5
Ruzena was sitting at a small table in the huge room in the thermal building where, after undergoing treatment, women rested in beds lined up against the walls. She had just received the charts of two new patients. She filled in the date and gave the women towels, large white sheets, and keys to the changing cubicles. Then she looked at her watch and headed for the adjoining room (she was wearing only a white smock over her bare body, because the tiled rooms were filled with hot steam), to the pool where some twenty naked women were splashing about in the miraculous spring waters. She called three of them by name, to tell them their time was up. The ladies obediently left the pool, shaking their bulky, dripping breasts and following Ruzena, who escorted them back to the treatment room to lie down on vacant beds. One after another, she wrapped each in a sheet, wiped each one’s eyes with a bit of it, and covered her with a warm blanket. The ladies gave her a smile, but Ruzena didn’t smile in return.
It is surely not pleasant to have been born in a small town through which every year ten thousand women but practically no young men pass; unless she moves elsewhere, a woman will have a precise idea by the age of fifteen of all the erotic possibilities her lifetime will offer her. And how is she to move elsewhere? Her employers did not readily release their employees, and Ruzena’s parents protested vehemently whenever she hinted at moving away.
No, this young woman, who all in all did her best to fulfill her professional obligations meticulously, felt no great love for the women taking the waters. We can cite three reasons for this:
Envy: These women came here directly from husbands and lovers, from a world she imagined teeming with a thousand possibilities inaccessible to her, even though she had prettier breasts, longer legs, and more regular features.
Besides envy, impatience: These women came here with their destinies far away, and she was here without a destiny, with one year the same as the next; she was frightened by the thought that, in this small town, she was living an eventless time span, and, despite her youth, constantly thought that life was passing her by before she had begun to live.
Third, there was the instinctive dislike inspired in her by their sheer numbers, which diminished each woman’s worth as an individual. She was surrounded by a sad excess of bosoms, among which even a bosom as attractive as hers lost its worth.
Without a smile, she had just wrapped the last of three women when her thin colleague stuck her head into the room and shouted: “Ruzena! Telephone!”
Her colleague’s expression was so reverent that Ruzena knew at once who had phoned her. Blushing, she went behind the cubicles, picked up the receiver, and gave her name.
Klima identified himself and asked her when she would be free to see him.
“I finish work at three. We could see each other at four.”
Then they had to agree on where to meet. Ruzena suggested the spa’s big brasserie, which was open all day. The thin nurse, who was standing beside Ruzena and keeping her eyes fixed on her lips, gave an approving nod. The trumpeter replied that he preferred to see Ruzena in a place where they could be alone and suggested driving out into the country in his car.
“What for? Where would we go?”
“We’d be alone.”
“If you’re ashamed of me you shouldn’t have bothered to come here,” said Ruzena, and her colleague nodded.
“That’s not what I meant,” said Klima. “I’ll meet you at four in front of the brasserie.”
“Perfect,” said the thin nurse when Ruzena hung up. “He wants to meet you in some hideaway, but you have to make sure you’re seen together by as many people as possible.”
Ruzena was still very agitated, and the prospect of the meeting made her nervous. She could no longer picture Klima. What did his face, his smile, his posture look like? Their single encounter had left her only a vague memory. Her colleagues had pressed her at the time with questions about the trumpeter, they wanted to know what he was like, what he said, what he looked like undressed, and how he made love. But she was unable to tell them anything, and merely repeated that it was “like a dream.”
This was not simply a cliché: the man with whom she had spent two hours in bed had come down from the posters to join her. For a moment his photograph had acquired a three-dimensional reality, a warmth, a weight, and then had again become an impalpable, colorless image reproduced in thousands of copies and thus all the more abstract and unreal.
And because he had then so quickly escaped back into being his own graphic sign, his icon, she had been left with an unpleasant awareness of his perfection. She was unable to cling to a single detail that would bring him down or bring him nearer. When he was far away, she had been full of energetic combativeness, but now that she felt his presence, her courage failed her.
“Hang in there,” said the thin nurse. “I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”
6
When Klima had finished his phone conversation with Ruzena, Bertlef took him by the arm and led him across the park to Karl Marx House, where Dr. Skreta had his office and living quarters. Several women were sitting in the waiting room, but Bertlef without hesitation rapped sharply four times on the office door. In an instant a tall man appeared, wearing a white coat and with eyeglasses on his big nose. “Just a moment, please,” he said to the women
