Chapter 7 Chapter Three The Poet's Self-blasphemy (1) (1)

The day Jaromil showed Mamen his poems, she waited in vain for her husband's return.He did not return home in the following days. Maman was officially notified by the Gestapo that her husband had been arrested.Towards the end of the war another official notice came to the effect that her husband had died in a concentration camp. Her marriage may have been a misfortune, but her widow was solemn and sublime.She had a large photograph of her husband from their engagement, which she hung on the wall in a gold frame. Then the war was over, the citizens of Prague rejoiced, the Germans evacuated Bohemia, and Maman began to live a life of austerity, a life illuminated by the beauty of simplicity; the money inherited from her father was spent, She had to fire the maid.After Arik died, she was reluctant to buy another dog, and she had to find a job.

There were also changes: her sister decided to give up her city center apartment to her newly married son; she moved with her husband and young son to the ground floor of her parents' villa.The grandmother and the widowed Maman moved to the second floor. Since Maman heard her brother-in-law claim that Fortel was the physicist who invented the Volt, she had nothing but contempt for him.The brother-in-law's family was always rowdy and indulged in crude entertainment.There is a world of difference between the cheerful life on the ground floor and the melancholy kingdom on the second floor.

But Maman walks more proudly than in past prosperity, as if bearing (as a Balkan woman carries a basket of grapes) her husband's invisible urn on her head. The bathroom shelf was full of small perfume bottles, ointment tubes, and creams, but Maman hardly ever used them again.Still, she often stopped to look at them, sighing, and they reminded her of her dead father, his drug store (now in the hands of a odious brother-in-law), and the happy and carefree days before. Her old life with her parents and her husband seemed to be shrouded in a mournful half-light, and this dimness oppressed her.Realizing that only now, when they were gone for good, did she understand the beauty of those years, she blamed herself for the infidelity of her marriage.There is no doubt that her husband has been risking his life, he must be nervous inside, but in order to keep her peace, he never confided a word to her about his underground activities, she still doesn't know why he was arrested, he belongs to Which resistance organization, what is his actual mission.She was ignorant of all this, and she saw her ignorance as a narrowness of her womanhood, a humiliating punishment for her husband's behavior which she imagined only as cruelty, and the thought of her infidelity was his last In dangerous times, she despises herself extremely.

She looked at herself in the mirror and was surprised to see that her face was still young—unnecessarily young, in fact, as if time had made a big mistake and neglected the face.She had heard recently that people saw her and Jaromil walking in the street and thought they were brother and sister.She thought it was funny.But despite this, she was flattered, and from then on she was more than happy to take Jaromil to theaters and concerts. Anyway, what else was there for her but Jaromil? Grandma's memory and health are getting worse and worse.She sat at home all day mending Jaromil's socks and ironing her daughter's clothes.Steeped in regrets, memories and worries, it exudes a lovely, brooding vibe.Thus Jaromil lived in the woman's house.In the house of two widows.

Jaromil's childhood witticisms no longer adorn the walls of his room (Maman regrettably stores them in a drawer); and reproductions of surrealist painters.A microphone with dangling telephone wires is also hanging on the wall (a gift from a telephone repairman, in this cut-off microphone Jaromil sees the object that has acquired magical powers due to being separated from the upper and lower frames, it could quite be called a surreal object).However, he often gazes at his own image in the mirror hanging on the same wall.He studied his face more carefully than anything else, nothing tormented him more than his face, and at the same time he had more confidence in his own face than anything else (even if that confidence came with great effort) :

It was a face like his mother's, but its handsomeness was all the more striking because he was a man: he had a small, fine nose, and a small chin that was cut back slightly.It was this chin that caused him so much pain.He had read in a famous treatise by Schopenhauer that a receding jaw was particularly repulsive because it was the shape of the jaw that distinguished man from ape.But then Jaromil happened to see a photograph of Rilke and found that the poet also had a receding jaw, which comforted and inspired him.He spends a lot of time looking in the mirror, wandering hopelessly in the vast territory of the ape on one side and Rilke on the other.

In fact, Jaromil's chin only receded slightly, and Maman justly thought his son's face was attractive.But it was this face that troubled Jaromil more than the chin itself: the handsome features made him look several years younger, and since his classmates were all a year older than him, the childishness of his face was all the more noticeable, It was unavoidable, it was mentioned constantly, so Jaromil thought about it all the time. How heavy it is to carry such a face!What a burden that frail and delicate countenance is! (Jaromil sometimes has nightmares: he dreams that he has to lift some very light objects—cups, spoons, feathers—but he cannot lift them. The lighter the object, the weaker he becomes, he sinks to Its lightness. He often woke up trembling and sweating profusely. We believe that these dreams had something to do with his delicate face, which was as light as a spider's web - which he tried in vain to wipe away. .)

Generally speaking, lyric poets were born in families headed by women: Yesenin and Mayakovsky's sisters, Blok's aunt, Hölderlin.And Lermontov's grandmother, Pushkin's nanny and, of course, above all the mothers - the ones who towered over their fathers.Wilde's mother and Rilke's mother dressed their son like a little girl.Isn't it weird that boys look anxiously in the mirror?It's time to be a man, Auden wrote in his diary.All his life the lyric poet has searched his face for signs of manliness. Jaromil kept looking in the mirror until he saw what he longed to see: the stern look in the eyes, the hard line around the lips.To achieve this, of course, he had to put on a certain kind of special smile, or rather, a look of disdain, with his upper lip convulsively drawn back.He also tried changing the style of his hair to change his face, pulling the hair on his forehead into thick, tousled curls.what!His hair, which Maman liked so much and kept in a lock with a barrette, was not to Jaromil's liking: yellow like the down of a newly hatched chick, soft like the feathers of a dandelion.There is no way to make it into shape.Mother often strokes it and calls it the hair of an angel, but Jaromil hates angels and loves devils.He wanted to dye his hair black, but was afraid to do so, because dyed hair was even more girlish than natural blonde.All he can do is keep it as long as possible.And never comb your hair.

He examines and adjusts his appearance every chance he gets.Every time he passed a shop window he gave himself a quick glance.The more he paid attention to his own appearance, the more familiar it became, and the more annoying and painful it became to him at the same time.voila: He is coming home from school.The street was empty except for a young woman walking towards him from a distance.Inevitably they grew closer.Jaromil found the woman beautiful, and he thought of his own face.He tried to make a practiced sneer, but was afraid he wouldn't succeed.All he could think about was his stupid face.That girlish childishness made him look ridiculous to women.His whole being was the embodiment of that stupid little face, which had grown rigid at the moment--how horrible! -- ashamed.He quickened his pace, trying not to let that woman look at him, if a beautiful woman saw him blushing, he would never be able to wash away this shame!

The hours spent before the looking-glass always cast him into the abyss of despair.Fortunately, however, there was also a mirror that lifted him to the stars.This celestial mirror is his poetry; he longs for lines not yet written and for lines already created, and he collects them with the joy of a man remembering a beautiful woman; he is not only their author, but is their theoretician and chronicler; he writes about his poems, divides his work into phases, gives them names, with the result that in two or three years he learns to regard his poems as A development process worthy of the attention of literary historians.

This gave him consolation: in the abyss, he lived in a realm of everyday life, went to school, ate with his mother and grandmother, faced with a monotonous emptiness.But in the sky, it is another world, full of brightly lit road signs, and time is divided into brilliant spectrums. He jumps from one light to another with great excitement, firmly believing that he will land in a new place every time. An era of great creativity. Another reason for his confidence was his conviction that he was the heir to a rare fortune, that despite his unremarkable looks (and his life), he was a chosen one of God. Let's clarify what this means: Jaromil continued to see the painter, but not often, because Mamen often discouraged him; Show all his poems to painters.The painter read these poems with great interest, and sometimes left them for his friends, which made Jaromil very proud, because for him, the painter—he had been very suspicious of Jaromil's paintings— Always an unshakable authority.Jaromil believed that there was an objective standard for estimating the value of art (as sacred to the novice as the platinum metera ruler kept in a museum in France), and painters knew this standard. But there was one thing that puzzled Jaromil: he could never guess in advance which poem would be the painter's favorite.Sometimes he admired some small poems that Jaromil wrote casually with his left hand, and sometimes he yawned at a poem that the author himself thought was his masterpiece.What does this mean? If Jaromil cannot recognize the value of his own work, does it not mean that he is writing poetry carelessly, nonsensically, mechanically, without real understanding and therefore no real talent (as he once created with a Does the world of kobolds fascinate painters as well)? "Look here," said the painter in one conversation, "that the idea you express in this poem is not the result of your thinking, is it? Yes, not at all: it just came about by accident, out of the blue." , came to your head unexpectedly. The real author of this idea is not you, but someone inside you, a poet in your head. The poet is the powerful subconscious stream that flows through everyone. It is not your achievement, but the subconscious stream - which has no preference - which happened to choose the strings of the violin on which you made it." The painter wanted to give a sermon on modesty, but Jaromil immediately found a shining jewel in this speech to adorn his self-esteem.Well, even if he did not create these poetic images, a magical force chose him as its instrument.Therefore, he can be proud of something much bigger than "talent", he can be proud of "choice". And he never forgot the prophecy of the lady at the spa: the child had great promise.He believed these words as if they were a divine prophecy.In Jaromil's mind, the future is the unknown kingdom beyond the line, where the vague ideas of revolution (painters often speak of the inevitability of revolution) and the poet's wild and unruly vague ideas are mixed.He knew that this future kingdom would be full of his honour, and this knowledge gave him a certainty (separate, independent) that coexisted with all his painful doubts. Oh, how long and empty the days seemed when Jaromil shut himself up in his room in the afternoon and looked in the mirror, looking now at one side and now at the other! How is this possible?Don't people always say that youth is the golden age of life?So why does he feel so lifeless?so empty? This word is as unpleasant as the word "failure".There were also words no one dared to say to his face (at least at home, in this empty castle).For example, words like "love" or "girl."How he hated the three relatives who lived on the ground floor!They often held dances until midnight. From time to time, there were loud chatter and laughter, and women's screams. The sound seemed to tear Jaromil's soul. He curled up in the bed and couldn't fall asleep.His cousin was only two years older than him, but those years made a big difference.The cousin, a student, used to bring attractive girls to his room (with the understanding and approval of his parents), and was both kind and cold to Jaromil.Jaromil's uncle was seldom at home (he was preoccupied with his inheritance), but his aunt's voice rang throughout the house.Whenever she met Jaromil, she would ask the same question: How are your relationships with girls?Jaromil really wanted to spit in her face, because her condescending and cheerful question hit him where it hurt.It's not that he doesn't have any relationship with girls, but that he has very few dates with them, as few as the stars in the sky. The word "girl" is as depressing as the words "lonely" and "failure." Even though his actual time with the girls was short, he looked forward to a long time before every date.Not just daydreaming, but hard preparation.Jaromil is convinced that the most important thing for a successful date is to be able to speak well and avoid embarrassing silences.So a date is mostly an exercise in the art of conversation.He prepared a notebook specially for this purpose, in which he wrote down stories suitable for telling.These stories are not anecdotes about other people, but stories about his own life.Since he had had so few adventures of his own, he made some up.He is measured: in these invented (or read or heard) stories, he makes himself the hero, but it doesn't make him a hero.They serve only to drive him unobtrusively across the borders of the dull and unchanging realm into the realm of action and adventure. He also copied lines from various poems (which, we may note, were not particularly favorite of his own), which extolled the beauty of women and could pass off as his own observations.For example, he jotted down the line, "A proud tricolor flag is your face: your lips, your eyes, your hair..." A line like this can be easily moved by simply moving a rhyming element. Can be told to a girl as a sudden original thought, like a flattering compliment: "You know, I just realized that your face is like a lovely tricolor flag! Your eyes, mouth, hair. From From now on, I will never serve under another banner!" Look: Jaromil is out for an appointment.He was preoccupied with the lines he had prepared, and he worried that his voice would be unnatural, that his words would sound like a poor amateur actor reciting his lines.At the last moment, he decided not to say these words, but since he hadn't thought about anything else, he had nothing to say.That night's date turned out to be painful and embarrassing, and Jaromil felt the girl secretly laughing at him, so he bid her farewell with a feeling of complete failure. As soon as he got home, he sat at the table and scratched angrily on the paper: your eyes are like warm urine, my flintlock gun is aimed at your stupid thoughts like a fragile sparrow, and a fat frog plops into your thigh Muddy ponds between... He wrote and wrote, and read his lines contentedly, triumphant in the wildness of his fancy. I am a poet, I am a great poet, he said to himself, and then wrote in his diary: "I am a great poet, I have extraordinary sensibility, I have demonic fantasies, I dare to feel..." Maman came home and went straight to her room. Jaromil stood in front of the mirror, studying his disgusting child's face.He gazed at it for a long time, until at last he discerned something unusual and select. In the next room, Maman tiptoed to remove the gold-framed photograph of her husband from the wall. She learned that day that her husband had been having an affair with a Jewish girl for a long time, even before the war.After the Germans occupied Bohemia, the Jews had to wear yellow stars of humiliation on their sleeves, but he did not abandon her, went to see her anyway, and tried to help her as much as possible. Then they drove her to the Triessen ghetto, so he resorted to a crazy plan: with the help of a few Czech guards, he managed to sneak into the high-security camp and meet his lover for a few minutes. , Dazed by his first success, he tried to rebuild his great achievements, but was caught, and neither he nor the girl came back. The invisible urn on Maman's head was discarded along with her husband's photo.She no longer has any reason to walk proudly upright, nothing to hold her head high.All mental grief is now someone else's legacy. The voice of an old Jewish woman echoed in her ears.The old woman, a relative of her husband's lover, told her all that had happened: "He was the bravest man I ever knew." Then she added: "Now I am all alone in the world. My whole family Died in a concentration camp." The Jewish woman who sat before her was full of majestic pathos, while the pain felt by Maman was without brilliance.It was a base pain that writhed pitifully within her. Your haystacks are smoking in the fog Lit a piece of incense in her heart He wrote, imagining the body of a girl buried in a field. Death frequently appears in his poems.Maman (who was still the first reader of his oeuvre) misinterpreted this notion as the result of a premature maturation of the son's sensibilities through premature experience of life's misfortunes. In fact, the death Jaromil describes has little to do with real death.In real life, death comes only when it penetrates the crevices of old age.For Jaromil, death is infinitely far away; it is abstract; it is not reality but a dream. What was he looking for in this dream? He is looking for infinity.His life was hopelessly small, and everything around him was flat and gray.Death is absolute.It can neither be separated nor diluted. His actual experience with the girls is trivial (a few touches and many meaningless words), their disappearance is the grandeur.When he imagines a girl buried in a field, he suddenly discovers the sublime of sorrow and the greatness of love. In his death dreams, he was not only seeking the Absolute, but also pleasure. He dreamed of a corpse slowly dissolving in the soil, and he thought it was a beautiful act of love, a sweet transformation of the body into the earth. The world continued to hurt him.Whenever he saw a woman, he blushed, felt ashamed, and met mocking looks everywhere.In his death phantasy there was complete silence, undisturbed.Live quietly and happily.Yes, death for Jaromil is life.It is very similar to the period when a man does not need to enter the world, because under the vault of his mother's belly he is a world in himself. He longed to be united with a woman in such a death, a death that approximated eternal bliss.In one of his poems, a pair of lovers embrace each other until they become one, becoming an immovable being, and then fade into a solid fossil that lasts forever. Another time he imagined two lovers staying together so long that they were covered with moss and eventually turned into moss themselves.Then someone stepped on them by chance (because the moss happened to be blooming at this time), and they flew through the air like pollen, feeling the indescribable happiness that only a pair of flying lovers can. Do you think that what has happened is the end of the past and cannot be changed?Oh no, the past is wrapped in moiré silks of various colors, and every time we look at it, we see different colors.Not long ago, Maman was accusing herself of betraying her husband together with the painter, but now she fell into despair. It was because of her loyalty to her husband that she betrayed her only true love. How cowardly she is!Her engineer husband had been living a life of great romantic adventure, and she had to settle for tedious leftovers, like a domestic servant.The thought that she had been so tormented by anxiety and pangs of conscience that she hadn't had time to grasp the meaning of her adventure with the painter had faded away from her.She could see it clearly now: she had missed the only chance life had given her. The image of the painter began to occupy her mind feverishly and persistently.It should be noted that her memories are not projected on the background of his studio in the city, where she experienced moments of carnal love, but on the background of an idyllic landscape, a small vacation. The river of the health resort, the boats, the arcades of the Renaissance.She kept this heavenly scene in her mind during those quiet, easy days when love was not yet born, but only in conception, and she longed to see the painter again, and begged him to return with her to the place where they had first met. That lightly colored place so that their love story can be reborn freely, joyfully, without hindrance. One day, she climbed the stairs of his attic studio, but did not ring the doorbell, because she heard a woman's voice talking endlessly behind the door. For the next few days, she walked up and down in front of his room until she saw him.He was wearing the fur coat as before; he was taking a young girl by the arm and taking her to the tram stop.As he walked back, she managed to meet him.He recognized her and greeted her in surprise.She also pretended to be surprised by the encounter.He invited her to his studio upstairs.Her heart began to pound and she knew that if he touched her she would melt into his arms. He poured her some wine, showed her his new painting, and smiled at her in a kind way—the way we smile at the old days.He took her back to the station without touching her at all.