the tablet without a moment's hesitation.'
'Maybe because he's an oddball.'
'Maybe. But mostly because he understood me. He knew that I wasn't a hysteric who liked to play suicide games. He understood what was at stake for me. I'm going to give him back the tablet today. I don't need it anymore.'
'So all the dangers are gone?'
'Tomorrow morning I'm leaving the country for good. I've been invited to teach at a university, and I've got permission from the authorities to leave.'
He had finally said it. Jakub looked at Olga and saw that she was smiling. She took his hand: 'Really? That's very good news! I'm very pleased for you!'
She was showing the same disinterested pleasure he himself would feel if he were to learn that Olga was leaving for a foreign country where she would have a more pleasant life. This was surprising, because he had always feared she had an emotional attachment to him. He was happy that it wasn't so, but he also surprised himself by being a bit upset.
Olga was so interested in Jakub's disclosure that she forgot to go on questioning him about the pale-blue tablet lying between them on the piece of tissue paper, and Jakub had to tell her in detail all the circumstances of his future career.
'I'm extremely pleased you managed it. Here you'd always be suspect. They haven't even let you practice
your profession. And what's more, they spend their time preaching love of country. How can you love a country where you're forbidden to work? I can tell you I don't feel any love for my homeland. Is that bad of me?'
'I don't know,' said Jakub. 'I really don't. As far as I'm concerned, I've been rather attached to this coun- try.
'Maybe it's bad of me,' Olga went on, 'but I don't feel tied to anything. What could I be attached to here?'
'Even painful memories are ties that bind.'
'Bind us to what? To staying in the country where we were born? I don't understand how people can talk about freedom and not get that millstone off their necks. As if a tree were at home where it can't grow. A tree is at home wherever water percolates through the soil.'
'And you, do you find enough water here?'
'All in all, yes. Now that they're finally letting me study, I've got what I want. I'm going to do my biology, and I don't want to hear about anything else. I wasn't the one who set up this regime, and I'm not responsible for any of it. But when exactly are you leaving?'
'Tomorrow.'
'So soon?' She took his hand. 'Since you were nice enough to come and say goodbye to me, please don't be in such a hurry to go.'
It continued to be different from what he had expected. She was behaving neither like a young
woman secretly in love with him nor like an adopted daughter feeling unfleshly filial love for him. She held his hand with eloquent tenderness, looked him in the eye, and repeated: 'Don't be in such a hurry! It makes no sense to me that you're not staying here awhile to say goodbye to me.'
Jakub was somewhat perplexed by this: 'We'll see,' he said. 'Skreta's also trying to convince me to stay a little longer.'
'You should certainly stay longer,' said Olga. 'In any case, we have so little time for each other. Now I have to go back to the baths…' After a moment's thought she announced that she would not go anywhere while Jakub was here.
'No, no, you should go. You shouldn't miss your treatment. I'll go with you.'
'Really?' asked Olga happily. She opened the wardrobe and started to look for something.
The pale-blue tablet was still lying on the unfolded piece of paper on the table, and Olga, the only person in the world to whom Jakub had revealed its existence, was leaning into the wardrobe with her back to the poison. Jakub thought that this pale-blue tablet was the drama of his life, a neglected, nearly forgotten, and probably uninteresting drama. And he told himself that it was high time to rid himself of this uninteresting drama, to say goodbye to it quickly and leave it behind him. He wrapped the tablet in the piece of paper and stuck it into the breast pocket of his jacket.
Olga took a bag out of the wardrobe, put a towel
into it, closed the wardrobe door, and said to Jakub: 'I'm ready.'
7
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.
