The unbearable lightness of being (32 page)

The very beginning
of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over
fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a
horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over
other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to
sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the
horse. Yes, the right to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind
can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars.

The reason we take that right for
granted is that we stand at the top of the hierarchy. But let a third party
enter the game—a visitor from another planet, for example, someone to whom God
says, "Thou shalt have dominion over creatures of all other stars"—and
all at once taking Genesis for granted becomes problematical. Perhaps a man
hitched to the cart of a Martian or roasted on the spit by inhabitants of the
Milky Way will recall the veal cutlet he used to slice on his dinner plate and
apologize (belatedly!) to the cow.

Walking along with her heifers,
driving them in front of her, Tereza was constantly obliged to use discipline,
because young cows are frisky and like to run off into the fields. Karenin kept
her company. He had been going along daily to the pasture with her for two years.
He always enjoyed being strict with the heifers, barking at them, asserting his
authority. (His God had given him dominion over cows, and he was proud of it.)
Today, however, he was having great trouble making his way, and hobbled along
on three legs; the fourth had a wound on it, and the wound was festering.
Tereza kept bending down and stroking his back. Two weeks after the operation,
it became clear that the cancer had continued to spread and that Karenin would
fare worse and worse.

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Along the way, they met a neighbor
who was hurrying off to a cow shed in her rubber boots. The woman stopped long
enough to ask, "What's wrong with the dog? It seems to be limping."
"He has cancer," said Tereza. "There's no hope." And the
lump in her throat kept her from going on. The woman noticed Tereza's tears and
nearly lost her temper: "Good heavens! Don't tell me you're going to bawl
your head off over a dog!" She was not being vicious; she was a kind woman
and merely wanted to comfort Tereza. Tereza understood, and had spent enough
time in the country to realize that if the local inhabitants loved every rabbit
as she loved Karenin, they would be unable to kill any of them and they and
their animals would soon starve to death. Still, the woman's words struck her
as less than friendly. "I understand," she answered without protest,
but quickly turned her back and went her way. The love she bore her dog made
her feel cut off, isolated. With a sad smile, she told herself that she needed
to hide it more than she would an affair. People are indignant at the thought
of someone loving a dog. But if the neighbor had discovered that Tereza had
been unfaithful to Tomas, she would have given Tereza a playful pat on the
back as a sign of secret solidarity.

Be that as it
may, Tereza continued on her path, and, watching her heifers rub against one
another, she thought what nice animals they were. Calm, guileless, and
sometimes childishly animated, they looked like fat fifty-year-olds pretending
they were fourteen. There was nothing more touching than cows at play. Tereza
took pleasure in their antics and could not help thinking (it is an idea that
kept coming back to her during her two years in the country) that man is as
much a parasite on the cow as the tapeworm is on man: We have sucked their
udders like leeches. "Man the cow parasite" is probably how non-man
defines man in his zoology books.

Now, we may treat
this definition as a joke and dismiss it with a condescending laugh. But since
Tereza took it seriously,

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she found herself
in a precarious position: her ideas were dangerous and distanced her from the
rest of mankind. Even though Genesis says that God gave man dominion over all
animals, we can also construe it to mean that He merely entrusted them to
man's care. Man was not the planet's master, merely its administrator, and
therefore eventually responsible for his administration. Descartes took a
decisive step forward:

he made man
"maitre
et proprietaire de la nature."
And surely there is a deep connection
between that step and the fact that he was also the one who point-blank denied
animals a soul. Man is master and proprietor, says Descartes, whereas the beast
is merely an automaton, an animated machine, a
machina
animata
.
When an animal laments, it is not a lament; it is merely the rasp of a poorly
functioning mechanism. When a wagon wheel grates, the wagon is not in pain; it
simply needs oiling. Thus, we have no reason to grieve for a dog being carved
up alive in the laboratory.

While the heifers grazed, Tereza
sat on a stump with Karenin at her side, his head resting in her lap. She
recalled reading a two-line filler in the papers ten or so years ago about how
all the dogs in a certain Russian city had been summarily shot. It was that
inconspicuous and seemingly insignificant little article that had brought home
to her for the first time the sheer horror of her country's oversized neighbor.

That little article was a
premonition of things to come. The first years following the Russian invasion
could not yet be characterized as a reign of terror. Because practically no
one in the entire nation agreed with the occupation regime, the Russians had to
ferret out the few exceptions and push them into power. But where could they
look? All faith in Communism and love for Russia was dead. So they sought
people who wished to get back at life for something, people with revenge on the
brain. Then they had to focus, cultivate, and maintain those people's
aggressiveness, give them a temporary substitute to practice on.

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The substitute they lit upon was animals.

All at once the papers started
coming out with cycles of features and organized letters-to-the-editor
campaigns demanding, for example, the extermination of all pigeons within city
limits. And the pigeons would be exterminated. But the major drive was directed
against dogs. People were still disconsolate over the catastrophe of the
occupation, but radio, television, and the press went on and on about dogs: how
they soil our streets and parks, endanger our children's health, fulfill no useful
function, yet must be fed. They whipped up such a psychotic fever that Tereza
had been afraid that the crazed mob would do harm to Karenin. Only after a year
did the accumulated malice (which until then had been vented, for the sake of
training, on animals) find its true goal: people. People started being removed
from their jobs, arrested, put on trial. At last the animals could breathe
freely.

Tereza kept
stroking Karenin's head, which was quietly resting in her lap, while something
like the following ran through her mind: There's no particular merit in being
nice to one's fellow man. She had to treat the other villagers decently,
because otherwise she couldn't live there. Even with Tomas, she was
obliged
to behave lovingly because she needed him. We can never establish with
certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions—love,
antipathy, charity, or malice—and what part is predetermined by the constant
power play among individuals.

True human goodness, in all its
purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from
view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And
in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so
fundamental that all others stem from it.

One
of the heifers had made friends with Tereza. The

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heifer would stop
and stare at her with her big brown eyes. Tereza knew her. She called her
Marketa. She would have been happy to give all her heifers names, but she was
unable to. There were too many of them. Not so long before, forty years or so,
all the cows in the village had names. (And if having a name is a sign of
having a soul, I can say that they had souls despite Descartes.) But then the
villages were turned into a large collective factory, and the cows began
spending all their lives in the five square feet set aside for them in their
cow sheds. From that time on, they have had no names and become mere
machinae
animatae.
The world has proved Descartes correct.

Tereza keeps appearing before my
eyes. I see her sitting on the stump petting Karenin's head and ruminating on
mankind's debacles. Another image also comes to mind: Nietzsche leaving his
hotel in Turin. Seeing a horse and a coachman beating it with a whip, Nietzsche
went up to the horse and, before the coachman's very eyes, put his arms around
the horse's neck and burst into tears.

That took place in 1889, when
Nietzsche, too, had removed himself from the world of people. In other words,
it was at the time when his mental illness had just erupted. But for that very
reason I feel his gesture has broad implications:

Nietzsche was
trying to apologize to the horse for Descartes. His lunacy (that is, his final
break with mankind) began at the very moment he burst into tears over the
horse.

And that is the Nietzsche I love,
just as I love Tereza with the mortally ill dog resting his head in her lap. I
see them one next to the other: both stepping down from the road along which
mankind, "the master and proprietor of nature," marches onward.

Karenin gave birth
to two rolls and a bee. He stared, amazed, at his own progeny. The rolls were
utterly serene, but the bee staggered about as if drugged, then flew up and
away.

Or so it happened in Tereza's
dream. She told it to Tomas the minute he woke up, and they both found a
certain consolation in it. It transformed Karenin's illness into a pregnancy
and the drama of giving birth into something both laughable and touching: two
rolls and a bee.

She again fell prey to illogical
hopes. She got out of bed and put on her clothes. Here, too, her day began with
a trip to the shop for milk, bread, rolls. But when she called Karenin for his
walk that morning, he barely raised his head. It was the first time that he had
refused to take part in the ritual he himself had forced upon them.

She went off without him.
"Where's Karenin?" asked the woman behind the counter, who had
Karenin's roll ready as usual. Tereza carried it home herself in her bag, She
pulled it out and showed it to him while still in the doorway. She wanted him
to come and fetch it. But he just lay there motionless.

Tomas saw how
unhappy Tereza was. He put the roll in his mouth and dropped down on all fours
opposite Karenin. Then he slowly crawled up to him.

Karenin followed
him with his eyes, which seemed to show a glimmer of interest, but he did not
pick himself up. Tomas brought his face right up to his muzzle. Without moving
his body, the dog took the end of the roll sticking out of Tomas's mouth into
his own. Then Tomas let go of his end so that Karenin could eat it all.

Still on all fours,
Tomas retreated a little, arched his back, and started yelping, making believe
he wanted to fight over the

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roll. After a short
while, the dog responded with some yelps of his own. At last! What they were
hoping for! Karenin feels like playing! Karenin hasn't lost the will to live!

Those yelps were Karenin's smile,
and they wanted it to last as long as possible. So Tomas crawled back to him
and tore off the end of the roll sticking out of Karenin's mouth. Their faces
were so close that Tomas could smell the dog's breath, feel the long hairs on
Karenin's muzzle tickling him. The dog gave out another yelp and his mouth
twitched; now they each had half a roll between their teeth. Then Karenin made
an old tactical error: he dropped his half in the hope of seizing the half in
his master's mouth, forgetting, as always, that Tomas was not a dog and had
hands. Without letting his half of the roll out of his mouth, Tomas picked up
the other half from the floor.

"Tomas!" Tereza cried.
"You're not going to take his roll away from him, are you?"

Tomas laid both halves on the floor
in front of Karenin, who quickly gulped down the first and held the second in
his mouth for an ostentatiously long time, flaunting his victory over the two
of them.

Standing there watching him, they
thought once more that he was smiling and that as long as he kept smiling he
had a motive to keep living despite his death sentence.

The next day his condition actually
appeared to have improved. They had lunch. It was the time of day when they
normally took him out for a walk. His habit was to start running back and forth
between them restlessly. On that day, however, Tereza picked up the leash and
collar only to be stared at dully. They tried to look cheerful (for and about
him) and pep him up a bit, and after a long wait he took pity on them, tottered
over on his three legs, and let her put on the collar.

"I know you hate the camera,
Tereza," said Tomas, "but take it along today, will you?"

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Tereza went and opened the cupboard
to rummage for the long-abandoned, long-forgotten camera. "One day we'll
be glad to have the pictures," Tomas went on. "Karenin has been an
important part of our life."

"What do you mean, 'has
been'?" said Tereza as if she had been bitten by a snake. The camera lay
directly in front of her on the cupboard floor, but she would not bend to pick
it up. "I won't take it along. I refuse to think about losing Karenin. And
you refer to him in the past tense!" "I'm sorry," said Tomas.

"That's all right," said
Tereza mildly. "I catch myself thinking about him in the past tense all
the time. I keep having to push it out of my mind. That's why I won't take the
camera."

They walked along in silence.
Silence was the only way of not thinking about Karenin in the past tense. They
did not let him out of their sight; they were with him constantly, waiting for
him to smile. But he did not smile; he merely walked with them, limping along
on his three legs.

"He's just doing it for
us," said Tereza. "He didn't want to go for a walk. He's just doing
it to make us happy."

It was sad, what she said, yet
without realizing it they were happy. They were happy not in spite of their
sadness but thanks to it. They were holding hands and both had the same image
in their eyes: a limping dog who represented ten years of their lives.

They walked a bit
farther. Then, to their great disappointment, Karenin stopped and turned. They
had to go back.

Perhaps that day or perhaps the
next Tereza walked in on Tomas reading a letter. Hearing the door open, he
slipped it in among some other papers, but she saw him do it. On her way out of
the room she also noticed him stuffing the letter into his pocket. But he
forgot about the envelope. As soon as she was