The Last Bell

by Johannes Urzidil

  One day Schaschek was coming from Mader’s store, passing through Havelská Street on his way to Melantrichova Street, when outside Kobylka’s pipe and cane shop he bumped into a pedestrian in a most unfortunate way. Schaschek knew the collision was not his fault, for he walked with the very same prudence and precision that he used when entering numbers in his ledger and keeping his files in order. He neither looked up at the stars like Thales of Miletus nor down at the ground like a sniffing dog, and not straight ahead like a horse in blinders either; rather, his gaze was spherical, he took in simultaneously what was going on around him, never touching anyone. Even in the densest throng of people there was always a vacuum around him. This particular pedestrian, however, had stepped on his feet in such a cockamamie and unpleasant way that Schaschek couldn’t help but snap at him: “I see you’re quite a skillful klutz.”

  “How so?” asked the pedestrian, offended by the word “klutz” and honored by the reference to his skillfulness.

  “Yes, sir,” said Schaschek, “with one and the same foot you’ve managed to step on both of my little toes simultaneously.”

  “That really is unusual,” conceded the pedestrian.

  “Indeed. If it had been the two big toes that would be different. They’re next to each other. But the two little ones? Can you explain to me how you managed such a feat?”

  “I beg your pardon. It was unintentional.”

  “Wonderful. And I thought you’d stepped on my toes deliberately! Which passerby is concerned about his fellow man these days?”

  “I’m not a passerby. I live right here on Schwefelgasse. I don’t go out very much. Today, as chance would have it, I had to.”

  “Nothing but me, me, me,” thundered Schaschek, “and why ‘chance’? If something is necessary, it doesn’t happen by chance.”

  “Oh dear, you’re getting into fundamentals. And in broad daylight on top of it all.”

  “Why ‘in broad daylight’? Fundamentals are fundamentals no matter where or when.”

  “Does it still hurt?” asked the pedestrian.

  “That’s not the point. The point is how can you justify your simultaneous attack on both of my little toes?”

  “Fine,” said the pedestrian, slightly irritated, “I’m guilty. But did you ever ask yourself if maybe you didn’t provoke the whole situation yourself? Let’s say, by putting your feet in such an unusual position that all I could do was approach you in this singular way. Is the other person always responsible for what he does to us? Are we not accountable to him as well?”

  “All I can say to that is that you obviously want to turn the world upside down.”

  “Not a bad idea. I hope you’re on my side. I happen to be a painter. Or, rather, was a painter. I gave it up again not long ago.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Need you ask? The world is beautiful enough. You shouldn’t go thinking you can make it more beautiful than it is already. But human misery, dear sir! This is something completely different. King Thoas delivering an iambic monologue while the stocking-weavers of Apolda starve? You yourself accused me a moment ago of ‘Nothing but me, me, me.’ War, dear sir. The Social Question! Universal suffrage!”

  “There’s more than that,” said Schaschek, “and besides: In the midst of the squalor and stench of this world artists have created the greatest masterpieces. Because they wanted to say: This is reality, and each man seeks out his own.”

  “You’re mistaken,” protested the passerby, “or, rather, your arguments only apply to a few great individuals. Am I one of them? Are you? Excuse me, I don’t mean to offend you, maybe you are one of them. I have too much self-respect to count myself among them. But a person thinks he’s entitled to something just because he was born. It’s the old dispute with God, do you follow? But, sir, I’ve sinned. My name is Fürth. My hair’s a scruffy mop, because I’m so distraught at my lowliness that I don’t even manage to go to a barber. It’s true, I stepped on your toes. That could be a profession. In a very complicated way, at that. You could almost make a living from it. From its opposite, too. Take me, for example. I used to restore paintings. But this is pure vanity—shallow and vapid and unproductive. Humanity is going to the dogs. The more numerous its members, the less of it remains. And all you can think about is your feet! When I say feet, of course I mean that symbolically. Pars pro toto, a mere part taken for the whole. You reproach me for having bad luck with you. Are you the judge of the world? Most people think they’re God-knows-who. Some fool stole the Duchess of Albanera because he didn’t have the guts to approach the baker’s daughter around the corner. Now he thinks he’s got something. But all he’s got is his own foolishness—which he had before—and he can’t even begin to imagine what havoc he might have caused through his folly.”

  “Why are you telling me this,” yelled Schaschek. “It’s worse than getting stepped on by you. And, anyway, it’s wrong. The man does have something lasting.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “He dared to do what no one had done before.”

  “Because no one was such a fool! I know that painting. The eyes. I restored them. They’d almost lost their glow entirely. No one even knew if they were blue or brown. I made them brown.”

  Schaschek took a swing at him. But the pedestrian dodged the blow, escaping into the dark entranceway of “Zu den zwei Bären.” Schaschek staggered home. He didn’t eat. He immediately pulled out the painting and studied it long and hard.

  “Why the bright light?” asked the Duchess, “what’s gotten into you? You look disturbed.”

  “A man stepped on my toes. But that was the least of it.”

  “Did you have a duel?” she asked with interest, “Did you kill him?”

  “Nonsense. No one duels anymore these days.”

  “No sense of honor, how boring,” retorted the disappointed Duchess.

  “It wasn’t the collision itself. It was the things he said.”

  “He was probably drunk. Did he insult you? What did he say?”

  “He talked about war and the decline of humanity.”

  “How tasteless. That’s nothing new. War can hinder peace, but peace can’t hinder war. What else can you do to fill the empty hours and the endless infinity of time? And the decline of humanity? Platitudes. I’ve known princes who lived like slaves. They were slaves at heart. My maids may not have eaten nightingale tongues, but they weren’t poisoned or daggered either. In those days that was a prerogative of good society. And yet they looked at me, the one in constant mortal danger, with envy in their eyes.”

  “Eyes,” said Schaschek pensively. “Tell me Eleonor, back then, I mean back in the days before you lived in a painting, what color were your eyes, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “What kind of question is that! If you really want to know, I think my eyes changed color. It seems that a person’s eyes depend on the eyes of the beholder, especially in the case of women.”

  “Did something in particular ever happen to yours?”

  “Did something ever happen? Something in particular? Constantly. No end of things. Does one not receive the most through the eyes, and give the most through them? The other senses merely take things in. The eye takes, gives, and even creates. It’s with the eye that the most happens.”

  “Surely. But are you certain that your eyes are really yours?”

  “And are you certain that your eyes are yours?”

  Schaschek fell silent, and the Duchess, too, said nothing more. Her dome eyelids, otherwise visible for just a split second, slowly lowered over her eyes. He observed the sleeping woman at length: The experiences of life had vanished from her features, which now, as so often the case with women, had something childish or at any rate girlish about them.

  “Isn’t a picture just a likeness of an image?” he asked.

  “When Allori painted me,” said the Duchess, sighing herself from her slumber, “he confessed to me one day that he’d mixed his paint with tears, and
that each of the pearls in my hair and on my dress stood for a night of his grief. There are one hundred and sixty-one of them, and he wasn’t lying either, because I sat twenty-three weeks for him to paint my portrait. So please note what the portrait of a woman can mean. Who are you to feel entitled to these tears?”

  “Tell me about your eyes.”

  “Let them be! You want to know too much and don’t even know yourself. You think you’re courageous. But your daring was a fluke. You say you don’t mind if I ruin you. But if you ruin me—this you haven’t even considered. You’ll kiss the ring on my finger someday and the poison’s mere shimmering through a sapphire stone, even just in oils, will have its corrosive effect. You think it’s not the worst thing to perish from the poison of a duchess. But what will become of me? I’ll wither away in the darkness of your armoire, the wood of the table will rot, and my colors will turn to dust. No one will look after me, and I’ll crumble in the hands of the one who finds me. And you would be to blame for my end. Just because you wanted a woman without the natural hazards she entails.”

  The following morning, Schaschek didn’t show up at the bank. The manager waited an hour. Then he went to the director.

  “Schaschek didn’t come.”

  “Maybe he’s sick.”

  “That’s what I mean. He lives all alone.”

  “You should check on him.”

  “I’ll stop by on my lunch break.”

  The manager asked Paní Kralíková which apartment he lived in.

  “Herr Schaschek? He left this morning.” The manager heaved a sigh of relief. At least Schaschek wasn’t seriously ill.

  “Do you know where he went by any chance?”

  “No idea,” said Paní Kralíková. She would have answered the same even if she had known, for it was always safest not to give out information. The manager went back to the bank. “Schaschek is in good health, at any rate,” he reported to the director. “I know,” the latter replied. “He’s been back at his desk for a while now. He had something urgent to attend to.”

  That same day the evening paper printed the following news item: “The Bronzino portrait of the Duchess of Albanera, whose disappearance was recently reported, was returned to the State Gallery today undamaged. The circumstances surrounding its restitution were just as mysterious as those of its disappearance. While the gallery doorkeeper was in his lodge taking a call on the newly installed telephone, the painting was deposited by an unknown individual on the porter’s desk in the entranceway. It was carefully wrapped in an old silk scarf and packed in brown paper. The painting is being returned to its former location and, with heightened security precautions, can be viewed by the public once again, weekdays (Mondays excepted) from nine to four, Sundays from ten to one.”

  Ferda, the assistant, was about to slice fifteen dekagrams of Hungarian salami when Schaschek interjected: “Ham!”

  “Very well, sir,” said Ferda, “but if you’ll pardon my saying so, wasn’t yesterday ham day?”

  “Yesterday? Yesterday was a long time ago. But when I say ‘Ham!’ it’s ham day. Or am I not a free man?”

  “Surely, at your service,” said Ferda. And when Schaschek left the store with his package, the assistant commented to his boss: “It’s strange indeed. Very strange. When I put one and two together, the thing with the ham and the salami, his suddenly not eating at ‘Zum Prinzen’ anymore, his talking to himself, the violin-playing you can hear from the gallery, and the most suspicious thing of all, his remark about being a free man: Taken together it leaves a peculiar aftertaste.”

  “Delicatessen stores are home to uncommon tastes,” said Herr Mader. “The goods we carry are exceptional, which is why our customers are extravagant. Anyway, there’s no one in the world who doesn’t have their special secret.”

  So was everything back to normal now? The painting back to where it was before, Schaschek back to his rotating sequence of ham and salami and Sunday roast at “Zum Prinzen”? Was this incident, by all accounts so outwardly and inwardly outrageous, destined to fizzle out into nothing? Hardly. An important point had yet to be considered in the various resolutions to the problem and of which Schaschek knew nothing at first. The fact that museum guard Novotný, referred to respectfully as “Inspector Novotný” by the regulars at his favorite beer bar, did not show up at “Zur Stadt Moskau” on the evening of his dismissal did not seem particularly noteworthy; but his failing to visit his only child, his daughter Gretuška, at the Kateřinky lunatic asylum that very same day certainly did. Each day Novotný had only half an hour between the end of his shift at the museum and the end of visiting hours at the asylum to visit the twenty-year-old girl who was institutionalized there for self-persecuting melancholia. It’s the time restrictions that torment people, the time restrictions that cut off the vital breath of those who are hard-pressed anyway and which the fortunate ones are skillful at evading.

  Novotný, on that fateful day, had roamed the streets full of grief and shame until it grew dark outside, then—to calm his beating heart—downed a couple of kümmels at a liquor bar, and on his way home got involved in a conflict through no fault of his own and thanks to which he spent the rest of the night at Vyšehrad police station. Suddenly, and without the least instigation on his part, a heavily made-up streetwalker had linked arms with the slightly reeling man right when a policeman, leaping from a doorway just as suddenly, was about to take her away. The lawman grabbed the unknown female so ruthlessly that Novotný protested with some rather unchoice words, which the policeman instantly classified as an attempt to obstruct an officer of the law in the discharge of his duty, giving him a reason to haul in Novotný too. Only in the morning was he allowed to go home, where, sobbing, he explained to his dumbfounded wife the full extent of his misfortune.

  Now, Novotný’s daily visits to his daughter at the mental institution were by no means merely sentimental in nature but of therapeutic importance as well. It was thanks to these tender-loving visits that Gretuška’s condition had been improving from week to week. The feeling of blissful security and an intimate embrace had gradually bolstered and reassured her and had even given the doctors some hope that a certain, albeit tenuous equilibrium might be in the offing. Every day, the girl anxiously awaited her father in the hallway of the women’s ward, ached for him like a woman dying of thirst, then rushed at him with shouts of joy when they let him pass through the grated door and she’d spend this half an hour as if she were with a lover, one capable of fulfilling a young creature’s every expectation. But this time he didn’t come. The orderly tried to calm her with a dozen reasons and explanations, yet the girl fell into a vicious depression; then, while the orderly went down the long and ancient corridor to fetch a doctor and sedatives, the patient rammed her head against the wall, so vigorously that she collapsed and didn’t survive the night.

  The news of this, which the orderly tried to convey to the Novotnýs as gently as she could the following morning, triggered off a tragic chain reaction, the kind that sometimes frightens us in the case of natural catastrophes or the fates of nations, but that shakes us to the core of our being when it happens to those around us. The girl’s mother, who had a heart condition, could not get over this accumulated disaster and a few days after her daughter’s burial followed her into the grave. When, after the painting’s mysterious return, the museum director summoned Novotný and in a rare fit of human emotion offered to rehire him as a sweeper at least, Novotný looked at him, face twisted in pain, and explained: No, he can’t live here any longer. He appreciates the director’s good intentions, but unfortunately he has to leave this place. Where to? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t really care, either. Because anyone as lonesome as he is must feel at home in his loneliness, and it makes no difference where this loneliness is located. But he can’t stay here any longer, here where his loneliness was born. “Yes, we’re all alone on this earth,” said the director, who couldn’t think of anything better to say.

  Perhaps Schas
chek never would have learned of all these sad developments that were prompted by his selfish act because, truth be told, we never really know the misfortunes great and small for which we are deeply responsible. This might even be an aid to human existence, as our consciences would necessarily collapse under the burden of guilt, which at bottom they should. The scale of Schaschek’s conscience, at any rate, would never be balanced again. For whoever has had his toes stepped on in a complicated way by the powers of the Erinyes, such a person will never be free again until the final word has been spoken, the final blow has been dealt—which doesn’t put an end to anything, however, but is actually just the beginning of the many, countless varieties of despair. He who has run into Walter Fürth on Melantrichova Street shall run into him there again. And it was during this second encounter that Schaschek learned the awful details about the fate of Novotný and his family.

  “How is that,” he said to himself, freezing with icy fear. “All this time I was living in guilt on account of my hideous selfishness, and I didn’t even know it?” He found out where Novotný lived, but the man had already left, destination unknown. Schaschek now realized the absurd extent of his transgression, and that it wasn’t about the theft of the Duchess of Albanera at all, not about her and not about him, but by snatching the portrait off the wall he had ruined an entire family and given rise to a Sophoclean tragedy. Maybe it had to come that way. But woe betide him who causes such an offense. His own problem remained unsolved, his daring hadn’t remedied his cowardice. It had only ended in disaster.