Immortality

by Milan Kundera

  And the dead? They are under the ground. Even lower than the old The old are still accorded human rights. The dead, however, lose all rights from the very first second of death. No law protects them any longer from slander, their privacy has ceased to be private; not even the

  letters written to them by their loved ones, not even the family album left to them by their mothers, nothing, nothing belongs to them any longer.

  In the last years before he died, her father gradually destroyed all his belongings; no suits remained in the wardrobe, no manuscripts, no lecture notes, no letters. He erased all traces of himself without anyone being the wiser. Only in the case of the photographs did Agnes and Laura accidentally find him out. All the same, they were unable to prevent him from destroying them. Not a single one remained.

  Laura protested. She fought for the rights of the living against the unjustified demands of the dead. The face that will disappear tomorrow under the earth or into the fire does not belong to the future dead but purely and entirely to the living, who are hungry and need to eat the dead, their letters, their money, their photographs, their old loves, their secrets.

  But Father escaped them all, Agnes kept telling herself.

  She thought of him and smiled. And suddenly it occurred to her that her father was her only love. Yes, it was quite clear: her father was her only love.

  At that moment, huge motorcycles once again flew past her with great speed; in the glare of her headlights she could see the riders bent over the handlebars, filled with aggression that made the night tremble. That was precisely the world she wanted to escape, to escape forever; so she decided to get off the highway at the first opportunity onto a quieter road.

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  WE found ourselves on a Paris avenue full of noise and lights and set out toward Avenarius's Mercedes, which was parked a few blocks away. We were still thinking about the girl squatting on a dark highway with her head in her hands, waiting for a car to run her over.

  I said, "I tried to explain to you that we all carry inscribed within us the reasons for our actions, what the Germans call Grund; a code determining the essence of our fate; that code, in my opinion, is in the nature of a metaphor. You cannot understand the girl we are talking about without a metaphoric image. For example: she goes through lift as if it were a valley; she keeps meeting people all the time, and addressing them; but they look at her uncomprehendingly and walk on because her voice is so quiet that no one hears it. That's how I imagine her, and I am sure that she sees herself that way, too: as a woman walking through a valley among people who do not hear her. Or another image: she is at the dentist's, sitting in a crowded waiting room; a new patient enters, walks to the couch where she is seated, and sits down on her lap; he didn't do it intentionally, he simply saw an empty seat on the couch; she protests and tries to push him away, shouting, 'Sir! Can't you see? This seat is taken! I am sitting here!' but the man doesn't hear her, he sits comfortably on top of her and cheerfully chats with another waiting patient. These are two images, two metaphors that define her and enable me to understand her. Her longing for suicide was provoked not by something from outside her. It was planted in the very soil of her being, and it slowly grew and unfolded like a black flower."

  "I accept that," said Avenarius. "But you still have to explain why she chose to take her life on one particular day rather than another."

  "How do you explain why a flower unfolds on one particular day and

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  not on another? Its time has come. The longing for self-destruction slowly grew until one day she was no longer capable of resisting it. I am guessing that the wrongs done to her were probably quite minor: people didn't respond to her greeting; nobody smiled at her; she was waiting in line at the post office and some fat woman elbowed her way past; she had a job as a saleswoman in a department store and the manager accused her of not treating the customers with respect. Thou-sands of times she felt like protesting and shouting, but she never found the courage, because she had a weak voice that faltered in moments of excitement. She was weaker than anyone else and was continually being insulted. When evil strikes a man, he shifts it onto others. That's called conflict, quarrel, or revenge. But a weak man doesn't have the strength to shift the evil that strikes him; his own weakness insults and humiliates him, and he is totally defenseless in the face of it. He has no other choice but to destroy his weakness along with his own self. And so the girl's dream of her own death was born."

  Avenarius looked around for his Mercedes and realized that we were on the wrong street. We turned and walked back.

  I continued, 'The death she was longing for did not have the form of going away but of throwing away. Throwing away the self. She wasn't satisfied with a single day of her life, a single word she had ever said. She carried herself through life as something monstrous, something she hated and couldn't get rid of. That's why she longed so much to throw herself away, as one throws away a crumpled piece of paper or a rotten apple. She longed to throw herself away as if the one doing the throwing and the one being thrown away were two different people. She tried to imagine throwing herself out of a window. But that idea was ridiculous, because she lived on the first floor and the store where she worked was on the mezzanine and had no windows. And she longed to die like a beetle crushed by a sudden fist. It was almost a physical longing to be crushed, like the need to press one's palm against the part of our body that hurts."

  We reached Avenarius's flashy Mercedes and stopped.

  Avenarius said, "The way you describe her, one could almost feel affection for her ..."

  "I know what you're trying to say: if she hadn't decided to send other

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  people to death as well. But that, too, is expressed in the two metaphors I used to introduce her to you. Whenever she spoke to anyone, nobody heard her. She was losing the world. When I say Svorld,' I mean the part of existence that answers our call (even if only by way of a barely audible echo), and whose call we ourselves hear. For her, the world was becoming mute and ceasing to be her world. She was completely locked into herself and her suffering. At least, could the sight of the suffering of others tear her out of her isolation? No. Because the suffering of others was taking place in a world she had lost, a world no longer hers. If the planet Mars were nothing but one huge ball of suffering, where every stone cried out in pain, it would not be able to move us to compassion, because Mars does not belong to our world. A person who finds himself outside the world is not sensitive to the world's suffering. The only event that drew her away from her own suffering for a moment was the illness and death of her little dog. Her neighbor was indignant: she doesn't care about people but weeps over a dog! She wept over a dog because the dog was a part of her world whereas the neighbor was not; the dog answered her voice, people did not."

  We fell silent, thinking about the poor girl, and then Avenarius opened the car door and nodded to me: "Come on! I'll take you along! Fll lend you some running shoes and a knife!"

  I knew that if I didn't go with him on his tire-slashing expedition he would never find anyone else and would remain isolated in his eccentricity as if in exile. I had an enormous desire to go with him, yet I felt lazy; drowsiness was creeping up on me, and chasing around dark streets after midnight seemed like an unimaginable sacrifice.

  "I am going home. I'll walk," I said, and shook his hand.

  He drove off. I gazed after his Mercedes with the guilty feeling of having betrayed a friend. Then I set out for home, and after a while my thoughts returned to the girl in whom the longing for self-destruction grew like a black flower.

  I thought: one day, after work, she didn't go home but started walking out of the city. She wasn't aware of anything around her, she didn't know whether it was summer or winter, whether she was walking along a beach or along a factory wall; after all, for a long time now she had no longer been living in the world; her only world was her soul.

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/>   She wasn't aware of anything around her, she didn't know whether it was summer or winter, whether she was walking along a beach or a factory wall, she kept walking only because her soul, full of disquiet, required motion, and it was not able to rest in one place, for without movement it began to hurt terribly. Imagine an excruciating toothache: something forces you to pace the room from one end to the other; there is no sensible reason for it, because movement cannot diminish the pain, but without your knowing why, the aching tooth begs you to keep moving.

  And so the girl kept walking and found herself on a highway with one car after another flashing by, she walked along the hard shoulder, passing one milestone after another, she wasn't conscious of anything, she merely stared into her soul, in which she saw nothing but the same few images of humiliation. She couldn't tear her eyes away from them; only now and again when a motorcycle thundered past and the noise hurt her eardrums did she realize that an outer world existed; but that world was without meaning, it was empty space suitable only for walking and for shifting her painful soul from one place to another in the hope that it would hurt less.

  She had long been thinking about letting herself be run over by a car. But cars speeding down a highway scared her, they were a thousand times more powerful than she; she couldn't imagine where she might dind the courage to throw herself under their wheels. She would have to throw herself upon them, against them, and she lacked the strength for that, just as she lacked the strength to shout back at the manager when he reproached her unjustly.

  She had left at dusk, and now night had fallen. Her feet hurt, and she

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  knew she didn't have the strength to go much farther. At that moment of exhaustion, she saw on a big illuminated sign the word dijon.

  At once, she forgot her exhaustion. The word seemed to remind her of something. She tried to recapture a fleeting memory: someone she knew came from Dijon, or else someone had told her something amusing that had happened there. Suddenly she came to believe that the town was pleasant and that the people there were different from the ones she had known before. It was as if dance music had suddenly broken out in the middle of a desert. It was as if a spring of silvery water had gushed up in a cemetery.

  Yes, she would go to Dijon! She started to wave at cars. But the cars kept passing, blinding her with their lights, and didn't stop. The same situation, from which there was no escape, kept repeating itself over and over: she would turn to someone, address him, speak to him, call out, and he would not hear.

  For half an hour she kept sticking out her arm in vain: the cars didn't stop. The city of lights, the happy city of Dijon, the dance orchestra in the midst of a desert, receded into the darkness. The world was withdrawing from her once again, and she was returning to her soul surrounded far and wide by nothing but emptiness.

  Then she came to a place where a smaller road joined the highway. She stopped: no, the cars on the highway were useless: they would neither crush her nor take her to Dijon. She took the exit and found the quieter route.

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  JL Xow TO live in a world with which you disagree? How to live with people when you share neither their suffering nor their joys? When you know that you don't belong among them?

  ? Agnes is driving down a quiet road in her car and she answers hei.self: love or the cloister. Love or the cloister: two ways you can reject the Creator's computer and escape it.

  Ixwe: Agnes had long been imagining the following test. You would Ik asked whether after death you wished to be reawakened to life. If y( >u truly loved someone, you would agree to come back to life only on i he condition that you'd be reunited with your beloved. Life's value is u mditional and justified only by the fact that it enables you to live your love. The one you love means more to you than God's creation, more than life itself. This is, of course, a derisive blasphemy toward the (,i cator's computer, which considers itself the apex of all things and the K>urce of all meaning.

  But the majority of mankind has never known love, and of those l>cople who believe they have known it, only a few would successfully pass the test conceived by Agnes; they would grasp at the promise of renewed life without asking for any condition; they would give pre-Icrcnce to life over love and voluntarily fall back into the Creator's web.

  * If a person is not fated to live with the beloved and subordinate everything to love, there is a second method of eluding the Creator: to leave for a cloister. Agnes recalled a sentence from Stendhal's novel: "II n retira a la chartreuse de Parme." Fabrice left; he retired to the charterhouse of Parma. No charterhouse is mentioned anywhere else in the

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  novel, and yet that single sentence on the last page is so important that Stendhal used it for the title; because the real goal of all of Fabrice's adventures was the charterhouse, a place secluded from people and the world.

  In the old days, people who disagreed with the world and considered neither its sufferings nor its joys their own withdrew to a cloister. But our century refuses to acknowledge anyone's right to disagree with the world, and therefore there are no longer cloisters to which a Fabrics might escape. There is no longer a place secluded from people and the world. All that remains of such a place is the memory, the ideal of a cloister, the dream of a cloister. Charterhouse. Il se retira a la chartreuse de Panne. The vision of a cloister. Agnes has been following this vision to Switzerland for seven years, following the vision of the charterhouse. The charterhouse of roads secluded from the world.

  Agnes recalled the special moment she experienced on the day of her departure, when she took a final walk through the countryside. She-reached the bank of a stream and lay down in the grass. She lay there for a long time and had the feeling that the stream was flowing into her, washing away all her pain and dirt: washing away her self. A special, unforgettable moment: she was forgetting her self, losing her self, she was without a self; and that was happiness.

  In recalling this moment, an idea came to Agnes, vague and fleeting and yet so very important, perhaps supremely important, that she tried to capture it for herself in words:

  What is unbearable in life is not being but being one's self. The Creator, with his computer, released into the world billions of selves as well as their lives. But apart from this quantity of lives it is possible to imagine some primordial being that was present even before the Creator began to create, a being that was—and still is—beyond his influence. When she lay on the ground that day and the monotonous song of the stream flowed into her, cleansing her of the self, the dirt of the self, she participated in that primordial being, which manifested itself in the voice of fleeting time and the blue of the sky; she now knows there is nothing more beautiful.

  The road she drove onto from the highway was quiet, and distant

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  stars, infinitely distant stars, shone over it. Agnes drove on and thought:

  Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one's painful self through the world.

  But being, being is happiness. Being: becoming a fountain, a foun-tain on which the universe falls like warm rain.

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  The girl kept on walking for a long time, her feet hurt, she staggered, and then she sat down on the asphalt precisely in the middle of the right-hand lane. She tucked her head between her shoulders, her nose touched her knees, and her hunched back throbbed with the knowledge that it was exposed to chrome, steel, shock. Her chest was caved in, her poor, weak chest burning with the bitter flame that let her think of nothing but her painful self. She longed for a shock that would crush her and put out that flame.

  When she heard an oncoming car, she hunched down even more, the noise became unbearable, but instead of the expected shock she only felt a strong blast of air to her right that spun her halfway around. She heard the squeal of tires, then an enormous crash; with her eyes closed and her face pressed to her knees, she saw nothing and was amazed that she was still alive, sitti
ng as before.

  Once again, she heard the noise of an approaching car; this time the blast of air blew her to the ground, the noise of the crash sounded very near, and immediately she heard screaming, indescribable screaming, terrible screaming that brought her sharply to her feet. She stood in the middle of an empty road; about two hundred yards away she saw flames, and from another spot, closer to her, that same indescribable terrible screaming still rose from the ditch into the dark sky.

  The screaming was so insistent, so terrible, that the world around her, the world she had lost, became real, colored, blinding, noisy. She stood in the middle of the road, her arms outstretched, and suddenly felt big, powerful, strong; the world, that lost world that had refused to listen, was now returning to her, screaming, and it was so beautiful and

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  so terrible that she, too, felt like screaming, but she couldn't, her voice died in her throat, and she was unable to revive it.

  She found herself in the blinding headlights of a third car. She wanted to jump aside but didn't know whether to go right or left; she heard the squealing of tires, the car went past her, and she heard a crash. At that point the scream that was in her throat finally came to life. From the ditch, still from the same place, the cry of pain did not cease, and now she answered it.

  Then she turned and ran away. She ran screaming, amazed that her weak voice was capable of such a scream. At the point where the road crossed the highway there was a telephone on a pole. The girl picked it up: "Hello! Hello!" Finally a voice answered at the other end. "There's been an accident!" The voice asked her for the location, but she didn't know where she was, and so she hung up and started running back toward the town she had left that afternoon.