Severin's Journey Into the Dark (3 page)

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.

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.

He spoke to Nikolaus about his heart. He told him everything he thought to himself as he wrote the figures on the gray paper at the office in the morning while the naked light of the electric bulb shimmered on the damp ink. He talked about the book he had read as a boy, and about the fear that sometimes seized him when he stood in front of the closed door of his apartment and, for minutes at a time, did not dare to open it, as though the action might decide something terrible. He confided in him about his love affairs, insofar as he could remember everything that had happened in the nights of drunken revelry, in the bars and cheap suburban dance-halls. He had always believed that his innermost being would be able to detect the great and unintentional event that overwhelmed everyone else, that drove women into the Moldau and forced pistols to the brows of men. He had once been present on the riverbank at Podskal when the raftmen pulled a woman’s body out of the water. She was a young person from the lower classes, a servant or a laborer, and the wet clothes that clung to her rigid body lay tightly around her powerful thighs and round breasts. Severin arrived when the people were gathering around the corpse and the policeman was filling out his report. He looked at her death-stiffened face and bluish mouth and asked himself what state must this person’s life have been in, what brutalities and privations had brought her to this end. Every day he read something in the newspaper about a suicide. Recently two people had shot themselves in a hotel room, recently a girl had taken poison and died in agony. Schoolboys and fifteen-year-olds — half-children — killed themselves because they could no longer bear living. Severin did not understand it. Solitary and defiant, he looked at the long row of unfortunates who had gone under because of hatred or love. In the legal pages of the dailies he read about troubled people who reeled between destinies, unnerved. The tally of victims and conquerors in this struggle rose before his eyes, and he knew that when he was on the street he was walking next to people with burning souls, gamblers who set their happiness on a card, bankrupts who could not go on.

Nikolaus listened to him thoughtfully and pushed the skin beneath his fingernails with a small ivory blade. And when Severin talked about Zdenka and Susanna, about the women he knew, about how he had waited in vain for the ecstasy of his blood in the arms of the waitresses, in the bed of the Jewess, in Karla’s embraces, Nikolaus said:

Stories about women are nothing to you. I think something greater awaits you.

Severin was startled. He remembered the strange prophecy Nikolaus had read from the lines of his palm at their first meeting in Doctor Konrad’s atelier. He felt the beating of his pulse and, with opposition and horror, the proximity of an undefined fate that he strove toward with all his senses and knew nothing about.

Winter had come suddenly, without any warning. One day, when the remains of dawn were still spread out over the city, Severin left the house to find snow whirling in the air and covering the footpaths and rooftops. It was eight o’clock. Slowly and noisily, the merchants were opening their shops. The wind blew a light chill into the snow-covered streets, and Severin felt a little cold in his thin overcoat. He had been caught unprepared, and walked slowly down a narrow lane that led indirectly to his office. For the first time in years the knowledge returned that snow had a distinct smell, like apples that have lain between the windowpanes for a long time. Even as a child he had possessed a sentimental awareness of the aromas that characterized particular objects and particular times. He thought of the days at the beginning of school, when he entered the classroom for the first time since vacation and was met by the damp smell of chalk. He remembered the pleasure he had felt when, in the morning, after long and severe frosts, he smelled the thaw through the cracks in the door. He went outside and sipped the ice water that ran from the trees and ledges in glittering strands, which tasted milder and completely different in the sun than they did in the shadows. His youth was filled with the joy of many different smells which pleased or oppressed him, which accompanied the seasons and signified continuation and return. He was happy that the autumn was over and that winter was here. To him it was as though something new would be decided by it, something he had long felt the absence of.