mİsho

“Fast-forward to 1988: I am raped by an acquaintance the night before my graduation from college. The next morning, before donning cap and gown, I stumble into the University Health Services building to report the crime. I’m advised not to press charges. “They’ll smear you,” I’m told by the female psychologist assigned to my case. I don’t want to be smeared. I’ve got a life to live. Twenty-five years later, while watching CNN lament the effects of the Steubenville rape on two promising lives—the rapists’, not the victim’s—I’ll hold two competing thoughts: nothing has changed; I wish I’d been braver. I decide to Google my rapist’s name, something I’ve never done in the quarter-century since the crime. His promise, I note, has been duly fulfilled. He’s successful. He’s married—to a woman who recently spoke on a “Lean In” panel with Sheryl Sandberg.”

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“Don’t forget,” said the writer, his face more and more agitated, “it was in Rourou that I first rode a bike. Yes, I tell about it in detail in my book. And you all know what the bicycle signifies in my work. It’s a symbol. For me, the bicycle is the first step taken by humanity out of the patriarchal world and into the world of civilization. The first flirtation with civilization. The flirtation of a virgin before her first kiss. Still virginity and already sin.”

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

Everyone started discussing Tanaka’s orgasm, and Tamina asked Bibi: “May I make a telephone call?”

… at the window, among the begonias, there is Zdena’s face, with its gigantic nose, and Mirek feels immense love.

Is that possible?

Yes. And why not? Can’t a weak boy feel true love for an ugly girl?

He told her he was in rebellion against his reactionary father, she inveighed against intellectuals, they got blisters on their buttocks, and held hands. They went to meetings, denounced their fellow citizens, told lies, and were in love ….

He wanted to efface her from the photograph of his life not because he had not loved her but because he had. He had erased her, her and his love for her, he had scratched out her image until he had made it disappear as the party propaganda section had made Clementis disappear from the balcony where Gottswald had given his historic speech. Mired rewrote history just like the Communist Party, like all political parties, like all peoples, like mankind. They shout that they want to shape a better future, but that’s not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past. We fight for access to the labs where we can retouch photos and rewrite biographies and history.

Tamina serves coffee and calvados to the customers (there aren’t all that many, the room being always half empty) and then goes back behind the bar. Almost always there is someone sitting on a barstool, trying to talk to her. Everyone likes Tamina. Because she knows how to listen to people.

But is she really listening? Or is she merely looking at them so attentively, so silently? I don’t know, and it’s not very important. What matters is that she doesn’t interrupt anyone. You know what happens when two poeple talk. One of them speaks and the other breaks in: “It’s absolutely the same with me, I … ” and starts talking about himself until the first one manages to slip back in with his own “It’s absolutely the same with me, I …”

The phrase “It’s absolutely the same with me, I …” seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other’s thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy’s ear by force. Because all of man’s life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others. The whole secret of Tamina’s popularity is that she has no desire to talk about herself. She submits to the forces occupying her ear, never saying: “It’s absolutely the same with me, I …”