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

a
train. This symmetrical composition—the same motif appears at the beginning and
at the end—may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to
agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as
"fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life"
into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed in
precisely such a fashion.
    They are composed like music.
Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence
(Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a
permanent place in the composition of the individual's life. Anna could have
chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway
station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of
despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes
his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
    It is wrong, then, to chide the
novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of
Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven,
Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to
such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a
dimension of beauty.
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    Impelled
by the birds of fortuity fluttering down on her shoulders, she took a week's
leave and, without a word to her mother, boarded the train to Prague. During
the journey, she made frequent trips to the toilet to look in the mirror and
beg her soul not to abandon the deck of her body for a moment on this most
crucial day of her life. Scrutinizing herself on one such trip, she had a
sudden scare: she felt a scratch in her throat. Could she be coming down with
something on this most crucial day of her life?
    But there was no turning back. So
she phoned him from the station, and the moment he opened the door, her stomach
started rumbling terribly. She was mortified. She felt as though she were
carrying her mother in her stomach and her mother had guffawed to spoil her
meeting with Tomas.
    For the first few seconds, she was
afraid he would throw her out because of the crude noises she was making, but
then he put his arms around her. She was grateful to him for ignoring her
rumbles, and kissed him passionately, her eyes misting. Before the first
minute was up, they were making love. She screamed while making love. She had a
fever by then. She had come down with the flu. The nozzle of the hose supplying
oxygen to the lungs was stuffed and red.
    When she traveled to Prague a
second time, it was with a heavy suitcase. She had packed all her things,
determined never again to return to the small town. He had invited her to come
to his place the following evening. That night, she had slept in a cheap hotel.
In the morning, she carried her heavy suitcase to the station, left it there,
and roamed the streets of Prague the whole day with Anna Karenina under
her arm. Not even after she rang the doorbell and he opened the door would she
part
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    with it. It was
like a ticket into Tomas's world. She realized that she had nothing but that
miserable ticket, and the thought brought her nearly to tears. To keep from
crying, she talked too much and too loudly, and she laughed. And again he took
her in his arms almost at once and they made love. She had entered a mist in
which nothing could be seen and only her scream could be heard.
13
    It was no sigh, no
moan; it was a real scream. She screamed so hard that Tomas had to turn his
head away from her face, afraid that her voice so close to his ear would
rupture his eardrum. The scream was not an expression of sensuality. Sensuality
is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner
intently, straining to catch every sound. But her scream aimed at crippling the
senses, preventing all seeing and hearing. What was screaming in fact was the
naive idealism of her love trying to banish all