Milan kundera

PART FOUR 
Soul and Body 
When Tereza came home, it was almost half past one in the morning. She went into the 
bathroom, put on her pajamas, and lay down next to Tomas. He was asleep. She 
leaned over his face and, kissing it, detected a curious aroma coming from his hair. She 
took another whiff and yet another. She sniffed him up and down like a dog before 
realizing what it was: the aroma of a woman's sex organs. 
At six the alarm went off. Karenin's great moment had arrived. He always woke up 
much earlier than they did, but did not dare to disturb them. He would wait impatiently 
for the alarm, because it gave him the right to jump up on their bed, trample their 
bodies, and butt them with his muzzle. For a time they had tried to curb him and pushed 
him off the bed, but he was more headstrong than they were and ended by defending 
his rights. Lately, Tereza realized, she positively enjoyed being welcomed into the day 
by Karenin. Waking up was sheer delight for him: he always showed a naive and simple 
amazement at the discovery that he was back on earth; he was sincerely pleased. She, 
on the other hand, awoke with great reluctance with a desire to stave off the day by 
keeping her eyes closed. 
Now he was standing in the entrance hall, gazing up at the hat stand, where his leash 
and collar hung ready. She slipped his head through the collar, and off they went 
together to do the shopping. She needed to pick up some milk, butter, and bread and, 
as usual, his morning roll. Later, he trotted back alongside her, roll in mouth, looking 
proudly from side to side, gratified by the attention he attracted from the passersby. 

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Once home, he would stretch out with his roll on the threshold of the bedroom and wait 
for Tomas to take notice of him, creep up to him, snarl at him, and make believe he was 
trying to snatch his roll away from him. That was how it went every day. Not until they 
had chased each other through the flat for at least five minutes would Karenin scramble 
under a table and gobble up the roll. 
This time, however, he waited in vain for his morning ritual. Tomas had a small 
transistor radio on the table in front of him and was listening to it intently. 
It was a program about the Czech emigration, a montage of private conversations 
recorded with the latest bugging devices by a Czech spy who had infiltrated the emigre 
community and then returned in great glory to Prague. It was insignificant prattle dotted 
with some harsh words about the occupation regime, but here and there one emigre 
would call another an imbecile or a fraud. These trivial remarks were the point of the 
broadcast. They were meant to prove not merely that emigres had bad things to say 
about the Soviet Union (which neither surprised nor upset anyone in the country), but 
that they call one another names and make free use of dirty words. People use filthy 
language all day long, but when they turn on the radio and hear a well-known 
personality, someone they respect, saying fuck in every sentence, they feel somehow 
let down. 
It all started with Prochazka, said Tomas. 
Jan Prochazka, a forty-year-old Czech novelist with the strength and vitality of an ox, 
began criticizing public affairs vociferously even before 1968. He then became one of 
the best-loved figures of the Prague Spring, that dizzying liberalization of Communism 
which ended with the Russian invasion. Shortly after the invasion the press initiated a 
smear campaign against him, but the more they smeared, the more people liked him. 
Then (in 1970, to be exact) the Czech radio broadcast a series of private talks between 
Prochazka and a professor friend of his which had taken place two years before (that is, 
in the spring of 1968). For a long time, neither of them had any idea that the professor's 
flat was bugged and their every step dogged. Prochazka loved to regale his friends with 
hyperbole and excess. Now his excesses had become a weekly radio series. The 
secret police, who produced and directed the show, took pains to emphasize the 
sequences in which Prochazka made fun of his friends—Dubcek, for instance. People 
slander their friends at the drop of a hat, but they were more shocked by the much-
loved Prochazka than by the much-hated secret police. 
Tomas turned off the radio and said, Every country has its secret police. But a secret 
police that broadcasts its tapes over the radio—there's something that could happen 
only in Prague, something absolutely without precedent!
I know a precedent, said Tereza. When I was fourteen I kept a secret diary. I was 
terrified that someone might read it so I kept it hidden in the attic. Mother sniffed it out. 
One day at dinner, while we were all hunched over our soup, she took it out of her 
pocket and said, 'Listen carefully now, everybody!' And after every sentence, she burst 
out laughing. They all laughed so hard they couldn't eat.

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He always tried to get her to stay in bed and let him have breakfast alone. She never 
gave in. Tomas was at work from seven to four, Tereza from four to midnight. If she 
were to miss breakfast with him, the only time they could actually talk together was on 
Sundays. That was why she got up when he did and then went back to bed. 
This morning, however, she was afraid of going back to sleep, because at ten she was 
due at the sauna on Zofin Island. The sauna, though coveted by the many, could 
accommodate only the few, and the only way to get in was by pull. Luckily, the cashier 
was the wife of a professor removed from the university after 1968 and the professor a 
friend of a former patient of Tomas's. Tomas told the patient, the patient told the profes-
sor, the professor told his wife, and Tereza had a ticket waiting for her once a week. 
She walked there. She detested the trams constantly packed with people pushing into 
one another's hate-filled embraces, stepping on one another's feet, tearing off one 
another's coat buttons, and shouting insults. 
It was drizzling. As people rushed along, they began opening umbrellas over their 
heads, and all at once the streets were crowded, too. Arched umbrella roofs collided 
with one another. The men were courteous, and when passing Tereza they held their 
umbrellas high over their heads and gave her room to go by. But the women would not 
yield; each looked straight ahead, waiting for the other woman to acknowledge her 
inferiority and step aside. The meeting of the umbrellas was a test of strength. At first 
Tereza gave way, but when she realized her courtesy was not being reciprocated, she 
started clutching her umbrella like the other women and ramming it forcefully against 
the oncoming umbrellas. No one ever said Sorry. For the most part no one said 
anything, though once or twice she did hear a Fat cow! or Fuck you!
The women thus armed with umbrellas were both young and old, but the younger 
among them proved the more steeled warriors. Tereza recalled the days of the invasion 
and the girls in miniskirts carrying flags on long staffs. Theirs was a sexual vengeance: 
the Russian soldiers had been kept in enforced celibacy for several long years and 
must have felt they had landed on a planet invented by a science fiction writer, a planet 
of stunning women who paraded their scorn on beautiful long legs the likes of which 
had not been seen in Russia for the past five or six centuries. 
She had taken many pictures of those young women against a backdrop of tanks. How 
she had admired them! And now these same women were bumping into her, meanly 
and spitefully. Instead of flags, they held umbrellas, but they held them with the same 
pride. They were ready to fight as obstinately against a foreign army as against an 
umbrella that refused to move out of their way. 
She came out into Old Town Square—the stern spires of Tyn Church, the irregular 
rectangle of Gothic and baroque houses. Old Town Hall, which dated from the 
fourteenth century and had once stretched over a whole side of the square, was in ruins 
and had been so for twenty-seven years. Warsaw, Dresden, Berlin, Cologne, 
Budapest—all were horribly scarred in the last war. But their inhabitants had built them 
up again and painstakingly restored the old historical sections. The people of Prague 
had an inferiority complex with respect to these other cities. Old Town Hall was the only 

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monument of note destroyed in the war, and they decided to leave it in ruins so that no 
Pole or German could accuse them of having suffered less than their share. In front of 
the glorious ruins, a reminder for now and eternity of the evils perpetrated by war, stood 
a steel-bar reviewing stand for some demonstration or other that the Communist Party 
had herded the people of Prague to the day before or would be herding them to the day 
after. 
Gazing at the remains of Old Town Hall, Tereza was suddenly reminded of her mother: 
that perverse need one has to expose one's ruins, one's ugliness, to parade one's 
misery, to uncover the stump of one's amputated arm and force the whole world to look 
at it. Everything had begun reminding her of her mother lately. Her mother's world, 
which she had fled ten years before, seemed to be coming back to her, surrounding her 
on all sides. That was why she told Tomas that morning about how her mother had 
read her secret diary at the dinner table to an accompaniment of guffaws. When a 
private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the 
world is turning into a concentration camp? 
Almost from childhood, Tereza had used the term to express how she felt about life with 
her family. A concentration camp is a world in which people live crammed together con-
stantly, night and day. Brutality and violence are merely secondary (and not in the least 
indispensable) characteristics. A concentration camp is the complete obliteration of 
privacy. Prochazka, who was not allowed to chat with a friend over a bottle of wine in 
the shelter of privacy, lived (unknown to him—a fatal error on his part!) in a 
concentration camp. Tereza lived in the concentration camp when she lived with her 
mother. Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was nothing 
exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which we are born and 
from which we can escape only with the greatest of efforts. 
The women sitting on the three terraced benches were packed in so tightly that they 
could not help touching. Sweating away next to Tereza was a woman of about thirty 
with a very pretty face. She had two unbelievably large, pendulous breasts hanging 
from her shoulders, bouncing at the slightest movement. When the woman got up, 
Tereza saw that her behind was also like two enormous sacks and that it had nothing in 
common with her fine face. 
Perhaps the woman stood frequently in front of the mirror observing her body, trying to 
peer through it into her soul, as Tereza had done since childhood. Surely she, too, had 
harbored the blissful hope of using her body as a poster for her soul. But what a 
monstrous soul it would have to be if it reflected that body, that rack for four pouches. 
Tereza got up and rinsed herself off under the shower. Then she went out into the 
open. It was still drizzling. Standing just above the Vltava on a slatted deck, and 
sheltered from the eyes of the city by a few square feet of tall wooden panel, she 
looked down to see the head of the woman she had just been thinking about. It was 
bobbing on the surface of the rushing river. 
The woman smiled up at her. She had a delicate nose, large brown eyes, and a childish 
glance. 

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As she climbed the ladder, her tender features gave way to two sets of quivering 
pouches spraying tiny drops of cold water right and left. 
Tereza went in to get dressed and stood in front of the large mirror. 
No, there was nothing monstrous about her body. She had no pouches hanging from 
her shoulders; in fact, her breasts were quite small. Her mother used to ridicule her for 
having such small breasts, and she had had a complex about them until Tomas came 
along. But reconciled to their size as she was, she was still mortified by the very large, 
very dark circles around her nipples. Had she been able to design her own body, she 
would have chosen inconspicuous nipples, the kind that scarcely protrude from the arch 
of the breast and all but blend in color with the rest of the skin. She thought of her 
areolae as big crimson targets painted by a primitivist of pornography for the poor. 
Looking at herself, she wondered what she would be like if her nose grew a millimeter a 
day. How long would it take before her face began to look like someone else's? 
And if various parts of her body began to grow and shrink and Tereza no longer looked 
like herself, would she still be herself, would she still be Tereza? 
Of course. Even if Tereza were completely unlike Tereza, her soul inside her would be 
the same and look on in amazement at what was happening to her body. 
Then what was the relationship between Tereza and her body? Had her body the right 
to call itself Tereza? And if not, then what did the name refer to? Merely something 
incorporeal, intangible? 
(These are questions that had been going through Tereza's head since she was a child. 
Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only 
the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. 
A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is 
questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the 
boundaries of human existence.) 
Tereza stood bewitched before the mirror, staring at her body as if it were alien to her, 
alien and yet assigned to her and no one else. She felt disgusted by it. It lacked the 
power to become the only body in Tomas's life. It had disappointed and deceived her. 
All that night she had had to inhale the aroma of another woman's groin from his hair! 
Suddenly she longed to dismiss her body as one dismisses a servant: to stay on with 
Tomas only as a soul and send her body into the world to behave as other female 
bodies behave with male bodies. If her body had failed to become the only body for 
Tomas, and thereby lost her the biggest battle of her life, it could just as well go off on 
its own! 
She went home and forced herself to eat a stand-up lunch in the kitchen. At half past 
three, she put Karenin on his leash and walked (walking again) to the outskirts of town 
where her hotel was. When they fired Tereza from her job at the magazine, she found 
work behind the bar of a hotel. It happened several months after she came back from 

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Zurich: they could not forgive her, in the end, for the week she spent photographing 
Russian tanks. She got the job through friends, other people who had taken refuge 
there when thrown out of work by the Russians: a former professor of theology in the 
accounting office, an ambassador (who had protested against the invasion on foreign 
television) at the reception desk. 
She was worried about her legs again. While working as a waitress in the small-town 
restaurant, she had been horrified at the sight of the older waitresses' varicose veins, a 
professional hazard that came of a life of walking, running, and standing with heavy 
loads. But the new job was less demanding: although she began each shift by dragging 
out heavy cases of beer and mineral water, all she had to do then was stand behind the 
bar, serve the customers their drinks, and wash out the glasses in the small sink on her 
side of the bar. And through it all she had Karenin lying docilely at her feet. 
It was long past midnight before she had finished her accounts and delivered the cash 
receipts to the hotel director. She then went to say good-bye to the ambassador, who 
had night duty. The door behind the reception desk led to a tiny room with a narrow cot 
where he could take a nap. The wall above the cot was covered with framed 
photographs of himself and various people smiling at the camera or shaking his hand or 
sitting next to him at a table and signing something or other. Some of them were 
autographed. In the place of honor hung a picture showing, side by side with his own 
face, the smiling face of John F. Kennedy. 
When Tereza entered the room that night, she found him talking not to Kennedy but to 
a man of about sixty whom she had never seen before and who fell silent as soon as he 
saw her. 
It's all right, said the ambassador. She's a friend. You can speak freely in front of her. 
Then he turned to Tereza. His son got five years today.
During the first days of the invasion, she learned, the man's son and some friends had 
stood watch over the entrance to a building housing the Russian army special staff. 
Since any Czechs they saw coming or going were clearly agents in the service of the 
Russians, he and his friends trailed them, traced the number plates of their cars, and 
passed on the information to the pro-Dubcek clandestine radio and television 
broadcasters, who then warned the public. In the process the boy and his friends had 
given one of the traitors a thorough going over. 
The boy's father said, This photograph was the only corpus delicti. He denied it all until 
they showed it to him.
He took a clipping out of his wallet. It came out in the 
Times
in the autumn of 1968.
It was a picture of a young man grabbing another man by the throat and a crowd 
looking on in the background. Collaborator Punished read the caption. 
Tereza let out her breath. No, it wasn't one of hers. 

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Walking home with Karenin through nocturnal Prague, she thought of the days she had 
spent photographing tanks. How naive they had been, thinking they were risking their 
lives for their country when in fact they were helping the Russian police. 
She got home at half past one. Tomas was asleep. His hair gave off the aroma of a 
woman's groin. 
What is flirtation? One might say that it is behavior leading another to believe that 
sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty. 
In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee. 
When Tereza stood behind the bar, the men whose drinks she poured flirted with her. 
Was she annoyed by the unending ebb and flow of flattery, double entendres, off-color 
stories, propositions, smiles, and glances? Not in the least. She had an irresistible 
desire to expose her body (that alien body she wanted to expel into the big wide world) 
to the undertow. 
Tomas kept trying to convince her that love and lovemaking were two different things. 
She refused to understand. Now she was surrounded by men she did not care for in the 
slightest. What would making love with them be like? She yearned to try it, if only in the 
form of that no-guarantee promise called flirting. 
Let there be no mistake: Tereza did not wish to take revenge on Tomas; she merely 
wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she had become a burden to him: 
she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the 
lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn 
lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell. 
If for some women flirting is second nature, insignificant, routine, for Tereza it had 
developed into an important field of research with the goal of teaching her who she was 
and what she was capable of. But by making it important and serious, she deprived it of 
its lightness, and it became forced, labored, overdone. She disturbed the balance 
between promise and lack of guarantee (which, when maintained, is a sign of flirtistic 
virtuosity); she promised too ardently, and without making it clear that the promise 
involved no guarantee on her part. Which is another way of saying that she gave 
everyone the impression of being there for the taking. But when men responded by 
asking for what they felt they had been promised, they met with strong resistance, and 
their only explanation for it was that she was deceitful and malicious. 
One day, a boy of about sixteen perched himself on a bar stool and dropped a few 
provocative phrases that stood out in the general conversation like a false line in a 
drawing, a line that can be neither continued nor erased. 
That's some pair of legs you've got there.
So you can see through wood! she fired back. I've watched you in the street, he 
responded, but by then she had turned away and was serving another customer. When 
she had finished, he ordered a cognac. She shook her head. But I'm eighteen! he 
objected. May I see your identification card? Tereza said. You may not, the boy 

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answered. Then how about a soft drink? said Tereza. Without a word, the boy stood up 
from the bar stool and left. He was back about a half hour later. With exaggerated 
gestures, he took a seat at the bar. There was enough alcohol on his breath to cover a 
ten-foot radius. Give me that soft drink, he commanded. 
Why, you're drunk! said Tereza. The boy pointed to a sign hanging on the wall behind 
Tereza's back: Sale of Alcoholic Beverages to Minors Is Strictly Prohibited. You are 
prohibited from serving me alcohol, he said, sweeping his arm from the sign to Tereza, 
but I am not prohibited from being drunk.
Where did you get so drunk? Tereza asked. In the bar across the street, he said, 
laughing, and asked again for a soft drink. 
Well, why didn't you stay there? Because I wanted to look at you, he said. I love you! 
His face contorted oddly as he said it, and Tereza had trouble deciding whether he was 
sneering, making advances, or joking. Or was he simply so drunk that he had no idea 
what he was saying? 
She put the soft drink down in front of him and went back to her other customers. The I 
love you! seemed to have exhausted the boy's resources. He emptied his glass in 
silence, left money on the counter, and slipped out before Tereza had time to look up 
again. 
A moment after he left, a short, bald-headed man, who was on his third vodka, said, 
You ought to know that serving young people alcohol is against the law.
I didn't serve him alcohol! That was a soft drink!
I saw what you slipped into it!
What are you talking about?
Give me another vodka, said the bald man, and added, I've had my eye on you for 
some time now.
Then why not be grateful for the view of a beautiful woman and keep your mouth shut? 
interjected a tall man who had stepped up to the bar in time to observe the entire 
scene. 
You stay out of this! shouted the bald man. What business is it of yours?
And what business is it of yours, if I may ask? the tall man retorted. 
Tereza served the bald man his vodka. He downed it at one gulp, paid, and departed. 
Thank you, said Tereza to the tall man. 
Don't mention it, said the tall man, and went his way, too. 

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A few days later, he turned up at the bar again. When she saw him, she smiled at him 
like a friend. Thanks again. That bald fellow comes in all the time. He's terribly 
unpleasant.
Forget him.
What makes him want to hurt me?
He's a petty little drunk. Forget him.
If you say so.
The tall man looked in her eyes. Promise?
I promise.
I like hearing you make me promises, he said, still looking in her eyes. 
The flirtation was on: the behavior leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is 
possible, even though the possibility itself remains in the realm of theory, in suspense. 
What's a beautiful girl like you doing in the ugliest part of Prague?
And you? she countered. What are you doing in the ugliest part of Prague?
He told her he lived nearby. He was an engineer and had stopped off on his way home 
from work the other day by sheer chance. 
When Tereza looked at Tomas, her eyes went not to his eyes but to a point three or 
four inches higher, to his hair, which gave off the aroma of other women's groins. 
I can't take it anymore, Tomas. I know I shouldn't complain. Ever since you came back 
to Prague for me, I've forbidden myself to be jealous. I don't want to be jealous. I 
suppose I'm just not strong enough to stand up to it. Help me, please!
He put his arm in hers and took her to the park where years before they had gone on 
frequent walks. The park had red, blue, and yellow benches. They sat down. 
I understand you. I know what you want, said Tomas. I've taken care of everything. All 
you have to do is climb Petrin Hill.
Petrin Hill? She felt a surge of anxiety. Why Petrin Hill?
You'll see when you get up there.
She was terribly upset about the idea of going. Her body was so weak that she could 
scarcely lift it off the bench. But she was constitutionally unable to disobey Tomas. She 
forced herself to stand. 
She looked back. He was still sitting on the bench, smiling at her almost cheerfully. With 
a wave of the hand he signaled her to move on. 

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Coming out at the foot of Petrin Hill, that great green mound rising up in the middle of 
Prague, she was surprised to find it devoid of people. This was strange, because at 
other times half of Prague seemed to be milling about. It made her anxious. But the hill 
was so quiet and the quiet so comforting that she yielded fully to its embrace. On her 
way up, she paused several times to look back: below her she saw the towers and 
bridges; the saints were shaking their fists and lifting their stone eyes to the clouds. It 
was the most beautiful city in the world. 
At last she reached the top. Beyond the ice-cream and souvenir stands (none of which 
happened to be open) stretched a broad lawn spotted here and there with trees. She 
noticed several men on the lawn. The closer she came to them, the slower she walked. 
There were six in all. They were standing or strolling along at a leisurely pace like 
golfers looking over the course and weighing various clubs in their hands, trying to get 
into the proper frame of mind for a match. 
She finally came near them. Of the six men, three were there to play the same role as 
she: they were unsettled; they seemed eager to ask all sorts of questions, but feared 
making nuisances of themselves and so held their tongues and merely looked about 
inquisitively. 
The other three radiated condescending benevolence. One of them had a rifle in his 
hand. Spotting Tereza, he waved at her and said with a smile, Yes, this is the place.
She gave a nod in reply, but still felt extremely anxious. 
The man added: To avoid an error, this was 
your
choice, wasn t it? 
It would have been easy to say, No, no! It wasn't my choice at all! but she could not 
imagine disappointing Tomas. What excuse, what apology could she find for going back 
home? And so she said, Yes, of course. It was my choice.
The man with the rifle continued: Let me explain why I wish to know. The only time we 
do this is when we are certain that the people who come to us have chosen to die of 
their own accord. We consider it a service.
He gave her so quizzical a glance that she had to assure him once more: No, no, don't 
worry. It was my choice.
Would you like to go first? he asked. 
Because she wanted to put off the execution as long as she could, she said, No, 
please, no. If it's at all possible, I'd like to be last.
As you please, he said, and went off to the others. Neither of his assistants was armed; 
their sole function was to attend to the people who were to die. They took them by the 
arms and walked them across the lawn. The grassy surface proved quite an expanse; it 
ran as far as the eye could see. The people to be executed were allowed to choose 
their own trees. They paused at each one and looked it over carefully, unable to make 
up their minds. Two of them eventually chose plane trees, but the third wandered on 

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and on, no tree apparently striking him as worthy of his death. The assistant who held 
him by the arm guided him along gently and patiently until at last the man lost the 
courage to go on and stopped at a luxuriant maple. 
Then the assistants blindfolded all three men. 
And so three men, their eyes blindfolded, their heads turned to the sky, stood with their 
backs against three trees on the endless lawn. 
The man with the rifle took aim and fired. There was nothing to be heard but the singing 
of birds: the rifle was equipped with a silencing device. There was nothing to be seen 
but the collapse of the man who had been leaning against the maple. 
Without taking a step, the man with the rifle turned in a different direction, and one of 
the other men silently crumpled. And seconds later (again the man with the rifle merely 
turned in place), the third man sank to the lawn. 
One of the assistants went up to Tereza; he was holding a dark-blue ribbon. 
She realized he had come to blindfold her. No, she said, shaking her head, I want to 
watch.
But that was not the real reason why she refused to be blindfolded. She was not one of 
those heroic types who are determined to stare down the firing squad. She simply 
wanted to postpone death. Once her eyes were covered, she would be in death's 
antechamber, from which there was no return. 
The man did not force her; he merely took her arm. But as they walked across the open 
lawn, Tereza was unable to choose a tree. No one forced her to hurry, but she knew 
that in the end she would not escape. Seeing a flowering chestnut ahead of her, she 
walked up and stopped in front of it. She leaned her back against its trunk and looked 
up. She saw the leaves resplendent in the sun; she heard the sounds of the city, faint 
and sweet, like thousands of distant violins. 
The man raised his rifle. 
Tereza felt her courage slipping away. Her weakness drove her to despair, but she 
could do nothing to counteract it. But it wasn't my choice, she said. 
He immediately lowered the barrel of his rifle and said in a gentle voice, If it wasn't your 
choice, we can't do it. We haven't the right.
He said it kindly, as if apologizing to Tereza for not being able to shoot her if it was not 
her choice. His kindness tore at her heartstrings, and she turned her face to the bark of 
the tree and burst into tears. 
Her whole body racked with sobs, she embraced the tree as if it were not a tree, as if it 
were her long-lost father, a grandfather she had never known, a great-grandfather, a 
great-great-grandfather, a hoary old man come to her from the depths of time to offer 
her his face in the form of rough tree bark. 

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
78
Then she turned her head. The three men were far off in the distance by then, 
wandering across the greensward like golfers. The one with the rifle even held it like a 
golf club. 
Walking down the paths of Petrin Hill, she could not wean her thoughts from the man 
who was supposed to shoot her but did not. Oh, how she longed for him! Someone had 
to help her, after all! Tomas wouldn't. Tomas was sending her to her death. Someone 
else would have to help her! 
The closer she got to the city, the more she longed for the man with the rifle and the 
more she feared Tomas. He would never forgive her for failing to keep her word. He 
would never forgive her her cowardice, her betrayal. She had come to the street where 
they lived, and knew she would see him in a minute or two. She was so afraid of seeing 
him that her stomach was in knots and she thought she was going to be sick. 
The engineer started trying to lure her up to his flat. She refused the first two invitations, 
but accepted the third. 
After her usual stand-up lunch in the kitchen, she set off. It was just before two. 
As she approached his house, she could feel her legs slowing down of their own 
accord. 
But then it occurred to her that she was actually being sent to him by Tomas. Hadn't he 
told her time and again that love and sexuality had nothing in common? Well, she was 
merely testing his words, confirming them. She could almost hear him say, I understand 
you. I know what you want. I've taken care of everything. You'll see when you get up 
there.
Yes, all she was doing was following Tomas's commands. 
She wouldn't stay long; long enough for a cup of coffee; long enough to feel what it was 
like to reach the very border of infidelity. She would push her body up to the border, let 
it stand there for a moment as at the stake, and then, when the engineer tried to put his 
arms around her, she would say, as she said to the man with the rifle on Petrin Hill, It 
wasn't my choice.
Whereupon the man would lower the barrel of his rifle and say in a gentle voice, If it 
wasn't your choice, I can't do it. I haven't the right.
And she would turn her face to the bark of the tree and burst into tears. 
The building had been constructed at the turn of the century in a workers' district of 
Prague. She entered a hall with dirty whitewashed walls, climbed a flight of worn stone 
stairs with iron banisters, and turned to the left. It was the second door, no name, no 
bell. She knocked. 
He opened the door. 

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
79
The entire flat consisted of a single room with a curtain setting off the first five or six feet 
from the rest and therefore forming a kind of makeshift anteroom. It had a table, a hot 
plate, and a refrigerator. Stepping beyond the curtain, she saw the oblong of a window 
at the end of a long, narrow space, with books along one side and a daybed and 
armchair against the other. 
It's a very simple place I have here, said the engineer. I hope you don't find it 
depressing.
No, not at all, said Tereza, looking at the wall covered with bookshelves. He had no 
desk, but hundreds of books. She liked seeing them, and the anxiety that had plagued 
her died down somewhat. From childhood, she had regarded books as the emblems of 
a secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her. 
He asked her what she'd like to drink. Wine? 
No, no, no wine. Coffee, if anything. 
He disappeared behind the curtain, and she went over to the bookshelves. One of the 
books caught her eye at once. It was a translation of Sophocles'