Life Is Elsewhere (27 page)
At that moment the bit of lucid reason left to her joined with the blind fit of anger into a sudden frenzied inspiration: when the redhead in the next room moaned once more, Mama shouted in a voice filled with anxious concern: "My God, Jaromil, what's wrong with her?"
The moans in the next room ceased instantly, and Mama ran to the medicine chest; she took out a small bottle and came running to Jaromil's door; she pushed down the door handle; the door was locked. "My God, you're scaring me, what's going on? What's wrong with the young lady?"
Holding the redhead, who was trembling like a leaf, in his arms, Jaromil said: "Nothing, nothing at all. ..."
"Is your girlfriend having cramps?"
"Yes, that's right...,'' he answered.
"Open the door, I have some drops for her," said Mama, again pushing down the handle of the locked door.
"Wait a minute," said her son, getting up rapidly.
"Those cramps are horrible," said Mama.
"One second," said Jaromil, hastily putting on his trousers and shirt; he threw a blanket over the girl.
"It must be an upset stomach, no?" Mama asked through the door.
"Yes," said Jaromil, and he opened the door and reached for the small bottle of medicine.
"You might let me in," said Mama. An odd frenzy drove her on; she didn't let herself be deterred, and she entered the room; the first thing she caught sight of was a bra and other feminine underclothes thrown over a chair; then she saw the girl; she huddled under the blanket and was as pale as if she were really ill.
Now Mama could no longer retreat; she sat down next to her: "What's wrong with you? I came into the house and I heard those moans, you poor little ..." She shook out twenty drops on a sugar cube: "But I know all about these cramps, take this and you'll soon be fine ..." and she brought the sugar cube to the redhead's lips, and the girl obediently opened her mouth and turned it toward the sugar cube as she had opened it moments before and turned it toward Jaromil's lips.
Mama had barged into her son's room in an intoxication of anger, but now only the intoxication remained: she looked at that little mouth tenderly opening and she was suddenly overtaken by a terrible urge to tear the blanket off the redheaded girl's body and to have her naked before her; to shatter the intimacy of the closed little world formed by the redhead and Jaromil; to touch what he touched; to claim it as her own; to occupy it; to enfold both bodies in her ethereal embrace; to slip between their ill-concealed nakedness (it didn't escape her that the gym shorts Jaromil wore under his trousers were lying on the floor); to slip between them insolently and innocently, as if it really were a matter of an upset stomach; to be with them as she had been with Jaromil when she had him drink from her naked breast; to gain access, by way of that bridge of ambiguous innocence, to their games and their caresses; to be like a sky surrounding their naked bodies, to be with them. . . .
Then she became frightened of her own agitation. She advised the girl to breathe deeply, and she quickly withdrew to her room.
A minibus, its doors locked, was parked in front of the Police Building, and a group of poets stood waiting beside it for the driver. With them were two police organizers of the poetry evening and of course Jaromil; he knew some of the poets by sight (for example, the poet in his sixties who some time ago had recited a poem about his youth at the meeting at his faculty), but he didn't dare say a word to anyone. His anxieties were allayed a bit by the publication at last, a few days earlier, of five of his poems in the literary review; he saw this as official confirmation of his right to the name of poet; so as to be ready for any eventuality, he had the review in the inside pocket of his jacket, which made one side of his chest flat and male and the other side protuberant and female.
The driver arrived, and the poets (there were eleven in all, including Jaromil) got into the vehicle. After an hour on the road, the minibus stopped in a pleasant countryside, the poets got out, the organizers showed them a river, a garden, a villa, took them into classrooms and the big function room where the evening event would soon begin, obliged them to have a look at the police trainees' three-bed dormitories (caught unawares at whatever they had been doing, the men snapped to attention for the poets with the same discipline they exhibited when an officer inspected the rooms), and at last led them into the director's office. Awaiting them were sandwiches and two bottles of wine, the uniformed director, and as if that weren't enough, an extremely beautiful young woman. When the poets in turn had shaken hands with the director and muttered their names, the director introduced them to the young woman: "This is the supervisor of our film circle," and then he explained to the eleven poets (who one after the other were shaking the young woman's hand) that the people's police had its own social club where cultural activities were pursued intensively; there was an amateur theater and an amateur chorus, and they had just started the film circle, which was supervised by this young woman, who was a student at the film school and at the same time kind enough to help the young policemen; incidentally, they had the best of conditions here: an excellent camera, all kinds of lighting equipment, and, above all, enthusiastic young men, although, the director said, he wasn't sure whether they were more interested in film or in the supervisor.
After shaking all the poets' hands, the young filmmaker motioned to two young men standing at big reflectors; the poets and the director were now munching their sandwiches under the glare of floodlights. Their conversation, which the director tried to make as natural as possible, was interrupted by the young woman's instructions, which were followed by the lights being moved and then by the soft whirring of the camera. After a while the director thanked the poets for having come, looked at his watch, and said that the audience was impatiently awaiting them.
"All right, comrade poets, please take your places," said one of the organizers, and he read their names from a sheet of paper; the poets lined up, and when the organizer motioned to them they mounted the platform; on it was a long table with a chair for each poet marked by a place card. The poets sat down in their chairs, and the room (in which all the seats were occupied) rang with applause.
This was the first time Jaromil had displayed himself before a crowd; he was prey to a feeling of intoxication that never left him until the end of the evening. Besides, everything went wonderfully well; after the poets sat down on their assigned chairs, an organizer went over to the lectern at one end of the table, welcomed the eleven poets, and introduced them. One by one the poets stood up and bowed, and the room applauded. Jaromil, too, stood up and bowed, and he was so stunned by the applause
that he didn't immediately notice the janitor's son sitting in the first row and motioning to him; he motioned back, and this gesture from the platform, which could be seen by everyone, made him feel the charm of artificial naturalness, and so during the evening he motioned several times more to his old classmate, like someone who feels at ease and at home on the stage.
The poets were sitting in alphabetical order, and Jaromil found himself next to the poet in his sixties: "My friend, what a surprise, I didn't know it was you! You've had poems recently in a review!" Jaromil smiled politely, and the poet went on: "I remembered your name; they're excellent poems, I enjoyed them very much!" But at that moment the organizer again spoke up, inviting the poets to come to the microphone in alphabetical order and read some of their latest poems.
And so the poets came to the microphone, read poems, were applauded, and returned to their seats. Jaromil anxiously awaited his turn; he was afraid of stammering, he was afraid of using an ineffective tone of voice, he was afraid of everything; but then he got up as if bedazzled; he had no time even to think. He began to read, and from the very first lines he felt sure of himself. And in fact the applause that followed his first poem was longer than anyone's thus far.
The applause emboldened Jaromil, who read his second poem with more assurance than the first, and he felt not at all uncomfortable when two nearby floodlights inundated him with light while a camera began to bum ten meters away. He pretended not to notice any of this, not for a moment hesitating in his recitation and even managing to lift his eyes from his sheet of paper and looking not only at the indistinct space of the room but at the completely distinct spot where (a few steps from the camera) the pretty filmmaker was standing. Again there was applause; Jaromil read two more poems, heard the hum of the camera, looked at the filmmaker's face, bowed, and returned to his seat; at that moment the poet in his sixties rose from his chair, and, solemnly tilting his head back, opened his arms and closed them around Jaromil's shoulders: "My friend, you are a poet, you are a poet!" and since the applause continued, he turned toward the audience, raised his hand, and bowed.
When the eleventh poet had finished his reading, the organizer remounted the platform, thanked all the poets, and announced that after a brief intermission anyone interested was to come back into the room for a discussion with the poets. "That part of the program is not compulsory; only those who are interested are invited to participate."
Jaromil was carried away; people gathered around him to shake his hand; one of the poets introduced himself as also an editor at a publishing house, expressed surprise that Jaromil had not yet published a book, and asked him for a selection of his verse; another invited him to a meeting arranged by the Youth Union; and of course the janitor's son came up to him and stayed, making it clear to everyone that Jaromil and he had known each other since childhood; then the director himself approached him and said: "It seems to me that the laurels of victory this evening belong to the youngest!"
Then, turning to the other poets, he declared that to his great regret he would be unable to participate in the discussion because he had to attend a dance the trainees had organized, which was about to begin in the next room. Many girls from the neighboring villages, he added with a greedy smile, had come for the event because policemen were first-rate Don Juans. "Well, comrades, I thank you for your beautiful poems, and I hope that this isn't the last time we see you here!" He shook the poets' hands and left for the room next door, from which, like an invitation to the dance, a brass band could already be heard.
In the function room, where a few minutes earlier applause had resounded, the small group of excited poets found itself alone at the edge of the platform; one of the organizers mounted the platform and announced: "Dear comrades, the intermission is over, and I return the floor to our guests. I ask those who want to participate in the discussion with the comrade poets to sit down."
The poets returned to their seats on the platform and ten people sat down facing them in the first row of the otherwise empty room: among them were the janitor's son, the two organizers who had accompanied the poets on the minibus, an old gentleman with a wooden leg and a crutch, several less conspicuous men, and two women: one of them (probably a secretary at the academy) seemed to be about fifty; the other was the filmmaker, who had finished shooting and now had her large, calm eyes fixed on the poets; the presence of a pretty woman in the room was all the more remarkable and stimulating to the poets as they heard the increasingly loud and seductive sounds of the band music and growing din of the dance coming from the room next door.
The two rows sitting facing each other were about equal in number, like two soccer teams; Jaromil thought that the silence that had set in was like the silence that precedes a confrontation; and since the silence had already lasted thirty seconds, he figured that the poetic eleven was already losing the game.
But Jaromil had underestimated his teammates; in the course of the year some of them had participated in a hundred various discussions, and so discussion had become their main activity, their specialty, and their art. Let me recall a historical detail: trade union clubs and Party and Youth Union committees organized evenings to which they invited all sorts of painters, poets, astronomers, or economists; the organizers of these evenings were duly noted and rewarded for their initiatives, for the era required revolutionary activity, which, impossible to exert on the barricades, had to blossom in meetings and discussions. Also, all sorts of painters, poets, astronomers, or economists readily participated in such evenings, which enabled them to show that they were not narrow specialists but revolutionary specialists with ties to the people.
Thus the poets were quite familiar with the questions audiences posed, they knew that they were repeated with the stupefying regularity of statistical probability. They knew that someone was certainly going to ask: Comrade, how did you first start to write? They knew that someone else would ask: How old were you when you wrote you first poem? They also knew that someone would ask who their favorite author was, and that you could also expect someone in the audience anxious to display his Marxist learning pose the question: Comrade, how would you define socialist realism? And they also knew that in addition to questions they would be reminded of their duty to write more poetry about (1) the occupations of the people in the audience, (2) youth, (3) the cruelty of life under capitalism, and (4) love.
The initial half minute of silence thus was not caused by any kind of embarrassment; it was rather an oversight on the part of the poets, who knew the routine all too well; or it may have been poor coordination, because the poets had never appeared in this formation before and each one wanted to allow one of the others the privilege of the first shot at the goal. At last the poet in his sixties spoke up. He spoke with ease and forcefully, and after ten minutes of improvisation he invited the facing row not to be afraid to ask questions. These were of a kind that finally enabled the poets to display their eloquence and their aptitude at improvised team play, which from then on was flawless: they knew how to relay, to complement one another, to swiftly alternate a serious answer with an anecdote. Of course, all the basic questions were posed and all the basic answers given (everyone listened with interest to the poet in his sixties, who had been asked how and when he wrote his first poem, explaining that if it hadn't been for his cat, Mimi, he would never have been a poet, for it was she who had inspired him to write his first poem at the age of five; then he recited that poem, and since the facing row didn't know whether he was serious or joking, he hastened to be the first to laugh, and then everyone, poets and audience alike, laughed long and cheerfully).