E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten
Kundera Laughable Loves
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-36766-5
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-36766-5
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
The French-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in the Czech Republic and has lived in France since 1975. He died in Paris in 2023.
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… they do not know that they seek only the chase and not the quarry.
—Blaise Pascal
Martin
Martin is able to do something I’m incapable of. Stop any woman on any street. I must say that during the long time I’ve known him I’ve greatly profited from this skill of his, for I like women as much as he does, but I wasn’t granted his reckless audacity. On the other hand, Martin committed the error of reducing accosting to an exercise of virtuosity as an end in itself. And so he used to say, not without a certain bitterness, that he was like a soccer forward who unselfishly passes unstoppable balls to his teammate, who then kicks easy goals and reaps cheap glory.
Last Monday afternoon after work I was waiting for him in a café on Vaclav Square, looking through a thick German book on Etruscan culture. It had taken several months for the university library to negotiate its loan from Germany, and now that it had finally come just that day, I carried it off as if it were a relic, and I was actually quite pleased that Martin had kept me waiting, and that I could leaf through the book I’d long wanted at a café table.
Whenever I think about ancient cultures nostalgia seizes me. Perhaps this is nothing but envy of the sweet slowness of the history of that time. The era of ancient Egyptian culture lasted for several thousand years; the era of Greek antiquity for almost a thousand. In this respect, a single human life imitates the history of mankind; at first it is plunged into immobile slowness, and then only gradually does it accelerate more and more. Just two months ago Martin had turned forty.
The Adventure Begins
It was he who disturbed my thoughtful mood. He appeared suddenly at the glass door of the café and headed for me, making expressive gestures and grimaces in the direction of a table at which a woman was sitting over a cup of coffee. Without taking his eyes off her, he sat down beside me and said: “What do you say about that?”
I felt humiliated; I’d actually been so engrossed in my thick volume that only now did I notice the girl; I had to admit that she was pretty. And at that moment the girl straightened up and called the man with the black bow tie, saying that she wished to pay.
“Pay too!” Martin ordered me.
We thought that we would have to run after the girl, but luckily she was detained at the cloakroom. She had left a shopping bag there, and the cloakroom attendant had to hunt for a while before placing it on the counter in front of the girl. As the girl gave the cloakroom attendant some coins, Martin snatched the German book out of my hands.
“It will be better to put it in here,” he said with daredevil nonchalance, and slipped the book carefully into the girl’s bag. The girl looked surprised, but she didn’t know what she was supposed to say.
“It’s uncomfortable to carry in one’s hand,” continued Martin, and when the girl went to pick up the bag herself, he told me off for not knowing how to behave.
The young woman was a nurse in a country hospital. She was in Prague, she said, only for a look around and was hurrying off to the bus terminal. The short distance to the streetcar stop was enough for us to say everything essential and to agree that on Saturday we would come to the town of B. to visit this lovely young woman, who, as Martin meaningfully pointed out, would certainly have a pretty colleague join us.
The streetcar arrived. I handed the young woman her bag, and she began to take the book out of it, but Martin prevented her with a grand gesture, saying we would come for it on Saturday, and that she should read through it carefully in the meantime. The young woman smiled in a bewildered fashion, the streetcar carried her away, and we waved.
Nothing could be done; the book, which I’d been looking forward to for so long, suddenly found itself in a faraway place; when you came to think of it it was quite annoying; but nonetheless a certain lunacy happily uplifted me on the wings it promptly provided. Martin immediately began thinking about how to make an excuse for Saturday afternoon and night to his young wife (for this is how things stand: at home he has a young wife; and what is worse, he loves her; and what is still worse, he is afraid of her; and what is far worse still, he is anxious about her).
A Successful Sighting
For our excursion I borrowed a neat little Fiat, and on Saturday at two o’clock I drove up in front of Martin’s apartment building; Martin was waiting for me and we set off. It was July and oppressively hot.
We wanted to get to B. as soon as possible, but when we saw, in a village through which we were driving, two young men only in swim trunks and with eloquently wet hair, I stopped the car. The lake was actually not far away, a few paces, a mere stone’s throw. I needed to be refreshed; Martin was also for swimming.
We changed into our swim trunks and leaped into the water. I swam quickly to the other side. Martin, however, barely took a dip, washed himself off, and came out again. When I’d had a good swim and returned to shore, I caught sight of him in a state of intent absorption. On the shore a crowd of kids was yelling, somewhere farther off the local young people were playing soccer, but Martin was staring at the sturdy little figure of a young girl, who was perhaps fifteen meters away with her back toward us. Totally motionless, she was observing the water.
“Look,” said Martin.
“I am looking.”
“And what do you say?”
“What should I say?”
“You don’t know what you should say about that?”
“We’ll have to wait until she turns around,” I suggested.
“Not at all. We don’t have to wait until she turns around. What’s showing from this side is quite enough for me.”
“Okay. But we don’t have the time to spend with her.”
“A sighting, a sighting,” said Martin, and turned to a little boy a short distance away who was putting on his swim trunks: “Say, kid, do you know the name of that girl over there?” and he pointed to the girl, who, apparently in some curious state of apathy, went on standing in the same position.
“That one there?”
“Yes, that one there.”
“That one isn’t from around here,” said the little boy.
Martin turned to a little girl of about twelve, who was sunbathing close by.
“Say, kid, do you know who that girl over there is, the one standing at the edge of the water?”
The little girl obediently sat up. “That one there?”
“Yes, that one.”
“That’s Marie—”
“Marie? Marie who?”
“Marie Panek, from Traplice.”
And the girl still stood with her back to us, looking at the water. Now she bent down for her bathing cap, and when she straightened up again, putting it on her head as she did so, Martin was already at my side saying: “That’s Marie Panek from Traplice. Now we can drive on.”
He was completely calmed and satisfied, and obviously no longer thinking of anything but the rest of the journey.
A Little Theory
That’s what Martin calls sighting. From his vast experience, he has come to the conclusion that it is not as difficult, for someone with high numerical requirements, to seduce a girl as it is to know enough girls one hasn’t yet seduced.
Therefore he asserts that it is necessary always, no matter where, and at every opportunity, systematically to sight women, that is, to record in a notebook or in our memories the names of women who have attracted us and whom we could one day board.
Boarding is a higher level of activity and means that we will get in touch with a particular woman, make her acquaintance, and gain access to her.
He who likes to look back boastfully will stress the names of the women he’s made love to; but he who looks forward, toward the future, must above all see to it that he has plenty of women sighted and boarded.
Over and above boarding there exists only one last level of activity, and I am happy to point out, in deference to Martin, that those who do not go after anything but this last level are wretched, primitive men, who remind me of village soccer players pressing forward thoughtlessly toward the other team’s goal, forgetting that it is not enough to score a goal (and many goals) out of the frenetic desire of the kicker, but that it is first necessary to play a conscientious and systematic game on the field.
“Do you think you’ll go look her up in Traplice sometime?” I asked Martin, when we were driving again.
“You never know,” said Martin.
Then I said: “In any case the day is beginning propitiously for us.”
Game and Necessity
We arrived at the hospital in B. in excellent spirits. It was about three-thirty. We called our nurse on the phone in the lobby. Before long she came down in her cap and white uniform; I...
