The unbearable lightness of being (16 page)

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press
how she felt about life with her family. A concentration camp is a world in
which people live crammed together constantly, night and day. Brutality and
violence are merely secondary (and not in the least indispensable)
characteristics. A concentration camp is the complete obliteration of privacy.
Prochazka, who was not allowed to chat with a friend over a bottle of wine in
the shelter of privacy, lived (unknown to him—a fatal error on his part!) in a
concentration camp. Tereza lived in the concentration camp when she lived with
her mother. Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was
nothing exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which
we are born and from which we can escape only with the greatest of efforts.

5

The
women sitting on the three terraced benches were packed in so tightly that they
could not help touching. Sweating away next to Tereza was a woman of about
thirty with a very pretty face. She had two unbelievably large, pendulous
breasts hanging from her shoulders, bouncing at the slightest movement. When
the woman got up, Tereza saw that her behind was also like two enormous sacks
and that it had nothing in common with her fine face.

Perhaps the
woman stood frequently in front of the mirror observing her body, trying to
peer through it into her soul, as Tereza had done since childhood. Surely she,
too, had harbored the blissful hope of using her body as a poster for her

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soul.
But what a monstrous soul it would have to be if it reflected that body, that
rack for four pouches.

Tereza got up and rinsed herself off under the shower. Then she went out
into the open. It was still drizzling. Standing just above the Vltava on a
slatted deck, and sheltered from the eyes of the city by a few square feet of
tall wooden panel, she looked down to see the head of the woman she had just
been thinking about. It was bobbing on the surface of the rushing river.

The woman smiled up at her. She had a delicate nose, large brown eyes,
and a childish glance.

As she climbed the ladder, her tender features gave way to two sets of
quivering pouches spraying tiny drops of cold water right and left.

Tereza
went in to get dressed and stood in front of the large mirror.

No, there was
nothing monstrous about her body. She had no pouches hanging from her
shoulders; in fact, her breasts were quite small. Her mother used to ridicule
her for having such small breasts, and she had had a complex about them until
Tomas came along. But reconciled to their size as she was, she was still
mortified by the very large, very dark circles around her nipples. Had she been
able to design her own body, she would have chosen inconspicuous nipples, the
kind that scarcely protrude from the arch of the breast and all but blend in
color with

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the rest of the
skin. She thought of her areolae as big crimson targets painted by a
primitivist of pornography for the poor.

Looking at
herself, she wondered what she would be like if her nose grew a millimeter a
day. How long would it take before her face began to look like someone else's?

And if various
parts of her body began to grow and shrink and Tereza no longer looked like
herself, would she still be herself, would she still be Tereza?

Of course. Even
if Tereza were completely unlike Tereza, her soul inside her would be the same
and look on in amazement at what was happening to her body.

Then what was
the relationship between Tereza and her body? Had her body the right to call
itself Tereza? And if not, then what did the name refer to? Merely something
incorporeal, intangible?

(These are
questions that had been going through Tereza's head since she was a child.
Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can
formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the
questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot
be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the
limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.)

Tereza stood
bewitched before the mirror, staring at her body as if it were alien to her,
alien and yet assigned to her and no one else. She felt disgusted by it. It
lacked the power to become the only body in Tomas's life. It had disappointed
and deceived her. All that night she had had to inhale the aroma of another
woman's groin from his hair!

Suddenly she
longed to dismiss her body as one dismisses a servant: to stay on with Tomas
only as a soul and send her body into the world to behave as other female
bodies behave with male bodies. If her body had failed to become the only body
for

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Tomas, and thereby lost her the biggest
battle of her life, it could just as well go off on its own!

She
went home and forced herself to eat a stand-up lunch in the kitchen. At half
past three, she put Karenin on his leash and walked (walking again) to the
outskirts of town where her hotel was. When they fired Tereza from her job at
the magazine, she found work behind the bar of a hotel. It happened several
months after she came back from Zurich: they could not forgive her, in the
end, for the week she spent photographing Russian tanks. She got the job
through friends, other people who had taken refuge there when thrown out of
work by the Russians: a former professor of theology in the accounting office,
an ambassador (who had protested against the invasion on foreign television) at
the reception desk.

She was worried about her legs
again. While working as a waitress in the small-town restaurant, she had been
horrified at the sight of the older waitresses' varicose veins, a professional
hazard that came of a life of walking, running, and standing with heavy loads.
But the new job was less demanding: although she began each shift by dragging
out heavy cases of beer and mineral water, all she had to do then was stand
behind the bar, serve the customers their drinks, and wash out the glasses in
the small sink on her side of the bar. And through it all she had Karenin lying
docilely at her feet.

It was long past
midnight before she had finished her ac-

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counts
and delivered the cash receipts to the hotel director. She then went to say
good-bye to the ambassador, who had night duty. The door behind the reception
desk led to a tiny room with a narrow cot where he could take a nap. The wall
above the cot was covered with framed photographs of himself and various people
smiling at the camera or shaking his hand or sitting next to him at a table and
signing something or other. Some of them were autographed. In the place of
honor hung a picture showing, side by side with his own face, the smiling face
of John F. Kennedy.

When Tereza entered the room that
night, she found him talking not to Kennedy but to a man of about sixty whom
she had never seen before and who fell silent as soon as he saw her.

"It's all right," said
the ambassador. "She's a friend. You can speak freely in front of
her." Then he turned to Tereza. "His son got five years today."

During the first days of the
invasion, she learned, the man's son and some friends had stood watch over the
entrance to a building housing the Russian army special staff. Since any Czechs
they saw coming or going were clearly agents in the service of the Russians, he
and his friends trailed them, traced the number plates of their cars, and
passed on the information to the pro-Dubcek clandestine radio and television
broadcasters, who then warned the public. In the process the boy and his
friends had given one of the traitors a thorough going over.

The boy's father said, "This
photograph was the only corpus delicti. He denied it all until they showed it
to him."

He took a clipping out of his
wallet. "It came out in the
Times
in the autumn of 1968."

It was a picture of a young man
grabbing another man by the throat and a crowd looking on in the background.
"Collaborator Punished" read the caption.

Tereza let out her breath. No, it
wasn't one of hers.

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Walking home with
Karenin through nocturnal Prague, she thought of the days she had spent
photographing tanks. How naive they had been, thinking they were risking their
lives for their country when in fact they were helping the Russian police.

She got home at
half past one. Tomas was asleep. His hair gave off the aroma of a woman's
groin.

What
is flirtation? One might say that it is behavior leading another to believe
that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from
becoming a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual
intercourse without a guarantee.

When Tereza stood behind the bar,
the men whose drinks she poured flirted with her. Was she annoyed by the
unending ebb and flow of flattery, double entendres, off-color stories,
propositions, smiles, and glances? Not in the least. She had an irresistible
desire to expose her body (that alien body she wanted to expel into the big
wide world) to the undertow.

Tomas kept trying to convince her
that love and lovemaking were two different things. She refused to understand.
Now she was surrounded by men she did not care for in the slightest. What would
making love with them be like? She yearned to try it, if only in the form of
that no-guarantee promise called flirting.

Let there be no
mistake: Tereza did not wish to take re-

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venge
on Tomas; she merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she
had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything
into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of
physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for
someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.

If for some women flirting is
second nature, insignificant, routine, for Tereza it had developed into an
important field of research with the goal of teaching her who she was and what
she was capable of. But by making it important and serious, she deprived it of
its lightness, and it became forced, labored, overdone. She disturbed the
balance between promise and lack of guarantee (which, when maintained, is a sign
of flirtistic virtuosity); she promised too ardently, and without making it
clear that the promise involved no guarantee on her part. Which is another way
of saying that she gave everyone the impression of being there for the taking.
But when men responded by asking for what they felt they had been promised,
they met with strong resistance, and their only explanation for it was that she
was deceitful and malicious.

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"So
you can see through wood!" she fired back. "I've watched you in the
street," he responded, but by then she had turned away and was serving
another customer. When she had finished, he ordered a cognac. She shook her
head. "But I'm eighteen!" he objected. "May I see your
identification card?" Tereza said. "You may not," the boy
answered. "Then how about a soft drink?" said Tereza. Without a word,
the boy stood up from the bar stool and left. He was back about a half hour
later. With exaggerated gestures, he took a seat at the bar. There was enough
alcohol on his breath to cover a ten-foot radius. "Give me that soft
drink," he commanded.

"Why, you're
drunk!" said Tereza. The boy pointed to a sign hanging on the wall behind
Tereza's back: Sale of Alcoholic Beverages to Minors Is Strictly Prohibited.
"You are prohibited from serving me alcohol," he said, sweeping his
arm from the sign to Tereza, "but I am not prohibited from being
drunk."

"Where did you
get so drunk?" Tereza asked. "In the bar across the street," he
said, laughing, and asked again for a soft drink.

"Well, why didn't
you stay there?" "Because I wanted to look at you," he said.
"I love you!" His face contorted oddly as he said it, and Tereza had
trouble deciding whether he was sneering, making advances, or joking. Or was he
simply so drunk that he had no idea what he was saying?

She put the soft
drink down in front of him and went back to her other customers. The "I
love you!" seemed to have exhausted the boy's resources. He emptied his
glass in silence, left money on the counter, and slipped out before Tereza had
time to look up again.

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A moment after he
left, a short, bald-headed man, who was on his third vodka, said, "You
ought to know that serving young people alcohol is against the law."

"I didn't
serve him alcohol! That was a soft drink!"

"I saw what
you slipped into it!"

"What are
you talking about?"

"Give me another vodka,"
said the bald man, and added, "I've had my eye on you for some time
now."

"Then why not be grateful for
the view of a beautiful woman and keep your mouth shut?" interjected a
tall man who had stepped up to the bar in time to observe the entire scene.

"You stay out of this!"
shouted the bald man. "What business is it of yours?"

"And what business is it of
yours, if I may ask?" the tall man retorted.

Tereza served the bald man his vodka.
He downed it at one gulp, paid, and departed.

"Thank
you," said Tereza to the tall man.

"Don't mention it," said
the tall man, and went his way, too.

A
few days later, he turned up at the bar again. When she saw him, she smiled at
him like a friend. "Thanks again. That bald fellow comes in all the time.
He's terribly unpleasant."

"Forget
him."

"What makes
him want to hurt me?"