Immortality

by Milan Kundera

He glanced at her with surprise.

  "I'm looking at the cover," she said.

  He still failed to understand.

  "How can you shove such a tasteless cover in my face? If you really insist on reading this book in my presence, at least you could do me a favor and tear the cover off."

  Without a word, Bernard tore off the cover, handed it to her, and continued reading.

  Laura felt like screaming. She told herself that she should now get

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  up, leave, and never see him again. Or gently push aside the book he was holding in his hand and spit in his face. But she lacked the courage for either of these things. Instead, she threw herself at him (the book fell out of his hand and dropped to the floor), kissed him furiously, and began feeling him all over.

  Bernard did not have the slightest desire to make love. But though he dared to refuse to talk to her, he was unable to refuse her erotic challenge. In that regard he was like every man in the world. What man would dare tell a woman who touched him seductively between the legs, "Take your hands off!" And so the man who a moment before . tore off a book cover with sovereign disdain and handed it to his humbled lover now reacted obediently to her touches and kissed her while taking off his trousers.

  However, she did not feel like making love either. What propelled her toward him was desperation at not knowing what to do and the need to do something. Her passionate, impatient movements expressed her blind desire for the deed, her silent desire for the word. When they started to make love, she tried to make their embrace wilder than ever before, an immense conflagration. But how could this be achieved in the course of silent sex? (Their lovemaking was always silent, with the exception of a few lyrical, breathlessly whispered words.) Yes, how? through the violence of movements? the loudness of sighs? frequent changes of position? She knew of no other methods and so she now used all three. Mainly, she kept changing the position of her body, by herself, on her own initiative; now she was on all fours, now she squatted down on him with her legs parted, and she kept inventing new, extremely demanding positions, which they had never used before.

  Bernard interpreted her surprising physical performance as a challenge to which he could not help but respond. He felt in himself the first anxiety of a young boy afraid that others might question his erotic talents and erotic maturity. That anxiety gave back to Laura the power that she had recently been losing and upon which their relationship had initially been founded: the power of a woman older than her partner. Once again, he had the unpleasant impression that Laura was more experienced than he, that she knew what he did not, that she could compare him with others and judge him. So he performed all the

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  required motions with exceptional zeal, and on the slightest hint that she was about to change her position he reacted with agility and discipline, like a soldier performing a military drill. The unexpectedly demanding mobility of their lovemaking kept him occupied to such an extent that he had no chance to decide whether or not he was excited or whether he was experiencing anything that could be called pleasure. She didn't think about pleasure or excitement either. She told herself silently: I won't let you go, I won't let you drive me away, I will fight for you. And her sex, moving up and down, turned into a machine of war that she set in motion and controlled. She told herself that it was her last weapon, the only one left to her, but an almighty one. As if it were an ostinato providing the bass accompaniment to a musical composition, she kept silently repeating to the rhythm of her motion: I will fight, I will fight, I will fight, and she was sure that she would win.

  Just open any dictionary. To fight means to set one's will against the will of another, with the aim of defeating the opponent, to bring him to his knees, possibly to kill him. "Life is a battle" is a proposition that must at first have expressed melancholy and resignation. But our century of optimism and massacres has succeeded in making this terrible sentence sound like a joyous refrain. You will say that to fight against somebody may be terrible, but to fight for something is noble and beautiful. Yes, it is beautiful to strive for happiness (or love, or justice, and so on), but if you are in the habit of designating your striving with the word "fight," it means that your noble striving conceals the longing to knock someone to the ground. The fight/or is always connected with the fight against, and the preposition "for" is always forgotten in the course of the fight in favor of the preposition "against."

  Laura's sex kept moving powerfully up and down. Laura was fighting. She was making love and fighting. Fighting for Bernard. But against whom? Against the one whom she kept pressing to her body and then pushing away in order to force him to take some new physical position. These exhausting gymnastics on the couch and on the carpet, with both of them bathed in perspiration, both of them out of breath, resembled in pantomime a merciless fight in which she attacked and he defended himself, she gave orders and he obeyed.

  Professor Avenarius

  rofessor Avenarius walked down the Avenue du Maine, passed the Montparnasse railway station, and not being in any hurry, decided to look around the Lafayette department store. In the ladies' clothing department, plastic mannequins dressed in the latest fashions watched him from all sides. Avenarius liked their company. He was especially attracted to these immobile women frozen in crazy gestures, whose wide-open mouths did not express laughter (their lips were not spread wide) but astonishment. Professor Avenarius imagined that these petrified women had just seen his splendidly erect member; this was not only enormous but differed from other members by the horned devil's head at its tip. As well as those who expressed admiring terror, there were other mannequins whose mouths were not open but merely puckered up, small red circles with a tiny opening in the middle, ready at any moment to stick out their tongue and treat Professor Avenarius to a sensual kiss. And then there was a third group, whose lips traced dreamy smiles on their waxy faces. Their half-closed eyes clearly showed that they were savoring the quiet, prolonged enjoyment of intercourse.

  The wonderful sexuality that these mannequins transmitted like waves of atomic radiation found no response; tired, gray, bored, irritated, and totally asexual people passed by the display. Only Professor Avenarius strolled happily along, feeling like the director of a gigantic orgy.

  But all beautiful things must come to an end: Professor Avenarius left the department store and descended a stairway to the underground maze of the Metro, in order to avoid the stream of cars on the boulc- vard above. He walked this way often, and nothing he saw surprised

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  him. In the underground passage was the usual cast of characters. Two vagrants, dochards, were stumbling along, one of whom, holding a bottle of red wine, would from time to time lazily turn to passersby and with a disarming smile ask for a contribution. A young man, cradling his face in the palms of his hands, sat leaning against the wall; a chalk message in front of him stated that he had just been released from prison, could not find a job, and was hungry. Standing next to the wall opposite the ex-prisoner was a weary musician; on one side lay a hat with a few shiny coins, and on the other a brass trumpet.

  All this was quite normal, but one thing was unusual and caught Professor Avenarius's attention. Right between the ex-prisoner and the two drunken dochards stood an attractive woman, hardly forty years old; she was not standing by the wall but in the middle of the corridor and she held a red collection box in her hand; with a dazzling smile of seductive femininity she was offering it to the passersby; attached to the box was a sign: Help the lepers! The elegance of her clothing was in sharp contrast to her surroundings, and her enthusiasm lit up the gloom of the subway like a lantern. Her presence clearly annoyed the beggars who regularly spent their working hours here, and the trumpet standing at the musician's feet was undoubtedly a sign of his capitulation in the face of unfair competition.

  When the woman's eyes met someone's gaze, she said so softly tha
t the passerby read her lips rather than heard her voice: "Lepers!" Professor Avenarius, too, wished to read the words on her lips, but when the woman saw him she said only "Le..." and did not finish "... pers," because she recognized him. Avenarius recognized her, too, and was at a complete loss to understand what she was doing there. He climbed the stairs and found himself on the other side of the boulevard.

  He saw that he had wasted his time trying to avoid the stream of cars, because traffic had been halted: from the direction of La Coupole crowds of people were flowing toward the Rue de Rennes. They were all dark-skinned. Professor Avenarius assumed they were young Arabs protesting against racism. Unconcerned, he walked a bit farther and opened the door of a cafe; the manager called out to him, uMr. Kun-dera stopped by here. He said he would be late, so he asked that you

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  excuse him. He left this book for you, to give you something to do in the meantime," and he handed him an inexpensive paperback copy of my novel Life Is Elsewhere.

  Avenarius stuck the book in his pocket without paying the slightest attention to it, because at that moment he remembered the woman with the red collection box and he longed to see her again.

  "I'll be back in a moment," he said, and went out. From the slogans over the heads of the demonstrators he finally realized that they were not Arabs but Turks and that they were not protesting against French racism but against the Bulgarization of the Turkish minority in Bulgaria. The demonstrators kept raising their fists, but in a somewhat dejected manner, for the Parisians' limitless indifference was driving them to the edge of despair. But now they saw the splendid, warlike potbelly of a man marching along the edge of the sidewalk in the same direction as themselves, raising his fist and shouting, "A bas les Russes! A bas les Bulgares!" Down with the Russians! Down with the Bulgarians! so that new energy surged into them and their voices once again rang out across the boulevard.

  At the top of the stairs he had climbed a few moments before, he saw two ugly women distributing leaflets. He wanted to learn more about the Turkish cause; "Are you Turks?" he asked one of them. "Good Lord, no!" she exclaimed, as if he had accused her of something terrible. "We have nothing to do with this demonstration! We are here to protest against racism!" Professor Avenarius took a leaflet from each of the women, and his glance happened to meet the smile of a young man nonchalantly leaning against the Metro balustrade. Joyously provocative, he, too, handed him a leaflet. "This is against what?" Avenarius asked. "It's for the freedom of the Kanakas in New Caledonia." Professor Avenarius descended into the Metro with three leaflets in his pocket; from afar he was already able to observe that the atmosphere in the subway had changed; the air of boredom had disappeared, something was going on: he heard the clarion call of a trumpet, the clapping of hands, laughter. And then he saw; the youthful woman was still there, but now she was surrounded by the two dochards: one

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  held her free hand, the other gently supported the arm clasped around the collection box. The one who held her arm was stretching out the musician's hat toward the passersby, shouting, "Pour les lepreux!" For the lepers! "Pour VAfriquel" and the trumpeter stood next to him, blowing his trumpet, blowing, blowing, yes, blowing his heart out, and an amused crowd of people gathered around them, smiled, threw coins and bills into the clochard's hat while he kept thanking them: "Merci! Ah, que la France est genereusel Without France the lepers would croak like animals! Ah, que la France estgenereusel"

  The woman didn't know what to do; now and again she tried to break free, but when she heard the applause of the onlookers she took a couple of dance steps backward and forward. Once the clochard tried to turn her toward him and to dance with her cheek to cheek. She was struck by the smell of alcohol on his breath and she began to struggle free, her face full of anxiety and fear.

  The young ex-prisoner suddenly rose to his feet and began waving his arms, as if he wanted to warn the two clochards about something. Two policemen were approaching. When Professor Avenarius noticed them, he too began to dance. His splendid potbelly shook from side to side, he made circular dancing movements with his arms, bent at the elbow, and he smiled all around, emanating an indescribable mood of peace and lightheartedness. As the policemen passed by, he smiled at the woman with the collection box as if he were somehow connected with her, and he clapped to the rhythm of the trumpet and his own steps. The policemen turned their heads listlessly and continued their patrol.

  Buoyed up by his success, Avenarius danced with even greater verve, twirled around with unexpected agility, skipped backward and forward, and kicked his legs in the air, while his hands imitated the gesture of a can-can dancer lifting up her skirt. That inspired the clochard who was supporting the woman; he bent down and picked up the hem of her skirt with his fingers. She wanted to defend herself, but she could not take her eyes off the portly man who was smiling encouragement; when she tried to return his smile, the clochard lifted her skirt waist-high: this revealed her bare legs and green panties (an excellent match

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  for the pink skirt). Again she wanted to defend herself, but she was powerless: she was holding the collection box in one hand (nobody bothered any longer to drop a single coin into it, but she held it as tightly as if it contained all her honor, the meaning of her life, perhaps her very soul), while her other hand was immobilized by the clochard's grip. If they had tied both her hands and begun to violate her, she couldn't have felt any worse. The clochard was lifting the hem of her skirt, shouting, "For the lepers! For Africa!" while tears of humiliation ran down her face. But she tried to conceal her humiliation (an acknowledged humiliation is a double humiliation), and so she tried to smile as if everything was happening with her approval and for the good of Africa, and she voluntarily lifted up her leg, pretty though somewhat short.

  Then she suddenly got a whiff of the clochard's terrible stench, the stench of his breath as well as his clothing, which, worn day and night for many years, had grown into his skin (if he were injured in an accident, a whole staff of surgeons would have to spend an hour scraping it off his body before they could put him on the operating table); at that point she couldn't hold out any longer; she wrenched herself loose from his grasp, and pressing the collection box to her bosom, she ran to Professor Avenarius. He opened his arms and embraced her. She clung to his body, trembling and sobbing. He quickly managed to calm her down, took her by the hand, and led her out of the Metro.

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  The Body

  L

  aura, you look too thin," Agnes said in a worried voice. She and her sister were dining in a restaurant.

  "I have no appetite. I vomit everything up," said Laura, and she took a drink of the mineral water she had ordered instead of the usual wine. "It's awfully strong," she said.

  'The mineral water?"

  "I need to dilute it."

  "Laura..." Agnes was about to chide her sister, but instead she said, "You mustn't brood on things so much."

  "Everything is lost, Agnes."

  tcWhat has actually changed between the two of you?"

  "Everything. And yet we make love like never before. Like mad."

  "So what has changed, if you make love like mad?"

  "Those are the only times when I'm sure he's with me. But the moment the lovemaking ends his mind is somewhere else. Even if we make love a hundred times more madly, it's all over. Because making love isn't the main thing. It's not a question of making love. It's a question of his thinking of me. I have had lots of men and today none of them knows anything about me nor I about them, and I ask myself why I bothered to live all those years when I didn't leave any trace of myself with anyone. What's left of my life? Nothing, Agnes, nothing! But these last two years I have really been happy because I knew that Bernard was thinking of me, that I was present in his head, that I was alive in him. Because for me that's the only real life: to live in the thoughts of an
other. Otherwise I am the living dead."

  "And when you're home by yourself listening to your records, your Mahler, isn't that enough to give you a kind of small basic happiness worth living for?"

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  "Agnes, I'm sure you realize that's a foolish thing to say. Mahler means nothing to me, absolutely nothing, when I'm alone. I enjoy Mahler only when I'm with Bernard or when I know that he's thinking of me. When I'm not with him, I don't even have the strength to make my bed. I don't even feel like washing or changing my underwear."

  "Laura! Bernard is not the only man in the world!"

  "He is!" said Laura. "Why do you want me to lie to myself? Bernard is my last chance. I am not twenty or thirty. Beyond Bernard there is nothing but desert."

  She took a drink of mineral water and said, "It's awfully strong." She called to the waiter to bring her plain water.

  "In a month he is leaving for a two-week stay on Martinique," she continued. "We were there together twice. But this time he told me in advance that he was going without me. After he said that, I couldn't eat for two days. But I know what I'll do."

  The waiter brought a carafe of water; before his amazed eyes Laura poured some of it into her glass of mineral water, and then she repeated: "Yes, I know what I'll do."

  She fell silent, as if inviting her sister to ask a question. Agnes understood and deliberately refrained from asking. But when the silence lasted too long, she capitulated: "What are you thinking of doing?"

  Laura answered that in recent weeks she had visited five doctors, complained of insomnia, and asked each of them to prescribe barbiturates for her.

  From the time that Laura began to add hints of suicide to her usual complaints, Agnes felt increasingly depressed and fatigued. She tried many times to talk her sister out of her intention by means of both logical and emotional arguments; she emphasized the love she felt for her ("Surely you would never do something like that to me!"), but it had no effect: Laura continued to speak of suicide as if she hadn't heard Agnes at all.