The unbearable lightness of being (31 page)

274

ized
how happy he was with his student-mistress. All at once, the Cambodia venture
struck him as meaningless, laughable. Why had he come? Only now did he know. He
had come to find out once and for all that neither parades nor Sabina but
rather the girl with the glasses was his real life, his only real life! He had
come to find out that reality was more than a dream, much more than a dream!

Suddenly a figure emerged out of
the semi-darkness and said something to him in a language he did not know. He
gave the intruder a look that was startled but sympathetic. The man bowed and
smiled and muttered something with great urgency. What was he trying to say? He
seemed to be inviting him somewhere. The man took him by the hand and started
leading him away. Franz decided that someone needed his help. Maybe there
was
some sense in his coming all that distance. Wasn't he being called to help
somebody?

Suddenly there were two other men
next to the first, and one of them asked him in English for his money.

At that point, the girl with the
glasses vanished from his thoughts and Sabina fixed her eyes on him, unreal
Sabina with her grand fate, Sabina who had made him feel so small. Her wrathful
eyes bored into him, angry and dissatisfied: Had he been had once again? Had
someone else abused his idiotic goodness?

He tore his arm away from the man,
who was now holding on to his sleeve. He remembered that Sabina had always admired
his strength. He seized the arm one of the other men was lifting against him,
and, tightening his grip, tossed him over his shoulder in a perfect judo flip.

Now he was satisfied with himself.
Sabina's eyes were still on him. She would never see him humiliate himself
again! She would never see him retreat! Franz was through with being soft and
sentimental!

275

He felt what was
almost a cheerful hatred for these men. They had thought to have a good laugh
at him and his naivete! He stood there with his shoulders slightly hunched and
his eyes darting back and forth between the two remaining men. Suddenly, he
felt a heavy blow on his head, and he crumpled immediately. He vaguely sensed
being carried somewhere. Then he was thrown into emptiness and felt himself
falling. A violent crack, and he lost consciousness.

He woke up in a hospital in Geneva.
Marie-Claude was leaning over his bed. He wanted to tell her she had no right
to be there. He wanted them to send immediately for the girl with the glasses.
All his thoughts were with her. He wanted to shout that he couldn't stand
having anyone but her at his side. But he realized with horror that he could
not speak. He looked up at Marie-Claude with infinite hatred and tried to turn
away from her. But he could not move his body. His head, perhaps? No, he could
not even move his head. He closed his eyes so as not to see her.

In
death, Franz at last belonged to his wife. He belonged to her as he had never
belonged to her before. Marie-Claude took care of everything: she saw to the
funeral, sent out the announcements, bought the wreaths, and had a black dress
made—a wedding dress, in reality. Yes, a husband's funeral is a wife's true
wedding! The climax of her life's work! The reward for her sufferings!

276

The pastor
understood this very well. His funeral oration was about a true conjugal love
that had withstood many tests to remain a haven of peace for the deceased, a
haven to which he had returned at the end of his days. The colleague of Franz's
whom Marie-Claude asked to speak at the graveside services also paid homage
primarily to the deceased's brave wife.

Somewhere in the back, supported by
a friend, stood the girl with the big glasses. The combination of many pills
and suppressed sobs gave her an attack of cramps before the ceremony came to
an end. She lurched forward, clutching her stomach, and her friend had to take
her away from the cemetery.

The
moment he received the telegram from the chairman of the collective farm, he
jumped on his motorcycle. He arrived in time to arrange for the funeral. The
inscription he chose to go under his father's name on the gravestone read:
he wanted the

KINGDOM OF
GOD ON EARTH.

He was well aware that his father
would not have said it in those words, but he was certain they expressed what
his father actually thought. The kingdom of God means justice. Tomas had longed
for a world in which justice would reign. Hadn't Simon the right to express his
father's life in his own vocabulary? Of course he had: haven't all heirs had
that right from time immemorial?

a return after long wanderings
was the
inscription adorn-

277

ing
the stone above Franz's grave. It can be interpreted in religious terms: the
wanderings being our earthly existence, the return our return to God's embrace.
But the insiders knew that it had a perfectly secular meaning as well. Indeed,
Marie-Claude talked about it every day:

Franz, dear,
sweet Franz! The mid-life crisis was just too much for him. And that pitiful
little girl who caught him in her net! Why, she wasn't even pretty! (Did you
see those enormous glasses she tried to hide behind?) But when they start
pushing fifty (don't we know it!), they'll sell their souls for a fresh piece
of flesh. Only his wife knows how it made him suffer! It was pure moral
torture! Because, deep down, Franz was a kind and decent man. How else can you
explain that crazy, desperate trip to wherever it was in Asia? He went there to
find death. Yes, Marie-Claude knew it for an absolute fact:

Franz had
consciously sought out death. In his last days, when he was dying and had no
need to lie, she was the only person he asked for. He couldn't talk, but how
he'd thanked her with his eyes! He'd fixed his eyes on her and begged to be
forgiven. And she forgave him.

What remains of the dying population of
Cambodia?

One large photograph of an American
actress holding an Asian child in her arms.

What remains of
Tomas?

An inscription reading
he wanted the kingdom of god on earth.

278

What remains of
Beethoven?

A frown, an improbable mane, and a
somber voice intoning
"Es muss sein!"

What remains of
Franz?

An inscription
reading
a return after long wanderings.

And so on and so forth. Before we
are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between
being and oblivion.

The
window looked out on a slope overgrown with the crooked bodies of apple trees.
The woods cut off the view above the slope, and a crooked line of hills
stretched into the distance. When, towards evening, a white moon made its way
into the pale sky, Tereza would go and stand on the threshold. The sphere
hanging in the not yet darkened sky seemed like a lamp they had forgotten to
turn off in the morning, a lamp that had burned all day in the room of the
dead.

None of the crooked apple trees
growing along the slope could ever leave the spot where it had put down its
roots, just as neither Tereza nor Tomas could ever leave their village. They
had sold their car, their television set, and their radio to buy a tiny cottage
and garden from a farmer who was moving to town.

Life in the country was the only
escape open to them, because only in the country was there a constant deficit
of people and a surplus of living accommodations. No one both-

281

282

ered to look into
the political past of people willing to go off and work in the fields or woods;
no one envied them.

Tereza was happy to abandon the
city, the drunken barflies molesting her, and the anonymous women leaving the
smell of their groins in Tomas's hair. The police stopped pestering them, and
the incident with the engineer so merged with the scene on Petrin Hill that she
was hard put to tell which was a dream and which the truth. (Was the engineer
in fact employed by the secret police? Perhaps he was, perhaps not. Men who
use borrowed flats for rendezvous and never make love to the same woman twice
are not so rare.)

In any case, Tereza was happy and
felt that she had at last reached her goal: she and Tomas were together and
alone. Alone? Let me be more precise: living "alone" meant breaking
with all their former friends and acquaintances, cutting their life in two like
a ribbon; however, they felt perfectly at home in the company of the country
people they worked with, and they sometimes exchanged visits with them.

The day they met the chairman of
the local collective farm at the spa that had Russian street names, Tereza
discovered in herself a picture of country life originating in memories of
books she had read or in her ancestors. It was a harmonious world; everyone
came together in one big happy family with common interests and routines:
church services on Sundays, a tavern where the men could get away from their
womenfolk, and a hall in the tavern where a band played on Saturdays and the
villagers danced.

Under Communism, however, village
life no longer fit the age-old pattern. The church was in the neighboring
village, and no one went there; the tavern had been turned into offices, so the
men had nowhere to meet and drink beer, the young people nowhere to dance.
Celebrating church holidays was forbidden, and no one cared about their
secular replacements. The

283

nearest cinema was
in a town fifteen miles away. So, at the end of a day's work filled with
boisterous shouting and relaxed chatter, they would all shut themselves up
within their four walls and, surrounded by contemporary furniture emanating bad
taste like a cold draft, stare at the refulgent television screen. They never
paid one another visits besides dropping in on a neighbor for a word or two
before supper. They all dreamed of moving into town. The country offered them
nothing in the way of even a minimally interesting life.

Perhaps it was the fact that no one
wished to settle there that caused the state to lose its power over the
countryside. A farmer who no longer owns his own land and is merely a laborer
tilling the soil forms no allegiance to either region or work; he has nothing
to lose, nothing to fear for. As a result of such apathy, the countryside had
maintained more than a modicum of autonomy and freedom. The chairman of the
collective farm was not brought in from outside (as were all high-level managers
in the city); he was elected by the villagers from among themselves.

Because everyone
wanted to leave, Tereza and Tomas were in an exceptional position: they had
come voluntarily. If the other villagers took advantage of every opportunity to
make day trips to the surrounding towns, Tereza and Tomas were content to
remain where they were, which meant that before long they knew the villagers
better than the villagers knew one another.

The collective
farm chairman became a truly close friend. He had a wife, four children, and a
pig he raised like a dog. The pig's name was Mefisto, and he was the pride and
main attraction of the village. He would answer his master's call and was
always clean and pink; he paraded about on his hoofs like a heavy-thighed woman
in high heels.

When
Karenin first saw Mefisto, he was very upset and

284

circled
him, sniffing, for a long time. But he soon made friends with him, even to the
point of preferring him to the village dogs. Indeed, he had nothing but scorn
for the dogs, because they were all chained to their doghouses and never
stopped their silly, unmotivated barking. Karenin correctly assessed the value
of being one of a kind, and I can state without compunction that he greatly
appreciated his friendship with the pig.

The chairman was glad to be able to
help his former surgeon, though at the same time sad that he could do nothing
more. Tomas became the driver of the pickup truck that took the farm workers
out to the fields and hauled equipment.

The collective farm had four large
cow sheds as well as a small stable of forty heifers. Tereza was charged with
looking after them and taking them out to pasture twice a day. Because the
closer, easily accessible meadows would eventually be mowed, she had to take
her herd into the surrounding hills for grazing, gradually moving farther and
farther out and, in the course of the year, covering all the pastureland round
about. As in her small-town youth, she was never without a book, and the minute
she reached the day's pasture she would open it and read.

Karenin always kept her company. He
learned to bark at the young cows when they got too frisky and tried to go off
on their own; he did so with obvious zest. He was definitely the happiest of
the three. Never before had his position as keeper of the clock been so respected.
The country was no place for improvisation; the time in which Tereza and Tomas
lived was growing closer to the regularity of his time.

One day, after lunch (a time when
they both had an hour to themselves), they took a walk with Karenin up the slope
behind their cottage.

"I don't
like the way he's running," said Tereza.

Karenin was
limping on a hind leg. Tomas bent down and

285

carefully
felt all along it. Near the hock he found a small bump.

The next day he sat him in the
front seat of the pickup and drove, during his rounds, to the neighboring
village, where the local veterinarian lived. A week later, he paid him another
visit. He came home with the news that Karenin had cancer.

Within three days, Tomas himself,
with the vet in attendance, had operated on him. When Tomas brought him home,
Karenin had not quite come out of the anesthesia. He lay on the rug next to
their bed with his eyes open, whimpering, his thigh shaved bare and the
incision and six stitches painfully visible.

At last he tried to stand up. He
failed.

Tereza was
terrified that he would never walk again.

"Don't worry," said
Tomas. "He's still under the anesthetic."

She tried to pick him up, but he
snapped at her. It was the first time he'd ever tried to bite Tereza!

"He doesn't know who you
are," said Tomas. "He doesn't recognize you."

They lifted him onto their bed,
where he quickly fell asleep, as did they.

At three o'clock that morning, he
suddenly woke them up, wagging his tail and climbing all over them, cuddling up
to them, unable to have his fill.

It was the first time he'd ever got
them up, too! He had always waited until one of them woke up before he dared
jump on them.

But when he suddenly came to in the
middle of the night, he could not control himself. Who can tell what distances
he covered on his way back? Who knows what phantoms he battled? And now that
he was at home with his dear ones, he felt compelled to share his overwhelming
joy, a joy of return and rebirth.