The Last Bell

by Johannes Urzidil

“What, you want to throw our money in his greedy maw? And if I hadn’t told Flash, the woman on the fourth floor would have. She knows him, and has to pay rent too.”

  She says “our money,” cool as a cucumber. And I’m fretting about Herzig, who of course is none of my business. But when suddenly you share the blame for something without having done anything, that gives a decent person the creeps. And I do share the blame. Joška is my flesh and blood, and she lives with me, and we have the same mother. Maybe not the same father, but that’s not really so important. It’s the mother that counts. And mine told me: “Keep an eye on her. She’ll stop at nothing, and someday she’ll get herself into a real pickle.” It was my duty, in other words, to keep her out of this pickle, especially since it was me that had her come here in the first place. Beating up Flaschenknopf and going to prison for it, that wouldn’t be so bad. I was even a little proud of her. But flirting and sharing her bed with him, now that’s a real disgrace. And now this on top of it, and her being after my money, and even calling it “our money”—that really takes the cake. Yesterday Flash says to me, before going up to the bedroom with Joška: “You mind polishing up my boots a little in the meantime?” In the meantime! As if I were his servant girl! But what do I do? I really do go and polish his boots, buff them till they shine, I really do act like a servant girl. When somebody gives me orders like that, I’m what people call hypnotized. But this fellow? Not so much as a thank-you once his “in the meantime” is over. What will it all come to? You never know what’s going to happen to you, but I shouldn’t let it get to that point. Which is true for Joška and true for me. No, it really shouldn’t go that far.

  I rang the bell downstairs at Herzigs’ and his wife opened the door for me. They don’t have a maidservant anymore. His wife gave me a terrified look, and when I ask if I can maybe speak to Herr Herzig, she looks even more terrified and asks, “How come?” All I can think of is, “Because of the rent,” and this calmed her down a little. She leads me through the hall, past a couple of suitcases into the parlor, and says to her husband: “It’s Marška from the sixth floor, she’s here because of the rent.”

  Herr Herzig looks up, and even smiles a little. “Oh, don’t lose any sleep on account of the rent. There’s time, plenty of time.”

  Suddenly it’s silent. I don’t dare speak up. I don’t want to kill his friendly smile. He’s an older man, around fifty, and whenever you run into him he always asks how everything’s going, if everything’s all right in the apartment, and if there’s anything you need. He was always a kind landlord. It wrings my heart to tell him, but I can’t just leave now and let things run their course. So I finally break the silence: “Herr Herzig, don’t be angry with me. It’s not about the rent at all.”

  “Is that so. So what’s on your mind then?”

  “It’s because I wanted to warn you, so nothing bad happens to you.”

  “What could possibly happen to me?” he asks, and I can see he knows what I want to say, so he adds: “I haven’t done anything against the law.”

  “Of course not. But I heard they’re coming for you tonight.”

  “And how can you know that for sure? Who told you that?”

  I don’t answer. Frau Herzig is sitting on the couch with her head resting in her hand, and Herr Herzig paces the room. His face has gone red and it seems like he’s angry.

  “Herr Landlord,” I say, “I beg you, don’t be angry at me. And don’t ask me too many questions. Because whatever you ask me, I can’t answer it in this lifetime. I can only say that I know it for sure, and that I’m scared for you and the missus. My Mister and Missus left a long time ago. Please listen to me, and don’t wait around too long.”

  Silence once again, and I look around the room and wonder what will happen to the silver box and the onion-pattern dishes behind the glazed sideboard, and I think that poor Frau Herzig is thinking the same thing as me. But then he says: “You’re just trying to scare us, Fräulein. You’re having gloomy thoughts.”

  “Very gloomy, Herr Herzig, believe me. But they’re more than thoughts. I implore you: Leave everything behind and make sure you get out of here today before nightfall. Tomorrow morning will probably be too late. Don’t wait, don’t do that to me.”

  “Why you? What does any of this have to do with you? Or do you have an inside line or something?”

  “I have nothing and everything to do with it. The truth is I’m asking you for your own sake, for my sake too, and also for the sake of my sister. You won’t understand all that, and I can’t explain it to you, not in all eternity, amen. But for the love of God: Get out of here, now. I can’t stay here any longer.”

  “But how do you expect us to do that? Even if I wanted to leave, we don’t have passports, and no exit permits. Where are we supposed to go?”

  “Anywhere, Herr Herzig, anywhere. Just don’t stay here. I’m being straight with you. There are moments, Herr Herzig, when you shouldn’t ask questions and shouldn’t wait around. There’s just one door and you have to pass through it. I say that to you and to myself. The things that are right are only worth something if it’s true for you as well as for the others. I had to come see you. I’d never be able to forgive myself otherwise. For Heaven’s sake, can’t you see how desperate I am?”

  “You’re a little bit hysterical, it’s no wonder in times like these. Calm down, please. It won’t cost us our heads, or yours for that matter. Why should anything happen to you? Rest assured, we won’t tell anyone that you were here. And I repeat: I’ve never done anything against the law in my entire life. I paid my taxes, was an officer in the Great War, even a liaison officer with a German division, and was recommended for the Iron Cross. I didn’t get it, unfortunately. The war was just coming to an end. But I got the big silver one, have a look over here, in the glass cabinet.”

  “Herr Landlord, I don’t think you understand me. These fellows who come to take people away at night, they have no respect for anything, there’s nothing you could show them, even if you had ten Iron Crosses. I know. There’s nothing you can do or say to convince them. Not even with money. Because they’ll take it anyway. I only know one thing: If you don’t pack the bare necessities and disappear with the missus before nightfall, you’ll bring misfortune to you and your wife and all of us.”

  “Now I’m really getting impatient. Why ‘all of us’? Who do you mean, ‘all of us’? You can’t make us responsible for something that happens to you, assuming it would happen at all, which I highly doubt.”

  “Herr Herzig, I beg you, you wouldn’t believe how much we’re responsible for, how much is our fault, what we’ve done and what we’ve neglected. I know what I’m talking about. I won’t talk about it though. It would take me until the day after tomorrow. And your time is precious. The day after tomorrow you might not be there to listen to me anymore. For the last time: I beseech you—on my knees. Holy Mother of God, I’ve tried. I told you and I told myself. Maybe the only reason I came was to tell myself. Don’t wait any longer. If you need help packing, I’m there.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Herr Herzig says, “but I really don’t need anyone’s help. For anything at all.”

  “Excuse the disturbance. I meant well.” And with that I went.

  IV

  The elevator’s not working again and, climbing the stairs from the Herzigs’, my legs are like blocks of cement, crashing down on each step. I’m only in my early thirties, but the last months have weighed on me like decades. Crawling up the stairs, I’m mortified when it occurs to me that I didn’t bring the money pouches with me; I stuck them in the old Russian samovar while changing my clothes and forgot them there when I went down to the landlord. Hopefully those two were busy while I was gone. But the thought that they might have been snooping around doesn’t make my legs any lighter. I want to get up there as fast as I can. They say that fear makes you run, but maybe fear knows what happened already, so that now there’s no reason to strain myself. I climb the stairs slowly
, puffing and panting, step by step, boom, boom, boom. My steps ring out like cannon shots at a military funeral. Nobody is in the stairwell. There’s a niche with a plaster vase in it on every landing. I stop a few seconds at each one. I do it so the vases have some kind of purpose. I’m at the fifth one already. Our door is next to the sixth.

  There’s not a sound from Joška’s room. Why are the two of them so quiet? They’re way too quiet. I go to my room and lift the copper crown from the samovar, then the sieve inside. Empty. Nothing left there. Joška! No answer. Her door is unlocked. They’re gone.

  It’s not about the money. When you get right down to it, I’m even kind of happy that it’s gone. It’ll keep on eating away like acid, wherever it goes. My Mister even said once that all the money in the world is nothing but the interest on Judas’s thirty pieces of silver. They’re still in circulation and are multiplying, and Jesus is still being bartered away. Of course in that case he had no good reason to slip the poison in my hand in the first place.

  I’ll stay here and wait. For what? I stand at the door of the apartment and listen for sounds from the floors below. What kind of sounds? It’s already late in the afternoon, but it gets dark pretty late now. From the stairwell it sounds like the house is deserted. Not many people go out now. A few people come home around six. I know exactly which floors they live on, and sometimes I hear them talking at their doors. That was Herr Sichrovsky, the druggist. He said something to his wife. You used to hear them yelling and fighting all the time. Now you almost only hear them whisper. It’s not a good sign, I think, when people start to whisper. I stand and I stand and I always know who’s coming, I can tell which floor by the sound of the bell. And so the hours pass. Hours and hours. I can hear from way down below as the janitor’s wife goes to lock the front door. Paní Vladislavská. She doesn’t quarrel with her husband anymore either. The light goes out in the stairwell. It’s pitch-dark. So it must be past ten o’clock. That’s how long I’ve been standing at the door. But only now does my vigil begin. I leave the door open a crack to hear better. Moonlight falls through the stairwell window, right onto our plaster vase in its niche. It grins like a face. Maybe it is one, and only transforms into a vase in the daytime. Who knows what things really are? No one can really say what humans are either. Eleven o’clock. I hear the church bell ring at the nearby cemetery. It’s odd enough that it has a clock at all, because isn’t that where time stops? But maybe it’s so the dead will know how long they have to wait till resurrection. What a racket that’ll make. And all the waiting and being dead will have been for nothing anyway, because it’s then that the actual Judgment comes.

  The front door rings. I know this ringing well. You can’t hear it in the apartments, but it echoes through the stairwell. The bell really booms today. I hear the janitor’s wife, too, going to unlock the door. She drags her old slippers slowly across the tiled floor. When her husband goes to open the door, you hear the firm steps of shoe-shod feet. She talks to some people at the door. There are at least four voices, three male ones and the voice of Paní Vladislavská. I can’t understand them, but I know what’s happening.

  The electric light goes on in the stairwell. I hear men’s footsteps and an argument in the stairwell. And now they ring at Herzigs’. They ring three times and knock on the door. It must be open now, because I hear the voice of Herr Herzig clearly. And I hear Frau Herzig sobbing. I can even understand what Herr Herzig says. “I haven’t done anything against the law.” Or I think I understand, because I know he’ll say it. But his objections and protestations about the Iron Cross and the Great Silver Medal for Bravery are drowned out by the three other male voices, which aren’t even human voices at all, they’re not even animal voices, because even wolves have some kind of justice. Who knows what kind of beings they are.

  It’s quiet now for a while. They probably went into Herzigs’ apartment and he’s getting dressed and packing some things. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I told him and he wouldn’t believe me! They come back out again now. I hear Frau Herzig, her voice is loud but unintelligible. The men are swearing. Paní Vladislavská, who was waiting outside, unlocks the front door and locks it again. I hear her shuffling back in her slippers. Then the stairwell is dark and silent again.

  That was the first part of my vigil. Now I have to wait till Joška gets back. And then I have to wait till this night of waiting comes to an end. So Joška wasn’t making it up. She really did do it, the thing with the money and with Herr Herzig. I would have looked the other way with the money. Easy come, easy go. And who does money belong to anyway? I wait my way through, slowly, through the whole apartment, through the hallway, the three rooms and through the kitchen with all of its pots, pans, spoons, forks and knives. That was my life. I loved the old Italian knife-grinder, who always came at Christmastime and parked his grinder’s cart outside the building. What’s he going to live off of when everyone starts using Nirosta stainless-steel knives that you don’t even need to sharpen? I love the old ones, with their long, curved blades and the marks left by the grindstone that make the edge sparkle and the tip disappear in an invisible world.

  I lie down in the dark for a while and hear Joška at the door. She tries not to wake me, and has good reasons not to. She tiptoes into her room and doesn’t even switch on the light. But still she can’t suppress the urge to hum to herself very quietly. They came for Herzig and she’s humming. Frau Herzig is downstairs crying. I hear it, even if I don’t hear it. And Joška’s humming. It’s not about the money. One person steals from the next. She opens the door to the hallway now, ’cause she likes to have a little breeze. The waiting is almost over, until her breathing is heavy and even.

  Our Master is a writer. I wonder if someday, in a foreign country, he’ll imagine what went on inside me, why I became the way I am now, and why I have to do what I’m about to do. I wonder if he’ll write it down the way I lived it, and everything that went through my mind while it happened? I wonder if he’ll be on my side when they summon him as a witness at the Last Judgment? Maybe he’ll come forward and swear: “I wasn’t there when it happened, and yet I was there. I share the blame. I should have known better, because I was the one who gave her the money.”

  She starts to breathe more deeply now. She doesn’t hear me. Even when she sleeps all she hears is herself. The knife’s wavy handle is clenched securely in my fist. The moon caresses her neck. Jesus, Mary and Joseph!

  THE DUCHESS OF ALBANERA

  For Max Brod

  WITH:

  The bank clerk Wenzel Schaschek

  The delicatessen-store owner Mader

  His assistant Ferda

  The janitress Paní Kralíková

  The janitor Pan Kralík

  Eleonor, the Duchess of Albanera

  The museum director

  The museum director’s assistant

  The museum guard Novotný

  The pedestrian Walter Fürth

  The bank director

  The bank manager

  THE BANK CLERK Wenzel Schaschek left the building of Union Bank on Na příkopě and—like every day after work—headed towards Havířská Street, passing the old Bohemian State Theater and entering Herr Mader’s delicatessen store. Herr Mader gave his store that name to show that he didn’t, or didn’t merely, offer the usual run of comestibles for stilling a vulgar hunger but was adapted to more sophisticated tastes. He always had the best French sardines in stock, Dresden sausage appetizers, Lomnitz zwieback, Carlsbad wafers, Elbogen gingerbread, gray, large-grained Malossol caviar, and Strasbourg goose-liver pâté. And when they were in season, he’d also have a lobster or a pineapple. Whatever the case, the whole store smelled like saltwater fish, because Herr Mader was the only one in Prague who imported them back then. This was a business tradition. Grandfather Mader, whose sister had married a man from Mecklenburg, laid the foundations of the business by trading in dried cod, smoked eel, flounder, bloaters and kippers, peppered fish and pickled herring. And however muc
h son and grandson skillfully expanded their business horizons with a selection of sausages and cold cuts, with quality cheeses and wines en primeur, the true-to-life cod painted on the signboard by a valiant local artist was nothing less than a city landmark, which the Mader family clung to with religious atavism.

  But Herr Mader the Third was adamantly opposed to being addressed as a mere fishmonger. He had even read Brillat-Savarin (in a Reclam edition), and the always well-endowed wheel of Swiss cheese displayed a little plaque bearing the gilt inscription: “A dinner which ends without cheese is like a woman with only one eye.”

  Herr Schaschek entered this delicatessen, turned to Ferda, the white-aproned assistant standing behind the counter, and said: “Ham.” At this point it should be noted that the celebrated Prague ham was normally bought at the pork butcher’s. But, first of all, Herr Schaschek was a special person, as this report endeavors to show; second, Herr Mader stocked a special kind of ham, chimney-smoked just for him by butcher Sykora in Křivoklát and not available anywhere else; third, Herr Schaschek’s relation to Herr Mader’s store was one of character-defining continuity. Which is why he just said: “Ham.”

  At that, the assistant Ferda looked first at Herr Schaschek, then at his boss, Herr Mader, every bit astonished, repeated in a highly troubled and questioning tone, “Ham?” then added: “Beg your pardon, sir, but you just had ham yesterday, shouldn’t it be Hungarian salami today?”

  “No, ham,” declared Schaschek with sulky defiance. “I’m a free man, after all.” Following this conjecture, which had something menacing about it thanks to the insertion of the words “after all,” the assistant Ferda, mute and swallowing his disbelief, grabbed the very long carving knife, made slender from years of sharpening but still razor-sharp, cut into the ham that was held in place by a metal clamp on the chopping board, and carefully shaved off six thin slices with a rose-quartz gleam and the delicate, pervading scent of freshly cured meat, laid them terrace-fashion on parchment paper, weighed them on the well-tared brass scale (which wasn’t really necessary, since Ferda had an infallible eye for fifteen dekagrams of ham, but was nonetheless part of the ceremony), then wrapped it all in brown packing paper, and said with anguish in his voice, “Thirty-six hellers, please.”