E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten
Kundera Life is Elsewhere
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-26801-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-26801-6
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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1
The noise of the recreation period about to end reached him from inside the building; the old math teacher would be entering the classroom to plague the students with numbers chalked on the blackboard; the buzz of a stray fly would fill the vast duration between the teacher’s question and a student’s answer.… But by then he would already be far away!
The war had ended the year before; it was spring, and the sun was shining; he went down the streets to the Vltava and walked along the embankment. The five-hour galaxy of classes was far away, and only a small brown schoolbag containing notebooks and a textbook still connected him to it.
He reached the Charles Bridge. The double row of statues over the water beckoned him to cross to the other bank. When he absented himself from his high school (he was absent gladly and often!), he was almost always drawn to the Charles Bridge and to cross it. He knew that today too he would cross it, and that today too he would stop at the place where, having left the river behind, the bridge passed an old yellow house on the riverbank; its fourth-floor window was almost level with the bridge’s parapet and just an arm’s length away; he liked to gaze at it (it was always closed) and to wonder who lived behind it.
Now, for the first time (probably because it was so unusually sunny), the window was open. A cage with a canary was hanging at one side. He stopped, watched the small, elegantly wrought white rococo wire cage, and noticed a figure in the room’s half-light: he saw its back, which he recognized as a woman’s, and he longed for her to turn around so that he could see her face.
The figure moved, but in the opposite direction; she disappeared into the darkness. The window was open, and he was convinced that this was an invitation, a silent, private sign meant only for him.
He couldn’t resist. He climbed up on the parapet. The window was separated from the bridge by a deep gap that ended in cobblestones. The schoolbag would hamper him. He hurled it through the open window into the murky room and jumped.
2
By extending his arms Xavier could touch both sides of the high rectangular window frame he had jumped into, and he entirely filled its height. He examined the room beginning at the far end (like people who always start by concentrating on the distant) and initially saw a door, then a big-bellied wardrobe along the left wall, on the right a wooden bed with carved posts, and in the middle of the room a round table with a crocheted cover on which stood a vase of flowers; and finally he noticed his schoolbag lying on the fringed edge of a cheap rug.
Most likely at the moment he noticed it and was about to hop down to pick it up, the door at the dark far end of the room opened, and the woman appeared. She saw him at once; the room was actually so dim that the window rectangle shone as if it were night inside and day outside; from the woman’s viewpoint, the man standing in the window frame seemed like a black silhouette against a background of golden light; it was a man between day and night.
While the woman dazzled by the light was unable to make out the man’s features, Xavier was a bit luckier; his eyes had already become accustomed to the dimness and he could at least see the softness of the woman’s features and the melancholy of her face, the light of whose pallor would radiate to a distance even in deepest darkness; she stayed at the door, scrutinizing him; she was neither spontaneous enough to express her fear aloud nor quick-witted enough to address him.
Only after long moments of gazing at each other’s indistinct face did Xavier speak: “My schoolbag is here.”
“Your schoolbag?” she asked, and as if the sound of Xavier’s words had rid her of her initial amazement, she closed the door behind her.
Xavier squatted on the windowsill and pointed at the schoolbag lying on the floor below him: “I have important things in it. My math notebook, my science textbook, and also the notebook with my Czech homework. It’s the one with my newest composition, ‘The Coming of Spring.’ It was a lot of work, and I’d hate to have to rack my brains with it again.”
The woman took a few steps into the room, so that Xavier now was able to see her in better light. His first impression had been correct: softness and melancholy. He saw two big eyes floating in the indistinct face, and still another word occurred to him: “fright”; not a fright caused by his unexpected arrival, but an old fright that had remained with the woman in the form of the two big motionless eyes, in the form of her pallor, in the form of gestures that seemed to be asking forgiveness.
Yes, the woman was really asking forgiveness! “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I don’t understand how your schoolbag got here. I was just cleaning here a while ago, and I didn’t see anything that doesn’t belong here.”
“All the same,” said Xavier, still squatting on the windowsill and pointing at the rug, “I’m really glad it’s here.”
“I’m very pleased too that you found it,” said the woman with a smile.
They were now face to face with nothing between them but the table with the crocheted cover and the vase filled with paper flowers.
“Yes, it would have been annoying to lose it,” said Xavier. “My Czech teacher hates me, and she might flunk me if I lost my notebook.”
Compassion appeared in the woman’s face; her eyes suddenly became so big that Xavier could no longer make out anything else, as if the rest of her face and her body were merely their accompaniments, their containers; he didn’t even know what the various features of the woman’s face and the proportions of her body were like, all that remaining on the periphery of his vision; his impression of her figure was really only the impression made by her enormous eyes, whose brown light inundated all the rest of her body.
It was therefore toward her eyes that Xavier now moved, going around the table. “I’m an old flunker,” he said, grasping the woman by the shoulder (that shoulder was as soft as a breast!). “Believe me, there’s nothing sadder than to find yourself back again in the same class a year later, to sit down again at the same desk.…”
Then he saw the brown eyes raised toward him, and a wave of happiness engulfed him; Xavier knew that he could now slide his hand lower and touch her breast and belly and anything else he wanted to because the fright that supremely dominated this woman had dropped her, docile, into his arms. But he did nothing; he held his hand on her shoulder, that beautiful rounded height, and he found this beautiful enough, exhilarating enough; he wanted nothing more.
For a few moments they stood motionless, then the woman seemed to be alerted by something: “You have to leave. My husband’s back!”
Nothing could have been simpler than for Xavier to pick up the schoolbag and jump onto the windowsill and from there over to the bridge, but he did not do it. The delightful feeling took hold of him that the woman was in danger and that he had to stay with her. “I can’t leave you alone here!”
“My husband! Go away!” the woman pleaded with anguish.
“No, I’m going to stay with you! I’m not a coward!” said Xavier, while footsteps were already resounding clearly from the stairway.
The woman tried to push Xavier toward the window, but he knew that he had no right to abandon this woman when she was in danger. A door opening at the other end of the apartment could already be heard, and at the last moment, Xavier flung himself down and slid under the bed.
3
The space between the floor and his ceiling consisted of five boards supporting a torn mattress and was hardly bigger than a coffin; but, unlike a coffin, the space was fragrant (the good smell of the mattress straw), very resonant (the floor clearly transmitted every footstep), and full of visions (just above him he saw the face of the woman he knew he must never abandon, a face projected against the dark fabric of the mattress, a face pierced by three wisps of straw protruding through the ticking).
The footsteps he heard were heavy, and when he turned his head he saw a pair of boots tramping into the room. Then he heard a female voice, and he couldn’t help experiencing a vague yet heartbreaking feeling of regret: the voice was as melancholy, frightened, and entrancing as it had been a few moments before when she was speaking to Xavier. But Xavier was reasonable and controlled his sudden impulse of jealousy; he understood that the woman was in danger and that she was defending herself with what she had: her face and her sadness.
Then he heard a male voice, and he thought that this voice was like the boots he saw moving across the floor; then he heard the woman saying “No, no, no,” and then footsteps staggering toward his hiding place and then the low ceiling under which he was lying dropped still lower, nearly touching his face.
Again he heard the woman saying, “No, no, not now, please, not now,” and he saw the vision of her face on the coarse ticking a centimeter from his eyes, and he thought the face was confiding its humiliation to him.
He wanted to stand up in his coffin, he wanted to save this woman, but he knew that he had no right to do it. The woman’s face was so close to...
