Ignorance by Milan Kundera Read Free Book Online

slightest desire to find out
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    what his brother had managed to salvage and what he had done with it.
    He gazed for a long while at the picture: a working-class suburb, poor, rendered in that bold welter of colors that recalled the Fauve artists from the turn of the century, Derain for example. And yet the painting was no pastiche; if it had been shown in 1905 at the Salon d'Automne together with works by the Fauves, viewers would have been struck by its strangeness, intrigued by the enigmatic perfume of an alluring visitor come from some faraway place. In fact the picture was painted in 1955, a period when doctrine on socialist art was strict in its demand for realism: this artist, who was a passionate modernist, would have preferred to paint the way people were painting all over the world at the time, which is to say in the abstract manner, but he also wanted his work to be exhibited; therefore he had to locate the magic point where the ideologues' imperatives intersected with his own desires as an artist; the shacks evoking workers' lives were a bow to the ideologues, and the violently unrealistic colors were his gift to himself.
    Josef had visited the man's studio in the 1960s,
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    when the official doctrine was losing some of its force and the painter was already free to do pretty much whatever he wanted. In his naive sincerity Josef had liked this early picture better than the recent ones, and the painter, who looked on his own proletarian Fauvism with a slightly condescending affection, had cheerfully made him a gift of it; he'd even picked up his brush and, alongside his signature, written a dedication with Josef's name.
    "You knew this painter well," remarked the brother.
    "Yes. I saved his poodle's life for him."
    "Are you planning to go see him?"
    "No."
    Shortly after 1989 a package had arrived at Josef's house in Denmark: photographs of the painter's latest canvases, created now in complete freedom. They were indistinguishable from the millions of other pictures being painted around the planet at the time; the painter could boast of a double victory: he was utterly free and utterly like everybody else.
    "You still like this picture?" asked the brother.
    "Yes, it's still very fine."
    The brother tilted his head toward his wife: "Katy loves it. She stops to look at it every day." Then he added: "After you left, you told me to give it to Papa. He hung it over the table in his office at the hospital. He knew how much Katy loved it, and before he died he bequeathed it to her." After a little pause: "You can't imagine. We lived through some dreadful years."
    Looking at the sister-in-law, Josef remembered that he had never liked her. His old antipathy (she'd returned it in spades) now seemed to him stupid and regrettable. She stood there staring at the picture with an expression of sad impotence on her face, and in pity Josef said to his brother: "I know."
    The brother began an account of the family's story: the father's lingering death, Katy's illness, their daughter's failed marriage, then on to the cabals against him at the hospital, where his position had been gravely compromised by the fact of Josef's emigrating.
    There was no tone of reproach to that last remark, but Josef had no doubt of the animosity with which the brother and sister-in-law must have discussed him at the time, indignant at the
    paltry reasons Josef might have alleged to justify his emigration, which they certainly considered irresponsible: the regime did not make life easy for the relatives of emigres.
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    In the dining room the table was set for lunch. The conversation turned lively, with the brother and sister-in-law eager to inform him of everything that had happened during his absence. The decades hovered above the dishes, and his sister-in-law suddenly attacked him: "You had some fanatical years yourself. The way you used to talk about the Church! We were all scared of you."
    The remark startled him. "Scared of me?" His sister-in-law held