Life Is Elsewhere (3 page)

When his sixth birthday was approaching and he was a few months from entering school, the family insisted that he have his own room and sleep by himself. Mama looked upon the passage of time with regret, but she agreed. She and her husband agreed to give their son the third and smallest room on their floor as a birthday present, and to buy him a bed and other furniture for a child's room: a small bookcase, a mirror to encourage cleanliness, and a small desk.

Papa suggested decorating the room with Jaromil's own drawings, and he soon set about framing the childish scrawls of apples and gardens. Then Mama went over to Papa and said: "I want to ask you for something." He looked at her, and Mama's voice, at once shy and forceful, went on: "I'd like some sheets of paper and paints." Then she sat down at a table in her room, laid a sheet of paper in front of her, and on it started to draw letters in pencil; finally she dipped a brush in red paint and redid the penciled letters in that color, the first a capital L. It was followed by a small i and an/, and went on to form this line: "Life is like weeds." She examined her work with satisfaction: the letters were straight and well shaped; and yet she picked up a new sheet of paper, again wrote the line in pencil, and colored it in dark blue this time, for that seemed to her much better suited to the ineffable sadness of her son's maxim.

Then she remembered that Jaromil had said, "Grandmama not fair, ate my pear," and with a happy smile she started to write (in bright red), "Grandmama fair, loves her pear." And after that, with a hidden smile, she again remembered "You're pricks," but she refrained from copying this thought and instead penciled and colored (in green), "We'll dance in the wood, our hearts feeling good," and then (in purple), "Dear Hana bends like a banana" (Jaromil had actually said "Maid Hana," but Mama found the word offensive), then she remembered Jaromil bending down to stroke a stone, and after a moment's thought she wrote and painted (in sky blue), "I can't harm or even alarm a rock," and with a bit of embarrassment but with all the more pleasure (in orange), "Mama, I give you a lollipop kiss," and finally (in gold), "My mama is the most beautiful in the world."

The day before his birthday his parents sent the overexcited Jaromil down to sleep with his grandmother while they moved the furniture amd decorated the walls. The next morning, when they brought the child into the renovated room, Mama was tense, and Jaromil did nothing to dispel her agitation; he was dumbfounded and silent; the main object of his interest (which he showed only feebly and shyly) was the desk; it was an odd-looking piece of furniture resembling a school desk, with the slanted desktop (its hinged lid covering a space for books and notebooks) attached to the seat.

"Well, what do you say? Do you like it?" asked Mama impatiently.

"Yes, I like it," the child responded.

"And what do you like best?" inquired Grandpapa, who with Grandmama was watching the long-awaited scene from the room's doorway.

"The desk," said the child. He sat down and began raising and lowering the lid. "And what do you say about the pictures?" Papa asked, pointing to the framed drawings.

The child raised his head and smiled. "I know them."

"And how do you like them hanging on the wall?"

The child, still sitting at his little desk, nodded to indicate he liked the drawings on the wall.

Mama was heartbroken and wanted to vanish from the room. But there she was, and she couldn't allow the framed, colored inscriptions on the wall to be passed over in silence, for she would have taken such silence for condemnation. That is why she said: "And look at this writing."

The child lowered his head and looked inside the little desk.

"You know, I wanted . . . ," she went on in great confusion, "I wanted you to be able to remember how you grew up, from cradle to school, because you were a bright little boy and a joy to us all. ..." She said this as if in apology, and since she was nervous, she repeated the same thing several times. At last, not knowing what to say, she was silent.

But she was wrong to think that Jaromil was not pleased by his gift. He didn't know what to say, but he wasn't disappointed; he had always been proud of his words, and he didn't want to utter them into the void; now that he saw them carefully copied in color and transformed into pictures, he experienced a feeling of success, a success so great and unexpected that he didn't know how to respond, and it gave him stage fright; he understood that he was a child who uttered striking words, and he knew that this child should at this moment say something striking, yet nothing striking came to mind, and so he lowered his head. But when he saw out of the corner of his eye his own words on the walls, set, fixed, more durable and bigger than himself, he was carried away; he had the impression of being surrounded by his own self, of being vast, of filling the entire room, of filling the entire house.

4

Jaromil already knew how to read and write before he started school, and Mama decided that he could go directly into second grade; she obtained special authorization from the ministry, and after passing an examination before a committee, Jaromil was permitted to take a place among pupils a year older than he. Because everyone in school admired him, the classroom seemed to him merely a reflection of the family house. On Mother's Day the pupils performed at the school celebration. Jaromil was the last to step up on the podium, and he recited a touching little poem that was much applauded by the audience of parents.

But he soon realized that behind the audience that applauded him there was another that was slyly and antagonistically on the lookout for him. In the dentist's crowded waiting room one day, he ran into one of his schoolmates. As the boys stood side by side with their backs to the window, Jaromil saw an old gentleman listening with a kindly smile to what they were saying. Encouraged by this sign of interest, Jaromil asked his fellow pupil (raising his voice a bit so that the question would be heard by all) what he would do if he were the country's minister of education. Since the boy didn't know what to say, Jaromil began to elaborate his own thoughts, which was not very difficult because all he needed was to repeat the speech with which his grandfather regularly entertained him. And so if Jaromil were minister of education, there would be two months of school and ten months of vacation, the teacher would have to obey the children and bring them their snacks from the bakery, and there would be all kinds of other remarkable reforms, all of which Jaromil loudly and clearly put forward.

Then the door to the treatment room opened, and a patient came out, accompanied by the nurse. A woman holding a book with her finger in it to mark the place turned to the nurse and asked, almost pleading: "Please say something to that child! It's dreadful the way he's showing off!"

After Christmas the teacher had the pupils come to the front of the room one by one to tell what they had found under the tree. Jaromil began to enumerate a construction set, skis, ice skates, books, but he quickly noticed that the children didn't share his fervor, that, on the contrary, some of them were looking indifferent, indeed hostile. He stopped without breathing a word about the rest of his presents.

No, no, don't worry, I don't intend to retell the tired old story of the rich kid his poor schoolmates hate; in Jaromil's class there were in fact children from families better off than his, and yet they got along well with the others, and no one resented their affluence. What was it about Jaromil that annoyed his schoolmates; what was it that got on their nerves, that made him different?

I almost hesitate to say it: it was not wealth, it was his mama's love. That love left its traces on everything; it was recorded on his shirt, on his hair, on the words he used, on the schoolbag in which he carried his notebooks, and on the books he read at home for pleasure. Everything was specially chosen and arranged for him. The shirts made for him by his frugal grandmother resembled, God knows why, girls' blouses more than boys' shirts. He had to keep his long hair off his brow and out of his eyes with one of his mother's barrettes. When it rained Mama waited for him in front of the school with a large umbrella, while his friends took off their shoes and waded through the puddles.

Mother love imprints a mark on boys' brows that rebuffs the friendliness of schoolmates. Eventually Jaromil gained the skill to hide that stigma, but after his glorious arrival at school he experienced a difficult time (lasting a year or two) during which his schoolmates, who taunted him with a passion, also beat him up several times just for the fun of it. But even during that worst time he had some friends to whom he would remain grateful throughout his life; a few words need to be said about them:

His number one friend was his father: sometimes he would go out into the yard with a soccer ball (he had played soccer as a student), and Jaromil would plant himself between two trees; his father kicked the ball toward Jaromil, who pretended that he was the goalkeeper of the Czech national team.

His number two friend was his grandfather. He would take Jaromil to his two businesses—a large housewares store that Jaromil's father was now running, and a cosmetics shop, where the salesgirl was a young woman who greeted the boy with a friendly smile and let him sniff all the perfumes, soon enabling him to recognize the various brands; he would close his eyes and make his grandfather test him by holding the little bottles under his nose. "You're a genius of smell," his grandfather would congratulate him, and Jaromil dreamed of becoming the inventor of new perfumes.

His number three friend was Alik. Alik was a wild little dog that had been living in the villa for some time; even though it was untrained and unruly, the dog provided Jaromil with fine daydreams of a faithful friend who waited for him in the corridor outside the classroom and, to the envy of his schoolmates, accompanied him home after school.

Daydreaming about dogs became the passion of his solitude, even leading him into a peculiar Manicheism: for him dogs represented the
goodness
of the animal world, the sum total of all natural virtues; he imagined great wars of dogs against cats (wars with generals, officers, and all the tactics he had learned while playing with his tin soldiers) and was always on the side of the dogs, in the same way as a man should always be on the side of justice.

And since he spent much time with pencil and paper in his father's study, dogs also became the chief subject of his drawings: an endless number of epic scenes in which dogs were generals, soldiers, soccer players, and knights. And since as quadrupeds they could hardly perform their human roles, Jaromil gave them human bodies. That was a great invention! Whenever he had tried to draw a human being, he encountered a serious difficulty: he couldn't draw the human face; on the other hand, he succeeded marvelously with the elongated canine head and the spot of a nose at its tip, and so his daydreams and clumsiness gave rise to a strange world of dog-headed people, a world of characters that could quickly and easily be drawn and situated in soccer matches, wars, and stories of brigands. The adventure serials Jaromil thus drew filled many a sheet of paper.

The only boy among his friends was number four: a classmate whose father was the school janitor, a sallow little man who often informed on pupils to the principal; these boys would take revenge on the janitor's son, who was the class pariah. When the pupils one after another started to turn away from Jaromil, the janitor's son remained his sole faithful admirer and thus was invited one day to the villa; he was given lunch and dinner, he and Jaromil played with the construction set, and they did their homework together. The following Sunday Jaromil's father took them both to a soccer match; the game was wonderful and, just as wonderful, Jaromil's father knew all the players' names and talked about the game so like an expert that the janitor's son never took his eyes off him, and Jaromil was proud.

It seemed like a comical friendship: Jaromil always carefully dressed, the janitor's son threadbare; Jaromil with his homework carefully prepared, the janitor's son a poor student. All the same Jaromil was contented with this faithful companion at his side, for the janitor's son was extraordinarily strong; one winter day some classmates attacked them, but the attackers got more than they bargained for; though Jaromil was exhilarated by this triumph over superior numbers, the prestige of successful defense cannot compare with the prestige of attack:

One day, as they were taking a walk through the suburb's vacant lots, they encountered a boy so clean and well-dressed that he could have been coming from some children's tea dance. "Mama's darling!" said the janitor's son, barring the way. They asked him mocking questions and were delighted by his fright. Finally the boy grew bold and tried to push them aside. "How dare you! You'll pay for this!" Jaromil shouted, cut to the quick by this insolent contact; the janitor's son took these words as a signal and hit the boy in the face.

Intellect and physical force can sometimes complement each other remarkably. Didn't Byron feel great affection for the boxer Jackson, who trained the discriminating aristocrat in all kinds of sports? "Don't hit him, just hold him!" said Jaromil to his friend as he pulled up some stinging nettles; then they made the boy undress and flogged him with the nettles from head to toe. "Your mama'll be glad to see her darling little red crayfish," said Jaromil, experiencing a great feeling of fervent friendship for his companion and fervent hatred for all the mama's darlings of the world.

5

But exactly why did Jaromil remain an only child? Did Mama simply not want another one?

On the contrary: she very much hoped to regain the blissful time of her first years as a mother, but her husband always found reasons to put her off. To be sure, the yearning she had for another child didn't lessen, but she no longer dared to be insistent, fearing the humiliation of further refusal.

But the more she refrained from talking about her maternal yearning, the more she thought about it; she thought about it as an illicit, clandestine, and thus forbidden thing; the idea that her husband could make a child for her attracted her not only because of the child itself but because it had taken on a lasciviously ambiguous tone; "Come here and make me a little daughter," she would imagine saying to her husband, and the words seemed arousing to her.