And you've called me in for advice on likely candidates in my field? Tomas asked.
No, the editor said, laughing. We don't want your advice. We want your signature!
And again he felt flattered! Again he enjoyed the feeling that he had not been forgotten as a surgeon! He protested, but only out of modesty, Wait a minute. Just because they kicked me out doesn't mean I'm a famous doctor!
We haven't forgotten what you wrote for our paper, said the editor, smiling at Tomas.
Yes, sighed Tomas's son with an alacrity Tomas may have missed.
I don't see how my name on a petition can help your political prisoners. Wouldn't it be better to have it signed by people who haven't fallen afoul of the regime, people who have at least some influence on the powers that be?
The editor smiled. Of course it would.
Tomas's son smiled, too; he smiled the smile of one who understands many things. The only trouble is, they'd never sign!
Which doesn't mean we don't go after them, the editor continued, or that we're too nice to spare them the embarrassment. He laughed. You should hear the excuses they give. They're fantastic!
Tomas's son laughed in agreement.
Of course they all begin by claiming they agree with us right down the line, the editor went on. We just need a different approach, they say. Something more prudent, more reasonable, more discreet. They're scared to sign and worried that if they don't they'll sink in our estimation.
Again Tomas's son and the editor laughed together.
Then the editor gave Tomas a sheet of paper with a short text calling upon the president of the republic, in a relatively respectful manner, to grant amnesty to all political prisoners.
Tomas ran the idea quickly through his mind. Amnesty to political prisoners? Would amnesty be granted because people jettisoned by the regime (and therefore themselves potential political prisoners) request it of the president? The only thing such a petition would accomplish was to keep political prisoners from being amnestied if there happened to be a plan afoot to do so!
His son interrupted his thoughts. The main thing is to make the point that there still are a handful of people in this country who are not afraid. And to show who stands where. Separate the wheat from the chaff.
True, true, thought Tomas, but what had that to do with political prisoners? Either you called for an amnesty or you separated the wheat from the chaff. The two were not identical.
On the fence? the editor asked.
Yes. He was on the fence. But he was afraid to say so. There was a picture on the wall, a picture of a soldier pointing a threatening finger at him and saying, Are you hesitating about joining the Red Army? or Haven't you signed the Two Thousand Words yet? or Have you too signed the Two Thousand Words? or You mean you don't want to sign the amnesty petition?! But no matter what the soldier said, it was a threat.
The editor had barely finished saying what he thought about people who agree that the political prisoners should be granted amnesty but come up with thousands of reasons against signing the petition. In his opinion, their reasons were just so many excuses and their excuses a smoke screen for cowardice. What could Tomas say?
At last he broke the silence with a laugh, and pointing to the poster on the wall, he said, With that soldier threatening me, asking whether I'm going to sign or not, I can't possibly think straight.
Then all three laughed for a while.
All right, said Tomas after the laughter had died down. I'll think it over. Can we get together again in the next few days?
Any time at all, said the editor, but unfortunately the petition can't wait. We plan to get it off to the president tomorrow.
Tomorrow? And suddenly Tomas recalled the portly policeman handing him the denunciation of none other than this tall editor with the big chin. Everyone was trying to make him sign statements he had not written himself.
There's nothing to think over anyway, said his son. Although his words were aggressive, his intonation bordered on the supplicatory. Now that they were looking each other in the eye, Tomas noticed that when concentrating the boy slightly raised the left side of his upper lip. It was an expression he saw on his own face whenever he peered into the mirror to determine whether it was clean-shaven. Discovering it on the face of another made him uneasy.
When parents live with their children through childhood, they grow accustomed to that kind of similarity; it seems trivial to them or, if they stop and think about it, amusing. But Tomas was talking to his son for the first time in his life! He was not used to sitting face to face with his own asymmetrical mouth!
Imagine having an arm amputated and implanted on someone else. Imagine that person sitting opposite you and gesticulating with it in your face. You would stare at that arm as at a ghost. Even though it was your own personal, beloved arm, you would be horrified at the possibility of its touching you!
Aren't you on the side of the persecuted? his son added, and Tomas suddenly saw that what was really at stake in this scene they were playing was not the amnesty of political prisoners; it was his relationship with his son. If he signed, their fates would be united and Tomas would be more or less obliged to befriend him; if he failed to sign, their relations would remain null as before, though now not so much by his own will as by the will of his son, who would renounce his father for his cowardice.
He was in the situation of a chess player who cannot avoid checkmate and is forced to resign. Whether he signed the petition or not made not the slightest difference. It would alter nothing in his own life or in the lives of the political prisoners.
Hand it over, he said, and took the sheet of paper.
14
As if rewarding him for his decision, the editor said, That was a fine piece you wrote about Oedipus.
Handing him a pen, his son added, Some ideas have the force of a bomb exploding.
Although the editor's words of praise pleased him, his son's metaphor struck him as forced and out of place. Unfortunately, I was the only casualty, he said. Thanks to those ideas, I can no longer operate on my patients.
It sounded cold, almost hostile.
Apparently hoping to counteract the discordant note, the editor said, by way of apology, But think of all the people your article helped!
From childhood, Tomas had associated the words helping people with one thing and one thing only: medicine. How could an article help people? What were these two trying to make him swallow, reducing his whole life to a single small idea about Oedipus or even less: to a single primitive no! in the face of the regime.
Maybe it helped people, maybe it didn't, he said (in a voice still cold, though he probably did not realize it), but as a surgeon I know I saved a few lives.
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 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 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.
15
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.
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 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 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.
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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.
16
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.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Page 18