Life Is Elsewhere

by Milan Kundera

  There was no letter from the girl. If only there had at least been a letter from anybody! If only someone had agreed to enter his nothingness! If only the famous poet to whom he had sent his poems had finally written him a few lines! Oh, if only he had written him a few friendly words! (Yes, I did say that he would have given all his poetry to be considered a man, but I must add here: if he was not to be considered a man, only one thing could bring him some consolation: at least to be considered a poet.)

  He wanted once more to attract the attention of the famous poet. Not by means of a letter, but by a gesture laden with poetry. One day he left the house with a sharp knife. He walked for a long time around a telephone booth, and when he was certain that no one was nearby he went inside and cut off the receiver. He managed to cut off a receiver a day for twenty days (he still had no letter either from the girl or the poet), collecting twenty receivers with severed wires. He put them into a box that he wrapped with paper and tied with string, addressed it to the famous poet, and wrote his own name as the sender. Quite excited, he took the package to the post office.

  As he was leaving the counter, someone slapped him on the shoulder. He turned around and recognized his old friend from school, the school janitor's son. Jaromil was happy to see him (the slightest event was welcome in this emptiness where nothing happened!); he entered into the conversation gratefully, and when he learned that his old classmate lived nearby, he almost compelled him to invite him over.

  The janitor's son no longer lived in the school building with his parents, but had his own one-room apartment. "My wife has gone out," he explained as they entered. Jaromil had not suspected that his friend was married. "Yes, a year ago," said the janitor's son, and he said this so naturally and with such confidence that Jaromil felt envious.

  They sat down and Jaromil noticed a baby's crib across the room; he reflected that his old classmate was a father and he himself was merely an onanist.

  The janitor's son took a bottle of liqueur out of a cabinet and filled two glasses while Jaromil reflected that he couldn't have such a bottle in his room because Mama would have asked him a thousand questions about it.

  "What are you up to these days?" asked Jaromil.

  "I'm with the police," said the janitor's son, and Jaromil recalled the day he had spent with his neck wrapped in compresses, listening on the radio to the din of the chanting crowd. The police gave the most solid support to the Communist Party, and his old classmate had surely been in the roaring crowd while Jaromil was home with his grandmother.

  Yes, the janitor's son had actually spent those days in the streets, speaking about it proudly but cautiously, and Jaromil thought it necessary to make him understand that they shared the same convictions; he told him about the meetings in the darkhaired fellow's apartment. "That Yid?" said the janitor's son without enthusiasm. "Watch yourself with him! He's a strange bird!"

  The janitor's son kept eluding him, was always a step ahead of him, and Jaromil hoped to find common ground; he said sadly: "I don't know if you know that my father died in a concentration camp. Since then I've realized that the world has to be radically changed, and I know where my place is."

  The janitor's son finally seemed to understand, nodding in agreement; after this they talked for a long while, and when they came to their future Jaromil suddenly asserted: "I want to be in politics." He was himself surprised to have said this; as if the words had preceded the thought; as if the words themselves, not he, had decided his future for him. "You know," he went on, "my mother wants me to study the history of art or French literature or something like that, but I'm not interested. Those things aren't life. Real life—that's what you're immersed in."

  As he was leaving the janitor's son's place he reflected that he had just experienced a decisive illumination. A few hours earlier he had mailed a package containing twenty telephone receivers, convinced that this was a fantastic plea that he was addressing to a great poet so that he would respond to him. That he was thus making a gift to him of the fruitless wait for his words, a gift to him of the longing for his voice.

  But the conversation with his old classmate right afterward (he was certain it wasn't by chance!) gave his poetic act an opposite meaning: it was no longer a gift and a plea; not at all; he was proudly returning to the poet his fruitless wait; the receivers with severed wires were the severed heads of his veneration, and Jaromil was sending them to the poet with contempt, like a Turkish sultan returning to a Christian commander the severed heads of Crusaders.

  Now he understood everything: his whole life had merely been a long wait in an abandoned telephone booth with a dead phone. Now there was only one solution: to leave the abandoned booth as quickly as possible!

  28

  "What's wrong, Jaromil?" The warmth of this sympathetic question brought tears to his eyes; he couldn't get away, and Mama went on: "You're my child all the same. I know you inside out. I know everything about you, even though you don't confide in me."

  Jaromil looked away, ashamed. Mama kept talking: "Don't think of me as your mother, think of me as an older friend. If you confided in me, maybe you'd feel better. I know you're tormenting yourself." And she added softly: "And I also know that it's on account of a woman."

  "Yes, Mama, I'm sad," Jaromil admitted, because the warm atmosphere of mutual understanding surrounded him, and he couldn't get away from it. "But it's hard for me to talk about it ...

  "I understand. Besides, I don't want you to tell me what it is right now, I just want you to know that you can tell me anything whenever you want to. Listen. It's a beautiful day. I'm going out on a boat ride with some friends. Come along with us. You need a bit of diversion."

  The idea didn't attract Jaromil much, but he had no excuse handy; and then was too weary and sad that he didn't have the energy to refuse, and so without quite knowing how, he suddenly found himself on the deck of an excursion boat with four ladies.

  The other ladies were Mama's age, and Jaromil provided them with an ideal subject for conversation; they were very surprised to learn that he had already finished high school; they declared that he looked like his mama; they were astonished to hear that he had decided to study political science (they thought the field unsuitable for such a sensitive young man), and of course they asked him suggestively whether he already had a girlfriend; Jaromil hated them in silence, but he saw that Mama was having a good time, and for her sake he kept smiling obligingly.

  The boat docked and the ladies and their young man disembarked on a shore covered with half-naked bodies and looked for a spot where they could sunbathe; only two of them had brought swimsuits, the third bared her fat, white body down to her bra and underpants (unashamed of showing her underwear, perhaps feeling her modesty preserved by her ugliness), and Mama announced that she would only tan her face and turned, squinting, toward the sun. All four urged that their young man should undress, sunbathe, and go into the water. Mama had remembered to bring Jaromils swim trunks.

  Hit tunes reached them from a nearby cafe, filling Jaromil with an unappeased languorous desire; tanned girls and boys went by them, clad only in bathing suits, and Jarornil had the impression that they were all focusing on him; he was enveloped by their gaze as though by fire; he tried desperately to prevent people from seeing that he was with four middle-aged ladies; but the ladies noisily surrounded him and behaved like one mother with four cackling heads; they insisted he go into the water.

  He objected: "There's no place to change."

  "Silly boy, nobody's going to look at you, just put a towel around you," suggested the fat lady in the bra and pink underpants.

  "He's shy," said Mama, laughing, and the other ladies laughed with her.

  "We should respect his modesty," said Mama. "Come on, change behind the towel and nobody'll see you." She held up a large white towel in her extended hands as a partition to shield him from the eyes of the people on the shore.

  He backed away, and Mama followed him with the towel. He backed aw
ay from her and she kept following him like a huge white-winged bird pursuing its fleeing prey.

  Jaromil backed away, backed away and then turned and ran.

  The ladies looked at him in surprise, Mama still held the white towel between her extended hands, and he ran, threading his way among bare young bodies until he was out of sight.

  PART FOUR

  The Poet Runs

  1

  The time must come when a poet tears himself away from his mother's arms and runs.

  Until recently he was still walking obediently two abreast: his sisters Isabelle and Vitalie up ahead, he behind them with his brother, Frederic, and, like a captain bringing up the rear, his mother, who once a week took her children this way through Charleville.

  When he was sixteen, he tore himself away from his mother's arms for the first time. In Paris he was arrested by the police, his teacher Izambard and Izambard's sisters (yes, the ones who leaned over him to delouse his hair) sheltered him for a few weeks, and then, after two slaps in the face, the cold maternal embrace closed on him again.

  But Arthur Rimbaud ran away again and again; he ran with a collar fastened to his neck, writing his poems as he ran.

  2

  The year is 1870, and the cannons of the Franco-Prussian War can be heard in Charleville from afar. That is a particularly favorable situation for running away, because the din of battle has a nostalgic allure for poets.

  His squat body with its crooked legs is strapped up tight in a hussar's uniform. At eighteen Lermontov has become a soldier so as to run away from his grandmother and her burdensome maternal love. He has exchanged the pen, which is the key to his soul, for the pistol, which is the key to the world's doors. For when we send a bullet into a man's chest it is as if we are entering that chest ourselves; and another man's chest—that is the world.

  From the moment he tore himself away from Mama's arms, Jaromil has not stopped running, and it seems that the sound of his footsteps mingles with still another sound, which resembles the roar of cannon. It is not the detonations of shellfire but rather the tumult of political upheaval. At such a time the soldier is mere decoration, and the politician takes the soldier's place. Jaromil no longer writes poetry but diligently studies political science at the university.

  3

  Revolution and youth are a pair. What can a revolution promise to adults? To some, disgrace; to others, favor. But that favor is not worth much, for it affects only the more miserable half of life and, along with advantages, brings uncertainty, exhausting activity, and disruption.

  Youth is more fortunate: it is not burdened by guilt, and the revolution can take it entirely under its wing. The uncertainty of revolutionary times is an advantage for youth, for it is the world of the fathers that is being hurled into uncertainty. Oh, how beautiful it is to enter adulthood when the ramparts of the adult world are crumbling!

  In the first years after 1948, Communist professors were a minority in Czech higher education. To maintain its grip on the university, the revolution had to give power to the students. Jaromil was a militant in his faculty's Youth Union, and as such he was an observer at examinations. He then submitted a report to the faculty's political committee indicating how this or that professor behaved during examinations, the questions he asked, and the opinions he expressed, so that it was actually the examiner rather than the examined who was being subjected to an examination.

  4

  But Jaromil was himself subjected to an examination when he presented his report to the committee. He had to answer the questions of stern young people, and he wanted to speak in a way that would please them: When young people's education is at stake, compromise is a crime. We must guard against teachers with outdated ideas: the future will be new, or it will not exist. And we can no longer trust teachers who change their ideas from one day to the next: the future will be pure, or it will be tarnished.

  Now that Jaromil has become a rigorous militant whose reports affect the destiny of adults, can I still maintain that he is on the run? Doesn't it seem instead that he has reached his goal?

  Not at all.

  When he was six years old, Mama had put him in the position of being a year younger than his classmates; he is still a year younger. When he is reporting on a professor who has bourgeois opinions, it is not the professor he is thinking about but rather the young people whose eyes he is anxiously watching to see his own image in them; just as he checks his smile and hair in the mirror at home, so he checks in their eyes the firmness, manliness, and harshness of his words.

  He is always surrounded by a wall of mirrors, and he cannot see beyond it.

  For adulthood is indivisible; adulthood is total, or it doesn't exist. As long as Jaromil remains a child, his presence at the examination board and his reports on professors will merely be a variant route of his run.

  5

  Because he is always running away from her, and always without success; he has breakfast and dinner with her, he says goodnight and good morning to her. Every morning she hands him the shopping bag; Mama doesn't care that this household emblem is ill suited to an ideological supervisor of professors, and she sends him off to do the day's marketing.

  Look: he is on the same street we saw him walk at the beginning of the preceding part, when he blushed at the sight of a woman coming toward him. Several years have passed, but he still blushes, and in the store to which Mama sends him he is afraid to meet the eyes of a girl in a white smock.

  He is mad about this girl, who spends eight hours a day in the cashier's cage. The softness of her features, the slowness of her gestures, her imprisonment—all this seems mysteriously close to him and predestined. Moreover, he knows why: this girl resembles the maid whose fiance was shot; Magda: sadness-beautiful face. And the cashier's cage in which she is sitting resembles the bathtub in which he saw the maid.

  6

  He is bent over his desk and and trembling at the thought of his exams; he is just as afraid of them at the university as he was in high school, because he is used to showing his mother his perfect grades and he doesn't wish to disappoint her.

  But how unbearable the airlessness of this tiny Prague bedroom when the air outside is filled with echoes of revolutionary songs and the windows admit the shadows of vigorous men with hammers in their hands!

  It is 1922, five years after the great Russian revolution, and he is forced to bend over a textbook and tremble with fear because of an exam! What a penalty!

  At last he pushes the book aside (it is late at night) and he dreams about the poem he is writing: the poem is about a worker who wants to kill his dream about the beauty of life by making it come true; holding a hammer, he gives his other arm to his beloved, and marches with a multitude of comrades to make a revolution.

  And the law student (yes, of course, it's Jiri Wolker) sees blood on the desk; much blood, for when

  we kill great dreams

  much blood is spilled

  but he is not afraid, for he knows that if he wants to be a man, he must not be afraid of blood.

  7

  The store closes at six, and he positions himself at the opposite corner. He knows that the cashier always quits work a little after six, but he also knows that she is always accompanied by one of the salesgirls.

  This friend is much less pretty, seeming almost ugly to Jaromil; the two are exact opposites: the cashier is dark haired, the other is a redhead; the cashier is buxom, the other skinny; the cashier is quiet, the other noisy; he feels mysteriously close to the cashier, repelled by the other.

  He often returned to his observation post in the hope that the girls might leave the store separately so that he could speak to the dark-haired one. But that never happened. One day he followed them; they went down several streets and entered a building; he remained near the door for almost an hour, but neither one of them came out.

  8

  She has come to Prague from the provinces to see him, and she listens to him reading his poems to her. S
he is tranquil; she knows that her son is still hers; neither women nor the world have taken him away from her; on the contrary, women and the world have entered the magical circle of poetry, and this is a circle she herself has drawn around her son, a circle inside which she secretly rules.

  He is reading her a poem he has written in memory of his grandmother, his mother's mother:

  since I go into battle

  Grandmother for the beauty of

  this world

  Mrs. Wolker is tranquil. Her son can go into battle in his poems, holding a hammer in his hand and giving his arm to his girlfriend; that doesn't trouble her; because in his poems he has retained his mother and his grandmother, the family meal, and all the virtues she has inculcated in him. Let the world see him march by, hammer in hand! No, she doesn't want to lose him, but she knows very well that she has nothing to fear: to show himself to the world is an entirely different thing from going into the world.

  But the poet also knows this difference. And he alone knows how sad he is in the house of poetry!

  9

  Only a true poet can speak of the immense longing not to be a poet, the longing to leave that house of mirrors where deafening silence reigns.

  Banished from the land of dreams