The unbearable lightness of being by Milan Kundera Read Free Book Online Page A

Beethoven quartets.
    Then the pharmacist invited the
musicians to dinner and asked the girl in the audience to come along with them.
From then on, Beethoven became her image of the world on the other side, the
world she yearned for. Rounding the counter with Tomas's cognac, she tried to
read chance's message: How was it possible that at the very moment she was
taking an order of cognac to a stranger she found attractive, at that very moment
she heard Beethoven?
    Necessity knows no magic formulae—they
are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must
immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's
shoulders.
    10
    He
called her back to pay for the cognac. He closed his book (the emblem of the
secret brotherhood), and she thought of asking him what he was reading.
    "Can you
have it charged to my room? " he asked.
    "Yes,"
she said. "What number are you in?"
    He showed her his key, which was
attached to a piece of wood with a red six drawn on it.
    "That's
odd," she said. "Six."
    "What's so
odd about that?" he asked.
    She had suddenly recalled that the
house where they had lived in Prague before her parents were divorced was
number six. But she answered something else (which we may credit to her wiles):
"You're in room six and my shift ends at six."
    "Well, my
train leaves at seven," said the stranger.
    She did not know how to respond, so
she gave him the bill for his signature and took it over to the reception desk.
When she finished work, the stranger was no longer at his table. Had he
understood her discreet message? She left the restaurant in a state of
excitement.
    Opposite the hotel was a barren
little park, as wretched as only the park of a dirty little town can be, but
for Tereza it had always been an island of beauty: it had grass, four poplars,
benches, a weeping willow, and a few forsythia bushes.
    He was sitting on a yellow bench
that afforded a clear view of the restaurant entrance. The very same bench she
had sat on the day before with a book in her lap! She knew then (the birds of
fortuity had begun alighting on her shoulders) that this stranger was her
fate. He called out to her, invited her to sit next to him. (The crew other
soul rushed up to the deck other body.) Then she walked him to the station, and
he gave her his card as
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    a farewell gesture. "If ever you should
happen to come to Prague..."
11
    Much
more than the card he slipped her at the last minute, it was the call of all
those fortuities (the book, Beethoven, the number six, the yellow park bench)
which gave her the courage to leave home and change her fate. It may well be
those few fortuities (quite modest, by the way, even drab, just what one would
expect from so lackluster a town) which set her love in motion and provided her
with a source of energy she had not yet exhausted at the end of her days.
    Our day-to-day life is bombarded
with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people
and events we call coincidences. "Co-incidence" means that two events
unexpectedly happen at the same time, they meet: Tomas appears in the hotel
restaurant at the same time the radio is playing Beethoven. We do not even
notice the great majority of such coincidences. If the seat Tomas occupied had
been occupied instead by the local butcher, Tereza never would have noticed
that the radio was playing Beethoven (though the meeting of Beethoven and the
butcher would also have been an interesting coincidence). But her nascent love
inflamed her sense of beauty, and she would never forget that music. Whenever
she heard it, she would be touched. Everything going on around her at that
moment would be haloed by the music and take on its beauty.
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    Early in the novel
that Tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit Tomas, Anna meets
Vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone
is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under