Milan kundera

A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words (concluded)
THE OLD CHURCH IN AMSTERDAM 
There are houses running along one side of the street, and behind the large ground-
floor shop-front windows all the whores have little rooms and plushly pillowed armchairs 
in which they sit up close to the glass wearing bras and panties. They look like big 
bored cats. 
On the other side of the street is a gigantic Gothic cathedral dating from the fourteenth 
century. 
Between the whores' world and God's world, like a river dividing two empires, stretches 
an intense smell of urine. 
Inside the Old Church, all that is left of the Gothic style is the high, bare, white walls, the 
columns, the vaulting, and the windows. There is not a single image on the walls, not a 
single piece of statuary anywhere. The church is as empty as a gymnasium, except in 
the very center, where several rows of chairs have been arranged in a large square 
around a miniature podium for the minister. Behind the chairs are wooden booths, stalls 
for wealthy burghers. 
The chairs and stalls seem to have been placed there without the slightest concern for 
the shape of the walls or position of the columns, as if wishing to express their 
indifference to or disdain for Gothic architecture. Centuries ago Calvinist faith turned the 
cathedral into a hangar, its only function being to keep the prayers of the faithful safe 
from rain and snow. 
Franz was fascinated by it: the Grand March of History had passed through this gigantic 
hall! 
Sabina recalled how after the Communist coup all the castles in Bohemia were 
nationalized and turned into manual training centers, retirement homes, and also cow 
sheds. She had visited one of the cow sheds: hooks for iron rings had been hammered 
into the stucco walls, and cows tied to the rings gazed dreamily out of the windows at 
the castle grounds, now overrun with chickens. 
It's the emptiness of it that fascinates me, said Franz. People collect altars, statues, 
paintings, chairs, carpets, and books, and then comes a time of joyful relief and they 
throw it all out like so much refuse from yesterday's dinner table. Can't you just picture 
Hercules' broom sweeping out this cathedral?
The poor had to stand, while the rich had stalls, said Sabina, pointing to them. But there 
was something that bound the bankers to beggars: a hatred of beauty.

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
57
What is beauty? said Franz, and he saw himself attending a recent gallery preview at 
his wife's side, and at her insistence. The endless vanity of speeches and words, the 
vanity of culture, the vanity of art. 
When Sabina was working in the student brigade, her soul poisoned by the cheerful 
marches issuing incessantly from the loudspeakers, she borrowed a motorcycle one 
Sunday and headed for the hills. She stopped at a tiny remote village she had never 
seen before, leaned the motorcycle against the church, and went in. A mass happened 
to be in progress. Religion was persecuted by the regime, and most people gave the 
church a wide berth. The only people in the pews were old men and old women, 
because they did not fear the regime. They feared only death. 
The priest intoned words in a singsong voice, and the people repeated them after him 
in unison. It was a litany. The same words kept coming back, like a wanderer who 
cannot tear his eyes away from the countryside or like a man who cannot take leave of 
life. She sat in one of the last pews, closing her eyes to hear the music of the words, 
opening them to stare up at the blue vault dotted with large gold stars. She was en-
tranced. 
What she had unexpectedly met there in the village church was not God; it was beauty. 
She knew perfectly well that neither the church nor the litany was beautiful in and of 
itself, but they were beautiful compared to the construction site, where she spent her 
days amid the racket of the songs. The mass was beautiful because it appeared to her 
in a sudden, mysterious revelation as a world betrayed. 
From that time on she had known that beauty is a world betrayed. The only way we can 
encounter it is if its persecutors have overlooked it somewhere. Beauty hides behind 
the scenes of the May Day parade. If we want to find it, we must demolish the scenery. 
This is the first time I've ever been fascinated by a church, said Franz. 
It was neither Protestantism nor asceticism that made him so enthusiastic; it was 
something else, something highly personal, something he did not dare discuss with 
Sabina. He thought he heard a voice telling him to seize Hercules' broom and sweep all 
of Marie-Claude's previews, all of Marie-Anne's singers, all lectures and symposia, all 
useless speeches and vain words—sweep them out of his life. The great empty space 
of Amsterdam's Old Church had appeared to him in a sudden and mysterious 
revelation as the image of his own liberation. 
STRENGTH 
Stroking Franz's arms in bed in one of the many hotels where they made love, Sabina 
said, The muscles you have! They're unbelievable!
Franz took pleasure in her praise. He climbed out of bed, got down on his haunches, 
grabbed a heavy oak chair by one leg, and lifted it slowly into the air. You never have to 
be afraid, he said. I can protect you no matter what. I used to be a judo champion.

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
58
When he raised the hand with the heavy chair above his head, Sabina said, It's good to 
know you're so strong.
But deep down she said to herself, Franz may be strong, but his strength is directed 
outward; when it comes to the people he lives with, the people he loves, he's weak. 
Franz's weakness is called goodness. Franz would never give Sabina orders. He would 
never command her, as Tomas had, to lay the mirror on the floor and walk back and 
forth on it naked. Not that he lacks sensuality; he simply lacks the strength to give 
orders. There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is 
unthinkable without violence. 
Sabina watched Franz walk across the room with the chair above his head; the scene 
struck her as grotesque and filled her with an odd sadness. 
Franz set the chair down on the floor opposite Sabina and sat in it. I enjoy being strong, 
of course, he said, but what good do these muscles do me in Geneva? They're like an 
ornament, a peacock feather. I've never fought anyone in my life.
Sabina proceeded with her melancholy musings: What if she had a man who ordered 
her about? A man who wanted to master her? How long would she put up with him? 
Not five minutes! From which it follows that no man was right for her. Strong or weak. 
Why don't you ever use your strength on me? she said. 
Because love means renouncing strength, said Franz softly. 
Sabina realized two things: first, that Franz's words were noble and just; second, that 
they disqualified him from her love life. 
LIVING IN TRUTH 
Such is the formula set forth by Kafka somewhere in the diaries or letters. Franz 
couldn't quite remember where. But it captivated him. What does it mean to live in 
truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not 
dissimulating. From the time he met Sabina, however, Franz had been living in lies. He 
told his wife about nonexistent congresses in Amsterdam and lectures in Madrid; he 
was afraid to walk with Sabina through the streets of Geneva. And he enjoyed the lying 
and hiding: it was all so new to him. He was as excited as a teacher's pet who has 
plucked up the courage to play truant. 
For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only 
away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, allowances 
for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, 
means living in lies. Sabina despised literature in which people give away all kinds of 
intimate secrets about themselves and their friends. A man who loses his privacy loses 
everything, Sabina thought. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster. 
That was why Sabina did not suffer in the least from having to keep her love secret. On 
the contrary, only by doing so could she live in truth. 

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
59
Franz, on the other hand, was certain that the division of life into private and public 
spheres is the source of all lies: a person is one thing in private and something quite 
different in public. For Franz, living in truth meant breaking down the barriers between 
the private and the public. He was fond of quoting Andre Breton on the desirability of 
living in a glass house into which everyone can look and there are no secrets. 
When he heard his wife telling Sabina, That pendant is ugly! he knew he could no 
longer live in lies and had to stand up for Sabina. He had not done so only because he 
was afraid of betraying their secret love. 
The day after the cocktail party, he was supposed to go to Rome with Sabina for the 
weekend. He could not get That pendant is ugly! out of his mind, and it made him see 
Marie-Claude in a completely new light. Her aggressiveness—invulnerable, noisy, and 
full of vitality—relieved him of the burden of goodness he had patiently borne all twenty-
three years of their marriage. He recalled the enormous inner space of the Old Church 
in Amsterdam and felt the strange incomprehensible ecstasy that void had evoked in 
him. 
He was packing his overnight bag when Marie-Claude came into the room, chatting 
about the guests at the party, energetically endorsing the views of some and laughing 
off the views of others. 
Franz looked at her for a long time and said, There isn't any conference in Rome.
She did not see the point. Then why are you going? I've had a mistress for nine 
months, he said. I don't want to meet her in Geneva. That's why I've been traveling so 
much. I thought it was time you knew about it.
After the first few words he lost his nerve. He turned away so as not to see the despair 
on Marie-Claude's face, the despair he expected his words to produce. 
After a short pause he heard her say, Yes, I think it's time I knew about it.
Her voice was so firm that Franz turned in her direction. She did not look at all 
disturbed; in fact, she looked like the very same woman who had said the day before in 
a raucous voice, That pendant is ugly!
She continued: Now that you've plucked up the courage to tell me you've been 
deceiving me for nine months, do you think you can tell me who she is?
He had always told himself he had no right to hurt Marie-Claude and should respect the 
woman in her. But where had the woman in her gone? In other words, what had 
happened to the mother image he mentally linked with his wife? His mother, sad and 
wounded, his mother, wearing unmatched shoes, had departed from Marie-Claude—or 
perhaps not, perhaps she had never been inside Marie-Claude at all. The whole thing 
came to him in a flash of hatred. 

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
60
I have no reason to hide it from you, he said. If he had not succeeded in wounding her 
with his infidelity, he was certain the revelation of her rival would do the trick. Looking 
her straight in the eye, he told her about Sabina. 
A while later he met Sabina at the airport. As the plane gained altitude, he felt lighter 
and lighter. At last, he said to himself, after nine months he was living in truth. 
Sabina felt as though Franz had pried open the door of their privacy. As though she 
were peering into the heads of Marie-Claude, of Marie-Anne, of Alain the painter, of the 
sculptor who held on to his finger—of all the people she knew in Geneva. Now she 
would willy-nilly become the rival of a woman who did not interest her in the least. Franz 
would ask for a divorce, and she would take Marie-Claude's place in his large conjugal 
bed. Everyone would follow the process from a greater or lesser distance, and she 
would be forced to playact before them all; instead of being Sabina, she would have to 
act the role of Sabina, decide how best to act the role. Once her love had been 
publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden. Sabina cringed at the very thought 
of it. 
They had supper at a restaurant in Rome. She drank her wine in silence. 
You're not angry, are you? Franz asked. 
She assured him she was not. She was still confused and unsure whether to be happy 
or not. She recalled the time they met in the sleeping compartment of the Amsterdam 
express, the time she had wanted to go down on her knees before him and beg him to 
hold her, squeeze her, never let her go. She had longed to come to the end of the 
dangerous road of betrayals. She had longed to call a halt to it all. 
Try as she might to intensify that longing, summon it to her aid, lean on it, the feeling of 
distaste only grew stronger. 
They walked back to the hotel through the streets of Rome. Because the Italians 
around them were making a racket, shouting and gesticulating, they could walk along in 
silence without hearing their silence. 
Sabina spent a long time washing in the bathroom; Franz waited for her under the 
blanket. As always, the small lamp was lit. 
When she came out, she turned it off. It was the first time she had done so. Franz 
should have paid better attention. He did not notice it, because light did not mean 
anything to him. As we know, he made love with his eyes shut. 
In fact, it was his closed eyes that made Sabina turn out the light. She could not stand 
those lowered eyelids a moment longer. The eyes, as the saying goes, are windows to 
the soul. Franz's body, which thrashed about on top of hers with closed eyes, was 
therefore a body without a soul. It was like a newborn animal, still blind and whimpering 
for the dug. Muscular Franz in coitus was like a gigantic puppy suckling at her breasts. 
He actually had her nipple in his mouth as if he were sucking milk! The idea that he was 
a mature man below and a suckling infant above, that she was therefore having 
intercourse with a baby, bordered on the disgusting. No, she would never again see his 

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
61
body moving desperately over hers, would never again offer him her breast, bitch to 
whelp, today was the last time, irrevocably the last time! 
She knew, of course, that she was being supremely unfair, that Franz was the best man 
she had ever had—he was intelligent, he understood her paintings, he was handsome 
and good—but the more she thought about it, the more she longed to ravish his 
intelligence, defile his kindheartedness, and violate his powerless strength. 
That night, she made love to him with greater frenzy than ever before, aroused by the 
realization that this was the last time. Making love, she was far, far away. Once more 
she heard the golden horn of betrayal beckoning her in the distance, and she knew she 
would not hold out. She sensed an expanse of freedom before her, and the 
boundlessness of it excited her. She made mad, unrestrained love to Franz as she 
never had before. 
Franz sobbed as he lay on top of her; he was certain he understood: Sabina had been 
quiet all through dinner and said not a word about his decision, but this was her answer. 
She had made a clear show of her joy, her passion, her consent, her desire to live with 
him forever. 
He felt like a rider galloping off into a magnificent void, a void of no wife, no daughter, 
no household, the magnificent void swept clean by Hercules' broom, a magnificent void 
he would fill with his love. 
Each was riding the other like a horse, and both were galloping off into the distance of 
their desires, drunk on the betrayals that freed them. Franz was riding Sabina and had 
betrayed his wife; Sabina was riding Franz and had betrayed Franz. 
For twenty years he had seen his mother—a poor, weak creature who needed his 
protection—in his wife. This image was deeply rooted in him, and he could not rid 
himself of it in two dys. On the way home his conscience began to bother him: he was 
afraid that Marie-Claude had fallen apart after he left and that he would find her terribly 
sick at heart. Stealthily he unlocked the door and went into his room. He stood there for 
a moment and listened: Yes, she was at home. After a moment's hesitation he went 
into her room, ready to greet her as usual. 
What? she exclaimed, raising her eyebrows in mock surprise. You? Here?
Where else can I go? he wanted to say (genuinely surprised), but said nothing. 
Let's set the record straight, shall we? I have nothing against your moving in with her at 
once.
When he made his confession on the day he left for Rome, he had no precise plan of 
action. He expected to come home and talk it all out in a friendly atmosphere so as not 
to harm Marie-Claude any more than necessary. It never occurred to him that she 
would calmly and coolly urge him to leave. 

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
62
Even though it facilitated things, he could not help feeling disappointed. He had been 
afraid of wounding her all his life and voluntarily stuck to a stultifying discipline of 
monogamy, and now, after twenty years, he suddenly learned that it had all been 
superfluous and he had given up scores of women because of a misunderstanding! 
That afternoon, he gave his lecture, then went straight to Sabina's from the university. 
He had decided to ask her whether he could spend the night. He rang the doorbell, but 
no one answered. He went and sat at the cafe across the street and stared long and 
hard at the entrance to her building. 
Evening came, and he did not know where to turn. All his life he had shared his bed 
with Marie-Claude. If he went home to Marie-Claude, where should he sleep? He could, 
of course, make up a bed on the sofa in the next room. But wouldn't that be merely an 
eccentric gesture? Wouldn't it look like a sign of ill will? He wanted to remain friends 
with her, after all! Yet getting into bed with her was out of the question. He could just 
hear her asking him ironically why he didn't prefer Sabina's bed. He took a room in a 
hotel. 
The next day, he rang Sabina's doorbell morning, noon, and night. 
The day after, he paid a visit to the concierge, who had no information and referred him 
to the owner of the flat. He phoned her and found out that Sabina had given notice two 
days before. 
During the next few days, he returned at regular intervals, still hoping to find her in, but 
one day he found the door open and three men in overalls loading the furniture and 
paintings into a van parked outside. 
He asked them where they were taking the furniture. 
They replied that they were under strict instructions not to reveal the address. 
He was about to offer them a few francs for the secret address when suddenly he felt 
he lacked the strength to do it. His grief had broken him utterly. He understood nothing, 
had no idea what had happened; all he knew was that he had been waiting for it to 
happen ever since he met Sabina. What must be must be. Franz did not oppose it. 
He found a small flat for himself in the old part of town. When he knew his wife and 
daughter were away, he went back to his former home to fetch his clothes and most 
essential books. He was careful to remove nothing that Marie-Claude might miss. 
One day, he saw her through the window of a cafe. She was sitting with two women, 
and her face, long riddled with wrinkles from her unbridled gift for grimaces, was in a 
state of animation. The women were listening closely and laughing continually. Franz 
could not get over the feeling that she was telling them about him. Surely she knew that 
Sabina had disappeared from Geneva at the very time Franz decided to live with her. 
What a funny story it would make! He was not the least bit surprised at becoming a butt 
to his wife's friends. 

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
63
When he got home to his new flat, where every hour he could hear the bells of Saint-
Pierre, he found that the department store had delivered his new desk. He promptly 
forgot about Marie-Claude and her friends. He even forgot about Sabina for the time 
being. He sat down at the desk. He was glad to have picked it out himself. For twenty 
years he had lived among furniture not of his own choosing. Marie-Claude had taken 
care of everything. At last he had ceased to be a little boy; for the first time in his life he 
was on his own. The next day he hired a carpenter to make a bookcase for him. He 
spent several days designing it and deciding where it should stand. 
And at some point, he realized to his great surprise that he was not particularly 
unhappy. Sabina's physical presence was much less important than he had suspected. 
What was important was the golden footprint, the magic footprint she had left on his life 
and no one could ever remove. Just before disappearing from his horizon, she had 
slipped him Hercules' broom, and he had used it to sweep everything he despised out 
of his life. A sudden happiness, a feeling of bliss, the joy that came of freedom and a 
new life—these were the gifts she had left him. 
Actually, he had always preferred the unreal to the real. Just as he felt better at 
demonstrations (which, as I have pointed out, are all playacting and dreams) than in a 
lecture hall full of students, so he was happier with Sabina the invisible goddess than 
the Sabina who had accompanied him throughout the world and whose love he 
constantly feared losing. By giving him the unexpected freedom of a man living on his 
own, she provided him with a halo of seductiveness. He became very attractive to 
women, and one of his students fell in love with him. 
And so within an amazingly short period the backdrop of his life had changed 
completely. Until recently he had lived in a large upper-middle-class flat with a servant, 
a daughter, and a wife; now he lived in a tiny flat in the old part of town, where almost 
every night he was joined by his young student-mistress. He did not need to squire her 
through the world from hotel to hotel; he could make love to her in his own flat, in his 
own bed, with his own books and ashtray on the bedside table! 
She was a modest girl and not particularly pretty, but she admired Franz in the way 
Franz had only recently admired Sabina. He did not find it unpleasant. And if he did 
perhaps feel that trading Sabina for a student with glasses was something for a 
comedown, his innate goodness saw to it that he cared for her and lavished on her the 
paternal love that had never had a true outlet before, given that Marie-Anne had always 
behaved less like his daughter than like a copy of Marie-Claude. 
One day, he paid a visit to his wife.
 
He told her he would like to remarry. 
Marie-Claude shook her head. 
But a divorce won't make any difference to you! You won't lose a thing! I'll give you all 
the property!
I don't care about property, she said. 
Then what do you care about?

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
64
Love, she said with a smile. 
Love? Franz asked in amazement. 
Love is a battle, said Marie-Claude, still smiling. And I plan to go on fighting. To the 
end.
Love is a battle? said Franz. Well, I don't feel at all like fighting. And he left. 
After four years in Geneva, Sabina settled in Paris, but she could not escape her 
melancholy. If someone had asked her what had come over her, she would have been 
hard pressed to find words for it. 
When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use 
metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We 
either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And 
Sabina—what 
had
come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like 
leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her 
drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the 
burden but the unbearable lightness of being. 
Until that time, her betrayals had filled her with excitement and joy, because they 
opened up new paths to new adventures of betrayal. But what if the paths came to an 
end? One could betray one's parents, husband, country, love, but when parents 
husband, country, and love were gone—what was left to betray? 
Sabina felt emptiness all around her. What if that emptiness was the goal of all her 
betrayals? 
Naturally she had not realized it until now. How could she have? The goals we pursue 
are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing 
about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives 
our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us. Sabina was unaware of 
the goal that lay behind her longing to betray. The unbearable lightness of being—was 
that the goal? Her departure from Geneva brought her considerably closer to it. 
Three years after moving to Paris, she received a letter from Prague. It was from 
Tomas's son. Somehow or other he had found out about her and got hold of her 
address, and now he was writing to her as his father's closest friend. He informed her of 
the deaths of Tomas and Tereza. For the past few years they had been living in a 
village, where Tomas was employed as a driver at a collective farm. From time to time 
they would drive over to the next town and spend the night in a cheap hotel. The road 
there wound through some hills, and their pickup had crashed and hurtled down a steep 
incline. Their bodies had been crushed to a pulp. The police determined later that the 
brakes were in disastrous condition. 
She could not get over the news. The last link to her past had been broken. 

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
65
According to her old habit, she decided to calm herself by taking a walk in a cemetery. 
The Montparnasse Cemetery was the closest. It was all tiny houses, miniature chapels 
over each grave. Sabina could not understand why the dead would want to have 
imitation palaces built over them. The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone. 
Instead of growing more sensible in death, the inhabitants of the cemetery were sillier 
than they had been in life. Their monuments were meant to display how important they 
were. There were no fathers, brothers, sons, or grandmothers buried there, only public 
figures, the bearers of titles, degrees, and honors; even the postal clerk celebrated his 
chosen profession, his social significance—his dignity. 
Walking along a row of graves, she noticed people gathering for a burial. The funeral 
director had an armful of flowers and was giving one to each mourner. He handed one 
to Sabina as well. She joined the group. They made a detour past many monuments 
before they came to the grave, free for the moment of its heavy gravestone. She leaned 
over the hole. It was extremely deep. She dropped in the flower. It sailed down to the 
coffin in graceful somersaults. In Bohemia the graves were not so deep. In Paris the 
graves were deeper, just as the buildings were taller. Her eye fell on the stone, which 
lay next to the grave. It chilled her, and she hurried home. 
She thought about that stone all day. Why had it horrified her so? 
She answered herself: When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer 
get out. 
But the dead can't get out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're 
covered with soil or stones? 
The difference is that if a grave is covered with a stone it means we don't want the 
deceased to come back. The heavy stone tells the deceased, Stay where you are!
That made Sabina think about her father's grave. There was soil above his grave with 
flowers growing out of it and a maple tree reaching down to it, and the roots and flowers 
offered his corpse a path out of the grave. If her father had been covered with a stone, 
she would never have been able to communicate with him after he died, and hear his 
voice in the trees pardoning her. 
What was it like in the cemetery where Tereza and Tomas were buried? 
Once more she started thinking about them. From time to time they would drive over to 
the next town and spend the night in a cheap hotel. That passage in the letter had 
caught her eye. It meant they were happy. And again she pictured Tomas as if he were 
one of her paintings: Don Juan in the foreground, a specious stage-set by a naive 
painter, and through a crack in the set—Tristan. He died as Tristan, not as Don Juan. 
Sabina's parents had died in the same week. Tomas and Tereza in the same second. 
Suddenly she missed Franz terribly. 
When she told him about her cemetery walks, he gave a shiver of disgust and called 
cemeteries bone and stone dumps. A gulf of misunderstanding had immediately 

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
66
opened between them. Not until that day at the Montparnasse Cemetery did she see 
what he meant. She was sorry to have been so impatient with him. Perhaps if they had 
stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words 
they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like 
bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of 
the other. But it was too late now. 
Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, 
because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of 
a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable. 
All Franz's friends knew about Marie-Claude; they all knew about the girl with the 
oversized glasses. But no one knew about Sabina. Franz was wrong when he thought 
his wife had told her friends about her. Sabina was a beautiful woman, and Marie-
Claude did not want people going about comparing their faces. 
Because Franz was so afraid of being found out, he had never asked for any of 
Sabina's paintings or drawings or even a snapshot of her. As a result, she disappeared 
from his life without a trace. There was not a scrap of tangible evidence to show that he 
had spent the most wonderful year of his life with her. 
Which only increased his desire to remain faithful to her. 
Sometimes when they were alone in his flat together, the girl would lift her eyes from a 
book, throw him an inquiring glance, and say, What are you thinking about?
Sitting in his armchair, staring up at the ceiling, Franz always found some plausible 
response, but in fact he was thinking of Sabina. 
Whenever he published an article in a scholarly journal, the girl was the first to read it 
and discuss it with him. But all he could think of was what Sabina would have said 
about it. Everything he did, he did for Sabina, the way Sabina would have liked to see it 
done. 
It was a perfectly innocent form of infidelity and one eminently suited to Franz, who 
would never have done his bespectacled student-mistress any harm. He nourished the 
cult of Sabina more as religion than as love. 
Indeed, according to the theology of that religion it was Sabina who had sent him the 
girl. Between his earthly love and his unearthly love, therefore, there was perfect peace. 
And if unearthly love must (for theological reasons) contain a strong dose of the 
inexplicable and incomprehensible (we have only to recall the dictionary of 
misunderstood words and the long lexicon of misunderstandings!), his earthly love 
rested on true understanding. 
The student-mistress was much younger than Sabina, and the musical composition of 
her life had scarcely been outlined; she was grateful to Franz for the motifs he gave her 
to insert. Franz's Grand March was now her creed as well. Music was now her 
Dionysian intoxication. They often went dancing together. They lived in truth, and 

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
67
nothing they did was secret. They sought out the company of friends, colleagues, 
students, and strangers, and enjoyed sitting, drinking, and chatting with them. They 
took frequent excursions to the Alps. Franz would bend over, the girl hopped onto his 
back, and off he ran through the meadows, declaiming at the top of his voice a long 
German poem his mother had taught him as a child. The girl laughed with glee, 
admiring his legs, shoulders, and lungs as she clasped his neck. 
The only thing she could not quite fathom was the curious sympathy he had for the 
countries occupied by the Russian empire. On the anniversary of the invasion, they 
attended a memorial meeting organized by a Czech group in Geneva. 
The room was nearly empty. The speaker had artificially waved gray hair. He read out a 
long speech that bored even the few enthusiasts who had come to hear it. His French 
was grammatically correct but heavily accented. From time to time, to stress a point, he 
would raise his index finger, as if threatening the audience. 
The girl with the glasses could barely suppress her yawns, while Franz smiled blissfully 
at her side. The longer he looked at the pleasing gray-haired man with the admirable 
index finger, the more he saw him as a secret messenger, an angelic intermediary 
between him and his goddess. He closed his eyes and dreamed. He closed his eyes as 
he had closed them on Sabina's body in fifteen European hotels and one in America.