“The Hitchhiking Game” by Milan Kundera (thoughts)

This was one of the stories I loved from the anthology My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead. And I’m publishing the review on Monday to participate in John’s Short Story Monday.

I’ve enjoyed Kundera’s novels, but I’d never read any of his stories before. “The Hitchhiking Game” looks at a young couple in Czechoslovakia who are finally going on a long-awaited vacation. On the drive, they have to stop for gas, and the girlfriend wanders down the road, pretending to be a hitchhiker. The boyfriend picks her up, but the two pretend they’re strangers. The girl finds herself being much more brazen, how she imagines a strange woman hitchhiking would act, as opposed to her usual shy self. The guy, on the other hand, begins treating her with much less respect (because in his mind, only pure women deserve good treatment). The story switches points of view between the two of them fairly often, so the reader gets to see how the game affects both sides. And how their ‘pretend’ characters get mixed up with who they really are. I wouldn’t say this is a love story, but it’s a relationship story and a good exploration of how people’s perceptions completely determine how they treat each other. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a free copy online, but it’s definitely worth reading!

Notable Passages
She had never undressed like this before. The shyness, the feeling of inner panic, the dizziness, all that she had always felt when undressing in front of the young man (and she couldn’t hide in the darkness), all this was gone. She was standing in front of him self-confident, insolent, bathed in light, and astonished at her sudden discovery of the gestures, heretofore unknown to her, of a slow, provocative striptease.

It was a peculiar game. This peculiarity was evidenced, for example, by the fact that the young man, even though he himself was playing the unknown driver remarkably well, did not for a moment stop seeing his girl in the hitchhiker. And it was precisely this that was tormenting; he saw his girl seduce a strange man, and he had the bitter privilege of being present, of seeing at close quarters how she looked and of hearing what she said when she was cheating on him (when she had cheated on him, when she would cheat on him); he had the paradoxical honor of being himself the pretext for her unfaithfulness.

This was all the worse because he worshipped rather than loved her; it had always seemed that the girl had reality only within the bounds of fidelity and purity, and that beyond these bounds it simply didn’t exist; beyond these bounds she would cease to be herself, as water ceases to be water beyond the boiling point.