The unbearable lightness of being (34 page)

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Tereza knelt by the couch and held
Karenin's head close to her own.

Tomas asked her to squeeze the leg
because he was having trouble sticking the needle in. She did as she was told,
but did not move her face from his head. She kept talking gently to Karenin,
and he thought only of her. He was not afraid. He licked her face two more
times. And Tereza kept whispering, "Don't be scared, don't be scared, you
won't feel any pain there, you'll dream of squirrels and rabbits, you'll have
cows there, and Mefisto will be there, don't be scared ..."

Tomas jabbed the needle into the
vein and pushed the plunger. Karenin's leg jerked; his breath quickened for a
few seconds, then stopped. Tereza remained on the floor by the couch and buried
her face in his head.

Then they both had to go back to
work and leave the dog laid out on the couch, on the white sheet with tiny
violets.

They came back towards evening.
Tomas went into the garden. He found the lines of the rectangle that Tereza had
drawn with her heel between the two apple trees. Then he started digging. He
kept precisely to her specifications. He wanted everything to be just as Tereza
wished.

She stayed in the house with
Karenin. She was afraid of burying him alive. She put her ear to his mouth and
thought she heard a weak breathing sound. She stepped back and seemed to see
his breast moving slightly.

(No, the breath she heard was her
own, and because it set her own body ever so slightly in motion, she had the
impression the dog was moving.)

She found a mirror in her bag and held
it to his mouth. The mirror was so smudged she thought she saw drops on it,
drops caused by his breath.

"Tomas! He's alive!" she
cried, when Tomas came in from the garden in his muddy boots.

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Tomas
bent over him and shook his head. They each took an end of the sheet he was
lying on, Tereza the lower end, Tomas the upper. Then they lifted him up and
carried him out to the garden.

The sheet felt
wet to Tereza's hands. He puddled his way into our lives and now he's puddling
his way out, she thought, and she was glad to feel the moisture on her hands,
his final greeting.

They carried him
to the apple trees and set him down. She leaned over the pit and arranged the
sheet so that it covered him entirely. It was unbearable to think of the earth
they would soon be throwing over him, raining down on his
naked
body.

Then she went into the house and came back with his collar, his leash,
and a handful of the chocolate that had lain untouched on the floor since
morning. She threw it all in after him.

Next to the pit
was a pile of freshly dug earth. Tomas picked up the shovel.

Just then Tereza
recalled her dream: Karenin giving birth to two rolls and a bee. Suddenly the
words sounded like an epitaph. She pictured a monument standing there, between
the apple trees, with the inscription
Here lies Karenin. He gave birth to
two rolls and a bee.

It was twilight
in the garden, the time between day and evening. There was a pale moon in the
sky, a forgotten lamp in the room of the dead.

Their boots were
caked with dirt by the time they took the shovel and spade back to the recess
where their tools stood all in a row: rakes, watering cans, hoes.

He was sitting at
the desk where he usually read his books. At times like these Tereza would come
up to him from behind, lean over, and press her cheek to his. On that day,
however, she gave a start. Tomas was not reading a book; he had a letter in
front of him, and even though it consisted of no more than five typed lines,
Tomas was staring at it long and hard.

"What is
it?" Tereza asked, full of sudden anguish.

Without turning his head, Tomas
picked up the letter and handed it to her. It said that he was obliged to
report that day to the airfield of the neighboring town.

When at last he turned to her,
Tereza read her own new-felt horror in his eyes.

"I'll go
with you," she said.

He shook his
head. "I'm the one they want to see."

"No, I'm
going with you," she repeated.

They took Tomas's pickup. They were
at the airfield in no time. It was foggy. They could make out only the vaguest
outlines of the few airplanes on the field. They went from one to the next, but
the doors were all closed. No admittance. At last they found one that was open,
with a set of movable stairs leading up to it. They climbed the stairs and were
greeted by a steward at the door. It was a small airplane—one that sat barely
thirty passengers—and completely empty. They walked down the aisle between the
seats, holding on to each other and not paying much attention to their
surroundings. They took two adjoining seats, and Tereza laid her head on
Tomas's shoulder. The first wave of horror had passed and been replaced by sadness.

Horror is a shock, a time of utter
blindness. Horror lacks every hint of beauty. All we can see is the piercing
light of an

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unknown event
awaiting us. Sadness, on the other hand, assumes we are in the know. Tomas and
Tereza knew what was awaiting them. The light of horror thus lost its
harshness, and the world was bathed in a gentle, bluish light that actually
beautified it.

While reading
the letter, Tereza did not feel any love for Tomas; she simply realized that
she could not now leave him for an instant: the feeling of horror overwhelmed
all other emotions and instincts. Now that she was leaning against him (as the
plane sailed through the storm clouds), her fear subsided and she became aware
of her love, a love that she knew had no limit or bounds.

At last the airplane landed. They
stood up and went to the door, which the steward opened for them. Still holding
each other around the waist, they stood at the top of the stairs. Down below
they saw three men with hoods over their heads and rifles in their hands. There
was no point in stalling, because there was no escape. They descended slowly,
and when their feet reached the ground of the airfield, one of the men raised
his rifle and aimed it at them. Although no shot rang out, Tereza felt Tomas—who
a second before had been leaning against her, his arm around her waist—crumple
to the ground.

She tried pressing him to her but
could not hold him up, and he fell against the cement runway. She leaned over
him, about to fling herself on him, cover him with her body, when suddenly she
noticed something strange: his body was quickly shrinking before her eyes. She
was so shocked that she froze and stood stock still. The more Tomas's body
shrank, the less it resembled him, until it turned into a tiny little object
that started moving, running, dashing across the airfield.

The man who had shot him took off
his mask and gave Tereza a pleasant smile. Then he turned and set off after the
little object, which was darting here and there as if trying des-

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perately to dodge
someone and find shelter. The chase went on for a while, until suddenly the man
hurled himself to the ground. The chase was over.

The man stood up and went back to
Tereza, carrying the object in his hand. It was quaking with fear. It was a
rabbit. He handed it to Tereza. At that instant her fear and sadness subsided
and she was happy to be holding an animal in her arms, happy that the animal
was hers and she could press it to her body. She burst into tears of joy. She
wept, wept until blinded by her tears, and took the rabbit home with the
feeling that she was nearly at her goal, the place where she wanted to be and
would never forsake.

Wandering the streets of Prague,
she had no trouble finding her house, the house where she had lived with Mama
and Papa as a small girl. But Mama and Papa were gone. She was greeted by two
old people she had never seen before, but whom she knew to be her
great-grandfather and great-grandmother. They both had faces as wrinkled as the
bark of a tree, and Tereza was happy she would be living with them. But for
now, she wanted to be alone with her animal. She immediately found the room she
had been given at the age of five, when her parents decided she deserved her
own living space.

It had a bed, a table, and a chair.
The table had a lamp on it, a lamp that had never stopped burning in
anticipation of her return, and on the lamp perched a butterfly with two large
eyes painted on its widespread wings. Tereza knew she was at her goal. She lay
down on the bed and pressed the rabbit to her face.

7

He
was sitting at the desk where he usually read his books, an open envelope with
a letter in it lying in front of him. "From time to time I get letters I
haven't told you about," he said to Tereza. "They're from my son.
I've tried to keep his life and mine completely separate, and look how fate is
getting even with me. A few years ago he was expelled from the university. Now
he drives a tractor in a village. Our lives may be separate, but they run in
the same direction, like parallel lines."

"Why didn't
you ever tell me about the letters?" Tereza asked, with a feeling of great
relief.

"I
don't know. It was too unpleasant, I suppose." "Does he write
often?" "Now and then." "What about?"
"Himself." "And is it interesting?"

"Yes, it is. You remember that
his mother was an ardent Communist. Well, he broke with her long ago. Then he
took up with people who had trouble like ours, and got involved in political
activities with them. Some of them are in prison now. But he's broken with
them, too. In his letters he calls them 'eternal revolutionaries.'"

"Does that
mean he's made his peace with the regime?" "No, not in the least. He
believes in God and thinks that that's the key. He says we should all live our
daily lives according to the dictates of religion and pay no heed to the
regime, completely ignore it. If we believe in God, he claims, we can take any
situation and, by means of our own behavior, transform it into what he calls
'the kingdom of God on earth.' He tells me that the Church is the only
voluntary association in our

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country which
eludes the control of the state. I wonder whether he's joined the Church because
it helps him to oppose the regime or because he really believes in God."
"Why don't you ask him?"

"I used to
admire believers," Tomas continued. "I thought they had an odd
transcendental way of perceiving things which was closed to me. Like
clairvoyants, you might say. But my son's experience proves that faith is
actually quite a simple matter. He was down and out, the Catholics took him
in, and before he knew it, he had faith. So it was gratitude that decided the
issue, most likely. Human decisions are terribly simple." "Haven't
you ever answered his letters?" "He never gives a return
address," he said, "though the postmark indicates the name of the
district. I could just send a letter to the local collective farm."

Tereza was ashamed of having been
suspicious of Tomas, and hoped to expiate her guilt with a rush of benevolence
towards his son. "Then why not drop him a line, invite him to come and see
us?"

"He looks like me," said Tomas. "When he talks, his upper
lip curls just like mine. The thought of watching my own lips go on about the
kingdom of God—it seems too strange." Tereza burst out laughing. Tomas
laughed with her.

"Don't be such a child,
Tomas!" said Tereza. "It's ancient history, after all, you and your
first wife. What's it to him? What's he got to do with it? Why hurt the boy
just because you had bad taste when you were young?"

"Frankly, I
have stage fright at the thought of meeting him. That's the main reason I
haven't done anything about it. I don't know what's made me so headstrong and kept
me from seeing him. Sometimes you make up your mind about something without
knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it
gets harder to change."

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"Invite him," she said.

That afternoon she was on her way back from the cow sheds when she heard
voices from the road. Coming closer, she saw Tomas's pickup. Tomas was bent
over, changing a tire, while some of the men stood about looking on and waiting
for him to finish.

She could not
tear her eyes away from him: he looked like an old man. His hair had gone gray,
and his lack of coordination was not that of a surgeon turned driver but of a
man no longer young.

She recalled a recent talk with the
chairman of the collective farm. He had told her that Tomas's pickup was in miserable
condition. He said it as a joke, not a complaint, but she could tell he was
concerned. "Tomas knows the insides of the body better than the insides of
an engine," he said with a laugh. He then confessed that he had made
several visits to the authorities to request permission for Tomas to resume
his medical practice, if only locally. He had learned that the police would
never grant it.

She had stepped behind a tree trunk
so that none of the men by the pickup could see her. Standing there observing
him, she suffered a bout of self-recrimination: It was her fault that he had
come back to Prague from Zurich, her fault that he had left Prague, and even
here she could not leave him in peace, torturing him with her secret suspicions
while Karenin lay dying.

She had always secretly reproached
him for not loving her enough. Her own love she considered above reproach,
while his seemed mere condescension.

Now she saw that she had been
unfair: If she had really loved Tomas with a great love, she would have stuck
it out with him abroad! Tomas had been happy there; a new life was opening for
him! And she had left him! True, at the time she had convinced herself she was
being magnanimous, giving him his