Farewell Waltz

you so madly adore.
The joyful shamelessness of the fat women in the pool was a necrophiliac ring dance around the transience of youth, a ring dance made all the more joyful by the presence in the pool of a young woman to serve as sacrificial victim. When Olga wrapped herself in the sheet they interpreted the gesture as sabotage of their cruel rite, and thus they were furious.
But Ruzena was neither fat nor old, she was actually prettier than Olga! Why then did she show no solidarity with her?
Had she decided to have an abortion and been convinced that happiness with Klima was awaiting her, she would have reacted quite differently. Consciousness of being loved separates a woman from the herd, and Ruzena would have been enraptured by the experience of her inimitable singularity. She would have seen the fat women as enemies and Olga as a sister. She would have come to her aid, as beauty comes to the aid of beauty, happiness to happiness, love to love.
But the night before, Ruzena had slept very poorly and had decided that she could not count on Klima’s love, so that everything separating her from the herd seemed to her an illusion. All she had was the burgeoning embryo in her belly, protected by society and tradition. All she had was the glorious universality of female destiny, which promised to fight for her.
And these women in the pool exactly represented femaleness in its universality: the femaleness of eternal childbirth, nursing and withering, the femaleness that snickers at the thought of that fleeting second when a woman believes she is loved and feels she is an inimitable individual.
There is no reconciliation possible between a woman who is convinced she is unique and women who have shrouded themselves in universal female destiny. After a sleepless night heavy with thought, Ruzena took (poor trumpeter!) the side of those women.
4
Jakub was at the wheel, and Bob, sitting beside him on the front seat, kept turning his head to lick his face. Beyond the last houses of the town stood highrise apartment buildings. They had not been there the year before, and Jakub found them hideous. In the midst of a green landscape they were like brooms in a plant pot. Jakub was stroking Bob, who was looking at the buildings with satisfaction, and he reflected that God had been kind to dogs in not putting a sense of beauty into their heads.
The dog again licked his face (perhaps he felt that Jakub was always thinking about him), and Jakub thought that in his country things were getting neither better nor worse but only more and more ridiculous: he had once been victim of a hunt for humans, and yesterday he witnessed a hunt for dogs that was like the same old play with a new cast. Pensioners took the roles of examining magistrates and prison guards, and the parts of the imprisoned political figures were played by a boxer dog, a mutt, and a dachshund.
He remembered that several years earlier his neighbors had found their cat in front of their door with its legs bound, nails pushed into its eyes, its tongue cut out. Neighborhood kids had been playing adults. Jakub stroked Bob’s head and parked the car in front of the inn.
When he stepped out he thought the dog would rush joyfully toward the door of his home. But instead of starting to run, Bob jumped around Jakub, wanting to play. And yet when a voice shouted “Bob!” the dog was off like a shot toward a woman standing in the doorway.
“You’re a hopeless vagabond,” she said, and she asked Jakub apologetically how long the dog had been bothering him.
When Jakob replied that the dog had spent the night with him and that he had just driven him back home, the woman profusely and noisily thanked him and urged him to come in. She seated him in a special room apparently used for club banquets and rushed off in search of her husband.
She soon came back with a young man who sat down beside Jakub and shook his hand: “You must be a very nice man to drive all the way here just to bring Bob back. He’s stupid, and all he does is run around. But we really love him. Would you like something to eat?”
“Yes, thanks,” said Jakub, and the woman rushed off to the kitchen. Then Jakub recounted how he had saved Bob from a bunch of pensioners.
“The bastards!” exclaimed the young man, and then, turning toward the kitchen, called out to his wife: “Vera! Come here! You should hear what they’re doing down there in town, the bastards!”
Vera came back carrying a tray with a steaming bowl of soup. She sat down and Jakub had to resume the story of his adventure of the day before. The dog sat under the table, letting himself be scratched behind the ears.
When Jakub had finished his soup, the man got up and rushed off to the kitchen to bring back a dish of roast pork with dumplings.
Jakub was sitting by the window and feeling good. The man cursed the people down there (Jakub was fascinated: the man considered his restaurant a lofty place, an Olympus, a point of retreat and loftiness), and the woman went off to lead a two-year-old boy in by the hand: “Say thank you to the gentleman,” she said. “He brought back your Bob.”
The toddler babbled some unintelligible words and emitted a little laugh for Jakub. It was sunny outside, and the yellowing foliage bent gently over the open window. There was not a sound. The inn was well above the world, and one could find peace there.
Although he did not like to procreate, Jakub liked children: “You have a good-looking little boy,” he said.
“He’s a bit strange,” said the woman. “I don’t know where he got that big beak.”
Jakub recalled his friend’s nose and said: “Doctor Skreta told me that he took care of you.”
“You know the