A Married Woman and Milan Kundera
28 Duben 1990, Sobota, Praha
Felt very ill for most of the day due, I expect, to the Meat of Two Colours. Tried to phone Milena but Jitka was out1. Went and taught. Very fragile for the first lesson. Gradually improved. Took Jarmila to Slavia. She is very nice. She is married2. Went for a meal with her.
Barbora’s flat — where young-Toby is living — has no phone, and will not get one for months. If Jan and Jitka aren’t in, the only option is to go to the bank of payphones behind the tower block opposite. There are eight phones in a row.
A single phone call within Praha, of whatever length, costs 1 crown (Česká koruna, kčs). A single trip on the Metro, of whatever distance, costs 1 crown. A large beer of 0.5 litres costs half a crown or, if you know the right place (which Charles does) a quarter. These are still, for a while, Socialist prices.
Young-Toby is paid a couple of thousand crowns a month. This will buy him, in the right place (see below), 4,000 to 8,000 litres of beer a month. But Barbora takes a chunk of his wages for rent. She deserves it.
What difference would Jarmila being married have made?
Young-Toby learns very quickly that almost everyone in Praha has affairs. This is because, for years, almost everyone has had to get married very very young. To move out from home, under communism, you needed to get a flat. And to get a flat, you needed first to be married, and secondly to get on the waiting list for a flat. A waiting list that might be several years. And so, young people during that period often married at eighteen or nineteen. And by the time they were twenty-five, if not before, they were starting to see other people. It was what they did for entertainment. The state did not disapprove, and did not intervene.
Through his parents, especially his mother, young-Toby has a profound respect of, almost a terror of, marriage. If he had caused a married woman to — in conventional terms — be unfaithful, even though not for the first time, he would have expected something very bad to come of it. It would be a bad thing. He’d be bad.
This is not to say he wouldn’t have started an affair, but he wouldn’t have thought it safe to continue. He’s puritanical in convoluted ways, and vastly superstitious. He’d have expected punishment every moment. He wants a girlfriend, not to cause a betrayal.
Milan Kundera — author of The Joke and Laughable Loves, not Kafka, author of The Castle and The Trial, is the writer of this flirtatious Praha young-Toby is getting to know. Kundera is the poet of these absolutely routine infidelities. Kundera and also Ivan Klíma, author of A Summer Affair and My First Loves, who young-Toby will spot around the place — on Národní, at the Reduta Jazz Club.
Kundera lives in France, and has done since leaving ČSSR in 1975. He makes no big public return to Praha, although apparently there were a few quiet trips home. When young-Toby asks, he finds people suspicious of the exile, the non-dissident Kundera. He was known as an ambitious young Stalinist, they say. He played the game. He was published, as only good boys and girls were, in the annual anthologies of new writing. Young-Toby buys one of these anthologies very cheaply (no-one wants them) and tries translating Kundera’s early poetry. It is very unlike his later writing.
This may be one of Kundera’s poems, or maybe it’s by someone else. I have it filed as by Kundera, but there’s no name on the top.
Maybe some knows? Maybe someone has one of those long disregarded anthologies?
Lullaby, sung by a woman to her husband
Sleep, darling. For our love
is a big apple orchard.
Here the wood of trees snaps silently,
here we will be sweetly sleeping.
Sleep, darling. What you would like
in my arms is becoming a dream
over which you would break your hands
you will see as if under steamed-up glass.
Let yourself dream about a huge meeting.
Somebody has been storming forcefully from the podium.
He’s accusing you. You must stand up.
You’re now a target and under your eyes,
as targets do, you have black circles.
You’re defending yourself: What have I done?
Let those who have known me bear witness!
A friend who you have known since childhood
is looking estranged, cold
as from a wall a bricked-in window.
Let this betrayal sweetly dream
and don’t be afraid; it’s only the orchard
telling you its strange tales.
Just sleep. You don’t have to be afraid.
You’re in the arms of my broad love.
And let yourself dream about one summer
and about pavement, on which walks
a cavalcade, which walked out of your gates
and towards the sunny garden is bending.
A little bell chimes once more,
a little bell remembers once more:
in that casket is your mom
and earth is falling on everything.
Sleep, darling. What you would like
you will dream with me only as a dream.
Over which you would smite your brow,
you will see as if under steamed-up glass,
it was I who steamed the glass with my breath,
so that even the casket became your dream
just as a little cupboard, a boat or a cloudlet,
a little box of children’s building blocks.
“A box of blocks – Yes, perhaps.”
Darling, don’t speak. You must sleep.
And the strange woman you can dream of,
madly you started to love her.
Let yourself dream about a hotel room,
and in this room a bed, your infidelity,
then a platform, blurred mouths,
eyes, which do not believe the train,
and life, which remained after her
as a long corridor without doors.
Let yourself sweetly dream about meeting that woman
and don’t be afraid, it’s only an orchard
which is telling its strange tales to you.
Just sleep. You don’t have to be afraid.
You’re embraced by my broad love.
And one more thing. Let yourself dream about your old age.
A table, a bed, a crack-paint window,
out of which can be seen a pole and a wire
and a sky bald as an eye
which is watching without blinking your last silent moves.
Sleep, darling. What you would have liked
you dreamt as a dream with me.
What you would have smote your brow over
you have seen under steamed glass.
“It was you who steamed this glass for me.”
So that even death seemed small.
“But which way have you seen the world?!
You have lived everything twice!
Yours and mine! All of it alone!
My God, all of it was carried by you and you alone?!”
Twice?… Alone? Yes. Perhaps.
Darling, don’t speak. You’ve got to sleep.
Wives and husbands.