The unbearable lightness of being Read Online Free PDF Page A

knew where they
were, everyone feared for the men's lives, and hatred for the Russians drugged
people like alcohol. It was a drunken carnival of hate. Czech towns were
decorated with thousands of hand-painted posters bearing ironic texts,
epigrams, poems, and cartoons of Brezhnev and his soldiers, jeered at by one
and all as a circus of illiterates. But no carnival can go on forever. In the
meantime, the Russians had forced the Czech representatives to sign a
compromise agreement in Moscow. When Dubcek returned with them to Prague, he
gave a speech over the radio. He was so devastated after his six-day detention
he could hardly talk; he kept stuttering and gasping for breath, making long
pauses between sentences, pauses lasting nearly thirty seconds.
    The compromise saved the country
from the worst: the executions and mass deportations to Siberia that had
terrified everyone. But one thing was clear: the country would have to bow to
the conqueror. For ever and ever, it will stutter, stammer, gasp for air like
Alexander Dubcek. The carnival was over. Workaday humiliation had begun.
    Tereza had explained all this to
Tomas and he knew that it was true. But he also knew that underneath it all hid
still another, more fundamental truth, the reason why she wanted to leave
Prague: she had never really been happy before.
    The days she walked through the
streets of Prague taking pictures of Russian soldiers and looking danger in the
face were the best of her life. They were the only time when the televi-
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    sion series of her
dreams had been interrupted and she had enjoyed a few happy nights. The Russians
had brought equilibrium to her in their tanks, and now that the carnival was
over, she feared her nights again and wanted to escape them. She now knew there
were conditions under which she could feel strong and fulfilled, and she longed
to go off into the world and seek those conditions somewhere else.
    "It doesn't bother you that Sabina has also emigrated to
Switzerland?" Tomas asked.
    "Geneva isn't Zurich," said Tereza. "She'll be much less
of a difficulty there than she was in Prague."
    A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy
person. That is why Tomas accepted Tereza's wish to emigrate as the culprit
accepts his sentence, and one day he and Tereza and Karenin found themselves in
the largest city in Switzerland.
13
    He
bought a bed for their empty flat (they had no money yet for other furniture)
and threw himself into his work with the frenzy of a man of forty beginning a
new life.
    He made several
telephone calls to Geneva. A show of Sabina's work had opened there by chance a
week after the Russian invasion, and in a wave of sympathy for her tiny country,
Geneva's patrons of the arts bought up all her paintings.
    "Thanks to
the Russians, I'm a rich woman," she said, laughing into the telephone.
She invited Tomas to come and
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    see
her new studio, and assured him it did not differ greatly from the one he had
known in Prague.
    He would have
been only too glad to visit her, but was unable to find an excuse to explain
his absence to Tereza. And so Sabina came to Zurich. She stayed at a hotel.
Tomas went to see her after work. He phoned first from the reception desk, then
went upstairs. When she opened the door, she stood before him on her beautiful
long legs wearing nothing but panties and bra. And a black bowler hat. She
stood there staring, mute and motionless. Tomas did the same. Suddenly he
realized how touched he was. He removed the bowler from her head and placed it
on the bedside table. Then they made love without saying a word.
    Leaving the
hotel for his Hat (which by now had acquired table, chairs, couch, and carpet),
he thought happily that he carried his way of living with him as a snail
carries his house. Tereza and Sabina represented the two poles of his life,
separate and irreconcilable, yet equally appealing.
    But the fact
that he carried his life-support system with him everywhere like a