Milan Kundera’s "Farewell Waltz," a summary

This book is a farce about an accidental conception and secret poisoning at a small Czech spa, where infertile women are treated with mineral waters, and the head doctor secretly inseminates patients with his own sperm from a plastic-tipped syringe. The entire plot unfolds over five autumn days, scheduled according to the classic rules of vaudeville, with chance encounters at the door. Milan Kundera completed the manuscript in Czechoslovakia in 1971 or 1972, during a period of publication ban in his home country; the text was first published in French in 1976.

In 1978, the novel won the Mondello Prize for best foreign work in Italy.

A telephone behind the booths and a bouquet of roses

An autumn Monday. In the spa pool, nurse Ruzena wraps naked patients in wet sheets. From her locker behind the changing rooms, she calls the famous trumpeter Klima at the capital’s theater, where she spent two hours in bed after a summer concert, and informs him of a six-week delay.

At the theater, the orchestra members suggest ways for the conductor to save himself. The eighteen-year-old guitarist advises luring the nurse onto the highway and running her over with a car, while the veteran double bass player insists on a trick: he should shower the girl with declarations of love, promise a divorce, and persuade her to have an abortion for a bright start to their future life together.

Klima buys his wife Kamila a huge bouquet of roses. She immediately suspects something is wrong. Her birthday is tomorrow, and the flowers were delivered that evening — meaning her husband is planning a trip and lying about a boring conference on socialist music. At dinner, Kamila, offended, oversalts the food.

The patron saint with Saint Lazarus and a drummer in a white robe

On Tuesday morning, the trumpeter’s white car pulls up to the modernist Richmond Hotel. Bertlef, an American who suffered a massive heart attack six months ago, is staying there. He wanders around the room in his pajamas, orders four soft-boiled eggs with ham, and shows his guest a painting he painted of the Byzantine monk Lazarus, with a glowing blue disk around his head. After listening to the musician’s complaints about his one-night stands and his passionate attachment to his jealous wife, Bertlef declares such monogamy heresy and takes his friend to Marx’s house to see the chief physician, Shkrete.

Dr. Shkreta confirms Ružena’s pregnancy and agrees to have her undergo an abortion on Friday. This favor demands a reciprocal gesture. The head doctor plays the drums at a local club, the pharmacist bangs out the piano keys, and on Thursday evening, the trio is scheduled to perform a joint jazz concert.

At home, Růžena dresses for a date behind the closet door, while her retired father curses dog owners from the couch for pooping in children’s sandboxes. At four o’clock in the wine cellar, Klíma takes the nurse’s hand, raises a glass of cognac to their unborn child, and takes her into the forest. During their kiss, he examines the small fillings in her teeth, chokes on the sound of someone else’s tongue, and with difficulty wrings her consent to surgery. On the way back, by the highway, they are blinded by the headlights of a young repairman named František’s motorcycle, shouting that a city celebrity isn’t allowed to fool other people’s brides.

Late in the evening, the trumpeter enters Bertleff’s room without knocking and freezes on the threshold, blinded by a strange blue light shining from the corner of the room.

Syringe, dog loops and a pill in silk paper

On Wednesday, forty-five-year-old former political prisoner Jakub arrives at Marx’s house. He has received permission to leave the country permanently and has stopped by to say goodbye to his old friend Shkreta and his ward Olga, the daughter of the executed communist leader. The head doctor dresses his guest in a white coat, passes him off as a fellow gynecologist, and, right in front of him, injects the attractive patient with a syringe containing sperm from a treasured vial into her crotch. Left alone, Jakub tries to return the blue poison pill he made fifteen years ago to protect himself from prison torture, while the absent-minded doctor asks about Bertlef. Shkreta dreams of going salmon fishing in Iceland and wants a wealthy American to adopt him for a passport.

Over lunch in the dining room, Olga jealously listens to her guardian’s rants about her neighbor Ruzhena’s sensual mouth, which could easily chew up any man. In the living room over coffee, the girl inquires about the anonymous letters accusing her late father of massacring innocent people, and learns of Yakub’s departure.

Meanwhile, her co-workers at the hydrotherapy center mock Růžena’s gullibility. The thirty-five-year-old nurse assures her friend that the musician will abandon her immediately after the cleansing, and hands her a glass tube of blue sedative pills. František is on duty downstairs in the lobby; he hands Růžena a bundle containing a blue nightgown, and she, enraged, threatens to kill herself if she’s forced to give birth.

In the park, a squad of old men wearing red armbands charges on command with three-meter poles. The pensioners tie wire nooses around the necks of stray mongrels, snatch a dachshund from a crying boy, and throw the howling animals into a green van. Jakub calls over a fat boxer he doesn’t recognize and leads him by the collar to the doors of the Richmond, while Růžena, standing on the steps, blocks their path, grabs a belt, and screams about dogs in strollers until the man abruptly slaps her wrist away.

That evening, over a beef and wine dinner at Bertleff’s, the discussion turns to King Herod, motherhood, and Saint Simeon Stylites. The conversation is interrupted by a five-year-old girl with a white bow and a large dahlia in her hand, who takes the apartment’s owner on a nighttime date. After seeing Olga off, Shkreta, on the way to the park, reveals his secret plan to Jakub: for years, he’s been filling a test tube with his own sperm, curing infertile women, and populating the country with hundreds of big-nosed brothers, inviting his departing friend to join this eugenics enterprise.

Three Fauns, Someone Else’s Tube, and a Drum Concert

On Thursday morning, Camila takes time off from the theater and catches the eleven o’clock train. On a resort promenade, she sees a homemade poster with her husband’s name and runs into three bohemian acquaintances — a film director, an assistant, and a cameraman in a torn sweater — who had been filming a newsreel in the women’s pool that morning and had driven the shy Olga to flee in a wet sheet.

Jakub takes the rescued dog Bobesh to a forest inn, dines on pork and dumplings, and notices the owner’s two-year-old son has a huge Dr. Škréta nose. Returning to town, he sits down in a wine cellar next to the table where Růžena announces to a pale-faced Klíma that she refuses the abortion. The girl sees František hiding behind a tree in the window, swallows a sedative, and leaves with the musician for the car, leaving the glass tube in the ashtray.

Moving to the window, Jakub takes a piece of paper containing his old poison from his breast pocket. He shakes one of the nurse’s pills into his palm, compares the color and size, and replaces both pills in the glass tube. A second later, Ruzhena, returning, snatches her medicine from his open fist.

Jakub spends the rest of the day rushing between the club and Marx’s house, his half-measures in searching leading nowhere. Meanwhile, Růžena sits at a peeling red table in the front garden of the Slavia pub with Kamila and three filmmakers. The cameraman squeezes the nurse’s breasts through her dress, the women laugh, until Růžena suddenly recognizes her beautiful companion as the wife of her trumpeter. A quarrel erupts, with a mocking vote on odd and even hours; the offended girl reaches into her bag for a tube, but Bertlef, suddenly appearing behind her, intercepts her fingers, orders a 1922 vintage wine with a cheese platter, scolds the cameraman for the dirt under his fingernails, and leads the rescued queen off to a concert.

In the hall, Škret calmly beats the drums, Klíma strides across the stage with a golden trumpet, and after the first number, Bertlef takes Růžena to his apartment, where he drinks whiskey all night and brings her to sobs and multiple orgasms. After the concert, Kamila goes backstage and takes her husband to the Richmond suite; on the bed, under her wet lips, the trumpeter’s body cringes in fear and disgust and refuses. Two doors down, Olga herself takes off Jakub’s jacket and whispers obscenities in his ear, ruining his attempt at lovemaking out of pure paternal pity, while outside, outside, a jealous František paces back and forth until five in the morning.

The commission, cramps by the pool, and a mole on the platform

At dawn on Friday, Klima lies in wait for Růžena at the entrance to the women’s ward. The morning after her night with Bertlef has changed her plans: the old man has given her peace, and the nurse readily agrees to attend the abortion commission at nine o’clock. Meanwhile, Jakub calls the hydropathic clinic, learns that Růžena is alive and working at the pool, and concludes that fifteen years ago, the cunning Shkreta slipped him a harmless placebo instead of the deadly poison. In the hallway of the Richmond, he runs into Kamila leaving her room, walks her through the park, and, intoxicated by the prospect of his imminent departure, confesses to the beautiful stranger that he lived his life blind and would be willing to stay for her.

On the fourth floor of the clinic, Klimova writes her name with a trembling hand under "Father" next to posters of peeing boys. At the commission table, Dr. Shkreta sternly reprimands the couple, then refers to Mrs. Klimova’s fictitious suicidal syndrome, signs a referral for Monday, and a stocky activist forces the trumpeter to donate a quarter liter of blood.

At the ward door, František intercepts Růžena and rushes after her into the tiled room toward the couches. The technician screams that he won’t let his child be killed, threatening suicide, and the agitated girl shakes a blue pill out of the tube, swallows it, and a second later, convulsing, falls dead to the floor among a crowd of naked, wet patients.

An unsuspecting Jakub enters Shkreta’s office. As he says goodbye, he confesses that Olga’s father didn’t save him at all, but personally voted for his friend’s arrest for the sake of revolutionary ideals. When a phone call summons the head doctor to the body at the hydropathic clinic, he calmly drives to the border. Meanwhile, Klima, having heard the doctor’s news of the nurse’s death and the police’s ready-made story of a fake paternity claim to help an unmarried girl, kisses the hem of his wife’s dress in a fit of joy. Meanwhile, Kamila, behind the wheel, recalls the stranger’s words in the park that morning and, for the first time, contemplates her future divorce without fear.

At Růžena’s body, Dr. Shkreta confirms poisoning by an unknown alkaloid. Later, in Bertleff’s room, in front of Olga, a familiar detective examines theories and jokingly accuses the American himself, in an attempt to discourage him from arguing with the police. When the detective leaves and Olga directly asks the doctor about Jakub’s blue pill, Shkreta coldly cuts her off, declaring that she values friendship above any form of justice.

On the way to the evening train station, Bertleff agrees to adopt the doctor. Shkreta’s pregnant wife, Zuzi, and the American’s young wife disembark on the platform, holding their one-year-old son, John, whose upper lip bears a mole identical to that of the resort’s chief physician. A few kilometers from the border barrier, Jakub stops the car in a dirty village, looks out the window at a five-year-old boy wearing heavy, prison-like glasses, and takes with him a strange pity for his abandoned homeland.