The Book of Laughter & Forgetting by Kundera Milan

Author:Kundera, Milan [Kundera, Milan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-10-19T20:34:06+00:00

Part Five

Litost

Who Is Kristyna?

Kristyna is a woman of about thirty, who has a child, a butcher husband she gets along with quite well, and a very intermittent affair with a local mechanic, who now and then makes love to her after hours amid the discomforts of the auto-repair shop. The small town hardly lends itself to extramarital love, or rather it requires a wealth of ingenuity and audacity, qualities Kristyna is not abundantly endowed with.

Meeting the student turned her head powerfully. He had come to the town to spend his summer vacation with his mother, had twice stared at the butcher’s wife as she stood behind the shop counter, and the third time, when he spoke to her at the local swimming place, he was so charmingly timid that the young woman, accustomed to the butcher and the mechanic, could not resist. Ever since her marriage (a good ten years now), she had not dared touch another man except in the safety of the locked repair shop, among dismantled cars and old tires, and suddenly she had found the audacity for amorous meetings out in the open, exposed to prying eyes. Though the spots they chose for their walks were the most isolated and the likelihood of anyone intruding on them negligible, Kristyna’s heart would pound and she would be filled with stimulating fear. But the more bravely she faced the danger, the more reserved she was with the student. They did not go very far. He got only some brief hugs and tender kisses, she would often slip out of his arms entirely, and when he was fondling her body she kept her legs tightly together.

It was not that she did not want the student. It was that she had fallen in love with his tender timidity and wanted to preserve it for herself. Hearing a man expound ideas about life and mention the names of poets and philosophers was something that never before had happened to Kristyna. The student, poor boy, could talk about nothing else; the range of his seducer’s eloquence was very limited, and he could not adapt it to women of varying social levels. Anyway, he felt no need to blame himself in this regard, because the quotations from the philosophers produced much more of an effect on that simple butcher’s wife than on any fellow student. One thing nonetheless escaped him: an effective quotation from a philosopher might charm the butcher’s wife’s soul, but it stood as an obstacle between the butcher’s wife’s body and his own. For Kristyna vaguely imagined that by giving her body to the student she would lower their affair to the butcher’s or the mechanic’s level and she would never again hear a word about Schopenhauer.

With the student she suffered from an embarrassment she had never known before. With the butcher and the mechanic she always arrived quickly and cheerfully at an understanding about things. For instance, both men agreed to be very careful, because the doctor had told her after her child was born that she could risk her health if not her life by having another.

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