Journey Into the Past (8 page)

“Madness,” he exclaimed to himself, in astonishment, faltering. “Madness! What do they want? Once again, once again!”

War once again, war that had so recently shattered his whole life? With a strange shudder, he looked at those young faces, staring at the black mass on the move in ranks of four, like a square strip of film running, unrolling out of a narrow alley as if out of a dark box, and every face it showed was instantly rigid with bitter determination, a threat, a weapon. Why was this threat so noisily uttered on a mild June evening, hammered home in a gently dreaming city?

“What do they want? What do they want?” The question still had him by the throat. Only just now he had seen the world in bright, musical clarity, with the light of love and tenderness shining over it, he had been part of a melody of kindness and trust. And suddenly the iron steps of that marching throng were treading everything down, men girding themselves for the fray, men of a thousand different kinds, shouting with a thousand voices, yet expressing only one thing in their eyes and their onward march, hate, hate, hate.

He instinctively took her arm so as to feel something warm, love, passion, kindness, sympathy, a soft, soothing sensation, yet the drums broke through his inner silence, and now that all the thousands of voices were raised in what was unmistakably a war song, now that the ground was shaking with feet marching in time, the air exploding in sudden jubilant hurrahs from the huge mob, he felt as if something tender and sweet-sounding inside him was crushed by the powerful, noisily forceful drone of reality.

A slight movement at his side drew his attention to her hand with its gloved fingers, gently deterring his own from clenching so wildly into a fist. Then he turned his eyes, which had been fixed on the crowd—she was looking at him pleadingly, without words, he merely felt her gently compelling touch on his arm.

“Yes, let’s go,” he murmured, pulling himself together, hunching his shoulders as if to ward off something invisible, and he began forcing a way through the conveniently close-packed crowd of spectators, all staring as silently as he had been, spellbound, at the never-ending march past of these military legions. He did not know where he was going, he just wanted to get out of this tumultuous crowd, away from this square where all that was gentle in him, all dreams, were being ground down as if in a mortar by this pitiless rhythm. Just to get away, be alone with her, with this one woman, surrounded by the dark, under a roof, feeling her breath, able to look into her eyes at his leisure, unwatched, for the first time in ten years, to enjoy being alone with her. It was something he had promised himself in so many dreams, and now it was almost swept away by that swirling human mass marching and singing, a surging wave constantly breaking over itself. His nervous gaze went to the buildings, all with banners draped over their façades, but many of them had gold lettering proclaiming that they were business premises, and some were restaurants. All at once he felt the little suitcase pulling slightly at his hand, conveying a message—he longed to rest, to be at home somewhere, and alone! To buy a handful of silence and a few square metres of space! And as if in answer, the gleaming golden name of a hotel now leaped to the eye above a tall stone façade, and its glazed porch curved out to meet them. He was walking slowly, taking shallow breaths. Almost dazed, he stopped, and instinctively let go of her arm. “This is supposed to be a good hotel. It was recommended to me,” he said untruthfully and awkwardly.

She flinched back in alarm, blood pouring into her pale face. He lips moved, trying to say something—perhaps the same words she had said ten years ago, that distressed, “Not now! Not here.”

But then she saw his gaze turning to her, anxious, disturbed, nervous. And she bowed her head in silent consent, and followed him, with small and daunted steps, to the entrance.

In the reception area of the hotel a porter, wearing a brightly coloured cap and with the self-important air of a ship’s captain at his lookout post, stood behind the desk that kept them at a distance. He did not move towards them as they hesitantly entered, merely cast a fleeting and disparaging look at them, taking in the small suitcase. He waited, and they had to approach him. He was now apparently busy again with the folio pages of the big register open before him. Only when the prospective guests were right in front of him did he raise cool eyes to inspect them objectively and severely. “Have you booked in with us, sir?” He then responded to the almost guilty negative by leafing through the register again. “I’m afraid we are fully booked. There was a big ceremony here today, the consecration of the flag—but,” he added graciously, “I’ll see what I can do.”

Oh, to punch this sergeant-major with his braided uniform in the face, thought the humiliated man bitterly. A beggar again, a petitioner, an intruder for the first time in a decade. But by now the self-satisfied porter had finished his lengthy study of the register. “Number twenty-seven has just fallen vacant, a double room, if you’d care to take that.” What was there to do but to say, with a muted growl, a swift, “Yes, that will do,” and his restless fingers took the key handed to him, impatient as he already was to have silent walls between himself and this man. Then, behind him, he heard the stern voice again: “Register here, please,” and a rectangular form was place in front of him, with ten or twelve headings to boxes that must be filled in with title, name, age, place of origin, place of residence, all the intrusive questions that officialdom puts to living human beings. The distasteful task was quickly performed, pencil flying—only when he had to enter her surname, untruthfully uniting it in marriage with his (though once that had been his secret wish), did the light weight of the pencil shake clumsily in his hand. “Duration of stay, please,” demanded the implacable doorman, running his eye over the completed form and pointing to the one box still empty. “One day,” wrote the pencil angrily. In his agitation he felt his moist forehead and had to take off his hat, the air here in this strange place seemed so oppressive.

“First floor on the left,” said a courteous waiter, swiftly coming up as the exhausted man turned aside. But he was looking around for her. All through this procedure she had been standing motionless, showing intense interest in a poster announcing a Schubert recital to be given by an unknown singer, but as she stood there, very still, a slight quiver kept passing over her shoulders like the wind blowing over a grassy meadow. He noticed, ashamed, how she was controlling her agitation by main force; why, he thought against his will, did I tear her away from her quiet home to bring her here? But now there was no going back. “Come on,” he urged her quietly. Without showing him her face, she moved away from the poster that meant nothing to them and went ahead up the stairs, slowly and treading heavily, with difficulty—like an old woman, he involuntarily reflected.

That thought lasted for a mere second as she made her way up the few steps, with her hand on the banister rail, and he immediately banished the ugly idea. But something cold and hurtful remained in his mind, replacing the thought he had so forcibly dismissed from it.

At last they were upstairs in the corridor—those two silent minutes had been an eternity. A door stood open. It was the door of their room, and the chambermaid was still busy with broom and duster in it. “I’ll soon be finished,” she excused herself. “The room’s only this moment been vacated, but sir and madam can come in, I’ll just fetch clean sheets.”

They went in. The air in the closed room was musty and sweetish, smelling of olive soap and cold cigarette smoke. Somewhere the unseen trace of other guests still lingered.

Boldly, perhaps still warm from human bodies, the unmade double bed bore visible witness to the point and purpose of this room. He was nauseated by its explicit meaning, and instinctively went to the window and opened it. Soft damp air, mingled with the muted noise of the street, drifted slowly in past the gently fluttering curtains. He stayed there at the open window, looking out intently at the now dark rooftops. How ugly this room was, how shaming their presence here seemed, how disappointing was this moment when they were together, a moment longed for so much over the years—but neither he nor she had wanted it to be so sudden, to show itself in all its shameless nudity! For the space of three, four, five breaths—he counted them—he looked out, too cowardly to speak first, but then he forced himself to do so. No, no, this would not do, he said. And just as he had known and feared in advance, she stood in the middle of the room as if turned to stone in her grey dustcoat, her arms hanging down as if they had snapped, as if she were something that did not belong here and had entered this unpleasant room only by the accident of force and chance. She had taken off her gloves, obviously to put them down, but then she must have felt revulsion against the idea of placing them anywhere here, and so they dangled empty from her fingers, like the husks of her hands. Her gaze was fixed, her eyes veiled, but when he turned they looked at him with a plea in them. He understood. “Why don’t we—” and his voice stumbled over the breath he was expelling—“why don’t we go for a little walk? It’s so gloomy in here.”

“Yes, yes!” She uttered the word as if liberating it, letting fear off the chain. And already her hand was reaching for the door handle. He followed her more slowly, and saw her shoulders shaking like the flanks of an animal when it has just escaped the clutch of deadly claws.

The street was waiting, warm and crowded. In the wake of the ceremonial rally, the human current was still restless, so they turned off into quieter streets, finding the path through the woods that had taken them up to the castle on an excursion ten years ago. “It was a Sunday, do your remember?” he said, instinctively speaking in a loud voice, and she, obviously calling the same memory to mind, replied quietly, “I haven’t forgotten anything I did with you. Otto had his school friend with him, and they hurried on ahead so fast that we almost lost them in the woods. I called for him, telling him to come back, and I didn’t do it willingly, because I so much wanted to be alone with you. But we were still strangers to each other at that time.”

“And today too,” he said, trying to make a joke of it. But she did not reply. I ought not to have said that, he felt vaguely; what makes me keep comparing the past with the present? But why can’t I say anything right to her today? The past always comes between us, the time that has gone by.

So they climbed the rising slope of the road in silence. The houses below them were already huddling close together in the faint light, the curving river showed more clearly in the twilight of the valley, while here the trees rustled and darkness fell over them. No one came towards them, only their own shadows went ahead in silence. And whenever a lamp by the roadside cast its light on them at an angle, the shadows ahead merged as if embracing, stretching, longing for one another, two bodies in one form, parting again only to embrace once more, while they themselves walked on, tired and apart from each other. As if spellbound, he watched this strange game, that escape and recapture and separation again of the soulless figures, shadowy bodies that were only the reflection of their own. With a kind of sick curiosity he saw the flight and merging of those insubstantial figures, and as he watched the black, flowing, fleeting image before him, he almost forgot the living woman at his side. He was not thinking clearly of anything, yet he felt vaguely that this furtive game was a warning of something that lay deep as a well within him, but was now insistently rising, like the bucket dipped into the well menacingly reaching the surface. What was it? He strained every sense. What was the shadow play here in the sleeping woods telling him? There must be words in it, a situation, something he had experienced, heard, felt, something hidden in a melody, a deeply buried memory that he had not touched for many years.

And suddenly it came to him, a lightning flash in the darkness of oblivion—yes, words, a poem that she had once read aloud to him in the drawing room in the evening. A French poem, he still knew the words, and as if blown to him by a hot wind they were suddenly rising to his lips; he heard those forgotten lines from a poem in another language spoken, over a space of ten years, in her voice:

And as soon as those lines lit up in his memory, an image joined them at magical speed—the lamp with its golden light in the darkened drawing room where she had read Verlaine’s poem to him one evening. He saw her in the shadow cast by the lamp, sitting both near to him and far away, beloved and out of reach, he suddenly felt his own heart of those days hammering with excitement to hear her voice coming to him on the musical wave of the words, hearing her say the words of the poem—although only in the poem—words that spoke of love and longing, in a foreign language and meant for a stranger, yet it was intoxicating to hear them in that voice, her voice. He wondered how he could have forgotten it all these years, that poem, that evening when they had been on their own in the house, confused because they were alone, taking flight from the dangers of conversation into the easier terrain of books, where a confession of more intimate feelings sometimes showed clearly through the words and the melody, flashing like light in the bushes, sparkling intangibly, yet comforting without any palpable presence. How could he have forgotten it for so long? But how was it that the forgotten poem had suddenly surfaced again? Involuntarily, he spoke the lines aloud, translating them:

And no sooner had he said it than she understood, and placed the room-key, heavy and shining, in his hand, so abruptly did that one sharply outlined, bright association plucked from the sleeping depths of memory come to the surface. The shadows there on the path had touched and woken her own words, and more besides. With a shiver running down his spine, he suddenly felt the full truth and sense of them. Had not those spectres searching for their past been muted questions, asked of a time that was no longer real, mere shadows wanting to come back to life but unable to do so now? Neither she nor he was the same any more, yet they were searching for each other in a vain effort, fleeing one another, persisting in disembodied, powerless efforts like those black spectres at their feet.