Free Ignorance by Milan Kundera Page B

swells his chest for the mirror and declares in ringing tones: "Kafka was born in Prague!"
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    She had separated from her first boyfriend with no great pain. With the second it was worse. When she heard him say, "If you go, it's the end between us. I swear—the end!" she could not utter a single word. She loved him, and he was flinging in her face a thing that, only a few minutes earlier, she would have thought inconceivable, unspeakable: their breakup.
    "It's the end between us." The end. If he's promising her the end, what should she promise him? His words contain a threat; so will hers: "All right," she says slowly and evenly. "Then it will be the end. I promise you that, too, and you won't forget it." Then she turned her back on him, leaving him standing right there in the street.
    She was wounded, but was she angry with him? Perhaps not even. Of course, he ought to have been more understanding, for clearly she could not pull out of the trip, which was a school requirement. She would have had to feign an illness, but with her clumsy honesty, she could never have pulled it off. No question, he was over-
    doing it, he was unfair, but she knew it was because he loved her. She understood his jealousy: he was imagining her off in the mountains with other boys, and it upset him.
    Incapable of real anger, she waited for him outside school, to explain that with the best will in the world, she really couldn't do what he wanted, and that he had no reason to be jealous; she was sure he would understand. From the doorway he saw her and dropped back to fall into step with a friend. Denied a private conversation, she followed behind him through the streets, and when he took leave of the friend she hurried toward him. Poor thing, she should have suspected that there wasn't a chance, that her sweetheart was caught up in an unremitting frenzy. She had barely begun to speak when he broke in: "You've changed your mind? You're cancelling?" When she started to say the same thing again for the tenth time, he was the one who spun on his heel and left her standing alone in the middle of the street.
    She fell back into a deep sorrow, but still without anger at him. She knew that love means giving each other everything. "Everything": that
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    word is fundamental. Everything, thus not only the physical love she had promised him, but courage too, the courage for big things as well as small ones, which is to say even the puny courage to disobey a silly school requirement. And in shame she saw that despite all her love, she was not capable of mustering that courage. It was grotesque, heartbreakingly grotesque: here she was prepared to give him everything, her virginity of course, but also, if he wanted it, her health and any sacrifice he could think up, and still she couldn't bring herself to disobey a miserable school principal. Should she let herself be defeated by such pettiness? Her self-disgust was unbearable, and she wanted to get free of it at any cost; she wanted to reach some greatness in which her pettiness would disappear; a greatness before which he would ultimately have to bow down; she wanted to die.
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    To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.
    Transfixed, she watched her shattered love, the most beautiful piece of her life, drawing away slowly and forever; nothing existed for her except that past; to it she wanted to make herself known, wanted to speak and send signals. The future held no interest for her; she desired eternity; eternity is time that has stopped, come to a standstill; the future makes eternity impossible; she wanted to annihilate the future.
    But how can a person die in the midst of a crowd of students, in a little mountain hotel, constantly in plain view? She figured