Farewell Waltz

the mind more completely than passionate intellectual work. The mind has not a moment of leisure. A victim of jealousy never knows boredom.
Frantisek keeps pacing a short stretch of path, barely one hundred meters long, from which the Richmond’s entrance can be seen. He is going to be pacing back and forth like this all night, until everyone else is asleep, he is going to pace back and forth like this until tomorrow, until the last part of this book.
But why is he not sitting down? There are benches facing the Richmond!
He cannot sit down. Jealousy is like a raging toothache. One cannot do anything when one is jealous, not even sit down. One can only come and go. Back and forth.
27
They followed the same route as Bertlef and Ruzena, Jakub and Olga; up the stairs to the second floor, then along the red plush carpet to the corridor’s end at the large door to Bertlef’s suite. To the right was the door to Jakub’s room, to the left the room Dr. Skreta had lent to Klima.
When he opened the door and turned on the light, he noticed the quick inquisitive look Kamila cast through the room. He knew she was looking for traces of a woman. He was familiar with that look. He knew everything about her. He knew that her kindness was insincere. He knew that she had come here to spy on him, knew that she would pretend to have come here to please him. And he knew that she clearly perceived his embarrassment and that she was certain she had spoiled one of his love adventures.
“Darling, you really don’t mind that I came?” she asked.
“Why should I mind?”
“I was afraid you’d be sad here.”
“Yes, without you I’d be sad. It pleased me to see you applauding at the foot of the bandstand.”
“You seem tired. Or is something bothering you?”
“No. No, nothing’s bothering me. I’m just tired.”
“You’re sad because you’re always surrounded by men here. But now you’re with a beautiful woman. Am I not a beautiful woman?”
“Yes, you’re a beautiful woman,” answered Klima, and these were the first sincere words he had said to her that day. Kamila was gloriously beautiful, and Klima felt immense pain at the thought that this beauty was exposed to mortal peril. But this beauty smiled at him and began to undress before his eyes. He gazed at her body being bared, and it was as if he were bidding it farewell. The breasts, her beautiful, flawless breasts, her narrow waist, the belly from which her underpants had just slipped free. He watched her with longing, as if she were a memory. As if through a window. As if from a distance. Her nakedness was so distant that he felt not the least aroused. And yet he was contemplating her with a voracious gaze. He drank her nakedness as a condemned man drinks his last glass. He drank her nakedness as a man drinks a lost past, a lost life.
Kamila came near him: “What is it? Aren’t you going to undress?”
All he could do was undress, and he was terribly sad.
“Don’t think you have the right to be tired now that I’ve come all this way to be with you. I want you.”
He knew that it was not true. He knew that Kamila did not have the slightest desire to make love, and that she was forcing herself to behave provocatively only because she saw his sadness and attributed it to his love for another woman. He knew (my God, how well he knew her!) that she was trying to test him with this love challenge, to find out to what degree his mind was engrossed by another woman, he knew that she wanted to wound herself with his sadness.
“I’m really tired,” he said.
She took him in her arms and then led him to the bed: “You’ll see how I’m going to make you forget your fatigue!” And she began to play with his naked body.
He was stretched out as if on an operating table. He knew that all his wife’s efforts would be useless. His body shrank into itself and no longer had the slightest power of expansion. Kamila ran her moist lips all over his body, and he knew that she wanted to make herself suffer and make him suffer, and he hated her. He hated her with all the intensity of his love: it was she and she alone, with her jealousy, her suspicions, her mistrust, she and she alone who had spoiled everything by coming here today, it was because of her that their marriage was menaced by a bomb deposited in another woman’s belly, by a charge timed to blow everything up in seven months. It was she and she alone, with her insane fear about their love, who had destroyed everything.
She put her mouth to his belly and felt his member contract under her touches, going back inside, fleeing from her, becoming more and more small and anxious. And he knew that Kamila saw the rejection of her body as a measure of the extent of his love for another woman. He knew that she was suffering, and that the more she suffered the more she would make him suffer and persist in putting her moist lips to his powerless body.
28
He had never wanted to go to bed with this girl. He desired to make her happy and shower her with goodness, but this goodness had nothing in common with sensual desire, better still, it totally excluded such desire, for it wished to be pure, disinterested, detached from all pleasure.
But what could he do now? Must he, in order not to sully his goodness, reject Olga? He knew he could not do that. His rejection would hurt Olga and would mark her for a long time. He realized that he must drink the chalice of goodness to the dregs.
And then she was suddenly naked in front of him and he told himself that