Life Is Elsewhere

by Milan Kundera

  Once again Jaromil came out of the Police Building and into a frosty, sunny morning; once again he breathed the cold air and felt big and filled with his destiny. But it wasn't the same as it was two days before. Because now he reflected for the first time that his act had caused him to enter tragedy.

  Yes, that is what he told himself, word for word, as he descended the broad steps: I am entering tragedy. He kept hearing the jovial and threatening "We're going to give them a good grilling," and these words stirred his imagination; he realized that his girl was now in the hands of strange men, that she was at their mercy, that she was in danger, and that interrogation lasting several days was no small matter; he recalled what his old classmate had told him about the dark-haired Jew and about the grimness of police work. All these ideas and images filled him with a kind of sweet, fragrant, and noble substance, so that it seemed to him that he was growing bigger, that he was walking through the streets like an itinerant monument of sadness.

  Then he thought that he now knew why the lines he had written two days earlier were worthless. Because at the time he didn't know yet what he had just done. Only now did he understand his own act, understand himself and his destiny. Two days ago he wanted to write poems about duty; but now he knew more about it: the glory of duty flowers from the hacked-open head of love.

  Jaromil walked though the streets, fascinated by his own destiny. When he returned home he found a letter for him: I'd be very glad if you could come next week to a small party, on such and such a day and hour, to meet some people who will interest you. The letter was signed by the filmmaker.

  Even though the invitation didn't promise anything definite, Jaromil was immensely pleased, for he saw in it proof that the filmmaker was not a lost opportunity, that their story was not yet over, that the game was continuing. And the vague, strange idea crept into his mind that there was a profound meaning in the fact that this letter had reached him exactly on the day when he had realized the tragedy of his situation; he had the confused and exhilarating feeling that everything he had experienced during the last two days finally qualified him to face the radiant beauty of the dark-haired filmmaker and to attend the sophisticated party with self-confidence, without fear, and like a man.

  He felt happier than ever before. He felt full of poems, and he sat down at his desk. No, it wasn't right to put love and duty into opposition, he reflected; that was just the old conception of the problem. Love or duty, the beloved woman or the revolution—no, no, that's not it at all. He had exposed the redhead to danger not because love didn't matter to him; what Jaromil wanted was precisely a world in which man and woman would love each other more than ever. Yes, that's how it was: Jaromil had exposed his girl to danger precisely because he loved her more than other men loved their women; precisely because he knew what love and the future world of love were. Of course, it was terrible to sacrifice an actual woman (redheaded, nice, delicate, talkative) for the sake of the future world, but it was probably the only tragedy of our time that was worthy of beautiful verse, worthy of a great poem!

  So he sat down at his desk and wrote and then got up and paced the room, saying to himself that what he was writing was greater than anything he had ever written before.

  It was an exhilarating evening, more exhilarating than all the amorous evenings he could imagine, it was an exhilarating evening even though he was spending it alone in his childhood room; Mama was in the next room, and Jaromil had completely forgotten that he had detested her a few days earlier; when she knocked on the door to ask him what he was doing, he tenderly called her "Mama" and asked her to help him find the calm and concentration he needed because, he said, "Today I'm writing the greatest poem of my life. Mama smiled (a maternal, considerate, understanding smile) and left him in peace.

  When he went to bed later he realized that at that very moment his girl was surrounded by men; that they could do with her whatever they wanted; that they watched her change into prison clothes; that the guard watched her through the peephole while she was sitting on a bucket, urinating.

  He didn't much believe in these extreme possibilities (they were probably interrogating her and would soon let her go), but the imagination doesn't allow itself to be bridled: tirelessly he imagined her in her cell, sitting on a bucket as a strange man watched, imagined interrogators tearing off her clothes; one thing astounded him: despite these images, he felt no jealousy!

  "You must be mine to die upon the rack if I want you!'' John Keats's cry resounds through the centuries. Why should Jaromil be jealous? The redhead is his now, she belongs to him more than ever: her destiny is his creation; it is his eye that watches her urinate into the bucket; it is his palms in the hands of the guards that are touching her; she is his victim, she is his creation, she is his, his, his.

  Jaromil is not jealous; he is sleeping the manly sleep of men.

  PART SIX

  The Man in His Forties

  1

  The first part of this novel encompasses fifteen years of Jaromil's life, but the fifth part, which is longer, covers barely a year. In this book, therefore, time flows in a tempo opposite to the tempo of real life; it slows down.

  The reason for this is that we're looking at Jaromil from an observatory I've erected at the point of his death. For us his childhood is in the distances where months merge into years; he has come with his mama from these misty distances right up to the observatory, where everything is as visible as the foreground of an old painting in which the eye can distinguish every leaf on a tree and every leaf's delicate tracing of veins.

  Just as your life is determined by the profession and marriage you have chosen, so this novel is limited by the view from the observatory, from which one always sees only Jaromil and his mother while other characters are caught sight of only when they appear in the presence of the two protagonists. I've chosen this way as you have chosen your destiny, and my choice is equally irreparable.

  But everyone regrets being unable to live lives other than his own; you too would like to live all your unrealized potentialities, all your possible lives (ah! inaccessible Xavier!). This novel is like you. It too would like to be other novels, those it might have been.

  That is why I am constantly dreaming of other possible unbuilt observatories. What if I were to put one, for example, in the painter's life, in the janitor's son's life, or in the redheaded girl's life? We don't know much about them. Hardly more than did foolish Jaromil, who never knew anything about anyone! What kind of novel would it be if it followed the career of that downtrodden janitor's son, and his former classmate the poet appeared in it only once or twice as a minor character? Or if I followed the painter's story and finally found out what exactly he thought of his mistress, whose belly he decorated with drawings in India ink?

  A man cannot simply walk out of his life, but a novel has much more freedom. What if I swiftly and secretly dismantled my observatory and transported it elsewhere, if only temporarily? For example, well beyond Jaromil's death! For example, all the way to the present, where there is no longer anyone, absolutely no one (his mother, too, died a few years ago) who still remembers Jaromil. . . .

  2

  My God, transport the observatory right here! And pay a visit to the ten poets who sat on the platform with Jaromil at that evening with the cops! Where are the poems they recited then? No one, no one remembers them, and the poets would deny having written them.

  What actually remains of that distant time? Nowadays everyone regards it as an era of political trials, persecution, forbidden books, and judicial murder. But we who remember must bear witness: that was not only a time of horror but also a time of lyricism! The poet reigned along with the hangman.

  The wall behind which people were imprisoned was made entirely of verse, and in front of the wall there was dancing. No, not a danse macabre. Here innocence danced! Innocence with its bloody smile.

  Was it a time of bad poetry? Not quite! Novelists, who wrote about that time with the blind eyes of c
onformism, created mendacious, stillborn works. But lyrical poets, who exalted the time in an equally blind manner, often left behind beautiful verse. Because, I repeat, in the magical territory of verse all assertions become true as long as they are backed by the power of experienced emotion. And the poets experienced their emotions with such fervor that from their souls a vapor mounted and a rainbow extended in the sky, a miraculous rainbow above the prisons. ...

  No, I'm not going to transport the observatory into the present, because it is not important to me to portray that time and once again offer it new and newer mirrors. I did not choose those years because I wanted to draw their portrait, but only because they seemed to me to be a matchless trap to set for Rimbaud and Lermon-tov, a matchless trap to set for poetry and youth. And is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero? To hell with portraying an era! What interests me is a young man who writes poems!

  That's why this young man, whom I've named Jaromil, must never go completely out of our sight. Yes, let's leave this novel for a while, let's transport the observatory beyond Jaromil's life, and let's place it in the mind of an entirely different character made of completely different stuff. But let's move it no more than two or three years beyond his death, so that it remains in a time when Jaromil has not yet been forgotten by everyone. Let's construct a part of the novel that will be related to all its other parts as the cottage on an estate is related to the mansion:

  The cottage to which I compare this sixth part of the novel is several dozen meters away from the mansion; it is an independent structure, which the mansion can do without; besides, the former owner long ago sublet it. But through the open cottage windows voices from the mansion can be faintly heard.

  This sixth part of the novel, which I've compared to a cottage, takes place in a studio apartment: a foyer with a clothes closet that has been casually left wide open; a bathroom with a spotlessly clean tub; a small, untidy kitchen, a room containing a wide daybed with a large mirror facing it, bookshelves all around, some engravings behind glass (reproductions of paintings and sculpture from classical antiquity), a coffee table with two armchairs, and a window over the courtyard looking out on rooftops and chimneys.

  It is late afternoon, and the owner of the apartment has just come home; he opens his briefcase and takes out a rumpled pair of overalls that he hangs up in the closet; he enters the room and opens the window wide; it is a sunny spring day, a cool breeze wafts into the room, and he goes into the bathroom, turns on the hot water, and undresses; he examines his body with satisfaction; he is a man in his forties, but from the time he began working with his hands he has been feeling in excellent shape; he has a lighter brain and heavier arms.

  He is stretched out in the bathtub, across which he has put a board to serve as a desk; books are spread out in front of him (that odd predilection for the authors of antiquity!), and as he warms himself in the hot water, he reads.

  Then he hearsthe doorbell. One short ring, two long, and after a pause, another short ring.

  He doesn't like to be disturbed by unexpected visits, and so he has arranged signals with each of his friends and mistresses. But whose signal is this one?

  It seems to him that he is getting old and losing his memory.

  "Just a minute!" he shouts. He gets out of the tub, unhurriedly dries himself, puts on his bathrobe, and goes to open the door.

  4

  A girl in a winter coat stood before him.

  He recognized her immediately and was speechless with surprise.

  "They let me go," she said.

  "When?"

  "This morning. I was waiting for you to come home from work."

  He helped her out of her coat; it was heavy, brown, and shabby; he put it on a hanger and hung it up. The girl was wearing a dress the man in his forties knew well; he recalled that she had been wearing that dress the last time she had come to see him, yes, that dress and that coat, and it seemed that a winter day of three years ago was entering this spring afternoon.

  The girl was astonished, too, that the room was still the same while so much had changed in her life since that day. "Everything here is just the way it was," she said.

  "Yes, everything is just the way it was," the man in his forties agreed, and he motioned her to sit down in the chair she had always sat in; then he hastened to question her: Are you hungry? Have you really eaten? When did you eat? Where are you going from here? Are you going to your parents' house?

  She told him that she had to go to her parents' house, that she had gone to the railroad station but then had hesitated and decided to come here first.

  "Wait, I'm going to get dressed," he said. He had just noticed that he was still in his bathrobe; he went into the foyer and closed the door behind him; before starting to dress he picked up the phone; he dialed a number, and when a woman's voice answered, he apologized, saying that he would be unable to see her today.

  He was under no obligation to the girl waiting in the room; nevertheless he didn't want her to overhear his conversation, and he spoke in a low voice. While he was talking, he kept looking at the heavy brown coat hanging on the peg and filling the foyer with poignant music.

  5

  It had been about three years since he had last seen her, and about five years since he had come to know her. He had had prettier girlfriends, but this one possessed fine qualities: she was barely seventeen when they had met; she had an amusing spontaneity and was erotically gifted and malleable: she did exactly what she read in his eyes; she understood within fifteen minutes not to talk about feelings with him, and without his having to explain anything, obediently came to visit only (it was hardly once a month) when he invited her over.

  The man in his forties didn't hide his penchant for lesbian women; one day, amid the intoxication of physical love, the girl had whispered in his ear that she had once surprised a strange woman in a swimming-pool cubicle and made love with her; the story greatly pleased the man in his forties, and later, after realizing its improbability, was still more touched by the effort the girl had made to please him. Furthermore the girl didn't confine herself to fabrications; she readily introduced the man in his forties to some of her girlfriends, and she inspired and organized a good many erotic entertainments.

  She understood that the man in his forties not only didn't require her faithfulness but also felt safer when his girlfriends had serious affairs with other men. She therefore talked to him with innocent indiscretion about her boyfriends past and present, which interested and entertained him.

  Now she is sitting before him in an armchair (the man in his forties had put on a pair of slacks and a sweater), and she says: "As I was leaving the prison, I saw horses coming toward me."

  6

  "Horses? What horses?"

  As she was going through the prison gate early that morning she came across a group of horseback riders. They sat straight in the saddle, upright and firm, as if they were attached to the animals to form huge inhuman bodies. The girl felt herself level with the ground, tiny and insignificant. Far above her she heard laughter and the snorting of the horses; she crouched against the wall.

  "Where did you go after that?"

  She had gone to the last stop of the streetcar line. It was morning, but the sun was already hot; she was wearing the heavy coat, and the stares of passersby intimidated her. She was afraid that there would be a crowd at the stop and that people would be eyeing her. Fortunately, there was no one but an old woman on the traffic island. That was good; it was like a balm to find only an old woman there. "And you decided right away that you were going to see me first?"

  Her duty was to go home, to her parents. She had gone to the railroad station, she was standing in line at the ticket window, but when her turn came she ran away. She shivered at the idea of her family. She was hungry, and she bought a piece of salami. She sat in a square and waited until four o'clock, when she knew the man in his forties would be coming home from work.

  "I'm glad you came to me first,
it was nice of you," he said.

  "Do you remember," he said a moment later, "do you still remember what you said? That you would never come here again?"

  "That's not true," said the girl.

  He smiled. "Yes, it is," he said.

  "No, it isn't."

  7

  Of course it was true. When she had come to see him that day, the man in his forties had opened the liquor cabinet; when he was about to pour two glasses of cognac, the girl shook her head: "No, I don't want anything. I'm never drinking with you again."

  The man in his forties was surprised, and the girl went on: "I'm not coming here anymore, I only came today to tell you that."

  As the man in his forties continued to show surprise, she told him that she really loved the young man she had told him about, and that she didn't want to deceive him any longer; she had come to ask the man in his forties to understand her and to hold no grudge against her.

  Even though he enjoyed a colorful erotic life, the man in his forties was basically an idyllist and saw to it that his adventures were calm and orderly. To be sure, the girl gravitated as a humble intermittent star in his erotic constellation, but even a single small star suddenly torn out of its place can unpleasantly rupture the harmony of a universe.

  He was also hurt by her lack of understanding: he had always been happy that the girl had a boyfriend who loved her; he had urged her to talk about him, and he gave her advice about how she should behave with him. The young man so amused him that he kept in a drawer the poems the fellow had written for her; he disliked these poems, but at the same time they interested him, just as he was interested in and disliked the world that was taking form around him, which he observed from his bathtub.