9 MILAN KUNDERA The Unbearable Lightness of Being Part 6 The Grand March
PART SIX
The Grand March
Not until 1980 were we able to read in the Sunday Times how Stalin’s son, Yakov, died.
Captured by the Germans during the Second World War, he was placed in a camp together with a group of British officers. They shared a latrine. Stalin’s son habitually left a foul mess. The British officers resented having their latrine smeared with shit, even if it was the shit of the son of the most powerful man in the world. They brought the matter to his attention. He took offense. They brought it to his attention again and again, and tried to make him clean the latrine. He raged, argued, and fought. Finally, he demanded a hearing with the camp commander. He wanted the commander to act as arbiter. But the arrogant German refused to talk about shit. Stalin’s son could not stand the humiliation. Crying out to heaven in the most terrifying of Russian curses, he took a running jump into the electrified barbed-wire fence that surrounded the camp. He hit the target. His body, which would never again make a mess of the Britishers’ latrine, was pinned to the wire.
Stalin’s son had a hard time of it. All evidence points to the conclusion that his father killed the woman by whom he had the boy. Young Stalin was therefore both the Son of God (because his father was revered like God) and His cast-off. People feared him twofold: he could injure them by both his wrath (he was, after all, Stalin’s son) and his favor (his father might punish his cast-off son’s friends in order to punish him).
Rejection and privilege, happiness and woe—no one felt more concretely than Yakov how interchangeable opposites are, how short the step from one pole of human existence to the other.
Then, at the very outset of the war, he fell prisoner to the Germans, and other prisoners, belonging to an incomprehensible, standoffish nation that had always been intrinsically repulsive to him, accused him of being dirty. Was he, who bore on his shoulders a drama of the highest order (as fallen angel and Son of God), to undergo judgment not for something sublime (in the realm of God and the angels) but for shit?
Were the very highest of drama and the very lowest so vertiginously close?
Vertiginously close? Can proximity cause vertigo?
It can. When the north pole comes so close as to touch the south pole, the earth disappears and man finds himself in a void that makes his head spin and beckons him to fall.
If rejection and privilege are one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, if the Son of God can undergo judgment for shit, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearably light. When Stalin’s son ran up to the electrified wire and hurled his body at it, the fence was like the pan of a scales sticking pitifully up in the air, lifted by the infinite lightness of a world that has lost its dimensions.
“The Unbearable Lightness Of Being” By Milan Kundera 129
Stalin’s son laid down his life for shit. But a death for shit is not a senseless death. The Germans who sacrificed their lives to expand their country’s territory to the east, the Russians who died to extend their country’s power to the west—yes, they died for something idiotic, and their deaths have no meaning or general validity. Amid the general idiocy of the war, the death of Stalin’s son stands out as the sole metaphysical death.
When I was small and would leaf through the Old Testament retold for children and illustrated in engravings by Gustave Dore, I saw the Lord God standing on a cloud. He was an old man with eyes, nose, and a long beard, and I would say to myself that if He had a mouth, He had to eat. And if He ate, He had intestines. But that thought always gave me a fright, because even though I come from a family that was not particularly religious, I felt the idea of a divine intestine to be sacrilegious.
Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely, that man was created in God’s image. Either/or: either man was created in God’s image—and God has intestines!—or God lacks intestines and man is not like Him.
The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that Jesus ate and drank, but did not defecate.
Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man’s crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the Creator of man.
In the fourth century, Saint Jerome completely rejected the notion that Adam and Eve had sexual intercourse in Paradise. On the other hand, Johannes Scotus Erigena, the great ninth-century theologian, accepted the idea. He believed, moreover, that Adam’s virile member could be made to rise like an arm or a leg, when and as its owner wished.
We must not dismiss this fancy as the recurrent dream of a man obsessed with the threat of impotence. Erigena’s idea has a different meaning. If it were possible to raise the penis by means of a simple command, then sexual excitement would have no place in the world. The penis would rise not because we are excited but because we order it to do so. What the great theologian found incompatible with Paradise was not sexual intercourse and the attendant pleasure; what he found incompatible with Paradise was excitement. Bear in mind: There was pleasure in Paradise, but no excitement.
Erigena’s argument holds the key to a theological justification (in other words, a theodicy) of shit. As long as man was allowed to remain in Paradise, either (like Valentinus’ Jesus) he did not defecate at all, or (as would seem more likely) he did not look upon shit as something repellent. Not until after God expelled man from Paradise did He make him feel disgust. Man began to hide what shamed him, and by the time he removed the veil, he was blinded by a great light. Thus, immediately after his introduction to disgust, he was introduced to excitement. Without shit (in both the literal and figurative senses of the word), there would be no sexual love as we know it, accompanied by pounding heart and blinded senses.
“The Unbearable Lightness Of Being” By Milan Kundera 130
In Part Three of this novel I told the tale of Sabina standing half-naked with a bowler hat on her head and the fully dressed Tomas at her side. There is something I failed to mention at the time. While she was looking at herself in the mirror, excited by her self-denigration, she had a fantasy of Tomas seating her on the toilet in her bowler hat and watching her void her bowels. Suddenly her heart began to pound and, on the verge of fainting, she pulled Tomas down to the rug and immediately let out an orgasmic shout.
The dispute between those who believe that the world was created by God and those who think it came into being of its own accord deals with phenomena that go beyond our reason and experience. Much more real is the line separating those who doubt being as it is granted to man (no matter how or by whom) from those who accept it without reservation.
Behind all the European faiths, religious and political, we find the first chapter of Genesis, which tells us that the world was created properly, that human existence is good, and that we are therefore entitled to multiply. Let us call this basic faith a categorical agreement with being.
The fact that until recently the word shit appeared in print as s— has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don’t lock yourself in the bathroom!) or we are created in an unacceptable manner.
It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch.
Kitsch is a German word born in the middle of the sentimental nineteenth century, and from German it entered all Western languages. Repeated use, however, has obliterated its original metaphysical meaning: kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
Sabina’s initial inner revolt against Communism was aesthetic rather than ethical in character. What repelled her was not nearly so much the ugliness of the Communist world (ruined castles transformed into cow sheds) as the mask of beauty it tried to wear—in other words, Communist kitsch. The model of Communist kitsch is the ceremony called May Day.
She had seen May Day parades during the time when people were still enthusiastic or still did their best to feign enthusiasm. The women all wore red, white, and blue blouses, and the public, looking on from balconies and windows, could make out various five-pointed stars, hearts, and letters when the marchers went into formation.
Small brass bands accompanied the individual groups, keeping everyone in step. As a group approached the reviewing stand, even the most blase faces would beam with dazzling smiles, as if trying to prove they were properly joyful or, to be more precise, in proper agreement. Nor were they merely expressing political agreement with Communism; no, theirs was an agreement with being as such. The May Day ceremony
“The Unbearable Lightness Of Being” By Milan Kundera 131
drew its inspiration from the deep well of the categorical agreement with being. The unwritten, unsung motto of the parade was not Long live Communism! but Long live life!
The power and cunning of Communist politics lay in the fact that it appropriated this slogan. For it was this idiotic tautology ( Long live life! ) which attracted people indifferent to the theses of Communism to the Communist parade.
Ten years later (by which time she was living in America), a friend of some friends, an American senator, took Sabina for a drive in his gigantic car, his four children bouncing up and down in the back. The senator stopped the car in front of a stadium with an artificial skating rink, and the children jumped out and started running along the large expanse of grass surrounding it. Sitting behind the wheel and gazing dreamily after the four little bounding figures, he said to Sabina, Just look at them. And describing a circle with his arm, a circle that was meant to take in stadium, grass, and children, he added, Now that’s what I call happiness.
Behind his words there was more than joy at seeing children run and grass grow; there was a deep understanding of the plight of a refugee from a Communist country where, the senator was convinced, no grass grew or children ran.
At that moment an image of the senator standing on a reviewing stand in a Prague square flashed through Sabina’s mind. The smile on his face was the smile Communist statesmen beamed from the height of their reviewing stand to the identically smiling citizens in the parade below.
How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if, the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up?
The senator had only one argument in his favor: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.
The feeling induced by kitsch must be a kind the multitudes can share. Kitsch may not, therefore, depend on an unusual situation; it must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their memories: the ungrateful daughter, the neglected father, children running on the grass, the motherland betrayed, first love.
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!
The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch.
“The Unbearable Lightness Of Being” By Milan Kundera 132
And no one knows this better than politicians. Whenever a camera is in the offing, they immediately run to the nearest child, lift it in the air, kiss it on the cheek. Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements.
Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality; the artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.
When I say totalitarian, what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree Be fruitful and multiply.
In this light, we can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse.
The decade immediately following the Second World War was a time of the most horrible Stalinist terror. It was the time when Tereza’s father was arrested on some piddling charge and ten-year-old Tereza was thrown out of their flat. It was also the time when twenty-year-old Sabina was studying at the Academy of Fine Arts. There, her professor of Marxism expounded on the following theory of socialist art: Soviet society had made such progress that the basic conflict was no longer between good and evil but between good and better. So shit (that is, whatever is essentially unacceptable) could exist only on the other side (in America, for instance), and only from there, from the outside, as something alien (a spy, for instance), could it penetrate the world of good and better.
And in fact, Soviet films, which flooded the cinemas of all Communist countries in that crudest of times, were saturated with incredible innocence and chastity. The greatest conflict that could occur between two Russians was a lovers’ misunderstanding: he thought she no longer loved him; she thought he no longer loved her. But in the final scene they would fall into each other’s arms, tears of happiness trickling down their cheeks.
The current conventional interpretation of these films is this: that they showed the Communist ideal, whereas Communist reality was worse.
Sabina always rebelled against that interpretation. Whenever she imagined the world of Soviet kitsch becoming a reality, she felt a shiver run down her back. She would unhesitatingly prefer life in a real Communist regime with all its persecution and meat queues. Life in the real Communist world was still livable. In the world of the Communist ideal made real, in that world of grinning idiots, she would have nothing to say, she would die of horror within a week.
“The Unbearable Lightness Of Being” By Milan Kundera 133
The feeling Soviet kitsch evoked in Sabina strikes me as very much like the horror Tereza experienced in her dream of being marched around a swimming pool with a group of naked women and forced to sing cheerful songs with them while corpses floated just below the surface of the pool. Tereza could not address a single question, a single word, to any of the women; the only response she would have got was the next stanza of the current song. She could not even give any of them a secret wink; they would immediately have pointed her out to the man standing in the basket above the pool, and he would have shot her dead.
Tereza’s dream reveals the true function of kitsch: kitsch is a folding screen set up to curtain off death.
In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it. In fact, that was exactly how Sabina had explained the meaning of her paintings to Tereza: on the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth showing through.
But the people who struggle against what we call totalitarian regimes cannot function with queries and doubts. They, too, need certainties and simple truths to make the multitudes understand, to provoke collective tears.
Sabina had once had an exhibit that was organized by a political organization in Germany. When she picked up the catalogue, the first thing she saw was a picture of herself with a drawing of barbed wire superimposed on it. Inside she found a biography that read like the life of a saint or martyr: she had suffered, struggled against injustice, been forced to abandon her bleeding homeland, yet was carrying on the struggle. Her paintings are a struggle for happiness was the final sentence.
She protested, but they did not understand her.
Do you mean that modern art isn’t persecuted under Communism?
My enemy is kitsch, not Communism! she replied, infuriated.
From that time on, she began to insert mystifications in her biography, and by the time she got to America she even managed to hide the fact that she was Czech. It was all merely a desperate attempt to escape the kitsch that people wanted to make of her life.
She stood in front of her easel with a half-finished canvas on it, the old man in the armchair behind her observing every stroke of her brush.
It’s time we went home, he said at last with a glance at his watch.
She laid down her palette and went into the bathroom to wash. The old man raised himself out of the armchair and reached for his cane, which was leaning against a table.
The door of the studio led directly out to the lawn. It was growing dark. Fifty feet away
“The Unbearable Lightness Of Being” By Milan Kundera 134
was a white clapboard house. The ground-floor windows were lit. Sabina was moved by the two windows shining out into the dying day.
All her life she had proclaimed kitsch her enemy. But hadn’t she in fact been carrying it with her? Her kitsch was her image of home, all peace, quiet, and harmony, and ruled by a loving mother and wise father. It was an image that took shape within her after the death of her parents. The less her life resembled that sweetest of dreams, the more sensitive she was to its magic, and more than once she shed tears when the ungrateful daughter in a sentimental film embraced the neglected father as the windows of the happy family’s house shone out into the dying day.
She had met the old man in New York. He was rich and liked paintings. He lived alone with his wife, also aging, in a house in the country. Facing the house, but still on his land, stood an old stable. He had had it remodeled into a studio for Sabina and would follow the movements of her brush for days on end.
Now all three of them were having supper together. The old woman called Sabina my daughter, but all indications would lead one to believe the opposite, namely, that Sabina was the mother and that her two children doted on her, worshipped her, would do anything she asked.
Had she then, herself on the threshold of old age, found the parents who had been snatched from her as a girl? Had she at last found the children she had never had herself?
She was well aware it was an illusion. Her days with the aging couple were merely a brief interval. The old man was seriously ill, and when his wife was left on her own, she would go and live with their son in Canada. Sabina’s path of betrayals would then continue elsewhere, and from the depths of her being, a silly mawkish song about two shining windows and the happy family living behind them would occasionally make its way into the unbearable lightness of being.
Though touched by the song, Sabina did not take her feeling seriously. She knew only too well that the song was a beautiful lie. As soon as kitsch is recognized for the lie it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power and becoming as touching as any other human weakness. For none among us is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.
Kitsch has its source in the categorical agreement with being.
But what is the basis of being? God? Mankind? Struggle? Love? Man? Woman?
Since opinions vary, there are various kitsches: Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Communist, Fascist, democratic, feminist, European, American, national, international.
Since the days of the French Revolution, one half of Europe has been referred to as the left, the other half as the right. Yet to define one or the other by means of the theoretical principles it professes is all but impossible. And no wonder: political movements rest not
“The Unbearable Lightness Of Being” By Milan Kundera 135
so much on rational attitudes as on the fantasies, images, words, and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch.
The fantasy of the Grand March that Franz was so intoxicated by is the political kitsch joining leftists of all times and tendencies. The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.
The dictatorship of the proletariat or democracy? Rejection of the consumer society or demands for increased productivity? The guillotine or an end to the death penalty? It is all beside the point. What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.
Franz was obviously not a devotee of kitsch. The fantasy of the Grand March played more or less the same role in his life as the mawkish song about the two brightly lit windows in Sabina’s. What political party did Franz vote for? I am afraid he did not vote at all; he preferred to spend Election Day hiking in the mountains. Which does not, of course, imply that he was no longer touched by the Grand March. It is always nice to dream that we are part of a jubilant throng marching through the centuries, and Franz never quite forgot the dream.
One day, some friends phoned him from Paris. They were planning a march on Cambodia and invited him to join them.
Cambodia had recently been through American bombardment, a civil war, a paroxysm of carnage by local Communists that reduced the small nation by a fifth, and finally occupation by neighboring Vietnam, which by then was a mere vassal of Russia.
Cambodia was racked by famine, and people were dying for want of medical care. An international medical committee had repeatedly requested permission to enter the country, but the Vietnamese had turned them down. The idea was for a group of important Western intellectuals to march to the Cambodian border and by means of this great spectacle performed before the eyes of the world to force the occupied country to allow the doctors in.
The friend who spoke to Franz was one he had marched with through the streets of Paris. At first Franz was thrilled by the invitation, but then his eye fell on his student-mistress sitting across the room in an armchair. She was looking up at him, her eyes magnified by the big round lenses in her glasses. Franz had the feeling those eyes were begging him not to go. And so he apologetically declined.
No sooner had he hung up than he regretted his decision. True, he had taken care of his earthly mistress, but he had neglected his unearthly love. Wasn’t Cambodia the same as Sabina’s country? A country occupied by its neighbor’s Communist army! A country that had felt the brunt of Russia’s fist! All at once, Franz felt that his half-forgotten friend had contacted him at Sabina’s secret bidding.
Heavenly bodies know all and see all. If he went on the march, Sabina would gaze down on him enraptured; she would understand that he had remained faithful to her.
“The Unbearable Lightness Of Being” By Milan Kundera 136
Would you be terribly upset if I went on the march? he asked the girl with the glasses, who counted every day away from him a loss, yet could not deny him a thing.
Several days later he was in a large jet taking off from Paris with twenty doctors and about fifty intellectuals (professors, writers, diplomats, singers, actors, and mayors) as well as four hundred reporters and photographers.
The plane landed in Bangkok. Four hundred and seventy doctors, intellectuals, and reporters made their way to the large ballroom of an international hotel, where more doctors, actors, singers, and professors of linguistics had gathered with several hundred journalists bearing notebooks, tape recorders, and cameras, still and video. On the podium, a group of twenty or so Americans sitting at a long table were presiding over the proceedings.
The French intellectuals with whom Franz had entered the ballroom felt slighted and humiliated. The march on Cambodia had been their idea, and here the Americans, supremely unabashed as usual, had not only taken over, but had taken over in English without a thought that a Dane or a Frenchman might not understand them. And because the Danes had long since forgotten that they once formed a nation of their own, the French were the only Europeans capable of protest. So high were their principles that they refused to protest in English, and made their case to the Americans on the podium in their mother tongue. The Americans, not understanding a word, reacted with friendly, agreeing smiles. In the end, the French had no choice but to frame their objection in English: Why is this meeting in English when there are Frenchmen present?
Though amazed at so curious an objection, the Americans, still smiling, acquiesced: the meeting would be run bilingually. Before it could resume, however, a suitable interpreter had to be found. Then, every sentence had to resound in both English and French, which made the discussion take twice as long, or rather more than twice as long, since all the French had some English and kept interrupting the interpreter to correct him, disputing every word.
The meeting reached its peak when a famous American actress rose to speak.
Because of her, even more photographers and cameramen streamed into the auditorium, and every syllable she pronounced was accompanied by the click of another camera. The actress spoke about suffering children, about the barbarity of Communist dictatorship, the human right to security, the current threat to the traditional values of civilized society, the inalienable freedom of the human individual, and President Carter, who was deeply sorrowed by the events in Cambodia. By the time she had pronounced her closing words, she was in tears.
Then up jumped a young French doctor with a red mustache and shouted, We’re here to cure dying people, not to pay homage to President Carter! Let’s not turn this into an American propaganda circus! We’re not here to protest against Communism! We’re here to save lives!
He was immediately seconded by several other Frenchmen.
“The Unbearable Lightness Of Being” By Milan Kundera 137
The interpreter was frightened and did not dare translate what they said. So the twenty Americans on the podium looked on once more with smiles full of good will, many nodding agreement. One of them even lifted his fist in the air because he knew Europeans liked to raise their fists in times of collective euphoria.
How can it be that leftist intellectuals (because the doctor with the mustache was nothing if not a leftist intellectual) are willing to march against the interests of a Communist country when Communism has always been considered the left’s domain?
When the crimes of the country called the Soviet Union became too scandalous, a leftist had two choices: either to spit on his former life and stop marching or (more or less sheepishly) to reclassify the Soviet Union as an obstacle to the Grand March and march on.
Have I not said that what makes a leftist a leftist is the kitsch of the Grand March? The identity of kitsch comes not from a political strategy but from images, metaphors, and vocabulary. It is therefore possible to break the habit and march against the interests of a Communist country. What is impossible, however, is to substitute one word for others.
It is possible to threaten the Vietnamese army with one’s fist. It is impossible to shout Down with Communism! Down with Communism! is a slogan belonging to the enemies of the Grand March, and anyone worried about losing face must remain faithful to the purity of his own kitsch.
The only reason I bring all this up is to explain the misunderstanding between the French doctor and the American actress, who, egocentric as she was, imagined herself the victim of envy or misogyny. In point of fact, the French doctor displayed a finely honed aesthetic sensibility: the phrases President Carter, our traditional values, the barbarity of Communism all belong to the vocabulary of American kitsch and have nothing to do with the kitsch of the Grand March.
The next morning, they all boarded buses and rode through Thailand to the Cambodian border. In the evening, they pulled into a small village where they had rented several houses on stilts. The regularly flooding river forced the villagers to live above ground level, while their pigs huddled down below. Franz slept in a room with four other professors. From afar came the oinking of the swine, from up close the snores of a famous mathematician.
In the morning, they climbed back into the buses. At a point about a mile from the border, all vehicular traffic was prohibited. The border crossing could be reached only by means of a narrow, heavily guarded road. The buses stopped. The French contingent poured out of them only to find that again the Americans had beaten them and formed the vanguard of the parade. The crucial moment had come. The interpreter was recalled and a long quarrel ensued. At last everyone assented to the following: the parade would be headed by one American, one Frenchman, and the Cambodian interpreter; next would come the doctors, and only then the rest of the crowd. The American actress brought up the rear.
“The Unbearable Lightness Of Being” By Milan Kundera 138
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.
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.
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 Unbearable Lightness Of Being” By Milan Kundera 139
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.
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
“The Unbearable Lightness Of Being” By Milan Kundera 140
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.
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.
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.
“The Unbearable Lightness Of Being” By Milan Kundera 141
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.
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.
“The Unbearable Lightness Of Being” By Milan Kundera 142
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.
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
“The Unbearable Lightness Of Being” By Milan Kundera 143
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.
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
“The Unbearable Lightness Of Being” By Milan Kundera 144
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.
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.
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.
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:
“The Unbearable Lightness Of Being” By Milan Kundera 145
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.
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.