Free The unbearable lightness of being by Milan Kundera

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
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    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were out of date.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."
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    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