The unbearable lightness of being (15 page)

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Yes, it was too
late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because
were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a
woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is
unbearable.

All Franz's friends
knew about Marie-Claude; they all knew about the girl with the oversized
glasses. But no one knew about Sabina. Franz was wrong when he thought his wife
had told her friends about her. Sabina was a beautiful woman, and Marie-Claude
did not want people going about comparing their faces.

Because Franz
was so afraid of being found out, he had never asked for any of Sabina's
paintings or drawings or even a snapshot of her. As a result, she disappeared
from his life without a trace. There was not a scrap of tangible evidence to
show that he had spent the most wonderful year of his life with her.

Which
only increased his desire to remain faithful to her.

Sometimes when
they were alone in his flat together, the girl would lift her eyes from a book,
throw him an inquiring glance, and say, "What are you thinking
about?"

Sitting in his
armchair, staring up at the ceiling, Franz always found some plausible
response, but in fact he was thinking of Sabina.

Whenever he
published an article in a scholarly journal, the girl was the first to read it
and discuss it with him. But all he

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could
think of was what Sabina would have said about it. Everything he did, he did
for Sabina, the way Sabina would have liked to see it done.

It was a perfectly innocent form of
infidelity and one eminently suited to Franz, who would never have done his
bespectacled student-mistress any harm. He nourished the cult of Sabina more
as religion than as love.

Indeed, according to the theology
of that religion it was Sabina who had sent him the girl. Between his earthly
love and his unearthly love, therefore, there was perfect peace. And if
unearthly love must (for theological reasons) contain a strong dose of the
inexplicable and incomprehensible (we have only to recall the dictionary of
misunderstood words and the long lexicon of misunderstandings!), his earthly
love rested on true understanding.

The
student-mistress was much younger than Sabina, and the musical composition of
her life had scarcely been outlined; she was grateful to Franz for the motifs
he gave her to insert. Franz's Grand March was now her creed as well. Music was
now her Dionysian intoxication. They often went dancing together. They lived
in truth, and nothing they did was secret. They sought out the company of
friends, colleagues, students, and strangers, and enjoyed sitting, drinking,
and chatting with them. They took frequent excursions to the Alps. Franz would
bend over, the girl hopped onto his back, and off he ran through the meadows,
declaiming at the top of his voice a long German poem his mother had taught him
as a child. The girl laughed with glee, admiring his legs, shoulders, and lungs
as she clasped his neck.

The only thing she could not quite
fathom was the curious sympathy he had for the countries occupied by the
Russian empire. On the anniversary of the invasion, they attended a memorial
meeting organized by a Czech group in Geneva.

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The
room was nearly empty. The speaker had artificially waved gray hair. He read
out a long speech that bored even the few enthusiasts who had come to hear it.
His French was grammatically correct but heavily accented. From time to time,
to stress a point, he would raise his index finger, as if threatening the

audience.

The girl with
the glasses could barely suppress her yawns, while Franz smiled blissfully at
her side. The longer he looked at the pleasing gray-haired man with the
admirable index finger, the more he saw him as a secret messenger, an angelic
intermediary between him and his goddess. He closed his eyes and dreamed. He
closed his eyes as he had closed them on Sabina's body in fifteen European
hotels and one in America.

When
Tereza came home, it was almost half past one in the morning. She went into the
bathroom, put on her pajamas, and lay down next to Tomas. He was asleep. She
leaned over his face and, kissing it, detected a curious aroma coming from his
hair. She took another whiff and yet another. She sniffed him up and down like
a dog before realizing what it was: the aroma of a woman's sex organs.

At six the alarm
went off. Karenin's great moment had arrived. He always woke up much earlier
than they did, but did not dare to disturb them. He would wait impatiently for
the alarm, because it gave him the right to jump up on their bed, trample their
bodies, and butt them with his muzzle. For a time they had tried to curb him
and pushed him off the bed, but he was more headstrong than they were and ended
by defending his rights. Lately, Tereza realized, she positively enjoyed being
welcomed into the day by Karenin. Waking up was sheer delight for him: he
always showed a naive and simple amazement

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at the discovery
that he was back on earth; he was sincerely pleased. She, on the other hand,
awoke with great reluctance with a desire to stave off the day by keeping her
eyes closed.

Now he was
standing in the entrance hall, gazing up at the hat stand, where his leash and
collar hung ready. She slipped his head through the collar, and off they went
together to do the shopping. She needed to pick up some milk, butter, and bread
and, as usual, his morning roll. Later, he trotted back alongside her, roll in
mouth, looking proudly from side to side, gratified by the attention he
attracted from the passersby.

Once home, he
would stretch out with his roll on the threshold of the bedroom and wait for
Tomas to take notice of him, creep up to him, snarl at him, and make believe he
was trying to snatch his roll away from him. That was how it went every day.
Not until they had chased each other through the flat for at least five minutes
would Karenin scramble under a table and gobble up the roll.

This time,
however, he waited in vain for his morning ritual. Tomas had a small transistor
radio on the table in front of him and was listening to it intently.

It
was a program about the Czech emigration, a montage of private conversations
recorded with the latest bugging devices by a Czech spy who had infiltrated the
emigre community and then returned in great glory to Prague. It was
insignificant prattle dotted with some harsh words about the occupation
regime,

but here and there
one emigre would call another an imbecile or a fraud. These trivial remarks
were the point of the broadcast. They were meant to prove not merely that
emigres had bad things to say about the Soviet Union (which neither surprised
nor upset anyone in the country), but that they call one another names and make
free use of dirty words. People use filthy language all day long, but when they
turn on the radio and hear a well-known personality, someone they respect, saying
"fuck" in every sentence, they feel somehow let down.

"It all
started with Prochazka," said Tomas.

Jan Prochazka, a
forty-year-old Czech novelist with the strength and vitality of an ox, began
criticizing public affairs vociferously even before 1968. He then became one of
the best-loved figures of the Prague Spring, that dizzying liberalization of Communism
which ended with the Russian invasion. Shortly after the invasion the press
initiated a smear campaign against him, but the more they smeared, the more
people liked him. Then (in 1970, to be exact) the Czech radio broadcast a
series of private talks between Prochazka and a professor friend of his which
had taken place two years before (that is, in the spring of 1968). For a long
time, neither of them had any idea that the professor's flat was bugged and
their every step dogged. Prochazka loved to regale his friends with hyperbole
and excess. Now his excesses had become a weekly radio series. The secret
police, who produced and directed the show, took pains to emphasize the
sequences in which Prochazka made fun of his friends—Dubcek, for instance. People
slander their friends at the drop of a hat, but they were more shocked by the
much-loved Prochazka than by the much-hated secret police.

Tomas turned off
the radio and said, "Every country has its secret police. But a secret
police that broadcasts its tapes over the radio—there's something that could
happen only in Prague, something absolutely without precedent!"

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"I know a precedent,"
said Tereza. "When I was fourteen I kept a secret diary. I was terrified
that someone might read it so I kept it hidden in the attic. Mother sniffed it
out. One day at dinner, while we were all hunched over our soup, she took it
out of her pocket and said, 'Listen carefully now, everybody!' And after every
sentence, she burst out laughing. They all laughed so hard they couldn't
eat."

He
always tried to get her to stay in bed and let him have breakfast alone. She
never gave in. Tomas was at work from seven to four, Tereza from four to
midnight. If she were to miss breakfast with him, the only time they could
actually talk together was on Sundays. That was why she got up when he did and
then went back to bed.

This morning,
however, she was afraid of going back to sleep, because at ten she was due at
the sauna on Zofin Island. The sauna, though coveted by the many, could
accommodate only the few, and the only way to get in was by pull. Luckily, the
cashier was the wife of a professor removed from the university after 1968 and
the professor a friend of a former patient of Tomas's. Tomas told the patient,
the patient told the professor, the professor told his wife, and Tereza had a
ticket waiting for her once a week.

She walked there.
She detested the trams constantly packed with people pushing into one another's
hate-filled embraces, stepping on one another's feet, tearing off one another's
coat buttons, and shouting insults.

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It was
drizzling. As people rushed along, they began opening umbrellas over their
heads, and all at once the streets were crowded, too. Arched umbrella roofs
collided with one another. The men were courteous, and when passing Tereza they
held their umbrellas high over their heads and gave her room to go by. But the
women would not yield; each looked straight ahead, waiting for the other woman
to acknowledge her inferiority and step aside. The meeting of the umbrellas was
a test of strength. At first Tereza gave way, but when she realized her
courtesy was not being reciprocated, she started clutching her umbrella like
the other women and ramming it forcefully against the oncoming umbrellas. No one
ever said "Sorry." For the most part no one said anything, though
once or twice she did hear a "Fat cow!" or "Fuck you!"

The women thus
armed with umbrellas were both young and old, but the younger among them proved
the more steeled warriors. Tereza recalled the days of the invasion and the
girls in miniskirts carrying flags on long staffs. Theirs was a sexual
vengeance: the Russian soldiers had been kept in enforced celibacy for several
long years and must have felt they had landed on a planet invented by a science
fiction writer, a planet of stunning women who paraded their scorn on beautiful
long legs the likes of which had not been seen in Russia for the past five or
six centuries.

She had taken
many pictures of those young women against a backdrop of tanks. How she had
admired them! And now these same women were bumping into her, meanly and
spitefully. Instead of flags, they held umbrellas, but they held them with the
same pride. They were ready to fight as obstinately against a foreign army as
against an umbrella that refused to move out of their way.

She
came out into Old Town Square—the stern spires of Tyn Church, the irregular
rectangle of Gothic and baroque houses. Old Town Hall, which dated from the
fourteenth century and had once stretched over a whole side of the square, was
in ruins and had been so for twenty-seven years. Warsaw, Dresden, Berlin,
Cologne, Budapest—all were horribly scarred in the last war. But their
inhabitants had built them up again and painstakingly restored the old historical
sections. The people of Prague had an inferiority complex with respect to these
other cities. Old Town Hall was the only monument of note destroyed in the war,
and they decided to leave it in ruins so that no Pole or German could accuse
them of having suffered less than their share. In front of the glorious ruins,
a reminder for now and eternity of the evils perpetrated by war, stood a
steel-bar reviewing stand for some demonstration or other that the Communist
Party had herded the people of Prague to the day before or would be herding
them to the day after.

Gazing at the remains of Old Town
Hall, Tereza was suddenly reminded of her mother: that perverse need one has
to expose one's ruins, one's ugliness, to parade one's misery, to uncover the
stump of one's amputated arm and force the whole world to look at it.
Everything had begun reminding her of her mother lately. Her mother's world,
which she had fled ten years before, seemed to be coming back to her,
surrounding her on all sides. That was why she told Tomas that morning about
how her mother had read her secret diary at the dinner table to an
accompaniment of guffaws. When a private talk over a bottle of wine is
broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a
concentration camp?

Almost from
childhood, Tereza had used the term to ex-

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