Free The JOKE by Milan Kundera

a thread stretching across that pause in the score; no matter how thin, how agonizingly thin and fragile it might have been, it was still a thread. I had no such thread; I'd broken off all relations with Marketa, and the only letters I received were from my mother.... Well, was that not a thread?
    No, it was not; if home is only the parental house, it is no thread; it is only the past: letters written by your parents are messages from a shore you are forsaking; worse still, these letters recalling the port you sailed away from incessantly repeat that you strayed, leaving an environment so decently and so laboriously put together; yes, such letters tell you, the port is still there, unchanging, secure and beautiful in its old setting, but the bearing, the compass bearing is lost!
    Little by little I grew used to the idea that my life had lost its continuity, that it had been taken out of my hands, and that it only remained for me finally to begin to exist, even in my heart of hearts, in the reality in which I inescapably found myself. And so my eyes gradually adjusted to the penumbra of depersonalization, and I began to notice the people around me; later than the others, but fortunately not so late as to alienate myself from them altogether.
    The first to emerge from the penumbra was Honza from Brno (he spoke the almost incomprehensible patois of that city), who had been issued his black insignia for assaulting a policeman. The beating resulted from a personal argument with the man, an old schoolmate, but the court didn't see it that way, and he had come to us straight from six months in jail. He was a skilled metalworker but it was clearly all the same to him whether he would one day regain his vocation or do something else; he had no attachments, and as for the future, he displayed an indifference that gave him a carefree, insolent feeling of freedom.
    The only other one of us with this rare feeling of inner freedom was Bedrich, the most eccentric occupant of our twenty-bunk room. Bed-rich came to us two months after the usual September influx, having originally been assigned to an infantry unit where he had stubbornly
    refused to bear arms on strict religious grounds; then the authorities intercepted letters he'd addressed to Truman and Stalin, passionately appealing for the disbanding of all armies in the name of socialist brotherhood; in their confusion they let him take part in drill, and though he was the only man without a weapon, he went through the manual of arms perfectly, with empty hands. He also took part in political sessions, inveighing enthusiastically against imperialist warmongers. But when on his own initiative he made a poster calling for total disarmament and hung it in the barracks, he was court-martialed for insubordination. The judges, disconcerted by his pacifist harangues, had ordered him examined by a team of psychiatrists, and after a good deal of temporizing, had withdrawn their charges and transferred him to us. Bedrich was delighted: he was the only one who had deliberately earned his black insignia and took pleasure in wearing it. That was why he felt free—though unlike Honza, he expressed his independence by means of quiet discipline and contented industry.
    All the others were plagued by fear and despair: Varga, a thirty-year-old Hungarian from southern Slovakia, who, oblivious of national prejudices, had fought successively in several armies and been in and out of prisoner of war camps on both sides of the front; Petran the carrot top, whose brother had slipped out of the country, shooting a border guard on the way; Stana, a twenty-year-old dandy from a Prague working-class district, on whom the local council had passed a savage sentence for getting drunk in the May Day parade and deliberately urinating on the curb in full view of the cheering citizens; Pavel Pekny, a law student, who at the time of the February Communist coup had demonstrated against the Communists with a handful of his