Farewell Waltz

doctor?” the man asked cheerily.
“He’s a friend of mine,” said Jakub.
“We’re very grateful to him,” said the young mother, and Jakub thought that the child was probably one of the successes of Skreta’s eugenic project.
“He’s not a physician, he’s a magician,” the man said admiringly.
Jakub reflected that, in this place where the peace of Bethlehem reigned, these three were a holy family, with the child begotten not by a human father but by the god Skreta.
The toddler with the big nose again babbled unintelligibly, and the young father gazed at him lovingly. “I wonder,” he said to his wife, “which of your distant ancestors had a big nose.”
Jakub smiled. A curious question had just occurred to him: Had Dr. Skreta also used a syringe to impregnate his own wife?
“Isn’t that right?” the young father asked.
“Of course,” said Jakub. “It’s a great consolation to think that when we’ve long been in the grave our noses will still be strolling the earth.”
They all laughed, and the idea that Skreta could be the toddler’s father now seemed to Jakub to be a fanciful dream.
5
Frantisek took the money from the lady whose refrigerator he had just fixed. He left the house, got on his faithful motorcycle, and headed toward the other end of town to hand over the day’s receipts at the office in charge of repair services for the whole district. A few minutes after two he was through for the day. He started the motorcycle again and rode toward the thermal building. At the parking lot he saw the white sedan. He parked the motorcycle next to the car and walked under the colonnades toward the Hall of the People, because he surmised the trumpeter might be there.
He was driven neither by audacity nor combativeness. He no longer wanted to make a scene. On the contrary, he was determined to control himself, to yield, to submit totally. He told himself that his love was so great that he could bear anything for its sake. Like the fairy-tale prince who endures all kinds of torments and sufferings for the sake of the princess, confronting dragons and crossing oceans, he was ready to accept fabulously excessive humiliations.
Why was he so humble? Why did he not turn instead to another young woman, one of those available in the small spa town in such alluring abundance?
Frantisek is younger than Ruzena, and thus, unfortunately for him, he is very young. When he is more mature he will find out that things are transient, and he will become aware that beyond one woman’s horizon there opens up a horizon of yet more women. But Frantisek still knows nothing about time. He has been living since childhood in an enduring, unchanging world, living in a kind of immobile eternity, he still has the same father and the same mother, and Ruzena, who had made a man of him, is above him like the lid of the firmament, of the only possible firmament. He cannot imagine life without her.
The day before, he had docilely promised not to spy on her and simultaneously had sincerely decided not to bother her. He told himself he was interested only in the trumpeter, and trailing him would not really be a violation of his promise. But at the same time he realized that this was only an excuse and that Ruzena would condemn his behavior, but it was stronger in him than any reflection or any resolution, it was like a drug addiction: he had to see the man; he had to see him once more, for a long time and close up. He had to look his torment in the face. He had to look at that body, whose union with Ruzena’s body seemed to him unimaginable and unbelievable. He had to look at him to confirm with his own eyes whether it was possible to think of their two bodies united.
On the bandstand they were already playing: Dr. Skreta on drums, a slender man on piano, and Klima on trumpet. Some young jazz fans who had slipped in to listen to the rehearsal were sitting in the hall. Frantisek had no fear that the motive for his presence would be found out. He was certain that the trumpeter, blinded by the motorcycle’s light, had not seen his face on Tuesday evening, and thanks to Ruzena’s caution no one knew much about his relations with the young woman.
The trumpeter interrupted the musicians and sat down at the piano to show the slender man the right tempo. Frantisek took a seat in the back of the hall, slowly transforming himself into a shadow that would not for a moment leave the trumpeter that day.
6
He was driving back from the forest inn and regretted no longer having beside him the jolly dog who had licked his face. Then he thought it a miracle that he had succeeded for the forty-five years of his life in keeping that seat beside him free, enabling him now to leave the country so easily, with no baggage, with no burdens, alone, with a false (and yet beautiful) sensation of youth, as if he were a student just beginning to lay the foundation of his future.
He tried to get firmly in mind the idea that he was leaving his country. He tried hard to evoke his past life. He tried hard to see it as a landscape he looked back on with longing, a landscape vertiginously distant. But he could not manage it. What he did succeed in seeing behind him in his mind’s eye was tiny, compressed like a closed accordion. He had to make an effort to evoke the scraps of memory that could give him the illusion of a destiny that had been lived.
He looked at the trees along the road. Their foliage was green, red, yellow, and brown. The forest looked aflame. He thought that he was departing at a moment when the forests were on fire and his life and memories were being