An old thought came back to her: Her home was Karenin, not Tomas. Who would wind the clock of their days when he was gone?
Transported mentally into the future, a future without Karenin, Tereza felt abandoned.
Karenin was lying in a corner whimpering. Tereza went out into the garden. She looked down at a patch of grass between two apple trees and imagined burying Karenin there. She dug her heel into the earth and traced a rectangle in the grass. That was where his grave would be.
What are you doing? Tomas asked, surprising her just as she had surprised him reading the letter a few hours earlier.
She gave no answer. He noticed her hands trembling for the first time in many months. He grabbed hold of them. She pulled away from him.
Is that a grave for Karenin?
She did not answer.
Her silence grated on him. He exploded. First you blame me for thinking of him in the past tense, and then what do you do? You go and make the funeral arrangements! She turned her back on him.
Tomas retreated into his room, slamming the door behind him.
Tereza went in and opened it. Instead of thinking about yourself all the time, you might at least have some consideration for him, she said. He was asleep until you woke him. Now he'll start whimpering again.
She knew she was being unfair (the dog was not asleep); she knew she was acting like the most vulgar of women, the kind that is out to cause pain and knows how.
Tomas tiptoed into the room where Karenin was lying, but she would not leave him alone with the dog. They both leaned over him, each from his own side. Not that there was a hint of reconciliation in the move. Quite the contrary. Each of them was alone. Tereza with her dog, Tomas with his.
It is thus divided, each alone, that, sad to say, they remained with him until his last hour.
4
Why was the word idyll so important for Tereza?
Raised as we are on the mythology of the Old Testament, we might say that an idyll is an image that has remained with us like a memory of Paradise: life in Paradise was not like following a straight line to the unknown; it was not an adventure. It moved in a circle among known objects. Its monotony bred happiness, not boredom.
As long as people lived in the country, in nature, surrounded by domestic animals, in the bosom of regularly recurring seasons, they retained at least a glimmer of that paradisiac idyll. That is why Tereza, when she met the chairman of the collective farm at the spa, conjured up an image of the countryside (a countryside she had never lived in or known) that she found enchanting. It was her way of looking back, back to Paradise.
Adam, leaning over a well, did not yet realize that what he saw was himself. He would not have understood Tereza when she stood before the mirror as a young girl and tried to see her soul through her body. Adam was like Karenin. Tereza made a game of getting him to look at himself in the mirror, but he never recognized his image, gazed at it vacantly, with incredible indifference.
Comparing Adam and Karenin leads me to the thought that in Paradise man was not yet man. Or to be more precise, man had not yet been cast out on man's path. Now we are longtime outcasts, Hying through the emptiness of time in a straight line. Yet somewhere deep down a thin thread still ties us to that far-off misty Paradise, where Adam leans over a well and, unlike Narcissus, never even suspects that the pale yellow blotch appearing in it is he himself. The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.
Whenever, as a child, she came across her mother's sanitary napkins soiled with menstrual blood, she felt disgusted, and hated her mother for lacking the shame to hide them. But Karenin, who was after all a female, had his periods, too. They came once every six months and lasted a fortnight. To keep him from soiling their flat, Tereza would put a wad of absorbent cotton between his legs and pull a pair of old panties over it, skillfully tying them to his body with a long ribbon. She would go on laughing at the outfit for the entire two weeks of each period.
Why is it that a dog's menstruation made her lighthearted and gay, while her own menstruation made her squeamish? The answer seems simple to me: dogs were never expelled from Paradise. Karenin knew nothing about the duality of body and soul and had no concept of disgust. That is why Tereza felt so free and easy with him. (And that is why it is so dangerous to turn an animal into a machina animata, a cow into an automaton for the production of milk. By so doing, man cuts the thread binding him to Paradise and has nothing left to hold or comfort him on his flight through the emptiness of time.)
From this jumble of ideas came a sacrilegious thought that Tereza could not shake off: the love that tied her to Karenin was better than the love between her and Tomas. Better, not bigger. Tereza did not wish to fault either Tomas or herself; she did not wish to claim that they could love each other more. Her feeling was rather that, given the nature of the human couple, the love of man and woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best instances) in the love between man and dog, that oddity of human history probably unplanned by the Creator.
It is a completely selfless love: Tereza did not want anything of Karenin; she did not ever ask him to love her back. Nor had she ever asked herself the questions that plague human couples: Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
And something else: Tereza accepted Karenin for what he was; she did not try to make him over in her image; she agreed from the outset with his dog's life, did not wish to deprive him of it, did not envy him his secret intrigues. The reason she trained him was not to transform him (as a husband tries to reform his wife and a wife her husband), but to provide him with the elementary language that enabled them to communicate and live together.
Then too: No one forced her to love Karenin; love for dogs is voluntary. (Tereza was again reminded of her mother, and regretted everything that had happened between them. If her mother had been one of the anonymous women in the village, she might well have found her easygoing coarseness agreeable. Oh, if only her mother had been a stranger! From childhood on, Tereza had been ashamed of the way her mother occupied the features of her face and confiscated her I . What made it even worse was that the age-old imperative Love your father and mother! forced her to agree with that occupation, to call the aggression love! It was not her mother's fault that Tereza broke with her. Tereza broke with her not because she was the mother she was but because she was a mother.)
But most of all: No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development. Karenin surrounded Tereza and Tomas with a life based on repetition, and he expected the same from them.
If Karenin had been a person instead of a dog, he would surely have long since said to Tereza, Look, I'm sick and tired of carrying that roll in my mouth every day. Can't you come up with something different? And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
Yes, happiness is the longing for repetition, Tereza said to herself.
When the chairman of the collective farm took his Mefisto out for a walk after work and met Tereza, he never failed to say, Why did he come into my life so late, Tereza? We could have gone skirt chasing, he and I! What woman could resist these two little pigs? at which point the pig was trained to grunt and snort. Tereza laughed each time, even though she knew beforehand exactly what he would say. The joke did not lose its charm, through repetition. On the contrary. In an idyllic setting, even humor is subject to the sweet law of repetition.
5
Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death. Karenin walked on three legs and spent more and more of his time lying in a corner. And whimpering. Both husband and wife agreed that they had no business letting him suffer needlessly. But agree as they might in principle, they still had to face the anguish of determining the time when his suffering was in fact needless, the point at which life was no longer worth living.
If only Tomas hadn't been a doctor! Then they would have been able to hide behind a third party. They would have been able to go back to the vet and ask him to put the dog to sleep with an injection.
Assuming the role of Death is a terrifying thing. Tomas insisted that he would not give the injection himself; he would have the vet come and do it. But then he realized that he could grant Karenin a privilege forbidden to humans: Death would come for him in the guise of his loved ones.
Karenin had whimpered all night. After feeling his leg in the morning, Tomas said to Tereza, There's no point in waiting.
In a few minutes they would both have to go to work. Tereza went in to see Karenin. Until then, he had lain in his corner completely apathetic (not even acknowledging Tomas when he felt his leg), but when he heard the door open and saw Tereza come in, he raised his head and looked at her.
She could not stand his stare; it almost frightened her. He did not look that way at Tomas, only at her. But never with such intensity. It was not a desperate look, or even sad. No, it was a look of awful, unbearable trust. The look was an eager question. All his life Karenin had waited for answers from Tereza, and he was letting her know (with more urgency than usual, however) that he was still ready to learn the truth from her. (Everything that came from Tereza was the truth. Even when she gave commands like Sit! or Lie down! he took them as truths to identify with, to give his life meaning.)
His look of awful trust did not last long; he soon laid his head back down on his paws. Tereza knew that no one ever again would look at her like that.
They had never fed him sweets, but recently she had bought him a few chocolate bars. She took them out of the foil, broke them into pieces, and made a circle of them around him. Then she brought over a bowl of water to make sure that he had everything he needed for the several hours he would spend at home alone. The look he had given her just then seemed to have tired him out. Even surrounded by chocolate, he did not raise his head.
She lay down on the floor next to him and hugged him. With a slow and labored turn of the head, he sniffed her and gave her a lick or two. She closed her eyes while the licking went on, as if she wanted to remember it forever. She held out the other cheek to be licked.
Then she had to go and take care of her heifers. She did not return until just before lunch. Tomas had not come home yet. Karenin was still lying on the floor surrounded by the chocolate, and did not even lift his head when he heard her come in. His bad leg was swollen now, and the tumor had burst in another place. She noticed some light red (not blood-like,) drops forming beneath his fur.
Again she lay down next to him on the floor. She stretched one arm across his body and closed her eyes. Then she heard someone banging on the door. Doctor! Doctor! The pig is here! The pig and his master! She lacked the strength to talk to anyone, and did not move, did not open her eyes. Doctor! Doctor! The pigs have come! Then silence.
Tomas did not get back for another half hour. He went straight to the kitchen and prepared the injection without a word. When he entered the room, Tereza was on her feet and Karenin was picking himself up. As soon as he saw Tomas, he gave him a weak wag of the tail.
Look, said Tereza, he's still smiling. She said it beseechingly, trying to win a short reprieve, but did not push for it.
Slowly she spread a sheet out over the couch. It was a white sheet with a pattern of tiny violets. She had everything carefully laid out and thought out, having imagined Karenin's death many days in advance. (Oh, how horrible that we actually dream ahead to the death of those we love!)
He no longer had the strength to jump up on the couch. They picked him up in their arms together. Tereza laid him on his side, and Tomas examined one of his good legs. He was looking for a more or less prominent vein. Then he cut away the fur with a pair of scissors.
Tereza knelt by the couch and held Karenin's head close to her own.
Tomas asked her to squeeze the leg because he was having trouble sticking the needle in. She did as she was told, but did not move her face from his head. She kept talking gently to Karenin, and he thought only of her. He was not afraid. He licked her face two more times. And Tereza kept whispering, Don't be scared, don't be scared, you won't feel any pain there, you'll dream of squirrels and rabbits, you'll have cows there, and Mefisto will be there, don't be scared ...
Tomas jabbed the needle into the vein and pushed the plunger. Karenin's leg jerked; his breath quickened for a few seconds, then stopped. Tereza remained on the floor by the couch and buried her face in his head.
Then they both had to go back to work and leave the dog laid out on the couch, on the white sheet with tiny violets.
They came back towards evening. Tomas went into the garden. He found the lines of the rectangle that Tereza had drawn with her heel between the two apple trees. Then he started digging. He kept precisely to her specifications. He wanted everything to be just as Tereza wished.
She stayed in the house with Karenin. She was afraid of burying him alive. She put her ear to his mouth and thought she heard a weak breathing sound. She stepped back and seemed to see his breast moving slightly.
(No, the breath she heard was her own, and because it set her own body ever so slightly in motion, she had the impression the dog was moving.)
She found a mirror in her bag and held it to his mouth. The mirror was so smudged she thought she saw drops on it, drops caused by his breath.
Tomas! He's alive! she cried, when Tomas came in from the garden in his muddy boots.
Tomas bent over him and shook his head. They each took an end of the sheet he was lying on, Tereza the lower end, Tomas the upper. Then they lifted him up and carried him out to the garden.
