Life Is Elsewhere (30 page)

When the three men were going downstairs to stow the camera and lights in their van, he came out of his room. And he heard Mama saying to the filmmaker: "Let's go out somewhere for coffee."

During their afternoon of work together, while he had been shut away in his room, the two women had begun to use the familiar pronoun with each other!

When he realized this, it was as if his lover had just been whisked away from under his nose. He coldly said goodbye to the filmmaker, and as soon as the two women left the house he too left and quickly and angrily headed toward the redhead's building; she wasn't home; he paced up and down in front of the building for nearly half an hour, his mood increasingly gloomy, until he saw her at last; her face expressed delighted surprise, and his expressed harsh reproaches: Why hadn't she been home? Why hadn't she realized that he was probably coming? Where had she gone to be coming home so late?

She had hardly closed the door when he tore off her dress; then he made love to her, imagining that the woman lying under him was the dark-eyed woman; hearing the redhead's sighs but simultaneously seeing dark eyes, he had the impression that the sighs belonged to those eyes, and this so aroused him that he made love several times in a row, but never for more than a few seconds each time. The redheaded young woman found this so peculiar that she began to laugh; but Jaromil was particularly sensitive to irony that day, and the friendly indulgence of the redhead's laughter escaped him; offended, he gave her a pair of slaps; she began to cry; for Jaromil that was like a balm; she cried, and he struck her again; the tears of a woman we have made cry are redemption; they are Jesus Christ dying for us on the cross; for some moments Jaromil enjoyed the sight of the redhead's tears, and then he kissed her face, soothed her, and went home quite serenely.

A few days later the filming resumed; again the van came and three men (that hostile audience) got out, along with the beautiful girl whose sighs he had heard two evenings before at the redhead's; and of course there was also Mama, getting younger and younger, resembling a musical instrument that growled, thundered, laughed, and broke out of the orchestra to play a solo.

This time the camera lens was to be aimed directly at Jaromil; he had to be shown in his everyday surroundings, at his desk, in the garden (for Jaromil, it seemed, loved the garden, the flower beds, the lawn, the flowers); he had to be shown with Mama, who, let's remember, had already recorded a lengthy commentary on her son. The filmmaker sat them down on a bench in the garden and compelled Jaromil to chat normally with his mother; this apprenticeship in normality lasted an hour, and Mama didn't for a moment lose her energy; she was always saying something or other (in the film nothing of what they were saying would be heard, their inaudible conversation would be accompanied by the prerecorded maternal commentary), and when she noticed that Jaromil's expression was insufficiently amiable, she began explaining to him that it wasn't easy to be the mother of a boy like him, a timid, solitary boy who always had stage fright.

After that they shoved him into the van and took him to the romantic spot on the outskirts of Prague where Jaromil, Mama was convinced, had been conceived. She was too prudish ever to have dared tell why this landscape was so dear to her; even though she had wanted to, she hadn't told anyone, and now she told everyone, with forced ambiguity, that for her this particular landscape had always represented a sensual landscape, a landscape of love. "Look how the soil undulates, it looks like a woman, like her curves, like her maternal shapes! And look at those boulders, those blocks of gigantic boulders rising in the background! Isn't there something virile about those overhanging, steep, vertical boulders? Isn't this a landscape of man and woman? Isn't this an erotic landscape?"

Jaromil wished to rebel; he wanted to tell them that their film was silly; he felt rising in him the pride of a man who knows what good taste means; he might have made a small and useless fuss or at least run away, as he had from the swimming place on the shore of the Vltava, but this time he couldn't; the filmmaker's dark eyes rendered him powerless; he was afraid of losing them a second time; those eyes barred his avenue of escape.

They posed him in front of a huge boulder and told him to recite his favorite poem. Mama was at a height of excitement. It was such a long time since she had been here! Exactly at the spot where she had made love with a young engineer on a Sunday morning so many years ago, exactly here her son was now standing; as if, after so many years, he had sprung up here like a mushroom (ah, yes, as if children came to be like mushrooms exactly at the spot where their parents mingled their seed!); Mama was carried away by the sight of this strange, beautiful, impossible mushroom reciting, in a quavering voice, lines about his wish to die by fire.

Jaromil felt that he was reciting very badly, but he couldn't help it; however much he told himself that he had no stage fright, that in the police villa the other evening he had recited masterfully and splendidly, here it was too much for him; standing in front of this absurd boulder in that absurd landscape, in a panic at the thought that someone might pass by walking his dog or strolling with his girl (you see, he had the same fears as his mother twenty years earlier!), he was unable to concentrate, and he uttered his words unnaturally and with difficulty.

They compelled him to repeat his poem several times in succession, and finally they gave up. "He's always had stage fright!" sighed Mama. "Even in high school he trembled at every exam; often I had to drag him to school by force because of his stage fright!"

The filmmaker said that they would dub an actor reciting the poem and that all Jaromil had to do was stand in front of the boulder and silently move his lips. That's what he did.

"Dammit!" the filmmaker shouted impatiently. "You have to move your mouth properly, as if you were reciting your poem, not just any old way. The actor will recite the poem by following the movement of your lips!"

And so Jaromil stood in front of the boulder, moved his lips   (obediently and properly), and the camera finally hummed.

The day before yesterday he had stood outside facing the camera in a light coat, but today he had to wear a heavy winter coat, a scarf, and a hat; it had snowed. He was meeting her in front of her building at six o'clock. But it was already six-fifteen, and the redhead had not yet turned up.

A delay of fifteen minutes was certainly not serious; but Jaromil, after all the humiliations he had undergone the last few days, was unable to bear the merest slight; he had to pace up and down in front of the building in a street full of people who could see that he was waiting for someone in no hurry to join him, thus making his failure public.

He didn't dare look at his watch, fearing that this ail-too eloquent gesture would reveal him in the eyes of everyone on the street as a lover waiting in vain; he pulled up the sleeve of his overcoat slightly and slipped its edge under his watchband so as to be able to keep glancing inconspicuously at the time; when he saw that it was six-twenty, he nearly went into a frenzy: Why was he always a few minutes early, and why did she, so stupid and ugly, always turn up late?

She finally turned up and saw Jaromil's stony face. They went into her room, sat down, and the girl apologized: she had been with a young woman friend. She couldn't have found a worse thing to say. Of course nothing could have absolved her, especially not a young woman friend who to Jaromil was the very essence of insignificance. He told the redhead that he was well aware of the importance of her diversions with her friend; that is why he suggested that she turn around and go right back to her friend's place.

The girl realized that things were going badly; she told him that she and her friend had spoken of very serious matters; the friend was about to break up with her boyfriend; the friend seemed to be very sad, she was weeping, the redhead wanted to calm her, and she couldn't leave before she had comforted her.

Jaromil said that it was very generous of her to have dried her friends tears. But who was going to dry the redheaded girl's tears when Jaromil broke up with her because he refused to continue seeing a girl to whom a friend's stupid tears meant more than he did?

The girl realized that things were going from bad to worse; she apologized again, said she was sorry, and asked his forgiveness.

But this was too little for his humiliation's insatiable appetite; he replied that her excuses made no difference to his conviction: what the redheaded girl called love was not love at all; no, he said, anticipating her objections, it wasn't pettiness that caused him to draw extreme conclusions from an apparently ordinary episode; it was in fact such small details that revealed the basis of the redhead's feelings toward Jaromil; that intolerable flightiness, that typical heedlessness with which she treated Jaromil, just as if he were a woman friend, a customer in the store, a passerby on the street!

She must never again have the gall to tell him that she loved him! Her love was only a paltry imitation of love!

The girl realized that things couldn't possibly get worse. She tried to break into Jaromil's malicious sadness with a kiss; he pushed her away almost brutally; she took advantage of this to fall to her knees and press her head against his stomach; he hesitated for a moment, but then he lifted her up and coldly asked her not to touch him.

The hatred that went to his head like alcohol was beautiful and fascinating; it fascinated him all the more in that it echoed back to him from the young woman and wounded him in turn; it was a self-destructive anger, for he knew very well that by driving the redheaded girl away he was driving away the only woman he had; he sensed that his anger was unjustified and that he was unjust to the girl, but knowing this was probably what made him still more cruel, for what attracted him was the abyss; the abyss of solitude, the abyss of self-condemnation; he knew that he would be unhappy without his girlfriend (he would be alone) and dissatisfied with himself (he was aware that he had been unjust), but this knowledge was powerless against the splendid intoxication of anger. He told her that what he had just said was not only for now but forever: he never wanted to be touched by her hand again.

This was not the first time the girl had encountered Jaromil's anger and jealousy; but this time she perceived an almost frantic obstinacy in his voice; she felt that Jaromil was capable of doing anything to satisfy his incomprehensible fury. Nearly at the last moment, nearly at the edge of the abyss, she said: "I beg you, don't be angry; I lied to you. I wasn't at a friend's."

He was bewildered: "Where were you then?"

"You'll be furious, you don't like him, I can't help it, but I had to go see him." "Well, who were you with?"

"With my brother. The one who stayed at my place."

He was outraged: "Why do you always need to be with him?"

"Don't get mad; I don't care about him. Compared to you he means nothing at all to me, but you have to understand that he's my brother, after all; we grew up together for fifteen years. He's going away. For a long time. I had to say goodbye to him."

This sentimental farewell to her brother was repellent to him: "Where's your brother going that you have to say such a long goodbye to him and forget everything else? On a job somewhere for a week? Or is he going to the country on Sunday?"

No, he's going neither to work nor to the country; it's something much more serious, and she can't tell Jaromil about it because she knows that he would be furious.

"And that's what you call loving me? Hiding things from me that I don't approve of? Keeping secrets from me? "

Yes, the girl is well aware that to love is to tell each other everything; but Jaromil must understand her: she is afraid, simply afraid. . . .

"What are you afraid of? Where's your brother going that you're afraid to tell me?"

Can it be that Jaromil really has no idea? That he really can't guess?

No, Jaromil can't guess (and at this point his anger is limping far behind his curiosity).

The girl finally confesses: her brother has decided to go across the border, secretly, illegally; by tomorrow he will be out of the country.

What? Her brother wants to abandon our young socialist republic? Her brother wants to betray the revolution? Her brother wants to become an emigre? Doesn't she realize what being an emigre means? Doesn't she realize that every emigre automatically becomes an agent of the foreign espionage services that are trying to destroy our country?

The girl nodded in agreement. Instinct told her that Jaromil would much more readily forgive her brother's treason than her fifteen minutes of tardiness. That's why she kept nodding and said that she agreed with everything Jaromil was saying.

"What do you mean, you agree with me? You should have talked him out of it! You should have stopped him!"

Yes, she had tried to dissuade him; she had done everything she could to dissuade him; now Jaromil would probably understand why she had been late; now Jaromil would probably forgive her.

Curiously Jaromil really did tell her that he forgave her lateness; but he couldn't forgive her brother's leaving the country: "Your brother is on the other side of the barricades. He's my personal enemy. If war broke out, your brother would shoot at me and I at him. Do you understand?"

"Yes, I understand," said the redheaded girl, and she assured him that she would always be on the same side as he; at his side and never with anyone else.

"How can you say you're on my side? If you were really on my side, you'd never let your brother leave!"

"What could I do? Am I strong enough to hold him back?"

"You should have come to me at once, and I would have known what to do. But instead of that you lied! You claimed you were with a friend! You wanted to mislead me! And you claim to be on my side."

She swore to him that she really was on his side and that she would stay there whatever happened.

"If what you're saying were true, you'd call the police!"