Severin's Journey Into the Dark (2 page)

That will never come again — he said, and his words contained a sincere lament. For a while they both sat quietly in the half-dark of the pub and brooded over the amorous marvels of past ages, while across the street the church-bells fell silent and only a golden humming remained in the air, constantly becoming softer and more delicate, and finally inaudible. Lazarus had turned his face back to the window, and Severin looked furtively at his bald skull and Jewish profile, which was torn by countless wrinkles. He was overcome by the suspicion that this man experienced a similar malady to his own, that he suffered from an unappeased passion which had fled from a narrow and senseless life into old books. He was seized by compassion for the old man, who had wasted years of his life looking at dead pictures. They conversed for a while longer, and Lazarus told him about his daughter and the raven. As he was leaving, he invited Severin to visit him in his shop.

Severin responded to the invitation within the next few days. Susanna was sitting on a low upholstered chair next to the oven. The days were still fine and the book dealer had no fire burning. Nevertheless a drizzling chill entered the houses on that street after sunset. Susanna had thrown a black shawl over her shoulders, and the gaslight danced on the pages of the open book in her lap. Lazarus stood behind the counter and greeted Severin without surprise. His naked head shone in the light as he bent over a few valuable curios and examined them with a magnifying glass. Severin listened to his explanations patiently, and looked distractedly over at Susanna, who was silently reading her book. Her brown hair was parted smoothly and the shadows of her long lashes played over her cheeks. Once she raised her face and their glances met.

From that time on Severin went to see Lazarus Kain often. The thought of the young Jewess would not let him sleep. Actually, Susanna was not beautiful. But an intriguing flame flickered in her eyes, in sharp contrast to her quiet mouth. In their velvet depths smoldered a treacherous devotion that disconcerted and excited him. Sometimes he had seen stars flicker like that when, worn out by an incomprehensible compulsion, he looked up into the sky as he made his way home late at night. Severin sought her eyes behind the smoke of his cigarette, behind her father’s bald avian head, behind the quick flutters of the raven, which jumped from one corner of the room to another as if in a cage. Susanna presented her eyes to him with an inexplicable seriousness, without ever taking part in the conversation or speaking a word to him. When he addressed her, her answers were curt and indifferent. This bothered him and made him stop trying. He continued speaking with Lazarus, and let him show him lithographs and photogravures.

One day when Susanna was not there, Lazarus promised Severin to introduce him at Doctor Konrad’s. He brought out the proposal cautiously, like the last part of a guarded confession. And in response to Severin’s amazed questions, he told him about the large atelier in one of the new buildings that were being constructed on the former site of the hovels of the Jewish Quarter. Here, with the last remains of a fortune that had been significant years before, Doctor Konrad had rented a painter’s workshop, which in reality served for entirely different purposes. Tapestries and potted palms gave the room an exotic appearance, and a few picture frames in the corner, an easel, and some studies of heads that were turned to the wall indicated the occupant’s métier. In reality it had been a long time since Doctor Konrad had touched a palette. He lay for hours on the comfortable Turkish sofa, rolled perfumed cigarettes in his hand, and let his servant bring him French cognac with seltzer. Sometimes he also listened to his mistress as she wearily strummed the mandolin. She was a blonde and spoiled creature named Ruschena. A swarm of guests came in the afternoons: Young gentlemen in dinner-jackets, with mouse-gray spats and patent leather shoes; old and experienced playboys in elegant street clothes, the ivory knobs of their riding crops at their mouths; artists with slouch hats and dirty linen; models in silk blouses and tight skirts who spent their free time here, drinking Doctor Konrad’s sweet liqueurs; and now and then a girl or a woman from better society, one shy and uncertain, the other with more impudence than was really necessary, brought here by the polymorphous attraction a dissolute life has to outsiders. That was what Lazarus talked about, and Severin guessed everything else from the old man’s suppressed excitement and fidgeting hands.

When he went back outside he met Susanna in the fog of the evening street. She looked at him with a smile, and his body began to shake, as though in terror. He took her warm hand mechanically, without flinching.

Come — she said to him, the smile still on her lips. He went with her into the house, where the stairs lay in darkness. Then he kissed her throat, which her dress left open to the nape of her neck.

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.

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.

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 attention 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.