Severin's Journey Into the Dark (8 page)

He loved everything that was hers. Every garment she wore on her fervid body became a fetish to him. He tried to awaken her breath from the mesh of the veil she had once left behind in his apartment. The scent of the gloves he stole from her comforted him in the hours when he did not possess her. When, with cruelly trifling fingers, she undressed in front of him, he threw his destiny at her feet. He could no longer escape it, and it forced him to his knees. Sobbing, tantalized by an unearthly bliss, he touched his lips to her camisole.

He knew that by leaving Zdenka for Mylada he had finally sacrificed her forever. But it was too late to turn back, and the thought that there had ever been a time that was not filled to overflowing with a consuming love was barren and ghostly. Often, when he held her in his arms and she curled up in his lap like an unruly child, the eyes of the nun he had accompanied on her way to church during the summer looked at him from beneath her lashes. He told her about their meeting and about how he had seen her smile when, at her side, he prayed, Hail Regina, full of grace — — Mylada laughed and began to talk about her sister, who had been dead for years. She told him he had been seeing ghosts. But Severin refused to accept it, and held to his story. The young woman’s white face stood before his soul, clear and genuine, and within him the sultry fires of the unholy wishes that had been ignited then continued to smolder.

Mylada allowed him his fantasies. With the acute instinct she used to dominate men, she soon realized that a source of new and complex pleasures was concealed here, and that she must unearth them in order to savor them. One day she came later than usual, when the twilight of the autumn evening was already darkening his room. Feverish, devastated by the wait, he opened the door. Speechless and tranquil, her pious hands folded over her breast, the young nun stood before him as he had seen her under the acacias on the riverbank. The broad and pleated cowl flowed over her arms and legs, and her star-eyes glittered beneath the black bonnet.

Regina! he stammered.

Then she fell on him with a cry and her lips suckled at his mouth. Only when she kissed him did he realize that it was Mylada. He ripped the coarse garment in two, and beneath it her body shone like lusterless and beautiful silk. He put his arms around her corset and carried her to his bed.

Regina! Regina!

An astounding felicity, larger than life, ran into his blood like molten metal and burned a sweet, coral-red scar in his abject, love-conquered heart.

Severin spent all the nights following this afternoon in The Spider. Separated from the others, he sat in his place and watched the customers who troubled themselves over Mylada. For every one of them she had a word, a brightening in her voice, a half-spoken promise each of them believed he alone possessed, which colored their cheeks with a furtive redness. But now and then her gaze flew to Severin, and whenever she walked past him she ran her fingers through his hair. She looked at him while she sang the songs he loved, in which the music of his childhood resonated. She too possessed the lulling and fanciful charm of Slavic women that had made Zdenka fascinating to him. But there was a dangerous sentimentality in her that clung to the surface and made her essence no less of a riddle. Severin drank the dark red wine that Karla poured for him and did not stir. He took no part in the gaiety that pushed against him. It did nothing to pull him out of his reverie. In the middle of the exalted frenzy he was alone with Mylada, and he thought secretly of the hour when she would belong to him again.

It was already light when he emptied his glass and went out into the street. A man with a pole over his shoulders walked in front of him and extinguished the last of the lanterns. A group of chattering women came toward him, lugging large baskets on their backs. They were merchants carrying vegetables to early market. When he got home, he lay down to sleep without getting undressed.

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!

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!

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.