When the man from the Ministry accused him of insincerity, Tomas nearly felt guilty; he had to surmount a moral barrier to be able to persevere in his lie: I suppose he did introduce himself, he said, but because his name didn't ring a bell, I immediately forgot it.
What did he look like?
The editor who had dealt with him was a short man with a light brown crew cut. Tomas tried to choose diametrically opposed characteristics: He was tall, he said, and had long black hair.
Aha, said the man from the Ministry, and a big chin!
That's right, said Tomas.
A little stooped.
That's right, said Tomas again, realizing that now the man from the Ministry had pinpointed an individual. Not only had Tomas informed on some poor editor but, more important, the information he had given was false.
And what did he want to see you about? What did you talk about?
It had something to do with word order.
It sounded like a ridiculous attempt at evasion. And again the man from the Ministry waxed indignant at Tomas's refusal to tell the truth: First you tell me they cut your text by a third, then you tell me they talked to you about word order! Is that logical?
This time Tomas had no trouble responding, because he had told the absolute truth. It's not logical, but that's how it was. He laughed. They asked me to let them change the word order in one sentence and then cut a third of what I had written.
The man from the Ministry shook his head, as if unable to grasp so immoral an act. That was highly irregular on their part.
He finished his wine and concluded: You have been manipulated, Doctor, used. It would be a pity for you and your patients to suffer as a result. We are very much aware of your positive qualities. We'll see what can be done.
He gave Tomas his hand and pumped it cordially. Then each went off to his own car.
6
After the talk with the man from the Ministry, Tomas fell into a deep depression. How could he have gone along with the jovial tone of the conversation? If he hadn't refused to have anything at all to do with the man (he was not prepared for what happened and did not know what was condoned by law and what was not), he could at least have refused to drink wine with him as if they were friends! Supposing someone had seen him, someone who knew the man. He could only have inferred that Tomas was working with the police! And why did he even tell him that the article had been cut? Why did he throw in that piece of information? He was extremely displeased with himself.
Two weeks later, the man from the Ministry paid him another visit. Once more he invited him out for a drink, but this time Tomas requested that they stay in his office.
I understand perfectly, Doctor, said the man, with a smile.
Tomas was intrigued by his words. He said them like a chess player who is letting his opponent know he made an error in the previous move.
They sat opposite each other, Tomas at his desk. After about ten minutes, during which they talked about the flu epidemic raging at the time, the man said, We've given your case a lot of thought. If we were the only ones involved, there would be nothing to it. But we have public opinion to take into account. Whether you meant to or not, you fanned the flames of anti-Communist hysteria with your article. I must tell you there was even a proposal to take you to court for that article. There's a law against public incitement to violence.
The man from the Ministry of the Interior paused to look Tomas in the eye. Tomas shrugged his shoulders. The man assumed his comforting tone again. We voted down the proposal. No matter what your responsibility in the affair, society has an interest in seeing you use your abilities to the utmost. The chief surgeon of your hospital speaks very highly of you. We have reports from your patients as well. You are a fine specialist. Nobody requires a doctor to understand politics. You let yourself be carried away. It's high time we settled this thing once and for all. That's why we've put together a sample statement for you. All you have to do is make it available to the press, and we'll make sure it comes out at the proper time. He handed Tomas a piece of paper.
Tomas read what was in it and panicked. It was much worse than what the chief surgeon had asked him to sign two years before. It did not stop at a retraction of the Oedipus article. It contained words of love for the Soviet Union, vows of fidelity to the Communist Party; it condemned the intelligentsia, which wanted to push the country into civil war; and, above all, it denounced the editors of the writers' weekly (with special emphasis on the tall, stooped editor; Tomas had never met him, though he knew his name and had seen pictures of him), who had consciously distorted his article and used it for their own devices, turning it into a call for counterrevolution: too cowardly to write such an article themselves, they had hid behind a naive doctor.
The man from the Ministry saw the panic in Tomas's eyes. He leaned over and gave his knee a friendly pat under the table. Remember now, Doctor, it's only a sample! Think it over, and if there's something you want to change, I'm sure we can come to an agreement. After all, it's your statement!
Tomas held the paper out to the secret policeman as if he were afraid to keep it in his hands another second, as if he were worried someone would find his fingerprints on it.
But instead of taking the paper, the man from the Ministry spread his arms in feigned amazement (the same gesture the Pope uses to bless the crowds from his balcony). Now why do a thing like that, Doctor? Keep it. Think it over calmly at home.
Tomas shook his head and patiently held the paper in his outstretched hand. In the end, the man from the Ministry was forced to abandon his papal gesture and take the paper back.
Tomas was on the point of telling him emphatically that he would neither write nor sign any text whatever, but at the last moment he changed his tone and said mildly, I'm no illiterate, am I? Why should I sign something I didn't write myself?
Very well, then, Doctor. Let's do it your way. You write it up yourself, and we'll go over it together. You can use what you've just read as a model.
Why didn't Tomas give the secret policeman an immediate and unconditional no?
This is what probably went through his head: Besides using a statement like that to demoralize the nation in general (which is clearly the Russian strategy), the police could have a concrete goal in his case: they might be gathering evidence for a trial against the editors of the weekly that had published Tomas's article. If that was so, they would need his statement for the hearing and for the smear campaign the press would conduct against them. Were he to refuse flatly, on principle, there was always the danger that the police would print the prepared statement over his signature, whether he gave his consent or not. No newspaper would dare publish his denial. No one in the world would believe that he hadn't written or signed it. People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation.
By giving the police the hope that he would write a text of his own, he gained a bit of time. The very next day he resigned from the clinic, assuming (correctly) that after he had descended voluntarily to the lowest rung of the social ladder (a descent being made by thousands of intellectuals in other fields at the time), the police would have no more hold over him and he would cease to interest them. Once he had reached the lowest rung on the ladder, they would no longer be able to publish a statement in his name, for the simple reason that no one would accept it as genuine. Humiliating public statements are associated exclusively with the signatories' rise, not fall.
But in Tomas's country, doctors are state employees, and the state may or may not release them from its service. The official with whom Tomas negotiated his resignation knew him by name and reputation and tried to talk him into staying on. Tomas suddenly realized that he was not at all sure he had made the proper choice, but he felt bound to it by then by an unspoken vow of fidelity, so he stood fast. And that is how he became a window washer.
7
Leaving Zurich for Prague a few years earlier, Tomas had quietly said to himself, Es muss sein! He was thinking of his love for Tereza. No sooner had he crossed the border, however, than he began to doubt whether it actually did have to be. Later, lying next to Tereza, he recalled that he had been led to her by a chain of laughable coincidences that took place seven years earlier (when the chief surgeon's sciatica was in its early stages) and were about to return him to a cage from which he would be unable to escape.
Does that mean his life lacked any Es muss sein!, any overriding necessity? In my opinion, it did have one. But it was not love, it was his profession. He had come to medicine not by coincidence or calculation but by a deep inner desire.
Insofar as it is possible to divide people into categories, the surest criterion is the deep-seated desires that orient them to one or another lifelong activity. Every Frenchman is different. But all actors the world over are similar—in Paris, Prague, or the back of beyond. An actor is someone who in early childhood consents to exhibit himself for the rest of his life to an anonymous public. Without that basic consent, which has nothing to do with talent, which goes deeper than talent, no one can become an actor. Similarly, a doctor is someone who consents to spend his life involved with human bodies and all that they entail. That basic consent (and not talent or skill) enables him to enter the dissecting room during the first year of medical school and persevere for the requisite number of years.
Surgery takes the basic imperative of the medical profession to its outermost border, where the human makes contact with the divine. When a person is clubbed violently on the head, he collapses and stops breathing. Some day, he will stop breathing anyway. Murder simply hastens a bit what God will eventually see to on His own. God, it may be assumed, took murder into account; He did not take surgery into account. He never suspected that someone would dare to stick his hand into the mechanism He had invented, wrapped carefully in skin, and sealed away from human eyes. When Tomas first positioned his scalpel on the skin of a man asleep under an anesthetic, then breached the skin with a decisive incision, and finally cut it open with a precise and even stroke (as if it were a piece of fabric—a coat, a skirt, a curtain), he experienced a brief but intense feeling of blasphemy. Then again, that was what attracted him to it! That was the Es muss sein! rooted deep inside him, and it was planted there not by chance, not by the chief's sciatica, or by anything external.
But how could he take something so much a part of him and cast it off so fast, so forcefully, and so lightly?
He would respond that he did it so as not to let the police misuse him. But to be quite frank, even if it was theoretically possible (and even if a number of cases have actually occurred), it was not too likely that the police would make public a false statement over his signature.
Granted, a man has a right to fear dangers that are less than likely to occur. Granted, he was annoyed with himself and at his clumsiness, and desired to avoid further contact with the police and the concomitant feeling of helplessness. And granted, he had lost his profession anyway, because the mechanical aspirin-medicine he practiced at the clinic had nothing in common with his concept of medicine. Even so, the way he rushed into his decision seems rather odd to me. Could it perhaps conceal something else, something deeper that escaped his reasoning?
8
Even though he came to love Beethoven through Tereza, Tomas was not particularly knowledgeable about music, and I doubt that he knew the true story behind Beethoven's famous Muss es sein? Es muss sein! motif.
This is how it goes: A certain Dembscher owed Beethoven fifty florins, and when the composer, who was chronically short of funds, reminded him of the debt, Dembscher heaved a mournful sigh and said, Muss es sein? To which Beethoven replied, with a hearty laugh, Es muss sein! and immediately jotted down these words and their melody. On this realistic motif he then composed a canon for four voices: three voices sing Es muss sein, es muss sein, ja, ja, ja, ja! (It must be, it must be, yes, yes, yes, yes!), and the fourth voice chimes in with Heraus mit dem Beutel! (Out with the purse!).
A year later, the same motif showed up as the basis for the fourth movement of the last quartet, Opus 155. By that time, Beethoven had forgotten about Dembscher's purse. The words Es muss sein! had acquired a much more solemn ring; they seemed to issue directly from the lips of Fate. In Kant's language, even Good morning, suitably pronounced, can take the shape of a metaphysical thesis. German is a language of heavy words. Es muss sein! was no longer a joke; it had become der schwer gefasste Entschluss (the difficult or weighty resolution).
So Beethoven turned a frivolous inspiration into a serious quartet, a joke into metaphysical truth. It is an interesting tale of light going to heavy or, as Parmenides would have it, positive going to negative. Yet oddly enough, the transformation fails to surprise us. We would have been shocked, on the other hand, if Beethoven had transformed the seriousness of his quartet into the trifling joke of a four-voice canon about Dembscher's purse. Had he done so, however, he would have been in the spirit of Parmenides and made heavy go to light, that is, negative to positive! First (as an unfinished sketch) would have come the great metaphysical truth and last (as a finished masterpiece)—the most frivolous of jokes! But we no longer know how to think as Parmenides thought.
It is my feeling that Tomas had long been secretly irritated by the stern, aggressive, solemn Es muss sein! and that he harbored a deep desire to follow the spirit of Parmenides and make heavy go to light. Remember that at one point in his life he broke completely with his first wife and his son and that he was relieved when both his parents broke with him. What could be at the bottom of it all but a rash and not quite rational move to reject what proclaimed itself to be his weighty duty, his Es muss sein!' ?
That, of course, was an external Es muss sein! reserved for him by social convention, whereas the Es muss sein! of his love for medicine was internal. So much the worse for him. Internal imperatives are all the more powerful and therefore all the more of an inducement to revolt.
Being a surgeon means slitting open the surface of things and looking at what lies hidden inside. Perhaps Tomas was led to surgery by a desire to know what lies hidden on the other side of Es muss sein! ; in other words, what remains of life when a person rejects what he previously considered his mission.
