The Unbearable Lightness of Being

by Milan Kundera

  He woke up in a hospital in Geneva. Marie-Claude was leaning over his bed. He wanted to tell her she had no right to be there. He wanted them to send immediately for the girl with the glasses. All his thoughts were with her. He wanted to shout that he couldn't stand having anyone but her at his side. But he realized with horror that he could not speak. He looked up at Marie-Claude with infinite hatred and tried to turn away from her. But he could not move his body. His head, perhaps? No, he could not even move his head. He closed his eyes so as not to see her.

  27

  In death, Franz at last belonged to his wife. He belonged to her as he had never belonged to her before. Marie-Claude took care of everything: she saw to the funeral, sent out the announcements, bought the wreaths, and had a black dress made-a wedding dress, in reality. Yes, a husband's funeral is a wife's true wedding! The climax of her life's work! The reward for her sufferings!

  The pastor understood this very well. His funeral oration was about a true conjugal love that had withstood many tests to remain a haven of peace for the deceased, a haven to which he had returned at the end of his days. The colleague of Franz's whom Marie-Claude asked to speak at the graveside services also paid homage primarily to the deceased's brave wife.

  Somewhere in the back, supported by a friend, stood the girl with the big glasses. The combination of many pills and suppressed sobs gave her an attack of cramps before the ceremony came to an end. She lurched forward, clutching her stomach, and her friend had to take her away from the cemetery.

  28

  The moment he received the telegram from the chairman of the collective farm, he jumped on his motorcycle. He arrived in time to arrange for the funeral. The inscription he chose to go under his father's name on the gravestone read:

  HE WANTED THE KINGDOM OF GOD ON EARTH.

  He was well aware that his father would not have said it in those words, but he was certain they expressed what his father actually thought. The kingdom of God means justice. Tomas had longed for a world in which justice would reign. Hadn't Simon the right to express his father's life in his own vocabulary? Of course he had: haven't all heirs had that right from time immemorial?

  A return after long wanderings was the inscription adorning the stone above Franz's grave. It can be interpreted in religious terms: the wanderings being our earthly existence, the return our return to God's embrace. But the insiders knew that it had a perfectly secular meaning as well. Indeed, Marie-Claude talked about it every day:

  Franz, dear, sweet Franz! The mid-life crisis was just too much for him. And that pitiful little girl who caught him in her net! Why, she wasn't even pretty! (Did you see those enormous glasses she tried to hide behind?) But when they start pushing fifty (don't we know it!), they'll sell their souls for a fresh piece of flesh. Only his wife knows how it made him suffer! It was pure moral torture! Because, deep down, Franz was a kind and decent man. How else can you explain that crazy, desperate trip to wherever it was in Asia? He went there to find death. Yes, Marie-Claude knew it for an absolute fact:

  Franz had consciously sought out death. In his last days, when he was dying and had no need to lie, she was the only person he asked for. He couldn't talk, but how he'd thanked her with his eyes! He'd fixed his eyes on her and begged to be forgiven. And she forgave him.

  29

  What remains of the dying population of Cambodia?

  One large photograph of an American actress holding an Asian child in her arms.

  What remains of Tomas?

  An inscription reading he wanted the kingdom of god on earth.

  What remains of Beethoven?

  A frown, an improbable mane, and a somber voice intoning Es muss sein!

  What remains of Franz?

  An inscription reading a return after long wanderings.

  And so on and so forth. Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

  PART SEVEN . Karenin's Smile

  1

  The window looked out on a slope overgrown with the crooked bodies of apple trees. The woods cut off the view above the slope, and a crooked line of hills stretched into the distance. When, towards evening, a white moon made its way into the pale sky, Tereza would go and stand on the threshold. The sphere hanging in the not yet darkened sky seemed like a lamp they had forgotten to turn off in the morning, a lamp that had burned all day in the room of the dead.

  None of the crooked apple trees growing along the slope could ever leave the spot where it had put down its roots, just as neither Tereza nor Tomas could ever leave their village. They had sold their car, their television set, and their radio to buy a tiny cottage and garden from a farmer who was moving to town.

  Life in the country was the only escape open to them, because only in the country was there a constant deficit of people and a surplus of living accommodations. No one bothered to look into the political past of people willing to go off and work in the fields or woods; no one envied them.

  Tereza was happy to abandon the city, the drunken barflies molesting her, and the anonymous women leaving the smell of their groins in Tomas's hair. The police stopped pestering them, and the incident with the engineer so merged with the scene on Petrin Hill that she was hard put to tell which was a dream and which the truth. (Was the engineer in fact employed by the secret police? Perhaps he was, perhaps not. Men who use borrowed flats for rendezvous and never make love to the same woman twice are not so rare.)

  In any case, Tereza was happy and felt that she had at last reached her goal: she and Tomas were together and alone. Alone? Let me be more precise: living alone meant breaking with all their former friends and acquaintances, cutting their life in two like a ribbon; however, they felt perfectly at home in the company of the country people they worked with, and they sometimes exchanged visits with them.

  The day they met the chairman of the local collective farm at the spa that had Russian street names, Tereza discovered in herself a picture of country life originating in memories of books she had read or in her ancestors. It was a harmonious world; everyone came together in one big happy family with common interests and routines: church services on Sundays, a tavern where the men could get away from their womenfolk, and a hall in the tavern where a band played on Saturdays and the villagers danced.

  Under Communism, however, village life no longer fit the age-old pattern. The church was in the neighboring village, and no one went there; the tavern had been turned into offices, so the men had nowhere to meet and drink beer, the young people nowhere to dance. Celebrating church holidays was forbidden, and no one cared about their secular replacements. The nearest cinema was in a town fifteen miles away. So, at the end of a day's work filled with boisterous shouting and relaxed chatter, they would all shut themselves up within their four walls and, surrounded by contemporary furniture emanating bad taste like a cold draft, stare at the refulgent television screen. They never paid one another visits besides dropping in on a neighbor for a word or two before supper. They all dreamed of moving into town. The country offered them nothing in the way of even a minimally interesting life.

  Perhaps it was the fact that no one wished to settle there that caused the state to lose its power over the countryside. A farmer who no longer owns his own land and is merely a laborer tilling the soil forms no allegiance to either region or work; he has nothing to lose, nothing to fear for. As a result of such apathy, the countryside had maintained more than a modicum of autonomy and freedom. The chairman of the collective farm was not brought in from outside (as were all high-level managers in the city); he was elected by the villagers from among themselves.

  Because everyone wanted to leave, Tereza and Tomas were in an exceptional position: they had come voluntarily. If the other villagers took advantage of every opportunity to make day trips to the surrounding towns, Tereza and Tomas were content to remain where they were, which meant that before long they knew the villagers better than the villagers knew one another.


  The collective farm chairman became a truly close friend. He had a wife, four children, and a pig he raised like a dog. The pig's name was Mefisto, and he was the pride and main attraction of the village. He would answer his master's call and was always clean and pink; he paraded about on his hoofs like a heavy-thighed woman in high heels.

  When Karenin first saw Mefisto, he was very upset and circled him, sniffing, for a long time. But he soon made friends with him, even to the point of preferring him to the village dogs. Indeed, he had nothing but scorn for the dogs, because they were all chained to their doghouses and never stopped their silly, unmotivated barking. Karenin correctly assessed the value of being one of a kind, and I can state without compunction that he greatly appreciated his friendship with the pig.

  The chairman was glad to be able to help his former surgeon, though at the same time sad that he could do nothing more. Tomas became the driver of the pickup truck that took the farm workers out to the fields and hauled equipment.

  The collective farm had four large cow sheds as well as a small stable of forty heifers. Tereza was charged with looking after them and taking them out to pasture twice a day. Because the closer, easily accessible meadows would eventually be mowed, she had to take her herd into the surrounding hills for grazing, gradually moving farther and farther out and, in the course of the year, covering all the pastureland round about. As in her small-town youth, she was never without a book, and the minute she reached the day's pasture she would open it and read.

  Karenin always kept her company. He learned to bark at the young cows when they got too frisky and tried to go off on their own; he did so with obvious zest. He was definitely the happiest of the three. Never before had his position as keeper of the clock been so respected. The country was no place for improvisation; the time in which Tereza and Tomas lived was growing closer to the regularity of his time.

  One day, after lunch (a time when they both had an hour to themselves), they took a walk with Karenin up the slope behind their cottage.

  I don't like the way he's running, said Tereza.

  Karenin was limping on a hind leg. Tomas bent down and carefully felt all along it. Near the hock he found a small bump.

  The next day he sat him in the front seat of the pickup and drove, during his rounds, to the neighboring village, where the local veterinarian lived. A week later, he paid him another visit. He came home with the news that Karenin had cancer.

  Within three days, Tomas himself, with the vet in attendance, had operated on him. When Tomas brought him home, Karenin had not quite come out of the anesthesia. He lay on the rug next to their bed with his eyes open, whimpering, his thigh shaved bare and the incision and six stitches painfully visible.

  At last he tried to stand up. He failed.

  Tereza was terrified that he would never walk again.

  Don't worry, said Tomas. He's still under the anesthetic.

  She tried to pick him up, but he snapped at her. It was the first time he'd ever tried to bite Tereza!

  He doesn't know who you are, said Tomas. He doesn't recognize you.

  They lifted him onto their bed, where he quickly fell asleep, as did they.

  At three o'clock that morning, he suddenly woke them up, wagging his tail and climbing all over them, cuddling up to them, unable to have his fill.

  It was the first time he'd ever got them up, too! He had always waited until one of them woke up before he dared jump on them.

  But when he suddenly came to in the middle of the night, he could not control himself. Who can tell what distances he covered on his way back? Who knows what phantoms he battled? And now that he was at home with his dear ones, he felt compelled to share his overwhelming joy, a joy of return and rebirth.

  2

  The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse. Yes, the right to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars.

  The reason we take that right for granted is that we stand at the top of the hierarchy. But let a third party enter the game-a visitor from another planet, for example, someone to whom God says, Thou shalt have dominion over creatures of all other stars -and all at once taking Genesis for granted becomes problematical. Perhaps a man hitched to the cart of a Martian or roasted on the spit by inhabitants of the Milky Way will recall the veal cutlet he used to slice on his dinner plate and apologize (belatedly!) to the cow.

  Walking along with her heifers, driving them in front of her, Tereza was constantly obliged to use discipline, because young cows are frisky and like to run off into the fields. Karenin kept her company. He had been going along daily to the pasture with her for two years. He always enjoyed being strict with the heifers, barking at them, asserting his authority. (His God had given him dominion over cows, and he was proud of it.) Today, however, he was having great trouble making his way, and hobbled along on three legs; the fourth had a wound on it, and the wound was festering. Tereza kept bending down and stroking his back. Two weeks after the operation, it became clear that the cancer had continued to spread and that Karenin would fare worse and worse.

  Along the way, they met a neighbor who was hurrying off to a cow shed in her rubber boots. The woman stopped long enough to ask, What's wrong with the dog? It seems to be limping. He has cancer, said Tereza. There's no hope. And the lump in her throat kept her from going on. The woman noticed Tereza's tears and nearly lost her temper: Good heavens! Don't tell me you're going to bawl your head off over a dog! She was not being vicious; she was a kind woman and merely wanted to comfort Tereza. Tereza understood, and had spent enough time in the country to realize that if the local inhabitants loved every rabbit as she loved Karenin, they would be unable to kill any of them and they and their animals would soon starve to death. Still, the woman's words struck her as less than friendly. I understand, she answered without protest, but quickly turned her back and went her way. The love she bore her dog made her feel cut off, isolated. With a sad smile, she told herself that she needed to hide it more than she would an affair. People are indignant at the thought of someone loving a dog. But if the neighbor had discovered that Tereza had been unfaithful to Tomas, she would have given Tereza a playful pat on the back as a sign of secret solidarity.

  Be that as it may, Tereza continued on her path, and, watching her heifers rub against one another, she thought what nice animals they were. Calm, guileless, and sometimes childishly animated, they looked like fat fifty-year-olds pretending they were fourteen. There was nothing more touching than cows at play. Tereza took pleasure in their antics and could not help thinking (it is an idea that kept coming back to her during her two years in the country) that man is as much a parasite on the cow as the tapeworm is on man: We have sucked their udders like leeches. Man the cow parasite is probably how non-man defines man in his zoology books.

  Now, we may treat this definition as a joke and dismiss it with a condescending laugh. But since Tereza took it seriously, she found herself in a precarious position: her ideas were dangerous and distanced her from the rest of mankind. Even though Genesis says that God gave man dominion over all animals, we can also construe it to mean that He merely entrusted them to man's care. Man was not the planet's master, merely its administrator, and therefore eventually responsible for his administration. Descartes took a decisive step forward: he made man maitre et proprietaire de la nature. And surely there is a deep connection between that step and the fact that he was also the one who point-blank denied animals a soul. Man is master and proprietor, says Descartes, whereas the beast is merely an automaton, an animated machine, a machina animata. When an animal laments, it is not a lament; it is merely
the rasp of a poorly functioning mechanism. When a wagon wheel grates, the wagon is not in pain; it simply needs oiling. Thus, we have no reason to grieve for a dog being carved up alive in the laboratory.

  While the heifers grazed, Tereza sat on a stump with Karenin at her side, his head resting in her lap. She recalled reading a two-line filler in the papers ten or so years ago about how all the dogs in a certain Russian city had been summarily shot. It was that inconspicuous and seemingly insignificant little article that had brought home to her for the first time the sheer horror of her country's oversized neighbor.

  That little article was a premonition of things to come. The first years following the Russian invasion could not yet be characterized as a reign of terror. Because practically no one in the entire nation agreed with the occupation regime, the Russians had to ferret out the few exceptions and push them into power. But where could they look? All faith in Communism and love for Russia was dead. So they sought people who wished to get back at life for something, people with revenge on the brain. Then they had to focus, cultivate, and maintain those people's aggressiveness, give them a temporary substitute to practice on.

  The substitute they lit upon was animals.

  All at once the papers started coming out with cycles of features and organized letters-to-the-editor campaigns demanding, for example, the extermination of all pigeons within city limits. And the pigeons would be exterminated. But the major drive was directed against dogs. People were still disconsolate over the catastrophe of the occupation, but radio, television, and the press went on and on about dogs: how they soil our streets and parks, endanger our children's health, fulfill no useful function, yet must be fed. They whipped up such a psychotic fever that Tereza had been afraid that the crazed mob would do harm to Karenin. Only after a year did the accumulated malice (which until then had been vented, for the sake of training, on animals) find its true goal: people. People started being removed from their jobs, arrested, put on trial. At last the animals could breathe freely.