Farewell Waltz

than the others and was unable to get her fill of it.
Bertlef lifted his raised glass higher: “To Ruzena!” The manager raised his glass in turn, and then Kamila, followed by the director and his assistant, and they repeated after Bertlef: “To Ruzena!” Even the cameraman ended up raising his glass and, without a word, taking a sip.
The director tasted his mouthful. “This wine really is excellent,” he said.
“What did I tell you?” said the manager.
Meanwhile the boy had set a platter of cheese in the middle of the table, and Bertlef said: “Help yourselves, they are exquisite!”
The director was astounded: “Where did you find this selection of cheeses? You’d think we were in France.”
All of a sudden the tension had completely receded, the atmosphere had calmed. They became talkative, helped themselves to the cheeses, wondered where the manager had managed to find them (in this country where the varieties of cheese were so few), and kept refilling their glasses.
When things were at their peak, Bertlef rose and took his leave: “I am very glad to have been in your company, and I thank you. My friend Doctor Skreta is giving a concert this evening, and Ruzena and I want to be there.”
19
Ruzena and Bertlef vanished into the light mist of nightfall, and the initial momentum that had carried the company of drinkers away to the dreamed-of island of lustfulness had clearly been lost, and nothing could restore it. Everyone gave way to disheartenment.
For Mrs. Klima it was as if she were coming out of a dream in which she would have wished at all costs to linger. She had been reflecting that she didn’t have to go to the concert. How fantastically surprising it would be for her to discover that she had come here not to track down her husband but to have an adventure. How splendid it would be to stay with the three film people and return home on the sly tomorrow morning. Something whispered to her that this was what she needed to do; that this would be to act; to be delivered; to be healed; to be awakened after a bewitchment.
But now she was already too sober. All the magic spells had stopped working. She was alone again with herself, with her past, with her heavy head full of agonizing old thoughts. She would have liked to extend this much too brief dream, even if only for a few hours, but she knew that the dream was already growing pale, like the half light of early morning.
“I have to go too,” she said.
They tried to dissuade her, even though they realized that they no longer had the power and self-confidence to make her stay.
“Shit!” said the cameraman. “Who was that guy, anyway?”
They tried to ask the manager, but now that Bertlef had left, once again no one was paying attention to them. From the restaurant came the noise of tipsy customers, while they sat abandoned around the table in the garden with their leftover cheese and wine.
“Whoever he is, he spoiled our party. He took away one of our ladies, and now the other one is going off all alone. Let’s go with Kamila.”
“No,” she said. “Stay here. I wish to be alone.”
She was no longer with them. Their presence now disturbed her. Jealousy, like death, had come looking for her. She was in its power, and she took no notice of anyone else. She got up and went off in the direction Bertlef and Ruzena had taken a few moments earlier. From a distance she heard the cameraman saying: “Shit …”
20
After greeting Skreta in the artists’ room, Jakub and Olga went into the hall. Olga wanted to leave during the intermission in order to spend the rest of the evening alone with Jakub. Jakub replied that his friend would be angered by their early departure, but Olga maintained that he wouldn’t even notice it.
The hall was just about full, with only their two seats still vacant in their row.
“That woman has been following us like a shadow,” said Olga, leaning toward Jakub as they sat down.
Jakub turned his head and next to Olga saw Bertlef and next to him the nurse with the poison in her handbag. His heart skipped a beat, but since he had tried hard all his life to hide what was going on deep down inside him, he said quite calmly: “I see that our row’s tickets are the complimentary ones Skreta gave to his friends and acquaintances. So he knows where we are, and he’d notice us leaving.”
“Tell him that the acoustics were bad here and that we moved to the back of the hall during intermission,” said Olga.
Klima was already coming forward on the bandstand with his golden trumpet, and the audience began to applaud. When Dr. Skreta appeared behind him, the applause gained strength and murmuring swelled through the hall. Dr. Skreta stood modestly behind the trumpeter and awkwardly waved his arms to indicate that the concert’s real star was the guest from the capital. The audience perceived the exquisite awkwardness of the gesture and reacted to it by applauding still louder. In back of the hall someone shouted: “Long live Doctor Skreta!”
The pianist, who was the most unobtrusive and least acclaimed of the three, sat down at the piano on a low chair. Skreta took his place behind an imposing set of drums, and the trumpeter came and went between the pianist and Skreta with a light and rhythmic step.
The applause ended, and the pianist struck the keyboard to begin a solo introduction. But Jakub noticed that his friend seemed nervous and was looking around in exasperation. Then the trumpeter, too, became aware of the physician’s distress and approached him. Skreta whispered something to him. The two men bent over. They examined the floor, and then the trumpeter picked up a drumstick that had fallen at the foot of the piano and handed it to Skreta.
The audience, which had been watching the whole