Farewell Waltz

and deserted town. And then she imagined Klima talking about the concert the next day and questioning him about the details. She would look him in the face, listen to his inventions, and drink the poisonous brew of his lies with bitter pleasure.
But she immediately told herself that she should not behave this way. No, she could not spend whole days and weeks spying and nurturing the images of her jealousy. She dreaded losing him, and because of this fear she would end up losing him!
But another voice immediately replied with cunning naïveté: No, she was not going to spy on him! Klima had asserted that he was going to give a concert, and she believed him! It was just because she did not wish to be jealous that she took him seriously, that she accepted his assertions without suspicion! He had said that he was going unhappily, that he was afraid he would be spending a dreary day and evening there! It was thus only to prepare a pleasant surprise for him that she decided to go and join him! When Klima, at the end of the concert, was disgustedly taking his bows and thinking of the exhausting trip home, she would slip onto the foot of the stage, he would see her, and they would both laugh!
She handed the manager the letters she had written with difficulty. They thought well of her at the theater. They appreciated the modesty and friendliness of a famous musician’s wife. The sadness that sometimes emanated from her had something disarming about it. The manager could not refuse her anything. She promised to return Friday afternoon and stay late at the theater that day to make up the lost time.
2
It was ten o’clock, and, as she did each day, Olga had just received a large white sheet and a key from Ruzena. She went into a cubicle, took off her clothes, hung them on a hanger, slung the sheet around her like a toga, locked the cubicle, returned the key to Ruzena, and headed for the adjoining room with the pool. She threw the sheet onto the railing and went down the steps into the water, where there were already many women bathing. The pool was not big, but Olga was convinced that swimming was necessary for her health, and so she tried a few strokes. That splashed water into the talkative mouth of one of the ladies. “Are you crazy?” she cried out at Olga testily. “This pool isn’t for swimming!”
Women were squatting in the shallow water, huddled up along the wall of the pool like big frogs. Olga was afraid of them. They were all older than she, they were more robust, they had more fat and skin. She thus sat down among them humbled, and stayed motionless and frowning.
Then she suddenly caught sight of a young man at the door; he was short and wore blue jeans and a torn sweater.
“What’s that fellow doing here?” she exclaimed.
All the women turned in the direction Olga was looking and started to snicker and squeal.
Just then Ruzena came into the room and shouted: “We’ve got visitors. They’re going to film you for the news.”
The women greeted this with great laughter.
Olga protested: “What is all this?”
“The management gave them permission,” said Ruzena.
“I don’t care about the management, nobody consulted me!” Olga exclaimed.
The young man in the torn sweater (he had a light meter dangling from his neck) approached the pool and looked at Olga with a grin she found obscene: “Miss, thousands of viewers will go mad for you when they see you on the screen!”
The women responded with a new burst of laughter, and Olga hid her chest with her hands (it was not difficult, for, as we know, her breasts looked like two plums) and huddled behind the others.
Two more fellows in blue jeans moved toward the pool, and the taller one declared: “Please behave just as naturally as you would if we weren’t here.”
Olga reached out to the railing where her sheet was hanging. Still in the water, she wrapped the sheet around her and then climbed the steps and stood on the tiled floor; the sheet was dripping wet.
“Oh, shit! Don’t go yet!” shouted the young man in the torn sweater.
“You have to stay in the pool fifteen minutes more!” Ruzena then shouted.
“She’s shy!” came with guffaws from the pool behind Olga’s back.
“She’s afraid somebody’ll steal her beauty!” said Ruzena.
“Look at her, the princess!” said a voice from the pool.
“Those who don’t wish to be filmed of course may go,” the tall fellow calmly said.
“The rest of us aren’t ashamed! We’re beautiful women!” a fat woman said stridently, and the laughter rippled the surface of the water.
“But that young lady can’t go! She has to stay in the pool fifteen minutes more!” protested Ruzena as her eyes followed Olga stubbornly heading toward the changing room.
3
No one could blame Ruzena for being in a bad mood. But why was she so irritated by Olga’s refusal to let herself be filmed? Why did she identify herself so totally with the mob of fat women who had welcomed the men’s arrival with joyful squeals?
And, by the way, why were these fat women squealing so joyfully? Was it because they wanted to display their beauty to the young men and to seduce them?
Surely not. Their conspicuous shamelessness arose precisely from the certainty that they had no seductive beauty at their disposal. They were filled with rancor against youthful women, and hoped by exhibiting their sexually useless bodies to malign and mock female nakedness. They wished to take revenge on and torpedo with the repulsiveness of their bodies the glory of female beauty, for they knew that bodies, whether beautiful or ugly, are ultimately all the same and that the ugly overshadow the beautiful as they whisper in men’s ears: Look, this is the truth of the body that bewitches you! Look, this big flabby tit is the same thing as that breast