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facts, and this keeps the logic very simple. Of motives, an
infinite number can be inferred from Lída s disappearance, but
of facts  about what she could have done or about what could
have happened to her  there is a limited selection. However,
action brings an end to the unlimited nature of anything.
Actions are not as individual as motives, there is a uniformity
to them, a repetition and regularity that have nothing to do
with motives and that go well beyond our wishes and drives.
Facts are fatal.
 Raskolnikov had uncommon motives for the murder he
committed. His plan was thought out in great detail and with
great originality, but in the end, the actual deed came off as
somehow run-of-the-mill, strikingly similar to a hundred other
common murders. But the oddest thing is that, in actuality, it
happened purely by chance.
 Let s suppose that the motivation for every suicide is
entirely individual: but similar suicides almost always follow.
Housemaids almost always resort to poison and not to a noose
made from bedsheets; poison isn t a requirement, but it s
customary. Unconsciously, our own acts imitate those acts most
frequently repeated; they follow in the same direction. Perhaps
even reality itself tends in that directon. The more ordinary
something is, the more likely it is to happen. Facts ordinarily
crop up in association with other facts, not from some sort of
requisite causality, but as if by chance, from habit, unwittingly,
involuntarily. In short, it has little to do with us. It is sheer
concomitance. We can presuppose that, even in Lída s case,
100 C ROSS ROADS
ordinariness is playing its role.
 Lída s case is not ordinary, Martinec insisted.
 It might very well be out of the ordinary, said Holub,
 but there is a paradox in regard to uncommon cases: they
recur. Misfortunes repeat themselves, as do suicides, murders,
even records. People who play roulette count on this paradox
of chance, on the repetition of uncommon events. In short, the
singularity of a case does not foreclose fatal similarities and
repetition. Even Lída s misfortune has its striking, recent
analogues.
 You want to find Lída, you want to solve the mystery,
whose circumstances elude you. All hypotheses are possible; the
less we know, the more possible they are. There s only one
thing left to do: to find among all the imaginable possibilities
the most probable and most possible, which is the most
ordinary, familiar, and ready at hand. Anything ordinary is
probable, not because the motivation might be better
understood, but because it occurs more often. An estimate of
probability must deal with the ordinariness of events, with the
unwitting repetition of acts; it must take into account the fact
that individual, unknown circumstances result in regular,
similar, fatally ordinary, pre-dictable outcomes. The goal is not
to find facts, but to show the workings of fate, which apply
blindly and with regularity.
 We don t know the facts of Lída s case, but at least we ll
try hard to work out its likely plot. But take care that we aren t
tempting fate. Here and there we ll come across the probable,
and we can be confident that fate controls even the facts of
Lída s case and leads her, unwittingly, in the direction she is
going.
 Like you, I imagine that this is a question of  that it
relates to Lída as a woman. This is highly probable, because
Lída is pretty. The question is whether or not force is involved.
You of course think But force is not so easy as you perhaps
imagine. Lída could not simply have been attacked. Look, if
LÍDA 101
you want to dream up everything that could have happened, we
would never be finished. To kidnap and violate a young woman
here in the city would be possible only in fairly remarkable
circumstances, and uncommon circumstances are things of
fantasy, not of probability.
 Unfortunately, I cannot win you over you with subtle
reasoning; I m lacking in that regard. If we eliminate suicide
and accident, we re left with either force or flight. But force
most often occurs under other circumstances, in the countryside,
among other classes of people  In short, I don t recall such a
thing ever happening in circumstances such as ours; yet there
are dozens, hundreds of runaways. Thus, Lída is far more likely [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]