Milan Kundera - Farewell Waltz

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.

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.

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.