The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire by Milan Kundera

First published: "Zlaté jablko vecné touhy," 1963 (English translation, 1974)

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: 1963

Locale: Prague, Czechoslovakia

Principal Characters:

• The unnamed narrator
• Martin, his friend, a notable womanizer

The Story

The story opens with a quotation from the French author Blaise Pascal: "They do not know that they seek only the chase and not the quarry." The quotation is an ironic commentary on the game of womanizing played by the story's two middle-aged male protagonists. The unnamed narrator is in a café, reading a book obtained with great difficulty from a library. His friend Martin, a seasoned veteran of the game of womanizing, joins him and draws his attention to a woman sitting at another table. When she gets up to leave and collects her shopping bag from the cloakroom, Martin drops the narrator's precious book in her bag. He explains that it is uncomfortable to carry by hand, and suggests to the narrator that he carry the bag for her. The two men accompany the bemused woman to her bus terminal. They learn that she is a nurse, and arrange a meeting on the following Saturday. When the woman's streetcar arrives, she goes to take the book out of her bag, but Martin prevents her, saying they will come for it on Saturday.

Martin does not "arrest" every woman who attracts his attention. There are countless more whom he merely registers without following up with a contact. He considers this a worthwhile achievement because it is easier (and, by implication, less heroic) to seduce a woman than to know enough women whom he chooses not to seduce. The narrator comments that he who likes to look back boastfully will emphasize the women to whom he has made love, but he who looks toward the future must ensure that he has plenty of registered and contacted women.

On Saturday, the two men arrive at the hospital and arrange to meet the nurse and her friend at seven. Martin wants to check out the friend, but the narrator, much to Martin's annoyance, betrays his less-than-devoted attitude to the game by demanding that he first retrieve his book. The narrator confesses that he is a dilettante, merely playing at something that Martin lives.

As they leave the hospital, Martin mentions that he must be home by nine because his wife, whom he loves, expects him to play cards with her on Saturdays. The exasperated narrator remarks that because they must leave for home at eight, they will only have an hour to spend with their new dates. This ludicrous anticlimax is the first concrete sign that Martin is more interested in the pursuit than the catch.

While they are walking in the park, Martin notices an attractive young woman. He approaches her with the concocted story that he and his friend are a famous film director and his assistant, looking for locations to make a film. They ask her to show them a certain castle, and she volunteers to go with them after visiting her mother.

They wait for the young woman to arrive, passing up another contact in doing so. When she fails to turn up, Martin is amazed because she evidently believed in them absolutely. The narrator abstracts the philosophical point that a genuine adherent to a faith never takes its sophistries seriously, but only the practical aims underlying those sophistries. Foolish people, on the other hand, who take the sophistries in earnest, eventually find inconsistencies in them, protest, and finish as heretics and apostates. The woman believed their stories so completely that she told her mother, who apparently pointed out the absurdities, until she became as disenchanted as she previously had been enchanted.

The two men arrive at the hospital to meet the nurse and her friend, but the women do not turn up on time. The narrator states that it is a matter of indifference to him whether they come at all because at the moment when Martin limited their available time to one hour, he shifted the affair to nothing but a self-deluding game. Martin's games are no longer able to cross the line into real life, although he is unaware of this fact.

The narrator observes that although Martin is a captive of his self-deception, he himself sees the delusion for what it is. He therefore has no excuse for assisting his friend in his ridiculous game. He has no illusion that an amorous adventure lies before them, only a single aimless hour with indifferent women. At that moment, the narrator looks in his rear-view mirror and sees the women approaching. He announces to Martin, who has not seen them, that they should give them up for lost, and drives away.

The narrator is struck by guilt. He has betrayed Martin because he stopped believing in him. Will he stop playing the game just because it is futile? He knows he will not; the game will continue. The story ends with a conversation between the two men about an imaginary medical student whom the narrator invented to satisfy Martin's insistence that he is a consummate womanizer. Martin suggests that the narrator pass her on to him, and they decide that Martin will pose as an athlete in order to impress her. As the plan becomes concrete, the narrator sees it dangling before them like a ripe, shining apple: "The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire."