Tereza kept stroking Karenin's head, which was quietly resting in her lap, while something like the following ran through her mind: There's no particular merit in being nice to one's fellow man. She had to treat the other villagers decently, because otherwise she couldn't live there. Even with Tomas, she was obliged to behave lovingly because she needed him. We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions-love, antipathy, charity, or malice-and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
One of the heifers had made friends with Tereza. The heifer would stop and stare at her with her big brown eyes. Tereza knew her. She called her Marketa. She would have been happy to give all her heifers names, but she was unable to. There were too many of them. Not so long before, forty years or so, all the cows in the village had names. (And if having a name is a sign of having a soul, I can say that they had souls despite Descartes.) But then the villages were turned into a large collective factory, and the cows began spending all their lives in the five square feet set aside for them in their cow sheds. From that time on, they have had no names and become mere machinae animatae. The world has proved Descartes correct.
Tereza keeps appearing before my eyes. I see her sitting on the stump petting Karenin's head and ruminating on mankind's debacles. Another image also comes to mind: Nietzsche leaving his hotel in Turin. Seeing a horse and a coachman beating it with a whip, Nietzsche went up to the horse and, before the coachman's very eyes, put his arms around the horse's neck and burst into tears.
That took place in 1889, when Nietzsche, too, had removed himself from the world of people. In other words, it was at the time when his mental illness had just erupted. But for that very reason I feel his gesture has broad implications:
Nietzsche was trying to apologize to the horse for Descartes. His lunacy (that is, his final break with mankind) began at the very moment he burst into tears over the horse.
And that is the Nietzsche I love, just as I love Tereza with the mortally ill dog resting his head in her lap. I see them one next to the other: both stepping down from the road along which mankind, the master and proprietor of nature, marches onward.
3
Karenin gave birth to two rolls and a bee. He stared, amazed, at his own progeny. The rolls were utterly serene, but the bee staggered about as if drugged, then flew up and away.
Or so it happened in Tereza's dream. She told it to Tomas the minute he woke up, and they both found a certain consolation in it. It transformed Karenin's illness into a pregnancy and the drama of giving birth into something both laughable and touching: two rolls and a bee.
She again fell prey to illogical hopes. She got out of bed and put on her clothes. Here, too, her day began with a trip to the shop for milk, bread, rolls. But when she called Karenin for his walk that morning, he barely raised his head. It was the first time that he had refused to take part in the ritual he himself had forced upon them.
She went off without him. Where's Karenin? asked the woman behind the counter, who had Karenin's roll ready as usual. Tereza carried it home herself in her bag, She pulled it out and showed it to him while still in the doorway. She wanted him to come and fetch it. But he just lay there motionless.
Tomas saw how unhappy Tereza was. He put the roll in his mouth and dropped down on all fours opposite Karenin. Then he slowly crawled up to him.
Karenin followed him with his eyes, which seemed to show a glimmer of interest, but he did not pick himself up. Tomas brought his face right up to his muzzle. Without moving his body, the dog took the end of the roll sticking out of Tomas's mouth into his own. Then Tomas let go of his end so that Karenin could eat it all.
Still on all fours, Tomas retreated a little, arched his back, and started yelping, making believe he wanted to fight over the roll. After a short while, the dog responded with some yelps of his own. At last! What they were hoping for! Karenin feels like playing! Karenin hasn't lost the will to live!
Those yelps were Karenin's smile, and they wanted it to last as long as possible. So Tomas crawled back to him and tore off the end of the roll sticking out of Karenin's mouth. Their faces were so close that Tomas could smell the dog's breath, feel the long hairs on Karenin's muzzle tickling him. The dog gave out another yelp and his mouth twitched; now they each had half a roll between their teeth. Then Karenin made an old tactical error: he dropped his half in the hope of seizing the half in his master's mouth, forgetting, as always, that Tomas was not a dog and had hands. Without letting his half of the roll out of his mouth, Tomas picked up the other half from the floor.
Tomas! Tereza cried. You're not going to take his roll away from him, are you?
Tomas laid both halves on the floor in front of Karenin, who quickly gulped down the first and held the second in his mouth for an ostentatiously long time, flaunting his victory over the two of them.
Standing there watching him, they thought once more that he was smiling and that as long as he kept smiling he had a motive to keep living despite his death sentence.
The next day his condition actually appeared to have improved. They had lunch. It was the time of day when they normally took him out for a walk. His habit was to start running back and forth between them restlessly. On that day, however, Tereza picked up the leash and collar only to be stared at dully. They tried to look cheerful (for and about him) and pep him up a bit, and after a long wait he took pity on them, tottered over on his three legs, and let her put on the collar.
I know you hate the camera, Tereza, said Tomas, but take it along today, will you?
Tereza went and opened the cupboard to rummage for the long-abandoned, long-forgotten camera. One day we'll be glad to have the pictures, Tomas went on. Karenin has been an important part of our life.
What do you mean, 'has been'? said Tereza as if she had been bitten by a snake. The camera lay directly in front of her on the cupboard floor, but she would not bend to pick it up. I won't take it along. I refuse to think about losing Karenin. And you refer to him in the past tense! I'm sorry, said Tomas.
That's all right, said Tereza mildly. I catch myself thinking about him in the past tense all the time. I keep having to push it out of my mind. That's why I won't take the camera.
They walked along in silence. Silence was the only way of not thinking about Karenin in the past tense. They did not let him out of their sight; they were with him constantly, waiting for him to smile. But he did not smile; he merely walked with them, limping along on his three legs.
He's just doing it for us, said Tereza. He didn't want to go for a walk. He's just doing it to make us happy.
It was sad, what she said, yet without realizing it they were happy. They were happy not in spite of their sadness but thanks to it. They were holding hands and both had the same image in their eyes: a limping dog who represented ten years of their lives.
They walked a bit farther. Then, to their great disappointment, Karenin stopped and turned. They had to go back.
Perhaps that day or perhaps the next Tereza walked in on Tomas reading a letter. Hearing the door open, he slipped it in among some other papers, but she saw him do it. On her way out of the room she also noticed him stuffing the letter into his pocket. But he forgot about the envelope. As soon as she was alone in the house, she studied it carefully. The address was written in an unfamiliar hand, but it was very neat and she guessed it to be a woman's.
When he came back later, she asked him nonchalantly whether the mail had come.
No, said Tomas, and filled Tereza with despair, a despair all the worse for her having grown unaccustomed to it
. No, she did not believe he had a secret mistress in the village. That was all but impossible. She knew what he did with every spare minute. He must have kept up with a woman in Prague who meant so much to him that he thought of her even if she could no longer leave the smell of her groin in his hair. Tereza did not believe that Tomas meant to leave her for the woman, but the happiness of their two years in the country now seemed besmirched by lies.
An old thought came back to her: Her home was Karenin, not Tomas. Who would wind the clock of their days when he was gone?
Transported mentally into the future, a future without Karenin, Tereza felt abandoned.
Karenin was lying in a corner whimpering. Tereza went out into the garden. She looked down at a patch of grass between two apple trees and imagined burying Karenin there. She dug her heel into the earth and traced a rectangle in the grass. That was where his grave would be.
What are you doing? Tomas asked, surprising her just as she had surprised him reading the letter a few hours earlier.
She gave no answer. He noticed her hands trembling for the first time in many months. He grabbed hold of them. She pulled away from him.
Is that a grave for Karenin?
She did not answer.
Her silence grated on him. He exploded. First you blame me for thinking of him in the past tense, and then what do you do? You go and make the funeral arrangements! She turned her back on him.
Tomas retreated into his room, slamming the door behind him.
Tereza went in and opened it. Instead of thinking about yourself all the time, you might at least have some consideration for him, she said. He was asleep until you woke him. Now he'll start whimpering again.
She knew she was being unfair (the dog was not asleep); she knew she was acting like the most vulgar of women, the kind that is out to cause pain and knows how.
Tomas tiptoed into the room where Karenin was lying, but she would not leave him alone with the dog. They both leaned over him, each from his own side. Not that there was a hint of reconciliation in the move. Quite the contrary. Each of them was alone. Tereza with her dog, Tomas with his.
It is thus divided, each alone, that, sad to say, they remained with him until his last hour.
4
Why was the word idyll so important for Tereza?
Raised as we are on the mythology of the Old Testament, we might say that an idyll is an image that has remained with us like a memory of Paradise: life in Paradise was not like following a straight line to the unknown; it was not an adventure. It moved in a circle among known objects. Its monotony bred happiness, not boredom.
As long as people lived in the country, in nature, surrounded by domestic animals, in the bosom of regularly recurring seasons, they retained at least a glimmer of that paradisiac idyll. That is why Tereza, when she met the chairman of the collective farm at the spa, conjured up an image of the countryside (a countryside she had never lived in or known) that she found enchanting. It was her way of looking back, back to Paradise.
Adam, leaning over a well, did not yet realize that what he saw was himself. He would not have understood Tereza when she stood before the mirror as a young girl and tried to see her soul through her body. Adam was like Karenin. Tereza made a game of getting him to look at himself in the mirror, but he never recognized his image, gazed at it vacantly, with incredible indifference.
Comparing Adam and Karenin leads me to the thought that in Paradise man was not yet man. Or to be more precise, man had not yet been cast out on man's path. Now we are longtime outcasts, Hying through the emptiness of time in a straight line. Yet somewhere deep down a thin thread still ties us to that far-off misty Paradise, where Adam leans over a well and, unlike Narcissus, never even suspects that the pale yellow blotch appearing in it is he himself. The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.
Whenever, as a child, she came across her mother's sanitary napkins soiled with menstrual blood, she felt disgusted, and hated her mother for lacking the shame to hide them. But Karenin, who was after all a female, had his periods, too. They came once every six months and lasted a fortnight. To keep him from soiling their flat, Tereza would put a wad of absorbent cotton between his legs and pull a pair of old panties over it, skillfully tying them to his body with a long ribbon. She would go on laughing at the outfit for the entire two weeks of each period.
Why is it that a dog's menstruation made her lighthearted and gay, while her own menstruation made her squeamish? The answer seems simple to me: dogs were never expelled from Paradise. Karenin knew nothing about the duality of body and soul and had no concept of disgust. That is why Tereza felt so free and easy with him. (And that is why it is so dangerous to turn an animal into a machina animata, a cow into an automaton for the production of milk. By so doing, man cuts the thread binding him to Paradise and has nothing left to hold or comfort him on his flight through the emptiness of time.)
From this jumble of ideas came a sacrilegious thought that Tereza could not shake off: the love that tied her to Karenin was better than the love between her and Tomas. Better, not bigger. Tereza did not wish to fault either Tomas or herself; she did not wish to claim that they could love each other more. Her feeling was rather that, given the nature of the human couple, the love of man and woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best instances) in the love between man and dog, that oddity of human history probably unplanned by the Creator.
It is a completely selfless love: Tereza did not want anything of Karenin; she did not ever ask him to love her back. Nor had she ever asked herself the questions that plague human couples: Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
And something else: Tereza accepted Karenin for what he was; she did not try to make him over in her image; she agreed from the outset with his dog's life, did not wish to deprive him of it, did not envy him his secret intrigues. The reason she trained him was not to transform him (as a husband tries to reform his wife and a wife her husband), but to provide him with the elementary language that enabled them to communicate and live together.
Then too: No one forced her to love Karenin; love for dogs is voluntary. (Tereza was again reminded of her mother, and regretted everything that had happened between them. If her mother had been one of the anonymous women in the village, she might well have found her easygoing coarseness agreeable. Oh, if only her mother had been a stranger! From childhood on, Tereza had been ashamed of the way her mother occupied the features of her face and confiscated her I. What made it even worse was that the age-old imperative Love your father and mother! forced her to agree with that occupation, to call the aggression love! It was not her mother's fault that Tereza broke with her. Tereza broke with her not because she was the mother she was but because she was a mother.)
But most of all: No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development. Karenin surrounded Tereza and Tomas with a life based on repetition, and he expected the same from them.
If Karenin had been a person instead of a dog, he would surely have long since said to Tereza, Look, I'm sick and tired of carrying that roll in my mouth every day. Can't you come up with something different? And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
Yes, happiness is the longing for repetition, Tereza said to herself.
When the chairman of the collective farm took his Mefisto out for a w
alk after work and met Tereza, he never failed to say, Why did he come into my life so late, Tereza? We could have gone skirt chasing, he and I! What woman could resist these two little pigs? at which point the pig was trained to grunt and snort. Tereza laughed each time, even though she knew beforehand exactly what he would say. The joke did not lose its charm, through repetition. On the contrary. In an idyllic setting, even humor is subject to the sweet law of repetition.
5
Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death. Karenin walked on three legs and spent more and more of his time lying in a corner. And whimpering. Both husband and wife agreed that they had no business letting him suffer needlessly. But agree as they might in principle, they still had to face the anguish of determining the time when his suffering was in fact needless, the point at which life was no longer worth living.
If only Tomas hadn't been a doctor! Then they would have been able to hide behind a third party. They would have been able to go back to the vet and ask him to put the dog to sleep with an injection.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Page 24