The Unbearable Lightness of Being A Novel

What shall we choose, weight or lightness? The question was posed by Parmenides, but it is Tomas who must live it. We see him first at a window, a successful Prague surgeon, looking out over a courtyard and deliberating. A young woman named Tereza has appeared in his life, brought to him by a chain of six improbable fortuities, beginning with his chief's sciatica. She arrived with a heavy suitcase and a copy of *Anna Karenina*, a child placed in a bulrush basket and sent downstream for him to find. He fears the responsibility, the weight she offers, for he has built his life around a principle of lightness, a system of erotic friendships with carefully spaced intervals and no claims on freedom. Yet, a strange compassion has taken root, a feeling so strong that when she falls ill in his bed, he kneels beside her and feels he would not survive her death.

Tereza moves in, and the weight of her love becomes the anchor of his world, just as the lightness of his infidelities becomes its constant, destabilizing orbit. He cannot give them up, this need to conquer the one-millionth part of dissimilarity that makes each woman unique, this quest driven by the maxim *Einmal ist keinmal* - what happens but once might as well not have happened at all. For Tereza, whose life has been a flight from a mother who celebrated the vulgar sameness of all bodies, this is a special kind of hell. She came to him to make her body unique, irreplaceable, and he sends her back, with every affair, to march naked with the other women. Her suffering is not silent; it spills into the night in a series of terrible, beautiful dreams. She dreams of cats clawing at her face, of being forced to perform kneebends naked around a pool while Tomas shoots the women who falter, their bodies falling into the water. The dreams are an accusation, and his compassion - that curse of co-feeling - makes him unable to be angry, only to love her more.

In Geneva, another life plays out, one of exhilarating lightness. Sabina, a painter and Tomas's favorite mistress, has also left Prague. She lives by a creed of betrayal - betraying her father, her husband, her country, her lovers. Betrayal is not a sin but a glorious departure into the unknown. Her lover is Franz, a brilliant academic who is her perfect opposite. He is a man of weight, of earnestness, of fidelity to his mother's memory and to the grand, romantic idea of history as a "Grand March" toward justice. They are lovers, but they speak in different languages, their words floating past one another into a gulf of misunderstanding. When she dons her grandfather's bowler hat - a motif of her erotic games with Tomas, a symbol of her defiant originality - he sees only an incomprehensible gesture and gently removes it, erasing its meaning. For him, love means renouncing strength; for her, physical love is unthinkable without it.

The Prague Spring of 1968 arrives, a brief carnival of hope that ends with the rumble of Russian tanks. For a week, Tereza finds a strange happiness, roaming the streets and photographing the invasion, her lens a weapon against the occupiers. This shared danger gives her a strength that eclipses her jealousy, and she persuades Tomas to emigrate to Zurich. But the lightness of exile is unbearable for her. The freedom from her homeland is a void, and without the weight of its tragedy, her old anxieties return. She leaves a note on the table and, taking their dog Karenin, returns to the occupied city. Tomas is briefly ecstatic in his restored freedom, soaring in the sweet lightness of being. But soon, the weight of compassion crushes him. He sees her alone in their Prague flat, feels her abandonment as his own. There is nothing heavier. He tells his Swiss director, “*Es muss sein.*” It must be. And he follows her back into the cage.

Back in Prague, Tomas's past catches up with him. An old article he wrote, a brief reflection on Oedipus and guilt, is used as a pretext by the new regime to demand his loyalty. He is told to sign a retraction. To refuse is to lose his profession; to sign is to lose his honor. He watches his colleagues, some smiling conspiratorially as they capitulate, others smiling smugly in their own virtue, and he cannot bear either. And so, with a sudden, intoxicating rush of freedom, he rejects the mission of his life, the surgical “*Es muss sein!*” that has defined him. He quits his post and becomes a window washer. His life becomes a long holiday, a dizzying return to his bachelor existence, with sixteen hours a day free for new women, new conquests. But the holiday is his alone. For Tereza, it is a time of renewed pain, of inhaling the scent of other women from his hair each night.

Eventually, the city itself becomes unbearable, a place of spies and suspicion. They move to the country, seeking an escape, an idyll. Tomas becomes a truck driver for a collective farm; Tereza tends to a herd of heifers. Their life slows, finding a rhythm in the turning of the seasons, a life based on repetition. Happiness, Tereza realizes, is the longing for repetition. The center of this idyll is their dog, Karenin. His love is selfless, without conflict, a remnant of Paradise from which animals were never expelled. His aging and illness become the central drama of their lives, a shared sadness that binds them more closely than any joy. They wait for his smile, a twitch of the mouth that signals he still has the will to live, and when it is gone, they grant him a merciful death, burying him between two apple trees.

In the quiet that follows, Tomas finally decides to write to the son he has not seen in twenty years. His son, now a believer, writes back of wanting the kingdom of God on earth. Tereza, meanwhile, is overcome by a wave of self-recrimination. She sees Tomas, gray and tired from fixing his truck, and understands that she has been the agent of his downfall, her weakness a constant, aggressive force that has pulled him down from the heights of Zurich to this place where there is nowhere left to go. She sees him not as a philanderer, but as a rabbit she holds in her arms, his strength finally gone, making him hers completely.

One evening, they drive to a hotel in a nearby town to dance. The band, a piano and a violin, plays songs from forty years before. As they move across the floor, Tereza leans her head on his shoulder. She is filled with a strange happiness and a strange sadness. The sadness means: we are at the last station. The happiness means: we are together. The sadness is the form, the happiness is the content. Happiness fills the space of sadness. Later, in their room, a large nocturnal butterfly flutters around the lamp. She feels a deep calm. The fear is gone. She has reached her goal.