The unbearable lightness of being Read Online Free PDF

part of his
body meant that Tereza went on having her dreams.
    They had been in
Zurich for six or seven months when he came home late one evening to find a
letter on the table telling him she had left for Prague. She had left because
she lacked the strength to live abroad. She knew she was supposed to bolster
him up, but did not know how to go about it. She had been silly enough to think
that going abroad would change her. She thought that after what she had been
through during the invasion she would stop being petty and grow up, grow wise
and strong, but she had overestimated herself. She was weighing him down and
would do so no longer. She had drawn the necessary conclusions before it was
too late. And she apologized for taking Karenin with her.
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    He
took some sleeping pills but still did not close his eyes until morning.
Luckily it was Saturday and he could stay at home. For the hundred and fiftieth
time he went over the situation: the borders between his country and the rest
of the world were no longer open. No telegrams or telephone calls could bring
her back. The authorities would never let her travel abroad. Her departure was
staggeringly definitive.
14
    The
realization that he was utterly powerless was like the blow of a sledgehammer,
yet it was curiously calming as well. No one was forcing him into a decision.
He felt no need to stare at the walls of the houses across the courtyard and
ponder whether to live with her or not. Tereza had made the decision herself.
    He went to a
restaurant for lunch. He was depressed, but as he ate, his original desperation
waned, lost its strength, and soon all that was left was melancholy. Looking
back on the years he had spent with her, he came to feel that their story could
have had no better ending. If someone had invented the story, this is how he
would have had to end it.
    One day Tereza
came to him uninvited. One day she left the same way. She came with a heavy
suitcase. She left with a heavy suitcase.
    He paid the
bill, left the restaurant, and started walking through the streets, his
melancholy growing more and more beautiful. He had spent seven years of life
with Tereza, and now he realized that those years were more attractive in
retro-
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    spect than they were when he was living
them.
    His love for
Tereza was beautiful, but it was also tiring: he had constantly had to hide
things from her, sham, dissemble, make amends, buck her up, calm her down, give
her evidence of his feelings, play the defendant to her jealousy, her
suffering, and her dreams, feel guilty, make excuses and apologies. Now what
was tiring had disappeared and only the beauty remained.
    Saturday found
him for the first time strolling alone through Zurich, breathing in the heady smell
of his freedom. New adventures hid around each corner. The future was again a
secret. He was on his way back to the bachelor life, the life he had once felt
destined for, the life that would let him be what he actually was.
    For seven years
he had lived bound to her, his every step subject to her scrutiny. She might as
well have chained iron balls to his ankles. Suddenly his step was much lighter.
He soared. He had entered Parmenides' magic field: he was enjoying the sweet
lightness of being.
    (Did he feel
like phoning Sabina in Geneva? Contacting one or another of the women he had
met during his several months in Zurich? No, not in the least. Perhaps he
sensed that any woman would make his memory of Tereza unbearably painful.)
15
    This
curious melancholic fascination lasted until Sunday evening. .On Monday,
everything changed. Tereza forced her way into his thoughts: he imagined her
sitting there writing her
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    farewell
letter; he felt her hands trembling; he saw her lugging her heavy suitcase in
one hand and leading Karenin on his leash with the other; he pictured her
unlocking their Prague flat, and suffered the utter abandonment breathing her
in the face as she opened the door.
    During those two
beautiful days of