Laughable Loves

by Milan Kundera

"Take those hands away," he called her to order. "Clasp them!"

  Once again she looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  "Clasp them! Did you hear?"

  She clasped her hands.

  "Pray!" he commanded.

  She had her hands clasped, and she raised her eyes toward him fervently.

  "Pray! So that God may forgive us," he shouted.

  She had her hands clasped. She was looking up at him with her large eyes, and Eduard not only gained time, but looking down at her from above, he began to lose the oppressive feeling that he was merely her quarry, and he regained his self-assurance. He stepped back so that he could see all of her, and once again he commanded, "Pray!"

  When she remained silent, he yelled: "Out loud!"

  And the skinny, naked, kneeling woman began to recite: "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come ..."

  As she uttered the words of the prayer, she gazed up at him as if he were God himself. He watched her with growing pleasure: in front of him was kneeling the directress, being humiliated by a subordinate; in front of him a naked revolutionary was being humiliated by prayer; in front of him a praying woman was being humiliated by her nakedness.

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  This threefold image of humiliation intoxicated him, and something unexpected suddenly happened: his body revoked its passive resistance; Eduard had an erection!

  As the directress said, "And lead us not into temptation," he quickly threw off all his clothes. When she said, "Amen," he violently lifted her off the floor and dragged her onto the couch.

  9

  That was on Thursday, and on Saturday Eduard went with Alice to the country to visit his brother, who welcomed them warmly and lent them the key to the nearby cottage.

  The two lovers spent the whole afternoon wandering through the woods and meadows. They kissed, and Eduard's contented hands found that the imaginary line, level with her navel, which separated the sphere of innocence from that of fornication, didn't count anymore. At first he wanted to verify the long-awaited event verbally, but he became frightened of doing so and understood that he had best keep silent.

  His judgment was probably correct; Alice's abrupt turnaround had occurred independently of his many weeks of persuasion, independently of his argumenta-

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  tion, independently of any logical consideration whatsoever. In fact it was based exclusively upon the news of Eduard's martyrdom, consequently upon a mistake, and it had been deduced quite illogically even from this mistake; let us reflect for a moment: why should Eduard's sufferings for his fidelity to his beliefs result in Alices infidelity to God's law? If Eduard had not betrayed God before the fact-finding committee, why should she now betray him before Eduard?

  In such a situation any reflection expressed aloud could risk revealing to Alice the inconsistency of her attitude. So Eduard prudently kept silent, which went unnoticed, because Alice herself kept chattering. She was cheerful, and nothing indicated that this turnaround in her soul had been dramatic or painful.

  When it got dark they went back to the cottage, turned on the lights, turned down the bed, and kissed, whereupon Alice asked Eduard to turn off the lights. But the light of the stars continued to show through the window, so Eduard had to close the shutters as well on Alice's request. Then, in total darkness, Alice undressed and gave herself to him.

  Eduard had been looking forward to this moment for so many weeks, but surprisingly enough, now, when it was actually taking place, he didn't have the feeling that it would be as significant as the length of time he had been waiting for it suggested; it seemed to him so easy and self-evident that during the act of love he was almost distracted and was vainly trying to drive away the thoughts that were running through his head:

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  everything came back to him, those long, futile weeks when Alice had tormented him with her coldness; the problems at school, which she had been the cause of, so instead of gratitude for her giving herself to him, he began to feel a kind of vindictive rancor. It irritated him how easily and without remorse she was now betraying her God Antifornicator, whom she had once so fanatically worshiped; it irritated him that no desire, no event, no upset troubled her serenity. It irritated him that she experienced everything without inner conflict, self-confidently and easily. And when this irritation threatened to overcome him with its power, he strove to make love to her passionately and furiously so as to force from her some sort of sound, moan, word, or pathetic cry, but he didn't succeed. The girl was quiet, and in spite of all his exertions in their lovemaking, it ended modestly and in silence.

  Then she snuggled up against his chest and quickly fell asleep, while Eduard lay awake for a long time and realized that he felt no joy at all. He made an effort to imagine Alice (not her physical appearance but, if possible, her being in its entirety), and it occurred to him that he saw her blurred.

  Let's stop at this word: Alice, as Eduard had seen her until this time, was, with all her naivete, a stable and distinct being: the beautiful simplicity of her looks seemed to accord with the unaffected simplicity of her faith, and the simplicity of her destiny seemed to be the reason for her attitude. Until this time Eduard had seen her as solid and coherent: he could laugh at her, he

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  could curse her, he could get around her with his guile, but (despite himself) he had to respect her.

  Now, however, the unpremeditated snare of false news had caused a split in the coherence of her being, and it seemed to Eduard that her ideas were in fact only a veneer on her destiny, and her destiny only a veneer on her body; he saw her as an accidental conjunction of a body, ideas, and a life's course, an inorganic structure, arbitrary and unstable. He visualized Alice (who was breathing deeply on his shoulder), and he saw her body separately from her ideas, he liked this body, its ideas seemed ridiculous to him, and this body and its ideas formed no unity; he saw her as an ink line spreading on a blotter: without contours, without shape.

  He really liked this body. When Alice got up in the morning, he forced her to remain naked, and, although just yesterday she had stubbornly insisted on closed shutters, for even the dim light of the stars had bothered her, she now altogether forgot her shame. Eduard was scrutinizing her (she cheerfully pranced around, looking for a package of tea and cookies for breakfast), and when Alice glanced at him after a moment, noticed that he was lost in thought. She asked him what was the matter. Eduard replied that after breakfast he had to go and see his brother.

  His brother inquired how he was getting on at the school. Eduard replied that on the whole it was fine, and his brother said: "That Cechackova is a pig, but I forgave her long ago. I forgave her because she didn't know what she was doing. She wanted to harm me, but

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  instead she helped me find a beautiful life. As a farmer I earn more, and contact with nature protects me from the skepticism to which citydwellers are prone."

  "That woman, as a matter of fact, brought me some happiness too," said Eduard, lost in thought, and he told his brother that he had fallen in love with Alice, that he had feigned a belief in God, that he had had to appear before a committee, that Cechackova had wanted to reeducate him, and that Alice had finally given herself to him, thinking he was a martyr. The only thing he didn't tell was that he had forced the directress to recite the Lord's Prayer, because he saw disapproval in his brother's eyes. He stopped talking, and his brother said: "I may have a great many faults, but one I don't have: I've never dissimulated, and I've said to everyone's face what I thought."

  Eduard loved his brother, and his disapproval hurt, so he made an effort to justify himself, and they began to argue. In the end Eduard said:

  "I know you are a straightforward man and that you pride yourself on it. But put one question to yourself: Why in fact should one tell the truth
? What obliges us to do it? And why do we consider telling the truth to be a virtue? Imagine that you meet a madman, who claims that he is a fish and that we are all fish. Are you going to argue with him? Are you going to undress in front of him and show him that you don't have fins? Are you going to say to his face what you think? Well, tell me!"

  His brother was silent, and Eduard went on: "If you

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  told him the whole truth and nothing but the truth, only what you really thought, you would enter into a serious conversation with a madman and you yourself would become mad. And it is the same way with the world that surrounds us. If I obstinately told the truth to its face, it would mean that I was taking it seriously. And to take seriously something so unserious means to lose all one's own seriousness. I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself."

 

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  10

  It was Sunday afternoon, and the two lovers left for town; they were alone in a compartment (the girl was again chattering cheerfully), and Eduard remembered how some time ago he had looked forward to finding in Alices optional character a seriousness that his duties would never provide for him; and he sadly realized (as the train idyllically clattered over the joints of the tracks) that the love adventure he had experienced with Alice was derisory, made up of chance and errors, without any seriousness or meaning; he heard Alice's words, he saw her gestures (she squeezed his hand), and it occurred to him that these were signs devoid of significance, currency without backing, weights made of paper, and that he could not grant them value any more than God could the prayer of the naked directress; and suddenly it seemed to him that, in fact, all the people he had met in this town were only ink lines spreading on a blotter, beings with interchangeable attitudes, beings without firm substance; but what was worse, what was far worse (it struck him next), was that he himself was only a shadow of all these shadow-characters; for he had been exhausting his own brain only to adjust to them and imitate them and yet, even if he imitated them with an internal laugh, not taking them seriously, even if he made an effort to mock them secretly (and so to justify his effort to adapt), it didn't alter the case, for even malicious imitation remains

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  imitation, even a shadow that mocks remains a shadow, a secondary thing, derivative and wretched.

  It was humiliating, terribly humiliating. The train idyllically clattered over the joints of the tracks (the girl was chattering) and Eduard said:

  "Alice, are you happy?"

  "Yes," said Alice.

  "I'm miserable," said Eduard.

  "What, are you crazy?" said Alice.

  "We shouldn't have done it. It shouldn't have hap-pened."

  "What's gotten into you? You're the one who wanted to do it!"

  "Yes, I wanted to," said Eduard. "But that was my greatest mistake, for which God will never forgive me. It was a sin, Alice."

  "Come on, what's happened to you?" asked the girl calmly. "You yourself always said that God wants love most of all!"

  When Eduard heard Alice, after the fact, quietly appropriating the theological sophistries with which he had so unsuccessfully taken the field a while ago, fury seized him: "I said that to test you. Now I've found out how faithful you are to God! And a person who is capable of betraying God is capable of betraying a man a hundred times more easily!"

  Alice always found ready answers, but it would have been better for her if she hadn't, because they only provoked his vindictive rage. Eduard went on and on talking (in the end he used the words "nausea" and

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  "physical disgust") until he did obtain from this placid and gentle face (finally!) sobs, tears, and moans.

  "Goodbye," he said to her at the station, and he left her in tears. Only at home, several hours later, when this curious anger had subsided, did he understand all the consequences of what he had done: He imagined her body, which had pranced stark naked in front of him that morning, and when he realized that this beautiful body was lost to him because he himself, of his own free will, had driven it away, he called himself an idiot and had a mind to slap his own face.

  But what had happened had happened, and it was no longer possible to change anything.

  In order to be truthful, I must add that even if the idea of this beautiful body he had rejected caused Eduard a certain amount of grief, he coped with this loss fairly quickly. If the need for physical love had once tormented him and reduced him to a state of longing, it was the short-lived need of a recent arrival in the town. Eduard no longer suffered from this need. Once a week he visited the directress (habit had relieved his body of its initial anxieties), and he resolved to continue to visit her regularly until his position at the school was definitively clarified. Besides this, with increasing success he chased all sorts of other women and girls. As a consequence he began to appreciate far more the times when he was alone, and he became fond of solitary walks, which he sometimes combined (please devote a bit of attention to this detail) with a visit to the church.

  No, don't worry, Eduard did not begin to believe in

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  God. I have no intention of crowning my story with such a flagrant paradox. But even if Eduard was almost certain that God did not exist, he turned toward the idea of God with yearning.

  God is essence itself, whereas Eduard never found (and a number of years have passed since his adventures with the directress and with Alice) anything essential in his love affairs, or in his teaching, or in his thoughts. He is too honest to concede that he finds the essential in the unessential, but he is too weak not to long secretly for the essential.

  Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously!

  And that is why Eduard longs for God, for God alone is relieved of the distracting obligation of appearing and can merely be; for he alone constitutes (he alone, unique and nonexistent) the essential antithesis of this world, which is all the more existent for being unessential.

  And so Eduard occasionally sits in church and looks dreamily at the cupola. Let us take leave of him at just such a time: It is afternoon, the church is quiet and empty. Eduard is sitting in a wooden pew and feeling sad at the thought that God does not exist. But just at this moment his sadness is so great that suddenly from its depth emerges the genuine living face of God. Look! It's true! Eduard is smiling! He is smiling, and his smile is happy.

  Please keep him in your memory with this smile.

  WRITTEN IN BOHEMIA BETWEEN 1958 AND 1968

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