The unbearable lightness of being (25 page)

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Another silence
set in. Tomas's son broke it. "Ideas can save lives, too."

Watching his own mouth in the boy's
face, Tomas thought How strange to see one's own lips stammer.

"You know the best thing about
what you wrote?" the boy went on, and Tomas could see the effort it cost
him to speak. "Your refusal to compromise. Your clear-cut sense of what's
good and what's evil, something we're beginning to lose. We have no idea
anymore what it means to feel guilty. The Communists have the excuse that
Stalin misled them. Murderers have the excuse that their mothers didn't love
them. And suddenly you come out and say: there is no excuse. No one could be
more innocent, in his soul and conscience, than Oedipus. And yet he punished
himself when he saw what he had done."

Tomas tore his eyes away from his
son's mouth and tried to focus on the editor. He was irritated and felt like
arguing with them. "But it's all a misunderstanding! The border between
good and evil is terribly fuzzy. I wasn't out to punish anyone, either.
Punishing people who don't know what they've done is barbaric. The myth of
Oedipus is a beautiful one, but treating it like this. . ." He had more to
say, but suddenly he remembered that the place might be bugged. He had not the
slightest ambition to be quoted by historians of centuries to come. He was
simply afraid of being quoted by the police. Wasn't that what they wanted from
him, after all? A condemnation of the article? He did not like the idea of
feeding it to them from his own lips. Besides, he knew that anything anyone in
the country said could be broadcast over the radio at any time. He held his
tongue.

"I wonder what's made you
change your mind," said the editor.

"What I wonder is what made me
write the thing in the first place," said Tomas, and just then he
remembered: She had landed at his bedside like a child sent downstream in a
bulrush

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basket.
Yes, that was why he had picked up the book and gone back to the stories of
Romulus, Moses, and Oedipus. And now she was with him again. He saw her
pressing the crow wrapped in red to her breast. The image of her brought him
peace. It seemed to tell him that Tereza was alive, that she was with him in
the same city, and that nothing else counted.

This time, the
editor broke the silence. "I understand. I don't like the idea of
punishment, either. After all," he added, smiling, "we don't call for
punishment to be inflicted; we call for it to cease."

"I
know," said Tomas. In the next few moments he would do something possibly
noble but certainly, and totally, useless (because it would not help the
political prisoners) and unpleasant to himself (because it took place under
conditions the two of them had imposed on him).

"It's
your duty to sign," his son added, almost pleading.

Duty? His son
reminding him of his duty? That was the worst word anyone could have used on
him! Once more, the image of Tereza appeared before his eyes, Tereza holding
the crow in her arms. Then he remembered that she had been accosted by an
undercover agent the day before. Her hands had started trembling again. She had
aged. She was all that mattered to him. She, born of six fortuities, she, the
blossom sprung from the chief surgeon's sciatica, she, the reverse side of all
his
"Es muss sein!"—
she was the only thing he cared about.

Why even think
about whether to sign or not? There was only one criterion for all his
decisions: he must do nothing that could harm her. Tomas could not save
political prisoners, but he could make Tereza happy. He could not really
succeed in doing even that. But if he signed the petition, he could be fairly
certain that she would have more frequent visits from undercover agents, and
that her hands would tremble more and more.

"It is
much more important to dig a half-buried crow out of

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the ground,"
he said, "than to send petitions to a president."

He knew that his
words were incomprehensible, but enjoyed them all the more for it. He felt a
sudden, unexpected intoxication come over him. It was the same black
intoxication he had felt when he solemnly announced to his wife that he no
longer wished to see her or his son. It was the same black intoxication he had
felt when he sent off the letter that meant the end of his career in medicine.
He was not at all sure he was doing the right thing, but he was sure he was
doing what he wanted to do.

"I'm
sorry," he said, "but I'm not going to sign."

Several days
later he read about the petition in the papers.

There was not a word, of course,
about its being a politely worded plea for the release of political prisoners.
None of the papers cited a single sentence from the short text. Instead, they
went on at great length and in vague, menacing terms about an anti-state
proclamation meant to lay the foundation for a new campaign against socialism.
They also listed all the signatories, accompanying each of their names with
slanderous attacks that gave Tomas gooseflesh.

Not that it was unexpected. The
fact that any public undertaking (meeting, petition, street gathering) not
organized by the Communist Party was automatically considered illegal and endangered
all the participants was common knowledge. But it may have made him sorrier he
had not signed the petition.

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Why hadn't he
signed? He could no longer quite remember what had prompted his decision.

And once more I
see him the way he appeared to me at the very beginning of the novel: standing
at the window and staring across the courtyard at the walls opposite.

This is the image
from which he was born. As I have pointed out before, characters are not born
like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor
containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no
one else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn't it true
that an author can write only about himself? Staring impotently across a
courtyard, at a loss for what to do; hearing the pertinacious rumbling of one's
own stomach during a moment of love; betraying, yet lacking the will to abandon
the glamorous path of betrayal; raising one's fist with the crowds in the Grand
March; displaying one's wit before hidden microphones—I have known all these
situations, I have experienced them myself, yet none of them has given rise to
the person my curriculum vitae and I represent. The characters in my novels are
my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and
equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have
circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own
"I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the
secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an
investigation of human life in the trap the world has become. But enough. Let
us return to Tomas.

Alone in his
flat, he stared across the courtyard at the dirty walls of the building
opposite. He missed the tall, stooped man with the big chin and the man's
friends, whom he did not know, who were not even members of his circle. He felt
as though he had just met a beautiful woman on a railway platform, and before
he could say anything to her, she had stepped

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into a sleeping car on its way to Istanbul or Lisbon.

Then he tried again to think
through what he should have done. Even though he did his best to put aside
everything belonging to the realm of the emotions (the admiration he had for
the editor and the irritation his son caused him), he was still not sure
whether he ought to have signed the text they gave him.

Is it right to raise one's voice
when others are being silenced? Yes.

On the other hand, why did the
papers devote so much space to the petition? After all, the press (totally
manipulated by the state) could have kept it quiet and no one would have been
the wiser. If they publicized the petition, then the petition played into the
rulers' hands! It was manna from heaven, the perfect start and justification
for a new wave of persecution.

What then should
he have done? Sign or not?

Another way of formulating the question
is, Is it better to shout and thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and
gain thereby a slower death?

Is there any
answer to these questions?

And again he thought the thought we
already know: Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine
which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we
can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life
in which to compare various decisions.

History is similar to individual
lives in this respect. There is only one history of the Czechs. One day it will
come to an end as surely as Tomas's life, never to be repeated.

In 1618, the Czech estates took
courage and vented their ire on the emperor reigning in Vienna by pitching two
of his high officials out of a window in the Prague Castle. Their defiance led
to the Thirty Years War, which in turn led to the

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almost complete
destruction of the Czech nation. Should the Czechs have shown more caution than
courage? The answer may seem simple; it is not.

Three hundred
and twenty years later, after the Munich Conference of 1938, the entire world
decided to sacrifice the Czechs' country to Hitler. Should the Czechs have
tried to stand up to a power eight times their size? In contrast to 1618, they
opted for caution. Their capitulation led to the Second World War, which in
turn led to the forfeit of their nation's freedom for many decades or even
centuries. Should they have shown more courage than caution? What should they
have done?

If Czech history could be repeated,
we should of course find it desirable to test the other possibility each time
and compare the results. Without such an experiment, all considerations of
this kind remain a game of hypotheses.

Einmal ist
keinmal.
What happens but once might as well not have happened at all. The
history of the Czechs will not be repeated, nor will the history of Europe. The
history of the Czechs and of Europe is a pair of sketches from the pen of
mankind's fateful inexperience. History is as light as individual human life,
unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as
whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.

Once more, and
with a nostalgia akin to love, Tomas thought of the tall, stooped editor. That
man acted as though history were a finished picture rather than a sketch. He
acted as though everything he did were to be repeated endlessly, to return
eternally, without the slightest doubt about his actions. He was convinced he
was right, and for him that was a sign not of narrowmindedness but of virtue.
Yes, that man lived in a history different from Tomas's: a history that was not
(or did not realize it was) a sketch.

Several days later,
he was struck by another thought, which I record here as an addendum to the
preceding chapter: Somewhere out in space there was a planet where all people
would be born again. They would be fully aware of the life they had spent on
earth and of all the experience they had amassed here.

And perhaps there was still another
planet, where we would all be born a third time with the experience of our
first two lives.

And perhaps there were yet more and
more planets, where mankind would be born one degree (one life) more mature.

That was Tomas's
version of eternal return.

Of course we here on earth (planet
number one, the planet of inexperience) can only fabricate vague fantasies of
what will happen to man on those other planets. Will he be wiser? Is maturity
within man's power? Can he attain it through repetition?

Only from the perspective of such a
utopia is it possible to use the concepts of pessimism and optimism with full
justification: an optimist is someone who thinks that on planet number five
the history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is one who thinks
otherwise.

17

One of Jules
Verne's famous novels, a favorite of Tomas's in his childhood, is called
Two
Years on Holiday,
and indeed two years is the maximum. Tomas was in his
third year as a window washer.

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In the last few
weeks, he had come to realize (half sadly, half laughing to himself) that he
had grown physically tired (he had one, sometimes two erotic engagements a
day), and that although he had not lost his zest for women, he found himself
straining his forces to the utmost. (Let me add that the strain was on his
physical, not his sexual powers; his problem was with his breath, not with his
penis, a state of affairs that had its comical side.)

One day he was
having trouble reaching a prospect for his afternoon time slot, and it looked
as though he was going to have one of his rare off days. He was desperate. He
had phoned a certain young woman about ten times. A charming acting student
whose body had been tanned on Yugoslavia's nudist beaches with an evenness that
called to mind slow rotation on a mechanized spit.

After making one last call from his
final job of the day and starting back to the office at four to hand in his
signed order slips, he was stopped in the center of Prague by a woman he failed
to recognize. "Wherever have you disappeared to? I haven't seen you in
ages!"

Tomas racked his
brains to place her. Had she been one of his patients? She was behaving like an
intimate friend. He tried to answer in a manner that would conceal the fact
that he did not recognize her. He was already thinking about how to lure her to
his friend's flat (he had the key in his pocket) when he realized from a chance
remark who the woman was: the budding actress with the perfect tan, the one he
had been trying to reach all day.

This episode both
amused and horrified him: it proved that he was as tired mentally as
physically. Two years of holiday could not be extended indefinitely.