The women sitting on the three terraced benches were packed in so tightly that they could not help touching. Sweating away next to Tereza was a woman of about thirty with a very pretty face. She had two unbelievably large, pendulous breasts hanging from her shoulders, bouncing at the slightest movement. When the woman got up, Tereza saw that her behind was also like two enormous sacks and that it had nothing in common with her fine face.
Perhaps the woman stood frequently in front of the mirror observing her body, trying to peer through it into her soul, as Tereza had done since childhood. Surely she, too, had harbored the blissful hope of using her body as a poster for her soul. But what a monstrous soul it would have to be if it reflected that body, that rack for four pouches.
Tereza got up and rinsed herself off under the shower. Then she went out into the open. It was still drizzling. Standing just above the Vltava on a slatted deck, and sheltered from the eyes of the city by a few square feet of tall wooden panel, she looked down to see the head of the woman she had just been thinking about. It was bobbing on the surface of the rushing river.
The woman smiled up at her. She had a delicate nose, large brown eyes, and a childish glance.
As she climbed the ladder, her tender features gave way to two sets of quivering pouches spraying tiny drops of cold water right and left.
6
Tereza went in to get dressed and stood in front of the large mirror.
No, there was nothing monstrous about her body. She had no pouches hanging from her shoulders; in fact, her breasts were quite small. Her mother used to ridicule her for having such small breasts, and she had had a complex about them until Tomas came along. But reconciled to their size as she was, she was still mortified by the very large, very dark circles around her nipples. Had she been able to design her own body, she would have chosen inconspicuous nipples, the kind that scarcely protrude from the arch of the breast and all but blend in color with the rest of the skin. She thought of her areolae as big crimson targets painted by a primitivist of pornography for the poor.
Looking at herself, she wondered what she would be like if her nose grew a millimeter a day. How long would it take before her face began to look like someone else's?
And if various parts of her body began to grow and shrink and Tereza no longer looked like herself, would she still be herself, would she still be Tereza?
Of course. Even if Tereza were completely unlike Tereza, her soul inside her would be the same and look on in amazement at what was happening to her body.
Then what was the relationship between Tereza and her body? Had her body the right to call itself Tereza? And if not, then what did the name refer to? Merely something incorporeal, intangible?
(These are questions that had been going through Tereza's head since she was a child. Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.)
Tereza stood bewitched before the mirror, staring at her body as if it were alien to her, alien and yet assigned to her and no one else. She felt disgusted by it. It lacked the power to become the only body in Tomas's life. It had disappointed and deceived her. All that night she had had to inhale the aroma of another woman's groin from his hair!
Suddenly she longed to dismiss her body as one dismisses a servant: to stay on with Tomas only as a soul and send her body into the world to behave as other female bodies behave with male bodies. If her body had failed to become the only body for Tomas, and thereby lost her the biggest battle of her life, it could just as well go off on its own!
7
She went home and forced herself to eat a stand-up lunch in the kitchen. At half past three, she put Karenin on his leash and walked (walking again) to the outskirts of town where her hotel was. When they fired Tereza from her job at the magazine, she found work behind the bar of a hotel. It happened several months after she came back from Zurich: they could not forgive her, in the end, for the week she spent photographing Russian tanks. She got the job through friends, other people who had taken refuge there when thrown out of work by the Russians: a former professor of theology in the accounting office, an ambassador (who had protested against the invasion on foreign television) at the reception desk.
She was worried about her legs again. While working as a waitress in the small-town restaurant, she had been horrified at the sight of the older waitresses' varicose veins, a professional hazard that came of a life of walking, running, and standing with heavy loads. But the new job was less demanding: although she began each shift by dragging out heavy cases of beer and mineral water, all she had to do then was stand behind the bar, serve the customers their drinks, and wash out the glasses in the small sink on her side of the bar. And through it all she had Karenin lying docilely at her feet.
It was long past midnight before she had finished her accounts and delivered the cash receipts to the hotel director. She then went to say good-bye to the ambassador, who had night duty. The door behind the reception desk led to a tiny room with a narrow cot where he could take a nap. The wall above the cot was covered with framed photographs of himself and various people smiling at the camera or shaking his hand or sitting next to him at a table and signing something or other. Some of them were autographed. In the place of honor hung a picture showing, side by side with his own face, the smiling face of John F. Kennedy.
When Tereza entered the room that night, she found him talking not to Kennedy but to a man of about sixty whom she had never seen before and who fell silent as soon as he saw her.
It's all right, said the ambassador. She's a friend. You can speak freely in front of her. Then he turned to Tereza. His son got five years today.
During the first days of the invasion, she learned, the man's son and some friends had stood watch over the entrance to a building housing the Russian army special staff. Since any Czechs they saw coming or going were clearly agents in the service of the Russians, he and his friends trailed them, traced the number plates of their cars, and passed on the information to the pro-Dubcek clandestine radio and television broadcasters, who then warned the public. In the process the boy and his friends had given one of the traitors a thorough going over.
The boy's father said, This photograph was the only corpus delicti. He denied it all until they showed it to him.
He took a clipping out of his wallet. It came out in the Times in the autumn of 1968.
It was a picture of a young man grabbing another man by the throat and a crowd looking on in the background. Collaborator Punished read the caption.
Tereza let out her breath. No, it wasn't one of hers.
Walking home with Karenin through nocturnal Prague, she thought of the days she had spent photographing tanks. How naive they had been, thinking they were risking their lives for their country when in fact they were helping the Russian police.
She got home at half past one. Tomas was asleep. His hair gave off the aroma of a woman's groin.
8
What is flirtation? One might say that it is behavior leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.