The unbearable lightness of being (22 page)

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anyway.
Murder simply hastens a bit what God will eventually see to on His own. God, it
may be assumed, took murder into account; He did not take surgery into account.
He never suspected that someone would dare to stick his hand into the
mechanism He had invented, wrapped carefully in skin, and sealed away from
human eyes. When Tomas first positioned his scalpel on the skin of a man asleep
under an anesthetic, then breached the skin with a decisive incision, and
finally cut it open with a precise and even stroke (as if it were a piece of
fabric—a coat, a skirt, a curtain), he experienced a brief but intense feeling
of blasphemy. Then again, that was what attracted him to it! That was the
"Es
muss sein!"
rooted deep inside him, and it was planted there not by
chance, not by the chief's sciatica, or by anything external.

But how could he take something so
much a part of him and cast it off so fast, so forcefully, and so lightly?

He would respond that he did it so
as not to let the police misuse him. But to be quite frank, even if it was
theoretically possible (and even if a number of cases have actually occurred),
it was not too likely that the police would make public a false statement over
his signature.

Granted, a man has a right to fear
dangers that are less than likely to occur. Granted, he was annoyed with
himself and at his clumsiness, and desired to avoid further contact with the
police and the concomitant feeling of helplessness. And granted, he had lost
his profession anyway, because the mechanical aspirin-medicine he practiced at
the clinic had nothing in common with his concept of medicine. Even so, the
way he rushed into his decision seems rather odd to me. Could it perhaps
conceal something else, something deeper that escaped his reasoning?

Even
though he came to love Beethoven through Tereza, Tomas was not particularly
knowledgeable about music, and I doubt that he knew the true story behind
Beethoven's famous
"Muss es sein? Es muss sein!"
motif.

This is how it goes: A certain
Dembscher owed Beethoven fifty florins, and when the composer, who was
chronically short of funds, reminded him of the debt, Dembscher heaved a
mournful sigh and said,
"Muss es sein?"
To which Beethoven
replied, with a hearty laugh,
"Es muss sein!"
and immediately
jotted down these words and their melody. On this realistic motif he then
composed a canon for four voices: three voices sing
"Es muss sein, es
muss sein, ja, ja, ja, ja!"
(It must be, it must be, yes, yes, yes,
yes!), and the fourth voice chimes in with
"Heraus mit dem
Beutel!"
(Out with the purse!).

A year later, the same motif showed
up as the basis for the fourth movement of the last quartet, Opus 155. By that
time, Beethoven had forgotten about Dembscher's purse. The words
"Es
muss sein!"
had acquired a much more solemn ring; they seemed to issue
directly from the lips of Fate. In Kant's language, even "Good
morning," suitably pronounced, can take the shape of a metaphysical
thesis. German is a language of
heavy
words.
"Es muss
sein!"
was no longer a joke; it had become
"der schwer
gefasste Entschluss"
(the difficult or weighty resolution).

So Beethoven turned a frivolous
inspiration into a serious quartet, a joke into metaphysical truth. It is an
interesting tale of light going to heavy or, as Parmenides would have it,
positive going to negative. Yet oddly enough, the transformation fails to
surprise us. We would have been shocked, on the other hand, if Beethoven had
transformed the seriousness of his quartet into

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the
trifling joke of a four-voice canon about Dembscher's purse. Had he done so,
however, he would have been in the spirit of Parmenides and made heavy go to
light, that is, negative to positive! First (as an unfinished sketch) would
have come the great metaphysical truth and last (as a finished masterpiece)—the
most frivolous of jokes! But we no longer know how to think as Parmenides
thought.

It is my feeling that Tomas had
long been secretly irritated by the stern, aggressive, solemn
"Es muss
sein!"
and that he harbored a deep desire to follow the spirit of
Parmenides and make heavy go to light. Remember that at one point in his life
he broke completely with his first wife and his son and that he was relieved
when both his parents broke with him. What could be at the bottom of it all but
a rash and not quite rational move to reject what proclaimed itself to be his
weighty duty, his
"Es muss sein!
'"?

That, of course, was an external
"Es
muss sein!"
reserved for him by social convention, whereas the
"Es
muss sein!" of
his love for medicine was internal. So much the worse
for him. Internal imperatives are all the more powerful and therefore all the
more of an inducement to revolt.

Being a surgeon means slitting open
the surface of things and looking at what lies hidden inside. Perhaps Tomas was
led to surgery by a desire to know what lies hidden on the other side of
"Es
muss sein!
"; in other words, what remains of life when a person
rejects what he previously considered his mission.

The day he reported to the
good-natured woman responsible for the cleanliness of all shop windows and
display cases in Prague, and was confronted with the result of his decision in
all its concrete and inescapable reality, he went into a state of shock, a
state that kept him in its thrall during the first few days of his new job. But
once he got over the astounding strangeness

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of
his new life (it took him about a week), he suddenly realized he was simply on
a long holiday.

Here he was, doing things he didn't
care a damn about, and enjoying it. Now he understood what made people (people
he always pitied) happy when they took a job without feeling the compulsion of
an internal
"Es muss sein!"
and forgot it the moment they left
for home every evening. This was the first time he had felt that blissful
indifference. Whenever anything went wrong on the operating table, he would be
despondent and unable to sleep. He would even lose his taste for women. The
"Es
muss sein!"
of his profession had been like a vampire sucking his
blood.

Now he roamed the streets of Prague
with brush and pole, feeling ten years younger. The salesgirls all called him
"doctor" (the Prague bush telegraph was working better than ever) and
asked his advice about their colds, aching backs, and irregular periods. They
seemed almost embarrassed to watch him douse the glass with water, fit the
brush on the end of the pole, and start washing. If they could have left their
customers alone in the shops, they would surely have grabbed the pole from his
hands and washed the windows for him.

Most of Tomas's orders came from
large shops, but his boss sent him out to private customers, too. People were
still reacting to the mass persecution of Czech intellectuals with the
euphoria of solidarity, and when his former patients found out that Tomas was
washing windows for a living, they would phone in and order him by name. Then
they would greet him with a bottle of champagne or slivovitz, sign for thirteen
windows on the order slip, and chat with him for two hours, drinking his
health all the while. Tomas would move on to his next flat or shop in a capital
mood. While the families of Russian officers settled in throughout the land and
radios intoned ominous reports of police functionaries who had replaced
cashiered

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broadcasters, Tomas
reeled through the streets of Prague from one glass of wine to the next like
someone going from party to party. It was his grand holiday.

He had reverted
to his bachelor existence. Tereza was suddenly out of his life. The only times
he saw her were when she came back from the bar late at night and he woke
befuddled from a half-sleep, and in the morning, when she was the befuddled
one and he was hurrying off to work. Each workday, he had sixteen hours to
himself, an unexpected field of freedom. And from Tomas's early youth that had
meant women.

When
his friends asked him how many women he had had in his life, he would try to
evade the question, and when they pressed him further he would say, "Well,
two hundred, give or take a few." The envious among them accused him of stretching
the truth. "That's not so many," he said by way of self-defense.
"I've been involved with women for about twenty-five years now. Divide two
hundred by twenty-five and you'll see it comes to only eight or so new women a
year. That's not so many, is it?"

But setting up
house with Tereza cramped his style. Because of the organizational
difficulties it entailed, he had been forced to relegate his erotic activities
to a narrow strip of time (between the operating room and home) which, though
he had used it intensively (as a mountain farmer tills his narrow plot for all
it is worth), was nothing like the sixteen hours that now had

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suddenly been
bestowed on him. (I say sixteen hours because the eight hours he spent washing
windows were filled with new salesgirls, housewives, and female functionaries,
each of whom represented a potential erotic engagement.)

What did he look
for in them? What attracted him to them? Isn't making love merely an eternal
repetition of the same?

Not at all. There
is always the small part that is unimaginable. When he saw a woman in her
clothes, he could naturally imagine more or less what she would look like naked
(his experience as a doctor supplementing his experience as a lover), but
between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a
small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.
And then, the pursuit of the unimaginable does not stop with the revelations of
nudity; it goes much further: How would she behave while undressing? What would
she say when he made love to her? How would her sighs sound? How would her face
distort at the moment of orgasm?

What is unique
about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a
person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else,
what people have in common. The individual "I" is what differs from
the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must
be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.

Tomas, who had
spent the last ten years of his medical practice working exclusively with the
human brain, knew that there was nothing more difficult to capture than the
human "I." There are many more resemblances between Hitler and
Einstein or Brezhnev and Solzhenitsyn than there are differences. Using
numbers, we might say that there is one-millionth part dissimilarity to nine
hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine millionths parts
similarity.

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Tomas was obsessed by the desire to
discover and appropriate that one-millionth part; he saw it as the core of his
obsession. He was not obsessed with women; he was obsessed with what in each
of them is unimaginable, obsessed, in other words, with the one-millionth part
that makes a woman dissimilar to others of her sex.

(Here too, perhaps, his passion for
surgery and his passion for women came together. Even with his mistresses, he
could never quite put down the imaginary scalpel. Since he longed to take
possession of something deep inside them, he needed to slit them open.)

We may ask, of course, why he
sought that millionth part dissimilarity in sex and nowhere else. Why couldn't
he find it, say, in a woman's gait or culinary caprices or artistic taste?

To be sure, the millionth part
dissimilarity is present in all areas of human existence, but in all areas
other than sex it is exposed and needs no one to discover it, needs no scalpel.
One woman prefers cheese at the end of the meal, another loathes cauliflower,
and although each may demonstrate her originality thereby, it is an originality
that demonstrates its own irrelevance and warns us to pay it no heed, to expect
nothing of value to come of it.

Only in sexuality does the
millionth part dissimilarity become precious, because, not accessible in
public, it must be conquered. As recently as fifty years ago, this form of
conquest took considerable time (weeks, even months!), and the worth of the
conquered object was proportional to the time the conquest took. Even today,
when conquest time has been drastically cut, sexuality seems still to be a
strongbox hiding the mystery of a woman's "I."

So it was a desire not for pleasure
(the pleasure came as an extra, a bonus) but for possession of the world
(slitting open the outstretched body of the world with his scalpel) that sent
him in pursuit of women.

10

Men who pursue a
multitude of women fit neatly into two categories. Some seek their own
subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in all women. Others are prompted by
a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female world.

The obsession of the former is
lyrical:
what they seek in women is themselves, their ideal, and since an ideal is by
definition something that can never be found, they are disappointed again and
again. The disappointment that propels them from woman to woman gives their
inconstancy a kind of romantic excuse, so that many sentimental women are
touched by their unbridled philandering.

The obsession of the latter is
epic,
and women see nothing the least bit touching in it: the man projects no subjective
ideal on women, and since everything interests him, nothing can disappoint him.
This inability to be disappointed has something scandalous about it. The
obsession of the epic womanizer strikes people as lacking in redemption
(redemption by disappointment).

Because the lyrical womanizer
always runs after the same type of woman, we even fail to notice when he
exchanges one mistress for another. His friends perpetually cause misunderstandings
by mixing up his lovers and calling them by the same name.

In pursuit of knowledge, epic
womanizers (and of course Tomas belonged in their ranks) turn away from
conventional feminine beauty, of which they quickly tire, and inevitably end up
as curiosity collectors. They are aware of this and a little ashamed of it, and
to avoid causing their friends embarrassment, they refrain from appearing in
public with their mistresses.

Tomas had been a
window washer for nearly two years

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