The unbearable lightness of being (20 page)

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Like all intellectuals at the time,
he read a weekly newspaper published in three hundred thousand copies by the
Union of Czech Writers. It was a paper that had achieved considerable autonomy
within the regime and dealt with issues forbidden to others. Consequently, it
was the writers' paper that raised the issue of who bore the burden of guilt
for the judicial murders resulting from the political trials that marked the
early years of Communist power.

Even
the writers' paper merely repeated the same question: Did they know or did they
not? Because Tomas found this question second-rate, he sat down one day, wrote
down his reflections on Oedipus, and sent them to the weekly. A month later he
received an answer: an invitation to the editorial offices. The editor who
greeted him was short but as straight as a ruler. He suggested that Tomas
change the word order in one of the sentences. And soon the text made its
appearance—on the next to the last page, in the Letters to the Editor section.

Tomas was far from overjoyed. They
had considered it necessary to ask him to the editorial offices to approve a
change in word order, but then, without asking him, shortened his text by so
much that it was reduced to its basic thesis (making it too schematic and
aggressive). He didn't like it anymore.

All this happened in the spring of
1968. Alexander Dubcek was in power, along with those Communists who felt
guilty and were willing to do something about their guilt. But the other
Communists, the ones who kept shouting how innocent they were, were afraid that
the enraged nation would bring them to justice. They complained daily to the
Russian ambassador, trying to drum up support. When Tomas's letter appeared,
they shouted: See what things have come to! Now they're telling us publicly to
put our eyes out!

Two or three
months later the Russians decided that free

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speech was inadmissible in their
gubernia,
and in a
single night they occupied Tomas's country with their army.

When Tomas came
back to Prague from Zurich, he took up in his hospital where he had left off.
Then one day the chief surgeon called him in.

"You know as well as I
do," he said, "that you're no writer or journalist or savior of the
nation. You're a doctor and a scientist. I'd be very sad to lose you, and I'll
do everything I can to keep you here. But you've got to retract that article
you wrote about Oedipus. Is it terribly important to you?"

"To tell you the truth,"
said Tomas, recalling how they had amputated a good third of the text, "it
couldn't be any less important."

"You know what's
at stake," said the chief surgeon.

He
knew, all right. There were two things in the balance: his honor (which
consisted in his refusing to retract what he had said) and what he had come to
call the meaning of his life (his work in medicine and research).

The chief surgeon went on:
"The pressure to make public retractions of past statements—there's
something medieval about it. What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what
you've said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is
no longer valid? In modern times an idea can be
refuted,
yes, but not
retracted.
And since to retract an idea is

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impossible, merely
verbal, formal sorcery, I see no reason why you shouldn't do as they wish. In a
society run by terror, no statements whatsoever can be taken seriously. They
are all forced, and it is the duty of every honest man to ignore them. Let me
conclude by saying that it is in my interest and in your patients' interest
that you stay on here with us."

"You're right,
I'm sure," said Tomas, looking very unhappy.

"But?"
The chief surgeon was trying to guess his train of thought.

"I'm afraid
I'd be ashamed."

"Ashamed!
You mean to say you hold your colleagues in such high esteem that you care what
they think?"

"No, I don't
hold them in high esteem," said Tomas.

"Oh, by the
way," the chief surgeon added, "you won't have to make a public
statement. I have their assurance. They're bureaucrats. All they need is a note
in their files to the effect that you've nothing against the regime. Then if
someone comes and attacks them for letting you work at the hospital, they're
covered. They've given me their word that anything you say will remain between
you and them. They have no intention of publishing a word of it."

"Give me a
week to think it over," said Tomas, and there the matter rested.

Tomas
was considered the best surgeon in the hospital. Rumor had it that the chief
surgeon, who was getting on towards retirement age, would soon ask him to take
over. When that rumor

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was supplemented by
the rumor that the authorities had requested a statement of self-criticism
from him, no one doubted he would comply.

That was the
first thing that struck him: although he had never given people cause to doubt
his integrity, they were ready to bet on his dishonesty rather than on his
virtue.

The second thing
that struck him was their reaction to the position they attributed to him. I
might divide it into two basic types:

The first type
of reaction came from people who themselves (they or their intimates) had retracted
something, who had themselves been forced to make public peace with the
occupation regime or were prepared to do so (unwillingly, of course—no one
wanted to do it).

These people
began to smile a curious smile at him, a smile he had never seen before: the
sheepish smile of secret conspiratorial consent. It was the smile of two men
meeting accidentally in a brothel: both slightly abashed, they are at the same
time glad that the feeling is mutual, and a bond of something akin to
brotherhood develops between them.

Their smiles
were all the more complacent because he had never had the reputation of being a
conformist. His supposed acceptance of the chief surgeon's proposal was
therefore further proof that cowardice was slowly but surely becoming the norm of
behavior and would soon cease being taken for what it actually was. He had
never been friends with these people, and he realized with dismay that if he
did in fact make the statement the chief surgeon had requested of him, they
would start inviting him to parties and he would have to make friends with
them.

The second type
of reaction came from people who themselves (they or their intimates) had been
persecuted, who had refused to compromise with the occupation powers or were

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convinced they
would refuse to compromise (to sign a statement) even though no one had
requested it of them (for instance, because they were too young to be
seriously involved).

One of the latter, Doctor S., a
talented young physician, asked Tomas one day, "Well, have you written it
up for them?"

"What in the world are you
talking about?" Tomas asked in return.

"Why, your retraction,"
he said. There was no malice in his voice. He even smiled. One more smile from
that thick herbal of smiles: the smile of smug moral superiority.

"Tell me, what do you know
about my retraction?" said Tomas. "Have you read it?"

"No,"
said S.

"Then what
are you babbling about?"

Still smug, still smiling, S.
replied, "Look, we know how it goes. You incorporate it into a letter to
the chief surgeon or to some minister or somebody, and he promises it won't
leak out and humiliate the author. Isn't that right?"

Tomas shrugged
his shoulders and let S. go on.

"But even after the statement
is safely filed away, the author knows that it can be made public at any
moment. So from then on he doesn't open his mouth, never criticizes a thing,
never makes the slightest protest. The first peep out of him and into print it
goes, sullying his good name far and wide. On the whole, it's rather a nice
method. One could imagine worse."

"Yes, it's a very nice
method," said Tomas, "but would you mind telling me who gave you the
idea I'd agreed to go along with it?"

S. shrugged his shoulders, but the
smile did not disappear from his face.

And suddenly Tomas grasped a
strange fact:
everyone
was smiling at him,
everyone
wanted him to
write the retraction; it

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would make
everyone
happy! The people with the first type of reaction would be happy because by
inflating cowardice, he would make their actions seem commonplace and thereby
give them back their lost honor. The people with the second type of reaction,
who had come to consider their honor a special privilege never to be yielded,
nurtured a secret love for the cowards, for without them their courage would
soon erode into a trivial, monotonous grind admired by no one.

Tomas could not bear the smiles. He
thought he saw them everywhere, even on the faces of strangers in the street.
He began losing sleep. Could it be? Did he really hold those people in such
high esteem? No. He had nothing good to say about them and was angry with
himself for letting their glances upset him so. It was completely illogical.
How could someone who had so little respect for people be so dependent on what
they thought of him?

Perhaps his deep-seated mistrust of
people (his doubts as to their right to decide his destiny and to judge him)
had played its part in his choice of profession, a profession that excluded him
from public display. A man who chooses to be a politician, say, voluntarily
makes the public his judge, with the naive assurance that he will gain its
favor. And if the crowd does express its disapproval, it merely goads him on to
bigger and better things, much in the way Tomas was spurred on by the
difficulty of a diagnosis.

A doctor (unlike a politician or an
actor) is judged only by his patients and immediate colleagues, that is, behind
closed doors, man to man. Confronted by the looks of those who judge him, he
can respond at once with his own look, to explain or defend himself. Now (for
the first time in his life) Tomas found himself in a situation where the looks
fixed on him were so numerous that he was unable to register them. He could
answer them neither with his own look nor with words. He was

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at
everyone's mercy. People talked about him inside and outside the hospital (it
was a time when news about who betrayed, who denounced, and who collaborated
spread through nervous Prague with the uncanny speed of a bush telegraph);
although he knew about it, he could do nothing to stop it. He was surprised at
how unbearable he found it, how panic-stricken it made him feel. The interest
they showed in him was as unpleasant as an elbowing crowd or the pawings of
the people who tear our clothes off in nightmares.

He went to the chief surgeon and
told him he would not write a word.

The chief surgeon shook his hand
with greater energy than usual and said that he had anticipated Tomas's
decision.

"Perhaps you can find a way to
keep me on even without a statement," said Tomas, trying to hint that a
threat by all his colleagues to resign upon his dismissal would suffice.

But his colleagues never dreamed of
threatening to resign, and so before long (the chief surgeon shook his hand
even more energetically than the previous time—it was black and blue for days),
he was forced to leave the hospital.

First
he went to work in a country clinic about fifty miles from Prague. He commuted
daily by train and came home exhausted. A year later, he managed to find a
more advantageous but much inferior position at a clinic on the outskirts of
Prague. There, he could no longer practice surgery, and became a gen-

185

eral
practitioner. The waiting room was jammed, and he had scarcely five minutes for
each patient; he told them how much aspirin to take, signed their sick-leave
documents, and referred them to specialists. He considered himself more civil
servant than doctor.

One day, at the end of office
hours, he was visited by a man of about fifty whose portliness added to his
dignity. He introduced himself as representing the Ministry of the Interior,
and invited Tomas to join him for a drink across the street.

He ordered a bottle of wine.
"I have to drive home," said Tomas by way of refusal. "I'll lose
my license if they find I've been drinking." The man from the Ministry of
the Interior smiled. "If anything happens, just show them this." And
he handed Tomas a card engraved with his name (though clearly not his real
name) and the telephone number of the Ministry.

He then went into a long speech
about how much he admired Tomas and how the whole Ministry was distressed at
the thought of so respected a surgeon dispensing aspirin at an outlying
clinic. He gave Tomas to understand that although he couldn't come out and say
it, the police did not agree with drastic tactics like removing specialists
from their posts.

Since no one had thought to praise
Tomas in quite some time, he listened to the plump official very carefully, and
he was surprised by the precision and detail of the man's knowledge of his
professional career. How defenseless we are in the face of flattery! Tomas was
unable to prevent himself from taking seriously what the Ministry official
said.

But it was not out of mere vanity.
More important was Tomas's lack of experience. When you sit face to face with
someone who is pleasant, respectful, and polite, you have a hard time reminding
yourself that
nothing
he says is true, that
nothing
is sincere.
Maintaining nonbelief (constantly, systematically, without the slightest
vacillation) requires a tremendous