The JOKE by Milan Kundera Page A

what she thought of them. She said she condemned them. He approved and asked if she was still seeing me. She was embarrassed and tried to evade the question. He told her they had received a highly favorable report on her from the training course and that the Party Organization was counting on her. She said she was glad to hear it. He told her he did not intend to interfere in her private affairs but that as far as he was concerned, people were judged by the company they kept and that I was not the most promising company for her.
    For weeks thereafter, she told me, his words kept running around in her head. She had not seen me for several months, so Zemanek's admonition was superfluous; yet it was that very admonition that started her thinking about whether it was not cruel and morally inadmissible to encourage a person to break up a friendship merely because the friend had made a mistake, and therefore whether it had not also been unjust on her part to break up with me in the first place. She went to see the Comrade who had run the training course and asked him whether she was still forbidden to talk to me about the postcard incident, and learning that there was no longer reason for secrecy, she had stopped me and asked for a chance to talk.
    She then confided to me all the things that had been worrying, torturing her: yes, she had acted badly in deciding not to see me anymore; no man is completely lost, however great his mistakes. She recalled the Soviet film Court of Honor (at that time very popular in Party circles), in which a Soviet medical researcher places his discovery at the disposal of other countries before his own, an act bordering on treason. She had been especially touched by the film's conclusion: though the scientist is in the end condemned by a court of honor consisting of his colleagues, his wife does not desert him; she does her best to infuse in him the strength to atone, for his egregious error.
    "So you've decided not to leave me," I said.
    "Yes," said Marketa, taking my hand.
    "But tell me, Marketa, do you really think I've committed a great crime?"
    "Yes, I do," said Marketa.
    "And do you think I have the right to remain in the Party? Yes or no?"
    "No, Ludvik, I don't."
    I knew that if I joined the game Marketa had thrown herself into, and which she appeared to be living wholeheartedly on the emotional side, I would gain everything that I had sought in vain for months: powered by a Salvationist passion as a steamboat is powered by steam, she was all ready to give herself to me. On one condition, of course: that her Salvationist urge be fully satisfied; for that to happen, it was necessary that the object of salvation (alas, I in person) would have to agree to acknowledge his deep, his very deep guilt. And that I could not do. I was minutes away from the long-desired goal of her body, but I could not take it at that price; I could not agree to my guilt and accept an intolerable verdict; I could not stand to hear anyone supposedly close to me acknowledge that guilt and that verdict.
    I did not give in to Marketa, I refused her help, and I lost her; but is it true that I felt innocent? Of course, I kept assuring myself of the farcical nature of the whole affair, but even as I did so (and here we come to what now, with hindsight, I find most upsetting and most revealing) I began to see the three sentences on the postcard through the eyes of my interrogators; I myself began to feel outraged by my words and to fear that something serious did in fact lurk behind their comedy, to know
    that I never really had been one with the body of the Party, that I had never been a true proletarian revolutionary, that I had "gone over to the revolutionaries" on the basis of a simple (!) decision (we felt participation in the proletarian revolutionary movement to be, so to speak, not a matter of choice but a matter of essence, a man either was a revolutionary, in which case he completely merged with the movement into one