Laughable Loves

by Milan Kundera

Havel's speech puzzled and excited the young man, and they kept on walking together for a long time through the deepening dusk. When they parted Havel declared that he was tired of his diet and that tomorrow he would like to go out for a good dinner; he asked the editor if he would like to accompany him.

  Of course the young man accepted the invitation.

  4

  "Don't tell my doctor,'' said Havel, when he had taken a seat across the table from the editor and picked up the menu, "but I have my own conception of a diet: I strictly avoid all the foods I don't enjoy" Then he asked the young man what aperitif he would have. The editor was not used to drinking aperitifs before

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  dinner, and because nothing else occurred to him, he said: "Vodka."

  Dr. Havel looked displeased: "Vodka stinks of the Russian soul."

  "That's true," said the editor, and from that moment he was lost. He was like a student at the final high school oral examination before his committee. He didn't try to say what he thought and do what he wanted, but attempted to satisfy the examiners; he tried to divine their thoughts, their whims, their taste; he wanted to be worthy of them. Not for anything in the world would he have admitted that his meals were usually poor and rudimentary, and that he didn't have a clue about which wine went with which meat. And Dr. Havel unwittingly tormented him when he persisted in conferring with him about the choice of hors d'oeuvre, main course, wine, and cheese.

  When the editor realized that the committee had taken off many points in the gastronomy examination, he wanted more than ever to make up the loss, and now in the interval between the hors d'oeuvre and the main course, he conspicuously looked around at the women in the restaurant and by various remarks tried hard to demonstrate his interest and experience. But once again he was the loser. When he said that the red-haired woman sitting two tables away would certainly be an excellent mistress, Dr. Havel without malice asked him what made him say that. The editor replied vaguely, and when the doctor asked about his experiences with

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  redheads, he became entangled in improbable lies and soon fell silent.

  By contrast Dr. Havel felt happy and relaxed with the editor's admiring eyes fixed on him. He ordered a bottle of red wine with the meat, and the young man, encouraged by the alcohol, made a further attempt to become worthy of the master's favor; he commented at length about a girl he had recently met and whom he had been wooing for the past several weeks, with, he said, great hope of success. His statement was not too substantial, and the unnatural smile that covered his face and was intended, with its artificial ambiguity, to state what he had left unsaid, only conveyed that he was trying to overcome his insecurity. Havel was well aware of all this and, moved by pity, asked the editor about the most diverse physical attributes of the girl, so as to detain him on this agreeable topic for as long as possible and give him a chance to talk more freely. However, even this time the young man was an incredible failure: it turned out that he wasn't able to describe with sufficient precision the general architecture of the girl's body or particular features of it, and even less the girl's mind. And so Dr. Havel himself finally talked expansively and, becoming elated by the coziness of the evening and by the wine, overwhelmed the editor with a witty monologue of his own reminiscences, anecdotes, and remarks.

  The editor sipped his wine, listened, and at the same time experienced ambiguous emotions. On the one hand he was unhappy: he felt his own insignificance and stu-

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  pidity, he felt like a questionable apprentice in front of an unquestionable master, and he was ashamed to open his mouth; but at the same time he was also happy: it flattered him that the master was sitting opposite him, having a nice, long, friendly chat with him and confiding to him the most varied, intimate, and valuable observations.

  When Havel's speech had already lasted too long, the young man yearned, after all, to open his own mouth, to make his own contribution, to join in, to prove his ability to be a partner; he spoke, therefore, once more about his girl and invited Havel to take a look at her the next day and let him know how she looked to him in the light of his experience; put differently (yes, in his whimsical frame of mind he used these words), to check her out.

  What was he thinking of ? Was it only an involuntary notion born of wine and the intense desire to say some-thing?

  However spontaneous the idea may have been, the editor was pursuing at least a threefold benefit: �by means of the conspiracy involving a common and clandestine judgment (the checking out), a secret bond would be established between him and the master, they would become real pals, a thing the editor craved;

  �if the master voiced his approval (and the young man expected this, for he himself was greatly taken with the girl in question), this would be approval of the young man, of his judgment and taste, so that in

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  the master's eyes he would change from an apprentice into a journeyman, and in his own eyes he would also be more important than before; �and last: the girl would then mean more to the young man than before, and the pleasure he experienced in her presence would change from fictional to real (for the young man occasionally realized that the world in which he lived was for him a labyrinth of values, whose worth he only quite dimly surmised; therefore he knew that illusory values could become real values only when they were endorsed).

  5

  When Dr. Havel awoke the next day he felt a slight pain in his gall bladder because of yesterday's dinner; and when he looked at his watch he found that in half an hour he had to be at a hydrotherapy session and would therefore have to hurry, which of all things in life he liked to do least; and when, combing his hair, he caught sight of his face in the mirror, it didn't please him. The day was beginning badly.

  He didn't even have time for breakfast (he considered this a bad sign as well), and he hurried to the building that housed the baths. There was a long corridor with many doors; he knocked on one and a pretty

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  Monde in a white smock peeped out; she ill-humoredly chided him for being late and asked him in. A moment after Dr. Havel went behind a screen in a cubicle to undress, he heard, "Will you hurry up?" The masseuses voice became more and more impolite; it offended Havel and provoked him to retaliate (and alas, over the years Dr. Havel had become accustomed to only one way of retaliating against women!). He took off his underpants, pulled in his stomach, stuck out his chest, and was about to step out of the cubicle; but then, disgusted by an act that was beneath his dignity and that would have seemed ridiculous to him in someone else; he comfortably relaxed his stomach again and, with a nonchalance he considered worthy of his dignity, headed toward the large bath and immersed himself in the tepid water.

  The masseuse, completely disregarding both his chest and his stomach, meanwhile turned several faucets on a large control board and, when Dr. Havel was already lying stretched out on the bottom of the bath, she seized his right foot under the water and put the nozzle of a hose, from which there issued a stinging stream, against his sole. Dr. Havel, who was ticklish, jerked his foot, so that the masseuse had to rebuke him.

  It would certainly not have been too difficult to get the blonde to abandon her cold and impolite tone by means of some joke, gossip, or facetious question, only Havel was too angry and insulted for that. He said to himself that the blonde deserved to be punished and shouldn't have things made easy for her. As she ran the

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  hose over his groin and he covered his genitals with his hands so that the stinging stream wouldn't hurt them, he asked her what she was doing that evening. Without looking at him, she asked him why he wanted to know. He explained to her that he was staying alone in a single bedroom and that he wanted her to come to him there that evening. "Maybe you've confused m
e with someone else," said the blonde, and she told him to turn over onto his stomach.

  And so Dr. Havel lay with his stomach on the bottom of the bath, holding his chin up high so that he could breathe. He felt the stinging stream massaging his calves, and he was satisfied with the way he had addressed the masseuse. Dr. Havel had for a long time been in the habit of punishing rebellious, insolent, or spoiled women by leading them over to his couch coldly, without any tenderness, almost without a word, and also by then dismissing them in an equally chilly manner. Only after a moment did it occur to him that though he had no doubt addressed the masseuse with appropriate coldness and without any sort of tenderness, still he had not led her to the couch and was not likely to do so. He understood that he had been rejected and that this was a new insult. For this reason he was glad when at last he was drying himself with a towel in the cubicle.

  He quickly left the building and hurried to the Time Cinema to look at the display case; three publicity stills were displayed there, and in one of them his wife was kneeling in terror over a corpse. Dr. Havel looked at

  Dr. Havel After Twenty Years

  that sweet face, distorted by fright, and felt boundless love and boundless yearning. For a long time he could-n't drag himself away from the display case. Then he decided to drop in on Frantiska.

  "Get me long distance, please, I have to talk to my wife," he said to her when she had seen her patient out and asked him into the consulting room.

  "Has something happened?"

  "Yes," said Havel. "I feel lonely!"

  Frantiska looked at him mistrustfully, dialed the long-distance operator, and gave the number Havel told her. Then she hung up and said: "So you're lonely?"

  "And why shouldn't I be?" Havel said angrily.

  You're like my wife. You see in me someone whom I

  haven't been for a long time. I'm humble, I'm forlorn,

  I'm sad. The years weigh heavily on me. And I'm

  telling you that this is not a pleasant thing."

  "You should have children," the woman doctor replied. "Then you wouldn't think so much about yourself. The years also weigh heavily on me, but I don't think about it. When I see my son growing up, I look forward to seeing what he will be like as a man, and I don't complain about the passage of time. Imag-

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  ine what he said to me yesterday: 'Why,' he said, 'are there doctors in the world when everyone will die anyway?' What do you say to that? What would you have said to him?"

  Luckily Dr. Havel didn't have time to answer because the telephone rang. He picked up the receiver, and when he heard his wife's voice, he immediately blurted out how sad he was, how he had no one to talk to or look at here, how he couldn't bear it alone here.

  Through the receiver a small voice was heard, distrustful at first, startled, almost faltering, which under the impact of her husband's words unbent a little.

  "Please, come here to see me; come to see me as soon as you can!" said Havel, and heard his wife reply that she'd like to but that nearly every day she had a show to do.

  "Nearly every day isn't every day," said Havel, and he heard his wife say that she had the following day free, but that she didn't know if it was worth coming for just one day.

  "How can you say that? Don't you realize how precious one day is in this short life of ours?"

  "And you really aren't angry with me?" asked the small voice into the receiver.

  "Why should I be angry?"

  "Because of that letter. You're in pain, and I bore you stiff with the silly letter of a jealous woman."

  Dr. Havel murmured sweet nothings into the mouthpiece, and his wife (in a voice already grown quite tender) declared that she would come the next day.

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  "Whatever you say, I envy you," said Frantiska, when Havel had hung up the receiver. "You have everything. Girls at your beck and call and a happy marriage besides."

  Havel looked at his friend, who talked to him of envy, but because of the very goodness of her heart, probably wasn't capable of that emotion. And he felt sorry for her, for he knew that the pleasure to be had from children cannot compensate for other pleasures, and, moreover, a pleasure burdened with the obliga-tion to substitute for other pleasures will soon become too wearisomea pleasure.

  He then left for lunch. After lunch he slept, and when he woke up he remembered that the young editor was awaiting him in a cafe, to present his girl to him. So he dressed and went out. As he walked down the stairs of the patients' building, in the hall near the cloakroom he caught sight of a tall woman who resembled a beautiful riding horse. Ah, this should not have happened! That is to say Havel always found precisely this type of woman madly attractive. The cloakroom attendant was handing the tall woman her coat, and Dr. Havel ran over to help her into it. The woman who resembled a horse casually thanked him, and Havel said: "Is there anything else I can do for you?" He was smiling at her, but she replied, without a smile, that he couldn't, and she dashed out of the building.

  Dr. Havel felt as if he'd been slapped in the face, and in a renewed state of gloom he headed toward the cafe.

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  7

  The editor had already been sitting in a booth beside his girlfriend for quite a while (he'd picked a place from which the entrance was visible), and he wasn't up to concentrating on conversation, which at other times used to bubble up between them gaily and unflag-gingly. He was shy at the thought of Havel's arrival. For the first time today he had attempted to look at his girlfriend with a more critical eye. And while she was saying something (fortunately she went on saying something, so that the young man's inner anxiety remained unnoticed), he discovered several minor flaws in her beauty. This greatly disturbed him, even if in no time he was assuring himself that these minor flaws in fact made her beauty more interesting and that it was precisely these things that gave him a warm feeling of closeness to her whole being.

  That is to say he loved the girl.

  But if he loved her, why had he proceeded with this venture that would be so humiliating to her, checking her out with the lubricious doctor? And if we grant him extenuating circumstances, allowing that this was only a game for him, how was it that he had become so shy and troubled by a mere game?

  This was not a game. The young man really did not know what his girl was like, he wasn't able to pass judgment on the degree of her beauty and attractiveness.

  But was he really so naive and inexperienced that he

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  could not distinguish a pretty woman from an ugly one?

  Not at all. The young man wasn't so inexperienced; he had already known a few women and had affairs with them, but while they were going on he had been concentrating far more on himself than on them. Take a look at this noteworthy detail: the young man recalled precisely when and how he had been dressed with which woman; he knew on what occasion he had worn pants that were too wide and had been unhappy about this; he knew that at another time he had worn a white sweater in which he had felt like a stylish sportsman, but he had no idea how his girlfriends had been dressed.

  Yes, this is noteworthy: during his brief adventures he had undertaken long and detailed studies of himself in the mirror, while he had only an overall, general impression of his female counterparts; it was far more important to him how he himself was seen in the eyes of his partner than how she appeared to him. By this I don't mean to say that it didn't matter to him whether the girl he was seeing was or was not beautiful. It did matter. For he himself was not merely seen by the eyes of his partner, but both of them together were seen and judged by the eyes of others (by the eyes of the world), and it was very important to him that the world should be pleased with his girl, for he knew that through her was judged his choice, his taste, his status, thus he himself. But precisely because what concerned him was the judgment of ot
hers, he had not dared to rely on his own

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  eyes; until now, on the contrary, he had considered it sufficient to listen to the voice of general opinion and to accept it.

  But what was the voice of general opinion against the voice of a master and an expert? The editor was looking anxiously toward the entrance, and when at last he caught sight of Dr. Havel's figure in the glass door, he pretended to be astonished and said to the girl that by sheer chance a certain distinguished man, whom he wanted to interview for his magazine within the next few days, was just coming in. He went to meet Havel and led him over to their table. The girl, interrupted for a moment by the introduction, soon picked up the thread of her incessant conversation and continued to chatter away.

  Dr. Havel, rejected ten minutes before by the woman who resembled a riding horse, looked slowly at the prattling girl and sank deeper and deeper into a surly mood. The girl wasn't a beauty, but she was quite cute, and there was no doubt that Dr. Havel (who was alleged to be like death, because he took everything) would have taken her gladly any time. She possessed several features indicative of a curious, aesthetic ambiguity: At the base of her nose she had a shower of freckles, which could be taken as a flaw in the whiteness of her complexion, but also conversely as a natural gem; she was very slender, which could be taken as the inadequate filling out of ideal feminine proportions, but also conversely as the provocative delicacy of the child

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  continuing to exist within the woman; she was immensely talkative, which could be taken as inconvenient blather, but also conversely as a useful trait, which would allow her partner to give himself up to his own thoughts in the shelter of her words whenever he liked and without fear of being caught.

  The editor secretly and anxiously examined the doc-tor's face, and when it seemed to him that it was dangerously (and for his hopes unfavorably) lost in thought, he called over a waiter and ordered three cognacs. The girl protested that she did not drink, and then again slowly let herself be persuaded that she could drink and should, and Dr. Havel sadly realized that this aesthetically ambiguous creature, revealing in her stream of words all the simplicity of her inward nature, would very probability be, if he were to make a play for her, his third failure of the day. For he, Dr. Havel, once as supreme as death, was no longer the man he once had been.

  Then the waiter brought the cognacs, they all three raised them to clink glasses, and Dr. Havel looked into the girl's blue eyes as into the hostile eyes of someone who was not going to belong to him. And when he understood the significance of these eyes as hostile, he reciprocated with hostility, and suddenly saw before him a creature aesthetically quite unambiguous: a sickly girl, her face splattered with a smudge of freckles, insufferably garrulous.