The unbearable lightness of being (33 page)

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alone in the house,
she studied it carefully. The address was written in an unfamiliar hand, but it
was very neat and she guessed it to be a woman's.

When he came back later, she asked
him nonchalantly whether the mail had come.

"No,"
said Tomas, and filled Tereza with despair, a despair all the worse for her
having grown unaccustomed to it. No, she did not believe he had a secret
mistress in the village. That was all but impossible. She knew what he did with
every spare minute. He must have kept up with a woman in Prague who meant so
much to him that he thought of her even if she could no longer leave the smell
of her groin in his hair. Tereza did not believe that Tomas meant to leave her
for the woman, but the happiness of their two years in the country now seemed
besmirched by lies.

An old thought
came back to her: Her home was Karenin, not Tomas. Who would wind the clock of
their days when he was gone?

Transported
mentally into the future, a future without Karenin, Tereza felt abandoned.

Karenin was
lying in a corner whimpering. Tereza went out into the garden. She looked down
at a patch of grass between two apple trees and imagined burying Karenin
there. She dug her heel into the earth and traced a rectangle in the grass.
That was where his grave would be.

"What are
you doing?" Tomas asked, surprising her just as she had surprised him
reading the letter a few hours earlier.

She gave no
answer. He noticed her hands trembling for the first time in many months. He
grabbed hold of them. She pulled away from him.

"Is that a grave for Karenin?"

She did not answer.

Her silence grated on him. He exploded.
"First you blame

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me
for thinking of him in the past tense, and then what do you do? You go and make
the funeral arrangements!" She turned her back on him.

Tomas retreated into his room, slamming the door behind him.

Tereza went in and opened it.
"Instead of thinking about yourself all the time, you might at least have
some consideration for him," she said. "He was asleep until you woke
him. Now he'll start whimpering again."

She
knew she was being unfair (the dog was not asleep); she knew she was acting
like the most vulgar of women, the kind that is out to cause pain and knows
how.

Tomas tiptoed into the room where
Karenin was lying, but she would not leave him alone with the dog. They both
leaned over him, each from his own side. Not that there was a hint of
reconciliation in the move. Quite the contrary. Each of them was alone. Tereza
with her dog, Tomas with his.

It is thus divided,
each alone, that, sad to say, they remained with him until his last hour.

Why was the word "idyll" so important for Tereza?

Raised as we are on the mythology
of the Old Testament, we might say that an idyll is an image that has remained
with us like a memory of Paradise: life in Paradise was not like following a
straight line to the unknown; it was not an adventure. It moved in a circle
among known objects. Its monotony bred happiness, not boredom.

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As long as people lived in the
country, in nature, surrounded by domestic animals, in the bosom of regularly
recurring seasons, they retained at least a glimmer of that paradisiac idyll.
That is why Tereza, when she met the chairman of the collective farm at the
spa, conjured up an image of the countryside (a countryside she had never lived
in or known) that she found enchanting. It was her way of looking back, back to
Paradise.

Adam, leaning over a well, did not
yet realize that what he saw was himself. He would not have understood Tereza
when she stood before the mirror as a young girl and tried to see her soul
through her body. Adam was like Karenin. Tereza made a game of getting him to
look at himself in the mirror, but he never recognized his image, gazed at it
vacantly, with incredible indifference.

Comparing Adam and Karenin leads me
to the thought that in Paradise man was not yet man. Or to be more precise, man
had not yet been cast out on man's path. Now we are longtime outcasts, Hying
through the emptiness of time in a straight line. Yet somewhere deep down a
thin thread still ties us to that far-off misty Paradise, where Adam leans over
a well and, unlike Narcissus, never even suspects that the pale yellow blotch
appearing in it is he himself. The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to
be man.

Whenever, as a child, she came
across her mother's sanitary napkins soiled with menstrual blood, she felt
disgusted, and hated her mother for lacking the shame to hide them. But
Karenin, who was after all a female, had his periods, too. They came once every
six months and lasted a fortnight. To keep him from soiling their flat, Tereza
would put a wad of absorbent cotton between his legs and pull a pair of old panties
over it, skillfully tying them to his body with a long ribbon. She would go on
laughing at the outfit for the entire two weeks of each period.

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Why is it that a dog's menstruation
made her lighthearted and gay, while her own menstruation made her squeamish?
The answer seems simple to me: dogs were never expelled from Paradise. Karenin
knew nothing about the duality of body and soul and had no concept of disgust.
That is why Tereza felt so free and easy with him. (And that is why it is so
dangerous to turn an animal into a
machina animata, a
cow into an automaton
for the production of milk. By so doing, man cuts the thread binding him to
Paradise and has nothing left to hold or comfort him on his flight through the
emptiness of time.)

From this jumble of ideas came a
sacrilegious thought that Tereza could not shake off: the love that tied her to
Karenin was better than the love between her and Tomas. Better, not bigger.
Tereza did not wish to fault either Tomas or herself;

she
did not wish to claim that they could love each other
more.
Her feeling
was rather that, given the nature of the human couple, the love of man and
woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best
instances) in the love between man and dog, that oddity of human history
probably unplanned by the Creator.

It is a
completely selfless love: Tereza did not want anything of Karenin; she did not
ever ask him to love her back. Nor had she ever asked herself the questions
that plague human couples: Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me?
Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love,
to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it
short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved,
that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering
ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.

And something else:
Tereza accepted Karenin for what he was; she did not try to make him over in
her image; she agreed

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from the outset
with his dog's life, did not wish to deprive him of it, did not envy him his
secret intrigues. The reason she trained him was not to transform him (as a
husband tries to reform his wife and a wife her husband), but to provide him
with the elementary language that enabled them to communicate and live
together.

Then too: No one forced her to love
Karenin; love for dogs is voluntary. (Tereza was again reminded of her mother,
and regretted everything that had happened between them. If her mother had been
one of the anonymous women in the village, she might well have found her
easygoing coarseness agreeable. Oh, if only her mother had been a stranger!
From childhood on, Tereza had been ashamed of the way her mother occupied the
features of her face and confiscated her "I". What made it even worse
was that the age-old imperative "Love your father and mother!" forced
her to agree with that occupation, to call the aggression love! It was not her
mother's fault that Tereza broke with her. Tereza broke with her not because
she was the mother she was but because she was a mother.)

But most of all: No one can give
anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only
animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic.
It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development. Karenin
surrounded Tereza and Tomas with a life based on repetition, and he expected
the same from them.

If Karenin had been a person instead
of a dog, he would surely have long since said to Tereza, "Look, I'm sick
and tired of carrying that roll in my mouth every day. Can't you come up with
something different?" And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human
time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why
man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.

Yes, happiness is the longing for
repetition, Tereza said to herself.

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When the
chairman of the collective farm took his Mefisto out for a walk after work and
met Tereza, he never failed to say, "Why did he come into my life so late,
Tereza? We could have gone skirt chasing, he and I! What woman could resist
these two little pigs?" at which point the pig was trained to grunt and
snort. Tereza laughed each time, even though she knew beforehand exactly what
he would say. The joke did not lose its charm, through repetition. On the
contrary. In an idyllic setting, even humor is subject to the sweet law of
repetition.

5

Dogs
do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely
important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the
right to a merciful death. Karenin walked on three legs and spent more and
more of his time lying in a corner. And whimpering. Both husband and wife
agreed that they had no business letting him suffer needlessly. But agree as
they might in principle, they still had to face the anguish of determining the
time when his suffering was in fact needless, the point at which life was no longer
worth living.

If only Tomas hadn't been a doctor!
Then they would have been able to hide behind a third party. They would have
been able to go back to the vet and ask him to put the dog to sleep with an
injection.

Assuming the role of Death is a
terrifying thing. Tomas insisted that he would not give the injection himself;
he would have the vet come and do it. But then he realized that he could grant
Karenin a privilege forbidden to humans: Death would

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come for him in the guise of his loved ones.

Karenin had
whimpered all night. After feeling his leg in the morning, Tomas said to
Tereza, "There's no point in waiting."

In a few minutes
they would both have to go to work. Tereza went in to see Karenin. Until then,
he had lain in his corner completely apathetic (not even acknowledging Tomas
when he felt his leg), but when he heard the door open and saw Tereza come in,
he raised his head and looked at her.

She could not
stand his stare; it almost frightened her. He did not look that way at Tomas,
only at her. But never with such intensity. It was not a desperate look, or
even sad. No, it was a look of awful, unbearable trust. The look was an eager
question. All his life Karenin had waited for answers from Tereza, and he was
letting her know (with more urgency than usual, however) that he was still
ready to learn the truth from her. (Everything that came from Tereza was the
truth. Even when she gave commands like "Sit!" or "Lie
down!" he took them as truths to identify with, to give his life meaning.)

His look of awful
trust did not last long; he soon laid his head back down on his paws. Tereza
knew that no one ever again would look at her like that.

They had never
fed him sweets, but recently she had bought him a few chocolate bars. She took
them out of the foil, broke them into pieces, and made a circle of them around
him. Then she brought over a bowl of water to make sure that he had everything
he needed for the several hours he would spend at home alone. The look he had
given her just then seemed to have tired him out. Even surrounded by chocolate,
he did not raise his head.

She lay down on
the floor next to him and hugged him. With a slow and labored turn of the head,
he sniffed her and gave her a lick or two. She closed her eyes while the
licking

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went on, as if she
wanted to remember it forever. She held out the other cheek to be licked.

Then she had to go and take care of
her heifers. She did not return until just before lunch. Tomas had not come
home yet. Karenin was still lying on the floor surrounded by the chocolate, and
did not even lift his head when he heard her come in. His bad leg was swollen
now, and the tumor had burst in another place. She noticed some light red (not
blood-like,) drops forming beneath his fur.

Again she lay down next to him on
the floor. She stretched one arm across his body and closed her eyes. Then she
heard someone banging on the door. "Doctor! Doctor! The pig is here! The
pig and his master!" She lacked the strength to talk to anyone, and did
not move, did not open her eyes. "Doctor! Doctor! The pigs have
come!" Then silence.

Tomas did not get back for another
half hour. He went straight to the kitchen and prepared the injection without a
word. When he entered the room, Tereza was on her feet and Karenin was picking
himself up. As soon as he saw Tomas, he gave him a weak wag of the tail.

"Look,"
said Tereza, "he's still smiling." She said it beseechingly, trying
to win a short reprieve, but did not push for it.

Slowly she spread a sheet out over
the couch. It was a white sheet with a pattern of tiny violets. She had
everything carefully laid out and thought out, having imagined Karenin's death
many days in advance. (Oh, how horrible that we actually dream ahead to the
death of those we love!)

He no longer had the strength to
jump up on the couch. They picked him up in their arms together. Tereza laid
him on his side, and Tomas examined one of his good legs. He was looking for a
more or less prominent vein. Then he cut away the fur with a pair of scissors.