Ruzena tried to make out her destiny in these few square centimeters.
“I didn’t know she was so young,” she said, filled with apprehension.
“Come on!” said the fortyish nurse, smiling. “This photo is ten years old. They’re both the same age. That woman can’t begin to match you!”
4
During the phone conversation with Ruzena, Klima recalled that he had been anticipating such terrifying news for a long time. Of course he had no reasonable grounds for thinking he had impregnated Ruzena after that fateful party (on the contrary, he was certain he was being unjustly accused), but he had been anticipating news of this kind for many years now, long before he ever met Ruzena.
He was twenty-one when an infatuated blonde thought of feigning pregnancy in order to force him into marriage. In those harrowing weeks he suffered stomach cramps and finally fell ill. Ever since, he had known that pregnancy was a blow that could strike anywhere at any time, a blow against which there is no lightning rod and that announces itself by a pathetic tone of voice on the telephone (yes, the blonde too had initially given him the disastrous news on the phone). That event of his youth always made him approach women with a feeling of anxiety (though with much zeal), and after each amorous rendezvous he was fearful of disastrous consequences. He reasoned that his pathological cautiousness kept the probability of disaster down to barely a thousandth of one percent, but even that thousandth managed to terrify him.
Once, tempted by a free evening, he phoned a young woman he had not seen for two months. When she recognized his voice she cried out: “My God, it’s you! I’ve been waiting and waiting for you to call! I really needed you to call me!” and she said this so insistently, so pathetically, that the familiar anxiety clutched Klima’s heart, and he felt in his whole being that the dreaded moment had now arrived. And because he wanted to confront the truth as quickly as possible, he went on the attack: “Why are you saying that in such a tragic tone of voice?” “Mama died yesterday,” the young woman replied, and he was relieved, though he knew that someday he would not escape the misfortune he dreaded.
5
“All right, what’s this all about?” said the drummer, and Klima finally returned to his senses. He looked around at the musicians’ worried faces and told them what had happened to him. They laid down their instruments and tried to help him with advice.
The first piece of advice was radical: it came from the eighteen-year-old guitarist, who declared that the kind of woman who had just phoned their leader and trumpeter has to be brushed off. “Tell her she can do whatever she wants. The brat isn’t yours, it’s got nothing to do with you. If she keeps insisting, a blood test will show who the father is.”
Klima pointed out that blood tests mostly prove nothing, and therefore the woman’s accusation prevails.
The guitarist replied that there wouldn’t have to be any blood test. When you fend off a young woman, she’s very careful to avoid taking useless steps, and when she realizes that the man she accused is no pushover, she gets rid of the kid at her own expense. “And even if she ends up having it, we’ll all go, all of us in the band, and testify in court that we’d all been to bed with her. Let them try to find out which one of us is the father!”
But Klima responded: “I’m sure you’d do that for me. But by then I’d already have gone out of my mind with uncertainty and fear. In this kind of thing I’m the biggest coward, and what I need most of all is certainty.”
They all agreed with this. The guitarist’s proposal was good in principle, but it was not for everyone. It was especially not advisable for a man with weak nerves. Nor was it recommended for a famous, rich man whom women considered worth the trouble of rushing into a very risky venture. So the band shifted to the opinion that, instead of brushing off the young woman, he should persuade her to have an abortion. But what arguments should he use? They considered three basic possibilities:
The first method was to appeal to the young woman’s compassionate heart: Klima would talk to the nurse as to his closest friend; he would confide in her sincerely; he would tell her his wife was seriously ill and would die if she were to learn that her husband had a child by another woman; that both from the moral point of view and because of the state of his nerves, he would be unable to bear such a situation; and he would beg the nurse for mercy.
This method came up against an objection in principle. You could not base an entire strategy on something as dubious, as uncertain, as the nurse’s kindliness. Unless she had a really good and compassionate heart, the maneuver would backfire. She would be all the more aggressive because of the insult of the elected father of her child showing such excessive regard for another woman.
A second method was to appeal to the young woman’s good sense: Klima would try to explain to her that he was not and never could be certain the child was really his. He had met the nurse only that one time and knew absolutely nothing about her. He had no idea what other men she was seeing. No, no, he didn’t suspect her of deliberately deceiving him, but surely she couldn’t insist she wasn’t seeing other men! And if she were to insist on this, how could Klima be sure she was telling the truth? And would it make sense to bring into the world a child whose father would always be in doubt about its paternity? Could Klima leave his wife for
