Read Ignorance for Free Online

spotted a boy of about ten, stopped the car, asked the way to the cemetery. The boy stared at him without answering. Thinking he had not understood, Josef articulated his question more slowly, louder, like a foreigner trying to enunciate clearly. The boy finally answered that he didn't know. But how in hell can a person not know where the cemetery is, the only ceme-
    49
    tery in town? Josef shifted gears, set off again, asked some other people, but their directions seemed barely intelligible. Eventually he found it: cramped behind a newly built viaduct, it seemed unimposing, and much smaller than it used to be.
    He parked the car and walked down a lane of linden trees to the grave. Here, some thirty years earlier, he had watched the lowering of the coffin that held his mother. He had often come here afterward, on every visit to his hometown before his departure abroad. When, a month ago, he was planning this trip back to Bohemia, he already knew he would begin it here. He looked at the tombstone; the marble was covered with many names: apparently the grave had meanwhile become a large dormitory. Between the lane and the tombstone there was only lawn, neatly kept, with a flowerbed; he tried to imagine the coffins underneath: they must lie jammed one against the next, in rows of three, piled several layers deep. Mama was way down at the bottom. Where was the father? He had died fifteen years later; he would be separated from her by at least one layer of coffins.
    He envisioned Mama's burial again. At the
    50
    time there were only two bodies in the grave: his father's parents. He'd found it perfectly natural back then that his mother should be with her husband's family; he'd never even wondered if she might not have preferred to join her own parents. Only later did he understand: regroupings in family vaults are determined well in advance by power relationships; his father's family was more influential than his mother's.
    The number of new names on the stone troubled him. A few years after he left the country, he got word of his uncle's death, then of his aunt's, then eventually of his father's. Now he began reading the names closely; some were of people he had thought still living; he was stunned. It was not their deaths that unsettled him (anyone who decides to leave his country forever has to resign himself never to see his family again), but the fact that he had not been sent any announcement. The Communist police kept watch on letters addressed to emigres; had people been afraid to write him? He examined the dates: the two most recent were after 1989. So it was not out of caution that they didn't write. The truth was worse: he no longer existed for them.
    51
    14
    The hotel dated from the last years of Communism: a sleek modern building of the sort built all over the world, on the main square, very tall, towering by many stories over the city's rooftops. He settled into his seventh-floor room and then went to the window. It was seven in the evening, dusk was falling, the streetlights went on, and the square was amazingly quiet.
    Before leaving Denmark he had considered the coming encounter with places he had known, with his past life, and had wondered: would he be moved? cold? delighted? depressed? Nothing of the sort. During his absence, an invisible broom had swept across the landscape of his childhood, wiping away everything familiar; the encounter he had expected never took place.
    A long time ago Irena had visited a town in the French provinces, seeking out a little respite for her husband, who was already very ill. It was a Sunday; the town was quiet; they stopped on a bridge and stared at the water flowing peacefully between the greenish banks. At the point where
    the river formed an elbow, an old villa surrounded by a garden looked to them like the image of a comforting home, the dream of an idyll long past. Caught up by the beauty, they took a stairway down onto the embankment, hoping for a stroll. After a few steps