Milan kundera

PART FIVE 
Lightness and Weight 
When Tereza unexpectedly came to visit Tomas in Prague, he made love to her, as I 
pointed out in Part One, that very day, or rather, that very hour, but suddenly thereafter 
she became feverish. As she lay in his bed and he stood over her, he had the 
irrepressible feeling that she was a child who had been put in a bulrush basket and sent 
downstream to him. 

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"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
89
The image of the abandoned child had consequently become dear to him, and he often 
reflected on the ancient myths in which it occurred. It was apparently with this in mind 
that he picked up a translation of Sophocles' 
Oedipus.
The story of Oedipus is well known: Abandoned as an infant, he was taken to King 
Polybus, who raised him. One day, when he had grown into a youth, he came upon a 
dignitary riding along a mountain path. A quarrel arose, and Oedipus killed the 
dignitary. Later he became the husband of Queen Jocasta and ruler of Thebes. Little 
did he know that the man he had killed in the mountains was his father and the woman 
with whom he slept his mother. In the meantime, fate visited a plague on his subjects 
and tortured them with great pestilences. When Oedipus realized that he himself was 
the cause of their suffering, he put out his own eyes and wandered blind away from 
Thebes. 
Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the 
work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made not by 
criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. 
They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. 
Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore 
murderers. 
Then everyone took to shouting at the Communists: You're the ones responsible for our 
country's misfortunes (it had grown poor and desolate), for its loss of independence (it 
had fallen into the hands of the Russians), for its judicial murders! 
And the accused responded: We didn't know! We were deceived! We were true 
believers! Deep in our hearts we are innocent! 
In the end, the dispute narrowed down to a single question: Did they really not know or 
were they merely making believe? 
Tomas followed the dispute closely (as did his ten million fellow Czechs) and was of the 
opinion that while there had definitely been Communists who were not completely 
unaware of the atrocities (they could not have been ignorant of the horrors that had 
been perpetrated and were still being perpetrated in postrevolutionary Russia), it was 
probable that the majority of the Communists had not in fact known of them. 
But, he said to himself, whether they knew or didn't know is not the main issue; the 
main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn't know. Is a fool on the throne 
relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool? 
Let us concede that a Czech public prosecutor in the early fifties who called for the 
death of an innocent man was deceived by the Russian secret police and the 
government of his own country. But now that we all know the accusations to have been 
absurd and the executed to have been innocent, how can that selfsame public 
prosecutor defend his purity of heart by beating himself on the chest and proclaiming, 
My conscience is clear! I didn't know! I was a believer! Isn't his I didn't know! I was a 
believer! at the very root of his irreparable guilt? 

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"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
90
It was in this connection that Tomas recalled the tale of Oedipus: Oedipus did not know 
he was sleeping with his own mother, yet when he realized what had happened, he did 
not feel innocent. Unable to stand the sight of the misfortunes he had wrought by not 
knowing, he put out his eyes and wandered blind away from Thebes. 
When Tomas heard Communists shouting in defense of their inner purity, he said to 
himself, As a result of your not knowing, this country has lost its freedom, lost it for 
centuries, perhaps, and you shout that you feel no guilt? How can you stand the sight of 
what you've done? How is it you aren't horrified? Have you no eyes to see? If you had 
eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes! 
The analogy so pleased him that he often used it in conversation with friends, and his 
formulation grew increasingly precise and elegant. 
Like all intellectuals at the time, he read a weekly newspaper published in three 
hundred thousand copies by the Union of Czech Writers. It was a paper that had 
achieved considerable autonomy within the regime and dealt with issues forbidden to 
others. Consequently, it was the writers' paper that raised the issue of who bore the 
burden of guilt for the judicial murders resulting from the political trials that marked the 
early years of Communist power. 
Even the writers' paper merely repeated the same question: Did they know or did they 
not? Because Tomas found this question second-rate, he sat down one day, wrote 
down his reflections on Oedipus, and sent them to the weekly. A month later he 
received an answer: an invitation to the editorial offices. The editor who greeted him 
was short but as straight as a ruler. He suggested that Tomas change the word order in 
one of the sentences. And soon the text made its appearance—on the next to the last 
page, in the Letters to the Editor section. 
Tomas was far from overjoyed. They had considered it necessary to ask him to the 
editorial offices to approve a change in word order, but then, without asking him, 
shortened his text by so much that it was reduced to its basic thesis (making it too 
schematic and aggressive). He didn't like it anymore. 
All this happened in the spring of 1968. Alexander Dubcek was in power, along with 
those Communists who felt guilty and were willing to do something about their guilt. But 
the other Communists, the ones who kept shouting how innocent they were, were afraid 
that the enraged nation would bring them to justice. They complained daily to the 
Russian ambassador, trying to drum up support. When Tomas's letter appeared, they 
shouted: See what things have come to! Now they're telling us publicly to put our eyes 
out! 
Two or three months later the Russians decided that free speech was inadmissible in 
their