Free The JOKE by Milan Kundera Page A

fellow students (he soon discovered I belonged to the camp of those who had kicked him out of the university after the coup, and he alone showed a malicious satisfaction at the thought that we had both ended up in the same boat).
    I could tell about numerous other soldiers who shared my fate then, but I want to stick to essentials: Honza, the one I liked best. I remember one of the first conversations we had together; during a break in a pit gallery where we happened to be sitting (chewing on some bread)
    side by side, Honza gave me a slap on the knee: "Hey, you there! You deaf and dumb, what makes you tick anyway?" Since I really was deaf and dumb at the time (entirely absorbed by my endless attempts at self-justification), I was hard put to explain (all at once I felt how forced and affected my choice of words must have sounded to him) how I had ended up in the mines and why I actually did not belong there. "Why, you fucking bastard! You mean the rest of us belong here?" I tried to make my position clearer (and choose more natural-sounding words), but Honza, swallowing his last mouthful, interrupted. "You know, if you were as tall as you are stupid, the sun'd burn a hole through your head." Aimed at me, this plebeian mockery suddenly made me ashamed of endlessly dwelling on my lost privileges like a spoiled child, especially since my convictions were based on opposition to privilege.
    As time went on, Honza and I became fast friends (Honza respected me for my skill at mental arithmetic; more than once a fast calculation on my part had saved us from being shortchanged on payday). One night he called me an idiot for spending my leaves in camp and dragged me along with the rest of the gang. I'll never forget it. We were a pretty big group, about eight in all, including Stana, Varga, and a former student of applied art by the name of Cenek (Cenek was put in with us because he had insisted on doing cubist paintings at school; now, for an occasional favor, he covered the barracks walls with oversized charcoal drawings of Hussite warriors, complete with flails and maces). We didn't have much choice where to go: the center of Ostrava was off limits, and even in the neighborhoods open to us we were limited to certain places. But that night we were in luck: there was a dance at a nearby hall where none of our restrictions applied. We paid the small entrance fee and surged in. The hall had lots of tables, lots of chairs, but not that many people: ten girls, no more, and about thirty men, half of them soldiers from the local artillery barracks; the minute they saw us, they were on their guard; we could feel their eyes on us, counting heads. We sat down at a long empty table and ordered a bottle of vodka, but the waitress announced sternly that no alcohol was to be served, so Honza ordered eight lemonades; then he collected money from each of us and returned a short while later with three bottles of
    rum, which we immediately added to our lemonades under the table. We had to act with utmost circumspection because we knew the artillerymen were watching us and wouldn't hesitate to report us for illegal consumption of alcoholic beverages. Members of the normal military, it must be said, were extremely hostile to us: on the one hand, they looked upon us as suspicious elements, criminals, murderers, and enemies (as the propaganda spy novels put it) ready to cut the throats of their poor innocent families; on the other hand (and probably most important), they envied us for having more money and earning hourly five times more than they did.
    That was what made our position so unusual: all we knew was drudgery and fatigue, we had our heads shaved clean every two weeks to rid them of all thoughts of self-esteem, we were the disinherited with nothing more to look forward to in life, but we had money.
    Oh, not much; but for a soldier with only two nights free a month it was a fortune: in those few hours (and in those few places not off limits) he