I strove for total silence, so that I could surprise Franz. I had no clear idea what I was expecting to happen when he turned and found me there in the room with him. The writing table was opposite the door, under the window, so that even if I had succeeded in surprising him all that would have been visible to me would have been the back of his head and his body hunched over the table.
But, in any case, I never succeeded. Even on the occasions when the metal hinges slid over themselves as silently as the wings of a moth, some movement in the air or a change in temperature alerted him to my presence, and the slit of the door would always widen to reveal him turned in his chair, facing me.
By the time I had stepped into the room he had always slid his papers away and there was no hope of catching even a glimpse of them.
On occasion, usually when I lay awake in my bed at night, the idea would come to me that I could simply take advantage of his absence from the room—when he was washing in the morning, for example—and read through his papers then. But somehow I did not have the heart for this. The image of myself actively hunting through his papers seemed cheap and sad, like one thief stealing from another. I also feared being caught. I had many opportunities to consider it; more and more often it happened that when I returned to the room in the evening I would find him absent. I would stand outside the door and still my breath, straining my ears for the sound of his pen, the creak of his chair as he shifted his weight, but there would be only a rustling silence. The door would be locked and when I had opened it the room empty. Now, I would think, my heart racing. Now.
But I would hesitate. He could come through that door at any moment. On some days he would arrive back at the hotel much later, after I had eaten and undressed for bed; on others he would arrive a moment after me. He never explained where he had been, and I could not ask him.
One day I returned later than usual and found that he was not there. I added my sightseeing notes to the pile on the writing table and casually shuffled through it, as though I were being watched. The hotel was very quiet and I could hear a nightjar call. I stood with one eye on the door, ready to leap away the moment I heard a sound. I looked through the heap of papers, but they were all mine. The ones at the bottom of the pile were already gathering dust.
I rifled through the drawers of the little writing table. I looked around the room for likely places for him to stow his papers; in such a small room there were not many. I stooped to look under his bed. I shifted his pillow and looked underneath. I hunted through the wardrobe. His suitcase was with mine in a storeroom of the hotel, and I wondered how likely it was that he would venture there twice a day to take out his papers and then lock them in again. The wastepaper basket was full of crumpled pages. I took out a compact ball at random and opened it out.
The familiar sweep of Anja’s writing covered the page. My skin hardened and my heart was a sharp object in my chest. It was a letter, not the first page, and contained a detailed analysis of some poem or section of prose. Anja was in rhapsodies about it, and the cadences of her voice rang painfully in my head as I read the words she had written. I imaged her small hand holding the pen and guiding it to form the letters that stood there against the paper.
I immediately upended the wastepaper basket and began smoothing out all the pages it contained. Among them were many empty sheets, some containing a few words written by Franz, mostly columns of figures being added or subtracted, or what appeared to be lists of food eaten throughout the day, but there was nothing more of Anja’s. I searched through each sheet again to make sure. I read the page of the letter and read it again and then put it in my pocket. I did not know what it meant. I stood in the room, aware of the walls around me, enclosing me. Then I went out into the gardens.
The smell of the springs, to which I had become largely accustomed over the past weeks and rarely noticed now, was extremely strong that night and as noxious as a poisonous gas. I breathed it in with difficulty and could feel the odour penetrate into the fabric of my clothing and the strands of my hair. I walked around in the stench for as long as I could bear it, with one hand in my pocket, the fingers pushed into the folds of the letter, a paper pocket inside the cloth one. Naturally the letter was meant for me; it was the reply I had been waiting weeks for. I thought of Franz coming into the room every day with piles of letters addressed to him, from Klopstock, from the plump lady in the dining room, from any number of strangers.
‘Nothing for you,’ he would say, and laugh. And I would laugh, right through the stab of pain brought by Anja’s silence.
Had he discarded my letter by mistake? Or did he stand there in the hall and sort out her letters to me and put them in his pocket, smiling to himself, leering, or with a mechanical gesture, blank-eyed? Had she been writing all this time? Did he read them? I took the page out again to look for a date, but there was none.
I made up my mind to ask him about it. I had every right to ask him. Unable to wait a moment more, I hurried back to our room. I was shaking and out of breath when I reached the staircase. As I came up the stairs, I knew that the room would be dark and empty, and so it was. I took out the letter and, gripping it like a talisman, settled myself in the chair to wait for him to appear.
I had only been sitting for a short time when I heard the creak of the top stair and the sound of the door handle squeaking as it opened. Franz looked at me without greeting me. I unfolded the letter, smoothed it with my palm onto the surface of the writing table. He watched me, still standing in the doorway with the door open and his hand on the handle. Neither of us spoke. Earlier, out in the garden, I had felt ready to shout and rage at him, but now something made me hesitate. His face was blank, but held a look of slyness, of mastery. Once again, his handsomeness came into focus for me. Seeing him every day for the past weeks had habituated me to it somewhat, and made me forget it, but now I could hardly see him for all his beauty. It struck me then that I had been mistaken. The letter from Anja was not my letter—of course not. It was his.
I pictured myself sitting on trains and park benches writing to Anja, while at the same moment he sat here, in the same chair in which I now sat, and wrote too. I saw our letters being collected in tandem by the postman, and being processed and delivered together also; twins, arriving in her letterbox at the same moment. The thought made me sick. I slid the still-crumpled page of the letter into the pile of notes in front of me.
‘Still awake,’ he said; an observation. He had come into the room, hung up his hat and was taking off his jacket. I could not speak. My guts roiled, I feared my veins could not contain the sharp surges of blood sent from my heart, the edges of the room turned black. I nodded. Yes. Still awake. Then I undressed and lay in my bed, with the darkness pressing in on my opened eyes.
Morning came and I pretended to sleep while Franz rose early and left the room. After he had gone I slept a little, and as soon as I woke I took the letter out from under the pile of papers and read it again. I no longer knew where I stood in relation to Anja. I thought again and again of the last times I had seen her, but I could not understand it: the kiss, and then her rain-soaked face on the stairs. I had to keep on arranging the facts in a row in my mind, but I could not hold them there long enough to evaluate them, to discover their meaning.
I abandoned my plans for the day, washed and dressed and then went to the hotel desk to ask for the morning’s letters for our room. My hands were shaking as I shuffled through them. I did not recognise Anja’s writing on any of the envelopes, but one of the letters was addressed to me. I turned it over and saw that it was from Theodor. Of course he would be expecting a draft of our travelogue by now, and all we had was my dusty pile of notes. I cursed under my breath as I remembered the agreement I had signed. Back in our room, I opened each letter one by one, Theodor’s also. I crumpled the pages without reading them and threw them into the wastepaper basket. It seemed to take a long time, and when I had finished I felt more alert.
I had to see Anja. I packed my
clothes and hesitated before the pile of travelogue notes.† In the end I took them, thinking that it would not take me long to write them up. I took out a sheet of notepaper to write to Franz, but I could think of nothing to say. In the end I left it there, blank, a square of white on the table’s surface.
__________________
* Blank postcards of Karlsbad and train schedules were found between these pages of the manuscript.
† These notes were located among the manuscripts. They are unremarkable, and written in a shorthand style. Their content mostly paraphrases the information that appears in the 1905 Baedeker.
18.
ON THE TRAIN, WITH KARLSBAD RECEDING INTO THE DISTANCE, I felt an immense sense of relief. I opened the window of the compartment wide and stood up to better breathe in the clean air, to rid my lungs of the sulphurous fumes that I knew still lingered there, and in my hair and on the tips of my fingers. I watched the wooded hills speed past. My head was clearer and my whole body felt clean and true, like an arrow being shot from a bow, sure of the target. If I am honest with myself, I was also relieved to be returning home because it would allow me to peel myself out from under the heavy shadow of Franz. Although the anonymity at Karlsbad had the benefit of concealment, I realised as soon as my feet were back on the streets of Prague that I much preferred to be recognised, even though this meant that I lived with the weight of the world’s appraising eyes on me.
Prague was bathed in sun and the droplets of a recent shower, and the stones of the familiar streets and buildings were softened and gathered tight around me like an embrace. On the train I had been planning to go directly to Anja’s house, but on catching sight of myself in the compartment window I decided to return home first, to wash and change my clothes.
Even so I could not help taking the route that passed Anja’s house, and as I turned into the Martinsgasse my heart quickened in my chest. I walked on the opposite side of the street to her house, to be able to see it more easily. The thought that Anja was only a few metres distant from me, separated perhaps by only a pane of glass and the thickness of a curtain, calmed me. I imagined her sitting in her room, brushing her hair, or talking with her mother, drinking tea. My sense of urgency evaporated. It occurred to me that my formulations of the previous night might have been paranoid. The whole thing was probably nothing more than a misunderstanding. In the sparkling light of my beautiful city, all the anxieties of the time at Karlsbad shrank and became nothing more significant than an unpleasant dream.
Although I had intended to call on Anja on the day of my arrival, I did not make the visit until a few days later. When I returned home I found that I had many responsibilities requiring my attention: I had work waiting for me at the post office, and Theodor, who had somehow already got wind of my return, was demanding explanations. I began to develop a strange, almost superstitious, reluctance to see Anja. I had not seen her for so long that a part of me preferred to keep her in the sure realm of my imagination, where I could control what happened. I began almost to fear meeting with her, an event which would decisively clarify the situation for good or ill.
On the day of my visit to her I dressed with care and made a detour to buy a bouquet from a flower seller. My hands were trembling as I walked up the Martinsgasse. The street was completely deserted and the houses were silent. Everything had an abandoned air, including Anja’s house, when I arrived.
I had to wait a long time for the concierge to open the door and, when he did, it was only to inform me that the Železnýs were not at home, and then slam the door in my face. I stepped back out into the street and looked up at Anja’s curtained windows. I stood for a long time, but the curtains never shifted and the folds of fabric fell across the glass like rolls of iron. I returned home and gave the bouquet to my mother instead.
When I’d left Karlsbad, I had thought that I was leaving Franz behind. I had looked forward to existing once more in my own right, rather than as an appendage to him, but it was not long before I realised that he had followed me here; it was impossible to escape him. He was everywhere in Prague. Everyone was talking about him, his stories appeared in the journals to which I subscribed, friends of mine reviewed the stories in other journals, and people were constantly asking me about him and begging to be introduced.
When I went to see Theodor I found the whole office completely altered. The furniture was new and modern and in a different arrangement, and the workers too had been replaced with new ones. No one recognised me, no one knew who I was, and the head clerk, on glancing at my card, called out to Theodor that Franz’s agent was waiting to see him.
The other strange workers at the office began to bustle in and out of the hall, glancing curiously at me as I sat waiting. I could hear them whispering in the back room, and presently the youngest-looking one came towards me like an envoy, holding out a copy of Franz’s book. He shyly asked me to sign it, which, though slightly puzzled by the request, I did, before realising that he had misunderstood and taken me for Franz.
I felt terribly ashamed when I became aware of my mistake; that I had defaced his book with a nonsensical inscription. After the initial confusion, he also seemed embarrassed, and, eager to cover his embarrassment with pleasantry, told me that he would simply cut out the page and then paste it into my first book when that was published.
Even in the realm of sleep there was no escape from Franz. His face floated in front of my eyes when I drifted off, and in my dreams I would find it superimposed onto other faces: those of small children playing in the street, my mother’s face, and even my own in the mirror. I began to dread going out lest I be asked yet again about Franz, and I remained sequestered either in my office or at home.
Although it was unpleasant, this enforced isolation ultimately worked in my favour. The weeks had sped past and the deadline for Schopenhauer was almost upon me. Now I could not avoid the many hours of joyless work that awaited me, and I set myself to the task of marshalling my notes into a vague shape to produce something that might make a book. All my optimism at the outset of writing this book had melted away, leaving only a kind of sick fatigue. How I hated Schopenhauer now. I went about the work passionlessly, all of my lofty ideas gone, aiming only to finish it. I set a strict daily quota of two thousand words and mechanically kept to it with no excuses. I finished exactly on the day of the deadline. I sent the papers off to Theodor, but there was none of the usual euphoria of achievement; only a dull sense of relief. That night I fell into bed at six o’clock and slept a blank, anaesthetised sleep.
19.
BY THIS TIME I HAD BEEN BACK IN PRAGUE FOR MORE THAN A month, and Anja’s house still remained empty. I called on her twice a day, on my way to and from the post office, and soon I was such a familiar figure on the Martinsgasse that the concierge stopped even bothering to open the door to me. Instead his grizzled head would appear in the glass panel beside the door and he would peer at out me, frown, and then make an impatient movement with his hand before turning away.
After this silent exchange, I would take up my post on the opposite side of the street and watch the windows of Anja’s apartment. I could not tell you why I did this. I would stare at the pattern of the curtains’ folds until I was hypnotised by them, and then nothing else—not Prague, myself, Franz or even Anja—seemed to exist anymore. Inevitably, just when I had made up my mind to leave, I would imagine that the curtain had moved, or the shadow of a person had appeared at the window, and I would remain there in the street, looking up.
Anja’s continued absence obsessed me. I searched for her everywhere. I walked through the halls of the university, hoping to run into her, but the campus was closed for the summer and the empty corridors echoed with my lonely footfalls. I lingered in the cafés, museums and parks that we had visited together, waiting for her to appear, but she never did. Her ghost began to haunt me, appearing all over the city. I would constantly see girls with hair of exactly the same hue or with the same supple figure walking down the street or w
aiting at shop counters, and the sight of them would stop my heart. I would hurry along the street, or open the door of the shop, my heart racing, but the girl would disappear or turn her head to reveal that she did not resemble Anja in the slightest.
I asked everyone I knew where she and her family had gone, but no one could tell me, or they gave me contradictory information about the summer-holiday destinations of the family. They were in Vienna or Paris or Berlin, or they had seen Anja yesterday, trying on hats in a shop in the Little Quarter. When I lay in bed at night I began to have paranoid thoughts that she was with Franz, in Karlsbad or in some other place. I pictured the two of them sharing our little Karlsbad hotel room. This would drive me into such a frenzy that I would be ready to leap up and return there by the next train. Consumed by jealousy, I wavered between intense feelings of love and hatred for Anja. I continued to write to her, despite my awareness that the letters would not find her and would instead be collected by the impatient hands of the concierge. It occurred to me that if Franz was also writing to her, at least he was in the same situation as me. As sad as it was, the thought cheered me immensely.
20.
AFTER I HAD SENT MY DRAFT TO THEODOR, SCHOPENHAUER AND the book completely left my mind; and a tranquillity settled over me. A few weeks later, however, my manuscript returned to me once again, its pages disfigured by crossings-out, question marks and notes that were scrawled in every margin. I was given a month to set it to rights, and for the whole of that month I rued the day I had conceived of my exalted notions of an avant-garde philosophical novel.
Usually after a time away from a piece of writing, even one with which I had been fatigued, I had always returned refreshed, with new eyes that could see the flaws but also appreciate the merits of that writing. But this was totally demoralising. There was nothing of much merit that I could see. The pace limped along, no matter how I laboured, scenes followed each other in a confusing order and even I was bored by my own voice. I worked and reorganised and deleted and expanded up until the last day, and then sent it on its way. I was expecting more challenges from Theodor and requests to rewrite it, but I had the sense that he had given up on me, and the book went to print without other changes. I cannot say whether I was relieved or saddened by this.
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