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comparatively common.
 Is Lída common? Martinec asked rather softly.
 No, and the worse for her if she were to become
common. Ordinarily, lovers run away because of some sort of
obstacle. In view of the fact that none of you imposed restraints
on Lída in her contacts with others, then something else must
have done so, something indecipherable, moral, that she had to
forcibly transgress. That  something was perhaps someone
whom none of you knew. The hindering was apparently on his
side. You can imagine romantic scenarios if you like, but
ordinary cases are more likely to be less star-crossed. True love
has too great a capacity for suffering for it to suddenly resort
to such a solution. In the majority of cases, the girl is the
victim, involuntarily entangled in passion; in this respect, as a
rule, things happen as if determined by the deepest of motives.
You are young; if you find the man, you will consider it your
duty  a matter of honor.  Clearly, you must not treat him
as your equal, Holub added, suddenly showing sympathy.
Young Martinec stood up.  Are you finished?
 Not yet. There is one striking fact here: that Lída left the
house quietly and that before leaving she had a good appetite.
A good appetite is one of those things it is impossible to feign;
102 C ROSS ROADS
apparently she wasn t worried about not returning. Presumably,
she merely had an engagement with someone she didn t know
very well, but then, in the course of the afternoon, something
suddenly happened to her and she ended up in some sort of
situation we cannot grasp. You suppose it to be infatuation, but
that s only a name for wholly unknown motives. What
happened to her must have happened suddenly; if she were to
come home, I don t think she would even know how to run
away. It s all terribly enigmatic. Martinec, perhaps you will find
her, but don t question her, don t force a confession out of her,
don t humiliate her.
 And where would I find her? Martinec said peevishly.
 Somewhere outside of Prague. There are tens of thousands
of places where she could be, and there are countless circum-
stances which could influence the choice of destination, but we
aren t in a position to know any of them. If Lída acted
deliberately, in circumstances unknown to us, then we couldn t
begin to guess where she is; but in the event that she chose the
destination blindly, due to infatuation, by chance, we can have
a go at it. This is the paradox of chance.
 When someone places a bet in roulette according to some
plan we know nothing about, we cannot guess beforehand what
his game is, but if he plays according to chance, at random, we
can say with some degree of probability which number he will
involuntarily choose: his age, his favorite number, an important
date, et cetera. It s the same with lotteries and every other game
of chance: we can guess where Lída ran away to only if she
acted blindly, out of her senses, as if she had a fever.
 Lída didn t play the lottery unless there was a number
that had a certain special flavor for her. Any place Lída would
haphazardly choose would have to have a similar sort of flavor.
Everyone feels partial to some special place, perhaps because he
was there in his youth, or because he hasn t been there yet, or
its name appeals to him  it doesn t matter why, that place
always stands a greater chance for him than anywhere else in
LÍDA 103
the world. Perhaps you recall Lída talking happily that way
about such places, some dream she had, somewhere she always
wanted to go, or some particular place she had fixed in her
mind. Lída liked to talk about her fantasies; try to recall 
words that just popped out of her. Surely you can remember
something.
Martinec, coated with the sweat of impotence, said
nothing.
 Presumably, then, Lída ran off with someone, Holub
concluded in a monotone.  Most likely it was a man with
whom she had had contact for some inadmissible reason or
other. To all appearances she acted suddenly, in a fit of sorts,
erratically, hurriedly, and there s a chance that she chose as her
refuge a place in which, at some point, she s shown an interest.
It s a simple case of probability, yet it s unreliable because it
doesn t take into account a thousand factors unknown to us,
and it says only what might have happened, not what did. I [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]