The unbearable lightness of being (4 page)

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"How could I have come without it?" cried Tomas, looking at
his watch. "I wasn't wearing only one sock when I came,

Tl›?

was I?

"It's not
out of the question. You've been very absent-minded lately. Always rushing
somewhere, looking at your watch. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if you
forgot to put on a sock."

He was just about
to put his shoe on his bare foot. "It's cold out," Sabina said.
"I'll lend you one of my stockings."

She handed him a
long, white, fashionable, wide-net stocking.

He knew very well
she was getting back at him for glancing at his watch while making love to her.
She had hidden his sock somewhere. It was indeed cold out, and he had no choice
but to take her up on the offer. He went home wearing a sock on one foot and a
wide-net stocking rolled down over his ankle on the other.

He was in a bind:
in his mistresses' eyes, he bore the stigma of his love for Tereza; in Tereza's
eyes, the stigma of his exploits with the mistresses.

To
assuage Tereza's sufferings, he married her (they could finally give up the
room, which she had not lived in for quite some time) and gave her a puppy.

It was born to a
Saint Bernard owned by a colleague. The sire was a neighbor's German shepherd.
No one wanted the

24

little mongrels, and his colleague was loath to kill them.

Looking over the puppies, Tomas
knew that the ones he rejected would have to die. He felt like the president of
the republic standing before four prisoners condemned to death and empowered to
pardon only one of them. At last he made his choice: a bitch whose body seemed
reminiscent of the German shepherd and whose head belonged to its Saint
Bernard mother. He took it home to Tereza, who picked it up and pressed it to
her breast. The puppy immediately peed on her blouse.

Then they tried to come up with a
name for it. Tomas wanted the name to be a clear indication that the dog was
Tereza's, and he thought of the book she was clutching under her arm when she
arrived unannounced in Prague. He suggested they call the puppy Tolstoy.

"It can't be Tolstoy,"
Tereza said. "It's a girl. How about Anna Karenina?"

"It can't be Anna
Karenina," said Tomas. "No woman could possibly have so funny a face.
It's much more like Karenin. Yes, Anna's husband. That's just how I've always
pictured him."

"But won't
calling her Karenin affect her sexuality?"

"It is entirely
possible," said Tomas, "that a female dog addressed continually by a
male name will develop lesbian tendencies."

Strangely enough, Tomas's words
came true. Though bitches are usually more affectionate to their masters than
to their mistresses, Karenin proved an exception, deciding that he was in love
with Tereza. Tomas was grateful to him for it. He would stroke the puppy's head
and say, "Well done, Karenin! That's just what I wanted you for. Since I
can't cope with her by myself, you must help me."

But even with Karenin's help Tomas
failed to make her happy. He became aware of his failure some years later, on

25

approximately
the tenth day after his country was occupied by Russian tanks. It was August
1968, and Tomas was receiving daily phone calls from a hospital in Zurich. The
director there, a physician who had struck up a friendship with Tomas at an
international conference, was worried about him and kept offering him a job.

If Tomas rejected
the Swiss doctor's offer without a second thought, it was for Tereza's sake. He
assumed she would not want to leave. She had spent the whole first week of the
occupation in a kind of trance almost resembling happiness. After roaming the
streets with her camera, she would hand the rolls of film to foreign
journalists, who actually fought over them. Once, when she went too far and
took a close-up of an officer pointing his revolver at a group of people, she
was arrested and kept overnight at Russian military headquarters. There they
threatened to shoot her, but no sooner did they let her go than she was back in
the streets with her camera.

That is why Tomas was surprised when on the tenth day of the occupation
she said to him, "Why is it you don't want to go to Switzerland?"
             
'

"Why
should I?"

"They
could make it hard for you here."

"They can make it hard for anybody," replied Tomas with a wave
of the hand. "What about you? Could you live abroad?"

"Why
not?"

26

"You've been out there risking
your life for this country. How can you be so nonchalant about leaving
it?"

"Now that Dubcek is back,
things have changed," said Tereza.

It was true: the general euphoria
lasted no longer than the first week. The representatives of the country had
been hauled away like criminals by the Russian army, no one knew where they
were, everyone feared for the men's lives, and hatred for the Russians drugged
people like alcohol. It was a drunken carnival of hate. Czech towns were
decorated with thousands of hand-painted posters bearing ironic texts,
epigrams, poems, and cartoons of Brezhnev and his soldiers, jeered at by one
and all as a circus of illiterates. But no carnival can go on forever. In the
meantime, the Russians had forced the Czech representatives to sign a
compromise agreement in Moscow. When Dubcek returned with them to Prague, he
gave a speech over the radio. He was so devastated after his six-day detention
he could hardly talk; he kept stuttering and gasping for breath, making long
pauses between sentences, pauses lasting nearly thirty seconds.

The compromise saved the country
from the worst: the executions and mass deportations to Siberia that had
terrified everyone. But one thing was clear: the country would have to bow to
the conqueror. For ever and ever, it will stutter, stammer, gasp for air like
Alexander Dubcek. The carnival was over. Workaday humiliation had begun.

Tereza had explained all this to
Tomas and he knew that it was true. But he also knew that underneath it all hid
still another, more fundamental truth, the reason why she wanted to leave
Prague: she had never really been happy before.

The days she walked through the
streets of Prague taking pictures of Russian soldiers and looking danger in the
face were the best of her life. They were the only time when the televi-

27

sion series of her
dreams had been interrupted and she had enjoyed a few happy nights. The Russians
had brought equilibrium to her in their tanks, and now that the carnival was
over, she feared her nights again and wanted to escape them. She now knew there
were conditions under which she could feel strong and fulfilled, and she longed
to go off into the world and seek those conditions somewhere else.

"It doesn't bother you that Sabina has also emigrated to
Switzerland?" Tomas asked.

"Geneva isn't Zurich," said Tereza. "She'll be much less
of a difficulty there than she was in Prague."

A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy
person. That is why Tomas accepted Tereza's wish to emigrate as the culprit
accepts his sentence, and one day he and Tereza and Karenin found themselves in
the largest city in Switzerland.

He
bought a bed for their empty flat (they had no money yet for other furniture)
and threw himself into his work with the frenzy of a man of forty beginning a
new life.

He made several
telephone calls to Geneva. A show of Sabina's work had opened there by chance a
week after the Russian invasion, and in a wave of sympathy for her tiny country,
Geneva's patrons of the arts bought up all her paintings.

"Thanks to
the Russians, I'm a rich woman," she said, laughing into the telephone.
She invited Tomas to come and

28

see
her new studio, and assured him it did not differ greatly from the one he had
known in Prague.

He would have
been only too glad to visit her, but was unable to find an excuse to explain
his absence to Tereza. And so Sabina came to Zurich. She stayed at a hotel.
Tomas went to see her after work. He phoned first from the reception desk, then
went upstairs. When she opened the door, she stood before him on her beautiful
long legs wearing nothing but panties and bra. And a black bowler hat. She
stood there staring, mute and motionless. Tomas did the same. Suddenly he
realized how touched he was. He removed the bowler from her head and placed it
on the bedside table. Then they made love without saying a word.

Leaving the
hotel for his Hat (which by now had acquired table, chairs, couch, and carpet),
he thought happily that he carried his way of living with him as a snail
carries his house. Tereza and Sabina represented the two poles of his life,
separate and irreconcilable, yet equally appealing.

But the fact
that he carried his life-support system with him everywhere like a part of his
body meant that Tereza went on having her dreams.

They had been in
Zurich for six or seven months when he came home late one evening to find a
letter on the table telling him she had left for Prague. She had left because
she lacked the strength to live abroad. She knew she was supposed to bolster
him up, but did not know how to go about it. She had been silly enough to think
that going abroad would change her. She thought that after what she had been
through during the invasion she would stop being petty and grow up, grow wise
and strong, but she had overestimated herself. She was weighing him down and
would do so no longer. She had drawn the necessary conclusions before it was
too late. And she apologized for taking Karenin with her.

29

He
took some sleeping pills but still did not close his eyes until morning.
Luckily it was Saturday and he could stay at home. For the hundred and fiftieth
time he went over the situation: the borders between his country and the rest
of the world were no longer open. No telegrams or telephone calls could bring
her back. The authorities would never let her travel abroad. Her departure was
staggeringly definitive.

The
realization that he was utterly powerless was like the blow of a sledgehammer,
yet it was curiously calming as well. No one was forcing him into a decision.
He felt no need to stare at the walls of the houses across the courtyard and
ponder whether to live with her or not. Tereza had made the decision herself.

He went to a
restaurant for lunch. He was depressed, but as he ate, his original desperation
waned, lost its strength, and soon all that was left was melancholy. Looking
back on the years he had spent with her, he came to feel that their story could
have had no better ending. If someone had invented the story, this is how he
would have had to end it.

One day Tereza
came to him uninvited. One day she left the same way. She came with a heavy
suitcase. She left with a heavy suitcase.

He paid the
bill, left the restaurant, and started walking through the streets, his
melancholy growing more and more beautiful. He had spent seven years of life
with Tereza, and now he realized that those years were more attractive in
retro-

30

spect than they were when he was living
them.

His love for
Tereza was beautiful, but it was also tiring: he had constantly had to hide
things from her, sham, dissemble, make amends, buck her up, calm her down, give
her evidence of his feelings, play the defendant to her jealousy, her
suffering, and her dreams, feel guilty, make excuses and apologies. Now what
was tiring had disappeared and only the beauty remained.

Saturday found
him for the first time strolling alone through Zurich, breathing in the heady smell
of his freedom. New adventures hid around each corner. The future was again a
secret. He was on his way back to the bachelor life, the life he had once felt
destined for, the life that would let him be what he actually was.

For seven years
he had lived bound to her, his every step subject to her scrutiny. She might as
well have chained iron balls to his ankles. Suddenly his step was much lighter.
He soared. He had entered Parmenides' magic field: he was enjoying the sweet
lightness of being.

(Did he feel
like phoning Sabina in Geneva? Contacting one or another of the women he had
met during his several months in Zurich? No, not in the least. Perhaps he
sensed that any woman would make his memory of Tereza unbearably painful.)

This
curious melancholic fascination lasted until Sunday evening. .On Monday,
everything changed. Tereza forced her way into his thoughts: he imagined her
sitting there writing her

31

farewell
letter; he felt her hands trembling; he saw her lugging her heavy suitcase in
one hand and leading Karenin on his leash with the other; he pictured her
unlocking their Prague flat, and suffered the utter abandonment breathing her
in the face as she opened the door.

During those two
beautiful days of melancholy, his compassion (that curse of emotional
telepathy) had taken a holiday. It had slept the sound Sunday sleep of a miner
who, after a hard week's work, needs to gather strength for his Monday shift.

   
Instead of the patients he was treating,
Tomas saw Tereza.

He tried to remind
himself. Don't think about her! Don't think about her! He said to himself, I'm
sick with compassion. It's good that she's gone and that I'll never see her
again, though it's not Tereza I need to be free of—it's that sickness,
compassion, which I thought I was immune to until she infected me with it.

On Saturday and
Sunday, he felt the sweet lightness of being rise up to him out of the depths
of the future. On Monday, he was hit by a weight the likes of which he had
never known. The tons of steel of the Russian tanks were nothing compared with
it. For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain
weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain
intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

He kept warning
himself not to give in to compassion, and compassion listened with bowed head
and a seemingly guilty conscience. Compassion knew it was being presumptuous,
yet it quietly stood its ground, and on the fifth day after her departure
Tomas informed the director of his hospital (the man who had phoned him daily
in Prague after the Russian invasion) that he had to return at once. He was
ashamed. He knew that the move would appear irresponsible, inexcusable to the
man. He thought to unbosom himself and tell him the story of Tereza and the
letter she had left on the table for him. But in the end