out into the country in his car.
'What for? Where would we go?'
'We'd be alone.'
'If you're ashamed of me you shouldn't have bothered to come here,' said Ruzena, and her colleague nodded.
'That's not what I meant,' said Klima. 'I'll meet you at four in front of the brasserie.'
'Perfect,' said the thin nurse when Ruzena hung up. 'He wants to meet you in some hideaway, but you have to make sure you're seen together by as many people as possible.'
Ruzena was still very agitated, and the prospect of the meeting made her nervous. She could no longer picture Klima. What did his face, his smile, his posture look like? Their single encounter had left her only a vague memory. Her colleagues had pressed her at the time with questions about the trumpeter, they wanted to know what he was like, what he said, what he looked like undressed, and how he made love. But she was
unable to tell them anything, and merely repeated that it was 'like a dream.'
This was not simply a cliche: the man with whom she had spent two hours in bed had come down from the posters to join her. For a moment his photograph had acquired a three-dimensional reality, a warmth, a weight, and then had again become an impalpable, colorless image reproduced in thousands of copies and thus all the more abstract and unreal.
And because he had then so quickly escaped back into being his own graphic sign, his icon, she had been left with an unpleasant awareness of his perfection. She was unable to cling to a single detail that would bring him down or bring him nearer. When he was far away, she had been full of energetic combativeness, but now that she felt his presence, her courage failed her.
'Hang in there,' said the thin nurse. 'I'll keep my fingers crossed.'
6
When Klima had finished his phone conversation with Ruzena, Bertlef took him by the arm and led him across the park to Karl Marx House, where Dr. Skreta had his office and living quarters. Several women were sitting in the waiting room, but Bertlef without
hesitation rapped sharply four times on the office door. In an instant a tall man appeared, wearing a white coat and with eyeglasses on his big nose. 'Just a moment, please,' he said to the women sitting in the waiting room, and then he led the two men into the corridor and up the stairs to his apartment on the floor above.
'How are you, Maestro?' he said, addressing the trumpeter when all three were seated. 'When are you going to give another concert here?'
'Never again in my lifetime,' answered Klima, 'because this spa jinxed me.'
Bertlef explained to Dr. Skreta what had happened to the trumpeter, and then Klima added: 'I want to ask for your help. First, I want to know if she's really pregnant. Maybe she's just late. Or it's all an act. That's already happened to me once. That one was a blonde too.'
'Never start anything with a blonde,' said Dr. Skreta.
'Yes,' Klima agreed, 'blondes are my downfall. Doctor, it was horrible that time. I had her examined by a physician. But at the beginning of a pregnancy you can't tell anything for sure. So I insisted they do the mouse test. The one where they inject urine into a mouse and if the mouse's ovaries swell up…'
'… the lady is pregnant,' Dr. Skreta finished.
'She was carrying her morning urine in a little bottle, I was with her, and right in front of the clinic she dropped the little bottle on the sidewalk. I pounced on
those bits of glass trying to save at least a few drops! Seeing me, you'd have sworn I'd dropped the Holy Grail. She did it on purpose, broke the little bottle, because she knew she wasn't pregnant and she wanted to make my ordeal last as long as possible.'
'Typical blonde behavior,' Dr. Skreta said, unsurprised.
'Do you think there is a difference between blondes and brunettes?' asked Bertlef, visibly skeptical about Dr. Skreta's experience with women.
'You bet!' said Dr. Skreta. 'Blonde hair and black hair are the two poles of human nature. Black hair signifies virility, courage, frankness, activity, while blonde hair symbolizes femininity, tenderness, weakness, and passivity. Therefore a blonde is in fact doubly a woman. A princess can only be blonde. That's also why, to be as feminine as possible, women dye their hair yellow but never black.'
'I'm curious about how pigments exercise their influence over the human soul,' said Bertlef doubt-fully.
'It's not a matter of pigments. A blonde unconsciously adapts herself to her hair. Especially if the blonde is a brunette who dyes her hair yellow. She tries to be faithful to her hair color and behaves like a fragile creature, a shallow doll, she demands tenderness and service, courtesy and alimony, she's incapable of doing anything for herself, all refinement on the outside and coarseness on the inside. If black hair became a universal fashion, life in this world would clearly be
better. It would be the most useful social reform ever achieved.'
'So it's very likely that Ruzena is also putting on an act,' Klima interjected, looking for hope in Dr. Skreta's words.
'No. I examined her yesterday. She's pregnant,' said the physician.
Bertlef noticed that the trumpeter had gone pale, and he said: 'Doctor, you are chairman of the Abortion Committee here, are you not?'
'Yes,' said Dr. Skreta. 'We're meeting on Friday.'
'Perfect,' said Bertlef. 'There is no time to lose, because our friend is having a breakdown. I realize that in this country you don't readily authorize abortions.'
'Not at all readily,' said Dr. Skreta. 'On the committee with me are two females who are there to represent the power of the people. They're repulsively ugly and hate all the women who come before us. Do you know who are the most virulent misogynists in the world? Women. No man, gentlemen, not even Mister Klima, whom two women have already attempted to hold responsible for their pregnancies, has ever felt such hatred for women as women themselves feel toward their own sex. Why do you think they try to seduce us? Solely to defy and humiliate their fellow women. God instilled in women's hearts a hatred of other women because He wanted the human race to multiply.'
'I shall forgive this remark of yours,' said Bertlef,
'because I want to return to our friends problem. Aren't you really the one who makes the decisions on that committee, and those hideous females do whatever you say:
'I'm certainly the one who decides, but this doesn't mean I want to keep on doing it. It pays nothing. Tell me, Maestro, how much are you paid, for example, for one concert?'
The amount mentioned by Klima interested Dr. Skreta: 'I often think I could supplement my income by making music. I'm not a bad drummer.'
'You're a drummer?' asked Klima, showing forced interest.
'Yes,' said Dr. Skreta. 'We have a piano and a set of drums in the Hall of the People. I play the drums in my free moments.'
'That's wonderful!' exclaimed the trumpeter, pleased by the opportunity to flatter the physician.
'But I don't have any partners to have a real band with. There's only the pharmacist, who plays the piano fairly well. We've tried out some things together a few times.' He broke off and seemed to be thinking. 'Listen! When Ruzena appears before the committee…'
Klima gave a deep sigh. 'If she would only come-'
Dr. Skreta gestured impatiently: 'She'll be glad to come, just like all the others. But the committee requires the father to appear too; you'll have to be there with her. And to make the trip here worthwhile, you might arrive the day before and give a concert that evening. Trumpet, piano, drums.
Klima was always excessively punctilious about the technical quality of his concerts, and two days earlier the
