Farewell Waltz

by Milan Kundera

  A while ago he had been discomfited by the portrait of the bearded man with the halo. He had remembered Bertlef as a jovial bon vivant, and it would never have occurred to him that the man could be a believer. He

  felt a pang of anxiety at the thought that he was going to be getting a lesson in morality and that his sole oasis in this desert of a spa was going to be covered with sand. He replied in a choked voice: "Are you one of those who calls that murder?"

  Bertlef delayed answering. When he finally emerged from the bathroom, he was dressed to go out and meticulously combed.

  "'Murder' is a word that smacks a little too much of the electric chair," he said. "That is not what I am trying to say. You know, I am convinced that life must be accepted such as it is given to us. That is the real first commandment, prior to the other ten. All events are in the hands of God, and we know nothing about their evolution. I am trying to say that to accept life such as it is given to us is to accept the unforeseeable. And a child is the quintessence of the unforeseeable. A child is unforeseeability itself. You don't know what it will become, what it will bring you, and that is precisely why you must accept it. Otherwise you are only half alive, you are living like a nonswimmer wading near the shore, while the ocean is not really the ocean until you are out of your depth."

  The trumpeter pointed out that the child was not his.

  "Let us assume that that is so," said Bertlef. "But you in turn should frankly admit that if the child were yours you would be just as persistent in trying to convince Ruzena to have an abortion. You would be doing it for the sake of your wife and of your guilty love for her."

  "Yes, I admit it," said the trumpeter. "I'd insist she have an abortion under any circumstances."

  Still leaning against the bathroom door, Bertlef smiled: "I understand you, and I shall not attempt to make you change your mind. I am too old to want to improve the world. I have told you what I think, and that is all. I shall remain your friend even if you act contrary to my convictions, and I shall help you even if I disagree with you."

  The trumpeter scrutinized Bertlef, who uttered these last words in the velvety voice of a wise preacher. He found him admirable. He felt that everything Bertlef said could be a legend, a parable, an example, a chapter from a modern gospel. He wanted (we should know that he was moved by and drawn to inflated gestures) to bow down before him.

  "I shall do my best to help you," Bertlef went on. "In a while we are going to see my friend Doctor Skreta, who will settle the medical aspect of the matter. But tell me, how are you going to induce Ruzena to do something she is reluctant to do?"

  4

  When the trumpeter had presented his plan, Bertlef said: "This reminds me of something that happened

  to me in my adventurous youth, when I was working on the docks as a longshoreman, and there was a girl there who brought us our lunch. She had an exceptionally kind heart and didn't know how to refuse anyone anything. Alas, such kindness of heart-and body-makes men more crude than grateful, so that I was the only one to pay her any respectful attention, although I was also the only one who had not gone to bed with her. Because of my gentleness she fell in love with me. It would have hurt and humiliated her if I had not made love to her. But this happened only once, and I immediately explained to her that I would go on loving her with a great spiritual love, but that we could no longer be lovers. She burst into tears, she ran off, she stopped talking to me, and she gave herself still more conspicuously to all the others. When two months had gone by, she told me she was pregnant by me."

  "So you were in the same situation I'm in!" the trumpeter exclaimed.

  "Ah, my friend," said Bertlef, "are you not aware that what has happened to you is every man's lot?"

  "And what did you do?"

  "I behaved exactly as you are planning to behave, but with one difference. You are going to try to pretend to love Ruzena, whereas I really loved that girl. I saw before me a poor creature humiliated and insulted by everyone, a poor creature to whom only a single being in the world had ever shown any consideration, and this consideration was something she did not want to

  lose. I realized that she loved me, and I just could not hold it against her that she showed it the only way she could, the way provided her by her innocent low-mind-edness. Listen to what I told her: T know very well that you are pregnant by someone else. But I also know that you are employing this ruse out of love, and I want to repay your love with my love. I don't care whose child it is, if it is your wish, I shall marry you.'"

  "That was crazy!"

  "But probably more effective than your carefully prepared maneuver. After I had told the little tart many times that I loved her and wanted to marry her and keep the child, she dissolved in tears and confessed she had lied to me. My kindness made her realize, she said, that she was not worthy of me, that she could never marry me."

  The trumpeter remained silent and pensive, and Bertlef added: "I would be glad if this story could serve you as a parable. Don't try to make Ruzena believe you love her, try truly to love her. Try to feel pity for her. Even if she misled you, try to see in this lie a form of her love. I am certain she will then be unable to withstand the power of your kindness, and she herself will

  make all the arrangements required to avoid wronging you."

  Bertlef's words made a great impression on the trumpeter. But as soon as Ruzena had come to mind in a more vivid light, he realized that the path of love, which Bertlef had suggested, was closed to him; it was the path of saints, not of ordinary men.

  5

  Ruzena was sitting at a small table in the huge room in the thermal building where, after undergoing treatment, women rested in beds lined up against the walls. She had just received the charts of two new patients. She filled in the date and gave the women towels, large white sheets, and keys to the changing cubicles. Then she looked at her watch and headed for the adjoining room (she was wearing only a white smock over her bare body, because the tiled rooms were filled with hot steam), to the pool where some twenty naked women were splashing about in the miraculous spring waters. She called three of them by name, to tell them their time was up. The ladies obediently left the pool, shaking their bulky, dripping breasts and following Ruzena, who escorted them back to the treatment room to lie down on vacant beds. One after another, she wrapped each in a sheet, wiped each one's eyes with a bit of it, and covered her with a warm blanket. The ladies gave her a smile, but Ruzena didn't smile in return.

  It is surely not pleasant to have been born in a small town through which every year ten thousand women but practically no young men pass; unless she moves elsewhere, a woman will have a precise idea by the age of fifteen of all the erotic possibilities her lifetime will offer her. And how is she to move elsewhere? Her employers did not readily release their employees, and

  Ruzena's parents protested vehemently whenever she hinted at moving away.

  No, this young woman, who all in all did her best to fulfill her professional obligations meticulously, felt no great love for the women taking the waters. We can cite three reasons for this:

  Envy: These women came here directly from husbands and lovers, from a world she imagined teeming with a thousand possibilities inaccessible to her, even though she had prettier breasts, longer legs, and more regular features.

  Besides envy, impatience: These women came here with their destinies far away, and she was here without a destiny, with one year the same as the next; she was frightened by the thought that, in this small town, she was living an eventless time span, and, despite her youth, constantly thought that life was passing her by before she had begun to live.

  Third, there was the instinctive dislike inspired in her by their sheer numbers, which diminished each woman's worth as an individual. She was surrounded by a sad excess of bosoms, among which even a bosom as attractive as hers lost its worth.

  Without a smile, she had just wrapped the last of three women when her thin colleague stuck her head into the room and s
houted: "Ruzena! Telephone!"

  Her colleagues expression was so reverent that Ruzena knew at once who had phoned her. Blushing, she went behind the cubicles, picked up the receiver, and gave her name.

  Klima identified himself and asked her when she would be free to see him.

  "I finish work at three. We could see each other at four."

  Then they had to agree on where to meet. Ruzena suggested the spa's big brasserie, which was open all day. The thin nurse, who was standing beside Ruzena and keeping her eyes fixed on her lips, gave an approving nod. The trumpeter replied that he preferred to see Ruzena in a place where they could be alone and suggested driving out into the country in his car.

  "What for? Where would we go?"

  "We'd be alone."

  "If you're ashamed of me you shouldn't have bothered to come here," said Ruzena, and her colleague nodded.

  "That's not what I meant," said Klima. "I'll meet you at four in front of the brasserie."

  "Perfect," said the thin nurse when Ruzena hung up. "He wants to meet you in some hideaway, but you have to make sure you're seen together by as many people as possible."

  Ruzena was still very agitated, and the prospect of the meeting made her nervous. She could no longer picture Klima. What did his face, his smile, his posture look like? Their single encounter had left her only a vague memory. Her colleagues had pressed her at the time with questions about the trumpeter, they wanted to know what he was like, what he said, what he looked like undressed, and how he made love. But she was

  unable to tell them anything, and merely repeated that it was "like a dream."

  This was not simply a cliche: the man with whom she had spent two hours in bed had come down from the posters to join her. For a moment his photograph had acquired a three-dimensional reality, a warmth, a weight, and then had again become an impalpable, colorless image reproduced in thousands of copies and thus all the more abstract and unreal.

  And because he had then so quickly escaped back into being his own graphic sign, his icon, she had been left with an unpleasant awareness of his perfection. She was unable to cling to a single detail that would bring him down or bring him nearer. When he was far away, she had been full of energetic combativeness, but now that she felt his presence, her courage failed her.

  "Hang in there," said the thin nurse. "I'll keep my fingers crossed."

  6

  When Klima had finished his phone conversation with Ruzena, Bertlef took him by the arm and led him across the park to Karl Marx House, where Dr. Skreta had his office and living quarters. Several women were sitting in the waiting room, but Bertlef without

  hesitation rapped sharply four times on the office door. In an instant a tall man appeared, wearing a white coat and with eyeglasses on his big nose. "Just a moment, please," he said to the women sitting in the waiting room, and then he led the two men into the corridor and up the stairs to his apartment on the floor above.

  "How are you, Maestro?" he said, addressing the trumpeter when all three were seated. "When are you going to give another concert here?"

  "Never again in my lifetime," answered Klima, "because this spa jinxed me."

  Bertlef explained to Dr. Skreta what had happened to the trumpeter, and then Klima added: "I want to ask for your help. First, I want to know if she's really pregnant. Maybe she's just late. Or it's all an act. That's already happened to me once. That one was a blonde too."

  "Never start anything with a blonde," said Dr. Skreta.

  "Yes," Klima agreed, "blondes are my downfall. Doctor, it was horrible that time. I had her examined by a physician. But at the beginning of a pregnancy you can't tell anything for sure. So I insisted they do the mouse test. The one where they inject urine into a mouse and if the mouse's ovaries swell up…"

  "… the lady is pregnant," Dr. Skreta finished.

  "She was carrying her morning urine in a little bottle, I was with her, and right in front of the clinic she dropped the little bottle on the sidewalk. I pounced on

  those bits of glass trying to save at least a few drops! Seeing me, you'd have sworn I'd dropped the Holy Grail. She did it on purpose, broke the little bottle, because she knew she wasn't pregnant and she wanted to make my ordeal last as long as possible."

  "Typical blonde behavior," Dr. Skreta said, unsurprised.

  "Do you think there is a difference between blondes and brunettes?" asked Bertlef, visibly skeptical about Dr. Skreta's experience with women.

  "You bet!" said Dr. Skreta. "Blonde hair and black hair are the two poles of human nature. Black hair signifies virility, courage, frankness, activity, while blonde hair symbolizes femininity, tenderness, weakness, and passivity. Therefore a blonde is in fact doubly a woman. A princess can only be blonde. That's also why, to be as feminine as possible, women dye their hair yellow but never black."

  "I'm curious about how pigments exercise their influence over the human soul," said Bertlef doubt-fully.

  "It's not a matter of pigments. A blonde unconsciously adapts herself to her hair. Especially if the blonde is a brunette who dyes her hair yellow. She tries to be faithful to her hair color and behaves like a fragile creature, a shallow doll, she demands tenderness and service, courtesy and alimony, she's incapable of doing anything for herself, all refinement on the outside and coarseness on the inside. If black hair became a universal fashion, life in this world would clearly be

  better. It would be the most useful social reform ever achieved."

  "So it's very likely that Ruzena is also putting on an act," Klima interjected, looking for hope in Dr. Skreta's words.

  "No. I examined her yesterday. She's pregnant," said the physician.

  Bertlef noticed that the trumpeter had gone pale, and he said: "Doctor, you are chairman of the Abortion Committee here, are you not?"

  "Yes," said Dr. Skreta. "We're meeting on Friday."

  "Perfect," said Bertlef. "There is no time to lose, because our friend is having a breakdown. I realize that in this country you don't readily authorize abortions."

  "Not at all readily," said Dr. Skreta. "On the committee with me are two females who are there to represent the power of the people. They're repulsively ugly and hate all the women who come before us. Do you know who are the most virulent misogynists in the world? Women. No man, gentlemen, not even Mister Klima, whom two women have already attempted to hold responsible for their pregnancies, has ever felt such hatred for women as women themselves feel toward their own sex. Why do you think they try to seduce us? Solely to defy and humiliate their fellow women. God instilled in women's hearts a hatred of other women because He wanted the human race to multiply."

  "I shall forgive this remark of yours," said Bertlef,

  "because I want to return to our friends problem. Aren't you really the one who makes the decisions on that committee, and those hideous females do whatever you say:

  "I'm certainly the one who decides, but this doesn't mean I want to keep on doing it. It pays nothing. Tell me, Maestro, how much are you paid, for example, for one concert?"

  The amount mentioned by Klima interested Dr. Skreta: "I often think I could supplement my income by making music. I'm not a bad drummer."

  "You're a drummer?" asked Klima, showing forced interest.

  "Yes," said Dr. Skreta. "We have a piano and a set of drums in the Hall of the People. I play the drums in my free moments."

  "That's wonderful!" exclaimed the trumpeter, pleased by the opportunity to flatter the physician.

  "But I don't have any partners to have a real band with. There's only the pharmacist, who plays the piano fairly well. We've tried out some things together a few times." He broke off and seemed to be thinking. "Listen! When Ruzena appears before the committee…"

  Klima gave a deep sigh. "If she would only come-"

  Dr. Skreta gestured impatiently: "She'll be glad to come, just like all the others. But the committee requires the father to appear too; you'll have to be there with her. And to make the trip here
worthwhile, you might arrive the day before and give a concert that evening. Trumpet, piano, drums. Tres faciunt

  orchestrum. With your name on the posters, we'll fill the hall. What do you say?"

  Klima was always excessively punctilious about the technical quality of his concerts, and two days earlier the physician's proposal would have seemed completely insane to him. But now he was only interested in a particular nurse's womb, and he responded to the physician's question with polite enthusiasm: "That would be splendid!"

  "Really? Will you do it?"

  "Of course."

  "And you, what do you say?" Skreta asked Bertlef.

  "It seems an excellent idea to me. But I don't know how you can make all the preparations in two days."

  By way of response, Skreta got up and went over to the phone. He dialed a number, but there was no answer. "The most important thing is to order the posters right away. Unfortunately the secretary must have gone to lunch," he said. "Getting the use of the hall is child's play. The People's Education Association has an anti-alcohol meeting scheduled for Thursday, and one of my colleagues is supposed to give the lecture. He'll be delighted when I ask him to cancel because of illness. But of course you'll have to get here on Thursday morning so the three of us can rehearse. Unless it's unnecessary."

  "No, no," said Klima. "It's essential. You have to prepare in advance."

  "That's my opinion too," said Skreta. "Let's play them the most surefire program. I'm good at backing

  up 'St. Louis Blues' and 'When the Saints Go Marching In.' I've got some solos ready, I'm curious to know what you'll think of them. For that matter, are you free this afternoon? Would you like to give it a try?''

  "Unfortunately, this afternoon I have to persuade Ruzena to consent to an abortion."

  Skreta waved his hand: "Forget about that! She'll consent without any coaxing."

  "Doctor," Klima pleaded, "better on Thursday."