Life Is Elsewhere

by Milan Kundera

  Isn't the victorious revolution's love for rhyme merely a chance infatuation? Probably not. Rhyme and rhythm possess magical power: the formless world enclosed in regular verse all at once becomes limpid, orderly, clear, and beautiful. If in a poem the word "death" is in the same spot as the sound "breath" echoing in the preceding line, death becomes a melodious element of order. And even if the poem is protesting against death, death is automatically justified, at least as the theme of a beautiful protest. Bones, roses, coffins, wounds—everything in a poem changes into a ballet, and the poet and the reader are the dancers in this ballet. The dancers, of course, cannot disagree with the dance. By means of a poem, man achieves his agreement with being, and rhyme and rhythm are the most violent way to gain agreement. Doesn't a revolution that has just triumphed need a violent affirmation of the new order, and therefore poetry filled with rhyme?

  "Join me in delirium!" Vitezslav Nezval cried out to his reader, and Baudelaire wrote: "One must always be drunk ... on wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish. ..." Lyricism is intoxication, and man drinks in order to merge more easily with the world. Revolution has no desire to be examined or analyzed, it only desires that the people merge with it; in this sense it is lyrical and in need of lyricism.

  The revolution, of course, had in mind poetry of a kind other than the poetry Jaromil used to write; at that time he was rapturously observing the quiet adventures and beautiful eccentricities of his own self; but now he emptied his soul as a hangar for the worlds noisy brass bands to enter; he had exchanged the beauty of singularities that he alone understood for the beauty of generalities that everyone understood.

  He passionately hoped to restore to favor the old beauties at which modern art (with its apostate's pride) had turned up its nose: sunsets, roses, dewy grass, the stars, darkness, a melody heard from afar, mama, and nostalgia; oh, how beautiful that world was, familiar and comprehensible! Jaromil was returning there with amazement and emotion, like a prodigal son returning after long years to the house he had abandoned.

  Oh, to be simple, totally simple, simple like a folk song, like a nursery rhyme, like a brook, like a little redhead!

  To be at the source of eternal beauties, to love the words "far away," "silver," "rainbow," "love," and even that much-despised little word "oh!"

  Jaromil was also fascinated by certain verbs: above all those that represent simple forward movement: "run," "walk," and especially "sail" and "fly." In a poem he wrote for Lenin's birthday, he threw an apple branch into a stream (this gesture charmed him because it was linked to old popular customs like throwing wreaths of flowers into the current), so that it would be borne on the water to Lenin's country; not a single river runs from Bohemia to Russia, but a poem is a magical territory where rivers change their course. In another poem he wrote that "some day the world will be free like the fragrance of firs that spans the mountain ranges." In another he spoke of the fragrance of jasmine being so powerful that it becomes an invisible sailing ship floating in the air; he imagined himself on the bridge of this fragrance and that he was sailing far, far away, away to Marseilles, where (as he had read in Rude Pravo) the workers he wished to join as a comrade and brother had just gone on strike.

  This is also why the most poetic instrument of motion, wings, appeared countless times in his poems: night was filled with a "silent beating of wings"; desire, sadness, even hatred, and of course time had wings.

  What was hidden in all these words was the desire for a boundless embrace, which seemed to recall Schiller's famous lines: "Seid umschlungen, Millionen! / Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!" This boundless embrace encompassed not only space but also time; the destina-tion of the flight was not only Marseilles on strike but also the future, that miraculous distant island.

  Previously the future had above all been a mystery to Jaromil; everything unknown was hidden there; that was why it at once attracted and frightened him; it was the contrary of certainty, the contrary of home (this is why in times of anxiety he dreamed about the love of old people, who were happy because they no longer had a future). But the revolution gave the future an opposite meaning: the future was no longer a mystery; a revolutionary knew it by heart; he knew it from brochures, books, lectures, propaganda speeches; it didn't frighten, on the contrary, it offered certainty within an uncertain present, so that a revolutionary rushed to it for refuge like a child to its mama.

  Jaromil wrote a poem about a Communist functionary asleep late at night on the couch in the secretariat, at the hour when "dawn is breaking on the thoughtful meeting" (at the time the idea of a Communist fighter was always expressed as a Communist at a meeting); the clang of the streetcar bell under the windows becomes in his dream a chiming of bells, the chiming of all the bells in the world announcing that there would be no more wars and that the globe belongs to the workers. He realizes that a miraculous leap has transported him to the distant future; he is somewhere in the countryside, and coming toward him on her tractor is a woman (on all the posters the woman of the future was depicted as a woman on a tractor) who recognizes him, with amazement, as a kind of man she has never seen before, a man of the past worn out by labor, a man who had sacrificed himself so that she would be able to work joyfully (and singing) in the fields. She descends from her machine to welcome him, saying: "This is your home, this is your world . . . ," and she wants to reward him (my God, how could this young woman reward an old militant worn out on the job?); at this moment the streetcar bells down in the street start clanging very loudly and the man sleeping on the narrow couch in a corner of the secretariat awakens. . . .

  Jaromil had already written quite a few new poems, but he wasn't satisfied, because only he and Mama had read them. He sent all of them to Rude Pravo, and he bought the newspaper every morning; one day he finally found five quatrains on the top right of page three, with his name in boldface under the title. That same day he handed a copy of Rude Pravo to the redhead and told her to look through it carefully; she examined the paper for a long time without finding anything remarkable (as a rule she paid no attention to poetry, so she paid no attention to the names of its authors), and in the end Jaromil had to point his finger at the poem.

  "I had no idea you were a poet," she said, looking into his eyes admiringly.

  Jaromil told her that he had been writing poetry for a very long time, and he took some typed poems out of his pocket.

  The redhead read them, and Jaromil told her he had stopped writing poetry some time ago, but that he had begun again after coming to know her. Meeting her was like meeting Poetry itself.

  "Really?" asked the girl, and when Jaromil nodded she embraced and kissed him.

  "What's extraordinary," Jaromil went on, "is that you're not only the queen of the poems I'm writing now but also of those that I wrote before I met you. When I saw you the first time, it seemed to me that my old poems had come back to life and turned into a woman."

  He gazed eagerly at her curious and incredulous face and began to tell her that several years ago he had written a long piece of poetic prose, a kind of fantastic story about a young man named Xavier. Written? Not really. It was rather that he had dreamed his adventures and wanted to write them down someday.

  Xavier lived in a competely different way from other people; his life was sleep; Xavier slept and had a dream; in that dream he fell asleep and had another dream and in that dream he slept again and had still another dream; he woke up from that dream and found himself in the preceding dream; he thus went from dream to dream and lived several successive lives; he lived in several lives and passed from one to the other. Wasn't it marvelous to live as Xavier lived? Not to be imprisoned in a single life? To be mortal, of course, and yet to have several lives?

  "Yes, it would be nice . . . ," said the redhead.

  And Jaromil told her that the day he first saw her in the store he had been dumbfounded because she looked exactly the way he had imagined Xavier's great love to look: a frail, redheaded woman, with a delicately freckled f
ace. . . .

  "I'm ugly!" said the redhead.

  "No! I love your freckles and your red hair! I love them because they're my home, my homeland, my old dream!"

  The redhead kissed Jaromil, and he went on: "Imagine that the whole story started like this: Xavier likes to walk through smoky suburban streets; he passes a basement window, stops, and has a reverie about a beautiful woman who perhaps lives behind that window. One day there is a light in that window and he sees a tender, frail, redheaded girl. He can't resist—he opens the shutters wide and jumps inside.

  "But you ran away from my window!" said the redhead, laughing.

  "Yes, I ran away," Jaromil admitted, "because I was afraid of having that same dream again! Do you know what it's like to find yourself suddenly in a situation you've already experienced in a dream? It's something so frightening that you want to escape!"

  "Yes," the redhead happily agreed.

  "So he jumps inside to get to the girl, but then her husband comes in, and Xavier locks him into a heavy oak wardrobe. The husband is there to this day, turned into a skeleton. And Xavier takes the woman far away, just as I'm going to take you."

  "You're my Xavier," whispered the redhead gratefully in Jaromil's ear, and she improvised variations on that name, turning it into Xavi, Xaxa, Xavipet, and she called him by all these diminutives and kissed him for a long, long time.

  3

  Among Jaromil's numerous visits to the redheaded girl's room, I wish to mention in particular the one when she was wearing a dress with a row of large white buttons all the way down its front. Jaromil began to unbutton them, and the girl burst out laughing because the buttons served only as decoration.

  "Wait, I'll undress myself," she said, and she raised her arms to reach the zipper at the back of her neck.

  Jaromil was irritated at having shown his ineptness, and at last understanding the way the garment was fastened, he quickly tried to nullify his failure.

  "No, no, I'll undress myself, let me do it!" said the girl, backing away from him and laughing.

  He couldn't keep insisting because he was afraid of seeming ridiculous, but it was utterly unpleasant to him that the girl wanted to undress herself. To his mind the difference between amorous undressing and ordinary undressing consisted precisely in the woman being undressed by the man.

  This idea had not been instilled in him by experience, but by literature and its suggestive phrases: "he knew how to disrobe a woman"; or "he impatiently tore off her dress." He could not imagine physical love without a prologue of confused and eager gestures to undo buttons, pull down zippers, lift up sweaters.

  He complained: "It's not as if you're at the doctor's, undressing yourself." But the girl had already taken off her dress and was wearing only her underwear.

  "At the doctor's? Why?"

  "Yes, you seem to me as if you're at the doctors."

  "Of course," said the girl. "It's just the way it is at the doctor's."

  She took off her bra and stood in front of Jaromil, thrusting her small breasts at him. "I have a sharp pain here, Doctor, next to my heart."

  Jaromil looked at her uncomprehendingly, and she said, by way of apology: "I'm sorry, Doctor, you're probably used to examining your patients lying down," and she lay down on the bed. "Please take a look! What's wrong with my heart?"

  Jaromil had no choice but to go along with the game; he leaned over the girl's chest and put the side of his head over her heart; he touched the soft fullness of her breast with his ear and heard a regular beat. He thought that the doctor probably touched the redhead's breasts like this when he listened to the sounds in her chest behind the closed, mysterious doors of the examining room. He raised his head, looked at the naked girl, and felt a sharp pain, for he was seeing her just as another man, the doctor, saw her. He quickly placed both his hands on the redhead's chest (not the doctor's way but his own) so as to put an end to this painful game.

  The redhead complained: "Now, now, Doctor, what are you doing? You're not allowed to do that! That's not part of the examination!" Jaromil flared up: he saw what his girlfriend's face expressed when a stranger's hands were touching her; he saw that she was complaining frivolously, and he wanted to hit her; but at that very moment he realized that he had become aroused, and he tore off the girl's underpants and entered her.

  His arousal was so great that Jaromil's jealous rage quickly weakened, all the more when he heard the girl's moans (that splendid homage) and the words that had become a perpetual part of their intimate moments: "Xavi, Xaxa, Xavipet!"

  Afterward he lay quietly beside her, tenderly kissed her on the shoulder, and felt good. But that scatterbrain was incapable of being satisfied with a beautiful moment., a beautiful moment was meaningful to him only if it was an emissary from a beautiful eternity; a beautiful moment that had fallen from a tarnished eternity was only a lie to him. He wanted therefore to be sure that their eternity was unblemished, and he asked, more pleadingly than aggressively: "Tell me that it's just a bad joke, that stuff with the doctor."

  "Of course it is!" said the girl; what else could she say to such a stupid question? But Jaromil wasn't satisfied with that "Of course it is"; he went on:

  "I couldn't bear it if anyone else's hands touched you. I couldn't bear it," and he caressed the girl's meager breasts as if his entire happiness depended on their inviolability.

  The girl started to laugh (quite innocently): "But what do you want me to do when I get sick?"

  Jaromil knew that it was hard to avoid medical examinations and that his position was indefensible; but he also knew that if someone else's hands were to touch the girl's breasts, his whole world would crumble. And so he repeated:

  "I couldn't bear it, do you understand, 1 couldn't bear it."

  "Then what should I do if I'm sick?"

  He said softly and reproachfully: "You could find a woman doctor."

  "As if I have a choice! You know how it works," she answered, indignantly this time, "everybody is assigned a doctor! Don't you know what socialist medicine is? You have no choice and you have to obey! Take gynecological consultations, for instance. ..."

  Jaromil felt his heart skip a beat, but he said calmly: "Is something wrong with you?"

  "No, it's just preventive medicine. Because of cancer. It's compulsory."

  "Keep quiet, I don't want to hear about it," said Jaromil, and put his hand over her mouth; his gesture was so fierce that it nearly frightened him, for the redhead could think of it as a blow and become angry; but the girl's eyes looked at him so humbly that Jaromil felt no need to moderate the involuntary roughness of his gesture; he took pleasure in it, and he said:

  "I want you to know that if anyone ever touches you, I'll never touch you again."

  He was still holding his hand over the girl's mouth; it was the first time he had ever touched a woman roughly, and he found it intoxicating; he then put his hands around her throat, as though he were choking her; he felt the fragility of her neck under his fingers, and he thought that he only had to clench them in order to strangle her.

  "I'll strangle you if anyone ever touches you," he said, and he still had his hands around the girl's throat; he was thrilled to feel the girl's possible nonexistence in this contact; he thought that, at least at this moment, the redhead really belonged to him, and a sensation of elated power intoxicated him, a sensation so beautiful that he began again to make love.

  During the lovemaking he squeezed her roughly several times, put his hand on her neck (he thought it would be beautiful to strangle a beloved while making love), and also bit her several times.

  Afterward they lay side by side, but the lovemaking had probably not lasted long enough to dissipate the young man's anger; the redhead, unstrangled, alive, was lying beside him, a naked body that went to gynecological consultations.

  She caressed his hand: "Don't be angry with me."

  "I'm telling you that a body other men have touched disgusts me."

  The girl realized that Jar
omil was serious; she said insistently: "Dammit, it was only a joke!"

  "It was no joke! It was the truth."

  "It wasn't the truth."

  "Sure it was! It was the truth, and I know there's nothing to be done about it. Gynecological consultations are compulsory, and you have to go. I'm not blaming you. But a body other men touch is repellent to me. I can't help it, that's how it is."

  "I swear to you there's no truth to it! I've never been sick except when I was a child. I never go to the doctor. I was summoned to a gynecological consultation, but I threw away the notification. I never went."

  "I don't believe you."

  It was an effort to convince him.

  "And what will you do if they summon you again?"

  "Don't worry, they're totally disorganized."

  He believed her, but his bitterness couldn't be eased by practical arguments; it wasn't only a matter of medical examinations; the root of the problem was that she eluded him, that she was not totally his.

  "I love you so much," she said, but he placed no confidence in that brief moment; he wanted eternity; he wanted at least the small eternity of the redheaded girl's life, and he knew that he didn't have it: he recalled that he had not known her as a virgin.

  "I can't bear the idea that someone else is going to touch you and that someone else has already touched you," he said.

  "No one's going to touch me."

  "But someone's already touched you. And that disgusts me."

  She put her arms around him.

  He pushed her away.

  "How many men have you had before me?"

  "Just one."

  "Don't lie!"

  "I swear there's only been one."

  "Did you love him?"

  She shook her head.

  "How could you go to bed with someone you didn't love?"

  "Don't torture me," she said.

  "Answer me! How could you do that?"

  "Don't torture me. I didn't love him, and it was horrible."