Life Is Elsewhere (11 page)

The man in the peaked cap looked at him with cold, severe eyes in which there was a glimmer of understanding. "All right, get going!" he said to him.

11

He went through a metal door and found himself in a narrow courtyard. It was dark, the crackle of distant gunfire could be heard, and when he raised his eyes he saw the beams of searchlights wandering above the rooftops. Facing him was a narrow metal ladder leading to the roof of a six-story building. He began to climb up quickly. The others rushed into the courtyard behind him and hugged the walls. They were waiting for him to reach the roof and signal them that the way was clear.

Once on the rooftops, they crept along cautiously, with Xavier always in the lead; he was risking his life to protect the others. He moved alertly, he moved slowly, he moved like a feline, his eyes penetrating the darkness. At one point he stopped and gestured to show the man in the peaked cap the figures in black running around far below them, with short-barreled weapons in their hands and peering into the shadows. "Keep on leading us," the man said to Xavier.

And Xavier went on, jumping from one rooftop to another, climbing short metal ladders, hiding behind chimneys to escape the maddening searchlights ceaselessly sweeping the buildings, the rooftop edges, and the street canyons.

It was a beautiful journey of silent men turned into a swarm of birds passing through the sky to evade the enemy that was looking for them, crossing the city on wings of rooftops to escape being trapped. It was a beautiful, long journey, but a journey already so long that Xavier was beginning to feel fatigue; the fatigue that muddles the senses and fills the mind with hallucinations; he thought he heard a funeral march, the famous Chopin Funeral March played by brass bands in cemeteries.

He didn't slow down, trying with all his might to stay alert and get rid of the deadly hallucination. In vain; the music continued as if it were proclaiming his imminent end, as if at this moment of struggle it were pinning the black veil of coming death.

But why was he so strongly resisting this hallucination? Did he not wish that the grandeur of death would make his passage on the rooftops unforgettable and immense? Was not the funeral music that was coming to him like an omen the most beautiful accompaniment to his courage? Was it not sublime that his battle was also his funeral rite and that his funeral rite was a battle, that life and death were so magnificently joined?

No, what frightened Xavier was not that death had proclaimed itself but rather that he could no longer trust his own senses, could no longer (he, on whom the safety of his companions depended!) perceive the enemy's sly traps now that his ears had been clogged by the liquid melancholy of a funeral march.

But is it in fact possible that a hallucination can seem so real that one hears Chopin's march with all the faulty rhythms and the false notes of the trombone?

12

He opened his eyes and saw a room furnished with a scarred wardrobe and the bed he was lying on. He noted with satisfaction that he had been sleeping with his clothes on, so there was no need to change; he merely put on the shoes thrown off at the foot of the bed.

But where was that sad brass music coming from, its tones seeming so real?

He went over to the window. A few steps away, in a landscape from which the snow had nearly vanished, a group of men and women in black stood motionless with their backs to him. The group was desolate and sad, sad like the landscape surrounding them; all that remained of the dazzling snow was dirty bits and pieces on the wet ground.

He opened the window and leaned out. Now he understood the situation better. The people in black were gathered around an open grave with a coffin beside it. On the far side of the grave men in black were holding to their mouths brass instruments with tiny music holders clipped to them which the musicians' eyes were riveted on; they were playing Chopin's Funeral March.

The window was barely a meter above the ground. He stepped through it and went over to the group of mourners. At that moment, two sturdy workers slipped ropes under the coffin, lifted it up, and let it slowly down. An old couple among the mourners in black broke into sobs, and the others took them by the arms and tried to comfort them.

The coffin was set down at the bottom of the grave, and the people in black, one after another, went over to loss handfuls of earth on its lid. Xavier was the last to lean over the coffin and throw a lump of earth and clumps of snow into the grave.

He alone was unknown to all the others, and he alone knew everything that had happened. He alone knew how and why the blond girl had died, he alone knew that the icy hand had come to rest on her calf so as to climb up her body to her belly and between her breasts, he alone knew who had caused her death. He alone knew why she had asked to be buried here, for it was here that she had suffered most and had wished to die for having seen love betray and escape her.

He alone knew everything; the others were there as an uncomprehending audience or as uncomprehending victims. He saw them against the background of the distant mountainous landscape and it seemed to him that they were lost in immense distances as the girl was lost in immense earth; and that he himself (because he knew everything) was even more immense than the misty landscape, and that all of it—the mourners, the dead girl, the gravediggers with their shovels, and the countryside and mountains—entered him and vanished in him.

He was inhabited by the landscape, by the sadness of the mourners, and by the death of the blond girl, and he felt filled with their presence as if a tree were growing inside him; he felt himself grow, and his own real person seemed to be no more than an impersonation, a disguise, a mask of modesty; and it was under the mask of his own person that he approached the dead girl's parents (the father's face reminded him of the blond girl's features; it was red with weeping) and offered his condolences; they absently gave him their hands and he felt their fragility and insignificance in the palm of his hand.

Then he remained for a long while leaning with his back against the wall of the chalet in which he had slept for so long watching the people who had attended the funeral separate into small groups and slowly vanish into the misty distance. Suddenly, he felt a caress: yes, he felt the touch of a hand on his face. He was sure that he understood the meaning of that caress, and he accepted it gratefully; he knew that it was the hand of forgiveness; that the blond girl was letting him know that she had not stopped loving him and that love lasts beyond the grave.

13

He was falling from one dream into another.

The most beautiful moments were those when he was still in one dream while another into which he was awakening was beginning to dawn.

The hands that caressed him as he stood motionless in the mountainous landscape belonged to a woman in another dream into which he was about to fall again, but Xavier didn't know this yet, and for the moment the hands existed alone, by themselves; they were miraculous hands in an empty space; hands between two adventures, between two lives; hands unspoiled by a body or a head.

If only that caress of disembodied hands would last as long as possible!

14

Then he felt not only the caress of the hands but also the touch of soft, ample breasts pressing against his chest, and he saw the face of a dark-haired woman and heard her voice: "Wake up! My God, wake up!"

He was on a rumpled bed in a grayish room with a massive wardrobe. Xavier remembered that he was in the house at the Charles Bridge.

"I know you want to go on sleeping," said the woman, as if to excuse herself, "but I really had to wake you. I'm terribly afraid."

"What are you afraid of? "

"My God, you don't know anything," said the woman. "Listen!"

Xavier made an effort to listen attentively: he heard the sound of distant gunfire.

He jumped out of bed and ran to the window; groups of men in blue overalls with submachine guns slung across their shoulders were passing along the Charles Bridge.

It was like searching for a memory through several walls; Xavier was quite aware of the meaning of these groups of armed men guarding the bridge, but there was something he couldn't remember, something that would clarify his own link to what he was seeing. He was aware that he had a part to play in this scene and that he was not in it because of a mistake, that he was like an actor who has forgotten to make his entrance and the play, oddly crippled, goes on without him. And suddenly he remembered.

As he was remembering, he ran his eyes over the room and felt relieved: the schoolbag was still there, propped against the wall in a corner, no one had taken it. He leaped over to it and opened it. Everything was there: the math notebook, the Czech notebook, the science textbook. He took out the Czech notebook, opened it from the back, and again felt relief: the list that the man in the peaked cap had demanded of him had been carefully written out in a small but legible hand, and Xavier was thrilled by his idea of hiding this important document in a school notebook, the front of which was devoted to a composition on the theme "The Coming of Spring."

"What are you looking for in there, for goodness' sake?"

"Nothing," said Xavier.

"I need you, I need your help. You can see what's happening. They're going from house to house, arresting people and shooting them."

"Don't worry," he said, laughing. "They can't shoot anybody!"

"How can you know that?" the woman asked.

How could he know that? He knew it very well: the list of all the enemies of the people, who were to be executed on the first day of the revolution, was in his notebook; it was really true that the executions couldn't take place. Anyway the beautiful woman's anxiety mattered little to him; he heard gunfire, he saw the men guarding the bridge, and he thought that the day he had been enthusiastically preparing for alongside his companions in the struggle had finally come, and that he had been asleep; that he had been elsewhere, in another room and in another dream.

He wanted to leave, he wanted immediately to rejoin these men in overalls, to return to them the list only he had and without which the revolution was blind, not knowing whom to arrest and shoot. But then he realized that it was impossible: he didn't know the day's password, he had long been regarded as a traitor, and nobody would believe him. He was in another life, he was in another adventure, and he was unable to save from this life the other life in which he no longer was.

"What's the matter with you?" the woman insisted anxiously.

And Xavier thought that if he couldn't save that lost life, he would have to make great the life he was living at the moment. He turned to the beautiful, generously curved woman and understood that he must leave her, for it was over there that life was—outside, on the other side of the window, over there from where the rattling gunfire reached him like a nightingale's trill.

"Where are you going?" the woman shouted.

Xavier smiled and pointed at the window.

"You promised to take me with you!"

"That was a long time ago."

"Are you going to betray me?"

She fell to her knees before him and clasped his legs.

He looked at her and thought about how beautiful she was and how hard it was to leave her. But the world on the other side of the window was still more beautiful. And if he was abandoning a beloved woman for it, that world was even more costly by the price of his betrayed love.

"You are beautiful," he said, "but I must betray you." He tore himself out of her embrace and moved toward the window.

PART THREE

The Poet Masturbates

1

The day Jaromil showed his poems to Mama, she waited in vain for her husband, and she also waited in vain the next day and the following days.

She received instead an official notification from the Gestapo telling her that her husband had been arrested. Toward the end of the war she received another official notification that he had died in a concentration camp.

Her marriage had been joyless, but her widowhood was grand and glorious. She found a large photograph of her husband from their early days together, and she put it into a gilded frame and hung it on the wall.

Soon the war ended with great jubilation in Prague, the Germans withdrew from Bohemia, and Mama began a life that enhanced the austere beauty of renunciation; the money she had inherited from her father having been used up, she dismissed the maid, after Alik's death she refused to buy a new dog, and she had to look for a job.

There were still other changes: her sister decided to give the apartment in the center of Prague to her newly married son, and to move with her husband and younger son into the ground floor of the family villa, while Grandmania settled into a room on the widow's floor.

Mama had been contemptuous of her brother-in-law ever since she had heard him assert that Voltaire was a physicist who had invented volts. His family was noisy and indulged in crude entertainments; the jolly life resounding throughout the rooms of the ground floor was separated by an impassable border from the melancholy terrain of the upper floor.

And yet Mama at that time stood up straighter than in the past. It was as if she carried on her head (like Dalmatian women carrying baskets of grapes) her husband's invisible urn.

2

In the bathroom small bottles of perfume and tubes of creams stand on the shelf beneath the mirror, but Mama hardly ever uses them for skin care. She often lingers over these objects, but only because they remind her of her late father, his cosmetics shop (long since the property of the detested brother-in-law), and the long years of carefree life in the villa.

Her past life with parents and husband are illuminated by the nostalgic light of a sun that has already set. This nostalgic glow breaks her heart; she realizes that, now that they are gone, it is too late to appreciate the beauty of those years, and she reproaches herself for having been an ungrateful wife. Her husband had exposed himself to great dangers and been burdened with cares, but in order to leave her tranquillity undis-turbed he had never breathed a word of it to her, and to this day she is unaware of the reason for his arrest, which resistance group he had belonged to, and what role he played in it; she knows nothing at all about it, and she thinks of that as a humiliating punishment inflicted on her for having been a narrow-minded woman who merely saw in her husbands behavior a sign of indifference. The thought that she had been unfaithful to him at the very moment he was running the greatest risks brings her close to self-contempt.