It is Wednesday morning, and the spa is once again awake for an active day. Torrents of water are flowing into tubs, masseurs are kneading naked backs, and a private car has just pulled into the parking lot. Not the big, luxurious white sedan that had been in the same spot the day before, but the ordinary car one can see so many of in this country. The man behind the wheel is about forty-five, and he is alone. The back seat is cluttered with suitcases.
The man gets out, locks the doors, gives a five-crown coin to the parking-lot attendant, and heads toward Karl Marx House; he walks along the corridor until he comes to the door with Dr. Skreta’s name on it. He enters the waiting room and knocks on the office door. A nurse appears, the man introduces himself, and then Dr. Skreta comes out to greet him: “Jakub! When did you get here?”
“Just now!”
“Wonderful! We’ve got a lot of things to discuss. Listen …” he says after a moment’s thought, “I can’t leave right now. Come with me into the examining room. I’ll lend you a coat.”
Jakub was not a physician and had never before entered a gynecologist’s examining room. But Dr. Skreta had already taken him by the arm and led him into a white room, where an undressed woman was lying on an examination table with her legs spread.
“Give the doctor a coat,” Skreta said to the nurse, who opened a cabinet and handed Jakub a white coat. “Come take a look, I want you to confirm my diagnosis,” he said to Jakub, inviting him to go near the patient, who was visibly quite pleased by the idea that the mystery of her ovaries, which despite great efforts had not yet produced any descendants, was going to be explored by two medical specialists.
Dr. Skreta resumed palpating the patient’s womb, uttered some Latin words to which Jakub grunted approval, and then asked: “How long are you staying here?”
“One day.”
“One day? That’s absurdly brief, we won’t be able to discuss anything!”
“It hurts when you touch me like that,” said the woman with the raised legs.
“It should hurt a little bit, it’s nothing,” said Jakub to amuse his friend.
“Yes, the doctor’s right,” said Skreta. “It’s nothing, it’s normal. I’m going to prescribe a series of shots for you. Be here every morning at six, and the nurse will give you your shot. You can get dressed now.”
“I really came to say goodbye to you,” said Jakub.
“What do you mean, goodbye?”
“I’m going abroad. I’ve got permission to emigrate.”
The woman dressed and took leave of Dr. Skreta and his colleague.
“What a surprise! I never expected that!” Dr. Skreta marveled. “Seeing that you came to say goodbye to me, I’m going to send these women home.”
“Doctor,” the nurse interrupted, “you sent them away yesterday too. We’ll have a big backlog at the end of the week!”
“All right then, send in the next one,” said Dr. Skreta with a sigh.
The nurse sent in the next one, whom the two men glanced at absentmindedly, noting that she was prettier than the last one.
Dr. Skreta asked her how she had been feeling since she began the baths, and then asked her to undress.
“It took forever to get my passport. But after that I was ready to leave in two days. I didn’t want to say goodbye to anyone.”
“Then I’m all the happier that you stopped here,” said Dr. Skreta, and then he asked the young woman to climb up on the examination table. He put on a rubber glove and thrust his hand into the patient.
“I don’t want to see anybody but you and Olga,” said Jakub. “I hope she’s all right.”
“Everything’s fine, fine,” said Skreta, but from the sound of his voice it was obvious he was not aware of what he was saying to Jakub. He was concentrating all his attention on the patient: “We’re going to do a little procedure,” he said. “Don’t worry, you won’t feel a thing.” Then he opened the glass door of a cabinet and took out a hypodermic syringe with a small plastic nozzle at the end instead of a needle.
“What’s that?” asked Jakub.
“During many years of practicing medicine, I’ve perfected some extremely effective new methods. You might find it selfish of me, but for the moment I consider them my secret.”
Her voice more flirtatious than fearful, the woman lying with her legs spread asked: “It won’t hurt?”
“Not at all,” replied Dr. Skreta, dipping the syringe into a test tube he was handling with meticulous care. Then he came close to the woman, inserted the syringe between her legs, and pushed the plunger.
“Did that hurt?”
“No,” said the patient.
“I also came here to give you back the tablet.”
Dr. Skreta barely took notice of Jakub’s words. He was still busy with his patient. He inspected her from head to toe with a serious and thoughtful expression and said: “In your case, it would really be a shame if you didn’t have a child. You’ve got long legs, a well-developed pelvis, a beautiful rib cage, and quite a pleasant face.”
He touched the patient’s face, chucked her chin, and said: “A nice jaw, sturdy and well-shaped.”
Then he took hold of her thigh: “And you’ve got marvelously firm bones. It looks like they’re shining under your muscles.”
He went on for a time praising the patient while manipulating her body, and she didn’t protest or giggle any longer, for the seriousness of the physician’s interest in her put his touchings well on this side of shamelessness.
At last he indicated that she should get dressed, and he turned to his friend: “What were you saying?”
“That I came to give you back the tablet.”
“What tablet?”
As she was dressing the woman said: “Well, Doctor, do you think there’s any hope for me?”
“I’m extremely satisfied,” said Dr. Skreta. “I think that things are developing positively and that we, you and I both, can count on a success.”
Thanking him, the woman left the examining room, and then Jakub said: “Years ago you gave me a tablet nobody else would give me. Now that I’m leaving, I think I won’t need it anymore, and I should give it back to you.”
“Keep it! The tablet could be just as useful elsewhere as it is here.”
“No, no. The tablet was part of this country. I want to leave in this country everything that belongs to it,” said Jakub.
“Doctor, I’m going to bring in the next one,” said the nurse.
“Send all those females home,” said Dr. Skreta. “I’ve done my work for today. You’ll see, that last one will surely have a child. That’s enough for a day, no?”
The nurse looked at the doctor tenderly and yet showed not the slightest intention of obeying him.
Dr. Skreta understood this look: “All right, don’t send them away; just tell them I’ll be back in half an hour.”
“Doctor, you said half an hour yesterday too, and I had to run after you in the street.”
“Don’t worry, my dear, I’ll be back in half an hour,” said Skreta, and he motioned his friend to return the white coat to the nurse. Then they left the building and went straight across the park to the Richmond.
They went up to the second floor and followed the long red carpet to the end of the corridor. Dr. Skreta opened a door and with his friend entered a cramped but pleasant room.
“It’s nice of you,” said Jakub, “always to have a room for me here.”
“I’ve got some rooms set aside now at this end of the corridor for my special patients. Next to your room is a beautiful corner suite where cabinet ministers and industrialists stayed in the old days. I’ve put up my prize patient there, a rich American whose family originated here. He’s become something of a friend.”
“And where does Olga live?”
“In Marx House, like me. Don’t worry, she’s all right there.”
“The main thing is that you’re looking after her. How is she doing?”
“She has the usual problems of women with fragile nerves.”
“I told you in my letter about the life she’s had.”
“Most women come here to gain fertility. In your ward’s case, it would be better if she didn’t take advantage of her fertility. Have you ever seen her naked?”
“My God! Certainly not!” said Jakub.
“Well, take a look at her! She has tiny breasts hanging from her chest like two little plums. You can see her ribs. From now on look more closely at rib cages. A real thorax should be aggressive, outgoing, it has to expand as if it wants to take up as much space as possible. On the other hand, there are rib cages that are on the defensive, that retreat from the outside world; it’s like a straitjacket getting tighter and tighter around someone and finally suffocating him. That’s the case with hers. Tell her to show it to you.”
“It’s the last thing I’d do,” said Jakub.
“You’re afraid that if you saw it you’d no longer regard her as your ward.”
“On the contrary,” said Jakub. “I’m afraid of feeling even more sorry for her.”
“Incidentally, old friend,” said Skreta, “that American is really an extremely odd type.”
“Where can I see her right now?” asked Jakub.
“Who?”
“Olga.”
“You can’t see her now. She’s having her treatment. She has to spend the whole morning in the pool.”
“I don’t want to miss her. Can I phone her?”
Dr. Skreta lifted the receiver and dialed a number without interrupting his conversation with his friend: “I’m going to introduce you, and I want you to study him thoroughly for me. You’re psychologically astute. You’re going to see right through him. I’ve got plans for him.”
“Like what?” asked Jakub, but Dr. Skreta was already talking into the receiver: “Is this Ruzena? How are you? …. Don’t worry, nausea is normal in your condition. I wanted to ask you if a patient of mine is in the pool right now, your neighbor in the room next door.… Yes? Good, tell her she’s got a visitor from the capital, above all tell her not to go anywhere.… Yes, he’ll be waiting for her at noon in front of the thermal building.”
Skreta hung up. “Well, you heard that. You’re going to see her again at noon. Damn, what were we just talking about?”
“About the American.”
“Yes,” said Skreta. “He’s an extremely odd type. I cured his wife. They’d been unable to have children.”
“And what’s he here for?”
“His heart.”
“You said you’ve got plans for him.”
“It’s humiliating,” said Skreta indignantly, “what a physician is forced to do in this country in order to make a decent living! Klima, the famous trumpeter, is coming here. I have to accompany him on the drums!”
Jakub didn’t think Skreta was being serious, but he pretended to be surprised: “What, you play the drums?”
“Yes, my friend! What can I do, now that I’m going to have a family?”
“What?” Jakub exclaimed, this time truly surprised. “A family? Are you telling me you’re married?”
“Yes,” said Skreta.
“To Suzy?”
Suzy was a doctor at the spa who had been Skreta’s girlfriend for years, but at the last moment he had always succeeded in avoiding marriage.
“Yes, to Suzy,” said Skreta. “You know that every Sunday I used to climb up to the scenic view with her.”
“So you’re really married,” said Jakub with melancholy.
“Every time we climbed up there,” Skreta went on, “Suzy tried to convince me we should get married. And I’d be so worn out by the climb that I felt old and that there was nothing left for me but to marry. But in the end I always controlled myself, and when we came back down from the scenic view my strength would come back and I’d no longer want to get married. But one day Suzy made us take a detour, and the climb took so long I agreed to get married even before we got to the top. And now we’re expecting a child, and I have to think a bit about money. The American also paints religious pictures. One could make a lot of money from that. What do you think?”
“Do you believe there’s a market for religious pictures?”
“A fantastic market! All it takes, old friend, is to put up a stand next to the church on pilgrimage days and, at a hundred crowns apiece, we’d make a fortune! I could sell them for him and we’d split fifty-fifty.”
“And what does he say?”
“The fellow has so much money he doesn’t know what to do with it, and I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to get him to go into business with me,” said Skreta with a curse.
Olga clearly saw Nurse Ruzena waving to her from the edge of the pool, but she went on swimming and pretended she had not seen her.
The two women didn’t like each other. Dr. Skreta had put Olga in a small room next to Ruzena’s. Ruzena was in the habit of playing the radio very loud, and Olga liked quiet. She had rapped on the wall at various times, and the nurse’s only response was to turn up the volume.
Ruzena persisted in waving and finally succeeded in telling the patient that a visitor from the capital would be meeting her at noon.
Olga realized that it was Jakub, and she felt immense joy. And instantly she was surprised by this joy: How can I be feeling such pleasure at the idea of seeing him again?
Olga was actually one of those modern women who readily divide themselves into a person who lives life and a person who observes it.
But even the Olga who observed life was rejoicing. For she understood very well that it was utterly excessive for Olga (the one who lived life) to rejoice so impetuously, and because she (the one who observed life) was mischievous this excessiveness gave her pleasure. She smiled at the idea that Jakub would be frightened if he knew of the fierceness of her joy.
The hands of the clock above the pool showed a quarter to twelve. Olga wondered how Jakub would react if she were to throw her arms around his neck and kiss him passionately. She swam to the edge of the pool, climbed out, and went to a cubicle to change. She regretted a little not having been informed of Jakub’s visit earlier in the day. She would have been better dressed. Now she was wearing an uninteresting little gray suit that spoiled her good mood.
There were times, such as a few minutes earlier while swimming in the pool, when she totally forgot her appearance. But now she was planted in front of the cubicle’s small mirror and seeing herself in a gray suit. A few minutes earlier she had smiled mischievously at the idea that she could throw her arms around Jakub’s neck and kiss him passionately. But she had that idea in the pool, where she had been swimming bodilessly, like a disembodied thought. Now that she had suddenly been provided with a body and a suit, she was far away from that joyous fantasy, and she knew that she was exactly what to her great anger Jakub always saw her as: a touching little girl who needed help.
If Olga had been a little more foolish, she would have found herself quite pretty. But since she was an intelligent girl, she considered herself much uglier than she really was, for she was actually neither ugly nor pretty, and any man with normal aesthetic requirements would gladly spend the night with her.
But since Olga delighted in dividing herself in two, the one who observed life now interrupted the one who lived life: What did it matter that she was like this or like that? Why suffer over a reflection in a mirror? Wasn’t she something other than an object for men’s eyes? Other than merchandise putting herself on the market? Was she incapable of being independent of her appearance, at the very least to the degree that any man can be?
She left the thermal building and saw a good-natured and touching face. She knew that instead of extending his hand to her he was going to pat her on the head like a good little girl. Sure enough, that is what he did.
“Where are we having lunch?” he asked.
She suggested the patients’ dining room, where there was a vacant place at her table.
The patients’ dining room was immense, filled with tables and people squeezed closely together having lunch. Jakub and Olga sat down and then waited a long time before a waitress served them soup. Two other people were sitting at their table, and they tried to engage in conversation with Jakub, whom they immediately classified as a member of the sociable family of patients. It was therefore only in snatches during the general talk at the table that Jakub could question Olga about a few practical details: Was she satisfied with the food here, was she satisfied with the doctor, was she satisfied with the treatment? When he asked about her lodgings, she answered that she had a dreadful neighbor. She motioned with her head to a nearby table, where Ruzena was having lunch.
Their table companions took their leave, and looking at Ruzena, Jakub said: “Hegel has a curious reflection on the Grecian profile, whose beauty, according to him, comes from the fact that the nose and the brow form a single line that highlights the upper part of the head, the seat of intelligence and of the mind. Looking at your neighbor, I notice that her whole face, on the other hand, is concentrated on the mouth. Look how intensely she chews, and how she’s talking loudly at the same time. Hegel would be disgusted by such importance being attached to the lower part, the animal part, of the face, and yet this girl I dislike is quite pretty.”
“Do you think so?” asked Olga, her voice betraying annoyance.
That is why Jakub hastened to say: “At any rate I’d be afraid of being ground up into tiny bits by that ruminant’s mouth.” And he added: “Hegel would be more satisfied with you. The dominant part of your face is the brow, which instantly tells everyone about your intelligence.”
“Logic like that infuriates me,” said Olga sharply. “It tries to show that a human being’s physiognomy is imprinted on his soul. It’s absolute nonsense. I picture my soul with a strong chin and sensual lips, but my chin is small and so is my mouth. If I’d never seen myself in a mirror and had to describe my outside appearance from what I know of the inside of me, the portrait wouldn’t look at all like me! I am not at all the person I look like!”
It is difficult to find a word to characterize Jakub’s relation to Olga. She was the daughter of a friend of his who had been executed when Olga was seven years old. Jakub decided at that time to take the little orphan under his wing. He had no children, and such obligation-free fatherhood appealed to him. He playfully called Olga his ward.
They were now in Olga’s room. She plugged in a hotplate and put a small saucepan of water on it, and Jakub realized that he could not bring himself to reveal the purpose of his visit to her. He didn’t dare tell her that he had come to say goodbye, was afraid the news would take on too pathetic a dimension and generate an emotional climate between them that he regarded as uncalled for. He had long suspected her of being secretly in love with him.
Olga took two cups out of the cupboard, spooned instant coffee into them, and poured boiling water. Jakub stirred in a sugar cube and heard Olga say: “Please tell me, Jakub, what kind of man was my father really?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Did he really have nothing to blame himself for?”
“What are you thinking of?” asked Jakub, amazed. Olga’s father had been officially rehabilitated sometime earlier, and this political figure who had been sentenced to death and executed had been publicly proclaimed innocent. No one doubted his innocence.
“That’s not what I mean,” said Olga. “I mean just the opposite.”
“I don’t understand,” said Jakub.
“I was wondering if he hadn’t done to others exactly what was done to him. There wasn’t a grain of difference between him and those who sent him to the gallows. They had the same beliefs, they were the same fanatics. They were convinced that even the slightest differences could put the revolution in mortal danger, and they suspected everyone. They sent him to his death in the name of holy things he himself believed in. Why then couldn’t he have behaved toward others the same way they behaved toward him?”
“Time flies terribly fast, and the past is becoming more and more incomprehensible,” said Jakub after a moment’s hesitation. “What do you know of your father besides a few letters, a few pages of his diary they kindly returned to you, and a few recollections from his friends?”
But Olga insisted: “Why are you so evasive? I asked you a perfectly clear question. Was my father like the ones who sent him to his death?”
“It’s possible,” said Jakub with a shrug.
“Then why couldn’t he too have been capable of committing the same cruelties?”
“Theoretically,” replied Jakub very slowly, “theoretically he was capable of doing to others exactly the same thing they did to him. There isn’t a man in this world who isn’t capable, with a relatively light heart, of sending a fellow human to his death. At any rate I’ve never met one. If men one day come to change in this regard, they’ll lose a basic human attribute. They’ll no longer be men but creatures of another species.”
“You people are wonderful!” Olga exclaimed as if shouting at thousands of Jakubs. “When you turn everybody into murderers your own murders stop being crimes and just become an inevitable human attribute.”
“Most people move around inside an idyllic circle between their home and their work,” said Jakub. “They live in a secure territory beyond good and evil. They’re sincerely appalled by the sight of a murderer. But taking them out of this secure territory is enough to make them murderers themselves, without their knowing how it happened. There are tests and temptations that only rarely turn up during the course of history. Nobody can resist them. But it’s utterly useless to talk about this. What counts for you isn’t what your father was theoretically capable of doing, because there’s no way of proving it anyway. The only thing that should interest you is what he actually did or didn’t do. And in that sense he had a clear conscience.”
“Are you absolutely sure?”
“Absolutely. No one knew him better than I did.”
“I’m really glad to hear this from you,” said Olga. “Because I didn’t ask you the question by chance. For a while now I’ve been getting anonymous letters. They say I’m wrong to play the daughter of a martyr, because my father, before he was executed, himself sent to prison innocent people whose only offense was to have an idea of the world different from his.”
“Nonsense,” said Jakub.
“These letters describe him as a relentless fanatic and cruel man. Of course they’re spiteful anonymous letters, but they’re not the letters of a primitive. They’re not exaggerated, they’re concrete and precise, and I almost ended up believing them.”
“It’s always the same kind of revenge,” said Jakub. “I’m going to tell you something. When they arrested your father, the prisons were full of people the revolution had sent there in the first wave of terror. The prisoners recognized him as a well-known Communist, and at the first chance they pounced on him and beat him unconscious. The guards watched, smiling sadistically.”
“I know,” said Olga, and Jakub realized he had told her a story she had heard many times. He had long ago resolved never again to talk about these things, but without success. People who have been in an automobile accident cannot help remembering it.
“I know,” Olga repeated, “but it doesn’t surprise me. The prisoners were jailed without a trial, very often without any grounds. And all of a sudden they were face to face with one of the men they considered responsible!”
“From the moment your father put on the prison uniform, he was a prisoner among prisoners. There was no sense in harming him, especially under the guards’ complacent eyes. It was nothing but cowardly revenge. The vilest desire to trample on a defenseless victim. And these letters you got are fruits of the same kind of revenge, which I now see is stronger than time itself.”
“But Jakub! Nevertheless a hundred thousand people were put in prison! And thousands never came back! And not a single one of those responsible was ever punished! This desire for revenge is really just an unsatisfied desire for justice!”
“Taking revenge on the father through the daughter has nothing to do with justice. Remember that because of your father you lost your home, you were forced out of your home town, you were denied the right to attend the university. Because of a dead father you barely knew! And because of your father should you be persecuted now? I’m going to tell you the saddest discovery of my life: the persecuted are no better than the persecutors. I can easily imagine the roles reversed. You might see in this logic the desire to shift your father’s responsibility onto the Creator who made man as he is. And maybe it’s good for you to see things this way. Because to come to the conclusion that there’s no difference between the guilty and the victims is to abandon all hope. And that, my girl, is what is called hell.”
Ruzena’s two colleagues were burning with impatience. They wanted to know how the previous day’s meeting with Klima had gone, but they were on duty at the other end of the thermal building, and it was not until about three o’clock that they could get to their friend and bombard her with questions.
Ruzena hesitated to answer and finally said uncertainly: “He said he loved me and he’d marry me.”
“You see! I told you so!” said the thin one. “And is he going to get a divorce?”
“He said yes.”
“He’ll have to,” the fortyish one said cheerfully. “A baby’s a baby. And his wife’s never had one.”
Now Ruzena had to admit the truth: “He said he’s going to take me to Prague. He’s going to find me a job there. He said we’re going to Italy on vacation. But he doesn’t want a child right away. And he’s right. The first years are the most beautiful, and if we had a child we wouldn’t be able to make the most of each other.”
The fortyish one was stunned: “What, you’re going to have an abortion?”
Ruzena nodded.
“You’ve gone crazy!” the thin one exclaimed.
“He’s twisted you around his little finger,” said the fortyish one. “The minute you get rid of the child, he’ll send you packing!”
“Why would he?”
“You want to bet?”
“Even if he loves me?”
“And how do you know he loves you?” said the fortyish one.
“He told me he does!”
“And why didn’t you hear from him for two months?”
“He was afraid of love,” said Ruzena.
“What?”
“How can I explain it to you? He was afraid of being in love with me.”
“And that’s why he gave no sign of life?”
“It was a test he set himself. He wanted to be sure he couldn’t forget me. That’s understandable, isn’t it?”
“I see,” said the fortyish one. “And when he found out he’d knocked you up, he suddenly realized he couldn’t forget you.”
“He said he’s glad I’m pregnant. Not because of the child, but because I phoned him. It made him realize he loved me.”
“My God, what an idiot you are!” the thin one exclaimed.
“I don’t see why I’m an idiot.”
“Because this child is the only thing you’ve got,” said the fortyish one. “If you give up the child, you’ll have nothing, and he’ll spit on you.”
“I want him to want me for my own sake and not for the child’s sake!”
“Who do you think you are? Why would he want you for your own sake?”
They discussed the matter passionately for a long time. Her two colleagues went on repeating to Ruzena that the child was her only trump card and that she must not give it up.
“I’d never have an abortion, I can tell you that. Never, do you understand? Never,” the thin one declared.
Ruzena suddenly felt like a little girl and said (they were the same words that, the day before, had restored Klima’s desire to live): “So tell me what I should do!”
“Don’t give in,” said the fortyish one, and then she opened a drawer and took out a tube of tablets. “Here, take one! You’re a nervous wreck. It’ll calm you down.”
Ruzena put the tablet in her mouth and swallowed it.
“Keep the tube. Three times a day, but take them only when you need to calm down. So you don’t go doing stupid things while you’re agitated. Don’t forget he’s a slippery character. It’s not his first time! But this time he won’t get out of it so easily!”
Once more she didn’t know what to do. A little while ago she had thought her mind was made up, but her colleagues’ arguments seemed convincing, and once more she was upset. Torn by indecision, she went downstairs.
In the building’s entrance hall, an excited, red-faced young man rushed toward her.
“I told you never to wait for me here,” she said, looking at him rancorously. “And after what happened yesterday, I can’t believe you’ve got the gall!”
“Please don’t be angry!” the young man cried out in a tone of desperation.
“Shush!” she yelled. “And on top of it don’t make a scene here too,” and she turned to go.
“Don’t go away like that if you don’t want me to make a scene!”
There was nothing she could do. Patients were coming and going through the building lobby and staff people in white coats passing by. She didn’t want to attract attention, and so she had to stay and try hard to look natural: “All right, what do you want?” she said in an undertone.
“Nothing. I only wanted you to forgive me. I’m really sorry about what I did. But please swear to me there’s nothing between you and him.”
“I already told you there’s nothing between us.”
“Don’t be a child. I don’t swear to stupid things like that.”
“Because something’s happened between you.”
“I already said no. And if you don’t believe me, we’ve got nothing more to talk about. He’s just a friend. Don’t I have the right to have friends? I respect him, I’m glad he’s my friend.”
“I understand. I don’t blame you,” said the young man.
“He’s giving a concert here tomorrow. I hope you’re not going to spy on me.”
“I won’t if you give me your word of honor there’s nothing between you.”
“I already told you I won’t lower myself by giving my word of honor for things like that. But I give you my word of honor that if you spy on me once more, you’ll never see me again as long as you live.”
“Ruzena, it’s because I love you,” said the young man unhappily.
“Me too,” Ruzena said curtly. “But I don’t go making scenes on the highway for your sake.”
“That’s because you don’t love me. You’re ashamed of me.”
“Don’t talk nonsense!”
“You never want to go out with me, to be seen with me …”
“Shush!” she repeated, since he had raised his voice. “My father would kill me. I already told you he keeps an eye on me. But now don’t be angry, I really have to go.”
The young man grabbed her arm: “Don’t go yet.”
Ruzena raised her eyes to the ceiling in desperation.
The young man said: “If we got married, everything would be different. Then he couldn’t say anything. We’d have a child.”
“I don’t want to have a child,” Ruzena said sharply. “I’d rather kill myself than have a child!”
“Why?”
“Because. I don’t want a child.”
“I love you, Ruzena,” the young man said again.
And Ruzena responded: “And that’s why you want to drive me to suicide, right?”
“Suicide?” he asked, surprised.
“Yes! Suicide!”
“Ruzena!” said the young man.
“You’re going to drive me to it, all right! I guarantee you! You’re definitely going to drive me to it!”
“Can I come see you this evening?” he asked humbly.
“No, not this evening,” said Ruzena. Then, realizing she had to calm him, she added in a more conciliatory tone: “You can phone me here, Frantisek. But not before Monday.” She turned to go.
“Wait,” said the young man. “I brought you something. So that you’ll forgive me,” and he offered her a small package.
She took it and quickly went out into the street.
“Is Doctor Skreta really such an oddball or is he pretending?” Olga asked Jakub.
“I’ve been asking myself that ever since I’ve known him,” answered Jakub.
“Oddballs have an easy life when they succeed in making people respect their oddballness,” said Olga. “Doctor Skreta is incredibly absentminded. In the middle of a conversation he forgets what he was talking about. Sometimes he starts chatting in the street with somebody and gets to his office two hours late. But nobody dares hold it against him because the doctor is an officially recognized oddball and only a boor would contest his right to oddballness.”
“Oddball or not, I believe he looks after you rather well.”
“He probably does, but everyone here has the impression that for him the medical practice is something secondary that prevents him from devoting himself to lots of much more important projects. For example, tomorrow he’s going to play the drums!”
“Wait a minute,” interrupted Jakub. “Is that really so?”
“Of course! The whole spa is covered with posters announcing that the famous trumpeter Klima is giving a concert here tomorrow and that Doctor Skreta will be playing the drums.”
“That’s incredible,” said Jakub. “It’s not that I’m at all surprised to hear that Skreta intends to play the drums. Skreta is the biggest dreamer I’ve ever known. But I haven’t seen him yet realize a single one of his dreams. When we got to know each other, at the university, Skreta didn’t have much money. He was always broke and always contriving moneymaking schemes. He had a plan at the time to get a female Welsh terrier, because someone told him puppies of this breed brought four thousand crowns apiece. He quickly figured it out. The bitch would have two litters a year, five puppies each. Two times five makes ten, ten times four thousand makes forty thousand crowns per year. He thought of everything. With a lot of difficulty he got the help of the university dining-hall manager, who promised to let the dog have the daily leftovers. He wrote term papers for two women students who promised to walk the dog every day. His student dormitory didn’t allow dogs. So each week he brought the housemother a bouquet of roses until she promised to make an exception for him. He spent two months preparing the ground for his bitch, but we all knew he’d never get her. He needed four thousand crowns to buy her, and no one wanted to lend it to him. No one took him seriously. Everyone considered him a dreamer, surely an exceptionally canny and enterprising one, but only in the realm of the imaginary.”
“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 country.”
“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.
The first man to get out had no pole and gave orders; the old gentlemen, like a squad of bizarre lancers, came to attention and then to at ease a few times. Then the man shouted another order, and the squad of old men headed into the park at a run. There they broke ranks, each one running in a different direction, some along the paths, others on the grass. The patients strolling in the park, the children playing, everyone abruptly stopped to look in amazement at the old gentlemen, armed with long poles, launching an attack.
Ruzena too came out of her meditative stupor to watch what was happening. She recognized her father among the old gentlemen and watched him with disgust but without surprise.
A mutt was scampering on the grass around a birch tree. One of the old gentlemen started to run toward it, and the dog looked at him with surprise. The old man brandished the pole, trying to get the wire loop in front of the dog’s head. But the pole was long, the old hands were feeble, and the old man missed his objective. The wire loop wavered around the dog’s head while the dog watched curiously.
But another pensioner, one with stronger arms, was already rushing to the old man’s aid, and the little dog finally found himself prisoner in the wire loop. The old man pulled on the pole, the wire loop dug into the furry neck, and the dog let out a howl. The two pensioners laughed loudly as they dragged the dog along the lawn toward the parked vehicles. They opened the truck’s large door, from which a wave of barking rang out; then they threw the mutt in.
For Ruzena what she was seeing was merely a component of her own story: she was an unhappy woman caught between two worlds: Klima’s world rejected her, and Frantisek’s world, from which she wanted to escape (the world of banality and boredom, the world of failure and capitulation), had come to look for her here in the guise of this assault team as if it were trying to drag her away by a wire loop.
On a sand path a small boy of about ten was desperately calling his dog, which had strayed into the bushes. Running over to the boy came not the dog but Ruzena’s father, armed with a pole. The boy instantly fell silent. He was afraid to call his dog, knowing that the old man was going to take him away. He rushed down the path to escape him, but the old man too started to run. Now they were running side by side, Ruzena’s father armed with his pole and the small boy sobbing as he ran. And then the boy turned around and, still running, retraced his steps. Ruzena’s father followed suit. Again they were running side by side.
A dachshund came out of the bushes. Ruzena’s father extended his pole toward him, but the dog alertly evaded it and ran over to the boy, who lifted him up and hugged him. Other old men rushed over to help Ruzena’s father and tear the dachshund out of the boy’s arms. The boy was crying, shouting, and grappling with them so that the old men had to twist his arms and put a hand over his mouth because his cries were attracting too much attention from the passersby, who were turning to look but not daring to intervene.
Ruzena didn’t want to see any more of her father and his companions. But where to go? Into her little room, where there was a detective novel that she had not finished and that didn’t interest her; to the movies, where there was a film she had already seen; to the lobby of the Richmond, where there was a television set on all the time? She opted for television. She got up from her bench, and amid the clamor of the old men, which was continuing from all sides, she was again intensely conscious of what she had in her womb, and she told herself that it was something sacred. It transformed and ennobled her. It distinguished her from these fanatics who were chasing dogs. She told herself that she did not have the right to give up, did not have the right to capitulate, because in her belly she was carrying her only hope; her only admission ticket to the future.
When she reached the edge of the park, she caught sight of Jakub. He was standing on the sidewalk in front of the Richmond, watching what was going on. She had only seen him once before, at lunch, but she remembered him. The patient, her temporary neighbor who rapped on the wall every time she turned the radio up a little, was someone she disliked so strongly that Ruzena perceived everything about the woman with attentive loathing.
The man’s face displeased her. It looked ironic to her, and she detested irony. She always thought that irony (all forms of irony) was like an armed guard posted at the entrance to her future, scrutinizing her with an inquisitive eye and rejecting her with a shake of the head. She stuck out her chest, deciding to pass in front of the man with all the provocative arrogance of her breasts, all the pride of her belly.
And the man (she was watching him only out of the corner of her eye) suddenly said in a tender, gentle voice: “Come here, come over here …”
At first she didn’t understand why he was addressing her. The tenderness in his voice puzzled her, and she didn’t know how to respond. But then she turned around and caught sight of a heavy boxer dog with a humanly ugly mug following at her heels.
Jakub’s voice attracted the dog. He took him by the collar: “Come with me or you don’t stand a chance.” The dog lifted his trusting head to the man, his tongue hanging like a cheery little flag.
It was a moment filled with ridiculous, trivial, but obvious humiliation: the man had noticed neither her provocative arrogance nor her pride. She had thought he was talking to her, and he was talking to a dog. She passed in front of him and stopped on the broad front steps of the Richmond.
Two old men armed with poles came rushing across the park toward Jakub. She watched the scene spitefully, unable to keep from taking the old men’s side.
Jakub was leading the dog by the collar toward the hotel steps when one of the old men shouted: “Release that dog at once!”
And the other old man: “In the name of the law!”
Jakub pretended not to notice the old men and kept going, but behind him a pole slowly descended alongside his body and the wire loop wavered clumsily over the boxer’s head.
Jakub grabbed the end of the pole and brusquely pushed it aside.
A third old man ran up and shouted: “It’s an attack on law and order! I’m going to call the police!”
And the high-pitched voice of another old man complained: “He ran on the grass! He ran in the playground, where it’s prohibited! He pissed in the kids’ sandbox! Do you like dogs more than children?”
Ruzena was watching the scene from the top of the steps, and the pride that a moment before she had felt only in her belly flowed throughout her body, filling her with defiant strength. Jakub and the dog came up the steps near her, and she said: “It’s not allowed to take a dog inside.”
Jakub answered her calmly, but she could no longer back down. Her legs apart, she planted herself in front of the Richmond’s wide doorway and insisted: “This is a hotel for patients, not a hotel for dogs. Dogs are prohibited here.”
“Why don’t you get a pole with a loop too, young lady?” said Jakub, trying to go through the doorway with the dog.
Ruzena caught in Jakub’s words the irony she so detested and that sent her back where she had come from, back where she did not want to be. Anger blurred her sight. She grabbed hold of the dog by the collar. Now they were both holding him. Jakub was pulling him in and she was pulling him out.
Jakub seized Ruzena’s wrist and pried her fingers loose from the collar with such violence that she staggered.
“You’d rather see poodles in cradles than babies!” she shouted after him.
Jakub turned around and their eyes met, joined by sudden, naked hatred.
The boxer scampered around the room curiously, unaware that he had just escaped danger. Jakub stretched out on the daybed, wondering what to do with him. He liked the lively, good-natured dog. The insouciance with which, in a few minutes, he had made himself at home in a strange room and struck up a friendship with a strange man was nearly suspicious and seemed to verge on stupidity. After sniffing all corners of the room, he leaped up on the daybed and lay down beside Jakub. Jakub was startled, but he welcomed without reservation this sign of camaraderie. He put his hand on the dog’s back and felt with delight the warmth of the animal’s body. He had always liked dogs. They were familiar, affectionate, devoted, and at the same time entirely incomprehensible. We will never know what actually goes on in the heads and hearts of these confident, merry emissaries from incomprehensible nature.
He scratched the dog’s back and thought about the scene he had just witnessed. The old men armed with long poles merged in his mind with prison guards, examining magistrates, and informers who spied on neighbors to see if they talked politics while shopping. What drove such people to their sinister occupations? Spite? Certainly, but also the desire for order. Because the desire for order tries to transform the human world into an inorganic reign in which everything goes well, everything functions as a subject of an impersonal will. The desire for order is at the same time a desire for death, because life is a perpetual violation of order. Or, inversely, the desire for order is the virtuous pretext by which man’s hatred for man justifies its crimes.
Then he thought of the blonde young woman who tried to prevent him from entering the Richmond with the dog, and he felt a painful hatred for her. The old men armed with poles didn’t irritate him, he knew them well, he took them into account, he never doubted they existed and had to go on existing and would always be his persecutors. But that young woman, she was his eternal defeat. She was pretty, and she had appeared on the scene not as a persecutor but as a spectator who, fascinated by the spectacle, identified with the persecutors. Jakub was always horror-stricken by the idea that onlookers are ready to restrain the victim during an execution. For, with time, the hangman has become someone near at hand, a familiar figure, while the persecuted one has taken on something of an aristocratic smell. The soul of the crowd, which formerly identified with the miserable persecuted ones, today identifies with the misery of the persecutors. Because to hunt men in our century is to hunt the privileged: those who read books or own a dog.
He felt the animal’s warm body under his hand, and he realized that the blonde young woman had come to announce to him, as a secret sign, that he would never be liked in this country and that she, the people’s messenger, would always be ready to hold him down so as to offer him up to the men threatening him with poles with wire loops. He hugged the dog and pressed him close. He mused that he could not leave him here at risk, that he must take him along far away from this country as a souvenir of persecution, as one of those who had escaped. Then he realized that he was hiding this merry pooch here as if he were an outlaw fleeing the police, and this notion seemed comic to him.
Someone knocked at the door, and Dr. Skreta entered: “You’re finally back, and it’s about time. I’ve been looking for you all afternoon. What have you been up to?”
“I went to see Olga, and then …” He started to tell about the dog, but Skreta interrupted him:
“I should have known. Wasting time like that when we’ve got a lot of things to discuss! I’ve already told Bertlef you’re here, and I’ve arranged for him to invite both of us.”
At that moment the dog jumped off the daybed, went over to the doctor, stood up on his hind legs, and put his front legs on Skreta’s chest. He scratched the dog on the nape of the neck. “Yes, yes, Bob, you’re a good dog …” he said, not surprised to see him there.
“His name is Bob?”
“Yes, it’s Bob,” said Skreta, and he told him that the dog belonged to the owner of an inn in the forest nearby; everyone knew the dog, because he roamed everywhere.
The dog understood that they were talking about him, and this pleased him. He wagged his tail and tried to lick Skreta’s face.
“You’re shrewd psychologically,” said the doctor. “You have to study Bertlef in depth for me today. I don’t know how to handle him. I’ve got great plans for him.”
“To sell his pious pictures?”
“Pious pictures, that’s silly,” said Skreta. “This is about something much more important. I want him to adopt me.”
“Adopt you?”
“Adopt me as a son. It’s vital to me. If I become his adopted son, I’ll automatically acquire American citizenship.”
“You want to emigrate?”
“No. I’m engaged in long-term experiments here, and I don’t want to interrupt them. By the way, I have to talk to you about that too today, because I need you for these experiments. With American citizenship, I’d also get an American passport, and I could travel freely all over the world. You know very well that otherwise it’s difficult to leave this country. And I want very much to go to Iceland.”
“Why exactly Iceland?”
“Because it has the best salmon fishing,” said Skreta. And he went on: “What complicates things a bit is that Bertlef is only fifteen years older than I am. I have to explain to him that adoptive fatherhood is a legal status that has nothing to do with biological fatherhood, and that theoretically he could be my adoptive father even if he were younger than I. Maybe he’ll understand this, though he has a very young wife. She’s one of my patients. By the way, she’ll be arriving here the day after tomorrow. I’ve sent Suzy to Prague to meet her when she lands.”
“Does Suzy know about your plan?”
“Of course. I urged her at all costs to gain her future mother-in-law’s friendship.”
“And the American? What does he say about it?”
“That’s just what’s most difficult. The man can’t understand it if I don’t spell it out for him. That’s why I need you, to study him and tell me how to handle him.”
Skreta looked at his watch and announced that Bertlef was waiting for them.
“But what are we going to do with Bob?” asked Jakub.
“How come you brought him here?” said Skreta.
Jakub explained to his friend how he had saved the dog’s life, but Skreta was immersed in his thoughts and listened to him absentmindedly. After Jakub had finished, he said: “The innkeeper’s wife is one of my patients. Two years ago she gave birth to a beautiful baby. They love Bob, you should bring him back to them tomorrow. Meanwhile, let’s give him a sleeping tablet so he won’t bother us.”
He took a tube out of his pocket and shook out a tablet. He called the dog over, opened his jaws, and dropped the tablet down his gullet.
“In a minute, he’ll be sleeping sweetly,” he said, and he left the room with Jakub.
Bertlef welcomed his two visitors, and Jakub ran his eyes over the room. Then he went over to the painting of the bearded saint: “I’ve heard that you paint,” he said to Bertlef.
“Yes,” Bertlef replied, “that is Saint Lazarus, my patron saint.”
“Why did you paint a blue halo?” asked Jakub, showing his surprise.
“I am glad you asked me that question. As a rule people look at a painting and don’t even know what they are seeing. I made the halo blue simply because in reality halos are blue.”
Jakub again showed surprise, and Bertlef went on: “People who become attached to God with a particularly powerful love are rewarded by experiencing a sacred joy that flows through their entire being and radiates out from there. The light of this divine joy is soft and peaceful, and its color is the celestial azure.”
“Wait a moment,” Jakub interrupted. “Are you saying that halos are more than a symbol?”
“Certainly,” said Bertlef. “But you should not imagine that they emanate continuously from saints’ heads and that saints go around in the world like itinerant lanterns. Of course not. It is only at certain moments of intense inner joy that their brows give off a bluish light. In the first centuries after the death of Jesus, in an era when saints were numerous and there were many people who knew them well, no one had the slightest doubt about the color of halos, and on all the paintings and frescoes of that time you can see that the halos are blue. It was only in the fifth century that painters started little by little to depict them in other colors, such as orange or yellow. Much later, in Gothic painting, there are only golden halos. This was more decorative and better conveyed the terrestrial power and glory of the church. But that halo no more resembled the true halo than the church of the time resembled the early church.”
“That’s something I was unaware of,” said Jakub, and Bertlef went over to the liquor cabinet. He conferred with his two visitors for a few moments about what to drink. When he had poured cognac into the three glasses, he turned to the physician: “Please don’t forget about that unhappy expectant father. It is very important to me!”
Skreta assured Bertlef that it would all end well, and Jakub then asked what they were talking about. After they told him (let us appreciate the graceful discretion of the two men, who, even though it was only Jakub with them, mentioned no names), he expressed great pity for the unfortunate begetter: “Which of us hasn’t lived through this martyrdom! It’s one of life’s great trials. Those who give in and become fathers against their will are doomed forever by their defeat. They become spiteful, like all losers, and they wish the same fate on everyone else.”
“My friend!” Bertlef exclaimed. “You are speaking in the company of a happy father! If you stayed here for another day or two, you would see my son, a beautiful child, and you would take back what you have just said!”
“I wouldn’t take anything back,” said Jakub, “because you didn’t become a father against your will!”
“Certainly not. I became a father by my own free will and by the good will of Doctor Skreta.”
The doctor nodded with an air of satisfaction and declared that he too had a notion of fatherhood different from Jakub’s, as shown, by the way, by the blessed state of his dear Suzy. “The only thing,” he added, “that puzzles me a bit about procreation is how senselessly parents choose each other. It’s incredible what hideous-looking individuals decide to procreate. They probably imagine that the burden of ugliness will be lighter if they share it with their descendants.”
Bertlef called Dr. Skreta’s viewpoint aesthetic racism: “Don’t forget that not only was Socrates ugly but also that many famous women lovers did not distinguish themselves at all by their physical perfection. Aesthetic racism is almost always a sign of inexperience. Those who have not made their way far enough into the world of amorous delights judge women only by what can be seen. But those who really know women understand that the eye reveals only a minute fraction of what a woman can offer us. When God bade mankind be fruitful and multiply, Doctor, He was thinking of the ugly as well as of the beautiful. I am convinced, I might add, that the aesthetic criterion does not come from God but from the devil. In paradise no distinction was made between ugliness and beauty.”
Jakub reentered the conversation, asserting that aesthetic considerations played no part in the loathing he felt for procreation. “But I can cite ten other reasons for not being a father.”
“What are they? I am curious.”
“First of all, I don’t like motherhood,” said Jakub, and he broke off pensively. “Our century has already unmasked all myths. Childhood has long ceased to be an age of innocence. Freud discovered infant sexuality and told us all about Oedipus. Only Jocasta remains untouchable; no one dares tear off her veil. Motherhood is the last and greatest taboo, the one that harbors the most grievous curse. There is no stronger bond than the one that shackles mother to child. This bond cripples the child’s soul forever and prepares for the mother, when her son has grown up, the most cruel of all the griefs of love. I say that motherhood is a curse, and I refuse to contribute to it.”
“Next!” said Bertlef.
“Another reason I don’t want to add to the number of mothers,” said Jakub with some embarrassment, “is that I love the female body, and I am disgusted by the thought of my beloved’s breast becoming a milk-bag.”
“Next!” said Bertlef.
“The doctor here will certainly confirm that physicians and nurses treat women hospitalized after an aborted pregnancy more harshly than those who have given birth, and show some contempt toward them even though they themselves will, at least once in their lives, need a similar operation. But for them it’s a reflex stronger than any kind of thought, because the cult of procreation is an imperative of nature. That’s why it’s useless to look for the slightest rational argument in natalist propaganda. Do you perhaps think it’s the voice of Jesus you’re hearing in the natalist morality of the church? Do you think it’s the voice of Marx you’re hearing in the natalist propaganda of the Communist state? Impelled merely by the desire to perpetuate the species, mankind will end up smothering itself on its small planet. But the natalist propaganda mill grinds on, and the public is moved to tears by pictures of nursing mothers and infants making faces. It disgusts me. It chills me to think that, along with millions of other enthusiasts, I could be bending over a cradle with a silly smile.”
“Next!” said Bertlef.
“And of course I also have to ask myself what sort of world I’d be sending my child into. School soon takes him away to stuff his head with the falsehoods I’ve fought in vain against all my life. Should I see my son become a conformist fool? Or should I instill my own ideas into him and see him suffer because he’ll be dragged into the same conflicts I was?”
“Next!” said Bertlef.
“And of course I also have to think of myself. In this country children pay for their parents’ disobedience, and parents for their children’s disobedience. How many young people have been denied education because their parents fell into disgrace? And how many parents have chosen permanent cowardice for the sole purpose of preventing harm to their children? Anyone who wants to preserve at least some freedom here shouldn’t have children,” Jakub said, and fell into silence.
“You still need five more reasons to complete your decalogue,” said Bertlef.
“The last reason carries so much weight that it counts for five,” said Jakub. “Having a child is to show an absolute accord with mankind. If I have a child, it’s as though I’m saying: I was born and have tasted life and declare it so good that it merits being duplicated.”
“And you have not found life to be good?” asked Bertlef.
Jakub tried to be precise, and said cautiously: “All I know is that I could never say with complete conviction: Man is a wonderful being and I want to reproduce him.”
“That’s because you’ve only known life in its worst aspect,” said Dr. Skreta. “You’ve never known how to live. You’ve always thought that it was your duty to be, as they say, in the thick of things. In the core of reality. But what was that reality for you? Politics. And politics is what is least essential and least precious in life. Politics is the dirty foam on the surface of the river, while the life of the river is lived much deeper. The study of female fertility has been going on for thousands of years. It’s had a solid, steady history. And it’s quite indifferent to which government it is that happens to be in power. When I put on a rubber glove and examine a female organ, I’m much nearer the core of life than you, who nearly lost your life because you were concerned about the good of humanity.”
Instead of protesting Jakub agreed with his friend’s reproaches, and Dr. Skreta, feeling encouraged, went on: “Archimedes with his circles, Michelangelo with his block of stone, Pasteur with his test tubes—they and they alone have transformed human life and made real history, while the politicians …” Skreta paused and waved his hand scornfully.
“While the politicians?” asked Jakub, and went on: “I’ll tell you. If science and art are in fact the proper, real arenas of history, politics on the contrary is the closed scientific laboratory where unprecedented experiments are conducted on mankind. There human guinea pigs are hurled through trap doors and then brought back onto the stage, tempted by applause and terrified by the gallows, denounced and forced to denounce. I worked in that lab as an assistant, but I also served there several times as a victim of vivisection. I know that I created nothing of value there (no more than those who worked with me did), but I probably came to understand better than others what man is.”
“I understand you,” said Bertlef, “and I too know that laboratory, even though I never worked as an assistant but always as a guinea pig. I was in Germany when the war broke out. The woman I was in love with at the time denounced me to the Gestapo. They had come to her and shown her a photo of me in bed with another woman. She was hurt by it, and, as you know, love often takes on the features of hate. I went to prison with the strange sensation of having been led there by love. Is it not wonderful to find oneself in the hands of the Gestapo and to realize that this, in fact, is the privilege of a man who is loved too much?”
Jakub replied: “Something that always utterly disgusts me about mankind is seeing how its cruelty, its baseness, and its stupidity manage to wear the lyrical mask. She sends you to your death, and she experiences it as a romantic feat of wounded love. And you mount the scaffold because of an ordinary narrow-minded woman, feeling that you are playing a role in a tragedy Shakespeare wrote for you.”
“After the war she came to me in tears,” Bertlef went on, as though he had not heard Jakub’s objection. “I told her: ‘Don’t worry, Bertlef is never vindictive.’”
“You know,” said Jakub, “I often think about King Herod. You know the story. It’s said that when he learned about the birth of the future king of the Jews, he was afraid he’d lose his throne, and he had all the newborns murdered. Personally I have a different view of Herod, even though I know it’s only an imaginary game. To my mind Herod was an educated, wise, and very generous king, who had worked for a long time in the laboratory of politics and had learned much about life and mankind. He came to think that perhaps man should not have been created. His doubt, I might add, was not so uncalled-for and reprehensible. If I’m not mistaken, even the Lord had doubts about mankind and thought of destroying this part of His work.”
“Yes,” Bertlef agreed, “it is in the sixth chapter of Genesis: ‘I will destroy man whom I have created … for it repenteth me that I have made him.’”
“And perhaps it was only a moment of weakness on the Lord’s part finally to have permitted Noah to take refuge in his ark in order to start afresh the history of man. Can we be sure that God never regretted this weakness? But whether He regretted it or not, there was nothing more to do. God can’t make Himself ridiculous by constantly changing His decisions. But what if it was He who put the idea into Herod’s head? Can that be ruled out?”
Bertlef shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.
“Herod was a king. He was not just responsible for himself alone. He couldn’t tell himself, as I do: Let others do what they want, I refuse to procreate. Herod was a king and knew that he had to decide not only for himself but also for others, and he decided on behalf of all mankind that man would no longer reproduce. This is how the massacre of the newborns came about. His motives were not as vile as the ones tradition attributes to him. Herod was driven by a most generous wish finally to free the world from mankind’s clutches.”
“Your interpretation of Herod pleases me greatly,” said Bertlef. “It pleases me so much that from now on I shall see the Massacre of the Innocents as you do. But don’t forget that at the very moment Herod decided that mankind would cease to exist, there was born in Bethlehem a little boy who was to elude the king’s knife. And this child grew up and told people that only one thing was needed to make life worth living: to love one another. Herod was probably better educated and more experienced. Jesus was certainly wet behind the ears and did not know much about life. All his teachings might be explained by his youth and inexperience. By his naïveté, if you wish. And yet he possessed the truth.”
“The truth? Who has proved this truth?” Jakub asked sharply.
“No one,” said Bertlef. “No one has proved it, and no one ever will prove it. Jesus loved his Father so much that he could not admit his Father’s work was bad. He was not led to this conclusion by reason but by love. This is why only our hearts can bring the quarrel between Jesus and Herod to a close. Is it worth being a man, yes or no? I have no proof of it, but, along with Jesus, I believe the answer is yes.” That said, he turned with a smile to Dr. Skreta: “That is why I sent my wife here to take the cure under the direction of Doctor Skreta, who to my mind is one of the holy disciples of Jesus, for he knows how to perform miracles and bring back to life women’s dormant wombs. I drink to his health!”
Jakub had always treated Olga with paternal responsibility and playfully liked to call himself her “old gentleman.” She knew, however, that he had many women with whom things were entirely different, and she envied them. But today, for the first time, she thought there was really something old about Jakub. In the way he behaved with her, she sensed the mustiness that for the young emanates from the generation of their elders.
Old men are recognizable by their habit of bragging about past sufferings and making a museum of them (ah, these sad museums have so few visitors!). Olga realized that she was the most important living object in Jakub’s museum and that Jakub’s generously altruistic attitude toward her was meant to move visitors to tears.
Today too the most precious nonliving object in the museum had been revealed to her: the pale-blue tablet. Not long before, when he had unfolded in her presence the piece of paper the tablet was wrapped in, she had been surprised by not feeling the slightest emotion. Though she understood Jakub’s contemplation of suicide in a bad time, she found the solemnity with which he let her know about it ridiculous. She found it ridiculous that he had unfolded the tissue paper so cautiously, as if the tablet were a precious diamond. And she didn’t see why he wanted to give the poison back to Dr. Skreta on the day of his departure, since he had maintained that every adult should under all circumstances be in control of his own death. If, once he was abroad, he were stricken by cancer, would he not need the poison? No, for Jakub the tablet was not simply poison, it was a symbolic prop he now wanted to return to the high priest in a religious service. It was enough to make you laugh.
She left the baths and headed toward the Richmond. Despite all her disillusioned reflections, she looked forward to seeing Jakub. She had a great desire to desecrate his museum, to function in it no longer as an object but as a woman. She was thus a bit disappointed to find a note on his door asking her to join him in the room next door, where he was waiting for her with Bertlef and Dr. Skreta. The thought of being in the company of others made her lose heart, all the more so since she didn’t know Bertlef, and Dr. Skreta usually treated her with friendly but obvious indifference.
Bertlef quickly made her forget her shyness. He introduced himself with a deep bow and chided Dr. Skreta for not having acquainted him sooner with such an interesting woman.
Skreta responded that Jakub had asked him to look after the young woman, and he had deliberately refrained from introducing her to Bertlef because he knew that no woman could resist him.
Bertlef greeted this excuse with a satisfied smile. Then he picked up the telephone receiver to order dinner.
“It’s incredible,” said Dr. Skreta, “how our friend manages to live affluently in this hole where there’s not a single restaurant that serves a decent meal.”
Bertlef dug his hand into an open cigar box, beside the telephone, which was filled with half-dollar pieces: “Avarice is a sin,” he said, and smiled.
Jakub remarked that he had never before met anyone who believed so fervently in God while knowing so well how to enjoy life.
“That is probably because you have never before met a true Christian. The word of the Gospel, as you know, is a message of joy. The enjoyment of life is the most important teaching of Jesus.”
Olga considered this an opportunity to enter the conversation: “Insofar as I can trust what my teachers said, Christians saw earthly life as a vale of tears and rejoiced in the idea that true life would begin for them after death.”
“My dear young lady,” Bertlef said, “never believe teachers.”
“And what the saints all did,” Olga went on, “was to renounce life. Instead of making love they flagellated themselves; instead of discussing things as you and I are doing they retreated to hermitages; and instead of ordering dinner by telephone they chewed roots.”
“You don’t understand anything about saints, my dear. These people were immensely attached to the pleasures of life. But they attained them by other means. In your opinion, what is man’s supreme pleasure? You could try to guess, but you would be deceiving yourself, because you are not sincere enough. This is not a reproach, for sincerity requires self-knowledge and self-knowledge is the fruit of age. How could a young woman like you, who radiates youthfulness, be sincere? She cannot be sincere because she does not even know what there is within her. But if she did know, she would have to admit along with me that the greatest pleasure is to be admired. Do you agree?”
Olga replied that she knew of greater pleasures.
“No,” said Bertlef. “Take for instance your famous runner, the one every child here knows about because he won three Olympic events. Do you think he renounced life? And yet instead of chatting, making love, and eating well, he surely had to spend his time constantly running round and round a stadium. His training very much resembled what our most celebrated saints did. Saint Makarios of Alexandria, when he was in the desert, regularly refilled a basket with sand, put it on his back, and traveled endless distances in this way day after day until he dropped from total exhaustion. But both for your runner and for Saint Makarios, there was surely a great reward that amply repaid them for all their efforts. Do you know what it is to hear the applause in an immense Olympic stadium? There is no greater joy! Saint Makarios of Alexandria knew why he carried a basket of sand on his back. The glory of his desert marathons soon spread throughout Christendom. And Saint Makarios was like your runner. Your runner, too, first won the five-thousand-meter race, then the ten-thousand-meter, and finally nothing sufficed for him but to win the marathon as well. The desire for admiration is insatiable. Saint Makarios went to a monastery in Thebes without making himself known and asked to be accepted as a member. Then, when the Lenten fast began, came his hour of glory. All the monks fasted sitting down, but he remained standing for the entire forty-day fast! You have no idea what a triumph that was! Or remember Saint Simeon Stylites! In the desert he built a pillar with a narrow platform on top. There was no room to sit on it, he had to stand. And he remained standing there for the rest of his life, and all Christendom enthusiastically admired this man’s incredible record, which seemed to exceed human limits. Saint Simeon Stylites was the Gagarin of the fifth century. Can you imagine the happiness of Saint Geneviève of Paris the day she learned from a Welsh trading mission that Saint Simeon Stylites had heard of her and blessed her from atop his pillar? And why do you think he wanted to set a record? Because he didn’t care about life and mankind? Don’t be naïve! The church fathers knew very well that Saint Simeon Stylites was vain, and they put him to the test. In the name of their spiritual authority they ordered him to descend from his pillar and retire from competition. It was a harsh blow to Saint Simeon Stylites! But he was either wise or cunning enough to obey them. The church fathers were not hostile to his record-setting, but they wanted to be certain that Saint Simeon’s vanity did not prevail over his sense of discipline. As soon as they saw him sadly descending from his perch, they ordered him to climb back up, ensuring that Saint Simeon could die on his pillar surrounded by the love and admiration of the world.”
Olga listened attentively, and upon hearing Bertlef’s last words she began to laugh.
“That tremendous desire for admiration has nothing laughable about it, I find it rather moving,” said Bertlef. “Someone who desires admiration is attached to his fellow men, he cares about them, he cannot live without them. Saint Simeon Stylites is alone in the desert on a square meter of pillar. And yet he is with all mankind! He imagines millions of eyes raised toward him. He is present in millions of thoughts, and this delights him. It is a great example of love for mankind and love for life. You would not suspect, dear young lady, to what extent Simeon Stylites continues to live in every one of us. And to this day he is the better of the polarities of our being.”
Someone knocked at the door, and in came a waiter pushing a cart loaded with food. He spread a tablecloth and set the table. Bertlef dug into the cigar box and stuffed a fistful of coins into the waiter’s pocket. Then they all began to eat, with the waiter behind them pouring wine and serving the various dishes.
Bertlef commented greedily on the tastiness of each dish, and Skreta remarked that he didn’t know how long it had been since he had had such a good meal. “Maybe the last time was when my mother was still cooking for me, but I was still little then. I’ve been an orphan since the age of five. After that, the world around me was a strange world, and the cooking also seemed strange to me. The love of food arises from the love of the nearest and dearest.”
“Quite right,” said Bertlef, lifting a mouthful of beef to his lips.
“A forsaken child loses its appetite,” Skreta went on. “Believe me, to this day I feel bad about having no father or mother. Believe me, to this day, and as old as I am, I’d give anything to have a papa.”
“You overestimate family affinities,” said Bertlef. “Everyone is your nearest and dearest. Don’t forget what Jesus said when they tried to call him back to his mother and brothers. He pointed to his disciples and said: ‘Here are my mother and my brothers.’”
“And yet the Holy Church,” Dr. Skreta ventured to reply, “didn’t have the slightest desire to abolish the family or to replace it with a community open to everyone.”
“There is a difference between the Holy Church and Jesus. And to my mind Saint Paul, if you will allow me to say so, is not only the successor but also the falsifier of Jesus. First there is the sudden change from Saul to Paul! As if we have not known enough of those passionate fanatics who trade one faith for another in the course of a night! And let no one tell me that the fanatics are guided by love! They are moralists muttering their ten commandments. But Jesus was not a moralist. Remember what he said when they reproached him for not celebrating the Sabbath: ‘The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.’ Jesus loved women! And can you picture Saint Paul with the features of a lover? Saint Paul would condemn me because I love women. But Jesus would not. I don’t see anything bad about loving women, many women, and about being loved by women, many women.” Bertlef smiled, and his smile expressed great self-satisfaction: “My friends, I have not had an easy life, and more than once I have looked death in the eye. But in one thing God has shown himself to be generous to me. I have had a multitude of women, and they have loved me.”
The guests finished their meal, and the waiter was beginning to clear the table when there was another knock at the door. It was weak, shy knocking, as if begging for encouragement. “Come in!” said Bertlef.
The door opened, and a child came in. It was a little girl about five years old; she was wearing a ruffled white dress belted with a broad white ribbon tied in back with a huge bow looking like a pair of wings. She was holding a flower by the stem: a large dahlia. Seeing in the room so many people who all seemed to be staring dumbfounded at her, she stopped, not daring to go farther.
Then Bertlef, beaming, stood up and said: “Don’t be afraid, little angel, come on in.”
And the child, as though she were seeing support in Bertlef’s smile, burst out laughing and ran over to Bertlef, who accepted the flower and kissed her on the forehead.
The guests and the waiter watched this scene with surprise. With the huge white bow on her back, the child really did look like a little angel. And Bertlef, bending over her with the dahlia in his hand, made one think of the Baroque statues of saints to be seen in the country’s small towns.
“Dear friends,” he said, turning to his guests, “I have had a very pleasant time with you, and I hope that you too have enjoyed yourselves. I would gladly stay with you late into the night, but as you can see, I am unable to. This beautiful angel has come to summon me to a person who is waiting for me. I told you that life has struck me with all kinds of blows, but women have loved me.”
Bertlef held the dahlia against his chest with one hand and with the other touched the little girl’s shoulder. He bowed to his small group of guests. Olga thought him ridiculously theatrical, and she was delighted to see him go and that, finally, she would soon be alone with Jakub.
Bertlef turned around and, taking the little girl’s hand, headed toward the door. But before leaving the room he bent over the cigar box to fill his pocket with an ample fistful of coins.
The waiter stacked the dirty dishes and empty bottles on the cart, and when he had left the room, Olga asked: “Who is that little girl?”
“I’ve never seen her before,” said Skreta.
“She really did have the look of a little angel,” said Jakub.
“An angel who procures mistresses for him?” said Olga.
“Yes,” said Jakub. “A procurer and go-between angel. It’s exactly how I picture his guardian angel.”
“I don’t know if she’s an angel,” said Skreta, “but what’s curious is that I’ve never seen this little girl before, although I know nearly everybody around here.”
“In that case there’s only one explanation,” said Jakub. “She’s not of this world.”
“Whether she’s an angel or the chambermaid’s daughter, I can guarantee you,” said Olga, “that he hasn’t gone to meet a woman! He’s a terribly vain character, and all he does is brag.”
“I find him likable,” said Jakub.
“He might well be,” said Olga, “but I still insist he’s the vainest kind of character. I’m willing to bet that an hour before we arrived he gave some of those fifty-cent coins to that little girl and asked her to come here at a certain time holding a flower. Believers have a great talent for staging miracles.”
“I very much hope you’re right,” said Dr. Skreta. “Because Mister Bertlef is actually a very sick man, and a night of love would expose him to great danger.”
“You see, I was right. All his hints about women are just bluster.”
“My dear young woman,” said Dr. Skreta, “I’m his physician and his friend, and yet I’m not so sure. I don’t know.”
“Is he really so ill?” asked Jakub.
“Why do you think he’s been staying here for nearly a year now, and his young wife, to whom he’s very attached, comes to see him only now and again?”
“And all of a sudden it’s a bit dreary here without him,” said Jakub.
True, all three suddenly felt orphaned and not at home in the room, and they had no wish to stay any longer.
Skreta got up from his chair: “You and I are going to take Miss Olga home, and then we’ll go for a walk. We’ve got a lot of things to discuss.”
Olga protested: “I don’t want to go to sleep yet!”
“On the contrary, it’s high time. I’m ordering you to as your physician,” Skreta said sternly.
They left the Richmond and headed across the park. On the way Olga found an opportunity to say softly to Jakub: “I wanted to spend the evening with you …”
But Jakub merely shrugged his shoulders, for Skreta was imperiously imposing his will. They escorted the young woman to Karl Marx House, and in his friend’s presence Jakub did not even pat her on the head, as he usually did. The doctor’s antipathy toward her plumlike breasts had deterred him. He saw the disappointment in Olga’s face and was annoyed with himself for distressing her.
“So what do you think?” asked Skreta when he found himself alone with his friend on the path. “You heard me say I need a father. It would have wrung tears from a stone. But he started talking about Saint Paul! Is it really so hard for him to understand? For two years now I’ve been telling him I’m an orphan, two years praising the advantages of an American passport. I’ve alluded a thousand times in passing to various adoption cases. I figured all these allusions would have given him the idea of adopting me long ago.”
“He’s too absorbed in himself,” said Jakub.
“That’s so,” Skreta agreed.
“If he’s seriously ill, that’s not surprising,” said Jakub. “Is he really as sick as you said he is?”
“It’s really worse,” said Skreta. “Six months ago he had his second and very serious heart attack, and since then he hasn’t been allowed to travel far, and he lives here like a prisoner. His life hangs by a thread. And he knows it.”
“You see,” said Jakub, “in that case you should have realized a long time ago that the allusions method is no good, because any allusion only causes him to think about himself. You should make your request directly. He certainly will agree, because he likes to please people. It fits with his idea of himself. He wants to give people pleasure.”
“You’re a genius!” Skreta exclaimed, coming to a stop. “It’s simple once you think of it, and exactly right! Like an idiot I’ve wasted two years of my life because I didn’t know how to figure him out! I’ve spent two years of my life going about it in roundabout ways! And it’s your fault, because you should have advised me long ago.”
“You should have asked me long ago!”
“You haven’t come to see me for two years!”
The two friends strolled on in the dark park, breathing in the crisp early autumn air.
“I made him a father,” said Skreta, “so maybe I deserve his making me his son!”
Jakub agreed.
“What’s unfortunate,” Skreta went on after a long silence, “is that one is surrounded by idiots. Is there anyone in this town I can ask for advice? Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile. I don’t think about anything else, because it’s my specialty: mankind produces an incredible quantity of idiots. The more stupid the individual, the more he wants to procreate. The perfect creatures at most engender a single child, and the best of them, like you, decide not to procreate at all. That’s a disaster. And I spend my time dreaming of a world a man would come into not among strangers but among brothers.”
Jakub listened to Skreta’s speech without finding much of interest in it.
Skreta went on: “Don’t think those are just words! I’m not a politician but a physician, and the word ‘brother’ has an exact meaning for me. Brothers are those who have at least a mother or a father in common. All of Solomon’s sons, even though they had a hundred different mothers, were brothers. That must have been marvelous! What do you think?”
Jakub breathed the crisp air and could not think of anything to say.
“Of course,” Skreta went on, “it’s very hard to force people while they’re having sex to take an interest in future generations. But that’s not what it’s about. In our century there should really be other ways of solving the problem of rational procreation of children. We can’t go on forever mixing up love and procreation.”
Jakub approved of that idea.
“But you’re only interested in detaching love from procreation,” said Skreta. “For me, instead, it’s a matter of detaching procreation from love. I want to initiate you into my project. It was my semen in that test tube.”
This time he got Jakub’s attention.
“What do you say to that?”
“It’s a marvelous idea,” said Jakub.
“It’s extraordinary!” said Skreta. “By this procedure I’ve already cured quite a few women. Don’t forget that many women can’t have children only because it’s the husbands who are sterile. I have a large clientele from all over the country, and for the last four years I’ve been in charge of gynecological examinations at the town clinic. It’s no big deal to fill a syringe from a test tube and then deposit the seminal fluid into a woman being examined.”
“So how many children do you have?”
“I’ve been doing this for several years, but I can only make a very approximate tally. I can’t always be certain I’m the father because my patients are, so to speak, unfaithful to me with their husbands. And besides, they go back home, and it happens that I don’t find out if the treatment succeeded. Things are clearer with the local patients.”
Skreta fell silent, and Jakub gave himself up to tender reverie. Skreta’s project delighted and moved him, for in it he recognized his old friend the incorrigible dreamer: “It must be terrific to have children with so many women,” he said.
“And they’re all brothers,” Skreta added.
They strolled on, breathing the fragrant air in silence. Then Skreta resumed talking: “You know, I often tell myself that even though there are a lot of things here we don’t like, we’re responsible for this country. It infuriates me that I can’t travel abroad freely, but I could never defame my country. I’d have to defame myself first. And which one of us has ever done anything to make this country better? Which one of us has ever done anything to make it possible to live here? To make it be a country where you could feel at home? Simply to feel at home …” Skreta now spoke more softly, tenderly: “Feeling at home is being among one’s own. And because you said you’re leaving, I’ve thought that I have to persuade you to take part in my project. I’ve got a test tube for you. You’ll be abroad, and your children will be brought into the world here. And in ten or twenty years you’ll see what a splendid country this will be!”
There was a round moon in the sky (it will stay there until the last night of our story, which we could therefore call a lunar story), and Dr. Skreta accompanied
Jakub back to the Richmond. “You don’t have to leave tomorrow,” he said.
“I have to. They’re waiting for me,” said Jakub, but he knew that he would let himself be persuaded.
“Nonsense,” said Skreta. “I’m glad you like my project. Tomorrow we’re going to discuss it in detail.”