Milan kundera

Anna Karenina
under her arm amounted to false papers; it had given Tomas 
the wrong idea. In spite of their love, they had made each other's life a hell. The fact 
that they loved each other was merely proof that the fault lay not in themselves, in their 
behavior or inconstancy of feeling, but rather in their incompatibility: he was strong and 
she was weak. She was like Dubcek, who made a thirty-second pause in the middle of 
a sentence; she was like her country, which stuttered, gasped for breath, could not 
speak. 
But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough 
to leave. 
And having told herself all this, she pressed her face against Karenin's furry head and 
said, Sorry, Karenin. It looks as though you're going to have to move again.
Sitting crushed into a corner of the train compartment with her heavy suitcase above 
her head and Karenin squeezed against her legs, she kept thinking about the cook at 
the hotel restaurant where she had worked when she lived with her mother. The cook 
would take every opportunity to give her a slap on the behind, and never tired of asking 
her in front of everyone when she would give in and go to bed with him. It was odd that 
he was the one who came to mind. He had always been the prime example of 
everything she loathed. And now all she could think of was looking him up and telling 
him, You used to say you wanted to sleep with me. Well, here I am.
She longed to do something that would prevent her from turning back to Tomas. She 
longed to destroy brutally the past seven years of her life. It was vertigo. A heady, 
insuperable longing to fall. 
We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man 
decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow 
even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, 
wishes to be down, lower than down. 
She tried to talk herself into settling outside of Prague and giving up her profession as a 
photographer. She would go back to the small town from which Tomas's voice had 
once lured her. 
But once in Prague, she found she had to spend some time taking care of various 
practical matters, and began putting off her departure. 

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
39
On the fifth day, Tomas suddenly turned up. Karenin jumped all over him, so it was a 
while before they had to make any overtures to each other. 
They felt they were standing on a snow-covered plain, shivering with cold. 
Then they moved together like lovers who had never kissed before. 
Has everything been all right? he asked. 
Yes, she answered. 
Have you been to the magazine?
I've given them a call.
Well?
Nothing yet. I've been waiting.
For what?
She made no response. She could not tell him that she had been waiting for him. 
Now we return to a moment we already know about. Tomas was desperately unhappy 
and had a bad stomachache. He did not fall asleep until very late at night. 
Soon thereafter Tereza awoke. (There were Russian airplanes circling over Prague, 
and it was impossible to sleep for the noise.) Her first thought was that he had come 
back because of her; because of her, he had changed his destiny. Now he would no 
longer be responsible for her; now she was responsible for him. 
The responsibility, she felt, seemed to require more strength than she could muster. 
But all at once she recalled that just before he had appeared at the door of their flat the 
day before, the church bells had chimed six o'clock. On the day they first met, her shift 
had ended at six. She saw him sitting there in front of her on the yellow bench and 
heard the bells in the belfry chime six. 
No, it was not superstition, it was a sense of beauty that cured her of her depression 
and imbued her with a new will to live. The birds of fortuity had alighted once more on 
her shoulders. There were tears in her eyes, and she was unutterably happy to hear 
him breathing at her side.