Life Is Elsewhere

by Milan Kundera

  That first week they saw each other every day: they took four long evening walks through the city and went to the theater once (they sat in a box, kissed, and ignored the performance) and to the movies twice. On the seventh day they again went for a walk: it was freezing cold, and Jaromil was wearing only a light topcoat with nothing between his shirt and jacket (because the gray cardigan Mama told him to wear seemed to him better suited to a retired provincial), no hat or cap (because on the second day the girl with glasses had praised his hair, which he had formerly hated, by asserting that it was as untamable as he himself), and since the elastics of his knee socks had worn out and were always sliding down his calves and into his shoes, short gray socks.

  They met at seven and started on a long walk through suburbs where the snow on vacant lots crunched under their feet and where they could periodically stop to kiss. What fascinated Jaromil was the docility of the girl's body. Until then his advance toward the female body had been like a long journey with one stage after another: it took time before a girl let him kiss her, it took time before he could put his hand on her breast, and when he touched her rump he thought he was already far along the way—never having gone any farther. This time, from the very first, something unexpected happened: the student was totally submissive in his arms, defenseless, ready for anything, he could touch her wherever he wanted. He considered this a great proof of love, but at the same time he was embarrassed about it because he didn't know what to do with this sudden freedom.

  And that day (the seventh day) the girl told him that her parents were often away from home and that she was looking forward to inviting Jaromil to her house. The radiant explosion of these words was followed by a long silence; both of them knew what a meeting in an empty apartment would mean (let's recall that when the girl with glasses was in Jaromil's arms she didn't refuse him anything); they remained silent for quite a while, and then the girl serenely said: "I believe that when it comes to love there's no such thing as compromise. When you're in love you must give everything."

  Jaromil agreed with this statement wholeheartedly because for him, too, love meant everything; but he didn't know what to say; by way of an answer he stopped, with pathos fixed his eyes on the girl (forgetting that it was night and that the pathos of a look was barely perceivable), and began to hug and kiss her frantically.

  After fifteen minutes of silence, the girl resumed the conversation, telling him that he was the first man she had ever invited to her house; she said that she had many men friends, but they were only friends; they had become used to this and nicknamed her the Stone Virgin.

  Jaromil was very pleased to learn that he was to be the student's first lover, but at the same time he was struck by stage fright: he had heard a lot about the act of love and he knew that defloration was generally considered a difficult matter. So he was unable to join the student in her effusiveness, finding himself beyond the present moment; in his mind he was experiencing the voluptuous pleasures and torments of that promised great day (Marx's well-known idea about mankind's leap from prehistory into history had always inspired him) when the true history of his life would begin.

  Not talking much, they walked through the streets for a very long time; as the evening went on it grew colder, and Jaromil felt the cold on his thinly clad body. He suggested they find a place to sit down somewhere, but they were too far from the center of town and there was no cafe or tavern in the area. By the time he came home he was chilled to the bone (toward the end of the walk it had been an effort for him to keep her from hearing the chattering of his teeth), and when he woke up the next morning he had a sore throat. Mama took his temperature and confirmed that he had a fever.

  20

  Jaromil's sick body was in bed, but his soul was experiencing the long-awaited great day. His idea of this day consisted, on the one hand, of abstract happiness and, on the other, of concrete worries. For Jaromil absolutely could not imagine in precise detail what going to bed with a woman really involved; he knew only that it required preparation, skill, and knowledge; he knew that behind physical love the threatening specter of pregnancy grinned, and he also knew (it had been the subject of innumerable conversations among his classmates) that there were ways to prevent this danger. In those barbarous times men (like knights donning armor before a battle) slipped onto their love-leg a translucent sock. Theoretically Jaromil was thoroughly informed about all this. But how could he procure that sock? Jaromil would never overcome his shyness and go into a pharmacy to buy one! And how could he actually put it on without the girl seeing it? The sock seemed ridiculous to him, and he couldn't bear the idea that the girl would know about it! Could he put it on in advance, at home? Or did he have to wait until he was naked in front of the girl?

  These were questions he couldn't answer. Jaromil had no trial (training) sock, but he decided to get one at all costs and practice putting it on. He thought that speed and dexterity played a decisive role in this area, and that these couldn't be acquired without training.

  But other things, too, tormented him: What exactly was the act of love? What did it feel like? What happened in your body? Was the pleasure so great that you started to scream and lose control of yourself? Didn't screaming make you look ridiculous? How long did the whole thing actually take? Ah, my God, was it even possible to embark on something like that without preparing for it?

  Until then Jaromil had never masturbated. He had considered this activity to be something shameful, which a real man should guard against; it was a great love he felt destined for, not onanism. But how do you achieve a great love without some preparation? Jaromil realized that masturbation was indispensable to such preparation, and he abandoned his principled feeling of hostility toward it: it was no longer a wretched substitute for physical love but a necessary step toward it; it was not a confession of poverty but a rung on the ladder to riches.

  And so he performed (with a fever of thirty-eight and two tenths) his first imitation of the act of love, which surprised him by its extreme brevity and by its inability to induce screams of sensual pleasure. Thus he was both disappointed and reassured: during the next few days he repeated the experiment several times, learning nothing new; but he was convinced that he was becoming increasingly seasoned in this way, and that he would be able to face his beloved without fear.

  He had been in bed for three days with compresses around his neck when Grandmama rushed into the room in the morning and said: "Jaromil! Everybody's in a panic downstairs!" "What's happened?" he asked her, and Grandmama explained that they were listening to the radio at his aunt's downstairs, and there had been a revolution. Jaromil jumped out of bed and ran into the next room. He turned on the radio and heard the voice of Klement Gottwald.

  He quickly understood what was going on, for in the past few days he had heard talk (though the matter didn't interest him much, for—as we have just seen—he had more serious worries) that the non-Communist ministers had threatened the Communist prime minister Gottwald that they would resign. And now he heard Gottwald addressing a crowd in Old Town Square, denouncing the traitors who were plotting to oust the Communist Party from the government and obstruct the people's march to socialism; Gottwald called on the people to insist on and accept the ministers' resignations and to set up everywhere new, revolutionary organs of power under the leadership of the Communist Party.

  Static crackled on the old radio, mingling Gottwald's words with the tumult of the crowd, which inflamed Jaromil and filled him with enthusiasm. He was in his pajamas with a towel around his neck, standing in Grandmama's room and shouting: "At last! It had to come! At last!"

  Grandmama was not quite sure that Jaromil's enthusiasm was justified. "Do you really think this is good?" she asked him anxiously. "Yes, Grandmama, it's good.

  It's even excellent!" He took her into his arms; then he started to pace vigorously up and down the room; he reflected that the crowd gathered in Old Town Square had launched today's date into the skies, where it would shine lik
e a star for centuries; and then that it was really a shame to be spending such a great day at home with his grandmother instead of being in the streets with the crowd. Before he had time to think this through, the door opened and his uncle came in, flushed and furious, shouting: "Do you hear them? The scum! The scum! It's a putsch!"

  Jaromil looked at his uncle, whom along with his wife and their conceited son he had always hated, and he thought that his moment to defeat the man had finally come. They stood face to face: the uncle had the door at his back, and at Jaromil's back was the radio, which made him feel linked to a crowd of a hundred thousand people, and he now spoke to his uncle like a hundred thousand people speaking to one man: "It's not a putsch, it's a revolution," he said.

  "Fuck off with your revolution," the uncle said. "It's easy to make a revolution when you've got the army and the police and a certain big country behind you."

  When he heard his uncle's self-assured voice talking to him as if he were a stupid kid, Jaromil's hatred went to his head: "The army and the police are trying to prevent a handful of hooligans from oppressing us again."

  "You little moron," said the uncle. "The Communists had most of the power already, and they made this putsch so they could have all of it. I always knew you were a little idiot."

  "And I always knew that you were an exploiter and that the working class would wring your neck."

  Jaromil made this assertion in a fit of anger, in fact without much thought; all the same, it's worth our attention for a moment: he used words frequently seen in the Communist press and heard in the speeches of Communist orators, but he had been rather repelled by them, just as he was repelled by all stereotypical language. He always considered himself a poet first, and so, even though he made revolutionary speeches, he was unwilling to abandon his own language. And yet he had said: "The working class will wring your neck."

  Yes, it was strange: in a moment of excitement (thus at a moment when an individual acts spontaneously and reveals his true self), Jaromil abandoned his language and chose to be a medium for someone else. And not only did he do this, he did it with a feeling of intense pleasure; it seemed to him that he was part of a thousand-headed crowd, one of the heads of the thousand-headed dragon of a people on the march, and he found that glorious. He suddenly felt strong and with the power to laugh openly at a man who used to make him blush with timidity. The harsh simplicity of the assertion ("the working class will wring your neck") gave him pleasure because it placed him in the ranks of those wonderfully simple men who laugh at nuances and whose entire wisdom consists of the essential, which is always insolently simple.

  Jaromil (in pajamas and with a towel around his neck) stood, legs apart, in front of the radio, which right behind his back had just resounded with tremendous applause, and it seemed to him that this din was entering and expanding him so that he stood facing his uncle like an immovable tree, like a laughing rock.

  And his uncle, who believed that Voltaire had invented volts, came forward and slapped his face.

  Jaromil felt a sharp pain on his cheek. He was humiliated, and because he felt as big and powerful as a tree or a rock (the thousands of voices were still resounding from the radio behind him), he wanted to throw himself at his uncle and slap him back. But since it took him a moment to decide, his uncle had time to turn around and leave the room.

  Jaromil shouted: "I'll get him for this! The bastard! I'll get him!" and headed toward the door. But Grand-mama grabbed him by the pajama sleeve and begged him to calm down, which made Jaromil content himself with repeating "the bastard, the bastard, the bastard" as he returned to the bed in which, less than an hour ago, he had left his imaginary lover. He was now unable to think about her. He saw his uncle before him and felt the slap and heaped endless reproaches on himself for not having acted swiftly, like a man; he reproached himself so bitterly that he began to cry and wet his pillow with angry tears.

  Late that afternoon Mama came home and anxiously told him that the director of her department, a very respected man, had already been dismissed and that all the non-Communists in the office feared they would soon be arrested.

  In bed Jaromil propped himself up on his elbow and began to talk passionately. He explained to Mama that what was happening was a revolution, and that a revolution is a brief period when recourse to violence is necessary in order to hasten the arrival of a society in which violence is forbidden. Mama should understand that!

  She, too, put her heart and soul into the debate, but Jaromil managed to refute her objections. He said that the rule of the rich and of that whole society of entrepreneurs and shopkeepers was stupid, and he cleverly reminded Mama that she herself, in her own family, was the victim of such people; he reminded her of the arrogance of her sister and the ignorance of her brother-in-law.

  This made her waver, and Jaromil was pleased by the success of his arguments; he felt that he had taken revenge for the slap he had been given a few hours before; but when he thought of that, he felt his anger return, and he said: "And you know, Mama, I want to join the Communist Party too."

  He read the disapproval in Mama's eyes, but he persisted with his assertion; he said that he was ashamed he had not joined earlier, that only the burdensome legacy of the house in which he had grown up separated him from those with whom he had long known he belonged.

  "Are you saying you're sorry you were born here and that I'm your mother?"

  Mama's tone showed that she was hurt by this, and Jaromil had to add quickly that she had misunderstood; in his opinion Mama, as she really was, had basically nothing in common with her sister or brother-in-law or the world of rich people.

  But Mama told him: "If you love me at all, don't do it! You know how hellish your uncle already makes my life. If you join the Party it'll be absolutely intolerable. Be sensible, I beg you."

  A tearful sadness clutched Jaromil's throat. Instead of returning his uncle's slap, he had just received from him a second one. He turned away from Mama and waited for her to leave the room. Then he again began to cry.

  21

  It was six o'clock in the evening, and the student greeted him at the door in a white apron and led him into a tidy kitchen. Dinner was nothing special, scrambled eggs with diced sausage, but it was the first dinner a woman (except for Mama and Grandmama) had ever prepared for Jaromil, and he ate with the pride of a man whose mistress takes care of him.

  Then they went into the next room; it contained a round mahogany table with a crocheted cover on which there stood, like a weight, a massive crystal vase; the walls were decorated with hideous paintings, and one corner was occupied by a couch heaped with countless cushions. Everything had been determined and agreed in advance for this evening, and all they had to do was to sink into the pillows' soft swells; but the student, oddly enough, sat down on a hard chair at the round table and he sat down facing her; then, still sitting on those hard chairs, they talked about one thing and another for a long, long time, until Jaromil felt his throat tighten.

  He had to be home by eleven; he had of course asked Mama to let him stay out all night (he invented a party organized by his classmates), but he came up against

  such vigorous resistance that he didn't dare insist and thus could only hope that the five hours between six and eleven would be sufficient for his first night of love.

  But the student chattered on and on, and the five hours rapidly dwindled; she talked about her family, about her brother who had once attempted suicide over an unhappy love affair: "That marked me. I can't be like other girls. I can't take love lightly," she said, and Jaromil felt that these words were meant to put the imprint of seriousness on the physical love that had been promised him. And so he got up from his chair, bent over the girl, and said in a very serious voice: "I understand, yes, I understand you"; he then helped her up from her chair, led her to the couch, and sat her down.

  Then they kissed, caressed, necked. That lasted for a long while, until Jaromil thought it was probably time to undress the girl,
but never having done such a thing before, he didn't know how to begin. First of all he didn't know whether he should or shouldn't turn off the light. According to all the reports he had heard about situations of this kind, he supposed that he should turn it off. Somewhere in his jacket pocket he had a little packet containing the translucent sock, and if at the decisive moment he was to put it on discreetly and secretly, darkness was absolutely essential. But he couldn't just decide to get up in the midst of the caresses and head for the light switch, which seemed to him rather out of place (let's not forget that he was well brought up), for he was a guest here and it was up to the hostess to turn the switch. Finally he dared to ask shyly: "Shouldn't we turn off the light?"

  The girl answered: "No, no, please." Jaromil wondered whether this meant that the girl didn't want darkness because she didn't want to make love or whether the girl wanted to make love but not in the dark. He could of course have asked her, but he was ashamed to say out loud what he thought.

  Then he recalled that he had to be home by eleven, and he made an effort to overcome his shyness; he unbuttoned the first female button of his life. It was a button on her white blouse and he unbuttoned it with fearful expectation of what she might say. She said nothing. So he continued unbuttoning, lifted her blouse out of the waistband of her skirt, and then took her blouse off entirely.