Life Is Elsewhere (4 page)
Late one evening, when the couple had come home a bit tipsy from the house of friends, Jaromil's father, having stretched out beside his wife and turned off the light (let me note that, ever since their wedding, he had always taken her blindly, letting his desire be guided not by sight but by touch), threw off the blanket, and coupled with her. The rarity of their erotic relations and the influence of wine made her give herself to him with a voluptuous sensuality she had not felt for a long time. The idea that they were making a child together again filled her mind, and when she sensed that her husband was approaching his spasm of pleasure she stopped controlling herself and began to shout ecstatically at him to abandon his usual caution, to stay inside her, to make her a child, to make her a pretty little daughter, and she clutched him so firmly and convulsively that he had to struggle to free himself so as to make sure that his wife's wish would not be granted.
Then, as they lay exhausted side by side, Mama moved closer to him and, now whispering in his ear, again said that she wanted to have another child with him; no, she no longer wanted to insist on it, she only wanted to explain why a few moments ago she had shown her desire so abruptly and emphatically (and maybe improperly, she was willing to admit); she added that this time they would surely have a little daughter in whom he would see himself just as she saw herself in Jaromil.
The engineer then told her (it was the first time since their wedding that he had reminded her of it) that he had never wanted to have a child with her; that he had been forced to give in regarding the one child, and that now it was her turn to give in; that if she wanted him to see himself in a child, he could assure her that he would see the most accurate image of himself in a child that had never been born.
They lay side by side, silent for a moment, and then Mama began to sob and she sobbed all night, her husband not even touching her and saying barely a few soothing words that couldn't even get through the outer wave of her tears; she felt that she understood everything at last: the man she lived with had never loved her.
The sadness into which she had sunk was the deepest of all the sorrows she had ever known. Fortunately the consolation her husband had refused her was provided by another creature: History. Three weeks after the night I've just described, her husband was called up for active duty in the military, and he took his gear and left for the country's border. War was about to break out at any moment, people were buying gas masks and preparing air-raid shelters in their cellars. And Mama clutched the misfortune of her country like a saving hand; she experienced it with emotion and spent long hours with her son colorfully describing the events for him.
Then the Great Powers reached an agreement in Munich, and Jaromil's father came home from one of the fortifications now occupied by the German army. After that the whole family would sit downstairs in Grandpapa's room evening after evening to go over the various moves of History, which until recently they had believed to be dozing (maybe, since it was watchful, pretending to be asleep) but which had now suddenly leaped out of its lair and overshadowed everything with its great bulk. Oh, how good Mama felt to be protected by this shadow! Czechs were fleeing the Sudeten region en masse, Bohemia was left defenseless in the center of Europe like a peeled orange, and six months later, early in the morning, German tanks swept into the streets of Prague, and during that time Jaromil's mother was always close to the soldier who had been prevented from defending his homeland, completely forgetting that he was a man who had never loved her.
But even during periods when History impetuously rages, everyday life sooner or later emerges from its shadow and the conjugal bed shows all its monumental triviality and astounding permanence. One evening, when Jaromil's father again put his hand on Mama's breast, she realized that the man who was touching her was the same man who had brought her down. She pushed his hand away, subtly reminding him of the harsh words he had said to her some time before.
She didn't want to be spiteful; she only wanted to signify by this refusal that the great matters of nations cannot make us forget the modest matters of the heart; she wanted to give her husband the opportunity to rectify today the words of yesterday and to raise up the person he had brought down. She believed that the nation's tragedy had made him more sensitive, and she was ready to greet with gratitude even a furtive caress as a sign of repentance and the beginning of a new chapter in their love. Alas, the husband whose hand had just been pushed away from his wife's breast turned over and quickly fell asleep.
After the great student demonstration in Prague, the Germans closed the Czech universities, and Mama waited in vain for her husband again to slip his hand under the blanket and put his hand on her breast. Grandpapa, having discovered that the pretty salesgirl in the cosmetics shop had been stealing from him for ten years, went into a rage and died of a stroke. Czech students were taken away in cattle cars to concentration camps, and Mama consulted a doctor, who deplored the bad state of her nerves and recommended a rest. He told her about a boardinghouse on the edge of a small spa, surrounded by a river and lakes, which every summer attracted crowds of people who liked swimming, fishing, and boating. It was early spring, and she was enchanted by the thought of tranquil lakeside walks. But then she was afraid of the delightful dance music that, forgotten, lingers in the air of restaurant terraces like a poignant recollection of summer; she was afraid of her own longing, and she decided that she couldn't go there alone.
Ah, of course! She knew right away with whom she would go. Because of the sorrow her husband had caused her and because of her desire for another child she had for some time nearly forgotten him. How stupid she had been, how badly she had treated herself by forgetting him! Repentant, she bent over him: "Jaromil, you're my first and my second child," she said, pressing his face to her breast, going on senselessly: "You're my first, my second, my third, my fourth, my fifth, my sixth, and my tenth child," and she covered his face with kisses.
6
A tall, gray-haired lady with an erect bearing greeted them at the railroad station; a sturdy countryman grabbed the two suitcases and carried them out to a waiting horse-drawn black carriage; the man got up onto the driver's seat and Jaromil, Mama, and the tall lady sat down on the facing passenger seats to be conveyed through the streets of the small town to a square bordered on one side by a Renaissance colonnade and on the other by a wrought-iron fence before a garden in which stood an old vine-covered chateau; then they headed down to the river; Jaromil noticed a row of yellow wooden cabanas, a diving board, white pedestal tables and chairs, a line of poplars in the background along the riverbank, and by then the carriage was already on its way to the scattered riverfront villas.
In front of one of them the horse stopped, the man got down from his seat and picked up the two suitcases, and Jaromil and Mama followed him through a garden, a foyer, and upstairs to a room with twin beds placed against each other in the marital arrangement and with two windows, one of them opening onto a balcony facing the garden and the river. Mama went over to the balcony railing and took a deep breath: "Ah, how divinely peaceful!" she said and again inhaled and exhaled deeply, looking at the riverside, where a red boat moored to a wooden landing was rocking.
That evening at dinner downstairs in the small dining room, she met an old couple who occupied another of the guest rooms, and every evening thereafter the murmur of prolonged conversation ruled the room; everyone liked Jaromil, and Mama listened with pleasure to his small talk, ideas, and discreet boasting. Yes,
discreet:
Jaromil would never forget the woman in the dentists waiting room and would always seek a shield against her nasty look; to be sure he would still thirst for admiration, but he had learned to gain it with terse phrases naively and modestly uttered.
The villa in the peaceful garden; the dark river with the moored boat awakening thoughts of long voyages; the black carriage that stopped in front of the villa from time to time to pick up the tall lady who looked like a princess from a book filled with castles and palaces; the still, deserted swimming pool to which one could descend upon leaving the carriage as if passing from one century to another, one dream to another, one book to another; the Renaissance square with the narrow colonnade among whose columns men with swords once clashed—all this made up a world that Jaromil entered with delight.
The man with the dog was also part of this beautiful world; the first time they saw him he was standing motionless on the riverbank, looking at the water; he was wearing a leather coat, and a black German shepherd sat at his side; their stillness made them look like otherworldly figures. The next time they met him it was in the same place; the man (again in the leather coat) was throwing sticks, and the dog was retrieving them.
The third time (the setting was always the same: poplars and river), the man briefly bowed to Mama and then, as the perceptive Jaromil noticed, he turned to look at them after they passed him. Returning from their walk the next day, they saw the black German shepherd sitting at the entrance to the villa. When they entered the foyer they heard voices in the next room and were in no doubt that the masculine one belonged to the dog's master; their curiosity was great enough to keep them standing in the foyer for a while, looking around and chatting until the tall lady, the boarding-house owner, at last appeared.
Mama pointed at the dog: "Who is that man this dog belongs to? We're always running into him on our walks.'' "He's the art teacher at the high school here." Mama remarked that she would be very delighted to talk to an art teacher because Jaromil liked to draw, and she was eager to have an expert's opinion. The boardinghouse owner introduced the man to Mama, and Jaromil had to run up to the room to get his sketchbook.
Then the four of them sat down in the small salon— the boardinghouse owner; Jaromil; the dog's master, who was examining the drawings; and Mama, who accompanied his examination with her commentary: she explained that Jaromil always said that what interested him was not drawing landscapes or still lifes but rather action scenes, and, she said, his drawings really did have astonishing vitality and movement, even though she didn't understand why all the people in them had dogs' heads; maybe if Jaromil drew people with real human bodies his modest work might have some value, but the way it was she unfortunately couldn't say whether it made any sense at all.
The dog's owner examined the drawings with satisfaction; then he declared that it was in fact the combination of animal head and human body that captivated him. For that fantastic combination was no chance idea but, as so many of the child's drawings showed, a haunting image, something rooted in the unfathomable depths of his childhood. Jaromil's mother should be careful of judging her son's talent only by his ability to depict the outer world; anyone could acquire that; what interested him as a painter (letting it be understood that teaching for him was a necessary evil to earn a living) was precisely the original inner world the child was laying out on paper.
Mama listened with pleasure to the painter's praise, the tall lady stroked Jaromil's hair and asserted that he had a great future ahead of him, and Jaromil looked down, registering in his memory everything he was hearing. The painter said that next year he would be transferred to a Prague high school, and that he would be pleased if Jaromil's mother were to bring him further examples of the boy's work.
"Inner world!" Those were grand words, and Jaromil heard them with extreme satisfaction. He never forgot that at the age of five he had already been considered an exceptional child, different from others; the behavior of his classmates, who made fun of his schoolbag and shirt, also (at times harshly) confirmed his uniqueness. Until this moment that uniqueness had only been a vague and empty notion; it had been an incomprehensible hope or an incomprehensible rejection; but now it had received a name: "original inner world"; and that designation was immediately given definite content: drawings of people with dogs' heads. Jaromil of course knew very well that he had made this admired discovery of dog-headed humans by chance, purely because he couldn't draw a human face; this gave him the confused idea that the originality of his inner world was not the result of laborious effort but rather the expression of everything that randomly passed through his head; it was given him like a gift.
From then on he paid great attention to his own thoughts and began to admire them. For example, the idea came to him that when he died the world he was living in would cease to exist. At first this thought only flickered in his head, but now that he had been made aware of his inner originality, he didn't allow the thought to escape (as he had allowed so many other thoughts to escape previously) but immediately seized it, observed it, examined it from all sides. He was walking along the river, closing his eyes from time to time and wondering if the river existed when his eyes were closed. Of course, every time he opened his eyes the river was flowing as before, but what was astonishing was that Jaromil was unable to consider this as proof that the river was really there when he was not seeing it. That seemed inordinately interesting to him, and he devoted the better part of a day to this observation before telling Mama about it. The nearer they came to their vacation's end, the greater the pleasure they took in their conversations. Now they would take their walks after dark, just the two of them, sit down on a worm-eaten bench at the edge of the water, hold hands, and look at the wavelets on which an enormous moon gently rocked. "How beautiful," Mama said with a sigh, and the child watched the moonlit circle of water and dreamed of the river's long course; Mama thought of the empty days that would soon resume, and she said: "Darling, there's a sadness in me you'll never understand." Then she looked into her son's eyes, and it seemed to her that she saw great love there and a yearning to understand. This frightened her; she couldn't really confide a woman's troubles to a child! But at the same time those understanding eyes attracted her like a vice. When mother and son lay stretched out side by side on the twin beds Mama remembered that she had reclined this way beside Jaromil until he was five years old and that she was happy then; she said to herself: He's the only man I've ever been happy with in bed; at first this thought made her smile, but when she looked again at her son's tender gaze she told herself that this child was not only capable of distracting her from the things that grieved her (thus giving her the
consolation of forgettin
g) but also of listening to her attentively (thus bringing her the
consolation of understanding
). "I want you to know that my life is far from being full of love," she said to him; and another time she went so far as to confide to him: "As a mama, I'm happy, but a mama is not only a mama, she's also a woman."