Milan kundera

partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other. 
To ensure that erotic friendship never grew into the aggression of love, he would meet 
each of his long-term mistresses only at intervals. He considered this method flawless 
and propagated it among his friends: The important thing is to abide by the rule of 
threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, 
or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least 
three weeks apart.
The rule of threes enabled Tomas to keep intact his liaisons with some women while 
continuing to engage in short-term affairs with many others. He was not always 
understood. The woman who understood him best was Sabina. She was a painter. The 
reason I like you, she would say to him, is you're the complete opposite of kitsch. In the 
kingdom of kitsch you would be a monster.
It was Sabina he turned to when he needed to find a job for Tereza in Prague. 
Following the unwritten rules of erotic friendship, Sabina promised to do everything in 
her power, and before long she had in fact located a place for Tereza in the darkroom 
of an illustrated weekly. Although her new job did not require any particular 
qualifications, it raised her status from waitress to member of the press. When Sabina 
herself introduced Tereza to everyone on the weekly, Tomas knew he had never had a 
better friend as a mistress than Sabina. 
The unwritten contract of erotic friendship stipulated that Tomas should exclude all love 
from his life. The moment he violated that clause of the contract, his other mistresses 
would assume inferior status and become ripe for insurrection. 
Accordingly, he rented a room for Tereza and her heavy suitcase. He wanted to be able 
to watch over her, protect her, enjoy her presence, but felt no need to change his way 
of life. He did not want word to get out that Tereza was sleeping at his place: spending 
the night together was the corpus delicti of love. 

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"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
8
He never spent the night with the others. It was easy enough if he was at their place: he 
could leave whenever he pleased. It was worse when they were at his and he had to 
explain that come midnight he would have to drive them home because he was an 
insomniac and found it impossible to fall asleep in close proximity to another person. 
Though it was not far from the truth, he never dared tell them the whole truth: 
after making love he had an uncontrollable craving to be by himself; waking in the 
middle of the night at the side of an alien body was distasteful to him, rising in the 
morning with an intruder repellent; he had no desire to be overheard brushing his teeth 
in the bathroom, nor was he enticed by the thought of an intimate breakfast. 
That is why he was so surprised to wake up and find Tereza squeezing his hand tightly. 
Lying there looking at her, he could not quite understand what had happened. But as he 
ran through the previous few hours in his mind, he began to sense an aura of hitherto 
unknown happiness emanating from them. 
From that time on they both looked forward to sleeping together. I might even say that 
the goal of their lovemaking was not so much pleasure as the sleep that followed it. She 
especially was affected. Whenever she stayed overnight in her rented room (which 
quickly became only an alibi for Tomas), she was unable to fall asleep; in his arms she 
would fall asleep no matter how wrought up she might have been. He would whisper 
impromptu fairy tales about her, or gibberish, words he repeated monotonously, words 
soothing or comical, which turned into vague visions lulling her through the first dreams 
of the night. He had complete control over her sleep: she dozed off at the second he 
chose. 
While they slept, she held him as on the first night, keeping a firm grip on wrist, finger, 
or ankle. If he wanted to move without waking her, he had to resort to artifice. After 
freeing his finger (wrist, ankle) from her clutches, a process which, since she guarded 
him carefully even in her sleep, never failed to rouse her partially, he would calm her by 
slipping an object into her hand (a rolled-up pajama top, a slipper, a book), which she 
then gripped as tightly as if it were a part of his body. 
Once, when he had just lulled her to sleep but she had gone no farther than dream's 
antechamber and was therefore still responsive to him, he said to her, Good-bye, I'm 
going now. Where? she asked in her sleep. Away, he answered sternly. Then I'm going 
with you, she said, sitting up in bed. No, you can't. I'm going away for good, he said, 
going out into the hall. She stood up and followed him out, squinting. She was naked 
beneath her short nightdress. Her face was blank, expressionless, but she moved 
energetically. He walked through the hall of the flat into the hall of the building (the hall 
shared by all the occupants), closing the door in her face. She flung it open and 
continued to follow him, convinced in her sleep that he meant to leave her for good and 
she had to stop him. He walked down the stairs to the first landing and waited for her 
there. She went down after him, took him by the hand, and led him back to bed. 
Tomas came to this conclusion: Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman 
are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself 
felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) 
but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman). 

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
9
In the middle of the night she started moaning in her sleep. Tomas woke her up, but 
when she saw his face she said, with hatred in her voice, Get away from me! Get away 
from me! Then she told him her dream: The two of them and Sabina had been in a big 
room together. There was a bed in the middle of the room. It was like a platform in the 
theater. Tomas ordered her to stand in the corner while he made love to Sabina. The 
sight of it caused Tereza intolerable suffering. Hoping to alleviate the pain in her heart 
by pains of the flesh, she jabbed needles under her fingernails. It hurt so much, she 
said, squeezing her hands into fists as if they actually were wounded. 
He pressed her to him, and she gradually (trembling violently for a long time) fell asleep 
in his arms. 
Thinking about the dream the next day, he remembered something. He opened a desk 
drawer and took out a packet of letters Sabina had written to him. He was not long in 
finding the following passage: 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....
The worst of it was that the letter was dated. It was quite recent, written long after 
Tereza had moved in with Tomas. 
So you've been rummaging in my letters!
She did not deny it. Throw me out, then!
But he did not throw her out. He could picture her pressed against the wall of Sabina's 
studio jabbing needles up under her nails. He took her fingers between his hands and 
stroked them, brought them to his lips and kissed them, as if they still had drops of 
blood on them. 
But from that time on, everything seemed to conspire against him. Not a day went by 
without her learning something about his secret life. 
At first he denied it all. Then, when the evidence became too blatant, he argued that his 
polygamous way of life did not in the least run counter to his love for her. He was 
inconsistent: first he disavowed his infidelities, then he tried to justify them. 
Once he was saying good-bye after making a date with a woman on the phone, when 
from the next room came a strange sound like the chattering of teeth.By chance she 
had come home without his realizing it. She was pouring something from a medicine 
bottle down her throat, and her hand shook so badly the glass bottle clicked against her 
teeth. 
He pounced on her as if trying to save her from drowning. The bottle fell to the floor, 
spotting the carpet with valerian drops. She put up a good fight, and he had to keep her 
in a straitjacket-like hold for a quarter of an hour before he could calm her. 
He knew he was in an unjustifiable situation, based as it was on complete inequality. 

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
10
One evening, before she discovered his correspondence with Sabina, they had gone to 
a bar with some friends to celebrate Tereza's new job. She had been promoted at the 
weekly from darkroom technician to staff photographer. Because he had never been 
much for dancing, one of his younger colleagues took over. They made a splendid 
couple on the dance floor, and Tomas found her more beautiful than ever. He looked on 
in amazement at the split-second precision and deference with which Tereza 
anticipated her partner's will. The dance seemed to him a declaration that her devotion, 
her ardent desire to satisfy his every whim, was not necessarily bound to his person, 
that if she hadn't met Tomas, she would have been ready to respond to the call of any 
other man she might have met instead. He had no difficulty imagining Tereza and his 
young colleague as lovers. And the ease with which he arrived at this fiction wounded 
him. He realized that Tereza's body was perfectly thinkable coupled with any male 
body, and the thought put him in a foul mood. Not until late that night, at home, did he 
admit to her he was jealous. 
This absurd jealousy, grounded as it was in mere hypotheses, proved that he 
considered her fidelity an unconditional postulate of their relationship. How then could 
he begrudge her her jealousy of his very real mistresses? 
During the day, she tried (though with only partial success) to believe what Tomas told 
her and to be as cheerful as she had been before. But her jealousy thus tamed by day 
burst forth all the more savagely in her dreams, each of which ended in a wail he could 
silence only by waking her. 
Her dreams recurred like themes and variations or television series. For example, she 
repeatedly dreamed of cats jumping at her face and digging their claws into her skin. 
We need not look far for an interpretation: in Czech slang the word cat means a pretty 
woman. Tereza saw herself threatened by women, all women. All women were 
potential mistresses for Tomas, and she feared them all. 
In another cycle she was being sent to her death. Once, when he woke her as she 
screamed in terror in the dead of night, she told him about it. I was at a large indoor 
swimming pool. There were about twenty of us. All women. We were naked and had to 
march around the pool. There was a basket hanging from the ceiling and a man 
standing in the basket. The man wore a broad-brimmed hat shading his face, but I 
could see it was you. You kept giving us orders. Shouting at us. We had to sing as we 
marched, sing and do kneebends. If one of us did a bad kneebend, you would shoot 
her with a pistol and she would fall dead into the pool. Which made everybody laugh 
and sing even louder. You never took your eyes off us, and the minute we did 
something wrong, you would shoot. The pool was full of corpses floating just below the 
surface. And I knew I lacked the strength to do the next kneebend and you were going 
to shoot me!
In a third cycle she was dead. 
bying in a hearse as big as a furniture van, she was surrounded by dead women. There 
were so many of them that the back door would not close and several legs dangled out. 
But I'm not dead! Tereza cried. I can still feel!

---

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
11
So can we, the corpses laughed. 
They laughed the same laugh as the live women who used to tell her cheerfully it was 
perfectly normal that one day she would have bad teeth, faulty ovaries, and wrinkles, 
because they all had bad teeth, faulty ovaries, and wrinkles. Laughing the same laugh, 
they told her that she was dead and it was perfectly all right! 
Suddenly she felt a need to urinate. You see, she cried. I need to pee. That's proof 
positive I'm not dead!
But they only laughed again. Needing to pee is perfectly normal! they said. You'll go on 
feeling that kind of thing for a long time yet. Like a person who has an arm cut off and 
keeps feeling it's there. We may not have a drop of pee left in us, but we keep needing 
to pee.
Tereza huddled against Tomas in bed. And the way they talked to me! Like old friends, 
people who'd known me forever. I was appalled at the thought of having to stay with 
them forever.
All languages that derive from Latin form the word compassion by combining the prefix 
meaning with