Farewell Waltz

by Milan Kundera

  But she immediately told herself that she should not behave this way. No, she could not spend whole days and weeks spying and nurturing the images of her jeal-

  ousy. She dreaded losing him, and because of this fear she would end up losing him!

  But another voice immediately replied with cunning naivete: No, she was not going to spy on him! Klima had asserted that he was going to give a concert, and she believed him! It was just because she did not wish to be jealous that she took him seriously, that she accepted his assertions without suspicion! He had said that he was going unhappily, that he was afraid he would be spending a dreary day and evening there! It was thus only to prepare a pleasant surprise for him that she decided to go and join him! When Klima, at the end of the concert, was disgustedly taking his bows and thinking of the exhausting trip home, she would slip onto the foot of the stage, he would see her, and they would both laugh!

  She handed the manager the letters she had written with difficulty. They thought well of her at the theater. They appreciated the modesty and friendliness of a famous musicians wife. The sadness that sometimes emanated from her had something disarming about it. The manager could not refuse her anything. She promised to return Friday afternoon and stay late at the theater that day to make up the lost time.

  2

  It was ten o'clock, and, as she did each day, Olga had just received a large white sheet and a key from Ruzena. She went into a cubicle, took off her clothes, hung them on a hanger, slung the sheet around her like a toga, locked the cubicle, returned the key to Ruzena, and headed for the adjoining room with the pool. She threw the sheet onto the railing and went down the steps into the water, where there were already many women bathing. The pool was not big, but Olga was convinced that swimming was necessary for her health, and so she tried a few strokes. That splashed water into the talkative mouth of one of the ladies. "Are you crazy?" she cried out at Olga testily. "This pool isn't for swimming!"

  Women were squatting in the shallow water, huddled up along the wall of the pool like big frogs. Olga was afraid of them. They were all older than she, they were more robust, they had more fat and skin. She thus sat down among them humbled, and stayed motionless and frowning.

  Then she suddenly caught sight of a young man at the door; he was short and wore blue jeans and a torn sweater.

  "What's that fellow doing here?" she exclaimed.

  All the women turned in the direction Olga was looking and started to snicker and squeal.

  Just then Ruzena came into the room and shouted:

  "We've got visitors. They're going to film you for the news.''

  The women greeted this with great laughter.

  Olga protested: "What is all this?"

  "The management gave them permission," said Ruzena.

  "I don't care about the management, nobody consulted me!" Olga exclaimed.

  The young man in the torn sweater (he had a light meter dangling from his neck) approached the pool and looked at Olga with a grin she found obscene: "Miss, thousands of viewers will go mad for you when they see you on the screen!"

  The women responded with a new burst of laughter, and Olga hid her chest with her hands (it was not difficult, for, as we know, her breasts looked like two plums) and huddled behind the others.

  Two more fellows in blue jeans moved toward the pool, and the taller one declared: "Please behave just as naturally as you would if we weren't here."

  Olga reached out to the railing where her sheet was hanging. Still in the water, she wrapped the sheet around her and then climbed the steps and stood on the tiled floor; the sheet was dripping wet.

  "Oh, shit! Don't go yet!" shouted the young man in the torn sweater.

  "You have to stay in the pool fifteen minutes more!" Ruzena then shouted.

  "She's shy!" came with guffaws from the pool behind Olga's back.

  "She's afraid somebody'll steal her beauty!" said Ruzena.

  "Look at her, the princess!" said a voice from the pool.

  "Those who don't wish to be filmed of course may go," the tall fellow calmly said.

  "The rest of us aren't ashamed! We're beautiful women!" a fat woman said stridently, and the laughter rippled the surface of the water.

  "But that young lady can't go! She has to stay in the pool fifteen minutes more!" protested Ruzena as her eyes followed Olga stubbornly heading toward the changing room.

  3

  No one could blame Ruzena for being in a bad mood. But why was she so irritated by Olga's refusal to let herself be filmed? Why did she identify herself so totally with the mob of fat women who had welcomed the men's arrival with joyful squeals?

  And, by the way, why were these fat women squealing so joyfully? Was it because they wanted to display their beauty to the young men and to seduce them?

  Surely not. Their conspicuous shamelessness arose precisely from the certainty that they had no seductive

  beauty at their disposal. They were filled with rancor against youthful women, and hoped by exhibiting their sexually useless bodies to malign and mock female nakedness. They wished to take revenge on and torpedo with the repulsiveness of their bodies the glory of female beauty, for they knew that bodies, whether beautiful or ugly, are ultimately all the same and that the ugly overshadow the beautiful as they whisper in men's ears: Look, this is the truth of the body that bewitches you! Look, this big flabby tit is the same thing as that breast you so madly adore.

  The joyful shamelessness of the fat women in the pool was a necrophiliac ring dance around the transience of youth, a ring dance made all the more joyful by the presence in the pool of a young woman to serve as sacrificial victim. When Olga wrapped herself in the sheet they interpreted the gesture as sabotage of their cruel rite, and thus they were furious.

  But Ruzena was neither fat nor old, she was actually prettier than Olga! Why then did she show no solidarity with her?

  Had she decided to have an abortion and been convinced that happiness with Klima was awaiting her, she would have reacted quite differently. Consciousness of being loved separates a woman from the herd, and Ruzena would have been enraptured by the experience of her inimitable singularity. She would have seen the fat women as enemies and Olga as a sister. She would have come to her aid, as beauty comes to the aid of beauty, happiness to happiness, love to love.

  But the night before, Ruzena had slept very poorly and had decided that she could not count on Klima's love, so that everything separating her from the herd seemed to her an illusion. All she had was the burgeoning embryo in her belly, protected by society and tradition. All she had was the glorious universality of female destiny, which promised to fight for her.

  And these women in the pool exactly represented femaleness in its universality: the femaleness of eternal childbirth, nursing and withering, the femaleness that snickers at the thought of that fleeting second when a woman believes she is loved and feels she is an inimitable individual.

  There is no reconciliation possible between a woman who is convinced she is unique and women who have shrouded themselves in universal female destiny. After a sleepless night heavy with thought, Ruzena took (poor trumpeter!) the side of those women.

  Jakub was at the wheel, and Bob, sitting beside him on the front seat, kept turning his head to lick his face. Beyond the last houses of the town stood high-rise apartment buildings. They had not been there the year before, and Jakub found them hideous. In the

  midst of a green landscape they were like brooms in a plant pot. Jakub was stroking Bob, who was looking at the buildings with satisfaction, and he reflected that God had been kind to dogs in not putting a sense of beauty into their heads.

  The dog again licked his face (perhaps he felt that Jakub was always thinking about him), and Jakub thought that in his country things were getting neither better nor worse but only more and more ridiculous: he had once been victim of a hunt for humans, and yesterday he witnessed a hunt for dogs that was like the same old play with a new cast. Pensioners took the
roles of examining magistrates and prison guards, and the parts of the imprisoned political figures were played by a boxer dog, a mutt, and a dachshund.

  He remembered that several years earlier his neighbors had found their cat in front of their door with its legs bound, nails pushed into its eyes, its tongue cut out. Neighborhood kids had been playing adults. Jakub stroked Bob's head and parked the car in front of the inn.

  When he stepped out he thought the dog would rush joyfully toward the door of his home. But instead of starting to run, Bob jumped around Jakub, wanting to play. And yet when a voice shouted "Bob!" the dog was off like a shot toward a woman standing in the doorway.

  "You're a hopeless vagabond," she said, and she asked Jakub apologetically how long the dog had been bothering him.

  When Jakob replied that the dog had spent the night with him and that he had just driven him back home, the woman profusely and noisily thanked him and urged him to come in. She seated him in a special room apparently used for club banquets and rushed off in search of her husband.

  She soon came back with a young man who sat down beside Jakub and shook his hand: "You must be a very nice man to drive all the way here just to bring Bob back. He's stupid, and all he does is run around. But we really love him. Would you like something to eat?"

  "Yes, thanks," said Jakub, and the woman rushed off to the kitchen. Then Jakub recounted how he had saved Bob from a bunch of pensioners.

  "The bastards!" exclaimed the young man, and then, turning toward the kitchen, called out to his wife: "Vera! Come here! You should hear what they're doing down there in town, the bastards!"

  Vera came back carrying a tray with a steaming bowl of soup. She sat down and Jakub had to resume the story of his adventure of the day before. The dog sat under the table, letting himself be scratched behind the ears.

  When Jakub had finished his soup, the man got up and rushed off to the kitchen to bring back a dish of roast pork with dumplings.

  Jakub was sitting by the window and feeling good. The man cursed the people down there (Jakub was fascinated: the man considered his restaurant a lofty place, an Olympus, a point of retreat and loftiness),

  and the woman went off to lead a two-year-old boy in by the hand: "Say thank you to the gentleman," she said. "He brought back your Bob."

  The toddler babbled some unintelligible words and emitted a little laugh for Jakub. It was sunny outside, and the yellowing foliage bent gently over the open window. There was not a sound. The inn was well above the world, and one could find peace there.

  Although he did not like to procreate, Jakub liked children: "You have a good-looking little boy," he said.

  "He's a bit strange," said the woman. "I don't know where he got that big beak."

  Jakub recalled his friend's nose and said: "Doctor Skreta told me that he took care of you."

  "You know the doctor?" the man asked cheerily.

  "He's a friend of mine," said Jakub.

  "We're very grateful to him," said the young mother, and Jakub thought that the child was probably one of the successes of Skreta's eugenic project.

  "He's not a physician, he's a magician," the man said admiringly.

  Jakub reflected that, in this place where the peace of Bethlehem reigned, these three were a holy family, with the child begotten not by a human father but by the god Skreta.

  The toddler with the big nose again babbled unintelligibly, and the young father gazed at him lovingly. "I wonder," he said to his wife, "which of your distant ancestors had a big nose."

  Jakub smiled. A curious question had just occurred

  to him: Had Dr. Skreta also used a syringe to impregnate his own wife?

  "Isn't that right?" the young father asked.

  "Of course," said Jakub. "It's a great consolation to think that when we've long been in the grave our noses will still be strolling the earth."

  They all laughed, and the idea that Skreta could be the toddler's father now seemed to Jakub to be a fanciful dream.

  5

  Frantisek took the money from the lady whose refrigerator he had just fixed. He left the house, got on his faithful motorcycle, and headed toward the other end of town to hand over the day's receipts at the office in charge of repair services for the whole district. A few minutes after two he was through for the day. He started the motorcycle again and rode toward the thermal building. At the parking lot he saw the white sedan. He parked the motorcycle next to the car and walked under the colonnades toward the Hall of the People, because he surmised the trumpeter might be there.

  He was driven neither by audacity nor combative-ness. He no longer wanted to make a scene. On the contrary, he was determined to control himself, to yield, to

  submit totally. He told himself that his love was so great that he could bear anything for its sake. Like the fairy-tale prince who endures all kinds of torments and sufferings for the sake of the princess, confronting dragons and crossing oceans, he was ready to accept fabulously excessive humiliations.

  Why was he so humble? Why did he not turn instead to another young woman, one of those available in the small spa town in such alluring abundance?

  Frantisek is younger than Ruzena, and thus, unfortunately for him, he is very young. When he is more mature he will find out that things are transient, and he will become aware that beyond one woman's horizon there opens up a horizon of yet more women. But Frantisek still knows nothing about time. He has been living since childhood in an enduring, unchanging world, living in a kind of immobile eternity, he still has the same father and the same mother, and Ruzena, who had made a man of him, is above him like the lid of the firmament, of the only possible firmament. He cannot imagine life without her.

  The day before, he had docilely promised not to spy on her and simultaneously had sincerely decided not to bother her. He told himself he was interested only in the trumpeter, and trailing him would not really be a violation of his promise. But at the same time he realized that this was only an excuse and that Ruzena would condemn his behavior, but it was stronger in him than any reflection or any resolution, it was like a drug addiction: he had to see the man; he had to see

  him once more, for a long time and close up. He had to look his torment in the face. He had to look at that body, whose union with Ruzena's body seemed to him unimaginable and unbelievable. He had to look at him to confirm with his own eyes whether it was possible to think of their two bodies united.

  On the bandstand they were already playing: Dr. Skreta on drums, a slender man on piano, and Klima on trumpet. Some young jazz fans who had slipped in to listen to the rehearsal were sitting in the hall. Frantisek had no fear that the motive for his presence would be found out. He was certain that the trumpeter, blinded by the motorcycle's light, had not seen his face on Tuesday evening, and thanks to Ruzena's caution no one knew much about his relations with the young woman.

  The trumpeter interrupted the musicians and sat down at the piano to show the slender man the right tempo. Frantisek took a seat in the back of the hall, slowly transforming himself into a shadow that would not for a moment leave the trumpeter that day.

  6

  He was driving back from the forest inn and regretted no longer having beside him the jolly dog who had

  licked his face. Then he thought it a miracle that he had succeeded for the forty-five years of his life in keeping that seat beside him free, enabling him now to leave the country so easily, with no baggage, with no burdens, alone, with a false (and yet beautiful) sensation of youth, as if he were a student just beginning to lay the foundation of his future.

  He tried to get firmly in mind the idea that he was leaving his country. He tried hard to evoke his past life. He tried hard to see it as a landscape he looked back on with longing, a landscape vertiginously distant. But he could not manage it. What he did succeed in seeing behind him in his mind's eye was tiny, compressed like a closed accordion. He had to make an effort to evoke the scraps of memory that could give him the illusion of a
destiny that had been lived.

  He looked at the trees along the road. Their foliage was green, red, yellow, and brown. The forest looked aflame. He thought that he was departing at a moment when the forests were on fire and his life and memories were being consumed in those glorious and unfeeling flames. Should he hurt for not hurting? Should he be sad for not being sad?

  He felt no sadness, but neither was he in any hurry. According to his arrangements with his friends abroad, he should already have crossed the border by now, but he felt he was again prey to that indecisive lethargy so well known and so much derided in his circle because he succumbed to it exactly when circumstances demanded energetic and resolute behavior. He knew

  that he was going to maintain to the last moment that he was leaving today, but he was also aware that since the morning he had done all he could to delay the moment of departure from this charming spa town where for years he had been coming to see his friend, sometimes after long intervals but always with pleasure.

  He parked the car (yes, the trumpeter's white sedan and Frantisek's motorcycle were already there) and went into the brasserie, where Olga would be joining him in half an hour. He saw a table he liked, next to the bay window in back looking out at the park's flaming trees, but unfortunately it was already occupied by a man in his thirties. Jakub sat down nearby. He could not see the trees from there; he was fascinated instead by the man, who was visibly nervous, never taking his eyes off the door as he tapped his foot.

  7

  She finally arrived. Klima sprang up from his chair, went forward to meet her, and led her to the window table. He smiled at her as if trying by that smile to show that their agreement was still valid, that they were calm and in alliance, and that they had confidence in each other. He searched the young woman's expression for a