Milan Kundera - Farewell Waltz

"That's quite charming, but I still don't understand your strange affection for him. He's not reliable. He's incapable of being on time, and he forgets the day after what he promised the day before."

"That's not quite right. He helped me a great deal once. In fact, no one's ever helped me as much."

Jakub thrust his hand into the breast pocket of his jacket and took out a folded piece of tissue paper. He unfolded it to reveal a pale-blue tablet.

"What is it?" asked Olga.

"Poison."

Jakub savored the young woman's inquiring silence for a moment and then went on: "I've had this tablet for more than fifteen years. After my year in prison, there was one thing I understood. You need to have at least one certainty: to remain in control of your own death and of the ability to choose its time and manner. With that certainty, you can put up with a lot of things. You know you can get away from people whenever you want."

"Did you have this tablet with you in prison?"

"Unfortunately not! But I got it as soon as I was released."

"When you didn't need it anymore?"

"In this country you never know when you're going to need a thing like that. And then, for me it was a matter of principle. Every person should be given a poison tablet on the day he reaches maturity. A solemn ceremony should take place on that occasion. Not to prompt him to suicide, but, on the contrary, to allow him to live more securely and serenely. To live knowing he's in control of his own life and his own death."

"And how did you get this poison?"

"Skreta started out as a biochemist in a lab. At first I

asked someone else, but she considered it her moral duty to deny me the poison. Skreta himself compounded the tablet without a moment's hesitation."

"Maybe because he's an oddball."

"Maybe. But mostly because he understood me. He knew that I wasn't a hysteric who liked to play suicide games. He understood what was at stake for me. I'm going to give him back the tablet today. I don't need it anymore."

"So all the dangers are gone?"

"Tomorrow morning I'm leaving the country for good. I've been invited to teach at a university, and I've got permission from the authorities to leave."

He had finally said it. Jakub looked at Olga and saw that she was smiling. She took his hand: "Really? That's very good news! I'm very pleased for you!"

She was showing the same disinterested pleasure he himself would feel if he were to learn that Olga was leaving for a foreign country where she would have a more pleasant life. This was surprising, because he had always feared she had an emotional attachment to him. He was happy that it wasn't so, but he also surprised himself by being a bit upset.

Olga was so interested in Jakub's disclosure that she forgot to go on questioning him about the pale-blue tablet lying between them on the piece of tissue paper, and Jakub had to tell her in detail all the circumstances of his future career.

"I'm extremely pleased you managed it. Here you'd always be suspect. They haven't even let you practice

your profession. And what's more, they spend their time preaching love of country. How can you love a country where you're forbidden to work? I can tell you I don't feel any love for my homeland. Is that bad of me?"

"I don't know," said Jakub. "I really don't. As far as I'm concerned, I've been rather attached to this coun-try.

"Maybe it's bad of me," Olga went on, "but I don't feel tied to anything. What could I be attached to here?"

"Even painful memories are ties that bind."

"Bind us to what? To staying in the country where we were born? I don't understand how people can talk about freedom and not get that millstone off their necks. As if a tree were at home where it can't grow. A tree is at home wherever water percolates through the soil."

"And you, do you find enough water here?"

"All in all, yes. Now that they're finally letting me study, I've got what I want. I'm going to do my biology, and I don't want to hear about anything else. I wasn't the one who set up this regime, and I'm not responsible for any of it. But when exactly are you leaving?"

"Tomorrow."

"So soon?" She took his hand. "Since you were nice enough to come and say goodbye to me, please don't be in such a hurry to go."

It continued to be different from what he had expected. She was behaving neither like a young

woman secretly in love with him nor like an adopted daughter feeling unfleshly filial love for him. She held his hand with eloquent tenderness, looked him in the eye, and repeated: "Don't be in such a hurry! It makes no sense to me that you're not staying here awhile to say goodbye to me."

Jakub was somewhat perplexed by this: "We'll see," he said. "Skreta's also trying to convince me to stay a little longer."

"You should certainly stay longer," said Olga. "In any case, we have so little time for each other. Now I have to go back to the baths…" After a moment's thought she announced that she would not go anywhere while Jakub was here.

"No, no, you should go. You shouldn't miss your treatment. I'll go with you."

"Really?" asked Olga happily. She opened the wardrobe and started to look for something.

The pale-blue tablet was still lying on the unfolded piece of paper on the table, and Olga, the only person in the world to whom Jakub had revealed its existence, was leaning into the wardrobe with her back to the poison. Jakub thought that this pale-blue tablet was the drama of his life, a neglected, nearly forgotten, and probably uninteresting drama. And he told himself that it was high time to rid himself of this uninteresting drama, to say goodbye to it quickly and leave it behind him. He wrapped the tablet in the piece of paper and stuck it into the breast pocket of his jacket.

Olga took a bag out of the wardrobe, put a towel

into it, closed the wardrobe door, and said to Jakub: "I'm ready."

Ruzena had been sitting on a park bench for God knows how long, probably unable to budge because her thoughts too were motionless, fixed on a single point.

Yesterday she had still believed what the trumpeter told her. Not only because it was pleasant but also because it was more simple: it provided her a way to give up, with a clear conscience, a fight for which she lacked the strength. But after her colleagues laughed at her, she again mistrusted him and thought of him with hatred, fearing deep down that she was neither cunning nor stubborn enough to win him.

Apathetically she tore open the package Frantisek had given her. Inside was something made of pale-blue fabric, and Ruzena realized he had made her a present of a nightgown; a nightgown he wished to see her in every day; every day, a great many days, for the rest of his life. She gazed at the pale-blue fabric and thought she saw that patch of blue run and expand, turn into a pond, a pond of goodness and devotion, a pond of abject love which would end up engulfing her.

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.