8 MILAN KUNDERA The Unbearable Lightness of Being Part 5 Lightness and Weight

PART FIVE

Lightness and Weight

When Tereza unexpectedly came to visit Tomas in Prague, he made love to her, as I pointed out in Part One, that very day, or rather, that very hour, but suddenly thereafter she became feverish. As she lay in his bed and he stood over her, he had the irrepressible feeling that she was a child who had been put in a bulrush basket and sent downstream to him.

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The image of the abandoned child had consequently become dear to him, and he often reflected on the ancient myths in which it occurred. It was apparently with this in mind that he picked up a translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus.

The story of Oedipus is well known: Abandoned as an infant, he was taken to King Polybus, who raised him. One day, when he had grown into a youth, he came upon a dignitary riding along a mountain path. A quarrel arose, and Oedipus killed the dignitary. Later he became the husband of Queen Jocasta and ruler of Thebes. Little did he know that the man he had killed in the mountains was his father and the woman with whom he slept his mother. In the meantime, fate visited a plague on his subjects and tortured them with great pestilences. When Oedipus realized that he himself was the cause of their suffering, he put out his own eyes and wandered blind away from Thebes.

Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise.

They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people.

Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.

Then everyone took to shouting at the Communists: You’re the ones responsible for our country’s misfortunes (it had grown poor and desolate), for its loss of independence (it had fallen into the hands of the Russians), for its judicial murders!

And the accused responded: We didn’t know! We were deceived! We were true believers! Deep in our hearts we are innocent!

In the end, the dispute narrowed down to a single question: Did they really not know or were they merely making believe?

Tomas followed the dispute closely (as did his ten million fellow Czechs) and was of the opinion that while there had definitely been Communists who were not completely unaware of the atrocities (they could not have been ignorant of the horrors that had been perpetrated and were still being perpetrated in postrevolutionary Russia), it was probable that the majority of the Communists had not in fact known of them.

But, he said to himself, whether they knew or didn’t know is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn’t know. Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?

Let us concede that a Czech public prosecutor in the early fifties who called for the death of an innocent man was deceived by the Russian secret police and the government of his own country. But now that we all know the accusations to have been absurd and the executed to have been innocent, how can that selfsame public prosecutor defend his purity of heart by beating himself on the chest and proclaiming, My conscience is clear! I didn’t know! I was a believer! Isn’t his I didn’t know! I was a believer! at the very root of his irreparable guilt?

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It was in this connection that Tomas recalled the tale of Oedipus: Oedipus did not know he was sleeping with his own mother, yet when he realized what had happened, he did not feel innocent. Unable to stand the sight of the misfortunes he had wrought by not knowing, he put out his eyes and wandered blind away from Thebes.

When Tomas heard Communists shouting in defense of their inner purity, he said to himself, As a result of your not knowing, this country has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries, perhaps, and you shout that you feel no guilt? How can you stand the sight of what you’ve done? How is it you aren’t horrified? Have you no eyes to see? If you had eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes!

The analogy so pleased him that he often used it in conversation with friends, and his formulation grew increasingly precise and elegant.

Like all intellectuals at the time, he read a weekly newspaper published in three hundred thousand copies by the Union of Czech Writers. It was a paper that had achieved considerable autonomy within the regime and dealt with issues forbidden to others. Consequently, it was the writers’ paper that raised the issue of who bore the burden of guilt for the judicial murders resulting from the political trials that marked the early years of Communist power.

Even the writers’ paper merely repeated the same question: Did they know or did they not? Because Tomas found this question second-rate, he sat down one day, wrote down his reflections on Oedipus, and sent them to the weekly. A month later he received an answer: an invitation to the editorial offices. The editor who greeted him was short but as straight as a ruler. He suggested that Tomas change the word order in one of the sentences. And soon the text made its appearance—on the next to the last page, in the Letters to the Editor section.

Tomas was far from overjoyed. They had considered it necessary to ask him to the editorial offices to approve a change in word order, but then, without asking him, shortened his text by so much that it was reduced to its basic thesis (making it too schematic and aggressive). He didn’t like it anymore.

All this happened in the spring of 1968. Alexander Dubcek was in power, along with those Communists who felt guilty and were willing to do something about their guilt. But the other Communists, the ones who kept shouting how innocent they were, were afraid that the enraged nation would bring them to justice. They complained daily to the Russian ambassador, trying to drum up support. When Tomas’s letter appeared, they shouted: See what things have come to! Now they’re telling us publicly to put our eyes out!

Two or three months later the Russians decided that free speech was inadmissible in their gubernia, and in a single night they occupied Tomas’s country with their army.

When Tomas came back to Prague from Zurich, he took up in his hospital where he had left off. Then one day the chief surgeon called him in.

You know as well as I do, he said, that you’re no writer or journalist or savior of the nation. You’re a doctor and a scientist. I’d be very sad to lose you, and I’ll do everything

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I can to keep you here. But you’ve got to retract that article you wrote about Oedipus. Is it terribly important to you?

To tell you the truth, said Tomas, recalling how they had amputated a good third of the text, it couldn’t be any less important.

You know what’s at stake, said the chief surgeon.

He knew, all right. There were two things in the balance: his honor (which consisted in his refusing to retract what he had said) and what he had come to call the meaning of his life (his work in medicine and research).

The chief surgeon went on: The pressure to make public retractions of past statements—there’s something medieval about it. What does it mean, anyway, to

‘retract’ what you’ve said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid? In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted.

And since to retract an idea is impossible, merely verbal, formal sorcery, I see no reason why you shouldn’t do as they wish. In a society run by terror, no statements whatsoever can be taken seriously. They are all forced, and it is the duty of every honest man to ignore them. Let me conclude by saying that it is in my interest and in your patients’ interest that you stay on here with us.

You’re right, I’m sure, said Tomas, looking very unhappy.

But? The chief surgeon was trying to guess his train of thought.

I’m afraid I’d be ashamed.

Ashamed! You mean to say you hold your colleagues in such high esteem that you care what they think?

No, I don’t hold them in high esteem, said Tomas.

Oh, by the way, the chief surgeon added, you won’t have to make a public statement. I have their assurance. They’re bureaucrats. All they need is a note in their files to the effect that you’ve nothing against the regime. Then if someone comes and attacks them for letting you work at the hospital, they’re covered. They’ve given me their word that anything you say will remain between you and them. They have no intention of publishing a word of it.

Give me a week to think it over, said Tomas, and there the matter rested.

Tomas was considered the best surgeon in the hospital. Rumor had it that the chief surgeon, who was getting on towards retirement age, would soon ask him to take over.

When that rumor was supplemented by the rumor that the authorities had requested a statement of self-criticism from him, no one doubted he would comply.

That was the first thing that struck him: although he had never given people cause to doubt his integrity, they were ready to bet on his dishonesty rather than on his virtue.

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The second thing that struck him was their reaction to the position they attributed to him. I might divide it into two basic types:

The first type of reaction came from people who themselves (they or their intimates) had retracted something, who had themselves been forced to make public peace with the occupation regime or were prepared to do so (unwillingly, of course—no one wanted to do it).

These people began to smile a curious smile at him, a smile he had never seen before: the sheepish smile of secret conspiratorial consent. It was the smile of two men meeting accidentally in a brothel: both slightly abashed, they are at the same time glad that the feeling is mutual, and a bond of something akin to brotherhood develops between them.

Their smiles were all the more complacent because he had never had the reputation of being a conformist. His supposed acceptance of the chief surgeon’s proposal was therefore further proof that cowardice was slowly but surely becoming the norm of behavior and would soon cease being taken for what it actually was. He had never been friends with these people, and he realized with dismay that if he did in fact make the statement the chief surgeon had requested of him, they would start inviting him to parties and he would have to make friends with them.

The second type of reaction came from people who themselves (they or their intimates) had been persecuted, who had refused to compromise with the occupation powers or were convinced they would refuse to compromise (to sign a statement) even though no one had requested it of them (for instance, because they were too young to be seriously involved).

One of the latter, Doctor S., a talented young physician, asked Tomas one day, Well, have you written it up for them?

What in the world are you talking about? Tomas asked in return.

Why, your retraction, he said. There was no malice in his voice. He even smiled. One more smile from that thick herbal of smiles: the smile of smug moral superiority.

Tell me, what do you know about my retraction? said Tomas. Have you read it?

No, said S.

Then what are you babbling about?

Still smug, still smiling, S. replied, Look, we know how it goes. You incorporate it into a letter to the chief surgeon or to some minister or somebody, and he promises it won’t leak out and humiliate the author. Isn’t that right?

Tomas shrugged his shoulders and let S. go on.

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But even after the statement is safely filed away, the author knows that it can be made public at any moment. So from then on he doesn’t open his mouth, never criticizes a thing, never makes the slightest protest. The first peep out of him and into print it goes, sullying his good name far and wide. On the whole, it’s rather a nice method. One could imagine worse.

Yes, it’s a very nice method, said Tomas, but would you mind telling me who gave you the idea I’d agreed to go along with it?

S. shrugged his shoulders, but the smile did not disappear from his face.

And suddenly Tomas grasped a strange fact: everyone was smiling at him, everyone wanted him to write the retraction; it would make everyone happy! The people with the first type of reaction would be happy because by inflating cowardice, he would make their actions seem commonplace and thereby give them back their lost honor. The people with the second type of reaction, who had come to consider their honor a special privilege never to be yielded, nurtured a secret love for the cowards, for without them their courage would soon erode into a trivial, monotonous grind admired by no one.

Tomas could not bear the smiles. He thought he saw them everywhere, even on the faces of strangers in the street. He began losing sleep. Could it be? Did he really hold those people in such high esteem? No. He had nothing good to say about them and was angry with himself for letting their glances upset him so. It was completely illogical.

How could someone who had so little respect for people be so dependent on what they thought of him?

Perhaps his deep-seated mistrust of people (his doubts as to their right to decide his destiny and to judge him) had played its part in his choice of profession, a profession that excluded him from public display. A man who chooses to be a politician, say, voluntarily makes the public his judge, with the naive assurance that he will gain its favor. And if the crowd does express its disapproval, it merely goads him on to bigger and better things, much in the way Tomas was spurred on by the difficulty of a diagnosis.

A doctor (unlike a politician or an actor) is judged only by his patients and immediate colleagues, that is, behind closed doors, man to man. Confronted by the looks of those who judge him, he can respond at once with his own look, to explain or defend himself.

Now (for the first time in his life) Tomas found himself in a situation where the looks fixed on him were so numerous that he was unable to register them. He could answer them neither with his own look nor with words. He was at everyone’s mercy. People talked about him inside and outside the hospital (it was a time when news about who betrayed, who denounced, and who collaborated spread through nervous Prague with the uncanny speed of a bush telegraph); although he knew about it, he could do nothing to stop it. He was surprised at how unbearable he found it, how panic-stricken it made him feel. The interest they showed in him was as unpleasant as an elbowing crowd or the pawings of the people who tear our clothes off in nightmares.

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He went to the chief surgeon and told him he would not write a word.

The chief surgeon shook his hand with greater energy than usual and said that he had anticipated Tomas’s decision.

Perhaps you can find a way to keep me on even without a statement, said Tomas, trying to hint that a threat by all his colleagues to resign upon his dismissal would suffice.

But his colleagues never dreamed of threatening to resign, and so before long (the chief surgeon shook his hand even more energetically than the previous time—it was black and blue for days), he was forced to leave the hospital.

First he went to work in a country clinic about fifty miles from Prague. He commuted daily by train and came home exhausted. A year later, he managed to find a more advantageous but much inferior position at a clinic on the outskirts of Prague. There, he could no longer practice surgery, and became a general practitioner. The waiting room was jammed, and he had scarcely five minutes for each patient; he told them how much aspirin to take, signed their sick-leave documents, and referred them to specialists. He considered himself more civil servant than doctor.

One day, at the end of office hours, he was visited by a man of about fifty whose portliness added to his dignity. He introduced himself as representing the Ministry of the Interior, and invited Tomas to join him for a drink across the street.

He ordered a bottle of wine. I have to drive home, said Tomas by way of refusal. I’ll lose my license if they find I’ve been drinking. The man from the Ministry of the Interior smiled. If anything happens, just show them this. And he handed Tomas a card engraved with his name (though clearly not his real name) and the telephone number of the Ministry.

He then went into a long speech about how much he admired Tomas and how the whole Ministry was distressed at the thought of so respected a surgeon dispensing aspirin at an outlying clinic. He gave Tomas to understand that although he couldn’t come out and say it, the police did not agree with drastic tactics like removing specialists from their posts.

Since no one had thought to praise Tomas in quite some time, he listened to the plump official very carefully, and he was surprised by the precision and detail of the man’s knowledge of his professional career. How defenseless we are in the face of flattery!

Tomas was unable to prevent himself from taking seriously what the Ministry official said.

But it was not out of mere vanity. More important was Tomas’s lack of experience.

When you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful, and polite, you have a hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true, that nothing is sincere.

Maintaining nonbelief (constantly, systematically, without the slightest vacillation)

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requires a tremendous effort and the proper training—in other words, frequent police interrogations. Tomas lacked that training.

The man from the Ministry went on: We know you had an excellent position in Zurich, and we very much appreciate your having returned. It was a noble deed. You realized your place was here. And then he added, as if scolding Tomas for something, But your place is at the operating table, too!

I couldn’t agree more, said Tomas.

There was a short pause, after which the man from the Ministry said in mournful tones, Then tell me, Doctor, do you really think that Communists should put out their eyes?

You, who have given so many people the gift of health?

But that’s preposterous! Tomas cried in self-defense. Why don’t you read what I wrote?

I have read it, said the man from the Ministry in a voice that was meant to sound very sad.

Well, did I write that Communists ought to put out their eyes?

That’s how everyone understood it, said the man from the Ministry, his voice growing sadder and sadder.

If you’d read the complete version, the way I wrote it originally, you wouldn’t have read that into it. The published version was slightly cut.

What was that? asked the man from the Ministry, pricking up his ears. You mean they didn’t publish it the way you wrote it?

They cut it.

A lot?

By about a third.

The man from the Ministry appeared sincerely shocked. That was very improper of them.

Tomas shrugged his shoulders.

You should have protested! Demanded they set the record straight immediately!

The Russians came before I had time to think about it. We all had other things to think about then.

But you don’t want people to think that you, a doctor, wanted to deprive human beings of their right to see!

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Try to understand, will you? It was a letter to the editor, buried in the back pages. No one even noticed it. No one but the Russian embassy staff, because it’s what they look for.

Don’t say that! Don’t think that! I myself have talked to many people who read your article and were amazed you could have written it. But now that you tell me it didn’t come out the way you wrote it, a lot of things fall into place. Did they put you up to it?

To writing it? No. I submitted it on my own.

Do you know the people there?

What people?

The people who published your article.

No.

You mean you never spoke to them?

They asked me to come in once in person.

Why?

About the article.

And who was it you talked to?

One of the editors.

What was his name?

Not until that point did Tomas realize that he was under interrogation. All at once he saw that his every word could put someone in danger. Although he obviously knew the name of the editor in question, he denied it: I’m not sure.

Now, now, said the man in a voice dripping with indignation over Tomas’s insincerity, you can’t tell me he didn’t introduce himself!

It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police.

We do not know how to lie. The Tell the truth! imperative drummed into us by our mamas and papas functions so automatically that we feel ashamed of lying even to a secret policeman during an interrogation. It is simpler for us to argue with him or insult him (which makes no sense whatever) than to lie to his face (which is the only thing to do).

When the man from the Ministry accused him of insincerity, Tomas nearly felt guilty; he had to surmount a moral barrier to be able to persevere in his lie: I suppose he did introduce himself, he said, but because his name didn’t ring a bell, I immediately forgot it.

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What did he look like?

The editor who had dealt with him was a short man with a light brown crew cut. Tomas tried to choose diametrically opposed characteristics: He was tall, he said, and had long black hair.

Aha, said the man from the Ministry, and a big chin!

That’s right, said Tomas.

A little stooped.

That’s right, said Tomas again, realizing that now the man from the Ministry had pinpointed an individual. Not only had Tomas informed on some poor editor but, more important, the information he had given was false.

And what did he want to see you about? What did you talk about?

It had something to do with word order.

It sounded like a ridiculous attempt at evasion. And again the man from the Ministry waxed indignant at Tomas’s refusal to tell the truth: First you tell me they cut your text by a third, then you tell me they talked to you about word order! Is that logical?

This time Tomas had no trouble responding, because he had told the absolute truth. It’s not logical, but that’s how it was. He laughed. They asked me to let them change the word order in one sentence and then cut a third of what I had written.

The man from the Ministry shook his head, as if unable to grasp so immoral an act.

That was highly irregular on their part.

He finished his wine and concluded: You have been manipulated, Doctor, used. It would be a pity for you and your patients to suffer as a result. We are very much aware of your positive qualities. We’ll see what can be done.

He gave Tomas his hand and pumped it cordially. Then each went off to his own car.

After the talk with the man from the Ministry, Tomas fell into a deep depression. How could he have gone along with the jovial tone of the conversation? If he hadn’t refused to have anything at all to do with the man (he was not prepared for what happened and did not know what was condoned by law and what was not), he could at least have refused to drink wine with him as if they were friends! Supposing someone had seen him, someone who knew the man. He could only have inferred that Tomas was working with the police! And why did he even tell him that the article had been cut? Why did he throw in that piece of information? He was extremely displeased with himself.

Two weeks later, the man from the Ministry paid him another visit. Once more he invited him out for a drink, but this time Tomas requested that they stay in his office.

I understand perfectly, Doctor, said the man, with a smile.

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Tomas was intrigued by his words. He said them like a chess player who is letting his opponent know he made an error in the previous move.

They sat opposite each other, Tomas at his desk. After about ten minutes, during which they talked about the flu epidemic raging at the time, the man said, We’ve given your case a lot of thought. If we were the only ones involved, there would be nothing to it.

But we have public opinion to take into account. Whether you meant to or not, you fanned the flames of anti-Communist hysteria with your article. I must tell you there was even a proposal to take you to court for that article. There’s a law against public incitement to violence.

The man from the Ministry of the Interior paused to look Tomas in the eye. Tomas shrugged his shoulders. The man assumed his comforting tone again. We voted down the proposal. No matter what your responsibility in the affair, society has an interest in seeing you use your abilities to the utmost. The chief surgeon of your hospital speaks very highly of you. We have reports from your patients as well. You are a fine specialist.

Nobody requires a doctor to understand politics. You let yourself be carried away. It’s high time we settled this thing once and for all. That’s why we’ve put together a sample statement for you. All you have to do is make it available to the press, and we’ll make sure it comes out at the proper time. He handed Tomas a piece of paper.

Tomas read what was in it and panicked. It was much worse than what the chief surgeon had asked him to sign two years before. It did not stop at a retraction of the Oedipus article. It contained words of love for the Soviet Union, vows of fidelity to the Communist Party; it condemned the intelligentsia, which wanted to push the country into civil war; and, above all, it denounced the editors of the writers’ weekly (with special emphasis on the tall, stooped editor; Tomas had never met him, though he knew his name and had seen pictures of him), who had consciously distorted his article and used it for their own devices, turning it into a call for counterrevolution: too cowardly to write such an article themselves, they had hid behind a naive doctor.

The man from the Ministry saw the panic in Tomas’s eyes. He leaned over and gave his knee a friendly pat under the table. Remember now, Doctor, it’s only a sample! Think it over, and if there’s something you want to change, I’m sure we can come to an agreement. After all, it’s your statement!

Tomas held the paper out to the secret policeman as if he were afraid to keep it in his hands another second, as if he were worried someone would find his fingerprints on it.

But instead of taking the paper, the man from the Ministry spread his arms in feigned amazement (the same gesture the Pope uses to bless the crowds from his balcony).

Now why do a thing like that, Doctor? Keep it. Think it over calmly at home.

Tomas shook his head and patiently held the paper in his outstretched hand. In the end, the man from the Ministry was forced to abandon his papal gesture and take the paper back.

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Tomas was on the point of telling him emphatically that he would neither write nor sign any text whatever, but at the last moment he changed his tone and said mildly, I’m no illiterate, am I? Why should I sign something I didn’t write myself?

Very well, then, Doctor. Let’s do it your way. You write it up yourself, and we’ll go over it together. You can use what you’ve just read as a model.

Why didn’t Tomas give the secret policeman an immediate and unconditional no?

This is what probably went through his head: Besides using a statement like that to demoralize the nation in general (which is clearly the Russian strategy), the police could have a concrete goal in his case: they might be gathering evidence for a trial against the editors of the weekly that had published Tomas’s article. If that was so, they would need his statement for the hearing and for the smear campaign the press would conduct against them. Were he to refuse flatly, on principle, there was always the danger that the police would print the prepared statement over his signature, whether he gave his consent or not. No newspaper would dare publish his denial. No one in the world would believe that he hadn’t written or signed it. People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation.

By giving the police the hope that he would write a text of his own, he gained a bit of time. The very next day he resigned from the clinic, assuming (correctly) that after he had descended voluntarily to the lowest rung of the social ladder (a descent being made by thousands of intellectuals in other fields at the time), the police would have no more hold over him and he would cease to interest them. Once he had reached the lowest rung on the ladder, they would no longer be able to publish a statement in his name, for the simple reason that no one would accept it as genuine. Humiliating public statements are associated exclusively with the signatories’ rise, not fall.

But in Tomas’s country, doctors are state employees, and the state may or may not release them from its service. The official with whom Tomas negotiated his resignation knew him by name and reputation and tried to talk him into staying on. Tomas suddenly realized that he was not at all sure he had made the proper choice, but he felt bound to it by then by an unspoken vow of fidelity, so he stood fast. And that is how he became a window washer.

Leaving Zurich for Prague a few years earlier, Tomas had quietly said to himself, Es muss sein! He was thinking of his love for Tereza. No sooner had he crossed the border, however, than he began to doubt whether it actually did have to be. Later, lying next to Tereza, he recalled that he had been led to her by a chain of laughable coincidences that took place seven years earlier (when the chief surgeon’s sciatica was in its early stages) and were about to return him to a cage from which he would be unable to escape.

Does that mean his life lacked any Es muss sein!, any overriding necessity? In my opinion, it did have one. But it was not love, it was his profession. He had come to medicine not by coincidence or calculation but by a deep inner desire.

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Insofar as it is possible to divide people into categories, the surest criterion is the deep-seated desires that orient them to one or another lifelong activity. Every Frenchman is different. But all actors the world over are similar—in Paris, Prague, or the back of beyond. An actor is someone who in early childhood consents to exhibit himself for the rest of his life to an anonymous public. Without that basic consent, which has nothing to do with talent, which goes deeper than talent, no one can become an actor. Similarly, a doctor is someone who consents to spend his life involved with human bodies and all that they entail. That basic consent (and not talent or skill) enables him to enter the dissecting room during the first year of medical school and persevere for the requisite number of years.

Surgery takes the basic imperative of the medical profession to its outermost border, where the human makes contact with the divine. When a person is clubbed violently on the head, he collapses and stops breathing. Some day, he will stop breathing anyway.

Murder simply hastens a bit what God will eventually see to on His own. God, it may be assumed, took murder into account; He did not take surgery into account. He never suspected that someone would dare to stick his hand into the mechanism He had invented, wrapped carefully in skin, and sealed away from human eyes. When Tomas first positioned his scalpel on the skin of a man asleep under an anesthetic, then breached the skin with a decisive incision, and finally cut it open with a precise and even stroke (as if it were a piece of fabric—a coat, a skirt, a curtain), he experienced a brief but intense feeling of blasphemy. Then again, that was what attracted him to it!

That was the Es muss sein! rooted deep inside him, and it was planted there not by chance, not by the chief’s sciatica, or by anything external.

But how could he take something so much a part of him and cast it off so fast, so forcefully, and so lightly?

He would respond that he did it so as not to let the police misuse him. But to be quite frank, even if it was theoretically possible (and even if a number of cases have actually occurred), it was not too likely that the police would make public a false statement over his signature.

Granted, a man has a right to fear dangers that are less than likely to occur. Granted, he was annoyed with himself and at his clumsiness, and desired to avoid further contact with the police and the concomitant feeling of helplessness. And granted, he had lost his profession anyway, because the mechanical aspirin-medicine he practiced at the clinic had nothing in common with his concept of medicine. Even so, the way he rushed into his decision seems rather odd to me. Could it perhaps conceal something else, something deeper that escaped his reasoning?

Even though he came to love Beethoven through Tereza, Tomas was not particularly knowledgeable about music, and I doubt that he knew the true story behind Beethoven’s famous Muss es sein? Es muss sein! motif.

This is how it goes: A certain Dembscher owed Beethoven fifty florins, and when the composer, who was chronically short of funds, reminded him of the debt, Dembscher heaved a mournful sigh and said, Muss es sein? To which Beethoven replied, with a

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hearty laugh, Es muss sein! and immediately jotted down these words and their melody. On this realistic motif he then composed a canon for four voices: three voices sing Es muss sein, es muss sein, ja, ja, ja, ja! (It must be, it must be, yes, yes, yes, yes!), and the fourth voice chimes in with Heraus mit dem Beutel! (Out with the purse!).

A year later, the same motif showed up as the basis for the fourth movement of the last quartet, Opus 155. By that time, Beethoven had forgotten about Dembscher’s purse.

The words Es muss sein! had acquired a much more solemn ring; they seemed to issue directly from the lips of Fate. In Kant’s language, even Good morning, suitably pronounced, can take the shape of a metaphysical thesis. German is a language of heavy words. Es muss sein! was no longer a joke; it had become der schwer gefasste Entschluss (the difficult or weighty resolution).

So Beethoven turned a frivolous inspiration into a serious quartet, a joke into metaphysical truth. It is an interesting tale of light going to heavy or, as Parmenides would have it, positive going to negative. Yet oddly enough, the transformation fails to surprise us. We would have been shocked, on the other hand, if Beethoven had transformed the seriousness of his quartet into the trifling joke of a four-voice canon about Dembscher’s purse. Had he done so, however, he would have been in the spirit of Parmenides and made heavy go to light, that is, negative to positive! First (as an unfinished sketch) would have come the great metaphysical truth and last (as a finished masterpiece)—the most frivolous of jokes! But we no longer know how to think as Parmenides thought.

It is my feeling that Tomas had long been secretly irritated by the stern, aggressive, solemn Es muss sein! and that he harbored a deep desire to follow the spirit of Parmenides and make heavy go to light. Remember that at one point in his life he broke completely with his first wife and his son and that he was relieved when both his parents broke with him. What could be at the bottom of it all but a rash and not quite rational move to reject what proclaimed itself to be his weighty duty, his Es muss sein! ‘?

That, of course, was an external Es muss sein! reserved for him by social convention, whereas the Es muss sein! of his love for medicine was internal. So much the worse for him. Internal imperatives are all the more powerful and therefore all the more of an inducement to revolt.

Being a surgeon means slitting open the surface of things and looking at what lies hidden inside. Perhaps Tomas was led to surgery by a desire to know what lies hidden on the other side of Es muss sein! ; in other words, what remains of life when a person rejects what he previously considered his mission.

The day he reported to the good-natured woman responsible for the cleanliness of all shop windows and display cases in Prague, and was confronted with the result of his decision in all its concrete and inescapable reality, he went into a state of shock, a state that kept him in its thrall during the first few days of his new job. But once he got over the astounding strangeness of his new life (it took him about a week), he suddenly realized he was simply on a long holiday.

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Here he was, doing things he didn’t care a damn about, and enjoying it. Now he understood what made people (people he always pitied) happy when they took a job without feeling the compulsion of an internal Es muss sein! and forgot it the moment they left for home every evening. This was the first time he had felt that blissful indifference. Whenever anything went wrong on the operating table, he would be despondent and unable to sleep. He would even lose his taste for women. The Es muss sein! of his profession had been like a vampire sucking his blood.

Now he roamed the streets of Prague with brush and pole, feeling ten years younger.

The salesgirls all called him doctor (the Prague bush telegraph was working better than ever) and asked his advice about their colds, aching backs, and irregular periods. They seemed almost embarrassed to watch him douse the glass with water, fit the brush on the end of the pole, and start washing. If they could have left their customers alone in the shops, they would surely have grabbed the pole from his hands and washed the windows for him.

Most of Tomas’s orders came from large shops, but his boss sent him out to private customers, too. People were still reacting to the mass persecution of Czech intellectuals with the euphoria of solidarity, and when his former patients found out that Tomas was washing windows for a living, they would phone in and order him by name.

Then they would greet him with a bottle of champagne or slivovitz, sign for thirteen windows on the order slip, and chat with him for two hours, drinking his health all the while.

Tomas would move on to his next flat or shop in a capital mood. While the families of Russian officers settled in throughout the land and radios intoned ominous reports of police functionaries who had replaced cashiered broadcasters, Tomas reeled through the streets of Prague from one glass of wine to the next like someone going from party to party. It was his grand holiday.

He had reverted to his bachelor existence. Tereza was suddenly out of his life. The only times he saw her were when she came back from the bar late at night and he woke befuddled from a half-sleep, and in the morning, when she was the befuddled one and he was hurrying off to work. Each workday, he had sixteen hours to himself, an unexpected field of freedom. And from Tomas’s early youth that had meant women.

When his friends asked him how many women he had had in his life, he would try to evade the question, and when they pressed him further he would say, Well, two hundred, give or take a few. The envious among them accused him of stretching the truth. That’s not so many, he said by way of self-defense. I’ve been involved with women for about twenty-five years now. Divide two hundred by twenty-five and you’ll see it comes to only eight or so new women a year. That’s not so many, is it?

But setting up house with Tereza cramped his style. Because of the organizational difficulties it entailed, he had been forced to relegate his erotic activities to a narrow strip of time (between the operating room and home) which, though he had used it intensively (as a mountain farmer tills his narrow plot for all it is worth), was nothing like the sixteen hours that now had suddenly been bestowed on him. (I say sixteen hours because the eight hours he spent washing windows were filled with new salesgirls,

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housewives, and female functionaries, each of whom represented a potential erotic engagement.)

What did he look for in them? What attracted him to them? Isn’t making love merely an eternal repetition of the same?

Not at all. There is always the small part that is unimaginable. When he saw a woman in her clothes, he could naturally imagine more or less what she would look like naked (his experience as a doctor supplementing his experience as a lover), but between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest. And then, the pursuit of the unimaginable does not stop with the revelations of nudity; it goes much further: How would she behave while undressing? What would she say when he made love to her?

How would her sighs sound? How would her face distort at the moment of orgasm?

What is unique about the I hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person.

All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual I is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.

Tomas, who had spent the last ten years of his medical practice working exclusively with the human brain, knew that there was nothing more difficult to capture than the human I. There are many more resemblances between Hitler and Einstein or Brezhnev and Solzhenitsyn than there are differences. Using numbers, we might say that there is one-millionth part dissimilarity to nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine millionths parts similarity.

Tomas was obsessed by the desire to discover and appropriate that one-millionth part; he saw it as the core of his obsession. He was not obsessed with women; he was obsessed with what in each of them is unimaginable, obsessed, in other words, with the one-millionth part that makes a woman dissimilar to others of her sex.

(Here too, perhaps, his passion for surgery and his passion for women came together.

Even with his mistresses, he could never quite put down the imaginary scalpel. Since he longed to take possession of something deep inside them, he needed to slit them open.)

We may ask, of course, why he sought that millionth part dissimilarity in sex and nowhere else. Why couldn’t he find it, say, in a woman’s gait or culinary caprices or artistic taste?

To be sure, the millionth part dissimilarity is present in all areas of human existence, but in all areas other than sex it is exposed and needs no one to discover it, needs no scalpel. One woman prefers cheese at the end of the meal, another loathes cauliflower, and although each may demonstrate her originality thereby, it is an originality that demonstrates its own irrelevance and warns us to pay it no heed, to expect nothing of value to come of it.

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Only in sexuality does the millionth part dissimilarity become precious, because, not accessible in public, it must be conquered. As recently as fifty years ago, this form of conquest took considerable time (weeks, even months!), and the worth of the conquered object was proportional to the time the conquest took. Even today, when conquest time has been drastically cut, sexuality seems still to be a strongbox hiding the mystery of a woman’s I.

So it was a desire not for pleasure (the pleasure came as an extra, a bonus) but for possession of the world (slitting open the outstretched body of the world with his scalpel) that sent him in pursuit of women.

Men who pursue a multitude of women fit neatly into two categories. Some seek their own subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in all women. Others are prompted by a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female world.

The obsession of the former is lyrical: what they seek in women is themselves, their ideal, and since an ideal is by definition something that can never be found, they are disappointed again and again. The disappointment that propels them from woman to woman gives their inconstancy a kind of romantic excuse, so that many sentimental women are touched by their unbridled philandering.

The obsession of the latter is epic, and women see nothing the least bit touching in it: the man projects no subjective ideal on women, and since everything interests him, nothing can disappoint him. This inability to be disappointed has something scandalous about it. The obsession of the epic womanizer strikes people as lacking in redemption (redemption by disappointment).

Because the lyrical womanizer always runs after the same type of woman, we even fail to notice when he exchanges one mistress for another. His friends perpetually cause misunderstandings by mixing up his lovers and calling them by the same name.

In pursuit of knowledge, epic womanizers (and of course Tomas belonged in their ranks) turn away from conventional feminine beauty, of which they quickly tire, and inevitably end up as curiosity collectors. They are aware of this and a little ashamed of it, and to avoid causing their friends embarrassment, they refrain from appearing in public with their mistresses.

Tomas had been a window washer for nearly two years when he was sent to a new customer whose bizarre appearance struck him the moment he saw her. Though bizarre, it was also discreet, understated, within the bounds of the agreeably ordinary (Tomas’s fascination with curiosities had nothing in common with Fellini’s fascination with monsters): she was very tall, quite a bit taller than he was, and she had a delicate and very long nose in a face so unusual that it was impossible to call it attractive (everyone would have protested!), yet (in Tomas’s eyes, at least) it could not be called unattractive. She was wearing slacks and a white blouse, and looked like an odd combination of giraffe, stork, and sensitive young boy.

She fixed him with a long, careful, searching stare that was not devoid of irony’s intelligent sparkle. Come in, Doctor, she said.

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Although he realized that she knew who he was, he did not want to show it, and asked, Where can I get some water?

She opened the door to the bathroom. He saw a washbasin, bathtub, and toilet bowl; in front of bath, basin, and bowl lay miniature pink rugs.

When the woman who looked like a giraffe and a stork smiled, her eyes screwed up, and everything she said seemed full of irony or secret messages.

The bathroom is all yours, she said. You can do whatever your heart desires in it.

May I have a bath? Tomas asked.

Do you like baths? she asked.

He filled his pail with warm water and went into the living room. Where would you like me to start?

It’s up to you, she said with a shrug of the shoulders.

May I see the windows in the other rooms?

So you want to have a look around? Her smile seemed to indicate that window washing was only a caprice that did not interest her.

He went into the adjoining room. It was a bedroom with one large window, two beds pushed next to each other, and, on the wall, an autumn landscape with birches and a setting sun.

When he came back, he found an open bottle of wine and two glasses on the table.

How about a little something to keep your strength up during the big job ahead?

I wouldn’t mind a little something, actually, said Tomas, and sat down at the table.

You must find it interesting, seeing how people live, she said.

I can’t complain, said Tomas. All those wives at home alone, waiting for you. You mean grandmothers and mothers-in-law. Don’t you ever miss your original profession? Tell me, how did you find out about my original profession?

Your boss likes to boast about you, said the stork-woman. After all this time! said Tomas in amazement. When I spoke to her on the phone about having the windows washed, she asked whether I didn’t want you. She said you were a famous surgeon who’d been kicked out of the hospital. Well, naturally she piqued my curiosity.

You have a fine sense of curiosity, he said. Is it so obvious? Yes, in the way you use your eyes. And how do I use my eyes? You squint. And then, the questions you ask.

You mean you don’t like to respond? Thanks to her, the conversation had been delightfully flirtatious from the outset. Nothing she said had any bearing on the outside world; it was all directed inward, towards themselves. And because it dealt so palpably with him and her, there was nothing simpler than to complement words with touch.

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Thus, when Tomas mentioned her squinting eyes, he stroked them, and she did the same to his. It was not a spontaneous reaction; she seemed to be consciously setting up a do as I do kind of game. And so they sat there face to face, their hands moving in stages along each other’s bodies.

Not until Tomas reached her groin did she start resisting. He could not quite guess how seriously she meant it. Since much time had now passed and he was due at his next customer’s in ten minutes, he stood up and told her he had to go. Her face was red. I have to sign the order slip, she said. But I haven’t done a thing, he objected. That’s my fault. And then in a soft, innocent voice she drawled, I suppose I’ll just have to order you back and have you finish what I kept you from starting.

When Tomas refused to hand her the slip to sign, she said to him sweetly, as if asking him for a favor, Give it to me. Please? Then she squinted again and added, After all, I’m not paying for it, my husband is. And you’re not being paid for it, the state is. The transaction has nothing whatever to do with the two of us.

The odd asymmetry of the woman who looked like a giraffe and a stork continued to excite his memory: the combination of the flirtatious and the gawky; the very real sexual desire offset by the ironic smile; the vulgar conventionality of the flat and the originality of its owner. What would she be like when they made love? Try as he might, he could not picture it. He thought of nothing else for several days.

The next time he answered her summons, the wine and two glasses stood waiting on the table. And this time everything went like clockwork. Before long, they were standing face to face in the bedroom (where the sun was setting on the birches in the painting) and kissing. But when he gave her his standard Strip! command, she not only failed to comply but counter-commanded, No, you first!

Unaccustomed to such a response, he was somewhat taken aback. She started to open his fly. After ordering Strip! several more times (with comic failure), he was forced to accept a compromise. According to the rules of the game she had set up during his last visit ( do as I do ), she took off his trousers, he took off her skirt, then she took off his shirt, he her blouse, until at last they stood there naked. He placed his hand on her moist genitals, then moved his fingers along to the anus, the spot he loved most in all women’s bodies. Hers was unusually prominent, evoking the long digestive tract that ended there with a slight protrusion. Fingering her strong, healthy orb, that most splendid of rings called by doctors the sphincter, he suddenly felt her fingers on the corresponding part of his own anatomy. She was mimicking his moves with the precision of a mirror.

Even though, as I have pointed out, he had known approximately two hundred women (plus the considerable lot that had accrued during his days as a window washer), he had yet to be faced with a woman who was taller than he was, squinted at him, and fingered his anus. To overcome his embarrassment, he forced her down on the bed.

So precipitous was his move that he caught her off guard. As her towering frame fell on its back, he caught among the red blotches on her face the frightened expression of equilibrium lost. Now that he was standing over her, he grabbed her under the knees

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and lifted her slightly parted legs in the air, so that they suddenly looked like the raised arms of a soldier surrendering to a gun pointed at him.

Clumsiness combined with ardor, ardor with clumsiness— they excited Tomas utterly.

He made love to her for a very long time, constantly scanning her red-blotched face for that frightened expression of a woman whom someone has tripped and who is falling, the inimitable expression that moments earlier had conveyed excitement to his brain.

Then he went to wash in the bathroom. She followed him in and gave him long-drawn-out explanations of where the soap was and where the sponge was and how to turn on the hot water. He was surprised that she went into such detail over such simple matters. At last he had to tell her that he understood everything perfectly, and motioned to her to leave him alone in the bathroom.

Won’t you let me stay and watch? she begged.

At last he managed to get her out. As he washed and urinated into the washbasin (standard procedure among Czech doctors), he had the feeling she was running back and forth outside the bathroom, looking for a way to break in. When he turned off the water and the flat was suddenly silent, he felt he was being watched. He was nearly certain that there was a peephole somewhere in the bathroom door and that her beautiful eye was squinting through it.

He went off in the best of moods, trying to fix her essence in his memory, to reduce that memory to a chemical formula capable of defining her uniqueness (her millionth part dissimilarity). The result was a formula consisting of three givens: 1) clumsiness with ardor,

2) the frightened face of one who has lost her equilibrium and is falling, and 3) legs raised in the air like the arms of a soldier surrendering to a pointed gun.

Going over them, he felt the joy of having acquired yet another piece of the world, of having taken his imaginary scalpel and snipped yet another strip off the infinite canvas of the universe.

At about the same time, he had the following experience: He had been meeting a young woman in a room that an old friend put at his disposal every day until midnight.

After a month or two, she reminded him of one of their early encounters: they had made love on a rug under the window while it was thundering and lightning outside; they had made love for the length of the storm; it had been unforgettably beautiful!

Tomas was appalled. Yes, he remembered making love to her on the rug (his friend slept on a narrow couch that Tomas found uncomfortable), but he had completely forgotten the storm! It was odd. He could recall each of their times together; he had even kept close track of the ways they made love (she refused to be entered from behind); he remembered several of the things she had said during intercourse (she

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would ask him to squeeze her hips and to stop looking at her all the time); he even remembered the cut of her lingerie; but the storm had left no trace.

Of each erotic experience his memory recorded only the steep and narrow path of sexual conquest: the first piece of verbal aggression, the first touch, the first obscenity he said to her and she to him, the minor perversions he could make her acquiesce in and the ones she held out against. All else he excluded (almost pedantically) from his memory. He even forgot where he had first seen one or another woman, if that event occurred before his sexual offensive began.

The young woman smiled dreamily as she went on about the storm, and he looked at her in amazement and something akin to shame: she had experienced something beautiful, and he had failed to experience it with her. The two ways in which their memories reacted to the evening storm sharply delimit love and nonlove.

By the word nonlove I do not wish to imply that he took a cynical attitude to the young woman, that, as present-day parlance has it, he looked upon her as a sex object; on the contrary, he was quite fond of her, valued her character and intelligence, and was willing to come to her aid if ever she needed him. He was not the one who behaved shamefully towards her; it was his memory, for it was his memory that, unbeknown to him, had excluded her from the sphere of love.

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful.

From the time he met Tereza, no woman had the right to leave the slightest impression on that part of his brain.

Tereza occupied his poetic memory like a despot and exterminated all trace of other women. That was unfair, because the young woman he made love to on the rug during the storm was not a bit less worthy of poetry than Tereza. She shouted, Close your eyes! Squeeze my hips! Hold me tight! ; she could not stand it that when Tomas made love he kept his eyes open, focused and observant, his body ever so slightly arched above her, never pressing against her skin. She did not want him to study her. She wanted to draw him into the magic stream that may be entered only with closed eyes.

The reason she refused to get down on all fours was that in that position their bodies did not touch at all and he could observe her from a distance of several feet. She hated that distance. She wanted to merge with him. That is why, looking him straight in the eye, she insisted she had not had an orgasm even though the rug was fairly dripping with it. It’s not sensual pleasure I’m after, she would say, it’s happiness. And pleasure without happiness is not pleasure. In other words, she was pounding on the gate of his poetic memory. But the gate was shut. There was no room for her in his poetic memory.

There was room for her only on the rug.

His adventure with Tereza began at the exact point where his adventures with other women left off. It took place on the other side of the imperative that pushed him into conquest after conquest. He had no desire to uncover anything in Tereza. She had come to him uncovered. He had made love to her before he could grab for the

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imaginary scalpel he used to open the prostrate body of the world. Before he could start wondering what she would be like when they made love, he loved her.

Their love story did not begin until afterward: she fell ill and he was unable to send her home as he had the others. Kneeling by her as she lay sleeping in his bed, he realized that someone had sent her downstream in a bulrush basket. I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

Recently she had made another entry into his mind. Returning home with the milk one morning as usual, she stood in the doorway with a crow wrapped in her red scarf and pressed against her breast. It was the way gypsies held their babies. He would never forget it: the crow’s enormous plaintive beak up next to her face.

She had found it half-buried, the way Cossacks used to dig their prisoners into the ground. It was children, she said, and her words did more than state a fact; they revealed an unexpected repugnance for people in general. It reminded him of something she had said to him not long before: I’m beginning to be grateful to you for not wanting to have children.

And then she had complained to him about a man who had been bothering her at work.

He had grabbed at a cheap necklace of hers and suggested that the only way she could have afforded it was by doing some prostitution on the side. She was very upset about it. More than necessary, thought Tomas. He suddenly felt dismayed at how little he had seen of her the last two years; he had so few opportunities to press her hands in his to stop them from trembling.

The next morning he had gone to work with Tereza on his mind. The woman who gave the window washers their assignments told him that a private customer had insisted on him personally. Tomas was not looking forward to it; he was afraid it was still another woman. Fully occupied with Tereza, he was in no mood for adventure.

When the door opened, he gave a sigh of relief. He saw a tall, slightly stooped man before him. The man had a big chin and seemed vaguely familiar.

Come in, said the man with a smile, taking him inside.

There was also a young man standing there. His face was bright red. He was looking at Tomas and trying to smile.

I assume there’s no need for me to introduce you two, said the man.

No, said Tomas, and without returning the smile he held out his hand to the young man.

It was his son.

Only then did the man with the big chin introduce himself.

I knew you looked familiar! said Tomas. Of course! Now I place you. It was the name that did it.

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They sat down at what was like a small conference table. Tomas realized that both men opposite him were his own involuntary creations. He had been forced to produce the younger one by his first wife, and the features of the older one had taken shape when he was under interrogation by the police.

To clear his mind of these thoughts, he said, Well, which window do you want me to start with?

Both men burst out laughing.

Clearly windows had nothing to do with the case. He had not been called in to do the windows; he had been lured into a trap. He had never before talked to his son. This was the first time he had shaken hands with him. He knew him only by sight and had no desire to know him any other way. As far as he was concerned, the less he knew about his son the better, and he hoped the feeling was mutual.

Nice poster, isn’t it? said the editor, pointing at a large framed drawing on the wall opposite Tomas.

Tomas now glanced around the room. The walls were hung with interesting pictures, mostly photographs and posters. The drawing the editor had singled out came from one of the last issues of his paper before the Russians closed it down in 1969. It was an imitation of a famous recruitment poster from the Russian Civil War of 1918 showing a soldier, red star on his cap and extraordinarily stern look in his eyes, staring straight at you and aiming his index finger at you. The original Russian caption read: Citizen, have you joined the Red Army? It was replaced by a Czech text that read: Citizen, have you signed the Two Thousand Words?

That was an excellent joke! The Two Thousand Words was the first glorious manifesto of the 1968 Prague Spring. It called for the radical democratization of the Communist regime. First it was signed by a number of intellectuals, and then other people came forward and asked to sign, and finally there were so many signatures that no one could quite count them up. When the Red Army invaded their country and launched a series of political purges, one of the questions asked of each citizen was Have you signed the Two Thousand Words? Anyone who admitted to having done so was summarily dismissed from his job.

A fine poster, said Tomas. I remember it well. Let’s hope the Red Army man isn’t listening in on us, said the editor with a smile.

Then he went on, without the smile: Seriously though, this isn’t my flat. It belongs to a friend. We can’t be absolutely certain the police can hear us; it’s only a possibility. If I’d invited you to my place, it would have been a certainty.

Then he switched back to a playful tone. But the way I’ look at it, we’ve got nothing to hide. And think of what a boon it will be to Czech historians of the future. The complete recorded lives of the Czech intelligentsia on file in the police archives! Do you know what effort literary historians have put into reconstructing in detail the sex lives of, say,

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Voltaire or Balzac or Tolstoy? No such problems with Czech writers. It’s all on tape.

Every last sigh.

And turning to the imaginary microphones in the wall, he said in a stentorian voice, Gentlemen, as always in such circumstances, I wish to take this opportunity to encourage you in your work and to thank you on my behalf and on behalf of all future historians.

After the three of them had had a good laugh, the editor told the story of how his paper had been banned, what the artist who designed the poster was doing, and what had become of other Czech painters, philosophers, and writers. After the Russian invasion they had been relieved of their positions and become window washers, parking attendants, night watchmen, boilermen in public buildings, or at best—and usually with pull—taxi drivers.

Although what the editor said was interesting enough, Tomas was unable to concentrate on it. He was thinking about his son. He remembered passing him in the street during the past two months. Apparently these encounters had not been fortuitous. He had certainly never expected to find him in the company of a persecuted editor. Tomas’s first wife was an orthodox Communist, and Tomas automatically assumed that his son was under her influence. He knew nothing about him. Of course he could have come out and asked him what kind of relationship he had with his mother, but he felt that it would have been tactless in the presence of a third party.

At last the editor came to the point. He said that more and more people were going to prison for no offense other than upholding their own opinions, and concluded with the words And so we’ve decided to do something.

What is it you want to do? asked Tomas.

Here his son took over. It was the first time he had ever heard him speak. He was surprised to note that he stuttered.

According to our sources, he said, political prisoners are being subjected to very rough treatment. Several are in a bad way. And so we’ve decided to draft a petition and have it signed by the most important Czech intellectuals, the ones who still mean something.

No, it wasn’t actually a stutter; it was more of a stammer, slowing down the flow of speech, stressing or highlighting every word he uttered whether he wanted to or not. He obviously felt himself doing it, and his cheeks, which had barely regained their natural pallor, turned scarlet again.

And you’ve called me in for advice on likely candidates in my field? Tomas asked.

No, the editor said, laughing. We don’t want your advice. We want your signature!

And again he felt flattered! Again he enjoyed the feeling that he had not been forgotten as a surgeon! He protested, but only out of modesty, Wait a minute. Just because they kicked me out doesn’t mean I’m a famous doctor!

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We haven’t forgotten what you wrote for our paper, said the editor, smiling at Tomas.

Yes, sighed Tomas’s son with an alacrity Tomas may have missed.

I don’t see how my name on a petition can help your political prisoners. Wouldn’t it be better to have it signed by people who haven’t fallen afoul of the regime, people who have at least some influence on the powers that be?

The editor smiled. Of course it would.

Tomas’s son smiled, too; he smiled the smile of one who understands many things. The only trouble is, they’d never sign!

Which doesn’t mean we don’t go after them, the editor continued, or that we’re too nice to spare them the embarrassment. He laughed. You should hear the excuses they give.

They’re fantastic!

Tomas’s son laughed in agreement.

Of course they all begin by claiming they agree with us right down the line, the editor went on. We just need a different approach, they say. Something more prudent, more reasonable, more discreet. They’re scared to sign and worried that if they don’t they’ll sink in our estimation.

Again Tomas’s son and the editor laughed together.

Then the editor gave Tomas a sheet of paper with a short text calling upon the president of the republic, in a relatively respectful manner, to grant amnesty to all political prisoners.

Tomas ran the idea quickly through his mind. Amnesty to political prisoners? Would amnesty be granted because people jettisoned by the regime (and therefore themselves potential political prisoners) request it of the president? The only thing such a petition would accomplish was to keep political prisoners from being amnestied if there happened to be a plan afoot to do so!

His son interrupted his thoughts. The main thing is to make the point that there still are a handful of people in this country who are not afraid. And to show who stands where.

Separate the wheat from the chaff.

True, true, thought Tomas, but what had that to do with political prisoners? Either you called for an amnesty or you separated the wheat from the chaff. The two were not identical.

On the fence? the editor asked.

Yes. He was on the fence. But he was afraid to say so. There was a picture on the wall, a picture of a soldier pointing a threatening finger at him and saying, Are you hesitating about joining the Red Army? or Haven’t you signed the Two Thousand Words yet? or

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Have you too signed the Two Thousand Words? or You mean you don’t want to sign the amnesty petition?! But no matter what the soldier said, it was a threat.

The editor had barely finished saying what he thought about people who agree that the political prisoners should be granted amnesty but come up with thousands of reasons against signing the petition. In his opinion, their reasons were just so many excuses and their excuses a smoke screen for cowardice. What could Tomas say?

At last he broke the silence with a laugh, and pointing to the poster on the wall, he said, With that soldier threatening me, asking whether I’m going to sign or not, I can’t possibly think straight.

Then all three laughed for a while.

All right, said Tomas after the laughter had died down. I’ll think it over. Can we get together again in the next few days?

Any time at all, said the editor, but unfortunately the petition can’t wait. We plan to get it off to the president tomorrow.

Tomorrow? And suddenly Tomas recalled the portly policeman handing him the denunciation of none other than this tall editor with the big chin. Everyone was trying to make him sign statements he had not written himself.

There’s nothing to think over anyway, said his son. Although his words were aggressive, his intonation bordered on the supplicatory. Now that they were looking each other in the eye, Tomas noticed that when concentrating the boy slightly raised the left side of his upper lip. It was an expression he saw on his own face whenever he peered into the mirror to determine whether it was clean-shaven. Discovering it on the face of another made him uneasy.

When parents live with their children through childhood, they grow accustomed to that kind of similarity; it seems trivial to them or, if they stop and think about it, amusing. But Tomas was talking to his son for the first time in his life! He was not used to sitting face to face with his own asymmetrical mouth!

Imagine having an arm amputated and implanted on someone else. Imagine that person sitting opposite you and gesticulating with it in your face. You would stare at that arm as at a ghost. Even though it was your own personal, beloved arm, you would be horrified at the possibility of its touching you!

Aren’t you on the side of the persecuted? his son added, and Tomas suddenly saw that what was really at stake in this scene they were playing was not the amnesty of political prisoners; it was his relationship with his son. If he signed, their fates would be united and Tomas would be more or less obliged to befriend him; if he failed to sign, their relations would remain null as before, though now not so much by his own will as by the will of his son, who would renounce his father for his cowardice.

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He was in the situation of a chess player who cannot avoid checkmate and is forced to resign. Whether he signed the petition or not made not the slightest difference. It would alter nothing in his own life or in the lives of the political prisoners.

Hand it over, he said, and took the sheet of paper.

As if rewarding him for his decision, the editor said, That was a fine piece you wrote about Oedipus.

Handing him a pen, his son added, Some ideas have the force of a bomb exploding.

Although the editor’s words of praise pleased him, his son’s metaphor struck him as forced and out of place. Unfortunately, I was the only casualty, he said. Thanks to those ideas, I can no longer operate on my patients.

It sounded cold, almost hostile.

Apparently hoping to counteract the discordant note, the editor said, by way of apology, But think of all the people your article helped!

From childhood, Tomas had associated the words helping people with one thing and one thing only: medicine. How could an article help people? What were these two trying to make him swallow, reducing his whole life to a single small idea about Oedipus or even less: to a single primitive no! in the face of the regime.

Maybe it helped people, maybe it didn’t, he said (in a voice still cold, though he probably did not realize it), but as a surgeon I know I saved a few lives.

Another silence set in. Tomas’s son broke it. Ideas can save lives, too.

Watching his own mouth in the boy’s face, Tomas thought How strange to see one’s own lips stammer.

You know the best thing about what you wrote? the boy went on, and Tomas could see the effort it cost him to speak. Your refusal to compromise. Your clear-cut sense of what’s good and what’s evil, something we’re beginning to lose. We have no idea anymore what it means to feel guilty. The Communists have the excuse that Stalin misled them. Murderers have the excuse that their mothers didn’t love them. And suddenly you come out and say: there is no excuse. No one could be more innocent, in his soul and conscience, than Oedipus. And yet he punished himself when he saw what he had done.

Tomas tore his eyes away from his son’s mouth and tried to focus on the editor. He was irritated and felt like arguing with them. But it’s all a misunderstanding! The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy. I wasn’t out to punish anyone, either. Punishing people who don’t know what they’ve done is barbaric. The myth of Oedipus is a beautiful one, but treating it like this. . . He had more to say, but suddenly he remembered that the place might be bugged. He had not the slightest ambition to be quoted by historians of centuries to come. He was simply afraid of being quoted by the police.

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Wasn’t that what they wanted from him, after all? A condemnation of the article? He did not like the idea of feeding it to them from his own lips. Besides, he knew that anything anyone in the country said could be broadcast over the radio at any time. He held his tongue.

I wonder what’s made you change your mind, said the editor.

What I wonder is what made me write the thing in the first place, said Tomas, and just then he remembered: She had landed at his bedside like a child sent downstream in a bulrush basket. Yes, that was why he had picked up the book and gone back to the stories of Romulus, Moses, and Oedipus. And now she was with him again. He saw her pressing the crow wrapped in red to her breast. The image of her brought him peace. It seemed to tell him that Tereza was alive, that she was with him in the same city, and that nothing else counted.

This time, the editor broke the silence. I understand. I don’t like the idea of punishment, either. After all, he added, smiling, we don’t call for punishment to be inflicted; we call for it to cease.

I know, said Tomas. In the next few moments he would do something possibly noble but certainly, and totally, useless (because it would not help the political prisoners) and unpleasant to himself (because it took place under conditions the two of them had imposed on him).

It’s your duty to sign, his son added, almost pleading.

Duty? His son reminding him of his duty? That was the worst word anyone could have used on him! Once more, the image of Tereza appeared before his eyes, Tereza holding the crow in her arms. Then he remembered that she had been accosted by an undercover agent the day before. Her hands had started trembling again. She had aged. She was all that mattered to him. She, born of six fortuities, she, the blossom sprung from the chief surgeon’s sciatica, she, the reverse side of all his Es muss sein!

— she was the only thing he cared about.

Why even think about whether to sign or not? There was only one criterion for all his decisions: he must do nothing that could harm her. Tomas could not save political prisoners, but he could make Tereza happy. He could not really succeed in doing even that. But if he signed the petition, he could be fairly certain that she would have more frequent visits from undercover agents, and that her hands would tremble more and more.

It is much more important to dig a half-buried crow out of the ground, he said, than to send petitions to a president.

He knew that his words were incomprehensible, but enjoyed them all the more for it. He felt a sudden, unexpected intoxication come over him. It was the same black intoxication he had felt when he solemnly announced to his wife that he no longer wished to see her or his son. It was the same black intoxication he had felt when he

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sent off the letter that meant the end of his career in medicine. He was not at all sure he was doing the right thing, but he was sure he was doing what he wanted to do.

I’m sorry, he said, but I’m not going to sign.

Several days later he read about the petition in the papers.

There was not a word, of course, about its being a politely worded plea for the release of political prisoners. None of the papers cited a single sentence from the short text.

Instead, they went on at great length and in vague, menacing terms about an anti-state proclamation meant to lay the foundation for a new campaign against socialism. They also listed all the signatories, accompanying each of their names with slanderous attacks that gave Tomas gooseflesh.

Not that it was unexpected. The fact that any public undertaking (meeting, petition, street gathering) not organized by the Communist Party was automatically considered illegal and endangered all the participants was common knowledge. But it may have made him sorrier he had not signed the petition.

Why hadn’t he signed? He could no longer quite remember what had prompted his decision.

And once more I see him the way he appeared to me at the very beginning of the novel: standing at the window and staring across the courtyard at the walls opposite.

This is the image from which he was born. As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn’t it true that an author can write only about himself? Staring impotently across a courtyard, at a loss for what to do; hearing the pertinacious rumbling of one’s own stomach during a moment of love; betraying, yet lacking the will to abandon the glamorous path of betrayal; raising one’s fist with the crowds in the Grand March; displaying one’s wit before hidden microphones—I have known all these situations, I have experienced them myself, yet none of them has given rise to the person my curriculum vitae and I represent. The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own I ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become. But enough. Let us return to Tomas.

Alone in his flat, he stared across the courtyard at the dirty walls of the building opposite. He missed the tall, stooped man with the big chin and the man’s friends, whom he did not know, who were not even members of his circle. He felt as though he had just met a beautiful woman on a railway platform, and before he could say anything to her, she had stepped into a sleeping car on its way to Istanbul or Lisbon.

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Then he tried again to think through what he should have done. Even though he did his best to put aside everything belonging to the realm of the emotions (the admiration he had for the editor and the irritation his son caused him), he was still not sure whether he ought to have signed the text they gave him.

Is it right to raise one’s voice when others are being silenced? Yes.

On the other hand, why did the papers devote so much space to the petition? After all, the press (totally manipulated by the state) could have kept it quiet and no one would have been the wiser. If they publicized the petition, then the petition played into the rulers’ hands! It was manna from heaven, the perfect start and justification for a new wave of persecution.

What then should he have done? Sign or not?

Another way of formulating the question is, Is it better to shout and thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and gain thereby a slower death?

Is there any answer to these questions?

And again he thought the thought we already know: Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.

History is similar to individual lives in this respect. There is only one history of the Czechs. One day it will come to an end as surely as Tomas’s life, never to be repeated.

In 1618, the Czech estates took courage and vented their ire on the emperor reigning in Vienna by pitching two of his high officials out of a window in the Prague Castle. Their defiance led to the Thirty Years War, which in turn led to the almost complete destruction of the Czech nation. Should the Czechs have shown more caution than courage? The answer may seem simple; it is not.

Three hundred and twenty years later, after the Munich Conference of 1938, the entire world decided to sacrifice the Czechs’ country to Hitler. Should the Czechs have tried to stand up to a power eight times their size? In contrast to 1618, they opted for caution.

Their capitulation led to the Second World War, which in turn led to the forfeit of their nation’s freedom for many decades or even centuries. Should they have shown more courage than caution? What should they have done?

If Czech history could be repeated, we should of course find it desirable to test the other possibility each time and compare the results. Without such an experiment, all considerations of this kind remain a game of hypotheses.

Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all. The history of the Czechs will not be repeated, nor will the history of Europe. The history of the Czechs and of Europe is a pair of sketches from the pen of mankind’s fateful

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inexperience. History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.

Once more, and with a nostalgia akin to love, Tomas thought of the tall, stooped editor.

That man acted as though history were a finished picture rather than a sketch. He acted as though everything he did were to be repeated endlessly, to return eternally, without the slightest doubt about his actions. He was convinced he was right, and for him that was a sign not of narrowmindedness but of virtue. Yes, that man lived in a history different from Tomas’s: a history that was not (or did not realize it was) a sketch.

Several days later, he was struck by another thought, which I record here as an addendum to the preceding chapter: Somewhere out in space there was a planet where all people would be born again. They would be fully aware of the life they had spent on earth and of all the experience they had amassed here.

And perhaps there was still another planet, where we would all be born a third time with the experience of our first two lives.

And perhaps there were yet more and more planets, where mankind would be born one degree (one life) more mature.

That was Tomas’s version of eternal return.

Of course we here on earth (planet number one, the planet of inexperience) can only fabricate vague fantasies of what will happen to man on those other planets. Will he be wiser? Is maturity within man’s power? Can he attain it through repetition?

Only from the perspective of such a utopia is it possible to use the concepts of pessimism and optimism with full justification: an optimist is someone who thinks that on planet number five the history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is one who thinks otherwise.

One of Jules Verne’s famous novels, a favorite of Tomas’s in his childhood, is called Two Years on Holiday, and indeed two years is the maximum. Tomas was in his third year as a window washer.

In the last few weeks, he had come to realize (half sadly, half laughing to himself) that he had grown physically tired (he had one, sometimes two erotic engagements a day), and that although he had not lost his zest for women, he found himself straining his forces to the utmost. (Let me add that the strain was on his physical, not his sexual powers; his problem was with his breath, not with his penis, a state of affairs that had its comical side.)

One day he was having trouble reaching a prospect for his afternoon time slot, and it looked as though he was going to have one of his rare off days. He was desperate. He had phoned a certain young woman about ten times. A charming acting student whose body had been tanned on Yugoslavia’s nudist beaches with an evenness that called to mind slow rotation on a mechanized spit.

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After making one last call from his final job of the day and starting back to the office at four to hand in his signed order slips, he was stopped in the center of Prague by a woman he failed to recognize. Wherever have you disappeared to? I haven’t seen you in ages!

Tomas racked his brains to place her. Had she been one of his patients? She was behaving like an intimate friend. He tried to answer in a manner that would conceal the fact that he did not recognize her. He was already thinking about how to lure her to his friend’s flat (he had the key in his pocket) when he realized from a chance remark who the woman was: the budding actress with the perfect tan, the one he had been trying to reach all day.

This episode both amused and horrified him: it proved that he was as tired mentally as physically. Two years of holiday could not be extended indefinitely.

The holiday from the operating table was also a holiday from Tereza. After hardly seeing each other for six days, they would finally be together on Sundays, full of desire; but, as on the evening when Tomas came back from Zurich, they were estranged and had a long way to go before they could touch and kiss. Physical love gave them pleasure but no consolation. She no longer cried out as she had in the past, and, at the moment of orgasm, her grimace seemed to him to express suffering and a strange absence. Only at night, in sleep, were they tenderly united. Holding his hand, she would forget the chasm (the chasm of daylight) that divided them. But the nights gave him neither the time nor the means to protect and take care of her. In the mornings, it was heartrending to see her, and he feared for her: she looked sad and infirm.

One Sunday, she asked him to take her for a ride outside Prague. They drove to a spa, where they found all the streets relabeled with Russian names and happened to meet an old patient of Tomas’s. Tomas was devastated by the meeting. Suddenly here was someone talking to him again as to a doctor, and he could feel his former life bridging the divide, coming back to him with its pleasant regularity of seeing patients and feeling their trusting eyes on him, those eyes he had pretended to ignore but in fact savored and now greatly missed.

Driving home, Tomas pondered the catastrophic mistake he had made by returning to Prague from Zurich. He kept his eyes trained on the road so as to avoid looking at Tereza. He was furious with her. Her presence at his side felt more unbearably fortuitous than ever. What was she doing here next to him? Who put her in the basket and sent her downstream? Why was his bed chosen as her shore? And why she and not some other woman?

Neither of them said a word the whole way.

When they got home, they had dinner in silence.

Silence lay between them like an agony. It grew heavier by the minute. To escape it they went straight to bed. He woke her in the middle of the night. She was crying.

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I was buried, she told him. I’d been buried for a long time. You came to see me every week. Each time you knocked at the grave, and I came out. My eyes were full of dirt.

You’d say, ‘How can you see?’ and try to wipe the dirt from my eyes.

And I’d say, ‘I can’t see anyway. I have holes instead of eyes.’

And then one day you went off on a long journey, and I knew you were with another woman. Weeks passed, and there was no sign of you. I was afraid of missing you, and stopped sleeping. At last you knocked at the grave again, but I was so worn down by a month of sleepless nights that I didn’t think I could make it out of there. When I finally did come out, you seemed disappointed. You said I didn’t look well. I could feel how awful I looked to you with my sunken cheeks and nervous gestures.

T’m sorry,’ I apologized. ‘I haven’t slept a wink since you left.’

‘ You see?’ you said in a voice full of false cheer. ‘What you need is a good rest. A month’s holiday!’

As if I didn’t know what you had in mind! A month’s holiday meant you didn’t want to see me for a month, you had another woman. Then you left and I slipped down into my grave, knowing full well that I’d have another month of sleepless nights waiting for you and that when you came back and I was uglier you’d be even more disappointed.

He had never heard anything more harrowing. Holding her tightly in his arms and feeling her body tremble, he thought he could not endure his love.

Let the planet be convulsed with exploding bombs, the country ravished daily by new hordes, all his neighbors taken out and shot—he could accept it all more easily than he dared admit. But the grief implicit in Tereza’s dream was something he could not endure.

He tried to reenter the dream she had told him. He pictured himself stroking her face and delicately—she mustn’t be aware of it—brushing the dirt out of her eye sockets.

Then he heard her say the unbelievably harrowing I can’t see anyway. I have holes instead of eyes.

His heart was about to break; he felt he was on the verge of a heart attack.

Tereza had gone back to sleep; he could not. He pictured her death. She was dead and having terrible nightmares; but because she was dead, he was unable to wake her from them. Yes, that is death: Tereza asleep, having terrible nightmares, and he unable to wake her.

During the five years that had passed since the Russian army invaded Tomas’s country, Prague had undergone considerable changes. The people Tomas met in the streets were different. Half of his friends had emigrated, and half of the half that remained had died. For it is a fact which will go unrecorded by historians that the years following the Russian invasion were a period of funerals: the death rate soared. I do not

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speak only of the cases (rather rare, of course) of people hounded to death, like Jan Prochazka, the novelist. Two weeks after his private conversations were broadcast daily over the radio, he entered the hospital. The cancer that had most likely lain dormant in his body until then suddenly blossomed like a rose. He was operated on in the presence of the police, who, when they realized he was doomed anyway, lost interest in him and let him die in the arms of his wife. But many also died without being directly subjected to persecution; the hopelessness pervading the entire country penetrated the soul to the body, shattering the latter. Some ran desperately from the favor of a regime that wanted to endow them with the honor of displaying them side by side with its new leaders. That is how the poet Frantisek Hrubin died—fleeing from the love of the Party. The Minister of Culture, from whom the poet did everything possible to hide, did not catch up with Hrubin until his funeral, when he made a speech over the grave about the poet’s love for the Soviet Union. Perhaps he hoped his words would ring so outrageously false that they would wake Hrubin from the dead. But the world was too ugly, and no one decided to rise up out of the grave.

One day, Tomas went to the crematorium to attend the funeral of a famous biologist who had been thrown out of the university and the Academy of Sciences. The authorities had forbidden mention of the hour of the funeral in the death announcement, fearing that the services would turn into a demonstration. The mourners themselves did not learn until the last moment that the body would be cremated at half past six in the morning.

Entering the crematorium, Tomas did not understand what was happening: the hall was lit up like a film studio. Looking around in bewilderment, he noticed cameras set up in three places. No, it was not television; it was the police. They were filming the funeral to study who had attended it. An old colleague of the dead scientist, still a member of the Academy of Sciences, had been brave enough to make the funeral oration. He had never counted on becoming a film star.

When the services were over and everyone had paid his respects to the family of the deceased, Tomas noticed a group of men in one corner of the hall and spotted the tall, stooped editor among them. The sight of him made Tomas feel how much he missed these people who feared nothing and seemed bound by a deep friendship. He started off in the editor’s direction with a smile and a greeting on his lips, but when the editor saw him he said, Careful! Don’t come any closer.

It was a strange thing to say. Tomas was not sure whether to interpret it as a sincere, friendly warning ( Watch out, we’re being filmed; if you talk to us, you may be hauled in for another interrogation ) or as irony ( If you weren’t brave enough to sign the petition, be consistent and don’t try the old-pals act on us ). Whatever the message meant, Tomas heeded it and moved off. He had the feeling that the beautiful woman on the railway platform had not only stepped into the sleeping car but, just as he was about to tell her how much he admired her, had put her finger over his lips and forbidden him to speak.

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That afternoon, he had another interesting encounter. He was washing the display window of a large shoe shop when a young man came to a halt right next to him, leaned up close to the window, and began scrutinizing the prices.

Prices are up, said Tomas without interrupting his pursuit of the rivulets trickling down the glass.

The man looked over at him. He was a hospital colleague of Tomas’s, the one I have designated S., the very one who had sneered at Tomas while under the impression that Tomas had written a statement of self-criticism. Tomas was delighted to see him (naively so, as we delight in unexpected events), but what he saw in his former colleague’s eyes (before S. had a chance to pull himself together) was a look of none-too-pleasant surprise. How are you? S. asked.

Before Tomas could respond, he realized that S. was ashamed of having asked. It was patently ridiculous for a doctor practicing his profession to ask a doctor washing windows how he was.

To clear the air Tomas came out with as sprightly a Fine, just fine! as he could muster, but he immediately felt that no matter how hard he tried (in fact, because he tried so hard), his fine sounded bitterly ironic. And so he quickly added, What’s new at the hospital?

Nothing, S. answered. Same as always. His response, too, though meant to be as neutral as possible, was completely inappropriate, and they both knew it. And they knew they both knew it. How can things be the same as always when one of them is washing windows? How’s the chief? asked Tomas. You mean you don’t see him?

asked S. No, said Tomas.

It was true. From the day he left, he had not seen the chief surgeon even once. And they had worked so well together; they had even tended to think of themselves as friends. So no matter how he said it, his no had a sad ring, and Tomas suspected that S. was angry with him for bringing up the subject: like the chief surgeon, S. had never dropped by to ask Tomas how he was doing or whether he needed anything.

All conversation between the two former colleagues had become impossible, even though they both regretted it, Tomas especially. He was not angry with his colleagues for having forgotten him. If only he could make that clear to the young man beside him.

What he really wanted to say was There’s nothing to be ashamed of! It’s perfectly normal for our paths not to cross. There’s nothing to get upset about! I’m glad to see you! But he was afraid to say it, because everything he had said so far failed to come out as intended, and these sincere words, too, would sound sarcastic to his colleague.

I’m sorry, said S. after a long pause, I’m in a real hurry. He held out his hand. I’ll give you a buzz.

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During the period when his colleagues turned their noses up at him for his supposed cowardice, they all smiled at him. Now that they could no longer scorn him, now that they were constrained to respect him, they gave him a wide berth.

Then again, even his old patients had stopped sending for him, to say nothing of greeting him with champagne. The situation of the declasse intellectual was no longer exceptional; it had turned into something permanent and unpleasant to confront.

He went home, lay down, and fell asleep earlier than usual. An hour later he woke up with stomach pains. They were an old malady that appeared whenever he was depressed. He opened the medicine chest and let out a curse: it was completely empty; he had forgotten to keep it stocked. He tried to keep the pain under control by force of will and was, in fact, fairly successful, but he could not fall asleep again. When Tereza came home at half past one, he felt like chatting with her. He told her about the funeral, about the editor’s refusal to talk to him, and about his encounter with S.

Prague has grown so ugly lately, said Tereza.

I know, said Tomas.

Tereza paused and said softly, The best thing to do would be to move away.

I agree, said Tomas, but there’s nowhere to go.

He was sitting on the bed in his pajamas, and she came and sat down next to him, putting her arms around his body from the side.

What about the country? she said.

The country? he asked, surprised.

We’d be alone there. You wouldn’t meet that editor or your old colleagues. The people there are different. And we’d be getting back to nature. Nature is the same as it always was.

Just then Tomas felt another stab in his stomach. It made him feel old, feel that what he longed for more than anything else was peace and quiet.

Maybe you’re right, he said with difficulty. The pain made it hard for him to breathe.

We’d have a little house and a little garden, but big enough to give Karenin room for a decent run.

Yes, said Tomas.

He was trying to picture what it would be like if they did move to the country. He would have difficulty finding a new woman every week. It would mean an end to his erotic adventures.

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The only thing is, you’d be bored with me in the country, said Tereza as if reading his mind.

The pain grew more intense. He could not speak. It occurred to him that his womanizing was also something of an Es muss sein! — an imperative enslaving him.

He longed for a holiday. But for an absolute holiday, a rest from a// imperatives, from all Es muss sein! If he could take a rest (a permanent rest) from the hospital operating table, then why not from the world operating table, the one where his imaginary scalpel opened the strongbox women use to hide their illusory one-millionth part dissimilarity?

Your stomach is acting up again! Tereza exclaimed, only then realizing that something was wrong. He nodded.

Have you had your injection?

He shook his head. I forgot to lay in a supply of medication.

Though annoyed at his carelessness, she stroked his forehead, which was beaded with sweat from the pain.

I feel a little better now.

Lie down, she said, and covered him with a blanket. She went off to the bathroom and in a minute was back and lying next to him.

Without lifting his head from the pillow, he turned to her and nearly gasped: the grief burning in her eyes was unbearable.

Tell me, Tereza, what’s wrong? Something’s been going on inside you lately. I can feel it. I know it.

No. She shook her head. There’s nothing wrong.

There’s no point in denying it.

It’s still the same things, she said.

The same things meant her jealousy and his infidelities.

But Tomas would not let up. No, Tereza. This time it’s something different. It’s never been this bad before.

Well then, I’ll tell you, she said. Go and wash your hair.

He did not understand.

The tone of her explanation was sad, unantagonistic, almost gentle. For months now your hair has had a strong odor to it. It smells of female genitals. I didn’t want to tell you, but night after night I’ve had to breathe in the groin of some mistress of yours.

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The moment she finished, his stomach began hurting again. He was desperate. The scrubbings he’d put himself through! Body, hands, face, to make sure not the slightest trace of their odors remained behind. He’d even avoided their fragrant soaps, carrying his own harsh variety with him at all times. But he’d forgotten about his hair! It had never occurred to him!

Then he remembered the woman who had straddled his face and wanted him to make love to her with it and with the crown of his head. He hated her now. What stupid ideas!

He saw there was no use denying it. All he could do was laugh a silly laugh and head for the bathroom to wash his hair.

But she stroked his forehead again and said, Stay here in bed. Don’t bother washing it out. I’m used to it by now.

His stomach was killing him, and he longed for peace and quiet. I’ll write to that patient of mine, the one we met at the spa. Do you know the district where his village is? No.

Tomas was having great trouble talking. All he could say was, Woods . . . rolling hills . .

.

That’s right. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll go away from here. But no talking now . . . And she kept stroking his forehead. They lay there side by side, neither saying a word.

Slowly the pain began to recede. Soon they were both asleep.

In the middle of the night, he woke up and realized to his surprise that he had been having one erotic dream after the other. The only one he could recall with any clarity was the last: an enormous naked woman, at least five times his size, floating on her back in a pool, her belly from crotch to navel covered with thick hair. Looking at her from the side of the pool, he was greatly excited.

How could he have been excited when his body was debilitated by a gastric disorder?

And how could he be excited by the sight of a woman who would have repelled him had he seen her while conscious?

He thought: In the clockwork of the head, two cogwheels turn opposite each other. On the one, images; on the other, the body’s reactions. The cog carrying the image of a naked woman meshes with the corresponding erection-command cog. But when, for one reason or another, the wheels go out of phase and the excitement cog meshes with a cog bearing the image of a swallow in flight, the penis rises at the sight of a swallow.

Moreover, a study by one of Tomas’s colleagues, a specialist in human sleep, claimed that during any kind of dream men have erections, which means that the link between erections and naked women is only one of a thousand ways the Creator can set the clockwork moving in a man’s head.

And what has love in common with all this? Nothing. If a cogwheel in Tomas’s head goes out of phase and he is excited by seeing a swallow, it has absolutely no effect on his love for Tereza.

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If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond Es muss sein!

Though that is not entirely true. Even if love is something other than a clockwork of sex that the Creator uses for His own amusement, it is still attached to it. It is attached to it like a tender naked woman to the pendulum of an enormous clock.

Thomas thought: Attaching love to sex is one of the most bizarre ideas the Creator ever had.

He also thought: One way of saving love from the stupidity of sex would be to set the clockwork in our head in such a way as to excite us at the sight of a swallow.

And with that sweet thought he started dozing off. But on the very threshold of sleep, in the no-man’s-land of muddled concepts, he was suddenly certain he had just discovered the solution to all riddles, the key to all mysteries, a new utopia, a paradise: a world where man is excited by seeing a swallow and Tomas can love Tereza without being disturbed by the aggressive stupidity of sex.

Then he fell asleep.

Several half-naked women were trying to wind themselves around him, but he was tired, and to extricate himself from them he opened the door leading to the next room.

There, just opposite him, he saw a young woman lying on her side on a couch. She, too, was half-naked: she wore nothing but panties. Leaning on her elbow, she looked up at him with a smile that said she had known he would come.

He went up to her. He was filled with a feeling of unutterable bliss at the thought that he had found her at last and could be there with her. He sat down at her side, said something to her, and she said something back. She radiated calm. Her hand made slow, supple movements. All his life he had longed for the calm of her movements.

Feminine calm had eluded him all his life.

But just then the dream began its slide back to reality. He found himself back in that no-man’s-land where we are neither asleep nor awake. He was horrified by the prospect of seeing the young woman vanish before his eyes and said to himself, God, how I’d hate to lose her! He tried desperately to remember who she was, where he’d met her, what they’d experienced together. How could he possibly forget when she knew him so well?

He promised himself to phone her first thing in the morning. But no sooner had he made the promise than he realized he couldn’t keep it: he didn’t know her name. How could he forget the name of someone he knew so well? By that time he was almost completely awake, his eyes were open, and he was asking himself, Where am I? Yes, I’m in Prague, but that woman, does she live here too? Didn’t I meet her somewhere else? Could she be from Switzerland? It took him quite some time to get it into his head that he didn’t know the woman, that she wasn’t from Prague or Switzerland, that she inhabited his dream and nowhere else.

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He was so upset he sat straight up in bed. Tereza was breathing deeply beside him.

The woman in the dream, he thought, was unlike any he had ever met. The woman he felt he knew most intimately of all had turned out to be a woman he did not even know.

And yet she was the one he had always longed for. If a personal paradise were ever to exist for him, then in that paradise he would have to live by her side. The woman from his dream was the Es muss sein! of his love.

He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

Let us suppose that such is the case, that somewhere in the world each of us has a partner who once formed part of our body. Tomas’s other part is the young woman he dreamed about. The trouble is, man does not find the other part of himself. Instead, he is sent a Tereza in a bulrush basket. But what happens if he nevertheless later meets the one who was meant for him, the other part of himself? Whom is he to prefer? The woman from the bulrush basket or the woman from Plato’s myth?

He tried to picture himself living in an ideal world with the young woman from the dream. He sees Tereza walking past the open windows of their ideal house. She is alone and stops to look in at him with an infinitely sad expression in her eyes. He cannot withstand her glance. Again, he feels her pain in his own heart. Again, he falls prey to compassion and sinks deep into her soul. He leaps out of the window, but she tells him bitterly to stay where he feels happy, making those abrupt, angular movements that so annoyed and displeased him. He grabs her nervous hands and presses them between his own to calm them. And he knows that time and again he will abandon the house of his happiness, time and again abandon his paradise and the woman from his dream and betray the Es muss sein! of his love to go off with Tereza, the woman born of six laughable fortuities.

All this time he was sitting up in bed and looking at the woman who was lying beside him and holding his hand in her sleep. He felt an ineffable love for her. Her sleep must have been very light at the moment because she opened her eyes and gazed up at him questioningly.

What are you looking at? she asked.

He knew that instead of waking her he should lull her back to sleep, so he tried to come up with an answer that would plant the image of a new dream in her mind.

I’m looking at the stars, he said.

Don’t say you’re looking at the stars. That’s a lie. You’re looking down.

That’s because we’re in an airplane. The stars are below us.

Oh, in an airplane, said Tereza, squeezing his hand even tighter and falling asleep again. And Tomas knew that Tereza was looking out of the round window of an airplane flying high above the stars.

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