Frantisek rushed out of Marx House after him. He saw him heading down the park to the thermal building, where Ruzena was due to begin work in half an hour. He rushed back to Marx House, hammered at Ruzena's door, and in a hushed but distinct voice said through the keyhole: "It's me! Frantisek! Don't be afraid of me! You can open the door for me!"
There was no answer.
As he left, the doorkeeper was waking up.
"Is Ruzena at home?" Frantisek asked him.
"She hasn't been here since yesterday," said the doorkeeper.
Frantisek went outside. In the distance he saw Klima entering the thermal building.
3
Ruzena regularly awoke at five-thirty. Even this morning, after having dozed off so pleasantly, she slept no longer than that. She got up, dressed, and tiptoed into the adjacent room.
Bertlef was lying on his side, breathing deeply, and his hair, always carefully combed during the day, was disheveled, revealing the naked skin over his skull. In sleep his face looked grayer and older. The small bottles of medicine on the night table reminded Ruzena of a hospital. But none of this disturbed her. Looking at him brought tears to her eyes. She had never had a more beautiful night. She felt a strange desire to kneel down before him. She did not do so, but she leaned over and delicately kissed his brow.
Outside, as she approached the thermal building she saw Frantisek coming toward her.
The day before, such an encounter would have disconcerted her. Even though Ruzena was in love with the trumpeter, Frantisek meant a great deal to her. He and Klima formed an inseparable pair. One embodied the everyday, the other a dream; one wanted her, the other did not want her; from one she wanted to escape, the other she desired. Each of the two men determined the meaning of the other's existence. When she decided that she was pregnant by Klima she did not eliminate Frantisek from her life; on the contrary: Frantisek remained the abiding reason for this decision. She was
between these two men as between the two poles of her life; they were the north and south of her planet, the only one she knew.
But this morning she suddenly realized that it was not the only habitable planet. She realized that it was possible to live without Klima and without Frantisek; that there was no reason to hurry; that there was time enough; that it was possible to let a wise, mature man lead you far away from this accursed domain where you age so quickly.
"Where did you spend the night?" Frantisek burst out at her.
"It's none of your business."
"I was at your place. You weren't in your room."
"It's absolutely none of your business where I spent the night," said Ruzena, and without stopping she passed through the entrance to the thermal building. "And quit following me. I forbid it."
Frantisek remained standing in front of the building, and then, because his feet hurt from a night spent pacing back and forth, he sat down on a bench from which he could keep a close watch on the entrance.
Ruzena rushed up the stairs to the second floor two at a time and entered the large waiting room lined with benches and chairs. Klima was sitting at the door to her workplace.
"Ruzena," he said as he stood up and looked at her with desperate eyes. "I beg you. I beg you, be reasonable! I'll go there with you!"
His anxiety was naked, stripped of all the sentimen-
tal 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 hesita-
tion, 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.