Life Is Elsewhere

by Milan Kundera

  I seek shelter in the crowd And wish to

  change my song To insults

  But when Frantisek Halas* wrote these lines he wasn't with the crowd in the streets; the room he wrote in, bent over his desk, was silent.

  And it's not at all true that he was banished from the land of dreams. The crowd he speaks of in his poems was in fact the land of his dreams.

  And he didn't succeed in changing his song to insults; it was, on the contrary, his insults that always changed into song.

  Well, is there really no way out of the house of mirrors?

  *Czech poet (1905-1952).

  10

  But I

  have tamed

  Myself

  I have stomped

  On the throat Of my own

  song

  wrote Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Jaromil understands him. Poetic language seems to him like the lace in Mamas linen closet. He has written no poetry for several months, and he has no desire to write any. He is on the run. Of course, he goes marketing for Mama, but he keeps his desk drawers locked. He has removed all the reproductions of modern paintings from the walls of his room.

  What did he put up instead? A photo of Karl Marx?

  Not at all. On the bare wall he hung up a photograph of his father. It was a picture taken in 1938, at the time of the sad mobilization, and his father is dressed in his officer's uniform.

  Jaromil loved this photograph of a man he hardly knew and whose image was beginning to blur in his mind. He yearned more and more for this man, who had been a soccer player, soldier, and concentration camp prisoner. He missed this man very much.

  11

  The political science faculty auditorium was packed, and there were several poets sitting on the podium. A young man in a blue shirt (worn in those days by members of the Youth Union) and with an enormous mop of hair was standing at the front of the podium and speaking:

  Poetry's role is at its most important in revolutionary times; poetry gave the revolution its voice, and in exchange the revolution freed poetry from its isolation; today the poet knows that he is understood by the people and especially understood by young people because youth, poetry, and revolution are one and the same!

  The first of the poets to speak now got up and recited a poem about a girl who broke up with her boyfriend, who worked at the milling machine next to hers, because he was lazy and failed to meet his production goals; but the boyfriend didn't want to lose his girlfriend, and so he set about working so diligently that the red flag of a shock worker was soon attached to his machine. Following this, other poets got up and recited poems about peace, Lenin and Stalin, martyrs in the antifascist struggle, and workers who exceed their norms.

  12

  Youth is unaware of the great power being young confers, but the poet (in his sixties) who now rises to recite his poem knows this.

  That person is young, he proclaims in a melodious voice, who is with the youth of the world, and the youth of the world is socialism. That person is young who plunges into the future and never looks back.

  In other words: according to the poet in his sixties, the word "youth" does not designate a specific period of life but a value above age and unconnected with it. This idea, elegantly versified, had at least a double objective: it flattered the young audience, and it magically rid the poet of his wrinkles and assured him (for he made it clear that he was on the side of socialism and that he would never look back) of a place beside the boys and girls.

  Jaromil was in the audience and watched the poets with interest, even though it seemed that he was on the other side, like someone who was no longer one of them. He listened to their poems as coldly as he had listened to the words of the professors he reported on to the committee. What interested him more was the famous poet who was now getting up from his chair (the applause for the poet in his sixties had died down) and heading toward the center of the podium. (Yes, he is the one who not long ago had received a package containing twenty telephone receivers with severed wires.)

  13

  "Dear Master, We are now in the month of love; I am seventeen years old. The age of hopes and chimeras, as they say. ... I am sending you some of this verse because I love all poets, all good Parnassians. . . . Don't make too many faces when you read this verse: .... You would render me deliriously happy and hopeful if you could make a small place among the Parnassians for the poem 'Credo in Unam'. ... I am unknown; does that matter? Poets are brothers. These verses believe; they love, they hope: that is everything. My dear Master: raise me up a little: I am young; give me your hand. . . ."

  Anyway, he is lying; he is fifteen years and seven months old; he has not yet run away from Charleville to escape from his mother. But this letter would long remain in his head as a litany of shame, as proof of weakness and servility. He would get even with this dear master, this old idiot, this bald-headed Theodore de Banville! A year later he would cruelly ridicule all his work, all the hyacinths and languid lilies that fill his verse, sending his sarcasms in a letter like a registered slap in the face.

  But at the moment the dear master as yet has no idea of the hatred lying in wait for him as he recites a poem about a Russian town that had been leveled by the fascists rising from its ruins; a town decorated with magical surrealist garlands; the breasts of young Soviet women float through the streets like small colored balloons; a kerosene lamp hanging below the sky lights up the white town on whose rooftops helicopters settle like angels.

  14

  Captivated by the charm of the poet's personality, the audience applauded. There was, however, among this unthinking majority a thoughtful minority who knew that a revolutionary audience ought not to wait like a humble beggar for whatever the podium deigns to give it; on the contrary, nowadays it is the poems that are the beggars; they are begging to be admitted to the socialist paradise; but the young revolutionaries who guard the gates of this paradise must be stern: for the future will be new, or it will not exist; the future will be pure, or it will be tarnished.

  "What is this nonsense he's feeding us?" Jaromil shouted, and others joined him. "He's hitching socialism to surrealism! He's hitching a cat to a horse, the future to the past!"

  The poet understood what was happening, but he was proud and had no intention of giving in. Since his youth he had been accustomed to being provocative before bourgeois narrow-mindedness, and he was unabashed by being one against many. His face flushed and he decided to recite as his final poem a different one from the one he had originally chosen: it was a poem full of violent metaphors and unbridled erotic images; there was hooting and shouting when he finished.

  The students whistled derisively at the old man standing before them, who had come there because he loved them; in their angry rebellion he saw the radiance of his own youth. He believed that his love for them gave him the right to tell them what he thought. It was the spring of 1968 in Paris. Alas! The students were incapable of seeing the radiance of their youth in the wrinkles of his face, and the old scholar watched with surprise as he was whistled at by those he loved.

  15

  The poet raised his hand to quell the din. And then he started to shout that the students were like puritan schoolmarms, dogmatic priests, and bigoted cops; that they protested against his poem because they hated freedom.

  The old scholar silently listened to the whistling and reflected that when he was young he too had been part of a group, that he too had eagerly whistled, but the group had long since scattered, and now he was alone.

  The poet shouted that freedom was poetry's duty, and that even a metaphor was worth fighting for. He shouted that he would go on hitching a cat to a horse and modern art to socialism, and if this was quixotic he wanted to be a Don Quixote, because for him socialism was an era of freedom and joy, and he rejected any other kind of socialism.

  The old scholar was watching the noisy young people around him, and it suddenly occurred to him that he was the only one in the whole audience who had the privilege
of freedom, for he was old; when he is old a man is no longer obliged to care about his group's opinions, about the public, and about the future. He is alone with approaching death, and death has neither eyes nor ears, he has no need to please death; he can do and say what he pleases.

  And they whistled and demanded the floor in order to answer him. Jaromil got up in his turn; he had black before his eyes and the crowd behind him; he said that only the revolution was modern and that decadent eroticism and unintelligible images were musty old poetizing that meant nothing to the people. "What's really modern," he asked the famous poet, "your unintelligible poems, or we who are building a new world? The only thing that's absolutely modern," he said, answering himself, "is the people building socialism.'' Thunderous applause greeted these words.

  The applause was still ringing as the old scholar departed through the corridors of the Sorbonne, reading the inscriptions on the walls: Be realistic, demand the impossible. And a bit farther on: The emancipation of man will either be total or nothing at all. And a bit farther still: Above all, no remorse.

  16

  The seats in the large classroom have been pushed against the walls and brushes and paint pots and long streamers strewn across the floor, where several political science students are painting slogans for the May Day procession. Jaromil, the author and editor of the slogans, is standing behind them and consulting a notebook.

  What is this? Have we got the wrong year? The slogans he is dictating to his fellow students are exactly the same as those the old scholar who was jeered at read a moment ago on the walls of the insurgent Sorbonne. No, we're not wrong; the slogans Jaromil is having inscribed on the streamers are exactly the same as those the French students scrawled twenty years later on the walls of the Sorbonne, the walls of Nanterre, the walls of Censier.

  He gives the order to write on a streamer: Dream is reality., on another one: Be realistic, demand the impossible; and nearby: We decree a state of permanent happiness; and a bit farther: Cancel churches (he is particularly pleased with this slogan, consisting of two words and rejecting two millennia of history); and more: No freedom for freedom's enemies; and still another: Power to the imagination! And then: Death to the lukewarm! And: Revolution in politics, in the family, in love!

  The students paint the letters and Jaromil proudly goes from one to the other like a field marshal of words. He is happy to be useful, happy that his gift for language has found a use. He knows that poetry is dead (for Art is dead, a Sorbonne wall proclaims), but it died in order to rise again from its grave and become the art of propaganda and slogans inscribed on streamers and on the walls of cities (for Poetry is in the street, proclaims a wall of the Odeon).

  "Don't you read the newspaper? On the front page of Rude Pravo there was a list of a hundred slogans for May Day. It was drawn up by the propaganda section of the Party Central Committee. Couldn't you find one to suit you?"

  Jaromil was facing a plump young fellow from the Party District Committee, who introduced himself as chairman of the university committee in charge of organizing the festivities for May 1, 1949.

  "'Dream is reality.' That's idealism of the crudest kind. 'Cancel churches.' I agree with you, comrade. But for the moment that conflicts with the Party's policy on religion. 'Death to the lukewarm.' Since when do we threaten people with death? 'Power to the imagination,' what would that be like? 'Revolution in love.' Can you tell me what you mean by that? Do you want free love as against bourgeois marriage, or monogamy as against bourgeois promiscuity?"

  Jaromil asserted that the revolution would transform all aspects of life, including love and the family, or it would not be a revolution.

  "That might well be so," the plump young fellow admitted. "But it can be put much better: 'For a socialist politics, for a socialist family!' You see, and it's one of the Rude Pravo slogans. There was no need to rack your brains over it!"

  18

  Life is elsewhere, the students have written on the walls of the Sorbonne. Yes, he knows that very well, it is why he is leaving London for Ireland, where the people are rebelling. His name is Percy Bysshe Shelley, he is twenty years old, he is a poet, and he is bringing with him hundreds of copies of leaflets and proclamations that are to serve him as visas for entry into real life.

  Because real life is elsewhere. The students are tearing up the cobblestones, overturning cars, building barricades; their irruption into the world is beautiful and noisy, illuminated by flames and greeted by explosions of tear-gas grenades. How much more painful was the lot of Rimbaud, who dreamed about the barricades of the Paris Commune and never got to it from Charleville. But in 1968 thousands of Rimbauds have their own barricades, behind which they stand and refuse any compromise with the former masters of the world. The emancipation of mankind will be total, or it will not exist.

  But only a kilometer from there, on the other bank of the Seine, the former masters of the world continue to live their lives, and the din of the Latin Quarter reaches them as something far away Dream is reality, the students wrote on the walls, but it seems that the opposite was true: that reality (the barricades, the trees cut down, the red flags) was a dream.

  19

  But we never know at the present moment whether reality is a dream or a dream is reality.; the students who lined up with their placards at the university came gladly, but they also knew that they risked trouble if they stayed away. In Prague the year 1949 marked for Czech students a curious transition during which a dream was already no longer only a dream; their shouts of jubilation were still voluntary but already compulsory.

  The procession marched through the streets with Jaromil alongside it; he was responsible not only for the slogans inscribed on the streamers but also for the rhythmic shouting of his comrades; this time he no longer invented beautiful provocative aphorisms but merely copied into a notebook some slogans recommended by the central propaganda section. He shouted them out loudly, like a priest leading a procession, and his comrades repeated them after him.

  20

  The processions had already passed the reviewing stand in Wenceslas Square, improvised bands had appeared on the street corners, and blue-shirted young people were starting to dance. Everyone was fraternizing here with both friends and strangers, but Percy Shelley is unhappy, the poet Shelley is alone.

  He's been in Dublin for several weeks, he's passed out hundreds of leaflets, the police already know him well, but he hasn't succeeded in befriending a single Irish person. Life is elsewhere, or it is nowhere.

  If only there were barricades and the sound of gunfire! Jaromil thinks that formal processions are merely ephemeral imitations of great revolutionary demonstrations, that they lack substance, that they slip through your fingers.

  And suddenly he imagines the girl imprisoned in the cashier's cage, and he is assailed by a horrible longing; he sees himself breaking the store window with a hammer, pushing away the women shoppers, opening the cashier's cage, and carrying off the liberated dark-haired girl under the amazed eyes of the gawking onlookers.

  And then he imagines that they are walking side by side through crowded streets, lovingly pressed against each other. And all at once the dance whirling around them is no longer a dance but barricades yet again, we are in 1848 and in 1870 and in 1945, and we are in Paris, Warsaw, Budapest, Prague, and Vienna, and these yet again are the eternal crowds crossing through history, leaping from one barricade to another, and he leaps with them, holding the beloved woman by the hand. . . .

  He was feeling the young woman's warm hand in his palm when he suddenly saw him. The man was coming toward him, broad-shouldered and sturdy, and a young woman was walking at his side; she was not wearing a blue shirt like most of the girls who were dancing alongside the streetcar tracks; she was as elegant as a fashion-show sylph.

  The sturdy man was absentmindedly looking around and acknowledging peoples greetings; when he was a few steps away from Jaromil, their eyes met and in a sudden instant of confusion (and following the examp
le of the other people who had recognized and greeted the famous man) Jaromil nodded and the man greeted him in turn, but with an absent look (as we greet someone we don't know) and the woman gave him a distant nod.

  Ah, that woman was immensely beautiful! And she was completely real! And the girl from the cashier's cage and the bathtub, who until just a moment ago had been pressed against Jaromil, began to fade away in the radiant light cast by that real body, and then she vanished.

  He stood on the sidewalk in his ignominious solitude, turned around, and threw a look of hatred at the couple; yes, it was he, the "dear master," the recipient of the twenty telephone receivers.

  22

  Dusk was slowly falling on the city, and Jaromil wanted to meet the dark-haired cashier. He followed several women who looked like her from the back. He found it beautiful to devote himself completely to the fruitless pursuit of a woman lost in a multitude of human beings. Then he decided to pace up and down in front of the building he had once seen her enter. There was little chance of meeting her, but he didn't want to go home before Mama went to bed. (The family home was bearable only at night, when Mama was asleep and his father's photograph awakened.)

  And so he went back and forth on the deserted suburban street on which the flags and flowers of May Day had left no trace of gaiety. Lights began to go on in the building windows. Then a light went on in a basement window above sidewalk level. Inside he saw a girl who looked familiar!

  No, it wasn't the dark-haired cashier. It was her friend, the skinny redhead; she was on her way to the window to lower the shade.