Farewell Waltz

by Milan Kundera

  Whom did she hate more? The one who did not want her or the one who did?

  So she sat rooted to the bench by these two hatreds, oblivious to what was going on around her. A minibus pulled up at the edge of the park, followed by a small green truck from which Ruzena heard dogs howling and barking. The minibus doors opened and out came an old man wearing a red armband on his sleeve. Ruzena was looking straight ahead in a daze, and it was a moment before she was aware of what she was looking at.

  The old gentleman shouted an order at the minibus and another old man got out, he too wearing a red armband but also holding a three-meter pole with a wire loop attached to the end. More men got out and lined up in front of the minibus. They were all old men, all with red armbands and holding long poles equipped with wire loops at the tips.

  The first man to get out had no pole and gave orders; the old gentlemen, like a squad of bizarre lancers, came to attention and then to at ease a few times. Then the man shouted another order, and the squad of old men headed into the park at a run. There they broke ranks, each one running in a different direction, some along the paths, others on the grass. The patients strolling in the park, the children playing, everyone abruptly stopped to look in amazement at the old gentlemen, armed with long poles, launching an attack.

  Ruzena too came out of her meditative stupor to watch what was happening. She recognized her father

  among the old gentlemen and watched him with disgust but without surprise.

  A mutt was scampering on the grass around a birch tree. One of the old gentlemen started to run toward it, and the dog looked at him with surprise. The old man brandished the pole, trying to get the wire loop in front of the dog's head. But the pole was long, the old hands were feeble, and the old man missed his objective. The wire loop wavered around the dog's head while the dog watched curiously.

  But another pensioner, one with stronger arms, was already rushing to the old man's aid, and the little dog finally found himself prisoner in the wire loop. The old man pulled on the pole, the wire loop dug into the furry neck, and the dog let out a howl. The two pensioners laughed loudly as they dragged the dog along the lawn toward the parked vehicles. They opened the truck's large door, from which a wave of barking rang out; then they threw the mutt in.

  For Ruzena what she was seeing was merely a component of her own story: she was an unhappy woman caught between two worlds: Klima's world rejected her, and Frantisek's world, from which she wanted to escape (the world of banality and boredom, the world of failure and capitulation), had come to look for her here in the guise of this assault team as if it were trying to drag her away by a wire loop.

  On a sand path a small boy of about ten was desperately calling his dog, which had strayed into the bushes. Running over to the boy came not the dog but

  Ruzena's father, armed with a pole. The boy instantly fell silent. He was afraid to call his dog, knowing that the old man was going to take him away. He rushed down the path to escape him, but the old man too started to run. Now they were running side by side, Ruzena's father armed with his pole and the small boy sobbing as he ran. And then the boy turned around and, still running, retraced his steps. Ruzena's father followed suit. Again they were running side by side.

  A dachshund came out of the bushes. Ruzena's father extended his pole toward him, but the dog alertly evaded it and ran over to the boy, who lifted him up and hugged him. Other old men rushed over to help Ruzena's father and tear the dachshund out of the boy's arms. The boy was crying, shouting, and grappling with them so that the old men had to twist his arms and put a hand over his mouth because his cries were attracting too much attention from the passersby, who were turning to look but not daring to intervene.

  Ruzena didn't want to see any more of her father and his companions. But where to go? Into her little room, where there was a detective novel that she had not finished and that didn't interest her; to the movies, where there was a film she had already seen; to the lobby of the Richmond, where there was a television set on all the time? She opted for television. She got up from her bench, and amid the clamor of the old men, which was continuing from all sides, she was again intensely conscious of what she had in her womb, and she told herself that it was something sacred. It transformed and

  ennobled her. It distinguished her from these fanatics who were chasing dogs. She told herself that she did not have the right to give up, did not have the right to capitulate, because in her belly she was carrying her only hope; her only admission ticket to the future.

  When she reached the edge of the park, she caught sight of Jakub. He was standing on the sidewalk in front of the Richmond, watching what was going on. She had only seen him once before, at lunch, but she remembered him. The patient, her temporary neighbor who rapped on the wall every time she turned the radio up a little, was someone she disliked so strongly that Ruzena perceived everything about the woman with attentive loathing.

  The man's face displeased her. It looked ironic to her, and she detested irony. She always thought that irony (all forms of irony) was like an armed guard posted at the entrance to her future, scrutinizing her with an inquisitive eye and rejecting her with a shake of the head. She stuck out her chest, deciding to pass in front of the man with all the provocative arrogance of her breasts, all the pride of her belly.

  And the man (she was watching him only out of the corner of her eye) suddenly said in a tender, gentle voice: "Come here, come over here…"

  At first she didn't understand why he was addressing her. The tenderness in his voice puzzled her, and she didn't know how to respond. But then she turned around and caught sight of a heavy boxer dog with a humanly ugly mug following at her heels.

  Jakubs voice attracted the dog. He took him by the collar: "Come with me or you don't stand a chance." The dog lifted his trusting head to the man, his tongue hanging like a cheery little flag.

  It was a moment filled with ridiculous, trivial, but obvious humiliation: the man had noticed neither her provocative arrogance nor her pride. She had thought he was talking to her, and he was talking to a dog. She passed in front of him and stopped on the broad front steps of the Richmond.

  Two old men armed with poles came rushing across the park toward Jakub. She watched the scene spitefully, unable to keep from taking the old men's side.

  Jakub was leading the dog by the collar toward the hotel steps when one of the old men shouted: "Release that dog at once!"

  And the other old man: "In the name of the law!"

  Jakub pretended not to notice the old men and kept going, but behind him a pole slowly descended alongside his body and the wire loop wavered clumsily over the boxer's head.

  Jakub grabbed the end of the pole and brusquely pushed it aside.

  A third old man ran up and shouted: "Its an attack on law and order! I'm going to call the police!"

  And the high-pitched voice of another old man complained: "He ran on the grass! He ran in the playground, where it's prohibited! He pissed in the kids' sandbox! Do you like dogs more than children?"

  Ruzena was watching the scene from the top of the

  steps, and the pride that a moment before she had felt only in her belly flowed throughout her body, filling her with defiant strength. Jakub and the dog came up the steps near her, and she said: "It's not allowed to take a dog inside."

  Jakub answered her calmly, but she could no longer back down. Her legs apart, she planted herself in front of the Richmond's wide doorway and insisted: "This is a hotel for patients, not a hotel for dogs. Dogs are prohibited here."

  "Why don't you get a pole with a loop too, young lady?" said Jakub, trying to go through the doorway with the dog.

  Ruzena caught in Jakub's words the irony she so detested and that sent her back where she had come from, back where she did not want to be. Anger blurred her sight. She grabbed hold of the dog by the collar. Now they were both holding him. Jakub was pulling him in and she was pulling him out.

  Jakub seized Ruzena's wris
t and pried her fingers loose from the collar with such violence that she staggered.

  "You'd rather see poodles in cradles than babies!" she shouted after him.

  Jakub turned around and their eyes met, joined by sudden, naked hatred.

  8

  The boxer scampered around the room curiously, unaware that he had just escaped danger. Jakub stretched out on the daybed, wondering what to do with him. He liked the lively, good-natured dog. The insouciance with which, in a few minutes, he had made himself at home in a strange room and struck up a friendship with a strange man was nearly suspicious and seemed to verge on stupidity. After sniffing all corners of the room, he leaped up on the daybed and lay down beside Jakub. Jakub was startled, but he welcomed without reservation this sign of camaraderie. He put his hand on the dog's back and felt with delight the warmth of the animal's body. He had always liked dogs. They were familiar, affectionate, devoted, and at the same time entirely incomprehensible. We will never know what actually goes on in the heads and hearts of these confident, merry emissaries from incomprehensible nature.

  He scratched the dog's back and thought about the scene he had just witnessed. The old men armed with long poles merged in his mind with prison guards, examining magistrates, and informers who spied on neighbors to see if they talked politics while shopping. What drove such people to their sinister occupations? Spite? Certainly, but also the desire for order. Because the desire for order tries to transform the human world into an inorganic reign in which everything goes well,

  everything functions as a subject of an impersonal will. The desire for order is at the same time a desire for death, because life is a perpetual violation of order. Or, inversely, the desire for order is the virtuous pretext by which man's hatred for man justifies its crimes.

  Then he thought of the blonde young woman who tried to prevent him from entering the Richmond with the dog, and he felt a painful hatred for her. The old men armed with poles didn't irritate him, he knew them well, he took them into account, he never doubted they existed and had to go on existing and would always be his persecutors. But that young woman, she was his eternal defeat. She was pretty, and she had appeared on the scene not as a persecutor but as a spectator who, fascinated by the spectacle, identified with the persecutors. Jakub was always horror-stricken by the idea that onlookers are ready to restrain the victim during an execution. For, with time, the hangman has become someone near at hand, a familiar figure, while the persecuted one has taken on something of an aristocratic smell. The soul of the crowd, which formerly identified with the miserable persecuted ones, today identifies with the misery of the persecutors. Because to hunt men in our century is to hunt the privileged: those who read books or own a dog.

  He felt the animal's warm body under his hand, and he realized that the blonde young woman had come to announce to him, as a secret sign, that he would never be liked in this country and that she, the people's mes-

  senger, would always be ready to hold him down so as to offer him up to the men threatening him with poles with wire loops. He hugged the dog and pressed him close. He mused that he could not leave him here at risk, that he must take him along far away from this country as a souvenir of persecution, as one of those who had escaped. Then he realized that he was hiding this merry pooch here as if he were an outlaw fleeing the police, and this notion seemed comic to him.

  Someone knocked at the door, and Dr. Skreta entered: "You're finally back, and it's about time. I've been looking for you all afternoon. What have you been up to?"

  "I went to see Olga, and then…" He started to tell about the dog, but Skreta interrupted him:

  "I should have known. Wasting time like that when we've got a lot of things to discuss! I've already told Bertlef you're here, and I've arranged for him to invite both of us."

  At that moment the dog jumped off the daybed, went over to the doctor, stood up on his hind legs, and put his front legs on Skreta's chest. He scratched the dog on the nape of the neck. "Yes, yes, Bob, you're a good dog…" he said, not surprised to see him there.

  "His name is Bob?"

  "Yes, it's Bob," said Skreta, and he told him that the dog belonged to the owner of an inn in the forest nearby; everyone knew the dog, because he roamed everywhere.

  The dog understood that they were talking about

  him, and this pleased him. He wagged his tail and tried to lick Skreta's face.

  "You're shrewd psychologically," said the doctor. "You have to study Bertlef in depth for me today. I don't know how to handle him. I've got great plans for him."

  "To sell his pious pictures?"

  "Pious pictures, that's silly," said Skreta. "This is about something much more important. I want him to adopt me."

  "Adopt you?"

  "Adopt me as a son. It's vital to me. If I become his adopted son, I'll automatically acquire American citizenship."

  "You want to emigrate?"

  "No. I'm engaged in long-term experiments here, and I don't want to interrupt them. By the way, I have to talk to you about that too today, because I need you for these experiments. With American citizenship, I'd also get an American passport, and I could travel freely all over the world. You know very well that otherwise it's difficult to leave this country. And I want very much to go to Iceland."

  "Why exactly Iceland?"

  "Because it has the best salmon fishing," said Skreta. And he went on: "What complicates things a bit is that Bertlef is only fifteen years older than I am. I have to explain to him that adoptive fatherhood is a legal status that has nothing to do with biological fatherhood, and that theoretically he could be my adoptive father even if he were younger than I. Maybe he'll understand

  this, though he has a very young wife. She's one of my patients. By the way, shell be arriving here the day after tomorrow. I've sent Suzy to Prague to meet her when she lands."

  "Does Suzy know about your plan?"

  "Of course. I urged her at all costs to gain her future mother-in-law's friendship."

  "And the American? What does he say about it?"

  "That's just what's most difficult. The man can't understand it if I don't spell it out for him. That's why I need you, to study him and tell me how to handle him."

  Skreta looked at his watch and announced that Bertlef was waiting for them.

  "But what are we going to do with Bob?" asked Jakub.

  "How come you brought him here?" said Skreta.

  Jakub explained to his friend how he had saved the dog's life, but Skreta was immersed in his thoughts and listened to him absentmindedly. After Jakub had finished, he said: "The innkeeper's wife is one of my patients. Two years ago she gave birth to a beautiful baby. They love Bob, you should bring him back to them tomorrow. Meanwhile, let's give him a sleeping tablet so he won't bother us."

  He took a tube out of his pocket and shook out a tablet. He called the dog over, opened his jaws, and dropped the tablet down his gullet.

  "In a minute, he'll be sleeping sweetly," he said, and he left the room with Jakub.

  9

  Bertlef welcomed his two visitors, and Jakub ran his eyes over the room. Then he went over to the painting of the bearded saint: "I've heard that you paint," he said to Bertlef.

  "Yes," Bertlef replied, "that is Saint Lazarus, my patron saint."

  "Why did you paint a blue halo?" asked Jakub, showing his surprise.

  "I am glad you asked me that question. As a rule people look at a painting and don't even know what they are seeing. I made the halo blue simply because in reality halos are blue."

  Jakub again showed surprise, and Bertlef went on: "People who become attached to God with a particularly powerful love are rewarded by experiencing a sacred joy that flows through their entire being and radiates out from there. The light of this divine joy is soft and peaceful, and its color is the celestial azure."

  "Wait a moment," Jakub interrupted. "Are you saying that halos are more than a symbol?"

  "Certainly," said Bertlef. "But
you should not imagine that they emanate continuously from saints' heads and that saints go around in the world like itinerant lanterns. Of course not. It is only at certain moments of intense inner joy that their brows give off a bluish light. In the first centuries after the death of Jesus, in an era when saints were numerous and there were

  many people who knew them well, no one had the slightest doubt about the color of halos, and on all the paintings and frescoes of that time you can see that the halos are blue. It was only in the fifth century that painters started little by little to depict them in other colors, such as orange or yellow. Much later, in Gothic painting, there are only golden halos. This was more decorative and better conveyed the terrestrial power and glory of the church. But that halo no more resembled the true halo than the church of the time resembled the early church."

  "That's something I was unaware of," said Jakub, and Bertlef went over to the liquor cabinet. He conferred with his two visitors for a few moments about what to drink. When he had poured cognac into the three glasses, he turned to the physician: "Please don't forget about that unhappy expectant father. It is very important to me!"

  Skreta assured Bertlef that it would all end well, and Jakub then asked what they were talking about. After they told him (let us appreciate the graceful discretion of the two men, who, even though it was only Jakub with them, mentioned no names), he expressed great pity for the unfortunate begetter: "Which of us hasn't lived through this martyrdom! It's one of life's great trials. Those who give in and become fathers against their will are doomed forever by their defeat. They become spiteful, like all losers, and they wish the same fate on everyone else."

  "My friend!" Bertlef exclaimed. "You are speaking

  in the company of a happy father! If you stayed here for another day or two, you would see my son, a beautiful child, and you would take back what you have just said!"