The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera

  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.

  24

  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 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.

  25

  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 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.

  26

  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 cont
ained 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 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.

  27

  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 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.

  28

  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.

  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.

  29

  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 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.

  PART THREE . Words Misunderstood

  1

  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 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.