The unbearable lightness of being (6 page)

Tereza's
mother blew her nose noisily, talked to people in public about her sex life,
and enjoyed demonstrating her false teeth. She was remarkably skillful at
loosening them with her tongue, and in the midst of a broad smile would cause
the uppers to drop down over the lowers in such a way as to give her face a
sinister expression.

Her behavior was but a single grand
gesture, a casting off of youth and beauty. In the days when she had had nine
suitors kneeling round her in a circle, she guarded her nakedness apprehensively,
as though trying to express the value of her body in terms of the modesty she
accorded it. Now she had not only lost that modesty, she had radically broken
with it, ceremoniously using her new immodesty to draw a dividing line through
her life and proclaim that youth and beauty were overrated and worthless.

Tereza appears to me a
continuation of the gesture by which her mother cast off her life as a young
beauty, cast it far behind her.

(And if Tereza has a nervous way of
moving, if her gestures lack a certain easy grace, we must not be surprised:
her mother's grand, wild, and self-destructive gesture has left an indelible
imprint on her.)

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Tereza's
mother demanded justice. She wanted to see the culprit penalized. That is why
she insisted her daughter remain with her in the world of immodesty, where
youth and beauty mean nothing, where the world is nothing but a vast concentration
camp of bodies, one like the next, with souls invisible.

Now we can better understand the
meaning of Tereza's secret vice, her long looks and frequent glances in the
mirror. It was a battle with her mother. It was a longing to be a body unlike
other bodies, to find that the surface of her face reflected the crew of the
soul charging up from below. It was not an easy task: her soul—her sad, timid,
self-effacing soul—lay concealed in the depths of her bowels and was ashamed to
show itself.

So it was the day she first met
Tomas. Weaving its way through the drunks in the hotel restaurant, her body
sagged under the weight of the beers on the tray, and her soul lay somewhere at
the level of the stomach or pancreas. Then Tomas called to her. That call
meant a great deal, because it came from someone who knew neither her mother
nor the drunks with their daily stereotypically scabrous remarks. His outsider
status raised him above the rest.

Something else raised him above the
others as well: he had an open book on his table. No one had ever opened a book
in that restaurant before. In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a
secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of
crudity surrounding her: the books she took out of the municipal library, and
above all, the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas
Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life
she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects:
she loved to walk down the street with a

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book
under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the
dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.

(Comparing the book to the elegant
cane of the dandy is not absolutely precise. A dandy's cane did more than make
him different; it made him modern and up to date. The book made Tereza
different, but old-fashioned. Of course, she was too young to see how
old-fashioned she looked to others. The young men walking by with transistor
radios pressed to their ears seemed silly to her. It never occurred to her that
they were modern.)

And so the man who called to her
was simultaneously a stranger and a member of the secret brotherhood. He called
to her in a kind voice, and Tereza felt her soul rushing up to the surface
through her blood vessels and pores to show itself to him.

After
Tomas had returned to Prague from Zurich, he began to feel uneasy at the
thought that his acquaintance with Tereza was the result of six improbable
fortuities.

But is not an event in fact more
significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to
bring it about?

Chance and chance alone has a
message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected,
repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its
message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee

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grounds at the bottom of a cup.

Tomas appeared to Tereza in the
hotel restaurant as chance in the absolute. There he sat, poring over an open
book, when suddenly he raised his eyes to her, smiled, and said, "A
cognac, please."

At that moment, the radio happened
to be playing music. On her way behind the counter to pour the cognac, Tereza
turned the volume up. She recognized Beethoven. She had known his music from
the time a string quartet from Prague had visited their town. Tereza (who, as
we know, yearned for "something higher") went to the concert. The
hall was nearly empty. The only other people in the audience were the local
pharmacist and his wife. And although the quartet of musicians on stage faced
only a trio of spectators down below, they were kind enough not to cancel the
concert, and gave a private performance of the last three Beethoven quartets.

Then the pharmacist invited the
musicians to dinner and asked the girl in the audience to come along with them.
From then on, Beethoven became her image of the world on the other side, the
world she yearned for. Rounding the counter with Tomas's cognac, she tried to
read chance's message: How was it possible that at the very moment she was
taking an order of cognac to a stranger she found attractive, at that very moment
she heard Beethoven?

Necessity knows no magic formulae—they
are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must
immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's
shoulders.

He
called her back to pay for the cognac. He closed his book (the emblem of the
secret brotherhood), and she thought of asking him what he was reading.

"Can you
have it charged to my room? " he asked.

"Yes,"
she said. "What number are you in?"

He showed her his key, which was
attached to a piece of wood with a red six drawn on it.

"That's
odd," she said. "Six."

"What's so
odd about that?" he asked.

She had suddenly recalled that the
house where they had lived in Prague before her parents were divorced was
number six. But she answered something else (which we may credit to her wiles):
"You're in room six and my shift ends at six."

"Well, my
train leaves at seven," said the stranger.

She did not know how to respond, so
she gave him the bill for his signature and took it over to the reception desk.
When she finished work, the stranger was no longer at his table. Had he
understood her discreet message? She left the restaurant in a state of
excitement.

Opposite the hotel was a barren
little park, as wretched as only the park of a dirty little town can be, but
for Tereza it had always been an island of beauty: it had grass, four poplars,
benches, a weeping willow, and a few forsythia bushes.

He was sitting on a yellow bench
that afforded a clear view of the restaurant entrance. The very same bench she
had sat on the day before with a book in her lap! She knew then (the birds of
fortuity had begun alighting on her shoulders) that this stranger was her
fate. He called out to her, invited her to sit next to him. (The crew other
soul rushed up to the deck other body.) Then she walked him to the station, and
he gave her his card as

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a farewell gesture. "If ever you should
happen to come to Prague..."

Much
more than the card he slipped her at the last minute, it was the call of all
those fortuities (the book, Beethoven, the number six, the yellow park bench)
which gave her the courage to leave home and change her fate. It may well be
those few fortuities (quite modest, by the way, even drab, just what one would
expect from so lackluster a town) which set her love in motion and provided her
with a source of energy she had not yet exhausted at the end of her days.

Our day-to-day life is bombarded
with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people
and events we call coincidences. "Co-incidence" means that two events
unexpectedly happen at the same time, they meet: Tomas appears in the hotel
restaurant at the same time the radio is playing Beethoven. We do not even
notice the great majority of such coincidences. If the seat Tomas occupied had
been occupied instead by the local butcher, Tereza never would have noticed
that the radio was playing Beethoven (though the meeting of Beethoven and the
butcher would also have been an interesting coincidence). But her nascent love
inflamed her sense of beauty, and she would never forget that music. Whenever
she heard it, she would be touched. Everything going on around her at that
moment would be haloed by the music and take on its beauty.

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Early in the novel
that Tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit Tomas, Anna meets
Vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone
is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a
train. This symmetrical composition—the same motif appears at the beginning and
at the end—may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to
agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as
"fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life"
into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed in
precisely such a fashion.

They are composed like music.
Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence
(Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a
permanent place in the composition of the individual's life. Anna could have
chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway
station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of
despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes
his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

It is wrong, then, to chide the
novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of
Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven,
Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to
such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a
dimension of beauty.

Impelled
by the birds of fortuity fluttering down on her shoulders, she took a week's
leave and, without a word to her mother, boarded the train to Prague. During
the journey, she made frequent trips to the toilet to look in the mirror and
beg her soul not to abandon the deck of her body for a moment on this most
crucial day of her life. Scrutinizing herself on one such trip, she had a
sudden scare: she felt a scratch in her throat. Could she be coming down with
something on this most crucial day of her life?

But there was no turning back. So
she phoned him from the station, and the moment he opened the door, her stomach
started rumbling terribly. She was mortified. She felt as though she were
carrying her mother in her stomach and her mother had guffawed to spoil her
meeting with Tomas.

For the first few seconds, she was
afraid he would throw her out because of the crude noises she was making, but
then he put his arms around her. She was grateful to him for ignoring her
rumbles, and kissed him passionately, her eyes misting. Before the first
minute was up, they were making love. She screamed while making love. She had a
fever by then. She had come down with the flu. The nozzle of the hose supplying
oxygen to the lungs was stuffed and red.

When she traveled to Prague a
second time, it was with a heavy suitcase. She had packed all her things,
determined never again to return to the small town. He had invited her to come
to his place the following evening. That night, she had slept in a cheap hotel.
In the morning, she carried her heavy suitcase to the station, left it there,
and roamed the streets of Prague the whole day with
Anna Karenina
under
her arm. Not even after she rang the doorbell and he opened the door would she
part

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with it. It was
like a ticket into Tomas's world. She realized that she had nothing but that
miserable ticket, and the thought brought her nearly to tears. To keep from
crying, she talked too much and too loudly, and she laughed. And again he took
her in his arms almost at once and they made love. She had entered a mist in
which nothing could be seen and only her scream could be heard.

It was no sigh, no
moan; it was a real scream. She screamed so hard that Tomas had to turn his
head away from her face, afraid that her voice so close to his ear would
rupture his eardrum. The scream was not an expression of sensuality. Sensuality
is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner
intently, straining to catch every sound. But her scream aimed at crippling the
senses, preventing all seeing and hearing. What was screaming in fact was the
naive idealism of her love trying to banish all contradictions, banish the
duality of body and soul, banish perhaps even time.

Were her eyes
closed? No, but they were not looking anywhere. She kept them fixed on the
void of the ceiling. At times she twisted her head violently from side to side.

When the scream
died down, she fell asleep at his side, clutching his hand. She held his hand
all night.

Even at the age
of eight she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and making
believe she was holding the hand of the man whom she loved, the man of her
life. So if