His anxiety was naked, stripped of all the sentimental demagogy to which he had devoted so much effort in the previous days.
Ruzena said: “You want to get rid of me.”
This frightened him: “I don’t want to get rid of you—on the contrary. I’m doing all this so we’ll be even happier together.”
“Don’t lie,” said Ruzena.
“Ruzena, I beg you! It’ll be a disaster if you don’t go!”
“Who told you I’m not going? We still have three hours. It’s only six o’clock. You can quietly get back into bed with your wife!”
She closed the door behind her, put on her white smock, and said to the fortyish nurse: “Please do me a favor. I need to go out at nine o’clock. Could you take my place for an hour?”
“So you’ve let yourself be talked into it after all,” her colleague said reproachfully.
“No. I’ve fallen in love,” said Ruzena.
4
Jakub went over to the window and opened it. He thought of the pale-blue tablet, and he could not believe that he had really given it the day before to a stranger. He looked up at the blue of the sky and breathed in the crisp air of the autumn morning. The world he saw through the window was normal, tranquil, natural. The episode with the nurse the day before suddenly seemed absurd and implausible.
He picked up the phone and dialed the thermal building. He asked to speak with Nurse Ruzena in the women’s section. He waited a long time. Then he heard a woman’s voice. He repeated that he wanted to speak with Nurse Ruzena. The voice replied that Nurse Ruzena was now at the pool and couldn’t come to the phone. He thanked her and hung up.
He felt immense relief: the nurse was alive. The tablets in the tube were to be taken three times a day; she must have taken one yesterday evening and another this morning, and thus she had swallowed Jakub’s tablet quite a while ago. Suddenly everything seemed absolutely clear: the pale-blue tablet he had been carrying in his pocket as a guarantee of his freedom was a fraud. His friend had given him a tablet of illusion.
My God, why had the thought not occurred to him before? Once more he recalled the distant day when he had asked his friends for poison. He had just been released from prison then, and now he realized, after the passage of many long years, that all of them had probably seen his request as a theatrical gesture designed to call attention, after the fact, to the sufferings he had endured. But Skreta had with no hesitation promised to get him what he asked for, and a few days later had brought him a shiny, pale-blue tablet. Why hesitate, why try to dissuade him? Skreta had handled it more cleverly than those who had turned him down. He had furnished him the harmless illusion of calm and certainty, and in addition made a lifelong friend.
Why had this thought never occurred to him? He had at the time found it a bit strange that Skreta had furnished him the poison in the guise of an ordinary manufactured tablet. While he knew that Skreta, as a biochemist, had access to poisons, he did not understand how he had tablet-making machinery at his disposal. But he asked no questions. Although he doubted everything else, he believed in his tablet as one believes in the Gospel.
Now, in this moment of immense relief, he was of course grateful to his friend for his fraud. He was happy that the nurse was alive and that the whole absurd misadventure was merely a nightmare, a bad dream. But nothing lasts long in this world, and behind the subsiding waves of relief, regret raised its shrill voice:
How grotesque! The tablet he kept in his pocket had given his every step a theatrical solemnity and allowed him to turn his life into a grandiose myth! He had been convinced that he was carrying death with him in a piece of tissue paper that in reality held only Skreta’s stifled laughter.
Jakub knew that, when all is said and done, his friend had been right, but he could not help thinking that the Skreta he loved so much had suddenly become an ordinary doctor like thousands of others. His having furnished him the poison with no hesitation, as a matter of course, radically distinguished him from other people Jakub knew. There was something implausible about his behavior. He did not act the way other people did. He had not even wondered if Jakub might misuse the poison in a fit of hysteria or depression. He had dealt with Jakub as a man who was in total control of himself and had no human weaknesses. They behaved with each other like two gods forced to live among humans—and that was beautiful. Unforgettable. And suddenly it was over.
Jakub looked up at the blue of the sky and thought: Today he brought me relief and calm. And at the same time he robbed me of himself; he robbed me of my Skreta.
5
Ruzena’s consent put Klima into a sweet stupor, but nothing could have lured him away from the waiting room. Ruzena’s baffling disappearance the day before was threateningly imprinted on his memory. He resolved to wait there patiently, to see to it that no one dissuaded her or carried her away.
Women patients began to arrive, opening the door behind which Ruzena had vanished just now, some of them staying in there and others returning to sit in the chairs along the walls and examine Klima curiously, for men were not usually seen in the women’s section waiting room.
Next a buxom woman in a white smock came in and took a long look at him; then she approached him and asked if he was waiting for Ruzena. He blushed and nodded.
“You don’t have to wait here. You’ve got till nine o’clock,” she said with obtrusive familiarity, and Klima had the impression that all
