Farewell Waltz

by Milan Kundera

  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."

  8

  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.

  9

  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.

  10

  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.

  11

  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.

  12

  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 obse
rver 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.