Farewell Waltz

paternity case: “Yes, we saw them, they were sitting facing each other like lovers, he was caressing her hand and gazing lovingly into her eyes …”
The anxiety was further aggravated by the trumpeter’s vanity; he actually considered Ruzena not beautiful enough for him to hold her hand in public. That was a bit unjust to Ruzena. She was much prettier than she seemed to him at this moment. Just as love makes the beloved woman more beautiful, anxiety inspired by a woman one fears brings her smallest flaws into disproportionate relief …
“I don’t like this place,” said Klima when they were finally alone again. “Do you want to go for a drive?”
She was eager to see his car, and she agreed. Klima paid the check, and they left the brasserie. Opposite them was a broad, yellow sand path. Some ten men were lined up there, facing the brasserie. For the most part they were old men, wearing red armbands on the sleeves of their wrinkled jackets and holding long poles in their hands.
Klima was dumbfounded: “What is that?”
Ruzena responded: “It’s nothing, show me your car,” and she quickly started to drag him away.
But Klima was unable to take his eyes off the men. He could not fathom the purpose of the long poles with wire loops at the ends. The men were like lamplighters, like fishermen in search of flying fish, like militiamen with a secret weapon.
While he was scrutinizing them, he thought one of them was smiling at him. He was afraid, even afraid for himself, thinking that he was beginning to hallucinate and seeing everyone as following and watching him. He let Ruzena drag him away to the parking lot.
9
“I’d like to go somewhere far away with you,” he said. He had his right arm around Ruzena’s shoulders and his left hand on the steering wheel. “Somewhere south. Where you drive for hours on a corniche along the sea. Have you been to Italy?”
“No.”
“Well then, promise you’ll come with me.”
“Aren’t you overdoing it a bit?”
Ruzena had said it only out of modesty, but the trumpeter was instantly on guard, as if that “overdoing it” applied to all of his demagogy, which she had suddenly seen through. But he could no longer back out: “Yes, I’m overdoing it. I always have crazy ideas. That’s how I am. But unlike other people, I carry out my crazy ideas. Believe me, nothing is more beautiful than to carry out crazy ideas. I’d like my whole life to be one single crazy idea. I’d like us not to go back to the spa, I’d like us to go on driving nonstop until we get to the sea. Down there I’d find a job in a band, and we’d go along the coast from one resort to another.”
He stopped the sedan at a spot with a scenic view. They got out, and he suggested they take a walk in the forest. They walked a few minutes and then sat down on a wooden bench dating from the time when people went by car less and appreciated excursions in the forest more. He kept his arm around Ruzena’s shoulders and suddenly said in a sad voice: “Everybody imagines I have a very happy life. That’s a big mistake. I’m really very unhappy. Not only these last few months, but for several years now.”
If Ruzena regarded the idea of a trip to Italy excessive and thought about it with vague suspicion (very few of their fellow citizens were allowed to travel abroad), the sadness that emanated from these words of Klima’s had for her a pleasant odor. She sniffed it as if it were roast pork.
“How can you be unhappy?”
“How I can be unhappy …” said the trumpeter with a sigh.
“You’re famous, you’ve got a beautiful car, you’ve got money, you’ve got a pretty wife …”
“Maybe pretty, yes …” the trumpeter said bitterly.
“I know,” said Ruzena. “She’s not young anymore. She’s your age, right?”
The trumpeter saw that Ruzena was probably fully informed on the subject of his wife, and this angered him. But he went on: “Yes, she’s my age.”
“You’re not old. You look like a kid,” said Ruzena.
“But a man needs a woman younger than he is,” said Klima. “And an artist more than anyone else. I need youth, you can’t imagine, Ruzena, how much I appreciate your youth. I sometimes think I can’t go on like this. I feel a frantic desire to free myself. To start all over again and in another way. Ruzena, your phone call—suddenly I was sure it was a message sent by fate.”
“Really?” she asked softly.
“Why do you think I called you back right away? All at once I felt that I couldn’t lose any more time. That I had to see you right now, right now, right now …” He fell silent and gazed into her eyes for a long while: “Do you love me?”
“Yes. And you?”
“I love you madly,” he said.
“Me too.”
He leaned over her and put his mouth against hers. It was a healthy mouth, a young mouth, a pretty mouth with prettily shaped soft lips and carefully brushed teeth, with everything in place, and the fact is that two months earlier he had yielded to the temptation of kissing these lips. But precisely because that mouth had charmed him, he had seen it at the time through a mist of desire and knew nothing of it in reality: the tongue had been like a flame and the saliva had been an intoxicating liqueur. Only now, having lost its charm, was the mouth suddenly what it was, a real mouth, an industrious orifice through which the young woman had already taken in cubic meters of dumplings, potatoes, and soups, a mouth containing teeth pocked with fillings and saliva that was no longer an intoxicating liqueur but the cousin of a glob of spit. The tongue in the trumpeter’s mouth had the effect of an unappetizing mouthful impossible to swallow and unseemly to remove.
The kiss