13
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."
14
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.
15
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.
16
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.
17
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 tel
l 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.
18
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."
Farewell Waltz Page 13
