The unbearable lightness of being (17 page)

146

"He's a
petty little drunk. Forget him."

"If you say
so."

The tall man
looked in her eyes. "Promise?"

"I
promise."

"I like hearing you make me
promises," he said, still looking in her eyes.

The flirtation was on: the behavior
leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, even though the
possibility itself remains in the realm of theory, in suspense.

"What's a beautiful girl like
you doing in the ugliest part of Prague?"

"And you?" she countered.
"What are you doing in the ugliest part of Prague?"

He told her he lived nearby. He was
an engineer and had stopped off on his way home from work the other day by sheer
chance.

When
Tereza looked at Tomas, her eyes went not to his eyes but to a point three or
four inches higher, to his hair, which gave off the aroma of other women's
groins.

"I can't take it anymore,
Tomas. I know I shouldn't complain. Ever since you came back to Prague for me,
I've forbidden myself to be jealous. I don't want to be jealous. I suppose I'm
just not strong enough to stand up to it. Help me, please!"

He put his arm in hers and took her
to the park where years before they had gone on frequent walks. The park had
red,

147

blue, and yellow benches. They sat down.

"I understand you. I know what
you want," said Tomas. "I've taken care of everything. All you have
to do is climb Petrin Hill."

"Petrin Hill?" She felt a
surge of anxiety. "Why Petrin Hill?"

"You'll see when you get up
there."

She was terribly upset about the
idea of going. Her body was so weak that she could scarcely lift it off the
bench. But she was constitutionally unable to disobey Tomas. She forced herself
to stand.

She looked back. He was still
sitting on the bench, smiling at her almost cheerfully. With a wave of the hand
he signaled her to move on.

Coming
out at the foot of Petrin Hill, that great green mound rising up in the middle
of Prague, she was surprised to find it devoid of people. This was strange,
because at other times half of Prague seemed to be milling about. It made her
anxious. But the hill was so quiet and the quiet so comforting that she yielded
fully to its embrace. On her way up, she paused several times to look back:
below her she saw the towers and bridges;

the saints were
shaking their fists and lifting their stone eyes to the clouds. It was the most
beautiful city in the world.

At last she
reached the top. Beyond the ice-cream and souvenir stands (none of which
happened to be open) stretched a

148

broad
lawn spotted here and there with trees. She noticed several men on the lawn.
The closer she came to them, the slower she walked. There were six in all. They
were standing or strolling along at a leisurely pace like golfers looking over
the course and weighing various clubs in their hands, trying to get into the
proper frame of mind for a match.

She finally came near them. Of the
six men, three were there to play the same role as she: they were unsettled;
they seemed eager to ask all sorts of questions, but feared making nuisances of
themselves and so held their tongues and merely looked about inquisitively.

The other three radiated
condescending benevolence. One of them had a rifle in his hand. Spotting
Tereza, he waved at her and said with a smile, "Yes, this is the
place."

She gave a nod
in reply, but still felt extremely anxious.

The
man added: "To avoid an error, this was
your
choice, wasn t it?

It would have
been easy to say, "No, no! It wasn't my choice at all!" but she could
not imagine disappointing Tomas. What excuse, what apology could she find for
going back home? And so she said, "Yes, of course. It was my choice."

The man with the
rifle continued: "Let me explain why I wish to know. The only time we do
this is when we are certain that the people who come to us have chosen to die
of their own accord. We consider it a service."

He gave her so
quizzical a glance that she had to assure him once more: "No, no, don't
worry. It was my choice."

"Would you
like to go first?" he asked.

Because she
wanted to put off the execution as long as she could, she said, "No,
please, no. If it's at all possible, I'd like to be last."

"As you
please," he said, and went off to the others. Neither of his assistants
was armed; their sole function was to attend to the people who were to die.
They took them by the

149

arms
and walked them across the lawn. The grassy surface proved quite an expanse; it
ran as far as the eye could see. The people to be executed were allowed to
choose their own trees. They paused at each one and looked it over carefully,
unable to make up their minds. Two of them eventually chose plane trees, but
the third wandered on and on, no tree apparently striking him as worthy of his
death. The assistant who held him by the arm guided him along gently and
patiently until at last the man lost the courage to go on and stopped at a
luxuriant maple.

Then
the assistants blindfolded all three men.

And so three men, their eyes blindfolded, their heads turned to the
sky, stood with their backs against three trees on the endless lawn.

The man with the rifle took aim and fired. There was nothing to be heard
but the singing of birds: the rifle was equipped with a silencing device. There
was nothing to be seen but the collapse of the man who had been leaning against
the maple.

Without taking a step, the man with the rifle turned in a different
direction, and one of the other men silently crumpled. And seconds later (again
the man with the rifle merely turned in place), the third man sank to the lawn.

One of the assistants went up to Tereza; he
was holding a dark-blue ribbon.

She realized
he had come to blindfold her. "No," she said, shaking her head,
"I want to watch."

150

But that was not
the real reason why she refused to be blindfolded. She was not one of those
heroic types who are determined to stare down the firing squad. She simply
wanted to postpone death. Once her eyes were covered, she would be in death's
antechamber, from which there was no return.

The man did not force her; he
merely took her arm. But as they walked across the open lawn, Tereza was unable
to choose a tree. No one forced her to hurry, but she knew that in the end she
would not escape. Seeing a flowering chestnut ahead of her, she walked up and
stopped in front of it. She leaned her back against its trunk and looked up.
She saw the leaves resplendent in the sun; she heard the sounds of the city,
faint and sweet, like thousands of distant violins.

The man raised
his rifle.

Tereza felt her courage slipping
away. Her weakness drove her to despair, but she could do nothing to counteract
it. "But it wasn't my choice," she said.

He immediately lowered the barrel
of his rifle and said in a gentle voice, "If it wasn't your choice, we
can't do it. We haven't the right."

He said it kindly, as if
apologizing to Tereza for not being able to shoot her if it was not her choice.
His kindness tore at her heartstrings, and she turned her face to the bark of
the tree and burst into tears.

Her whole body
racked with sobs, she embraced the tree as if it were not a tree, as if it were
her long-lost father, a grandfather she had never known, a great-grandfather, a
great-great-grandfather, a hoary old man come to her from the depths of time
to offer her his face in the form of rough tree bark.

Then she turned her head. The three
men were far off in the distance by then, wandering across the greensward like
golfers. The one with the rifle even held it like a golf club.

Walking down the paths of Petrin
Hill, she could not wean her thoughts from the man who was supposed to shoot
her but did not. Oh, how she longed for him! Someone had to help her, after
all! Tomas wouldn't. Tomas was sending her to her death. Someone else would
have to help her!

The closer she got to the city, the
more she longed for the man with the rifle and the more she feared Tomas. He
would never forgive her for failing to keep her word. He would never forgive
her her cowardice, her betrayal. She had come to the street where they lived, and
knew she would see him in a minute or two. She was so afraid of seeing him that
her stomach was in knots and she thought she was going to be sick.

151

The
engineer started trying to lure her up to his flat. She refused the first two
invitations, but accepted the third.

After her usual
stand-up lunch in the kitchen, she set off. It was just before two.

As she
approached his house, she could feel her legs slowing down of their own
accord.

But then it
occurred to her that she was actually being sent to him by Tomas. Hadn't he
told her time and again that love and sexuality had nothing in common? Well,
she was merely testing his words, confirming them. She could almost hear him
say, "I understand you. I know what you want. I've taken care of everything.
You'll see when you get up there."

Yes, all she was doing was following Tomas's commands.

She
wouldn't stay long; long enough for a cup of coffee; long enough to feel what
it was like to reach the very border of infidelity. She would push her body up
to the border, let it stand there for a moment as at the stake, and then, when
the engineer tried to put his arms around her, she would say, as she said to
the man with the rifle on Petrin Hill, "It wasn't my choice."

Whereupon the man
would lower the barrel of his rifle and say in a gentle voice, "If it
wasn't your choice, I can't do it. I haven't the right."

And she would
turn her face to the bark of the tree and burst into tears.

152

The
building had been constructed at the turn of the century in a workers' district
of Prague. She entered a hall with dirty whitewashed walls, climbed a flight of
worn stone stairs with iron banisters, and turned to the left. It was the
second door, no name, no bell. She knocked.

He opened the
door.

The entire flat consisted of a
single room with a curtain setting off the first five or six feet from the rest
and therefore forming a kind of makeshift anteroom. It had a table, a hot
plate, and a refrigerator. Stepping beyond the curtain, she saw the oblong of a
window at the end of a long, narrow space, with books along one side and a
daybed and armchair against the other.

"It's a very simple place I
have here," said the engineer. "I hope you don't find it
depressing."

"No, not at all," said
Tereza, looking at the wall covered with bookshelves. He had no desk, but
hundreds of books. She liked seeing them, and the anxiety that had plagued her
died down somewhat. From childhood, she had regarded books as the emblems of a
secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.

He asked her
what she'd like to drink. Wine?

No, no, no wine.
Coffee, if anything.

He disappeared behind the curtain,
and she went over to the bookshelves. One of the books caught her eye at once.
It was a translation of Sophocles'
Oedipus.
How odd to find it here!
Years ago, Tomas had given it to her, and after she had read it he went on and
on about it. Then he sent his reflections to a newspaper, and the article
turned their life upside down. But now, just looking at the spine of the book
seemed to calm

153

154

her.
It made her feel as though Tomas had purposely left a trace, a message that her
presence here was his doing. She took the book off the shelf and opened it.
When the tall engineer came back into the room, she would ask him why he had
it, whether he had read it, and what he thought of it. That would be her ruse
to turn the conversation away from the hazardous terrain of a stranger's flat
to the intimate world of Tomas's thoughts.

Then she felt his
hand on her shoulder. The man took the book out of her hand, put it back on the
shelf without a word, and led her over to the daybed.

Again she
recalled the words she had used with the Petrin executioner, and said them
aloud: "But it wasn't my choice!"

She believed them
to be a miraculous formula that would instantly change the situation, but in
that room the words lost their magic power. I have a feeling they even
strengthened the man in his resolve: he pressed her to himself and put his hand
on her breast.

Oddly enough, the
touch of his hand immediately erased what remained of her anxiety. For the
engineer's hand referred to her body, and she realized that she (her soul) was
not at all involved, only her body, her body alone. The body that had betrayed
her and that she had sent out into the world among other bodies.

He
undid the first button on her blouse and indicated she was to continue. She did
not comply. She had sent her body out into the world, and refused to take any
responsibility for it. She

155

neither
resisted nor assisted him, her soul thereby announcing that it did not condone
what was happening but had decided to remain neutral.

She was nearly immobile while he
undressed her. When he kissed her, her lips failed to react. But suddenly she
felt her groin becoming moist, and she was afraid.

The excitement she felt was all the
greater because she was excited against her will. In other words, her soul did
condone the proceedings, albeit covertly. But she also knew that if the feeling
of excitement was to continue, her soul's approval would have to keep mute. The
moment it said its yes aloud, the moment it tried to take an active part in the
love scene, the excitement would subside. For what made the soul so excited was
that the body was acting against its will; the body was betraying it, and the
soul was looking on.

Then he pulled off her panties and
she was completely naked. When her soul saw her naked body in the arms of a
stranger, it was so incredulous that it might as well have been watching the
planet Mars at close range. In the light of the incredible, the soul for the
first time saw the body as something other than banal; for the first time it
looked on the body with fascination: all the body's matchless, inimitable,
unique qualities had suddenly come to the fore. This was not the most ordinary
of bodies (as the soul had regarded it until then); this was the most
extraordinary body. The soul could not tear its eyes away from the body's
birthmark, the round brown blemish above its hairy triangle. It looked upon
that mark as its seal, a holy seal it had imprinted on the body, and now a
stranger's penis was moving blasphemously close to it.

Peering into the engineer's face,
she realized that she would never allow her body, on which her soul had left
its mark, to take pleasure in the embrace of someone she neither knew nor
wished to know. She was filled with an intoxicating hatred. She collected a gob
of saliva to spit in the stranger's