Life Is Elsewhere

by Milan Kundera

  She was now lying on the cushions in her skirt and brassiere, and then astonishingly, although she had been kissing Jaromil avidly just moments before, now that he had taken her blouse off, she seemed to have fallen into a stupor; she didn't move; she slightly thrust out her chest, like a condemned man offering himself to the gun barrels.

  There was nothing else he could do but go on undressing her: he found the zipper at the side of her skirt and opened it; the poor innocent didn't know about

  the fastener that held the skirt at the waist, and he tried stubbornly but in vain to pull it down over the girl's hips; she thrust out her chest, facing the invisible firing squad and not even noticing his difficulties.

  Ah, let's pass over in silence Jaromil's fifteen or so minutes of trouble! He finally succeeded in undressing the student completely. When he saw her obediently lying on the cushions, awaiting the long-awaited moment, he realized that he now had to undress as well. But the ceiling light was glaring and Jaromil was ashamed to take his clothes off. Then he had a saving idea: next to the living room he had noticed the bedroom (an old-fashioned bedroom with twin beds); the light was off there; he could undress in the dark there and even hide under the covers.

  "Aren't we going to the bedroom?" he asked her shyly.

  "To the bedroom? What for? Why do you need a bedroom?" said the girl, laughing.

  It's hard to say why she was laughing. It was gratuitous, embarrassed, thoughtless laughter. But Jaromil was wounded by it; he feared that he had said something stupid, as if his suggestion of going to the bedroom exposed his ridiculous inexperience. He was disconcerted; he was in a strange apartment, under a revealing light he couldn't turn off, with a strange woman who was making fun of him.

  He instantly realized that they wouldn't be making love that evening; he felt offended and sat silently on the couch; he regretted what had happened, but at the same time he was relieved; he no longer had to wonder whether he should or shouldn't turn off the light or how to undress; and he was glad it wasn't his fault; she had reason to laugh so stupidly!

  "What's wrong?" she asked.

  "Nothing," said Jaromil, and he knew that he would look even more ridiculous if he were to tell the girl the reason for his touchiness. He therefore made an effort to control himself, lifted her from the couch, and began conspicuously to examine her (he wanted to dominate the situation, and he thought that the one who examines dominates the one who is being examined); then he said: "You're beautiful."

  Risen from the couch on which she had been lying in motionless expectation, the girl seemed suddenly freed; she was again talkative and sure of herself. She was not at all embarrassed to be examined by a boy (perhaps she thought that the one being examined dominated the one who examines), and she asked: "Am I more beautiful naked or dressed?"

  There are a number of classic female questions that every man encounters sooner or later and that the educational institutions should prepare young males for. But Jaromil, like all of us, attended bad schools and didn't know how to answer; he tried to guess what the girl wanted to hear, but he was at a loss: most of the time, when she is with others, a girl is dressed, and so she is probably glad to be more beautiful with clothes on; but since nakedness is the body's truth, Jaromil was probably just as glad to tell her she was prettier when she was naked.

  "You're beautiful naked and dressed," he said, but the student was not at all satisfied with that answer. She pranced around the room, posed for the young man, and demanded a straight answer. "I want to know which way you like me more."

  When the question was put so precisely, it was easier to answer. Since other people knew her only when she was dressed, he thought it would be tactless to say that she was less beautiful dressed than naked; but because she had asked for his personal opinion, he could boldly answer that personally he preferred her naked, as this showed more clearly that he loved her as she was, for herself alone, and that he didn't care about anything that was merely added to her person.

  Evidently he had not misjudged, for when the student heard that she was more beautiful naked she reacted very favorably. She didn't put her clothes back on until after he left, she kissed him many times, and on the doorstep, as he was leaving (it was a quarter to eleven, Mama would be satisfied), she whispered in his ear: "Today you showed me that you love me. You're very nice; you really love me. Yes, it's better this way. We'll save it for later."

  22

  At around that time he began to write a long poem. It was a story poem about a man who suddenly realized that he was old; that he was "where fate no longer builds its rail stations"; that he was abandoned and forgotten; that around him

  They're whitewashing the walls they're removing

  the movables They're changing

  everything in his room

  So he rushes out of his house and goes back to where he experienced the most intense moments of his life:

  Rear of the house fourth floor rear door at left in

  the corner With a name on the card

  unreadable in the

  darkness "Moments have passed since twenty years ago

  please take me in!"

  An old woman opens the door, disturbed out of the careless apathy she has been immersed in during long years of solitude. Quickly, quickly she bites her bloodless lips to give them back a bit of color; quickly, with a gesture from long ago, she tries to put a bit of order into her sparse wisps of unwashed hair, and with an embarrassed air she waves her arms to hide from him the photographs of former lovers hanging on the walls. But then she feels that all is well in this room, and that appearances don't matter; she says:

  "Twenty years And yet you've come back As the

  last important thing I'll ever meet I have no

  chance of seeing anything If I try to peer over

  your shoulder into the future."

  Yes, all is well in this room; nothing matters any longer, neither wrinkles nor shabby clothes nor yellow teeth nor sparse hair nor pale lips nor a sagging belly.

  Certainty certainty I no longer move and I'm

  ready

  Certainty Compared to you beauty is nothing

  Compared to you youth is nothing

  And he wearily crosses the room, "wipes fingerprints of strangers off the table with his glove," and realizes that she had lovers, crowds of lovers who

  Squandered all the glow of her skin

  Even in the dark she is no longer beautiful

  A worthless coin worn out by fingers

  And an old song clings to his soul, a forgotten song,

  my God, what is that song?

  You're drifting away, you 're drifting away on the

  sand of beds And your appearance is fading You

  're drifting away, you 're drifting away and of

  you nothing remains But the center

  nothing but the center of you

  And she knows that she no longer has anything youthful for him. But:

  In the moments of weakness that now assail me My

  fatigue my withering that process so

  important and so pure

  Belong only to you

  Their wrinkled bodies touch each other with emotion, he says "little girl," she says "my darling," and they start to cry.

  And there was no go-between between them Not a

  word not a gesture Nothing behind which to hide

  Nothing to disguise their misery from each other

  Because it is exactly that mutual misery they seize full on the lips, they greedily drink one from the other. They caress each other's miserable bodies and already hear, under each other's skin, the engines of death softly purring. And they know that they are definitively and totally pledged to each other; that this is their last and also their greatest love, because the last love is the greatest. The man thinks:

  This is love with no way out This is love like a

  wall

  And the woman thinks:

  Here is death distant perhaps in ti
me but

  already so near in its likeness So near in

  being so like the two of us deeply

  sunk in our armchairs Here is the goal attained

  and the legs so happy

  they no longer even try to take a step And the

  hands so certain they no longer even

  seek a caress There is nothing more to do

  but wait for the

  saliva in our mouths to turn

  into dewdrops

  When Mama read this strange poem, she was as usual stunned by the precocious maturity that allowed her son to understand a time of life so far off from his own; she didn't understand that the characters in the poem had no connection with the real psychology ol old age.

  No, this poem was not at all about an old man and an old woman; if Jaromil had been asked the age of the characters in the poem, he would have hesitated and then replied that they were between forty and eighty; he was unaware of old age, which to him was a distant, abstract notion; what he knew of old age was that it is a time of life where the adult age already belongs to the past; where one's destiny is already completed; where one no longer fears that terrible unknown called the future; where love, when we encounter it, is certain and final.

  For Jaromil was filled with anxiety; he moved toward the undressed body of a young woman as if he were treading on thorns; he desired this body and he was afraid of it; that is why, in his poems of tenderness, he fled from the tangibility of the body to take refuge in the world of childish imagination; he deprived the body of its reality and imagined the female groin as a mechanical toy; this time, he had taken refuge on the opposite side: the side of old age; where the body is no longer proud and dangerous; where it is miserable and pitiful; the misery of a decrepit body more or less reconciled him to the pride of a youthful body that must age in its turn.

  His poem was filled with naturalistic ugliness; Jaromil had forgotten neither the yellow teeth nor the pus at the corners of eyes nor the sagging belly; but behind the coarseness of these details was the touching desire to limit love to the eternal, to the indestructible, to that which can replace the motherly embrace, to that which is not subj ect to time, to that which is "the center nothing but the center," to that which can overcome the power of the body, of the perfidious body whose universe was stretched out before him like unknown territory inhabited by lions.

  He wrote poems about the artificial childhood of tenderness, he wrote poems about an unreal death, he wrote poems about an unreal old age. These were the three blue flags under which he fearfully advanced toward the immensely real body of an adult woman.

  23

  When she arrived at his house (Mama and Grandmama were away from Prague for two days), he made sure not to turn on the lights, even though darkness was slowly falling. They finished dinner and were sitting in Jaromil's room. At about ten (that was when Mama ordinarily sent him to bed), he uttered the sentence he had mentally been repeating many times in order to be able to enunciate it easily and naturally: "What about going to bed?"

  She agreed, and Jaromil turned down the bed. Yes, everything happened as he had anticipated, and everything happened without difficulty. The girl undressed in a corner and Jaromil undressed (much more hastily) in another corner; he immediately put on his pajamas (in the pocket of which he had carefully deposited the packet containing the sock), then rapidly slipped under the covers (he knew that the pajamas didn't suit him, that they were too large for him and made him look small) and gazed at the girl who had kept nothing on and came naked (ah! in the darkness she seemed to him even more beautiful than last time) to stretch out beside him.

  She pressed up against him and started to kiss him furiously; after a moment Jaromil decided it was high time to open the packet. So he plunged his hand into his pocket and tried to lift it out discreetly. "What have you got there?" asked the girl. "Nothing," he answered, and he hastily placed on the student's breast the hand that was about to grasp the packet. Then he thought that he would have to excuse himself and go to the bathroom for a moment to get himself discreetly ready. But while he was considering this (the girl kept on kissing him), he noticed that the arousal he had felt at the beginning in all its physical obviousness had vanished. Noticing this threw him into a new plight, for he knew that under these conditions there was no point in opening the packet. So he tried to caress the girl with passion while he waited anxiously to regain the vanished arousal. In vain. Under his attentive gaze his body seemed to be seized with dread; rather than expand, it shrank.

  The caresses and kisses no longer brought him pleasure or satisfaction; they were no more than a screen behind which the boy tormented himself and desperately demanded his body's obedience. These were interminable caresses and embraces and endless torture, torture in total silence, for Jaromil didn't know what to say and had the feeling that any word would reveal his shame; the girl was silent too, probably because she too began to suspect something shameful, without knowing exactly whether the failure was Jaromil's or hers; in any case, something was happening that she was unprepared for and that she was afraid to name.

  But then, when the intensity of this terrible pantomime of caresses and kisses diminished and no longer had the strength to continue, both rested their heads on pillows and tried to sleep. It's hard to say if they slept or not and for how long, but even if they didn't sleep, they pretended, so as to hide, to get away from each other.

  When they got up in the morning, Jaromil was afraid to look at the student's body; she seemed painfully beautiful to him, all the more beautiful because he had not possessed her. They went into the kitchen, made breakfast, and tried to talk naturally. But then the student said: "You don't love me."

  Jaromil tried to assure her that it wasn't true, but she didn't let him speak: "No, it's not worth the trouble of looking for a way to persuade me. It's stronger than you are, and it was easy to see it last night. You don't love me enough. Last night you yourself noticed quite clearly that you don't love me enough."

  Jaromil wanted to explain to the girl that what happened had nothing to do with the extent of his love, but he said none of this. The girl's words had actually offered him an unexpected opportunity to hide his humiliation. It was a thousand times easier to take the reproach of not loving the girl than to admit the thought that his body was defective. He therefore didn't answer and lowered his head. And when the girl repeated the accusation, he said in a deliberately vague and unconvincing tone of voice: "Of course I love you.''

  "You're lying," she said. "There's someone else in your life that you love."

  That was even better. Jaromil bowed his head and sadly shrugged his shoulders, as if to acknowledge some truth to this reproach.

  "It makes no sense if it isn't real love," said the student morosely. "I warned you that

  I can't take these things lightly. I can't stand the thought that I'm replacing someone else for you."

  The night he had just lived through had been cruel, and there was only one way out for Jaromil: to start afresh and erase his failure. He thus found himself forced to reply: "No, you're being unfair. I love you. I love you tremendously. But I did hide something. It's true that there's another woman in my life. That woman loved me, and I treated her badly. There's now a shadow over me that weighs on me and that I'm helpless against. Please understand me. It would be unfair of you not to see me anymore because of that, because I love only you, only you."

  "I didn't say I didn't want to see you anymore, I only said that I can't stand the thought of another woman, even if it's just a shadow. Please understand me too, to me love is an absolute. In love I don't compromise."

  Jaromil looked at the face of the girl with glasses, and his heart was wrung by the thought that he might lose her; it seemed that she was close to him, that she could understand him. But despite that, he didn't want to, he couldn't confide to her that he had to pass himself off as a man over whom a fateful shadow hung, a man torn and worthy of pity. He replied: "Doesn't absolute
love mean above all that you can understand the other and love everything about him, even his shadows?"

  That was well said, and the student appeared to be reflecting on it. Jaromil thought that perhaps all was not lost.

  24

  He had not yet shown her his poems; the painter had promised to have them published in an avant-garde magazine, and he counted on the prestige of the printed word to dazzle the girl. But now he needed his poems to come quickly to his aid. He was convinced that once the student read them (particularly the one about the old couple), she would understand and be moved. He was wrong; she thought she had to give her young friend a critical opinion, and she chilled him with the terseness of her remarks.

  What had become of the marvelous mirror of her enthusiastic admiration in which he had first discovered his uniqueness? Now every mirror presented him with the grinning ugliness of his immaturity, and that was intolerable. It was then that he thought of the name of a famous poet who wore the halo of acceptance by the European avant-garde and of involvement in Prague scandals, and although he didn't know him and had never seen him, Jaromil had the same blind faith in him that a simple believer has in a high-ranking dignitary of his church. He sent him his poems along with a humble, pleading letter. He dreamed about a friendly, admiring response, and this dream spread like a balm over his dates with the student, which were getting rarer and rarer (she claimed that the approaching university exams left her little time) and sadder and sadder.