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Улбойтпчбойе: солп умбчб (вйвмйпфелб fort / Da)


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21


Next to the bed stood a small table, and on the table the model of a human head, the kind hairdressers put wigs on. Sabina's wig stand sported a bowler hat rather than a wig. "It used to belong to my grandfather," she said with a smile.

It was the kind of hat—black, hard, round—that Tereza had seen only on the screen, the kind of hat Chaplin wore. She smiled back, picked it up, and after studying it for a time, said, "Would you like me to take your picture in it?"

Sabina laughed for a long time at the idea. Tereza put down the bowler hat, picked up her camera, and started taking pictures.

When she had been at it for almost an hour, she suddenly said, "What would you say to some nude shots?"

"Nude shots?" Sabina laughed.

"Yes," said Tereza, repeating her proposal more boldly, "nude shots."

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"That calls for a drink," said Sabina, and opened a bottle of wine.



Tereza felt her body going weak; she was suddenly tongue-tied. Sabina, meanwhile, strode back and forth, wine in hand, going on about her grandfather, who'd been the mayor of a small town; Sabina had never known him; all he'd left behind was this bowler hat and a picture showing a raised platform with several small-town dignitaries on it; one of them was Grandfa­ther; it wasn't at all clear what they were doing up there on the platform; maybe they were officiating at some ceremony, un­veiling a monument to a fellow dignitary who had also once worn a bowler hat at public ceremonies.

Sabina went on and on about the bowler hat and her grand­father until, emptying her third glass, she said "I'll be right back" and disappeared into the bathroom.

She came out in her bathrobe. Tereza picked up her cam­era and put it to her eye. Sabina threw open the robe.

22


The camera served Tereza as both a mechanical eye through which to observe Tomas's mistress and a veil by which to con­ceal her face from her.

It took Sabina some time before she could bring herself to slip out of the robe entirely. The situation she found herself in was proving a bit more difficult than she had expected. After several minutes of posing, she went up to Tereza and said, "Now it's my turn to take your picture. Strip!"

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Sabina had heard the command "Strip!" so many times from Tomas that it was engraved in her memory. Thus, To­mas's mistress had just given Tomas's command to Tomas's wife. The two women were joined by the same magic word. That was Tomas's way of unexpectedly turning an innocent conversation with a woman into an erotic situation. Instead of stroking, flattering, pleading, he would issue a command, issue it abruptly, unexpectedly, softly yet firmly and authoritatively, and at a distance: at such moments he never touched the wom­an he was addressing. He often used it on Tereza as well, and even though he said it softly, even though he whispered it, it was a command, and obeying never failed to arouse her. Hear­ing the word now made her desire to obey even stronger, be­cause doing a stranger's bidding is a special madness, a madness all the more heady in this case because the command came not from a man but from a woman.



Sabina took the camera from her, and Tereza took off her clothes. There she stood before Sabina naked and disarmed. Literally disarmed: deprived of the apparatus she had been us­ing to cover her face and aim at Sabina like a weapon. She was completely at the mercy of Tomas's mistress. This beautiful submission intoxicated Tereza. She wished that the moments she stood naked opposite Sabina would never end.

I think that Sabina, too, felt the strange enchantment of the situation: her lover's wife standing oddly compliant and timo­rous before her. But after clicking the shutter two or three times, almost frightened by the enchantment and eager to dis­pel it, she burst into loud laughter.

Tereza followed suit, and the two of them got dressed.

23


All previous crimes of the Russian empire had been committed under the cover of a discreet shadow. The deportation of a million Lithuanians, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles, the liquidation of the Crimean Tatars remain in our memory, but no photographic documentation exists; sooner or later they will therefore be proclaimed as fabrications. Not so the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, of which both stills and motion pictures are stored in archives throughout the world.

Czech photographers and cameramen were acutely aware that they were the ones who could best do the only thing left to do: preserve the face of violence for the distant future. Seven days in a row, Tereza roamed the streets, photographing Rus­sian soldiers and officers in compromising situations. The Rus­sians did not know what to do. They had been carefully briefed about how to behave if someone fired at them or threw stones, but they had received no directives about what to do when someone aimed a lens.

She shot roll after roll and gave about half of them, unde­veloped, to foreign journalists (the borders were still open, and reporters passing through were grateful for any kind of docu­ment). Many of her photographs turned up in the Western press. They were pictures of tanks, of threatening fists, of houses destroyed, of corpses covered with bloodstained red-white-and-blue Czech flags, of young men on motorcycles rac­ing full speed around the tanks and waving Czech flags on long staffs, of young girls in unbelievably short skirts provoking the miserable sexually famished Russian soldiers by kissing random passersby before their eyes. As I have said, the Russian invasion was not only a tragedy; it was a carnival of hate filled with a curious (and no longer explicable) euphoria.

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24


She took some fifty prints with her to Switzerland, prints she had made herself with all the care and skill she could muster. She offered them to a high-circulation illustrated magazine. The editor gave her a kind reception (all Czechs still wore the halo of their misfortune, and the good Swiss were touched); he offered her a seat, looked through the prints, praised them, and explained that because a certain time had elapsed since the events, they hadn't the slightest chance ("not that they aren't very beautiful!") of being published.

"But it's not over yet in Prague!" she protested, and tried to explain to him in her bad German that at this very moment, even with the country occupied, with everything against them, workers' councils were forming in the factories, the students were going out on strike demanding the departure of the Rus­sians, and the whole country was saying aloud what it thought. "That's what's so unbelievable! And nobody here cares any­more."

The editor was glad when an energetic woman came into the office and interrupted the conversation. The woman hand­ed him a folder and said, "Here's the nudist beach article."

The editor was delicate enough to fear that a Czech who photographed tanks would find pictures of naked people on a beach frivolous. He laid the folder at the far end of the desk and quickly said to the woman, "How would you like to meet a Czech colleague of yours? She's brought me some marvelous pictures."

The woman shook Tereza's hand and picked up her photo­graphs. "Have a look at mine in the meantime," she said.

Tereza leaned over to the folder and took out the pictures.

Almost apologetically the editor said to Tereza, "Of course

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they're completely different from your pictures."

"Not at all," said Tereza. "They're the same."

Neither the editor nor the photographer understood her, and even I find it difficult to explain what she had in mind when she compared a nude beach to the Russian invasion. Looking through the pictures, she stopped for a time at one that showed a family of four standing in a circle: a naked moth­er leaning over her children, her giant tits hanging low like a goat's or cow's, and the husband leaning the same way on the other side, his penis and scrotum looking very much like an udder in miniature.

"You don't like them, do you?" asked the editor.

"They're good photographs."

"She's shocked by the subject matter," said the woman. "I can tell just by looking at you that you've never set foot on a nude beach."

"No," said Tereza.

The editor smiled. "You see how easy it is to guess where you're from? The Communist countries are awfully puritani­cal."

"There's nothing wrong with the naked body," the woman said with maternal affection. "It's normal. And everything nor­mal is beautiful!"

The image of her mother marching through the flat naked flashed through Tereza's mind. She could still hear the laughter behind her back when she ran and pulled the curtains to stop the neighbors from seeing her naked mother.


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