The unbearable lightness of being (2 page)

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Was he correct or not? That is the question. The only certainty is: the
lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all.

I
have been thinking about Tomas for many years. But only in the light of these
reflections did I see him clearly. I saw him standing at the window of his flat
and looking across the courtyard at the opposite walls, not knowing what to
do.

He had first met
Tereza about three weeks earlier in a small Czech town. They had spent scarcely
an hour together. She had accompanied him to the station and waited with him
until he boarded the train. Ten days later she paid him a visit. They made love
the day she arrived. That night she came down with a fever and stayed a whole
week in his flat with the flu.

He had come to
feel an inexplicable love for this all but complete stranger; she seemed a
child to him, a child someone had put in a bulrush basket daubed with pitch and
sent downstream for Tomas to fetch at the riverbank of his bed.

She stayed with
him a week, until she was well again, then went back to her town, some hundred
and twenty-five miles from Prague. And then came the time I have just spoken of
and see as the key to his life: Standing by the window, he looked out over the
courtyard at the walls opposite him and deliberated.

Should he call
her back to Prague for good? He feared the responsibility. If he invited her to
come, then come she would, and offer him up her life.

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Or
should he refrain from approaching her? Then she would remain a waitress in a
hotel restaurant of a provincial town and he would never see her again.

Did
he want her to come or did he not?

He looked out
over the courtyard at the opposite walls, seeking an answer.

He kept
recalling her lying on his bed; she reminded him of no one in his former life.
She was neither mistress nor wife. She was a child whom he had taken from a
bulrush basket that had been daubed with pitch and sent to the riverbank of his
bed. She fell asleep. He knelt down next to her. Her feverous breath quickened
and she gave out a weak moan. He pressed his face to hers and whispered calming
words into her sleep. After a while he felt her breath return to normal and her
face rise unconsciously to meet his. He smelled the delicate aroma of her fever
and breathed it in, as if trying to glut himself with the intimacy of her body.
And all at once he fancied she had been with him for many years and was dying.
He had a sudden clear feeling that he would not survive her death. He would lie
down beside her and want to die with her. He pressed his face into the pillow
beside her head and kept it there for a long time.

Now he was
standing at the window trying to call that moment to account. What could it
have been if not love declaring itself to him?

But was it love?
The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen
her only once before in his life! Was it simply the hysteria of a man who,
aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to
simulate it? His unconscious was so cowardly that the best partner it could
choose for its little comedy was this miserable provincial waitress with
practically no chance at all to enter his life!

Looking out over
the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was
hysteria or love.

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And he was
distressed that in a situation where a real man would instantly have known how
to act, he was vacillating and therefore depriving the most beautiful moments
he had ever experienced (kneeling at her bed and thinking he would not survive
her death) of their meaning.

He remained annoyed with himself
until he realized that not knowing what he wanted was actually quite natural.

We can never know what to want,
because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous
lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

Was it better to
be with Tereza or to remain alone?

There is no means of testing which
decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live
everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what
can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why
life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite the word,
because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture,
whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no
picture.

Einmal ist keinmal,
says
Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well
not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well
not have lived at all.

But
then one day at the hospital, during a break between operations, a nurse
called him to the telephone. He heard Tereza's voice coming from the receiver.
She had phoned him from the railway station. He was overjoyed. Unfortunately,
he had something on that evening and could not invite her to his place until
the next day. The moment he hung up, he reproached himself for not telling her
to go straight there. He had time enough to cancel his plans, after all! He
tried to imagine what Tereza would do in Prague during the thirty-six long
hours before they were to meet, and had half a mind to jump into his car and
drive through the streets looking for her.

She arrived the
next evening, a handbag dangling from her shoulder, looking more elegant than
before. She had a thick book under her arm. It was
Anna Karenina.
She
seemed in a good mood, even a little boisterous, and tried to make him think
she had just happened to drop in, things had just worked out that way: she was
in Prague on business, perhaps (at this point she became rather vague) to find
a job.

Later, as they
lay naked and spent side by side on the bed, he asked her where she was staying.
It was night by then, and he offered to drive her there. Embarrassed, she
answered that she still had to find a hotel and had left her suitcase at the
station.

Only two days
ago, he had feared that if he invited her to Prague she would offer him up her
life. When she told him her suitcase was at the station, he immediately
realized that the suitcase contained her life and that she had left it at the
station only until she could offer it up to him.

The two of them
got into his car, which was parked in front of the house, and drove to the
station. There he claimed the

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suitcase (it was
large and enormously heavy) and took it and her home.

How had he come
to make such a sudden decision when for nearly a fortnight he had wavered so
much that he could not even bring himself to send a postcard asking her how she
was?

He himself was
surprised. He had acted against his principles. Ten years earlier, when he had
divorced his wife, he celebrated the event the way others celebrate a marriage.
He understood he was not born to live side by side with any woman and could be
fully himself only as a bachelor. He tried to design his life in such a way
that no woman could move in with a suitcase. That was why his flat had only the
one bed. Even though it was wide enough, Tomas would tell his mistresses that
he was unable to fall asleep with anyone next to him, and drive them home after
midnight. And so it was not the flu that kept him from sleeping with Tereza on
her first visit. The first night he had slept in his large armchair, and the
rest of that week he drove each night to the hospital, where he had a cot in
his office.

But this time he fell asleep by her side. When he woke up the next
morning, he found Tereza, who was still asleep, holding his hand. Could they have
been hand in hand all night? It was hard to believe.

And while she breathed the deep breath of sleep and held his hand
(firmly: he was unable to disengage it from her grip), the enormously heavy
suitcase stood by the bed.

He refrained from loosening his hand from her grip for fear of waking
her, and turned carefully on his side to observe her better.

Again it occurred to him that Tereza was a child put in a pitch-daubed
bulrush basket and sent downstream. He couldn't very well let a basket with a
child in it float down a stormy river! If the Pharaoh's daughter hadn't
snatched the basket carrying

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little Moses from
the waves, there would have been no Old Testament, no civilization as we now
know it! How many ancient myths begin with the rescue of an abandoned child! If
Polybus hadn't taken in the young Oedipus, Sophocles wouldn't have written his
most beautiful tragedy!

Tomas did not
realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be
trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

He lived a scant
two years with his wife, and they had a son. At the divorce proceedings, the
judge awarded the infant to its mother and ordered Tomas to pay a third of his
salary for its support. He also granted him the right to visit the boy every
other week.

But each time Tomas was supposed to
see him, the boy's mother found an excuse to keep him away. He soon realized
that bringing them expensive gifts would make things a good deal easier, that
he was expected to bribe the mother for the son's love. He saw a future of
quixotic attempts to inculcate his views in the boy, views opposed in every way
to the mother's. The very thought of it exhausted him. When, one Sunday, the
boy's mother again canceled a scheduled visit, Tomas decided on the spur of the
moment never to see him again.

Why should he feel more for that
child, to whom he was bound by nothing but a single improvident night, than for
any other? He would be scrupulous about paying support; he just

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didn't want anybody making him fight for his son in the
name of paternal sentiments!

Needless to say, he found no sympathizers.
His own parents condemned him roundly: if Tomas refused to take an interest
in his son, then they, Tomas's parents, would no longer take an interest in
theirs. They made a great show of maintaining good relations with their
daughter-in-law and trumpeted their exemplary stance and sense of justice.

Thus in practically no time he managed to
rid himself of wife, son, mother, and father. The only thing they bequeathed to
him was a fear of women. Tomas desired but feared them. Needing to create a
compromise between fear and desire, he devised what he called "erotic
friendship."
He would tell his mistresses: the only relationship
that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place
and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.

To ensure that erotic friendship never grew
into the aggression of love, he would meet each of his long-term mistresses
only at intervals. He considered this method flawless and propagated it among
his friends: "The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes.
Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or
you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at
least three weeks apart."

The rule of threes enabled Tomas to keep
intact his liaisons with some women while continuing to engage in short-term
affairs with many others. He was not always understood. The woman who
understood him best was Sabina. She was a painter. "The reason I like
you," she would say to him, "is you're the complete opposite of
kitsch. In the kingdom of kitsch you would be a monster."

It was Sabina he turned to when he needed
to find a job for Tereza in Prague. Following the unwritten rules of erotic

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friendship,
Sabina promised to do everything in her power, and before long she had in fact
located a place for Tereza in the darkroom of an illustrated weekly. Although
her new job did not require any particular qualifications, it raised her status
from waitress to member of the press. When Sabina herself introduced Tereza to
everyone on the weekly, Tomas knew he had never had a better friend as a
mistress than Sabina.

The
unwritten contract of erotic friendship stipulated that Tomas should exclude
all love from his life. The moment he violated that clause of the contract, his
other mistresses would assume inferior status and become ripe for insurrection.

Accordingly, he
rented a room for Tereza and her heavy suitcase. He wanted to be able to watch
over her, protect her, enjoy her presence, but felt no need to change his way
of life. He did not want word to get out that Tereza was sleeping at his place:
spending the night together was the corpus delicti of love.

He never spent
the night with the others. It was easy enough if he was at their place: he
could leave whenever he pleased. It was worse when they were at his and he had
to explain that come midnight he would have to drive them home because he was
an insomniac and found it impossible to fall asleep in close proximity to
another person. Though it was not far from the truth, he never dared tell them
the whole truth:

after
making love he had an uncontrollable craving to be by

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himself;
waking in the middle of the night at the side of an alien body was distasteful
to him, rising in the morning with an intruder repellent; he had no desire to
be overheard brushing his teeth in the bathroom, nor was he enticed by the
thought of an intimate breakfast.

That is why he was so surprised to
wake up and find Tereza squeezing his hand tightly. Lying there looking at her,
he could not quite understand what had happened. But as he ran through the
previous few hours in his mind, he began to sense an aura of hitherto unknown
happiness emanating from them.

From that time on they both looked
forward to sleeping together. I might even say that the goal of their
lovemaking was not so much pleasure as the sleep that followed it. She
especially was affected. Whenever she stayed overnight in her rented room
(which quickly became only an alibi for Tomas), she was unable to fall asleep;
in his arms she would fall asleep no matter how wrought up she might have been.
He would whisper impromptu fairy tales about her, or gibberish, words he
repeated monotonously, words soothing or comical, which turned into vague
visions lulling her through the first dreams of the night. He had complete
control over her sleep: she dozed off at the second he chose.

While they slept, she held him as on
the first night, keeping a firm grip on wrist, finger, or ankle. If he wanted
to move without waking her, he had to resort to artifice. After freeing his
finger (wrist, ankle) from her clutches, a process which, since she guarded him
carefully even in her sleep, never failed to rouse her partially, he would calm
her by slipping an object into her hand (a rolled-up pajama top, a slipper, a
book), which she then gripped as tightly as if it were a part of his body.

Once, when he had just lulled her
to sleep but she had gone no farther than dream's antechamber and was therefore
still responsive to him, he said to her, "Good-bye, I'm going