The unbearable lightness of being (19 page)

People usually
escape from their troubles into the future; they draw an imaginary line across
the path of time, a line beyond which their current troubles will cease to
exist. But Tereza saw no such line in her future. Only looking back could bring
her consolation. It was Sunday again. They got into the car and drove far
beyond the limits of Prague.

Tomas was at the wheel, Tereza next
to him, and Karenin in the back, occasionally leaning over to lick their ears.
After two hours, they came to a small town known for its spa where they had been
for several days six years earlier. They wanted to spend the night there.

They pulled into the square and got
out of the car. Nothing had changed. They stood facing the hotel they had
stayed at. The same old linden trees rose up before it. Off to the left ran an
old wooden colonnade culminating in a stream spouting its medicinal water into
a marble bowl. People were bending over it, the same small glasses in hand.

When Tomas looked back at the
hotel, he noticed that something had in fact changed. What had once been the
Grand now bore the name Baikal. He looked at the street sign on the corner of
the building: Moscow Square. Then they took a walk (Karenin tagged along on his
own, without a leash) through all the streets they had known, and examined all their
names: Stalingrad Street, Leningrad Street, Rostov Street, Novosibirsk Street,
Kiev Street, Odessa Street. There was a Tchaikovsky Sanatorium, a Tolstoy
Sanatorium, a Rimsky-Korsakov Sanatorium; there was a Hotel Suvorov, a Gorky
Cinema, and a Cafe Pushkin. All the names were taken from Russian geography,
from Russian history.

Tereza suddenly
recalled the first days of the invasion. Peo-

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ple in every city
and town had pulled down the street signs; sign posts had disappeared.
Overnight, the country had become nameless. For seven days, Russian troops
wandered the countryside, not knowing where they were. The officers searched
for newspaper offices, for television and radio stations to occupy, but could
not find them. Whenever they asked, they would get either a shrug of the
shoulders or false names and directions.

Hindsight now
made that anonymity seem quite dangerous to the country. The streets and
buildings could no longer return to their original names. As a result, a Czech
spa had suddenly metamorphosed into a miniature imaginary Russia, and the past
that Tereza had gone there to find had turned out to be confiscated. It would
be impossible for them to spend the night.

They
started back to the car in silence. She was thinking about how all things and
people seemed to go about in disguise. An old Czech town was covered with
Russian names. Czechs taking pictures of the invasion had unconsciously worked
for the secret police. The man who sent her to die had worn a mask of Tomas's
face over his own. The spy played the part of an engineer, and the engineer
tried to play the part of the man from Petrin. The emblem of the book in his
flat proved a sham designed to lead her astray.

Recalling the book she had held in her hand
there, she had

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a sudden flash of
insight that made her cheeks burn red. What had been the sequence of events?
The engineer announced he would bring in some coffee. She walked over to the
bookshelves and took down Sophocles'
Oedipus.
Then the engineer came
back. But without the coffee!

Again and again she returned to
that situation: How long was he away when he went for the coffee? Surely a
minute at the least. Maybe two or even three. And what had he been up to for so
long in that miniature anteroom? Or had he gone to the toilet? She tried to
remember hearing the door shut or the water flush. No, she was positive she'd
heard no water; she would have remembered that. And she was almost certain the
door hadn't closed. What
had
he been up to in that anteroom?

It was only too clear. If they
meant to trap her, they would need more than the engineer's testimony. They
would need incontrovertible evidence. In the course of his suspiciously long
absence, the engineer could only have been setting up a movie camera in the
anteroom. Or, more likely, he had let in someone with a still camera, who then
had photographed them from behind the curtain.

Only a few weeks earlier, she had
scoffed at Prochazka for failing to see that he lived in a concentration camp,
where privacy ceased to exist. But what about her? By getting out from under
her mother's roof, she thought in all innocence that she had once and for all
become master of her privacy. But no, her mother's roof stretched out over the
whole world and would never let her be. Tereza would never escape her.

As they walked
down the garden-lined steps leading back to the square, Tomas asked her,
"What's wrong?"

Before she could
respond, someone called out a greeting to Tomas.

He
was a man of about fifty with a weather-beaten face, a farm worker whom Tomas
had once operated on and who was sent to the spa once a year for treatment. He
invited Tomas and Tereza to have a glass of wine with him. Since the law
prohibited dogs from entering public places, Tereza took Karenin back to the
car while the men found a table at a nearby cafe. When she came up to them, the
man was saying, "We live a quiet life. Two years ago they even elected me
chairman of the collective." "Congratulations," said Tomas.

"You know
how it is. People are dying to move to the city. The big shots, they're happy
when somebody wants to stay put. They can't fire us from our jobs."

"It
would be ideal for us," said Tereza. "You'd be bored to tears, ma'am.
There's nothing to do there. Nothing at all."

Tereza looked into the farm worker's
weather-beaten face. She found him very kind. For the first time in ages, she
had found someone kind! An image of life in the country arose before her eyes:
a village with a belfry, fields, woods, a rabbit scampering along a furrow, a
hunter with a green cap. She had never lived in the country. Her image of it
came entirely from what she had heard. Or read. Or received unconsciously from
distant ancestors. And yet it lived within her, as plain and clear as the
daguerreotype of her great-grandmother in the family album.

"Does it give
you any trouble?" Tomas asked. The farmer pointed to the area at the back
of the neck where the brain is connected to the spinal cord. "I still have
pains here from time to time."

Without
getting out of his seat, Tomas palpated the spot

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and put his former
patient through a brief examination. "I no longer have the right to
prescribe drugs," he said after he had finished, "but tell the doctor
taking care of you now that you talked to me and I recommended you use this."
And tearing a sheet of paper from the pad in his wallet, he wrote out the name
of a medicine in large letters.

They started back to Prague.

All the way Tereza brooded about
the photograph showing her naked body embracing the engineer. She tried to console
herself with the thought that even if the picture did exist, Tomas would never
see it. The only value it had for them was as a blackmailing device. It would
lose that value the moment they sent it to Tomas.

But what if the
police decided somewhere along the way that they couldn't use her? Then the
picture would become a mere plaything in their hands, and nothing would prevent
them from slipping it in an envelope and sending it off to Tomas. Just for the
fun of it.

What would happen
if Tomas were to receive such a picture? Would he throw her out? Perhaps not.
Probably not. But the fragile edifice of their love would certainly come
tumbling down. For that edifice rested on the single column of her fidelity,
and loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they,
too, fade away.

And
now she had an image before her eyes: a rabbit scamp-

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ering along a
furrow, a hunter with a green cap, and the belfry of a village church rising up
over the woods.

She wanted to
tell Tomas that they should leave Prague. Leave the children who bury crows
alive in the ground, leave the police spies, leave the young women armed with
umbrellas. She wanted to tell him that they should move to the country. That it
was their only path to salvation.

She turned to
him. But Tomas did not respond. He kept his eyes on the road ahead. Having thus
failed to scale the fence of silence between them, she lost all courage to
speak. She felt as she had felt when walking down Petrin Hill. Her stomach was
in knots, and she thought she was going to be sick. She was afraid of Tomas. He
was too strong for her; she was too weak. He gave her commands that she could
not understand; she tried to carry them out, but did not know how.

She wanted to go
back to Petrin Hill and ask the man with the rifle to wind the blindfold around
her eyes and let her lean against the trunk of the chestnut tree. She wanted to
die.

Waking up, she realized she was at home alone.

She went outside
and set off in the direction of the embankment. She wanted to see the Vltava.
She wanted to stand on its banks and look long and hard into its waters,
because the sight of the flow was soothing and healing. The river flowed from
century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves
out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on.

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Leaning against the balustrade, she
peered into the water. She was on the outskirts of Prague, and the Vltava had
already flowed through the city, leaving behind the glory of the Castle and
churches; like an actress after a performance, it was tired and contemplative;
it flowed on between its dirty banks, bounded by walls and fences that
themselves bounded factories and abandoned playgrounds.

She was staring at the water—it
seemed sadder and darker here—when suddenly she spied a strange object in the
middle of the river, something red—yes, it was a bench. A wooden bench on iron
legs, the kind Prague's parks abound in. It was floating down the Vltava.
Followed by another. And another and another, and only then did Tereza realize
that all the park benches of Prague were floating downstream, away from the
city, many, many benches, more and more, drifting by like the autumn leaves
that the water carries off from the woods—red, yellow, blue.

She turned and looked behind her as
if to ask the passersby what it meant. Why are Prague's park benches floating
downstream? But everyone passed her by, indifferent, for little did they care
that a river flowed from century to century through their ephemeral city.

Again she looked down at the river.
She was grief-stricken. She understood that what she saw was a farewell.

When most of the benches had
vanished from sight, a few latecomers appeared: one more yellow one, and then
another, blue, the last.

When
Tereza unexpectedly came to visit Tomas in Prague, he made love to her, as I
pointed out in Part One, that very day, or rather, that very hour, but suddenly
thereafter she became feverish. As she lay in his bed and he stood over her,
he had the irrepressible feeling that she was a child who had been put in a
bulrush basket and sent downstream to him.

The image of the abandoned child
had consequently become dear to him, and he often reflected on the ancient
myths in which it occurred. It was apparently with this in mind that he picked
up a translation of Sophocles'
Oedipus.

The story of Oedipus is well known:
Abandoned as an infant, he was taken to King Polybus, who raised him. One day,
when he had grown into a youth, he came upon a dignitary riding along a
mountain path. A quarrel arose, and Oedipus killed the dignitary. Later he
became the husband of Queen Jocasta and ruler of Thebes. Little did he know
that the man he had killed in the mountains was his father and the woman with

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whom
he slept his mother. In the meantime, fate visited a plague on his subjects and
tortured them with great pestilences. When Oedipus realized that he himself was
the cause of their suffering, he put out his own eyes and wandered blind away
from Thebes.

Anyone
who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the
work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made
not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road
to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to
execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the
enthusiasts were therefore murderers.

Then
everyone took to shouting at the Communists: You're the ones responsible for
our country's misfortunes (it had grown poor and desolate), for its loss of
independence (it had fallen into the hands of the Russians), for its judicial
murders!

And the accused responded: We didn't know! We were deceived! We were true
believers! Deep in our hearts we are innocent!

In
the end, the dispute narrowed down to a single question: Did they really not
know or were they merely making believe?

Tomas followed the dispute closely (as did his ten million fellow Czechs)
and was of the opinion that while there had definitely been Communists who were
not completely unaware

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of the atrocities
(they could not have been ignorant of the horrors that had been perpetrated and
were still being perpetrated in postrevolutionary Russia), it was probable
that the majority of the Communists had not in fact known of them.

But, he said to himself, whether
they knew or didn't know is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man
is innocent because he didn't know. Is a fool on the throne relieved of all
responsibility merely because he is a fool?

Let us concede that a Czech public
prosecutor in the early fifties who called for the death of an innocent man was
deceived by the Russian secret police and the government of his own country.
But now that we all know the accusations to have been absurd and the executed
to have been innocent, how can that selfsame public prosecutor defend his
purity of heart by beating himself on the chest and proclaiming, My conscience
is clear! I didn't know! I was a believer! Isn't his "I didn't know! I was
a believer!" at the very root of his irreparable guilt?

It was in this connection that
Tomas recalled the tale of Oedipus: Oedipus did not know he was sleeping with
his own mother, yet when he realized what had happened, he did not feel
innocent. Unable to stand the sight of the misfortunes he had wrought by
"not knowing," he put out his eyes and wandered blind away from
Thebes.

When Tomas heard Communists
shouting in defense of their inner purity, he said to himself, As a result of
your "not knowing," this country has lost its freedom, lost it for
centuries, perhaps, and you shout that you feel no guilt? How can you stand the
sight of what you've done? How is it you aren't horrified? Have you no eyes to
see? If you had eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from
Thebes!

The analogy so pleased him that he
often used it in conversation with friends, and his formulation grew
increasingly precise and elegant.