Life Is Elsewhere

by Milan Kundera

  But in order to dress himself in his portrait and enter the world behind this mask, the portrait must be exhibited and the poem published. Several of Jaromirs poems had already appeared in Rude Pravo, but he was still dissatisfied. In the letters accompanying the poems he addressed the editor, whom he didn't know, familiarly, hoping to induce an answer and to meet with him. But (it was almost humiliating) even after the poems were published, no literary people were interested in meeting him personally and welcoming him among them; the editor never answered.

  Among his fellow university students his poems also didn't arouse the reaction he had counted on. If he had belonged to the elite of contemporary poets who gave public readings and whose photographs shone forth in illustrated magazines, he would perhaps have become a curiosity for the students in his class. But some poems buried in the pages of a newspaper barely held anyone's attention for more than a minute or two, and in the eyes of his fellow students, who were heading toward political or diplomatic careers, Jaromil had become a person uninterestingly odd rather than oddly interesting.

  And talk about Jaromil's infinite longing for glory! He longed for it like all poets. "O glory! O mighty deity! Ah, may your great name inspire me and my verse gain you," Victor Hugo implored. "I am a poet, I am a great poet, and one day I shall be loved by the whole world, I must tell myself this, it is how I must pray at the foot of my unfinished mausoleum," Jiri Orten consoled himself with the thought of his future glory.

  An obsessive desire for admiration is not only a weakness added on to a lyric poet's talent (as it might be regarded in, for example, a mathematician or an architect) but is also part of the very essence of poetic talent, it is the distinctive mark of a lyric poet: for the poet is the one who offers the world his self-portrait in the hope that his face, projected on the screen of his poems, will be loved and worshipped.

  "My soul is an exotic flower with a rare and hypersensitive fragrance. I have great talent, perhaps also genius," Jiri Wolker wrote in his diary, and Jaromil, disgusted by the editor's silence, selected some poems and sent them to the most prominent literary monthly. What happiness! Two weeks later he received an answer: his poems were considered interesting, and he was asked to visit the magazine's office. He prepared for this meeting as carefully as he used to prepare for his dates with girls. He decided that he was going to present himself, in the deepest sense of the term, to the editors, and he tried to define who exactly he was, who he was as a poet, who he was as a man, what his plans were, where he came from, what he had overcome, what he loved, what he hated. Finally he picked up pencil and paper and wrote down the essentials of his positions, opinions, stages of development. He filled several pages, and then one day he knocked on the door and entered.

  A thin little bespectacled man sitting at a desk asked him what he wanted. Jaromil gave his name. The editor once again asked him what he wanted. Jaromil once again (more distinctly and loudly) gave his name. The editor said he was glad to meet Jaromil, but that he would like to know what he wanted. Jaromil said that he had sent some poems to the magazine and that he had received a letter inviting him to come for a visit. The editor said that his colleague who dealt with poetry was out at the moment. Jaromil said that he was very sorry to hear that because he wanted to know when his poems would appear.

  The editor lost his patience, got up from his chair, took Jaromil by the arm, and led him toward a big cabinet. He opened it and showed him piles of paper stacked on the shelves: "My dear comrade, in an average day we receive poems from a dozen new contributors. How many is that per year?"

  "I can't figure it out in my head," said Jaromil with embarrassment when the editor insisted he guess.

  "It comes to 4,380 new poets per year. Would you like to go abroad?"

  "Why not?" said Jaromil.

  "Then keep on writing," said the editor. "I'm certain that sooner or later we're going to be exporting poets. Other countries export technicians, engineers, wheat, or coal, but our main resource is lyrical poets. Czech lyrical poets are going to establish lyrical poetry in developing countries. In exchange for our lyrical poets we'll get coconuts and bananas."

  A few days later Mama told Jaromil that the school janitor's son had come asking for him. "He said that you should go see him at the Police Building. And he asked me to congratulate you on your poems."

  Jaromil blushed with pleasure: "He really said that?"

  "Yes. As he was leaving he said: 'Tell him that I congratulate him on his poems. Don't forget.'"

  "That makes me very happy, yes, very happy," said Jaromil with particular insistence. "It's for people like him that I write my poems. I don't write for editors. A carpenter doesn't make chairs for other carpenters but for people."

  And so one day he went into the huge National Police Building, gave his name to an armed guard, waited in the corridor a while, and shook hands with his old classmate, who had come downstairs to greet him warmly. When they arrived at his office, the janitor's son repeated for the fourth time: "Old pal, I didn't know I went to school with a famous man. I kept saying to myself, maybe it's him or maybe it isn't, but finally I told myself that it's not such a common name."

  Then he led Jaromil down the corridor to a big bulletin board on which were tacked a number of photographs (policemen training with dogs, with weapons, with a parachute), two circulars, and in the middle of it all a newspaper clipping of a poem by Jaromil; the clipping was nicely outlined in red pencil and seemed to be presiding over the whole board.

  "What do you say?'' asked the janitor's son, and Jaromil didn't say anything, but he was happy; it was the first time he had ever seen one of his poems live its own life, independent of him.

  The janitor's son took him by the arm and led him back to his office. "See, you probably didn't think policemen read poetry," he said, laughing.

  "Why not?" said Jaromil, who was very impressed by the idea that his verse was being read not by old maids but by men who wore revolvers on their behinds. "Why not? There's a big difference between policemen nowadays and the hirelings of the bourgeois republic."

  "You probably think cops and poetry don't go together, but that's not so," the j anitor's son went on, pursuing his idea.

  Jaromil, too, pursued his idea: "Besides, poets nowadays aren't the way they used to be. They aren't spoiled little girls anymore."

  The janitor's son continued pursuing the thread of his idea: "It's just because our job is so tough—you can't imagine how tough—that we sometimes need something delicate. Without it we wouldn't be able to bear what we have to do here.''

  Then he suggested (he was just going off duty) that they go across the street for a couple of beers. "Old pal, it's no joke working here every day,'' he went on, a beer stein in his hand. "Do you remember what I told you last time about that Jew? He's been locked up. He was scum."

  Jaromil of course didn't know that the dark-haired fellow who had led the Marxist youth circle had been arrested; he vaguely suspected that there had been arrests, but he didn t know that people had been arrested by the thousands, Communists among them, that they were tortured, and that their crimes were mostly imaginary; he therefore reacted to the news merely with a simple motion of surprise that expressed no opinion but a bit of astonishment and compassion of the kind that caused the janitor's son to assert vigorously: "In these matters there's no room for sentimentality."

  Jaromil was frightened by the thought that the janitor's son was again eluding him, was again way ahead of him. "Don't be surprised that I feel sorry for him. It's normal. But you're right, sentimentality could cost us dearly."

  "Very dearly," said the janitor's son.

  "None of us wants to be cruel," said Jaromil.

  "Certainly not," the janitor's son agreed.

  "But we'd be committing the greatest cruelty if we didn't have the courage to be cruel toward the cruel," said Jaromil.

  "That's right," the janitor's son agreed.

  "No freedom for freedom's enemies. It's cruel, I kn
ow, but that's how it has to be."

  "It has to," the janitor's son agreed. "I could tell you a lot about that, but I can't and I shouldn't tell you anything. It's all secret, my friend. I can't even talk to my wife about what I do here."

  "I know," said Jaromil, "I understand," and once again he envied his old classmate's manly job, his secrecy, and his wife, and also that he had to keep secrets from her and that she had to accept this; he envied his real life, whose cruel beauty (and beautiful cruelty) always outstripped him (he didn't at all understand why they arrested the darkhaired man, he only knew that it had to be done), he envied his real life, which he himself had not yet entered.

  While Jaromil was musing enviously, the janitors son gazed deep into his eyes (his lips were slightly open and smiling stupidly) and began to recite the poem he had tacked to the bulletin board; he knew the whole poem by heart and didn't make a single mistake. Not knowing how to react (his old friend never took his eyes off him), Jaromil blushed (aware of the ludicrous naivete of his old friend's performance), but the happy pride he felt was infinitely stronger than his embarrassment: the janitor's son knew and loved his poem! His poems had thus entered the world of men instead of him, ahead of him, as if they were his emissaries, his advance party! His eyes misted over with tears of blissful self-intoxication; ashamed, he lowered his head.

  The janitor's son finished his recitation, still looking into Jaromil's eyes; then he told him that a police academy situated at a big, beautiful villa outside Prague, where young policemen took an annual course, occasionally invited interesting people to address the trainees. "We'd like to invite some poets one Sunday. For a big poetry evening."

  They had another beer, and Jaromil said: "It's really good that the police in particular is organizing a poetry evening."

  "Why not the police? Why not?"

  "Of course, why not?" said Jaromil. "The police and poetry maybe go together better than certain people think."

  "Why shouldn't they go together?" said the janitor's son.

  "Why not?" said Jaromil.

  "Yes, why not?" said the janitor's son, and he declared that he would like to see Jaromil among the invited poets.

  Jaromil demurred, but in the end he happily accepted. Well, if literature had hesitated to offer to his verse its fragile (puny) hand, life itself now offered to it its (rough and firm) hand.

  6

  Let's look for a moment longer at Jaromil sitting with his beer stein across the table from the janitor's son; in the distance behind him is the closed world of his childhood, and before him, embodied in his old classmate, is the world of action, an alien world he fears and desperately longs for.

  This scene expresses the basic situation of immaturity; lyricism is an attempt to face that situation: the individual expelled from the protected enclosure of childhood wishes to enter the world, but at the same time, because he is frightened of it, he fashions an artificial replacement world out of his own verse. He makes his poems revolve around him like the planets around the sun; he becomes the center of a small universe in which nothing is alien, in which he feels as much at home as a child inside its mother, for everything here is fashioned only from the substance of his soul. Here he can accomplish everything that is so difficult "outside"; here he can, like the student Wolker, march with a proletarian crowd to make a revolution and, like the virginal Rimbaud, lash his "little girlfriends" because that crowd and those girlfriends are not fashioned out of the hostile substance of an alien world but out of the substance of his own dreams, and they are thus he himself and do not shatter the unity of the universe he has constructed for himself.

  Perhaps you know the beautiful poem by Jiri Orten about the child who was happy inside its mother's body and experienced his birth as a terrible death, "a death filled with light and frightening faces," and who wanted to go back, back inside its mother, back "into the very sweet fragrance."

  In an immature young man, the yearning long persists for the safety and unity of the universe that he alone completely filled inside his mother, and he is anxious about (or angered by) the relativized adult world in which he is now engulfed like a droplet in an ocean of otherness. That is why young people are passionate monists, emissaries of the absolute; that is why the poet weaves the private universe of his poems; that is why the young revolutionary demands a radically new world forged from a single clear idea; that is why he cannot allow compromise, either in love or in politics; the rebellious student proclaims his "all or nothing" throughout history, and twenty-year-old Victor Hugo is enraged when he sees his fiancee Adele Foucher raise her skirt over a muddy sidewalk, exposing her ankle. "It seems to me that modesty is more precious than a dress," he reproaches her in a harsh letter, and he threatens: "Pay heed to my words, if you don't want me to risk slapping the first insolent fellow who dares to turn toward you!"

  The world of adults, on hearing this pathetic threat, bursts out laughing. The poet is wounded by the betrayal of the beloved's ankle and by the laughter of the crowd, and the drama of poetry and the world begins.

  The world of adults knows perfectly well that the absolute is an illusion, that nothing human is either great or eternal, and that it is perfectly normal for a sister and brother to sleep in the same room; but Jaromil is in torment! The redhead had announced that her brother Jan was coming to Prague and would be staying with her for a week; she even asked him not to come to her place during that time. That was too much for him, and he complained loudly: he couldn't be expected to give up his girlfriend for a whole week because some character (he called him that with scornful arrogance) was turning up!

  "Why are you blaming me?" the readhead retorted. "I'm younger than you, but were always seeing each other at my place. We can't ever see each other at your place!"

  Jaromil knew that the redhead was right, and his bitterness increased; once more he had been made aware of the humiliation of his lack of independence, and, blinded by anger, he announced to Mama that very day (with unprecedented firmness) that he was going to bring his girlfriend to the house because he couldn't be alone with her anywhere else.

  How they resemble each other, mother and son! Both are equally bewitched by nostalgia for the monistic paradise of unity and harmony: he wants to go toward the "sweet fragrance" of the maternal womb, and she wants to be that "sweet fragrance." While her son was growing up, she wanted to enfold him in an ethereal embrace; she espoused all his opinions; she admired modern art, she proclaimed herself a Communist, she had faith in her son's glory, she was indignant about the hypocrisy of professors who said one thing one day and another the next; she wanted always to surround him like the sky, she wanted always to be of the same substance as he.

  How could she, an apostle of harmonious unity, accept the alien substance of another woman?

  Jaromil saw the opposition in her face, and he became inflexible. Yes, he wanted to return into the "sweet fragrance," he was looking for the old maternal universe, but he had long since stopped looking for it in his mama; in the search for the lost mama it was Mama who hampered him most.

  She realized that her son would not give in, and she yielded; Jaromil found himself for the first time alone in his room with the redhead, and it would certainly have been good if both of them hadn't been so nervous; Mama had gone to the movies, but she was really with them the whole time; they felt that she was listening to them; they talked more softly than usual; when Jaromil tried to take the redhead in his arms, he found her body cold, and he realized that he'd better not insist; and so instead of enjoying all the pleasures, they only chatted with embarrassment about this and that, always with an eye on the clock that announced Mama's approaching return; it was actually impossible to leave Jaromil's room without going through hers, and the redhead definitely didn't want to encounter her; so she left half an hour before Mama returned, leaving Jaromil in a very bad mood.

  Far from discouraging him, this setback made him still more determined. He realized that his position in the house was int
olerable; he wasn't living at his place but at his mother's. This observation aroused stubborn resistance in him; he invited his girlfriend once again, and this time he greeted her with cheerful chattiness, by which he was trying to overcome the anxiety that had paralyzed them the first time. He even had a bottle of wine on the table, and since they weren't used to alcohol they were soon in a state of mind in which they succeeded in forgetting Mama's omnipresent shadow.

  For a whole week she came home late in the evening, as Jaromil had hoped, even later than he had hoped. She was away from the house even on days when he hadn't asked her to be. It was neither goodwill nor a sensibly pondered concession on her part; it was a demonstration. By returning late she was trying to expose the brutality of her son by example, she was trying to show that her son behaved as if he were the master of a house in which she was merely tolerated and in which she didn't even have the right to sit in a chair and read in her room when she came home tired from work.

  During those long afternoons and evenings when she was out of the house, she unfortunately had not a single person to visit because the colleague who had once courted her had long since tired of his futile insistence, and so she went to the movies and to the theater, she tried (with little success) to take up again with some half-forgotten friends, and with perverse pleasure she entered into the bitter emotions of a woman who, having lost her parents and her husband, was being expelled from her home by her own son. She sat in a dark theater watching two strangers kissing on the distant screen, and tears ran down her cheeks.

  One day she came home a bit earlier than usual, ready to show a wounded face and to ignore her son's greeting. She had barely closed the door behind her after entering her room when the blood rushed to her head; from JarormTs room, barely a few meters away, she heard the panting of her son and, mingling with it, female moans.