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country belonged to him and him alone.
    "Es muss sein!" Tomas repeated to himself, but then he began to doubt. Did it really have to
be?
    Yes, it was unbearable for him to
stay in Zurich imagining Tereza living on her own in Prague.
    But how long would he have been
tortured by compassion? All his life? A year? Or a month? Or only a week?
    33
    34
    How
could he have known? How could he have gauged it? Any schoolboy can do
experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypotheses.
But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to
test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.
    It was with
these thoughts in mind that he opened the door to his flat. Karenin made the
homecoming easier by jumping up on him and licking his face. The desire to fall
into Tereza's arms (he could still feel it while getting into his car in
Zurich) had completely disintegrated. He fancied himself standing opposite her
in the midst of a snowy plain, the two of them shivering from the cold.
17
    From
the very beginning of the occupation, Russian military airplanes had flown over
Prague all night long. Tomas, no longer accustomed to the noise, was unable to
fall asleep.
    Twisting and
turning beside the slumbering Tereza, he recalled something she had told him a
long time before in the course of an insignificant conversation. They had been
talking about his friend Z. when she announced, "If I hadn't met you, I'd
certainly have fallen in love with him."
    Even then, her
words had left Tomas in a strange state of melancholy, and now he realized it
was only a matter of chance that Tereza loved him and not his friend Z. Apart
from her consummated love for Tomas, there were, in the realm of possibility,
an infinite number of unconsummated loves for other men.
                                               35
    We all reject out
of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or
weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would
no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring,
is playing the "Es muss sein!" to our own great love.
    Tomas often thought of Tereza's
remark about his friend Z. and came to the conclusion that the love story of
his life exemplified not "Es muss sein! " (It must be so), but
rather "Es konnte auch anders sein" (It could just as well be
otherwise).
    Seven years earlier, a complex
neurological case happened to have been discovered at the hospital in
Tereza's town. They called in the chief surgeon of Tomas's hospital in Prague
for consultation, but the chief surgeon of Tomas's hospital happened to
be suffering from sciatica, and because he could not move he sent Tomas to the
provincial hospital in his place. The town had several hotels, but Tomas happened to be given a room in the one where Tereza was employed. He happened to
have had enough free time before his train left to stop at the hotel restaurant.
Tereza happened to be on duty, and happened to be serving Tomas's
table. It had taken six chance happenings to push Tomas towards Tereza, as if
he had little inclination to go to her on his own.
    He had gone back to Prague because
of her. So fateful a decision resting on so fortuitous a love, a love that
would not even have existed had it not been for the chief surgeon's sciatica
seven years earlier. And that woman, that personification of absolute fortuity,
now again lay asleep beside him, breathing deeply.
    It was late at night. His stomach
started acting up as it tended to do in times of psychic stress.
    Once or twice her breathing turned
into mild snores. Tomas felt no compassion. All he felt was the pressure in
his stomach and the despair of having returned.

PART TWO
Soul and Body
    1
    It
would be senseless for the author to try to convince the reader that his
characters once actually lived. They were not born of a mother's womb; they
were born of a stimulating phrase or