And perhaps there was still another planet, where we would all be born a third time with the experience of our first two lives.
And perhaps there were yet more and more planets, where mankind would be born one degree (one life) more mature.
That was Tomas's version of eternal return.
Of course we here on earth (planet number one, the planet of inexperience) can only fabricate vague fantasies of what will happen to man on those other planets. Will he be wiser? Is maturity within man's power? Can he attain it through repetition?
Only from the perspective of such a utopia is it possible to use the concepts of pessimism and optimism with full justification: an optimist is someone who thinks that on planet number five the history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is one who thinks otherwise.
17
One of Jules Verne's famous novels, a favorite of Tomas's in his childhood, is called Two Years on Holiday, and indeed two years is the maximum. Tomas was in his third year as a window washer.
In the last few weeks, he had come to realize (half sadly, half laughing to himself) that he had grown physically tired (he had one, sometimes two erotic engagements a day), and that although he had not lost his zest for women, he found himself straining his forces to the utmost. (Let me add that the strain was on his physical, not his sexual powers; his problem was with his breath, not with his penis, a state of affairs that had its comical side.)
One day he was having trouble reaching a prospect for his afternoon time slot, and it looked as though he was going to have one of his rare off days. He was desperate. He had phoned a certain young woman about ten times. A charming acting student whose body had been tanned on Yugoslavia's nudist beaches with an evenness that called to mind slow rotation on a mechanized spit.
After making one last call from his final job of the day and starting back to the office at four to hand in his signed order slips, he was stopped in the center of Prague by a woman he failed to recognize. Wherever have you disappeared to? I haven't seen you in ages!
Tomas racked his brains to place her. Had she been one of his patients? She was behaving like an intimate friend. He tried to answer in a manner that would conceal the fact that he did not recognize her. He was already thinking about how to lure her to his friend's flat (he had the key in his pocket) when he realized from a chance remark who the woman was: the budding actress with the perfect tan, the one he had been trying to reach all day.
This episode both amused and horrified him: it proved that he was as tired mentally as physically. Two years of holiday could not be extended indefinitely.
18
The holiday from the operating table was also a holiday from Tereza. After hardly seeing each other for six days, they would finally be together on Sundays, full of desire; but, as on the evening when Tomas came back from Zurich, they were estranged and had a long way to go before they could touch and kiss. Physical love gave them pleasure but no consolation. She no longer cried out as she had in the past, and, at the moment of orgasm, her grimace seemed to him to express suffering and a strange absence. Only at night, in sleep, were they tenderly united. Holding his hand, she would forget the chasm (the chasm of daylight) that divided them. But the nights gave him neither the time nor the means to protect and take care of her. In the mornings, it was heartrending to see her, and he feared for her: she looked sad and infirm.
One Sunday, she asked him to take her for a ride outside Prague. They drove to a spa, where they found all the streets relabeled with Russian names and happened to meet an old patient of Tomas's. Tomas was devastated by the meeting. Suddenly here was someone talking to him again as to a doctor, and he could feel his former life bridging the divide, coming back to him with its pleasant regularity of seeing patients and feeling their trusting eyes on him, those eyes he had pretended to ignore but in fact savored and now greatly missed.
Driving home, Tomas pondered the catastrophic mistake he had made by returning to Prague from Zurich. He kept his eyes trained on the road so as to avoid looking at Tereza. He was furious with her. Her presence at his side felt more unbearably fortuitous than ever. What was she doing here next to him? Who put her in the basket and sent her downstream? Why was his bed chosen as her shore? And why she and not some other woman?
Neither of them said a word the whole way.
When they got home, they had dinner in silence.
Silence lay between them like an agony. It grew heavier by the minute. To escape it they went straight to bed. He woke her in the middle of the night. She was crying.
I was buried, she told him. I'd been buried for a long time. You came to see me every week. Each time you knocked at the grave, and I came out. My eyes were full of dirt.
You'd say, 'How can you see?' and try to wipe the dirt from my eyes.
And I'd say, 'I can't see anyway. I have holes instead of eyes.'
And then one day you went off on a long journey, and I knew you were with another woman. Weeks passed, and there was no sign of you. I was afraid of missing you, and stopped sleeping. At last you knocked at the grave again, but I was so worn down by a month of sleepless nights that I didn't think I could make it out of there. When I finally did come out, you seemed disappointed. You said I didn't look well. I could feel how awful I looked to you with my sunken cheeks and nervous gestures.
T'm sorry,' I apologized. 'I haven't slept a wink since you left.'
' You see?' you said in a voice full of false cheer. 'What you need is a good rest. A month's holiday!'
As if I didn't know what you had in mind! A month's holiday meant you didn't want to see me for a month, you had another woman. Then you left and I slipped down into my grave, knowing full well that I'd have another month of sleepless nights waiting for you and that when you came back and I was uglier you'd be even more disappointed.
He had never heard anything more harrowing. Holding her tightly in his arms and feeling her body tremble, he thought he could not endure his love.
Let the planet be convulsed with exploding bombs, the country ravished daily by new hordes, all his neighbors taken out and shot-he could accept it all more easily than he dared admit. But the grief implicit in Tereza's dream was something he could not endure.
He tried to reenter the dream she had told him. He pictured himself stroking her face and delicately-she mustn't be aware of it-brushing the dirt out of her eye sockets. Then he heard her say the unbelievably harrowing I can't see anyway. I have holes instead of eyes.
His heart was about to break; he felt he was on the verge of a heart attack.
Tereza had gone back to sleep; he could not. He pictured her death. She was dead and having terrible nightmares; but because she was dead, he was unable to wake her from them. Yes, that is death: Tereza asleep, having terrible nightmares, and he unable to wake her.
19
During the five years that had passed since the Russian army invaded Tomas's country, Prague had undergone considerable changes. The people Tomas met in the streets were different. Half of his friends had emigrated, and half of the half that remained had died. For it is a fact which will go unrecorded by historians that the years following the Russian invasion were a period of funerals: the death rate soared. I do not speak only of the cases (rather rare, of course) of people hounded to death, like Jan Prochazka, the novelist. Two weeks after his private conversations were broadcast daily over the radio, he entered the hospital. The cancer that had most likely lain dormant in his body until then suddenly blossomed like a rose. He was operated on in the presence of the police, who, when they realized he was doomed anyway, lost interest in him and let him die in the arms of his wife. But many also died without being directly subjected to persecution; the hopelessness pervading the entire country penetrated the soul to the body, shattering the latter. Some ran desperately from the favor of a regime that wanted to endow them with the honor of displaying them side by side with its new leaders. That is how the poet Frantisek Hrubin died-fleeing from the love of the Party. The Minister of Culture, from whom the poet did everything possible to hide, did not catch up with Hrubin until his funeral, when he made a speech over the grave about the poet's love for the Soviet Union. Perhaps he hoped his words would ring so outrageously false that they would wake Hrubin from the dead. But the world was too ugly, and no one decided to rise up out of the grave.