Mrs. Klima was getting ready to leave, but her husband was still in bed.
"Don't you also have to leave this morning?" she asked him.
"Why hurry? I've got plenty of time to get to those morons," Klima replied. He yawned and turned over.
He had announced to her two days before, in the middle of Tuesday night, that at the exhausting conference he had just come back from he had been pressured to help amateur bands and thus forced into giving a concert in a small spa town on Thursday evening with a jazz-playing pharmacist and physician. He had shouted all this angrily, but Mrs. Klima looked him in the face and clearly saw that his indignant curses were insincere, that there was no concert and Klima had invented it only to provide himself some time for one of his love intrigues. She could read everything on his face; he could never hide anything from her. Now, as he swore, yawned, and turned over, she realized instantly that he was doing so not out of sleepiness but to hide his face and prevent her from scrutinizing it.
Then she left for work. When, some years earlier, her illness had deprived her of her place in front of the
footlights, Klima found her a job at the theater as a secretary. It was not unpleasant, she met interesting people every day, and she was fairly free to arrange her own work schedule. Now she sat down in her office to write several official letters, but she could not manage to concentrate.
Nothing absorbs a human being more completely than jealousy. When Kamila lost her mother a year earlier, it was certainly an event more tragic than one of the trumpeter's escapades. And yet the death of her mother, whom she loved immensely, caused her less pain. The pain of her grief was benignly multicolored: there was sadness in it, and longing, emotion, regret (had Kamila taken sufficient care of her mother? had she neglected her?), even a serene smile. That pain was benignly dispersed in all directions: Kamila's thoughts rebounded from her mother's coffin and flew off toward memories, toward her own childhood and, still further, toward her mother's childhood, they flew off toward dozens of practical concerns, they flew off toward the future, which was wide open and where, as consolation (yes, in those exceptional days her husband was her consolation), Klima's figure stood outlined.
The pain of jealousy, on the contrary, did not move about in space, it turned like a drill on a single point. There was no dispersal. If her mother's death had opened the door to a future (different, more lonely, and also more adult), the suffering caused by her husband's infidelity opened no future at all. Everything was concentrated on a single (and perpetually present) image
of an unfaithful body, on a single (and perpetually present) reproach. When she lost her mother, Kamila could listen to music, she could even read; when she was jealous she could do nothing at all.
The day before, she had already gotten the idea of going to the spa town so as to check on the existence of the suspect concert, but she immediately gave it up because she knew that her jealousy would horrify Klima and that she must not overtly reveal it to him. But jealousy ran inside her like a racing engine, and she was unable to resist picking up the telephone and dialing the railroad station. In self-justification she told herself that she was phoning absentmindedly, with no particular intent, because she was unable to concentrate on administrative correspondence.
When she learned that the train departed at eleven, she imagined herself going up and down unfamiliar streets in search of a poster with Klima's name on it, asking at the tourist bureau if they knew about a concert to be given by her husband, being told there is no such concert, and then wandering, wretched and betrayed, through a strange and deserted town. And then she imagined Klima talking about the concert the next day and questioning him about the details. She would look him in the face, listen to his inventions, and drink the poisonous brew of his lies with bitter pleasure.
But she immediately told herself that she should not behave this way. No, she could not spend whole days and weeks spying and nurturing the images of her jeal-
ousy. She dreaded losing him, and because of this fear she would end up losing him!
But another voice immediately replied with cunning naivete: No, she was not going to spy on him! Klima had asserted that he was going to give a concert, and she believed him! It was just because she did not wish to be jealous that she took him seriously, that she accepted his assertions without suspicion! He had said that he was going unhappily, that he was afraid he would be spending a dreary day and evening there! It was thus only to prepare a pleasant surprise for him that she decided to go and join him! When Klima, at the end of the concert, was disgustedly taking his bows and thinking of the exhausting trip home, she would slip onto the foot of the stage, he would see her, and they would both laugh!
She handed the manager the letters she had written with difficulty. They thought well of her at the theater. They appreciated the modesty and friendliness of a famous musicians wife. The sadness that sometimes emanated from her had something disarming about it. The manager could not refuse her anything. She promised to return Friday afternoon and stay late at the theater that day to make up the lost time.
It was ten o'clock, and, as she did each day, Olga had just received a large white sheet and a key from Ruzena. She went into a cubicle, took off her clothes, hung them on a hanger, slung the sheet around her like a toga, locked the cubicle, returned the key to Ruzena, and headed for the adjoining room with the pool. She threw the sheet onto the railing and went down the steps into the water, where there were already many women bathing. The pool was not big, but Olga was convinced that swimming was necessary for her health, and so she tried a few strokes. That splashed water into the talkative mouth of one of the ladies. "Are you crazy?" she cried out at Olga testily. "This pool isn't for swimming!"
Women were squatting in the shallow water, huddled up along the wall of the pool like big frogs. Olga was afraid of them. They were all older than she, they were more robust, they had more fat and skin. She thus sat down among them humbled, and stayed motionless and frowning.
Then she suddenly caught sight of a young man at the door; he was short and wore blue jeans and a torn sweater.
"What's that fellow doing here?" she exclaimed.
All the women turned in the direction Olga was looking and started to snicker and squeal.
Just then Ruzena came into the room and shouted:
"We've got visitors. They're going to film you for the news.''
The women greeted this with great laughter.
Olga protested: "What is all this?"
"The management gave them permission," said Ruzena.
"I don't care about the management, nobody consulted me!" Olga exclaimed.
The young man in the torn sweater (he had a light meter dangling from his neck) approached the pool and looked at Olga with a grin she found obscene: "Miss, thousands of viewers will go mad for you when they see you on the screen!"
The women responded with a new burst of laughter, and Olga hid her chest with her hands (it was not difficult, for, as we know, her breasts looked like two plums) and huddled behind the others.
Two more fellows in blue jeans moved toward the pool, and the taller one declared: "Please behave just as naturally as you would if we weren't here."
Olga reached out to the railing where her sheet was hanging. Still in the water, she wrapped the sheet around her and then climbed the steps and stood on the tiled floor; the sheet was dripping wet.
"Oh, shit! Don't go yet!" shouted the young man in the torn sweater.
"You have to stay in the pool fifteen minutes more!" Ruzena then shouted.
"She's shy!" came with guffaws from the pool behind Olga's back.
"She's afraid somebody'll steal her beauty!" said Ruzena.
"Look at her, the princess!" said a voice from the pool.
"Those who don't wish to be filmed of course may go," the tall fellow calmly said.
"The rest of us aren't ashamed! We're beautiful women!" a fat woman said stridently, and the laughter rippled the surface of the water.
"But that young lady can't go! She has to stay in the pool fifteen minutes more!" protested Ruzena as her eyes followed Olga stubbornly heading toward the changing room.
No one could blame Ruzena for being in a bad mood. But why was she so irritated by Olga's refusal to let herself be filmed? Why did she identify herself so totally with the mob of fat women who had welcomed the men's arrival with joyful squeals?
And, by the way, why were these fat women squealing so joyfully? Was it because they wanted to display their beauty to the young men and to seduce them?
Surely not. Their conspicuous shamelessness arose precisely from the certainty that they had no seductive
beauty at their disposal. They were filled with rancor against youthful women, and hoped by exhibiting their sexually useless bodies to malign and mock female nakedness. They wished to take revenge on and torpedo with the repulsiveness of their bodies the glory of female beauty, for they knew that bodies, whether beautiful or ugly, are ultimately all the same and that the ugly overshadow the beautiful as they whisper in men's ears: Look, this is the truth of the body that bewitches you! Look, this big flabby tit is the same thing as that breast you so madly adore.
The joyful shamelessness of the fat women in the pool was a necrophiliac ring dance around the transience of youth, a ring dance made all the more joyful by the presence in the pool of a young woman to serve as sacrificial victim. When Olga wrapped herself in the sheet they interpreted the gesture as sabotage of their cruel rite, and thus they were furious.
But Ruzena was neither fat nor old, she was actually prettier than Olga! Why then did she show no solidarity with her?
Had she decided to have an abortion and been convinced that happiness with Klima was awaiting her, she would have reacted quite differently. Consciousness of being loved separates a woman from the herd, and Ruzena would have been enraptured by the experience of her inimitable singularity. She would have seen the fat women as enemies and Olga as a sister. She would have come to her aid, as beauty comes to the aid of beauty, happiness to happiness, love to love.
But the night before, Ruzena had slept very poorly and had decided that she could not count on Klima's love, so that everything separating her from the herd seemed to her an illusion. All she had was the burgeoning embryo in her belly, protected by society and tradition. All she had was the glorious universality of female destiny, which promised to fight for her.
And these women in the pool exactly represented femaleness in its universality: the femaleness of eternal childbirth, nursing and withering, the femaleness that snickers at the thought of that fleeting second when a woman believes she is loved and feels she is an inimitable individual.
There is no reconciliation possible between a woman who is convinced she is unique and women who have shrouded themselves in universal female destiny. After a sleepless night heavy with thought, Ruzena took (poor trumpeter!) the side of those women.
Jakub was at the wheel, and Bob, sitting beside him on the front seat, kept turning his head to lick his face. Beyond the last houses of the town stood high-rise apartment buildings. They had not been there the year before, and Jakub found them hideous. In the
midst of a green landscape they were like brooms in a plant pot. Jakub was stroking Bob, who was looking at the buildings with satisfaction, and he reflected that God had been kind to dogs in not putting a sense of beauty into their heads.
The dog again licked his face (perhaps he felt that Jakub was always thinking about him), and Jakub thought that in his country things were getting neither better nor worse but only more and more ridiculous: he had once been victim of a hunt for humans, and yesterday he witnessed a hunt for dogs that was like the same old play with a new cast. Pensioners took the roles of examining magistrates and prison guards, and the parts of the imprisoned political figures were played by a boxer dog, a mutt, and a dachshund.
He remembered that several years earlier his neighbors had found their cat in front of their door with its legs bound, nails pushed into its eyes, its tongue cut out. Neighborhood kids had been playing adults. Jakub stroked Bob's head and parked the car in front of the inn.
When he stepped out he thought the dog would rush joyfully toward the door of his home. But instead of starting to run, Bob jumped around Jakub, wanting to play. And yet when a voice shouted "Bob!" the dog was off like a shot toward a woman standing in the doorway.
"You're a hopeless vagabond," she said, and she asked Jakub apologetically how long the dog had been bothering him.
When Jakob replied that the dog had spent the night with him and that he had just driven him back home, the woman profusely and noisily thanked him and urged him to come in. She seated him in a special room apparently used for club banquets and rushed off in search of her husband.
She soon came back with a young man who sat down beside Jakub and shook his hand: "You must be a very nice man to drive all the way here just to bring Bob back. He's stupid, and all he does is run around. But we really love him. Would you like something to eat?"
"Yes, thanks," said Jakub, and the woman rushed off to the kitchen. Then Jakub recounted how he had saved Bob from a bunch of pensioners.
"The bastards!" exclaimed the young man, and then, turning toward the kitchen, called out to his wife: "Vera! Come here! You should hear what they're doing down there in town, the bastards!"
Vera came back carrying a tray with a steaming bowl of soup. She sat down and Jakub had to resume the story of his adventure of the day before. The dog sat under the table, letting himself be scratched behind the ears.
When Jakub had finished his soup, the man got up and rushed off to the kitchen to bring back a dish of roast pork with dumplings.
Jakub was sitting by the window and feeling good. The man cursed the people down there (Jakub was fascinated: the man considered his restaurant a lofty place, an Olympus, a point of retreat and loftiness),
and the woman went off to lead a two-year-old boy in by the hand: "Say thank you to the gentleman," she said. "He brought back your Bob."
The toddler babbled some unintelligible words and emitted a little laugh for Jakub. It was sunny outside, and the yellowing foliage bent gently over the open window. There was not a sound. The inn was well above the world, and one could find peace there.
Although he did not like to procreate, Jakub liked children: "You have a good-looking little boy," he said.
"He's a bit strange," said the woman. "I don't know where he got that big beak."
Jakub recalled his friend's nose and said: "Doctor Skreta told me that he took care of you."
"You know the doctor?" the man asked cheerily.
"He's a friend of mine," said Jakub.
"We're very grateful to him," said the young mother, and Jakub thought that the child was probably one of the successes of Skreta's eugenic project.
"He's not a physician, he's a magician," the man said admiringly.
Jakub reflected that, in this place where the peace of Bethlehem reigned, these three were a holy family, with the child begotten not by a human father but by the god Skreta.
The toddler with the big nose again babbled unintelligibly, and the young father gazed at him lovingly. "I wonder," he said to his wife, "which of your distant ancestors had a big nose."
Jakub smiled. A curious question had just occurred
to him: Had Dr. Skreta also used a syringe to impregnate his own wife?
"Isn't that right?" the young father asked.
"Of course," said Jakub. "It's a great consolation to think that when we've long been in the grave our noses will still be strolling the earth."
They all laughed, and the idea that Skreta could be the toddler's father now seemed to Jakub to be a fanciful dream.
Frantisek took the money from the lady whose refrigerator he had just fixed. He left the house, got on his faithful motorcycle, and headed toward the other end of town to hand over the day's receipts at the office in charge of repair services for the whole district. A few minutes after two he was through for the day. He started the motorcycle again and rode toward the thermal building. At the parking lot he saw the white sedan. He parked the motorcycle next to the car and walked under the colonnades toward the Hall of the People, because he surmised the trumpeter might be there.
He was driven neither by audacity nor combative-ness. He no longer wanted to make a scene. On the contrary, he was determined to control himself, to yield, to
submit totally. He told himself that his love was so great that he could bear anything for its sake. Like the fairy-tale prince who endures all kinds of torments and sufferings for the sake of the princess, confronting dragons and crossing oceans, he was ready to accept fabulously excessive humiliations.
Why was he so humble? Why did he not turn instead to another young woman, one of those available in the small spa town in such alluring abundance?
Frantisek is younger than Ruzena, and thus, unfortunately for him, he is very young. When he is more mature he will find out that things are transient, and he will become aware that beyond one woman's horizon there opens up a horizon of yet more women. But Frantisek still knows nothing about time. He has been living since childhood in an enduring, unchanging world, living in a kind of immobile eternity, he still has the same father and the same mother, and Ruzena, who had made a man of him, is above him like the lid of the firmament, of the only possible firmament. He cannot imagine life without her.
The day before, he had docilely promised not to spy on her and simultaneously had sincerely decided not to bother her. He told himself he was interested only in the trumpeter, and trailing him would not really be a violation of his promise. But at the same time he realized that this was only an excuse and that Ruzena would condemn his behavior, but it was stronger in him than any reflection or any resolution, it was like a drug addiction: he had to see the man; he had to see
him once more, for a long time and close up. He had to look his torment in the face. He had to look at that body, whose union with Ruzena's body seemed to him unimaginable and unbelievable. He had to look at him to confirm with his own eyes whether it was possible to think of their two bodies united.
On the bandstand they were already playing: Dr. Skreta on drums, a slender man on piano, and Klima on trumpet. Some young jazz fans who had slipped in to listen to the rehearsal were sitting in the hall. Frantisek had no fear that the motive for his presence would be found out. He was certain that the trumpeter, blinded by the motorcycle's light, had not seen his face on Tuesday evening, and thanks to Ruzena's caution no one knew much about his relations with the young woman.
The trumpeter interrupted the musicians and sat down at the piano to show the slender man the right tempo. Frantisek took a seat in the back of the hall, slowly transforming himself into a shadow that would not for a moment leave the trumpeter that day.
He was driving back from the forest inn and regretted no longer having beside him the jolly dog who had
licked his face. Then he thought it a miracle that he had succeeded for the forty-five years of his life in keeping that seat beside him free, enabling him now to leave the country so easily, with no baggage, with no burdens, alone, with a false (and yet beautiful) sensation of youth, as if he were a student just beginning to lay the foundation of his future.
He tried to get firmly in mind the idea that he was leaving his country. He tried hard to evoke his past life. He tried hard to see it as a landscape he looked back on with longing, a landscape vertiginously distant. But he could not manage it. What he did succeed in seeing behind him in his mind's eye was tiny, compressed like a closed accordion. He had to make an effort to evoke the scraps of memory that could give him the illusion of a destiny that had been lived.
He looked at the trees along the road. Their foliage was green, red, yellow, and brown. The forest looked aflame. He thought that he was departing at a moment when the forests were on fire and his life and memories were being consumed in those glorious and unfeeling flames. Should he hurt for not hurting? Should he be sad for not being sad?
He felt no sadness, but neither was he in any hurry. According to his arrangements with his friends abroad, he should already have crossed the border by now, but he felt he was again prey to that indecisive lethargy so well known and so much derided in his circle because he succumbed to it exactly when circumstances demanded energetic and resolute behavior. He knew
that he was going to maintain to the last moment that he was leaving today, but he was also aware that since the morning he had done all he could to delay the moment of departure from this charming spa town where for years he had been coming to see his friend, sometimes after long intervals but always with pleasure.
He parked the car (yes, the trumpeter's white sedan and Frantisek's motorcycle were already there) and went into the brasserie, where Olga would be joining him in half an hour. He saw a table he liked, next to the bay window in back looking out at the park's flaming trees, but unfortunately it was already occupied by a man in his thirties. Jakub sat down nearby. He could not see the trees from there; he was fascinated instead by the man, who was visibly nervous, never taking his eyes off the door as he tapped his foot.
She finally arrived. Klima sprang up from his chair, went forward to meet her, and led her to the window table. He smiled at her as if trying by that smile to show that their agreement was still valid, that they were calm and in alliance, and that they had confidence in each other. He searched the young woman's expression for a
positive response to his smile, but he didn't find it. That alarmed him. He didn't dare talk about what preoccupied him, and he engaged the young woman in a meaningless conversation that ought to have created a carefree atmosphere. Nonetheless his words echoed off the young woman's silence as though off a stone wall.
Then she interrupted him: "I've changed my mind. It would be a crime. You might be capable of something like that, but not me."
The trumpeter felt everything in him collapse. He fixed an expressionless look on Ruzena and no longer knew what to say. There was nothing in him but hopeless fatigue. And Ruzena repeated: "It would be a crime."
He looked at her, and she seemed unreal to him. This woman, whose face he was unable to recall when he was away from her, now presented herself to him as his life sentence. (Like all of us, Klima considered reality to be only what entered his life from inside, gradually and organically, whereas what came from outside, suddenly and randomly, he perceived as an invasion of unreality. Alas, nothing is more real than that unreality.)
Then the waiter who had recognized the trumpeter two days before appeared at their table. He brought them a tray with two brandies, and said jovially: "You see, I can read your wishes in your eyes." And to Ruzena he made the same remark as the last time: "Watch out! All the girls want to scratch your eyes out!" And he laughed very loudly.
This time Klima was too absorbed in his fear to pay attention to the waiter s words. He drank a mouthful of brandy and leaned toward Ruzena: "What's going on? I thought we agreed. It was all settled between us. Why did you suddenly change your mind? Just like me, you think we need a few years to devote ourselves entirely to each other. Ruzena! We're doing it only because of our love and to have a child together when both of us really want one."
Jakub instantly recognized the nurse who had wanted to turn Bob over to the old men. He looked at her, fascinated, very curious to know what she and the man with her were talking about. He could not distinguish a single word, but he saw clearly that the conversation was extremely fraught.
From the man's expression it soon became obvious that he had just heard distressing news. He needed a while to find his tongue. His gestures showed that he was trying to persuade the young woman, that he was imploring her. But the young woman remained obstinately silent.
Jakub could not keep from thinking that a life was at stake. The blonde young woman still seemed to him
like someone ready to restrain the victim during an execution, and he didn't for a moment doubt that the man was on the side of life and that she was on the side of death. The man wanted to save someone's life, he was asking for help, but the blonde was refusing it and because of her someone was going to die.
And then he noticed that the man had stopped insisting, that he was smiling and was not hesitating to caress the young woman's cheek. Had they reached an agreement? Not at all. Under the yellow hair the face looked obstinately into the distance, avoiding the man's look.
Jakub was powerless to tear his eyes away from the young woman, whom he was unable since the day before to imagine other than as a hangman's assistant. She had a pretty and vacant face. Pretty enough to attract a man and vacant enough to make all his pleas vanish in it. That face was proud and, Jakub knew, proud not of its prettiness but of its vacuity.
He thought that he saw in that face thousands of other faces he knew well. He thought that his entire life had been an unbroken dialogue with that face. Whenever he had tried to explain something to it, that face had turned away, offended, responding to his arguments by talking about something else; whenever he had smiled at it, that face had reproached him for his superficiality; whenever he had implored it to do something, that face had accused him of exhibiting his superiority-that face which understood nothing and decided everything, a face as vacant as a desert and proud of its desertedness.
It occurred to him that today he was looking at that face for the last time, that tomorrow he was leaving its realm.
Ruzena too had noticed Jakub and recognized him. She felt his eyes fixed on her, and it made her nervous. She found herself surrounded by two men in tacit collusion, surrounded by two gazes pointed at her like two gun barrels.
Klima kept going over his arguments, and she didn't know how to reply. She preferred to repeat quickly to herself that when it was a matter of the life of a child-to-be, reason had nothing to say and only feelings had the right to speak. In silence she turned her face out of range of the double gaze and looked fixedly out the window. Then, thanks to a certain degree of concentration, she felt beginning in her the offended consciousness of a misunderstood lover and mother, and this consciousness was rising in her soul like dumpling dough. And because she was unable to express this feeling in words, she let it be conveyed by fixing her eyes on a single spot in the park.
But precisely where her dazed eyes were fixed she suddenly saw a familiar figure and was panic-stricken.
She no longer heard what Klima was saying. Now there was a third gaze pointing its gun barrel at her, and it was the most dangerous. For Ruzena had been unable to tell with certainty who was responsible for her pregnancy. The one she had thought of first was the man now watching her on the sly, poorly hidden by a tree. But that was only obvious at the beginning, for as time passed she more and more favored choosing the trumpeter as begetter, until the day when she finally decided that it was most certainly he. Let us be utterly clear: she was not trying to attribute her pregnancy to him through trickery. In making her decision, she chose not trickery but truth. She decided it was truly so.
Besides, pregnancy is such a sacred thing that it seemed to her impossible that a man she so looked down on could be the cause of it. It was not logical reasoning but a kind of suprarational illumination that had convinced her she could only have become pregnant by a man she liked, respected, and admired. And when she heard over the telephone that the one she had chosen as the father of her child was shocked, frightened, and refusing to accept his paternal mission, everything was settled conclusively, for from that moment on, not only did she no longer doubt her truth, but she was ready to fight for it.
Klima was silent, and he caressed Ruzena's cheek. Brought out of her reflections, she noticed that he was smiling. He said that they should take another ride in the country, for this brasserie table was separating them like a wall.
She was afraid. Frantisek was still behind the tree in the park with his eyes fixed on the brasserie window. What would happen if he were to harass them as they were leaving? What would happen if he were to make a scene, as he had on Tuesday?
"I'll pay for the two brandies now," Klima said to the waiter.
Ruzena took a glass tube out of her handbag.
The trumpeter gave the waiter a bill and with a magnanimous gesture refused the change.
Ruzena opened the tube, shook a tablet into the hollow of her hand, and swallowed it.
When she closed the tube again, the trumpeter turned to her and looked her in the face. He moved both his hands toward hers, and she let go of the tube in order to feel the touch of his fingers.
"Come, let's go," he said, and Ruzena got up. She saw Jakub's gaze, fixed and hostile, and she looked away.
Once they were outside, she looked anxiously toward the park, but Frantisek was no longer there.
Jakub got up and, taking his half-full glass with him, sat down at the vacated table. With satisfaction he
cast a glance through the window at the reddening trees in the park, and again he thought that these trees were like a fire into which he was throwing his forty-five years of life. Then his glance slipped to the surface of the table, and next to the ashtray he saw the forgotten glass tube. He picked it up and examined it: on the label was the name of a drug unfamiliar to him, with a penciled addition: "Three times a day." The tablets inside the tube were pale blue. That seemed odd to him.
These were the last hours he was spending in his country, and the smallest events were being charged with extraordinary meaning and being changed into an allegorical show. What does it mean, he asked himself, that on this very day someone has left on a table for me a tube of pale-blue tablets? And why should it have been left here by that very woman, Political Persecution's Heiress and Hangman's Assistant? Was she trying to tell me that the need for pale-blue tablets was not yet over? Or was she really trying, by this allusion to poison tablets, to express her undying hatred? Or, still more, was she trying to tell me that by leaving the country I am showing the same resignation I would be showing if I were to swallow the pale-blue tablet I carry in my jacket pocket?
He searched in his pocket, pulled out the tiny wad of tissue paper, and unfolded it. Now that he was looking at it, his own tablet seemed to him a shade darker than those in the forgotten tube. He opened the tube and shook a tablet into his hand. Yes, his was a bit darker
and smaller. One after the other, he put the two tablets into the glass tube. Now that he was looking at them together, he saw that at first sight one would be unable to tell the difference. On top, above the harmless tablets probably intended to treat the mildest of ailments, death lay concealed.
At that moment Olga approached the table. Jakub quickly capped the tube, put it next to the ashtray, and rose to greet his friend.
"I just ran into Klima, the famous trumpeter! Is that possible?" she asked, sitting down beside Jakub. "He was with that horrible female! She gave me a hard time today at the baths!"
But she broke off, for at that moment Ruzena planted herself at their table and said: "I left my tablets here."
Before Jakub could reply, she noticed the tube next to the ashtray and reached for it.
But Jakub was quicker and grabbed it first.
"Give me that!" said Ruzena.
"I want to ask you a favor," said Jakub. "May I have one of those tablets?"
"Sorry! I haven't got time!"
"I'm taking the same drug, and…"
"I'm not a walking pharmacy," said Ruzena.
Jakub tried to remove the cap, but Ruzena prevented him by abruptly reaching for it. Jakub instantly grasped the tube in his fist.
"What's this all about? Give me those tablets!" the young woman shouted at him.
Jakub looked her in the eye; slowly he opened his hand.
Over the rhythmic clatter of the wheels, the futility of her trip seemed clear. She was sure at any rate that her husband was not in the spa town. Then why was she going there? Was she taking a four-hour train trip only to find out what she already knew? She was not acting on a rational intention. It was an engine within her, which had taken to turning and turning and which there was no way of stopping.
(Yes, at this moment Frantisek and Kamila are being propelled into the space of the story like two rockets guided from a distance by blind jealousy-but what guidance can blindness provide?)
Rail connections between the capital and the spa town were not the simplest, and Mrs. Klima had to change trains three times before she got off, exhausted, at an idyllic station filled with display advertisements recommending the locality's healing springs and miraculous muds. She took the poplar-lined avenue that led from the station to the thermal baths, and, arriving at the colonnades, she was struck by a hand-painted poster on which her husband's name appeared
in red. Surprised, she stopped and under her husband's name read two other men's names. She couldn't believe it: Klima hadn't lied to her! It was exactly what he had told her. In these first few seconds she experienced great joy, feeling again the trust she had lost long ago.
But her joy didn't last long, for she immediately realized that the existence of the concert was no proof of her husband's fidelity. He certainly must have agreed to perform in this isolated spa town in order to revisit a woman. And suddenly she became aware that the situation was actually worse than she had imagined, that she had fallen into a trap:
She had come here to make sure that her husband was elsewhere, and thus indirectly to prove him guilty (yet again, for the umpteenth time!) of infidelity. But now things had changed: She was not going to catch him in a blatant lie but catch him (directly, with her own eyes) in an act of infidelity. Whether she wanted to or not, she was going to see the woman with whom Klima had spent the day. This thought nearly staggered her. Of course she had long been certain that she knew everything, but until now she had never seen anything (any of his mistresses). To tell the truth, she knew nothing at all, she only believed she knew, and she gave this conjecture the weight of certainty. She believed in her husband's infidelity the way a Christian believes in God's existence. But the Christian believes in God with the absolute certainty that He will remain unseen. The thought that today she was going to see Klima with a
woman made her feel the terror a Christian would feel on receiving a phone call from God announcing that He was coming over for lunch.
Her entire body was overwhelmed by anxiety. Then she heard someone call her name. She turned around and saw three young men standing under the colonnades. They wore sweaters and jeans, and their bohemian style contrasted sharply with the dreary tidiness of the other spa clientele strolling by. They greeted her with laughter.
"What a surprise!" she exclaimed. They were film people, friends from her days onstage with a microphone.
The tallest one, a director, quickly took her by the arm: "How pleasant it would be to know that you came because of us…"
"But you came here because of your husband…" the assistant director said sadly.
"Just our lousy luck!" said the director. "The most beautiful woman in the capital, and that lout of a trumpeter keeps her in a cage so you don't get to see her for years."
"Shit!" said the cameraman (the short young man in the torn sweater), "we have to celebrate this!"
They thought they were devoting their effusive admiration to a radiant queen who was absentmind-edly hastening to throw it into a wicker basket filled with disdained gifts. And Kamila meanwhile was receiving their words with the gratitude of a lame girl leaning on a kindly arm.
While Olga talked, Jakub was thinking that he had just given poison to a stranger, a young woman who was in danger of swallowing it at any moment.
It had happened suddenly, happened so quickly that he had not even had time to become aware of it. It had happened without his knowledge.
Olga kept talking, and Jakub was searching his mind for justification, telling himself that he had not wanted to give the young woman the tube, that she and she alone had forced him to do it.
But he quickly realized that this was a glib excuse. There were a thousand possible ways he could have disobeyed her. He could have opposed the young woman's insolence with his own insolence, could calmly have shaken the first tablet into the hollow of his hand and put it in his pocket.
And since he had lacked the presence of mind to do this, he could have rushed after the young woman and confessed that there was poison in the tube. It was not too hard to explain to her how it had happened.
But rather than do anything, he remains sitting in his chair and looking at Olga while she is telling him something. He should be getting up, running to catch the nurse. There is still time. And it is his duty to do everything he can to save her life. Why then is he sitting in his chair, why doesn't he move?
Olga was talking, and he was amazed that he stayed sitting, immobile in his chair.
He decided that he must get up right now and look for the nurse. He wondered how he was going to explain to Olga that he must leave. Should he confess to her what had happened? He concluded that he could not confess it to her. What if the nurse swallowed the tablet before he could get to her? Should Olga know that Jakub was a murderer? And even if he got to the nurse in time, how could he justify his long hesitation to Olga and make her understand it? How could he explain to her why he had given the woman the tube? From now on, because of these moments of doing nothing, of remaining rooted to his chair, any observer would have to see him as a murderer!
No, he could not confess to Olga, but what could he say to her? How could he explain abruptly getting up and running God knows where?
But what did it matter what he might say to her? How could he still be occupying himself with such foolishness? How could he, when it was a matter of life and death, care about what Olga was going to think?
He knew that his reflections were quite uncalled for and that every second of hesitation increased the danger threatening the nurse. Actually, it was already too late. While he had been hesitating, she and her friend had already gotten so far from the brasserie that Jakub would not even know in what direction to look for her. If only he knew where they had gone! Where could he find them?
But he soon reproached himself that this argument was just another excuse. It would certainly be hard to find them quickly, but it was not impossible. It was not too late to act, but he had to act immediately, or else it would be too late!
"I started the day badly," Olga was saying. "I overslept, I was late for breakfast and they refused to serve me any, and at the baths there were those stupid film people. To think that I was longing so to have a beautiful day, since it's the last one I'll be spending here with you. It's so important to me. Do you have any idea, Jakub, how important it is to me?"
She leaned across the table and grasped his hands.
"Don't worry, there's no reason for you to spend a bad day,'' he said with an effort, for he was unable to fix his attention on her. A voice was constantly reminding him that the nurse had poison in her handbag and that her life and death depended on him. It was an intrusive, insistent voice, but at the same time strangely weak, as if it were coming to him from far too distant depths.
Klima was driving with Ruzena along a forest road, noting that this time a ride in his luxurious sedan
would not at all be working in his favor. Nothing could distract Ruzena from her stubborn silence, and the trumpeter himself stopped talking for quite a while. When the silence had become too heavy, he said: "Are you coming to the concert?"
"I don't know," she answered.
"Please come," he said, and that evening's concert provided the pretext for a conversation that momentarily diverted them from their quarrel. Klima made an effort to speak amusingly about the drum-playing physician, and decided to postpone the conclusive encounter with Ruzena until the evening.
"I hope you'll be waiting for me after the concert," he said. "Like the last time I played here." As soon as he said these words he realized their significance. "Like the last time" meant that they would make love after the concert. My God, why hadn't he considered that possibility?
It was odd, but until that moment the idea that he might go to bed with her had never even crossed his mind. Ruzena's pregnancy had gently and imperceptibly pushed her away into the asexual terrain of anxiety. Of course he had urged himself to show tenderness toward her, to kiss and caress her, and he made a point of doing so, but these were only gestures, empty signs, without any corporeal interest.
Reflecting on it now, he realized that this indifference to Ruzena's body was the most serious mistake he had made in the last few days. Yes, it was now absolutely clear to him (and he was indignant that the friends he
had consulted had not brought it to his attention): he absolutely had to go to bed with her! Because the remoteness the young woman had suddenly assumed, and he was unable to break through, came precisely from the continuing estrangement of their bodies. Rejecting the child, the flower of Ruzena's womb, was at the same time a wounding rejection of her gravid body. He thus had to show all the more interest in her nongravid body. He had to oppose the fertile body with the infertile body as his ally.
This analysis gave him a feeling of renewed hope. He put his arm around Ruzena's shoulder and leaned toward her: "It breaks my heart to think of us quarreling. Listen, we'll definitely find a solution. The main thing is that we'll be together. We won't let anybody deprive us of tonight, and it'll be as beautiful a night as last time."
One arm held the wheel, the other was around Ruzena's shoulders, and all of a sudden he thought he felt, deep down, a rising desire for the naked skin of this young woman, and this delighted him, for desire was in position to provide him with the only language he and she spoke in common.
"And where'll we meet?" she asked.
Klima was aware that the whole spa town would see with whom he was leaving the concert. But there was no getting around it: "As soon as I'm finished, come and get me behind the bandstand."
While Klima was hurrying back to the Hall of the People to rehearse "St. Louis Blues" and "When the Saints Go Marching In" one last time, Ruzena was looking around anxiously. Not long before, in the car, she had observed in the rearview mirror several times that Frantisek was following them at a distance on his motorcycle. But now he was nowhere to be seen.
She felt she was a fugitive pursued by time. She realized that by tomorrow she would have to know what she wanted, and she knew nothing. In the whole world there was not one person she trusted. Her own family was alien to her. Frantisek loved her, but that was just why she mistrusted him (as the doe mistrusts the hunter). She mistrusted Klima (as the hunter mistrusts the doe). She liked her colleagues well enough, but she did not quite trust them (as the hunter mistrusts other hunters). She was alone in life, and for the past few weeks she had been carrying in her womb a strange companion who some maintained was her greatest chance and others completely the opposite, a companion toward whom she herself felt only indifference.
She knew nothing. She was filled to the brim with not knowing. She was nothing but not knowing. She didn't even know where she was going.
She was passing the Slavia, the worst restaurant in the spa town, a filthy cafe where the locals came to drink beer and spit on the floor. In the old days it had
probably been the best, and from those times there still remained a small garden with three red wooden tables and their chairs (paint peeling), a memento of bourgeois pleasure in open-air brass bands and dancing and parasols propped against the chairs. But what did she know about those times, this young woman who merely went through life on the narrow footbridge of the present, devoid of all historical memory? She was unable to see the shadow the pink parasol casts on us from a distant time, she only saw three young men in jeans, a beautiful woman, and a bottle of wine standing in the middle of a bare table.
One of the men called out to her. She turned and recognized the short cameraman in the torn sweater.
"Come have a drink with us!" he exclaimed.
She complied.
"Thanks to this charming young lady we were able to shoot a little porn film this morning," said the cameraman, by way of introducing Ruzena to the woman, who offered her hand and unintelligibly murmured her name.
Ruzena sat down beside the cameraman, who put a glass in front of her and filled it with wine.
Ruzena was grateful that something was happening. That she no longer had to wonder where she was going or what she should do. That she no longer had to decide whether or not to keep the child.
He had finally made up his mind. He paid the waiter and told Olga that he had to leave and that they would meet before the concert.
Olga asked him what it was he had to do, and Jakub had the unpleasant sensation of being interrogated. He answered that he had an appointment with Skreta.
"All right," she said, "but that won't take you very long. I'll go and change, and I'll be here at six. I'm inviting you to dinner."
Jakub accompanied Olga to Karl Marx House. When she had disappeared down the corridor, he turned to the doorkeeper: "Would you tell me, please, if Miss Ruzena is in?"
"No," said the doorkeeper. "The key's hanging on the board."
"I have something extremely urgent to tell her," said Jakub. "Do you know where I might find her?"
"I don't know."
"I saw her a while ago with the trumpeter who's giving a concert this evening."
"Yes, me too I hear tell she's going out with him," said the doorkeeper. "Right now he must be rehearsing in the Hall of the People."
When Dr. Skreta, enthroned on the bandstand behind his set of drums, caught sight of Jakub in the doorway, he nodded to him. Jakub smiled at him and examined the rows of seats in which about a dozen fans
were sitting. (Yes, Frantisek, Klima's shadow, was among them.) Then Jakub sat down, hoping that the nurse would finally appear.
He wondered where he might still go looking for her. At this moment she might be in any number of different places he had no idea of. Should he ask the trumpeter? But how would he pose the question? And what if something had already happened to Ruzena? Jakub had already concluded that if she died, her death would be totally inexplicable, that a murderer who killed without a motive could not be caught. Should he attract attention to himself? Did he have to leave a trail and lay himself open to suspicion?
He called himself to order. A human life was in danger, and he had no right to be thinking in such a cowardly way. He took advantage of a pause between two numbers and climbed up on the back of the bandstand. Skreta turned toward him, beaming, but Jakub put a finger to his lips and begged him in an undertone to ask the trumpeter the whereabouts of the nurse he had noticed him with an hour earlier in the brasserie.
"What do all of you see in her?" Skreta grumbled sullenly. "Where's Ruzena?" he then cried out to the trumpeter, who blushed and said he didn't know.
"Never mind!" said Jakub apologetically. "Go on playing!"
"How do you like our band?" asked Dr. Skreta.
"It's great," said Jakub, and he climbed down and returned to his seat. He knew that he was still behaving wrongly. If he really cared about Ruzena's life, he
would move heaven and earth to alert everyone to find her immediately. But he had set out to look for her only so as to have an alibi to present to his own conscience.
Again he recalled the moment when he had given her the tube containing the poison. Had it really happened so quickly that he had not had the time to be aware of it? Had it really happened without his knowledge?
Jakub knew that this was not true. His conscience had not been lulled. He again evoked the face under the blonde hair, and he realized it was not by accident (not by lulling his conscience) that he had given the nurse the tube containing the poison, but that it was an old desire of his which for years had watched for the opportunity, a desire so powerful that the opportunity finally obeyed it and came rushing toward it.
He shuddered and got up from his seat. He ran off to Karl Marx House, but Ruzena was still not home.
What an idyll, what a respite! What an interlude in the middle of the drama! What a voluptuous afternoon with three fauns!
The trumpeter's two persecutors, his two hardships, are seated opposite each other, both drinking wine from the same bottle and both equally happy to be
where they are, able if only for a while to do something other than think about him. What a touching alliance, what harmony!
Mrs. Klima looks at the three men. She had once been part of their circle, and she looks at them now as if at a negative of her present life. Submerged by cares, she is seated here facing pure carefreeness; bound to one man, she is seated here facing three fauns who embody virility in its infinite variety.
The fauns' remarks have an obvious goal: to spend the night with the two women, spend the night in a fivesome. It is an illusory goal, because they know that Mrs. Klima's husband is here, but the goal is so beautiful that they are pursuing it even though it is unreachable.
Mrs. Klima knows what they are getting at, and she abandons herself all the more easily to the pursuit of this goal that is merely a fantasy, merely a game, merely a dream temptation. She laughs at their ambiguous remarks, she trades encouraging jokes with the nameless woman who is her accomplice, and she hopes to prolong the dramas interlude as long as possible in order to delay still longer the moment when she will see her rival and look truth in the face.
Yet another bottle of wine, everyone is cheerful, everyone is a bit drunk, but less on wine than on the oddness of the atmosphere, on that desire to prolong the very rapidly passing moment.
Mrs. Klima feels the director's calf pressing her left leg under the table. She is well aware of it, but she does
not withdraw her leg. It is a contact that establishes a sensual connection between them, but it could also have happened quite by chance, could very well have gone unnoticed by her because of its triviality. It is thus a contact situated right on the border between innocence and shamelessness. Kamila does not want to cross this border, but she is happy to be able to stay on it (on this thin sliver of unexpected freedom), and she would be still happier if this magic line were to shift itself toward other verbal allusions, other touchings, other games. Protected by the innocent ambiguity of this shifting border, she wishes to let herself be carried far away, far away and still farther.
Whereas Kamila's beauty, radiant to the point of being nearly embarrassing, forces the director to conduct his offensive with cautious slowness, Ruzena's ordinary charm attracts the cameraman powerfully and directly. He has his arm around her and his hand on her breast.
Kamila is watching. It has been a long time since she has seen up close the shameless gestures of others! She looks at the man's hand covering the young woman's breast, kneading it, pressing and caressing it through her clothing. She is watching Ruzena's face, immobile, passive, tinged with sensual abandon. The hand is caressing the breast, time is sweetly passing, and Kamila feels the assistant's knee against her other leg.
And now she says: "I'm really going to live it up tonight."
"To hell with your trumpeter husband!" the director retorts.
"Yes, to hell with him!" the assistant repeats.
At that moment Ruzena recognized her. Yes, that was the face in the photograph her colleague had shown her! She suddenly pushed away the cameraman's hand.
"You're crazy!" he complained.
He tried to put his arm around her again, and again he was pushed away.
"How dare you!" she shouted at him.
The director and his assistant laughed. "Do you really mean it?" the assistant asked Ruzena.
"Sure I mean it," she answered sternly.
The assistant looked at his watch and said to the cameraman: "It's exactly six o'clock. This complete reversal is taking place because our friend becomes a virtuous woman every even-numbered hour. So you have to wait until seven o'clock."
The laughter burst out again. Ruzena was red with humiliation. She had let herself be caught with a stranger's hand on her breast. She had let herself be caught being pawed. She had let herself be caught by
her greatest rival while everyone was making fun of her.
The director said to the cameraman: "Maybe you should request the young lady to make an exception and consider six an odd-numbered hour."
"Do you think it's theoretically possible to consider six an odd number?" asked the assistant.
"Yes," said the director. "In his famous Elements, Euclid literally says so: 'In certain particular and very mysterious circumstances, certain even numbers behave like odd numbers.' It seems to me that we're dealing with mysterious circumstances of that kind right now."
"Do you, Ruzena, therefore agree to consider six o'clock an odd-numbered hour?" said the assistant.
Ruzena remained silent.
"Do you agree?" asked the cameraman, leaning toward her.
"The young lady is silent," said the assistant. "It's therefore up to us to decide if we should take her silence as consent or as refusal."
"We can vote," said the director.
"That's fair," said the assistant. "Who is in favor of the proposition that Ruzena agrees in this case that six is an odd number? Kamila! You vote first!"
"I think that Ruzena absolutely agrees," said Kamila.
"And you, Director?"
"I'm convinced," said the director in his gentle voice, "that Miss Ruzena will agree to consider six an odd number."
"The cameraman is too much of an interested party, and so he can't vote. As for me, I vote in favor,'1 said the assistant. "We've therefore decided, three votes to none, that Ruzena's silence is equivalent to consent. From this it follows, cameraman, that you may immediately resume pursuing your advances."
The cameraman leaned toward Ruzena and put his arm around her so that his hand was once more touching her breast. Ruzena pushed him away even more violently than before and shouted: "Get your filthy paws off me!"
Kamila interceded: "Look, Ruzena, he can't help it that he likes you so much. We've all been having such a good time…"
A few minutes earlier Ruzena had been quite passive and had given herself up to the course of events to do with her what it wished, as if she hoped to read her fate in whatever chance brought her way. She would have let herself be taken away, she would have let herself be seduced and persuaded of anything, just to escape from the dead end in which she found herself trapped.
But chance, to which she lifted her imploring face, suddenly proved to be hostile, and Ruzena, held up to ridicule in front of her rival and made into a laughingstock, realized that she had only one single solid support, one single consolation, one single chance of salvation: the embryo in her womb. Her entire soul went down (once more! once more!), down inside to the inmost depths of her body, and Ruzena became more
and more convinced that she would never part with him who was quietly burgeoning within her. In him she held a secret trump card that lifted her high above their laughter and their unclean hands. She had an intense craving to tell them, to shout it in their faces, to take revenge on them for their sarcasm, to take revenge on that woman and her patronizing kindliness.
Keep calm! she told herself, and she rummaged in her handbag for the tube. She had just pulled it out when she felt a hand firmly gripping her wrist.
No one had seen him coming. He had appeared all of a sudden, and Ruzena looked up and saw him smile.
He kept restraining her hand; Ruzena felt the strong touch of his fingers on her wrist, and she obeyed: the tube dropped back into the bottom of the handbag.
"Please allow me, ladies and gentlemen, to sit down at your table. My name is Bertlef."
None of the men was enthusiastic about the intruder's arrival, none of them introduced himself, and Ruzena did not have enough social grace to introduce her companions to him.
"My unexpected arrival seems to have disconcerted
you," said Bertlef. He took a chair from a nearby table and put it at the vacant end of their table and sat down, so that he was presiding and had Ruzena at his right. "Forgive me," he went on. "For a long time I have had the peculiar habit of not arriving but appearing."
"In that case," said the assistant, "allow us to treat you as an apparition and pay no attention to you."
"I gladly allow you that," said Bertlef with a slight bow. "But I am afraid that despite my willingness you will not succeed."
Then he turned to look at the doorway to the Slavia's brightly lit indoor restaurant and clapped his hands.
"Who invited you here, Chief?" asked the cameraman.
"Are you trying to tell me that I am not welcome? I could leave right now with Ruzena, but a habit is a habit. I come to this table every day in the late afternoon to drink a bottle of wine." He examined the label of the bottle standing on the table: "But certainly a better wine than the one you are drinking."
"I wonder where you find any good wine in this dump," said the assistant.
"My impression, Chief, is that you brag too much," the cameraman added, seeking to ridicule the intruder. "It's true that after a certain age one can hardly do anything else."
"You are wrong," said Bertlef as if he had not heard the cameraman's insult, "they still have some bottles hidden here that are a great deal better than what you can find in the grandest hotels."
He was shaking the hand of the manager, who had been barely visible earlier but was now welcoming Bertlef and asking him: "Shall I set the table for everyone?"
"Certainly," Bertlef replied, and turned to the others: "Ladies and gentlemen, I invite you to drink a wine with me that I have had here a number of times and find excellent. Do you accept the invitation?"
No one replied to Bertlef, and the manager said: "When it's a matter of food and drink, I can advise the ladies and gentlemen to have full confidence in Mister Bertlef."
"My friend," Bertlef said to the manager, "bring two bottles and a platter of cheese." Then, turning to the others: "Your hesitation is unnecessary, Ruzena's friends are friends of mine."
A boy of no more than twelve came running out of the restaurant carrying a tray with glasses, saucers, and a tablecloth. He put the tray on a nearby table and then leaned over the customers one by one to remove their half-full glasses. He parked these, along with the open bottle, next to the tray he had just put on the nearby table. Then he carefully wiped their visibly dirty table with a dish towel and spread on it a tablecloth of dazzling whiteness. After that he went back to the nearby table to get the glasses and put them back in front of the customers.
"Get rid of those glasses and that bottle of vinegar," Bertlef said to the boy. "Your papa will bring us better wine."
The cameraman protested: "Would you be kind enough, Chief, to let us drink what we like?"
"As you wish, sir," said Bertlef. "I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails. Listen, son," he said, turning to the boy: "Give each of them back the old glass and an empty new one. My guests can choose freely between a wine produced in fog and a wine born of the sun."
So now there were two glasses per person, one empty and the other with leftover wine. The manager approached the table with two bottles, gripped one between his knees, and pulled out the cork with a grandiose gesture. Then he poured a bit of wine into Bertlef's glass. Bertlef brought his glass to his lips, took a sip, and turned to the manager: "Excellent. Is it the twenty-three?"
"It's the twenty-two," the manager corrected.
"Pour it!" said Bertlef, and the manager went around the table with the bottle and filled the empty glasses.
Bertlef held up his glass by the stem. "My friends, taste this wine. It has the sweet taste of the past. Savor it as if you were breathing it in, sucking in a long bone-ful of marrow, a long-forgotten summer. I would like with this toast to marry the past and the present, the sun of nineteen twenty-two and the sun of this moment. That sun is Ruzena, that thoroughly simple young woman who is a queen without knowing it. Against the backdrop of this spa town, she is like a dia-
mond on a mendicant's robe. She is like a crescent moon forgotten against the pale sky of day. She is like a butterfly fluttering against the snow."
The cameraman gave a forced laugh: "Aren't you overdoing it, Chief? "
"No, I am not overdoing it," said Bertlef, and then he addressed the cameraman: "You are under that impression because you merely live in the basement of being, you anthropomorphized barrel of vinegar! You are filled with acids seething in you as in an alchemist's pot! You are devoting your life to discovering around you the same ugliness you carry within you. That is the only way you can feel at peace for a moment with the world. Because the world, which is beautiful, frightens you, sickens you, and constantly pushes you away from its center. How unbearable it is to have dirt under your fingernails and a pretty woman sitting beside you! And so you have to soil the woman before you enjoy her. Isn't it so, sir? I am glad you are hiding your hands under the table, I was certainly right to have talked about your fingernails."
"I don't give a shit about your good manners, and I'm not a clown like you with your white collar and tie," the cameraman snapped.
"Your dirty fingernails and torn sweater are not new under the sun," said Bertlef. "Long ago one of the Cynic philosophers strutted through the streets of Athens in a torn mantle to make himself admired by everyone for displaying his contempt for convention. One day Socrates met him and said: T see your vanity
through the hole in your mantle.' Your dirt too, sir, is vanity, and your vanity is dirty."
Ruzena could not get over her amazement. A man she had vaguely known as a patient had come to her aid out of the blue, and she was captivated by the natural charm of his behavior and by the cruel assurance with which he had reduced the cameraman's insolence to dust.
"I see that you have lost the power of speech," Bertlef said to the cameraman after a brief silence, "and please believe that I did not in the least wish to offend you. I love harmony, not quarrels, and if I allowed myself to be carried away by eloquence, I ask you to forgive me. I want only one thing, that you taste this wine and join me in toasting Ruzena, for whose sake I have come here."
Bertlef had raised his glass, but no one joined him.
"Mister Restaurateur," said Bertlef, addressing the manager, "come and drink a toast with us!"
"With this wine, any time," said the manager, and he took an empty glass from the nearby table and filled it with wine. "Mister Bertlef knows all about good wine. A long time ago he sniffed out my cellar like a swallow finding its nest from a distance."
Bertlef emitted the happy laugh of a man whose self-esteem has been flattered.
"Will you join us in a toast to Ruzena? "
"Ruzena?" asked the manager.
"Yes, Ruzena," Bertlef said, indicating his neighbor with a look. "Do you like her as much as I do?"
"With you, Mister Bertlef, there're only pretty women. You barely have to look at her to know she's beautiful, since she's sitting next to you."
Bertlef once more emitted his happy laugh, the manager laughed with him, and oddly enough, Kamila, who had found Bertlef amusing ever since his arrival, joined them. This unexpected laughter was surprisingly and inexplicably contagious. Out of tactful solidarity the director in turn joined Kamila, then the assistant, and finally Ruzena, who plunged into the polyphonic laughter as if into a gentle embrace. It was her first laughter of the day. She laughed louder than the others and was unable to get her fill of it.
Bertlef lifted his raised glass higher: "To Ruzena!" The manager raised his glass in turn, and then Kamila, followed by the director and his assistant, and they repeated after Bertlef: "To Ruzena!" Even the cameraman ended up raising his glass and, without a word, taking a sip.
The director tasted his mouthful. "This wine really is excellent," he said.
"What did I tell you?" said the manager.
Meanwhile the boy had set a platter of cheese in the middle of the table, and Bertlef said: "Help yourselves, they are exquisite!"
The director was astounded: "Where did you find this selection of cheeses? You'd think we were in France."
All of a sudden the tension had completely receded, the atmosphere had calmed. They became talkative,
helped themselves to the cheeses, wondered where the manager had managed to find them (in this country where the varieties of cheese were so few), and kept refilling their glasses.
When things were at their peak, Bertlef rose and took his leave: "I am very glad to have been in your company, and I thank you. My friend Doctor Skreta is giving a concert this evening, and Ruzena and I want to be there."
Ruzena and Bertlef vanished into the light mist of nightfall, and the initial momentum that had carried the company of drinkers away to the dreamed-of island of lustfulness had clearly been lost, and nothing could restore it. Everyone gave way to dishearten-ment.
For Mrs. Klima it was as if she were coming out of a dream in which she would have wished at all costs to linger. She had been reflecting that she didn't have to go to the concert. How fantastically surprising it would be for her to discover that she had come here not to track down her husband but to have an adventure. How splendid it would be to stay with the three film people and return home on the sly tomorrow morning.
Something whispered to her that this was what she needed to do; that this would be to act; to be delivered; to be healed; to be awakened after a bewitchment.
But now she was already too sober. All the magic spells had stopped working. She was alone again with herself, with her past, with her heavy head full of agonizing old thoughts. She would have liked to extend this much too brief dream, even if only for a few hours, but she knew that the dream was already growing pale, like the half light of early morning.
"I have to go too," she said.
They tried to dissuade her, even though they realized that they no longer had the power and self-confidence to make her stay.
"Shit!" said the cameraman. "Who was that guy, anyway?"
They tried to ask the manager, but now that Bertlef had left, once again no one was paying attention to them. From the restaurant came the noise of tipsy customers, while they sat abandoned around the table in the garden with their leftover cheese and wine.
"Whoever he is, he spoiled our party. He took away one of our ladies, and now the other one is going off all alone. Let's go with Kamila."
"No," she said. "Stay here. I wish to be alone."
She was no longer with them. Their presence now disturbed her. Jealousy, like death, had come looking for her. She was in its power, and she took no notice of anyone else. She got up and went off in the direction Bertlef and Ruzena had taken a few moments earlier.
From a distance she heard the cameraman saying: "Shit…"
After greeting Skreta in the artists' room, Jakub and Olga went into the hall. Olga wanted to leave during the intermission in order to spend the rest of the evening alone with Jakub. Jakub replied that his friend would be angered by their early departure, but Olga maintained that he wouldn't even notice it.
The hall was just about full, with only their two seats still vacant in their row.
"That woman has been following us like a shadow," said Olga, leaning toward Jakub as they sat down.
Jakub turned his head and next to Olga saw Bertlef and next to him the nurse with the poison in her handbag. His heart skipped a beat, but since he had tried hard all his life to hide what was going on deep down inside him, he said quite calmly: "I see that our row's tickets are the complimentary ones Skreta gave to his friends and acquaintances. So he knows where we are, and he'd notice us leaving."
"Tell him that the acoustics were bad here and that we moved to the back of the hall during intermission," said Olga.
Klima was already coming forward on the bandstand with his golden trumpet, and the audience began to applaud. When Dr. Skreta appeared behind him, the applause gained strength and murmuring swelled through the hall. Dr. Skreta stood modestly behind the trumpeter and awkwardly waved his arms to indicate that the concerts real star was the guest from the capital. The audience perceived the exquisite awkwardness of the gesture and reacted to it by applauding still louder. In back of the hall someone shouted: "Long live Doctor Skreta!"
The pianist, who was the most unobtrusive and least acclaimed of the three, sat down at the piano on a low chair. Skreta took his place behind an imposing set of drums, and the trumpeter came and went between the pianist and Skreta with a light and rhythmic step.
The applause ended, and the pianist struck the keyboard to begin a solo introduction. But Jakub noticed that his friend seemed nervous and was looking around in exasperation. Then the trumpeter, too, became aware of the physician's distress and approached him. Skreta whispered something to him. The two men bent over. They examined the floor, and then the trumpeter picked up a drumstick that had fallen at the foot of the piano and handed it to Skreta.
The audience, which had been watching the whole scene attentively, burst into new applause, and the pianist, thinking that the acclaim was in tribute to his solo, nodded his head in acknowledgment as he continued to play.
Olga took hold of Jakub's arm and whispered into his ear: "This is marvelous! So marvelous I think that from this moment on my lousy luck today is over."
The trumpet and drums finally joined in. Klima was blowing in time with his small rhythmic steps, and Skreta sat enthroned over his drums like a splendid, dignified Buddha.
Jakub imagined the nurse thinking of her medicine during the concert, swallowing the tablet, collapsing in convulsions, and slumping dead in her seat while on the bandstand Dr. Skreta banged his drums and the audience yelled and applauded.
And all of a sudden he understood clearly why the young woman was sitting in the same row as he: the unexpected encounter in the brasserie a while ago had been a temptation, a test. It had occurred only so that he might see his own image in the mirror: the image of a man who gives his neighbor poison. But the One who is testing him (God, in whom he does not believe) demands no bloody sacrifice, no blood of innocents. The test might end not in a death but only in Jakub's self-revelation, which might confiscate his inappropriate moral pride. The nurse is now sitting in the same row to enable him, at the last moment, to save her life. And that is also why she has next to her a man who the day before became Jakub's friend and who will help him.
Yes, he will wait for the first opportunity, perhaps at the first break between numbers, and he will ask Bertlef and the young woman to step outside with him
for a moment. Once there, he will explain everything, and the unbelievable madness will end.
The musicians finished the first piece, the applause broke out, the nurse said "Excuse me" and left the row, accompanied by Bertlef. Jakub tried to get up to follow them, but Olga grabbed him by the arm and restrained him: "No, please, not now. After intermission!"
It was all so quick he had no time to realize what happened. The musicians had already launched into the next piece, and Jakub understood that the One who was testing him had seated Ruzena nearby not in order to redeem him but in order to confirm his failure and his condemnation beyond all possible doubt.
The trumpeter was blowing, Dr. Skreta was towering over his drums like a great Buddha, and Jakub was sitting immobile in his seat. He saw neither the trumpeter nor Dr. Skreta, he saw only himself, he saw that he was sitting immobile, and he could not tear his eyes away from this horrifying image.
When the clear sound of his trumpet resounded in Klima's ears, he believed that it was he himself who was vibrating thus, that he alone was filling the space of the entire hall. He felt strong and invincible.
Ruzena was sitting in the row of complimentary reserved seats, she was sitting next to Bertlef (and that too was a good omen), and the evening's atmosphere was delightful. The audience was listening intently and, above all, in such a good mood that it gave Klima the cautious hope that all would end well. When the applause for the first piece broke out, he pointed with a stylish gesture to Dr. Skreta, who for some reason he found likable and felt close to that evening. The doctor stood up behind his drums and took a bow.
But when he looked into the audience after the second piece, he noticed that Ruzena's seat was empty. This frightened him. From then on he played tensely, running his eyes over the entire hall seat by seat, checking each one but failing to find her. He thought that she had deliberately left in order not to have to hear his arguments once again, having made up her mind not to appear before the Abortion Committee. Where should he look for her after the concert? And what would happen if he failed to find her?
He felt that he was playing badly, mechanically, absentmindedly. But incapable as it was of detecting the trumpeter's gloomy mood, the audience was satisfied and the ovations increased in intensity after each piece.
He reassured himself with the thought that she had merely gone to the toilet. That she was having the sickness common to pregnant women. When half an hour had passed he told himself that she had gone home to
get something and would be reappearing in her seat. But after the intermission had gone by and the concert was nearing its end, her seat was still vacant. Perhaps she didn't dare come back into the hall in the middle of the concert. Perhaps she would come back during the final applause.
But now he was hearing the final applause. Ruzena had not appeared, and Klima was at his wits' end. The audience rose and shouted for encores. Klima turned toward Dr. Skreta and shook his head to indicate that he did not want to play anymore. But he was met by a pair of radiant eyes that wanted only to drum, to go on drumming the whole night through.
The audience interpreted Klima's shake of the head as a star's routine flirtatiousness and went on applauding. Just then a beautiful young woman edged her way to the foot of the bandstand, and when he noticed her, Klima thought he was going to collapse, to faint and never reawaken. She smiled at him and said (he could not hear her voice, but he read the words on her lips): "Please play! Please! Please!"
Klima lifted his trumpet to show that he was going to play. The audience instantly quieted.
His two partners were delighted and started to encore the last piece. For Klima it was as if he were playing in the funeral band marching behind his own coffin. He played, and he knew that all was lost, that there was nothing more to do but close his eyes, give up, and let himself be crushed under the wheels of fate.
On a small table in Bertlef's suite stood bottles adorned with splendid labels bearing exotic names. Ruzena knew nothing about luxury drinks, and, unable to specify anything else, she asked for whisky.
Her mind, meanwhile, was trying hard to penetrate the veil of giddiness and to understand the situation. She asked Bertlef several times why he had been looking for her today in particular, though he barely knew her. "I want to know," she kept repeating, "I want to know why you thought about me."
"I have been wanting to for a long time," Bertlef answered, gazing steadily into her eyes.
"But why today instead of some other day?"
"Because there is a time for everything. And our time is now."
These words were puzzling, but Ruzena felt they were sincere. The insolubility of her situation had become so intolerable today that something had to happen.
"Yes," she said pensively, "it's been a very strange day."
"You see, you yourself know that I arrived at the right time," Bertlef said in a velvety voice.
Ruzena was overcome by a confused but delightful feeling of relief: Bertlef's appearing precisely today meant that everything that happened had been ordained elsewhere, and she could relax and put herself in the hands of that higher power.
"Yes, it's true, you came at the right time," she said.
"I know it."
And yet there was still something that escaped her: "But why? Why were you looking for me?"
"Because I love you."
The word "love" was uttered very softly, but the room was suddenly filled with it.
Ruzena lowered her voice: "You love me?"
"Yes, I love you."
Frantisek and Klima had already said the word to her, but only now did she see it as it really is when it comes unasked for, unexpected, naked. The word entered the room like a miracle. It was totally inexplicable, but to Ruzena it seemed all the more real, for the most basic things in this world exist without explanation and without motive, drawing from within themselves their reason for being.
"Really?" she asked, and her voice, usually too loud, was only a whisper.
"Yes, really."
"But I'm a very ordinary girl."
"Not at all"
"Yes, I am."
"You are beautiful."
"No, I'm not."
"You are tender."
"No," she said, shaking her head.
"You radiate kindness and goodness."
She shook her head: "No, no, no."
"I know what you are. I know it better than you do."
"You don't know anything about it."
"Yes, I do."
The confidence in her that was emanating from Bertlef's eyes was like a magical bath, and Ruzena wished that gaze, which flooded over and caressed her, to go on for as long as possible.
"Is it true? That I'm like that?"
"Yes. I know you are."
It was as beautiful as a vertigo: in Bertlef's eyes she felt herself delicate, tender, pure, she felt as noble as a queen. It was like being suddenly gorged with honey and fragrant herbs. She found herself adorable. (My God, she had never before found herself so delightfully adorable!)
She continued to protest: "But you hardly know me."
"I have known you for a long time. I have been watching you for a long time, and you never even suspected it. I know you by heart," he said, running his fingers over her face. "Your nose, your delicately drawn smile, your hair…"
Then he started to unbutton her clothes, and she did not resist at all, she merely looked deeply into his eyes, into that gaze that enveloped her like water, like velvety water. She was sitting facing him, her bare breasts rising under his gaze and desiring to be seen and praised. Her whole body was turned toward his eyes like a sunflower toward the sun.
They were in Jakub's room, Olga talking and Jakub repeating to himself that there was still time. He could return to Karl Marx House, and if she was not there he could disturb Bertlef in the suite next door and ask him if he knew where the young woman had gone.
Olga chattered on, and he went on to imagine the painful scene in which, having found the nurse, he was telling her something or other, stammering, making excuses, apologizing, and trying to get her to give him the tube of tablets. Then, all of a sudden, as if wearied by these visions that for several hours had been confronting him, he felt gripped by an intense indifference.
This was not merely the indifference of weariness, it was a deliberate and combative indifference. Jakub came to realize that it was absolutely all the same to him whether the creature with the yellow hair lived or died, and that it would in fact be hypocrisy and shameful playacting if he tried to save her. That he would actually be deceiving the One who was testing him. For the One who was testing him (God, who did not exist) wished to know Jakub as he really was, not as he pretended to be. And Jakub resolved to be honest with Him; to be who he really was.
They were sitting in facing armchairs, with a small table between them. Jakub saw Olga leaning toward him over that small table and heard her voice:"I want
to kiss you. How can we have known each other such a long time and never kissed? "
With a forced smile on her face and anxiety deep down within her, Mrs. Klima slipped into the artists' room behind her husband. She was afraid of seeing the actual face of Klima's mistress. But there was no mistress at all. There were several girls flittering around Klima asking for autographs, and she discerned (she had an eagle eye) that none of them knew him personally.
All the same she was certain that the mistress was somewhere nearby. She could see it on Klima's face, which was pale and absent. He smiled at his wife as falsely as she smiled at him.
Dr. Skreta, the pharmacist, and some others, probably physicians and their spouses, introduced themselves to Mrs. Klima with nods. Someone suggested they go to the only bar in town. Klima excused himself, claiming fatigue. Mrs. Klima thought that the mistress must be waiting in the bar; that was why Klima was refusing to go there. And because calamity attracted her like a magnet, she asked him to please her by overcoming his fatigue.
But in the bar, too, there was no woman she might suspect of having an affair with Klima. They sat down at a large table. Dr. Skreta was garrulously praising the trumpeter. The pharmacist was filled with shy happiness he was unable to express. Mrs. Klima tried to be charming and cheerfully talkative: "Doctor, you were magnificent," she said to Skreta, "and you, too, my dear pharmacist. And the atmosphere was genuine, cheerful, carefree, a thousand times better than at the concerts in the capital."
Without staring at Klima, she did not for a second stop observing him. She felt that he was hiding his nervousness only with great effort, and that he was uttering a word now and again only to avoid showing that his mind was elsewhere. It was obvious that she had spoiled something for him, something out of the ordinary. If it had been only a matter of some ordinary adventure (Klima always swore up and down to her that he could never fall in love with another woman), he would not have gone into such a deep depression. Admittedly she had not seen the mistress, but she believed she was seeing the love; the love in his face (suffering, desperate love), and that sight was perhaps still more painful.
"What's the matter, Mister Klima?" suddenly asked the pharmacist, who was all the more friendly and perceptive for being so quiet.
"Nothing. Nothing at all!" said Klima, struck by fear. "I've got a little headache."
"Do you want an aspirin?" the pharmacist asked.
"No, no," said the trumpeter, shaking his head. "But please excuse us if we leave a bit early. I'm really very tired."
How had she finally dared to do it?
From the moment she had joined Jakub in the brasserie, she found him not as he had been. He was quiet yet pleasant, unable to focus attention yet docile, was mentally elsewhere yet did whatever she wished. The lack of concentration (she attributed it to his approaching departure) was agreeable to her: she was speaking to an absent face, and it seemed to her that she was speaking into distances where she could not be heard. She could thus say to him what she had never said before.
Now, in asking him for a kiss, she had the impression that she had disturbed him, troubled him. But this did not discourage her at all, on the contrary, it pleased her: she felt she had finally become the bold, provocative woman she had always hoped to be, the woman who dominates the situation, sets it in motion, watches her partner with curiosity, and puts him into a quandary.
She continued to look him firmly in the eye and said
with a smile: "But not here. It would be ridiculous for us to lean over the table to kiss. Come."
She took his hand, led him to the daybed, and savored the finesse, elegance, and quiet authority of her behavior. Then she kissed him and was stirred by a passion she had never known before. And yet it was not the spontaneous passion of a body unable to control itself, it was a passion of the brain, a passion conscious and deliberate. She wanted to tear away from Jakub the disguise of his paternal role, wanted to shock him and arouse herself with the sight of his confusion, wanted to rape him and watch herself raping him, wanted to know the taste of his tongue and feel his paternal hands become bit by bit bolder and cover her with caresses.
She unbuttoned his jacket and took it off.
He never took his eyes off him throughout the concert, and then he mingled with the fans who rushed behind the bandstand to get the artists to scribble an autograph for them. But Ruzena was not there. He followed a small group of people leading the trumpeter to the spa town's bar. He went in behind them, convinced that Ruzena was already waiting there for the trum-
peter. But he was wrong. He went out and for a long time kept watch in front of the entrance.
A sudden pang went through him. The trumpeter had come out of the bar with a female figure pressed against him. At first he thought it was Ruzena, but it was not she.
He followed them to the Hotel Richmond, and Klima and the woman vanished inside.
He quickly went across the park to Karl Marx House. The door was still unlocked. He asked the doorkeeper if Ruzena was at home. She was not.
He ran back to the Richmond, fearing that Ruzena in the meantime had joined Klima there. He paced back and forth on the park path, keeping his eyes fixed on the entrance. He didn't understand what was happening. Several possibilities came to his mind, but they didn't matter. What mattered was that he was here and that he was keeping watch, and he knew that he would keep watch until he saw them.
Why? What good would it do? Would it not be better to go home to sleep?
He repeated to himself that he finally had to find out the whole truth.
But did he really want to know the truth? Did he really wish so strongly to make sure that Ruzena was going to bed with Klima? Was he not waiting instead for some proof of Ruzena's innocence? And yet, suspicious as he was, would he lend credence to such proof?
He didn't know what he was waiting for. He knew only that he would wait a long time, all night if he had
to, and even several nights. For time spurred on by jealousy passes with amazing speed. Jealousy occupies the mind more completely than passionate intellectual work. The mind has not a moment of leisure. A victim of jealousy never knows boredom.
Frantisek keeps pacing a short stretch of path, barely one hundred meters long, from which the Richmond's entrance can be seen. He is going to be pacing back and forth like this all night, until everyone else is asleep, he is going to pace back and forth like this until tomorrow, until the last part of this book.
But why is he not sitting down? There are benches facing the Richmond!
He cannot sit down. Jealousy is like a raging toothache. One cannot do anything when one is jealous, not even sit down. One can only come and go. Back and forth.
They followed the same route as Bertlef and Ruzena, Jakub and Olga; up the stairs to the second floor, then along the red plush carpet to the corridor's end at the large door to Bertlef's suite. To the right was the door to Jakub's room, to the left the room Dr. Skreta had lent to Klima.
When he opened the door and turned on the light, he noticed the quick inquisitive look Kamila cast through the room. He knew she was looking for traces of a woman. He was familiar with that look. He knew everything about her. He knew that her kindness was insincere. He knew that she had come here to spy on him, knew that she would pretend to have come here to please him. And he knew that she clearly perceived his embarrassment and that she was certain she had spoiled one of his love adventures.
"Darling, you really don't mind that I came?" she asked.
"Why should I mind?"
"I was afraid you'd be sad here."
"Yes, without you I'd be sad. It pleased me to see you applauding at the foot of the bandstand."
"You seem tired. Or is something bothering you?"
"No. No, nothing's bothering me. I'm just tired."
"You're sad because you're always surrounded by men here. But now you're with a beautiful woman. Am I not a beautiful woman?"
"Yes, you're a beautiful woman," answered Klima, and these were the first sincere words he had said to her that day. Kamila was gloriously beautiful, and Klima felt immense pain at the thought that this beauty was exposed to mortal peril. But this beauty smiled at him and began to undress before his eyes. He gazed at her body being bared, and it was as if he were bidding it farewell. The breasts, her beautiful, flawless breasts, her narrow waist, the belly from which her underpants
had just slipped free. He watched her with longing, as if she were a memory. As if through a window. As if from a distance. Her nakedness was so distant that he felt not the least aroused. And yet he was contemplating her with a voracious gaze. He drank her nakedness as a condemned man drinks his last glass. He drank her nakedness as a man drinks a lost past, a lost life.
Kamila came near him: "What is it? Aren't you going to undress?"
All he could do was undress, and he was terribly sad.
"Don't think you have the right to be tired now that I've come all this way to be with you. I want you.''
He knew that it was not true. He knew that Kamila did not have the slightest desire to make love, and that she was forcing herself to behave provocatively only because she saw his sadness and attributed it to his love for another woman. He knew (my God, how well he knew her!) that she was trying to test him with this love challenge, to find out to what degree his mind was engrossed by another woman, he knew that she wanted to wound herself with his sadness.
"I'm really tired," he said.
She took him in her arms and then led him to the bed: "You'll see how I'm going to make you forget your fatigue!" And she began to play with his naked body.
He was stretched out as if on an operating table. He knew that all his wife's efforts would be useless. His body shrank into itself and no longer had the slightest power of expansion. Kamila ran her moist lips all over his body, and he knew that she wanted to make herself
suffer and make him suffer, and he hated her. He hated her with all the intensity of his love: it was she and she alone, with her jealousy, her suspicions, her mistrust, she and she alone who had spoiled everything by coming here today, it was because of her that their marriage was menaced by a bomb deposited in another woman's belly, by a charge timed to blow everything up in seven months. It was she and she alone, with her insane fear about their love, who had destroyed everything.
She put her mouth to his belly and felt his member contract under her touches, going back inside, fleeing from her, becoming more and more small and anxious. And he knew that Kamila saw the rejection of her body as a measure of the extent of his love for another woman. He knew that she was suffering, and that the more she suffered the more she would make him suffer and persist in putting her moist lips to his powerless body.
He had never wanted to go to bed with this girl. He desired to make her happy and shower her with goodness, but this goodness had nothing in common with sensual desire, better still, it totally excluded such desire, for it wished to be pure, disinterested, detached from all pleasure.
But what could he do now? Must he, in order not to sully his goodness, reject Olga? He knew he could not do that. His rejection would hurt Olga and would mark her for a long time. He realized that he must drink the chalice of goodness to the dregs.
And then she was suddenly naked in front of him and he told himself that her face was noble and pleasing. But that was small comfort when he saw the face together with the body, which looked like a long thin stem topped by an inordinately big, long-haired flower.
But whether she was beautiful or not, Jakub knew that there was no escape. Besides, he felt that his body (that servile body) was once more quite willing to lift its obliging spear. His arousal, however, seemed to him to be happening to someone else far away, outside his own soul, as if he were being aroused without his participation and were secretly scorning it. His soul was far from his body, obsessed by the thought of the poison in the woman's handbag. At the utmost, it watched regretfully as the body blindly and pitilessly pursued its trivial interests.
A fleeting memory passed through his mind: he had been ten years old when he learned how children come into the world, and since then the thought of it had increasingly haunted him, all the more when, over the years, he gradually discovered the actual substance of the female organs. Since then he had often imagined his own birth; he imagined his tiny body sliding through a narrow, wet tunnel, he imagined his nose and his mouth full of the strange mucus he was entirely anointed with
and marked by. Yes, that female mucus had marked Jakub throughout his life with its ability to exert its mysterious power to summon him to it at any moment and to control the bizarre mechanisms of his body. This had always been repugnant to him, and he rebelled against that servitude by at least refusing to give women his soul, by safeguarding his freedom and solitude, by restricting mucus power to particular hours of his life. Yes, his great affection for Olga probably derived from her being sexually out of bounds to him, and from his certainty that her body would never remind him of the shameful way he had come into the world.
He abruptly pushed these thoughts away, because the situation on the daybed was developing rapidly, and in a moment or two he was going to have to enter her body, and he did not wish to do so with a sensation of repugnance. He told himself that this woman opening herself up to him was the only woman to whom he was attached by pure and disinterested affection, and that he was now going to make love to her only to make her happy, to please her, to make her self-confident and cheerful.
But now he amazed himself: he was moving on top of her as if he were rocking on waves of goodness. He felt happy, he felt good. His soul humbly identified itself with the activity of his body, as if the act of love were merely the physical expression of a kindly tenderness, of a pure feeling toward one's neighbor. There was no obstacle, not a false note. They held each other tightly, and their breaths mingled.
Those were long, beautiful minutes, and then Olga whispered a lewd word in his ear. She whispered it once, then again and yet again, arousing herself with the word.
The waves of goodness suddenly ebbed, and Jakub and the young woman found themselves in the middle of a desert.
No, Jakub ordinarily had nothing against lewd words during lovemaking. They awakened his sensuality and ferocity. They made women pleasantly strange to his soul, pleasantly desirable to his body.
But the lewd word coming from Olga's mouth brutally destroyed the whole sweet illusion. It woke him from a dream. The haze of goodness lifted, and suddenly he saw Olga in his arms as he had seen her a while earlier: with the big flower of her head atop the swaying thin stem of her body. This touching creature had the provocative manner of a whore without ceasing to be touching, so that the lewd words sounded ridiculous and sad.
But Jakub knew that he must not let anything show, that he must control himself, that he must drink the bitter chalice of goodness again and again, because this absurd embrace was his only good deed, his only redemption (not for a moment did he forget the poison in that woman's handbag), his only salvation.
Like a large pearl in a mollusk's double shell, Bertlef's luxurious suite is surrounded on both sides by the less luxurious rooms occupied by Jakub and Klima. In these two neighboring rooms silence and calm have been reigning for quite a while, as Ruzena, in Bertlef's arms, heaves her last sighs of voluptuous pleasure.
Then she lies stretched out peacefully beside him as he caresses her face. She soon bursts into tears. She cries for a long time, her head buried in his chest.
Bertlef caresses her as if she were a little girl, and she really does feel little. Little as never before (never before has she hidden this way in anyone's chest), but also big as never before (never before has she experienced so much pleasure). And the spasmodic movements of her sobs carry her away to sensations of well-being which until now had been equally unknown to her.
Where is Klima at this moment, and where is Frantisek? They are somewhere in a distant haze, figures as light as feathers receding toward the horizon. And where is Ruzena's stubborn longing to grab hold of one and get rid of the other? What has become of her fits of anger, of the offended silence she has locked herself into since morning?
She is lying down, she is sobbing, and he is caressing her face. He tells her to sleep, that his bed is in the next room. Ruzena opens her eyes and looks at him: naked,
Bertlef goes to the bathroom (the sound of running water is heard), then he returns, opens the wardrobe, takes out a blanket, and delicately unfolds it over Ruzena's body.
Ruzena sees the varicose veins on his calves. When he is bent over her she notices that his curly hair is graying and thin enough to let the scalp show through. Bertlef is sixty, perhaps sixty-five, but that is not important to Ruzena. On the contrary, his age calms her, his age throws a radiant light on her own still dull and expressionless youth, and she feels full of life and that she has finally arrived at the very beginning of her journey. And here in his presence is where she finds out that she will still be young for a long time, that she has no need to hurry. Bertlef again sits down beside her and caresses her, and she has the sense of having found refuge not only in the comforting touch of his fingers but also in the reassuring embrace of his years.
Then she loses consciousness, the confused visions of sleep's approach passing through her head. She awakes, and it seems to her that the whole room is flooded with a strange blue light. What is this unnatural glow she has never before seen? Has the moon come down here veiled in blue? Or is Ruzena dreaming with her eyes open?
Bertlef smiles at her and goes on caressing her face.
And now she closes her eyes for the night, carried away by a dream.