Read Life Is Elsewhere for Free Online Page A

was living in would cease to exist. At first this thought only flickered in his head, but now that he had been made aware of his inner originality, he didn't allow the thought to escape (as he had allowed so many other thoughts to escape previously) but immediately seized it, observed it, examined it from all sides. He was walking along the river, closing his eyes from time to time and wondering if the river existed when his eyes were closed. Of course, every time he opened his eyes the river was flowing as before, but what was astonishing was that Jaromil was unable to consider this as proof that the river was really there when he was not seeing it. That seemed inordinately interesting to him, and he devoted the better part of a day to this observation before telling Mama about it. The nearer they came to their vacation's end, the greater the pleasure they took in their conversations. Now they would take their walks after dark, just the two of them, sit down on a worm-eaten bench at the edge of the water, hold hands, and look at the wavelets on which an enormous moon gently rocked. "How beautiful," Mama said with a sigh, and the child watched the moonlit circle of water and dreamed of the river's long course; Mama thought of the empty days that would soon resume, and she said: "Darling, there's a sadness in me you'll never understand." Then she looked into her son's eyes, and it seemed to her that she saw great love there and a yearning to understand. This frightened her; she couldn't really confide a woman's troubles to a child! But at the same time those understanding eyes attracted her like a vice. When mother and son lay stretched out side by side on the twin beds Mama remembered that she had reclined this way beside Jaromil until he was five years old and that she was happy then; she said to herself: He's the only man I've ever been happy with in bed; at first this thought made her smile, but when she looked again at her son's tender gaze she told herself that this child was not only capable of distracting her from the things that grieved her (thus giving her the consolation of forgettin g) but also of listening to her attentively (thus bringing her the consolation of understanding ). "I want you to know that my life is far from being full of love," she said to him; and another time she went so far as to confide to him: "As a mama, I'm happy, but a mama is not only a mama, she's also a woman."
    Yes, these incomplete confidences attracted her like a sin, and she was aware of it. When Jaromil once suddenly said to her: "Mama, I'm not so little, I understand you," she was almost frightened. Naturally the boy hadn't surmised anything precise, he only wanted to suggest to Mama that he was able to share her sorrows, whatever they might be, but what he had said was fraught with meaning, and Mama saw his words as an abyss that had suddenly opened: an abyss of illicit intimacy and forbidden understanding.
    7
    And how did Jaromil's inner world continue to expand?
    Not much; the schoolwork that had come so easily to him in the elementary grades became much more difficult in high school, and in that dullness the glory of the inner world disappeared. The teacher spoke of pessimistic books that saw the here and now merely as misery and ruin, which made his maxim that life is like weeds seem shamefully trite. Jaromil was no longer at all convinced that everything he thought and felt was solely his, as if all ideas had always existed in a definitive form and could only be borrowed as from a public library. But who then was he? What could his own self really consist of? He bent over that self in order to peer into it, but all he could find was the reflection of himself bending over himself to peer into that self. . . .
    And so he began to yearn for the man who, two years before, had first talked about his inner originality; and since his art grades were barely average (in his water-colors the paint always strayed beyond the penciled