The unbearable lightness of being (7 page)

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in her sleep she
pressed Tomas's hand with such tenacity, we can understand why: she had been
training for it since childhood.

A young woman
forced to keep drunks supplied with beer and siblings with clean underwear—instead
of being allowed to pursue "something higher"—stores up great
reserves of vitality, a vitality never dreamed of by university students
yawning over their books. Tereza had read a good deal more than they, and
learned a good deal more about life, but she would never realize it. The
difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much
in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence.
The elan with which Tereza flung herself into her new Prague existence was
both frenzied and precarious. She seemed to be expecting someone to come up to
her any day and say, "What are you doing here? Go back where you
belong!" All her eagerness for life hung by a thread: Tomas's voice. For
it was Tomas's voice that had once coaxed forth her timorous soul from its
hiding place in her bowels.

Tereza had a job in a darkroom, but
it was not enough for her. She wanted to take pictures, not develop them.
Tomas's friend Sabina lent her three or four monographs of famous
photographers, then invited her to a cafe and explained over the open books
what made each of the pictures interesting. Tereza listened with silent
concentration, the kind few profes-

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sors ever glimpse on their students' faces.

Thanks to Sabina, she came to
understand the ties between photography and painting, and she made Tomas take her
to every exhibit that opened in Prague. Before long, she was placing her own
pictures in the illustrated weekly where she worked, and finally she left the
darkroom for the staff of professional photographers.

On the evening of that day, she and
Tomas went out to a bar with friends to celebrate her promotion. Everyone
danced. Tomas began to mope. Back at home, after some prodding from Tereza, he
admitted that he had been jealous watching her dance with a colleague of his.

"You mean you were really
jealous?" she asked him ten times or more, incredulously, as though
someone had just informed her she had been awarded a Nobel Prize.

Then she put her arm around his
waist and began dancing across the room. The step she used was not the one she
had shown off in the bar. It was more like a village polka, a wild romp that
sent her legs flying in the air and her torso bouncing all over the room, with
Tomas in tow.

Before long, unfortunately, she
began to be jealous herself, and Tomas saw her jealousy not as a Nobel Prize,
but as a burden, a burden he would be saddled with until not long before his
death.

While
she marched around the pool naked with a large group of other naked women,
Tomas stood over them in a basket hanging from the pool's arched roof, shouting
at them, making them sing and do kneebends. The moment one of them did a faulty
kneebend, he would shoot her.

Let me return to
this dream. Its horror did not begin with Tomas's first pistol shot; it was
horrifying from the outset. Marching naked in formation with a group of naked
women was for Tereza the quintessential image of horror. When she lived at
home, her mother forbade her to lock the bathroom door. What she meant by her
injunction was: Your body is just like all other bodies; you have no right to
shame; you have no reason to hide something that exists in millions of
identical copies. In her mother's world all bodies were the same and marched
behind one another in formation. Since childhood, Tereza had seen nudity as a
sign of concentration camp uniformity, a sign of humiliation.

There was yet
another horror at the very beginning of the dream: all the women had to sing!
Not only were their bodies identical, identically worthless, not only were
their bodies mere resounding soulless mechanisms—the women rejoiced over it!
Theirs was the joyful solidarity of the soulless. The women were pleased at
having thrown off the ballast of the soul—that laughable conceit, that illusion
of uniqueness—to become one like the next. Tereza sang with them, but did not
rejoice. She sang because she was afraid that if she did not sing the women
would kill her.

But what was the
meaning of the fact that Tomas shot at them, toppling one after another into
the pool, dead?

The
women, overjoyed by their sameness, their lack of di-

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versity, were, in
fact, celebrating their imminent demise, which would render their sameness
absolute. So Tomas's shots were merely the joyful climax to their morbid march.
After every report of his pistol, they burst into joyous laughter, and as each
corpse sank beneath the surface, they sang even louder.

But why was Tomas the one doing the
shooting? And why was he out to shoot Tereza with the rest of them?

Because he was the one who sent
Tereza to join them. That was what the dream was meant to tell Tomas, what Tereza
was unable to tell him herself. She had come to him to escape her mother's
world, a world where all bodies were equal. She had come to him to make her
body unique, irreplaceable. But he, too, had drawn an equal sign between her and
the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them alike, made no,
absolutely no distinction between Tereza's body and the other bodies. He had
sent her back into the world she tried to escape, sent her to march naked with
the other naked women.

She would dream
three series of dreams in succession: the first was of cats going berserk and
referred to the sufferings she had gone through in her lifetime; the second was
images of her execution and came in countless variations; the third was of her
life after death, when humiliation turned into a never-ending state.

The dreams left nothing to be
deciphered. The accusation they leveled at Tomas was so clear that his only
reaction was to hang his head and stroke her hand without a word.

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The dreams were eloquent, but they were also beautiful. That aspect seems
to have escaped Freud in his theory of dreams. Dreaming is not merely an act of
communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic
activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our
dreams prove that to imagine—to dream about things that have not happened—is
among mankind's deepest needs. Herein lies the danger. If dreams were not
beautiful, they would quickly be forgotten. But Tereza kept coming back to her
dreams, running through them in her mind, turning them into legends. Tomas
lived under the hypnotic spell cast by the excruciating beauty of Tereza's
dreams.

"Dear Tereza, sweet Tereza, what am I losing you to?" he once
said to her as they sat face to face in a wine cellar. "Every night you
dream of death as if you really wished to quit this world. . . ."

It was day; reason and will power were back in place. A drop of red wine
ran slowly down her glass as she answered. "There's nothing I can do about
it, Tomas. Oh, I understand. I know you love me. I know your infidelities are
no great tragedy ..."

She looked at him with love in her eyes, but she feared the night ahead,
feared her dreams. Her life was split. Both day and night were competing for
her.

Anyone whose goal
is "something higher" must expect some day to suffer vertigo. What is
vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation
tower comes

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equipped
with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of
falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us,
it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

The naked women marching around the
swimming pool, the corpses in the hearse rejoicing that she, too, was dead— these
were the "down below" she had feared and fled once before but which
mysteriously beckoned her. These were her vertigo: she heard a sweet (almost
joyous) summons to renounce her fate and soul. The solidarity of the soulless
calling her. And in times of weakness, she was ready to heed the call and
return to her mother. She was ready to dismiss the crew of her soul from the
deck of her body; ready to descend to a place among her mother's friends and
laugh when one of them broke wind noisily; ready to march around the pool naked
with them and sing.

True,
Tereza fought with her mother until the day she left home, but let us not
forget that she never stopped loving her. She would have done anything for her
if her mother had asked in a loving voice. The only reason she found the
strength to leave was that she never heard that voice.

When Tereza's mother realized that
her aggressiveness no longer had any power over her daughter, she started
writing her querulous letters, complaining about her husband, her boss, her
health, her children, and assuring Tereza she was the only

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person
left in her life. Tereza thought that at last, after twenty years, she was
hearing the voice of her mother's love, and felt like going back. All the more
because she felt so weak, so debilitated by Tomas's infidelities. They exposed
her powerlessness, which in turn led to vertigo, the insuperable longing to
fall.

One day her mother phoned to say
she had cancer and only a few months to live. The news transformed into
rebellion Tereza's despair at Tomas's infidelities. She had betrayed her
mother, she told herself reproachfully, and for a man who did not love her. She
was willing to forget everything her mother had done to torture her. She was in
a position to understand her now; they were in the same situation: her mother
loved her stepfather just as Tereza loved Tomas, and her stepfather tortured
her mother with his infidelities just as Tomas galled her with his. The cause
of her mother's malice was that she had suffered so.

Tereza told Tomas that her mother
was ill and that she would be taking a week off to go and see her. Her voice
was full of spite.

Sensing that the real reason
calling her back to her mother was vertigo, Tomas opposed the trip. He rang up
the hospital in the small town. Meticulous records of the incidence of cancer
were kept throughout the country, so he had no trouble finding out that
Tereza's mother had never been suspected of having the disease nor had she even
seen a doctor for over a year.

Tereza obeyed Tomas and did not go
to visit her mother. Several hours after the decision she fell in the street
and injured her knee. She began to teeter as she walked, fell almost daily,
bumped into things or, at the very least, dropped objects.

She was in the grip of an
insuperable longing to fall. She lived in a constant state of vertigo.

"Pick me up," is the
message of a person who keeps falling. Tomas kept picking her up, patiently.

"I
want to make love to you in my studio. It will be like a stage surrounded by
people. The audience won't be allowed up close, but they won't be able to take
their eyes off us...."

As time passed, the image lost some
of its original cruelty and began to excite Tereza. She would whisper the
details to him while they made love.

Then it occurred to her that there
might be a way to avoid the condemnation she saw in Tomas's infidelities: all
he had to do was take her along, take her with him when he went to see his
mistresses! Maybe then her body would again become the first and only among all
others. Her body would become his second, his assistant, his alter ego.

"I'll undress them for you,
give them a bath, bring them in to you ..." she would whisper to him as
they pressed together. She yearned for the two of them to merge into a
hermaphrodite. Then the other women's bodies would be their playthings.

Oh,
to be the alter ego of his polygamous life! Tomas refused to understand, but
she could not get it out of her head, and tried to cultivate her friendship
with Sabina. Tereza began by offering to do a series of photographs of Sabina.

Sabina
invited Tereza to her studio, and at last she saw the

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spacious
room and its centerpiece: the large, square, platform-like bed.

"I feel awful that you've
never been here before," said Sabina, as she showed her the pictures
leaning against the wall. She even pulled out an old canvas, of a steelworks
under construction, which she had done during her school days, a period when
the strictest realism had been required of all students (art that was not
realistic was said to sap the foundations of socialism). In the spirit of the
wager of the times, she had tried to be stricter than her teachers and had
painted in a style concealing the brush strokes and closely resembling color
photography.

"Here is a painting I happened
to drip red paint on. At first I was terribly upset, but then I started
enjoying it. The trickle looked like a crack; it turned the building site into
a battered old backdrop, a backdrop with a building site painted on it. I began
playing with the crack, filling it out, wondering what might be visible behind
it. And that's how I began my first cycle of paintings. I called it
"Behind the Scenes." Of course, I couldn't show them to anybody. I'd
have been kicked out of the Academy. On the surface, there was always an
impeccably realistic world, but underneath, behind the backdrop's cracked
canvas, lurked something different, something mysterious or abstract."

After pausing for a moment, she
added, "On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the
unintelligible truth."

Tereza listened to her with the
remarkable concentration that few professors ever see on the face of a student
and began to perceive that all Sabina's paintings, past and present, did indeed
treat the same idea, that they all featured the confluence of two themes, two
worlds, that they were all double exposures, so to speak. A landscape showing
an old-fashioned table lamp shining through it. An idyllic still life of
apples, nuts, and a tiny,