The Last Bell

by Johannes Urzidil

  It wasn’t as if Schaschek, as in the case of most trivial art thefts, had been coming to the gallery on a weekly basis to study the portrait, its placement and surroundings, to familiarize himself with the gallery’s security system and the habits of the guards, all for the sake of pulling off the ideal heist which he’d planned down to the fraction of a minute. For criminals or fools of that sort, the real fun is the planning and preparing, which is why they’re virtually asking to be arrested, are working towards being apprehended sooner or later. Incidentally, the living presence is constantly at feud with such calculated projects. Any attempt to control this life principle would be tantamount to invalidating it. The sudden impulse acting in harmony with nature, on the other hand, always offers the surest chance of success, provided that luck is on your side, without which even the most meticulous planning will lead to nothing, lacking as it does, in any event, the self-evidence of free improvisation. Of course, the aforementioned pedantic experts of the soul might advance the theory that years of complicated projects are subconsciously compressed into the narrow space of seconds. Whatever the case, Schaschek had the Duchess with him for better or for worse—like a lover or, rather, almost like a wife.

  The museum director had lived in a constant state of severe melancholy ever since the incident. He was responsible to the “Society of Patriotic Friends of the Arts,” which provided his institution with support and funding for ensuring the safety of its works of art. No less displeased was his assistant, especially considering his burdened conscience, having failed to mount the painting in a theft-proof manner. The other exhibits were no more secure. But the effort it would have required to reliably safeguard the existing collection would have cut into the resources for adding and expanding it—a frequent dilemma in other areas of life as well. The missing Duchess escalated the conflict between conservative and liberal members of the “Society of Patriotic Friends of the Arts” (whose spiritual patrons once included Goethe). Indeed, this conflict had reached its climacteric peak. As always, the collective fury of everyone involved began by seeking an outlet where it was bound to encounter the least resistance, meaning that for the time being—and for the sake of reacting at all—the museum guard in charge of the gallery where the portrait of the Duchess had been hanging was fired. It was no use for him to point out that he’d had four rooms to watch over, and that he wasn’t omnipresent like the Good Lord was. He had happened to be explaining to a group of visitors the magnificence of his favorite painting, the Ascension of Christ by the Master of Třeboň, when the mishap occurred. But the words “favorite painting” were the bane of this unfortunate man. “It’s not your job to interpret your favorite painting,” shouted the director, “It’s not your job to have favorite paintings at all! Your job is to keep an eye out and make sure that nothing gets damaged or even stolen.”

  “Gets stolen or even damaged,” shouted for his part the curator for Renaissance art.

  “Words are not the issue here,” State Curator Dr Hönigschmied chipped in, “the issue is how the thief could have gotten away with his loot.”

  “No,” the society’s treasurer, Count Sternberg, objected, “the issue is how we can get the painting back.”

  The director’s assistant, Herr Ströbl, swore that at no time during visiting hours had he left the office where he was standing in for his boss that day. And he even believed this himself, for he’d completely forgotten that he’d gone to the facilities without, in his haste, making sure that the backdoor to the office was locked. Things like this usually get repressed in such cases. The door in question, which led to a small staircase and from there to the side exit, was—in this the director and his assistant were agreed—naturally always kept locked. These two men were in the habit of entering and exiting the gallery through the main entrance. No one used the side door, which was actually just a kind of emergency exit. It’s possible that the assistant (even though he wouldn’t admit it) or the director (but he, too, wouldn’t admit it) had accidentally unlocked the door, turning the key the wrong way without thinking when carrying out a routine check to see if the door was securely closed. Each of them had a key. And both of them secretly shuddered at the thought that this door might have actually been open for weeks or months on end without anyone even noticing. The consequence of this awkward state of affairs at any rate was that a palpable sense of alienation and suspicion had developed between the director and his assistant, accompanied at the same time, however, by a secret solidarity, because neither of the two was entirely sure—of himself or the other—regarding the question of who was guilty of leaving the door unlocked. Whatever the case, the policemen who inspected the scene of the crime and ascertained the facts of the case found the door locked. And Schaschek, of course, knew he’d passed through it.

  “How did the thief pull it off?” pondered the assistant.

  “Robbers aren’t thieves,” shouted the director, “the appropriation of property in the presence of others is robbery and not theft, according to the law.”

  “But no one was present.”

  “Baloney! The room is connected with the one where Novotný was blathering about his Master of Třeboň.”

  “Novotný comes from Třeboň,” said the assistant. He suggested hanging a Bassano in the empty space. “It happens to be from around the same period and about the same size.”

  “For all I care you can hang yourself, Herr Ströbl,” suggested the director.

  *

  “You don’t know the least thing about me,” said the Duchess to Schaschek. “You know nothing about my childhood and youth, and you don’t know how I went on living apart from my becoming an image: as a girl, as a lover, as a wife, and then—what do you know—as a lover once again, as a mother at the same time, growing old and, finally, as a corpse. Don’t tell me you’ve read about me in history books. History books know nothing about real life, least of all about the life of a woman.”

  “I didn’t read about you in history books. I’m not tactless.”

  “You don’t know a thing yet think you love me, you take me as a kind of wife without even stopping to think about it.”

  “It’s always that way between people,” replied Schaschek. “You know nothing about my past either.”

  “Certainly not. But I didn’t tie you to me.”

  “That’s debatable. It’s always that way with people, and it’s no different anywhere else in the world. Two strangers come together and call each other by their names as if they knew each other. The details? They’re good for conversation, even necessary for it. But they don’t enable you to really know another person. The love of details is bound to decay. Only the love of something whole can last and grow.”

  “You seem awfully pious, my dear, or at least you act like it. But I see you looking at me. You talk to me too. You play the violin for me. And I know you think of me when you’re not around, and surely you dream about me too, because you don’t possess me so entirely and wantonly that you wouldn’t be dreaming of me. None of that is possible without details. If it were, you could just as well love that blowzy, arrogant wench by Gerard Dou who kept giving me sidelong glances from her window. Even the gallery director, a man otherwise entirely devoid of manners, could see that the situation was inadmissible and moved the petty-minded, vulgar woman to another gallery. Thus, dear Wenzeslaus, only through my being imaginable, only by virtue of my personal attributes can you love me.”

  “You’re very witty, Eleonora, I have to hand it to you. If you’d been born a hundred years later, I bet you would have read Spinoza. And a few centuries later you would have learned that the whole is not merely the sum of its parts, that every detail is co-created by all the other ones as well as by the whole, and that therefore one thing gives rise to the other ad infinitum. But that too is probably not the be-all and end-all. Because life is obviously much more than all of this taken together.”

  “The way you see me now,” answered the Duchess, “and profess your love for
me, I don’t have hips, thighs and legs. That’s part of a woman, you know. My invisible parts could be completely misshapen. Not to mention my character. What do you know about my character? You don’t honestly think you can read it in my face, do you? Aren’t we women at the height of our beauty endowed by nature with an ephemeral and deceptive mask whose only purpose is to cause men’s downfall, and behind which more masks are usually lurking?”

  “This, dearest Duchess, was said by Schopenhauer. But I only believe him up to a point.”

  “Dio mio! I can tell you don’t have the least experience with women. How many have been loved by you? How many have you bestowed your favors upon? How many have you destroyed? Have many have ruined you? That’s all part of the game. My dear fellow, you don’t know the first thing about women, and when I say ‘women,’ I mean women and not some half-baked tadpoles.”

  Schaschek was silent.

  “You see, I told you!” laughed the Duchess. She laughed uncontrollably and couldn’t stop, so that it must have been audible from outside on the access gallery. Then her laughter suddenly ceased, and she said, “It’s obvious that only a wholly inexperienced person could have gotten into what you did. I even have a soft spot for you because of it. But don’t expect too much. Take a good hard look at me. Do you really think that I’m sweet, innocent and devoted? Hardly. I’m selfish and depraved. Believe me, the way women subjugate themselves and a man to their body, so unconditionally, has something gruesome about it. Any man who’s slept with one should drive her away the very same night if he doesn’t want her to chase him away.”

  “Maybe,” remarked Schaschek unperturbed, “but what you describe can never happen to us. There’s nothing to fear, neither me nor yourself.”

  “Some comfort,” muttered the Duchess. “You fool,” she then screamed, “I murdered with a dagger and poison. Underneath the sapphire on the index finger of my right hand there’s a poison that’s more destructive than all the poisons of the Borgias. While painting the ring, the artist Agnolo kissed it, and I was frightened that this mere kiss would bring his death in a matter of seconds. I had a spouse. Most marriages fail, because men marry for different reasons than women, and because every man and every woman discovers before long that life is an utterly lonely place, a loneliness that marriage can barely disguise. The worst thing about it, though, is not the fact itself, but its boundless and ever-recurring banality. My husband thought he couldn’t do without me, so I used my ring to help him overcome his loneliness while holding on to my own. What do you say to that?”

  “That’s pretty much what I expected.”

  “The whole world knew about it, but I was never accused of anything. I had friends in high places. When I got married the second time, the Holy Father said to me, ‘My daughter, don’t forget that the key to a good marriage is that everything in it, whatever it happens to be, every suffering, every insult, every guilt and every misfortune can always be made good again.’ And I was determined to forgive my new spouse, the Duke, no matter what he did to hurt me. But there was one thing I hadn’t counted on. Three days after our wedding night, he left me alone on my silken bed. He betrayed me—with another man.”

  “So you probably used your ring again?” interjected Schaschek.

  “Not at all. I did something far better. I enslaved my husband’s lover to my body and worked him to a point that one day, with the aid of God and the Madonna, he thrust a Toledo dagger in my spouse’s heart.”

  “With the aid of God and the Madonna?”

  “Yes. In the middle of the act, when he’d gone to bed with him. He was a gifted goldsmith and by nature a God-fearing man. I watched my husband breathe his last. Would you believe I felt almost nothing? Could you see that in my features, my eyes, my mouth? Maybe you could tell from my body if you knew it.”

  “Well, that’s the Renaissance, isn’t it,” observed Schaschek.

  “The painter refused to depict my entire figure. When he finished the portrait after a hundred and sixty sittings, I asked him: ‘Agnolo, would you like to paint me as Venus? You may.’ He thought about it a while and said: ‘I would never be able to paint again.’ Then he left and never came back. He was right, of course, and this for two reasons. You see, my darling, that’s the way I am.”

  “Perhaps. But not your portrait. What does that duchess have to do with me? She was a slave to her carnal desires. But this one here is no slave. Vice, crime and death have no power over her. The painter recognized this, and this is what he wanted to show. Do you think he knew nothing of the abominations you committed or, rather, got entangled in, which basically amounts to the same in terms of higher morality? But it didn’t bother him, and it’s none of my business either. If I’d wanted flesh and bone I could have had it a thousand times—on the street, in the alleyways, or even at the customary altar. Anyone can do that.”

  “Anyone? Only if he dares to approach flesh and bone. And that’s no easy matter. Because such an individual has to begin by abandoning himself to his own flesh, he has to become completely selfish. And it’s none too easy—believe me—to be entirely selfish. You were selfish to the extreme for one brief moment without considering the consequences. That impressed me. But the consequences will be dire. Anyone who does what you did can neither escape unscathed nor with his heart in one piece. You must be aware of that.”

  “I am aware of that,” said Schaschek, “but I’m here for now. And the whole purpose of life, strictly speaking, is to be in the here and now, and postpone as long as possible the inevitable consequences we face, for whatever reason. It’s these delays that matter in the end. As long as there’s a delay, anything can happen, the meaning of everything you’ve done, thought, or known before can change completely. You have every right to live with the stolen. Misdeeds flourish for the benefit of generations. Everything is transforming. Only the dream once dreamt, the happiness lived is eternal and can’t be taken back. My reality is alive in you. Who can take you away from me? A museum director? The public? The police?”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that someone else might love me more intensely than you?”

  “Then it would have been up to him to steal you first. As with any woman, it’s all a matter of who gets there first.”

  The Duchess blushed. “You’ll ruin my complexion,” she said, angered. “Don’t you know that there are very different kinds of love?”

  “Mine is mine.”

  “Marvelous! And how can you be so sure that I don’t prefer a different one?”

  “Pursue it if you can.”

  “You know very well that I’m not altogether impervious to your violence.”

  Schaschek reached for his violin. He plays as if he wanted to capture my entire life, she thought. When he struck up a melody she had the feeling of being reborn, and when he finished, that of blissful death. His solo had the simultaneity of an entire orchestra. His violin seemed to contain all instruments. This amateur doesn’t know how artful he is, thought Eleonor; he plays like a maestro, with a naturalness as compelling as the clarity of a children’s étude. As if a boy were holding me, his first woman, in his arms for the very first time. The slowly intensifying smile on her face dreamily mimicked that of a Florentine friend of her youth. What were you smiling about, Lisa, when he painted you?—I never smile. What you see is his smile.

  Schaschek had left Mader’s delicatessen with a degree of apprehension, because for the past few days now he thought he’d noticed a certain reservedness in Ferda, the assistant. It was not only the sequence of salami and ham days that had changed, however, but his purchases on Saturday had also become more voluminous, since Schaschek now stayed home instead of eating out in a restaurant. In short, the structure of his life had changed. At the bank, of course, no one noticed a thing. He kept regular office hours, and the precision of his work was exemplary. But Ferda knew from the Maders’ charwoman what her sister-in-law, the janitress Kralíková, had told her: that Herr Schaschek now played the violin every even
ing and on Sundays, too, and that his playing was extraordinarily beautiful, that, indeed, he played with peculiar fervor, so that not only she herself but a number of neighbors would listen with rapt attention from the gallery. You could hear him speaking too, but he must have been talking to himself, because, despite her extreme vigilance, Paní Kralíková had never seen anyone coming or going apart from Schaschek himself. She even used her master key—so she gossiped with her girlfriend—to enter his apartment twice, but hadn’t noticed anything unusual at all, except perhaps for a jar of Krems mustard. But that can be explained, of course, by the fact that the dill pickle season on Rytířská Street is over. As for her, she never buys Krems mustard; it’s too sweet for her, and too grainy, and anyway it costs a kreutzer more than the smooth kind. But there’s no accounting for tastes, is there. Incidentally, that Schaschek is an incorrigible bachelor. Every Saturday afternoon he has her haul up the week’s coal from the cellar and straighten up a bit. He’s always around, so she tries to nudge him in the right direction. “Isn’t it about time for you to put an end to your being alone? My niece in Napajedl is a marvelous cook.” But he always answers, “Paní Kralíková, you can count me out.”

  The assistant Ferda knew all of these details, and the mustard jar purchased in Mader’s store was proof enough of her reliability. Herr Mader himself had felt a repeated urge to ask, “Herr Schaschek, is something troubling you? Is everything all right?” but even his father had trained him that, while any delicatessen-store owner worth his salt should be polite and obliging to his customers when serving them, he should not get involved in their private affairs—apart from their gastronomic ones, that is. Though, mind you, even a comment like “This Madeira has a soothing quality” can be inopportune—because how can you know if a customer wants to soothe himself or his guests? So Herr Mader kept to himself and adhered to the rules of business tact, which didn’t go unnoticed by Schaschek, for Herr Mader would always comment on meteorological phenomena whenever a change in the weather occurred; indeed, he considered himself an expert in these matters, what with a professor from the nearby observatory occasionally buying some cod from him and expounding on cloud formations in the process in the hope of getting better service.