Ruzena sighed deeply and looked down at the table. There was her handbag with the tube of pale-blue tablets in it. She shook one into the hollow of her hand and swallowed it.
And Frantisek said, no longer shouting but pleading: “I beg you, Ruzena. I beg you. I can’t live without you. I’ll kill myself.”
Just then Ruzena felt a violent pain in her entrails, and Frantisek saw her face become unrecognizable, contorted by pain, her eyes widening but unseeing, her body twisted, doubled over, her hands pressed against her belly. Then he saw her slump to the floor.
15
Olga was splashing around in the pool when she suddenly heard … What exactly did she hear? She didn’t know what she was hearing. The room was filled with confusion. The women around her were leaving the pool and looking toward the adjoining treatment room, which seemed to be sucking in everything near it. Olga, too, found herself caught in the flow of this irresistible suction, and unthinkingly, filled with anxious curiosity, she followed the others.
In the adjoining room, she saw a cluster of women at the door with the small table near it. She saw them from behind: they were naked and wet, and bending over with their rumps sticking up. Facing them stood a young man.
More naked women came in jostling one another to join the group, and Olga too worked her way through the crowd and saw Nurse Ruzena lying motionless on the floor. The young man got down on his knees and began to yell: “I killed her! I killed her! I’m a murderer!”
The women were dripping wet. One woman bent over Ruzena’s recumbent body to take her pulse. But it was a useless gesture, because death was there and no one doubted it. The naked, wet women’s bodies jostled one another impatiently to see death up close, to see it on a familiar face.
Frantisek was still kneeling. He clasped her in his arms and kissed her face.
The women were standing all around him, and he lifted his eyes to them and repeated: “I killed her! I did it! Arrest me!”
“We have to do something!” said one woman, and another ran out into the corridor and started shouting. In a moment two colleagues of Ruzena’s came running, followed by a physician in a white smock.
Only then did Olga realize that she was naked and that she was jostling and being jostled by other naked women in front of a young man and a man physician, and the situation suddenly appeared ridiculous to her. But she knew that this would not prevent her from staying here with the crowd and looking at death, which fascinated her.
The physician was holding the recumbent Ruzena’s wrist, trying in vain to feel her pulse, and Frantisek kept repeating: “I killed her! Call the police, arrest me!”
16
Jakub found his friend in his office at Karl Marx House just as he was returning from the clinic. He congratulated him on his performance on the drums the day before, and he excused himself for not having come to see him after the concert.
“It really frustrated me,” said the doctor. “It’s your last day here, and God knows where you’ll be hanging out this evening. We had a lot of things to discuss. And what’s worse is that most likely you were with that skinny little thing. Gratitude is a dangerous feeling.”
“What gratitude? Why should I be grateful to her?”
“You wrote me that her father had done a lot for you.”
That day Dr. Skreta had no office hours, and the gynecological examination table stood unoccupied in the back of the room. The two friends sat down in facing armchairs.
“No,” said Jakub. “I only wanted you to take care of her, and it seemed simplest to tell you that I owed a debt of gratitude to her father. But in fact it wasn’t that at all. Now that I’m bringing everything to an end, I can tell you about it. I was arrested with her father’s total approval. Her father was sending me to my death. Six months later he ended up on the gallows, while I was lucky and escaped it.”
“In other words, she’s the daughter of a bastard,” said the doctor.
Jakub shrugged: “He believed I was an enemy of the revolution. Everybody was saying that, and he let himself be convinced.”
“Then why did you tell me he was your friend?”
“We were friends. And nothing was more important to him than to vote for my arrest. This proved that he placed ideals above friendship. When he denounced me as a traitor to the revolution, he felt that he was suppressing his personal interests for the sake of something more sublime, and he experienced it as the great act of his life.”
“And is that the reason you like that ugly girl?”
“She had nothing to do with it. She’s innocent.”
“There are thousands of girls as innocent as she is. If you chose this one, it’s probably because she’s her father’s daughter.”
Jakub shrugged, and Dr. Skreta went on: “You’re as perverted as he was. I believe that you consider your friendship with this girl the greatest act of your life. You suppressed your natural hatred, your natural loathing, to prove to yourself that you’re magnanimous. It’s beautiful, but at the same time it’s unnatural and entirely pointless.”
“You’re wrong,” Jakub protested. “I wasn’t suppressing anything in me, and I wasn’t trying to look magnanimous. I was simply sorry for her. From the first time I saw her. She was still a child when they forced her out of her home and she went to live with her mother in some mountain village where the people were afraid to talk to
