Frantisek's face flushed, and Ruzena's threat made him so furious that he advanced into the room and slammed the door behind him. "I don't care if you have me thrown out! I don't care!" he shouted.
"I'm telling you to get going this minute!" said Ruzena.
"I can see right through both of you! It's that trumpeter character! It's all lies and pulling strings! He arranged everything for you with the doctor; yesterday they gave a concert together! I see it all clearly, and I'm going to stop you from killing my child! I'm the father, and I've got something to say about it! I forbid you to kill my child!"
Frantisek was yelling, and the women lying on the beds under their blankets lifted their heads with curiosity.
By this time Ruzena, too, was completely unnerved because Frantisek was yelling and she didn't know how to calm things down.
"It's not your child," she said. "You've made that up. The child isn't yours."
"What?" yelled Frantisek and, advancing farther into the room, went around the table to come nearer to Ruzena: "What do you mean, not my child! I'm in a pretty good position to know it is! And I know it is!"
Just then a woman, naked and wet, came in from the pool toward Ruzena to be wrapped in a sheet and led to a bed. The woman was startled when she saw Frantisek staring at her unseeingly a few yards away.
For Ruzena it was a moment of respite; she went over to the woman, wrapped her in a sheet, and led her to a bed.
"What's that fellow doing here?" the woman asked, looking back at Frantisek.
"He's a madman! He's gone out of his mind and I don't know how to get him out of here. I don't know what to do with him!" said Ruzena, covering the woman with a warm blanket.
A woman in another bed shouted at Frantisek: "Hey, there! You're not supposed to be here! Get out!''
"I'm supposed to be here, all right!" Frantisek retorted stubbornly and refused to budge. When Ruzena returned he was no longer flushed but pallid; he no longer shouted but spoke softly and resolutely: "I'm only going to tell you one thing. If you get rid of the child, I won't be around anymore either. If you kill this child, you'll have two deaths on your conscience."
Ruzena sighed deeply and looked down at the table. There was her handbag with the tube of pale-blue tablets in it. She shook one into the hollow of her hand and swallowed it.
And Frantisek said, no longer shouting but pleading: "I beg you, Ruzena. I beg you. I can't live without you. I'll kill myself."
Just then Ruzena felt a violent pain in her entrails, and Frantisek saw her face become unrecognizable, contorted by pain, her eyes widening but unseeing, her body twisted, doubled over, her hands pressed against her belly. Then he saw her slump to the floor.
15
Olga was splashing around in the pool when she suddenly heard… What exactly did she hear? She didn't know what she was hearing. The room was filled with confusion. The women around her were leaving the pool and looking toward the adjoining treatment room, which seemed to be sucking in everything near it. Olga, too, found herself caught in the flow of this irresistible suction, and unthinkingly, filled with anxious curiosity, she followed the others.
In the adjoining room, she saw a cluster of women at the door with the small table near it. She saw them from behind: they were naked and wet, and bending over with their rumps sticking up. Facing them stood a young man.
More naked women came in jostling one another to join the group, and Olga too worked her way through the crowd and saw Nurse Ruzena lying motionless on the floor. The young man got down on his knees and began to yell: "I killed her! I killed her! I'm a murderer!"
The women were dripping wet. One woman bent over Ruzena's recumbent body to take her pulse. But it was a useless gesture, because death was there and no one doubted it. The naked, wet women's bodies jostled one another impatiently to see death up close, to see it on a familiar face.
Frantisek was still kneeling. He clasped her in his arms and kissed her face.
The women were standing all around him, and he lifted his eyes to them and repeated: "I killed her! I did it! Arrest me!"
"We have to do something!" said one woman, and another ran out into the corridor and started shouting. In a moment two colleagues of Ruzena's came running, followed by a physician in a white smock.
Only then did Olga realize that she was naked and that she was jostling and being jostled by other naked women in front of a young man and a man physician, and the situation suddenly appeared ridiculous to her. But she knew that this would not prevent her from staying here with the crowd and looking at death, which fascinated her.
The physician was holding the recumbent Ruzena's wrist, trying in vain to feel her pulse, and Frantisek kept repeating: "I killed her! Call the police, arrest me!"
16
Jakub found his friend in his office at Karl Marx House just as he was returning from the clinic. He congratulated him on his performance on the drums the day before, and he excused himself for not having come to see him after the concert.
"It really frustrated me," said the doctor. "It's your
last day here, and God knows where you'll be hanging out this evening. We had a lot of things to discuss. And what's worse is that most likely you were with that skinny little thing. Gratitude is a dangerous feeling."
"What gratitude? Why should I be grateful to her?"
"You wrote me that her father had done a lot for you.
That day Dr. Skreta had no office hours, and the gynecological examination table stood unoccupied in the back of the room. The two friends sat down in facing armchairs.
"No," said Jakub. "I only wanted you to take care of her, and it seemed simplest to tell you that I owed a debt of gratitude to her father. But in fact it wasn't that at all. Now that I'm bringing everything to an end, I can tell you about it. I was arrested with her father's total approval. Her father was sending me to my death. Six months later he ended up on the gallows, while I was lucky and escaped it."
"In other words, she's the daughter of a bastard," said the doctor.
Jakub shrugged: "He believed I was an enemy of the revolution. Everybody was saying that, and he let himself be convinced."
"Then why did you tell me he was your friend?"
"We were friends. And nothing was more important to him than to vote for my arrest. This proved that he placed ideals above friendship. When he denounced me as a traitor to the revolution, he felt that he was suppressing his personal interests for the sake of some-
thing more sublime, and he experienced it as the great act of his life."
"And is that the reason you like that ugly girl?" "She had nothing to do with it. She's innocent." "There are thousands of girls as innocent as she is. If you chose this one, it's probably because she's her father's daughter."
Jakub shrugged, and Dr. Skreta went on: "You're as perverted as he was. I believe that you consider your friendship with this girl the greatest act of your life. You suppressed your natural hatred, your natural loathing, to prove to yourself that you're magnanimous. It's beautiful, but at the same time it's unnatural and entirely pointless."
"You're wrong," Jakub protested. "I wasn't suppressing anything in me, and I wasn't trying to look magnanimous. I was simply sorry for her. From the first time I saw her. She was still a child when they forced her out of her home and she went to live with her mother in some mountain village where the people were afraid to talk to them. For a long time she was unable to get authorization to study, even though she's a gifted girl. It's vile to persecute children because of their parents. Would you want me, too, to hate her because of her father? I was sorry for her. I was sorry for her because her father had been executed, and I was sorry for her because her father had sent a friend to his death."
Just then the telephone rang. Skreta picked up the receiver and listened for a moment. His face darkened,
and he said: "I'm busy here right now. Do you really need me?" After a pause he said: "All right. Okay. I'm coming." He hung up and cursed.
>
"If you've got to go, don't bother about me, I have to leave anyway,'' said Jakub, rising from his chair.
"No, you're not leaving! We haven't discussed anything yet. And there's something we have to discuss today, right? They made me lose the thread. It was about something important. I've been thinking about it since I woke up. Do you remember what it might be about?"
"No," said Jakub.
"Good God, and now I have to run to the thermal building…"
"It's better to say goodbye like this. In the midst of a conversation," said Jakub, and he pressed his friend's hand.
17
Ruzena's lifeless body was lying in a small room reserved for physicians on night duty. Several people were bustling around the room, and a police inspector was there and had already interrogated Frantisek and written down his statement. Frantisek once more expressed his desire to be arrested.
"Did you give her the tablet, yes or no?" asked the inspector.
"No!"
"Then stop saying you killed her."
"She always told me she was going to kill herself," said Frantisek.
"Did she tell you why she was going to kill herself? "
"She said she was going to kill herself if I kept spoiling her life. She said she didn't want a child. She'd rather kill herself than have a child!"
Dr. Skreta entered the room. He gave the inspector a friendly wave and went over to the deceased; he lifted her eyelid to examine the color of the conjunctiva.
"Doctor, were you this nurse's supervisor?" asked the inspector.
"Yes."
"Do you think she might have used a poison available in your practice?"
Skreta turned once more to Ruzena's body to examine the particulars of her death. Then he said: "It doesn't look to me like a drug or substance she could have gotten in our offices. It was probably an alkaloid. The autopsy will tell us which one."
"But where did she get it?"
"It's hard to say."
"At the moment, it's all very mysterious," said the inspector. "The motive too. This young man has just revealed that she was expecting a child by him and she wanted to have an abortion."
"That character was forcing her to do it," Frantisek shouted.
"What character?" asked the inspector.
"The trumpeter. He wanted to take her away from me and make her get rid of my child! I followed them! He was with her at the Abortion Committee."
"I can confirm that," said Dr. Skreta. "It's true that this morning we took up her request for an abortion."
"And the trumpeter was with her?" asked the inspector.
"Yes," said Skreta. "Ruzena declared that he was the child's father."
"It's a lie! The child's mine!" Frantisek shouted.
"Nobody doubts that," said Dr. Skreta, "but Ruzena had to declare a married man as the father so the committee would authorize termination of the pregnancy."
"So you knew it was a lie!" Frantisek shouted at Dr. Skreta.
"According to the law, we have to take the woman's word. Once Ruzena told us she was pregnant by Mister Klima and he confirmed her declaration, none of us had the right to assert the contrary."
"But you didn't believe Mister Klima was the father?" asked the inspector.
"No."
"And on what do you base your opinion?"
"Mister Klima has been to this town only twice before, and briefly both times. It's highly unlikely that a sexual relationship could have taken place between him and our nurse. This is too small a town for me not
to hear about such a thing. Mister Klima's paternity most likely was just a deception with which Ruzena persuaded him to appeal to the committee to authorize the abortion. This young gentleman here surely would not have consented to an abortion."
But Frantisek was no longer hearing what Skreta was saying. And he stood there unseeing. All he heard were Ruzena's words: "You're going to drive me to suicide, you're definitely going to drive me to suicide,'' and he knew that he had caused her death and yet he did not understand why, and it all seemed inexplicable to him. He stood there face to face with the unreal, like a savage confronted by a miracle, and all of a sudden he had become deaf and blind because his mind was unable to conceive of the incomprehensibility that had swooped down on him.
(My poor Frantisek, you will wander through your whole life without understanding, you will only know that your love killed the woman you loved, you will carry this certainty like a secret mark of horror; you will wander like a leper bringing inexplicable disasters to loved ones, you will wander through your whole life like a mailman of misfortune.)
He was pale, standing immobile like a pillar of salt and not even seeing that an agitated man had entered the room; the new arrival approached the dead woman, looked at her for a long while, and caressed her hair.
Dr. Skreta whispered: "Suicide. Poison."
The man shook his head violently: "Suicide? I can swear by all I hold dearest that this woman did not take
her own life. And if she swallowed poison it has to be murder."
The inspector looked at the man in amazement. It was Bertlef, and his eyes were burning with angry fire.
18
Jakub turned the ignition key and drove off. He passed the spa town's last villas and found himself in a landscape. He headed for the border, and he had no urge to hurry. The thought that he was driving this way for the last time made this landscape dear to him and strange. He kept feeling that he did not recognize it, that it was different from what he had thought, and that it was a pity he could not stay longer.
But he also told himself that no postponement of his departure, whether for a day or several years, could in any way change what it was now making him suffer; he would never know this landscape more intimately than he knew it today. He must accept the thought that he was going to leave it without knowing it, without having exhausted its charms, that he was going to leave it as a debtor and creditor both.
Then he thought again about the young woman to whom he had given the sham poison by slipping it into a medicine tube, and he told himself that his career as
a murderer had been the briefest of all his careers. I was a murderer for about eighteen hours, he told himself, and he smiled.
But then he raised an objection: It was not true, he had not been a murderer for only such a brief time. He was a murderer right now and would remain one for the rest of his life. For it mattered little whether the pale-blue tablet was poison or not, what counted was that he believed it was and yet had given it to a stranger and done nothing to save her.
And he set about reflecting on all of it with the unconcern of a man who regards his act as existing merely in the realm of the purely experimental: His act of murder was strange. It was a murder without a motive. It had no aim of gaining something or other for the murderer's benefit. What exactly, then, was its meaning? Obviously, the only meaning of his act of murder was to teach him that he was a murderer.
Murder as an experiment, as an act of self-knowledge, reminded him of something: yes, of Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov, who murdered in order to know whether a man has the right to kill an inferior human being, and whether he would have the strength to bear that murder; by that murder, he was interrogating himself about himself.
Yes, there was something that brought him close to Raskolnikov: the pointlessness of the murder, its theoretical nature. But there were differences: Raskolnikov wondered whether a superior man has the right to sacrifice the life of an inferior one for his own benefit.
When Jakub gave the nurse the tube containing the poison, he had nothing like that in mind. Jakub was not wondering whether a man had the right to sacrifice the life of another. On the contrary, Jakub had always been convinced that no one had that right. Jakub was living in a world where people sacrificed the lives of others for the sake of abstract ideas. Jakub knew the faces of these people, faces now brazenly innocent, now sadly craven, faces that apologetically but meticulously carried out cruel verdicts on their
neighbors. Jakub knew these faces, and he detested them. Moreover, Jakub knew that every human being wishes for someone's death, and that only two things deter him from murder: fear of punishment and the physical difficulty of inflicting death. Jakub knew that if everyone had the power to kill in secret and at a distance, mankind would vanish in a few minutes. He therefore concluded that Raskolnikovs experiment was totally useless.
Why then had he given the poison to the nurse? Was it simply by chance? Raskolnikov had actually spent a long time plotting and preparing for his crime, while Jakub had acted on the impulse of a moment. But Jakub realized that he, too, had unknowingly for many years been preparing for his act of murder, and that the instant he gave the poison to Ruzena was a fissure into which had been shoveled all of his past life, all of his disgust with mankind.
When Raskolnikov murdered the old woman usurer with an ax, he knew that he was crossing a horrifying
threshold; that he was transgressing divine law; he knew that although the old woman was contemptible, she was a creature of God. The fear that Raskolnikov felt, Jakub had not experienced. For him human beings were not creatures of God. Jakub loved scrupulousness and high-mindedness, and he was persuaded that these were not human qualities. Jakub knew human beings well, and that is why he did not love them. Jakub was high-minded, and that is why he gave them poison.
So I am a murderer out of high-mindedness, he said to himself, and the thought seemed ridiculous and sad.
After Raskolnikov killed the old usurer he did not have the strength to control the tremendous storm of remorse. Whereas Jakub, who was deeply convinced that no one had the right to sacrifice the lives of others, felt no remorse at all.
He tried to imagine that the nurse had really died, to see if he felt any guilt. No, he felt nothing of the kind. His mind calm and at peace, he drove on through the pleasant region that was bidding him farewell.
Raskolnikov experienced his crime as a tragedy, and eventually he was overwhelmed by the weight of his act. Jakub was amazed that his act was so light, so weightless, amazed that it did not overwhelm him. And he wondered if this lightness was not more terrifying than the Russian character's hysterical feelings.
Farewell Waltz Page 18
