The unbearable lightness of being (11 page)

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from
loneliness, introversion, the dust of the library; it opened the door of his
body and allowed his soul to step out into the world to make friends. He loved
to dance and regretted that Sabina did not share his passion.

They were
sitting together at a restaurant, and loud music with a heavy beat poured out
of a nearby speaker as they ate.

"It's a
vicious circle," Sabina said. "People are going deaf because music is
played louder and louder. But because they're going deaf, it has to be played
louder still."

"Don't
you like music?" Franz asked.

"No,"
said Sabina, and then added, "though in a different era..." She was
thinking of the days of Johann Sebastian Bach, when music was like a rose
blooming on a boundless snow-covered plain of silence.

Noise masked as
music had pursued her since early childhood. During her years at the Academy
of Fine Arts, students had been required to spend whole summer vacations at a
youth camp. They lived in common quarters and worked together on a steelworks
construction site. Music roared out of loudspeakers on the site from five in
the morning to nine at night. She felt like crying, but the music was cheerful,
and there was nowhere to hide, not in the latrine or under the bedclothes:
everything was in range of the speakers. The music was like a pack of hounds
that had been sicked on her.

At the time, she
had thought that only in the Communist world could such musical barbarism reign
supreme. Abroad, she discovered that the transformation of music into noise was
a planetary process by which mankind was entering the historical phase of total
ugliness. The total ugliness to come had made itself felt first as omnipresent
acoustical ugliness: cars, motorcycles, electric guitars, drills, loudspeakers,
sirens. The omnipresence of visual ugliness would soon follow.

After
dinner, they went upstairs to their room and made

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love,
and as Franz fell asleep his thoughts began to lose coherence. He recalled the
noisy music at dinner and said to himself, "Noise has one advantage. It
drowns out words." And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done
nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations
and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated,
their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff, dust, sand; prowling through
his brain, tearing at his head, they were his insomnia, his illness. And what
he yearned for at that moment, vaguely but with all his might, was unbounded
music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, overpowering,
window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the
vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word!
He yearned for one long embrace with Sabina, yearned never to say another
sentence, another word, to let his orgasm fuse with the orgiastic thunder of
music. And lulled by that blissful imaginary uproar, he fell asleep.

LIGHT AND
DARKNESS

Living
for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which
blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste
for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion
for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

In Franz the word "light"
did not evoke the picture of a landscape basking in the soft glow of day; it
evoked the source of light itself: the sun, a light bulb, a spotlight. Franz's
associations were familiar metaphors: the sun of righteousness, the lambent
flame of the intellect, and so on.

Darkness attracted him as much as
light. He knew that these days turning out the light before making love was
considered laughable, and so he always left a small lamp burning over

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the
bed. At the moment he penetrated Sabina, however, he closed his eyes. The
pleasure suffusing his body called for darkness. That darkness was pure,
perfect, thoughtless, visionless; that darkness was without end, without
borders; that darkness was the infinite we each carry within us. (Yes, if
you're looking for infinity, just close your eyes!)

And at the
moment he felt pleasure suffusing his body, Franz himself disintegrated and
dissolved into the infinity of his darkness, himself becoming infinite. But the
larger a man grows in his own inner darkness, the more his outer form
diminishes. A man with closed eyes is a wreck of a man. Then, Sabina found the
sight of Franz distasteful, and to avoid looking at him she too closed her
eyes. But for her, darkness did not mean infinity; for her, it meant a
disagreement with what she saw, the negation of what was seen, the refusal to
see.

Sabina
once allowed herself to be taken along to a gathering of fellow emigres. As
usual, they were hashing over whether they should or should not have taken up
arms against the Russians. In the safety of emigration, they all naturally came
out in favor of fighting. Sabina said: "Then why don't you go back and
fight?"

That was not the thing to say. A
man with artificially waved gray hair pointed a long index finger at her.
"That's no way to talk. You're all responsible for what happened. You,
too. How did you oppose the Communist regime? All you did was paint pictures.
..."

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Assessing the
populace, checking up on it, is a principal and never-ending social activity in
Communist countries. If a painter is to have an exhibition, an ordinary
citizen to receive a visa to a country with a sea coast, a soccer player to
join the national team, then a vast array of recommendations and reports must
be garnered (from the concierge, colleagues, the police, the local Party
organization, the pertinent trade union) and added up, weighed, and summarized
by special officials. These reports have nothing to do with artistic talent,
kicking ability, or maladies that respond well to salt sea air; they deal with
one thing only: the "citizen's political profile" (in other words,
what the citizen says, what he thinks, how he behaves, how he acquits himself
at meetings or May Day parades). Because everything (day-to-day existence, promotion
at work, vacations) depends on the outcome of the assessment process, everyone
(whether he wants to play soccer for the national team, have an exhibition, or
spend his holidays at the seaside) must behave in such a way as to deserve a
favorable assessment.

That was what ran through Sabina's
mind as she listened to the gray-haired man speak. He didn't care whether his
fellow-countrymen were good kickers or painters (none of the Czechs at the
emigre gathering ever showed any interest in what Sabina painted); he cared
whether they had opposed Communism actively or just passively, really and
truly or just for appearances' sake, from the very beginning or just since
emigration.

Because she was a painter, she had
an eye for detail and a memory for the physical characteristics of the people
in Prague who had a passion for assessing others. All of them had index fingers
slightly longer than their middle fingers and pointed them at whomever they
happened to be talking to. In fact, President Novotny, who had ruled the
country for the fourteen years preceding 1968, sported the very same
barber-induced

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gray
waves and had the longest index finger of all the inhabitants of Central
Europe.

When the distinguished emigre heard
from the lips of a painter whose pictures he had never seen that he resembled
Communist President Novotny, he turned scarlet, then white, then scarlet again,
then white once more; he tried to say something, did not succeed, and fell
silent. Everyone else kept silent until Sabina stood up and left.

It made her unhappy, and down in
the street she asked herself why she should bother to maintain contact with
Czechs. What bound her to them? The landscape? If each of them were asked to
say what the name of his native country evoked in him, the images that came to
mind would be so different as to rule out all possibility of unity.

Or the culture? But what was that?
Music? Dvorak and Janacek? Yes. But what if a Czech had no feeling for music?
Then the essence of being Czech vanished into thin air.

Or great men? Jan Hus? None of the
people in that room had ever read a line of his works. The only thing they were
all able to understand was the flames, the glory of the flames when he was
burned at the stake, the glory of the ashes, so for them the essence of being
Czech came down to ashes and nothing more. The only things that held them
together were their defeats and the reproaches they addressed to one another.

She was walking fast. She was more
disturbed by her own thoughts than by her break with the emigres. She knew she
was being unfair. There were other Czechs, after all, people quite different
from the man with the long index finger. The embarrassed silence that followed
her little speech did not by any means indicate they were all against her. No,
they were probably bewildered by the sudden hatred, the lack of understanding
they were all subjected to in emigration. Then why wasn't she

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sorry
for them? Why didn't she see them for the woeful and abandoned creatures they
were?

We know why. After she betrayed her
father, life opened up before her, a long road of betrayals, each one
attracting her as vice and victory. She
would not
keep ranks! She
refused
to keep ranks—always with the same people, with the same speeches! That was why
she was so stirred by her own injustice. But it was not an unpleasant feeling;
quite the contrary, Sabina had the impression she had just scored a victory and
someone invisible was applauding her for it.

Then suddenly the intoxication gave
way to anguish: The road had to end somewhere! Sooner or later she would have
to put an end to her betrayals! Sooner or later she would have to stop herself!

It was evening and she was hurrying
through the railway station. The train to Amsterdam was in. She found her
coach. Guided by a friendly guard, she opened the door to her compartment and
found Franz sitting on a couchette. He rose to greet her; she threw her arms
around him and smothered him with kisses.

She had an overwhelming desire to
tell him, like the most banal of women, Don't let me go, hold me tight, make me
your plaything, your slave, be strong! But they were words she could not say.

The only thing she said when he
released her from his embrace was, "You don't know how happy I am to be
with you." That was the most her reserved nature allowed her to express.

A Short
Dictionary of Misunderstood Words
(continued}

PARADES

People
in Italy or France have it easy. When their parents force them to go to church,
they get back at them by joining the Party (Communist, Maoist, Trotskyist,
etc.). Sabina, however, was first sent to church by her father, then forced by
him to attend meetings of the Communist Youth League. He was afraid of what
would happen if she stayed away.

When she marched
in the obligatory May Day parades, she could never keep in step, and the girl
behind her would shout at her and purposely tread on her heels. When the time
came to sing, she never knew the words of the songs and would merely open and
close her mouth. But the other girls would notice and report her. From her
youth on, she hated parades.

Franz had
studied in Paris, and because he was extraordinarily gifted his scholarly
career was assured from the time he was twenty. At twenty, he knew he would
live out his life within the confines of his university office, one or two
libraries, and two or three lecture halls. The idea of such a life made him
feel suffocated. He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a
house into the street.

And so as long
as he lived in Paris, he took part in every possible demonstration. How nice it
was to celebrate something, demand something, protest against something; to be
out in the open, to be with others. The parades filing down the Boulevard
Saint-Germain or from the Place de la Republique to the Bastille fascinated
him. He saw the marching, shouting crowd as the image of Europe and its
history. Europe was the Grand March. The march from revolution to revolution,
from struggle to struggle, ever onward.

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100

I might put it
another way: Franz felt his book life to be unreal. He yearned for real life,
for the touch of people walking side by side with him, for their shouts. It
never occurred to him that what he considered unreal (the work he did in the
solitude of the office or library) was in fact his real life, whereas the
parades he imagined to be reality were nothing but theater, dance, carnival—in
other words, a dream.

During her studies, Sabina lived in
a dormitory. On May Day all the students had to report early in the morning for
the parade. Student officials would comb the building to ensure that no one was
missing. Sabina hid in the lavatory. Not until long after the building was
empty would she go back to her room. It was quieter than anywhere she could
remember. The only sound was the parade music echoing in the distance. It was
as though she had found refuge inside a shell and the only sound she could hear
was the sea of an inimical world.

A year or two after emigrating, she
happened to be in Paris on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country.
A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. Fists
raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet
imperialism. She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself
unable to shout along with them. She lasted no more than a few minutes in the
parade.

When she told her French friends
about it, they were amazed. "You mean you don't want to fight the
occupation of your country?" She would have liked to tell them that behind
Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic,
pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching
by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew
she would never be able to make them understand. Embarrassed, she changed the
subject.