The Hitchhiking Game
by Milan Kundera
from Laughable Loves
This translation 1999 Aaron Asher
1
The needle on the gas gauge suddenly dipped toward empty, and the young driver of the sports car declared that it was maddening how much gas the car guzzled. "See that we don't run out of gas again," protested the girl (about twenty-two), and she reminded the driver of several places where this had already happened to them. The young man replied that he wasn't worried, because whatever he went through with her had the charm of adventure for him. The girl objected; whenever they had run out of gas on the highway it had, she said, always been an adventure only for her. The young man had hidden, and she had had to make ill use of her charms by thumbing a ride and letting herself be driven to the nearest gas station, then thumbing a ride back with a can of gas. The young man asked the girl whether the drivers who had given her a ride had been unpleasant, since she spoke as if her task had been a hardship. She replied (with awkward flirtatiousness) that sometimes they had been very pleasant, but that it hadn't done her any good as she had been burdened with the can and had had to leave them before she could get anything going. "Sex fiend," said the young man. The girl protested that it was he who was the sex fiend. God knows how many girls stopped him on the highway when he was driving the car alone! Still driving, the young man put his arm around the girl's shoulders and kissed her gently on the forehead. He knew that she loved him and that she was jealous. Jealousy isn't a pleasant trait, but if it isn't overdone (and if it's combined with modesty), apart from its inconvenience there's even something touching about it. At least that's what the young man thought. Because he was only twenty-eight, it seemed to him that he was old and knew everything that a man could know about women. In the girl sitting beside him he valued precisely what, until now, he had encountered least in women: purity.
The needle was already on empty when, to the right, the young man caught sight of a sign announcing that a gas station was five hundred meters ahead. The girl hardly had time to say how relieved she was before the young man was signaling left and driving into a space in front of the pumps. However, he had to stop a little way off, because beside the pumps was a huge gasoline truck with a large metal tank and a bulky hose, which was refilling the pumps. "We'll have to wait," said the young man to the girl, and he got out of the car. "How long will it take?" he shouted to the man in overalls. "Only a moment," replied the attendant, and the young man said: "I've heard that one before." He wanted to go back and sit in the car, but he saw that the girl had gotten out the other side. "I'll take a little walk in the meantime," she said. "Where to?" the young man asked on purpose, wanting to see the girl's embarrassment. He had known her for a year now, but she would still blush in front of him. He enjoyed her moments of modesty, partly because they distinguished her from the women he'd met before, partly because he was aware of the law of universal transience, which made even his girl's modesty a precious thing to him.
2
The girl really didn't like it when during a trip (the young man would drive for several hours without stopping) she had to ask him to stop for a moment somewhere near a clump of trees. She always got angry when, with feigned surprise, he asked her why he should stop. She knew that her modesty was ridiculous and old-fashioned. Many times at work she had noticed that they laughed at her on account of it and deliberately provoked her. She always blushed in advance at the idea that she was going to blush. She often longed to feel free and easy about her body, the way most of the women around her did. She had even invented a special course in self-persuasion: she would repeat to herself that at birth every human being received one out of the millions of available bodies, as one would receive an allotted room out of the millions of rooms in an enormous hotel; that consequently the body was fortuitous and impersonal, only a ready-made, borrowed thing. She would repeat this to herself in different ways, but she could never manage to feel it. This mind-body dualism was alien to her. She was too much at one with her body; that is why she always felt such anxiety about it.
She experienced this same anxiety even in her relations with the young man, whom she had known for a year and with whom she was happy, perhaps because he never separated her body from her soul, and she could live with him wholly. In this unity there was happiness, but it is not far from happiness to suspicion, and the girl was full of suspicions. For instance, it often occurred to her that other women (those who weren't anxious) were more attractive and more seductive, and that the young man, who did not conceal the fact that he knew this kind of woman well, would someday leave her for a woman like that. (True, the young man declared that he'd had enough of them to last his whole life, but she knew that he was still much younger than he thought.) She wanted him to be completely hers and herself to be completely his, but it often seemed to her that the more she tried to give him everything, the more she denied him something: the very thing that a light and superficial love or a flirtation gives a person. It worried her that she was not able to combine seriousness with lightheartedness.
But now she wasn't worrying, and any such thoughts were far from her mind. She felt good. It was the first day of their vacation (of their two-week vacation, which she had been dreaming about for a whole year), the sky was blue (the whole year she had been worrying about whether the sky would really be blue), and he was beside her. At his "Where to?" she bhished, and she left the car without a word. She walked around the gas station, which was situated beside the highway in total isolation, surrounded by fields. About a hundred meters away (in the direction in which they were traveling), a wood began. She set off for it, vanished behind a little bush, and gave herself up to her good mood. (In solitude it was possible for her to get the greatest enjoyment from the presence of the man she loved. If his presence had been continuous, it would have kept on disappearing. Only when she was alone was she able to hold on to it.)
When she came out of the wood onto the highway, the gas station was visible. The large gasoline truck was already pulling out, and the sports car moved forward toward the red column of the pump. The girl walked on along the highway and only at times looked back to see if the sports car was coming. At last she caught sight of it. She stopped and began to signal at it like a hitchhiker signaling at a stranger's car. The sports car slowed down and stopped close to the girl. The young man leaned toward the window, rolled it down, smiled, and asked: "Where are you headed, miss?" "Are you going to Bystrica?" asked the girl, smiling flirtatiously at him. "Yes, please get in," said the young man, opening the door. The girl got in, and the car took off.
3
The young man was always glad when his girlfriend was in a good mood. This didn't happen too often; she had quite a tiresome job in an unpleasant environment, many hours of overtime without compensatory leisure, and, at home, a sick mother. So she often felt tired. She didn't have either particularly good nerves or self-confidence, and she fell easily into a state of anxiety and fear. For this reason he welcomed every manifestation of her gaiety with the tender solicitude of an older brother. He smiled at her and said: "I'm lucky today. I've been driving for five years, but I've never given a ride to such a pretty hitchhiker."
The girl was grateful to the young man for every bit of flattery; she wanted to linger for a moment in its warmth, and so she said: "You're very good at lying."
"Do I look like a liar?"
"You look like you enjoy lying to women," said the girl, and into her words there crept unawares a touch of the old anxiety, because she really did believe that her young man enjoyed lying to women.
The girl's jealousy often irritated the young man, but this time he could easily overlook it for, after all, her words didn't apply to h
im but to an unknown driver. And so he merely asked an ordinary question: "Does it bother you?"
"If I were going out with you, then it would bother me," said the girl and her words contained a subtle, instructive message for the young man; but the end of her sentence applied only to the unknown driver: "but I don't know you, so it doesn't bother me."
"Things about her own man always bother a woman more than things about a stranger" (this was now the young man's subtle, instructive message to the girl), "so seeing that we are strangers, we could get along well together."
The girl pretended not to understand the implied meaning of his message, and so she now addressed the unknown driver exclusively: "What does it matter, since we'll part company in a little while?"
"Why?" asked the young man.
"Well, I'm getting out at Bystrica."
"And what if I get out with you?"
At these words the girl looked up at him and found that he looked exactly as she imagined him in her most agonizing hours of jealousy. She was alarmed at how he was flattering her and flirting with her (an unknown hitchhiker), and how seductive he was. Therefore she responded with defiant provocativeness: "What would you do with me, I wonder?"
"I wouldn't have to think too hard about what to do with such a beautiful woman," said the young man gallantly, and at this moment he was once again speaking far more to his own girl than to the figure of the hitchhiker.
But this flattering sentence made the girl feel as if she had caught him at something, as if she had wheedled a confession out of him with a fraudulent trick.
She felt toward him a brief flash of intense hatred and said: "Aren't you rather too sure of yourself?"
The young man looked at the girl. Her defiant face appeared to him to be completely convulsed. He felt sorry for her and longed for her usual, familiar expression (which he considered childish and simple). He leaned toward her, put his arm around her shoulders, and softly spoke the nickname he often used and with which he now wanted to stop the game.
But the girl released herself and said: "You're going a bit too fast!"
At this rebuff the young man said: "Excuse me, miss," and looked silently in front of him at the highway.
4
The girl's pitiful jealousy, however, left her as quickly as it had come over her. After all, she was sensible and knew perfectly well that all this was merely a game; now it even struck her as a little ridiculous that she had repulsed her man out of jealous rage; it wouldn't be pleasant for her if he found out why she had done it. Fortunately she had the miraculous ability to change the meaning of her actions after the event. Using this ability, she decided that she had repulsed him not out of anger but so that she could go on with the game, which, with its whimsicality, so well suited the first day of their vacation.
So again she was the hitchhiker who had just repulsed the overeager driver, but only so as to slow down his conquest and make it more exciting. She half turned toward the young man and said caressingly: "I didn't mean to offend you, mister!"
"Excuse me, I won't touch you again," said the young man.
He was furious with the girl for not listening to him and refusing to be herself when that was what he wanted. And since the girl insisted on continuing in her role, he transferred his anger to the unknown hitchhiker whom she was portraying. And all at once he discovered the character of his own role: he stopped making the gallant remarks with which he had wanted to flatter his girl in a roundabout way, and began to play the tough guy who treats women to the coarser aspects of his masculinity: willfulness, sarcasm, self-assurance.
This role was a complete contradiction of the young man's habitually solicitous approach to the girl. True, before he had met her he had in fact behaved roughly rather than gently toward women. But he had never resembled a heartless tough guy, because he had never demonstrated either a particularly strong will or ruth-lessness. However, if he did not resemble such a man, nonetheless he had longed to at one time. Of course it was a quite naive desire, but there it was. Childish desires withstand all the snares of the adult mind and often survive into ripe old age. And this childish desire quickly took advantage of the opportunity to embody itself in the proffered role.
The young man's sarcastic reserve suited the girl very well?it freed her from herself. For she herself was, above all, the epitome of jealousy. The moment she stopped seeing the gallantly seductive young man beside her and saw only his inaccessible face, her jealousy subsided. The girl could forget herself and give herself up to her role.
Her role? What was her role? It was a role out of trashy literature. The hitchhiker stopped the car not to get a ride, but to seduce the man who was driving the car. She was an artful seductress, cleverly knowing how to use her charms. The girl slipped into this silly, romantic part with an ease that astonished her and held her spellbound.
5
There was nothing the young man missed in his life more than lightheartedness. The main road of his life was drawn with implacable precision: his job didn't use up merely eight hours a day, it also infiltrated the remaining time with the compulsory boredom of meetings and home study, and, by means of the attentive-ness of his countless male and female colleagues, it infiltrated the wretchedly little time he had left for his private life as well; this private life never remained secret and sometimes even became the subject of gossip and public discussion. Even a two week vacation didn't give him a feeling of liberation and adventure; the gray shadow of precise planning lay even here. The scarcity of summer accommodations in our country had compelled him to book a room in the Tatras six months in advance, and since for that he needed a recommendation from his office, its omnipresent brain thus did not cease knowing about him for even an instant.
He had become reconciled to all this, yet all the same from time to time the terrible thought of the straight road would overcome him?a road along which he was being pursued, where he was visible to everyone, and from which he could not turn aside. At this moment that thought returned to him. Through an odd and brief conjunction of ideas the figurative road became identified with the real highway along which he was driving?and this led him suddenly to do a crazy thing.
"Where did you say you wanted to go?" he asked the girl.
"To Bystrica," she replied.
"And what are you going to do there?"
"I have a date there."
"Who with?"
"With a certain gentleman."
The car was just coming to a large crossroads. The driver slowed down so as to read the road signs, then turned off to the right.
"What will happen if you don't turn up for that date?"
"I would be your fault, and you would have to take care of me."
"You obviously didn't notice that I turned off in the direction of Nove Zamky."
"Is that true? You've gone crazy!"
"Don't worry! I'll take care of you," said the young man.
The game all at once went into a higher gear. The sports car was moving away not only from the imaginary goal of Bystrica, but also from the real goal, toward which it had been heading in the morning: the Tatras and the room that had been reserved. Fiction was suddenly making an assault on real life. The young man was moving away from himself and from the implacable straight road, from which he had never strayed until now.
"But you said you were going to the Tatras!" The girl was surprised.
"I'm going, miss, wherever I feel like going. I'm a free man, and I do what I want and what it pleases me to do."
6
When they drove into Nove Zamky it was already getting dark.
The young man had never been here before, and it took him a while to orient himself. Several times he stopped the car and asked the passersby directions to the hotel. Several streets had been dug up, so that the drive to the hotel, even though it was quite close by (as all those who had been asked asserted), necessitated so many detours and roundabout routes that it was almost a quarter of an hour before they finally stopped
in front of it. The hotel looked unprepossessing, but it was the only one in town and the young man didn't feel like driving on. So he said to the girl: "Wait here," and he got out of the car.
Out of the car he was, of course, himself again. And it was upsetting for him to find himself in the evening somewhere completely different from his intended destination?the more so because no one had forced him to do it and as a matter of fact he hadn't even really wanted to. He blamed himself for this piece of folly, but then became reconciled to it. The room in the Tatras could wait until tomorrow, and it wouldn't do any harm if they celebrated the first day of their vacation with something unexpected.
He walked through the restaurant?smoky, noisy, and crowded?and asked for the reception desk. They sent him to the back of the lobby near the staircase, where behind a glass panel a superannuated blonde was sitting beneath a board full of keys. With difficulty, he obtained the key to the only room left.
The girl, when she found herself alone, also threw off her role. She didn't feel ill-humored, though, at finding herself in an unexpected town. She was so devoted to the young man that she never had doubts about anything he did, and confidently entrusted every moment of her life to him. On the other hand the idea once again popped into her mind that perhaps?just as she was now doing?other women had waited for her man in his car, those women he met on business trips. But surprisingly enough this idea didn't upset her at all now; in fact, she smiled at the thought of how nice it was that today she was this other woman, this irresponsible, indecent other woman, one of those women of whom she was so jealous; it seemed to her that she was cutting them all out, that she had learned how to use their weapons; how to give the young man what until now she had not known how to give him: light-heartedness, shamelessness, and dissoluteness; a curious feeling of satisfaction filled her, because she alone had the ability to be all women and in this way (she alone) could completely captivate her lover and hold his interest.
The young man opened the car door and led the girl into the restaurant. Amid the din, the dirt, and the smoke he found a single unoccupied table in a corner.
7
"So how are you going to take care of me now?" asked the girl provocatively.
"What would you like for an aperitif ?"
The girl wasn't too fond of alcohol, still she drank a little wine and liked vermouth fairly well. Now, however, she purposely said: "Vodka."