The unbearable lightness of being (21 page)

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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!"

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"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!"

"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 ma-

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mas 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."

"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

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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.

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

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,

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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.

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

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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.

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

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