I felt ashamed for him, to have caught him in such a private moment, but also surprised, because his actions spoke of a vulnerability of which I had not thought him capable. I also felt the shock of recognition. In my younger years, and still now at times of nervous unease, I have engaged in a similar obsessive looking; to what end, I do not know. Perhaps I looked to try to gain control of my image, as if the offence it could cause were a finite physical thing that could be used up by my eyes alone. Or perhaps I looked to assess the exact sum of my hideousness, to quantify it. But in this I was never successful, because all proportion disappeared in front of the glass, and with my exposed self before my eyes my sense of judgment became confused and useless. Was I a complete monster or only mildly unpleasant? The answer always eluded me; the more I looked, the less I knew. What could Franz possibly be looking for? I wondered. He surely had no need of it in the way that I had.
I quietly took hold of the door handle and silently opened the door a small way and then noisily pulled it shut behind me, pretending that I had only just come into the room. I had expected him to jump hastily from the mirror and I gave him time to do so by lingering with my back to him while I hung up my hat and coat. But when I turned to face him I found that he had not moved; the only concession to my presence was his gaze sliding briefly over to me and then immediately back to the mirror’s surface.
During the time at Karlsbad, my thoughts often drifted to Anja. My feelings for her had the effect of inoculating me against the charms of the women in the town. The days of pleasant reverie about my relationship with Anja were long over and now my thoughts circled menacingly. Now I relived each one of our encounters obsessively, trying to discern the point of collapse, the moment when that first germ of destruction had entered into our relationship. There were so many things I would have liked to ask her.
As soon as we had arrived at Karlsbad I began to write letters to her, filling pages with questions and recriminations, with my own interpretations of looks she had given me, of phrases spoken. It became difficult to gather up the facts of the situation and I could no longer remember the exact nature of our relationship, how much of it was real and how much was lived only in my mind. I relived scene after scene of our days together, each time arriving at a different conclusion as to what was between us. Now I thought that she loved me; now that she barely saw me as a man. In the letters I was by turns abject in my sadness or crowing with accusations. Herr Liška came back to haunt me and I imagined him as a young Jan Žižka, still with both of his own eyes, austere and determined. I pictured encounters with him and plotted out what I would say to him if we chanced to meet. Of Franz too I was jealous. I remembered how she had looked that night on the stairs and how my mind had leaped immediately to Franz as an explanation. But I could not allow myself to dwell on that—I would have been driven mad—and I tried to I push all thoughts of him and Anja from my mind.
Although I wrote Anja letter after letter, I could never grasp the heart of what I wanted to say. Words are such imprecise tools, particularly words fixed in time and written black on white. Far better to expose one’s bare breast, to tear it open and display one’s heart, quivering; to show a naked eye, bathed in salt tears, or open late at night, dry and staring wakefully at the ceiling.
Of course I never sent Anja any of these letters. I screwed the pages into tight little balls and threw them away. Instead I sent her a few postcards and letters of the most conventional sort, recounting some amusing goings-on, or describing a local attraction as if in rehearsal for the travelogue. I never received any reply.
17.
FRANZ, AFTER SOME WEEKS AT THE HOTEL, HAD BEGUN TO TIRE of the attention that came at him from all sides. The turning point came as a result of some encounters with a certain doctor who was also a visitor to Karlsbad. I first came across Dr Klopstock in the gardens of the Kurhaus bathhouse one afternoon, where we were sitting in adjacent chairs, he sunning himself and I making notes for the travelogue.
We fell into conversation, uneasily on my part. By this stage of our trip I had become somewhat wary of people attempting to use me as a means of getting close to Franz. But Klopstock seemed to be a perfectly ordinary man and did not strike me as one likely to be given to such obsessions. He was of early middle age and his neatly combed, uniformly grey hair was the only tidy thing about him. He slouched casually in his chair and both the suit he wore and the newspaper he held were comfortably rumpled and a little the worse for wear.
When I introduced myself he told me that he had read my first novel, but that he could not venture any opinion on it because he could not remember it. This comment cheered me immensely, suggesting a lack of interest in either literature or any flattery of me that might have made him a potentially troublesome acquaintance. At some point in the afternoon he mentioned quite calmly that he had heard that Franz was staying at the town, and that he thought he had glimpsed him at the baths but had not realised that I accompanied him. I explained about the travelogue and we then had a pleasant conversation about the baths and he recommended various sights in the region of Karlsbad that might interest us.
We spent an enjoyable few hours together, and as we were about to part the doctor invited me for dinner the following evening, together with Franz. The mention of Franz put me on my guard, but I accepted, after warning him that he may be dining alone with me if Franz was not able to attend.
The evening of the dinner came and, sure enough, Franz was nowhere to be found. I did not wait, but went to meet Dr Klopstock on my own. Relations between Franz and I were still rather strained and our conversation was still restricted to the practicalities of the travelogue. I was looking forward to the dinner; to have some conversation on subjects other than schedules, museum opening times and train timetables would be a welcome relief.
The meal was quite unremarkable and Dr Klopstock was an attentive host. He was not excessively disappointed that I appeared alone. I had a pleasant evening and then I promptly forgot the occasion. Over the next few days I did not see the doctor again at the bathhouse or around the town, and as I was busily touring the area and reviewing the sights he disappeared from my mind.
The following week I was hurriedly dressing in our little room one morning, taking advantage of Franz’s visit to the bathroom, when I was startled by a noise at the window. It sounded as though a bird were on the other side, tapping its beak against the glass. When I had put my shirt on, I drew back the curtains to look, but the window revealed nothing more than an early-morning spring sky with a few reluctant clouds. I opened the window and heard a shout from the lawn below. A man was standing there on the grass and waving his arms energetically over his head, apparently trying to get my attention.
He was shouting something over and over, and I thought at first that there had been some kind of accident and he was calling for assistance, but then I realised that it was my name he was calling. I had no idea who the man was.
Windows on the floors below ours were beginning to swing open and curious heads to emerge. Other windows were being angrily slammed shut against the noise of the man’s shouts. I noticed a group of porters in uniform running towards him across the lawn, accompanied by a small bald man. I gestured to the shouting man that I would come down.
When I reached him he was surrounded by a ring of the porters, and was silently fighting his way out of the grip of the bald man, who I now saw was wearing pyjamas. His face and scalp were still scored with vivid purple runnels from the imprint of the creases on his pillowcase. The shouting man was the tallest of the group, but was nevertheless impeded by the bald man, who had his arms wrapped entirely around him, pinioning his arms to his trunk and trying to throw him off balance like a professional wrestler.
I realised then that the shouting man was Dr Klopstock. He totally ignored the bald man clinging to his waist and casually hailed me as though we were simply meeting by chance in a café or on the street. He looked so dishevelled as to be unrecognisable. His hair was now li
ke a cap of furze over his hollowed face and his clothing was covered in dirt.
‘Brod, I have been meaning to tell you that I have moved into your hotel. A room came up and I thought it would be good to be closer,’ he said, quite calmly.
The wrestle was still in progress, but Klopstock was managing to keep his voice on a remarkably even keel.
‘Do you and Franz fancy a morning walk? That’s what I wanted to ask you.’
My face must have communicated the disorientation I was feeling, because he indicated the bald man with a tilt of his chin, and said, ‘Oh, Jensen. You mustn’t bother about him.’
The bald man, Jensen, succeeded in pulling Klopstock to the ground. He lay there quite sedately, ignoring everyone and staring up at the sky. Another group of men had arrived, some fully dressed and some still in dressing-gowns. They huddled around the fallen Klopstock, blocking him from my view, and began discussing something in urgent tones. Occasionally one of them would turn and glare angrily at me and at the small knot of porters. I made my way back to our room.
Over the next days, Dr Klopstock came to be a regular feature in our lives. He tailed Franz with a ferocious tenacity that exceeded that of any other hotel guest. The apparent lack of interest he had shown in Franz in the beginning had given way to an all-consuming obsession. He seemed to spend all his time trying to get near to Franz and he seemed convinced that there existed between them some close relationship.
In the mornings I would open the door and discover him waiting outside on the landing, as if he had been standing there all night, which perhaps he had been. He would write letters to Franz, leave him small gifts, and send endless invitations for dinner or to the theatre. In the afternoons he would take a chair out onto the middle of the lawn, place it under our window, and simply sit and look up at it for hours. I had no idea how he had even found out which window was ours. He somehow managed also to discover which places we were to visit, and we would chance upon him in the corridors of museums, standing silently among some Roman sculptures or sitting on a park bench in Karlsbad, or we would catch sight of the top of his hat bobbing up and down at the other end of the train compartment.
He was always perfectly polite and reserved when we met him, and would calmly discuss some point of interest in the museum or the park as though his obsessive attentions did not exist. This was completely unlike the way he expressed himself in his letters, which were more like ardent declarations of love. I found this dissonance extremely unnerving.
To Franz, the whole thing was highly amusing at first; guessing where Klopstock would next appear became like a little game between us, the reading of his letters became a daily ritual, and these diversions greatly improved the cooled relations between Franz and me. Before long, the frequency of Klopstock’s letters increased and he began to outline his plans for moving to Prague to be close to Franz, and then at last Franz began to feel uneasy.
I was able to track down Dr Jensen and discovered that Klopstock was a psychiatric patient in his care. Jensen was a keen proponent of therapies that involved building a healthy body to build a healthy mind, and he was much given to experimental treatments for obsessive psychiatric disorders. He was insistent that Klopstock remain in the town for the planned duration of his cure, saying that to move him away now would have fatal consequences for his recovery.
The situation began to wear on Franz’s nerves. As well as Klopstock, amusing though he may have been, Franz also continued to be courted by the other guests. He still spent his time endlessly writing letters and fending off advances from all sides. It became unmanageable and he began to barricade himself in our tiny room to avoid encountering anyone, and had his meals sent up to him.
One result of this was that Franz felt unable to make the necessary tours of the area, so I spent long afternoons trailing through empty museums and dark churches alone, noting down every detail. I spent one whole day sampling each variety of spa wafer, both hot and cold, and weighing their relative merits. It took days to taste the water at each of the town’s thirteen main springs, mostly because the taste was so vile that I could only manage to force the stuff down a few times a day. Even today I can still recall the taste of those springs: a warm mixture of citrus and rust that lingered on the palate for hours. I was pressed by competing local shopkeepers to try out any number of patented cups and drinking vessels designed especially for the Karlsbader water, each claiming to provide the best way for the body to absorb the water’s healthful magic.
I took various bath cures at the Kurhaus, of varying levels of ignominy. I had my gums irrigated. I tried hydrotherapies of various means: being sprayed with a hose attached to a pneumatic pump in what I found to be a most undignified procedure, and being immersed in pools and springs. I was locked in a kind of sauna, which was referred to as ‘a cupboard for sweating’. This was a wooden box that fitted around the body and had a small opening that clamped around the neck. Steam from the springs was pumped into this box, but I failed to reap the miraculous benefits of rejuvenation that it promised.
I was initially self-conscious at the thought of exposing my body to the nurses and physicians at the Kurhaus, but even a few short hours of walking around the streets of Karlsbad allayed my worries, for it was immediately apparent that the place was a carnival of illness and deformity. I was certainly no longer alone in my difference in that place, for the streets were teeming with the diseased, the misshapen and the infirm, many of whom could not even walk, all hoping for a miraculous cure. We physical freaks seemed to dominate in number over the ordinary able-bodied. And indeed, even those who appeared to be normal from a distance would often on closer inspection be plagued with wheezing breath, rheumy eyes or lurid crops of facial pustules.
I was partly relieved at being spared Franz’s company on all these outings I made in aid of the travelogue, but at the same time his absence annoyed me. For all those hours that I was searching my way through unfamiliar towns to discover a recommended place or enduring uncomfortable treatment regimes, Franz was locked up in our room diligently writing. I would come back from an exhausting day of sightseeing or hydrotherapy and interrupt his scribbling. The very sound of his pen scratching across the page filled me with resentment. A few times I asked him what he was writing, but he would never tell me.
The only writing that I was managing to complete was my sightseeing notes and the letters to Anja that I never posted. Franz and I had made the arrangement that if I was to undertake the sightseeing, then he would transcribe the notes that I had made on the trip, in order to balance the workload between us; an arrangement that I still felt to be unfairly weighted in his favour.
Every evening I took out the notes that I had made during the day, together with brochures and maps that I had collected, and placed them on the little writing table in our room.* After more than a week these papers had amassed into a vast pile that grew larger every day, never appearing to make the transformation into the elegant prose that Theodor was expecting.
I asked Franz a few times about his progress with this, whether he had finished any transcriptions that he would like me to proofread, but he never had anything to give me. He complained that my handwriting was too difficult to read, and blamed this for his slow progress. I asked him then if he would like me to proofread any of his other writing. But no matter how often I asked Franz always declined to pass on any of his writing. He had become uncharacteristically evasive about it, and for some reason this nagged at me. Perhaps my nerves had been affected by living in the tense atmosphere of that hotel, constantly on guard against overfamiliar strangers seeking me out, not to mention Klopstock’s enduring obsession. I found myself constantly worrying about the question of what Franz was writing as though it would have some catastrophic consequence for me.
Possibly this reaction had come from the Gregor situation, which had put me on edge. Whenever I thought of Gregor I became stilted and silent in Franz’s presence and tried to reveal as little of myself as possible, frigh
tened that he might again be observing me for idiosyncrasies with which to pin me to the page. As the days passed I became more and more paranoid about the subject of his writing. When I came back to the hotel in the evening, I could hear him at work from the other side of the door to our room. The pen made a jagged scrabble on the paper, like an animal sliding through dry grass.
I stood silently outside the door of our room and held my breath and listened, as though the pen were a voice that could speak to me through the wood of the closed door. I would stand there for a long time before I proceeded to open the door with care. This was a delicate procedure. I laid my fingers lightly over the lever of the brass handle at first, slowly increasing my grip until my knuckles shone out white. The door was never locked. I would depress the handle with extreme slowness, as the spring mechanism inside ticked. I held my breath and swung the door gently on its hinges, millimetre by millimetre, my eyes on the slowly growing wedge of our room that emerged from between the door and the doorjamb.
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