The unbearable lightness of being (30 page)

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The American
actress had never heard of him, but after being humiliated she was more
receptive to sympathy than usual and ran over to him. The singer switched the
pole to his left hand and put his right arm around her shoulders.

They were
immediately surrounded by new photographers and cameramen. A well-known
American photographer, having trouble squeezing both their faces and the flag
into his viewfinder because the pole was so long, moved back a few steps into
the ricefield. And so it happened that he stepped on a mine. An explosion rang
out, and his body, ripped to pieces, went flying through the air, raining a
shower of blood on the European intellectuals.

The singer and
the actress were horrified and could not budge. They lifted their eyes to the
flag. It was spattered with blood. Once more they were horrified. Then they
timidly ventured a few more looks upward and began to smile slightly. They
were filled with a strange pride, a pride they had never known before: the flag
they were carrying had been consecrated by blood. Once more they joined the
march.

The
border was formed by a small river, but because a long wall, six feet high and
lined with sandbags to protect Thai sharpshooters, ran alongside it, it was
invisible. There was only one breach in the wall, at the point where a bridge
spanned the river. Vietnamese forces lay in wait on the other side, but they,
too, were invisible, their positions perfectly camouflaged. It was

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clear, however,
that the moment anyone set foot on the bridge, the invisible Vietnamese would
open fire.

The parade participants went up to
the wall and stood on tiptoe. Franz peered into the gap between two sandbags,
trying to see what was going on. He saw nothing. Then he was shoved away by a
photographer, who felt that he had more right to the space.

Franz looked back. Seven
photographers were perching in the mighty crown of an isolated tree like a
flock of overgrown crows, their eyes fixed on the opposite bank.

Just then the interpreter, at the
head of the parade, raised a large megaphone to her lips and called out in
Khmer to the other side: These people are doctors; they request permission to
enter the territory of Cambodia and offer medical assistance;

they have no
political designs whatsoever and are guided solely by a concern for human life.

The response from the other side
was a stunning silence. A silence so absolute that everyone's spirits sank.
Only the cameras clicked on, sounding in the silence like the song of an
exotic insect.

Franz had the sudden feeling that
the Grand March was coming to an end. Europe was surrounded by borders of silence,
and the space where the Grand March was occurring was now no more than a small
platform in the middle of the planet. The crowds that had once pressed eagerly
up to the platform had long since departed, and the Grand March went on in
solitude, without spectators. Yes, said Franz to himself, the Grand March goes
on, the world's indifference notwithstanding, but it is growing nervous and
hectic: yesterday against the American occupation of Vietnam, today against the
Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia; yesterday for Israel, today for the Palestinians;
yesterday for Cuba, tomorrow against Cuba— and always against America; at times
against massacres and at

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times in support of
other massacres; Europe marches on, and to keep up with events, to leave none
of them out, its pace grows faster and faster, until finally the Grand March is
a procession of rushing, galloping people and the platform is shrinking and
shrinking until one day it will be reduced to a mere dimension-less dot.

Once
more the interpreter shouted her challenge into the megaphone. And again the
response was a boundless and endlessly indifferent silence.

Franz looked in
all directions. The silence on the other side of the river had hit them all
like a slap in the face. Even the singer with the white flag and the American
actress were depressed, hesitant about what to do next.

In a flash of insight Franz saw how laughable they all were, but instead
of cutting him off from them or flooding him with irony, the thought made him
feel the kind of infinite love we feel for the condemned. Yes, the Grand March
was coming to an end, but was that any reason for Franz to betray it? Wasn't
his own life coming to an end as well? Who was he to jeer at the exhibitionism
of the people accompanying the courageous doctors to the border? What could
they all do but put on a show? Had they any choice?

Franz was right.
I can't help thinking about the editor in Prague who organized the petition for
the amnesty of political prisoners. He knew perfectly well that his petition
would not

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help the prisoners.
His true goal was not to free the prisoners; it was to show that people without
fear still exist. That, too, was playacting. But he had no other possibility.
His choice was not between playacting and action. His choice was between playacting
and no action at all. There are situations in which people are
condemned
to playact. Their struggle with mute power (the mute power across the river, a
police transmogrified into mute microphones in the wall) is the struggle of a
theater company that has attacked an army.

Franz watched
his friend from the Sorbonne lift his fist and threaten the silence on the
other side.

22

For the third time
the interpreter shouted her challenge into the megaphone.

The silence she again received in
response suddenly turned Franz's depression into rage. Here he was, standing
only a few steps from the bridge joining Thailand to Cambodia, and he felt an
overwhelming desire to run out onto it, scream bloodcurdling curses to the
skies, and die in a great clatter of gunfire.

That sudden desire of Franz's reminds us of
something;

yes, it reminds us
of Stalin's son, who ran to electrocute himself on the barbed wire when he
could no longer stand to watch the poles of human existence come so close to
each other as to touch, when there was no longer any difference between sublime
and squalid, angel and fly. God and shit.

Franz could not
accept the fact that the glory of the Grand

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March was equal to
the comic vanity of its marchers, that the exquisite noise of European history
was lost in an infinite silence and that there was no longer any difference
between history and silence. He felt like placing his own life on the scales;
he wanted to prove that the Grand March weighed more than shit.

But man can prove nothing of the
sort. One pan of the scales held shit; on the other, Stalin's son put his
entire body. And the scales did not move.

Instead of getting himself shot,
Franz merely hung his head and went back with the others, single file, to the
buses.

We all need someone
to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of
look we wish to live under.

The first
category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other
words, for the look of the public. That is the case with the German singer, the
American actress, and even the tall, stooped editor with the big chin. He was
accustomed to his readers, and when one day the Russians banned his newspaper,
he had the feeling that the atmosphere was suddenly a hundred times thinner.
Nothing could replace the look of unknown eyes. He thought he would suffocate.
Then one day he realized that he was constantly being followed, bugged, and
surreptitiously photographed in the street. Suddenly he had anonymous eyes on
him and he could breathe

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again! He began
making theatrical speeches to the microphones in his wall. In the police, he
had found his lost public.

The second category is made up of
people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the
tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. They are happier than the
people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the
feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. This happens
to nearly all of them sooner or later. People in the second category, on the
other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need. Marie-Claude and her
daughter belong in the second category.

Then there is the third category,
the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person
they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the
first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will
go dark. Tereza and Tomas belong in the third category.

And finally there is the fourth
category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of
those who are not present. They are the dreamers. Franz, for example. He
traveled to the borders of Cambodia only for Sabina. As the bus bumped along
the Thai road, he could feel her eyes fixed on him in a long stare.

Tomas's son belongs in the same
category. Let me call him Simon. (He will be glad to have a Biblical name, like
his father's.) The eyes he longed for were Tomas's. As a result of his
embroilment in the petition campaign, he was expelled from the university. The
girl he had been going out with was the niece of a village priest. He married
her, became a tractor driver on a collective farm, a practicing Catholic, and
a father. When he learned that Tomas, too, was living in the country, he was
thrilled: fate had made their lives symmetrical! This en-

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couraged him to write Tomas a letter. He did not ask him to
write back. He only wanted him to focus his eyes on his life.

24

Franz and Simon are
the dreamers of this novel. Unlike Franz, Simon never liked his mother. From
childhood he searched for his father. He was willing to believe his father the
victim of some sort of injustice that predated and explained the injustice his
father had perpetrated on him. He never felt angry with his father, because he
did not wish to ally himself with his mother, who continually maligned the man.

He lived with her until he was
eighteen and had finished secondary school; then he went off to Prague and the
university. By that time Tomas was washing windows. Often Simon would wait
long hours to arrange an accidental encounter with Tomas. But Tomas never
stopped to talk to him.

The only reason he became involved
with the big-chinned former editor was that the editor's fate reminded him of
his father's. The editor had never heard of Tomas. The Oedipus article had been
forgotten. It was Simon who told him about it and asked him to persuade Tomas
to sign the petition. The only reason the editor agreed was that he wanted to
do something nice for the boy, whom he liked.

Whenever Simon thought back to the
day when they had met, he was ashamed of his stage fright. His father couldn't
have liked him. He, on the other hand, liked his father. He

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remembered his
every word, and as time went on he saw how true they were. The words that made
the biggest impression on him were "Punishing people who don't know what
they've done is barbaric." When his girlfriend's uncle put a Bible in his
hands, he was particularly struck by Jesus' words "Forgive them, for they
know not what they do." He knew that his father was a nonbeliever, but in
the similarity of the two phrases he saw a secret sign: his father agreed with
the path he had taken.

During
approximately his third year in the country, he received a letter from Tomas
asking him to come and visit. Their meeting was a friendly one. Simon felt
relaxed and did not stammer a bit. He probably did not realize that they did
not understand each other very well. About four months later, he received a
telegram saying that Tomas and his wife had been crushed to death under a
truck.

At about that
time, he learned about a woman who had once been his father's mistress and was
living in France. He found out her address. Because he desperately needed an
imaginary eye to follow his life, he would occasionally write her long
letters.

Sabina continued to
receive letters from her sad village correspondent till the end of her life.
Many of them would remain unread, because she took less and less interest in
her native land.

The
old man died, and Sabina moved to California. Farther

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west, farther away from the country where she had been
born.

She had no
trouble selling her paintings, and liked America. But only on the surface.
Everything beneath the surface was alien to her. Down below, there was no
grandpa or uncle. She was afraid of shutting herself into a grave and sinking
into American earth.

And so one day
she composed a will in which she requested that her dead body be cremated and
its ashes thrown to the winds. Tereza and Tomas had died under the sign of
weight. She wanted to die under the sign of lightness. She would be lighter
than air. As Parmenides would put it, the negative would change into the
positive.

26

The
bus stopped in front of the Bangkok hotel. No one any longer felt like holding
meetings. People drifted off in groups to sightsee; some set off for temples,
others for brothels. Franz's friend from the Sorbonne suggested they spend the
evening together, but he preferred to be alone.

It was nearly
dark when he went out into the streets. He kept thinking about Sabina, feeling
her eyes on him. Whenever he felt her long stare, he began to doubt himself: he
had never known quite what Sabina thought. It made him uncomfortable now as
well. Could she be mocking him? Did she consider the cult he made of her silly?
Could she be trying to tell him it was time for him to grow up and devote
himself fully to the mistress she herself had sent to him?

Picturing the face
with big round glasses, he suddenly real-