Immortality

by Milan Kundera

  'They needed to make the broadcast more amusing and youthful," said Agnes. Her words were meant ironically, directed against those who had canceled Paul's program. Then she stroked his hair. But she shouldn't have done all that. In her eyes, Paul saw his own image: the image of a humiliated man, who people have decided is no longer young or amusing.

  128

  cat

  Each of us longs to transgress erotic conventions, erotic taboos, to enter with rapture into the kingdom of the Forbidden. And each of us has so little courage.... Loving an older woman or a younger man can be recommended as the easiest, most readily available means of tasting the Forbidden. For the first time in her life, Laura had a man younger than herself, for the first time Bernard had a woman older than himself, and both of them experienced it as an exciting mutual sin.

  When Laura told Paul some time ago that when she was by Bernard's side she felt ten years younger, it was the truth: she was filled with a wave of new energy. But that didn't make her feel younger than him! On the contrary, she savored with a previously unknown pleasure having a younger lover who considered himself weaker than she and was nervous because he believed that his experienced lover would compare him with his predecessors. Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other. For the first time in her life, Laura was leading a man, and this was just as intoxicating to her as being led was to Bernard.

  An older woman gives a younger man, above all, the assurance that their love is far removed from the traps of marriage, because surely nobody could seriously expect that a young man, with the prospect of a successful life stretching far into the distance, would marry a woman older by eight years. In that respect, Bernard regarded Laura very much as Paul regarded the lady he came to exalt as the jewel of his life: he supposed that his lover had reckoned on the necessity of one day voluntarily ceding her place to a younger woman whom Bernard would be able to introduce to his parents without embarrassment. His laith in her maternal wisdom even allowed him to dream that she

  129

  MILAN KUNDERA

  would serve as a witness at his wedding and completely conceal from his bride that she had once been (and perhaps would continue to be— why not?) his lover.

  Their relationship continued happily for two years. Then Bernard was declared a complete ass and became taciturn. Laura knew nothing about the diploma (Paul had kept his word), and because she was not accustomed to ask him about his work, she knew nothing about any of the other difficulties he had encountered at the radio station (misfortunes, as is well known, seldom come singly), and so she interpreted his silence as a sign that he no longer loved her. She noticed on several occasions that he wasn't listening to her, and she was certain that at these moments his mind must have been on some other woman. Alas, in love it takes so little to make a person desperate!

  One day when he came to see her, he was once again plunged in dark thoughts. She went to the next room to change, and he remained in the living room alone with the Siamese cat. He wasn't especially fond of the cat, but he knew that it meant a great deal to Laura. He sat down in an armchair, pondered his dark thoughts, and mechanically stretched out his hand to the animal in the belief that it was his duty to stroke it. But the cat spat and bit his hand. The bite immediately became linked to the chain of misfortunes that had been following and humiliating him all week, so a violent fit of fury seized hold of him; he leaped out of the armchair and took a swipe at the cat. The cat streaked into a corner and arched its back, hissing horribly.

  He turned around and saw Laura. She was standing in the doorway, and it was obvious that she had been watching the whole scene. She said, "No, no, you mustn't punish her. She was completely in the right."

  He looked at her, surprised. The cat's bite hurt, and he expected his lover, if not to take his part against the animal, at the very least to show an elementary sense of justice. He had a strong desire to walk over to the cat and give it such an enormous kick that it would splatter against the living room ceiling. It was only with the greatest effort that he managed to control himself.

  Laura added, emphasizing each word, "She demands that whoever

  130

  Immortality

  strokes her really concentrates on it. I, too, resent it when someone is with me but his mind is somewhere else."

  When she had watched Bernard stroke the cat and seen the cat's hostile reaction to his detached absentmindedness, she had felt a strong sense of solidarity with the animal. For the past several weeks Bernard had been treating her the same way: he would stroke her and think about something else; he would pretend he was with her but she knew very well he wasn't listening to what she was saying.

  The cat's biting Bernard made her feel as if her other, symbolic, mystical self, which is how she thought of the animal, was trying to encourage her, to show her what to do, to serve as an example. There are times when it is necessary to show one's claws, she told herself, and she decided that in the course of the intimate supper they were about to have at the restaurant, she would finally find the courage for a decisive act.

  I will jump ahead and say it outright: it is hard to imagine anything more foolish than her decision. The action she planned was completely contrary to all her interests. For I must stress that during those two years of their relationship, Bernard had been completely happy with her, perhaps happier than Laura herself could possibly imagine. She represented an escape from the kind of life that from childhood on had been prepared for him by his father, the euphonious Bertrand Bertrand. At last he could live freely, according to his desires, with a secret place where none of his family would be able to intrude, a place where he could live quite differently: he adored Laura's bohemian way of life, her piano, which she played now and again, the concerts to which she took him, her moods and her eccentricities. With her, he found himself far from the rich, boring people of his father's circle. Their happiness, of course, depended on one condition: they had to remain unmarried. If they ever became man and wife everything would change at once: their union would suddenly be accessible to all kinds of meddling by his family; their love would lose not only its charm but its very meaning. And Laura would lose all the power she had had over Bernard. How then was it possible that she could come to such a silly decision,

  131

  MILAN KUNDERA

  contrary to all her interests? Did she know her man so poorly? Did she understand him so little?

  Yes, no matter how strange it may seem, she didn't know him and didn't understand him. She was even proud that nothing about Bernard interested her but his love. She never asked about his father. She knew nothing about his family. Whenever he tried to talk about it, she was conspicuously bored and declared that rather than wasting time on such things, she preferred to devote herself to Bernard himself. Stranger still, even in the dark weeks following the diploma incident, when he became taciturn and apologized for having so many worries, she would always say, "Yes, I know what it's like to have worries," but she never asked him the simplest of all imaginable questions: "What kind of worries? Just exactly what is going on? Tell me what's bothering you!"

  Strange: she was up to her ears in love with him and yet she had no interest in him. I could even say: she was up to her ears in love with him and precisely for that reason she had no interest in him. If we were to take her to task for her lack of interest and accuse her of not knowing her beloved, she wouldn't understand us. For Laura was ignorant of what it means to know somebody. In that respect she was like a virgin who thinks that she will have a baby if she kisses her boyfriend often enough! Recently she had been thinking about Bernard almost constantly. She thought of his body, his face, she had the feeling that she was always with him, that she was permeated by him. She was therefore certain that she knew him by heart and that nobody had ever known him as well as she. The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.

  After this explanation, perhaps we can now believe that she told him over dessert (
I might point out, as an excuse, that they had drunk a bottle of wine and two brandies, but I am certain she would have said it even if she had been quite sober): "Bernard, marry me!"

  The gesture of protest

  against a violation

  of human rights

  132

  BRigitte left her German lesson firmly determined to end her study of the language. FirRst of all, she herself found no use for Goethe's tongue (the lessons had been forced on her by her mother), and in addition she felt deeply at odds with German. The language irritated her with its lack of logic. Today it really made her angry: the preposition ohne (without) takes the accusative case, the preposition mit (with) takes the dative. Why? After all, the two prepositions signify the positive and negative aspect of the same relationship, and so they should be linked to the same case. She raised the objection with her teacher, a young German, who became embarrassed and immediately felt guilty. He was a likable, sensitive man who found it painful to belong to a nation once ruled by Hitler. Ready to blame his country for every possible fault, he believed at once that there was no acceptable reason why the prepositions mit and ohne should be linked to two different cases.

  "It isn't logical, I know, but through the centuries this became the established usage," he said, as if begging the young Frenchwoman to take pity on a language cursed by history.

  "I am glad that you admit it. It isn't logical. But a language must be logical," Brigitte said.

  The young German agreed: "Unfortunately, we lack a Descartes. That's an unforgivable gap in our history. German lacks a tradition of reason and clarity, it's full of metaphysical mist and Wagnerian music, and we all know who was the greatest admirer of Wagner: Hitler!"

  133

  MILAN KUNDERA

  Brigitte was interested in neither Wagner nor Hitler and pursued her own line of thought: "A language that is not logical can be learned by a child, because a child doesn't think. But it cannot be learned by an adult. That's why, as far as I am concerned, German is not a world language."

  "You are absolutely right," said the German, and he added softly, "Now you see the absurdity of the German desire for world domi-nation."

  Well satisfied with herself, Brigitte got into her car and drove to Fauchon's to buy a bottle of wine. She wanted to park but found it impossible: rows of cars parked bumper to bumper lined the sidewalks for a radius of half a mile; after circling around and around for fifteen minutes, she was overcome by indignant astonishment at the total lack of space; she drove the car onto the sidewalk, got out, and set out for the store. She was still quite far away when she noticed that something peculiar was going on. As she came closer she understood what was happening:

  Fauchon, the famous food store where everything was ten times more expensive than anywhere else with the result that it was pa tronized only by people who get more pleasure out of paying than out of eating, was overrun by about a hundred poorly dressed, unemployed people. They had surrounded the store and were milling inside. It was a strange protest: the unemployed did not come to break anything or to threaten anyone or to shout slogans; they just wanted to embarrass the rich, and by their mere presence to spoil their appetite for wine and caviar. And indeed, the sales staff as well as the shoppers smiled uneasily and it had become impossible to transact any business.

  Brigitte pushed her way inside. She did not find the unemployed unpleasant, nor did she have anything at all against the ladies in fur coats. She asked in a loud voice for a bottle of Bordeaux. Her determination surprised the saleswoman, who suddenly realized that the presence of the peaceable unemployed should not prevent her from serving this young customer. Brigitte paid for her bottle and returned to the car, where two policemen were waiting and asked her to pay a parking fine.

  Immortality

  She started to abuse them, and when they maintained that the car was illegally parked and was blocking the sidewalk, she pointed to the rows of cars squeezed tightly one behind the other: "Can you tell me where I was supposed to park? If people are permitted to buy cars, they should also be guaranteed a place to put them, right? You must be logical!" she shouted at them.

  I tell the story only for the sake of this detail: at the moment when she was shouting at the policemen, Brigitte recalled the unemployed demonstrators in Fauchon's and felt a strong surge of sympathy for them: she felt united with them in a common fight. That gave her courage and she raised her voice; the policemen (hesitant, just like the women in fur coats under the gaze of the unemployed) kept repeating in an unconvincing and foolish manner words such as "forbidden," "prohibited," "discipline," "order," and in the end let her off without a fine.

  In the course of the dispute Brigitte kept rapidly shaking her head from left to right and right to left, at the same time lifting her shoulders and eyebrows. When she related the episode at home to her father, she kept making the same movements. We have encountered this gesture before: it expresses indignant astonishment at the fact that someone wants to deny us our most self-evident rights. Let us therefore call this the gesture of protest against a violation of human rights.

  The concept of human rights goes back some two hundred years, but it reached its greatest glory in the second half of the 1970s. Alexander Solzhenitsyn had just been exiled from his country, and his striking figure, adorned with a beard and handcuffs, hypnotized Western intellectuals sick with a longing for the great destiny that had been denied them. It was only thanks to him that they started to believe, after a fifty-year delay, that in communist Russia there were concentration camps; even progressive people were now ready to admit that imprisoning someone for his opinions was not just. And they found an excellent justification for their new attitude: Russian communists violated human rights, in spite of the fact that these rights had been gloriously proclaimed by the French Revolution itself!

  And so, thanks to Solzhenitsyn, human rights once again found their

  134

  135

  MILAN KUNDERA

  place in the vocabulary of our times; I don't know a single politician who doesn't mention ten times a day "the fight for human rights" or 'Violations of human rights." But because people in the West are not threatened by concentration camps and are free to say and write what they want, the more the fight for human rights gains in popularity, the more it loses any concrete content, becoming a kind of universal stance of everyone toward everything, a kind of energy that turns all human desires into rights. The world has become man's right and everything in it has become a right: the desire for love the right to love, the desire for rest the right to rest, the desire for friendship the right to friendship, the desire to exceed the speed limit the right to exceed the speed limit, the desire for happiness the right to happiness, the desire to publish a book the right to publish a book, the desire to shout in the street in the middle of the night the right to shout in the street. The unemployed have the right to occupy an expensive food store, the women in fur coats have the right to buy caviar, Brigitte has the right to park on the sidewalk, and everybody, the unemployed, the women in furcoats, as well as Brigitte, belongs to the same army of fighters for human rights. Paul sat in his armchair facing Brigitte and lovingly watched her head, which was vigorously shaking to and fro in a quick tempo. He knew that his daughter liked him, and that was more important to him than being liked by Agnes. His daughter's admiring eyes gave him something that Agnes was unable to give: they proved to him that he had not become estranged from youth, that he still belonged among the young. Hardly two hours had passed since Agnes, moved by his embarrassed coughing, had stroked his hair. How much dearer to him than that degrading caress were the motions of his daughter's head! Her presence energized him like a generator from which he drew strength.

  136

  To be absolutely modern

  Ah, MY dear Paul! He wanted to provoke and torment the Bear

  and put an X after history, after Beethoven and Picasso. . . .He merges

  in my mind with the figure of Jaromil
from a novel that I finished exactly twenty years ago, which, in a forthcoming chapter of this book, I shall leave for Professor Avenarius to find in a bistro on the Boulevard Montparnasse.

  We are in Prague, the year is 1948, and eighteen-year-old Jaromil is madly in love with modern poetry, with Breton, Eluard, Desnos, Nezval, and following their example becomes a votary of Rimbaud's dictum from A Season in Hell: "It is necessary to be absolutely modern." However, what turned out to be absolutely modern in the Prague of 1948 was the socialist revolution, which promptly and brutally rejected the modern art Jaromil loved madly. And then my hero, along with some of his friends (just as madly in love with modern art), sarcastically renounced everything he loved (truly loved, with all his heart), because he did not wish to betray the great commandment "to be absolutely modern." His renunciation was full of the rage and passion of a virginal youth who longs to break into adulthood through some brutal act. Seeing him stubbornly renouncing everything dearest to him, everything he had lived for and would have loved to go on living for, seeing him renouncing Cubism and Surrealism, Picasso and Dali, Breton and Rimbaud, renouncing them in the name of Lenin and the Red Army (who at that moment formed the pinnacle of any imaginable modernity), his friends were dismayed; at first they felt amazement, then revulsion, and finally something close to horror. The sight of this virginal youth ready to adapt to whatever proclaimed itself

  MILAN KUNDERA

  as modern, and to adapt not through cowardice (for the sake of personal gain or career), but courageously, as one painfully sacrificing what he loved, yes, this sight revealed a horror (a portent of the horror to come, the horror of persecution and imprisonment). It is possible that some of those watching him at the time thought to themselves: "Jaromil is the ally of his gravediggers."

  Of course, Paul and Jaromil are not at all alike. The only link between them is their passionate conviction that "it is necessary to be absolutely modern." "Absolutely modern" is a concept that has no fixed, clearly defined content. Rimbaud, in 1872, hardly imagined these words to mean millions of busts of Lenin and Stalin, and still less did he imagine promotional films, color photos in magazines, or the manic faces of rock singers. But that matters very little, because to be absolutely modern means never to question the content of modernity and to serve it as one serves the absolute, that is, without hesitation.