The unbearable lightness of being (8 page)

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candle-lit
Christmas tree showing a hand ripping through the canvas.

She felt a rush of admiration for
Sabina, and because Sabina treated her as a friend it was an admiration free of
fear and suspicion and quickly turned into friendship.

She nearly forgot she had come to
take photographs. Sabina had to remind her. Tereza finally looked away from the
paintings only to see the bed set in the middle of the room like a platform.

Next
to the bed stood a small table, and on the table the model of a human head, the
kind hairdressers put wigs on. Sabina's wig stand sported a bowler hat rather
than a wig. "It used to belong to my grandfather," she said with a
smile.

It was the kind of hat—black, hard,
round—that Tereza had seen only on the screen, the kind of hat Chaplin wore.
She smiled back, picked it up, and after studying it for a time, said,
"Would you like me to take your picture in it?"

Sabina laughed for a long time at
the idea. Tereza put down the bowler hat, picked up her camera, and started
taking pictures.

When she had been at it for almost
an hour, she suddenly said, "What would you say to some nude shots?"

"Nude
shots?" Sabina laughed.

"Yes," said Tereza,
repeating her proposal more boldly, "nude shots."

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"That calls for a drink," said Sabina, and opened a
bottle of wine.

Tereza felt her body going weak;
she was suddenly tongue-tied. Sabina, meanwhile, strode back and forth, wine in
hand, going on about her grandfather, who'd been the mayor of a small town;
Sabina had never known him; all he'd left behind was this bowler hat and a
picture showing a raised platform with several small-town dignitaries on it;
one of them was Grandfather; it wasn't at all clear what they were doing up
there on the platform; maybe they were officiating at some ceremony, unveiling
a monument to a fellow dignitary who had also once worn a bowler hat at public
ceremonies.

Sabina
went on and on about the bowler hat and her grandfather until, emptying her
third glass, she said "I'll be right back" and disappeared into the
bathroom.

She came
out in her bathrobe. Tereza picked up her camera and put it to her eye. Sabina
threw open the robe.

The
camera served Tereza as both a mechanical eye through which to observe Tomas's
mistress and a veil by which to conceal her face from her.

It took Sabina some time before she
could bring herself to slip out of the robe entirely. The situation she found
herself in was proving a bit more difficult than she had expected. After
several minutes of posing, she went up to Tereza and said, "Now it's my
turn to take your picture. Strip!"

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Sabina had heard
the command "Strip!" so many times from Tomas that it was engraved in
her memory. Thus, Tomas's mistress had just given Tomas's command to Tomas's
wife. The two women were joined by the same magic word. That was Tomas's way of
unexpectedly turning an innocent conversation with a woman into an erotic
situation. Instead of stroking, flattering, pleading, he would issue a command,
issue it abruptly, unexpectedly, softly yet firmly and authoritatively, and at
a distance: at such moments he never touched the woman he was addressing. He
often used it on Tereza as well, and even though he said it softly, even though
he whispered it, it was a command, and obeying never failed to arouse her. Hearing
the word now made her desire to obey even stronger, because doing a stranger's
bidding is a special madness, a madness all the more heady in this case because
the command came not from a man but from a woman.

Sabina took the camera from her,
and Tereza took off her clothes. There she stood before Sabina naked and
disarmed. Literally
disarmed:
deprived of the apparatus she had been using
to cover her face and aim at Sabina like a weapon. She was completely at the
mercy of Tomas's mistress. This beautiful submission intoxicated Tereza. She
wished that the moments she stood naked opposite Sabina would never end.

I think that Sabina, too, felt the
strange enchantment of the situation: her lover's wife standing oddly compliant
and timorous before her. But after clicking the shutter two or three times,
almost frightened by the enchantment and eager to dispel it, she burst into
loud laughter.

Tereza followed
suit, and the two of them got dressed.

All
previous crimes of the Russian empire had been committed under the cover of a
discreet shadow. The deportation of a million Lithuanians, the murder of
hundreds of thousands of Poles, the liquidation of the Crimean Tatars remain in
our memory, but no photographic documentation exists; sooner or later they will
therefore be proclaimed as fabrications. Not so the 1968 invasion of
Czechoslovakia, of which both stills and motion pictures are stored in archives
throughout the world.

Czech photographers and cameramen
were acutely aware that they were the ones who could best do the only thing
left to do: preserve the face of violence for the distant future. Seven days in
a row, Tereza roamed the streets, photographing Russian soldiers and officers
in compromising situations. The Russians did not know what to do. They had
been carefully briefed about how to behave if someone fired at them or threw
stones, but they had received no directives about what to do when someone aimed
a lens.

She shot roll after roll and gave
about half of them, undeveloped, to foreign journalists (the borders were
still open, and reporters passing through were grateful for any kind of document).
Many of her photographs turned up in the Western press. They were pictures of
tanks, of threatening fists, of houses destroyed, of corpses covered with
bloodstained red-white-and-blue Czech flags, of young men on motorcycles racing
full speed around the tanks and waving Czech flags on long staffs, of young
girls in unbelievably short skirts provoking the miserable sexually famished
Russian soldiers by kissing random passersby before their eyes. As I have said,
the Russian invasion was not only a tragedy; it was a carnival of hate filled
with a curious (and no longer explicable) euphoria.

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She
took some fifty prints with her to Switzerland, prints she had made herself
with all the care and skill she could muster. She offered them to a
high-circulation illustrated magazine. The editor gave her a kind reception
(all Czechs still wore the halo of their misfortune, and the good Swiss were
touched); he offered her a seat, looked through the prints, praised them, and
explained that because a certain time had elapsed since the events, they hadn't
the slightest chance ("not that they aren't very beautiful!") of
being published.

"But it's not over yet in
Prague!" she protested, and tried to explain to him in her bad German that
at this very moment, even with the country occupied, with everything against
them, workers' councils were forming in the factories, the students were going
out on strike demanding the departure of the Russians, and the whole country
was saying aloud what it thought. "That's what's so unbelievable! And
nobody here cares anymore."

The editor was glad when an
energetic woman came into the office and interrupted the conversation. The
woman handed him a folder and said, "Here's the nudist beach
article."

The editor was delicate enough to
fear that a Czech who photographed tanks would find pictures of naked people on
a beach frivolous. He laid the folder at the far end of the desk and quickly
said to the woman, "How would you like to meet a Czech colleague of yours?
She's brought me some marvelous pictures."

The woman shook Tereza's hand and
picked up her photographs. "Have a look at mine in the meantime,"
she said.

Tereza leaned
over to the folder and took out the pictures.

Almost
apologetically the editor said to Tereza, "Of course

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they're completely different from your
pictures."

"Not at
all," said Tereza. "They're the same."

Neither the editor nor the
photographer understood her, and even I find it difficult to explain what she
had in mind when she compared a nude beach to the Russian invasion. Looking
through the pictures, she stopped for a time at one that showed a family of
four standing in a circle: a naked mother leaning over her children, her giant
tits hanging low like a goat's or cow's, and the husband leaning the same way
on the other side, his penis and scrotum looking very much like an udder in
miniature.

"You don't like them, do
you?" asked the editor.

"They're
good photographs."

"She's shocked by the subject
matter," said the woman. "I can tell just by looking at you that
you've never set foot on a nude beach."

"No,"
said Tereza.

The editor smiled. "You see
how easy it is to guess where you're from? The Communist countries are awfully
puritanical."

"There's nothing wrong with
the naked body," the woman said with maternal affection. "It's
normal. And everything normal is beautiful!"

The image of her mother marching
through the flat naked flashed through Tereza's mind. She could still hear the
laughter behind her back when she ran and pulled the curtains to stop the
neighbors from seeing her naked mother.

The
woman photographer invited Tereza to the magazine's cafeteria for a cup of
coffee. "Those pictures of yours, they're very interesting. I couldn't
help noticing what a terrific sense of the female body you have. You know what
I mean. The girls with the provocative poses!"

"The ones
kissing passersby in front of the Russian tanks? "

"Yes. You'd be a top-notch
fashion photographer, you know? You'd have to get yourself a model first,
someone like you who's looking for a break. Then you could make a portfolio of
photographs and show them to the agencies. It would take some time before you
made a name for yourself, naturally, but I can do one thing for you here and
now: introduce you to the editor in charge of our garden section. He might need
some shots of cactuses and roses and things."

"Thank you very much,"
Tereza said sincerely, because it was clear that the woman sitting opposite her
was full of good will.

But then she said to herself, Why
take pictures of cactuses? She had no desire to go through in Zurich what she'd
been through in Prague: battles over job and career, over every picture
published. She had never been ambitious out of vanity. All she had ever wanted
was to escape from her mother's world. Yes, she saw it with absolute clarity:
no matter how enthusiastic she was about taking pictures, she could just as
easily have turned her enthusiasm to any other endeavor. Photography was
nothing but a way of getting at "something higher" and living beside
Tomas.

She said, "My husband is a
doctor. He can support me. I don't need to take pictures."

The woman
photographer replied, "I don't see how you

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can give it up after the beautiful work
you've done."

Yes, the pictures of the invasion
were something else again. She had not done them for Tomas. She had done them
out of passion. But not passion for photography. She had done them out of
passionate hatred. The situation would never recur. And these photographs,
which she had made out of passion, were the ones nobody wanted because they
were out of date. Only cactuses had perennial appeal. And cactuses were of no
interest to her.

She said, "You're too kind,
really, but I'd rather stay at home. I don't need a job."

The woman said, "But will you
be fulfilled sitting at home?"

Tereza said, "More fulfilled
than by taking pictures of cactuses."

The woman said, "Even if you
take pictures of cactuses, you're leading
your
life. If you live only
for your husband, you have no life of your own."

All of a sudden Tereza felt
annoyed: "My husband is my life, not cactuses."

The woman photographer responded in
kind: "You mean you think of yourself as happy? "

Tereza, still
annoyed, said, "Of course I'm happy!"

The woman said, "The only kind
of woman who can say that is very ..." She stopped short.

Tereza finished it for her:
"... limited. That's what you mean, isn't it?"

The woman regained control of
herself and said, "Not limited. Anachronistic."

"You're right," said
Tereza wistfully. "That's just what my husband says about me."

But
Tomas spent days on end at the hospital, and she was at home alone. At least
she had Karenin and could take him on long walks! Home again, she would pore
over her German and French grammars. But she felt sad and had trouble
concentrating. She kept coming back to the speech Dubcek had given over the
radio after his return from Moscow. Although she had completely forgotten what
he said, she could still hear his quavering voice. She thought about how
foreign soldiers had arrested him, the head of an independent state, in his
own country, held him for four days somewhere in the Ukrainian mountains,
informed him he was to be executed—as, a decade before, they had executed his
Hungarian counterpart Imre Nagy—then packed him off to Moscow, ordered him to
have a bath and shave, to change his clothes and put on a tie, apprised him of
the decision to commute his execution, instructed him to consider himself head
of state once more, sat him at a table opposite Brezhnev, and forced him to
act.

He returned, humiliated, to address
his humiliated nation. He was so humiliated he could not even speak. Tereza
would never forget those awful pauses in the middle of his sentences. Was he
that exhausted? 111? Had they drugged him? Or was it only despair? If nothing
was to remain of Dubcek, then at least those awful long pauses when he seemed
unable to breathe, when he gasped for air before a whole nation glued to its
radios, at least those pauses would remain. Those pauses contained all the
horror that had befallen their country.

It was the seventh day of the
invasion. She heard the speech in the editorial offices of a newspaper that had
been transformed overnight into an organ of the resistance. Everyone present
hated Dubcek at that moment. They reproached

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