The unbearable lightness of being (18 page)

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face.
He was observing her with as much eagerness as she him, and noting her rage, he
quickened the pace of his movements on her body. Tereza could feel orgasm
advancing from afar, and shouted "No, no, no!" to resist it, but
resisted, constrained, deprived of an outlet, the ecstasy lingered all the
longer in her body, flowing through her veins like a shot of morphine. She
thrashed in his arms, swung her fists in the air, and spat in his face.

Toilets
in modern water closets rise up from the floor like white water lilies. The
architect does all he can to make the body forget how paltry it is, and to make
man ignore what happens to his intestinal wastes after the water from the tank
flushes them down the drain. Even though the sewer pipelines reach far into our
houses with their tentacles, they are carefully hidden from view, and we are happily
ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms,
dance halls, and parliaments.

The bathroom in the old
working-class flat on the outskirts of Prague was less hypocritical: the floor
was covered with gray tile and the toilet rising up from it was broad, squat,
and pitiful. It did not look like a white water lily; it looked like what it
was:

the enlarged end of
a sewer pipe. And since it lacked even a wooden seat, Tereza had to perch on
the cold enamel rim.

She was sitting there on the
toilet, and her sudden desire to void her bowels was in fact a desire to go to
the extreme of

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humiliation,
to become only and utterly a body, the body her mother used to say was good for
nothing but digesting and excreting. And as she voided her bowels, Tereza was
overcome by a feeling of infinite grief and loneliness. Nothing could be more
miserable than her naked body perched on the enlarged end of a sewer pipe.

Her soul had
lost its onlooker's curiosity, its malice and pride; it had retreated deep into
the body again, to the farthest gut, waiting desperately for someone to call it
out.

She
stood up from the toilet, flushed it, and went into the anteroom. The soul
trembled in her body, her naked, spurned body. She still felt on her anus the
touch of the paper she had used to wipe herself.

And suddenly something
unforgettable occurred: suddenly she felt a desire to go in to him and hear his
voice, his words. If he spoke to her in a soft, deep voice, her soul would take
courage and rise to the surface of her body, and she would burst out crying.
She would put her arms around him the way she had put her arms around the
chestnut tree's thick trunk in her dream.

Standing there in the anteroom, she
tried to withstand the strong desire to burst out crying in his presence. She
knew that her failure to withstand it would have ruinous consequences. She
would fall in love with him.

Just then, his
voice called to her from the inner room. Now

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that
she heard that voice by itself (divorced from the engineer's tall stature), it
amazed her: it was high-pitched and thin. How could she have ignored it all
this time?

Perhaps the
surprise of that unpleasant voice was what saved her from temptation. She went
inside, picked up her clothes from the floor, threw them on, and left.

She
had done her shopping and was on her way home. Karenin had the usual roll in
his mouth. It was a cold morning; there was a slight frost. They were passing a
housing development, where in the spaces between buildings the tenants maintained
small flower and vegetable gardens, when Karenin suddenly stood stock still and
riveted his eyes on something. She looked over, but could see nothing out of
the ordinary. Karenin gave a tug, and she followed along behind. Only then did
she notice the black head and large beak of a crow lying on the cold dirt of a
barren plot. The bodiless head bobbed slowly up and down, and the beak gave out
an occasional hoarse and mournful croak.

Karenin was so excited he dropped
his roll. Tereza tied him to a tree to prevent him from hurting the crow. Then
she knelt down and tried to dig up the soil that had been stamped down around
the bird to bury it alive. It was not easy. She broke a nail. The blood began
to flow.

All at once a rock landed nearby.
She turned and caught sight of two nine- or ten-year-old boys peeking out from
behind

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a
wall. She stood up. They saw her move, saw the dog by the tree, and ran off.

Once more she knelt down and
scratched away at the dirt. At last she succeeded in pulling the crow out of
its grave. But the crow was lame and could neither walk nor fly. She wrapped it
up in the red scarf she had been wearing around her neck, and pressed it to her
body with her left hand. With her right hand she untied Karenin from the tree.
It took all the strength she could muster to quiet him down and make him heel.

She rang the doorbell, not having a
free hand for the key. Tomas opened the door. She handed him the leash, and
with the words "Hold him!" took the crow into the bathroom. She laid
it on the floor under the washbasin. It flapped its wings a little, but could
move no more than that. There was a thick yellow liquid oozing from it. She
made a bed of old rags to protect it from the cold tiles. From time to time the
bird would give a hopeless flap of its lame wing and raise its beak as a
reproach.

21

She
sat transfixed on the edge of the bath, unable to take her eyes off the dying
crow. In its solitude and desolation she saw a reflection of her own fate, and
she repeated several times to herself, I have no one left in the world but
Tomas.

Did her adventure with the engineer
teach her that casual sex has nothing to do with love? That it is light,
weightless? Was she calmer now?

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Not in the least.

She kept picturing the following scene: She had come out of the toilet
and her body was standing in the anteroom naked and spurned. Her soul was
trembling, terrified, buried in the depths of her bowels. If at that moment the
man in the inner room had addressed her soul, she would have burst out crying
and fallen into his arms.

She imagined
what it would have been like if the woman standing in the anteroom had been one
of Tomas's mistresses and if the man inside had been Tomas. All he would have
had to do was say one word, a single word, and the girl would have thrown her
arms around him and wept.

Tereza knew what
happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice
calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul
thus responds to his voice. Tomas had no defense against the lure of love, and
Tereza feared for him every minute of every hour.

What weapons did
she have at her disposal? None but her fidelity. And she offered him that at
the very outset, the very first day, as if aware she had nothing more to give.
Their love was an oddly asymmetrical construction: it was supported by the
absolute certainty of her fidelity like a gigantic edifice supported by a
single column.

Before long, the
crow stopped flapping its wings, and gave no more than the twitch of a broken,
mangled leg. Tereza refused to be separated from it. She could have been
keeping vigil over a dying sister. In the end, however, she did step into the
kitchen for a bite to eat.

When she returned, the crow was dead.

In the first year
of her love, Tereza would cry out during intercourse. Screaming, as I have
pointed out, was meant to blind and deafen the senses. With time she screamed
less, but her soul was still blinded by love, and saw nothing. Making love with
the engineer in the absence of love was what finally restored her soul's
sight.

During her next visit to the sauna,
she stood before the mirror again and, looking at herself, reviewed the scene
of physical love that had taken place in the engineer's flat. It was not her
lover she remembered. In fact, she would have been hard put to describe him.
She may not even have noticed what he looked like naked. What she did remember
(and what she now observed, aroused, in the mirror) was her own body: her pubic
triangle and the circular blotch located just above it. The blotch, which until
then she had regarded as the most prosaic of skin blemishes, had become an
obsession. She longed to see it again and again in that implausible proximity
to an alien penis.

Here I must stress again: She had no
desire to see another man's organs. She wished to see her own private parts in
close proximity to an alien penis. She did not desire her lover's body. She
desired her own body, newly discovered, intimate and alien beyond all others,
incomparably exciting.

Looking at her body speckled with
droplets of shower water, she imagined the engineer dropping in at the bar.
Oh, how she longed for him to come, longed for him to invite her back! Oh, how
she yearned for it!

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Every
day she feared that the engineer would make his appearance and she would be
unable to say no. But the days passed, and the fear that he would come merged
gradually into the dread that he would not.

A month had gone
by, and still the engineer stayed away. Tereza found it inexplicable. Her
frustrated desire receded and turned into
a
troublesome question:
Why
did he fail to come?

Waiting on
customers one day, she came upon the bald-headed man who had attacked her for
serving alcohol to a minor. He was telling a dirty joke in a loud voice. It was
a joke she had heard a hundred times before from the drunks in the small town
where she had once served beer. Once more, she had the feeling that her
mother's world was intruding on her. She curtly interrupted the bald man.

"I don't
take orders from you," the man responded in a huff. "You ought to
thank your lucky stars we let you stay here in the bar."

"
We?
Who do you mean by
we?"

"Us,"
said the man, holding up his glass for another vodka. "I won't have any
more insults out of you, is that clear? Oh, and by the way," he added,
pointing to Tereza's neck, which was wound round with a strand of cheap pearls,
"where did you get those from? You can't tell me your husband gave them to
you. A window washer! He can't afford gifts like that. It's your customers,
isn't it? I wonder what you give them in exchange?"

"You shut your
mouth this instant!" she hissed.

"Just
remember that prostitution is a criminal offense," he went on, trying to
grab hold of the necklace.

Suddenly
Karenin jumped up, leaned his front paws on the bar, and began to snarl.

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The ambassador said: "He's with the
secret police."

"Then why is he so open about
it? What good is a secret police that can't keep its secrets?"

The ambassador positioned himself
on the cot by folding his legs under his body, as he had learned to do in yoga
class. Kennedy, beaming down on him from the frame on the wall, gave his words
a special consecration.

"The secret police have
several functions, my dear," he began in an avuncular tone. "The
first is the classical one. They keep an ear out for what people are saying and
report it to their superiors.

"The second function is
intimidatory. They want to make it seem as if they have us in their power; they
want us to be afraid. That is what your bald-headed friend was after.

"The third function consists
of staging situations that will compromise us. Gone are the days when they
tried to accuse us of plotting the downfall of the state. That would only
increase our popularity. Now they slip hashish in our pockets or claim we've
raped a twelve-year-old girl. They can always dig up some girl to back
them."

The engineer immediately popped
back into Tereza's mind. Why had he never come?

"They need to trap
people," the ambassador went on, "to force them to collaborate and set
other traps for other people, so that gradually they can turn the whole nation
into a single organization of informers."

Tereza could think of nothing but
the possibility that the engineer had been sent by the police. And who was that
strange boy who drank himself silly and told her he loved her? It was because
of him that the bald police spy had launched into her

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and the engineer
stood up for her. So all three had been playing parts in a prearranged scenario
meant to soften her up for the seduction!

How could she
have missed it? The flat was so odd, and he didn't belong there at all! Why
would an elegantly dressed engineer live in a miserable place like that?
Was
he an engineer? And if so, how could he leave work at two in the afternoon?
Besides, how many engineers read Sophocles? No, that was no engineer's library!
The whole place had more the flavor of a flat confiscated from a poor
imprisoned intellectual. Her father was put in prison when she was ten, and the
state had confiscated their flat and all her father's books. Who knows to what
use the flat had then been put?

Now she saw clearly why the engineer had
never returned:

he had accomplished
his mission. What mission? The drunken undercover agent had inadvertently given
it away when he said, "Just remember that prostitution is a criminal
offense." Now that self-styled engineer would testify that she had slept
with him and demanded to be paid! They would threaten to blow it up into a
scandal unless she agreed to report on the people who got drunk in her bar.

"Don't worry," the ambassador comforted her. "Your story
doesn't sound the least bit dangerous."

"I suppose it doesn't," she said in a tight voice, as she
walked out into the Prague night with Karenin.