by Paul Leppin
Once, at the break of day, he barred the door of the tavern behind him and saw Nathan Meyer standing by his side. His thin mouth twisted scornfully as he greeted Severin. He accompanied him a short way down the street. When they parted, he cleared his throat roughly and shook his head.
She’s a slut! — he said repeatedly through his teeth, and Severin was not sure if what he said contained satisfaction or admonition.
With a strange, almost fatherly mien the Russian looked into his eyes.
She’s a slut, Severin! — — Believe me, — she’s a slut!
VII
Severin’s love for Mylada had come into his life like a jet of flame that suddenly shoots into the sky and hideously illuminates the fiery night. A fearsome and lonely horror enclosed him now as she distanced herself from him after a few weeks of an abandoned and capricious mood and left him once again to the icy shadows. He was incapable of accepting that he was alone again. The heat had burned out his soul, leaving a hollow and empty carapace. He did not understand that the agony of inflamed and horribly suppurating wounds was all that remained. With the rashness of the hopeless he bridled against fate.
Every day he waited in his room for her visit. The hands of the grandfather clock clicked over the quarter hours and it became late. Mylada was not coming anymore. He beat his face against the floor and saliva and blood flowed from his twisted mouth and soaked the carpet.
That evening in the wine bar he seized her arm. He dug in his nails to the bone. In a quavering voice she cried out for help, and tore the flesh from his wrist with savage bites. Finally she pulled herself free.
I don’t want anymore! It’s finished!
Shaken by revulsion, he fled into the street. A gust of wind carried off his hat, but he did not notice. Bareheaded, obliterated by suffering, he ran through the night. Terror followed loomingly at his back and he could not escape it. The uniform of a constable flashed next to him and a commanding voice hailed him. Severin answered with a curse and kept running.
In the fields beyond the suburbs he stopped. His breath rattled in his throat and his veins pounded and threatened to burst through his neck. He ripped off his collar and gradually succeeded in collecting himself. The clouds drifting across the sky dispersed and revealed the moon. Severin recognized the area. Nearby rose a dilapidated farmhouse that had been abandoned for years. In the summer vagabonds slept between its crumbling walls, and during the day ragpickers sometimes searched the old rubble for treasure.
A few steps further on, the footpath joined the main road. The new buildings of the large factories rose on either side. Beyond them the cemeteries began. Severin had not been in this neighborhood since Doctor Konrad’s death. His thoughts reviewed the days that had passed since the burial and were mortified and torn to pieces by the reality of what had happened. The moon vanished and darkness solidified over the fields. Severin ran on. He distanced himself further and further from the city, keeping his back to its cheerless lights. The night wind combed through his hair and seized his naked breast through his open shirt. His blood became calm and stopped pounding. Behind the churchyard’s iron gate, next to Konrad’s grave, stood the tree that had once haunted him even in sleep. Severin laughed as he walked by. He took a piece of earth from the ground and threw it over the wall.
A frightened weariness shackled his feet. He thought of the farm by the road. If he hid there until morning, he would not have to walk back to the city. He wanted to sleep. It occurred to him that a short time before there had been something in the newspapers about the farmhouse. There had been a suicide there, and the body of an officer was found amid the old debris. Severin had known him; he was a regular customer at The Spider. He remembered the evening when Karla had brought the news of his death to the wine bar. He had not worried about it then, because love had disrupted his life and sealed his eyes and ears. Now he saw the connection clearly. An unappeasable hatred, heavy with abscesses, broke within him; he raised his hand and shook his fist in the darkness.
The breakdown came to Severin a few days later. The tenacious vitality he possessed, which had withstood all the crises and excesses, broke and shattered beneath the force of an inconsolable sorrow. He reported himself sick and stopped going to the office. It was impossible for him to do or think anything that was not related to the masochistic desire with which he savored his pain and constantly renewed it from its earliest beginnings. A merciless and degenerate rage overcame him after hours of self-absorbed apathy. Then foam came to his lips and he smothered his horrible screams in the pillows on his bed. The mirror showed him a lacerated forehead and eyes red from wakefulness, and he smashed the glass with clenched fists. On the street he stepped out of the way of people who turned to look at him when they recognized his somber face and swollen tear-glands.
That evening he met Nathan Meyer in front of The Spider. Severin was staring into the circle of light from the lamp over the door and his teeth were chattering when Nathan came up to him and put his hand on his shoulder.
Don’t go in there anymore! he said.
His voice was gentle and contained the firm and caring undertone adults use when speaking to children.
Never go in there again, Severin!
Then he took him by the arm and led him up the stairs to his room. Severin followed him without offering any resistance.
What do you want from me, Nathan? — he asked, and let his weakened body lean against the man’s large frame.
Nathan Meyer turned up the lamp and found a chair for his guest. Before him he put a box of the slender cigarettes he brought from his homeland and smoked constantly, lighting new ones from the ends of others that were already burning.
Smoke!
Then he began to pace the room with long strides. Severin sat and listened to him. It was the same thing he had experienced in the café. With short sentences made choppy by agitation, the Russian preached war against the world. But there was also something else that betrayed itself in his words, a friendly sympathy, an undisguised concern which sounded strange to Severin and which he did not know how to explain.
What do you want from me? — he asked again.
Nathan Meyer stopped in front of him.
I like you, Severin!
He bent forward smiling.
You are one of us! You belong to the guild!
To the guild? — What is that?
But his question received no answer. Nathan rattled a bundle of keys and unlocked the desk.
You can look at the things here while I go downstairs and get a bottle of wine. — But be careful with your cigarette!
Severin rose and curiously opened the heavy drawer. Nathan Meyer had left him alone, and a peculiar feeling came over him in this room, where the bookshelves covered the walls up to the ceiling and the lamplight shimmered on the furniture. Resting next to each other in the chest were carefully stored high-explosive bombs made of iron, spherical hand grenades, and square and egg-shaped canisters with white fuses.
Severin bent over the open drawer. A bright red thought crept lasciviously through his brain, and his hands shook violently against his cuffs. He carefully weighed every object with his eyes. A medium-sized, wonderfully formed device lay among the others like a black heart. Severin took it and slipped it into his pocket.
So? — said Meyer as he came back into the room with two glasses and a filled carafe.
A child’s toy! he muttered contemptuously when Severin remained silent and closed the desk.
Come, we’ll drink a glass to the guild!
VIII
After weeks of cruelly desolate loneliness Severin could no longer control his desire to see Mylada. The bloodless webs of the deceptive fantasies he followed into the evening shadows led him again and again to the place where the light from the wine bar fell on the street like a large blinding wheel. Nathan’s warning no longer resounded in his soul. Humbled by shame and consumed by longing, one evening he found himself back in The Spider.
He
could no longer live without the final and bitterest sting of his sorrow. Mylada looked past him like a strange and unfamiliar guest. But her voice, which swelled with lubricity, and the golden cunning in the pupils of her eyes kindled the memory of her passion and her wicked and pernicious love. He recalled the hour when she had come to him dressed as a nun. Her kisses made him sigh and shudder. Delightedly he held in his arms the bewildering specter he had seen under the acacias during the summer.
Now he sat among the others, his head propped up on his arms. From between his fingers he watched how Mylada joked with the men, and traced the lines of her body under her dress. The book dealer Lazarus jostled her on his knees. His bare head pressed against her breasts, and beneath his taut skin Severin saw the creases of his skullbones. He recalled the evening when he had run through the city armed with a stone, intending to commit murder. Mylada played with the sparse and untidy beard that hung from the old man’s slack jaws, and the cloud Severin remembered rose in her clear eyes. A miserable thought slid through his throat like a slimy fist. He emptied his glass and stepped into the street.
Outside the deep and inexhaustible winter sky lay over the city. No stars were visible, and the departing autumn dragged behind it a raw and viscid trail of vapor that dampened the pavement. A tiny lamp burned by the mobile stand of a tea-maker; two prostitutes with feather hats and bright yellow summer coats were having a quick meal and laughing as they conversed. Severin walked up and bought a few cigarettes. One of the girls spoke to him and asked for twenty hellers. He reached into his pocket and gave her a handful of silver coins.
An apathetic and taciturn bitterness had taken possession of him. He did not know where he should go or what he should do. The warm smell of cheap spirits struck him from the carpeted entry hall of a bar, and the porter put his hand to his cap in greeting. Severin thought of the years when he had sealed up his life in such places. A keen desire for that time overcame him. Back then he had had a place of refuge. He was not alone in the poverty and narrowness of his existence; naive wishes kept him company, lachrymose notions of the vastness and sin of the world. Now he knew better. Ruined and besoiled, consumed and enervated, he was perishing in filth because a bargirl had ended things with him.
Now he could also understand the word that had come from Nathan Meyer’s mouth. There were some for whom the radiance of life was only the glitter of a delusion. Sneerers with accursed hands, pariahs hounded through the streets by fear, murderers and people who had been marked out. That was the guild, and Severin belonged to it too.
Actually he had always felt it, even as a boy, when he read in the wild book and hungered for adventures. In the pale flame of his rotten youth there had always been a reddish smoke that came from the wicked hiding-places of his heart. To him the happiness of others was a childish rebus. He had recklessly played with destiny, and had blundered onto its wretched mousetraps without hurting himself.
He looked up and noticed that he had been going around in a circle the whole time, retracing his own path. Before him the tea-cooker’s lamp glowed in the small lantern, and the man’s white apron shone in the darkness. Severin suppressed a sob. The man there had a home, and the stub of candle in the broken glass burned with a tranquil light.
And him? And Severin?
He felt a pain deep within his soul. The image of a woman, sweet, covered with dust and shards, raised its grief-stricken face to him. But he threw back his head and refused to look at it.
Or maybe? Was it possible?
A mild and disconcerting weakness made his limbs slacken. In front of the entry steps of a house he let his knees sink, and cooled his brow against the stones. He folded his hands and closed his eyes, and directly overhead, in the small space the buildings left open to the sky, a diffident star appeared and began to shine.
A fine, light gray luminescence was heralding the morning as Severin rose and set out toward Old Town Square. The indistinct borders of the colorful streetsigns were visible on the walls, and the man with the tea machine was preparing for his journey home. A bleary-eyed woman leaned in front of the Ringapotheke and rang the bell.
The custodian of the building sleepily held out his sweaty hand to the late visitor and nodded with satisfaction when he remembered who he was. Severin gave him a coin and climbed the stairs to Zdenka’s apartment. An endless pause stopped the beating of his heart before he knocked on the door.
Inside a noise became audible.
Is someone there? — a voice asked.
It’s me — Severin!
The door opened and a hot hand led him into the room. The petroleum lamp with the green shade burned on the table. Zdenka was in her nightshirt. Her hair fell to her throat in blond ringlets and she shivered from the cold.
Why did you come here? — she asked quietly. Severin removed his hat and held it in his hands. He looked around and embraced the room with a long, parting glance. The early light came through the curtains and made the glow from the lamp small and meager. Next to the bed stood the wardrobe where Zdenka kept her clothes and linen. The violet porcelain vase on the chest was cracked and the color had left the handle. A bunch of dried flowers they had picked in the woods during the summer was stuck inside.
Zdenka looked at him and waited. The nightshirt glided over her naked bosom and the cold made her draw her shoulders together. With a practiced and mechanical mo-tion he extended his arm. But then he let it sink again.
Why did you come? — —
Then he turned around and went out the door.
IX
The wind, which in the morning had made the signboards of the shopkeepers clatter, had subsided. A calm evening made the sky clear, and a pale and beautiful sun began to shine. Severin sat up in his tousled bed and looked at the clock. The long rest after his sleepless night had not refreshed him. He washed the hot stupor from his eyes and carefully put on his clothes.
Groups of adolescent boys from the Gymnasium came toward him from the street. They were on their way home from school, conversing animatedly. Severin looked back at them with a vague feeling of envy. The sudden change in the weather had brought people out of their homes, and a mob of pedestrians sauntered along the pavement and crowded around the shopwindows. Girls with fashionable velvet bonnets over their coquettish hairstyles made their way through the crowd. Two lovers stopped at an inter-
section and admired the sunset. Poppy-colored streaks appeared on the rooftops and set fire to the chimneys. A thick cloud entered the glow and floated over Karlsplatz like a bar of gold.
Severin walked along slowly, with a frigid and taciturn curiosity. The half-dark sensation that always afflicted him after a state of exhaustion took him unawares, and he gave himself up to it without resistance. His consciousness split off and lived an independent life, separate from his own. The past and the present went by like pictures in a panorama, and he looked into his own existence with astonishment and irresolution. The faces of people walking next to him and the profiles of houses he was familiar with acquired a new and peculiar clarity that stimulated his perception.
The chestnut-roasters had set up their ovens on the corners of the intersecting streets. A cheerful luminescence lay over the city. A wrinkled old woman with a crooked stick hobbled slowly over the pavement. Longhaired students stood in front of doors, talking to servant girls, and the dark blue dusk drew pleasant shadows from the niches. A lantern set out in anticipation of nightfall sparkled in front of Kreuzherrnkirche and filled the air with glassy color.
Severin stepped onto the bridge. A cold wind blew up from the river and chased away the mood to which he had surrendered himself. Razor-sharp, his memory returned and sliced the fraudulent play of his senses to pieces. Evening shimmered over the river. An automobile with large, milky-white headlamps honked gloomily, and the bell of the small chapel at the foot of the castle steps rang a benediction. Severin strode past the black statues on the parapet. He bit his tongue, and blood flowed into his mouth, tasting of gall. This
was not the city he knew. This was a peepshow, where proper male and female burghers ran errands and St. Nepomuk watched over the Moldau with the hands of a hypocrite.
The twilight was giving way to darkness as Severin walked through the tower entrance of the Kleinseite and toward the Radetzky memorial. By the main guardhouse a soldier walked back and forth with a shouldered rifle. The color of yellow copper lay on the square of arcades. Severin clambered through Spornergasse and up to Hradschin. The city he knew was different. — Its streets led into sin, and evil lurked at the thresholds. There the heart beat between dank, treacherous walls, there the night crept past curtained windows and throttled the soul while it slept. Satan had placed his traps everywhere. In churches and in the houses of lecherous women. His breath lived within their murderous kisses, and in the garments of a nun he went out to plunder —
In front of the entrance to the castle courtyard Severin turned his head. It had become dark, and with weeping lights Prague spread itself out at his feet.
Somewhere a dog howled, and its fearful baying sounded as though it came from the depths, from a forgotten pit beneath the crooked lanes of Hradschin —
A large group of people had been gathered in The Spider since early evening. Lazarus bought the champagne. Mylada’s birthday was being celebrated with lewd gaiety.
There were many members of the circle that used to meet at Doctor Konrad’s atelier. Lazarus had invited them all; even Nikolaus sat there, serious and bored, as well as the pock-faced painter who now lived with blonde Ruschena. In an enchanting mood Mylada presided over the table. Her lissome shamelessness charmed the men and filled the young people with enthusiasm. One after another, they drank to her, and she moistened her red tongue in every one of their glasses. Desire leapt over their faces like a tiny flame and fastened itself to her green dress. Someone suggested a raffle, the proceeds of which would be drunk up at the earliest opportunity, and, to laughter and jubilation, Mylada said she would give herself to the winner. The price of the lots was high, but nevertheless all but one had been bought up when Severin entered the room and was welcomed with a loud cheer.
