the hallway between the living room and the dining room. “What kind of joke is this? I had thought Mirna was going to invite workers, people like Zdenek Tobarkin, for a serious political discussion.”

I told Titus, “I have no idea what Mirna and Yara are up to. I wasn’t in on their game, I have no sympathy for it, and I don’t know who that man is.”

“You know perfectly well who he is!” Titus said indignantly. “Do you take me for a fool?”

“Honestly, Titus, I’ve never seen him before in my life!” I assured him.

Titus then told me, “That is the recently demoted member of the central committee of the state planning commission!”

I burst out laughing and asked very loudly, “That fat man is Marc Glavni?” I was immediately embarrassed by my involuntary outburst, and I looked into the living room to see if anyone had heard me. Apparently no one had, although Mirna winked at me when I looked in. My outburst was a sudden release of two weeks of tension. It suddenly dawned on me that all my speculations about Mirna’s “activities” with her provocative costume had been wrong, that the entire masquerade had been conceived with one aim in view: to entice the demoted member of the central committee to Titus’ and Jasna’s celebration. I told Titus, “I’m awfully sorry! I really had no idea who he was.”

“Don’t apologize; I believe you,” Titus said. “I think I’m starting to understand. She’s introducing him to the friends of Luisa Nachalo. That’s very funny indeed, since he was her lover once —”

I said, “Don’t hold that against him.”

Titus continued, “I should have known better than to expect Mirna Sedlak to be serious. How well did you know her father? He was the shrewdest, most calculating peasant I ever met. Jan and Mirna both took after him: extremely shrewd pranksters. In the last analysis they both became dilettantes despite their peasant origins.”

“Both of them were my closest companions,” I reminded him.

“How well I know!” he exclaimed. “And I suppose you still agree with Jan! Just push all the machinery into the streets and play with it like little children, bosses together with workers! Mirna obviously agrees with that! She’s as blind to the class struggle as Jan was! What kind of serious political discussion can take place between the highest functionaries and the lowest workers? There’s obviously no possibility for political regroupment between the proletariat and its class enemies!”

My attention was drawn to the living room; Jasna was shouting. I distractedly whispered to Titus, “I’m as surprised as you are by Mirna’s bizarre choice of guests.”

“At least old Sedlak’s frame of reference was always clearly defined,” he told me. “I never acquired a taste for Jan’s or Mirna’s pranks, which always lacked a frame of reference due to the fact that they were no longer peasants but were not yet integrated into the working class.”

We moved back into the living room. Jasna was shouting at Glavni: “Don’t tell me the well-being of workers is more important to you than your career! When certain workers were in prison, all of them one-time comrades of yours, you were perfectly willing to sacrifice their freedom, even their lives, to salvage your career!”

Marc was sitting on the couch. Mirna sat next to him and held his hand in her lap. Marc said to Jasna, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about!” Jasna snapped. “Twelve years ago every single person in this room right now, except Mirna and Yara, was arrested. A letter had come from what the police called the Alberts spy ring. We now know one copy of the letter was delivered to an official, namely to you! And you cleared yourself by charging the others with being agents of that so-called spy ring!”

Marc responded patiently, “I remember the arrests, Comrade Zbrkova, but this story of a spy ring is new to me.”

“It’s not new to any of us!” Jasna shouted. “Your former mistress Luisa Nachalo was supposed to be one of the international leaders of that ring!”

“I was told such a story after my first arrest twenty years ago,” Marc admitted. “But I could never make myself believe Luisa was capable of such activity.”

“Comrade Glavni, you’re a big hypocrite!” Jasna shouted. “When your career was in question you didn’t only pretend to believe Luisa was an international spy, you went on to accuse others of being her accomplices!”

Mirna took up her guest’s defense with a hypocrisy that infuriated Jasna. “What you’re saying seems completely illogical, Comrade Zbrkova. If Marc genuinely believed, or even pretended to believe, that Luisa Nachalo was an international spy, would he have come here for a get-together with the best friends of that accomplice to an international spy?” Then Mirna turned to Marc and asked him, “Could you be so charmed by me as to be willing to endanger your entire career for my sake?”

“You’re being positively hateful!” Jasna shouted at Mirna. “Jan was killed because of this man. Yarostan and Adrian were given long prison terms because they had supposedly tried to incriminate such a high personage as Comrade Marc Glavni —”

“If you’re talking about the rehabilitation proceedings, I must point out that it wasn’t I but Comrade Krena and her husband who initiated them.” As he said this, Marc made a slight bow in the direction of Vera.

Vera jumped. “You’re quite an expert at making insinuations and starting rumors, aren’t you, Comrade Glavni?”

Marc showed a trace of anger for the first time. “Pardon me, Comrade Krena? It’s common knowledge that you and Professor Kren initiated —”

Vera hissed at him, “Before something becomes common knowledge, it is a maliciously circulated rumor, and rumors begin somewhere, they have a specific origin —”

Marc cut in, “Comrade Kren initiated the rehabilitation proceedings as soon as —”

“I’m not talking about that stupid arrest!” Vera shouted. “I’m talking about current rumors! There are some people who’d love to drag my name through mud, and almost all of them are members of that conservative bureaucratic clique you’re aligned with —”

Marc commented, “I believe your husband is similarly aligned —”

“Precisely!” Vera shouted. “And the rumors have already reached his ears!”

“He must have larger ears than mine,” Marc told her. “I have no idea what rumors you’re referring to. Your speeches discredit you amply enough.”

Vera continued, “There are very few people in the world who know anything of my private life —”

“Surely you’re exaggerating,” Marc said. “Your affair with the standard of living commissioner has been a public secret for a very long time; you hardly keep it to a small number of people —”

Vera said darkly, “You know perfectly well that’s not what I’m talking about, Comrade Glavni. You’re one of the very few people who could possibly be at the source of the vicious slander that’s being circulated about me, that malicious rumor about my affair with Adrian being a mere cover for an altogether different type of relationship. Your entire clique is whispering about it! I hear nothing else from Kren!”

I noticed that Yara was having a hard time trying to keep from bursting out laughing.

There was a knock on the door. Yara ran to open it and relieved herself of her pent-up laughter, seemingly in response to the new arrivals. I had counted the number of places at the dining room table, and I figured out that the couple in the doorway were probably the last guests.

I didn’t recognize either of them until Vera shouted, “Adrian! Irena! You too?”

Adrian, who seemed intensely embarrassed, rushed to Vera and told her, “I’m terribly sorry about this, Vera. She insisted on dragging me along —”

“Don’t be sorry, dearest,” Vera told him, “This promises to be a grand entertainment! Was it the little girl who got you to come?”

“What little girl?” Adrian asked. “Irena? She insisted on coming in that outlandish costume and on dragging me along with her; she threatened to divorce me if I didn’t come.”

Vera’s humor vanished as she asked Adrian, “She what? Was this whole thing Irena’s idea?”

Vera’s eyes, as well as everyone else s, turned toward the open door, and the same stunned amazement appeared on everyone’s face. Yara and Irena were standing in the doorway, grinning. Both of them were identically dressed, in the same slacks and unusual work jacket; both had the same long black hair hanging down to their shoulders, the same black eyebrows. They looked like sisters, gypsy sisters. I walked toward Irena mechanically, as if I were in a trance, and extended my hand to her. “I have a feeling I knew you once, very long ago-”

Irena continued grinning. “So Yara tells me. You must be her father. She’s told me so much about that twin sister I look like! I’m not really sure I’d care to meet her!”

“I’m stunned by the similarity,” I told her.

Irena said, “I’m forever grateful to Yara. She made so many things clear to me when she told me about Vera’s relation to Sabina Nachalo.”

Irena looked exactly the way I would have expected her gypsy “twin” to look; she even seemed to be the same age. “Of course I haven’t seen Sabina for twenty years and I have no idea what she looks like today,” I told her.

My brief conversation was cut short by Vera, who regained control of herself after her shock at seeing the same similarity. Vera rushed toward Irena and pulled her from the doorway toward the staircase. “You little rat! You’re going to explain certain things to me!”

Irena beamed as she let herself be pulled up the staircase. “It’s you who are going to do the explaining, Comrade Krena! I finally understand what’s been behind —”

“Such a low, mean trick!” Vera hissed. “To send a little girl after me as Sabina Nachalo’s daughter! You’re going to tell me exactly how you learned —”

“You’re giving me far too much credit,” Irena told her. “I wasn’t the one who masterminded —” The two women disappeared into an upstairs room.

While the scene on the staircase was taking place, Adrian had embraced Titus. “Nice to see you again, Zabran! What in the world is this all about, and why did Irena consider it so urgent for me to attend?”

Titus explained to Adrian, “The event was originally to be a celebration of an engagement; subsequently it was to be a political discussion among workers; finally it disintegrated into an anarchic carnival. But I’m glad you came. That makes about four workers. Perhaps we could meet separately.”

“Whose engagement is being celebrated?” Adrian asked.

Titus told him, “My own engagement to Comrade Zbrkova.”

“Jasna?” Adrian asked. “Is she here?”

“Yes, Adrian,” Jasna told him. She was standing right next to him.

“Congratulations! But why was this so urgent to Irena? Do you know each other?” Adrian asked.

“No, we never met,” Jasna told him. Then she asked Yara, “Are they all here now? Let’s start eating before everything gets cold.”

“They’re all here now,” Yara told her.

Mirna stroked Glavni’s hand and begged, “Since you’ve stayed this long, you’ll surely stay to dinner.”

Marc seemed uneasy. “I would infinitely prefer to invite you to dine with me in a quiet restaurant. Believe me when I tell you that you have nothing at all in common with these people. They may all have been Luisa’s friends at one time, but that’s not an adequate reason for you to be so tolerant of what they’ve become.”

“No one’s ever said such beautiful things to me,” Mirna said, kissing his cheek. “But please stay, just for the meal. I find these people so interesting!”

“I would call them bizarre,” Marc told her, but he was once again defeated by her; holding on to her hand, he accompanied her to the dining room.

Titus stayed behind when everyone else left the living room. I was glad for the opportunity to ask him a question. “I was disturbed by the comment you made to Adrian,” I told him. “You said there were four workers here who might meet and talk separately. Why did you say that to Adrian? He’s an official too. I count six workers, including Mirna, Jasna and Vera’s secretary, but not including Adrian.”

“I was referring to workers potentially interested in a serious political discussion,” Titus told me.

“And you included Adrian as a worker?” I asked.

“Adrian is a prostitute,” he told me.

“A what?”

“A prostitute,” he repeated. “If he only realized what that Krena woman has done to his life, he would see that his place is with the working class.”

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“She literally bought him,” he said. “Adrian is a kept man. He’s that woman’s slave.”

I said loudly, “I had thought that was how most officials reached their posts — Vera Krena herself, for instance.” Just as I finished that comment, Vera and Irena came rushing down the staircase. I blushed; it was the second time I had shouted an insult within earshot of the person I insulted.

Jasna called from the dining room, “Titus! Vera! We’re waiting to start!”

Titus and I were the last to take our places at the table. Jasna and Titus faced each other across the length of the table. I took the last empty chair, at Jasna’s end of the table, next to Irena and directly across from Zdenek. As I sat down I noticed Yara throwing a questioning glance at Irena, who had also just sat down. Irena raised her black eyebrow and winked at Yara, who smiled and poked Zdenek. I figured out that Irena was part of the conspiracy. Jasna noticed nothing. Suddenly someone was poking me on the shoulder. Adrian, sitting on the other side of Irena, was extending his hand to me behind Irena’s back.

“Yarostan Vochek! I didn’t recognize you when I came in,” Adrian shouted. “I’m surprised we didn’t run into each other in prison during all the years we spent there.”

I extended my hand to him, but I couldn’t turn my eyes past the gypsy sitting next to me. Looking at Irena I asked Adrian, “Did you happen to run into Jan Sedlak during those years? He spent the rest of his life there.” As I said this I noticed Mirna, who was directly in my line of vision to the right of Irena; she was sitting at the opposite corner of the table from me, at Titus’ end and next to Marc. She momentarily stopped smiling at Marc and stared at me.

Adrian said, “I didn’t know about Jan Sedlak until after my release, when Jasna told me.”

Jasna said loudly, “And look at Jan’s sister carrying on with the man responsible for those arrests!”

Adrian whistled crudely and asked, “Is she Jan Sedlak’s sister?”

Irena whispered to me, “Aren’t you relieved you didn’t run into Adrian?”

“Yet you married him,” I whispered to her.

“Just for the sake of this experience,” she told me cryptically.

Mirna and Marc looked into each other’s eyes and seemed not to hear the references to them, although I was sure Mirna’s ears were picking up every sound.

Adrian said sarcastically, “Some people will do anything at all to get themselves another title.”

Irena said, “Yes, Adrian, some people certainly will.”

Titus addressed himself to me, as if he were continuing his earlier observations about Adrian, “It is important to distinguish a proletarian, who has no choice in the matter, from a member of the exploiting group, who enjoys a certain amount of so-called free will.”

Mirna said to Marc, “I believe we’re the subject of the conversation, dearest.”

Yara pulled a serving dish toward her and asked, “What’s everyone waiting for? I’m starving! Can I start?”

As soon as Yara started eating, all eyes turned to Marc. He suddenly forgot Mirna and started shoveling mounds from each platter onto his plate. Adrian, who sat directly across from him, shoved him the bread platter. Marc already had three slices of bread next to his plate. Adrian asked, “More bread, Comrade Glavni?”

Lifting a fork filled with food to his mouth, Marc told Adrian, “Later, thank you.”

Adrian, encouraged by the glances Jasna was giving him, asked Marc, “You know who I am, don’t you Comrade Glavni?”

“Of course, Povrshan. It’s not a secret,” Marc told him between mouthfuls.

“Did you also know me five years ago, when I came to your office looking for a job?” Adrian asked.

“If I’m not mistaken, you came to my office parading as the bank director, Kren,” Marc remembered.

Vera, sitting directly across from Mirna and until then staring at Mirna with fascination, turned to Adrian, who sat right next to her, and asked, “You introduced yourself as my husband? You never told me about that!”

Adrian continued to address his remarks to Marc. “I had just been released after six years in prison, only to learn that you were married. Vera. I needed a job, and Glavni would never have made an appointment with a less important person, isn’t that so, Comrade Glavni?”

“There were no openings in any case,” Marc told him.

Adrian continued, “My real reason for coming to you, Comrade Glavni, wasn’t to get a job, but to ask how it had happened that two people who had once worked in the same factory had met with such different fates. There you were, in one of the — shall we say plushier — offices of the bureaucracy, and already starting to fatten yourself on imported delicacies, while there I was, your former fellow worker, skinny as a broom after six years in prison, without the slightest prospects —”

Marc told him, “The explanation is very simple, Povrshan. You’re an idiot.”

Irena laughed, but I noticed that Mirna’s grin left her face; she gulped, got up abruptly and rushed to the kitchen biting her lip; she seemed to be on the verge of tears. Yara started to rise, but I got up and ran after Mirna. I found her pressing her body against the kitchen wall, beating both fists against it. I shook her and asked, “Haven’t you played enough of your game?”

Mirna, obviously repressing the urge to cry, told me, “No. love, my game is only beginning —”

Marc rushed into the kitchen, pulled me away from Mirna saying, “Excuse me, Comrade,” and asked her, “Is everything all right, my dear?”

Mirna’s grin returned. “I’m fine now, dearest. I swallowed a fish bone.”

When the three of us returned to the dining room table. Vera and Irena were shouting at each other across Adrian’s back (since he was sitting between them). Their argument would have been incomprehensible to me if I hadn’t learned some of the details from your previous two letters. Vera, the boss, was shouting to her secretary, “You’ll pay dearly for this, Irena! I should have known it was you! You’ve been dying to do this to me ever since I exposed that sex maniac who was rector of the university!”

“That act made you the champion of revolutionary morality, the heroine of the day!” Irena shouted back. “What an incredible sham! If anyone had known then that all you wanted was to take the rector’s place, that all you wanted was to go to bed with one of —”

Vera reached across Adrian at Irena’s throat and screeched, “Shut your trap you little —”

Adrian pulled Vera’s arm away from Irena and asked, seeming intensely embarrassed, “Couldn’t you two discuss these questions privately, some other time?”

Irena shouted at Adrian, “Jerk! You’re the medium through whom she acted all these years, the front that kept people from seeing what she was, the errand boy who carried her public image!”

Adrian, holding both of Vera’s hands down, shouted angrily at Irena, “Shut up! You’re making fools out of all of us!”

Irena suddenly became calm, like a rebel who had decided to spit into her boss’s face coldly and deliberately. “If you had only told me when we were students together that I looked like a little girl you had wanted to sleep with —”

Vera, straining under Adrian’s grasp, shouted, “Beast! Unscrupulous beast! I never did you any harm.” She started to cry.

Irena shouted, “You’ve taken half of my life. Vera! Why did you have to spin such an intricate web around me? I could have spared you all your trouble! If you’d only told me what you wanted fifteen years ago, I could have told you right then I had no desire to share you bed, even for an instant, because I could only make love to men!”

Vera cried pathetically. “Please stop it Irena, please!”

Yara reached across Zdenek to pull Jasna’s sleeve and asked in a whisper, “Fifteen years ago? That was when Vera lived with you. Did you know about Irena already then?”

Jasna angrily swatted Yara’s hand away from her arm and shook her head in the negative. Then she got up, walked toward Vera and pulled her up from her chair.

Vera sobbed, “Please help me.” Jasna accompanied her to the kitchen. Everyone’s eyes followed them except Marc’s; he went on eating.

Irena, who was directly across from Yara and had heard Yara’s question, said, “Jasna didn’t know. No one knew. When we were students I thought Vera and I were good friends and Adrian was her lover. Maybe I should have figured it all out then, but I’ve never been gifted at reading people’s thoughts. No, that’s wrong; it’s not as if she didn’t give me any clues. Everything she told me was a clue. But I’m as much of a goose as Adrian; I couldn’t interpret a single clue until three weeks ago when you asked me if my hair and my complexion were real or if Vera had asked me to paint myself this way.” Irena turned to me and said, “Yara shouted ‘That explains everything!’ as soon as I told her I was three-quarters gypsy and had come into the world exactly this way. And the funny thing is it did explain everything! How could I’ve been so dense?” Pointing at Adrian, she told Yara, “But I’m not as dense as he is! She’s his boss too, you know, and he simply refuses to believe anything I say about the boss.”

“Have you been together with her for fifteen years?” Yara asked again.

“But I couldn’t see through her until you came,” Irena said. “When we were students all she ever talked to me about was her romances, or rather anti-romances. She told me what a clown her ‘lover,’ Adrian, was; she never felt anything but contempt for him. I didn’t know him then. She’d boast to me, ‘He’s such a perfect front, isn’t he?’ I never asked myself what he was a perfect front for. I assumed he was the front behind which she carried on her affair with Professor Kren, but I didn’t wonder what purpose such a front served.”

Adrian rose from the table, said, “Excuse me,” and apparently headed toward the bathroom; he looked like he was ready to vomit.

Irena continued, “After we graduated she went on to study under Kren. I got hired as secretary in the rector’s office. That was when I learned she felt nothing but contempt for Kren as well; he was nothing more to her than a ladder to climb —”

Vera appeared in the kitchen doorway; her face was pale and had a contorted expression, but she was no longer crying. “All right, you little wretch, since we’re bringing it all into the open, we might as well be complete and do justice to the past! You weren’t merely hired by the rector’s office; you were bought by the rector! He was in your bed before your training period was over. Don’t single me out as the narrator of romances or as the one with contempt. Your feelings toward the rector were identical to mine toward Kren, and you narrated every gruesome detail with the greatest relish! After spending barely a month as the rector’s secretary you started talking about becoming assistant rector; you were waiting for the old man occupying that post to be forcefully retired.” Vera turned to everyone in the room and asked dramatically, as if speaking from a platform, “And how did this paragon of virtue intend to conquer that post? By marrying her boss! Unfortunately for our little Cinderella, the boss was not only already married, but was carrying on similar affairs with his other two secretaries!”

Irena shouted with venom, “And that was when you started dreaming of replacing the rector, not only in his office but in the bedrooms of his secretaries as well! Then that arrest twelve years ago almost spoiled it all for you! Your glorious ascent was interrupted. You came out so furious, and so hysterical! You simply had to find a scapegoat! And what better scapegoat was there than poor dumb Adrian? He’d be in your way in any case during your coming wedding ceremony with Kren! If they’d kept you in jail for only half a year, you’d have come out to find me married to the rector, occupying the office of assistant rector, and free for good from your attentions! The rector loved me and promised to divorce his wife —”

Vera smiled and said sarcastically, “He made the same promise to both of the other secretaries —”

“You’re lying!” Irena shouted. “You hated that man! Until now I didn’t understand your fierce hatred toward him. You were jealous of him! You conceived your scheme of driving him out with that scandal the moment you realized he really did love me! I didn’t love him; I admit it! How else does one become someone in this society except by selling oneself to a high official?”

Vera hissed, “I regret everything I ever did for you, Irena!”

“You’ll regret it even more before I’m through with you!” Irena shouted.

Vera retorted, “You’re nothing but the commonest dirt!”

“In that respect we’re twins!” Irena told her. “We both came out of the same cesspool! But as soon as you got out, you shoved me further in! I wouldn’t have done that to you if I’d gotten out first! Never forget that! But you beat me to it. You acquired free will and in the same act deprived me of mine.

First you had Kren force the retirement of the old assistant rector, and then you replaced him. But robbing me of that post wasn’t enough for you! You had to destroy the rest of my prospects as well. Comrade Vera Neis married Professor Kren and immediately began her glorious campaign to clear the university of decadent bourgeois remnants, exposing the rector of the university for sexual abuses! As soon as the rector was ousted and jailed, Comrade Neis Krena replaced him as rector of the university and all hailed the arrival of a new day! No more sexual abuses! The end of bourgeois decadence! A great step forward for womanhood! And all accomplished with one single arrest! But to satisfy the libertines in the population, the police had to add a charge about his having embezzled public funds for private purposes. Or did you add that, just for seasoning? Have you met a single official who hasn’t embezzled public funds for his country cottages and journeys? And he was finished off with such an exemplary trial! A twenty-year sentence! Do you even know that he died during his first year in prison? Do you care?”

“Don’t shout to me about caring, you ruthless hypocrite! Do you care how much this outburst of yours is going to cost me?” Vera asked.

Irena told her, “You’re right! I could care less! Do you really think people would rather be ruled by you than by the fat man across from you?”

Marc stirred to rise from the table, but Mirna told him, “Don’t be offended; I’m sure she didn’t mean it.”

Irena winked at Mirna and said, “Of course I didn’t. If I have to be ruled, I’d far rather be ruled by him! He’d be far too busy eating to have time to destroy people’s lives. I would infinitely prefer his unquenchable hunger for food to that unquenchable hunger for power, the power to manipulate the lives of thousands in order to satisfy a secret innermost desire to crawl into the bed of a little gypsy —”

Vera had snatched a tea pot from the unoccupied end of the table. Jasna ran toward her from the kitchen doorway but reached her too late to stop Vera from flinging the pot with hot tea. The tea pot barely missed my head and shattered on Adrian’s unoccupied chair, splashing its contents on Titus.

Irena said to Titus, “You see? You’re the ones who face the consequences! How right you are to say a proletarian is the one who has no choice. Before she hooked Kren we were equals. By the time she was rector, I had become common dirt, as she now calls it! All the prospects I had looked forward to for ten years were ruined. I literally had no alternatives left, no choice. I knew she was a sham, I knew she had married Kren in order to become rector of the university, I knew that her sole qualifications for that post were located a few centimeters above and below her waist. But I was bound and gagged. She had me in her office every day. When she was promoted to the ideological commission she called me to her mansion several nights a week and on weekends. What could I do? Once, when she was still rector, I stormed out of her office, infuriated by the triviality for which she had called me in. ‘I only wanted you by my side; you’re my favorite,’ she told me. I was furious. ‘Your favorite secretary!’ I shouted. I threatened to expose her whole sham. ‘You breathe a word,’ she said, ‘and what do you think everyone will say about the spiteful jealous secretary? You don’t suppose anyone will believe you, do you? They might even jail you as the former rector’s accomplice.’ I couldn’t even dream of leaving the rector’s office any more! In order to get any kind of decent job somewhere else I needed the recommendation of the rector of the university, Comrade Vera Krena. I had no choice. I was literally a proletarian.”

I asked Irena, “What did you accomplish by marrying Adrian?”

“Much less than I’d hoped,” she told me. “I didn’t meet him until he was released from prison. I was overjoyed to learn he was the one who had been her lover, and I was doubly attracted to him when he told me how Vera had victimized him by associating him with a spy ring and claiming he’d tried to incriminate her. Besides which he was my age, unlike the rector or Vera’s Comrade Professor Kren. But my only satisfaction with Adrian was to parade him in front of Vera in the rector’s office right after we were married. I still had no choice. She was shocked when I told her we were married, and that shock is all I ever accomplished with him. She immediately turned him into her own private roll of toilet paper. She knew him far better than I did. The second or third time he came for me, she made eyes at him and said, ‘Such a talented comrade is wasting away in the post of a lowly researcher.’ She knew she was about to be appointed deputy minister of the ideological commission, thanks to Kren’s influence, and she knew that from there she’d have almost as much power as Kren himself. She told Adrian: ‘Irena and I will find you a post more in keeping with your talents.’ That’s right: ‘Irena and I!’ My dog and I! I tried to stop Adrian from accepting anything from that woman, but he turned to jelly waiting for its mold; there was no talking to him. He accepted a post on the secretariat of the standard of living commission, and I became Comrade Krena’s private secretary. My reward, I thought! If I’d only known I was the one she was after! Wherever she went, Adrian and I tagged along. On trips the three of us always shared the same suite. The rumor started to circulate that Adrian was her lover, and she became popular for having the courage to display her lover in public. Kren became the subject of jokes. What no one knew was that Adrian was nothing more to her than a dog, that it was her personal secretary whom she —”

Vera hissed from the doorway, “I never touched you, Irena! Not once!”

Irena turned to Vera with hatred. “I wish you had touched me fifteen years ago! Everything would have been perfectly clear at the start! I would have destroyed your desire at its origin, I would have made you want to kill me instead of dragging me behind you bound up in your net! You didn’t dare touch me! And the more you postponed showing your hand the more you feared my response! You were deathly afraid your bubble would burst, and you were right! My first chance to free myself of you didn’t come until the current rebellion broke out. Nothing in my memory was so exciting as the uproar that started to spread to every sector of this society. That was when I realized I had become your political barometer. The more excited I became about the anti-bureaucratic activity, the more loudly you shouted about the need to reform the bureaucracy, and thanks to me you found yourself riding on the crest of the popular wave. When the strikes broke out and there were calls for the formation of workers’ councils, I went wild with joy. I looked forward to the overthrow of the entire bureaucracy. And you stayed right behind me, giving speech after speech in support of the most radical strikes. I wondered if you’d lost your senses. I knew I and the vast majority had everything to gain from the overthrow of the entire bureaucracy. But you! You had everything to lose! I wondered if you really expected to become the head worker of the head workers’ council, or if you pictured yourself as Liberty in the painting by Dalacroix. It wasn’t until Yara’s visit that I started to get an insight into the sordid motives behind your sudden populism!”

Adrian, who reappeared in the entranceway from the living room, stared blankly at Irena.

Vera, still leaning on the doorway to the kitchen, commented, “So on the basis of a twelve-year old girl’s gossip you decided to drive a knife into me —”

“Not quite, Comrade Krena!” Irena told her. “Not on the basis of anyone’s gossip, but on the basis of the testimony of a roomful of people whose lives you’ve destroyed, and during a period when the entire population is exposing those responsible for the arrests and imprisonments! When I learned about Sabina, I also learned that Adrian wasn’t the only one of your former comrades whose life you destroyed. Adrian spent six years in prison because of you!” Irena turned to me and asked, “How many years did you spend there?”

“Eight complete years,” I told her.

“Do you know why?” she asked.

I said, “I thought I knew —”

“I’ll remind you in case you forgot,” Irena said to me. “Comrade Vera Neis gave testimony to the effect that all her former comrades had been members of a totally fictional spy ring.” Then she turned to Titus and asked him, “How long did you spend there?”

“A year,” Titus told her, “but I should tell you I wasn’t arrested at the same time —”

“I don’t see that it matters,” Irena said, and she asked Yara, “How many years did your uncle spend?”

“He never came out,” Yara told her.

Irena exclaimed, “He died in prison, like the former rector! Jasna —”

Jasna cut her short. “I’m sorry to ruin your performance, but you’re missing your mark —”

“How long did you have to spend?” Irena asked.

“Two days,” Jasna told her, “but the person responsible for my arrest, and for all the other arrests, is sitting across the table from you, and his name isn’t Vera!”

Adrian shouted from the hallway, “That’s right, Irena! It was Glavni who was responsible for those arrests!”

Jasna told Irena, “We were all arrested because of a letter that was delivered —”

Irena asked Jasna indignantly, “Why are you protecting her? That letter was an invention of the police!”

Adrian shouted, “I’ve told you repeatedly, Irena! Some spies actually did try to get in contact with us! And it was undoubtedly Glavni who told the police I was corresponding with them. Why else would he have been so rude to me when I went to see him after my release?”

I asked Adrian, “Do you still today believe Luisa Nachalo was a spy?”

Adrian told me, “During my first prison term the police showed me an article about her in the foreign press —”

“That article merely proved she had emigrated with her companion and their daughters,” I told him.

Irena shouted at Adrian, “Idiot! You’d believe the police if they told you the sun was a triangle!”

Yara told her new friend insistently, “But there really was a letter, Irena!”

“I remember your telling me, but are you sure you didn’t learn about that letter from the same rumor started by the police?” Irena asked Yara.

I told her, “Irena, I’ve been carrying on a very stimulating correspondence with the person who sent those letters twelve years ago, Sabina Nachalo’s sister, or rather, Luisa Nachalo’s daughter, Sophia.”

Adrian shouted victoriously, “Who’s the idiot, Irena?”

Jasna told Irena, “A messenger tried to deliver Sophia’s letters to all the people she’d known in the carton plant eight years earlier.” She turned angrily to Adrian and told him, “Sophia was no spy! She was trying to reach us because she considered us the only friends she had in the world! Sophia learned that only one of those letters reached its destination, one delivered to someone who was an official at that time. Vera, Adrian and I were university students at that time; Yarostan and Jan were steel workers. Comrade Glavni had recently become head of the party organization of the plant where we had all worked.”

Adrian exclaimed, “And he was the one who was contacted! He cleared himself by telling the police the spies had contacted me!”

Marc told Adrian angrily, “The police asked me if I knew you. I had no idea why they wanted to know that, and all I told them was that I had known you once; it would have been ridiculous to deny it; we had both been arrested in the same plant eight years earlier.” Adrian apparently intended to answer, but Marc got up abruptly and told Mirna, “I don’t see the point of all these uncontrolled emotional outbursts, these accusations by uninformed ignoramuses, and I must say I don’t find this gathering the slightest bit interesting.”

Mirna took his arm again and begged, “Please, Marc, at least stay through the dessert —”

“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I’m already late for an important meeting, which I would have called off if —”

Mirna got up, placed her lips near his and knew she had defeated him again already before she told him, “Oh please do call it off, dearest; use the phone in the bedroom upstairs. And while you’re at it, would you please postpone my airplane reservation by a day? There are certain things I simply must discuss with you, but I can’t leave this gathering. Please understand I owe it to Luisa to try to communicate with these people who seem so convinced she was a spy. Surely you understand she’s still extremely concerned about that charge.”

“I can understand her concern,” Marc said, “but surely this is not the most fruitful way to clear her of the charge —” Adrian shouted from the hallway, “The only fruitful way is to accuse someone else, the way you did, Glavni!”

Marc asked Mirna, “Doesn’t that prove my point?” Mirna shook her head. “Very well, my dear. In whose name are those reservations?” he asked her.

Mirna was flustered. “Why, the name I gave to your secretary when I came to see you. Wait a second.” Her game almost ended. I started grinning. Yara fidgeted nervously. Mirna ran to the living room and returned with the little leather purse; she rummaged inside. “Here it is! It’s in the name of Matthews. Mirna Matthews.”

Marc said, “Oh yes. I remember. Matthews. Interesting! You’ve changed your original name, I take it?”

Mirna said nervously, “Oh no, I — I’m married.”

Marc smiled indulgently. “I see. I assure you there’s no cause for your embarrassment. I’ll do what I can about your reservation. If there are no vacancies for tomorrow, will the following day do?”

Mirna smiled, relieved. “The following day would be perfect.” She was cool and calculating again.

Marc walked past Adrian and headed upstairs. Mirna dropped her seductive posture and collapsed into her chair as if she had been carrying a heavy load.

As soon as Marc was gone, Jasna told Mirna, “If you don’t stop this ridiculous game, I’ll —”

Mirna said calmly, “You’re enjoying it as much as I am, Jasna! And you may learn something!” Then she turned to Titus, who was still sitting next to her, at the head of the table. “Titus, were you arrested right after the Magarna rising was suppressed?”

Jasna said angrily, “How many times will you repeat that stupid insinuation? You know perfectly well he was arrested a year after the rest of us!”

Titus asked Mirna, “Is this what you had in mind as the subject matter for a fruitful political discussion among workers interested in rejoining the stream of history?”

Mirna told him, “Yes, Titus, this is exactly the subject matter I had in mind.”

Titus told her, “Then I must ask you to leave me out of your discussion. The present moment is far too critical to be frittered away in sessions of bourgeois therapy and games. The struggle we face is a collective struggle, a class struggle, and not the struggle of individuals escaping from personal problems. The enemies we face are enemies because of their relation to society’s productive forces, not because of their relation to a letter sent by a Sophia Nachalo.”

Adrian whistled, apparently in response to Mirna’s unanswered question, and returned to his seat next to Irena. He told Titus, “Something just struck me, something that bothered me at the time. When I was arrested twelve years ago, the police asked me if I had ever worked with certain people. The first time they interrogated me, their list included all the people they had arrested at the carton plant eight years earlier, except you. As time passed, the list got shorter; the last time they asked me about my past acquaintances, two years after my arrest, the only name left on the list was Vochek’s. I assumed people were dropped from the list either because they were released or because they disappeared, and it turned out I was right. Soon after my release, Jasna told me everyone except Vochek had been released, and Sedlak had disappeared. You were among those she told me had been released —”

Jasna told Adrian, “They’re not as efficient as you take them to be. Titus was arrested a year after the rest of us, but for exactly the same reasons —”

“Then his name should have appeared on their list a year after I was arrested,” Adrian told her. “During the first two years they called me in at least once a month to ask me whom I had known; Zabran’s name should have been added to their list during my second year, shouldn’t it? He never appeared on their list. I thought at the time that he might have died.” He turned to me and asked, “Didn’t you wonder about that?”

I told him, “The first two times they interrogated me I told them I hadn’t ever known any of the people on their list, so they stopped interrogating me, and I paid no attention to the names they listed or failed to list.”

Jasna said, “It’s common knowledge that the police files are crammed with misinformation and deliberate lies. I’m not at all surprised they couldn’t keep track of all the names of people who had worked together in a small plant eight years earlier.”

Mirna asked Jasna, “If they lost Titus’ name, why was he arrested a year later?”

Jasna said, “I’m sure Titus can explain that to your satisfaction.”

But Titus protested, “I don’t owe anyone here an explanation. Is this a police trial?”

Mirna, as if she were upbraiding Jasna, asked her, “Why would you want to force Titus to do any explaining? He’s perfectly right: this isn’t a trial. And there’s nothing to explain. Everything is perfectly clear. I saw Titus a few days before the suppression of the Magarna rising, and I saw him again a few days after —”

Adrian whistled again. “You saw Zabran? You mean he was overseas at that time?”

Jasna said, “How awful! I thought you knew Mirna was Yarostan’s wife, Jan Sedlak’s sister!”

Adrian seemed fascinated by Mirna. “You told me she was Sedlak’s sister. But Glavni acts as if —”

Jasna snickered. “As if she were a foreign motion picture actress, which she really ought to be! She’s never been further than a hundred kilometers away from this city!”

“I’ll be damned! You certainly had me fooled!” Adrian told Mirna. Suddenly he looked at Zdenek, across the table from me. “And you, sir, is it going to turn out that you’re Zagad, one-time owner of the carton plant?”

Extending his hand across the table, Zdenek said, “Tobarkin Zdenek is my name: I’ve never owned a factory, a house or even a car, and if I were a sir’ I would be very far away from here. I’ve been a plain worker all my life; I was a union organizer once —”

Adrian shook Zdenek’s hand, but his interest returned to Mirna. “Where did you say you saw Zabran at the time of Magarna?”

“At our house, two or three days before the tanks invaded Magarna,” Mirna told him innocently. “He had just signed some kind of petition demanding freedom of the press. Jan was at our house too. He questioned the importance of such a petition. But Titus convinced me that workers had to be informed by the press before they could act intelligently.”

“And you saw him again after the rising was put down and we were arrested?” he asked.

“Why yes, I went to look for him the first time I could leave work,” Mirna told Adrian. “I thought he might know what had happened to my brother and my husband. He wasn’t in his office in the trade union building, but I did learn he hadn’t been arrested. I left a message for him with a trade union secretary. Titus came to see me that very night. I insisted Jan and Yarostan had been arrested because of that letter that had come from Sophia Nachalo, but he assured me they couldn’t possibly have been arrested because of that letter, but because of the activity in which they had engaged. This was what Yarostan had always thought too.”

I said to Mirna, “Titus couldn’t have told you that twelve years ago. Only two weeks ago he told us he didn’t believe we were arrested because of our activity, but because of that letter.”

Titus said, “Since I’ve been dragged into this discussion against my will, I might as well try to clarify the reason for the apparent contradiction.”

“Then Mirna isn’t lying?” I asked him.

He said, “She remembers correctly, but she fails to grasp the political significance of that letter as well as the significance of the arrests, and I’d like to analyze —”

“Please do analyze, Titus,” I begged him. “Something that was clear to me has just turned into a vast puzzle.”

“I knew nothing about the arrests until I went to your house immediately after I received Mirna’s message.” Titus said. “On that evening I didn’t believe that you or Jan could have been arrested because of the Nachalo letter. The police files contained enormous dossiers on both of you, and the police could have found any number of pretexts, at any time — in addition to which you had both recently been warned —”

“That was exactly my reasoning,” I told him. “What changed your mind?”

“As I told you two weeks ago, I went to the police to learn the precise reasons for your arrest, and I was completely surprised to learn that you had in fact been arrested because of that letter, not only the two of you, but the entire former production group of the carton plant —”

Jasna interrupted Titus to add, “Titus got himself in trouble with the police by trying to convince them to release the rest of us. But then Glavni and Vera set off the appeal for their rehabilitation and in the process they confirmed the police invention about the spy ring and also made the police suspicious of Titus —”

“Not exactly,” Titus told her. “I was arrested a year later because I had signed an appeal in support of a free press at the time of the uprising, not because Comrades Kren or Glavni accused me of being in contact with George Alberts or Sophia Nachalo. The matter wasn’t that simple. A letter did arrive by the unusual method of personal messenger, and this fact alone aroused the suspicions of the police, especially since the letter came from a person listed in the police records as the daughter of a man they considered a spy. But their suspicions were entirely groundless. George Alberts was convicted in the police files without ever having been tried for espionage, and I know for a fact that he was no spy. Several years earlier I had argued with the appropriate authorities that it was totally incorrect and hypocritical to consider George Alberts a spy, and I returned to these arguments after the Magarna arrests. But with similar lack of success. As for the letter itself, I tried to convince them that, regardless of its method of delivery, it was a major blunder to arrest the people to whom it was addressed. I insisted they release, not only Glavni and Vera Neis, but all the comrades who had been swept in on that ridiculous espionage charge. As is characteristic of this police, they relented up to a point, finding new pretexts for releasing several of those originally arrested, pretexts suggested to them by Comrade Kren, while retaining three of the original group in prison and reaffirming their position that the Nachalo letter constituted an actual and not merely a potential danger.”

I was completely confused and started to feel nauseated. I told him, “Titus, you’re making my head swim. Tell me something. You knew the police considered that letter an actual danger, in other words they arrested me because of it. Why didn’t you as much as mention that letter to me the first time you visited me in prison?”

Titus answered, “Because the Nachalo letter was not the real cause of your arrest; it was nothing more than the formal cause. As I told you before; the real cause for the arrests was that conception according to which errors of consciousness can be corrected by means of arrest and imprisonment. I spent day after day arguing with one after another official; I wrote one after another report; I tried to convince them the Nachalo letter, or any letter for that matter, even one from a spy, might represent a potential threat to coherent class consciousness, but that such a potential threat did not and could not become an actual danger unless and until it was transformed into a program of action of the class. In terms of its content, the Nachalo letter —”

“Its content, Titus?” Jasna asked. “The content of the letter Sophia sent twelve years ago?” Jasna had turned pale and seemed to feel as nauseated as I.

Titus continued, totally unselfconsciously, “Yes, the content of that letter did not call for arrest, or for any action whatever, and I tried to make that perfectly clear in my report to my section head as soon as I completed my study of it What should I have told you when I saw you, Yarostan? Arrest and imprisonment was a totally inappropriate response to that letter, unwarranted and unprincipled. But I simply didn’t have the courage to tell a man serving an eight-year prison term that he was in prison for no reason whatever, and that there was no prospect for his release!”

Jasna sighed and fainted. Vera caught her before she fell to the ground. Titus jumped up to help carry her to the living room sofa and on the way there he commented, “Poor Jasna, it must be the heat or the excitement; my own nerves are on edge.” He was totally unaware of the effect of his revelation that he was the one who had received your letter.

When Titus returned, Mirna asked him, with a coldness that made it clear she hadn’t been surprised by his self-exposure, “Are you really sure the content of Sophia’s letter didn’t warrant and even necessitate all those arrests?”

Titus said, “There’s no doubt in my mind. I didn’t deny the fact that the Nachalo girl was deeply infected by her father’s individualism, by his complete lack of discipline; she illustrated this by glorifying the hoodlum she found as a companion, and she incorrectly compared him to Yarostan although he had much more in common with Jan Sedlak and even more with her own father. I also didn’t deny the fact that, like her father and in some ways like Luisa as well, she sought a revolution not of the class, but of private bourgeois individuals, and not in history, but outside history, in something she called a community, namely in Utopia. Nor did I deny the fact that such unhistorical utopianism can only lead to a philosophy of despair on first contact with historical, I should say class realities. All these facts were undeniable, but none of them justified arrests and imprisonments. The only way for principled revolutionaries to deal with gaps in consciousness is to put forward the general interests of the proletariat and the final goals of the movement, not to arrest the proletariat or sections of it. It is our responsibility before history to isolate and arrest the virus, not to isolate and arrest perfectly healthy workers who are totally unaffected by the virus. And even if they become infected, the historical project can be realized only if we destroy the disease, not the patient. All this has always seemed perfectly obvious to me.”

Yara asked naively, “Do you mean the police did the same thing to the workers that the doctors did to Vesna?”

I begged, “Yara, please don’t reintroduce that game.”

But Mirna protested, “It’s no game, but a very serious matter. The responsibility of every reasonable adult is to take a sample of the disease to experts who are able to determine the gravity of the infection, isn’t that so, Titus? You considered Sophia’s letter harmless, but you’re only an individual, you’re not an expert in diagnosing the condition of the working class in the light of its historical task. This is the job of people whose special field is the health and disease of the proletariat. Or did I misunderstand you?”

Titus told her. “I hear my words coming back at me, but I don’t understand you.”

“I’m sorry I’m so obscure,” Mirna told him. “I don’t understand these things, since I’m not any kind of expert. Zdenek, help me explain what I mean to Titus.”

Zdenek plunged into the discussion. “The work you do in the trade union council consists of theoretical reflection and elaboration on the conditions and general results of the movement, is that correct, Zabran? I believe those are the words I’ve heard you use several times at prisoners’ club meetings.”

“Those were my words,” Titus admitted.

Zdenek continued, “And your work includes reflection and elaboration about such unusual documents as a letter from abroad addressed to the entire former production group of a factory, I take it. For instance, analysis of the historically progressive content of such a document, as well as what we might call its dangerous facets —”

Titus said, “Yes, of course, but I don’t see what this has to do with —”

“With hospitals?” Zdenek asked, laughing. “Frankly I don’t either, but I suspect Yara had a very profound insight by making that comparison, and I’m sure if we reflect on it, if we elaborate it —”

“Are you joking with me, Tobarkin?” Titus asked him.

“On the contrary, Zabran. I don’t consider this a subject for jokes,” Zdenek said with a sarcasm Titus missed. “What’s in question is history, the historical project of the proletariat.”

Zdenek’s exposure was interrupted by Marc Glavni’s heavy steps on the stairway. The seductive expression returned to Mirna’s face as she ran to the living room. She returned with her arm in Marc’s and asked him, “Did you succeed, my dear?”

Marc told her, “There seems to be some confusion. I’ve spent the past half hour trying to locate your airline reservation. They claim not to have a reservation in the name of Matthews.”

“Oh dear, this is simply awful,” Mirna said. She pondered, then picked up her leather purse and rummaged through it. “Why I have the flight number right here: it’s 357. This was all done for me by a travel agent before I left, and I really should have studied this material more closely. Oh don’t tell me! How terribly embarrassing! I’ve just come across my itinerary sheet. That’s not a flight number but the number of a sleeping car! I was to leave by railway tonight! I don’t know how to begin to apologize to you —”

Marc laughed, and most of the Test of us joined him. “We’ve all made such mistakes. Would you like me to try to postpone your tram reservation?”

“I simply don’t dare to ask you to do that!” Mirna told him. “I’ll postpone it myself. Mr. Zabran was just starting to tell us about history’s project. I’m sure you’ll find it fascinating. I won’t miss much since I don’t understand such things very well. I’ll be as brief as possible. Be sure to help yourself to dessert.”

Mirna went upstairs and Marc returned to his seat, next to Yara, and did indeed help himself to a generous serving of each dessert.

Zdenek said to Marc, “We were discussing certain things Mr. Zabran, I mean Comrade Zabran told me at a club where former political prisoners hold meetings —”

Marc was surprised. “Zabran attends meetings of that prisoners’ club?”

“Quite frequently; does that surprise you?” Zdenek asked.

Marc said, “No, I suppose not. I remember that he and Comrade Neis had that in common; they both ran after the so-called radical sectors to try to pull them by the tail —”

Vera protested, “Excuse me, Comrade Glavni. I’ve never run after —”

Titus also objected. “Your statement is equally offensive to me, Comrade Glavni. Your social position has destroyed your ability to distinguish a reformist from a revolutionary. What is needed today is not hysterical speeches glorifying directionless strikes, uncoordinated demonstrations, undisciplined workers, speeches glorifying a body which has lost its head! What is needed, Glavni, is something you’ve lost all contact with, namely historical direction, a self-disciplined working class with a head. The power of such a working class can be dislodged neither by reformist politicians nor by bureaucreats totally cut off from the class and thus from history!”

Zdenek told Marc, “I was trying to determine Zabran’s role in this historical process. Apparently he contributes to it by submitting reports to history, so to speak, reports on the present experience and future course of the historical movement.”

Marc asked Zdenek, “Are you referring to Zabran’s work in the trade union council? Has he really described it to you in such exalted terms? It is of course true that the tasks of the political sections are as important in their way as the tasks of the economic and planning sections, but Zabran doesn’t occupy what one might call a key role in the political section. I’ve never understood why; I’ve always thought him a perfectly competent person. He’s been content to remain at the lowest rung of the political section of the trade union council. You surely exaggerate his importance. His reports are not submitted to history, but to the chief of the political section of one department of the trade union council.”

Zdenek turned to Titus and asked, “Is that true, Zabran? All that theoretical reflection and elaboration on the proletariat’s task does not get submitted to history but to a mere section chief? For instance, when you wrote up your analysis of that Nachalo letter —”

I felt tears starting to run out of my eyes. I noticed Jasna leaning on the wall by the entranceway from the living room, pale as a sheet and expressionless. Mirna returned from upstairs and sat down next to Marc. The gathering looked funereal. Only Zdenek and Yara seemed to have any life in them. Marc was still eating. All the others stared at their plates.

Zdenek continued questioning, or should I say needling Titus. “I’m asking you because I’m genuinely interested, Zabran. I was also an employee of the trade union council. But that was twenty years ago, and even at that time I had no insight into the type of work you did there. All I ever did was to transmit instructions from the officials to the workers in the plants to which I was assigned. I never engaged in the reverse process, in analyzing the activity of the workers themselves, in the work of theoretical elaboration —”

Titus said, “It is solely on the basis of such theoretical work that the working class is able to resolve contradictions and steer its historical course —”

“Of course, I understand,” Zdenek told him. “Without your work the working class is a body without a head. But what interests me is the daily routine, so to speak, what you actually do during your working day. I have a very concrete reason for taking an interest in this. When I was arrested in the trade union building nineteen years ago and charged with syndicalism, I asked myself: Why syndicalism? A charge of sabotage would have made sense to me. Ever since the coup I had sabotaged every single instruction that had come down to me; it simply wasn’t in my blood to give speeches about labor discipline or to communicate threats to workers who took half-hour breaks every hour. But why syndicalism? That doesn’t refer to a person’s activity, but to his social philosophy; that wasn’t anything I had done, but something I had told someone. I searched my mind for the person with whom I had discussed my social philosophy, and the only person I could think of was someone with whom I’d had innumerable conversations, someone with whose social views I had agreed down to details, although there had been minor disagreements here and there. I started to wonder if that person, who had always seemed so friendly and sincere, had actually been reporting our conversations to the police —”

Titus protested, “I’ve never in my life sent a single report to the police, and I’ve never considered arrest and imprisonment correct methods for dealing with questions of consciousness!”

“I’m not accusing you of that, Zabran! God forbid!” Zdenek exclaimed. “Those questions I asked myself immediately after my arrest were all answered the moment I saw that you had also been arrested. I had obviously been wrong. This police system makes everyone suspicious of everyone else. It was obvious you hadn’t reported our conversations to the police, since you were arrested a year after the coup —”

Adrian said to Zdenek, “Surely you’re wrong about that. Zabran was arrested with the rest of us at the time of the revolutionary seizure of power, twenty years ago —”

Marc interrupted, “I beg to differ with you, Povrshan. I saw Zabran soon after the arrests!”

“You mean you weren’t arrested?” Adrian asked him. “I was arrested with the rest of you at the time of the seizure,” Marc answered. “Since I had only recently been hired at the carton plant, I had no trouble convincing police officials that I had not established any contacts with the ringleaders —”

“So that was how you got out so fast!” Vera shouted. “Didn’t they know you had been the ringleader’s lover?”

“That fact, Comrade Krena, does not seem to have interested them,” Marc told her.

Zdenek continued, “From the time I ran into you in prison nineteen years ago until very recently I stopped asking myself who or what had caused my arrest. I told myself I simply couldn’t fathom the methods and procedures of the police. But in recent months that old unresolved question returned to my mind, and it kept on returning —”

Adrian commented, “If Zabran was arrested for the same reasons you were and if he wasn’t immediately released, you can’t accuse him of clearing himself of his charge by implicating you, the way some comrades did to me!”

Zdenek told him, “You’re right, Comrade. If Zabran was arrested for the same reasons. But you see, he wasn’t arrested for the same reasons. He was charged, not with syndicalism, but with cosmopolitanism. I knew this at the time; he told me himself what his charge was. Zabran is a very open person, and it’s hard to be suspicious of him. I assumed the police investigators assigned to his case had charged him with cosmopolitanism because they hadn’t properly memorized the correct charge. But two or three months ago, in a conversation with some recently released long-term prisoners, I learned there had been a wave of arrests nineteen years ago; certain people were charged with cosmopolitanism. Do you know what this charge means?”

Vera snickered. “Certain ignoramuses in high places use that word to attack anyone who has ever spent time abroad, even people familiar with a foreign language —”

“That was precisely what the charge meant nineteen years ago,” Zdenek said. “It was a bizarre wave of arrests; it almost swept away every official who had any knowledge of the world — the so-called internationalists’ trial. Hundreds of major and minor functionaries who worked in the political sections of every institution were carted off to prison if they had been educated abroad or had fought in foreign revolutions. Then a few weeks ago, while reading the correspondence in which Yarostan has been engaged, I learned that my one-time syndicalist comrade Zabran had played a prominent part in a foreign revolution.”

Jasna objected, but without conviction, “That still doesn’t allow you to conclude he had anything to do with your arrest. In a way we were all arrested for cosmopolitanism both times, since they connected us with an international spy ring.”

Zdenek said, “I haven’t drawn any conclusions yet, Jasna. I’m only trying to clarify some questions that keep me from sleeping at night. You had much to do with reawakening my questions, Jasna. Several weeks ago, during a very enjoyable dinner at the Vocheks’, you told the history of certain letters delivered by a messenger at the time of Magarna, letters which caused several arrests. It was you who figured out the manner in which the letters were related to the arrests. You figured out that one letter had been addressed to someone who was an official at the time of its arrival —”

“So I was to have been that official,” Marc surmised. Zdenek told Marc, “I didn’t know you at the time, Glavni. I also didn’t know that my friend Zabran had ever had relations with Sophia Nachalo. Consequently Jasna’s explanation seemed reasonable to me. But a week or two later I learned, quite by accident, that Zabran was not a complete stranger to the Nachalos —”

“Yes, that is a bizarre coincidence,” Marc said.

“That was also my first thought,” Zdenek continued. “However, just before you arrived here, your friend Mrs. Matthews was telling us she didn’t believe in coincidences —” Marc said reproachfully to Mirna, “That seems somewhat far-fetched; life is full of coincidences —”

“Perhaps it is, Comrade,” Zdenek cut in, “but in this case Mrs. Matthews’ point of view was not so far-fetched. During the past few months I’ve had several conversations with Comrade Zabran and I’ve learned he’s a very committed person. He is totally devoted to the proletariat, and also to children. He has extremely clear ideas about the health of both, and very acute insights into the innumerable diseases that endanger their health —”

“I don’t see the significance of your drift,” Marc told him impatiently.

“Don’t you?” Zdenek asked. “If a man with such selfless devotion to the proletariat’s health, if a man who had devoted his life to reflection and elaboration in the service of the proletariat and its future course, if such a man had received the type of letter Zabran described for us earlier, do you really think it would be a coincidence if —”

Titus cut Zdenek short and asked angrily, “If he analyzed the political significance of the contents of the letter? Is that what you’ve been driving at for the past half hour? I must say I’m disappointed with you, Tobarkin. I had taken you for a much clearer thinker. You’re muddled to the point of being incoherent. I’m familiar with the conclusion to which your digressive speculations lead. You’re not the first to try to make such a point. You’re trying to establish an analogy between the work of a proletarian theorist and the work of the police. It’s a superficial analogy. It omits the central fact that the political theorist works with historical data and aims at making the proletariat conscious of its real interests, whereas the police are at the opposite end of the spectrum; they work with weapons and aim to arrest, confine and physically liquidate —”

“I apologize for my incoherence, Zabran; it stems from the fact that I’m not unaware of the difference you point out,” Zdenek told him. “That’s what makes me so curious about your daily activity, your routine. There’s a gap in my knowledge which causes the muddle in my consciousness. You see. I’m only familiar with the work of revolutionary theoreticians in pre-revolutionary situations. When I was a union organizer, a quarter of a century ago, most of my friends were revolutionary theorists of one sort or another. Every one of them engaged in work of theoretical reflection and elaboration, analyzed progressive and regressive social forces, defined the future course of the proletarian movement and the dangers along the path. Every one of them was familiar with the viruses and diseases that could infect the proletariat along the way, and each prescribed a different cure. But in those days each revolutionary theorist published his writings in the newspaper of the group to which he belonged, and the publication of the theories seemed to be the ultimate purpose of the reflection and elaboration. However, after the coup, or should I say after the seizure of power by one of the revolutionary groups, the countless sects, newspapers and publishing houses disappeared overnight, as well as the majority of the political theorists who animated them. Some theorists of course remain, but their researches and analyzes are no longer distributed by militants at the entrances to factories, and people who are mere workers, as I’ve been for the past fifteen years, no longer see the fruits of all that theoretical reflection. What I’d like to know is: what happens to all this theoretical work once the proletariat seizes power? You tell me this work is still motivated by a commitment to the historical interests of the proletariat, and I have no reason to doubt your motives. But to whom is the work submitted? To the proletariat? To history? According to Comrade Glavni it is submitted to a section chief —”

Titus interrupted angrily, “You obviously don’t expect a revolutionary theorist to —”

Zdenek’s anger was also mounting. “My expectations are irrelevant, Zabran! I have no idea whether such a person should print leaflets in a basement, shout from a window or submit critical reports to the appropriate channels; I’m not inclined in any of those directions! What interests me is how such selfless, indeed noble activity, carried out with such irreproachable motives, can possibly have any connection with the destruction of human lives, with the immiseration of the activity of an entire society, with the liquidation of all prospects —”

“At this point you’re raving!” Titus said to him.

Zdenek shouted, “You’re right, Zabran! Can you at least tell me this? When we worked together in the trade union council, the year during which we engaged in numerous conversations much less one-sided than the present one, I take it that you analyzed the political significance of my syndicalism. And I take it that you wrote your analysis down, isn’t that so, Zabran?” Zdenek received no answer; he turned to Marc. “Perhaps you can tell me, Glavni. What would a political analyst have written about syndicalism during the year after the coup?”

Marc seemed embarrassed by the question. “In its day, syndicalism was a very progressive historical —”

“I mean after the coup, nineteen or twenty years ago, not in its day!” Zdenek insisted.

Marc answered, “There were still innumerable progressive elements —”

Zdenek turned angrily to Titus and asked, “And there were also innumerable pitfalls, isn’t that so, Zabran? Gaps in consciousness, incorrect approaches, and in the final analysis gross errors which represented a great threat to —”

“But that’s common knowledge, Tobarkin,” Titus admitted. “Who can deny that? You personally admitted —”

“I no longer agree with the position, but that’s beside the point, Zabran,” Zdenek told him. “Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not trying to suggest you urged the police to arrest me because of my incoherence and muddle, because of the errors in my position. You need not repeat that you disown police methods as a way of dealing with problems of consciousness. Has it never occurred to you, Zabran, that men who have seized power over the entire apparatus of a modern state, who have total control not only over the entire network of communication and education, but also over an immense army and police — has it never occurred to you that such men have extremely powerful instruments for dealing with incoherent approaches and errors of consciousness?”

“That’s a mistake!” Titus insisted. “I’ve spent twenty years pointing out that physical coercion —”

“Is no way to deal with false consciousness. I know that. I’m not accusing you of holding a different position. I am told that the inventor of nuclear fission, or whatever it’s called, was a very peaceful man and campaigned against war! Did he or did he not give birth to that destructive weapon? Your reflections, Zabran: who uses them, how. for what purpose?”

Titus seemed exasperated by the argument. “That’s a typically Utopian position. Humanity can only solve those problems for which the social and material means already exist. The social means for the peaceful application of scientific discoveries are not yet sufficiently developed —”

Zdenek shouted, “The social means for making proletarians conscious of what you call their historical interests also don’t exist, do they Zabran? Your elaborations and reflections cannot be submitted to ideal carriers of the proletarian project, any more than nuclear fission can be submitted to human beings who will not make weapons out of it —”

“I’m not a utopian!” Titus shouted.

“Exactly what I’m driving at!” Zdenek shouted, banging on the table and red with anger. “ Your reflections and elaborations are submitted to the actual carriers of the proletarian project, those who currently define themselves as the agents of history! Your analyzes can only be translated into practice by history’s real agents, not by its ideal agents! You’re not a Utopian! When you analyze the incorrect and therefore dangerous positions of a Zdenek Tobarkin or a Yarostan Vochek, do you submit your analyzes to history, to the proletariat? When you define me as ill, Zabran, which doctors do you take me to? Ideal doctors with a perfect understanding of human life and human freedom? Or the actual doctors coughed up by humanity’s historical development?” Zdenek was sweating. Both Jasna and Yara extended their hands toward him to try to calm him, but he pushed their hands away and continued shouting. “Answer me, Zabran! What does it mean when you say you don’t believe in arrest and imprisonment as methods for dealing with questions of consciousness? No other methods exist, Zabran, and you’re not a Utopian! You’re not an idle bourgeois dilettante but a participant in the historical process! When you write that the position of a Sedlak or a Vochek represents a potential danger to historical development, surely you’re not surprised if Sedlak or Vochek are arrested! Why are you suddenly so silent, Zabran? Don’t you know the only real, the only concrete, the only historically available agents of your historical project are the military and the police armed with rifles, machine guns and tanks?”

Zdenek, flushed with anger, sweat dripping from his hair and his face, looked like he was about to have an attack. Mirna, forgetting all about Marc, ran to help Jasna and Yara raise Zdenek out of his chair and accompany him to the kitchen. I was too hypnotized to move, as were the others who remained at the table with me, all of them in one way or another servants of the same apparatus Titus served.

Adrian quickly let it be known that he was stunned for quite different reasons from mine. He let out a whistle and exclaimed, “That man is a raving lunatic!”

“And you’re a stunted chimpanzee!” Irena told Adrian, rising from the chair between me and Adrian and taking Zdenek’s seat directly across from me.

Marc stared at Titus, wiped his forehead and said, “I would never have believed it.”

“What do you believe, Glavni?” Titus asked him angrily. “Adrian is right; that man is obviously a lunatic.”

“Obviously! And you’re a model of sanity!” Marc said sarcastically.

I was irked by the thought that Comrade Marc Glavni did not have the most perfect “vantage point” from which to express himself so self-righteously. “Which apparatus do you serve, Glavni?” I asked him.

“My work happens to be in the domain of political economy and planning,” he told me.

“Aren’t human beings obstacles to the realization of your plans?” I asked him. “Aren’t your plans the practical translation of the proletariat’s historical project for which living individuals have to be sacrificed?”

Marc dismissed my questions with a shake of his hand, as if he were swatting a fly away from his face, and turned back to Titus. “It was thanks to you that I was rehired in the carton plant after my release. Zabran. I haven’t forgotten that. But it suddenly occurs to me that I wouldn’t have needed your intercession to regain my former job if I hadn’t lost that job to start with —”

Titus, with a contempt equaling Marc’s, the contempt of a proletarian revolutionary toward the class of bosses, said, “That’s very funny indeed, Glavni!”

Marc told him, “Yes it is, Zabran, extremely funny. The entire conversation I had with you at that time was extremely funny. You didn’t only help me get my job back. You also helped me resolve several, shall we call them philosophical, questions. On that occasion I didn’t only ask for your help in getting me reinstated in the carton plant. I also asked your opinion about a newspaper clipping that had been shown to me by prison officials shortly before my release, a clipping about a woman I had loved, a woman who had been known for her solidarity with her comrades. This clipping showed that she was not in jail, like the comrades who had stood by her, but had emigrated with a man who was supposedly a spy —”

Adrian shouted, “I saw that clipping too! I tried to bring it up earlier. The man’s name was Alberts. He was the head of the International Alberts espionage ring, and the clipping proved that Claude Tamnich had been right about Luisa Nachalo; she was the accomplice of an international spy —”

Marc disregarded Adrian with the same annoyed motion with which he had disregarded me, and continued addressing himself to Titus. “I asked you if you had known this Alberts —”

Adrian interrupted again. “I’m telling you that Alberts person was a convicted spy —”

I had an unobstructed view of Adrian, since Irena’s chair was unoccupied; he really did look like a “stunted chimpanzee” to me. I reached for his arm angrily and shouted, “Damn you, Povrshan, when was he convicted? By what court?”

Adrian, nonplused, told me, “He was a foreigner, like Luisa, and Zabran told us at the time he was a reactionary, therefore a foreign spy.”

Marc disregarded Adrian’s comments; he told Titus, “In answer to my question, you told me Alberts had been in the process of developing reactionary, perhaps you even said dangerous, views. I concluded that the police might have been right about Alberts.” The others started returning to the table. Marc continued, “But I refused to believe that Luisa had underhandedly been engaged in espionage while pretending to be our comrade; I refused to believe she had caused our arrest by implicating us in the activity of this Alberts.”

Since Zdenek’s former seat was occupied by Irena, Zdenek sat at the foot of the table, directly across from Titus. Jasna took Irena’s place next to me; as soon as she sat down she grabbed my arm and asked me in a whisper, “Surely he’s not also the one who started the rumor about Luisa’s being a spy? How could he? They were lifelong friends!”

“No, Jasna,” I whispered to her. “But by describing Alberts as a reactionary, he apparently confirmed that rumor in the minds of certain people.”

Vera heard me and told Jasna, “Namely in the minds of idiots, like Adrian and I. When Adrian and Claude told me Luisa was involved in a spy ring, I couldn’t believe it either, so I asked the most authoritative person in the plant, Titus Zabran. He told me exactly what he told Glavni, namely that Alberts was a man with dangerous views. I obviously concluded the rumor was true.”

Jasna said to Vera, “You wanted to believe it! You dreamed of replacing Luisa as the center of attention, as a popular heroine, as the spearhead of the carton plant strike, especially in the eyes of little Sabina —”

“So you’re in on that too, Jasna!” Vera exclaimed. “I’ll be damned! The way everyone here is carrying on, you’d think I was a sexual maniac who’d spent her life forcing little girls and secretaries into orgies! The fact is that I never touched a hair on Sabina’s head — or Irena’s! No proof exists for all your accusations! What do you hope to accomplish? What do you suppose would happen if a demoted bureaucrat and his clique started throwing outrageous accusations at one of the leading comrades?”

Irena retorted, “We all know perfectly well what would happen, Vera! We would all be arrested in the middle of the night, given Interminable prison terms, and most of us would never come out to say another word about the leading comrade Vera Krena!”

Vera turned red with frustration and stared at her plate.

Marc, raising his voice for the first time, told Vera, “Your sexual adventures don’t interest me in the least, Comrade Krena, so please don’t wave any threats at me! In my opinion you and your consort Povrshan deserve each other! May I return to the topic I was trying to raise?” He turned to Mirna and told her, “Forgive my anger, dear. I have an urgent meeting two hours from now, one which I cannot possibly call off, and it seems to me this is precisely the question you wanted to resolve, if I understood you correctly.”

Mirna nodded. “Yes, this was precisely the question.”

Marc turned back to Titus. “Your description of that Alberts person was extremely disturbing to me. In many ways the course my life took was affected by that brief conversation with you. I had known you and Luisa had been close friends once. Shortly before our arrest, a rumor was circulated, by Comrades Povrshan and Neis among others, to the effect that Luisa was the accomplice of a spy. Then I was arrested and charged by the police with maintaining contacts with a circle of spies, among whom Luisa was the ringleader’s accomplice. As proof of Luisa’s guilt, I was shown a clipping which Povrshan apparently also saw. This clipping proved nothing about Luisa’s espionage, but if it was authentic it did show that Luisa had emigrated with the so-called ringleader. I asked you what significance you attached to the clipping, expecting you to defend your comrade from the insinuations. But instead of proclaiming Luisa’s innocence, you told me about the dangerous views of this Alberts person. When I met Mrs. Matthews, Luisa’s closest companion for the past twenty years, she assured me Luisa had never had any connections with a spy ring, and I have every reason in the world to believe her. But I still find your position on this matter extremely unclear. Did you consider Luisa dangerous as well? Can you remember well enough to tell me that?”

Titus commented, “Apparently Vera Krena is not the only person who seems to be on trial here!”

Marc protested, “Excuse me, Zabran! I’m not a judge! I’m asking you about a person who was, and still is, very dear to me!”

Titus said angrily, “Be that as it may, Glavni, the rumor about Luisa or Alberts being spies could not have originated with me! I had known both of them for over ten years, and I knew for a fact that neither of them had ever been involved in a hostile spy ring. During the war, Alberts had done certain scientific work for the resistance, and it was especially insidious to accuse him of international espionage, as if he had done this work for the enemy. I forcefully protested the hypocrisy and injustice of this charge. Alberts was an idealist, a Utopian, but he was not a spy! Before the war he had taken part in a revolutionary uprising. He had expected workers to establish the perfect society overnight, without analyzing the nature of their organization, the international balance of forces, or even the material conditions in which this society was to be established. Such utopianism inevitably turns to despair as soon as it comes into contact with reality, and this is precisely what happened to Alberts. He cursed the workers for having failed to carry out what history itself kept them from carrying out. He didn’t only curse the workers; he gradually turned against the proletarian project itself. I analyzed this progression from utopianism to —”

“You what, Zabran?” Marc asked.

“I analyzed it!” Titus repeated. “I tried to determine its origins. And I think I located the source of the utopianism, at least the version carried by Alberts and to a smaller extent by Luisa as well as those she influenced —”

I sensed that Jasna had started to tremble. She raised herself up and whispered to me, “I can’t take any more of this, Yarostan.” She ran upstairs, probably to her bedroom.

Titus asked me, “Jasna looked ill; is there anything I can —”

“No, Titus.” I told him. “I think she’d rather be alone.”

Marc told Titus, “Please go on, Zabran. This is exactly what Mrs. Matthews wanted to learn. You say you analyzed the source of Luisa’s and her friend’s utopianism —”

Titus finally heard the irony in Marc’s tone, probably for the first time, and he hesitated; then he decided to continue. “Luisa’s companion at the time of the earlier rising, a very dynamic man by the name of Nachalo, exerted an enormous influence on Alberts, and obviously on Luisa as well. I didn’t actually know the man, but I was surrounded by his friends and consequently even I was infected by some of his attitudes, and I remained infected for many years after his death. This was the problem, you see. The man’s attitudes were as infectious as the man himself. I don’t want to go into the specific content of those positions, but let me just say they were Utopian to the highest degree. I traced Alberts’ utopianism, his subsequent despair as well as the reactionary conclusions which he finally drew, to this single source, this man Nachalo. Alberts was a scientist by profession, and neither his temperament nor his specific discipline would have led him to those positions. It was only his contact with Nachalo that derailed him from what we might consider his natural course. As I said, I had no direct contact with the man himself, but at the carton plant we all experienced the infectious character of his positions. Everyone in the carton plant was affected to a greater or lesser extent. You were hired very late, and consequently you didn’t experience this process long enough to draw the conclusions I was able to draw. Originally I thought that Luisa, in the absence of Nachalo and in the face of new demands and a new concrete situation, would gradually shed the Utopian elements and begin to grapple with realities. I was mistaken. Luisa not only continued to carry Nachalo’s attitudes; she infected almost everyone in the plant with them. The only two workers who remained completely immune to this influence were Tamnich and Povrshan. At the opposite extreme, Sedlak became something of a reincarnation of Nachalo inside the carton plant. Luisa communicated more of the dead man’s attitudes to Sedlak than she herself accepted in her own practice! The coherence, the political health of the entire production group was endangered —”

Marc got up abruptly. “I think you’ve told us quite enough, Zabran, and I really must be going now. But you’ve created an altogether new puzzle for me. If Alberts and Luisa represented everything you say they did —”

Mirna stopped him, “Oh my, you don’t actually believe Luisa was —”

“My dear,” Marc said to her, “it is fortunately not my business to translate the work of political theoreticians into policies which can be socially implemented. My work is exclusively in the economic domain. I believe Zabran’s analysis has a certain amount of plausibility, and I shudder when I think of the ways in which such an analysis must have been treated in the offices of administrators with more practical concerns than Zabran’s.” He turned to Titus again. “That’s why I’m puzzled, Zabran. If those two people represented what you say, why did our police release them in such a hurry? Why weren’t they shot?”

“Shot!” Mirna exclaimed with mock naivete. “They couldn’t have been shot, could they? Luisa told me the police were extremely courteous on the day they were released. After all, George Alberts was at that time an important name in international scientific circles —”

“Ah yes, I had forgotten!” Marc said. “He was the wartime physicist. The liquidation of such a personage would have done great harm to our international prestige, precisely at that critical moment. And if I understand you correctly, Zabran, you insisted on the fact that neither Alberts nor Luisa were dangerous as individuals, but merely as carriers of a dangerous and extremely infectious virus, and consequently their forced emigration removed the carriers from our midst as effectively as other forms of liquidation. But those among us who had caught the virus — to a greater or lesser degree, as you told us, and as I’m sure you scrupulously made clear to the responsible leaders at the time — could not be forced to emigrate. We were placed in confinement of varying durations, depending on the extent of the infection and the speed of the cure —”

Titus protested, “I’ve repeatedly told you I don’t consider physical confinement an adequate response —”

“That’s perfectly clear to me, Zabran,” Marc told him. “Your personal approach to these problems is extremely pacifistic. It is now also clear to me why you have never risen above the lowest rung of the political section of your department, namely why you haven’t been promoted to higher levels, where practical implementation is a more direct concern. Such a pacifistic approach has not been the most, shall we say expedient, approach to the political problems we have faced. But I must admit I’m surprised. Your squeamishness about methods combines rather badly with the brutal realism of your overall approach. Would you say this is an element of Nachalo’s influence that remains with you to this day — a trace of utopianism in the domain of methods? But I really must be going now —”

“Oh must you go?” Mirna asked him. “You clarified so many things for me —”

“I admit I’m glad you forced me to stay,” he told her. “Many things have been clarified for me as well. You see, I was profoundly hurt when I learned Luisa had emigrated with someone considered a foreign spy. I had been close, very close to Luisa. I obviously couldn’t make myself believe she had been engaged in espionage, nor that she had implicated the rest of us in that activity. But until today I could explain neither the reason for our sudden arrest nor the reason for Luisa’s mysterious emigration. My inability to explain those events had a marked effect on my personality. After my visit to Zabran I made decisions which have affected my life since then. I swore myself to celibacy and devoted myself single-mindedly to my career —”

His comments conflicted with what I had known about him, and I asked him, “Are you claiming you would never have been a careerist if the police hadn’t accused Luisa of being a spy?”

He disregarded my question with the same swatting gesture, and he told Mirna, “I have not experienced the desire for a woman’s affection from that day until you walked into my office. I hope I’m not embarrassing you, my dear. Furthermore, until today I had never called off a meeting except in instances when it overlapped with a more important meeting. I attribute all this to you, dear. You brought me news of Luisa, you brought me the assurance that Luisa had never been a spy, and above all you brought me yourself.” During this confession, Marc had been leading Mirna through the hallway toward the living room, his large arm around her waist.

After a few seconds, I heard Mirna shout, “How awful! I just remembered that I wasn’t able to get through to the train station to change my reservation, and my train leaves in an hour!”

They both rushed back into the dining room. Mirna ran to get the purse by her seat, while Marc paced back and forth, obviously annoyed. “That really is a distressing oversight,” he said. “I forgot too! Isn’t there some kind of time limit beyond which reservations cannot be changed?”

Mirna said, “Yes, and I’m afraid I missed that limit!”

“That’s extremely unfortunate,” Marc told her, still pacing; “I had very much wanted to have another rendez-vous with you.”

“I had wanted the same thing with you, Marc,” she told

him.

Marc looked at his watch and told her, “I’m sure something could still be done, but I simply don’t have the time to try to explore the possibilities still available to us.”

“I wouldn’t dream of asking you to spend your valuable time that way at this hour,” Mirna told him.

“One of the things I had wanted to tell you was that there is a great likelihood I will be traveling overseas in the very near future,” he told her, “and I very much wanted to have your home address, just in case —”

“What a wonderful solution to our present dilemma!” Mirna shouted. “And what an exciting prospect! I’ll be so happy to see you again!”

“And your husband?” Marc asked.

“We’ve been separated for several years,” she told him; “didn’t I tell you?”

“Please do give me your address,” he begged.

“How exciting!” Mirna started fishing through her purse. “Isn’t this silly? I’m so excited I can’t even remember my own address.”

Marc looked at his watch again and said impatiently, “Please do hurry, my dear.”

Mirna shouted, “Here it is!” She took out a piece of paper, wrote on it and handed it to him; then she took his hand in hers and told him, very seductively, “You’ll be more than welcome! And Luisa! She’ll simply go wild when I tell her!” They walked to the living room, arm in arm. Yara, Zdenek, Irena and I crowded into the hallway to watch the parting.

Marc kissed Mirna’s hand and told her, “I don’t know how to thank you. Please do communicate to Luisa how deeply I regret the thoughts I left unresolved during the past twenty years. In my heart I’ve never felt anything but admiration for her, an admiration the like of which I’ve since felt toward no one but you.”

While Marc still held Mirna’s hand near his lips, Adrian went bolting out of the dining room straight toward Marc, his right hand extended. “Comrade Glavni, I can’t let you leave before trying to explain myself. I owe you an apology —”

Marc dropped Mirna’s hand, turned his back to Adrian and started to walk toward the black limousine which was still waiting for him.

Adrian ran out of the house after him and shouted, “You’ve got to see my point of view, Comrade Glavni. When they threw that spy charge at me for the second time, and when I found out you had been released, and then remembering how close you had been to Luisa, I assumed —”

Marc slammed the door of the limousine and looked only at Mirna, who stood in the doorway.

Adrian continued shouting, “In any case I wasn’t the one who started that rumor about her!” Then he walked past Mirna back to the living room and exclaimed, “Damn!”

Zdenek asked him, “What’s the matter, Povrshan? Afraid Glavni might get reinstated?”

Adrian repeated, “Damn!” and dropped onto a sofa, red with frustration and perspiring.

Mirna stood in the doorway waving at the limousine as it drove off.

As soon as Mirna closed the door, Yara ran to her, embraced her and shouted, “You were perfect, absolutely perfect, in every way!”

Zdenek and Irena both grinned as they, too, congratulated her. Mirna looked quizzically at me.

I smiled and told her, “His career still came first — even above the prospect of a tête-à-tête with Mrs. Matthews. But you were never so — so seductive with me.”

“Of course not!” she told me. “You never asked me to have a tête-à-tête with you, whatever that is!” She ran to me and kissed me passionately on my lips. Then she looked around, asked, “But why isn’t the bride back?” and ran upstairs.

Yara started to return to the dining room, but Irena stopped her and told her, “They’re having it out with each other. Leave them.”

Vera was shouting at Titus in the dining room. “So you saw right through me, did you Comrade Zabran? You knew all about me from the very beginning! And with whom did you share this knowledge of yours? Why did you spread it? What do you expect to get out of it?”

Titus told her indignantly, “I happen not to be a gossip monger, Comrade Krena!”

“I suppose you only wanted your precious Adrian to recognize he was in the grip of a monster!” she shouted. “And what then? Do you really believe that after experiencing the upper echelons of the bureaucracy he’d ever again return to a factory job? You’re deluded beyond imagination! Adrian is permanently spoiled! He’ll never again be one of your beloved proletarians, he’ll never again be one of your followers!”

“Unscrupulous, shameless hypocrite!” Titus shouted, genuinely angry for the first time. “Under the guise of devotion to the proletarian cause, you’ve done nothing but surround yourself with instruments for the satisfaction of your depraved personal desires!”

“You have the nerve to say that to me!” she retorted. “You, Titus Zabran, dare to throw that in my face! You who’ve spent your life maiming and killing your beloved proletarians, who destroyed what you could never totally possess, you have the nerve to throw depravity in my face! I’ve come no closer to satisfying what you call my depraved desires than you. Comrade Zabran, but I never went to such lengths trying!” There was a long silence. Suddenly Vera was shouting through sobs, apparently on the verge of hysteria. “How can you just sit there, so cold, so impassive? Don’t you know what you’ve done?” She sobbed, and then continued, “I worshiped my proletarians as much as you ever did yours, but I never did mine any harm, not the slightest, ever! But you! When you lost your hold over yours, you had them maimed, tortured, confined, killed! And you talk to me about depravity!” There was silence again; only her hysterical sobbing could be heard.

Suddenly Titus appeared in the living room entrance; he walked toward the couch where I was and sat down. “Surely you’re still sober and unhysterical enough to understand, Yarostan.”

“I’m fairly sober and unhysterical, but I don’t understand,” I told him.

He went on, “Mass arrest of the entire group was an idiotic response to the actual danger the group represented, but uncritical acceptance of the group’s unbridled and growing individualism would have been an equally idiotic response. The potentially explosive and infectious character of such uncontrolled individualism in the midst of a revolutionary situation had to be carefully assessed, not with the saber-rattling hysteria of a Tamnich, but with the historically tried and tested methods of proletarian analysis. When the most combative elements of the class began to reject, not only the misleaders who headed their pseudo-organizations, but also the real leaders of the proletariat’s own organization, the consciousness of the entire class was put into jeopardy. Surely you understand this! The working class has always considered its organization as its most precious instrument. Opposition to its organization has always been the expression of confusion in the class, created by petty bourgeois influences —”

I moved as far to the other end of the couch as possible. I addressed him as “Zabran” and remembered how amazed I had been when Yara had started calling him “Mr. Zabran.” I said to him, “During the war, Zabran, when I was caught sleeping in the carton plant, you kept the foreman from having me arrested. You introduced me to your comrades in the resistance organization. Later you introduced me to Luisa Nachalo. I’ve always been grateful for what you did for me. But — and excuse me for putting it this way — I’m suddenly curious about your motives. What was I to you? Or to put it differently, what potential did I seem to represent for the working class struggle?”

While I was talking, Adrian was tiptoeing toward the hallway to the dining room. I heard him ask Vera. “Do you realize we go on the radio exactly ninety minutes from now?”

In a muffled voice, Vera said, “I forgot all about it. You’ll have to go on by yourself. I feel awful.”

“By myself?” Adrian gasped. “I’ve never given a talk by myself! The talk I prepared lasts all of five minutes!”

“Well have Irena type you more!” Vera shouted. “I can’t go on! Don’t you understand that?”

Adrian returned to the living room and walked toward Irena. He told her sheepishly, “Vera can’t go on.”

Irena told him, “Write your own speech, Adrian. I’m quitting!”

Adrian was on the verge of tears. “Irena, please —”

“Go to hell!” Irena shouted.

Adrian told her, “Don’t forget the comrades at the radio station extended our time to half an hour because you had insisted fifteen minutes wasn’t long enough for our program.”

Irena hesitated for a second. Then she walked toward me, extended her hand and looked into my eyes. “I’m sure we’ll see each other again.” She crossed the room toward Yara, took her hand and said, “Please do let me know when you’ll go on another one of your excursions. I’d like to go upstairs to say goodbye to Mirna.”

“I’m sure you’ll see her again too,” Yara told her. “We both love you for coming.”

“When will I meet your friend Julia?” Irena asked.

“I’ll bring her to your office tomorrow morning,” Yara told her. “I’m afraid you won’t like all the games Julia and I play —”

Irena said, “I’m sure I’ll love any games you play, Yara!”

Irena kissed Zdenek’s bearded cheek, and Yara accompanied her to the door. Yara told her, “Thanks for everything. Sisters?”

“Sisters, Yara. Forever!” They embraced in the doorway. I couldn’t take my eyes off them: identical hair, identical clothes, almost the same height. Finally Adrian pulled Irena away from Yara and walked out with her.

My eyes wandered back to Titus, who was staring at me from the other end of the sofa. I tried to return to the question I had asked him earlier. “I take it that I was more to you than simply a hoodlum, a homeless wretch for whom you merely felt pity. I represented something to you, didn’t I? I was one grain of that vast mass which could potentially raise the world to its shoulders, but which was asleep, blind and ignorant. You provided the necessary coherence, self-discipline and organization. I was expected to do the rest on my own.”

But before I clarified my question, Mirna came down the stairway pulling Jasna by the hand. Mirna sat down on the floor by my feet, placed her arm across my knees, and stretched her exposed stockinged feet toward Titus, as if to provoke him. Jasna sat down right next to me, or rather directly in front of me since I was facing sideways to talk to Titus. Jasna took both my hands and pulled them around her waist. This seemed to be her way of proclaiming that her marriage was off. Feeling an urge to convey the same message to him, I pulled Jasna closer toward me, buried my face in her hair and kissed her ear while I stared directly at Titus. Yara left the door and went to sit on Zdenek’s lap. Titus was completely alone, and for a second I felt sorry for him. He turned his face away from me and stared down at his own shoes.

Mirna said, “I’m sorry we interrupted. Please do go on.”

I wasn’t able to go on. There was a long silence. Then Yara said to Titus, “Yarostan was asking you why you took him into your organization! What did you expect from him?”

Titus, still looking down, said, “I’ve expressed my willingness to answer any question you ask, Yarostan — provided I can understand it.”

I apologized. I was having a hard time concentrating on the question I wanted to ask him. I tried again. “What you’ve just told about Luisa — I suppose you thought all those things about her at the time.” Titus nodded. “Yet you introduced me to her. You didn’t only introduce me. You apparently wanted me to be, how shall I say it, something like her political pupil.” Titus nodded again. I was irritated. “I don’t understand the significance of your nod.”

“I don’t understand your question,” he told me.

I shouted. “You took your patient to the wrong type of doctor, didn’t you?”

He looked up from his shoes with a bewildered expression; I could see that he genuinely hadn’t understood. I started again. “A hoodlum, a lumpen proletarian was found sleeping in the carton plant.” Titus stared down at his shoes again. I continued, “He wasn’t simply a hoodlum, but one familiar with the city ‘s hiding places, with the sewers and empty buildings, the alleys and underground passages. He was potentially useful to the resistance organization, particularly at a time when an armed rising was about to begin. You took him under your wing. The first goal was to win the war; the rest would come later. But the war ended, and you still kept this lumpen under your wing, although he was no longer useful to you. His knowledge of sewers had become irrelevant. What was needed then was a proletarian cadre, and this lumpen was ignorant, undisciplined and anti-intellectual. What you called a merely instinctive rebel had to be transformed into a class-conscious revolutionary, if possible one with a smattering of proletarian theory. But why did you choose Luisa for this task? How could she have carried that transformation through?”

Titus said, “I still fail to understand your question, unless you want the simplistic and obvious answer that Luisa was an experienced working class organizer whereas I was merely a theorist —”

“Are you being purposely dense?” I asked him, exasperated. “You apparently expected Luisa to shape me into a self-disciplined, realistic cadre, to channel my instinctive rebellion and Utopian hopes into scientific understanding of the laws of social development and rigid consciousness of the proletariat’s historical task. But you’ve just told us Luisa was incapable of carrying out such an assignment —”

Titus looked toward Zdenek with hostility and said, “I think I see what you’re driving at. You’re back to the fact that whatever our intentions are, we’re limited to historically available instruments, and Luisa was the only historically available proletarian organizer in that plant; there were no ideal organizers. Yes, Yarostan, unfortunately we don’t choose the circumstances in which we have to confront our tasks. Yes„ I took you under my wing, if you want to put it that way. You were something of a natural leader, and in fact you were the catalyst who set off the politicization of the others; it was you the others looked to. Luisa couldn’t play that role at the start because of her unfamiliarity with the local conditions and the distance created by her lack of local experiences —”

“But something went wrong, didn’t it?” I asked. “Luisa started — how did you put it? — infecting us with attitudes that threatened to spoil everything!”

“Luisa didn’t start by infecting you!” he protested. “She went a long way toward transforming you into a class-conscious revolutionary. I must have expressed myself simplistically earlier. The attitudes Luisa as well as Alberts’ daughter inherited from Nachalo were typical of the most militant sectors of the working class, they reflected the class’s implacable hatred for capital, its will to struggle against the capitalist order, its repudiation of all class collaboration. AH this is necessary, indeed indispensable, for the proletariat’s struggle. It is necessary, but not sufficient. Above all else the proletariat needs theory, namely proletarian consciousness, as well as organization. But consciousness cannot simply be placed into someone’s head. It grows out of the situation itself, out of daily confrontation with the contradiction between the productive forces and the production relations.”

“I see,” I told him. “So my job was supposed to inculcate the self-discipline. The final result was to be a cadre with Nachalo’s implacable hatred and with something, like your theory —”

“Precisely!” he said. “And Luisa was perfectly suited to guide you through such a development. If other factors hadn’t intervened, nothing, in the world would have made you turn against proletarian theory and ultimately against the proletariat’s very organization —”

“Now you’re coming to what I want to know,” I told him. “What were those other factors?”

“In essence they can all be reduced to Nachalo’s influence,” he said. “But this influence was not communicated as directly as you claim I made it seem. Nachalo combined implacable hatred for capitalism with implacable hatred for the proletariat’s own organization and theory.”

“Just like my brother,” Mirna observed.

“And like you, Mirna!” Titus told her. “It was precisely through Jan that the Nachalo influence was communicated to the rest of the production crew. It was no wonder to me that he and Alberts’ daughter took; to each other! Ultimately of course Luisa was the carrier of that influence, but what remained merely dormant in Luisa flared up in Jan! I wasn’t aware that two processes were taking place simultaneously. At Luisa’s house you became increasingly conscious of the tasks confronting the class and of the local material and social conditions in which our group found itself. However at the plant Jan Sedlak absorbed, not lessons drawn from the production process, but the lessons he drew from Luisa’s mannerisms and unintentional comments. This happened in spite of the fact that Luisa never considered him a comrade. Sedlak’s spontaneism, his instinctive rebellion could have been channeled and controlled, it could have played a useful role in the workers’ movement, if the rest of the group, and particularly you, had remained conscious of the historical tasks. But gradually you were swayed —”

“Just what did this influence consist of?” I asked him.

“Immaturity of consciousness, insufficient grasp of the needs of the class struggle, lack of any coherent approach to organization and political activity,” he answered. “In Nachalo and Sedlak we saw a total incomprehension of the three fundamental tasks of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat: class consciousness, proletarian theory and organization. This was extremely grave. All the combined forces of capital do not represent as great a danger to the proletariat as the incoherent and uncontrolled forces within the proletariat itself. I’ve devoted my whole life to the task of reflection and elaboration of the proletariat’s historical project, the task of defining and isolating uncontrolled and dangerous forces within the proletariat’s own ranks. What you don’t understand is that Nachalo and his likes appear to be the most militant workers during times when no organized struggle is taking place. But during times of struggle they become obstacles and fetters to the proletariat. What was needed in the carton plant was a coherent structure to maintain and develop political clarity. Terrorist petty bourgeois elements fighting only to gratify their own personal desires had no place in such a struggle. The entire aim of revolutionary theory can be reduced to this: to define, isolate and make possible the neutralization of such elements before they contaminate the entire class —”

“This neutralization, Zabran — how was it carried out?” I asked him. “By means of theory, by persuasion, by organizers like Luisa, by theorists like yourself? You’ve told me that in the earlier struggle you were a soldier in a so-called popular army. Tanks and rifles were the instruments with which you isolated and neutralized —”

“That military organization was established within the framework of an incorrect perspective, as I’ve told you before!” he said angrily. “The class must necessarily make use of violence, but this cannot be done by a minority separate from the general movement of the class! Terrorism, by individuals or separate groups like armies or police, is absolutely foreign to the methods of the class and constitutes a method which expresses the despair of the petty bourgeoisie —”

“Damn it, I don’t understand!” I shouted. “Do you actually conceive of the proletariat as a single body that turns all at once against its class enemy and deals a single blow, as if it didn’t consist of individuals, of different groups?”

“Just so!” he said. “And it is precisely this unity of purpose and unity of action that are sabotaged by individualists like Nachalo and Sedlak! Individualism is a disease! The entire tactics and strategy of the struggle reside in diagnosing this disease and isolating its carriers from the rest of the class, not by military methods but by the methods of science! Once the carriers are isolated, their own followers tend to absorb the historical lesson and weld themselves to the iron fist which clears away the fetters that obstruct the historical movement —”

“I’m starting to understand,” I said, feeling nauseated. “The point is not for an army, a minority, to carry your theory into history. The point is for Nachalo’s own comrades to carry your theory, and if possible Nachalo himself. The point is to turn Nachalo’s own comrades into partisans of a struggle he had repudiated from the marrow of his bones. So that’s what you expected in the carton plant? Once Luisa and Sabina were no longer able to infect us with the individualistic virus, the rest of us were to turn to the correct tasks on our own, under no other pressure than that of the level of development of the productive forces —”

“Yes, Yarostan, that’s precisely the point,” he said. “The point is not the physical liquidation of spontaneity or combativeness or instinctive rebellion. When this is done the proletariat is left disarmed; this is when tanks and rifles substitute themselves for the proletarian fist, because it is the force behind the fist that is thus liquidated. The goal is to transform not only you, but even a Jan Sedlak and a Nachalo into coherent expressions of class power, and this cannot be accomplished by means of guns aimed at their heads! The proletariat’s historical task is not that simple! It is the disease that has to be liquidated, not the proletariat! Surgery cannot be carried out by means of explosives! Not even in historical periods when explosives are the instruments most readily available to the surgeons! Theory has developed other methods, and these other methods cannot be considered Utopian because proletarian theory is not an abstraction; it is an excrescence of the class! A Sedlak must be made capable of turning his energy toward the appropriation of the productive forces when the historical opportunity for such an act presents itself, instead of shouting like a reactionary Luddite, ‘Let’s take the machinery into the street!’ A Nachalo must be made to distinguish his personal enemies from enemies of the class, and not left in a condition in which he greets the proletariat’s own organization by shouting ‘Down with the red butchers!’”

Jasna and Mirna were as startled as I was. The three of us jumped up; Yara and Zdenek joined us. We formed a hostile circle surrounding Titus. I asked him, “Could you repeat that? What did you say Nachalo shouted?”

He seemed disoriented and hesitated before answering. “I’ve already told you I never met Nachalo. I believe it was Alberts who told me Nachalo had said something of that nature —”

“Where was Nachalo when he said this?” I asked.

“I believe he was at the front,” Titus said hesitantly. “But as I told you, I’ve tried to forget my involvement with that military organization and I don’t remember any of it clearly —”

I shouted, “It was the only time in your life when you were personally in a position to implement your theory, to apply the cure called for by your diagnosis!”

“But that army was not an appropriate method.” he protested.

“You’re contradicting yourself!” I exclaimed. “You just said Nachalo shouted about red butchers in the face of the proletariat’s own organization. This means you did regard that army as the proletariat’s own organization, as the only historically available instrument —”

He protested, “I couldn’t have expressed myself —”

“On the contrary, you expressed yourself very clearly,” I told him. “History’s instrument was a firing squad!”

Titus stared at me with a bewildered expression and said nothing.

I tried to remember the exact words of Sabina’s account. “In the real revolution, the people will turn against the red butchers first!’”

Titus’ face turned into a grimace of horror. His whole body started trembling. He looked at me wildly, as if he were looking at a ghost — the ghost of Nachalo, whom he had never met. In a barely audible voice he said, ‘That’s impossible —”

Jasna. trying very hard to control her tears, walked to the front door and opened it slowly. “Titus, get out of this house.”

Titus rose slowly. He didn’t take his eyes off me. Every part of his body trembled as he walked out the door.

Jasna closed the door behind him and fell into Mirna’s arms, abandoning all her self-control, trembling as Titus had on his way out.

Zdenek asked Mirna, “Why did you make Jasna come down to face the gory end? You might have spared her.”

Mirna told him, “I asked her how she’d feel now if she had married him when she first met him. Then she didn’t want to be spared.”

Jasna wept convulsively. “You tried to tell me, but I didn’t want to believe you. I defended him to the very end. I know I would have stood by him when he had your Vesna taken away. Why are you so good to me, Mirna?”

“It was he who was good, Jasna, and you had every reason in the world to defend him,” Mirna told her. “He was good the way Vesna was good, the way my mother was good. He did everything for the noblest motives, for his plastic Jesus, the proletariat. Who could have thought that such a good man was an assassin? He helped Jan and Yarostan find jobs after their release from prison. He also helped you, Jasna. He helped my father get a pension after he was fired from his job. He visited Yarostan in prison and helped me get a pass —”

“Why are you repeating all that again?” Jasna asked. “None of us would have needed his help if he himself hadn’t been responsible —”

“I’m reminding you why you defended him,” Mirna told her. “Even I couldn’t believe it all until today, until he threw up all those gruesome details.”

Jasna asked, “How in the world did you see what Yarostan and I could never have imagined?”

I had wanted to ask Mirna the same question, but just then Vera walked in from the dining room. She had been crying and looked as pale as Titus had looked when he’d left. The elegant, proud woman I had seen at the beginning of the “celebration” now looked old; the dark rings around her eyes made her face look like a skull with a wig and paint. Vera walked toward Yara, fell to her knees, embraced Yara’s legs and placed her head in Yara’s bosom. She sobbed, “I never meant any harm. You know that, don’t you?”

Yara bent down to force Vera’s hands away from her legs and walked toward me; she put her arms around me, pressed her head to my chest and started to cry.

Vera pathetically crawled on her knees toward Mirna, extended her hand and reached for Mirna’s hand. Mirna pulled her hand away, walked to Zdenek’s chair and sat down on its arm, wrapping her arm around Zdenek’s shoulder. Vera turned to crawl toward Yara again.

“Vera, don’t!” Jasna screamed as she ran toward Vera and raised her to her feet. Jasna ran to the closet for Vera’s purse and hat. “I’ll walk you to the taxi stand; you’re overwrought,” she told Vera, leading her out the door, her arm around Vera’s shoulder. Vera walked out mechanically, like a human being suddenly deprived of her understanding.

When they had left, Zdenek commented, “That woman is carrying all of Zabran’s guilt because Zabran is too idiotic to realize what he’s done, and Jasna is the only one of us with enough compassion to know that Krena is carrying more than her share.”

“She’d have done the same thing he did,” Mirna insisted.

Zdenek objected, “But the fact is, she didn’t quite do the same thing.”

Yara was still sobbing. “I used to think she was so wonderful, such a powerful, proud woman.” I ran my hands through Yara’s hair. She looked up; there were tears on her pretty if not innocent face. “You like me again?” she asked me.

“Yes, Yara.”

“As much as you liked Irena?” she asked.

I blushed and looked away from her eyes. Her hands dropped from behind me. I put her hands back and forced myself to say, “More, Yara, infinitely more —”

“Show me!” she said; her eyes were big, her lips partially open.

I embraced Yara tightly. My heart beat so hard I thought the whole room shook; I felt a surge of desire I hadn’t known I could feel. I lowered my face, closed my eyes, parted my lips and placed them on Yara’s. When our lips parted, I was dizzy and unaware that I was standing. I almost fell to the floor; Yara helped me to a chair.

Mirna ran to me and asked, in a coaxing tone, “Aren’t you ashamed?”

“No, Mirna, I’m not ashamed.”

Mirna squeezed next to me and kissed me, not gently like Yara had, but fiercely, biting my lips and my tongue. “Didn’t I tell you he was still ours, Yara?” she asked.

“Whose did Yara think I was?” I asked her.

“God’s, morality’s, history’s!” Mirna said. “After what you did to her in my clearing, she was convinced you had given your life away, that you had become a servant of the tanks and firing squads —”

“She wasn’t so far wrong,” I admitted.

“Yes I was!” Yara protested. She crowded next to me from the other side and asked, “You didn’t ever want to turn me into a cadre, did you?”

I hid my tears by burying my face in Yara’s hair. Biting her ear gently, I whispered, “No, Yara, I want you exactly as you are.

Jasna returned, glanced with surprise at the love scene between the three of us, and turned to Zdenek. “Poor Zdenek, what did you do to drive everyone away from you?”

“Nothing except grow old, Jasna,” he told her.

“Old! All of life is still in front of you,” Jasna protested. She sat down on the arm of his chair in Mirna’s former position.

“Is that what you told Krena?” Zdenek asked.

Jasna almost cried again. “She’s completely broken. She kept repeating, ‘I’m not like him, Jasna, I’m not like him.’ I felt so sorry for her. Poor, sad Verushka. I tried to tell her none of us thought she was like him at all. She did cause Adrian’s and probably Jan’s and Yarostan’s jail terms to be lengthened — but she wasn’t the one who was responsible for their being in prison to start with.”

“And that rector?” Mirna asked.

“She alone was responsible for that.” Jasna admitted, and added, “But not a single one of us is pure.”

Mirna asked, “Are you boasting, Jasna?”

“You can sometimes be so cruel, Mirna,” Jasna told her. “God knows what you would have done if —”

Mirna cut in, “If I hadn’t concentrated my passion into —”

“Into love games!“Yara exclaimed. “Which is what those two didn’t ever do, even though they both longed to! They’ve pent it all up inside, and it gets so ugly when it’s so pent up. I was afraid of her. Didn’t you see how she looked at me? I was afraid she’d tear my arms off, one by one, and start eating them —”

I interrupted Yara to ask Mirna, “Jasna started asking you how you knew —”

“About Mr. Zabran?” Yara asked. “I knew three years ago, when he had Vesna taken to the hospital. I knew he wasn’t having her taken away because he loved her, but because he loved something he called health —”

“I knew even earlier,” Mirna said. “That day I went to his room, before you were released, he made me feel shame — the same shame I’d felt when my mother found Jan and me sleeping in each other’s arms, the same shame I’d felt when she surprised Sabina and me, the same shame I’d felt when Vesna turned rigid the day Yara and I returned from visiting you —”

I asked, with unintended sarcasm, “And from that feeling of shame you inferred —”

“I didn’t infer anything, Yarostan,” she told me. “I felt the same shame the day Yara. Zdenek and I went to his room to invite him to the dance at my plant. The look on his face was the same as my mother’s when she saw the devil in me — as if I intended to tear his clothes off and pull him into me right there and then! I nearly melted in the face of that look. Then Zdenek told me he had met him at the prisoners’ club, that he’d been talking to him when he saw you, and Titus mysteriously vanished. It was only then that I started asking myself what Sophia kept asking you: why hadn’t he ever told you about her letter? After Jasna told us what he had said to her about Luisa, Yara and I took all of Sophia’s letters to Zdenek’s and the three of us re-read every one of them. Sabina knew who Titus was twenty years ago, and maybe even earlier!”

Zdenek asked Mirna, “What I’d like to know is how that business about Krena got out —”

Yara told him, “Oh, I figured all that out by myself. Mr. Zabran had told Jasna everything he knew about Vera, but that really became interesting when I read what Sabina said about her. I went to listen to her lectures; once I stayed after the lecture and saw Irena! I figured it all out the moment I saw her! She looked exactly the way I’d been supposed to look at the dance! I had Mirna fix me up to look like Sabina again and I went to see Irena. She reacted the same way I had: we were twins! During all the years she’d worked for Vera, she hadn’t figured anything out —”

Zdenek asked, “But who started that rumor that supposedly reached Kren’s ears? I never heard of it before today.”

Yara blushed and looked guiltily toward Jasna. “Oh, that rumor,” she said. “Jasna wasn’t supposed to tell me what she’d learned from Mr. Zabran, I wasn’t supposed to tell Julia, Julia’s father wasn’t supposed to tell the people in the bank where he works, and they weren’t supposed to breathe a word to Kren.”

Everyone laughed, including Jasna. Yara looked relieved. Then Jasna asked Mirna, “Where in the world did you learn so much about airplane reservations? I’ve never even been to the airport!”

“Neither had I,” Mirna said. “The whole foreign tourist idea was Irena’s, or at least originated with her. Irena bought me the clothes and the little purse. I took two trips to the airport and acted as if I wanted to buy a ticket. I had the time of my life there, being ogled by all the important men with briefcases, especially the ones with their wives next to them! They weren’t all as polite as my Comrade Glavni. I also had another reason for going to the airport. At that time I thought we would soon be taking excursions by airplane. It was Irena who suggested I tell him I was leaving tonight. Otherwise I could never have made him stay — he kept trying to run out as it was —”

Yara asked her, “Had you planned the mixup between the airplane and sleeping car tickets?”

Mirna laughed and told her, “Planned it! I was so stupid it didn’t occur to me that there wouldn’t be a reservation for Mrs. Matthews when he called the airline! That was when I thought my whole game was over! Then I remembered a scene in a movie — a young man rushed to the railway station, pulled out his ticket, and learned it was a bus ticket —”

Yara asked, “What address did you send him to?”

“The only two addresses I knew were Luisa’s and Sophia s, and I didn’t wish him on either of them!” Mirna exclaimed. “There were ten of us here, so I wrote: Mrs. Ron Matthews, 10 Daman Street, New York. I hoped he wouldn’t happen to know Daman Street didn’t exist.”

Zdenek roared with laughter. “Maybe it does! Who knows whom he’ll find —”