But whether she was beautiful or not, Jakub knew that there was no escape. Besides, he felt that his body (that servile body) was once more quite willing to lift its obliging spear. His arousal, however, seemed to him to be happening to someone else far away, outside his own soul, as if he were being aroused without his participation and were secretly scorning it. His soul was far from his body, obsessed by the thought of the poison in the woman’s handbag. At the utmost, it watched regretfully as the body blindly and pitilessly pursued its trivial interests.
A fleeting memory passed through his mind: he had been ten years old when he learned how children come into the world, and since then the thought of it had increasingly haunted him, all the more when, over the years, he gradually discovered the actual substance of the female organs. Since then he had often imagined his own birth; he imagined his tiny body sliding through a narrow, wet tunnel, he imagined his nose and his mouth full of the strange mucus he was entirely anointed with and marked by. Yes, that female mucus had marked Jakub throughout his life with its ability to exert its mysterious power to summon him to it at any moment and to control the bizarre mechanisms of his body. This had always been repugnant to him, and he rebelled against that servitude by at least refusing to give women his soul, by safeguarding his freedom and solitude, by restricting mucus power to particular hours of his life. Yes, his great affection for Olga probably derived from her being sexually out of bounds to him, and from his certainty that her body would never remind him of the shameful way he had come into the world.
He abruptly pushed these thoughts away, because the situation on the daybed was developing rapidly, and in a moment or two he was going to have to enter her body, and he did not wish to do so with a sensation of repugnance. He told himself that this woman opening herself up to him was the only woman to whom he was attached by pure and disinterested affection, and that he was now going to make love to her only to make her happy, to please her, to make her self-confident and cheerful.
But now he amazed himself: he was moving on top of her as if he were rocking on waves of goodness. He felt happy, he felt good. His soul humbly identified itself with the activity of his body, as if the act of love were merely the physical expression of a kindly tenderness, of a pure feeling toward one’s neighbor. There was no obstacle, not a false note. They held each other tightly, and their breaths mingled.
Those were long, beautiful minutes, and then Olga whispered a lewd word in his ear. She whispered it once, then again and yet again, arousing herself with the word.
The waves of goodness suddenly ebbed, and Jakub and the young woman found themselves in the middle of a desert.
No, Jakub ordinarily had nothing against lewd words during lovemaking. They awakened his sensuality and ferocity. They made women pleasantly strange to his soul, pleasantly desirable to his body.
But the lewd word coming from Olga’s mouth brutally destroyed the whole sweet illusion. It woke him from a dream. The haze of goodness lifted, and suddenly he saw Olga in his arms as he had seen her a while earlier: with the big flower of her head atop the swaying thin stem of her body. This touching creature had the provocative manner of a whore without ceasing to be touching, so that the lewd words sounded ridiculous and sad.
But Jakub knew that he must not let anything show, that he must control himself, that he must drink the bitter chalice of goodness again and again, because this absurd embrace was his only good deed, his only redemption (not for a moment did he forget the poison in that woman’s handbag), his only salvation.
29
Like a large pearl in a mollusk’s double shell, Bertlef’s luxurious suite is surrounded on both sides by the less luxurious rooms occupied by Jakub and Klima. In these two neighboring rooms silence and calm have been reigning for quite a while, as Ruzena, in Bertlef’s arms, heaves her last sighs of voluptuous pleasure.
Then she lies stretched out peacefully beside him as he caresses her face. She soon bursts into tears. She cries for a long time, her head buried in his chest.
Bertlef caresses her as if she were a little girl, and she really does feel little. Little as never before (never before has she hidden this way in anyone’s chest), but also big as never before (never before has she experienced so much pleasure). And the spasmodic movements of her sobs carry her away to sensations of well-being which until now had been equally unknown to her.
Where is Klima at this moment, and where is Frantisek? They are somewhere in a distant haze, figures as light as feathers receding toward the horizon. And where is Ruzena’s stubborn longing to grab hold of one and get rid of the other? What has become of her fits of anger, of the offended silence she has locked herself into since morning?
She is lying down, she is sobbing, and he is caressing her face. He tells her to sleep, that his bed is in the next room. Ruzena opens her eyes and looks at him: naked, Bertlef goes to the bathroom (the sound of running water is heard), then he returns, opens the wardrobe, takes out a blanket, and delicately unfolds it over Ruzena’s body.
Ruzena sees the varicose veins on his calves. When he is bent over her she notices that his curly hair
