Life Is Elsewhere by Milan Kundera

beautiful about dreams is the unlikely encounter of creatures and objects that couldn't possibly meet in everyday life; in a dream a boat can sail through a bedroom window, a woman dead twenty years might be lying in bed and yet here she is getting into the boat, which immediately changes into a coffin, and the coffin begins floating between the flowering banks of a river. He quoted Lautreamonts famous phrase about the beauty of "the encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table," and then he said: "That encounter, however, is no more beautiful than the encounter of a woman and a child in a painter's studio."
    Jaromil could see that his teacher was a bit different from the way he had been before, noticing the fervor in his voice when he talked about dreams and poetry. Not' only did he like that, but he was pleased that he, Jaromil, had been the justification for such an exhilarating speech, and above all he had registered his teacher's last remark about the encounter of a child and a woman in a painter's studio. A short while before, when the painter had told him that they would stay in this room, Jaromil had surmised that there was probably a woman in the studio, and certainly not just any woman, because he was not allowed to see her. But he was still too far away from the adult world to try to clear up this puzzle; what interested him more was the fact that, with that last remark, the painter had placed him, Jaromil, on the same level as this woman who was certainly important to the painter, and the fact that Jaromil's arrival obviously made the presence of this woman still more beautiful and precious, and he concluded that the painter liked him, that he mattered in his life perhaps because of a deep and mysterious inner similarity between them that Jaromil, still a child, could not clearly discern but that the painter, a wise adult, was aware of. This thought filled him with calm enthusiasm, and when the painter gave him another subject he bent feverishly over the paper.
    The painter returned to the studio and found Mama in tears.
    "Please let me go home right now!"
    "Go ahead, you can leave together—Jaromil will soon be finished."
    "You're a devil," she said, still in tears, and the painter embraced her and covered her with kisses. Then he returned to the adjoining room, praised Jaromil's work (ah, Jaromil was very happy that day!), and sent him home. Then he returned to the studio, stretched tearful Mama out on the old paint-stained daybed, kissed her soft mouth and wet face, and again made love to her.
     
    9
    Mama and the painter's love affair never freed itself from the omens that marked its beginning: it was not a love she had long and dreamily contemplated in advance, firmly looking it in the eye; it was an unexpected love that had grabbed her by the neck from behind.
    This love constantly reminded her of her unpre-paredness for love; she was inexperienced, she knew neither what to do nor what to say. Before the painter's unusual and demanding face, she was ashamed in advance of her every word and gesture; even her body was no better prepared; for the first time she bitterly regretted taking care of herself so badly after she gave birth, and she was frightened when she looked in the mirror at her belly, at its sadly hanging wrinkled skin.
    Ah! She had always dreamed of a love in which her body and soul, hand in hand, would grow old together (yes, that was the love she had long contemplated in advance, looking it dreamily in the eye); but now, in this difficult liaison she was suddenly immersed in, she found her soul painfully young and her body painfully old, so that she moved forward into her adventure as if she were tremulously walking on a much-too-narrow plank, not knowing whether it was the youth of her soul or the age of her body that would cause her to fall.
    The painter treated her with extravagant solicitude and tried hard to introduce her to the world of his paintings and thoughts.