Then he went over to a small telephone table and asked: “When did you arrive?”
“This morning,” said Klima. “I drove.”
“You are surely hungry,” said Bertlef, and he picked up the receiver. He ordered two breakfasts: “Four poached eggs, cheese, butter, rolls, milk, ham, and tea.”
Meanwhile Klima scrutinized the room. A large round table, chairs, an armchair, a mirror, two couches, and doors leading to the bathroom and, he remembered, to Bertlef’s small bedroom. Here in this luxurious suite was where it had all started. Here had sat the tipsy musicians of his band, for whose pleasure the rich American had invited some nurses.
“Yes,” said Bertlef, “the picture you are looking at was not here before.”
It was only then that the trumpeter noticed a canvas showing a bearded man with a strange, pale-blue disk behind his head and holding a paintbrush and a palette. The picture seemed ineptly done, but the trumpeter knew that many seemingly inept pictures were famous works of art.
“Who painted that?”
“I did,” replied Bertlef.
“I didn’t know you painted.”
“I love to paint.”
“And who is this?” the trumpeter was emboldened to ask.
“Saint Lazarus.”
“What do you mean? Was Lazarus a painter?”
“This is not the Lazarus in the Bible, but Saint Lazarus, a monk who lived in the ninth century in Constantinople. He is my patron saint.”
“Really!” said the trumpeter.
“He was a very odd saint. He was not martyred by pagans because he believed in Christ, but by wicked Christians because he loved painting too much. As you may know, in the eighth and ninth centuries the Greek Orthodox Church fell prey to a rigorous asceticism intolerant of all worldly joys. Even paintings and statues were considered objects of impious pleasure. The emperor Theophilus ordered thousands of beautiful paintings destroyed and prohibited my cherished Lazarus from painting. But Lazarus knew that his paintings glorified God, and he refused to yield. Theophilus threw him into prison, had him tortured, demanded that Lazarus give up painting, but God was merciful and gave him the strength to bear cruel ordeals.”
“That’s a beautiful story,” said the trumpeter politely.
“A magnificent one. But surely it was not to look at my paintings that you came here to see me.”
Just then there was a knock at the door, and a waiter came in with a large tray. He set it on the table and laid out breakfast for the two men.
Bertlef asked the trumpeter to sit down at the table and said: “This breakfast is not remarkable enough to keep us from continuing our conversation. Tell me, what is on your mind?”
And so, as he chewed, the trumpeter told of his misfortune, prompting Bertlef at various points of the story to come up with penetrating questions.
2
He wanted above all to know why Klima had not answered the nurse’s two postcards, why he had not taken her telephone calls, and why he had never made a single friendly gesture that might have prolonged their night of love with a quiet, calming echo.
Klima acknowledged that his behavior had been neither gracious nor sensible. But, so he said, it was all too much for him. He had a horror of any further contact with the young woman.
“Any fool can seduce a woman,” Bertlef said with annoyance. “But one must also know how to break it off; that is the sign of a mature man.”
“I know,” the trumpeter admitted sadly, “but my loathing, my absolute distaste, is stronger than all my good intentions.”
“Tell me,” Bertlef said with surprise, “are you a misogynist?”
“That’s what they say about me.”
“But how is that possible? You don’t seem to be impotent or homosexual.”
“That’s right, I’m neither. It’s something much worse,” the trumpeter admitted melancholically. “I love my wife. That’s my erotic secret, which most people find totally incomprehensible.”
This confession was so moving that both men kept silent for a while. Then the trumpeter went on: “Nobody understands this, my wife least of all. She thinks that a great love keeps us from having affairs. But that’s a mistake. Something’s always pushing me toward some other woman, and yet once I’ve had her I’m torn away by a powerful spring that catapults me back to Kamila. I sometimes feel that I look for other women only because of that spring, that momentum, that marvelous flight—filled with tenderness, desire, humility—bringing me back to my wife, whom I love even more with every new infidelity.”
“So for you Nurse Ruzena is only a way of confirming your monogamous love.”
“Yes,” said the trumpeter. “And it’s an extremely pleasant confirmation. Ruzena has great charm at first sight, and also it’s an advantage that her charm totally fades away in two hours, which means that there’s nothing urging you to go on with it, and that spring launches you into a marvelous return flight.”
“Dear friend, excessive love is guilty love, and you are certainly the best proof of it.”
“I thought my love for my wife was the only good thing about me.”
“And you were wrong. The excessive love you bear your wife is not the opposite pole to your insensitivity, it is its source. Because your wife means everything to you, all other women mean nothing to you; in other words, for you they are whores. But this is great blasphemy, great contempt for creatures made by God. My dear friend, that kind of love is heresy.”
3
Bertlef pushed aside his empty cup, got up from the table, and retired to the bathroom, from which Klima first heard the sound of running water and then, after a moment, Bertlef’s voice: “Do you think one has the right to put to death a child that has not yet seen the light of day?”
A while ago he had been discomfited by the portrait of the bearded man with the halo. He had remembered Bertlef as a jovial bon vivant, and it would never have occurred to him that the man could be a believer. He felt a pang of anxiety at
