Life Is Elsewhere (28 page)

And naturally the poets were also reminded of their duty. The janitor's son stood up and spoke at length. Yes, the poetry evening had been remarkable and all the poets were first class, but did anyone notice that of the at least thirty-three poems they had heard (if you figured that each poet read about three poems), there was not a single poem on the subject of the National Police, either directly or indirectly? And yet, can anyone maintain that the National Police occupies less than one thirty-third of a place in our national life?

Then the fiftyish woman got up and said that she agreed completely with what Jaromil's classmate just said, but that she had an entirely different question: Why was so little written these days about love? Stifled laughter could be heard from the audience, but the woman went on: Even under socialism people love each other and like to read something about love.

The poet in his sixties rose, tilted his head back, and said that the comrade was totally correct. Was it necessary in a socialist system to be ashamed of love? Was it something bad? He was an old man, but he was not embarrassed to admit that when he saw women in flimsy summer dresses, which enable one to guess at the young and lovely bodies underneath, he coiddn't avoid turning around to look. From the row of eleven questioners came the complicitous laughter of fellow sinners, and the poet, thus encouraged, went on: What should he offer these pretty young women? A hammer with ferns? And when he is invited to visit should he put a sickle in the flower vase? Not at all; he offers them roses; love poetry is like the roses we offer to women.

Yes, yes, the fiftyish woman agreed fervently, and so the poet took a sheaf of paper out of his inside pocket and began to read a long love poem.

Yes, yes, that was wonderful, the fiftyish woman gushed, and then one of the organizers stood up and said that these verses were certainly beautiful, but nevertheless even in a love poem it must be obvious that the poem was written by a socialist poet.

But how could it be obvious? asked the fiftyish woman, still fascinated by the old poet's touchingly tilted head and by his poem.

Jaromil had remained silent while all the others spoke up, and he realized that he had to take his turn; he thought that now was the moment; here was a question he had pondered for a long time; yes, since the time when he used to visit the painter and listened obediently to his speeches about modern art and the new world. Alas, once again it was the painter who was expressing himself through Jaromil's mouth, once again it was his voice and his words that were issuing from Jaromil's lips!

What did he say? That in the previous society love had been so deformed by concern for money, by social considerations, by prejudices that it could really not be itself but rather a shadow of itself. Only the new era, by sweeping away the power of money and the influence of prejudice, would make man fully human and love greater than it had ever been in the past. Socialist love poetry is thus the expression of great, liberated emotion.

Jaromil was satisfied with what he had said, and he noticed the filmmaker's large, dark eyes fixed on him; he thought that the words "love greater" and "liberated emotion" came out of his mouth like a sailboat into the harbor of those large eyes.

But when he finished, one of the poets smiled ironically and said: "Do you really believe that the emotion of love is more powerful in your poems than in the poems of Heinrich Heine? Or that the loves of Victor Hugo are too petty for you? Was love in Macha or in Neruda* crippled by money and prejudice?"

*The nineteenth-century Czech poets Karel Hynek Macha and Jan Neruda.

That was a blow. Jaromil didn't know what to say; he blushed and saw a pair of large dark eyes witnessing his debacle.

The fiftyish woman was pleased by the sarcastic questions of Jaromil's colleague, saying: "Why do you want to transform love, comrades? Love will be the same until the end of time."

Once more the organizer intervened: "Oh, no, comrade. Certainly not!"

"No, that's not what I meant to say," the poet quickly said. "But the difference between the love poetry of yesterday and that of today has nothing to do with the intensity of the emotion."

"Then what does it have to do with?" asked the fiftyish woman.

"With the fact that in the past even the greatest love was always a means of escape from social life, which was loathsome. Today love is bound up with our social duties, our work, our struggle, with which it forms an entirety. That is where its new beauty lies."

The facing row expressed its agreement with Jaromil's colleague, but Jaromil gave a scornful laugh: "That kind of beauty, my dear friend, is nothing new. Didn't the great poets of the past lead lives in which love was in perfect harmony with their social struggle? The lovers in Shelley's poem The Revolt of Islam are revolutionaries who perish together on a pyre. Is that what you call love cut off from social life?"

Worst of all, just as Jaromil a few moments earlier hadn't known how to answer his colleague's objections, his colleague was stumped in turn, which risked causing the impression (an inadmissible impression) that there was no difference between the past and the present and that the new world did not exist. Besides, the liftyish woman got up and asked with an interrogator's smile: "So tell me, what is the difference between love today and love in the past?"

At that decisive moment, when everyone was at an impasse, the man with the wooden leg and crutch intervened; he had been following the debate attentively, though with visible impatience; now he got up and leaned firmly against a chair: "Dear comrades, allow me to introduce myself," and the people in his row quickly protested, shouting that it wasn't necessary, that they knew him very well. But he interrupted them: "I'm not introducing myself to you but to the comrades we've invited here," and as he knew that his name would mean nothing to the poets, he gave them a brief account of his life: he had been the caretaker of this villa for thirty years; he was already here in the time of the industrialist Kocvara, whose summer house this was; he was also here during the war, when the industrialist was arrested and the villa became a Gestapo vacation house; after the war the villa was confiscated by the Christian Party, and now the police were installed here. "Well, from what I've seen, I can say that no government takes such good care of working people as the Communist government." Of course, even these days not everything was perfect: "In Kocvara's time, in the Gestapo's time, and in the Christians' time, the bus stop was always right across from the villa." Yes, that was very convenient, it was only ten steps from his basement room in the villa to the bus stop. Then they moved the bus stop two hundred meters away! He had already complained wherever he could. It was absolutely useless. "Tell me," he said, thumping the floor with his crutch, "now that the villa belongs to the workers, why does the bus stop have to be so far away?"

The people in the first row answered (partly with impatience, partly with a certain amusement) that he had already been told a hundred times that the bus now stopped in front of a recently built factory.

The man with the wooden leg replied that he knew this very well, and that he had suggested that the bus should stop at both places.

The people in the first row said that it would be stupid for the bus to stop every two hundred meters.

The word "stupid" offended the man with the wooden leg; he declared that no one had the right to talk to him like that; he thumped the floor with his crutch and turned crimson. Besides, it wasn't true that buses couldn't stop every two hundred meters. He was well aware that on other bus routes the stops were closer together.

One of the organizers stood up and quoted word for word (it was not the first time he had had to do so) the Czechoslovak Transportation Department's decree expressly prohibiting bus stops so close together.

The man with the wooden leg replied that he had suggested a compromise solution: it would be possible to place the stop midway between the villa and the factory.

But it was pointed out to him that then the bus stop would be far away both for the factory workers and the policemen.

The dispute had lasted for twenty minutes, and the poets were vainly trying to join in the debate; the audience was impassioned about a subject it knew in depth and didn't allow the poets to speak. Only when the man with the wooden leg, disheartened by the resistance of his fellow employees, sat down again in exasperation did the room at last lapse into a silence that was immediately broken by the band music coming from the room next door.

Nobody said anything for a while, and then one of the organizers finally got up and thanked the poets for their visit and for the interesting discussion. On behalf of the visitors, the poet in his sixties got up and said that the discussion (as, by the way, was always the case) had certainly been more rewarding for them, the poets, than for their hosts, whom he and his colleagues thanked.

The voice of a male singer came from the next room, the audience gathered around the man with the wooden leg to soothe his anger, and the poets found themselves alone. Then, after a minute or two, the janitor's son along with the two organizers joined them and took them to the minibus.

8

The beautiful filmmaker was in the minibus taking them back to Prague. The poets surrounded her, each one doing his best to attract her attention. Jaromil's seat was unfortunately too far from hers to enable him to participate in the game; he thought of his redhead, and he realized with conclusive certainty that she was irremediably ugly.

The minibus stopped somewhere in the middle of Prague, and some of the poets decided to go into a tavern. Jaromil and the filmmaker went with them; they sat down at a large table, talked, drank, and as they were leaving the tavern the filmmaker suggested they go to her place. Only a handful of poets remained: Jaromil, the poet in his sixties, and the publishing house editor. They settled into armchairs in a handsome room on the second floor of a modern villa the young woman was subletting, and they started drinking again.

The old poet devoted himself to the filmmaker with matchless ardor. He sat beside her praising her beauty, reciting poems to her, improvising odes in honor of her charms, at moments kneeling at her feet and holding her hands. The editor, with almost equal ardor, devoted himself to Jaromil; to be sure, he. didn't praise his beauty, but he repeated an incalculable number of times: "You are a poet, you are a poet!" (Let me note in passing that when a poet calls someone a poet, it is not the same thing as an engineer calling someone an engineer or a farmer calling someone a farmer, because a farmer is someone who cultivates the earth while a poet is not merely someone who writes verse but someone— let's recall the word!—who is elected to write verse, and only a poet can with certainty recognize in another poet that touch of grace, for—let's recall Rimbaud's letter— all "poets are brothers," and only a brother can recognize the secret family sign.)

The filmmaker, before whom the poet in his sixties was kneeling and whose hands were victims of his assiduous fondling, never stopped looking into Jaromil's eyes. He soon noticed this, was enchanted, and looked into hers. It was a pretty rectangle! The old poet gazed at the filmmaker, the editor gazed at Jaromil, and Jaromil and the filmmaker gazed at each other.

This geometry of gazes was only broken once, when the editor took Jaromil by the arm and led him to the adjacent balcony; he invited Jaromil to urinate with him onto the courtyard below the railing. Jaromil gladly obliged, for he wanted the editor to remember his promise to publish a selection of his poems.

When the two of them returned from the balcony, the old poet got up from his knees and said it was time to go; he was well aware that he was not the one the young woman desired. Then he suggested to the editor (who was much less discerning and considerate) that they leave alone those who wanted and deserved to be, for, as the old poet labeled them, they were the prince and princess of the evening.

The editor finally realized what was going on and was ready to leave, the old poet took him by the arm and led him to the door, and Jaromil saw that he was about to be alone with the young woman, who was sitting in a wide armchair with her legs crossed under her, her dark hair disheveled, and her motionless eyes fixed on him. . . .

The story of two people who are on the verge of becoming lovers is so eternal that we can almost forget the era in which it is taking place. How pleasant it is to recount such love affairs! How delightful it would be to forget what it is that dries up the sap of our brief lives so as to enslave them to its useless work, how beautiful it would be to forget History!

But here is its specter knocking at the door and entering the story. It is not entering in the guise of the secret police or in the guise of a sudden revolution; History does not make its way only on the dramatic peaks of our lives but also soaks into everyday life like dirty water; it enters our story in the guise of underwear.

In Jaromil's country in the era I am speaking of, elegance was a political offense; the clothes worn at the time were very ugly (besides, the war had ended only a few years before, and there were still shortages); and in that austere era elegant underwear was considered a downright reprehensible luxury! Men who were embarrassed by the ugliness of the underwear then being sold (wide shorts that came down to the knees and had the amenity of a comical opening at the crotch) instead wore short pants intended for sports use, that is, for stadiums and gymnasiums. This was strange: everywhere in Bohemia in that era men climbed into their women's beds dressed like soccer players, going to their women as though they were entering the stadium, but from the viewpoint of elegance it was not so bad: the gym shorts had a certain athletic elegance and came in lively colors—blue, green, red, yellow.

Jaromil paid no attention to his clothing, for Mama took care of it; she chose his clothes for him, she chose his underwear, she made sure that he didn't catch cold by seeing to it that he wore warm undershorts. She knew exactly how many pairs of undershorts were stacked in his linen drawer, and she had merely to glance into the linen closet to know which one Jaromil was wearing that day. When she saw that not a single pair of undershorts was missing from the drawer, she immediately