The unbearable lightness of being (27 page)

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He did not understand.

The tone of her
explanation was sad, unantagonistic, almost gentle. "For months now your
hair has had a strong odor to it. It smells of female genitals. I didn't want
to tell you, but night after night I've had to breathe in the groin of some mistress
of yours."

The moment she
finished, his stomach began hurting again. He was desperate. The scrubbings
he'd put himself through! Body, hands, face, to make sure not the slightest
trace of their odors remained behind. He'd even avoided their fragrant soaps,
carrying his own harsh variety with him at all times. But he'd forgotten about
his hair! It had never occurred to him!

Then he
remembered the woman who had straddled his face and wanted him to make love to
her with it and with the crown of his head. He hated her now. What stupid
ideas! He saw there was no use denying it. All he could do was laugh a silly
laugh and head for the bathroom to wash his hair.

But she stroked
his forehead again and said, "Stay here in bed. Don't bother washing it
out. I'm used to it by now."

His stomach was
killing him, and he longed for peace and quiet. "I'll write to that
patient of mine, the one we met at the spa. Do you know the district where his
village is?" "No."

Tomas was having
great trouble talking. All he could say was, "Woods . . . rolling hills .
. ."

"That's
right. That's what we'll do. We'll go away from here. But no talking now . .
." And she kept stroking his forehead. They lay there side by side,
neither saying a word. Slowly the pain began to recede. Soon they were both
asleep.

In the middle of
the night, he woke up and realized to his surprise that he had been having one
erotic dream after the other. The only one he could recall with any clarity was
the last: an enormous naked woman, at least five times his size, floating on
her back in a pool, her belly from crotch to navel covered with thick hair.
Looking at her from the side of the pool, he was greatly excited.

How could he have been excited when his body was debilitated by a
gastric disorder? And how could he be excited by the sight of a woman who would
have repelled him had he seen her while conscious?

He thought: In the clockwork of the head, two cogwheels turn opposite
each other. On the one, images; on the other, the body's reactions. The cog carrying
the image of a naked woman meshes with the corresponding erection-command cog.
But when, for one reason or another, the wheels go out of phase and the
excitement cog meshes with a cog bearing the image of a swallow in flight, the
penis rises at the sight of a swallow.

Moreover, a study by one of Tomas's colleagues, a specialist in human
sleep, claimed that during
any
kind of dream men have erections, which
means that the link between erections and naked women is only one of a thousand
ways the Creator can set the clockwork moving in a man's head.

And what has love in common with all this? Nothing. If a cogwheel in
Tomas's head goes out of phase and he is excited by seeing a swallow, it has
absolutely no effect on his love for Tereza.

If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love
is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love
is our freedom. Love lies beyond
"Es muss sein!"

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Though that is not entirely true. Even if love is something other than a
clockwork of sex that the Creator uses for His own amusement, it is still
attached to it. It is attached to it like a tender naked woman to the pendulum
of an enormous clock.

Thomas thought: Attaching love to sex is one of the most bizarre ideas
the Creator ever had.

He also thought: One way of saving love from the stupidity of sex would
be to set the clockwork in our head in such a way as to excite us at the sight
of a swallow.

And with that sweet thought he started dozing off. But on the very
threshold of sleep, in the no-man's-land of muddled concepts, he was suddenly
certain he had just discovered the solution to all riddles, the key to all
mysteries, a new utopia, a paradise: a world where man is excited by seeing a
swallow and Tomas can love Tereza without being disturbed by the aggressive
stupidity of sex.

Then
he fell asleep.

Several
half-naked women were trying to wind themselves around him, but he was tired,
and to extricate himself from them he opened the door leading to the next room.
There, just opposite him, he saw a young woman lying on her side on a couch.
She, too, was half-naked: she wore nothing but panties. Leaning on her elbow,
she looked up at him with a smile that said she had known he would come.

He went up to her.
He was filled with a feeling of unutterable bliss at the thought that he had
found her at last and could

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be
there with her. He sat down at her side, said something to her, and she said
something back. She radiated calm. Her hand made slow, supple movements. All
his life he had longed for the calm of her movements. Feminine calm had eluded
him all his life.

But just then the dream began its slide back to reality. He found himself
back in that no-man's-land where we are neither asleep nor awake. He was horrified
by the prospect of seeing the young woman vanish before his eyes and said to
himself, God, how I'd hate to lose her! He tried desperately to remember who
she was, where he'd met her, what they'd experienced together. How could he
possibly forget when she knew him so well? He promised himself to phone her
first thing in the morning. But no sooner had he made the promise than he
realized he couldn't keep it: he didn't know her name. How could he forget the
name of someone he knew so well? By that time he was almost completely awake,
his eyes were open, and he was asking himself, Where am I? Yes, I'm in Prague,
but that woman, does she live here too? Didn't I meet her somewhere else?
Could she be from Switzerland? It took him quite some time to get it into his
head that he didn't know the woman, that she wasn't from Prague or Switzerland,
that she inhabited his dream and nowhere else.

He was so upset he sat straight up in bed. Tereza was breathing deeply
beside him. The woman in the dream, he thought, was unlike any he had ever met.
The woman he felt he knew most intimately of all had turned out to be a woman
he did not even know. And yet she was the one he had always longed for. If a
personal paradise were ever to exist for him, then in that paradise he would
have to live by her side. The woman from his dream was the
"Es muss
sein!"
of his love.

He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato's
Symposium:
People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two,

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and now all the
halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the
half of ourselves we have lost.

Let us suppose that such is the
case, that somewhere in the world each of us has a partner who once formed part
of our body. Tomas's other part is the young woman he dreamed about. The
trouble is, man does not find the other part of himself. Instead, he is sent a
Tereza in a bulrush basket. But what happens if he nevertheless later meets the
one who was meant for him, the other part of himself? Whom is he to prefer?
The woman from the bulrush basket or the woman from Plato's myth?

He tried to picture himself living
in an ideal world with the young woman from the dream. He sees Tereza walking
past the open windows of their ideal house. She is alone and stops to look in
at him with an infinitely sad expression in her eyes. He cannot withstand her
glance. Again, he feels her pain in his own heart. Again, he falls prey to
compassion and sinks deep into her soul. He leaps out of the window, but she
tells him bitterly to stay where he feels happy, making those abrupt, angular
movements that so annoyed and displeased him. He grabs her nervous hands and
presses them between his own to calm them. And he knows that time and again he
will abandon the house of his happiness, time and again abandon his paradise
and the woman from his dream and betray the
"Es muss sein!"
of
his love to go off with Tereza, the woman born of six laughable fortuities.

All this time he was sitting up in bed and looking at the woman who was
lying beside him and holding his hand in her sleep. He felt an ineffable love
for her. Her sleep must have been very light at the moment because she opened
her eyes and gazed up at him questioningly.

"What
are you looking at?" she asked.

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He knew that instead of waking her he should lull
her back to sleep, so he tried to come up with an answer that would plant the
image of a new dream in her mind.

"I'm
looking at the stars," he said.

"Don't say you're looking at
the stars. That's a lie. You're looking down."

"That's because we're in an
airplane. The stars are below us."

"Oh, in an airplane,"
said Tereza, squeezing his hand even tighter and falling asleep again. And
Tomas knew that Tereza was looking out of the round window of an airplane
flying high above the stars.

Not
until 1980 were we able to read in the
Sunday Times
how Stalin's son,
Yakov, died. Captured by the Germans during the Second World War, he was placed
in a camp together with a group of British officers. They shared a latrine. Stalin's
son habitually left a foul mess. The British officers resented having their
latrine smeared with shit, even if it was the shit of the son of the most
powerful man in the world. They brought the matter to his attention. He took
offense. They brought it to his attention again and again, and tried to make
him clean the latrine. He raged, argued, and fought. Finally, he demanded a
hearing with the camp commander. He wanted the commander to act as arbiter. But
the arrogant German refused to talk about shit. Stalin's son could not stand
the humiliation. Crying out to heaven in the most terrifying of Russian curses,
he took a running jump into the electrified barbed-wire fence that surrounded
the camp. He hit the target. His body, which would never again make a mess of
the Britishers' latrine, was pinned to the wire.

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Stalin's
son had a hard time of it. All evidence points to the conclusion that his
father killed the woman by whom he had the boy. Young Stalin was therefore both
the Son of God (because his father was revered like God) and His cast-off.
People feared him twofold: he could injure them by both his wrath (he was,
after all, Stalin's son) and his favor (his father might punish his cast-off
son's friends in order to punish him).

Rejection and privilege, happiness
and woe—no one felt more concretely than Yakov how interchangeable opposites
are, how short the step from one pole of human existence to the other.

Then, at the very outset of the
war, he fell prisoner to the Germans, and other prisoners, belonging to an
incomprehensible, standoffish nation that had always been intrinsically repulsive
to him, accused him of being dirty. Was he, who bore on his shoulders a drama
of the highest order (as fallen angel
and
Son of God), to undergo judgment
not for something sublime (in the realm of God and the angels) but for shit?
Were the very highest of drama and the very lowest so vertiginously close?

Vertiginously
close? Can proximity cause vertigo?

It can. When the north pole comes
so close as to touch the south pole, the earth disappears and man finds himself
in a void that makes his head spin and beckons him to fall.

If rejection and privilege are one
and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, if
the Son of God can undergo judgment for shit, then human existence loses its
dimensions and becomes unbearably light. When Stalin's son ran up to the
electrified wire and hurled his body at it, the fence was like the pan of a
scales sticking pitifully up in

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the
air, lifted by the infinite lightness of a world that has lost its dimensions.

Stalin's son laid down his life for
shit. But a death for shit is not a senseless death. The Germans who sacrificed
their lives to expand their country's territory to the east, the Russians who
died to extend their country's power to the west—yes, they died for something
idiotic, and their deaths have no meaning or general validity. Amid the general
idiocy of the war, the death of Stalin's son stands out as the sole
metaphysical death.

When
I was small and would leaf through the Old Testament retold for children and
illustrated in engravings by Gustave Dore, I saw the Lord God standing on a
cloud. He was an old man with eyes, nose, and a long beard, and I would say to
myself that if He had a mouth, He had to eat. And if He ate, He had intestines.
But that thought always gave me a fright, because even though I come from a
family that was not particularly religious, I felt the idea of a divine
intestine to be sacrilegious.

Spontaneously,
without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of
God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian
anthropology, namely, that man was created in God's image. Either/or: either
man was created in God's image—and God has intestines!—or God lacks intestines
and man is not like Him.

The ancient
Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the

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second century, the
great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that
Jesus "ate and drank, but did not defecate."

Shit is a more onerous theological
problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept
the idea that He is not responsible for man's crimes. The responsibility for
shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the Creator of man.

In the fourth
century, Saint Jerome completely rejected the notion that Adam and Eve had
sexual intercourse in Paradise. On the other hand, Johannes Scotus Erigena, the
great ninth-century theologian, accepted the idea. He believed, moreover, that
Adam's virile member could be made to rise like an arm or a leg, when and as
its owner wished. We must not dismiss this fancy as the recurrent dream of a
man obsessed with the threat of impotence. Erigena's idea has a different
meaning. If it were possible to raise the penis by means of a simple command,
then sexual excitement would have no place in the world. The penis would rise
not because we are excited but because we order it to do so. What the great
theologian found incompatible with Paradise was not sexual intercourse and the
attendant pleasure;

what
he found incompatible with Paradise was excitement. Bear in mind: There was
pleasure in Paradise, but no excitement.

Erigena's
argument holds the key to a theological justifica-