The fortyish nurse patted her on the shoulder: "Come, come, dear, calm yourself! I've got something for you." She opened a creased, grubby copy of an illustrated magazine: "Look at this!"
The three of them gazed at a photograph of a young,
pretty brunette standing onstage with a microphone at her lips.
Ruzena tried to make out her destiny in these few square centimeters.
"I didn't know she was so young," she said, filled with apprehension.
"Come on!" said the fortyish nurse, smiling. "This photo is ten years old. They're both the same age. That woman can't begin to match you!"
4
During the phone conversation with Ruzena, Klima recalled that he had been anticipating such terrifying news for a long time. Of course he had no reasonable grounds for thinking he had impregnated Ruzena after that fateful party (on the contrary, he was certain he was being unjustly accused), but he had been anticipating news of this kind for many years now, long before he ever met Ruzena.
He was twenty-one when an infatuated blonde thought of feigning pregnancy in order to force him into marriage. In those harrowing weeks he suffered stomach cramps and finally fell ill. Ever since, he had known that pregnancy was a blow that could strike anywhere at any time, a blow against which there is
no lightning rod and that announces itself by a pathetic tone of voice on the telephone (yes, the blonde too had initially given him the disastrous news on the phone). That event of his youth always made him approach women with a feeling of anxiety (though with much zeal), and after each amorous rendezvous he was fearful of disastrous consequences. He reasoned that his pathological cautiousness kept the probability of disaster down to barely a thousandth of one percent, but even that thousandth managed to terrify him.