The Last Bell

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The Last Bell Page 6

by Johannes Urzidil


  For those who haven’t yet noticed, these details should make apparent that this whole procedure is taking place in the days of the old Austrian monarchy, a golden era, inasmuch as a kilogram of ham still cost two crowns and forty hellers—or, for the more conservative-minded, who viewed the currency transition from florins to crowns as a Catilinarian craze for novelty and an assault on the very existence of the empire (and probably weren’t wrong about it): one florin and twenty kreutzers. Schaschek, still a boy at the time of the currency reform, had asked his father back then, “Why do you always call twenty hellers a six-kreutzer?” He was given the answer: “A florin has always been sixty kreutzers, ever since the world began. A tenth of that is six kreutzers, hence a six-kreutzer. All this fiddle-faddle nowadays has turned a florin into two crowns or two hundred hellers, a tenth of which, that is to say twenty hellers, is a six-kreutzer, got it?”

  But to understand the real significance of this delicatessen scene and the confusion, if not to say consternation, of the assistant and his boss, one needs to know that Herr Wenzel Schaschek was in the habit of entering Herr Mader’s store at the same time every day of the week, ordering fifteen dekagrams of Hungarian salami on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and fifteen dekagrams of ham on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, always in that sequence, and never anything else. The day in question was Wednesday, hence salami day, whose sudden transformation into ham day was tantamount to an elementary catastrophe for those involved. Since the Mader family’s charwoman was related by marriage to Schaschek’s janitress, Herr Mader knew that Schaschek was wont to take his supper at “Zum Prinzen” restaurant. The bachelor’s morning coffee was prepared on a spirit burner.

  Schaschek had slipped the wrapped-up ham in his coat pocket, whence he heard that satisfied murmur he was used to hearing whenever he purchased ham, and which went something like this: “Praise God, the penultimate station on the path of my blessed transformation has been reached. I’m going to taste good.” “Don’t give yourself airs,” Schaschek barked at the ham. Hungarian salami was more reserved, for the raw materials used to make it were processed into a chaotic jumble, allowing only limited possibilities of expression. Schaschek now turned his steps towards Rytířská Street to procure a freshly pickled cucumber, not too big, not too small, from one of the market women there, a pickle it was better not to store in your coat pocket, since the pickle woman had wrapped it up in newspaper, which back then wasn’t as sickening as it would be later on. The newsprint, at any rate, absorbed the salty-sour juice, which smelled like dill and allspice, and which formed the pickle’s element of existence; and since this in itself rather tasty brine would have made Schaschek’s coat pocket wet, he decided to keep the pickle in his hand. In doing so his gaze scanned one of the newspaper headlines, which ran: “Still No Trace of the Duchess of Albanera.”

  “Good thing,” said Schaschek contentedly. The pickle, however, which he carried in front of him vertically, held aloft by three fingers, dripped milky-opal tears. “Don’t cry like an imbecile,” said Schaschek, “the Duchess is just fine.” The pickle did in fact take its master’s words to heart and soon found solace, while its bearer turned onto Karlova Street and presently, at said place, reached the entrance of his building, where he lived on the second floor facing the courtyard, in a room with a kitchenette. He practically never used the latter, least of all the stove. The kitchen, for all intents and purposes, served as his storage room.

  The building itself was a venerable one, well-nigh historic. A variety of important individuals had supposedly lived there, and Schaschek sometimes felt a shudder of world historical proportions when, crossing the courtyard by way of the access balcony (called Pawlatsche in Prague, which according to folk etymology, he well knew, is derived from parvula loggia), he walked to the lavatory, which was shared by the other tenants on his floor, and in doing so thought that perhaps Cola di Rienzo or maybe even the great Petrarch himself had sat on the ancient, grayish-black oaken toilet seat, which with time had become nearly petrified. The oak board serving as a seat creaked a few times in the stony grooves it was sunk in on both sides. The rest of the oak tree stood in the form of a coffer up on Castle Hill, the Hradschin, in which was kept the Letter of Majesty reluctantly signed by melancholic Emperor Rudolf I, thereby granting the Bohemian Protestants all kinds of different rights. This coffer had the same woodgrain pattern, the same cross-section through the annual rings as the seat on Schaschek’s lavatory, Schaschek having noticed this secret correspondence once while viewing the Emperor’s apartment. Perhaps the oak board creaked and groaned from a restrained sense of longing or stifled resentment.

  Schaschek, still holding the pickle ceremoniously in front of him, ran into the janitor Kralík on the landing of the first floor, the husband of said relative of Mader’s charwoman, a man who when asked in greeting “How are you?” would always reply with a slightly moaning singsong “Táhneme to,” which basically meant, “Still trudging along,” not unlike the “Ey, ukhnem” of the Volga boatman that was turned into a famous folk song. This time he didn’t answer “Táhneme to,” though, but simply said, “Your window facing the Pawlatsche was open, but my wife closed it for you. Because it rained at noon for one thing, Herr Schaschek, not to mention that someone could have climbed into your apartment and carried off something valuable.”

  “What do you mean, something valuable?” Schaschek asked, the pickle in his hand wobbling ever so slightly.

  “Well, everyone’s got something valuable, don’t they,” the janitor Kralík explained.

  “Of course,” said Schaschek, “many thanks.” It didn’t even cross his mind to ask what exactly gave Paní Kralíková the authority to use her master key and open his apartment to make sure everything’s in order. It was none of her beeswax if he left his window open. But he was careful not to stir up a lawsuit. No one could win against the Kralíks. Not even the landlord, Herr Schimek, who descended from a family of comic actors, was able to win against them, when instead of the lock-out six-kreutzer customarily paid to Paní Kralíková for opening the front door after ten at night—Pan Kralík didn’t open for anyone—he wanted to provide the tenants with their own keys to the building. Well, what do you know, the lock on the front door suddenly stopped working and the tenants had to ring Paní Kralíková to come open it. Installing a new lock on the oak-plank door from the era of Charles IV, with its Gothic wrought-iron ornamentation, would have been impracticable; a whole new front door would have had to be custom-made, which not only would have been costly but would have met with objections from the Office for Historical Preservation. “You see, Herr Schimek,” Paní Kralíková had said, “what doesn’t work just doesn’t work.”

  So Schaschek, carrying his pickle, entered his living quarters without another word. Luckily he had stowed away all the things that mattered to him in his big, old armoire, to which there was only one key, and this he had in his pocket. The lock, made of engraved steel, had all kinds of springs and complicated, interlocking gears. Like opening a bank vault, one had to repeatedly twist the key back and forth using a certain magic formula before its double doors would open. This broad, heavy cabinet was from the Vienna of Maria Theresa’s day, and was what you call an heirloom. Not that Schaschek had inherited it. Rather, he had bought it on a sudden extravagant impulse with his first monthly salary when he moved into this apartment after the death of his father. He had seen it at an antique dealer’s, with a sign attached to it reading “heirloom.”

  “Who inherited it from whom?” asked Schaschek.

  “I don’t know,” said the antique dealer, “but armoires like that are always heirlooms.”

  The cabinet had curved flanks, its wing doors swiveled in fluted pilasters, and the surfaces were elaborately inlaid with variously tinted woods. The hinges, which sometimes gave a disgruntled screech, Schaschek calmed with a little salad oil. This piece of furniture had weathered the Seven Years’ War, the French Revolution, the Bonaparte era, the Revolution of
1848, as well as the rest of the century with its telegraphs and railroads. “It’ll survive Paní Kralíková, too,” muttered Schaschek, who was irritated that he’d been so careless to not close the window.

  Having turned on the light, closed the curtains and bolted the apartment door from inside, he freed the warty, greenish-yellow, sour pickle from its soggy wrapper, laid it on a plate and told it to wait. He was about to toss the sodden newsprint in the trash when his eye again caught the boldface headline about the very same Duchess of Albanera. The papers did not mean a real, live duchess in the usual sense of the word, but a painting by the noted Italian Renaissance Mannerist Agnolo Allori, a.k.a. Bronzino, depicting Duchess Eleonor of Albanera. The portrait, painted on poplar wood and about two and a half square feet, had disappeared from the State Gallery three days before. “The theft of the artwork,” it said in the newspaper, made almost indecipherable on account of the pickle brine, a report on the soccer match between “Slavia” and “Sparta” shimmering through it from the other side and mixing with its coverage of Bronzino—“the theft of the artwork seems all the more futile, given that every art dealer or enthusiast would immediately recognize the painting, thus rendering it unsaleable. Hence the thief can only be an uninformed novice or a madman. Whatever the case, he will be caught.” A statement by the museum directors printed underneath this self-assured news item offered the “borrower of this painting” immunity from criminal prosecution if he deposited it unharmed at a location yet to be agreed on. A reward was in store for anyone who could provide the police with any clues as to the whereabouts of the portrait.

  Schaschek unpacked his ham, fetched two leftover breakfast rolls from the kitchen sideboard along with a brown earthenware vessel with butter, and began his meal. Chewing, he looked around the room, greeting each and every single object, first the armoire, then the green plush-upholstered sofa, then the bookcase, then the armchair, then the bed and the music stand with sheet music. With each—even the walls—he carried on a kind of dialogue, forgetting neither the geranium on the windowsill nor the wall clock nor the table lamp, and all of these objects answered, first individually, then in unison, so that soon the entire room was filled with Doric rhythms:

  We, the waiting ones,

  always are loyal,

  incorruptible objects.

  We of wood or of iron,

  stone or of bone

  shadow-casting or,

  made of liquefied green glass

  some diaphanous,

  ever servicing objects.

  As the music faded away and he chewed and ate the last bites of his meal, cleared the table of plates and cutlery, and pedantically straightened up the kitchen, he slowly produced from his back pocket the ornate key with heart-shaped handle and opened the heirloom armoire, from which he took a wicker bottle with the label “Orvieto.” He filled a Bohemian overlay cut-glass cup with the gold-glowing drink. Then he took from the armoire the violin case, and from this the violin, honey-blond, slightly blackened around the grooves, but with the fine sweep of a true Brescian, whose every feminine detail, every line, every swelling served to produce pure harmony. Just tuning it was an unspeakable pleasure, rehearsing and sampling its tones, restoring order and the proper relations undone by the previous night’s playing.

  Finally, leaning into the deepest darkness of the armoire, he took from it a veiled object, lifted the faded, fleur-de-lis silk scarf, and placed on the fauteuil’s velvety softness the portrait of the Duchess of Albanera.

  “Your Highness doesn’t look too happy today. I admit that for a lady of your station staying in an armoire is a little unorthodox. But for Your Majesty, as well as for me, a whole new era has dawned. Bear in mind that you now have a private life again. Is it really so desirable to be in a gallery under the surveillance of plebian guards, always stuck in the same spot, at the mercy of the curious and shameless gazes of every petit bourgeois who comes along, every adolescent brat, every snobbish schmuck? Isn’t that a thousand times worse than being in prison, rightfully or wrongfully, or in a convent, where at least you can live a spiritual life even though it may be against your will? I admit, it wasn’t you who chose me, but I who chose you. But isn’t this act of daring alone worthy of your appreciation, of being rewarded by you? Have I not wrested you from a wrongful forlornness, from a bitterly foreign place you were carried off to, unasked? Do I not offer you a home, one you may never have counted on, and a modest one for sure, but nonetheless one that is human inasmuch as you are loved here?

  “Yes, you’re breathing again, I can see it, and you’re more real than the duchess you portray, who has long since passed away and rotted in her coffin. You, una bella, are still alive in all your beauty. Your inscrutable eyes shine golden light on all creation. Hopes and dreams still stir behind your brow, don’t deny it. Your ear listens closely in the hope of hearing ardent confessions. And your hand? Does your hand not reach for your heart, because you still have one to give away? Really, what are all bygone eras in view of your still-vivacious youth? Your dress is sewn with Indian pearls, your fingers sport gold and sapphire. You’re a duchess. But the tender roots of your brunette hair, held in place by a pearl net, hint that, should you want to undo it, it would gently and devotedly spill down over your shoulders. And the heavy velvet that seems to serve as your armor, contains—don’t deny it—fierce and trembling desires.

  “With me you’ll live, dear Duchess, because I live with you. In the big museum, which admittedly has something palatial about it, you were merely preserved, kept chemically healthy, a thermometer, barometer, and hygrometer showing the experts that you were doing well. Were you doing well? But here, albeit in a modest environment, you can lead a normal life, may fulfill your duties, might share my joys and cares and are not only given admiration as nourishment but—as it is between human beings—the occasional piquancy of a loving objection or (now, for example) blissful praise, because I can see that your dissatisfaction has vanished and that you’re smiling again, maybe not with abandon, but with a furtiveness that shows you’ve understood me. You’re smiling, Eleonor. The dearly departed, who only lived to sit as model for you, cannot do that anymore. We all live, I would venture to say, as provisional models of deeper realities, though not everyone has the good fortune to be cognizant of this.”

  Schaschek toasted the portrait, thinking this old-fashioned gesture would be timeless enough to seem familiar to the Duchess. Then he began to improvise on his violin. There was still some sheet music open on the music stand, but ever since his life had changed he didn’t follow the music anymore. He let the violin play on its own terms. Eleonor listened attentively to this miracle, indeed it almost seemed that her otherwise open eyes were now half closed. But it wasn’t she alone who was listening, for his playing carried into the courtyard arcades, muffled by the closed window.

  The authorities and the public were clueless as to how the portrait of the Duchess of Albanera had been stolen. It was even a mystery to Schaschek himself. What is certain is that the act of appropriation was not preceded by any elaborate planning. Neither physically nor psychologically had he prepared himself to do it. It was a sudden resolve, love at first sight, the moment he caught a glimpse of the portrait—the savage theft of a woman, Frauenraub, the way distant mountain peoples were probably still accustomed to doing it. Schaschek saw the painting, tore it from the wall, covered it with his raglan coat and left the gallery unobserved and through the director’s office to boot, which had a side exit onto the street. Anyone else attempting such a feat would have been caught for sure. But in Schaschek’s case, just as in roulette, the lone improbable bank-breaking factor happened to be on his side: sheer luck. No one saw him swipe the Duchess; no one was in the director’s office adjacent to the gallery; the side exit, otherwise securely bolted, happened to be unlocked this time; and no one was on the street outside, which was a relatively unfrequented side street anyway. With the painting tucked away beneath his coat, Schaschek even went for
a leisurely stroll in the nearby park along the riverbank, feasting his eyes on the ever-enchanting panorama of castle and cathedral before heading back to his apartment, in no particular hurry. No one could claim that he hadn’t given the custodians of the law ample opportunities to catch him red-handed. But perhaps that was the very secret of his success. He didn’t feel the least bit guilty, at most a little bit surprised at himself, and on the whole extremely satisfied. He hadn’t planned a thing, because he hadn’t even known that the portrait existed before he set eyes on it, and he hadn’t entered the gallery with the vague intention of stealing some painting or other, either. Pedantic experts of the soul might have come up with the clever explanation that his intention to conquer this incomparable pinnacle of radiant womanhood had smoldered, dimly or not so dimly, in the darkroom of his conscience ever since childhood, only to flare up irresistibly upon beholding the features of the Duchess of Albanera.

  Whatever the case may have been, never in his life, neither at his parental home, nor in his school days, nor on the job, had Schaschek broken a law of any kind. He enjoyed the most unconditional trust of his superiors and his environs. Union Bank would have given him their entire cash reserves for forwarding to consignees in Brazil or Alaska and not a single heller of it would have gone missing. This might be partly explained by the fact that money didn’t remotely interest him. He dealt all day with numbers signifying money, and so in his eyes it was degraded. The numbers themselves, on the other hand, numerals in general and the magic of calculability, had something astonishing for him, indeed were almost sacred, so that applying them to possessions and property seemed to estrange them from their deeper meaning. Money, to him, meant ham or salami, and you didn’t need much of those.

 

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