Farewell Waltz

breaks my heart to think of us quarreling. Listen, we’ll definitely find a solution. The main thing is that we’ll be together. We won’t let anybody deprive us of tonight, and it’ll be as beautiful a night as last time.”
One arm held the wheel, the other was around Ruzena’s shoulders, and all of a sudden he thought he felt, deep down, a rising desire for the naked skin of this young woman, and this delighted him, for desire was in position to provide him with the only language he and she spoke in common.
“And where’ll we meet?” she asked.
Klima was aware that the whole spa town would see with whom he was leaving the concert. But there was no getting around it: “As soon as I’m finished, come and get me behind the bandstand.”
14
While Klima was hurrying back to the Hall of the People to rehearse “St. Louis Blues” and “When the Saints Go Marching In” one last time, Ruzena was looking around anxiously. Not long before, in the car, she had observed in the rearview mirror several times that Frantisek was following them at a distance on his motorcycle. But now he was nowhere to be seen.
She felt she was a fugitive pursued by time. She realized that by tomorrow she would have to know what she wanted, and she knew nothing. In the whole world there was not one person she trusted. Her own family was alien to her. Frantisek loved her, but that was just why she mistrusted him (as the doe mistrusts the hunter). She mistrusted Klima (as the hunter mistrusts the doe). She liked her colleagues well enough, but she did not quite trust them (as the hunter mistrusts other hunters). She was alone in life, and for the past few weeks she had been carrying in her womb a strange companion who some maintained was her greatest chance and others completely the opposite, a companion toward whom she herself felt only indifference.
She knew nothing. She was filled to the brim with not knowing. She was nothing but not knowing. She didn’t even know where she was going.
She was passing the Slavia, the worst restaurant in the spa town, a filthy café where the locals came to drink beer and spit on the floor. In the old days it had probably been the best, and from those times there still remained a small garden with three red wooden tables and their chairs (paint peeling), a memento of bourgeois pleasure in open-air brass bands and dancing and parasols propped against the chairs. But what did she know about those times, this young woman who merely went through life on the narrow footbridge of the present, devoid of all historical memory? She was unable to see the shadow the pink parasol casts on us from a distant time, she only saw three young men in jeans, a beautiful woman, and a bottle of wine standing in the middle of a bare table.
One of the men called out to her. She turned and recognized the short cameraman in the torn sweater.
“Come have a drink with us!” he exclaimed.
She complied.
“Thanks to this charming young lady we were able to shoot a little porn film this morning,” said the cameraman, by way of introducing Ruzena to the woman, who offered her hand and unintelligibly murmured her name.
Ruzena sat down beside the cameraman, who put a glass in front of her and filled it with wine.
Ruzena was grateful that something was happening. That she no longer had to wonder where she was going or what she should do. That she no longer had to decide whether or not to keep the child.
15
He had finally made up his mind. He paid the waiter and told Olga that he had to leave and that they would meet before the concert.
Olga asked him what it was he had to do, and Jakub had the unpleasant sensation of being interrogated. He answered that he had an appointment with Skreta.
“All right,” she said, “but that won’t take you very long. I’ll go and change, and I’ll be here at six. I’m inviting you to dinner.”
Jakub accompanied Olga to Karl Marx House. When she had disappeared down the corridor, he turned to the doorkeeper: “Would you tell me, please, if Miss Ruzena is in?”
“No,” said the doorkeeper. “The key’s hanging on the board.”
“I have something extremely urgent to tell her,” said Jakub. “Do you know where I might find her?”
“I don’t know.”
“I saw her a while ago with the trumpeter who’s giving a concert this evening.”
“Yes, me too I hear tell she’s going out with him,” said the doorkeeper. “Right now he must be rehearsing in the Hall of the People.”
When Dr. Skreta, enthroned on the bandstand behind his set of drums, caught sight of Jakub in the doorway, he nodded to him. Jakub smiled at him and examined the rows of seats in which about a dozen fans were sitting. (Yes, Frantisek, Klima’s shadow, was among them.) Then Jakub sat down, hoping that the nurse would finally appear.
He wondered where he might still go looking for her. At this moment she might be in any number of different places he had no idea of. Should he ask the trumpeter? But how would he pose the question? And what if something had already happened to Ruzena? Jakub had already concluded that if she died, her death would be totally inexplicable, that a murderer who killed without a motive could not be caught. Should he attract attention to himself? Did he have to leave a trail and lay himself open to suspicion?
He called himself to order. A human life was in danger, and he had no right to be thinking in such a cowardly way. He took advantage of a pause between two numbers and climbed up on the back of the bandstand. Skreta turned toward him, beaming, but Jakub put a finger to his lips and begged him in an undertone to ask the trumpeter