Dr. Havel After Twenty Years

He didn't even have time for breakfast (he considered this a bad sign as well), and he hurried to the building that housed the baths. There was a long corridor with many doors; he knocked on one and a pretty Monde in a white smock peeped out; she ill-humoredly chided him for being late and asked him in. A moment after Dr. Havel went behind a screen in a cubicle to undress, he heard, "Will you hurry up?" The masseuses voice became more and more impolite; it offended Havel and provoked him to retaliate (and alas, over the years Dr. Havel had become accustomed to only one way of retaliating against women!). He took off his underpants, pulled in his stomach, stuck out his chest, and was about to step out of the cubicle; but then, disgusted by an act that was beneath his dignity and that would have seemed ridiculous to him in someone else; he comfortably relaxed his stomach again and, with a nonchalance he considered worthy of his dignity, headed toward the large bath and immersed himself in the tepid water.

  The masseuse, completely disregarding both his chest and his stomach, meanwhile turned several faucets on a large control board and, when Dr. Havel was already lying stretched out on the bottom of the bath, she seized his right foot under the water and put the nozzle of a hose, from which there issued a stinging stream, against his sole. Dr. Havel, who was ticklish, jerked his foot, so that the masseuse had to rebuke him.

  It would certainly not have been too difficult to get the blonde to abandon her cold and impolite tone by means of some joke, gossip, or facetious question, only Havel was too angry and insulted for that. He said to himself that the blonde deserved to be punished and shouldn't have things made easy for her. As she ran the hose over his groin and he covered his genitals with his hands so that the stinging stream wouldn't hurt them, he asked her what she was doing that evening. Without looking at him, she asked him why he wanted to know. He explained to her that he was staying alone in a single bedroom and that he wanted her to come to him there that evening. "Maybe you've confused me with someone else," said the blonde, and she told him to turn over onto his stomach.

  And so Dr. Havel lay with his stomach on the bottom of the bath, holding his chin up high so that he could breathe. He felt the stinging stream massaging his calves, and he was satisfied with the way he had addressed the masseuse. Dr. Havel had for a long time been in the habit of punishing rebellious, insolent, or spoiled women by leading them over to his couch coldly, without any tenderness, almost without a word, and also by then dismissing them in an equally chilly manner. Only after a moment did it occur to him that though he had no doubt addressed the masseuse with appropriate coldness and without any sort of tenderness, still he had not led her to the couch and was not likely to do so. He understood that he had been rejected and that this was a new insult. For this reason he was glad when at last he was drying himself with a towel in the cubicle.

  He quickly left the building and hurried to the Time Cinema to look at the display case; three publicity stills were displayed there, and in one of them his wife was kneeling in terror over a corpse. Dr. Havel looked at that sweet face, distorted by fright, and felt boundless love and boundless yearning. For a long time he could-n't drag himself away from the display case. Then he decided to drop in on Frantiska.

  6

  "Get me long distance, please, I have to talk to my wife," he said to her when she had seen her patient out and asked him into the consulting room.

  "Has something happened?"

  "Yes," said Havel. "I feel lonely!"

  Frantiska looked at him mistrustfully, dialed the long-distance operator, and gave the number Havel told her. Then she hung up and said: "So you're lonely?"

  "And why shouldn't I be?" Havel said angrily.

  You're like my wife. You see in me someone whom I haven't been for a long time. I'm humble, I'm forlorn, I'm sad. The years weigh heavily on me. And I'm telling you that this is not a pleasant thing."

  "You should have children," the woman doctor replied. "Then you wouldn't think so much about yourself. The years also weigh heavily on me, but I don't think about it. When I see my son growing up, I look forward to seeing what he will be like as a man, and I don't complain about the passage of time. Imagine what he said to me yesterday: 'Why,' he said, 'are there doctors in the world when everyone will die anyway?' What do you say to that? What would you have said to him?"

  Luckily Dr. Havel didn't have time to answer because the telephone rang. He picked up the receiver, and when he heard his wife's voice, he immediately blurted out how sad he was, how he had no one to talk to or look at here, how he couldn't bear it alone here.

  Through the receiver a small voice was heard, distrustful at first, startled, almost faltering, which under the impact of her husband's words unbent a little.

  "Please, come here to see me; come to see me as soon as you can!" said Havel, and heard his wife reply that she'd like to but that nearly every day she had a show to do.

  "Nearly every day isn't every day," said Havel, and he heard his wife say that she had the following day free, but that she didn't know if it was worth coming for just one day.

  "How can you say that? Don't you realize how precious one day is in this short life of ours?"

  "And you really aren't angry with me?" asked the small voice into the receiver.

  "Why should I be angry?"

  "Because of that letter. You're in pain, and I bore you stiff with the silly letter of a jealous woman."

  Dr. Havel murmured sweet nothings into the mouthpiece, and his wife (in a voice already grown quite tender) declared that she would come the next day.

  "Whatever you say, I envy you," said Frantiska, when Havel had hung up the receiver. "You have everything. Girls at your beck and call and a happy marriage besides."

  Havel looked at his friend, who talked to him of envy, but because of the very goodness of her heart, probably wasn't capable of that emotion. And he felt sorry for her, for he knew that the pleasure to be had from children cannot compensate for other pleasures, and, moreover, a pleasure burdened with the obligation to substitute for other pleasures will soon become too wearisomea pleasure.

  He then left for lunch. After lunch he slept, and when he woke up he remembered that the young editor was awaiting him in a cafe, to present his girl to him. So he dressed and went out. As he walked down the stairs of the patients' building, in the hall near the cloakroom he caught sight of a tall woman who resembled a beautiful riding horse. Ah, this should not have happened! That is to say Havel always found precisely this type of woman madly attractive. The cloakroom attendant was handing the tall woman her coat, and Dr. Havel ran over to help her into it. The woman who resembled a horse casually thanked him, and Havel said: "Is there anything else I can do for you?" He was smiling at her, but she replied, without a smile, that he couldn't, and she dashed out of the building.

  Dr. Havel felt as if he'd been slapped in the face, and in a renewed state of gloom he headed toward the cafe.

  7

  The editor had already been sitting in a booth beside his girlfriend for quite a while (he'd picked a place from which the entrance was visible), and he wasn't up to concentrating on conversation, which at other times used to bubble up between them gaily and unflag-gingly. He was shy at the thought of Havel's arrival. For the first time today he had attempted to look at his girlfriend with a more critical eye. And while she was saying something (fortunately she went on saying something, so that the young man's inner anxiety remained unnoticed), he discovered several minor flaws in her beauty. This greatly disturbed him, even if in no time he was assuring himself that these minor flaws in fact made her beauty more interesting and that it was precisely these things that gave him a warm feeling of closeness to her whole being.

  That is to say he loved the girl.

  But if he loved her, why had he proceeded with this venture that would be so humiliating to her, checking her out with the lubricious doctor? And if we grant him extenuating circumstances, allowing that this was only a game for him, how was it that he had become so shy and troubled by a m
ere game?

  This was not a game. The young man really did not know what his girl was like, he wasn't able to pass judgment on the degree of her beauty and attractiveness.

  But was he really so naive and inexperienced that he could not distinguish a pretty woman from an ugly one?

  Not at all. The young man wasn't so inexperienced; he had already known a few women and had affairs with them, but while they were going on he had been concentrating far more on himself than on them. Take a look at this noteworthy detail: the young man recalled precisely when and how he had been dressed with which woman; he knew on what occasion he had worn pants that were too wide and had been unhappy about this; he knew that at another time he had worn a white sweater in which he had felt like a stylish sportsman, but he had no idea how his girlfriends had been dressed.

  Yes, this is noteworthy: during his brief adventures he had undertaken long and detailed studies of himself in the mirror, while he had only an overall, general impression of his female counterparts; it was far more important to him how he himself was seen in the eyes of his partner than how she appeared to him. By this I don't mean to say that it didn't matter to him whether the girl he was seeing was or was not beautiful. It did matter. For he himself was not merely seen by the eyes of his partner, but both of them together were seen and judged by the eyes of others (by the eyes of the world), and it was very important to him that the world should be pleased with his girl, for he knew that through her was judged his choice, his taste, his status, thus he himself. But precisely because what concerned him was the judgment of others, he had not dared to rely on his own eyes; until now, on the contrary, he had considered it sufficient to listen to the voice of general opinion and to accept it.

  But what was the voice of general opinion against the voice of a master and an expert? The editor was looking anxiously toward the entrance, and when at last he caught sight of Dr. Havel's figure in the glass door, he pretended to be astonished and said to the girl that by sheer chance a certain distinguished man, whom he wanted to interview for his magazine within the next few days, was just coming in. He went to meet Havel and led him over to their table. The girl, interrupted for a moment by the introduction, soon picked up the thread of her incessant conversation and continued to chatter away.

  Dr. Havel, rejected ten minutes before by the woman who resembled a riding horse, looked slowly at the prattling girl and sank deeper and deeper into a surly mood. The girl wasn't a beauty, but she was quite cute, and there was no doubt that Dr. Havel (who was alleged to be like death, because he took everything) would have taken her gladly any time. She possessed several features indicative of a curious, aesthetic ambiguity: At the base of her nose she had a shower of freckles, which could be taken as a flaw in the whiteness of her complexion, but also conversely as a natural gem; she was very slender, which could be taken as the inadequate filling out of ideal feminine proportions, but also conversely as the provocative delicacy of the child continuing to exist within the woman; she was immensely talkative, which could be taken as inconvenient blather, but also conversely as a useful trait, which would allow her partner to give himself up to his own thoughts in the shelter of her words whenever he liked and without fear of being caught.

  The editor secretly and anxiously examined the doc-tor's face, and when it seemed to him that it was dangerously (and for his hopes unfavorably) lost in thought, he called over a waiter and ordered three cognacs. The girl protested that she did not drink, and then again slowly let herself be persuaded that she could drink and should, and Dr. Havel sadly realized that this aesthetically ambiguous creature, revealing in her stream of words all the simplicity of her inward nature, would very probability be, if he were to make a play for her, his third failure of the day. For he, Dr. Havel, once as supreme as death, was no longer the man he once had been.

  Then the waiter brought the cognacs, they all three raised them to clink glasses, and Dr. Havel looked into the girl's blue eyes as into the hostile eyes of someone who was not going to belong to him. And when he understood the significance of these eyes as hostile, he reciprocated with hostility, and suddenly saw before him a creature aesthetically quite unambiguous: a sickly girl, her face splattered with a smudge of freckles, insufferably garrulous.

  Even if this change, together with the young man's gaze fixed on him with an anxious and questioning look, gratified Havel, this pleasure was small in comparison with the bitterness that left a gaping hole inside him. It occurred to Havel that he ought not to prolong this meeting, which could not bring him any pleasure; so he quickly took over the conversation, uttered several charming witticisms for the young man and the girl, expressed his satisfaction at having been able to spend an agreeable moment with them, stated that he had to be somewhere, and took his leave.

  When the doctor reached the glass door, the young man tapped his forehead and told the girl that he had completely forgotten to make an appointment with the doctor about the interview. He rushed out of the booth and only caught up with Havel in the street. "Well, what do you say about her?" he asked.

  Dr. Havel stared for a long while into the eyes of the young man, whose imploring look cheered him up.

  On the other hand, Havel's silence chilled the editor, so that he began to retreat beforehand: "I know she isn't a beauty. ..."

  Havel said: "No, she isn't a beauty."

  The editor lowered his head: "She talks a little too much. But aside from that, she's nice!"

  "Yes, that girl is really nice," said Havel. "But a dog, a canary, or a duckling waddling about in a farmyard can also be nice. In life, my friend, it's not a question of having the greatest number of women, because that's too superficial a success. Rather, it's a question of cultivating one's own demanding taste, because in it is mirrored the extent of one's personal worth. Remember, my friend, that a real fisherman throws the little fish back into the water."

  The young man began to apologize and declared that he himself had considerable doubts about the girl, which was borne out by the fact that he had asked Havel for his judgment.

  "It's not important," said Havel.

  But the young man went on apologizing and justifying himself, and he pointed out that in the fall there is a dearth of beautiful women in the spa town and a man has to put up with what there is.

  "I don't agree with you in this matter," Havel replied. "I've seen several extremely attractive women here. But I'll tell you something. There exists a certain superficial prettiness in women, which small-town taste mistakenly considers beauty. And then there exists the genuine erotic beauty of women. Of course, it's not easy to recognize this at a mere glance. It is an art." Then he shook the young man's hand and left.

  8

  The editor fell into a terrible state: he understood that he was an incorrigible fool, lost in the unbounded (yes, it seemed to him unbounded) wilderness of his own youth; he realized that he had fallen in Dr. Havel's esteem, and he had discovered beyond a shadow of a doubt that his girl was uninteresting, insignificant, and not beautiful. When he sat down again beside her in the booth, it seemed to him that all the clientele at the cafe as well as the two busy waiters knew this and felt maliciously sorry for him. He called for the check and explained to the girl that he had pressing work to do and had to leave. The girl became downcast, and the young man's heart was wrung with grief. Even though he knew that he was throwing her back into the water like a real fisherman, deep down he still (secretly and with a kind of shame) loved her.

  The next morning did not bring any light into his gloomy mood, and when he saw Dr. Havel walking toward him with a fashionably dressed woman, he felt within himself an envy akin almost to hatred. This lady was too blatantly beautiful and Dr. Havel's mood, as he nodded gaily to the editor, was too blatantly buoyant, so that the young man felt even more wretched.

  "This is the editor of the local magazine; he made my acquaintance only so that he could meet you.''

  When the young man learned that before him was a woman
he had seen on the movie screen, his insecurity increased even more; Havel forced him to walk with them, and the editor, because he didn't know what to say, began to explain his projected interview and supplemented it with a new idea: he said that he would do a double interview with Mrs. Havel and the doctor.

  "But my dear friend," Havel admonished him, "the conversations that we engaged in were pleasant and, thanks to you, also interesting. But tell me, why should we make them public in a periodical destined for gall bladder sufferers and people with duodenal ulcers?"

  "I can easily imagine those conversations of yours," said Mrs. Havel smiling.

  "We talked about women," said Dr. Havel. "In this gentleman here I found an excellent partner and debater for this subject, a bright companion in my dreary, dark days."

  Mrs. Havel turned to the young man. "He didn't bore

  you?"

  The editor was delighted that the doctor had called him his bright companion, and, once again, his envy was mingled with devoted gratitude. He declared that perhaps rather it was he who had bored the doctor; that is, he was too well aware of his inexperience and color-lessness, yes?he even added?of his worthlessness.

  "Ah, my dear," said the actress, with a laugh, "you must have done a lot of showing off !"

  The editor stood up for the doctor: "That's not true! You, my dear lady, don't know what a small town is like, what this backwater where I live is like."

  "But it's beautiful here," protested the actress.

  "Yes, for you, because you've come here just for a while. But I live here and will go on living here. Always the same circle of people, whom I already know only too well. Always the same people, who all think alike, and the things they think are nothing but superficialities and foolishness. Whether I like it or not, I have to get along with them, and I don't always even realize that I'm conforming to them. It's dreadful! I could become one of them! It's terrible to see the world through their myopic eyes!"

  The editor spoke with increasing excitement, and it seemed to the actress that in his words she heard the eternal protest of youth. This captivated her, this took her fancy, and she said: "You mustn't conform! You mustn't!"

  "I mustn't," the young man agreed. "The doctor opened my eyes yesterday. At all costs I must get outside the vicious circle of this milieu. The vicious circle of this pettiness, of this mediocrity. I must leave," said the young man, "I must leave,'' he repeated.