Milan kundera

Oedipus.
How odd to 
find it here! Years ago, Tomas had given it to her, and after she had read it he went on 
and on about it. Then he sent his reflections to a newspaper, and the article turned their 
life upside down. But now, just looking at the spine of the book seemed to calm her. It 
made her feel as though Tomas had purposely left a trace, a message that her 
presence here was his doing. She took the book off the shelf and opened it. When the 
tall engineer came back into the room, she would ask him why he had it, whether he 
had read it, and what he thought of it. That would be her ruse to turn the conversation 
away from the hazardous terrain of a stranger's flat to the intimate world of Tomas's 
thoughts. 
Then she felt his hand on her shoulder. The man took the book out of her hand, put it 
back on the shelf without a word, and led her over to the daybed. 
Again she recalled the words she had used with the Petrin executioner, and said them 
aloud: But it wasn't my choice!
She believed them to be a miraculous formula that would instantly change the situation, 
but in that room the words lost their magic power. I have a feeling they even 
strengthened the man in his resolve: he pressed her to himself and put his hand on her 
breast. 
Oddly enough, the touch of his hand immediately erased what remained of her anxiety. 
For the engineer's hand referred to her body, and she realized that she (her soul) was 
not at all involved, only her body, her body alone. The body that had betrayed her and 
that she had sent out into the world among other bodies. 
He undid the first button on her blouse and indicated she was to continue. She did not 
comply. She had sent her body out into the world, and refused to take any responsibility 

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"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
80
for it. She neither resisted nor assisted him, her soul thereby announcing that it did not 
condone what was happening but had decided to remain neutral. 
She was nearly immobile while he undressed her. When he kissed her, her lips failed to 
react. But suddenly she felt her groin becoming moist, and she was afraid. 
The excitement she felt was all the greater because she was excited against her will. In 
other words, her soul did condone the proceedings, albeit covertly. But she also knew 
that if the feeling of excitement was to continue, her soul's approval would have to keep 
mute. The moment it said its yes aloud, the moment it tried to take an active part in the 
love scene, the excitement would subside. For what made the soul so excited was that 
the body was acting against its will; the body was betraying it, and the soul was looking 
on. 
Then he pulled off her panties and she was completely naked. When her soul saw her 
naked body in the arms of a stranger, it was so incredulous that it might as well have 
been watching the planet Mars at close range. In the light of the incredible, the soul for 
the first time saw the body as something other than banal; for the first time it looked on 
the body with fascination: all the body's matchless, inimitable, unique qualities had 
suddenly come to the fore. This was not the most ordinary of bodies (as the soul had 
regarded it until then); this was the most extraordinary body. The soul could not tear its 
eyes away from the body's birthmark, the round brown blemish above its hairy triangle. 
It looked upon that mark as its seal, a holy seal it had imprinted on the body, and now a 
stranger's penis was moving blasphemously close to it. 
Peering into the engineer's face, she realized that she would never allow her body, on 
which her soul had left its mark, to take pleasure in the embrace of someone she 
neither knew nor wished to know. She was filled with an intoxicating hatred. She 
collected a gob of saliva to spit in the stranger's face. He was observing her with as 
much eagerness as she him, and noting her rage, he quickened the pace of his 
movements on her body. Tereza could feel orgasm advancing from afar, and shouted 
No, no, no! to resist it, but resisted, constrained, deprived of an outlet, the ecstasy 
lingered all the longer in her body, flowing through her veins like a shot of morphine. 
She thrashed in his arms, swung her fists in the air, and spat in his face. 
Toilets in modern water closets rise up from the floor like white water lilies. The 
architect does all he can to make the body forget how paltry it is, and to make man 
ignore what happens to his intestinal wastes after the water from the tank flushes them 
down the drain. Even though the sewer pipelines reach far into our houses with their 
tentacles, they are carefully hidden from view, and we are happily ignorant of the 
invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and parlia-
ments. 
The bathroom in the old working-class flat on the outskirts of Prague was less 
hypocritical: the floor was covered with gray tile and the toilet rising up from it was 
broad, squat, and pitiful. It did not look like a white water lily; it looked like what it was: 
the enlarged end of a sewer pipe. And since it lacked even a wooden seat, Tereza had 
to perch on the cold enamel rim. 

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"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
81
She was sitting there on the toilet, and her sudden desire to void her bowels was in fact 
a desire to go to the extreme of humiliation, to become only and utterly a body, the 
body her mother used to say was good for nothing but digesting and excreting. And as 
she voided her bowels, Tereza was overcome by a feeling of infinite grief and 
loneliness. Nothing could be more miserable than her naked body perched on the 
enlarged end of a sewer pipe. 
Her soul had lost its onlooker's curiosity, its malice and pride; it had retreated deep into 
the body again, to the farthest gut, waiting desperately for someone to call it out. 
She stood up from the toilet, flushed it, and went into the anteroom. The soul trembled 
in her body, her naked, spurned body. She still felt on her anus the touch of the paper 
she had used to wipe herself. 
And suddenly something unforgettable occurred: suddenly she felt a desire to go in to 
him and hear his voice, his words. If he spoke to her in a soft, deep voice, her soul 
would take courage and rise to the surface of her body, and she would burst out crying. 
She would put her arms around him the way she had put her arms around the chestnut 
tree's thick trunk in her dream. 
Standing there in the anteroom, she tried to withstand the strong desire to burst out 
crying in his presence. She knew that her failure to withstand it would have ruinous 
consequences. She would fall in love with him. 
Just then, his voice called to her from the inner room. Now that she heard that voice by 
itself (divorced from the engineer's tall stature), it amazed her: it was high-pitched and 
thin. How could she have ignored it all this time? 
Perhaps the surprise of that unpleasant voice was what saved her from temptation. She 
went inside, picked up her clothes from the floor, threw them on, and left. 
She had done her shopping and was on her way home. Karenin had the usual roll in his 
mouth. It was a cold morning; there was a slight frost. They were passing a housing 
development, where in the spaces between buildings the tenants maintained small 
flower and vegetable gardens, when Karenin suddenly stood stock still and riveted his 
eyes on something. She looked over, but could see nothing out of the ordinary. Karenin 
gave a tug, and she followed along behind. Only then did she notice the black head and 
large beak of a crow lying on the cold dirt of a barren plot. The bodiless head bobbed 
slowly up and down, and the beak gave out an occasional hoarse and mournful croak. 
Karenin was so excited he dropped his roll. Tereza tied him to a tree to prevent him 
from hurting the crow. Then she knelt down and tried to dig up the soil that had been 
stamped down around the bird to bury it alive. It was not easy. She broke a nail. The 
blood began to flow. 
All at once a rock landed nearby. She turned and caught sight of two nine- or ten-year-
old boys peeking out from behind a wall. She stood up. They saw her move, saw the 
dog by the tree, and ran off. 

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"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
82
Once more she knelt down and scratched away at the dirt. At last she succeeded in 
pulling the crow out of its grave. But the crow was lame and could neither walk nor fly. 
She wrapped it up in the red scarf she had been wearing around her neck, and pressed 
it to her body with her left hand. With her right hand she untied Karenin from the tree. It 
took all the strength she could muster to quiet him down and make him heel. 
She rang the doorbell, not having a free hand for the key. Tomas opened the door. She 
handed him the leash, and with the words Hold him! took the crow into the bathroom. 
She laid it on the floor under the washbasin. It flapped its wings a little, but could move 
no more than that. There was a thick yellow liquid oozing from it. She made a bed of old 
rags to protect it from the cold tiles. From time to time the bird would give a hopeless 
flap of its lame wing and raise its beak as a reproach. 
She sat transfixed on the edge of the bath, unable to take her eyes off the dying crow. 
In its solitude and desolation she saw a reflection of her own fate, and she repeated 
several times to herself, I have no one left in the world but Tomas. 
Did her adventure with the engineer teach her that casual sex has nothing to do with 
love? That it is light, weightless? Was she calmer now? 
Not in the least. 
She kept picturing the following scene: She had come out of the toilet and her body was 
standing in the anteroom naked and spurned. Her soul was trembling, terrified, buried 
in the depths of her bowels. If at that moment the man in the inner room had addressed 
her soul, she would have burst out crying and fallen into his arms. 
She imagined what it would have been like if the woman standing in the anteroom had 
been one of Tomas's mistresses and if the man inside had been Tomas. All he would 
have had to do was say one word, a single word, and the girl would have thrown her 
arms around him and wept. 
Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist 
the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul 
thus responds to his voice. Tomas had no defense against the lure of love, and Tereza 
feared for him every minute of every hour. 
What weapons did she have at her disposal? None but her fidelity. And she offered him 
that at the very outset, the very first day, as if aware she had nothing more to give. 
Their love was an oddly asymmetrical construction: it was supported by the absolute 
certainty of her fidelity like a gigantic edifice supported by a single column. 
Before long, the crow stopped flapping its wings, and gave no more than the twitch of a 
broken, mangled leg. Tereza refused to be separated from it. She could have been 
keeping vigil over a dying sister. In the end, however, she did step into the kitchen for a 
bite to eat. 
When she returned, the crow was dead. 

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"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
83
In the first year of her love, Tereza would cry out during intercourse. Screaming, as I 
have pointed out, was meant to blind and deafen the senses. With time she screamed 
less, but her soul was still blinded by love, and saw nothing. Making love with the 
engineer in the absence of love was what finally restored her soul's sight. 
During her next visit to the sauna, she stood before the mirror again and, looking at 
herself, reviewed the scene of physical love that had taken place in the engineer's flat. 
It was not her lover she remembered. In fact, she would have been hard put to describe 
him. She may not even have noticed what he looked like naked. What she did 
remember (and what she now observed, aroused, in the mirror) was her own body: her 
pubic triangle and the circular blotch located just above it. The blotch, which until then 
she had regarded as the most prosaic of skin blemishes, had become an obsession. 
She longed to see it again and again in that implausible proximity to an alien penis. 
Here I must stress again: She had no desire to see another man's organs. She wished 
to see her own private parts in close proximity to an alien penis. She did not desire her 
lover's body. She desired her own body, newly discovered, intimate and alien beyond 
all others, incomparably exciting. 
Looking at her body speckled with droplets of shower water, she imagined the engineer 
dropping in at the bar. Oh, how she longed for him to come, longed for him to invite her 
back! Oh, how she yearned for it! 
Every day she feared that the engineer would make his appearance and she would be 
unable to say no. But the days passed, and the fear that he would come merged 
gradually into the dread that he would not. 
A month had gone by, and still the engineer stayed away. Tereza found it inexplicable. 
Her frustrated desire receded and turned into