Farewell Waltz

The thought that he was driving this way for the last time made this landscape dear to him and strange. He kept feeling that he did not recognize it, that it was different from what he had thought, and that it was a pity he could not stay longer.
But he also told himself that no postponement of his departure, whether for a day or several years, could in any way change what it was now making him suffer; he would never know this landscape more intimately than he knew it today. He must accept the thought that he was going to leave it without knowing it, without having exhausted its charms, that he was going to leave it as a debtor and creditor both.
Then he thought again about the young woman to whom he had given the sham poison by slipping it into a medicine tube, and he told himself that his career as a murderer had been the briefest of all his careers. I was a murderer for about eighteen hours, he told himself, and he smiled.
But then he raised an objection: It was not true, he had not been a murderer for only such a brief time. He was a murderer right now and would remain one for the rest of his life. For it mattered little whether the pale-blue tablet was poison or not, what counted was that he believed it was and yet had given it to a stranger and done nothing to save her.
And he set about reflecting on all of it with the unconcern of a man who regards his act as existing merely in the realm of the purely experimental: His act of murder was strange. It was a murder without a motive. It had no aim of gaining something or other for the murderer’s benefit. What exactly, then, was its meaning? Obviously, the only meaning of his act of murder was to teach him that he was a murderer.
Murder as an experiment, as an act of self-knowledge, reminded him of something: yes, of Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov, who murdered in order to know whether a man has the right to kill an inferior human being, and whether he would have the strength to bear that murder; by that murder, he was interrogating himself about himself.
Yes, there was something that brought him close to Raskolnikov: the pointlessness of the murder, its theoretical nature. But there were differences: Raskolnikov wondered whether a superior man has the right to sacrifice the life of an inferior one for his own benefit. When Jakub gave the nurse the tube containing the poison, he had nothing like that in mind. Jakub was not wondering whether a man had the right to sacrifice the life of another. On the contrary, Jakub had always been convinced that no one had that right. Jakub was living in a world where people sacrificed the lives of others for the sake of abstract ideas. Jakub knew the faces of these people, faces now brazenly innocent, now sadly craven, faces that apologetically but meticulously carried out cruel verdicts on their neighbors. Jakub knew these faces, and he detested them. Moreover, Jakub knew that every human being wishes for someone’s death, and that only two things deter him from murder: fear of punishment and the physical difficulty of inflicting death. Jakub knew that if everyone had the power to kill in secret and at a distance, mankind would vanish in a few minutes. He therefore concluded that Raskolnikov’s experiment was totally useless.
Why then had he given the poison to the nurse? Was it simply by chance? Raskolnikov had actually spent a long time plotting and preparing for his crime, while Jakub had acted on the impulse of a moment. But Jakub realized that he, too, had unknowingly for many years been preparing for his act of murder, and that the instant he gave the poison to Ruzena was a fissure into which had been shoveled all of his past life, all of his disgust with mankind.
When Raskolnikov murdered the old woman usurer with an ax, he knew that he was crossing a horrifying threshold; that he was transgressing divine law; he knew that although the old woman was contemptible, she was a creature of God. The fear that Raskolnikov felt, Jakub had not experienced. For him human beings were not creatures of God. Jakub loved scrupulousness and high-mindedness, and he was persuaded that these were not human qualities. Jakub knew human beings well, and that is why he did not love them. Jakub was high-minded, and that is why he gave them poison.
So I am a murderer out of high-mindedness, he said to himself, and the thought seemed ridiculous and sad.
After Raskolnikov killed the old usurer he did not have the strength to control the tremendous storm of remorse. Whereas Jakub, who was deeply convinced that no one had the right to sacrifice the lives of others, felt no remorse at all.
He tried to imagine that the nurse had really died, to see if he felt any guilt. No, he felt nothing of the kind. His mind calm and at peace, he drove on through the pleasant region that was bidding him farewell.
Raskolnikov experienced his crime as a tragedy, and eventually he was overwhelmed by the weight of his act. Jakub was amazed that his act was so light, so weightless, amazed that it did not overwhelm him. And he wondered if this lightness was not more terrifying than the Russian character’s hysterical feelings.
He drove slowly, now and then interrupting his reflections to look at the landscape. He told himself that the episode of the tablet had been merely a game, an inconsequential game like his whole life in this land on whose soil he had left not a single trace, not a root or a furrow, a land he was now going away from as a breeze goes away.
19
Lighter by a quarter liter of blood, Klima impatiently waited for Dr. Skreta in his waiting room.