Life Is Elsewhere (33 page)

The girl was astonished, too, that the room was still the same while so much had changed in her life since that day. "Everything here is just the way it was," she said.

"Yes, everything is just the way it was," the man in his forties agreed, and he motioned her to sit down in the chair she had always sat in; then he hastened to question her: Are you hungry? Have you really eaten? When did you eat? Where are you going from here? Are you going to your parents' house?

She told him that she had to go to her parents' house, that she had gone to the railroad station but then had hesitated and decided to come here first.

"Wait, I'm going to get dressed," he said. He had just noticed that he was still in his bathrobe; he went into the foyer and closed the door behind him; before starting to dress he picked up the phone; he dialed a number, and when a woman's voice answered, he apologized, saying that he would be unable to see her today.

He was under no obligation to the girl waiting in the room; nevertheless he didn't want her to overhear his conversation, and he spoke in a low voice. While he was talking, he kept looking at the heavy brown coat hanging on the peg and filling the foyer with poignant music.

5

It had been about three years since he had last seen her, and about five years since he had come to know her. He had had prettier girlfriends, but this one possessed fine qualities: she was barely seventeen when they had met; she had an amusing spontaneity and was erotically gifted and malleable: she did exactly what she read in his eyes; she understood within fifteen minutes not to talk about feelings with him, and without his having to explain anything, obediently came to visit only (it was hardly once a month) when he invited her over.

The man in his forties didn't hide his penchant for lesbian women; one day, amid the intoxication of physical love, the girl had whispered in his ear that she had once surprised a strange woman in a swimming-pool cubicle and made love with her; the story greatly pleased the man in his forties, and later, after realizing its improbability, was still more touched by the effort the girl had made to please him. Furthermore the girl didn't confine herself to fabrications; she readily introduced the man in his forties to some of her girlfriends, and she inspired and organized a good many erotic entertainments.

She understood that the man in his forties not only didn't require her faithfulness but also felt safer when his girlfriends had serious affairs with other men. She therefore talked to him with innocent indiscretion about her boyfriends past and present, which interested and entertained him.

Now she is sitting before him in an armchair (the man in his forties had put on a pair of slacks and a sweater), and she says: "As I was leaving the prison, I saw horses coming toward me."

6

"Horses? What horses?"

As she was going through the prison gate early that morning she came across a group of horseback riders. They sat straight in the saddle, upright and firm, as if they were attached to the animals to form huge inhuman bodies. The girl felt herself level with the ground, tiny and insignificant. Far above her she heard laughter and the snorting of the horses; she crouched against the wall.

"Where did you go after that?"

She had gone to the last stop of the streetcar line. It was morning, but the sun was already hot; she was wearing the heavy coat, and the stares of passersby intimidated her. She was afraid that there would be a crowd at the stop and that people would be eyeing her. Fortunately, there was no one but an old woman on the traffic island. That was good; it was like a balm to find only an old woman there. "And you decided right away that you were going to see me first?"

Her duty was to go home, to her parents. She had gone to the railroad station, she was standing in line at the ticket window, but when her turn came she ran away. She shivered at the idea of her family. She was hungry, and she bought a piece of salami. She sat in a square and waited until four o'clock, when she knew the man in his forties would be coming home from work.

"I'm glad you came to me first, it was nice of you," he said.

"Do you remember," he said a moment later, "do you still remember what you said? That you would never come here again?"

"That's not true," said the girl.

He smiled. "Yes, it is," he said.

"No, it isn't."

7

Of course it was true. When she had come to see him that day, the man in his forties had opened the liquor cabinet; when he was about to pour two glasses of cognac, the girl shook her head: "No, I don't want anything. I'm never drinking with you again."

The man in his forties was surprised, and the girl went on: "I'm not coming here anymore, I only came today to tell you that."

As the man in his forties continued to show surprise, she told him that she really loved the young man she had told him about, and that she didn't want to deceive him any longer; she had come to ask the man in his forties to understand her and to hold no grudge against her.

Even though he enjoyed a colorful erotic life, the man in his forties was basically an idyllist and saw to it that his adventures were calm and orderly. To be sure, the girl gravitated as a humble intermittent star in his erotic constellation, but even a single small star suddenly torn out of its place can unpleasantly rupture the harmony of a universe.

He was also hurt by her lack of understanding: he had always been happy that the girl had a boyfriend who loved her; he had urged her to talk about him, and he gave her advice about how she should behave with him. The young man so amused him that he kept in a drawer the poems the fellow had written for her; he disliked these poems, but at the same time they interested him, just as he was interested in and disliked the world that was taking form around him, which he observed from his bathtub.

He was willing to watch over the lovers with all his cynical benevolence, and the girl's sudden decision struck him as ungrateful. He was unable to control himself enough to let nothing show, and the girl, seeing his sullen look, kept on talking to justify her decision; she swore that she loved her young man and that she wanted to be honest with him.

And now she sat (in the same armchair, wearing the same dress) facing the man in his forties and claiming that she had never said anything of the kind.

8

She was not lying. She was one of those rare souls who don't distinguish between what is and what should be, and who regard their moral wishes as reality. Of course she recalled what she had said to the man in his forties; and yet she also knew that she should not have said it, and therefore she now denied her recollection the right to a real existence.

But she recalled it perfectly! That day she had stayed with the man in his forties longer than she had intended, and had been late for her date. Her boyfriend had been mortally insulted, and she had felt that she would only be able to placate him with an excuse of equally mortal gravity. And so she had invented the story that she had stayed for a long time with her brother, who was about to leave secretly for the West. She had not suspected that her boyfriend would urge her to denounce her brother to the police.

So after work the very next day, she ran to the man in his forties to ask for advice; he was understanding and friendly; he advised her to stick to her lie and to convince her boyfriend that after a dramatic scene her brother had sworn to give up the idea of leaving for the West. He had instructed her exactly how to describe the scene in which she dissuaded her brother from secretly crossing the border, and told her to suggest to her boyfriend that he was indirectly her family's savior, for without his influence and intervention her brother would perhaps already have been arrested at the border or—who knows?—already be dead, shot by a border guard.

"How did your conversation that day with your boyfriend end up?" he asked her now.

"I never talked to him. They arrested me just as I was coming home from seeing you. They were waiting in front of my house."

"So you never talked to him again?"

"No."

"But surely you know what happened to him."

"No."

"You really don't know?" asked the man in his forties, amazed.

"I don't know anything."

The girl shrugged her shoulders apathetically, as if she didn't want to know anything.

"He's dead," said the man in his forties. "He died soon after you were arrested."

9

She had not known that; from far away came the words of the young man who had readily weighed love and death on the same scales.

"Did he kill himself?" she asked in a soft voice that was suddenly ready to forgive.

The man in his forties smiled. "No. He just got sick and died. His mother moved away. You wouldn't find a trace of them now in the villa. There's nothing but a big black monument in the cemetery. Like the tombstone of a great writer. His mother had it inscribed: 'Here lies the poet. . .' and underneath his name there's the poem 'Epitaph' you once brought me: the one in which he says he wants to die by fire."

They fell silent; the girl was thinking that her boyfriend had not committed suicide but had died an entirely ordinary death; that even his death turned its back on her. When she left the prison she had firmly resolved never to see him again, but she had not imagined that he was no longer alive. If he didn't exist, the reason for her three years in prison no longer existed, and all of it was merely a bad dream, nonsense, some-thing unreal.

"Listen," he said, "we're going to make dinner. Come and give me a hand."

They went into the kitchen and sliced bread; they made ham and salami sandwiches; they opened a can of sardines; they found a bottle of wine; they took two glasses out of the cabinet.

That had been their habit when she used to visit him. It was comforting to her to notice that this stereotypical bit of life always awaited her, unchanged, immutable, and she was able today to reenter it without difficulty; she thought that it was the most beautiful part of life she had ever known.

The most beautiful? Why?

It was a part of life in which she was safe. This man was good to her and required nothing from her; in his eyes she was neither guilty of nor responsible for anything; she was always safe with him, as one is safe when one finds oneself for the moment beyond the reach of one's own destiny; she was safe as a character in a play is safe when the curtain falls after the first act and the interlude begins; the other characters, too, remove their masks and chat casually.

For a long time the man in his forties had felt that he was living outside the drama of his own life; at the beginning of the war he had slipped out of the country to England with his wife, fought against the Germans with the British air force, and lost his wife in an air raid on London; when he returned to Prague, he remained in the military, and at just about the time that Jaromil decided to study political science, the authorities determined that he had been too closely tied to capitalist England during the war and that he was therefore not reliable enough for a socialist army. And so he found himself working in a factory, his back turned on History and its dramatic performances, his back turned on his own destiny, he himself entirely preoccupied with himself, with his private, responsibility-free amusements and his books.

Three years earlier the girl had come to say goodbye, because he had merely offered her an interlude whereas her young boyfriend had promised her a life. And now she is chewing a ham sandwich, drinking wine, boundlessly happy that the man in his forties is bestowing on her an interlude during which she feels a delightful silence slowly blossom within her.

Suddenly she feels more at ease, and she begins to talk.

11

Only crumbs on the empty plates and a half-empty bottle of wine were still on the table, and she talked (freely and simply) about the prison, about her fellow prisoners and the guards, and she lingered, as she always did, over details that interested her, combining them in an illogical but charming stream of chatter.

And yet there was something new in her talk today; in the past her sentences had naively headed toward the essentials, but today they seemed to be merely a pretext to avoid the heart of the matter.

But what matter? Then the man in his forties thought he could guess, and he asked: "What happened to your brother?"

"I don't know . . . ," said the girl.

"Did they let him go?"

"No."

The man in his forties finally understood why the girl had run away from the ticket window and why she was so afraid to go home; for she was not only an innocent victim but also the guilty one who had brought calamity to her brother and to her whole family; he could easily imagine how the interrogators had made her confess, how her attempts to evade them had enmeshed her in ever more suspect lies. How can she now explain that it was not she who had denounced her brother by accusing him of an imaginary crime but some unknown young man who, moreover, was no longer alive?

The girl was silent, and a wave of compassion overwhelmed the man in his forties: "Don't go to your parents' today. There's plenty of time. You've got to think about it first. If you like you can stay here."

Then he leaned over her and put his hand on her face; he didn't caress her, he merely kept his hand tenderly and for a long while pressed against her skin.

The gesture expressed such kindness that tears began to flow down the girl's cheeks.

12

Since the death of his wife, whom he had loved, he had hated female tears; they frightened him just as he was frightened by the idea that women could make him an actor in the dramas of their lives; he saw tears as tentacles that tried to drag him away from the idyll of his nondestiny; tears repelled him.

So he was surprised to feel their unpleasant wetness on his hand. But he was even more surprised to find that this time he was unable to resist their melancholy power; he knew that these were not actually tears of love, that they were not directed at him, that they were neither a ruse nor a means of coercion nor a scene; he knew that they were content, simply and for themselves, to be, and that they streamed from the girl's eyes the way sadness and joy invisibly slip out of one's body. He had no shield against their innocence and was touched by them to the inmost depths of his soul.