Life Is Elsewhere

by Milan Kundera

  He couldn't bear the bitterness of this disappointment, and he realized that he had been seen; he blushed and he did just what he did the day the sad, beautiful maid looked up from the bathtub toward the keyhole:

  He ran away.

  23

  It was six o'clock in the evening on May 2, 1949; the salesgirls hurriedly left the store, and something unexpected happened: the redhead left alone.

  He tried to hide around the corner, but it was too late. The redhead saw him and came toward him: "Don't you know, sir, that it's not polite to spy on people through the window in the evening?'

  He blushed and tried to cut the conversation short; he was afraid that the presence of the redhead might again spoil his chances when her dark-haired friend left the store. But the redhead was very talkative and didn't intend to leave Jaromil; she even suggested that he accompany her home (it's much more appropriate, she said, to accompany a girl home than to watch her through the window).

  Jaromil looked desperately at the door of the store. "Where's your friend?" he finally asked.

  "Wake up. She's been gone for days.''

  They walked together to the building, and Jaromil learned that the two girls had come from the country, got work in the store, and shared the room; but the dark-haired girl had left Prague to get married.

  When they stopped in front of the building, the girl said: "Do you want to come in for a moment?"

  Surprised and confused, he went into her small room. And then, without knowing how it happened, they were embracing and kissing, and a moment later they were sitting on the bed.

  It was all so quick and simple! Without allowing him the time to think that he was about to undertake a difficult and decisive task, the redhead put her hand between his legs, and he experienced wild joy, for his body reacted in the most normal way.

  24

  "You're terrific, you're terrific," the redhead whispered into his ear as he was lying beside her, his head buried in the pillow; he was filled with fantastic joy; after a moment of silence he heard: "How many women have you had before me?"

  He shrugged his shoulders and smiled enigmatically.

  "You won't say?"

  "Guess."

  "I'd say between five and ten," she said knowledge-ably.

  He was filled with comforting pride; it seemed to him that he had just made love not only with her but also with the five or ten other women she attributed to him. She not only relieved him of his virginity, she suddenly brought him far into his adulthood.

  He looked at her gratefully, and her nakedness filled him with enthusiasm. How could he have considered her unattractive? Weren't there two entirely unquestionable breasts on her chest and an entirely unquestionable cluster of hair on her lower belly?

  "You're a hundred times more beautiful naked than dressed," he told her, and he went on praising her beauty.

  "Have you wanted me for a long time?" she asked him.

  "Yes, you know very well I wanted you."

  "Yes, I know it. I noticed it when you came to the store. I know that you waited for me outside."

  "Yes."

  "You didn't dare talk to me, because I was never alone. But I knew that someday you'd be here with me. Because I wanted you too."

  25

  He looked at the girl as her last words died away; yes, that's how it was; during all that time when he was tormented by solitude, when he was desperately taking part in meetings and processions, when he kept running on and on, his life as an adult had already been prepared for him here: this basement room with walls stained by dampness had been patiently waiting for him, this room and this ordinary woman whose body had finally linked him in a completely physical way to the crowd.

  The more I make love, the more I want to make a revolution—the more I make a revolution, the more I want to make love, a Sorbonne wall proclaims, and Jaromil entered the redhead's body a second time. Adulthood is total, or it doesn't exist. This time he made love to her long and marvelously.

  And Percy Bysshe Shelley, who like Jaromil had a girlish face and looked younger than his age, ran through the streets of Dublin, he ran on and on because he knew that life was elsewhere. And Rimbaud, too, kept running endlessly, to Stuttgart, to Milan, to Marseilles, to Aden, to Harar, and then back to Marseilles, but by then he had only one leg, and it is hard to run on one leg.

  Again he slid out of the girl's body, and as he lay stretched out beside her, it seemed to him that he was not resting after two acts of love but after months of running.

  PART FIVE

  The Poet Is Jealous

  1

  While Jaromil ran, the world changed; his uncle, who thought that Voltaire was the inventor of volts, was falsely accused of fraud (like thousands of other shopkeepers at that time), his two shops were confiscated (from then on they belonged to the state), and he was sent to prison for several years; his wife and son were expelled from Prague as class enemies. They left the villa in icy silence, determined never to forgive Mama, whose son had sided with the family's enemies.

  A family to whom the local authorities had assigned the ground-floor rooms moved into the villa. They came from miserable lodgings in a converted basement and considered it unjust for anyone to have owned such a spacious and pleasant villa; they thought that they hadn't come to the villa merely to live in it but to redress a long-standing historical injustice. Without asking for permission, they took over the garden, and they demanded that Mama have the peeling plaster of the walls repaired to prevent their children from being hurt when they played outside.

  Grandmama had aged; she lost her memory entirely, and one fine day (almost unnoticed) she turned into smoke at the crematorium.

  It's no surprise that Mama found it hard to bear seeing her son escape her; he was studying subjects she disliked, and he had stopped showing her his poems, which she had become used to reading regularly. When she tried to open his drawer she found it locked; it was like a slap in the face; Jaromil suspected her of rummaging through his things! But when she opened it with an extra key Jaromil didn't know about, she found no new entries in his diary and no new poems. Then, seeing the photo of her uniformed husband on the wall of the little room, she recalled that long ago she had implored the statuette of Apollo to erase her husband's features from the fruit of her womb. Oh, no—did she still have to contend with her deceased husband over her son?

  About a week after the evening at the end of the preceding part, when we left Jaromil in the redhead's bed, Mama again opened his desk drawer. She found in his diary several laconic remarks she didn't understand, but she also discovered something much more important: new poems. Apollo's lyre, she reflected, had again prevailed over her husband's uniform, and she quietly rejoiced.

  After reading the poems she was still more favorably impressed, because she really liked them (actually for the very first time!); they rhymed (deep down, Mama always thought that an unrhymed poem was no poem at all) and, moreover, they were easily understandable and full of pretty words; there were no old people, no bodies rotting in the earth, no sagging bellies or pus at the corners of eyes; there were instead the names of flowers, the sky, clouds, and several times (something completely new in Jaromil's poems!) the word "mama."

  Then Jaromil came home; when she heard his steps on the stairs, all the years of suffering rose to her eyes, and she couldn't hold back a sob.

  "Mama, what's the matter—my God, what's wrong?" he asked, and she heard a tenderness in his voice that she had not sensed in a long time.

  "Nothing, Jaromil, nothing," she answered, encouraged to sob all the more by her son's concern. Once again her tears were of several kinds: tears of sorrow, because she had been abandoned; tears of reproach, because her son had neglected her; tears of hope, because he might (by means of the new poems' melodious phrases) finally come back to her; tears of anger, because he was just standing there awkwardly, incapable even of stroking her hair; tears of deceit, expected to stir him and keep him near her.

&nb
sp; After a moment of embarrassment, he ended up taking her hand; that was beautiful; Mama stopped crying, and words began to flow from her as generously as tears had moments before; she talked about everything that tormented her: her widowhood, her loneliness, the tenants trying to drive her out of her own house, her sister closing the door on her ("because of you, Jaromil!"), and then the main thing: the only human being in the world she had in this horrible loneliness turned his back on her.

  "But that's not true, I'm not turning my back on you!"

  She could not accept such easy assurances, and she laughed bitterly; as for not turning his back, he came home late at night; whole days went by without a word exchanged between them; and when they did manage to talk, she knew very well that he wasn't listening but thinking of something else. Yes, he treated her like a stranger.

  "No, Mama, come on!"

  Again she laughed bitterly. He didn't treat her like a stranger? She'd have to show him proof! She'd have to tell him what hurt her? She'd always respected his privacy; even when he was a little boy she had struggled with everyone to get him his own room; and now, what an insult! Jaromil couldn't imagine what she felt the day she learned (completely by chance, while dusting the furniture in his room) that he locked his desk drawers! Why did he lock them? Did he really think that she was going to stick her nose into his business like a busybody?

  "Mama, that's a misunderstanding! I don't use that drawer anymore! If it's locked it's by chance!"

  Mama knew that her son was lying, but that wasn't important; much more important than the lying words was the humility in his voice, which seemed to be offering reconciliation. "I want to believe you, Jaromil," she said, and she squeezed his hand.

  As he looked at her, she became conscious of her teary face, and she left for the bathroom, where she was horrified by her reflection in the mirror; her tear-stained face seemed hideous to her; she even reproached herself for still wearing the gray dress she had worn to the office. She quickly washed her face with cold water, put on a pink dressing gown, went to the kitchen, and came back with a bottle of wine. Then she began to talk effusively, saying that they should again trust each other, because they had no one else in this sad world. She talked on this theme for a long time, and the look in Jaromil's eyes seemed friendly and approving. She thus allowed herself to say that she had no doubt that Jaromil, now a university student, certainly had his personal secrets, which she respected; she only hoped that any woman in Jaromil's life would not disrupt their relationship.

  Jaromil listened patiently and with understanding. He had avoided Mama for some time because his sorrow required solitude and murkiness. But since his landing on the sunny shore of the redhead's body, he had been longing for peace and light; disagreement with Mama troubled him. Feelings apart, there was also a more practical consideration: the redhead had a room of her own while Jaromil lived with Mama, and if he wanted to lead a personal life he could do so only through his girl's independence. He bitterly resented this inequality, and he was glad that Mama was now sitting beside him in a pink dressing gown and with a glass of wine, giving him the impression of a pleasant young woman with whom he could come to an amicable agreement regarding his rights.

  He told her that he had nothing to hide from her (Mama felt her throat tighten), and he started to talk about the redheaded girl. He didn't say, of course, that Mama already knew her by sight from the store where she shopped, but he did tell her that the girl was eighteen and that she was not a student but a simple girl (he said this almost aggressively), earning her living with her own hands.

  Mama poured some more wine and thought that things were taking a turn for the better. The picture of the girl that her son, his tongue loosened, was drawing for her allayed her anxiety: the girl was very young (the horrifying vision of a depraved older woman happily vanished), she wasn't overeducated (Mama thus had no fear of the strength of her influence), and finally Jaromil had so emphasized, in a nearly suspect manner, the virtues of her simplicity and kindness that she concluded the girl was probably not much of a beauty (enabling Mama to assume, to her secret satisfaction, that her son's infatuation would not last very long).

  Jaromil perceived that Mama didn't disapprove of the person he had described, and this made him happy; he imagined sitting at the same table with Mama and the redhead, with the angel of his childhood and the angel of his adulthood; that seemed to him as beautiful as peace; peace between home and the world; peace beneath the wings of two angels.

  And so, after a long break, mother and son again experienced a happy intimacy. They talked for a long while, but jaromil never lost sight of his modest practical objective: the right to bring his girlfriend to his room whenever and for as long as he liked; for he understood that the only true adult is someone who is the unrestrained master of a closed-off space where he can do what he wishes without being observed and watched over by anyone. He said this (cautiously and in a roundabout way) to Mama; he would feel more at home if he could consider himself his own master there.

  Despite the wine haze, Mama was still the vigilant tigress: "Are you saying, Jaromil, that you're not your own master here?''

  Jaromil replied that he liked his home very much but that he wanted the right to bring anyone here, to have the same independence here that the redhead had from her landlady.

  Mama realized that Jaromil was offering her a great opportunity; she too had several admirers whom she had been compelled to turn away because she feared Jaromil's disapproval. Couldn't she, with a bit of cleverness, exchange Jaromil's freedom for a bit of freedom for herself?

  But the thought that Jaromil could bring a woman into his childhood room filled her with insurmountable disgust: "You have to understand that there's a difference between a mother and a landlady," she said, offended, and at the same moment she realized that she was deliberately preventing herself from living the life of a woman again. She understood that the disgust aroused in her by her son's carnal life was stronger than her body's desire to live its own life, and she was terrified by this discovery.

  Jaromil, stubbornly pursuing his objective, didn't perceive Mama's state of mind and continued to pursue a lost cause, raising further useless arguments. After a while he noticed tears running down Mama's face. It frightened him that he had offended the angel of his childhood, and he fell silent. In the mirror of Mama's tears he suddenly saw his demand for independence as insolence, shamelessness, even obscene impudence.

  Mama was in despair: she saw the abyss reopening between her and her son. She had gained nothing, she was going to lose everything once more! Thinking quickly, she wondered what she could do to prevent a complete break in the precious thread of understanding between her and her son; she took his hand, and in tears, said:

  "Jaromil, please don't be angry! I'm so unhappy to see how much you've changed. You've changed so much recently."

  "How have I changed? I haven't changed at all. Mama."

  "Yes, you've changed. And I'm going to tell you what hurts me most. It's that you've stopped writing poetry. You wrote such beautiful poems, and it hurts me that you're not writing them anymore."

  Jaromil was about to answer, but she didn't let him speak: "Believe your mama. I know something about it; you have immense talent; it's your vocation; you mustn't abandon it: you're a poet, Jaromil, you're a poet, and it makes me ill to see that you've forgotten it."

  Jaromil heard Mama's words with near enthusiasm. It was true, the angel of his childhood understood him better than anyone else! Wasn't he himself also tormented by the thought that he was no longer writing?

  "Mama, I've started writing poetry again, I've writ-ten it! I'll show it to you!" "That's not true, Jaromil," Mama replied, shaking her head sadly. "Don't try to mislead me, I know very well that you're not writing."

  "But I am! I'm writing! I'm writing!" Jaromil shouted, and he rushed over to his room, opened his drawer, and returned with his poems.

  Mama read the same poems she had read a few hours earli
er, kneeling in front of Jaromil's desk:

  "Oh, Jaromil, these are such beautiful poems! You've made great progress, great progress. You're a poet, and I'm so happy ..."

  2

  Everything seemed to indicate that Jaromil's immense desire for the new (the religion of the New) had merely been the desire for inconceivable, still unknown, coition, a desire projected into a foggy distance; the first time he landed on the shore of the redheads body, the strange idea came to him that he finally knew what it meant to be absolutely modern; to be absolutely modern meant to lie on the shore of the redheads body.

  He was so happy and full of enthusiasm at this moment that he wanted to recite poetry to the girl; he thought about the poems he knew by heart (his own and other poets'), but he realized (with some amazement) that the redhead wouldn't like any of them, and he concluded that the only poems that were absolutely modern were those that the redhead, a girl of the crowd, could understand and appreciate.

  It was like a sudden illumination: Why stomp on the throat of his own song? Why give up poetry for the sake of the revolution? Now that he had landed on the shore of real life (by "real life" he was referring to the density created by the fusion of the crowd, physical love, and revolutionary slogans), all he had to do was give himself up entirely to this life and become its violin.

  He felt full of poetry and tried to write a poem the redheaded girl would like. That wasn't so simple; until now he had written unrhymed verse, and he now came up against the technical difficulties of regular verse, for it was certain that the redhead regarded a poem as something that rhymed. Besides, the victorious revolution was of the same opinion; let's recall that in those days no free verse was published; modern poetry as a whole was denounced as a product of the putrefying bourgeoisie, and free verse was the most obvious sign of the putrefaction of poetry.