consent or as refusal.'
'We can vote,' said the director.
'That's fair,' said the assistant. 'Who is in favor of the proposition that Ruzena agrees in this case that six is an odd number? Kamila! You vote first!'
'I think that Ruzena absolutely agrees,' said Kamila.
'And you, Director?'
'I'm convinced,' said the director in his gentle voice, 'that Miss Ruzena will agree to consider six an odd number.'
'The cameraman is too much of an interested party, and so he can't vote. As for me, I vote in favor,'1 said the assistant. 'We've therefore decided, three votes to none, that Ruzena's silence is equivalent to consent. From this it follows, cameraman, that you may immediately resume pursuing your advances.'
The cameraman leaned toward Ruzena and put his arm around her so that his hand was once more touching her breast. Ruzena pushed him away even more violently than before and shouted: 'Get your filthy paws off me!'
Kamila interceded: 'Look, Ruzena, he can't help it that he likes you so much. We've all been having such a good time…'
A few minutes earlier Ruzena had been quite passive and had given herself up to the course of events to do with her what it wished, as if she hoped to read her fate in whatever chance brought her way. She would have let herself be taken away, she would have let herself be seduced and persuaded of anything, just to escape from the dead end in which she found herself trapped.
But chance, to which she lifted her imploring face, suddenly proved to be hostile, and Ruzena, held up to ridicule in front of her rival and made into a laughingstock, realized that she had only one single solid support, one single consolation, one single chance of salvation: the embryo in her womb. Her entire soul went down (once more! once more!), down inside to the inmost depths of her body, and Ruzena became more
and more convinced that she would never part with him who was quietly burgeoning within her. In him she held a secret trump card that lifted her high above their laughter and their unclean hands. She had an intense craving to tell them, to shout it in their faces, to take revenge on them for their sarcasm, to take revenge on that woman and her patronizing kindliness.
Keep calm! she told herself, and she rummaged in her handbag for the tube. She had just pulled it out when she felt a hand firmly gripping her wrist.
18
No one had seen him coming. He had appeared all of a sudden, and Ruzena looked up and saw him smile.
He kept restraining her hand; Ruzena felt the strong touch of his fingers on her wrist, and she obeyed: the tube dropped back into the bottom of the handbag.
'Please allow me, ladies and gentlemen, to sit down at your table. My name is Bertlef.'
None of the men was enthusiastic about the intruder's arrival, none of them introduced himself, and Ruzena did not have enough social grace to introduce her companions to him.
'My unexpected arrival seems to have disconcerted
you,' said Bertlef. He took a chair from a nearby table and put it at the vacant end of their table and sat down, so that he was presiding and had Ruzena at his right. 'Forgive me,' he went on. 'For a long time I have had the peculiar habit of not arriving but appearing.'
'In that case,' said the assistant, 'allow us to treat you as an apparition and pay no attention to you.'
'I gladly allow you that,' said Bertlef with a slight bow. 'But I am afraid that despite my willingness you will not succeed.'
Then he turned to look at the doorway to the Slavia's brightly lit indoor restaurant and clapped his hands.
'Who invited you here, Chief?' asked the cameraman.
'Are you trying to tell me that I am not welcome? I could leave right now with Ruzena, but a habit is a habit. I come to this table every day in the late afternoon to drink a bottle of wine.' He examined the label of the bottle standing on the table: 'But certainly a better wine than the one you are drinking.'
'I wonder where you find any good wine in this dump,' said the assistant.
'My impression, Chief, is that you brag too much,' the cameraman added, seeking to ridicule the intruder. 'It's true that after a certain age one can hardly do anything else.'
'You are wrong,' said Bertlef as if he had not heard the cameraman's insult, 'they still have some bottles hidden here that are a great deal better than what you can find in the grandest hotels.'
He was shaking the hand of the manager, who had been barely visible earlier but was now welcoming Bertlef and asking him: 'Shall I set the table for everyone?'
'Certainly,' Bertlef replied, and turned to the others: 'Ladies and gentlemen, I invite you to drink a wine with me that I have had here a number of times and find excellent. Do you accept the invitation?'
No one replied to Bertlef, and the manager said: 'When it's a matter of food and drink, I can advise the ladies and gentlemen to have full confidence in Mister Bertlef.'
'My friend,' Bertlef said to the manager, 'bring two bottles and a platter of cheese.' Then, turning to the others: 'Your hesitation is unnecessary, Ruzena's friends are friends of mine.'
A boy of no more than twelve came running out of the restaurant carrying a tray with glasses, saucers, and a tablecloth. He put the tray on a nearby table and then leaned over the customers one by one to remove their half- full glasses. He parked these, along with the open bottle, next to the tray he had just put on the nearby table. Then he carefully wiped their visibly dirty table with a dish towel and spread on it a tablecloth of dazzling whiteness. After that he went back to the nearby table to get the glasses and put them back in front of the customers.
'Get rid of those glasses and that bottle of vinegar,' Bertlef said to the boy. 'Your papa will bring us better wine.'
The cameraman protested: 'Would you be kind enough, Chief, to let us drink what we like?'
'As you wish, sir,' said Bertlef. 'I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails. Listen, son,' he said, turning to the boy: 'Give each of them back the old glass and an empty new one. My guests can choose freely between a wine produced in fog and a wine born of the sun.'
So now there were two glasses per person, one empty and the other with leftover wine. The manager approached the table with two bottles, gripped one between his knees, and pulled out the cork with a grandiose gesture. Then he poured a bit of wine into Bertlef's glass. Bertlef brought his glass to his lips, took a sip, and turned to the manager: 'Excellent. Is it the twenty-three?'
'It's the twenty-two,' the manager corrected.
'Pour it!' said Bertlef, and the manager went around the table with the bottle and filled the empty glasses.
Bertlef held up his glass by the stem. 'My friends, taste this wine. It has the sweet taste of the past. Savor it as if you were breathing it in, sucking in a long bone-ful of marrow, a long-forgotten summer. I would like with this toast to marry the past and the present, the sun of nineteen twenty-two and the sun of this moment. That sun is Ruzena, that thoroughly simple young woman who is a queen without knowing it. Against the backdrop of this spa town, she is like a dia-
mond on a mendicant's robe. She is like a crescent moon forgotten against the pale sky of day. She is like a butterfly fluttering against the snow.'
The cameraman gave a forced laugh: 'Aren't you overdoing it, Chief? '
'No, I am not overdoing it,' said Bertlef, and then he addressed the cameraman: 'You are under that impression because you merely live in the basement of being, you anthropomorphized barrel of vinegar! You are filled with acids seething in you as in an alchemist's pot! You are devoting your life to discovering around you the same ugliness you carry within you. That is the only way you can feel at peace for a moment with the world.
