Necessity knows no magic formulas—they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulders.
10
He called her back to pay for the cognac. He closed his book (the emblem of the secret brotherhood), and she thought of asking him what he was reading.
“Can you have it charged to my room?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said “What number are you in?”
He showed her his key, which was attached to a piece of wood with a red 6 drawn on it.
“That’s odd,” she said. “Six.”
“What’s so odd about that?” he asked.
She had suddenly recalled that the house where they had lived in Prague before her parents were divorced was No. 6. But she answered something else (which we may credit to her wiles): “You’re in Room Six, and my shift ends at six.”
“Well, my train leaves at seven,” said the stranger.
She did not know how to respond, so she gave him the bill for his signature and took it over to the reception desk. When she finished work, the stranger was no longer at his table. Had he understood her discreet message? She left the restaurant in a state of excitement.
Opposite the hotel was a barren little park, as wretched as only the park of a dirty little town can be. But for Tereza it had always been an island of beauty: it had grass, four poplars, benches, a weeping willow, and a few forsythia bushes.
He was sitting on a yellow bench that afforded a clear view of the restaurant entrance. The very same bench she had sat on the day before with a book in her lap! She knew then (the birds of fortuity had begun alighting on her shoulders) that this stranger was her fate. He called out to her, invited her to sit next to him. (The crew of her soul rushed up to the deck of her body.) Then she walked him to the station, and he gave her his card as a farewell gesture. “If ever you should happen to come to Prague...”
11
Much more than the card he slipped her at the last minute, it was the call of all those fortuities (the book, Beethoven, the number six, the yellow park bench) which gave her the courage to leave home and to change her fate. It may well have been those few fortuities (quite modest, by the way—even drab; just what one would expect from so lacklustre a town) which set her love in motion and provided her with a source of energy she had still not yet exhausted at the end of her days.
Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities—or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. “Coincidence” means the unexpected happening of two events at the same time—they meet: Tomas appears in the hotel restaurant at the same time the radio is playing Beethoven. We do not even notice the great majority of such coincidences. If the seat Tomas occupied had been occupied instead by the local butcher, Tereza never would have noticed that the radio was playing Beethoven (though the meeting of Beethoven and the butcher would also have been an interesting coincidence). But her nascent love inflamed her sense of beauty, and she would never forget that music. Whenever she heard it, she would be touched. Everything going on around her at that moment would be haloed by the music and take on its beauty.
Early in the novel that Tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit Tomas, Anna meets Vronsky under curious circ*mstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. At the end of the novel Anna throws herself under a train. This symmetrical composition—the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end—may seem quite “novelistic” to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as “fictive,” “fabricated,” and “untrue to life” into the word “novelistic.” Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.
They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven’s music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound up with the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death, or the meeting of Tomas, Tereza, Beethoven, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.
12
Impelled by the birds of fortuity fluttering down on her shoulders, she took a week’s leave and, without word to her mother, boarded the train to Prague. During the journey, Tereza made frequent trips to the toilet to look in the mirror and beg her soul not to abandon the deck of her body for a moment on this most crucial day of her life. Scrutinizing herself on one such trip, she had a sudden scare: she felt a scratch in her throat. Could she be coming down with something on this most crucial day of her life?
But there was no turning back. So she phoned him from the station, and the moment he opened the door her stomach started rumbling terribly. She was mortified. She felt as though she were carrying her mother in her stomach and her mother had guffawed to spoil her meeting with Tomas.
For the first few seconds she was afraid he would throw her out because of the crude noises she was making, but then he put his arms around her. She was grateful to him for ignoring her rumbles and kissed him passionately, her eyes misting. Before the first minute was up, they were making love. She screamed while making love. She had a fever by then. She had come down with the flu. The nozzle of the hose supplying oxygen to the lungs was stuffed up and red.
When she travelled to Prague a second time, it was with a heavy suitcase. She had packed all her things, determined never again to return to the small town. He had invited her to come to his place the following evening. That night she had slept in a cheap hotel. In the morning she carried her heavy suitcase to the station, left it there, and roamed the streets of Prague the whole day with “Anna Karenina” under her arm. Not even after she rang the doorbell and he opened the door would she part with it. It was like a ticket into Tomas’s world. She realized that she had nothing but that miserable ticket, and the thought brought her nearly to tears. To keep from crying, she talked too much and too loudly, and she laughed. And again he took her in his arms almost at once and they made love. She had entered a mist in which nothing could be seen and only her scream could be heard.
13
It was no sigh, no moan; it was a real scream. She screamed so loud that Tomas had to turn his head away from her face, afraid that her voice so close to his ear would rupture his eardrum. The scream was not an expression of sensuality. Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes the partner intently, straining to catch every sound. But her scream aimed at crippling the senses, preventing all seeing and hearing. What was screaming, in fact, was the naïve idealism of her love trying to banish all contradictions, banish the duality of body and soul, banish perhaps even time.
Were her eyes closed? No, but they were not looking anywhere. She kept them fixed on the void of the ceiling. At times she twisted her head violently from side to side.
When the scream died down, she fell asleep at his side, clutching his hand. She held his hand all night.
Even at the age of eight, she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and making believe she was holding the hand of the man whom she loved, the man of her life. So if in her sleep she pressed Tomas’s hand with such tenacity, we can understand why: she had been training for it since childhood.
14
A young woman forced to keep drunks supplied with beer, and siblings with clean underwear—instead of being allowed to pursue “something higher”—stores up great reserves of vitality, a vitality never dreamed of by university students yawning over their books. Tereza had read a good deal more than they, and learned a good deal more about life, but she would never realize it. The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence. The élan with which Tereza flung herself into her new Prague existence was both frenzied and precarious. She seemed to be expecting someone to come up to her any day and say, “What are you doing here? Go back where you belong!” All her eagerness for life hung by a thread: Tomas’s voice. For it was Tomas’s voice that had once coaxed forth her timorous soul from its hiding place in her bowels.
Tereza had a job in a darkroom, but it was not enough for her. She wanted to take pictures, not develop them. Tomas’s friend Sabina lent her three or four collections of famous photographers, then invited her to a café and explained over the open books what made each of the pictures interesting. Tereza listened with silent concentration—the kind few professors ever glimpse on their students’ faces.
Thanks to Sabina, Tereza came to understand the ties between photography and painting, and she made Tomas take her to every exhibition that opened in Prague. Before long, her own pictures were appearing in the illustrated weekly where she worked, and finally she left the darkroom for the staff of professional photographers.
On the evening of that day, she and Tomas went out to a bar with friends to celebrate her promotion. Everyone danced. Tomas began to mope. Back at home, after some prodding from Tereza, he admitted that he had been jealous watching her dance with a colleague of his.
“You mean you were really jealous?” she asked him ten times or more, incredulously, as though someone had just informed her she had been awarded a Nobel Prize.
Then she put her arm around his waist and began dancing across the room. The step she used was not the one she had shown off in the bar. It was more like a village polka—a wild romp that sent her legs flying in the air and her torso bouncing all over the room, with Tomas in tow.
Before long, unfortunately, she began to be jealous herself, and Tomas saw her jealousy not as a Nobel Prize but as a burden, a burden he would be saddled with until not long before his death.
15
While she marched around the pool naked with a large group of other naked women, Tomas stood over them in a pannier hanging from the pool’s arched roof, shouting at them, making them sing and do knee bends. The moment one of them did a faulty knee bend, he would shoot her. Let me return to this dream. Its horror did not begin with Tomas’s first pistol shot; it was horrifying from the outset. Marching naked in formation with a group of naked women was for Tereza the quintessential image of horror. When she lived at home, her mother forbade her to lock the bathroom door. What she meant by her injunction was: Your body is just like all other bodies; you have no right to shame; you have no reason to hide something that exists in millions of identical copies. In her mother’s world all bodies were the same and marched one behind another in formation. Since childhood Tereza had seen nudity as a sign of concentration-camp uniformity, a sign of humiliation.
There was yet another horror at the very beginning of the dream: all the women had to sing! Not only were their bodies identical, identically worthless, not only were their bodies mere resounding soulless mechanisms—the women rejoiced over it! Theirs was a joyful solidarity of the soulless. The women were pleased at having thrown off the ballast of the soul—that laughable conceit, that illusion of uniqueness—to become one like another. Tereza sang with them but did not rejoice. She sang because she was afraid that if she did not sing the women would kill her.
But what was the meaning of the fact that Tomas shot at them, toppling one after another into the pool, dead?
The women, overjoyed by their sameness, their lack of diversity, were in fact celebrating their imminent demise, which would render their sameness absolute. So Tomas’s shots were merely the joyful climax to their morbid march. After every report of his pistol, they burst into joyous laughter, and as each corpse sank beneath the surface they sang even louder.
But why was Tomas the one doing the shooting? And why was he out to shoot Tereza with the rest of them?
Because he was the one who sent Tereza to join them. That was what the dream was meant to tell Tomas, what Tereza was unable to tell him herself. She had come to him to escape her mother’s world, a world where all bodies were equal. She had come to him to make her body unique, irreplaceable. But he, too, had drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them all alike, made no, absolutely no, distinction between Tereza’s body and the other bodies. He had sent her back into the world she tried to escape, sent her to march naked with the other naked women.
16
She would dream three series of dreams in succession. The first was of cats going berserk and referred to the sufferings she had gone through in her lifetime; the second was images of her execution and came in countless variations; the third was of her life after death, when humiliation turned into a never-ending state.
The dreams left nothing to be deciphered. The accusation they levelled at Tomas was so clear that his only reaction was to hang his head and stroke her hand without a word.
The dreams were eloquent, but they were also beautiful. That aspect seems to have escaped Freud in his theory of dreams. Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine—to dream about things that have not happened—is among mankind’s deepest needs. Herein lies the danger: if dreams were not beautiful, they would quickly be forgotten. But Tereza kept coming back to her dreams, running through them in her mind, turning them into legends. Tomas lived under the hypnotic spell cast by the excruciating beauty of Tereza’s dreams.
“Dear Tereza, sweet Tereza, what am I losing you to?” he once said to her as they sat face to face in a wine tavern. “Every night, you dream of death as if you really wished to quit this world....”
It was day; reason and will power were back in place. A drop of red wine ran slowly down her glass as she answered. “There’s nothing I can do about it, Tomas. Oh, I understand. I know you love me. I know your infidelities are no great tragedy....”
She looked at him with love in her eyes, but she feared the night ahead, feared her dreams. Her life was split. Day and night were competing for her.
17
Anyone whose goal is “something higher” must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
The naked women marching around the swimming pool, the corpses in the hearse rejoicing that she, too, was dead—these were the “down below” that she had feared and fled once before but that mysteriously beckoned her. These were her vertigo: she heard a sweet (almost joyous) summons to renounce her fate and soul. The solidarity of the soulless calling her. And in times of weakness she was ready to heed the call and return to her mother. She was ready to dismiss the crew of her soul from the deck of her body; ready to descend to a place among her mother’s friends and laugh when one of them broke wind noisily; ready to march around the pool naked with them and sing.
18
True, Tereza fought with her mother until the day she left home, but let us not forget that she never stopped loving her. She would have done anything for her if her mother had asked in a loving voice. The only reason she found the strength to leave was that she never heard that voice.
When Tereza’s mother realized that her aggressiveness no longer had any power over her daughter, she started writing her querulous letters, complaining about her husband, her boss, her health, her children, and assuring Tereza she was the only person she had in the world. Tereza thought that at last, after twenty years, she was hearing the voice of her mother’s love, and felt like going back. All the more so because she felt so weak, so debilitated by Tomas’s infidelities. They exposed her powerlessness, which in turn led to vertigo, the insuperable longing to fall.
One day her mother phoned to say that she had cancer and only a few months to live. The news transformed into rebellion Tereza’s despair at Tomas’s infidelities. She had betrayed her mother, she told herself reproachfully, and for a man who did not love her. She was willing to forget everything her mother had done to torture her. She was in a position to understand her now; they were in the same situation: her mother loved her stepfather just as Tereza loved Tomas, and her stepfather tortured her mother with his infidelities just as Tomas galled Tereza with his. The cause of her mother’s malice was that she had suffered so.
Tereza told Tomas that her mother was ill and that she would be taking a week off to go and see her. Her voice was full of spite.
Sensing that the real reason calling her back to her mother was vertigo, Tomas opposed the trip. He rang up the hospital in the small town. Meticulous records of the incidence of cancer were kept throughout the country, so he had no trouble finding out that Tereza’s mother had never been suspected of having the disease nor had she even seen a doctor for over a year.
Tereza obeyed Tomas and did not go to visit her mother. Several hours after the decision, she fell in the street and injured her knee. She began to teeter as she walked, fell almost daily, bumped into things or, at the very least, dropped objects.
She was in the grip of an insuperable longing to fall. She lived in a constant state of vertigo.
“Pick me up” is the message of a person who keeps falling. Tomas kept picking her up, patiently.
19
“I want to make love to you in my studio. It will be like a stage surrounded by people. The audience won’t be allowed up close, but they won’t be able to take their eyes off us.”
As time passed, the image lost some of its original cruelty and began to excite Tereza. She would whisper the details to him while they made love.
Then it occurred to her that there might be a way to avoid the condemnation she saw in Tomas’s infidelities: all he had to do was to take her along, take her with him when he went to see his mistresses! Maybe then her body would again become the first and only among all others. Her body would become his second, his assistant, his alter ego.
“I’ll undress them for you, give them a bath, bring them in to you...” she would whisper to him as they pressed together. She yearned for the two of them to merge into a hermaphrodite. Then the other women’s bodies would be their playthings.
20
Oh, to be the alter ego of his polygamous life! Tomas refused to understand, but she could not get it out of her head, and tried to cultivate her friendship with Sabina. Tereza began by offering to do a series of photographs of Sabina.
Sabina invited Tereza to her studio, and at last she saw the spacious room and its centerpiece: the large, square platform-like bed.
“I feel awful that you’ve never been here before,” said Sabina as she showed her the pictures leaning against the wall. She even pulled out an old canvas, of a steelworks under construction, which she had done during her school days, a period when the strictest realism had been required of all students (art that was not realistic was said to sap the foundations of socialism). In the spirit of the times, she had tried to be stricter than her teachers and had painted in a style concealing the brushstrokes and closely resembling color photography.
