Tereza leaned over to the folder and took out the pictures.
Almost apologetically the editor said to Tereza, Of course they're completely different from your pictures.
Not at all, said Tereza. They're the same.
Neither the editor nor the photographer understood her, and even I find it difficult to explain what she had in mind when she compared a nude beach to the Russian invasion. Looking through the pictures, she stopped for a time at one that showed a family of four standing in a circle: a naked mother leaning over her children, her giant tits hanging low like a goat's or cow's, and the husband leaning the same way on the other side, his penis and scrotum looking very much like an udder in miniature.
You don't like them, do you? asked the editor.
They're good photographs.
She's shocked by the subject matter, said the woman. I can tell just by looking at you that you've never set foot on a nude beach.
No, said Tereza.
The editor smiled. You see how easy it is to guess where you're from? The Communist countries are awfully puritanical.
There's nothing wrong with the naked body, the woman said with maternal affection. It's normal. And everything normal is beautiful!
The image of her mother marching through the flat naked flashed through Tereza's mind. She could still hear the laughter behind her back when she ran and pulled the curtains to stop the neighbors from seeing her naked mother.
25
The woman photographer invited Tereza to the magazine's cafeteria for a cup of coffee. Those pictures of yours, they're very interesting. I couldn't help noticing what a terrific sense of the female body you have. You know what I mean. The girls with the provocative poses!
The ones kissing passersby in front of the Russian tanks?
Yes. You'd be a top-notch fashion photographer, you know? You'd have to get yourself a model first, someone like you who's looking for a break. Then you could make a portfolio of photographs and show them to the agencies. It would take some time before you made a name for yourself, naturally, but I can do one thing for you here and now: introduce you to the editor in charge of our garden section. He might need some shots of cactuses and roses and things.
Thank you very much, Tereza said sincerely, because it was clear that the woman sitting opposite her was full of good will.
But then she said to herself, Why take pictures of cactuses? She had no desire to go through in Zurich what she'd been through in Prague: battles over job and career, over every picture published. She had never been ambitious out of vanity. All she had ever wanted was to escape from her mother's world. Yes, she saw it with absolute clarity: no matter how enthusiastic she was about taking pictures, she could just as easily have turned her enthusiasm to any other endeavor. Photography was nothing but a way of getting at something higher and living beside Tomas.
She said, My husband is a doctor. He can support me. I don't need to take pictures.
The woman photographer replied, I don't see how you can give it up after the beautiful work you've done.
Yes, the pictures of the invasion were something else again. She had not done them for Tomas. She had done them out of passion. But not passion for photography. She had done them out of passionate hatred. The situation would never recur. And these photographs, which she had made out of passion, were the ones nobody wanted because they were out of date. Only cactuses had perennial appeal. And cactuses were of no interest to her.
She said, You're too kind, really, but I'd rather stay at home. I don't need a job.
The woman said, But will you be fulfilled sitting at home?
Tereza said, More fulfilled than by taking pictures of cactuses.
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.
26
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. Everyone 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 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.
27
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.