Farewell Waltz

the whereabouts of the nurse he had noticed him with an hour earlier in the brasserie.
“What do all of you see in her?” Skreta grumbled sullenly. “Where’s Ruzena?” he then cried out to the trumpeter, who blushed and said he didn’t know.
“Never mind!” said Jakub apologetically. “Go on playing!”
“How do you like our band?” asked Dr. Skreta.
“It’s great,” said Jakub, and he climbed down and returned to his seat. He knew that he was still behaving wrongly. If he really cared about Ruzena’s life, he would move heaven and earth to alert everyone to find her immediately. But he had set out to look for her only so as to have an alibi to present to his own conscience.
Again he recalled the moment when he had given her the tube containing the poison. Had it really happened so quickly that he had not had the time to be aware of it? Had it really happened without his knowledge?
Jakub knew that this was not true. His conscience had not been lulled. He again evoked the face under the blonde hair, and he realized it was not by accident (not by lulling his conscience) that he had given the nurse the tube containing the poison, but that it was an old desire of his which for years had watched for the opportunity, a desire so powerful that the opportunity finally obeyed it and came rushing toward it.
He shuddered and got up from his seat. He ran off to Karl Marx House, but Ruzena was still not home.
16
What an idyll, what a respite! What an interlude in the middle of the drama! What a voluptuous afternoon with three fauns!
The trumpeter’s two persecutors, his two hardships, are seated opposite each other, both drinking wine from the same bottle and both equally happy to be where they are, able if only for a while to do something other than think about him. What a touching alliance, what harmony!
Mrs. Klima looks at the three men. She had once been part of their circle, and she looks at them now as if at a negative of her present life. Submerged by cares, she is seated here facing pure carefreeness; bound to one man, she is seated here facing three fauns who embody virility in its infinite variety.
The fauns’ remarks have an obvious goal: to spend the night with the two women, spend the night in a fivesome. It is an illusory goal, because they know that Mrs. Klima’s husband is here, but the goal is so beautiful that they are pursuing it even though it is unreachable.
Mrs. Klima knows what they are getting at, and she abandons herself all the more easily to the pursuit of this goal that is merely a fantasy, merely a game, merely a dream temptation. She laughs at their ambiguous remarks, she trades encouraging jokes with the nameless woman who is her accomplice, and she hopes to prolong the drama’s interlude as long as possible in order to delay still longer the moment when she will see her rival and look truth in the face.
Yet another bottle of wine, everyone is cheerful, everyone is a bit drunk, but less on wine than on the oddness of the atmosphere, on that desire to prolong the very rapidly passing moment.
Mrs. Klima feels the director’s calf pressing her left leg under the table. She is well aware of it, but she does not withdraw her leg. It is a contact that establishes a sensual connection between them, but it could also have happened quite by chance, could very well have gone unnoticed by her because of its triviality. It is thus a contact situated right on the border between innocence and shamelessness. Kamila does not want to cross this border, but she is happy to be able to stay on it (on this thin sliver of unexpected freedom), and she would be still happier if this magic line were to shift itself toward other verbal allusions, other touchings, other games. Protected by the innocent ambiguity of this shifting border, she wishes to let herself be carried far away, far away and still farther.
Whereas Kamila’s beauty, radiant to the point of being nearly embarrassing, forces the director to conduct his offensive with cautious slowness, Ruzena’s ordinary charm attracts the cameraman powerfully and directly. He has his arm around her and his hand on her breast.
Kamila is watching. It has been a long time since she has seen up close the shameless gestures of others! She looks at the man’s hand covering the young woman’s breast, kneading it, pressing and caressing it through her clothing. She is watching Ruzena’s face, immobile, passive, tinged with sensual abandon. The hand is caressing the breast, time is sweetly passing, and Kamila feels the assistant’s knee against her other leg.
And now she says: “I’m really going to live it up tonight.”
“To hell with your trumpeter husband!” the director retorts.
“Yes, to hell with him!” the assistant repeats.
17
At that moment Ruzena recognized her. Yes, that was the face in the photograph her colleague had shown her! She suddenly pushed away the cameraman’s hand.
“You’re crazy!” he complained.
He tried to put his arm around her again, and again he was pushed away.
“How dare you!” she shouted at him.
The director and his assistant laughed. “Do you really mean it?” the assistant asked Ruzena.
“Sure I mean it,” she answered sternly.
The assistant looked at his watch and said to the cameraman: “It’s exactly six o’clock. This complete reversal is taking place because our friend becomes a virtuous woman every even-numbered hour. So you have to wait until seven o’clock.”
The laughter burst out again. Ruzena was red with humiliation. She had let herself be caught with a stranger’s hand on her breast. She had let herself be caught being pawed. She had let herself be caught by her greatest rival while everyone was making fun of her.
The director said to the cameraman: “Maybe you should request the young lady to make an exception and consider six an