"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 cliche: 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