Milan Kundera - Farewell Waltz

"What's the matter, Mister Klima?" suddenly asked the pharmacist, who was all the more friendly and perceptive for being so quiet.

"Nothing. Nothing at all!" said Klima, struck by fear. "I've got a little headache."

"Do you want an aspirin?" the pharmacist asked.

"No, no," said the trumpeter, shaking his head. "But please excuse us if we leave a bit early. I'm really very tired."

How had she finally dared to do it?

From the moment she had joined Jakub in the brasserie, she found him not as he had been. He was quiet yet pleasant, unable to focus attention yet docile, was mentally elsewhere yet did whatever she wished. The lack of concentration (she attributed it to his approaching departure) was agreeable to her: she was speaking to an absent face, and it seemed to her that she was speaking into distances where she could not be heard. She could thus say to him what she had never said before.

Now, in asking him for a kiss, she had the impression that she had disturbed him, troubled him. But this did not discourage her at all, on the contrary, it pleased her: she felt she had finally become the bold, provocative woman she had always hoped to be, the woman who dominates the situation, sets it in motion, watches her partner with curiosity, and puts him into a quandary.

She continued to look him firmly in the eye and said

with a smile: "But not here. It would be ridiculous for us to lean over the table to kiss. Come."

She took his hand, led him to the daybed, and savored the finesse, elegance, and quiet authority of her behavior. Then she kissed him and was stirred by a passion she had never known before. And yet it was not the spontaneous passion of a body unable to control itself, it was a passion of the brain, a passion conscious and deliberate. She wanted to tear away from Jakub the disguise of his paternal role, wanted to shock him and arouse herself with the sight of his confusion, wanted to rape him and watch herself raping him, wanted to know the taste of his tongue and feel his paternal hands become bit by bit bolder and cover her with caresses.

She unbuttoned his jacket and took it off.

He never took his eyes off him throughout the concert, and then he mingled with the fans who rushed behind the bandstand to get the artists to scribble an autograph for them. But Ruzena was not there. He followed a small group of people leading the trumpeter to the spa town's bar. He went in behind them, convinced that Ruzena was already waiting there for the trum-

peter. But he was wrong. He went out and for a long time kept watch in front of the entrance.

A sudden pang went through him. The trumpeter had come out of the bar with a female figure pressed against him. At first he thought it was Ruzena, but it was not she.

He followed them to the Hotel Richmond, and Klima and the woman vanished inside.

He quickly went across the park to Karl Marx House. The door was still unlocked. He asked the doorkeeper if Ruzena was at home. She was not.

He ran back to the Richmond, fearing that Ruzena in the meantime had joined Klima there. He paced back and forth on the park path, keeping his eyes fixed on the entrance. He didn't understand what was happening. Several possibilities came to his mind, but they didn't matter. What mattered was that he was here and that he was keeping watch, and he knew that he would keep watch until he saw them.

Why? What good would it do? Would it not be better to go home to sleep?

He repeated to himself that he finally had to find out the whole truth.

But did he really want to know the truth? Did he really wish so strongly to make sure that Ruzena was going to bed with Klima? Was he not waiting instead for some proof of Ruzena's innocence? And yet, suspicious as he was, would he lend credence to such proof?

He didn't know what he was waiting for. He knew only that he would wait a long time, all night if he had

to, and even several nights. For time spurred on by jealousy passes with amazing speed. Jealousy occupies the mind more completely than passionate intellectual work. The mind has not a moment of leisure. A victim of jealousy never knows boredom.

Frantisek keeps pacing a short stretch of path, barely one hundred meters long, from which the Richmond's entrance can be seen. He is going to be pacing back and forth like this all night, until everyone else is asleep, he is going to pace back and forth like this until tomorrow, until the last part of this book.

But why is he not sitting down? There are benches facing the Richmond!

He cannot sit down. Jealousy is like a raging toothache. One cannot do anything when one is jealous, not even sit down. One can only come and go. Back and forth.

They followed the same route as Bertlef and Ruzena, Jakub and Olga; up the stairs to the second floor, then along the red plush carpet to the corridor's end at the large door to Bertlef's suite. To the right was the door to Jakub's room, to the left the room Dr. Skreta had lent to Klima.

When he opened the door and turned on the light, he noticed the quick inquisitive look Kamila cast through the room. He knew she was looking for traces of a woman. He was familiar with that look. He knew everything about her. He knew that her kindness was insincere. He knew that she had come here to spy on him, knew that she would pretend to have come here to please him. And he knew that she clearly perceived his embarrassment and that she was certain she had spoiled one of his love adventures.

"Darling, you really don't mind that I came?" she asked.

"Why should I mind?"

"I was afraid you'd be sad here."

"Yes, without you I'd be sad. It pleased me to see you applauding at the foot of the bandstand."

"You seem tired. Or is something bothering you?"

"No. No, nothing's bothering me. I'm just tired."

"You're sad because you're always surrounded by men here. But now you're with a beautiful woman. Am I not a beautiful woman?"

"Yes, you're a beautiful woman," answered Klima, and these were the first sincere words he had said to her that day. Kamila was gloriously beautiful, and Klima felt immense pain at the thought that this beauty was exposed to mortal peril. But this beauty smiled at him and began to undress before his eyes. He gazed at her body being bared, and it was as if he were bidding it farewell. The breasts, her beautiful, flawless breasts, her narrow waist, the belly from which her underpants

had just slipped free. He watched her with longing, as if she were a memory. As if through a window. As if from a distance. Her nakedness was so distant that he felt not the least aroused. And yet he was contemplating her with a voracious gaze. He drank her nakedness as a condemned man drinks his last glass. He drank her nakedness as a man drinks a lost past, a lost life.

Kamila came near him: "What is it? Aren't you going to undress?"

All he could do was undress, and he was terribly sad.

"Don't think you have the right to be tired now that I've come all this way to be with you. I want you.''

He knew that it was not true. He knew that Kamila did not have the slightest desire to make love, and that she was forcing herself to behave provocatively only because she saw his sadness and attributed it to his love for another woman. He knew (my God, how well he knew her!) that she was trying to test him with this love challenge, to find out to what degree his mind was engrossed by another woman, he knew that she wanted to wound herself with his sadness.

"I'm really tired," he said.

She took him in her arms and then led him to the bed: "You'll see how I'm going to make you forget your fatigue!" And she began to play with his naked body.

He was stretched out as if on an operating table. He knew that all his wife's efforts would be useless. His body shrank into itself and no longer had the slightest power of expansion. Kamila ran her moist lips all over his body, and he knew that she wanted to make herself