Life Is Elsewhere (23 page)

It was like a sudden illumination: Why stomp on the throat of his own song? Why give up poetry for the sake of the revolution? Now that he had landed on the shore of real life (by "real life" he was referring to the density created by the fusion of the crowd, physical love, and revolutionary slogans), all he had to do was give himself up entirely to this life and become its violin.

He felt full of poetry and tried to write a poem the redheaded girl would like. That wasn't so simple; until now he had written unrhymed verse, and he now came up against the technical difficulties of regular verse, for it was certain that the redhead regarded a poem as something that rhymed. Besides, the victorious revolution was of the same opinion; let's recall that in those days no free verse was published; modern poetry as a whole was denounced as a product of the putrefying bourgeoisie, and free verse was the most obvious sign of the putrefaction of poetry.

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 face. . . .

"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."