Life Is Elsewhere (20 page)

4

But Jaromil was himself subjected to an examination when he presented his report to the committee. He had to answer the questions of stern young people, and he wanted to speak in a way that would please them: When young people's education is at stake, compromise is a crime. We must guard against teachers with outdated ideas: the future will be new, or it will not exist. And we can no longer trust teachers who change their ideas from one day to the next: the future will be pure, or it will be tarnished.

Now that Jaromil has become a rigorous militant whose reports affect the destiny of adults, can I still maintain that he is on the run? Doesn't it seem instead that he has reached his goal?

Not at all.

When he was six years old, Mama had put him in the position of being a year younger than his classmates; he is still a year younger. When he is reporting on a professor who has bourgeois opinions, it is not the professor he is thinking about but rather the young people whose eyes he is anxiously watching to see his own image in them; just as he checks his smile and hair in the mirror at home, so he checks in their eyes the firmness, manliness, and harshness of his words.

He is always surrounded by a wall of mirrors, and he cannot see beyond it.

For adulthood is indivisible; adulthood is total, or it doesn't exist. As long as Jaromil remains a child, his presence at the examination board and his reports on professors will merely be a variant route of his run.

5

Because he is always running away from her, and always without success; he has breakfast and dinner with her, he says goodnight and good morning to her. Every morning she hands him the shopping bag; Mama doesn't care that this household emblem is ill suited to an ideological supervisor of professors, and she sends him off to do the day's marketing.

Look: he is on the same street we saw him walk at the beginning of the preceding part, when he blushed at the sight of a woman coming toward him. Several years have passed, but he still blushes, and in the store to which Mama sends him he is afraid to meet the eyes of a girl in a white smock.

He is mad about this girl, who spends eight hours a day in the cashier's cage. The softness of her features, the slowness of her gestures, her imprisonment—all this seems mysteriously close to him and predestined. Moreover, he knows why: this girl resembles the maid whose fiance was shot; Magda: sadness-beautiful face. And the cashier's cage in which she is sitting resembles the bathtub in which he saw the maid.

6

He is bent over his desk and and trembling at the thought of his exams; he is just as afraid of them at the university as he was in high school, because he is used to showing his mother his perfect grades and he doesn't wish to disappoint her.

But how unbearable the airlessness of this tiny Prague bedroom when the air outside is filled with echoes of revolutionary songs and the windows admit the shadows of vigorous men with hammers in their hands!

It is 1922, five years after the great Russian revolution, and he is forced to bend over a textbook and tremble with fear because of an exam! What a penalty!

At last he pushes the book aside (it is late at night) and he dreams about the poem he is writing: the poem is about a worker who wants to kill his dream about the beauty of life by making it come true; holding a hammer, he gives his other arm to his beloved, and marches with a multitude of comrades to make a revolution.

And the law student (yes, of course, it's Jiri Wolker) sees blood on the desk; much blood, for when

 
we kill great dreams 

much blood is spilled

 but he is not afraid, for he knows that if he wants to be a man, he must not be afraid of blood.

7

The store closes at six, and he positions himself at the opposite corner. He knows that the cashier always quits work a little after six, but he also knows that she is always accompanied by one of the salesgirls.

This friend is much less pretty, seeming almost ugly to Jaromil; the two are exact opposites: the cashier is dark haired, the other is a redhead; the cashier is buxom, the other skinny; the cashier is quiet, the other noisy; he feels mysteriously close to the cashier, repelled by the other.

He often returned to his observation post in the hope that the girls might leave the store separately so that he could speak to the dark-haired one. But that never happened. One day he followed them; they went down several streets and entered a building; he remained near the door for almost an hour, but neither one of them came out.

8

She has come to Prague from the provinces to see him, and she listens to him reading his poems to her. She is tranquil; she knows that her son is still hers; neither women nor the world have taken him away from her; on the contrary, women and the world have entered the magical circle of poetry, and this is a circle she herself has drawn around her son, a circle inside which she secretly rules.

He is reading her a poem he has written in memory of his grandmother, his mother's mother:

 since I go into battle

 Grandmother for the beauty of 

this world

Mrs. Wolker is tranquil. Her son can go into battle in his poems, holding a hammer in his hand and giving his arm to his girlfriend; that doesn't trouble her; because in his poems he has retained his mother and his grandmother, the family meal, and all the virtues she has inculcated in him. Let the world see him march by, hammer in hand! No, she doesn't want to lose him, but she knows very well that she has nothing to fear: to show himself to the world is an entirely different thing from going into the world.

But the poet also knows this difference. And he alone knows how sad he is in the house of poetry!

9

Only a true poet can speak of the immense longing not to be a poet, the longing to leave that house of mirrors where deafening silence reigns.

Banished from the land of dreams

 I seek shelter in the crowd And wish to

 change my song To insults

But when Frantisek Halas* wrote these lines he wasn't with the crowd in the streets; the room he wrote in, bent over his desk, was silent.

And it's not at all true that he was banished from the land of dreams. The crowd he speaks of in his poems was in fact the land of his dreams.

And he didn't succeed in changing his song to insults; it was, on the contrary, his insults that always changed into song.

Well, is there really no way out of the house of mirrors?

*Czech poet (1905-1952).

10

But I

have tamed

 Myself

I have stomped

 On the throat Of my own 

song

 wrote Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Jaromil understands him. Poetic language seems to him like the lace in Mamas linen closet. He has written no poetry for several months, and he has no desire to write any. He is on the run. Of course, he goes marketing for Mama, but he keeps his desk drawers locked. He has removed all the reproductions of modern paintings from the walls of his room.

What did he put up instead? A photo of Karl Marx?

Not at all. On the bare wall he hung up a photograph of his father. It was a picture taken in 1938, at the time of the sad mobilization, and his father is dressed in his officer's uniform.

Jaromil loved this photograph of a man he hardly knew and whose image was beginning to blur in his mind. He yearned more and more for this man, who had been a soccer player, soldier, and concentration camp prisoner. He missed this man very much.

11

The political science faculty auditorium was packed, and there were several poets sitting on the podium. A young man in a blue shirt (worn in those days by members of the Youth Union) and with an enormous mop of hair was standing at the front of the podium and speaking:

Poetry's role is at its most important in revolutionary times; poetry gave the revolution its voice, and in exchange the revolution freed poetry from its isolation; today the poet knows that he is understood by the people and especially understood by young people because youth, poetry, and revolution are one and the same!

The first of the poets to speak now got up and recited a poem about a girl who broke up with her boyfriend, who worked at the milling machine next to hers, because he was lazy and failed to meet his production goals; but the boyfriend didn't want to lose his girlfriend, and so he set about working so diligently that the red flag of a shock worker was soon attached to his machine. Following this, other poets got up and recited poems about peace, Lenin and Stalin, martyrs in the antifascist struggle, and workers who exceed their norms.

12

Youth is unaware of the great power being young confers, but the poet (in his sixties) who now rises to recite his poem knows this.

That person is young, he proclaims in a melodious voice, who is with the youth of the world, and the youth of the world is socialism. That person is young who plunges into the future and never looks back.

In other words: according to the poet in his sixties, the word "youth" does not designate a specific period of life but a
value
above age and unconnected with it. This idea, elegantly versified, had at least a double objective: it flattered the young audience, and it magically rid the poet of his wrinkles and assured him (for he made it clear that he was on the side of socialism and that he would never look back) of a place beside the boys and girls.

Jaromil was in the audience and watched the poets with interest, even though it seemed that he was on the other side, like someone who was no longer one of them. He listened to their poems as coldly as he had listened to the words of the professors he reported on to the committee. What interested him more was the famous poet who was now getting up from his chair (the applause for the poet in his sixties had died down) and heading toward the center of the podium. (Yes, he is the one who not long ago had received a package containing twenty telephone receivers with severed wires.)

13

"Dear Master, We are now in the month of love; I am seventeen years old. The age of hopes and chimeras, as they say. ... I am sending you some of this verse because I love all poets, all good Parnassians. . . . Don't make too many faces when you read this verse: .... You would render me deliriously happy and hopeful if you could
make
a small place among the Parnassians for the poem 'Credo in Unam'. ... I am unknown; does that matter? Poets are brothers. These verses believe; they love, they hope: that is everything. My dear Master: raise me up a little: I am young; give me your hand. . . ."

Anyway, he is lying; he is fifteen years and seven months old; he has not yet run away from Charleville to escape from his mother. But this letter would long remain in his head as a litany of shame, as proof of weakness and servility. He would get even with this dear master, this old idiot, this bald-headed Theodore de Banville! A year later he would cruelly ridicule all his work, all the hyacinths and languid lilies that fill his verse, sending his sarcasms in a letter like a registered slap in the face.

But at the moment the dear master as yet has no idea of the hatred lying in wait for him as he recites a poem about a Russian town that had been leveled by the fascists rising from its ruins; a town decorated with magical surrealist garlands; the breasts of young Soviet women float through the streets like small colored balloons; a kerosene lamp hanging below the sky lights up the white town on whose rooftops helicopters settle like angels.

14

Captivated by the charm of the poet's personality, the audience applauded. There was, however, among this unthinking majority a thoughtful minority who knew that a revolutionary audience ought not to wait like a humble beggar for whatever the podium deigns to give it; on the contrary, nowadays it is the poems that are the beggars; they are begging to be admitted to the socialist paradise; but the young revolutionaries who guard the gates of this paradise must be stern: for the future will be new, or it will not exist; the future will be pure, or it will be tarnished.

"What is this nonsense he's feeding us?" Jaromil shouted, and others joined him. "He's hitching socialism to surrealism! He's hitching a cat to a horse, the future to the past!"

The poet understood what was happening, but he was proud and had no intention of giving in. Since his youth he had been accustomed to being provocative before bourgeois narrow-mindedness, and he was unabashed by being one against many. His face flushed and he decided to recite as his final poem a different one from the one he had originally chosen: it was a poem full of violent metaphors and unbridled erotic images; there was hooting and shouting when he finished.

The students whistled derisively at the old man standing before them, who had come there because he loved them; in their angry rebellion he saw the radiance of his own youth. He believed that his love for them gave him the right to tell them what he thought. It was the spring of 1968 in Paris. Alas! The students were incapable of seeing the radiance of their youth in the wrinkles of his face, and the old scholar watched with surprise as he was whistled at by those he loved.

15

The poet raised his hand to quell the din. And then he started to shout that the students were like puritan schoolmarms, dogmatic priests, and bigoted cops; that they protested against his poem because they hated freedom.

The old scholar silently listened to the whistling and reflected that when he was young he too had been part of a group, that he too had eagerly whistled, but the group had long since scattered, and now he was alone.