Life Is Elsewhere

by Milan Kundera

  As for Magda—the maid who had been living in the villa for several years and about whom Grandmama, respectful of a sturdy democratic tradition, would say that she considered her more a member of the family than an employee—she came in weeping one day because her fiance had been arrested by the Gestapo. And a few days later the fiances name appeared in black letters oh a dark red poster among the names of others who had been shot, and Magda was given a few days off.

  When she came back, she said that her fiance's parents had been unable to obtain his ashes and that they would probably never know the location of their son's remains. She dissolved in tears and continued to weep almost every day. She wept most often in her small room, where her sobs were muffled by the wall, but sometimes she would suddenly begin to weep during lunch; since her misfortune the family had allowed her to eat with them at their table (before that she had eaten alone in

  the kitchen), and the exceptional nature of this favor reminded her at noon, day after day, that she was in mourning and being pitied, and her eyes would redden and a tear emerge and fall on the dumplings; she did her best to hide her tears and the redness of her eyes, lowering her head, hoping not to be seen, but they were noticed all the more, and someone was always ready to utter a comforting word, to which she would reply with great sobs.

  Jaromil watched all this as an exhilarating show; he looked forward to seeing a tear in the girl's eye, to seeing the girl's shyness as she tried to suppress sorrow and how sorrow would triumph over shyness and allow a tear to fall. His eyes drank in that face (surreptitiously, for he had the sense of doing something forbidden), he felt himself invaded by a warm excitement and by the desire to cover that face with affection, to caress it and console it. At night, when he was alone and curled up under the covers, he imagined Magda's face with her big brown eyes, imagined caressing it and saying, "Don't cry, don't cry, don't cry,'' because he could find no other words to say.

  At about that time Mama ended her medical treatments (she had cured herself with a week of sleep therapy) and began again to do the housekeeping and shopping even while constantly complaining of headaches and palpitations. One day she sat down and began to write a letter. The very first sentence made her realize that the painter would find her silly and sentimental, and she was afraid of his verdict; but she soon put herself at ease: she told herself that these words, the last she would ever address to him, required no answer, and this thought gave her the courage to continue; with relief (and a strange feeling of rebellion) she created sentences that were entirely herself, that were entirely as she had been before she knew him. She wrote that she loved him and that she would never forget the miraculous time she had spent with him, but that the moment had come to tell him the truth: she was different, completely different from what the painter imagined, she was really just an ordinary, old-fashioned woman afraid that some day she would be unable to look her innocent son in the eye.

  Had she therefore decided to tell him the truth? Ah, not at all! She didn't tell him that what she called the bliss of love had been for her a taxing effort, she didn't tell him how ashamed she had been of her marred belly or about her scraped knee, her nervous breakdown, or her having to sleep for a week. She didn't tell him anything of the kind because such sincerity was contrary to her nature and because she finally wanted again to be herself and she could be herself only in insincerity; because if she had confided everything to him sincerely, it would have been like lying down naked before him with the stretch marks on her belly showing. No, she no longer wanted to show him either her inside or her outside; she wanted to regain the protection of her modesty, and therefore to be insincere and write only about her child and her sacred duties as a mother. By the time she finished the letter she had persuaded herself that it was neither her belly nor her exhausting efforts to follow the painter's ideas that had provoked her nervous breakdown, but her great maternal feelings that had rebelled against her great but guilty love.

  At that moment she felt not only boundlessly sad but also noble, tragic, and strong; that she had depicted with grand words the sadness that a few days before had made her suffer now brought her a soothing joy; it was a beautiful sadness and she saw herself, illuminated by its melancholy light, as sadly beautiful.

  What a strange coincidence! Jaromil, who at that time spent entire days spying on Magda's weeping eye, was well acquainted with the beauty of sadness and had fully immersed himself in it. He again leafed through the book the painter had lent him, reading and endlessly rereading Eluard's poems and falling under the spell of certain lines: "She has in the tranquillity of her body / A small snowball the color of an eye"; or: "Distant the sea that bathes your eye"; and: "Good morning, sadness / You're inscribed on the eyes I love." Eluard had become the poet of Magda's calm body and of her eyes bathed by a sea of tears; her entire life seemed to him to be contained in a single line: "Sadness-beautiful face." Yes, that was Magda: sadness-beautiful face.

  One evening the rest of the family went out to the theater, and he was alone with her in the villa; aware of the habits of the household, he knew that Magda would be taking her Saturday bath. Since his parents and grandmother had arranged their outing to the theater a week in advance, that morning he had pushed aside the keyhole cover on the bathroom door and glued it in place with a wad of moistened bread; to provide a clear view, he took the key out of the door. Then he hid it carefully.

  The house was quiet and empty, and Jaromil's heart was pounding. He sat upstairs in his room with a book as if someone might suddenly turn up and ask him what he was doing, but he was not reading, he was only listening. At last he heard the sound of water rushing through the plumbing and the flow hitting the bottom of the bathtub. He turned off the light at the top of the stairs and tiptoed down; he was in luck; the keyhole was still open, and when he pressed his eye against it he saw Magda leaning over the bathtub, her breasts bare, with nothing on but her underpants. His heart was pounding violently, for he was seeing what he had never seen before, would soon see still more, and no one could prevent it. Magda straightened up, went over to the mirror (he saw her in profile), looked at herself for some moments, then turned (he saw her facing him) and headed toward the bathtub; she stopped, took off her underpants, threw them aside (he still saw her facing him), then climbed into the bathtub.

  When she was immersed in the bathtub, Jaromil went on watching her through the keyhole, but since the water was up to her shoulders, she once again was nothing but a face., the same familiar sad face with eyes bathed by a sea of tears but at the same time a completely different face: a face to which he had to add (now, in the future, and forever) bare breasts, a belly, thighs, a rump; it was a face illuminated by the body's nakedness; it still elicited tenderness from him, but this tenderness was different because it echoed the rapid pounding of his heart.

  And then he suddenly noticed that Magda was gazing right at him. He was afraid he had been discovered. Her eyes were fixed on the keyhole and she was smiling sweetly (a smile at once embarrassed and friendly). He quickly moved away from the door. Had she seen him or not? He had tested the keyhole many times, and he was sure that a spying eye on his side of the door couldn't be seen from inside the bathroom. But how to explain Magda's gaze and smile? Or was Magda merely looking in that direction by chance, and was smiling only at the thought that Jaromil could see her? In any event his encounter with Magda's gaze so disturbed him that he didn't dare go near the door again.

  And yet, when he calmed down, he suddenly had an idea that went beyond anything he had ever seen or experienced: the bathroom was unlocked, and Magda had not told him that she was going to take a bath. He could therefore pretend ignorance and simply go into the bathroom. His heart again started pounding; he imagined stopping in the doorway, an expression of surprise on his face, and saying: I'm just getting my hairbrush; walking past the naked Magda, who is speechless; shame reflected on her beautiful face, as it is at lunch when she suddenly begins sobbing; and Jaromil moves along the bat
htub to the washstand, picks up the hairbrush, and then stops at the bathtub to lean over Magda, over the naked body he sees through the greenish filter of water, and again he looks at the face that is ashamed and caresses the shame-filled face. . . . But when his imagination brought him to this point, it clouded over so that he could neither see nor imagine anything more.

  To make his entrance look entirely natural, he went quietly back upstairs to his room and then came down again, his every step now heavy and loud; he realized that he was trembling, and he feared that he would lack the strength calmly and naturally to say: I'm just getting my hairbrush; he continued nevertheless, and when he had nearly reached the bathroom door and his heart was pounding so hard he could barely breathe, he heard: "Jaromil, I'm taking a bath! Don't come in!" He answered: "Of course not, I'm just going to the kitchen!" And he crossed the corridor in the opposite direction, entering the kitchen and opening and then closing the door as if he were merely there to get something, and went back upstairs.

  Once in his room he realized that Magda's words, disconcerting as they were, should not at all have caused him to give in so hastily, that he need only have said: It's all right, Magda, I'm just getting my hairbrush, and walked in, because Magda would surely not complain about him; Magda liked him, he was always nice to her. And again he imagined the scene: he is in the bathroom, and Magda is stretched out in the bathtub, completely naked, and she says: Don't come near me, get out of here, but she can't do anything, she can't defend herself, she is as helpless as she is in confronting her fiance's death, for she is lying imprisoned in the bathtub and he is leaning over her face, over her big eyes. . . .

  But the opportunity had been irrevocably lost, and Jaromil heard only the feeble sound of water draining from the bathtub into distant sewers; the irretrievabil-ity of this marvelous opportunity broke his heart, for he knew that the chance to spend an evening alone in the house with Magda would not come again soon, and that even if it were to occur, the key would long since have been replaced and Magda would have double-locked herself in. He lay on his bed in despair. But what made him feel worse than the loss of the opportunity was the despair he felt at the thought of his timidity, his weakness, his stupidly pounding heart, which had deprived him of his presence of mind and spoiled everything. He felt a violent distaste for himself.

  But what to do about such distaste? Distaste is completely different from sadness; it is even its polar opposite; when someone was nasty to Jaromil he often locked himself in his room and cried; but those were happy, almost sensually pleasurable tears, almost tears of love with which Jaromil pitied and consoled Jaromil, casting his eyes down into his soul; whereas this sudden distaste that revealed to Jaromil his own ridiculousness pushed him away from his soul! This distaste was as direct and terse as an insult; as a slap in the face; the only escape was to flee.

  But when our own pettiness is suddenly revealed to us, where do we flee to escape it? From debasement the only escape is upward! So he sat down at his desk and opened the little book (that precious book the painter told him he never lent to anyone else) and tried hard to concentrate on the poems he liked best. Once again "the sea that bathes your eye" was there, and once again he saw Magda before him, the snowball in the tranquillity of her body was also there, and the sound of water entered the poem as the murmur of the river entered the room through the closed window. Jaromil was overcome by a languorous desire and closed the book. He picked up a piece of paper and a pencil and began to write—in the manner of Eluard, Nezval, Biebl, and Desnos—short lines, one under the other, without rhythm or rhyme. It was a variation on what he had read, but the variation contained what he had just experienced: there was the "sadness" that "begins to melt and turns into water," there was the "green water" whose surface "rises and rises until it reaches my eyes," there was the body, "the sad body," the body in the water "that I pursue, I pursue through endless water." He read these lines aloud several times in a melodious, pathetic voice, and he was enthusiastic. At the core of the poem was Magda in the bathtub and he with his face pressed against the door; he thus didn't find himself outside the limits of his experience; he was high above it. His distaste for himself remained down below; down below he had felt his palms become sweaty with fear and his breath speed up; but here, up high in the poem, he was above his paltryness; the keyhole episode and his cowardice were merely a trampoline above which he was now soaring; he was no longer subordinate to his experience, his experience was subordinate to what he had written.

  The next day he used his grandfather's typewriter to copy the poem on special paper, and the poem seemed even more beautiful to him than when he had recited it aloud, for the poem had ceased to be a simple succession of words and had become a thing., its autonomy was even more incontestable; ordinary words exist only to perish as soon as they are uttered, their only purpose is to serve the moment of communication; subordinate to things, they are merely their designations; whereas here words themselves had become things and were in no way subordinate; they were no longer destined for immediate communication and prompt disappearance, but for durability.

  What Jaromil had experienced the day before was expressed in the poem, but at the same time the experience slowly died there, as a seed dies in the fruit. "I am underwater, and my heartbeats make circles on the surface"; this line represented the adolescent trembling in front of the bathroom door, but at the same time his features, in this line, slowly became blurred; this line surpassed and transcended him. "Ah, my aquatic love," another line said, and Jaromil knew that the aquatic love was Magda, but he also knew that no one could recognize her behind these words, that she was lost, invisible, buried there; the poem he had written was absolutely autonomous, independent, and incomprehensible as reality itself, which is no one's ally and content simply to 6e; the poem's autonomy provided Jaromil a splendid refuge, the ideal possibility of a second life; he found that so beautiful that the next day he tried to write more poems, and little by little he gave himself over to this activity.

  11

  Even now that she was up and about the house like a convalescent, she was not cheerful. She had rejected the painter's love, but without regaining her husband's love in exchange. Jaromil's father was so rarely at home! They were used to his coming home late at night, they even got used to his often announcing absences of several days, for he was often away on business, but this time he had said nothing at all, he didn't return to the house in the evening, and Mama had no news of him.

  Jaromil saw his father so rarely that he didn't even notice his absence as he thought in his room about his poems: for a poem to be a poem it must be read by someone other than the author; only then can it be proved that the poem is something more than simply a private diary in code and that it is capable of living its own life, independent of whoever has written it. His first thought was to show his poems to the painter, but they were too important for him to risk submitting them to such a severe judge. He needed someone who would be as enthusiastic about the poems as he was, and he soon realized who this first reader, this predestined reader of his poetry was; he saw this reader moving around the house with sad eyes and a sorrowful voice as if she were moving toward a meeting with his Unes; gripped by great emotion, he therefore gave Mama several carefully typed poems and ran for refuge to his room, where he waited for her to read them and to call him.

  She read them and she cried. Maybe she didn't know why she was crying, but it's not difficult to guess; flowing from her eyes were four kinds of tears: first of all, she was struck by the resemblance between Jaromil's poems and the poems the painter had lent her, and the tears poured forth, tears for a lost love; then she felt a vague sadness emanating from her son's lines, recalling that her husband had been absent from the house for two days without having said a word, she shed tears of offended humiliation; but soon there were tears of consolation flowing from her eyes, for her son, rushing to her with so much confidence and emotion to show her his poems, had spread a balm on all her w
ounds; and finally, after reading the poems several times, she shed tears of admiration, because Jaromil's lines seemed unintelligible to her, and she therefore told herself that his poems contained much that she couldn't understand and that, as a consequence, she was the mother of a child prodigy.

  Then she called him in, but when he stood before her she felt as if she were standing before the painter when he would question her about the books he had lent her; she didn't know what to say about the poems; she saw his lowered head eagerly waiting, and she could only hug and kiss him. Jaromil was nervous and hence glad to hide his head on Mama's shoulder, and Mama, feeling the fragility of his child's body in her arms, drove the painter's oppressive specter far away from her, regained her courage, and began to speak. But she was unable to rid her voice of its quaver and her eyes of their moisture, and for Jaromil these were more important than the words she was uttering; this tremor and this teariness were a sacred guarantee of his poems' power; of their real, physical power.

  It was nightfall, Papa was not coming home, and Mama told herself that Jaromil's face had a delicate beauty neither her husband nor the painter could match; and this unseemly thought was so persistent that she couldn't free herself from it; she started to tell him that when she was pregnant she would look imploringly at the statuette of Apollo. "And you see, you really are as beautiful as that Apollo, you look just like him. They say that something of what a woman thinks about during her pregnancy always stays with the child, and it's not only a superstition. It's from him that you have your lyre."

  Then she told him that literature had always been her greatest love, that she had gone to the university to study literature and it was only marriage (she didn't say pregnancy) that had prevented her from devoting herself entirely to that vocation; and now that she had found out that Jaromil was a poet (yes, she was the first to stick this great label on him), it was obviously a surprise but at the same time something she had long expected.