10 MILAN KUNDERA The Unbearable Lightness of Being Part 7 Karenin’s Smile
PART SEVEN
Karenin’s Smile
The window looked out on a slope overgrown with the crooked bodies of apple trees.
The woods cut off the view above the slope, and a crooked line of hills stretched into the distance. When, towards evening, a white moon made its way into the pale sky, Tereza would go and stand on the threshold. The sphere hanging in the not yet darkened sky seemed like a lamp they had forgotten to turn off in the morning, a lamp that had burned all day in the room of the dead.
None of the crooked apple trees growing along the slope could ever leave the spot where it had put down its roots, just as neither Tereza nor Tomas could ever leave their village. They had sold their car, their television set, and their radio to buy a tiny cottage and garden from a farmer who was moving to town.
Life in the country was the only escape open to them, because only in the country was there a constant deficit of people and a surplus of living accommodations. No one
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bothered to look into the political past of people willing to go off and work in the fields or woods; no one envied them.
Tereza was happy to abandon the city, the drunken barflies molesting her, and the anonymous women leaving the smell of their groins in Tomas’s hair. The police stopped pestering them, and the incident with the engineer so merged with the scene on Petrin Hill that she was hard put to tell which was a dream and which the truth. (Was the engineer in fact employed by the secret police? Perhaps he was, perhaps not. Men who use borrowed flats for rendezvous and never make love to the same woman twice are not so rare.)
In any case, Tereza was happy and felt that she had at last reached her goal: she and Tomas were together and alone. Alone? Let me be more precise: living alone meant breaking with all their former friends and acquaintances, cutting their life in two like a ribbon; however, they felt perfectly at home in the company of the country people they worked with, and they sometimes exchanged visits with them.
The day they met the chairman of the local collective farm at the spa that had Russian street names, Tereza discovered in herself a picture of country life originating in memories of books she had read or in her ancestors. It was a harmonious world; everyone came together in one big happy family with common interests and routines: church services on Sundays, a tavern where the men could get away from their womenfolk, and a hall in the tavern where a band played on Saturdays and the villagers danced.
Under Communism, however, village life no longer fit the age-old pattern. The church was in the neighboring village, and no one went there; the tavern had been turned into offices, so the men had nowhere to meet and drink beer, the young people nowhere to dance. Celebrating church holidays was forbidden, and no one cared about their secular replacements. The nearest cinema was in a town fifteen miles away. So, at the end of a day’s work filled with boisterous shouting and relaxed chatter, they would all shut themselves up within their four walls and, surrounded by contemporary furniture emanating bad taste like a cold draft, stare at the refulgent television screen. They never paid one another visits besides dropping in on a neighbor for a word or two before supper. They all dreamed of moving into town. The country offered them nothing in the way of even a minimally interesting life.
Perhaps it was the fact that no one wished to settle there that caused the state to lose its power over the countryside. A farmer who no longer owns his own land and is merely a laborer tilling the soil forms no allegiance to either region or work; he has nothing to lose, nothing to fear for. As a result of such apathy, the countryside had maintained more than a modicum of autonomy and freedom. The chairman of the collective farm was not brought in from outside (as were all high-level managers in the city); he was elected by the villagers from among themselves.
Because everyone wanted to leave, Tereza and Tomas were in an exceptional position: they had come voluntarily. If the other villagers took advantage of every opportunity to make day trips to the surrounding towns, Tereza and Tomas were content to remain
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where they were, which meant that before long they knew the villagers better than the villagers knew one another.
The collective farm chairman became a truly close friend. He had a wife, four children, and a pig he raised like a dog. The pig’s name was Mefisto, and he was the pride and main attraction of the village. He would answer his master’s call and was always clean and pink; he paraded about on his hoofs like a heavy-thighed woman in high heels.
When Karenin first saw Mefisto, he was very upset and circled him, sniffing, for a long time. But he soon made friends with him, even to the point of preferring him to the village dogs. Indeed, he had nothing but scorn for the dogs, because they were all chained to their doghouses and never stopped their silly, unmotivated barking. Karenin correctly assessed the value of being one of a kind, and I can state without compunc-tion that he greatly appreciated his friendship with the pig.
The chairman was glad to be able to help his former surgeon, though at the same time sad that he could do nothing more. Tomas became the driver of the pickup truck that took the farm workers out to the fields and hauled equipment.
The collective farm had four large cow sheds as well as a small stable of forty heifers.
Tereza was charged with looking after them and taking them out to pasture twice a day.
Because the closer, easily accessible meadows would eventually be mowed, she had to take her herd into the surrounding hills for grazing, gradually moving farther and farther out and, in the course of the year, covering all the pastureland round about. As in her small-town youth, she was never without a book, and the minute she reached the day’s pasture she would open it and read.
Karenin always kept her company. He learned to bark at the young cows when they got too frisky and tried to go off on their own; he did so with obvious zest. He was definitely the happiest of the three. Never before had his position as keeper of the clock been so respected. The country was no place for improvisation; the time in which Tereza and Tomas lived was growing closer to the regularity of his time.
One day, after lunch (a time when they both had an hour to themselves), they took a walk with Karenin up the slope behind their cottage.
I don’t like the way he’s running, said Tereza.
Karenin was limping on a hind leg. Tomas bent down and carefully felt all along it. Near the hock he found a small bump.
The next day he sat him in the front seat of the pickup and drove, during his rounds, to the neighboring village, where the local veterinarian lived. A week later, he paid him another visit. He came home with the news that Karenin had cancer.
Within three days, Tomas himself, with the vet in attendance, had operated on him.
When Tomas brought him home, Karenin had not quite come out of the anesthesia. He lay on the rug next to their bed with his eyes open, whimpering, his thigh shaved bare and the incision and six stitches painfully visible.
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At last he tried to stand up. He failed.
Tereza was terrified that he would never walk again.
Don’t worry, said Tomas. He’s still under the anesthetic.
She tried to pick him up, but he snapped at her. It was the first time he’d ever tried to bite Tereza!
He doesn’t know who you are, said Tomas. He doesn’t recognize you.
They lifted him onto their bed, where he quickly fell asleep, as did they.
At three o’clock that morning, he suddenly woke them up, wagging his tail and climbing all over them, cuddling up to them, unable to have his fill.
It was the first time he’d ever got them up, too! He had always waited until one of them woke up before he dared jump on them.
But when he suddenly came to in the middle of the night, he could not control himself.
Who can tell what distances he covered on his way back? Who knows what phantoms he battled? And now that he was at home with his dear ones, he felt compelled to share his overwhelming joy, a joy of return and rebirth.
The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse. Yes, the right to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars.
The reason we take that right for granted is that we stand at the top of the hierarchy.
But let a third party enter the game—a visitor from another planet, for example, someone to whom God says, Thou shalt have dominion over creatures of all other stars
—and all at once taking Genesis for granted becomes problematical. Perhaps a man hitched to the cart of a Martian or roasted on the spit by inhabitants of the Milky Way will recall the veal cutlet he used to slice on his dinner plate and apologize (belatedly!) to the cow.
Walking along with her heifers, driving them in front of her, Tereza was constantly obliged to use discipline, because young cows are frisky and like to run off into the fields. Karenin kept her company. He had been going along daily to the pasture with her for two years. He always enjoyed being strict with the heifers, barking at them, asserting his authority. (His God had given him dominion over cows, and he was proud of it.) Today, however, he was having great trouble making his way, and hobbled along on three legs; the fourth had a wound on it, and the wound was festering. Tereza kept bending down and stroking his back. Two weeks after the operation, it became clear that the cancer had continued to spread and that Karenin would fare worse and worse.
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Along the way, they met a neighbor who was hurrying off to a cow shed in her rubber boots. The woman stopped long enough to ask, What’s wrong with the dog? It seems to be limping. He has cancer, said Tereza. There’s no hope. And the lump in her throat kept her from going on. The woman noticed Tereza’s tears and nearly lost her temper: Good heavens! Don’t tell me you’re going to bawl your head off over a dog! She was not being vicious; she was a kind woman and merely wanted to comfort Tereza. Tereza understood, and had spent enough time in the country to realize that if the local inhabitants loved every rabbit as she loved Karenin, they would be unable to kill any of them and they and their animals would soon starve to death. Still, the woman’s words struck her as less than friendly. I understand, she answered without protest, but quickly turned her back and went her way. The love she bore her dog made her feel cut off, isolated. With a sad smile, she told herself that she needed to hide it more than she would an affair. People are indignant at the thought of someone loving a dog. But if the neighbor had discovered that Tereza had been unfaithful to Tomas, she would have given Tereza a playful pat on the back as a sign of secret solidarity.
Be that as it may, Tereza continued on her path, and, watching her heifers rub against one another, she thought what nice animals they were. Calm, guileless, and sometimes childishly animated, they looked like fat fifty-year-olds pretending they were fourteen.
There was nothing more touching than cows at play. Tereza took pleasure in their antics and could not help thinking (it is an idea that kept coming back to her during her two years in the country) that man is as much a parasite on the cow as the tapeworm is on man: We have sucked their udders like leeches. Man the cow parasite is probably how non-man defines man in his zoology books.
Now, we may treat this definition as a joke and dismiss it with a condescending laugh.
But since Tereza took it seriously, she found herself in a precarious position: her ideas were dangerous and distanced her from the rest of mankind. Even though Genesis says that God gave man dominion over all animals, we can also construe it to mean that He merely entrusted them to man’s care. Man was not the planet’s master, merely its administrator, and therefore eventually responsible for his administration. Descartes took a decisive step forward: he made man maitre et proprietaire de la nature. And surely there is a deep connection between that step and the fact that he was also the one who point-blank denied animals a soul. Man is master and proprietor, says Descartes, whereas the beast is merely an automaton, an animated machine, a machina animata. When an animal laments, it is not a lament; it is merely the rasp of a poorly functioning mechanism. When a wagon wheel grates, the wagon is not in pain; it simply needs oiling. Thus, we have no reason to grieve for a dog being carved up alive in the laboratory.
While the heifers grazed, Tereza sat on a stump with Karenin at her side, his head resting in her lap. She recalled reading a two-line filler in the papers ten or so years ago about how all the dogs in a certain Russian city had been summarily shot. It was that inconspicuous and seemingly insignificant little article that had brought home to her for the first time the sheer horror of her country’s oversized neighbor.
That little article was a premonition of things to come. The first years following the Russian invasion could not yet be characterized as a reign of terror. Because practically
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no one in the entire nation agreed with the occupation regime, the Russians had to ferret out the few exceptions and push them into power. But where could they look? All faith in Communism and love for Russia was dead. So they sought people who wished to get back at life for something, people with revenge on the brain. Then they had to focus, cultivate, and maintain those people’s aggressiveness, give them a temporary substitute to practice on.
The substitute they lit upon was animals.
All at once the papers started coming out with cycles of features and organized letters-to-the-editor campaigns demanding, for example, the extermination of all pigeons within city limits. And the pigeons would be exterminated. But the major drive was directed against dogs. People were still disconsolate over the catastrophe of the occupation, but radio, television, and the press went on and on about dogs: how they soil our streets and parks, endanger our children’s health, fulfill no useful function, yet must be fed.
They whipped up such a psychotic fever that Tereza had been afraid that the crazed mob would do harm to Karenin. Only after a year did the accumulated malice (which until then had been vented, for the sake of training, on animals) find its true goal: people. People started being removed from their jobs, arrested, put on trial. At last the animals could breathe freely.
Tereza kept stroking Karenin’s head, which was quietly resting in her lap, while something like the following ran through her mind: There’s no particular merit in being nice to one’s fellow man. She had to treat the other villagers decently, because otherwise she couldn’t live there. Even with Tomas, she was obliged to behave lovingly because she needed him. We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions—love, antipathy, charity, or malice—
and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
One of the heifers had made friends with Tereza. The heifer would stop and stare at her with her big brown eyes. Tereza knew her. She called her Marketa. She would have been happy to give all her heifers names, but she was unable to. There were too many of them. Not so long before, forty years or so, all the cows in the village had names.
(And if having a name is a sign of having a soul, I can say that they had souls despite Descartes.) But then the villages were turned into a large collective factory, and the cows began spending all their lives in the five square feet set aside for them in their cow sheds. From that time on, they have had no names and become mere machinae animatae. The world has proved Descartes correct.
Tereza keeps appearing before my eyes. I see her sitting on the stump petting Karenin’s head and ruminating on mankind’s debacles. Another image also comes to mind: Nietzsche leaving his hotel in Turin. Seeing a horse and a coachman beating it
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with a whip, Nietzsche went up to the horse and, before the coachman’s very eyes, put his arms around the horse’s neck and burst into tears.
That took place in 1889, when Nietzsche, too, had removed himself from the world of people. In other words, it was at the time when his mental illness had just erupted. But for that very reason I feel his gesture has broad implications: Nietzsche was trying to apologize to the horse for Descartes. His lunacy (that is, his final break with mankind) began at the very moment he burst into tears over the horse.
And that is the Nietzsche I love, just as I love Tereza with the mortally ill dog resting his head in her lap. I see them one next to the other: both stepping down from the road along which mankind, the master and proprietor of nature, marches onward.
Karenin gave birth to two rolls and a bee. He stared, amazed, at his own progeny. The rolls were utterly serene, but the bee staggered about as if drugged, then flew up and away.
Or so it happened in Tereza’s dream. She told it to Tomas the minute he woke up, and they both found a certain consolation in it. It transformed Karenin’s illness into a pregnancy and the drama of giving birth into something both laughable and touching: two rolls and a bee.
She again fell prey to illogical hopes. She got out of bed and put on her clothes. Here, too, her day began with a trip to the shop for milk, bread, rolls. But when she called Karenin for his walk that morning, he barely raised his head. It was the first time that he had refused to take part in the ritual he himself had forced upon them.
She went off without him. Where’s Karenin? asked the woman behind the counter, who had Karenin’s roll ready as usual. Tereza carried it home herself in her bag, She pulled it out and showed it to him while still in the doorway. She wanted him to come and fetch it. But he just lay there motionless.
Tomas saw how unhappy Tereza was. He put the roll in his mouth and dropped down on all fours opposite Karenin. Then he slowly crawled up to him.
Karenin followed him with his eyes, which seemed to show a glimmer of interest, but he did not pick himself up. Tomas brought his face right up to his muzzle. Without moving his body, the dog took the end of the roll sticking out of Tomas’s mouth into his own.
Then Tomas let go of his end so that Karenin could eat it all.
Still on all fours, Tomas retreated a little, arched his back, and started yelping, making believe he wanted to fight over the roll. After a short while, the dog responded with some yelps of his own. At last! What they were hoping for! Karenin feels like playing!
Karenin hasn’t lost the will to live!
Those yelps were Karenin’s smile, and they wanted it to last as long as possible. So Tomas crawled back to him and tore off the end of the roll sticking out of Karenin’s mouth. Their faces were so close that Tomas could smell the dog’s breath, feel the long
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hairs on Karenin’s muzzle tickling him. The dog gave out another yelp and his mouth twitched; now they each had half a roll between their teeth. Then Karenin made an old tactical error: he dropped his half in the hope of seizing the half in his master’s mouth, forgetting, as always, that Tomas was not a dog and had hands. Without letting his half of the roll out of his mouth, Tomas picked up the other half from the floor.
Tomas! Tereza cried. You’re not going to take his roll away from him, are you?
Tomas laid both halves on the floor in front of Karenin, who quickly gulped down the first and held the second in his mouth for an ostentatiously long time, flaunting his victory over the two of them.
Standing there watching him, they thought once more that he was smiling and that as long as he kept smiling he had a motive to keep living despite his death sentence.
The next day his condition actually appeared to have improved. They had lunch. It was the time of day when they normally took him out for a walk. His habit was to start running back and forth between them restlessly. On that day, however, Tereza picked up the leash and collar only to be stared at dully. They tried to look cheerful (for and about him) and pep him up a bit, and after a long wait he took pity on them, tottered over on his three legs, and let her put on the collar.
I know you hate the camera, Tereza, said Tomas, but take it along today, will you?
Tereza went and opened the cupboard to rummage for the long-abandoned, long-forgotten camera. One day we’ll be glad to have the pictures, Tomas went on. Karenin has been an important part of our life.
What do you mean, ‘has been’? said Tereza as if she had been bitten by a snake. The camera lay directly in front of her on the cupboard floor, but she would not bend to pick it up. I won’t take it along. I refuse to think about losing Karenin. And you refer to him in the past tense! I’m sorry, said Tomas.
That’s all right, said Tereza mildly. I catch myself thinking about him in the past tense all the time. I keep having to push it out of my mind. That’s why I won’t take the camera.
They walked along in silence. Silence was the only way of not thinking about Karenin in the past tense. They did not let him out of their sight; they were with him constantly, waiting for him to smile. But he did not smile; he merely walked with them, limping along on his three legs.
He’s just doing it for us, said Tereza. He didn’t want to go for a walk. He’s just doing it to make us happy.
It was sad, what she said, yet without realizing it they were happy. They were happy not in spite of their sadness but thanks to it. They were holding hands and both had the same image in their eyes: a limping dog who represented ten years of their lives.
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They walked a bit farther. Then, to their great disappointment, Karenin stopped and turned. They had to go back.
Perhaps that day or perhaps the next Tereza walked in on Tomas reading a letter.
Hearing the door open, he slipped it in among some other papers, but she saw him do it. On her way out of the room she also noticed him stuffing the letter into his pocket.
But he forgot about the envelope. As soon as she was alone in the house, she studied it carefully. The address was written in an unfamiliar hand, but it was very neat and she guessed it to be a woman’s.
When he came back later, she asked him nonchalantly whether the mail had come.
No, said Tomas, and filled Tereza with despair, a despair all the worse for her having grown unaccustomed to it. No, she did not believe he had a secret mistress in the village. That was all but impossible. She knew what he did with every spare minute. He must have kept up with a woman in Prague who meant so much to him that he thought of her even if she could no longer leave the smell of her groin in his hair. Tereza did not believe that Tomas meant to leave her for the woman, but the happiness of their two years in the country now seemed besmirched by lies.
An old thought came back to her: Her home was Karenin, not Tomas. Who would wind the clock of their days when he was gone?
Transported mentally into the future, a future without Karenin, Tereza felt abandoned.
Karenin was lying in a corner whimpering. Tereza went out into the garden. She looked down at a patch of grass between two apple trees and imagined burying Karenin there.
She dug her heel into the earth and traced a rectangle in the grass. That was where his grave would be.
What are you doing? Tomas asked, surprising her just as she had surprised him reading the letter a few hours earlier.
She gave no answer. He noticed her hands trembling for the first time in many months.
He grabbed hold of them. She pulled away from him.
Is that a grave for Karenin?
She did not answer.
Her silence grated on him. He exploded. First you blame me for thinking of him in the past tense, and then what do you do? You go and make the funeral arrangements! She turned her back on him.
Tomas retreated into his room, slamming the door behind him.
Tereza went in and opened it. Instead of thinking about yourself all the time, you might at least have some consideration for him, she said. He was asleep until you woke him.
Now he’ll start whimpering again.
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She knew she was being unfair (the dog was not asleep); she knew she was acting like the most vulgar of women, the kind that is out to cause pain and knows how.
Tomas tiptoed into the room where Karenin was lying, but she would not leave him alone with the dog. They both leaned over him, each from his own side. Not that there was a hint of reconciliation in the move. Quite the contrary. Each of them was alone.
Tereza with her dog, Tomas with his.
It is thus divided, each alone, that, sad to say, they remained with him until his last hour.
Why was the word idyll so important for Tereza?
Raised as we are on the mythology of the Old Testament, we might say that an idyll is an image that has remained with us like a memory of Paradise: life in Paradise was not like following a straight line to the unknown; it was not an adventure. It moved in a circle among known objects. Its monotony bred happiness, not boredom.
As long as people lived in the country, in nature, surrounded by domestic animals, in the bosom of regularly recurring seasons, they retained at least a glimmer of that paradisiac idyll. That is why Tereza, when she met the chairman of the collective farm at the spa, conjured up an image of the countryside (a countryside she had never lived in or known) that she found enchanting. It was her way of looking back, back to Paradise.
Adam, leaning over a well, did not yet realize that what he saw was himself. He would not have understood Tereza when she stood before the mirror as a young girl and tried to see her soul through her body. Adam was like Karenin. Tereza made a game of getting him to look at himself in the mirror, but he never recognized his image, gazed at it vacantly, with incredible indifference.
Comparing Adam and Karenin leads me to the thought that in Paradise man was not yet man. Or to be more precise, man had not yet been cast out on man’s path. Now we are longtime outcasts, Hying through the emptiness of time in a straight line. Yet somewhere deep down a thin thread still ties us to that far-off misty Paradise, where Adam leans over a well and, unlike Narcissus, never even suspects that the pale yellow blotch appearing in it is he himself. The longing for Paradise is man’s longing not to be man.
Whenever, as a child, she came across her mother’s sanitary napkins soiled with menstrual blood, she felt disgusted, and hated her mother for lacking the shame to hide them. But Karenin, who was after all a female, had his periods, too. They came once every six months and lasted a fortnight. To keep him from soiling their flat, Tereza would put a wad of absorbent cotton between his legs and pull a pair of old panties over it, skillfully tying them to his body with a long ribbon. She would go on laughing at the outfit for the entire two weeks of each period.
Why is it that a dog’s menstruation made her lighthearted and gay, while her own menstruation made her squeamish? The answer seems simple to me: dogs were never
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expelled from Paradise. Karenin knew nothing about the duality of body and soul and had no concept of disgust. That is why Tereza felt so free and easy with him. (And that is why it is so dangerous to turn an animal into a machina animata, a cow into an automaton for the production of milk. By so doing, man cuts the thread binding him to Paradise and has nothing left to hold or comfort him on his flight through the emptiness of time.)
From this jumble of ideas came a sacrilegious thought that Tereza could not shake off: the love that tied her to Karenin was better than the love between her and Tomas.
Better, not bigger. Tereza did not wish to fault either Tomas or herself; she did not wish to claim that they could love each other more. Her feeling was rather that, given the nature of the human couple, the love of man and woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best instances) in the love between man and dog, that oddity of human history probably unplanned by the Creator.
It is a completely selfless love: Tereza did not want anything of Karenin; she did not ever ask him to love her back. Nor had she ever asked herself the questions that plague human couples: Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
And something else: Tereza accepted Karenin for what he was; she did not try to make him over in her image; she agreed from the outset with his dog’s life, did not wish to deprive him of it, did not envy him his secret intrigues. The reason she trained him was not to transform him (as a husband tries to reform his wife and a wife her husband), but to provide him with the elementary language that enabled them to communicate and live together.
Then too: No one forced her to love Karenin; love for dogs is voluntary. (Tereza was again reminded of her mother, and regretted everything that had happened between them. If her mother had been one of the anonymous women in the village, she might well have found her easygoing coarseness agreeable. Oh, if only her mother had been a stranger! From childhood on, Tereza had been ashamed of the way her mother occupied the features of her face and confiscated her I . What made it even worse was that the age-old imperative Love your father and mother! forced her to agree with that occupation, to call the aggression love! It was not her mother’s fault that Tereza broke with her. Tereza broke with her not because she was the mother she was but because she was a mother.)
But most of all: No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development.
Karenin surrounded Tereza and Tomas with a life based on repetition, and he expected the same from them.
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If Karenin had been a person instead of a dog, he would surely have long since said to Tereza, Look, I’m sick and tired of carrying that roll in my mouth every day. Can’t you come up with something different? And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
Yes, happiness is the longing for repetition, Tereza said to herself.
When the chairman of the collective farm took his Mefisto out for a walk after work and met Tereza, he never failed to say, Why did he come into my life so late, Tereza? We could have gone skirt chasing, he and I! What woman could resist these two little pigs?
at which point the pig was trained to grunt and snort. Tereza laughed each time, even though she knew beforehand exactly what he would say. The joke did not lose its charm, through repetition. On the contrary. In an idyllic setting, even humor is subject to the sweet law of repetition.
Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death. Karenin walked on three legs and spent more and more of his time lying in a corner. And whimpering. Both husband and wife agreed that they had no business letting him suffer needlessly. But agree as they might in principle, they still had to face the anguish of determining the time when his suffering was in fact needless, the point at which life was no longer worth living.
If only Tomas hadn’t been a doctor! Then they would have been able to hide behind a third party. They would have been able to go back to the vet and ask him to put the dog to sleep with an injection.
Assuming the role of Death is a terrifying thing. Tomas insisted that he would not give the injection himself; he would have the vet come and do it. But then he realized that he could grant Karenin a privilege forbidden to humans: Death would come for him in the guise of his loved ones.
Karenin had whimpered all night. After feeling his leg in the morning, Tomas said to Tereza, There’s no point in waiting.
In a few minutes they would both have to go to work. Tereza went in to see Karenin.
Until then, he had lain in his corner completely apathetic (not even acknowledging Tomas when he felt his leg), but when he heard the door open and saw Tereza come in, he raised his head and looked at her.
She could not stand his stare; it almost frightened her. He did not look that way at Tomas, only at her. But never with such intensity. It was not a desperate look, or even sad. No, it was a look of awful, unbearable trust. The look was an eager question. All his life Karenin had waited for answers from Tereza, and he was letting her know (with more urgency than usual, however) that he was still ready to learn the truth from her.
(Everything that came from Tereza was the truth. Even when she gave commands like Sit! or Lie down! he took them as truths to identify with, to give his life meaning.)
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His look of awful trust did not last long; he soon laid his head back down on his paws.
Tereza knew that no one ever again would look at her like that.
They had never fed him sweets, but recently she had bought him a few chocolate bars.
She took them out of the foil, broke them into pieces, and made a circle of them around him. Then she brought over a bowl of water to make sure that he had everything he needed for the several hours he would spend at home alone. The look he had given her just then seemed to have tired him out. Even surrounded by chocolate, he did not raise his head.
She lay down on the floor next to him and hugged him. With a slow and labored turn of the head, he sniffed her and gave her a lick or two. She closed her eyes while the licking went on, as if she wanted to remember it forever. She held out the other cheek to be licked.
Then she had to go and take care of her heifers. She did not return until just before lunch. Tomas had not come home yet. Karenin was still lying on the floor surrounded by the chocolate, and did not even lift his head when he heard her come in. His bad leg was swollen now, and the tumor had burst in another place. She noticed some light red (not blood-like,) drops forming beneath his fur.
Again she lay down next to him on the floor. She stretched one arm across his body and closed her eyes. Then she heard someone banging on the door. Doctor! Doctor!
The pig is here! The pig and his master! She lacked the strength to talk to anyone, and did not move, did not open her eyes. Doctor! Doctor! The pigs have come! Then silence.
Tomas did not get back for another half hour. He went straight to the kitchen and prepared the injection without a word. When he entered the room, Tereza was on her feet and Karenin was picking himself up. As soon as he saw Tomas, he gave him a weak wag of the tail.
Look, said Tereza, he’s still smiling. She said it beseechingly, trying to win a short reprieve, but did not push for it.
Slowly she spread a sheet out over the couch. It was a white sheet with a pattern of tiny violets. She had everything carefully laid out and thought out, having imagined Karenin’s death many days in advance. (Oh, how horrible that we actually dream ahead to the death of those we love!)
He no longer had the strength to jump up on the couch. They picked him up in their arms together. Tereza laid him on his side, and Tomas examined one of his good legs.
He was looking for a more or less prominent vein. Then he cut away the fur with a pair of scissors.
Tereza knelt by the couch and held Karenin’s head close to her own.
Tomas asked her to squeeze the leg because he was having trouble sticking the needle in. She did as she was told, but did not move her face from his head. She kept talking
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gently to Karenin, and he thought only of her. He was not afraid. He licked her face two more times. And Tereza kept whispering, Don’t be scared, don’t be scared, you won’t feel any pain there, you’ll dream of squirrels and rabbits, you’ll have cows there, and Mefisto will be there, don’t be scared …
Tomas jabbed the needle into the vein and pushed the plunger. Karenin’s leg jerked; his breath quickened for a few seconds, then stopped. Tereza remained on the floor by the couch and buried her face in his head.
Then they both had to go back to work and leave the dog laid out on the couch, on the white sheet with tiny violets.
They came back towards evening. Tomas went into the garden. He found the lines of the rectangle that Tereza had drawn with her heel between the two apple trees. Then he started digging. He kept precisely to her specifications. He wanted everything to be just as Tereza wished.
She stayed in the house with Karenin. She was afraid of burying him alive. She put her ear to his mouth and thought she heard a weak breathing sound. She stepped back and seemed to see his breast moving slightly.
(No, the breath she heard was her own, and because it set her own body ever so slightly in motion, she had the impression the dog was moving.) She found a mirror in her bag and held it to his mouth. The mirror was so smudged she thought she saw drops on it, drops caused by his breath.
Tomas! He’s alive! she cried, when Tomas came in from the garden in his muddy boots.
Tomas bent over him and shook his head. They each took an end of the sheet he was lying on, Tereza the lower end, Tomas the upper. Then they lifted him up and carried him out to the garden.
The sheet felt wet to Tereza’s hands. He puddled his way into our lives and now he’s puddling his way out, she thought, and she was glad to feel the moisture on her hands, his final greeting.
They carried him to the apple trees and set him down. She leaned over the pit and arranged the sheet so that it covered him entirely. It was unbearable to think of the earth they would soon be throwing over him, raining down on his naked body.
Then she went into the house and came back with his collar, his leash, and a handful of the chocolate that had lain untouched on the floor since morning. She threw it all in after him.
Next to the pit was a pile of freshly dug earth. Tomas picked up the shovel.
Just then Tereza recalled her dream: Karenin giving birth to two rolls and a bee.
Suddenly the words sounded like an epitaph. She pictured a monument standing there,
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between the apple trees, with the inscription Here lies Karenin. He gave birth to two rolls and a bee.
It was twilight in the garden, the time between day and evening. There was a pale moon in the sky, a forgotten lamp in the room of the dead.
Their boots were caked with dirt by the time they took the shovel and spade back to the recess where their tools stood all in a row: rakes, watering cans, hoes.
He was sitting at the desk where he usually read his books. At times like these Tereza would come up to him from behind, lean over, and press her cheek to his. On that day, however, she gave a start. Tomas was not reading a book; he had a letter in front of him, and even though it consisted of no more than five typed lines, Tomas was staring at it long and hard.
What is it? Tereza asked, full of sudden anguish.
Without turning his head, Tomas picked up the letter and handed it to her. It said that he was obliged to report that day to the airfield of the neighboring town.
When at last he turned to her, Tereza read her own new-felt horror in his eyes.
I’ll go with you, she said.
He shook his head. I’m the one they want to see.
No, I’m going with you, she repeated.
They took Tomas’s pickup. They were at the airfield in no time. It was foggy. They could make out only the vaguest outlines of the few airplanes on the field. They went from one to the next, but the doors were all closed. No admittance. At last they found one that was open, with a set of movable stairs leading up to it. They climbed the stairs and were greeted by a steward at the door. It was a small airplane—one that sat barely thirty passengers—and completely empty. They walked down the aisle between the seats, holding on to each other and not paying much attention to their surroundings.
They took two adjoining seats, and Tereza laid her head on Tomas’s shoulder. The first wave of horror had passed and been replaced by sadness.
Horror is a shock, a time of utter blindness. Horror lacks every hint of beauty. All we can see is the piercing light of an unknown event awaiting us. Sadness, on the other hand, assumes we are in the know. Tomas and Tereza knew what was awaiting them. The light of horror thus lost its harshness, and the world was bathed in a gentle, bluish light that actually beautified it.
While reading the letter, Tereza did not feel any love for Tomas; she simply realized that she could not now leave him for an instant: the feeling of horror overwhelmed all other emotions and instincts. Now that she was leaning against him (as the plane sailed through the storm clouds), her fear subsided and she became aware of her love, a love that she knew had no limit or bounds.
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At last the airplane landed. They stood up and went to the door, which the steward opened for them. Still holding each other around the waist, they stood at the top of the stairs. Down below they saw three men with hoods over their heads and rifles in their hands. There was no point in stalling, because there was no escape. They descended slowly, and when their feet reached the ground of the airfield, one of the men raised his rifle and aimed it at them. Although no shot rang out, Tereza felt Tomas—who a second before had been leaning against her, his arm around her waist—crumple to the ground.
She tried pressing him to her but could not hold him up, and he fell against the cement runway. She leaned over him, about to fling herself on him, cover him with her body, when suddenly she noticed something strange: his body was quickly shrinking before her eyes. She was so shocked that she froze and stood stock still. The more Tomas’s body shrank, the less it resembled him, until it turned into a tiny little object that started moving, running, dashing across the airfield.
The man who had shot him took off his mask and gave Tereza a pleasant smile. Then he turned and set off after the little object, which was darting here and there as if trying desperately to dodge someone and find shelter. The chase went on for a while, until suddenly the man hurled himself to the ground. The chase was over.
The man stood up and went back to Tereza, carrying the object in his hand. It was quaking with fear. It was a rabbit. He handed it to Tereza. At that instant her fear and sadness subsided and she was happy to be holding an animal in her arms, happy that the animal was hers and she could press it to her body. She burst into tears of joy. She wept, wept until blinded by her tears, and took the rabbit home with the feeling that she was nearly at her goal, the place where she wanted to be and would never forsake.
Wandering the streets of Prague, she had no trouble finding her house, the house where she had lived with Mama and Papa as a small girl. But Mama and Papa were gone. She was greeted by two old people she had never seen before, but whom she knew to be her great-grandfather and great-grandmother. They both had faces as wrinkled as the bark of a tree, and Tereza was happy she would be living with them.
But for now, she wanted to be alone with her animal. She immediately found the room she had been given at the age of five, when her parents decided she deserved her own living space.
It had a bed, a table, and a chair. The table had a lamp on it, a lamp that had never stopped burning in anticipation of her return, and on the lamp perched a butterfly with two large eyes painted on its widespread wings. Tereza knew she was at her goal. She lay down on the bed and pressed the rabbit to her face.
He was sitting at the desk where he usually read his books, an open envelope with a letter in it lying in front of him. From time to time I get letters I haven’t told you about, he said to Tereza. They’re from my son. I’ve tried to keep his life and mine completely separate, and look how fate is getting even with me. A few years ago he was expelled from the university. Now he drives a tractor in a village. Our lives may be separate, but they run in the same direction, like parallel lines.
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Why didn’t you ever tell me about the letters? Tereza asked, with a feeling of great relief.
I don’t know. It was too unpleasant, I suppose. Does he write often? Now and then.
What about? Himself. And is it interesting?
Yes, it is. You remember that his mother was an ardent Communist. Well, he broke with her long ago. Then he took up with people who had trouble like ours, and got involved in political activities with them. Some of them are in prison now. But he’s broken with them, too. In his letters he calls them ‘eternal revolutionaries.’
Does that mean he’s made his peace with the regime? No, not in the least. He believes in God and thinks that that’s the key. He says we should all live our daily lives according to the dictates of religion and pay no heed to the regime, completely ignore it. If we believe in God, he claims, we can take any situation and, by means of our own behavior, transform it into what he calls ‘the kingdom of God on earth.’ He tells me that the Church is the only voluntary association in ourcountry which eludes the control of the state. I wonder whether he’s joined the Church because it helps him to oppose the regime or because he really believes in God. Why don’t you ask him?
I used to admire believers, Tomas continued. I thought they had an odd transcendental way of perceiving things which was closed to me. Like clairvoyants, you might say. But my son’s experience proves that faith is actually quite a simple matter. He was down and out, the Catholics took him in, and before he knew it, he had faith. So it was gratitude that decided the issue, most likely. Human decisions are terribly simple.
Haven’t you ever answered his letters? He never gives a return address, he said, though the postmark indicates the name of the district. I could just send a letter to the local collective farm.
Tereza was ashamed of having been suspicious of Tomas, and hoped to expiate her guilt with a rush of benevolence towards his son. Then why not drop him a line, invite him to come and see us?
He looks like me, said Tomas. When he talks, his upper lip curls just like mine. The thought of watching my own lips go on about the kingdom of God—it seems too strange. Tereza burst out laughing. Tomas laughed with her.
Don’t be such a child, Tomas! said Tereza. It’s ancient history, after all, you and your first wife. What’s it to him? What’s he got to do with it? Why hurt the boy just because you had bad taste when you were young?
Frankly, I have stage fright at the thought of meeting him. That’s the main reason I haven’t done anything about it. I don’t know what’s made me so headstrong and kept me from seeing him. Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.
Invite him, she said.
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That afternoon she was on her way back from the cow sheds when she heard voices from the road. Coming closer, she saw Tomas’s pickup. Tomas was bent over, changing a tire, while some of the men stood about looking on and waiting for him to finish.
She could not tear her eyes away from him: he looked like an old man. His hair had gone gray, and his lack of coordination was not that of a surgeon turned driver but of a man no longer young.
She recalled a recent talk with the chairman of the collective farm. He had told her that Tomas’s pickup was in miserable condition. He said it as a joke, not a complaint, but she could tell he was concerned. Tomas knows the insides of the body better than the insides of an engine, he said with a laugh. He then confessed that he had made several visits to the authorities to request permission for Tomas to resume his medical practice, if only locally. He had learned that the police would never grant it.
She had stepped behind a tree trunk so that none of the men by the pickup could see her. Standing there observing him, she suffered a bout of self-recrimination: It was her fault that he had come back to Prague from Zurich, her fault that he had left Prague, and even here she could not leave him in peace, torturing him with her secret suspicions while Karenin lay dying.
She had always secretly reproached him for not loving her enough. Her own love she considered above reproach, while his seemed mere condescension.
Now she saw that she had been unfair: If she had really loved Tomas with a great love, she would have stuck it out with him abroad! Tomas had been happy there; a new life was opening for him! And she had left him! True, at the time she had convinced herself she was being magnanimous, giving him his freedom. But hadn’t her magnanimity been merely an excuse? She knew all along that he would come home to her! She had summoned him farther and farther down after her like the nymphs who lured unsuspecting villagers to the marshes and left them there to drown. She had taken advantage of a night of stomach cramps to inveigle him into moving to the country! How cunning she could be! She had summoned him to follow her as if wishing to test him again and again, to test his love for her; she had summoned him persistently, and here he was, tired and gray, with stiffened fingers that would never again be capable of holding a scalpel.
Now they were in a place that led nowhere. Where could they go from here? They would never be allowed abroad. They would never find a way back to Prague: no one would give them work. They didn’t even have a reason to move to another village.
Good God, had they had to cover all that distance just to make her believe he loved her?
At last Tomas succeeded in getting the tire back on. He climbed in behind the wheel, the men jumped in the back, and the engine roared.
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She went home and drew a bath. Lying in the hot water, she kept telling herself that she had set a lifetime of her weaknesses against Tomas. We all have a tendency to consider strength the culprit and weakness the innocent victim. But now Tereza realized that in her case the opposite was true! Even her dreams, as if aware of the single weakness in a man otherwise strong, made a display of her suffering to him, thereby forcing him to retreat. Her weakness was aggressive and kept forcing him to capitulate until eventually he lost his strength and was transformed into the rabbit in her arms. She could not get that dream out of her mind.
She stood up from her bath and went to put on some nice clothes. She wanted to look her best to please him, make him happy.
Just as she buttoned the last button, in burst Tomas with the chairman of the collective farm and an unusually pale young farm worker.
Quick! shouted Tomas. Something strong to drink! Tereza ran out and came back with a bottle of slivovitz. She poured some into a liqueur glass, and the young man downed it in one gulp.
Then they told her what had happened. The man had dislocated his shoulder and started bellowing with pain. No one knew what to do, so they called Tomas, who with one jerk set it back in its socket.
After downing another glass of slivovitz, the man said to Tomas, Your wife’s looking awfully pretty today.
You idiot, said the chairman. Tereza is always pretty.
I know she’s always pretty, said the young man, but today she has such pretty clothes on, too. I’ve never seen you in that dress. Are you going out somewhere?
No, I’m not. I put it on for Tomas.
You lucky devil! said the chairman, laughing. My old woman wouldn’t dream of dressing up just for me.
So that’s why you go out walking with your pig instead of your wife, said the young man, and he started laughing, too.
How is Mefisto, anyway? asked Tomas. I haven’t seen him for at least —he thought a bit— at least an hour.
He must be missing me, said the chairman.
Seeing you in that dress makes me want to dance, the young man said to Tereza. And turning to Tomas, he asked, Would you let me dance with her?
Let’s all go and dance, said Tereza.
Would you come along? the young man asked Tomas.
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Where do you plan to go? asked Tomas.
The young man named a nearby town where the hotel bar had a dance floor.
You come too, said the young man in an imperative tone of voice to the chairman of the collective farm, and because by then he had downed a third glass of slivovitz, he added, If Mefisto misses you so much, we’ll take him along. Then we’ll have both little pigs to show off. The women will come begging when they get an eyeful of those two together! And again he laughed and laughed.
If you’re not ashamed of Mefisto, I’m all yours. And they piled into Tomas’s pickup—
Tomas behind the wheel, Tereza next to him, and the two men in the back with the half-empty bottle of slivovitz. Not until they had left the village behind did the chairman realize that they had forgotten Mefisto. He shouted up to Tomas to turn back.
Never mind, said the young man. One little pig will do the trick. That calmed the chairman down.
It was growing dark. The road started climbing in hairpin curves.
When they reached the town, they drove straight to the hotel. Tereza and Tomas had never been there before. They went downstairs to the basement, where they found the bar, the dance floor, and some tables. A man of about sixty was playing the piano, a woman of the same age the violin. The hits they played were forty years old. There were five or so couples out on the floor.
Nothing here for me, said the young man after surveying the situation, and immediately asked Tereza to dance.
The collective farm chairman sat down at an empty table with Tomas and ordered a bottle of wine.
I can’t drink, Tomas reminded him. I’m driving.
Don’t be silly, he said. We’re staying the night. And he went off to the reception desk to book two rooms.
When Tereza came back from the dance floor with the young man, the chairman asked her to dance, and finally Tomas had a turn with her, too.
Tomas, she said to him out on the floor, everything bad that’s happened in your life is my fault. It’s my fault you ended up here, as low as you could possibly go.
Low? What are you talking about?
If we had stayed in Zurich, you’d still be a surgeon.
And you’d be a photographer.
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That’s a silly comparison to make, said Tereza. Your work meant everything to you; I don’t care what I do, I can do anything, I haven’t lost a thing; you’ve lost everything.
Haven’t you noticed I’ve been happy here, Tereza? Tomas said.
Surgery was your mission, she said.
Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has. And it’s a terrific relief to realize you’re free, free of all missions.
There was no doubting that forthright voice of his. She recalled the scene she had witnessed earlier in the day when he had been repairing the pickup and looked so old.
She had reached her goal: she had always wanted him to be old. Again she thought of the rabbit she had pressed to her face in her childhood room.
What does it mean to turn into a rabbit? It means losing all strength. It means that one is no stronger than the other anymore.
On they danced to the strains of the piano and violin. Tereza leaned her head on Tomas’s shoulder. Just as she had when they flew together in the airplane through the storm clouds. She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: we are at the last station. The happiness meant: we are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.
They went back to their table. She danced twice more with the collective farm chairman and once with the young man who was so drunk he fell with her on the dance floor.
Then they all went upstairs and to their two separate rooms.
Tomas turned the key and switched on the ceiling light. Tereza saw two beds pushed together, one of them flanked by a bedside table and lamp. Up out of the lampshade, startled by the overhead light, flew a large nocturnal butterfly that began circling the room. The strains of the piano and violin rose up weakly from below.