The Master of the Day of Judgment (2 page)

At last he decided to release Dina's hand and he came over to me.

"I believe we have already met, have we not, Mr Virtuoso?" he said.

I answered very calmly and very politely.

"My name is Baron von Yosch."

The whale swallowed the rebuke and apologised. As so often happens, he said, he had not heard my name correctly when we were introduced. He had a way of spouting out the words when he spoke that reminded me of a whale spouting out its jet of water.

"But you do remember me, don't you?" he said.

"No, I'm very sorry, I don't."

"Five weeks ago, if I'm not mistaken ..."

"I'm afraid you are mistaken. Five weeks ago I was travelling abroad."

"Quite right, in Norway, and we sat facing each other for four hours between Christiania and Bergen. Isn't that so?"

He stirred the teacup that Dina put in front of him. She overheard what he had just said and looked at us curiously.

"So you two have met before?" she said.

The whale chuckled quietly and said, turning to Dina:

"Yes, but on the trip across the Hardanger fjeld Baron von Yosch was just as uncommunicative as he is today."

"That's very likely, that's the way I am, I'm afraid, I seldom make friends with strangers when I'm travelling abroad," I replied, and so far as I was concerned that was the end of the matter.

But it wasn't the end of the matter for the whale. Eugen Bischoff, who was always prepared to attribute all sorts of talents and outstanding characteristics to his friends, made a remark of some sort about the amazing memory for faces that the engineer had once more demonstrated.

"Oh, there was really nothing very remarkable about it on this occasion," he said, sipping his tea. "You'll forgive me, baron, won't you, but your face really does not stand out from hundreds of others, your resemblance to many other people is really very striking. But that English pipe of yours is an entirely different matter, its distinctive characteristics enabled me to recognise you at once."

I found his joking rather crude, and thought he was paying me rather too much attention. I really did not know what entitled me to that honour.

"But now, Eugen, old boy, it's time you told us all about it," he said in loud and self-assured tones. "I see you were a great success in Berlin, the newspapers were full of it. And how are you getting on with your Richard III? Well, I hope?"

"Shall we go on playing?" I suggested.

The whale made an exaggeratedly alarmed and defensive gesture of apology.

"You haven't finished yet?" he exclaimed. "I beg pardon a thousand times. Really, I thought . . . alas, I'm completely unmusical."

I assured him with the greatest courtesy and friendliness that this had not escaped me.

He ignored this remark, sat down, stretched his legs, picked up some photographs from the table, and became immersed in contemplation of one of them, showing Eugen Bischoff in the role of some Shakespearean king.

I began tuning my fiddle.

"We just took a short interval between the first and second movements — in honour of your arrival, Herr Solgrub," said Dr Gorski, and behind me I heard Dina whispering:

"Why are you so unfriendly to him?" she said.

At that I flushed scarlet, as I always did when she spoke to me. I turned my head, and saw the strange oval of her face and her dark eyes looking at me questioningly and in surprise, and I sought for an answer, wanted to explain to her that I was prejudiced against people who came crashing into rooms at such inopportune moments. True, they didn't do it on purpose, they couldn't help it, they might be the best people in the world, I was being unfair to them, as I was very well aware. But an unhappy constitutional defect made them always turn up at the wrong moment. I gladly admitted that — but I couldn't suppress my antipathy, I just couldn't, it was impossible, it was my nature . . .

No, it was all lies. Whom was I trying to deceive? It was jealousy, just pitiful jealousy, the pain of disappointed love. When I saw Dina I became her watch-dog keeping guard over her. Anyone who approached her was my deadly enemy. I wanted to keep for myself alone every word that she spoke, every glance of her eyes. Why couldn't I escape from her, get up and go and put an end to it once and for all? It ached and burned inside me.

But hush. Dr Gorski tapped his music stand twice with his bow, and we began the second movement.

TWO

How often have the rhythms of that second movement filled me with fear and trembling. I have never been able to play it right through without succumbing to deep melancholy, though my passionate love is associated with it.

Yes, it's a scherzo, but what a scherzo. It begins with a dreadful merriment, a gaiety that makes one's blood run cold. Eerie laughter sweeps through the room, a wild and grim carnival of cloven-hoofed forms. That is how this strange scherzo begins; and suddenly from the midst of this infernal Bacchanal there arises a solitary human voice, the voice of a lost soul, a soul in a torment of fear that soars upwards and laments its suffering.

But the satanic laughter breaks out again, smashes loudly into the pure harmonies and tears the song to shreds. Once more the voice arises, softly and hesitantly, and finds its melody and bears it aloft as if wanting to escape with it to another world. But the devils of hell are triumphant, the day has come, the last day, the Day of Judgment. Satan triumphs over the sinful soul and the lamenting human voice falls from the heights and disappears in a Judas-like laughter of despair.

When the movement ended no-one spoke. The silence round me lasted for several minutes.

Then the gloomy, disconsolate world of shadows in which I was plunged suddenly vanished. The dream of the crack of doom, the nightmare of the Day of Judgment faded and left me free.

Dr Gorski had risen to his feet and was pacing slowly up and down, Eugen Bischoff was in a brown study, and the engineer had a good stretch as if he had just woken up. Then he helped himself to a cigarette from the box on the table and snapped the lid shut.

My eyes turned to Dina Bischoff. One's first thought when one wakes up in the morning is often the last one had when falling asleep the night before, and all I could think of now that the movement was finished was how angry she had been with me and how vital it was for me to make it up with her, and the longer I looked at her the stronger became the need to do so. I could think of nothing else, and presumably this childish need was an after-effect of the music.

She turned her head to me.

"Well, baron, why are you so deep in thought?" she said. "What are you thinking about?"

"I was thinking about my dog Zamor," I replied.

I knew very well why I said that, I looked her straight in the eye as I did so, both of us knew very well indeed. She knew that dog, oh, how well she knew it.

She winced, pretended not to hear, and turned away angrily. Now I had really upset her. I should not have said that, I should not have reminded her of my small dog Zamor just at the moment when that stranger, that whale, was certainly uppermost in her thoughts.

Meanwhile Dr Gorski had put his cello and bow back into its linen case.

"I think that will be enough for today," he said. "We'll spare Herr Solgrub the third movement, shan't we?"

Dina threw her head back and hummed the theme of the adagio.

"Listen," she said, "it makes you feel you're sitting in a boat, doesn't it?"

To my surprise the whale also started humming the theme of the third movement. He actually did so almost faultlessly, only a trifle too fast. Then he said:

"Sitting in a boat? No. I think it's the gliding rhythm that leads you astray. At all events it puts quite different ideas into my head."

"I see you know the B major trio very well," I said. This remark seemed to make things up between me and Dina. She immediately started talking to me.

"I must explain to you that our friend Solgrub is by no means as unmusical as he makes out," she said eagerly. "It's just that he feels obliged to display a superiority to music and all the other useless arts. Isn't that true, Waldemar, it's what your profession demands of you, isn't it? And he tries to persuade me that he accepts my husband as an actor only because he has seen his photo on picture postcards and in an illustrated weekly. Keep quiet, Waldemar, I know all about you."

The whale acted as if all this had nothing to do with him. He took a book from the shelf and started looking through it. But he obviously liked being talked about and being explained and analysed by Dina.

Her brother now intervened.

"And at the same time he's more deeply affected by music than any of us," he said. "It's the Russian soul, don't you see. He immediately sees whole pictures in his mind: a landscape, or the sea with clouds and breakers, or a sunset, or the movements of a human being, or — what was it just now? — a flock of fleeing cassowaries, I think, and heaven knows what else besides."

"The other day," Dina went on, "when I played him the last movement of the Appassionata — it was the Appassionata, wasn't it, Waldemar, that put the strange idea of a swearing and cursing old soldier into your head?"

So the two of them have got as far as that already, I said to myself, full of bitterness and rage. She plays Beethoven sonatas for him. That's exactly how things had begun between Dina and me once upon a time.

The whale put down his book.

"The Appassionata, third movement," he said thoughtfully, and leaned back and shut his eyes. "It makes me see — with a clarity that it's impossible to describe at this moment — but at the time I could describe every button on his uniform — I see a cripple with a wooden leg, an aged, disabled veteran of Napoleon's campaigns, raging and cursing as he limps round the room."

"Raging and cursing? Poor devil. But he had probably managed to lay aside a little money for a rainy day."

I said that quite unintentionally and without thinking, I meant it merely as a joke, and only a moment later did I realise what a painful effect that remark was bound to have; and indeed, Dr Gorski shook his head disapprovingly, Felix looked at me angrily and put his bandaged hand admonishingly to his mouth, and Dina looked at me in shocked amazement. There was a moment of dismayed silence, and I felt myself flushing with embarrassment. But Eugen Bischoff had noticed nothing. He turned to the engineer and said:

"I've often envied your ability to visualise things so vividly," and at that moment the idol of the gallery, the hero of the drama schools, looked very depressed. "You ought to have been an actor, my dear Solgrub."

"What a thing to say, Bischoff!" Dr Gorski exclaimed almost violently. "You, who are chock-full of characters and personalities. They're piled up on top of one another inside you, kings and rebels, chancellors and popes, murderers, rogues and archangels, beggars and God knows who else besides."

"But never in my life have I visualised a single one of them as vividly as Solgrub visualised his wooden-legged old soldier. All I've seen is their shadows, I've never seen anything but vague, shapeless, colourless, unsubstantial forms having a faint resemblance now to one character, now to another. If I had been able to visualise the button on that uniform, like Solgrub, good God, what an impersonator of human character I should have been."

I understand the resignation implicit in his words. He was an old man, no longer the great Eugen Bischoff. People let him feel this, and he felt it himself, though he fought the feeling and refused to admit it to himself. Oh, the sad hopelessness of the years to come, the years of your decline, my unhappy friend.

Suddenly the conversation with the director flashed through my mind, and I remembered what he had told me. Suppose someone passed on the information, suppose I myself. . . You know, dear Eugen, I'm on excellent terms with your director, we discuss all sorts of things, and recently — I can tell you, Eugen, you won't take it tragically — a few days ago he told me, only jestingly, of course ...

Good God, what an idea. Heaven forbid that he should find out, it would be the end of him. Emotionally he's so vulnerable, so devoid of any inner prop, a puff of wind would be enough to bowl him over.

Dina's brother was now talking to him. That excellent young man was resorting to all the stage jargon that he knew: the importance of psychological detail and of entering into the spirit of the play, and so on and so forth — but Eugen Bischoff shook his head.

"Don't build castles in the air for me, Felix," he said. "You know as well as I do what I lack. What you say is quite right, but it doesn't go to the heart of the matter. Take it from me, those things can be learnt, or can come by themselves with the task one is facing. But creative imagination cannot be learnt. You have it or you don't. I lack the imagination that can create a world out of nothing, and many others, in fact most, lack it too. Yes, Dina, I know what you are going to say. I've made my way in the world, there are some things I can do, never mind what the papers say. But do any of you suspect what a dry, prosaic person I really am? Something happens that ought to give one sleepless nights, send cold shudders down one's spine and give one nightmares, but heaven knows that the effect on me is not very different from reading reports of accidents in the paper at breakfast in the morning."

"Have you seen today's paper?" I interrupted. I was thinking of the workers' riots in St Petersburg. Eugen Bischoff was very interested in social questions.

"No," he replied. "I looked for it everywhere, but couldn't find it. Dina, what happened to the paper this morning?"

Dina went white and red and white again. Good heavens, I should have remembered that they had kept from him the newspaper with the news of the failure of his bank. I had put my foot in it again. I was committing one
faux pas
after another.

But Dina recovered her composure quickly.

"The paper?" she said casually, in tones as matter-of-fact as if she were mentioning something of no importance whatever. "I think I saw it somewhere in the garden. I'll find it again. But Eugen, please go on, you were telling us something so interesting."