The unbearable lightness of being (5 page)

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he
did not. From the Swiss doctor's point of view Tereza's move could only appear
hysterical and abhorrent. And Tomas refused to allow anyone an opportunity to
think ill of her. The director of the hospital was in fact offended. Tomas
shrugged his shoulders and said,
"Es muss sein. Es muss sein."

It
was an allusion. The last movement of Beethoven's last quartet is based on the
following two motifs:

To make the meaning of the words absolutely clear, Beethoven introduced
the movement with a phrase,
"Der schwer gefasste Entschluss,"
which is commonly translated as "the difficult resolution."

This allusion to Beethoven was actually Tomas's first step back to Tereza,
because she was the one who had induced him to buy records of the Beethoven
quartets and sonatas.

The allusion was even more pertinent than he had thought because the
Swiss doctor was a great music lover. Smiling serenely, he asked, in the
melody of Beethoven's motif,
"Muss es sein?"

"]a,
es muss sein!"
Tomas said again.

Unlike
Parmenides, Beethoven apparently viewed weight as something positive. Since the
German word
schwer
means both "difficult" and
"heavy," Beethoven's "difficult resolution" may also be
construed as a "heavy" or "weighty resolution." The
weighty resolution is at one with the voice of Fate (
"Es muss
sein!");
necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably
bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.

This is a conviction born of Beethoven's music, and although we cannot
ignore the possibility (or even probability) that it owes its origins more to
Beethoven's commentators than to Beethoven himself, we all more or less share,
it: we believe that the greatness of man stems from the fact that he
bears
his fate as Atlas bore the heavens on his shoulders. Beethoven's hero is a
lifter of metaphysical weights.

Tomas approached the Swiss border. I imagine a gloomy, shock-headed
Beethoven, in person, conducting the local firemen's brass band in a farewell
to emigration, an
"Es Muss Sein "
march.

Then Tomas crossed the Czech border
and was welcomed by columns of Russian tanks. He had to stop his car and wait a
half hour before they passed. A terrifying soldier in the black Uniform of the
armored forces stood at the crossroads directing traffic as if every road in
the country belonged to him and him alone.

"Es muss sein!"
Tomas repeated to himself, but then he began to doubt. Did it really have to
be?

Yes, it was unbearable for him to
stay in Zurich imagining Tereza living on her own in Prague.

But how long would he have been
tortured by compassion? All his life? A year? Or a month? Or only a week?

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How
could he have known? How could he have gauged it? Any schoolboy can do
experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypotheses.
But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to
test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.

It was with
these thoughts in mind that he opened the door to his flat. Karenin made the
homecoming easier by jumping up on him and licking his face. The desire to fall
into Tereza's arms (he could still feel it while getting into his car in
Zurich) had completely disintegrated. He fancied himself standing opposite her
in the midst of a snowy plain, the two of them shivering from the cold.

From
the very beginning of the occupation, Russian military airplanes had flown over
Prague all night long. Tomas, no longer accustomed to the noise, was unable to
fall asleep.

Twisting and
turning beside the slumbering Tereza, he recalled something she had told him a
long time before in the course of an insignificant conversation. They had been
talking about his friend Z. when she announced, "If I hadn't met you, I'd
certainly have fallen in love with him."

Even then, her
words had left Tomas in a strange state of melancholy, and now he realized it
was only a matter of chance that Tereza loved him and not his friend Z. Apart
from her consummated love for Tomas, there were, in the realm of possibility,
an infinite number of unconsummated loves for other men.

                                          
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We all reject out
of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or
weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would
no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring,
is playing the
"Es muss sein!"
to our own great love.

Tomas often thought of Tereza's
remark about his friend Z. and came to the conclusion that the love story of
his life exemplified not
"Es muss sein! "
(It must be so), but
rather
"Es konnte auch anders sein"
(It could just as well be
otherwise).

Seven years earlier, a complex
neurological case
happened
to have been discovered at the hospital in
Tereza's town. They called in the chief surgeon of Tomas's hospital in Prague
for consultation, but the chief surgeon of Tomas's hospital
happened
to
be suffering from sciatica, and because he could not move he sent Tomas to the
provincial hospital in his place. The town had several hotels, but Tomas
happened
to be given a room in the one where Tereza was employed. He
happened
to
have had enough free time before his train left to stop at the hotel restaurant.
Tereza
happened to
be on duty, and
happened
to be serving Tomas's
table. It had taken six chance happenings to push Tomas towards Tereza, as if
he had little inclination to go to her on his own.

He had gone back to Prague because
of her. So fateful a decision resting on so fortuitous a love, a love that
would not even have existed had it not been for the chief surgeon's sciatica
seven years earlier. And that woman, that personification of absolute fortuity,
now again lay asleep beside him, breathing deeply.

It was late at night. His stomach
started acting up as it tended to do in times of psychic stress.

Once or twice her breathing turned
into mild snores. Tomas felt no compassion. All he felt was the pressure in
his stomach and the despair of having returned.

It
would be senseless for the author to try to convince the reader that his
characters once actually lived. They were not born of a mother's womb; they
were born of a stimulating phrase or two or from a basic situation. Tomas was
born of the saying
"Einma! ist keinmal."
Tereza was born of
the rumbling of a stomach.

The first time she went to Tomas's
flat, her insides began to rumble. And no wonder: she had had nothing to eat
since breakfast but a quick sandwich on the platform before boarding the train.
She had concentrated on the daring journey ahead of her and forgotten about
food. But when we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it. She
felt terrible standing there in front of Tomas listening to her belly speak
out. She felt like crying. Fortunately, after the first ten seconds Tomas put
his arms around her and made her forget her ventral voices.

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Tereza
was therefore born of a situation which brutally reveals the irreconcilable
duality of body and soul, that fundamental human experience.

A long time ago, man would listen
in amazement to the sound of regular beats in his chest, never suspecting what
they were. He was unable to identify himself with so alien and unfamiliar an
object as the body. The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something
which looked, listened, feared, thought, and marveled; that something, that
remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.

Today, of course, the body is no
longer unfamiliar: we know that the beating in our chest is the heart and that
the nose is the nozzle of a hose sticking out of the body to take oxygen to the
lungs. The face is nothing but an instrument panel registering all the body
mechanisms: digestion, sight, hearing, respiration, thought.

Ever since man has learned to give
each part of the body a name, the body has given him less trouble. He has also
learned that the soul is nothing more than the gray matter of the brain in
action. The old duality of body and soul has become shrouded in scientific
terminology, and we can laugh at it as merely an obsolete prejudice.

But just make someone who has
fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul,
that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away.

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Tereza
tried to see herself through her body. That is why, from girlhood on, she would
stand before the mirror so often. And because she was afraid her mother would
catch her at it, every peek into the mirror had a tinge of secret vice.

It was not vanity that drew her to
the mirror; it was amazement at seeing her own "I." She forgot she
was looking at the instrument panel of her body mechanisms; she thought she saw
her soul shining through the features of her face. She forgot that the nose was
merely the nozzle of a hose that took oxygen to the lungs; she saw it as the
true expression of her nature.

Staring at herself for long
stretches of time, she was occasionally upset at the sight of her mother's
features in her face. She would stare all the more doggedly at her image in an
attempt to wish them away and keep only what was hers alone. Each time she
succeeded was a time of intoxication: her soul would rise to the surface of her
body like a crew charging up from the bowels of a ship, spreading out over the
deck, waving at the sky and singing in jubilation.

She
took after her mother, and not only physically. I sometimes have the feeling
that her entire life was merely a continuation of her mother's, much as the
course of a ball on the billiard table is merely the continuation of the
player's arm movement.

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Indeed, was she not
the principal culprit determining her mother's fate? She, the absurd encounter
of the sperm of the most manly of men and the egg of the most beautiful of women?
Yes, it was in that fateful second, which was named Tereza, that the botched
long-distance race, her mother's life, had begun.

Tereza's mother
never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything.
Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a
woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and
believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a
mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a
daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.

Of course, Tereza
did not know the story of the night when her mother whispered "Be
careful" into the ear of her father. Her guilty conscience was as vague as
original sin. But she did what she could to rid herself of it. Her mother took
her out of school at the age of fifteen, and Tereza went to work as a waitress,
handing over all her earnings. She was willing to do anything to gain her
mother's love. She ran the household, took care of her siblings, and spent all
day Sunday cleaning house and doing the family wash. It was a pity, because she
was the brightest in her class. She yearned for something higher, but in the
small town there was nothing higher for her. Whenever she did the

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clothes, she kept a
book next to the tub. As she turned the pages, the wash water dripped all over
them.

At home, there was no such thing as
shame. Her mother marched about the flat in her underwear, sometimes braless
and sometimes, on summer days, stark naked. Her stepfather did not walk about
naked, but he did go into the bathroom every time Tereza was in the bath. Once
she locked herself in and her mother was furious. "Who do you think you
are, anyway? Do you think he's going to bite off a piece of your beauty?"

(This confrontation shows clearly
that hatred for her daughter outweighed suspicion of her husband. Her
daughter's guilt was infinite and included the husband's infidelities. Tereza's
desire to be emancipated and insist on her rights—like the right to lock
herself in the bathroom—was more objectionable to Tereza's mother than the
possibility of her husband's taking a prurient interest in Tereza.)

Once her mother decided to go naked
in the winter when the lights were on. Tereza quickly ran to pull the curtains
so that no one could see her from across the street. She heard her mother's
laughter behind her. The following day her mother had some friends over: a
neighbor, a woman she worked with, a local schoolmistress, and two or three
other women in the habit of getting together regularly. Tereza and the
sixteen-year-old son of one of them came in at one point to say hello, and her
mother immediately took advantage of their presence to tell how Tereza had
tried to protect her mother's modesty. She laughed, and all the women laughed
with her. "Tereza can't reconcile herself to the idea that the human body
pisses and farts," she said. Tereza turned bright red, but her mother
would not stop. "What's so terrible about that?" and in answer to her
own question she broke wind loudly. All the women laughed again.