Farewell Waltz

certain I’m the father because my patients are, so to speak, unfaithful to me with their husbands. And besides, they go back home, and it happens that I don’t find out if the treatment succeeded. Things are clearer with the local patients.”
Skreta fell silent, and Jakub gave himself up to tender reverie. Skreta’s project delighted and moved him, for in it he recognized his old friend the incorrigible dreamer: “It must be terrific to have children with so many women,” he said.
“And they’re all brothers,” Skreta added.
They strolled on, breathing the fragrant air in silence. Then Skreta resumed talking: “You know, I often tell myself that even though there are a lot of things here we don’t like, we’re responsible for this country. It infuriates me that I can’t travel abroad freely, but I could never defame my country. I’d have to defame myself first. And which one of us has ever done anything to make this country better? Which one of us has ever done anything to make it possible to live here? To make it be a country where you could feel at home? Simply to feel at home …” Skreta now spoke more softly, tenderly: “Feeling at home is being among one’s own. And because you said you’re leaving, I’ve thought that I have to persuade you to take part in my project. I’ve got a test tube for you. You’ll be abroad, and your children will be brought into the world here. And in ten or twenty years you’ll see what a splendid country this will be!”
There was a round moon in the sky (it will stay there until the last night of our story, which we could therefore call a lunar story), and Dr. Skreta accompanied
Jakub back to the Richmond. “You don’t have to leave tomorrow,” he said.
“I have to. They’re waiting for me,” said Jakub, but he knew that he would let himself be persuaded.
“Nonsense,” said Skreta. “I’m glad you like my project. Tomorrow we’re going to discuss it in detail.”

Fourth Day


1
Mrs. Klima was getting ready to leave, but her husband was still in bed.
“Don’t you also have to leave this morning?” she asked him.
“Why hurry? I’ve got plenty of time to get to those morons,” Klima replied. He yawned and turned over.
He had announced to her two days before, in the middle of Tuesday night, that at the exhausting conference he had just come back from he had been pressured to help amateur bands and thus forced into giving a concert in a small spa town on Thursday evening with a jazz-playing pharmacist and physician. He had shouted all this angrily, but Mrs. Klima looked him in the face and clearly saw that his indignant curses were insincere, that there was no concert and Klima had invented it only to provide himself some time for one of his love intrigues. She could read everything on his face; he could never hide anything from her. Now, as he swore, yawned, and turned over, she realized instantly that he was doing so not out of sleepiness but to hide his face and prevent her from scrutinizing it.
Then she left for work. When, some years earlier, her illness had deprived her of her place in front of the footlights, Klima found her a job at the theater as a secretary. It was not unpleasant, she met interesting people every day, and she was fairly free to arrange her own work schedule. Now she sat down in her office to write several official letters, but she could not manage to concentrate.
Nothing absorbs a human being more completely than jealousy. When Kamila lost her mother a year earlier, it was certainly an event more tragic than one of the trumpeter’s escapades. And yet the death of her mother, whom she loved immensely, caused her less pain. The pain of her grief was benignly multicolored: there was sadness in it, and longing, emotion, regret (had Kamila taken sufficient care of her mother? had she neglected her?), even a serene smile. That pain was benignly dispersed in all directions: Kamila’s thoughts rebounded from her mother’s coffin and flew off toward memories, toward her own childhood and, still further, toward her mother’s childhood, they flew off toward dozens of practical concerns, they flew off toward the future, which was wide open and where, as consolation (yes, in those exceptional days her husband was her consolation), Klima’s figure stood outlined.
The pain of jealousy, on the contrary, did not move about in space, it turned like a drill on a single point. There was no dispersal. If her mother’s death had opened the door to a future (different, more lonely, and also more adult), the suffering caused by her husband’s infidelity opened no future at all. Everything was concentrated on a single (and perpetually present) image of an unfaithful body, on a single (and perpetually present) reproach. When she lost her mother, Kamila could listen to music, she could even read; when she was jealous she could do nothing at all.
The day before, she had already gotten the idea of going to the spa town so as to check on the existence of the suspect concert, but she immediately gave it up because she knew that her jealousy would horrify Klima and that she must not overtly reveal it to him. But jealousy ran inside her like a racing engine, and she was unable to resist picking up the telephone and dialing the railroad station. In self-justification she told herself that she was phoning absentmindedly, with no particular intent, because she was unable to concentrate on administrative correspondence.
When she learned that the train departed at eleven, she imagined herself going up and down unfamiliar streets in search of a poster with Klima’s name on it, asking at the tourist bureau if they knew about a concert to be given by her husband, being told there is no such concert, and then wandering, wretched and betrayed, through a strange