Milan Kundera - Farewell Waltz

Then she loses consciousness, the confused visions of sleep's approach passing through her head. She awakes, and it seems to her that the whole room is flooded with a strange blue light. What is this unnatural glow she has never before seen? Has the moon come down here veiled in blue? Or is Ruzena dreaming with her eyes open?

Bertlef smiles at her and goes on caressing her face.

And now she closes her eyes for the night, carried away by a dream.

It was still dark when Klima awoke from a very light sleep. He wanted to find Ruzena before she went to work. But how to explain to Kamila that he had an errand to run before daybreak?

He looked at his watch: five o'clock. He would miss Ruzena if he did not get up right away, but he could not think of an excuse. His heart pounded, but unable to do anything else, he got up and started to dress, quietly for fear of waking Kamila. He was buttoning his jacket when he heard her voice. It was a high-pitched, half-asleep little voice: "Where are you

going?"

He went over to the bed and lightly kissed her lips: "Go back to sleep, I'll be back soon."

"I'll go with you," said Kamila, but she was instantly asleep again.

Klima quickly left.

Was it possible? Was he still pacing back and forth?

Yes. But suddenly he stopped. He saw Klima coming out of the Richmond. He hid briefly and then started to follow him discreetly to Karl Marx House. He passed the doorkeeper's lodging (the doorkeeper was asleep) and stopped at the corner of the corridor leading to Ruzena's room. He saw the trumpeter knock at the nurse's door. The door did not open. Klima knocked several more times, then he turned to go.

Frantisek rushed out of Marx House after him. He saw him heading down the park to the thermal building, where Ruzena was due to begin work in half an hour. He rushed back to Marx House, hammered at Ruzena's door, and in a hushed but distinct voice said through the keyhole: "It's me! Frantisek! Don't be afraid of me! You can open the door for me!"

There was no answer.

As he left, the doorkeeper was waking up.

"Is Ruzena at home?" Frantisek asked him.

"She hasn't been here since yesterday," said the doorkeeper.

Frantisek went outside. In the distance he saw Klima entering the thermal building.

Ruzena regularly awoke at five-thirty. Even this morning, after having dozed off so pleasantly, she slept no longer than that. She got up, dressed, and tiptoed into the adjacent room.

Bertlef was lying on his side, breathing deeply, and his hair, always carefully combed during the day, was disheveled, revealing the naked skin over his skull. In sleep his face looked grayer and older. The small bottles of medicine on the night table reminded Ruzena of a hospital. But none of this disturbed her. Looking at him brought tears to her eyes. She had never had a more beautiful night. She felt a strange desire to kneel down before him. She did not do so, but she leaned over and delicately kissed his brow.

Outside, as she approached the thermal building she saw Frantisek coming toward her.

The day before, such an encounter would have disconcerted her. Even though Ruzena was in love with the trumpeter, Frantisek meant a great deal to her. He and Klima formed an inseparable pair. One embodied the everyday, the other a dream; one wanted her, the other did not want her; from one she wanted to escape, the other she desired. Each of the two men determined the meaning of the other's existence. When she decided that she was pregnant by Klima she did not eliminate Frantisek from her life; on the contrary: Frantisek remained the abiding reason for this decision. She was

between these two men as between the two poles of her life; they were the north and south of her planet, the only one she knew.

But this morning she suddenly realized that it was not the only habitable planet. She realized that it was possible to live without Klima and without Frantisek; that there was no reason to hurry; that there was time enough; that it was possible to let a wise, mature man lead you far away from this accursed domain where you age so quickly.

"Where did you spend the night?" Frantisek burst out at her.

"It's none of your business."

"I was at your place. You weren't in your room."

"It's absolutely none of your business where I spent the night," said Ruzena, and without stopping she passed through the entrance to the thermal building. "And quit following me. I forbid it."

Frantisek remained standing in front of the building, and then, because his feet hurt from a night spent pacing back and forth, he sat down on a bench from which he could keep a close watch on the entrance.

Ruzena rushed up the stairs to the second floor two at a time and entered the large waiting room lined with benches and chairs. Klima was sitting at the door to her workplace.

"Ruzena," he said as he stood up and looked at her with desperate eyes. "I beg you. I beg you, be reasonable! I'll go there with you!"

His anxiety was naked, stripped of all the sentimen-

tal demagogy to which he had devoted so much effort in the previous days.

Ruzena said: "You want to get rid of me."

This frightened him: "I don't want to get rid of you- on the contrary. I'm doing all this so we'll be even happier together."

"Don't lie," said Ruzena.

"Ruzena, I beg you! It'll be a disaster if you don't go!"

"Who told you I'm not going? We still have three hours. It's only six o'clock. You can quietly get back into bed with your wife!"

She closed the door behind her, put on her white smock, and said to the fortyish nurse: "Please do me a favor. I need to go out at nine o'clock. Could you take my place for an hour?"

"So you've let yourself be talked into it after all," her colleague said reproachfully.

"No. I've fallen in love," said Ruzena.

Jakub went over to the window and opened it. He thought of the pale-blue tablet, and he could not believe that he had really given it the day before to a stranger. He looked up at the blue of the sky and breathed in the crisp air of the autumn morning. The

world he saw through the window was normal, tranquil, natural. The episode with the nurse the day before suddenly seemed absurd and implausible.

He picked up the phone and dialed the thermal building. He asked to speak with Nurse Ruzena in the women's section. He waited a long time. Then he heard a woman's voice. He repeated that he wanted to speak with Nurse Ruzena. The voice replied that Nurse Ruzena was now at the pool and couldn't come to the phone. He thanked her and hung up.

He felt immense relief: the nurse was alive. The tablets in the tube were to be taken three times a day; she must have taken one yesterday evening and another this morning, and thus she had swallowed Jakub's tablet quite a while ago. Suddenly everything seemed absolutely clear: the pale-blue tablet he had been carrying in his pocket as a guarantee of his freedom was a fraud. His friend had given him a tablet of illusion.

My God, why had the thought not occurred to him before? Once more he recalled the distant day when he had asked his friends for poison. He had just been released from prison then, and now he realized, after the passage of many long years, that all of them had probably seen his request as a theatrical gesture designed to call attention, after the fact, to the sufferings he had endured. But Skreta had with no hesitation promised to get him what he asked for, and a few days later had brought him a shiny, pale-blue tablet. Why hesitate, why try to dissuade him? Skreta had handled

it more cleverly than those who had turned him down. He had furnished him the harmless illusion of calm and certainty, and in addition made a lifelong friend.