The unbearable lightness of being (14 page)

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Franz sobbed as he lay on top of her; he was certain he understood:
Sabina had been quiet all through dinner and said not a word about his
decision, but this was her answer. She had made a clear show of her joy, her
passion, her consent, her desire to live with him forever.

He felt like a
rider galloping off into a magnificent void, a void of no wife, no daughter, no
household, the magnificent void swept clean by Hercules' broom, a magnificent
void he would fill with his love.

Each was riding
the other like a horse, and both were galloping off into the distance of their
desires, drunk on the betrayals that freed them. Franz was riding Sabina and
had betrayed his wife; Sabina was riding Franz and had betrayed Franz.

For
twenty years he had seen his mother—a poor, weak creature who needed his
protection—in his wife. This image was deeply rooted in him, and he could not
rid himself of it in two dys. On the way home his conscience began to bother
him: he was afraid that Marie-Claude had fallen apart after he left and that he
would find her terribly sick at heart. Stealthily he unlocked the door and
went into his room. He stood there for a moment and listened: Yes, she was at
home. After a moment's hesitation he went into her room, ready to greet her as
usual.

"What?"
she exclaimed, raising her eyebrows in mock surprise. "You? Here?"

"Where else
can I go?" he wanted to say (genuinely surprised), but said nothing.

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"Let's set
the record straight, shall we? I have nothing against your moving in with her
at once."

When he made his confession on the
day he left for Rome, he had no precise plan of action. He expected to come
home and talk it all out in a friendly atmosphere so as not to harm
Marie-Claude any more than necessary. It never occurred to him that she would
calmly and coolly urge him to leave.

Even though it facilitated things,
he could not help feeling disappointed. He had been afraid of wounding her all
his life and voluntarily stuck to a stultifying discipline of monogamy, and
now, after twenty years, he suddenly learned that it had all been superfluous
and he had given up scores of women because of a misunderstanding!

That afternoon, he gave his
lecture, then went straight to Sabina's from the university. He had decided to
ask her whether he could spend the night. He rang the doorbell, but no one
answered. He went and sat at the cafe across the street and stared long and
hard at the entrance to her building.

Evening came, and he did not know
where to turn. All his life he had shared his bed with Marie-Claude. If he went
home to Marie-Claude, where should he sleep? He could, of course, make up a bed
on the sofa in the next room. But wouldn't that be merely an eccentric gesture?
Wouldn't it look like a sign of ill will? He wanted to remain friends with her,
after all! Yet getting into bed with her was out of the question. He could just
hear her asking him ironically why he didn't prefer Sabina's bed. He took a
room in a hotel.

The next day, he rang Sabina's
doorbell morning, noon, and night.

The day after, he paid a visit to
the concierge, who had no information and referred him to the owner of the
flat. He phoned her and found out that Sabina had given notice two days before.

During the next
few days, he returned at regular intervals,

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still
hoping to find her in, but one day he found the door open and three men in
overalls loading the furniture and paintings into a van parked outside.

He
asked them where they were taking the furniture.

They replied
that they were under strict instructions not to reveal the address.

He was about to
offer them a few francs for the secret address when suddenly he felt he lacked
the strength to do it. His grief had broken him utterly. He understood nothing,
had no idea what had happened; all he knew was that he had been waiting for it
to happen ever since he met Sabina. What must be must be. Franz did not oppose
it.

He found a small
flat for himself in the old part of town. When he knew his wife and daughter
were away, he went back to his former home to fetch his clothes and most
essential books. He was careful to remove nothing that Marie-Claude might miss.

One day, he saw
her through the window of a cafe. She was sitting with two women, and her face,
long riddled with wrinkles from her unbridled gift for grimaces, was in a
state of animation. The women were listening closely and laughing continually.
Franz could not get over the feeling that she was telling them about him.
Surely she knew that Sabina had disappeared from Geneva at the very time Franz
decided to live with her. What a funny story it would make! He was not the
least bit surprised at becoming a butt to his wife's friends.

When he got home
to his new flat, where every hour he could hear the bells of Saint-Pierre, he
found that the department store had delivered his new desk. He promptly forgot
about Marie-Claude and her friends. He even forgot about Sabina for the time
being. He sat down at the desk. He was glad to have picked it out himself. For
twenty years he had lived among furniture not of his own choosing. Marie-Claude
had taken care of everything. At last he had ceased to be a little boy;

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for
the first time in his life he was on his own. The next day he hired a carpenter
to make a bookcase for him. He spent several days designing it and deciding
where it should stand.

And at some point, he realized to
his great surprise that he was not particularly unhappy. Sabina's physical
presence was much less important than he had suspected. What was important was
the golden footprint, the magic footprint she had left on his life and no one
could ever remove. Just before disappearing from his horizon, she had slipped
him Hercules' broom, and he had used it to sweep everything he despised out of
his life. A sudden happiness, a feeling of bliss, the joy that came of freedom
and a new life—these were the gifts she had left him.

Actually, he had always preferred
the unreal to the real. Just as he felt better at demonstrations (which, as I
have pointed out, are all playacting and dreams) than in a lecture hall full of
students, so he was happier with Sabina the invisible goddess than the Sabina
who had accompanied him throughout the world and whose love he constantly
feared losing. By giving him the unexpected freedom of a man living on his own,
she provided him with a halo of seductiveness. He became very attractive to
women, and one of his students fell in love with him.

And so within an amazingly short
period the backdrop of his life had changed completely. Until recently he had
lived in a large upper-middle-class flat with a servant, a daughter, and a
wife; now he lived in a tiny flat in the old part of town, where almost every
night he was joined by his young student-mistress. He did not need to squire
her through the world from hotel to hotel; he could make love to her in his own
flat, in his own bed, with his own books and ashtray on the bedside table!

She was a modest girl and not
particularly pretty, but she admired Franz in the way Franz had only recently
admired Sabina. He did not find it unpleasant. And if he did perhaps feel that
trading Sabina for a student with glasses was something

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for
a comedown, his innate goodness saw to it that he cared for her and lavished on
her the paternal love that had never had a true outlet before, given that
Marie-Anne had always behaved less like his daughter than like a copy of
Marie-Claude.

One day, he paid
a visit to his wife.
He told her he would like to remarry.

Marie-Claude
shook her head.

"But a
divorce won't make any difference to you! You won't lose a thing! I'll give you
all the property!"

"I
don't care about property," she said.

"Then
what do you care about?"

"Love,"
she said with a smile.

"Love?"
Franz asked in amazement.

"Love is a
battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on
fighting. To the end."

"Love is a
battle?" said Franz. "Well, I don't feel at all like fighting."
And he left.

After
four years in Geneva, Sabina settled in Paris, but she could not escape her
melancholy. If someone had asked her what had come over her, she would have
been hard pressed to find words for it.

When we want to
give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors
of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either
bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or

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lose.
And Sabina—what
had
come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because
she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge
on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell
to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

Until that time, her betrayals had
filled her with excitement and joy, because they opened up new paths to new
adventures of betrayal. But what if the paths came to an end? One could betray
one's parents, husband, country, love, but when parents husband, country, and
love were gone—what was left to betray?

Sabina felt emptiness all around
her. What if that emptiness was the goal of all her betrayals?

Naturally she had not realized it
until now. How could she have? The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl
who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who
hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every
move its meaning is always totally unknown to us. Sabina was unaware of the
goal that lay behind her longing to betray. The unbearable lightness of being—was
that the goal? Her departure from Geneva brought her considerably closer to
it.

Three years after moving to Paris,
she received a letter from Prague. It was from Tomas's son. Somehow or other he
had found out about her and got hold of her address, and now he was writing to
her as his father's "closest friend." He informed her of the deaths
of Tomas and Tereza. For the past few years they had been living in a village,
where Tomas was employed as a driver at a collective farm. From time to time
they would drive over to the next town and spend the night in a cheap hotel.
The road there wound through some hills, and their pickup had crashed and
hurtled down a steep incline. Their bodies had been crushed to a pulp. The
police deter-

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mined later that the brakes were in
disastrous condition.

She could not
get over the news. The last link to her past had been broken.

According to her
old habit, she decided to calm herself by taking a walk in a cemetery. The
Montparnasse Cemetery was the closest. It was all tiny houses, miniature
chapels over each grave. Sabina could not understand why the dead would want to
have imitation palaces built over them. The cemetery was vanity transmogrified
into stone. Instead of growing more sensible in death, the inhabitants of the
cemetery were sillier than they had been in life. Their monuments were meant to
display how important they were. There were no fathers, brothers, sons, or
grandmothers buried there, only public figures, the bearers of titles, degrees,
and honors; even the postal clerk celebrated his chosen profession, his social
significance—his dignity.

Walking along a
row of graves, she noticed people gathering for a burial. The funeral director
had an armful of flowers and was giving one to each mourner. He handed one to
Sabina as well. She joined the group. They made a detour past many monuments
before they came to the grave, free for the moment of its heavy gravestone.
She leaned over the hole. It was extremely deep. She dropped in the flower. It
sailed down to the coffin in graceful somersaults. In Bohemia the graves were
not so deep. In Paris the graves were deeper, just as the buildings were taller.
Her eye fell on the stone, which lay next to the grave. It chilled her, and she
hurried home.

She thought
about that stone all day. Why had it horrified her so?

She answered
herself: When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out.

But the dead
can't get out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're covered with
soil or stones?

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The difference is
that if a grave is covered with a stone it means we don't want the deceased to
come back. The heavy stone tells the deceased, "Stay where you are!"

That made Sabina
think about her father's grave. There was soil above his grave with flowers
growing out of it and a maple tree reaching down to it, and the roots and
flowers offered his corpse a path out of the grave. If her father had been
covered with a stone, she would never have been able to communicate with him
after he died, and hear his voice in the trees pardoning her.

What was it like in the cemetery where Tereza and Tomas were buried?

Once more she
started thinking about them. From time to time they would drive over to the
next town and spend the night in a cheap hotel. That passage in the letter had
caught her eye. It meant they were happy. And again she pictured Tomas as if he
were one of her paintings: Don Juan in the foreground, a specious stage-set by
a naive painter, and through a crack in the set—Tristan. He died as Tristan,
not as Don Juan. Sabina's parents had died in the same week. Tomas and Tereza
in the same second. Suddenly she missed Franz terribly.

When she told
him about her cemetery walks, he gave a shiver of disgust and called cemeteries
bone and stone dumps. A gulf of misunderstanding had immediately opened between
them. Not until that day at the Montparnasse Cemetery did she see what he
meant. She was sorry to have been so impatient with him. Perhaps if they had
stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the
words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come
together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to
intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.