Farewell Waltz

she reached the edge of the park, she caught sight of Jakub. He was standing on the sidewalk in front of the Richmond, watching what was going on. She had only seen him once before, at lunch, but she remembered him. The patient, her temporary neighbor who rapped on the wall every time she turned the radio up a little, was someone she disliked so strongly that Ruzena perceived everything about the woman with attentive loathing.
The man’s face displeased her. It looked ironic to her, and she detested irony. She always thought that irony (all forms of irony) was like an armed guard posted at the entrance to her future, scrutinizing her with an inquisitive eye and rejecting her with a shake of the head. She stuck out her chest, deciding to pass in front of the man with all the provocative arrogance of her breasts, all the pride of her belly.
And the man (she was watching him only out of the corner of her eye) suddenly said in a tender, gentle voice: “Come here, come over here …”
At first she didn’t understand why he was addressing her. The tenderness in his voice puzzled her, and she didn’t know how to respond. But then she turned around and caught sight of a heavy boxer dog with a humanly ugly mug following at her heels.
Jakub’s voice attracted the dog. He took him by the collar: “Come with me or you don’t stand a chance.” The dog lifted his trusting head to the man, his tongue hanging like a cheery little flag.
It was a moment filled with ridiculous, trivial, but obvious humiliation: the man had noticed neither her provocative arrogance nor her pride. She had thought he was talking to her, and he was talking to a dog. She passed in front of him and stopped on the broad front steps of the Richmond.
Two old men armed with poles came rushing across the park toward Jakub. She watched the scene spitefully, unable to keep from taking the old men’s side.
Jakub was leading the dog by the collar toward the hotel steps when one of the old men shouted: “Release that dog at once!”
And the other old man: “In the name of the law!”
Jakub pretended not to notice the old men and kept going, but behind him a pole slowly descended alongside his body and the wire loop wavered clumsily over the boxer’s head.
Jakub grabbed the end of the pole and brusquely pushed it aside.
A third old man ran up and shouted: “It’s an attack on law and order! I’m going to call the police!”
And the high-pitched voice of another old man complained: “He ran on the grass! He ran in the playground, where it’s prohibited! He pissed in the kids’ sandbox! Do you like dogs more than children?”
Ruzena was watching the scene from the top of the steps, and the pride that a moment before she had felt only in her belly flowed throughout her body, filling her with defiant strength. Jakub and the dog came up the steps near her, and she said: “It’s not allowed to take a dog inside.”
Jakub answered her calmly, but she could no longer back down. Her legs apart, she planted herself in front of the Richmond’s wide doorway and insisted: “This is a hotel for patients, not a hotel for dogs. Dogs are prohibited here.”
“Why don’t you get a pole with a loop too, young lady?” said Jakub, trying to go through the doorway with the dog.
Ruzena caught in Jakub’s words the irony she so detested and that sent her back where she had come from, back where she did not want to be. Anger blurred her sight. She grabbed hold of the dog by the collar. Now they were both holding him. Jakub was pulling him in and she was pulling him out.
Jakub seized Ruzena’s wrist and pried her fingers loose from the collar with such violence that she staggered.
“You’d rather see poodles in cradles than babies!” she shouted after him.
Jakub turned around and their eyes met, joined by sudden, naked hatred.
8
The boxer scampered around the room curiously, unaware that he had just escaped danger. Jakub stretched out on the daybed, wondering what to do with him. He liked the lively, good-natured dog. The insouciance with which, in a few minutes, he had made himself at home in a strange room and struck up a friendship with a strange man was nearly suspicious and seemed to verge on stupidity. After sniffing all corners of the room, he leaped up on the daybed and lay down beside Jakub. Jakub was startled, but he welcomed without reservation this sign of camaraderie. He put his hand on the dog’s back and felt with delight the warmth of the animal’s body. He had always liked dogs. They were familiar, affectionate, devoted, and at the same time entirely incomprehensible. We will never know what actually goes on in the heads and hearts of these confident, merry emissaries from incomprehensible nature.
He scratched the dog’s back and thought about the scene he had just witnessed. The old men armed with long poles merged in his mind with prison guards, examining magistrates, and informers who spied on neighbors to see if they talked politics while shopping. What drove such people to their sinister occupations? Spite? Certainly, but also the desire for order. Because the desire for order tries to transform the human world into an inorganic reign in which everything goes well, everything functions as a subject of an impersonal will. The desire for order is at the same time a desire for death, because life is a perpetual violation of order. Or, inversely, the desire for order is the virtuous pretext by which man’s hatred for man justifies its crimes.
Then he thought of the blonde young woman who tried to prevent him from entering the Richmond with the dog, and he felt a painful hatred for her. The old men armed with poles didn’t irritate him, he knew them well,