Elisabet didn't understand any of it, but a foolish, blissful smile full of vague happiness and indistinct hope spread across her face.
Then Flajsman got up, squeezed Elisabet's shoulder (as a sign of discreet, self-restrained love), turned around, and left.
The Uncertainty of All Things
"Our beautiful female colleague, who looks absolutely radiant with youth today, has perhaps actually offered the most correct interpretation of the events," said the chief physician to the woman doctor and to Havel, when all three of them met in the ward. "Elisabet was
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making some coffee and fell asleep. At least that's what she claims."
"You see," said the woman doctor.
"I don't see anything," objected the chief physician. "As a matter of fact no one knows anything about how it really was. The pot could have been on the range already. If Elisabet wanted to turn the gas on herself, why would she take off the pot?"
"But she herself explains it that way!" argued the woman doctor.
"After she performed for us and scared us, don't be surprised that she put the blame on a pot. Don't forget that in this country would-be suicides are sent to an asylum for treatment. No one wants to go there."
"Do you like suicide stories, Chief?" asked the woman doctor.
"For once I'd like Havel to be tortured by remorse," the chief physician said, laughing.
Havel's Repentance
Havel's bad conscience heard in the chief physician's insignificant words a reproach in code, by means of which the heavens were discreetly admonishing him, and he said: "The chief physician is right. This wasn't necessarily a suicide attempt, but it could have been.
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Besides, if I am to speak frankly, I wouldn't hold it against Elisabet. Tell me, where in life is there a value that would make us consider suicide uncalled for on principle! Love? Or friendship? I guarantee you that friendship is not a bit less fickle than love, and it is impossible to build anything on it. Self-love? I wash it were possible," Havel now said almost ardently, and it sounded like repentance. "But, Chief, I swear to you that I don't like myself at all.''
"My dear gentlemen,'' said the woman doctor smiling, "if it will make the world more beautiful for you and will save your souls, please let's agree that Elisabet really did want to commit suicide. Agreed?"
A Happy Ending
"Nonsense," said the chief physician. "Quit it. Havel, don't pollute the beautiful morning air with your speeches! I'm fifteen years older than you. I am an unhappy man because I have a happy marriage, and consequently I cannot divorce. And I have an unhappy love, because the woman I love is unfortunately this doctor here! Yet all the same I like being alive!"
"That's right, that's right," said the woman doctor to the chief physician with unusual tenderness, seizing him by the hand. "I too like being alive!"
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At this moment, Flajsman came up to the trio of doctors and said: "I've been to see Elisabet. She's an astonishingly honorable woman. She denied everything. She's taken it all on herself."
"You see," said the chief physician, laughing. "And Havel here was pushing us all to suicide."
"Of course," said the woman doctor. She went over to the window. "It will be a beautiful day again. The sky is so blue. What do you say about that, my dear Flajsman?"
Only a moment before Flajsman had been almost reproaching himself for having acted cunningly when he had settled everything with a bunch of roses and some nice words, but now he was glad that he hadn't rushed into anything. He heard the woman doctor's signal, and he understood it perfectly. The thread of the romance was being resumed where it had been broken off yesterday, when the odor of gas had thwarted his rendezvous with the woman doctor. He couldn't help smiling at the woman doctor even in front of the jealous chief physician.
So the story picks up from where it finished yesterday, but it seems to Flajsman that he is reentering it a far older and far stronger man. He has known a love as great as death. His chest swells, and it is the most beautiful and powerful swelling he has ever experienced. For what is inflating him so pleasurably is death: the death that has been given him as a present; splendid and comforting death.
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Dead Make Room
for the Young
Dead
1
He was returning home along the street of a small Bohemian town, where he had been living for several years, reconciled to his not-too-exciting life, his backbiting neighbors, and the monotonous rowdiness that surrounded him at work, and he was walking so totally without seeing (as one walks along a path traversed a hundred times) that he almost passed her by. But she had already recognized him from a distance, and coming toward him she gave him that gentle smile of hers; only at the last moment, when they had almost passed each other, did the smile ring a bell in his memory and snap him out of his drowsy state.
"I wouldn't have recognized you!" he apologized, but it was a awkward apology, because it brought them precipitously to a painful subject, about which it would have been advisable to keep silent; they had not seen each other for fifteen years and during this time they had both aged. "Have I changed so much?" she asked, and he replied that she hadn't, and even if this was a lie it wasn't an out-and-out lie, because that gentle smile (expressing demurely and restrainedly a capacity for some sort of eternal enthusiasm) emerged from the distance of many years quite unchanged, and it confused him: it evoked for him so distinctly the
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former appearance of this woman that he had to make a definite effort to disregard it and to see her as she was now: she was almost an old woman.
He asked her where she was going and what was on her schedule, and she replied that she had nothing else to do but wait for the train that would take her back to Prague that evening. He evinced pleasure at their unexpected meeting, and because they agreed (with good reason) that the two local cafes were overcrowded and dirty, he invited her to his bachelor apartment, which wasn't very far away; he had both coffee and tea there, and, more important, it was clean and peaceful.
2
Right from the start it had been a bad day. Her husband (twenty-five years ago she had lived here with him for a short time as a new bride, then they had moved to Prague, where he'd died ten years back) was buried, thanks to an eccentric wish in his last will and testament, in the local cemetery. At that time she had paid in advance for a ten-year lease on the grave, but a few days before, she had become afraid that the time limit had expired and that she had forgotten to renew the lease. Her first impulse had been to write the cemetery administration, but then she had realized how
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futile it was to correspond with the authorities, and she had come out here.
She knew the path to her husband's grave from memory, and yet today she felt all as if she was in this cemetery for the first time. She couldn't find the grave, and it seemed to her that she had gone astray. It took her a while to understand. There, where the gray sandstone monument with the name of her husband in gold lettering used to be, precisely on that spot (she confidently recognized the two neighboring graves) now stood a black marble headstone with a quite different name in gilt.
Upset, she went to the cemetery administration. There they told her that upon expiration of the leases, the graves were canceled. She reproached them for not have advised her that she should renew the lease, and they replied that there was little room in the cemetery and that the old dead must make room for the young dead. This exasperated her, and she told them, holding back her tears, that they knew absolutely nothing of human dignity or respect for others, but she understood that the conversation was useless. Just as she could not have prevented her husband's death, so also she was defenseless against his second death, this dea
th of an old dead who is now forbidden to exist even as dead.
She went off into town, and anxiety quickly began to mingle with her sorrow as she tried to imagine how she would explain to her son the disappearance of his father's grave and how she would justify her neglect. At
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last fatigue overtook her: she didn't know how to pass the long hours until time for the departure of her train, for she no longer knew anyone here, and nothing encouraged her to take even a sentimental stroll, because over the years the town had changed too much, and the once familiar places looked quite strange to her now. That is why she gratefully accepted the invitation of the (half-forgotten) old acquaintance she'd met by chance: She could wash her hands in his bathroom and then sit in his soft armchair (her legs ached), look around his room, and listen to the boiling water bubbling away behind the screen that separated the kitchen nook from the room.
3
Not long ago he had turned thirty-five, and exactly at that time he had noticed that the hair on top of his head was thinning very visibly. The bald spot wasn't there yet, but its appearance was quite conceivable (the scalp was showing beneath the hair) and, more important, it was certain to appear and in the not-too-distant future. Certainly it was ridiculous to make thinning hair a matter of life or death, but he realized that baldness would change his face and that his hitherto youthful appearance (undeniably his best) was on its way out.
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?
Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead
And now these considerations made him think about how the balance sheet of this person (with hair), who was going away bit by bit, actually stood, what he had actually experienced and enjoyed. What astounded him was the knowledge that he had experienced rather little; when he thought about this he felt embarrassed; yes, he was ashamed, because to live here on earth so long and to experience so little was ignominious.
What did he actually mean when he said to himself that he had not experienced much? Did he mean by this travel, work, public service, sports, women? Of course he meant all of these things; yet, above all, women; because if his life was deficient in other spheres it certainly upset him, but he didn't have to lay the blame for it on himself; anyhow, not for work that was uninteresting and without prospects; not for curtailing his travels because he didn't have money or reliable party references; finally, not even for the fact that when he was twenty he had injured his knee and had had to give up sports, which he had enjoyed. On the other hand, the realm of women was for him a sphere of relative freedom, and that being so, he couldn't make any excuses about it; here he could have demonstrated his wealth; women became for him the one legitimate criterion of life's density.
But no such luck! Things had gone somewhat badly for him with women: Until he was twenty-five (though he was a good-looking guy) shyness would tie him up in knots; then he fell in love, got married, and after seven years had persuaded himself that it was possible
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to find the infinity of erotic possibilities in one woman; then he got divorced and the one-woman apologetics (and the illusion of infinity) melted away, and in their place came an agreeable taste for and boldness in the pursuit of women (a pursuit of their varied finiteness); unfortunately his bad financial situation frustrated his newfound desires (he had to pay his former wife for the support of a child he was allowed to see once or twice a year), and conditions in the small town were such that the curiosity of the neighbors was as enormous as the choice of women was scant.
And time was already passing very quickly, and all at once he was standing in the bathroom in front of the oval mirror located above the washbasin; in his right hand he held over his head a round mirror and was transfixed examining the bald spot that had begun to appear; this sight suddenly (without preparation) brought home to him the banal truth that what he'd missed couldn't be made good. He found himself in a state of chronic ill humor and was even assailed by thoughts of suicide. Naturally (and it is necessary to emphasize this, in order not to see him as a hysterical or stupid person), he appreciated the comic aspects of these thoughts, and he knew that he would never carry them out (he laughed inwardly at his own suicide note: I won't put up with my bald spot. Farewell!), but it is enough that these thoughts, however platonic they may have been, assailed him at all. Let us try to understand: the thoughts made themselves felt within him perhaps as the overwhelming desire to give up the race makes
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itself felt within a marathon runner, when halfway through he discovers that shamefully (and moreover through his own fault, his own blunders) he is losing. He also considered his race lost, and he didn't feel like running any farther.
And now he bent down over the small table and placed one cup of coffee on it in front of the couch (on which he was going to sit down), the other in front of the armchair, in which his visitor was sitting, and said to himself that there was a strange spitefulness in the fact that he had encountered this woman, with whom he had once been madly in love and whom he had allowed to escape him (through his own fault), encountered her precisely when he found himself in this state of mind and at a time when it was no longer possible to recapture anything.
4
She would hardly have guessed that in his eyes she was the one who had escaped him; still, she had always remembered the night they had spent together; she remembered how he had looked then (he was twenty, didn't know how to dress, used to blush, and his boyishness amused her); and she remembered what she had been like (she had been almost forty, and a thirst
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for beauty drove her into the arms of other men, but also drove her away from them; she had always thought that her life should have resembled a delightful ball, and she feared that her unfaithfulness to her husband might turn into an ugly habit).
Yes, she had decreed beauty for herself, as people decree moral injunctions for themselves; if she had noticed any ugliness in her own life, she would perhaps have fallen into despair. And because she was now aware that after fifteen years she must seem old to her host (with all the ugliness that this brings with it), she wanted quickly to unfold an imaginary fan in front of her face, and to this end she deluged him with questions: she asked him how he had come to this town; she asked him about his job; she complimented him on the coziness of his bachelor apartment, and praised the view from the window over the rooftops of the town (she said that it was of course no special view, but that there was an airiness and freedom about it). She named the painters of several framed reproductions of impressionist pictures (this was not difficult, in the apartments of most poor Czech intellectuals one was certain to find these cheap prints), then she got up from the table with her unfinished cup of coffee in her hand and bent over a small writing desk, on which were a few photographs in a stand (it didn't escape her that among them there was no photo of a young woman), and she asked whether the face of the old woman in one of them belonged to his mother (he confirmed this).
Then he asked her what she had meant when she
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had told him earlier that she had come here to take care of some things. She really dreaded speaking about the cemetery (here on the sixth floor she not only felt high above the roofs, but also pleasantly high above her own life); when he insisted, though, she finally confessed (but very briefly, because the immodesty of hasty frankness had always been foreign to her) that she had lived here many years before, that her husband was buried here (she was silent about the cancellation of the grave), and that she and her son had been coming here for the last ten years without fail on All Souls' Day.
5
"Every year?" This statement saddened him, and once again he thought of the spitefulness of fate; if only he'd met her six years ago when he'd moved here, everything could have been
possible; she wouldn't have been so marked by age, her appearance wouldn't have been so different from the image he had of the woman he had loved fifteen years before; it would have been within his power to surmount the difference and perceive both images (the image of the past and that of the present) as one. But now they stood hopelessly far apart.
She drank her coffee and talked. He tried hard to
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determine precisely the extent of the transformation by means of which she was escaping him for the second time: her face was wrinkled (in vain did the layer of powder try to deny this); her neck was withered (in vain did the high collar try to hide this); her cheeks sagged; her hair (but it was almost beautiful!) had grown gray; however, her hands drew his attention most of all (unfortunately, it was not possible to touch them up with powder or paint): bunches of blue veins stood out on them, so that all at once they were the hands of a man.
In him pity was mixed with anger, and he felt like drowning their too-long-put-off meeting in alcohol; he asked her if she wanted some cognac (he had an opened bottle in the cabinet behind the screen); she replied that she didn't, and he remembered that even fifteen years before she had drunk almost not at all, perhaps so that alcohol wouldn't make her behave contrary to the demands of good taste and decorum. And when he saw the delicate movement of her hand with which she refused the offer of cognac, he realized that this charm, this magic, this grace, which had enraptured him, was still the same in her, though hidden beneath the mask of old age, and was in itself still attractive, even though it was behind a grille.
When it crossed his mind that this was the grille of age, he felt immense pity for her, and this pity brought her nearer to him (this woman who had once been so dazzling, before whom he used to be tongue-tied), and he wanted to have a conversation with her and to talk
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the way a friend talks with a friend, at length, in a blue atmosphere of melancholy resignation. He started to talk (and it did indeed turn into a long talk) and eventually he got to the pessimistic thoughts that had visited him of late. Naturally he was silent about the bald spot that was beginning to appear (it was just like her silence about the canceled grave); on the other hand the vision of the bald spot was transubstantiated into quasi-philosophical maxims to the effect that time passes more quickly than man is able to live, and that life is terrible, because everything in it is necessarily doomed to extinction; he voiced these and similar maxims, to which he awaited a sympathetic response; but he didn't get it.