Life Is Elsewhere

by Milan Kundera

  The painter thought of these words as a lesson in modesty, but they instantly kindled Jaromil's pride; all right then, it wasn't he who had created the images in his poem; but it was something mysterious that had chosen precisely his writing hand; he could thus take pride in something greater than merit; he could take pride in being elected.

  Besides, he had never forgotten what the lady in the little spa had said: "This child has a great future ahead of him." He believed these words as if they were prophecies. The future consisted of unknown distances in which a vague image of revolution (the painter often spoke of its inevitability) merged with a vague image of the bohemian freedom of poets; he knew that he would fill that future with his glory, and this knowledge gave him the certainty that (free and independent) lived in him alongside the uncertainties that tormented him.

  6

  Ah, the long misery of afternoons when Jaromil is shut up in his room and looking, one after the other, into his two mirrors!

  How is it possible? He has read everywhere that youth is the most plentiful period of life! Where then does such nothingness, such dispersal of living matter come from? Where does such emptiness come from?

  That word was as unpleasant as the word "failure." And there were other words not to be said in his presence (at least in the house, that metropolis of emptiness). For example, the word "love" or the word "girls." How he hated the three people who lived on the villa's ground floor! They often had guests who stayed late into the night, and one could hear drunken voices, among them the shrill ones of women, that tore

  at Jaromil's soul as he lay huddled under his blanket, unable to sleep. His cousin was only two years older than he, but those two years stood between them like Pyrenees separating one century from another; his cousin, a university student, brought pretty girls to the villa (with the amused complicity of his parents) and was vaguely contemptuous of Jaromil; his uncle was seldom there (he was absorbed in the shops he had inherited), but his aunt's voice thundered through the house; whenever she met Jaromil, she asked him her stereotypical question: "So, how's it going with the girls?" Jaromil wanted to spit in her face, because her condescendingly jovial question completely bared his misery. Not that he didn't go out with girls, but his dates were so rare that they were as far apart as the stars in the universe. The word "girls" sounded as sad to his ear as the word "yearning" and the word "failure."

  Though his time was scarcely taken up by dates with girls, it was entirely occupied with the anticipation of dates, an anticipation that was no mere contemplation of the future but rather preparation and study. Jaromil was convinced that, for a date to succeed, it was essential not to fall into embarrassed silence, essential to know how to speak. A date with a girl was first of all the art of conversation. He therefore kept a special notebook in which he wrote down stories worth telling; not jokes, because they don't reveal anything personal about the teller. He wrote down his own adventures; but since he had not had any, he made them up; in this he showed good taste; the adventures he made up (or remembered reading or hearing about) and of which he was the hero didn't show him in a heroic light but only conveyed him delicately, almost imperceptibly, from the world of stagnation and emptiness into the world of activity and adventure.

  He also wrote down quotations from various poems (incidentally, not poems he himself admired), in which the poets dealt with feminine beauty and that could pass for spontaneous repartee. For example, he wrote down in his notebook the line: "On your face, components of a tricolor: your eyes, your mouth, your hair ..." Of course he had to free the line of its rhythmic devices and say it to the girl as if it were a sudden and natural idea, a compliment both spontaneous and witty: "Your face has a tricolor on it! Eyes, mouth, hair. It's the only flag I'm going to honor!"

  On every date Jaromil thinks about his prepared lines, worrying that his voice will seem unnatural, that his words will sound as if they were learned by heart and that his expression will be that of a talentless amateur. So he doesn't dare use them, but because they preoccupy him, he has nothing else to say. The date passes in painful silence. Jaromil senses the irony in the girl's look, and when they part he leaves with a feeling of failure.

  When he gets home he angrily sits down at his desk and writes rapidly and with hatred: "Looks run out of your eyes like urine / I fire my rifle at those scared sparrows, your idiot thoughts / Between your legs, a pond jumping with armies of toads ... "

  He writes on and on, and then reads his lines several times over, greatly satisfied with his fantasy, which seems to him marvelously diabolical.

  I'm a poet, I'm a great poet, he tells himself, and then writes it down in his diary. "I am a great poet, I have a diabolical imagination, I feel what others do not feel ..."

  Meanwhile, Mama comes home and goes into her room . . .

  Jaromil goes over to the mirror and looks for a long time at his childish, hated face. He looks at it so long that at last he sees the glow of an exceptional being, of one of the elect.

  And in the next room, Mama stands on tiptoe to take her husband's gilt-framed picture off the wall.

  7

  She had just learned that, starting well before the war, her husband had been having an affair with a young Jewish woman; when the Germans occupied Bohemia and Jews had to wear the degrading yellow star on their coats, he didn't leave her, continued to see her, and did his best to help her.

  Then she was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto, and he did something insane: with the help of some Czech policemen, he succeeded in getting into the closely guarded town and seeing his mistress for a few minutes. Tempted by his success, he again went to Theresienstadt and this time was caught, and neither he nor his mistress ever returned.

  The invisible urn Mama carried on her head has been put behind the wardrobe, along with her husband's picture. She no longer needs to walk with her head upright, she no longer has anything left to make her stand up straight, because all the moral grandeur belongs to others:

  She can still hear the voice of the old Jewish woman, a relative of her husband's mistress, who told her everything: "He was the bravest man I ever knew." And: "I'm all alone in the world. My whole family died in the concentration camp."

  The Jewish woman sat facing her in all the glory of her pain, while the pain Mama experienced at that moment had no glory to it; she felt the pain bowing her miserably down.

  8

  0 you haystacks vaguely smoking Smoking perhaps the tobacco of her heart

  he wrote, imagining a girl's body buried in a field.

  Death often appeared in his poems. But Mama was wrong (she was still the first reader of all his verse) when she tried to ascribe this to the precocious maturity of her son, who had been captivated by the tragedy of life.

  Death in Jaromil's poems had little in common with real death. Death becomes real when it begins to penetrate a person through the fissures of aging. For Jaromil it was infinitely far away; it was abstract; for him it was not a reality but a dream.

  But what was he looking for in that dream?

  He was looking for immensity. His life was hopelessly small, everything surrounding him was nondescript and gray. And death is absolute; it is indivisible and indissoluble.

  The presence of a girl was pathetic (a few caresses and a lot of meaningless words), but her absolute absence was infinitely grand; when he imagined a girl buried in a field, he suddenly discovered the nobility of pain and the grandeur of love.

  But it was not only the absolute but also bliss he was looking for in his dreams of death.

  He dreamed of a body slowly dissolving in the earth, seeing this as a sublime act of love in which the body at length and voluptuously is transformed into earth.

  The world was constantly wounding him; he blushed when he faced women, he was ashamed, and he saw ridicule everywhere. In his dreams of death he found silence; one could live there slowly, mutely, and happily. Yes, death, as Jaromil imagined it, was a lived death: it was oddly like that period
when a person has no need to enter the world because he is a world unto himself, when he has above him, like a protective vault, the internal arch of a mother's belly.

  In this kind of death, which resembles endless bliss, he longed to be united with a beloved woman. In one of his poems the lovers embrace until they merge into each other, becoming a single paralyzed being that slowly changes into a mineral and lives forever, withstanding the ravages of time.

  Or else he imagined two lovers locked together for so long that they are overgrown by moss and turned into moss themselves; then someone accidentally steps on them, and (it was in an era when moss bloomed) like pollen they rise up into space, indescribably happy, as only a flight can be happy.

  9

  Do you think that the past, because it has already occurred, is finished and unchangeable? Oh, no, it is clothed in mutable taffeta, and whenever we look back at it we see it in another color. Not long ago Mama was reproaching herself for having betrayed her husband with the painter, and now she is tearing her hair because she betrayed her only love for her husband's sake.

  What a coward she had been! Her engineer had been experiencing a great romantic love, while she was the servant who was left only the crusts of everyday life. And she had been so fearful and repentant that the tide of her adventure with the painter had rolled over her before she had the time to experience it. Now she could see this clearly: she had rejected the only great opportunity life had offered her heart.

  She began to think about the painter with mad persistence. Remarkably her memories didn't bring back the setting of the Prague studio where she had experienced interludes of sensual love with him, but rather the background of a pastel landscape with the river, boat, and Renaissance colonnade of a small spa. She found her heart's paradise in the tranquil vacation weeks when love had not yet been born but only conceived. She longed to see the painter, so as to ask him to go back there with her and begin again to live their love story, to live it in that pastel setting, freely, lightheart-edly, with no restraint.

  One day she climbed the stairs to his top-floor apartment. But she didn't ring the bell because she heard a talkative female voice coming from inside.

  She took to pacing back and forth in front of the building until she finally saw him; as usual, he was wearing his leather coat, and he was arm in arm with a young woman he was accompanying to the streetcar stop. On his way back she came toward him. He recognized her and greeted her with surprise. She pretended that she, too, was surprised by the unexpected encounter. He asked her to come upstairs. Her heart started to pound; she knew that at the first furtive touch she would melt in his arms.

  He offered her some wine and showed her his new paintings; he smiled at her in the friendly way we smile at the past; he never touched her, and he accompanied her to the streetcar stop.

  10

  One day, when the students leaving for the recreation break were crowded at the blackboard, he thought the moment had finally come; he made his way unnoticed to a girl sitting alone at her desk; he had liked her for a long time, and they often exchanged long looks; he sat down beside her. When the students, always mischievous, saw them together, they seized the opportunity for a practical joke; giggling, they left the room and locked the door behind them.

  While he was surrounded by his classmates, Jaromil had felt inconspicuous and at ease, but now that he was alone in the classroom with the girl it seemed as though he was on a brightly lit stage. He tried to conceal his awkwardness with witty remarks (he had finally learned to talk without recourse to prepared phrases). He said that what their classmates had done was an example of the worst possible action; it was disadvantageous for the perpetrators (out in the corridor their curiosity remained unsatisfied) and advantageous for the supposed victims (they were alone together just as they had wished). The girl agreed and said that they should make the most of the opportunity. A kiss hung in the air. All he had to do was lean closer to the girl. And yet the route to her lips seemed to him to be immensely long and difficult; he talked—talked and didn't kiss.

  The bell rang, which meant that the teacher was about to arrive at any moment and compel the students gathered at the door to open it. That excited them. Jaromil said that the best way to revenge themselves on their classmates would be to make them envy their kisses. He brushed the girl's lips (where did he find such audacity?) and said that a kiss by lips so heavily made up would surely leave a very noticeable mark on his face. The girl agreed again, saying it was too bad that they hadn't kissed, and just then the teacher's angry voice could be heard behind the door.

  Jaromil said it was too bad that neither the teacher nor the students would see the mark of a kiss on his face, and again he wanted to lean closer to the girl, and again her lips seemed as inaccessible as the peak of Mount Everest.

  "Yes, we have to make them envy us," said the girl, and she took a lipstick and a handkerchief out of her bag, smeared the lipstick on the handkerchief, and daubed Jaromil's face with it.

  The door opened and the furious teacher rushed into the classroom, followed by the students. Jaromil and the girl stood up, as students must when the teacher enters; they stood alone amid rows of empty desks, facing a crowd of spectators whose eyes were fixed on Jaromil's face, with its glorious red stains. Happy and proud, he presented himself to everyone's gaze.

  11

  A colleague in her office was pursuing her. He was married and trying to persuade her to invite him to her place.

  She sought to find out how Jaromil would respond to her erotic freedom. She began cautiously and indirectly by speaking about war widows and the difficulties they experienced in starting a new life.

  "What do you mean, a new life?" he said irritably. "Do you mean life with another man?"

  "That's part of it, certainly. Life goes on, Jaromil, life has its requirements ..."

  A woman's faithfulness to a fallen hero was one of Jaromil's sacred myths; it assured him that the absolute of love was not only an invention of poets but also a reality that made life worth living.

  "How can a woman who has had a great love wallow in bed with someone else?" he shouted with indignation at faithless widows. "How can they even touch someone else when they remember a husband who was tortured and murdered? How can they torture the victim yet again, put him to death a second time?"

  The past is clothed in mutable taffeta. Mama rejected her likable colleague and her past took on still another light:

  It isn't true that she betrayed the painter for her husband's sake. She left him for Jaromil's sake, in order to safeguard the tranquillity of her home! If her naked-

  ness made her anxious to this day, it was because of Jaromil, who had made her belly ugly. And it was also because of him that she had lost her husband's love, by stubbornly insisting on having the child!

  From the very beginning, he had taken everything away from her.

  12

  One day (by then he had already had many real kisses) he was walking along the deserted paths of Stromovka Park with a girl he had met at dancing class. After a while their conversation flagged, and their footsteps resounded in the silence, their footsteps in tandem suddenly making them realize what they had not dared give a name to: they were walking together, and if they were walking together, they probably loved each other; the footsteps resounding in the silence gave them away, and their pace became slower and slower, until the girl put her head on Jaromils shoulder.

  This was extremely beautiful, but before he was able to savor that beauty, Jaromil felt that he was becoming aroused, and in a very visible manner. He took fright. The only thing he wished was that the visible proof of his arousal would vanish as quickly as possible, but the more he thought about it the less his wish was granted. He was frightened by the thought that the girl would lower her eyes and see the compromising gesture of his body. He tried his best to entice her to look upward by talking about the clouds and the birds in the trees.

  That walk was filled with bliss (it was
the first time a woman had put her head on his shoulder, a gesture he saw as the sign of lifelong devotion), but at the same time also filled with shame. He was afraid that his body would repeat the inopportune indiscretion. After much thought he took a long, wide ribbon out of Mama's linen closet and before his next date tied it under his trousers in such a way that the possible proof of his excitement would remain chained to his leg.

  13

  I've chosen this episode among dozens of others in order to show that the greatest happiness Jaromil had experienced up to this point in his life was having a girl's head on his shoulder.

  A girl's head meant more to him than a girl's body. He knew almost nothing about the body (what exactly are pretty legs? what does a pretty rump look like?), whereas the face was comprehensible to him, and in his eyes it alone decided whether a woman was beautiful.

  I don't mean that he was indifferent to the body. The thought of female nakedness made him giddy. But let's carefully note this subtle distinction:

  He didn't long for the nakedness of a girl's body; he longed for a girl's face lighted by the nakedness of her body.

  He didn't long to possess a girl's body; he longed to possess the face of a girl who would yield her body to him as proof of her love.

  That body was beyond the limits of his experience, and precisely for this reason he devoted countless poems to it. How many times did the female genitals figure in his poems of that time? But through a miraculous effect of poetic magic (the magic of inexperience), Jaromil made of these copulatory and reproductive organs a chimerical object and a theme of playful dreams.

  For instance, in one poem he wrote about a "small watch ticking away" in the center of her body.