The unbearable lightness of being (9 page)

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him
for compromising; they felt humiliated by his humiliation;

his weakness offended them.

Thinking in Zurich of those days,
she no longer felt any aversion to the man. The word "weak" no longer
sounded like a verdict. Any man confronted with superior strength is weak, even
if he has an athletic body like Dubcek's. The very weakness that at the time
had seemed unbearable and repulsive, the weakness that had driven Tereza and Tomas
from the country, suddenly attracted her. She realized that she belonged among
the weak, in the camp of the weak, in the country of the weak, and that she had
to be faithful to them precisely because they were weak and gasped for breath
in the middle of sentences.

She felt attracted by their
weakness as by vertigo. She felt attracted by it because she felt weak herself.
Again she began to feel jealous and again her hands shook. When Tomas noticed
it, he did what he usually did: he took her hands in his and tried to calm them
by pressing hard. She tore them away from him.

"What's the
matter?" he asked.

"Nothing."

"What do
you want me to do for you?"

"I want you
to be old. Ten years older. Twenty years older!"

What she meant was: I want you to
be weak. As weak as I am.

Karenin was not
overjoyed by the move to Switzerland. Karenin hated change. Dog time cannot be
plotted along a straight line; it does not move on and on, from one thing to
the next. It moves in a circle like the hands of a clock, which—they, too,
unwilling to dash madly ahead—turn round and round the face, day in and day out
following the same path. In Prague, when Tomas and Tereza bought a new chair or
moved a flower pot, Karenin would look on in displeasure. It disturbed his
sense of time. It was as though they were trying to dupe the hands of the clock
by changing the numbers on its face.

Nonetheless, he soon managed to reestablish the old order and old rituals
in the Zurich flat. As in Prague, he would jump up on their bed and welcome
them to the day, accompany Tereza on her morning shopping jaunt, and make
certain he got the other walks coming to him as well.

He was the timepiece of their lives. In periods of
despair, she would remind herself she had to hold on because of him, because he
was weaker than she, weaker perhaps even than Dubcek and their abandoned
homeland.

One day when they came back from a walk, the phone was ringing. She
picked up the receiver and asked who it was.

It was a woman's voice speaking German and asking for Tomas. It was an
impatient voice, and Tereza felt there was a hint of derision in it. When she
said that Tomas wasn't there and she didn't know when he'd be back, the woman
on the other end of the line started laughing and, without saying goodbye,
hung up.

Tereza knew it did not mean a thing. It could have been a nurse from the
hospital, a patient, a secretary, anyone. But still she was upset and unable to
concentrate on anything. It was

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then that she
realized she had lost the last bit of strength she had had at home: she was
absolutely incapable of tolerating this absolutely insignificant incident.

Being in a foreign country means
walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by
the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can
easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood. In
Prague she was dependent on Tomas only when it came to the heart; here she was
dependent on him for everything. What would happen to her here if he abandoned
her? Would she have to live her whole life in fear of losing him?

She told herself: Their
acquaintance had been based on an error from the start. The copy of
Anna
Karenina
under her arm amounted to false papers; it had given Tomas the
wrong idea. In spite of their love, they had made each other's life a hell. The
fact that they loved each other was merely proof that the fault lay not in
themselves, in their behavior or inconstancy of feeling, but rather in their
incompatibility: he was strong and she was weak. She was like Dubcek, who made
a thirty-second pause in the middle of a sentence; she was like her country,
which stuttered, gasped for breath, could not speak.

But when the strong were too weak
to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.

And having told herself all this,
she pressed her face against Karenin's furry head and said, "Sorry,
Karenin. It looks as though you're going to have to move again."

Sitting crushed
into a corner of the train compartment with her heavy suitcase above her head
and Karenin squeezed against her legs, she kept thinking about the cook at the
hotel restaurant where she had worked when she lived with her mother. The cook
would take every opportunity to give her a slap on the behind, and never tired
of asking her in front of everyone when she would give in and go to bed with
him. It was odd that he was the one who came to mind. He had always been the
prime example of everything she loathed. And now all she could think of was
looking him up and telling him, "You used to say you wanted to sleep with
me. Well, here I am."

She longed to do something that
would prevent her from turning back to Tomas. She longed to destroy brutally
the past seven years of her life. It was vertigo. A heady, insuperable longing
to fall.

We might also call vertigo the
intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in
rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even
weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of
everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.

She tried to talk herself into
settling outside of Prague and giving up her profession as a photographer. She
would go back to the small town from which Tomas's voice had once lured her.

But once in Prague, she found she
had to spend some time taking care of various practical matters, and began
putting off her departure.

On the fifth day, Tomas suddenly
turned up. Karenin jumped all over him, so it was a while before they had to
make any overtures to each other.

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They felt they were standing on a
snow-covered plain, shivering with cold.

Then they moved together like
lovers who had never kissed before.

"Has everything been all right?" he asked.

"Yes," she answered.

"Have you been to the magazine?"

"I've given them a call."

"Well?"

"Nothing yet. I've been waiting."

"For what?"

She made
no response. She could not tell him that she had been waiting for him.

Now we return to a
moment we already know about. Tomas was desperately unhappy and had a bad
stomachache. He did not fall asleep until very late at night.

Soon thereafter
Tereza awoke. (There were Russian airplanes circling over Prague, and it was
impossible to sleep for the noise.) Her first thought was that he had come back
because of her; because of her, he had changed his destiny. Now he would no
longer be responsible for her; now she was responsible for him.

The
responsibility, she felt, seemed to require more strength than she could
muster.

But all at once she
recalled that just before he had appeared

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at
the door of their flat the day before, the church bells had chimed six o'clock.
On the day they first met, her shift had ended at six. She saw him sitting
there in front of her on the yellow bench and heard the bells in the belfry
chime six.

No, it was not
superstition, it was a sense of beauty that cured her of her depression and
imbued her with a new will to live. The birds of fortuity had alighted once
more on her shoulders. There were tears in her eyes, and she was unutterably
happy to hear him breathing at her side.

Geneva
is a city of fountains large and small, of parks where music once rang out from
the bandstands. Even the university is hidden among trees. Franz had just
finished his afternoon lecture. As he left the building, the sprinklers were
spouting jets of water over the lawn and he was in a capital mood. He was on
his way to see his mistress. She lived only a few streets away.

He often stopped in for a visit,
but only as a friend, never as a lover. If he made love to her in her Geneva
studio, he would be going from one woman to the other, from wife to mistress
and back in a single day, and because in Geneva husband and wife sleep together
in the French style, in the same bed, he would be going from the bed of one
woman to the bed of another in the space of several hours. And that, he felt,
would humiliate both mistress and wife and, in the end, himself as well.

The love he bore
this woman, with whom he had fallen in

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love
several months before, was so precious to him that he tried to create an
independent space for her in his life, a restricted zone of purity. He was
often invited to lecture at foreign universities, and now he accepted all
offers. But because they were not enough to satisfy his new-found wanderlust,
he took to inventing congresses and symposia as a means of justifying the new
absences to his wife. His mistress, who had a flexible schedule, accompanied
him on all speaking engagements, real and imagined. So it was that within a
short span of time he introduced her to many European cities and an American
one.

"How would you like to go to
Palermo ten days from now?" asked Franz.

"I prefer Geneva," she
answered. She was standing in front of her easel examining a work in progress.

"How can you live without
seeing Palermo?" asked Franz in an attempt at levity.

"I have
seen Palermo," she said.

"You
have?" he said with a hint of jealousy.

"A friend of mine once sent me
a postcard from there. It's taped up over the toilet. Haven't you
noticed?"

Then she told him a story.
"Once upon a time, in the early part of the century, there lived a poet.
He was so old he had to be taken on walks by his amanuensis. 'Master,' his
amanuensis said one day, 'look what's up in the sky! It's the first airplane
ever to fly over the city!' 'I have my own picture of it,' said the poet to his
amanuensis, without raising his eyes from the ground. Well, I have my own
picture of Palermo. It has the same hotels and cars as all cities. And my studio
always has new and different pictures."

Franz was sad. He had grown so
accustomed to linking their love life to foreign travel that his "Let's go
to Palermo!" was an unambiguous erotic message and her "I prefer
Geneva" could have only one meaning: his mistress no longer desired him.

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How could he be so
unsure of himself with her? She had not given him the slightest cause for
worry! In fact, she was the one who had taken the erotic initiative shortly
after they met. He was a good-looking man; he was at the peak of his scholarly
career; he was even feared by his colleagues for the arrogance and tenacity he
displayed during professional meetings and colloquia. Then why did he worry
daily that his mistress was about to leave him?

The only explanation I can suggest
is that for Franz, love was not an extension of public life but its antithesis.
It meant a longing to put himself at the mercy of his partner. He who gives
himself up like a prisoner of war must give up his weapons as well. And
deprived in advance of defense against a possible blow, he cannot help
wondering when the blow will fall. That is why I can say that for Franz, love
meant the constant expectation of a blow.

While Franz attended to his
anguish, his mistress put down her brush and went into the next room. She
returned with a bottle of wine. She opened it without a word and poured out two
glasses.

Immediately he felt relieved and
slightly ridiculous. The "I prefer Geneva" did not mean she refused
to make love; quite the contrary, it meant she was tired of limiting their
lovemaking to foreign cities.

She raised her glass and emptied it
in one swig. Franz did the same. He was naturally overjoyed that her refusal to
go to Palermo was actually a call to love, but he was a bit sorry as well: his
mistress seemed determined to violate the zone of Purity he had introduced into
their relationship; she had failed to understand his apprehensive attempts to
save their love from banality and separate it radically from his conjugal home.

The ban on making love with his
painter-mistress in Geneva was actually a self-inflicted punishment for having
married another woman. He felt it as a kind of guilt or defect. Even

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though
his conjugal sex life was hardly worth mentioning, he and his wife still slept
in the same bed, awoke in the middle of the night to each other's heavy
breathing, and inhaled the smells of each other's body. True, he would rather
have slept by himself, but the marriage bed is still the symbol of the marriage
bond, and symbols, as we know, are inviolable.

Each time he lay down next to his
wife in that bed, he thought of his mistress imagining him lying down next to
his wife in that bed, and each time he thought of her he felt ashamed. That was
why he wished to separate the bed he slept in with his wife as far as possible
in space from the bed he made love in with his mistress.

His painter-mistress poured herself
another glass of wine, drank it down, and then, still silent and with a curious
nonchalance, as if completely unaware of Franz's presence, slowly removed her
blouse. She was behaving like an acting student whose improvisation assignment
is to make the class believe she is alone in a room and no one can see her.

Standing there in her skirt and
bra, she suddenly (as if recalling only then that she was not alone in the
room) fixed Franz with a long stare.

That stare bewildered him; he could
not understand it. All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the
game, which from the outset admit no transgression. The stare she had just fixed
on him fell outside their rules; it had nothing in common with the looks and
gestures that usually preceded their lovemaking. It was neither provocative nor
flirtatious, simply interrogative. The problem was, Franz had not the slightest
notion what it was asking.

Next she stepped out of her skirt
and, taking Franz by the hand, turned him in the direction of a large mirror
propped against the wall. Without letting go of his hand, she looked into the
mirror with the same long questioning stare, training it first on herself, then
on him.