The unbearable lightness of being (3 page)

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now."
"Where?" she asked in her sleep. "Away," he answered
sternly. "Then I'm going with you," she said, sitting up in bed.
"No, you can't. I'm going away for good," he said, going out into the
hall. She stood up and followed him out, squinting. She was naked beneath her
short nightdress. Her face was blank, expressionless, but she moved
energetically. He walked through the hall of the flat into the hall of the
building (the hall shared by all the occupants), closing the door in her face.
She flung it open and continued to follow him, convinced in her sleep that he
meant to leave her for good and she had to stop him. He walked down the stairs
to the first landing and waited for her there. She went down after him, took
him by the hand, and led him back to bed.

Tomas came to
this conclusion: Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two
separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself
felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number
of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).

In the middle of
the night she started moaning in her sleep. Tomas woke her up, but when she saw
his face she said, with hatred in her voice, "Get away from me! Get away
from me!" Then she told him her dream: The two of them and Sabina had been
in a big room together. There was a bed in the middle of the room. It was like
a platform in the theater. Tomas ordered

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her
to stand in the corner while he made love to Sabina. The sight of it caused
Tereza intolerable suffering. Hoping to alleviate the pain in her heart by
pains of the flesh, she jabbed needles under her fingernails. "It hurt so
much," she said, squeezing her hands into fists as if they actually were
wounded.

He pressed her to him, and she
gradually (trembling violently for a long time) fell asleep in his arms.

Thinking about the dream the next
day, he remembered something. He opened a desk drawer and took out a packet of
letters Sabina had written to him. He was not long in finding the following
passage: "I want to make love to you in my studio. It will be like a stage
surrounded by people. The audience won't be allowed up close, but they won't
be able to take their eyes off us...."

The worst of it was that the letter
was dated. It was quite recent, written long after Tereza had moved in with
Tomas.

"So you've
been rummaging in my letters!"

She did not deny
it. "Throw me out, then!"

But he did not throw her out. He
could picture her pressed against the wall of Sabina's studio jabbing needles
up under her nails. He took her fingers between his hands and stroked them,
brought them to his lips and kissed them, as if they still had drops of blood
on them.

But from that time on, everything
seemed to conspire against him. Not a day went by without her learning
something about his secret life.

At first he denied it all. Then,
when the evidence became too blatant, he argued that his polygamous way of life
did not in the least run counter to his love for her. He was inconsistent:
first he disavowed his infidelities, then he tried to justify them.

Once he was saying good-bye after
making a date with a woman on the phone, when from the next room came a strange
sound like the chattering of teeth.

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By chance she had
come home without his realizing it. She was pouring something from a medicine
bottle down her throat, and her hand shook so badly the glass bottle clicked
against her teeth.

He pounced on her as if trying to
save her from drowning. The bottle fell to the floor, spotting the carpet with
valerian drops. She put up a good fight, and he had to keep her in a
straitjacket-like hold for a quarter of an hour before he could calm her.

He knew he was in an unjustifiable
situation, based as it was on complete inequality.

One evening, before she discovered
his correspondence with Sabina, they had gone to a bar with some friends to
celebrate Tereza's new job. She had been promoted at the weekly from darkroom
technician to staff photographer. Because he had never been much for dancing,
one of his younger colleagues took over. They made a splendid couple on the
dance floor, and Tomas found her more beautiful than ever. He looked on in
amazement at the split-second precision and deference with which Tereza
anticipated her partner's will. The dance seemed to him a declaration that her
devotion, her ardent desire to satisfy his every whim, was not necessarily
bound to his person, that if she hadn't met Tomas, she would have been ready to
respond to the call of any other man she might have met instead. He had no
difficulty imagining Tereza and his young colleague as lovers. And the ease
with which he arrived at this fiction wounded him. He realized that Tereza's
body was perfectly thinkable coupled with any male body, and the thought put
him in a foul mood. Not until late that night, at home, did he admit to her he
was jealous.

This absurd jealousy, grounded as
it was in mere hypotheses, proved that he considered her fidelity an
unconditional postulate of their relationship. How then could he begrudge her
her jealousy of his very real mistresses?

During
the day, she tried (though with only partial success) to believe what Tomas
told her and to be as cheerful as she had been before. But her jealousy thus
tamed by day burst forth all the more savagely in her dreams, each of which
ended in a wail he could silence only by waking her.

Her dreams
recurred like themes and variations or television series. For example, she
repeatedly dreamed of cats jumping at her face and digging their claws into
her skin. We need not look far for an interpretation: in Czech slang the word
"cat" means a pretty woman. Tereza saw herself threatened by women,
all women. All women were potential mistresses for Tomas, and she feared them
all.

In another cycle
she was being sent to her death. Once, when he woke her as she screamed in
terror in the dead of night, she told him about it. "I was at a large
indoor swimming pool. There were about twenty of us. All women. We were naked
and had to march around the pool. There was a basket hanging from the ceiling
and a man standing in the basket. The man wore a broad-brimmed hat shading his
face, but I could see it was you. You kept giving us orders. Shouting at us. We
had to sing as we marched, sing and do kneebends. If one of us did a bad
kneebend, you would shoot her with a pistol and she would fall dead into the
pool. Which made everybody laugh and sing even louder. You never took your eyes
off us, and the minute we did something wrong, you would shoot. The pool was
full of corpses floating just below the surface. And I knew I lacked the
strength to do the next kneebend and you were going to shoot me!"

In
a third cycle she was dead.

bying
in a hearse as big as a furniture van, she was sur-

18

19

rounded
by dead women. There were so many of them that the back door would not close
and several legs dangled out.

"But
I'm not dead!" Tereza cried. "I can still feel!"

"So
can we," the corpses laughed.

They laughed the same laugh as the live women who used to tell her
cheerfully it was perfectly normal that one day she would have bad teeth,
faulty ovaries, and wrinkles, because they all had bad teeth, faulty ovaries,
and wrinkles. Laughing the same laugh, they told her that she was dead and it
was perfectly all right!

Suddenly she felt a need to urinate. "You see," she cried.
"I need to pee. That's proof positive I'm not dead!"

But they only laughed again. "Needing to pee is perfectly
normal!" they said. "You'll go on feeling that kind of thing for a
long time yet. Like a person who has an arm cut off and keeps feeling it's
there. We may not have a drop of pee left in us, but we keep needing to pee."

Tereza huddled against Tomas in bed. "And the way they talked to me!
Like old friends, people who'd known me forever. I was appalled at the thought
of having to stay with them forever."

All
languages that derive from Latin form the word "compassion" by
combining the prefix meaning "with"
(corn-)
and the root
meaning "suffering" (Late Latin,
passio).
In other languages—Czech,
Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance— this word is translated by a noun
formed of an equivalent prefix

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combined with the word that means "feeling"
(Czech,
sou-cit;
Polish,
wspol-czucie;
German,
Mit-gefuhl;
Swedish,
med-kansia).

In languages that derive from Latin,
"compassion" means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we
sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same
meaning, "pity" (French,
pitie;
Italian,
pieta;
etc.),
connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. "To take pity on a
woman" means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level,
lower ourselves.

That is why the word "compassion" generally
inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate
sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion
means not really to love.

In languages that form the word "compassion"
not from the root "suffering" but from the root "feeling,"
the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it
designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult. The secret strength of its
etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to
have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other's
misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion—joy, anxiety, happiness, pain.
This kind of compassion (in the sense of souc/r,
wspofczucie, Mitgefuhl,
medkansia)
therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective
imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments,
then, it is supreme.

By revealing to Tomas her dream about jabbing needles
under her fingernails, Tereza unwittingly revealed that she had gone through
his desk. If Tereza had been any other woman, Tomas would never have spoken to
her again. Aware of that, Tereza said to him, "Throw me out!" But
instead of throwing her out, he seized her hand and kissed the tips of her
fingers, because at that moment he himself felt the pain under her

21

fingernails
as surely as if the nerves of her fingers led straight to his own brain.

Anyone who has
failed to benefit from the Devil's gift of compassion (co-feeling) will condemn
Tereza coldly for her deed, because privacy is sacred and drawers containing
intimate correspondence are not to be opened. But because compassion was
Tomas's fate (or curse), he felt that he himself had knelt before the open desk
drawer, unable to tear his eyes from Sabina's letter. He understood Tereza, and
not only was he incapable of being angry with her, he loved her all the more.

Her
gestures grew abrupt and unsteady. Two years had elapsed since she discovered
he was unfaithful, and things had grown worse. There was no way out.

Was he genuinely incapable of abandoning his erotic friendships? He was.
It would have torn him apart. He lacked the strength to control his taste for
other women. Besides, he failed to see the need. No one knew better than he how
little his exploits threatened Tereza. Why then give them up? He saw no more
reason for that than to deny himself soccer matches.

But was it still a matter of pleasure? Even as he set out to visit
another woman, he found her distasteful and promised himself he would not see
her again. He constantly had Tereza's image before his eyes, and the only way
he could erase it was by quickly getting drunk. Ever since meeting Tereza, he
had been unable to make love to other women without alcohol! But

22

alcohol on his breath was a sure sign to Tereza of
infidelity.

He was
caught in a trap: even on his way to see them, he found them distasteful, but
one day without them and he was back on the phone, eager to make contact.

He still
felt most comfortable with Sabina. He knew she was discreet and would not
divulge their rendezvous. Her studio greeted him like a memento of his past,
his idyllic bachelor past.

Perhaps
he himself did not realize how much he had changed: he was now afraid to come
home late, because Tereza would be waiting up for him. Then one day Sabina
caught him glancing at his watch during intercourse and trying to hasten its
conclusion.

Afterwards,
still naked and lazily walking across the studio, she stopped before an easel
with a half-finished painting and watched him sidelong as he threw on his
clothes.

When he
was fully dressed except for one bare foot, he looked around the room, and then
got down on all fours to continue the search under a table.

"You
seem to be turning into the theme of all my paintings," she said.
"The meeting of two worlds. A double exposure. Showing through the
outline of Tomas the libertine, incredibly, the face of a romantic lover. Or,
the other way, through a Tristan, always thinking of his Tereza, I see the
beautiful, betrayed world of the libertine."

Tomas
straightened up and, distractedly, listened to Sabina's words.

"What are you looking for?" she asked.

"A sock."

She
searched all over the room with him, and again he got down on all fours to look
under the table.

"Your
sock isn't anywhere to be seen," said Sabina. "You must have come
without it."