Milan kundera

Anna Karenina
under her arm. 
Not even after she rang the doorbell and he opened the door would she part with it. It 
was like a ticket into Tomas's world. She realized that she had nothing but that 
miserable ticket, and the thought brought her nearly to tears. To keep from crying, she 
talked too much and too loudly, and she laughed. And again he took her in his arms 
almost at once and they made love. She had entered a mist in which nothing could be 
seen and only her scream could be heard. 
It was no sigh, no moan; it was a real scream. She screamed so hard that Tomas had 
to turn his head away from her face, afraid that her voice so close to his ear would 
rupture his eardrum. The scream was not an expression of sensuality. Sensuality is the 
total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to 
catch every sound. But her scream aimed at crippling the senses, preventing all seeing 

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and hearing. What was screaming in fact was the naive idealism of her love trying to 
banish all contradictions, banish the duality of body and soul, banish perhaps even 
time. 
Were her eyes closed? No, but they were not looking anywhere. She kept them fixed 
on the void of the ceiling. At times she twisted her head violently from side to side. 
When the scream died down, she fell asleep at his side, clutching his hand. She held 
his hand all night. 
Even at the age of eight she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and 
making believe she was holding the hand of the man whom she loved, the man of her 
life. So if in her sleep she pressed Tomas's hand with such tenacity, we can understand 
why: she had been training for it since childhood. 
A young woman forced to keep drunks supplied with beer and siblings with clean 
underwear—instead of being allowed to pursue something higher —stores up great 
reserves of vitality, a vitality never dreamed of by university students yawning over their 
books. Tereza had read a good deal more than they, and learned a good deal more 
about life, but she would never realize it. The difference between the university 
graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the 
extent of vitality and self-confidence. The elan with which Tereza flung herself into her 
new Prague existence was both frenzied and precarious. She seemed to be expecting 
someone to come up to her any day and say, What are you doing here? Go back where 
you belong! All her eagerness for life hung by a thread: Tomas's voice. For it was 
Tomas's voice that had once coaxed forth her timorous soul from its hiding place in her 
bowels. 
Tereza had a job in a darkroom, but it was not enough for her. She wanted to take 
pictures, not develop them. Tomas's friend Sabina lent her three or four monographs of 
famous photographers, then invited her to a cafe and explained over the open books 
what made each of the pictures interesting. Tereza listened with silent concentration, 
the kind few professors ever glimpse on their students' faces. 
Thanks to Sabina, she came to understand the ties between photography and painting, 
and she made Tomas take her to every exhibit that opened in Prague. Before long, she 
was placing her own pictures in the illustrated weekly where she worked, and finally she 
left the darkroom for the staff of professional photographers. 
On the evening of that day, she and Tomas went out to a bar with friends to celebrate 
her promotion. Everyone danced. Tomas began to mope. Back at home, after some 
prodding from Tereza, he admitted that he had been jealous watching her dance with a 
colleague of his. 
You mean you were really jealous? she asked him ten times or more, incredulously, as 
though someone had just informed her she had been awarded a Nobel Prize. 

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Then she put her arm around his waist and began dancing across the room. The step 
she used was not the one she had shown off in the bar. It was more like a village polka, 
a wild romp that sent her legs flying in the air and her torso bouncing all over the room, 
with Tomas in tow. 
Before long, unfortunately, she began to be jealous herself, and Tomas saw her 
jealousy not as a Nobel Prize, but as a burden, a burden he would be saddled with until 
not long before his death. 
While she marched around the pool naked with a large group of other naked women, 
Tomas stood over them in a basket hanging from the pool's arched roof, shouting at 
them, making them sing and do kneebends. The moment one of them did a faulty 
kneebend, he would shoot her. 
Let me return to this dream. Its horror did not begin with Tomas's first pistol shot; it was 
horrifying from the outset. Marching naked in formation with a group of naked women 
was for Tereza the quintessential image of horror. When she lived at home, her mother 
forbade her to lock the bathroom door. What she meant by her injunction was: Your 
body is just like all other bodies; you have no right to shame; you have no reason to 
hide something that exists in millions of identical copies. In her mother's world all 
bodies were the same and marched behind one another in formation. Since childhood, 
Tereza had seen nudity as a sign of concentration camp uniformity, a sign of 
humiliation. 
There was yet another horror at the very beginning of the dream: all the women had to 
sing! Not only were their bodies identical, identically worthless, not only were their 
bodies mere resounding soulless mechanisms—the women rejoiced over it! Theirs was 
the joyful solidarity of the soulless. The women were pleased at having thrown off the 
ballast of the soul—that laughable conceit, that illusion of uniqueness—to become one 
like the next. Tereza sang with them, but did not rejoice. She sang because she was 
afraid that if she did not sing the women would kill her. 
But what was the meaning of the fact that Tomas shot at them, toppling one after 
another into the pool, dead? 
The women, overjoyed by their sameness, their lack of diversity, were, in fact, 
celebrating their imminent demise, which would render their sameness absolute. So 
Tomas's shots were merely the joyful climax to their morbid march. After every report of 
his pistol, they burst into joyous laughter, and as each corpse sank beneath the 
surface, they sang even louder. 
But why was Tomas the one doing the shooting? And why was he out to shoot Tereza 
with the rest of them? 
Because he was the one who sent Tereza to join them. That was what the dream was 
meant to tell Tomas, what Tereza was unable to tell him herself. She had come to him 
to escape her mother's world, a world where all bodies were equal. She had come to 
him to make her body unique, irreplaceable. But he, too, had drawn an equal sign 
between her and the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them alike, made 

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no, absolutely no distinction between Tereza's body and the other bodies. He had sent 
her back into the world she tried to escape, sent her to march naked with the other 
naked women. 
She would dream three series of dreams in succession: the first was of cats going 
berserk and referred to the sufferings she had gone through in her lifetime; the second 
was images of her execution and came in countless variations; the third was of her life 
after death, when humiliation turned into a never-ending state. 
The dreams left nothing to be deciphered. The accusation they leveled at Tomas was 
so clear that his only reaction was to hang his head and stroke her hand without a 
word. 
The dreams were eloquent, but they were also beautiful. That aspect seems to have 
escaped Freud in his theory of dreams. Dreaming is not merely an act of 
communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a 
game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to 
imagine—to dream about things that have not happened—is among mankind's deepest 
needs. Herein lies the danger. If dreams were not beautiful, they would quickly be 
forgotten. But Tereza kept coming back to her dreams, running through them in her 
mind, turning them into legends. Tomas lived under the hypnotic spell cast by the ex-
cruciating beauty of Tereza's dreams. 
Dear Tereza, sweet Tereza, what am I losing you to? he once said to her as they sat 
face to face in a wine cellar. Every night you dream of death as if you really wished to 
quit this world. . . .
It was day; reason and will power were back in place. A drop of red wine ran slowly 
down her glass as she answered. There's nothing I can do about it, Tomas. Oh, I 
understand. I know you love me. I know your infidelities are no great tragedy ...
She looked at him with love in her eyes, but she feared the night ahead, feared her 
dreams. Her life was split. Both day and night were competing for her. 
Anyone whose goal is something higher must expect some day to suffer vertigo. What 
is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower 
comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of 
falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the 
desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves. 
The naked women marching around the swimming pool, the corpses in the hearse 
rejoicing that she, too, was dead— these were the down below she had feared and fled 
once before but which mysteriously beckoned her. These were her vertigo: she heard a 
sweet (almost joyous) summons to renounce her fate and soul. The solidarity of the 
soulless calling her. And in times of weakness, she was ready to heed the call and 
return to her mother. She was ready to dismiss the crew of her soul from the deck of 
her body; ready to descend to a place among her mother's friends and laugh when one 
of them broke wind noisily; ready to march around the pool naked with them and sing. 

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True, Tereza fought with her mother until the day she left home, but let us not forget 
that she never stopped loving her. She would have done anything for her if her mother 
had asked in a loving voice. The only reason she found the strength to leave was that 
she never heard that voice. 
When Tereza's mother realized that her aggressiveness no longer had any power over 
her daughter, she started writing her querulous letters, complaining about her husband, 
her boss, her health, her children, and assuring Tereza she was the only person left in 
her life. Tereza thought that at last, after twenty years, she was hearing the voice of her 
mother's love, and felt like going back. All the more because she felt so weak, so debil-
itated by Tomas's infidelities. They exposed her powerlessness, which in turn led to 
vertigo, the insuperable longing to fall. 
One day her mother phoned to say she had cancer and only a few months to live. The 
news transformed into rebellion Tereza's despair at Tomas's infidelities. She had 
betrayed her mother, she told herself reproachfully, and for a man who did not love her. 
She was willing to forget everything her mother had done to torture her. She was in a 
position to understand her now; they were in the same situation: her mother loved her 
stepfather just as Tereza loved Tomas, and her stepfather tortured her mother with his 
infidelities just as Tomas galled her with his. The cause of her mother's malice was that 
she had suffered so. 
Tereza told Tomas that her mother was ill and that she would be taking a week off to go 
and see her. Her voice was full of spite. 
Sensing that the real reason calling her back to her mother was vertigo, Tomas 
opposed the trip. He rang up the hospital in the small town. Meticulous records of the 
incidence of cancer were kept throughout the country, so he had no trouble finding out 
that Tereza's mother had never been suspected of having the disease nor had she 
even seen a doctor for over a year. 
Tereza obeyed Tomas and did not go to visit her mother. Several hours after the 
decision she fell in the street and injured her knee. She began to teeter as she walked, 
fell almost daily, bumped into things or, at the very least, dropped objects. 
She was in the grip of an insuperable longing to fall. She lived in a constant state of 
vertigo. 
Pick me up, is the message of a person who keeps falling. Tomas kept picking her up, 
patiently. 
I want to make love to you in my studio. It will be like a stage surrounded by people. 
The audience won't be allowed up close, but they won't be able to take their eyes off 
us....
As time passed, the image lost some of its original cruelty and began to excite Tereza. 
She would whisper the details to him while they made love. 

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Then it occurred to her that there might be a way to avoid the condemnation she saw in 
Tomas's infidelities: all he had to do was take her along, take her with him when he 
went to see his mistresses! Maybe then her body would again become the first and only 
among all others. Her body would become his second, his assistant, his alter ego. 
I'll undress them for you, give them a bath, bring them in to you ... she would whisper to 
him as they pressed together. She yearned for the two of them to merge into a 
hermaphrodite. Then the other women's bodies would be their playthings. 
Oh, to be the alter ego of his polygamous life! Tomas refused to understand, but she 
could not get it out of her head, and tried to cultivate her friendship with Sabina. Tereza 
began by offering to do a series of photographs of Sabina. 
Sabina invited Tereza to her studio, and at last she saw the spacious room and its 
centerpiece: the large, square, platform-like bed. 
I feel awful that you've never been here before, said Sabina, as she showed her the 
pictures leaning against the wall. She even pulled out an old canvas, of a steelworks 
under construction, which she had done during her school days, a period when the 
strictest realism had been required of all students (art that was not realistic was said to 
sap the foundations of socialism). In the spirit of the wager of the times, she had tried to 
be stricter than her teachers and had painted in a style concealing the brush strokes 
and closely resembling color photography. 
Here is a painting I happened to drip red paint on. At first I was terribly upset, but then I 
started enjoying it. The trickle looked like a crack; it turned the building site into a 
battered old backdrop, a backdrop with a building site painted on it. I began playing with 
the crack, filling it out, wondering what might be visible behind it. And that's how I 
began my first cycle of paintings. I called it Behind the Scenes. Of course, I couldn't 
show them to anybody. I'd have been kicked out of the Academy. On the surface, there 
was always an impeccably realistic world, but underneath, behind the backdrop's 
cracked canvas, lurked something different, something mysterious or abstract.
After pausing for a moment, she added, On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, 
the unintelligible truth.
Tereza listened to her with the remarkable concentration that few professors ever see 
on the face of a student and began to perceive that all Sabina's paintings, past and 
present, did indeed treat the same idea, that they all featured the confluence of two 
themes, two worlds, that they were all double exposures, so to speak. A landscape 
showing an old-fashioned table lamp shining through it. An idyllic still life of apples, 
nuts, and a tiny, candle-lit Christmas tree showing a hand ripping through the canvas. 
She felt a rush of admiration for Sabina, and because Sabina treated her as a friend it 
was an admiration free of fear and suspicion and quickly turned into friendship. 
She nearly forgot she had come to take photographs. Sabina had to remind her. Tereza 
finally looked away from the paintings only to see the bed set in the middle of the room 
like a platform. 

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Next to the bed stood a small table, and on the table the model of a human head, the 
kind hairdressers put wigs on. Sabina's wig stand sported a bowler hat rather than a 
wig. It used to belong to my grandfather, she said with a smile. 
It was the kind of hat—black, hard, round—that Tereza had seen only on the screen, 
the kind of hat Chaplin wore. She smiled back, picked it up, and after studying it for a 
time, said, Would you like me to take your picture in it?
Sabina laughed for a long time at the idea. Tereza put down the bowler hat, picked up 
her camera, and started taking pictures. 
When she had been at it for almost an hour, she suddenly said, What would you say to 
some nude shots?
Nude shots? Sabina laughed. 
Yes, said Tereza, repeating her proposal more boldly, nude shots.
That calls for a drink, said Sabina, and opened a bottle of wine. 
Tereza felt her body going weak; she was suddenly tongue-tied. Sabina, meanwhile, 
strode back and forth, wine in hand, going on about her grandfather, who'd been the 
mayor of a small town; Sabina had never known him; all he'd left behind was this 
bowler hat and a picture showing a raised platform with several small-town dignitaries 
on it; one of them was Grandfather; it wasn't at all clear what they were doing up there 
on the platform; maybe they were officiating at some ceremony, unveiling a monument 
to a fellow dignitary who had also once worn a bowler hat at public ceremonies. 
Sabina went on and on about the bowler hat and her grandfather until, emptying her 
third glass, she said I'll be right back and disappeared into the bathroom. 
She came out in her bathrobe. Tereza picked up her camera and put it to her eye. 
Sabina threw open the robe. 
The camera served Tereza as both a mechanical eye through which to observe 
Tomas's mistress and a veil by which to conceal her face from her. 
It took Sabina some time before she could bring herself to slip out of the robe entirely. 
The situation she found herself in was proving a bit more difficult than she had 
expected. After several minutes of posing, she went up to Tereza and said, Now it's my 
turn to take your picture. Strip!
Sabina had heard the command Strip! so many times from Tomas that it was engraved 
in her memory. Thus, Tomas's mistress had just given Tomas's command to Tomas's 
wife. The two women were joined by the same magic word. That was Tomas's way of 
unexpectedly turning an innocent conversation with a woman into an erotic situation. 
Instead of stroking, flattering, pleading, he would issue a command, issue it abruptly, 
unexpectedly, softly yet firmly and authoritatively, and at a distance: at such moments 
he never touched the woman he was addressing. He often used it on Tereza as well, 

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and even though he said it softly, even though he whispered it, it was a command, and 
obeying never failed to arouse her. Hearing the word now made her desire to obey 
even stronger, because doing a stranger's bidding is a special madness, a madness all 
the more heady in this case because the command came not from a man but from a 
woman. 
Sabina took the camera from her, and Tereza took off her clothes. There she stood 
before Sabina naked and disarmed. Literally