Life Is Elsewhere

by Milan Kundera

  He was willing to watch over the lovers with all his cynical benevolence, and the girl's sudden decision struck him as ungrateful. He was unable to control himself enough to let nothing show, and the girl, seeing his sullen look, kept on talking to justify her decision; she swore that she loved her young man and that she wanted to be honest with him.

  And now she sat (in the same armchair, wearing the same dress) facing the man in his forties and claiming that she had never said anything of the kind.

  8

  She was not lying. She was one of those rare souls who don't distinguish between what is and what should be, and who regard their moral wishes as reality. Of course she recalled what she had said to the man in his forties; and yet she also knew that she should not have said it, and therefore she now denied her recollection the right to a real existence.

  But she recalled it perfectly! That day she had stayed with the man in his forties longer than she had intended, and had been late for her date. Her boyfriend had been mortally insulted, and she had felt that she would only be able to placate him with an excuse of equally mortal gravity. And so she had invented the story that she had stayed for a long time with her brother, who was about to leave secretly for the West. She had not suspected that her boyfriend would urge her to denounce her brother to the police.

  So after work the very next day, she ran to the man in his forties to ask for advice; he was understanding and friendly; he advised her to stick to her lie and to convince her boyfriend that after a dramatic scene her brother had sworn to give up the idea of leaving for the West. He had instructed her exactly how to describe the scene in which she dissuaded her brother from secretly crossing the border, and told her to suggest to her boyfriend that he was indirectly her family's savior, for without his influence and intervention her brother would perhaps already have been arrested at the border or—who knows?—already be dead, shot by a border guard.

  "How did your conversation that day with your boyfriend end up?" he asked her now.

  "I never talked to him. They arrested me just as I was coming home from seeing you. They were waiting in front of my house."

  "So you never talked to him again?"

  "No."

  "But surely you know what happened to him."

  "No."

  "You really don't know?" asked the man in his forties, amazed.

  "I don't know anything."

  The girl shrugged her shoulders apathetically, as if she didn't want to know anything.

  "He's dead," said the man in his forties. "He died soon after you were arrested."

  9

  She had not known that; from far away came the words of the young man who had readily weighed love and death on the same scales.

  "Did he kill himself?" she asked in a soft voice that was suddenly ready to forgive.

  The man in his forties smiled. "No. He just got sick and died. His mother moved away. You wouldn't find a trace of them now in the villa. There's nothing but a big black monument in the cemetery. Like the tombstone of a great writer. His mother had it inscribed: 'Here lies the poet. . .' and underneath his name there's the poem 'Epitaph' you once brought me: the one in which he says he wants to die by fire."

  They fell silent; the girl was thinking that her boyfriend had not committed suicide but had died an entirely ordinary death; that even his death turned its back on her. When she left the prison she had firmly resolved never to see him again, but she had not imagined that he was no longer alive. If he didn't exist, the reason for her three years in prison no longer existed, and all of it was merely a bad dream, nonsense, some-thing unreal.

  "Listen," he said, "we're going to make dinner. Come and give me a hand."

  They went into the kitchen and sliced bread; they made ham and salami sandwiches; they opened a can of sardines; they found a bottle of wine; they took two glasses out of the cabinet.

  That had been their habit when she used to visit him. It was comforting to her to notice that this stereotypical bit of life always awaited her, unchanged, immutable, and she was able today to reenter it without difficulty; she thought that it was the most beautiful part of life she had ever known.

  The most beautiful? Why?

  It was a part of life in which she was safe. This man was good to her and required nothing from her; in his eyes she was neither guilty of nor responsible for anything; she was always safe with him, as one is safe when one finds oneself for the moment beyond the reach of one's own destiny; she was safe as a character in a play is safe when the curtain falls after the first act and the interlude begins; the other characters, too, remove their masks and chat casually.

  For a long time the man in his forties had felt that he was living outside the drama of his own life; at the beginning of the war he had slipped out of the country to England with his wife, fought against the Germans with the British air force, and lost his wife in an air raid on London; when he returned to Prague, he remained in the military, and at just about the time that Jaromil decided to study political science, the authorities determined that he had been too closely tied to capitalist England during the war and that he was therefore not reliable enough for a socialist army. And so he found himself working in a factory, his back turned on History and its dramatic performances, his back turned on his own destiny, he himself entirely preoccupied with himself, with his private, responsibility-free amusements and his books.

  Three years earlier the girl had come to say goodbye, because he had merely offered her an interlude whereas her young boyfriend had promised her a life. And now she is chewing a ham sandwich, drinking wine, boundlessly happy that the man in his forties is bestowing on her an interlude during which she feels a delightful silence slowly blossom within her.

  Suddenly she feels more at ease, and she begins to talk.

  11

  Only crumbs on the empty plates and a half-empty bottle of wine were still on the table, and she talked (freely and simply) about the prison, about her fellow prisoners and the guards, and she lingered, as she always did, over details that interested her, combining them in an illogical but charming stream of chatter.

  And yet there was something new in her talk today; in the past her sentences had naively headed toward the essentials, but today they seemed to be merely a pretext to avoid the heart of the matter.

  But what matter? Then the man in his forties thought he could guess, and he asked: "What happened to your brother?"

  "I don't know . . . ," said the girl.

  "Did they let him go?"

  "No."

  The man in his forties finally understood why the girl had run away from the ticket window and why she was so afraid to go home; for she was not only an innocent victim but also the guilty one who had brought calamity to her brother and to her whole family; he could easily imagine how the interrogators had made her confess, how her attempts to evade them had enmeshed her in ever more suspect lies. How can she now explain that it was not she who had denounced her brother by accusing him of an imaginary crime but some unknown young man who, moreover, was no longer alive?

  The girl was silent, and a wave of compassion overwhelmed the man in his forties: "Don't go to your parents' today. There's plenty of time. You've got to think about it first. If you like you can stay here."

  Then he leaned over her and put his hand on her face; he didn't caress her, he merely kept his hand tenderly and for a long while pressed against her skin.

  The gesture expressed such kindness that tears began to flow down the girl's cheeks.

  12

  Since the death of his wife, whom he had loved, he had hated female tears; they frightened him just as he was frightened by the idea that women could make him an actor in the dramas of their lives; he saw tears as tentacles that tried to drag him away from the idyll of his nondestiny; tears repelled him.

  So he was surprised to feel their unpleasant wetness on his hand. But he was even more surprised to find that this time he was unable to resist their melancholy power;
he knew that these were not actually tears of love, that they were not directed at him, that they were neither a ruse nor a means of coercion nor a scene; he knew that they were content, simply and for themselves, to be, and that they streamed from the girl's eyes the way sadness and joy invisibly slip out of one's body. He had no shield against their innocence and was touched by them to the inmost depths of his soul.

  He reflected that throughout the time of their acquaintance he and the girl had never done each other harm; they had always been considerate of each other; they had always given each other the gift of a brief moment of well-being and had wanted no more than that; they had nothing to reproach themselves for. And he felt particular satisfaction that after the girl's arrest he had done everything he could to free her.

  He raised her from the armchair. He wiped the tears from her face with his fingers and tenderly took her into his arms.

  13

  Beyond the windows of this moment, somewhere dis-tant, three years back, death stamps its feet impatiently in the story we have abandoned; its skeletal figure has already come onto the illuminated stage and projects its shadow so far that the studio apartment in which the girl and the man in his forties are now standing face-to-face is invaded by twilight.

  He tenderly embraces the girl's body, and she is nestled motionless in his arms. What does this nestling mean?

  It means that she is abandoning herself to him; she is settled in his arms and she wants to stay there.

  But this abandonment is not an overture! She is set-tled in his arms, closed, locked up; her hunched shoulders guard her breasts, her head is turned away from his face and leans on his chest; she is staring into the darkness of his sweater. She is settled in his arms, sealed up so that he hides her in his embrace as in a steel safe.

  14

  He lifted her wet face to his own and began to kiss her. He was driven by compassionate warmth and not by sensual desire, but situations have their own automa tism, which one cannot escape: while he was kissing her he tried to pry her lips open with his tongue; in vain; the girl's lips remained shut and refused to respond.

  Strangely enough the less his kisses succeeded, the more he felt the wave of compassion in him increase, for he realized that the girl he was holding in his arms was under a spell, that her soul had been torn out of her and that all that was left after this amputation was a bloody wound.

  He felt a bloodless, bony, pitiable body in his arms, but the damp wave of sympathy, sustained by the twilight that had begun to fall, obliterated contour and size, depriving them both of their distinctness and their materiality. And just at that moment he felt himself desiring her physically!

  It was entirely unexpected: he was sensual without sensuality, he was aroused without arousal! Pure kindness had, perhaps by some mysterious transubstantia-tion, turned into arousal of the body!

  But perhaps just because it was unexpected and incomprehensible, this arousal carried him away. He caressed her body eagerly and began to unbutton her dress.

  "No, no! Please don't! No!" she defended herself.

  15

  Since words were unable to stop him, she ran for refuge into a corner of the room. "What's the matter with you? What's happened?" he asked.

  She pressed herself against the wall and remained silent.

  He approached her and caressed her face: "Don't be afraid of me, you needn't be afraid of me. Tell me what's the matter. What's happened to you?"

  She was motionless, silent, unable to find words. She saw looming up above her the horses passing the prison gate, great robust beasts that with their riders formed arrogant creatures with double bodies. She was so far beneath them and so incommensurable with their animal perfection that she wished to merge with something within her reach, with a tree trunk perhaps, or with a wall, to hide in their lifelessness.

  He persevered: "What's the matter with you?"

  "What a pity you're not an old woman or an old man," she said at last.

  Then she added: "I shouldn't have come here, because you're neither an old woman nor an old man."

  16

  He silently caressed her face for a long time, and then (the room was already dark) he asked her to help him make the wide daybed; they lay side by side on it, and he talked to her in a soft, comforting voice, in a way he had not talked to anyone in years.

  The physical desire had vanished, but his great and steady warmth for her was still there, and he felt a need for light; the man in his forties turned on the small bedside lamp and gazed at the girl.

  She was stretched out tensely, staring at the ceiling. What had happened to her? What had they done to her? Beaten her? Threatened her? Tortured her?

  He didn't know. The girl was silent, and he caressed her hair, her brow, her face. He caressed her until he felt the terror vanishing from her eyes.

  He caressed her until her eyes closed.

  17

  The studio apartment window was open, allowing the breeze of a spring night to enter; the bedside lamp had been turned off, and the man in his forties, lying motionless beside the girl, was listening to her agitated breathing and watching her drowsiness, and when he was sure she was asleep, he once more caressed her hand very gently, happy to have been able to provide her the first sleep in the new era of her sad freedom.

  The window of the cottage to which I have compared this sixth part is also always open, allowing entrance to the fragrances and sounds of the novel that we left a bit before its climax. Do you hear death stamping its feet impatiently in the distance? Let it wait, we are still here in that stranger's studio apartment, secluded in another novel, in another story.

  In another story? No. In the lives of the man in his forties and the girl, their encounter is an interlude in the middle of their stories rather than a story itself. This encounter will hardly engender a series of events. It is only a brief moment of respite the man in his forties bestows on the girl before she embarks on the long scramble her life will be.

  In this novel, too, this sixth part has been only a quiet interlude in which a stranger suddenly lights the lamp of kindness. Let us keep looking at it a few moments more, that gentle lamp, that kindly light, before the novel's cottage vanishes from our sight.

  PART SEVEN

  The Poet Dies

  1

  Only a real poet knows how sad it is inside the poetry house of mirrors. The crackle of distant gunfire is heard through the window, and the heart longs for departure. Lermontov is buttoning his military uniform; Byron is putting a pistol into the drawer of his night table; Wolker, in his poems, is marching with the crowd; Halas is rhyming his insults; Mayakovsky is stomping on the throat of his own song. A splendid battle is raging in the mirrors.

  But beware! The moment a poet mistakenly steps outside the house of mirrors he will perish, for he is a poor shot, and when he fires he will hit his own head.

  Alas, do you hear them? A horse is proceeding on a winding Caucasian road; the horseman is Lermontov, armed with a pistol. And here are other hoofbeats and a creaking carriage proceeding! This time it is Pushkin, also with a pistol and also heading for a duel!

  And what do we hear now? A streetcar; a Prague streetcar, clanking and decrepit; Jaromil is inside it, on his way from one suburb to another; it's cold: he's wearing a dark suit, a necktie, an overcoat, and a hat.

  2

  What poet never dreamed of his death? What poet never imagined it? "If I must die, let it be with you, my love, and only by fire turn into heat and light. ..." Do you think that it was merely an accidental play of the imagination that induced Jaromil to visualize his by fire? Not at all; for death is a message; death speaks; the act of dying has its own semantics, and it matters how a man dies, and in what element.

  Jan Masaryks life ended in 1948 with a fall into the courtyard of a Prague palace, after he had seen his destiny shattered by the hard shell of History. Three years later the poet Konstantin Biebl, frightened by the face of the world he had helped to bring about, threw
himself from a sixth floor onto the pavement of the same city (the city of defenestrations), perishing on the element earth and with his death offering an image of the tragic discord between the air and weight, between dream and awakening.

  Jan Hus and Giordano Bruno could not have died by the rope or by the sword; they could have died only at the stake. Their lives thus became the incandescence of a signal light, the beam of a lighthouse, a torch shining far into the space of time. For the body is ephemeral and thought is eternal and the flicker of fire is the image of thought. Jan Palach, who twenty years after Jaromil's death drenched himself with gasoline in a Prague square and set his body afire, would have been less likely to succeed in making his cry ring out to the nation's consciousness as a man who had drowned.

  On the other hand Ophelia is inconceivable afire and had to die by water, for the depth of water converges with the depths of the human soul; water is the exterminating element of those who have been led astray in their own selves, in their love, in their feelings, in their madness, in their mirrors and their whirlwinds; in old folk songs girls whose fiances fail to return from war drown themselves; Harriet Shelley threw herself into the water; Paul Celan drowned in the Seine.

  3

  He got off the streetcar and headed toward the snow-covered villa he had so precipitously run away from the other night, leaving the beautiful dark-haired young woman alone.