by Paul Leppin
Your father is downstairs in the shop — he said. Susanna only nodded and led him over the narrow steps and through the corridor into her room.
III
Last winter, on a clear and frosty evening, Zdenka had fallen in love with Severin. They had both been walking aimlessly among the bustling people, and the street had brought them together. The small locomotives of the chestnut vendors stood with red eyes on the edge of the roadway. A few reeling snowflakes fell slowly and distinctly in the lamplight. Zdenka looked at them and thought of the clear wings of the midges that floated around the shining spheres during the summer. She was still completely lost in thought when Severin spoke to her. But then she laughed cheerfully. And when she looked into his handsome young face, made more attractive by the chill, her mood became light and joyous. They walked through the city together. They looked at the comical wares in the display windows of a toyshop, where a small train ran on real tracks, and admired the stuffed tiger that a carpet dealer had put in his window as an advertisement. They stopped in front of the icy windows of delicatessens, where golden sprats shone in white boxes. Then Severin bought dinner for both of them and she went with him to his bachelor lodgings.
Zdenka worked in an office until six o’clock. Both her parents were dead and she lived alone in a room on Old Town Square. A few times during the period of her unhappy youth when she had been forced to care for herself, she had given herself to strange men, and, crying while Severin kissed her, she apologized that he was not the first to whom she had offered her love. He accepted her trembling tenderness without petty jealousy, and later, when he saw that a passion was growing in her from the playful mood of that evening, it gave him no cause for concern. She was a comfort in the emptiness of his weary heart, which did not become entangled by the luster and devotion of her love. He listened to her when, with a singing contralto, she spoke of her happiness, and was gladdened by the inexperienced words she chose. But basically she left him cold. She had nothing of the consuming flame, the flash of lightning that his soul needed. She was a pretty and fanciful accident that occurred without force or consequence, something of no interest to him.
For Zdenka, however, her meeting with Severin had become a wonderful event. It had seized her with irresistible force when he took her to his apartment after a short time together on the street. And once she was his, she loved him with an awed and boundless devotion. The Slavic blood that expressed itself in hatred and insurrection among the men of her people brought forth a flood of enthusiasm in her, and now all the gates were opened to it. She was frightened that she could do nothing against it, and in her deepest heart she felt it with terror and bliss.
It was the beginning of beautiful days for her. She walked through the city with Severin in the way that he had been accustomed to for years. He taught her the sensitivity to noises and distant cries that was part of his nature. When she closed her eyes and let him lead her, she recognized the streets she was walking on by the smells of the stones and the pavement. He revealed the monotonous beauty of the suburban landscape, the wonder of Wyschehrad with its large stone gates and the memorial of St. Wenceslaus. She learned to love the Moldau when the lights from the riverbanks rocked on the water in the darkness and the smell of tar came from the suspension bridges. She sat with him in the pubs of the Kleinseite, and was enchanted by the exaggerated leisureliness of the old men as they drank their glasses of beer. In the thick cigar smoke the arches of the low roof and the pictures of Napoleon on the wall lost their borders in achromatic grayness. Together they went to the Vikarka on Hradschin, where, a few armlengths from the door, the cathedral rose into the heights with wonderful wall ornaments and stone figures in its niches. Gradually the Czech girl came to understand the city’s silent language, in which Severin was more fluent than she. She understood that, amid the city’s darkened walls, its towers and palaces, its strange decay, a suppressed unreality had become great within him, and that he always walked the streets with the feeling that today he would meet his destiny.
When spring and summer came, she stood with him by the ponds of the Baumgarten and fed the swans. She rode the ferry with him to Troja. They walked through the gates of the walled embankments and fortifications toward Pankraz, and sat together at the stone tables of a tavern in a garden where one-eyed Žižka had rested during the Bohemian wars. Not far off, the prison rose like a small city in the field, and the inmates worked on the lawn with spades. Beyond the one-story houses the street led into a nearby village and into the woods. The melody of the barrel organs blended with the sound from the poplars and the telegraph lines. Day-trippers came and the cabs threw up clouds of dust as they approached. Sometimes she and Severin also stopped at the street-tavern The Green Foxes. Years before, when Severin was still a child, they had had excellent beer and good food; many Germans used to come to the cabman’s bar. Now there was dancing here every Sunday and red and white flags fluttered over the door. A few steps further on there was the noise from a merry-go-round. Sometimes Zdenka and Severin sat on one of the golden swings and went for a ride. A man with high boots beat the drum and the children cheered. The band played the barcarole from The Tales of Hoffmann.
They were delightful hours for Zdenka. She hardly noticed when Severin became surly and reticent, and comforted herself with the next smile he gave her. But when autumn arrived and he became increasingly distant, she was more frightened than ever before. Sometimes she did not see him for days at a time. Silent, with sorrowful steps, she went home and sat in her little room. It was lively on the large square beneath her window, except for a few bellboys who were loitering on the corners. Zdenka waited until it had become completely dark. It was late in the evening when she lit her lamp.
With senseless and incomprehensible cruelty Severin had told her about Susanna. With cold eyes he searched her features for the tiny flame of jealousy while, in exhaustive detail, he described his adventure. It disappointed him that her love remained so resolute and unshaken and that no reproach stirred her lips. He thought of the girl in the theatre who had Zdenka’s mannerisms, and of the play in which she had appeared. How she had stood on the stage, thin and fragile, shaken by destiny! But none of this happened now. There was only a pain that flew over Zdenka’s face like a passing shadow, and he was not even sure he really saw it.
On Sundays they met less and less often. When they did, they usually went walking through the city’s parks, where the cold autumn flowers were already burning. The iron chairs in the municipal park stood in the damp sand, unused, and the kiosks that sold soda water were empty. Now and then they rode the funicular up the Hasenburg. Zdenka stopped in front of the Stations of the Cross, where people prayed every year on the night of Good Friday. The chapel of St. Laurenzius was also here. From up above it was possible to see the city in the late afternoon mist. A sluggish wind pushed the withered leaves into the stone gutters on the sides of the path. Zdenka stepped on the white berries that rolled onto the earth from the bushes. As a child the small pop they made when they burst had always made her happy. A soldier came toward them. He bent toward his girl and kissed her. Zdenka walked next to Severin with a soul full of tears.
IV
The guests had already gathered in Doctor Konrad’s atelier when Lazarus and Severin arrived. A blur of voices struck them from the cigarette smoke: the unfamiliar mix of German and Czech conversations, the affected laughter of the women. In the corner a few provocatively dressed young models were milling around a table and entertaining themselves with an Italian dice game. Next to blonde Ruschena, casually leaning against the doorpost and looking on, stood the wonderfully slender figure of a lady in a black velvet dress. Severin recognized her immediately. An image he had not thought of in a long time rose in his memory, as sharp and full of life as something that had just happened. As a schoolboy, in the year before his finishing examination, he had crossed Ferdinandstrasse one holiday morning while the beautiful world was making its promenade. She had attracted his att
ention with the large, blood-red ostrich feather in her hat, with her unusual, exquisite slenderness, with the charming and dangerous smile he saw only once after that, in a painting of the penitent Magdalene. A beautiful young man approached with a greeting and kissed her gloved fingers. This image had remained clinging to his senses and now clarified again: the festive liveliness of the street, the smooth sound of the rubber tires as the carriages drove over the pavement, and, in the middle of the bustle of people and made-up faces, the motion full of indescribable grace with which the strange woman gave her hand to the young dandy to kiss. After that he had come across her on a few occasions, fleeting and distant. Then for a long time he had not seen her. She was a singer from the National Theatre, who at that time had stood at the height of public favor. Now Kain, who had noticed Severin’s unwavering glance, told him her story. She had lost her voice as a result of an illness she had contracted from her lover. She had tried her luck on the stages in the country until it was no longer possible. Now she was back in Prague, and Kain had already seen her a few times at Doctor Konrad’s atelier.
In this circle it was not customary for the guests to be introduced to one another. Everyone came and went as he pleased. Nevertheless, when the master of the house greeted the newcomers, Severin asked him to take him to the lady in black. He stood in front of her and bowed when Doctor Konrad said his name. He searched her face for the charm of that moment. Then, when she offered him her hand, he took it and kissed it. She looked into his eyes with amazement and smiled. But it was no longer the smile he remembered. Her mouth was white and unrouged and was a little twisted by a forced apathy.
And where is the hat with the red ostrich feather? — Severin asked.
Oh — she exclaimed, astonished. She raised her head and turned it in circles, as though she were remembering a dream. Then she spoke slowly, and her words had a harsh sound, veiled by a light hoarseness:
The hat with the red feather — it’s been gone for a long time —
Severin spent the entire evening by Karla’s side. The noise of the conversations was constantly increasing, and blonde Ruschena, adorned and groomed like a doll, took out her mandolin. The young models had stopped playing the dice game. They sat at the table chattering, eating little sandwiches, and sipping the champagne the servant brought to them. Lazarus Kain had taken a seat near them and was telling anecdotes. A few of the men had come with their girls, who sat in the comfortable chairs of the atelier, chewing and showing their legs beneath their short skirts. An unbelievably gaunt man was sitting next to Doctor Konrad. He was wearing a fashionable frock coat and had a noble air about him. A succession of guests approached, and he told their fortunes from the lines of their palms. Severin went up to him and asked him to do the same. The gaunt man looked at him searchingly from behind his round glasses, and held Severin’s hand in front of his face longer than he had any of the others.
You have experienced a destiny — he said when he looked up again — a great destiny, what was it?
I haven’t experienced anything — Severin said, and pulled his arm away.
Then it will come — You have a hand to be feared.
Severin went back to his place and sat down next to Karla. He was angry that he had followed the book dealer and come up here with him. Lazarus sat with the laughing wenches and amused himself. His angular shoulders bounced and his small Jewish skull trembled. Severin listened to the uproar with a feeling of sadness and loathing. The thick tobacco smoke rose into the air in wide bands and wrapped itself around the light from lamps that hung from the ceiling by decoratively worked chains. Now and then Doctor Konrad went from one group to another and, with the exaggerated politeness of a Slav, played the host. He was a large man with a full beard and must have been about thirty years old. Under his dinner jacket he wore a bright, fantastic vest with blue buttons. His clever face had something of a Tartar beauty about it. Severin looked at him and tried to figure out why this man, whose title of doctor took on a strange sound in these surroundings, spent his days in extravagant and meaningless debaucheries. To him the erotic allure was missing from situations where a few models lifted their skirts above their knees with insolent grace, where pretty Ruschena played sentimental verses and indecent songs, where the champagne made the women drunk and old Lazarus exhausted his repertoire of stale jokes. More than ever he thirsted for a genuine life, one that bestowed flowers and terror and blew the daily round to pieces with its stormy jaws. Until now he had had to satisfy himself with surrogates. His relationship with Zdenka, which lacked any great form, the game with Susanna, and now the vulgar last dance in Konrad’s atelier, where, in an evil mood, he sat next to Karla. He looked at her from the side and studied the traces that a turbulent existence had engraved in her face. He knew that after a short time she would belong to him too, because a power emanated from him that attracted women and made them want to kiss his closed and silent mouth. Here too he noticed how they all smiled at him with languid eyes, how even blonde Ruschena looked at him with passionate glances. And next to him, on the chair’s upholstered arm, lay Karla’s narrow hand, which the handsome cavalier had kissed that time. She knew life and the theatre. He wanted to ask her if it was possible to create an artificial life that was deceptively similar to the real one and could be mastered. If it was possible to transform the days into tragedies, operettas with resonant and profound conclusions? What was the stage anyway? There it was also nothing but a game, and people cried and cheered and crimes occurred and dread beat its wings against paper walls. To make a destiny from the whims and individual desires of the heart, for one’s self and others, just as in the theatre one made landscapes and cities from wood and cardboard — was that so difficult?
But Karla only shook her head softly.
Why? Why? — Everything comes from within —
No! No! — Severin shouted — that’s not true!
In this scream there was an accusation without equal, an overheated desire many here recognized. It pounded like an echo against the atelier’s smoky walls. The room became quiet and the conversations stopped. Everyone looked at Severin. Ruschena put aside the mandolin and clung to his impassioned face with her eyes. Karla smoothed her black velvet dress with nervous fingers and leaned toward him. The fiery beauty of earlier days slowly awakened in her raw, lacerated voice, where it sounded like the tone from a cracked glass. She spoke about the radiance her life had had when she still wore the hat with the red ostrich feather. About the young man Severin had seen on the street that time, who had loved her. She spoke of the abysses and plains of fortune. She whispered and faltered, and suddenly the charming Magdalene smile he had been waiting for all evening was on her lips again.
Then a feverish joy came over him. He took his glass, touched it to hers, and drank. Again and again he poured the cool sparkling wine down his throat, until the atelier dissolved into a chaos of forms and faces, until on the carpet in the center, Ruschena, with false curls and flying skirts, started to dance a cancan.
V
A kind of friendship developed between Severin and Nikolaus, the man who had entertained the guests with his palmistry at Doctor Konrad’s atelier. There was something murky and enigmatic in the young student’s character that drew Severin to him and made him cultivate his acquaintance. No one had anything definite to report about Nikolaus, who had come to Prague a few years before and was studying philosophical subjects at the university. On the playing fields by Belvedere one saw him at soccer games or tennis matches, and one met him in the boathouses of the rowing clubs on the Moldau. In the evenings he sat in cafés, playing chess for hours with all sorts of people and drinking countless glasses of Swedish punch through a thin straw. It was known that he was rich, owned a large and valuable library, associated with artists, and pursued interests in the occult. In his elegantly and tastefully furnished apartment there was a large collection of unusual and noteworthy objects: cross-legged bronze Buddhas, spiritual drawings in metal frames, scarabs and
magic mirrors, a portrait of Blavatsky, and an authentic confessional. It was said that a man had once lost his life here under mysterious circumstances. No one had witnessed the event, and the legal investigation revealed that the revolver, a beautiful and valuable piece, had accidentally fired as Nikolaus was showing it to his guest. The charges against Nikolaus were dropped. However, for a long time a stubborn rumor connected a woman of society with the accident, and people whispered about homicide and an American duel. Nikolaus never did anything to put these apocryphal tales to rest.
The story of the young man’s mysterious death made an enormous impression on Severin. On evenings at Nikolaus’s apartment he regarded the face of his new acquaintance with undisguised awe while sipping the strong spirits his host brought to him in frosted glasses. Again and again his glances went to the elegant ladies’ desk, where sharply whetted daggers lay among books and papers, where behind the yellow brass locks he imagined the presence of the gun that had conjured death into this room. Death. Something in the rasping sound of the word seemed more exciting, richer in associations than all the sleepy utterances of a sheltered life. A small and perverse envy crept along the surface of his soul and left cloudy, lingering blisters. An envy for Nikolaus, who played with the opal ring on his finger with serene hands and discussed books and journals while it was possible that the carpet beneath his feet still retained the dried blood of the man who had died on it. He felt the supremacy of a personality that, irreproachable and blasé, remained closed to the world, and that, in spite of Nikolaus’s youth, had none of the formlessness that characterized his own.
Sometimes Karla also came with him to Nikolaus’s. Since meeting Severin she followed his every step. She knew how to arrange things so that she saw him almost every day. For her sentimental soul, tried by frosts and fires, he was a new fever, not yet savored, under whose power she had fallen, and to which she succumbed. She courted him with a tenacious amorousness, with the genuine, unrefined yearning of her sorrowful existence, with the practiced arts of a reckless coquetry. Severin could not resist the influence of her personality, but his experience with her was no different than any of the others he had had up to this point. There were moments when his heart believed it was on the threshold of something nameless, of which he had only a blind, groping knowledge. Then his hands trembled; then everything that happened to him had a significant, golden radiance; then he sat quiet and motionless and the world around him took on an enchanting beauty. Then the hours returned when grace was completely lost to him. With grief and resentment he realized that his mood had deceived him. He saw the lights in Karla’s eyes, her tall slender body, her languid arms and legs. He saw the pandering shadows of twilight, which clung palely and uncertainly to a world that no longer contained anything of wonder. And he kissed Karla’s mouth and took her as he had taken Susanna and would take Ruschena when she asked him to.
