Milan kundera

 
36
The woman said, Even if you take pictures of cactuses, you're leading 
your
life. If you 
live only for your husband, you have no life of your own.
All of a sudden Tereza felt annoyed: My husband is my life, not cactuses.
The woman photographer responded in kind: You mean you think of yourself as happy?
Tereza, still annoyed, said, Of course I'm happy!
The woman said, The only kind of woman who can say that is very ... She stopped 
short. 
Tereza finished it for her: ... limited. That's what you mean, isn't it?
The woman regained control of herself and said, Not limited. Anachronistic.
You're right, said Tereza wistfully. That's just what my husband says about me.
But Tomas spent days on end at the hospital, and she was at home alone. At least she 
had Karenin and could take him on long walks! Home again, she would pore over her 
German and French grammars. But she felt sad and had trouble concentrating. She 
kept coming back to the speech Dubcek had given over the radio after his return from 
Moscow. Although she had completely forgotten what he said, she could still hear his 
quavering voice. She thought about how foreign soldiers had arrested him, the head of 
an independent state, in his own country, held him for four days somewhere in the 
Ukrainian mountains, informed him he was to be executed—as, a decade before, they 
had executed his Hungarian counterpart Imre Nagy—then packed him off to Moscow, 
ordered him to have a bath and shave, to change his clothes and put on a tie, apprised 
him of the decision to commute his execution, instructed him to consider himself head 
of state once more, sat him at a table opposite Brezhnev, and forced him to act. 
He returned, humiliated, to address his humiliated nation. He was so humiliated he 
could not even speak. Tereza would never forget those awful pauses in the middle of 
his sentences. Was he that exhausted? 111? Had they drugged him? Or was it only 
despair? If nothing was to remain of Dubcek, then at least those awful long pauses 
when he seemed unable to breathe, when he gasped for air before a whole nation 
glued to its radios, at least those pauses would remain. Those pauses contained all the 
horror that had befallen their country. 
It was the seventh day of the invasion. She heard the speech in the editorial offices of a 
newspaper that had been transformed overnight into an organ of the resistance. Every-
one present hated Dubcek at that moment. They reproached him for compromising; 
they felt humiliated by his humiliation; his weakness offended them. 
Thinking in Zurich of those days, she no longer felt any aversion to the man. The word 
weak no longer sounded like a verdict. Any man confronted with superior strength is 
weak, even if he has an athletic body like Dubcek's. The very weakness that at the time 
had seemed unbearable and repulsive, the weakness that had driven Tereza and 
Tomas from the country, suddenly attracted her. She realized that she belonged among 

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"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
37
the weak, in the camp of the weak, in the country of the weak, and that she had to be 
faithful to them precisely because they were weak and gasped for breath in the middle 
of sentences. 
She felt attracted by their weakness as by vertigo. She felt attracted by it because she 
felt weak herself. Again she began to feel jealous and again her hands shook. When 
Tomas noticed it, he did what he usually did: he took her hands in his and tried to calm 
them by pressing hard. She tore them away from him. 
What's the matter? he asked. 
Nothing.
What do you want me to do for you?
I want you to be old. Ten years older. Twenty years older!
What she meant was: I want you to be weak. As weak as I am. 
Karenin was not overjoyed by the move to Switzerland. Karenin hated change. Dog 
time cannot be plotted along a straight line; it does not move on and on, from one thing 
to the next. It moves in a circle like the hands of a clock, which—they, too, unwilling to 
dash madly ahead—turn round and round the face, day in and day out following the 
same path. In Prague, when Tomas and Tereza bought a new chair or moved a flower 
pot, Karenin would look on in displeasure. It disturbed his sense of time. It was as 
though they were trying to dupe the hands of the clock by changing the numbers on its 
face. 
Nonetheless, he soon managed to reestablish the old order and old rituals in the Zurich 
flat. As in Prague, he would jump up on their bed and welcome them to the day, 
accompany Tereza on her morning shopping jaunt, and make certain he got the other 
walks coming to him as well. 
He was the timepiece of their lives. In periods of despair, she would remind herself she 
had to hold on because of him, because he was weaker than she, weaker perhaps 
even than Dubcek and their abandoned homeland. 
One day when they came back from a walk, the phone was ringing. She picked up the 
receiver and asked who it was. 
It was a woman's voice speaking German and asking for Tomas. It was an impatient 
voice, and Tereza felt there was a hint of derision in it. When she said that Tomas 
wasn't there and she didn't know when he'd be back, the woman on the other end of the 
line started laughing and, without saying goodbye, hung up. 
Tereza knew it did not mean a thing. It could have been a nurse from the hospital, a 
patient, a secretary, anyone. But still she was upset and unable to concentrate on 
anything. It was then that she realized she had lost the last bit of strength she had had 
at home: she was absolutely incapable of tolerating this absolutely insignificant incident. 

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"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
 
38
Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the 
net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, 
and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from 
childhood. In Prague she was dependent on Tomas only when it came to the heart; 
here she was dependent on him for everything. What would happen to her here if he 
abandoned her? Would she have to live her whole life in fear of losing him? 
She told herself: Their acquaintance had been based on an error from the start. The 
copy of