The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera

  The road was narrow and lined with minefields. Every so often it was narrowed even more by a barrier-two cement blocks wound round with barbed wire-passable only in single file.

  About fifteen feet ahead of Franz was a famous German poet and pop singer who had already written nine hundred thirty songs for peace and against war. He was carrying a long pole topped by a white flag that set off his full black beard and set him apart from the others.

  All up and down the long parade, photographers and cameramen were snapping and whirring their equipment, dashing up to the front, pausing, inching back, dropping to their knees, then straightening up and running even farther ahead. Now and then they would call out the name of some celebrity, who would then unwittingly turn in their direction just long enough to let them trigger their shutters.

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  Something was in the air. People were slowing down and looking back.

  The American actress, who had ended up in the rear, could no longer stand the disgrace of it and, determined to take the offensive, was sprinting to the head of the parade. It was as if a runner in a five-kilometer race, who had been saving his strength by hanging back with the pack, had suddenly sprung forward and started overtaking his opponents one by one.

  The men stepped back with embarrassed smiles, not wishing to spoil the famous runner's bid for victory, but the women yelled, Get back in line! This is no star parade!

  Undaunted, the actress pushed on, a suite of five photographers and two cameramen in tow.

  Suddenly a Frenchwoman, a professor of linguistics, grabbed the actress by the wrist and said (in terrible-sounding English), This is a parade for doctors who have come to care for mortally ill Cambodians, not a publicity stunt for movie stars!

  The actress's wrist was locked in the linguistics professor's grip; she could do nothing to pry it loose. What the hell do you think you're doing? she said (in perfect English). I've been in a hundred parades like this! You won't get anywhere without stars! It's our job! Our moral obligation!

  Merde said the linguistics professor (in perfect French).

  The American actress understood and burst into tears.

  Hold it, please, a cameraman called out and knelt at her feet. The actress gave a long look into his lens, the tears flowing down her cheeks.

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  When at last the linguistics professor let go of the American actress's wrist, the German pop singer with the black beard and white flag called out her name.

  The American actress had never heard of him, but after being humiliated she was more receptive to sympathy than usual and ran over to him. The singer switched the pole to his left hand and put his right arm around her shoulders.

  They were immediately surrounded by new photographers and cameramen. A well-known American photographer, having trouble squeezing both their faces and the flag into his viewfinder because the pole was so long, moved back a few steps into the ricefield. And so it happened that he stepped on a mine. An explosion rang out, and his body, ripped to pieces, went flying through the air, raining a shower of blood on the European intellectuals.

  The singer and the actress were horrified and could not budge. They lifted their eyes to the flag. It was spattered with blood. Once more they were horrified. Then they timidly ventured a few more looks upward and began to smile slightly. They were filled with a strange pride, a pride they had never known before: the flag they were carrying had been consecrated by blood. Once more they joined the march.

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  The border was formed by a small river, but because a long wall, six feet high and lined with sandbags to protect Thai sharpshooters, ran alongside it, it was invisible. There was only one breach in the wall, at the point where a bridge spanned the river. Vietnamese forces lay in wait on the other side, but they, too, were invisible, their positions perfectly camouflaged. It was clear, however, that the moment anyone set foot on the bridge, the invisible Vietnamese would open fire.

  The parade participants went up to the wall and stood on tiptoe. Franz peered into the gap between two sandbags, trying to see what was going on. He saw nothing. Then he was shoved away by a photographer, who felt that he had more right to the space.

  Franz looked back. Seven photographers were perching in the mighty crown of an isolated tree like a flock of overgrown crows, their eyes fixed on the opposite bank.

  Just then the interpreter, at the head of the parade, raised a large megaphone to her lips and called out in Khmer to the other side: These people are doctors; they request permission to enter the territory of Cambodia and offer medical assistance; they have no political designs whatsoever and are guided solely by a concern for human life.

  The response from the other side was a stunning silence. A silence so absolute that everyone's spirits sank. Only the cameras clicked on, sounding in the silence like the song of an exotic insect.

  Franz had the sudden feeling that the Grand March was coming to an end. Europe was surrounded by borders of silence, and the space where the Grand March was occurring was now no more than a small platform in the middle of the planet. The crowds that had once pressed eagerly up to the platform had long since departed, and the Grand March went on in solitude, without spectators. Yes, said Franz to himself, the Grand March goes on, the world's indifference notwithstanding, but it is growing nervous and hectic: yesterday against the American occupation of Vietnam, today against the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia; yesterday for Israel, today for the Palestinians; yesterday for Cuba, tomorrow against Cuba- and always against America; at times against massacres and at times in support of other massacres; Europe marches on, and to keep up with events, to leave none of them out, its pace grows faster and faster, until finally the Grand March is a procession of rushing, galloping people and the platform is shrinking and shrinking until one day it will be reduced to a mere dimension-less dot.

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  Once more the interpreter shouted her challenge into the megaphone. And again the response was a boundless and endlessly indifferent silence.

  Franz looked in all directions. The silence on the other side of the river had hit them all like a slap in the face. Even the singer with the white flag and the American actress were depressed, hesitant about what to do next.

  In a flash of insight Franz saw how laughable they all were, but instead of cutting him off from them or flooding him with irony, the thought made him feel the kind of infinite love we feel for the condemned. Yes, the Grand March was coming to an end, but was that any reason for Franz to betray it? Wasn't his own life coming to an end as well? Who was he to jeer at the exhibitionism of the people accompanying the courageous doctors to the border? What could they all do but put on a show? Had they any choice?

  Franz was right. I can't help thinking about the editor in Prague who organized the petition for the amnesty of political prisoners. He knew perfectly well that his petition would not help the prisoners. His true goal was not to free the prisoners; it was to show that people without fear still exist. That, too, was playacting. But he had no other possibility. His choice was not between playacting and action. His choice was between playacting and no action at all. There are situations in which people are condemned to playact. Their struggle with mute power (the mute power across the river, a police transmogrified into mute microphones in the wall) is the struggle of a theater company that has attacked an army.

  Franz watched his friend from the Sorbonne lift his fist and threaten the silence on the other side.

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  For the third time the interpreter shouted her challenge into the megaphone.

  The silence she again received in response suddenly turned Franz's depression into rage. Here he was, standing only a few steps from the bridge joining Thailand to Cambodia, and he felt an overwhelming desire to run out onto it, scream bloodcurdling curses to the skies, and die in a great clatter of gunfire.

  That sudden desire of Franz's reminds us of something; yes, it reminds us of Stalin's son, who ran to electrocute himself on
the barbed wire when he could no longer stand to watch the poles of human existence come so close to each other as to touch, when there was no longer any difference between sublime and squalid, angel and fly. God and shit.

  Franz could not accept the fact that the glory of the Grand March was equal to the comic vanity of its marchers, that the exquisite noise of European history was lost in an infinite silence and that there was no longer any difference between history and silence. He felt like placing his own life on the scales; he wanted to prove that the Grand March weighed more than shit.

  But man can prove nothing of the sort. One pan of the scales held shit; on the other, Stalin's son put his entire body. And the scales did not move.

  Instead of getting himself shot, Franz merely hung his head and went back with the others, single file, to the buses.

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  We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under.

  The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public. That is the case with the German singer, the American actress, and even the tall, stooped editor with the big chin. He was accustomed to his readers, and when one day the Russians banned his newspaper, he had the feeling that the atmosphere was suddenly a hundred times thinner. Nothing could replace the look of unknown eyes. He thought he would suffocate. Then one day he realized that he was constantly being followed, bugged, and surreptitiously photographed in the street. Suddenly he had anonymous eyes on him and he could breathe again! He began making theatrical speeches to the microphones in his wall. In the police, he had found his lost public.

  The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. They are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. This happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. People in the second category, on the other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need. Marie-Claude and her daughter belong in the second category.

  Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark. Tereza and Tomas belong in the third category.

  And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers. Franz, for example. He traveled to the borders of Cambodia only for Sabina. As the bus bumped along the Thai road, he could feel her eyes fixed on him in a long stare.

  Tomas's son belongs in the same category. Let me call him Simon. (He will be glad to have a Biblical name, like his father's.) The eyes he longed for were Tomas's. As a result of his embroilment in the petition campaign, he was expelled from the university. The girl he had been going out with was the niece of a village priest. He married her, became a tractor driver on a collective farm, a practicing Catholic, and a father. When he learned that Tomas, too, was living in the country, he was thrilled: fate had made their lives symmetrical! This encouraged him to write Tomas a letter. He did not ask him to write back. He only wanted him to focus his eyes on his life.

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  Franz and Simon are the dreamers of this novel. Unlike Franz, Simon never liked his mother. From childhood he searched for his father. He was willing to believe his father the victim of some sort of injustice that predated and explained the injustice his father had perpetrated on him. He never felt angry with his father, because he did not wish to ally himself with his mother, who continually maligned the man.

  He lived with her until he was eighteen and had finished secondary school; then he went off to Prague and the university. By that time Tomas was washing windows. Often Simon would wait long hours to arrange an accidental encounter with Tomas. But Tomas never stopped to talk to him.

  The only reason he became involved with the big-chinned former editor was that the editor's fate reminded him of his father's. The editor had never heard of Tomas. The Oedipus article had been forgotten. It was Simon who told him about it and asked him to persuade Tomas to sign the petition. The only reason the editor agreed was that he wanted to do something nice for the boy, whom he liked.

  Whenever Simon thought back to the day when they had met, he was ashamed of his stage fright. His father couldn't have liked him. He, on the other hand, liked his father. He remembered his every word, and as time went on he saw how true they were. The words that made the biggest impression on him were Punishing people who don't know what they've done is barbaric. When his girlfriend's uncle put a Bible in his hands, he was particularly struck by Jesus' words Forgive them, for they know not what they do. He knew that his father was a nonbeliever, but in the similarity of the two phrases he saw a secret sign: his father agreed with the path he had taken.

  During approximately his third year in the country, he received a letter from Tomas asking him to come and visit. Their meeting was a friendly one. Simon felt relaxed and did not stammer a bit. He probably did not realize that they did not understand each other very well. About four months later, he received a telegram saying that Tomas and his wife had been crushed to death under a truck.

  At about that time, he learned about a woman who had once been his father's mistress and was living in France. He found out her address. Because he desperately needed an imaginary eye to follow his life, he would occasionally write her long letters.

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  Sabina continued to receive letters from her sad village correspondent till the end of her life. Many of them would remain unread, because she took less and less interest in her native land.

  The old man died, and Sabina moved to California. Farther west, farther away from the country where she had been born.

  She had no trouble selling her paintings, and liked America. But only on the surface. Everything beneath the surface was alien to her. Down below, there was no grandpa or uncle. She was afraid of shutting herself into a grave and sinking into American earth.

  And so one day she composed a will in which she requested that her dead body be cremated and its ashes thrown to the winds. Tereza and Tomas had died under the sign of weight. She wanted to die under the sign of lightness. She would be lighter than air. As Parmenides would put it, the negative would change into the positive.

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  The bus stopped in front of the Bangkok hotel. No one any longer felt like holding meetings. People drifted off in groups to sightsee; some set off for temples, others for brothels. Franz's friend from the Sorbonne suggested they spend the evening together, but he preferred to be alone.

  It was nearly dark when he went out into the streets. He kept thinking about Sabina, feeling her eyes on him. Whenever he felt her long stare, he began to doubt himself: he had never known quite what Sabina thought. It made him uncomfortable now as well. Could she be mocking him? Did she consider the cult he made of her silly? Could she be trying to tell him it was time for him to grow up and devote himself fully to the mistress she herself had sent to him?

  Picturing the face with big round glasses, he suddenly realized how happy he was with his student-mistress. All at once, the Cambodia venture struck him as meaningless, laughable. Why had he come? Only now did he know. He had come to find out once and for all that neither parades nor Sabina but rather the girl with the glasses was his real life, his only real life! He had come to find out that reality was more than a dream, much more than a dream!

  Suddenly a figure emerged out of the semi-darkness and said something to him in a language he did not know. He gave the intruder a look that was startled but sympathetic. The man bowed and smiled and muttered something with great urgency. What was he trying to say? He seemed to be inviting him somewhere. The man took him by the hand and started
leading him away. Franz decided that someone needed his help. Maybe there was some sense in his coming all that distance. Wasn't he being called to help somebody?

  Suddenly there were two other men next to the first, and one of them asked him in English for his money.

  At that point, the girl with the glasses vanished from his thoughts and Sabina fixed her eyes on him, unreal Sabina with her grand fate, Sabina who had made him feel so small. Her wrathful eyes bored into him, angry and dissatisfied: Had he been had once again? Had someone else abused his idiotic goodness?

  He tore his arm away from the man, who was now holding on to his sleeve. He remembered that Sabina had always admired his strength. He seized the arm one of the other men was lifting against him, and, tightening his grip, tossed him over his shoulder in a perfect judo flip.

  Now he was satisfied with himself. Sabina's eyes were still on him. She would never see him humiliate himself again! She would never see him retreat! Franz was through with being soft and sentimental!

  He felt what was almost a cheerful hatred for these men. They had thought to have a good laugh at him and his naivete! He stood there with his shoulders slightly hunched and his eyes darting back and forth between the two remaining men. Suddenly, he felt a heavy blow on his head, and he crumpled immediately. He vaguely sensed being carried somewhere. Then he was thrown into emptiness and felt himself falling. A violent crack, and he lost consciousness.