MILAN KUNDERA

"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera 70
monument of note destroyed in the war, and they decided to leave it in ruins so that no
Pole or German could accuse them of having suffered less than their share. In front of
the glorious ruins, a reminder for now and eternity of the evils perpetrated by war, stood
a steel-bar reviewing stand for some demonstration or other that the Communist Party
had herded the people of Prague to the day before or would be herding them to the day
after.
Gazing at the remains of Old Town Hall, Tereza was suddenly reminded of her mother:
that perverse need one has to expose one's ruins, one's ugliness, to parade one's
misery, to uncover the stump of one's amputated arm and force the whole world to look
at it. Everything had begun reminding her of her mother lately. Her mother's world,
which she had fled ten years before, seemed to be coming back to her, surrounding her
on all sides. That was why she told Tomas that morning about how her mother had
read her secret diary at the dinner table to an accompaniment of guffaws. When a
private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the
world is turning into a concentration camp?
Almost from childhood, Tereza had used the term to express how she felt about life with
her family. A concentration camp is a world in which people live crammed together constantly,
night and day. Brutality and violence are merely secondary (and not in the least
indispensable) characteristics. A concentration camp is the complete obliteration of
privacy. Prochazka, who was not allowed to chat with a friend over a bottle of wine in
the shelter of privacy, lived (unknown to him—a fatal error on his part!) in a
concentration camp. Tereza lived in the concentration camp when she lived with her
mother. Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was nothing
exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which we are born and
from which we can escape only with the greatest of efforts.
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.