LITMIR.BIZ

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part of his attraction to her. Her maturity far surpassed his own, but it didn’t show on her face in the soft way of aging. It showed as toughness—a chiseled quality to her features and resoluteness in her eyes. While Todor discovered his sexual attraction to his own gender to be specific to younger, more feminine-looking men, his attraction to the opposite gender was specific to older, harder-looking women.

      In 1984, Todor was stationed with his family in a suburb of Bangkok in a gated diplomatic community called Grafton. It housed diplomats from around the world, including young diplomats in training. Todor was a trade ambassador. He established mine building contracts and mining-related trades with the Thai government. On their second day there, a young man knocked on Todor’s door. It was six o’clock in the morning. When Todor opened the door, the boy gave a salute. Todor, forgetting he had a cup of coffee in his right hand, made to return the solute and splashed hot coffee against his chest, the crisp, white uniform shirt instantly soggy brown. His chest burned, but Todor barely noticed the pain, so taken he was by the boy’s beauty. He was tall and thin with black hair and eyes so deeply brown they looked almost black. Todor realized this was because they contrasted so sharply with his very pale, unblemished skin.

      “Sir, may I help you with your shirt?” he asked. Todor snapped out of his reverie and looked down at himself. Coffee had also spilled down the front of his trousers.

      “Well, this uniform is a mess now, isn’t it?”

      “Sir, you should take it off and I will have it cleaned for you.” Todor gazed at the young man. There was a feminine tilt to his hips and the way he held himself. When Todor next spoke, the boy’s gaze fell to focus on Todor’s mouth.

      “I’m clumsy. You should not feel obliged to clean up my mess. Come in, please,” he said. He knew right away that the young soldier was gay. The knowledge made him feel vulnerable and superior at the same time. When the boy walked in, one broad shoulder brushed past Todor’s shoulder and Todor smelled cloves. The scent overpowered the bitter scent of spilled coffee. As the boy crossed the room, Todor noticed that he limped. His feet were turned in, toes pointing toward one another.

      “Sir, may I sit?” he asked.

      “Yes, please, sit,” said Todor, “act at ease.”

      “Thank you, sir.”

      “Call me Todor. What’s your name?”

      “Emil, sir. I mean, my name is Emil. Pleased to meet you, Todor,” he said. His cheeks reddened, making him look adolescent.

      “Emil, what can I do for you?”

      “Sir, I mean, Todor, I have come to ask for your help. I want to stay at Grafton but they want to send me home. My feet, they’re bad, but I can walk normally with braces. That’s how I got through the interview process without anyone knowing there was anything different about me. But coming here, my braces were taken from me, and I can’t walk normally without them.”

      “What do you mean your feet are bad? How are they bad?”

      “They have a problem in the structure of the bones and joints. They’re twisted so that my feet point in. It causes nerve pain, which I have learned to overcome. I had braces specially designed to fit my feet and turn them back out, which allows me to walk normally.”

      “Walk normally with pain?”

      “I’m used to the pain, sir. I don’t even feel it.”

      “Can you run?”

      “Yes, sir, with the braces, I can do anything any other man can do.”

      Todor sat across from him, noticing during their conversation that his eyes kept falling to Todor’s mouth. This made Todor want to look at the boy’s mouth, which was exquisitely shaped.

      “What became of the braces?”

      “I don’t know, sir.”

      “And who wants to send you home?”

      “The Thai government, sir.”

      “Emil, I told you, call me Todor.”

      Emil blushed again and glanced at the floor before meeting Todor’s gaze with surprising confidence and saying, “Yes, Todor.”

      Todor felt a fleeting jolt in his stomach as though he were in free fall for a single second.

      “I will work on recovering your braces. Meanwhile, I will find work for you to do here, for me,” Todor said. Emil looked at Todor, wide-eyed and slack-mouthed.

      “Thank you, Todor,” he said, causing the same explosion of sensation in Todor’s stomach. Just to hear Emil say his name caused a stab of pure pleasure in his gut.

      At first, Todor gave Emil odd jobs to do: get his uniforms cleaned, shine his shoes, bring him coffee, deliver messages. Each of these tasks kept Emil away from Todor most of the time. Todor found himself searching for a task he could assign to Emil that would keep the boy in his office. He realized that most of the built-in shelving space in his office was empty. So one day, he and Emil went to a used bookstore in Bangkok and bought several boxes of books, all in English. He then asked Emil to organize his bookshelves.

      “Never have I seen so many books in English,” Emil said, unpacking the boxes.

      “The clerk at the store told me they were donated to the local library by an American when he left town. The clerk then made a donation to the library and they offered him the books. I like reading books in English, so I decided to buy them all.”

      Emil pulled out each book and inspected it. Several in succession about anatomy and physiology. Another several medical texts about the prognosis of various rare diseases. A smattering of ancient Greek philosophy. And several books on physics. When all the boxes were empty and the books stacked on the floor in groupings by subject, Todor and Emil regarded the collection as a whole.

      “No fiction,” they both said, nearly simultaneously. They laughed.

      “Except, look,” Emil said. He pulled a gray book from a box and held it up.

      THE

      UNBEARABLE

      LIGHTNESS

      OF BEING

      A NOVEL BY

      MILAN KUNDERA

       9. December 16, 2015, Cambridge, MA

      The dark body living inside the despair could pull Marko in at any moment. When it did, it was like a blackout. Marko didn’t remember what had happened when he came to. Often, a stressful situation could trigger it. Sometimes at school, when things got to be particularly stressful or scary, Marko would slip off with the dark body and come back later. Often, this would happen in the middle of a class when a teacher was saying something Marko wasn’t following or when another student was staring at Marko the way the other kids who aren’t in wheelchairs sometimes do. Marko never made a decision to slip off, it just happened.

      When he came back, the feeling was like waking up from a dream. He could remember scraps of what had happened but not all of it, and it would fade fast. Sometimes, he would have hit himself and screamed in the blackouts. But that stopped happening for a while and instead, when he woke up from these states, usually nothing would have happened and everyone would be just as they were before. He had just lost a bit of time. Until the day after his first trip in the dream bed, when something went very wrong.

      A girl who sat next to Marko in class pushed his books off his desk and then laughed. Another kid behind Marko laughed, too. That was the last thing Marko remembered before he slipped off. In his dream, Marko watched the dark body float around the ceiling of the classroom while everyone in the class was frozen still, like a movie on pause. Darkness from the dark body started to drip like melted wax over everyone and everything in the classroom until it was all covered and encased. Marko himself held his breath until his lungs burned, and when he inhaled finally, the dark body came rushing thickly into his lungs and made him cough. When Marko came

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