PART THREE
Words Misunderstood
Geneva is a city of fountains large and small, of parks where music once rang out from
the bandstands. Even the university is hidden among trees. Franz had just finished his
afternoon lecture. As he left the building, the sprinklers were spouting jets of water over
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40
the lawn and he was in a capital mood. He was on his way to see his mistress. She
lived only a few streets away.
He often stopped in for a visit, but only as a friend, never as a lover. If he made love to
her in her Geneva studio, he would be going from one woman to the other, from wife to
mistress and back in a single day, and because in Geneva husband and wife sleep
together in the French style, in the same bed, he would be going from the bed of one
woman to the bed of another in the space of several hours. And that, he felt, would
humiliate both mistress and wife and, in the end, himself as well.
The love he bore this woman, with whom he had fallen in love several months before,
was so precious to him that he tried to create an independent space for her in his life, a
restricted zone of purity. He was often invited to lecture at foreign universities, and now
he accepted all offers. But because they were not enough to satisfy his new-found
wanderlust, he took to inventing congresses and symposia as a means of justifying the
new absences to his wife. His mistress, who had a flexible schedule, accompanied him
on all speaking engagements, real and imagined. So it was that within a short span of
time he introduced her to many European cities and an American one.
How would you like to go to Palermo ten days from now? asked Franz.
I prefer Geneva, she answered. She was standing in front of her easel examining a
work in progress.
How can you live without seeing Palermo? asked Franz in an attempt at levity.
I have seen Palermo, she said.
You have? he said with a hint of jealousy.
A friend of mine once sent me a postcard from there. It's taped up over the toilet.
Haven't you noticed?
Then she told him a story. Once upon a time, in the early part of the century, there lived
a poet. He was so old he had to be taken on walks by his amanuensis. 'Master,' his
amanuensis said one day, 'look what's up in the sky! It's the first airplane ever to fly
over the city!' 'I have my own picture of it,' said the poet to his amanuensis, without
raising his eyes from the ground. Well, I have my own picture of Palermo. It has the
same hotels and cars as all cities. And my studio always has new and different pictures.
Franz was sad. He had grown so accustomed to linking their love life to foreign travel
that his Let's go to Palermo! was an unambiguous erotic message and her I prefer
Geneva could have only one meaning: his mistress no longer desired him.
How could he be so unsure of himself with her? She had not given him the slightest
cause for worry! In fact, she was the one who had taken the erotic initiative shortly after
they met. He was a good-looking man; he was at the peak of his scholarly career; he
was even feared by his colleagues for the arrogance and tenacity he displayed during
professional meetings and colloquia. Then why did he worry daily that his mistress was
about to leave him?
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41
The only explanation I can suggest is that for Franz, love was not an extension of public
life but its antithesis. It meant a longing to put himself at the mercy of his partner. He
who gives himself up like a prisoner of war must give up his weapons as well. And
deprived in advance of defense against a possible blow, he cannot help wondering
when the blow will fall. That is why I can say that for Franz, love meant the constant
expectation of a blow.
While Franz attended to his anguish, his mistress put down her brush and went into the
next room. She returned with a bottle of wine. She opened it without a word and poured
out two glasses.
Immediately he felt relieved and slightly ridiculous. The I prefer Geneva did not mean
she refused to make love; quite the contrary, it meant she was tired of limiting their
lovemaking to foreign cities.
She raised her glass and emptied it in one swig. Franz did the same. He was naturally
overjoyed that her refusal to go to Palermo was actually a call to love, but he was a bit
sorry as well: his mistress seemed determined to violate the zone of Purity he had
introduced into their relationship; she had failed to understand his apprehensive
attempts to save their love from banality and separate it radically from his conjugal
home.
The ban on making love with his painter-mistress in Geneva was actually a self-inflicted
punishment for having married another woman. He felt it as a kind of guilt or defect.
Even though his conjugal sex life was hardly worth mentioning, he and his wife still
slept in the same bed, awoke in the middle of the night to each other's heavy breathing,
and inhaled the smells of each other's body. True, he would rather have slept by
himself, but the marriage bed is still the symbol of the marriage bond, and symbols, as
we know, are inviolable.
Each time he lay down next to his wife in that bed, he thought of his mistress imagining
him lying down next to his wife in that bed, and each time he thought of her he felt
ashamed. That was why he wished to separate the bed he slept in with his wife as far
as possible in space from the bed he made love in with his mistress.
His painter-mistress poured herself another glass of wine, drank it down, and then, still
silent and with a curious nonchalance, as if completely unaware of Franz's presence,
slowly removed her blouse. She was behaving like an acting student whose
improvisation assignment is to make the class believe she is alone in a room and no
one can see her.
Standing there in her skirt and bra, she suddenly (as if recalling only then that she was
not alone in the room) fixed Franz with a long stare.
That stare bewildered him; he could not understand it. All lovers unconsciously
establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit no transgression.
The stare she had just fixed on him fell outside their rules; it had nothing in common
with the looks and gestures that usually preceded their lovemaking. It was neither
"The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" By Milan Kundera
42
provocative nor flirtatious, simply interrogative. The problem was, Franz had not the
slightest notion what it was asking.
Next she stepped out of her skirt and, taking Franz by the hand, turned him in the
direction of a large mirror propped against the wall. Without letting go of his hand, she
looked into the mirror with the same long questioning stare, training it first on herself,
then on him.
Near the mirror stood a wig stand with an old black bowler hat on it. She bent over,
picked up the hat, and put it on her head. The image in the mirror was instantaneously
transformed: suddenly it was a woman in her undergarments, a beautiful, distant,
indifferent woman with a terribly out-of-place bowler hat on her head, holding the hand
of a man in a gray suit and a tie.
Again he had to smile at how poorly he understood his mistress. When she took her
clothes off, it wasn't so much erotic provocation as an odd little caper, a happening a
deux. His smile beamed understanding and consent.
He waited for his mistress to respond in kind, but she did not. Without letting go of his
hand, she stood staring into the mirror, first at herself, then at him.
The time for the happening had come and gone. Franz was beginning to feel that the
caper (which, in and of itself, he was happy to think of as charming) had dragged on too
long. So he gently took the brim of the bowler hat between two fingers, lifted it off
Sabina's head with a smile, and laid it back on the wig stand. It was as though he were
erasing the mustache a naughty child had drawn on a picture of the Virgin Mary.
For several more seconds she remained motionless, staring at herself in the mirror.
Then Franz covered her with tender kisses and asked her once more to go with him in
ten days to Palermo. This time she said yes unquestioningly, and he left.
He was in an excellent mood again. Geneva, which he had cursed all his life as the
metropolis of boredom, now seemed beautiful and full of adventure. Outside in the
street, he looked back up at the studio's broad window. It was late spring and hot. All
the windows were shaded with striped awnings. Franz walked to the park. At its far end,
the golden cupolas of the Orthodox church rose up like two gilded cannonballs kept
from imminent collapse and suspended in the air by some invisible Power. Everything
was beautiful. Then he went down to the embankment and took the public transport
boat to the north bank of the lake, where he lived.
Sabina was now by herself. She went back to the mirror, still in her underwear. She put
the bowler hat back on her head and had a long look at herself. She was amazed at the
number of years she had spent pursuing one lost moment.
Once, during a visit to her studio many years before, the bowler hat had caught
Tomas's fancy. He had set it on his head and looked at himself in the large mirror
which, as in the Geneva studio, leaned against the wall. He wanted to see what he
would have looked like as a nineteenth-century mayor. When Sabina started
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43
undressing, he put the hat on her head. There they stood in front of the mirror (they
always stood in front of the mirror while she undressed), watching themselves. She
stripped to her underwear, but still had the hat on her head. And all at once she realized
they were both excited by what they saw in the mirror.
What could have excited them so? A moment before, the hat on her head had seemed
nothing but a joke. Was excitement really a mere step away from laughter?
Yes. When they looked at each other in the mirror that time, all she saw for the first few
seconds was a comic situation. But suddenly the comic became veiled by excitement:
the bowler hat no longer signified a joke; it signified violence; violence against Sabina,
against her dignity as a woman. She saw her bare legs and thin panties with her pubic
triangle showing through. The lingerie enhanced the charm of her femininity, while the
hard masculine hat denied it, violated and ridiculed it. The fact that Tomas stood beside
her fully dressed meant that the essence of what they both saw was far from good
clean fun (if it had been fun he was after, he, too, would have had to strip and don a
bowler hat); it was humiliation. But instead of spurning it, she proudly, provocatively
played it for all it was worth, as if submitting of her own will to public rape; and
suddenly, unable to wait any longer, she pulled Tomas down to the floor. The bowler
hat rolled under the table, and they began thrashing about on the rug at the foot of the
mirror.
But let us return to the bowler hat:
First, it was a vague reminder of a forgotten grandfather, the mayor of a small
Bohemian town during the nineteenth century.
Second, it was a memento of her father. After the funeral her brother appropriated all
their parents' property, and she, refusing out of sovereign contempt to fight for her
rights, announced sarcastically that she was taking the bowler hat as her sole
inheritance.
Third, it was a prop for her love games with Tomas.
Fourth, it was a sign of her originality, which she consciously cultivated. She could not
take much with her when she emigrated, and taking this bulky, impractical thing meant
giving UP other, more practical ones.
Fifth, now that she was abroad, the hat was a sentimental object. When she went to
visit Tomas in Zurich, she took it along and had it on her head when he opened the
hotel-room door. But then something she had not reckoned with happened: the hat, no
longer jaunty or sexy, turned into a monument to time past. They were both touched.
They made love as they never had before. This was no occasion for obscene games.
For this meeting was not a continuation of their erotic rendezvous, each of which had
been an opportunity to think up some new little vice; it was a recapitulation of time, a
hymn to their common past, a sentimental summary of an unsentimental story that was
disappearing in the distance.
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44
The bowler hat was a motif in the musical composition that was Sabina's life. It returned
again and again, each time with a different meaning, and all the meanings flowed
through the bowler hat like water through a riverbed. I might call it Heraclitus' ( You
can't step twice into the same river ) riverbed: the bowler hat was a bed through which
each time Sabina saw another river flow, another
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