Milan kundera

Es muss sein! 
What remains of Franz? 
An inscription reading A RETURN AFTER LONG WANDERINGS. 
And so on and so forth. Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is 
the stopover between being and oblivion. 
PART SEVEN 
Karenin's Smile 
The window looked out on a slope overgrown with the crooked bodies of apple trees. 
The woods cut off the view above the slope, and a crooked line of hills stretched into 
the distance. When, towards evening, a white moon made its way into the pale sky, 
Tereza would go and stand on the threshold. The sphere hanging in the not yet 
darkened sky seemed like a lamp they had forgotten to turn off in the morning, a lamp 
that had burned all day in the room of the dead. 
None of the crooked apple trees growing along the slope could ever leave the spot 
where it had put down its roots, just as neither Tereza nor Tomas could ever leave their 
village. They had sold their car, their television set, and their radio to buy a tiny cottage 
and garden from a farmer who was moving to town. 
Life in the country was the only escape open to them, because only in the country was 
there a constant deficit of people and a surplus of living accommodations. No one 

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bothered to look into the political past of people willing to go off and work in the fields or 
woods; no one envied them. 
Tereza was happy to abandon the city, the drunken barflies molesting her, and the 
anonymous women leaving the smell of their groins in Tomas's hair. The police stopped 
pestering them, and the incident with the engineer so merged with the scene on Petrin 
Hill that she was hard put to tell which was a dream and which the truth. (Was the 
engineer in fact employed by the secret police? Perhaps he was, perhaps not. Men who 
use borrowed flats for rendezvous and never make love to the same woman twice are 
not so rare.) 
In any case, Tereza was happy and felt that she had at last reached her goal: she and 
Tomas were together and alone. Alone? Let me be more precise: living alone meant 
breaking with all their former friends and acquaintances, cutting their life in two like a 
ribbon; however, they felt perfectly at home in the company of the country people they 
worked with, and they sometimes exchanged visits with them. 
The day they met the chairman of the local collective farm at the spa that had Russian 
street names, Tereza discovered in herself a picture of country life originating in 
memories of books she had read or in her ancestors. It was a harmonious world; 
everyone came together in one big happy family with common interests and routines: 
church services on Sundays, a tavern where the men could get away from their 
womenfolk, and a hall in the tavern where a band played on Saturdays and the villagers 
danced. 
Under Communism, however, village life no longer fit the age-old pattern. The church 
was in the neighboring village, and no one went there; the tavern had been turned into 
offices, so the men had nowhere to meet and drink beer, the young people nowhere to 
dance. Celebrating church holidays was forbidden, and no one cared about their 
secular replacements. The nearest cinema was in a town fifteen miles away. So, at the 
end of a day's work filled with boisterous shouting and relaxed chatter, they would all 
shut themselves up within their four walls and, surrounded by contemporary furniture 
emanating bad taste like a cold draft, stare at the refulgent television screen. They 
never paid one another visits besides dropping in on a neighbor for a word or two 
before supper. They all dreamed of moving into town. The country offered them nothing 
in the way of even a minimally interesting life. 
Perhaps it was the fact that no one wished to settle there that caused the state to lose 
its power over the countryside. A farmer who no longer owns his own land and is 
merely a laborer tilling the soil forms no allegiance to either region or work; he has 
nothing to lose, nothing to fear for. As a result of such apathy, the countryside had 
maintained more than a modicum of autonomy and freedom. The chairman of the 
collective farm was not brought in from outside (as were all high-level managers in the 
city); he was elected by the villagers from among themselves. 
Because everyone wanted to leave, Tereza and Tomas were in an exceptional position: 
they had come voluntarily. If the other villagers took advantage of every opportunity to 
make day trips to the surrounding towns, Tereza and Tomas were content to remain 

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where they were, which meant that before long they knew the villagers better than the 
villagers knew one another. 
The collective farm chairman became a truly close friend. He had a wife, four children, 
and a pig he raised like a dog. The pig's name was Mefisto, and he was the pride and 
main attraction of the village. He would answer his master's call and was always clean 
and pink; he paraded about on his hoofs like a heavy-thighed woman in high heels. 
When Karenin first saw Mefisto, he was very upset and circled him, sniffing, for a long 
time. But he soon made friends with him, even to the point of preferring him to the 
village dogs. Indeed, he had nothing but scorn for the dogs, because they were all 
chained to their doghouses and never stopped their silly, unmotivated barking. Karenin 
correctly assessed the value of being one of a kind, and I can state without compunc-
tion that he greatly appreciated his friendship with the pig. 
The chairman was glad to be able to help his former surgeon, though at the same time 
sad that he could do nothing more. Tomas became the driver of the pickup truck that 
took the farm workers out to the fields and hauled equipment. 
The collective farm had four large cow sheds as well as a small stable of forty heifers. 
Tereza was charged with looking after them and taking them out to pasture twice a day. 
Because the closer, easily accessible meadows would eventually be mowed, she had 
to take her herd into the surrounding hills for grazing, gradually moving farther and 
farther out and, in the course of the year, covering all the pastureland round about. As 
in her small-town youth, she was never without a book, and the minute she reached the 
day's pasture she would open it and read. 
Karenin always kept her company. He learned to bark at the young cows when they got 
too frisky and tried to go off on their own; he did so with obvious zest. He was definitely 
the happiest of the three. Never before had his position as keeper of the clock been so 
respected. The country was no place for improvisation; the time in which Tereza and 
Tomas lived was growing closer to the regularity of his time. 
One day, after lunch (a time when they both had an hour to themselves), they took a 
walk with Karenin up the slope behind their cottage. 
I don't like the way he's running, said Tereza. 
Karenin was limping on a hind leg. Tomas bent down and carefully felt all along it. Near 
the hock he found a small bump. 
The next day he sat him in the front seat of the pickup and drove, during his rounds, to 
the neighboring village, where the local veterinarian lived. A week later, he paid him 
another visit. He came home with the news that Karenin had cancer. 
Within three days, Tomas himself, with the vet in attendance, had operated on him. 
When Tomas brought him home, Karenin had not quite come out of the anesthesia. He 
lay on the rug next to their bed with his eyes open, whimpering, his thigh shaved bare 
and the incision and six stitches painfully visible. 

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At last he tried to stand up. He failed. 
Tereza was terrified that he would never walk again. 
Don't worry, said Tomas. He's still under the anesthetic.
She tried to pick him up, but he snapped at her. It was the first time he'd ever tried to 
bite Tereza! 
He doesn't know who you are, said Tomas. He doesn't recognize you.
They lifted him onto their bed, where he quickly fell asleep, as did they. 
At three o'clock that morning, he suddenly woke them up, wagging his tail and climbing 
all over them, cuddling up to them, unable to have his fill. 
It was the first time he'd ever got them up, too! He had always waited until one of them 
woke up before he dared jump on them. 
But when he suddenly came to in the middle of the night, he could not control himself. 
Who can tell what distances he covered on his way back? Who knows what phantoms 
he battled? And now that he was at home with his dear ones, he felt compelled to share 
his overwhelming joy, a joy of return and rebirth. 
The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him 
dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a 
man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over 
other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify 
the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse. Yes, the right 
to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the 
bloodiest of wars. 
The reason we take that right for granted is that we stand at the top of the hierarchy. 
But let a third party enter the game—a visitor from another planet, for example, 
someone to whom God says, Thou shalt have dominion over creatures of all other stars 
—and all at once taking Genesis for granted becomes problematical. Perhaps a man 
hitched to the cart of a Martian or roasted on the spit by inhabitants of the Milky Way 
will recall the veal cutlet he used to slice on his dinner plate and apologize (belatedly!) 
to the cow. 
Walking along with her heifers, driving them in front of her, Tereza was constantly 
obliged to use discipline, because young cows are frisky and like to run off into the 
fields. Karenin kept her company. He had been going along daily to the pasture with her 
for two years. He always enjoyed being strict with the heifers, barking at them, 
asserting his authority. (His God had given him dominion over cows, and he was proud 
of it.) Today, however, he was having great trouble making his way, and hobbled along 
on three legs; the fourth had a wound on it, and the wound was festering. Tereza kept 
bending down and stroking his back. Two weeks after the operation, it became clear 
that the cancer had continued to spread and that Karenin would fare worse and worse. 

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Along the way, they met a neighbor who was hurrying off to a cow shed in her rubber 
boots. The woman stopped long enough to ask, What's wrong with the dog? It seems to 
be limping. He has cancer, said Tereza. There's no hope. And the lump in her throat 
kept her from going on. The woman noticed Tereza's tears and nearly lost her temper: 
Good heavens! Don't tell me you're going to bawl your head off over a dog! She was 
not being vicious; she was a kind woman and merely wanted to comfort Tereza. Tereza 
understood, and had spent enough time in the country to realize that if the local 
inhabitants loved every rabbit as she loved Karenin, they would be unable to kill any of 
them and they and their animals would soon starve to death. Still, the woman's words 
struck her as less than friendly. I understand, she answered without protest, but quickly 
turned her back and went her way. The love she bore her dog made her feel cut off, 
isolated. With a sad smile, she told herself that she needed to hide it more than she 
would an affair. People are indignant at the thought of someone loving a dog. But if the 
neighbor had discovered that Tereza had been unfaithful to Tomas, she would have 
given Tereza a playful pat on the back as a sign of secret solidarity. 
Be that as it may, Tereza continued on her path, and, watching her heifers rub against 
one another, she thought what nice animals they were. Calm, guileless, and sometimes 
childishly animated, they looked like fat fifty-year-olds pretending they were fourteen. 
There was nothing more touching than cows at play. Tereza took pleasure in their 
antics and could not help thinking (it is an idea that kept coming back to her during her 
two years in the country) that man is as much a parasite on the cow as the tapeworm is 
on man: We have sucked their udders like leeches. Man the cow parasite is probably 
how non-man defines man in his zoology books. 
Now, we may treat this definition as a joke and dismiss it with a condescending laugh. 
But since Tereza took it seriously, she found herself in a precarious position: her ideas 
were dangerous and distanced her from the rest of mankind. Even though Genesis 
says that God gave man dominion over all animals, we can also construe it to mean 
that He merely entrusted them to man's care. Man was not the planet's master, merely 
its administrator, and therefore eventually responsible for his administration. Descartes 
took a decisive step forward: he made man