Life Is Elsewhere

by Milan Kundera

  He was inhabited by the landscape, by the sadness of the mourners, and by the death of the blond girl, and he felt filled with their presence as if a tree were growing inside him; he felt himself grow, and his own real person seemed to be no more than an impersonation, a disguise, a mask of modesty; and it was under the mask of his own person that he approached the dead girl's parents (the father's face reminded him of the blond girl's features; it was red with weeping) and offered his condolences; they absently gave him their hands and he felt their fragility and insignificance in the palm of his hand.

  Then he remained for a long while leaning with his back against the wall of the chalet in which he had slept for so long watching the people who had attended the funeral separate into small groups and slowly vanish into the misty distance. Suddenly, he felt a caress: yes, he felt the touch of a hand on his face. He was sure that he understood the meaning of that caress, and he accepted it gratefully; he knew that it was the hand of forgiveness; that the blond girl was letting him know that she had not stopped loving him and that love lasts beyond the grave.

  13

  He was falling from one dream into another.

  The most beautiful moments were those when he was still in one dream while another into which he was awakening was beginning to dawn.

  The hands that caressed him as he stood motionless in the mountainous landscape belonged to a woman in another dream into which he was about to fall again, but Xavier didn't know this yet, and for the moment the hands existed alone, by themselves; they were miraculous hands in an empty space; hands between two adventures, between two lives; hands unspoiled by a body or a head.

  If only that caress of disembodied hands would last as long as possible!

  14

  Then he felt not only the caress of the hands but also the touch of soft, ample breasts pressing against his chest, and he saw the face of a dark-haired woman and heard her voice: "Wake up! My God, wake up!"

  He was on a rumpled bed in a grayish room with a massive wardrobe. Xavier remembered that he was in the house at the Charles Bridge.

  "I know you want to go on sleeping," said the woman, as if to excuse herself, "but I really had to wake you. I'm terribly afraid."

  "What are you afraid of? "

  "My God, you don't know anything," said the woman. "Listen!"

  Xavier made an effort to listen attentively: he heard the sound of distant gunfire.

  He jumped out of bed and ran to the window; groups of men in blue overalls with submachine guns slung across their shoulders were passing along the Charles Bridge.

  It was like searching for a memory through several walls; Xavier was quite aware of the meaning of these groups of armed men guarding the bridge, but there was something he couldn't remember, something that would clarify his own link to what he was seeing. He was aware that he had a part to play in this scene and that he was not in it because of a mistake, that he was like an actor who has forgotten to make his entrance and the play, oddly crippled, goes on without him. And suddenly he remembered.

  As he was remembering, he ran his eyes over the room and felt relieved: the schoolbag was still there, propped against the wall in a corner, no one had taken it. He leaped over to it and opened it. Everything was there: the math notebook, the Czech notebook, the science textbook. He took out the Czech notebook, opened it from the back, and again felt relief: the list that the man in the peaked cap had demanded of him had been carefully written out in a small but legible hand, and Xavier was thrilled by his idea of hiding this important document in a school notebook, the front of which was devoted to a composition on the theme "The Coming of Spring."

  "What are you looking for in there, for goodness' sake?"

  "Nothing," said Xavier.

  "I need you, I need your help. You can see what's happening. They're going from house to house, arresting people and shooting them."

  "Don't worry," he said, laughing. "They can't shoot anybody!"

  "How can you know that?" the woman asked.

  How could he know that? He knew it very well: the list of all the enemies of the people, who were to be executed on the first day of the revolution, was in his notebook; it was really true that the executions couldn't take place. Anyway the beautiful woman's anxiety mattered little to him; he heard gunfire, he saw the men guarding the bridge, and he thought that the day he had been enthusiastically preparing for alongside his companions in the struggle had finally come, and that he had been asleep; that he had been elsewhere, in another room and in another dream.

  He wanted to leave, he wanted immediately to rejoin these men in overalls, to return to them the list only he had and without which the revolution was blind, not knowing whom to arrest and shoot. But then he realized that it was impossible: he didn't know the day's password, he had long been regarded as a traitor, and nobody would believe him. He was in another life, he was in another adventure, and he was unable to save from this life the other life in which he no longer was.

  "What's the matter with you?" the woman insisted anxiously.

  And Xavier thought that if he couldn't save that lost life, he would have to make great the life he was living at the moment. He turned to the beautiful, generously curved woman and understood that he must leave her, for it was over there that life was—outside, on the other side of the window, over there from where the rattling gunfire reached him like a nightingale's trill.

  "Where are you going?" the woman shouted.

  Xavier smiled and pointed at the window.

  "You promised to take me with you!"

  "That was a long time ago."

  "Are you going to betray me?"

  She fell to her knees before him and clasped his legs.

  He looked at her and thought about how beautiful she was and how hard it was to leave her. But the world on the other side of the window was still more beautiful. And if he was abandoning a beloved woman for it, that world was even more costly by the price of his betrayed love.

  "You are beautiful," he said, "but I must betray you." He tore himself out of her embrace and moved toward the window.

  PART THREE

  The Poet Masturbates

  1

  The day Jaromil showed his poems to Mama, she waited in vain for her husband, and she also waited in vain the next day and the following days.

  She received instead an official notification from the Gestapo telling her that her husband had been arrested. Toward the end of the war she received another official notification that he had died in a concentration camp.

  Her marriage had been joyless, but her widowhood was grand and glorious. She found a large photograph of her husband from their early days together, and she put it into a gilded frame and hung it on the wall.

  Soon the war ended with great jubilation in Prague, the Germans withdrew from Bohemia, and Mama began a life that enhanced the austere beauty of renunciation; the money she had inherited from her father having been used up, she dismissed the maid, after Alik's death she refused to buy a new dog, and she had to look for a job.

  There were still other changes: her sister decided to give the apartment in the center of Prague to her newly married son, and to move with her husband and younger son into the ground floor of the family villa, while Grandmania settled into a room on the widow's floor.

  Mama had been contemptuous of her brother-in-law ever since she had heard him assert that Voltaire was a physicist who had invented volts. His family was noisy and indulged in crude entertainments; the jolly life resounding throughout the rooms of the ground floor was separated by an impassable border from the melancholy terrain of the upper floor.

  And yet Mama at that time stood up straighter than in the past. It was as if she carried on her head (like Dalmatian women carrying baskets of grapes) her husband's invisible urn.

  2

  In the bathroom small bottles of perfume and tubes of creams stand on the shelf beneath the mirror, but Mama hardly ever uses them for skin care. She often lingers o
ver these objects, but only because they remind her of her late father, his cosmetics shop (long since the property of the detested brother-in-law), and the long years of carefree life in the villa.

  Her past life with parents and husband are illuminated by the nostalgic light of a sun that has already set. This nostalgic glow breaks her heart; she realizes that, now that they are gone, it is too late to appreciate the beauty of those years, and she reproaches herself for having been an ungrateful wife. Her husband had exposed himself to great dangers and been burdened with cares, but in order to leave her tranquillity undis-turbed he had never breathed a word of it to her, and to this day she is unaware of the reason for his arrest, which resistance group he had belonged to, and what role he played in it; she knows nothing at all about it, and she thinks of that as a humiliating punishment inflicted on her for having been a narrow-minded woman who merely saw in her husbands behavior a sign of indifference. The thought that she had been unfaithful to him at the very moment he was running the greatest risks brings her close to self-contempt.

  Now she looks at herself in the mirror and notes with surprise that her face is still young, and even, it seems to her, needlessly young, as if time has mistakenly and unjustly forgotten her. Recently she had learned that someone saw her in the street with Jaromil and had taken them for brother and sister; she finds that comical. All the same it pleases her; since then it has been a still greater pleasure for her to go to the theater or a concert with her son.

  Besides, what else was left to her?

  Grandmama had lost much of her health, staying home to darn Jaromil's socks and iron her daughter's dresses. She was filled with regrets and caring concern. Around her she created a melancholically loving atmosphere, intensifying the feminine character of the milieu (a milieu of double widowhood) in which Jaromil lived.

  3

  The walls of Jaromil's room were no longer decorated by his childhood sayings (with regret, Mama put them away in a drawer), but by twenty small reproductions of cubist and surrealist paintings he had cut out of magazines and pasted on cardboard. On the wall with them was a telephone receiver with a severed end of wire coming out of it (a telephone repairman had been in the villa some time ago, and Jaromil had seen in the defective receiver the kind of object that, removed from its usual context, creates a magical impression and can rightly be called a surrealist object). But the image he most often examined was in the mirror hanging on the same wall. He studied nothing more carefully than his own face, nothing that tormented him more, and nothing (even if it was at the cost of strenuous effort) in which he invested more hope:

  This face resembled Mama's, but because Jaromil was a man, the delicacy of its features was more striking: he had a good-looking, narrow nose and a small, slightly receding chin. This chin worried him a lot; he had read in a famous passage by Schopenhauer that a receding chin is a particularly repulsive feature because it is precisely his prominent chin that distinguishes man from ape. But then he came across a photograph of Rilke and saw that Rilke, too, had a receding chin, and this gave him priceless comfort. He would look at himself in the mirror for a long time, deperately struggling in the immense space between ape and Rilke.

  His chin in fact was only moderately receding, and Mama rightly regarded her son's face as having the charm of a child's. But that tormented Jaromil even more than his

  chin: the delicacy of his features made him seem a few years younger, and because his classmates were a year older than he, the childishness of his looks was striking, obvious, and a subject daily of numerous comments Jaromil was unable to forget for even an instant.

  Oh, what a burden it was to bear such a face! How heavy it was, this fine drawing of features!

  (Jaromil sometimes had terrible dreams: he dreamed that he had to lift some extremely light object—a teacup, a spoon, a feather—and he couldn't do it, that the lighter the object, the weaker he became, that he sank under its lightness; he experienced his dreams as nightmares and would wake up bathed in sweat; it seems to me that these dreams were about his fragile face, patterned in needlepoint lace he tried in vain to lift off and throw away.)

  4

  Poets come from homes where women rule: the sister of Trakl and those of Yesenin and Mayakovsky, the aunts of Blok, the grandmother of Holderlin and that of Lermontov, the nurse of Pushkin, and above all of course, the mothers, the poets' mothers, behind whom the fathers' shadows pale. Lady Wilde and Frau Rilke dressed their sons like little girls. Are you wondering why the child looked so anxiously at himself in the mirror? "It is time to become a man,'' Jiri Orten* wrote in his diary. During his entire life the poet searches for masculinity in the features of his face.

  *Czech poet who died in 1941 at the age of twenty-two.

  When he looked at himself in the mirror for a very long time, he succeeded in finding what he was looking for: a hard eye or a severe line of the mouth; but to do that it was of course essential to show a certain smile, or rather a certain grin that ferociously drew back his upper lip. He also sought a way to wear his hair that would alter his features: he tried to put his hair up above his forehead so as to give the impression of a thick, wild undergrowth; but alas, his hair, which Mama so cherished that she kept a bit of it in a locket, was the worst he could imagine: yellow as the down of a newly hatched chick and fine as dandelion fluff; it was impossible to shape; Mama often stroked his head and told him he had the hair of an angel. But Jaromil hated angels and loved devils; he longed to dye his hair black, but he didn't dare do it because dyeing his hair would be even more effeminate than being blond; all he could do was let it grow very long and shaggy.

  He never lost an opportunity to check and correct his appearance; he never passed a shop window without a glance at himself. But the more he watched over his appearance, the more he became aware of it and the more troubling and painful it seemed. For example:

  He is coming home from high school. The street is deserted, but far off he catches sight of a young woman coming toward him. They are unavoidably nearing each other. Jaromil is thinking about his face because he has seen that the woman is beautiful. He tries to put on his well-prepared tough-guy smile, but he senses that he won't manage it. He can think only of his face, whose childish femininity makes him ridiculous in the eyes of women, he is completely incarnated in that pathetic, sweet facelet, which stiffens, petrifies, and (calamity!) blushes! So he quickens his pace to reduce the risk of the woman casting her eyes on him, for if he were to allow a pretty woman to surprise him the moment he blushes, the shame would be unbearable!

  5

  The hours spent in front of the mirror made him touch the depths of despair; fortunately there was another mirror that took him to the stars. That exalting mirror was his poetry; he yearned for the poems he had not yet written, and those he had already written he remembered with the delectation men get from remembering women; he was not only the poems' author but also their theoretician and historian; he wrote reflections on what he had written, and he divided his output into different periods to which he gave names, so that in the course of two or three years he came to regard his poetic works as a historical process worthy of a historian's efforts.

  This gave him solace: down below, where he lived his everyday life, where he went to his classes, where he had lunch with Mama and Grandmama, an unarticulated emptiness stretched out before him; but up above, in his poems, he showed the way, installing inscribed signposts; there time was articulated and differentiated; he went from one poetic period to another, enabling him (looking out of the corner of his eye at the appalling, uneventful stagnation down below) to anticipate, with exalted ecstasy, the advent of a new era that would open his imagination to undreamed-of horizons.

  And he was also firmly and quietly confident that, despite the insignificance of his face (and of his life), he had within him exceptional riches; in other words, confidence in becoming one of the elect.

  Let's stop at this word:

  Jaromil continued to see
the painter, not very often of course, because Mama was unenthusiastic about these visits; he had long since stopped drawing, but one day he gathered enough courage to show the painter some of his poems and after that brought him the rest. The painter read them with ardent interest and sometimes kept them to show his friends, which thrilled Jaromil because the painter, who had once showed such skepticism about his drawings, remained for Jaromil a steadfast authority; Jaromil was convinced that there exists an objective criterion (carefully maintained in the minds of initiates) for evaluating artistic values (just as the Sevres museum maintains a platinum standard meter), and that the painter knew what that criterion was.

  But all the same there was something irritating about this: Jaromil had never been able to discern beforehand what the painter would like in his poems and what he would dislike; he would sometimes praise poems Jaromil had written in haste, and at other times he would sullenly dismiss poems Jaromil had great regard for. What did this mean? If Jaromil himself was incapable of understanding the value of what he had written, didn't he have to conclude that he was creating values mechanically, fortuitously, unknowingly, and unwittingly, and thus with no merit attached to it (just as he had once charmed the painter with a world of dog-headed people he had discovered quite by chance)?

  "Surely you believe, don't you," the painter said to him one day when they had touched on this subject, "that a fantastic image you've put into your poem is the result of rational thought. Not so: it came to you out of nowhere; suddenly; unexpectedly; the author of that image is not you but rather someone inside you, someone who wrote your poem inside you. And that someone who wrote your poem is the omnipotent stream of the unconscious that flows through each of us; it's not due to your merits that this stream, to which we're all the same, has chosen to make you its violin.''