While I was waiting for the book to come out, I tried to reassure myself that it was not as bad as it seemed, and perhaps some deep part of me believed this and even felt confident of the book’s brilliance, because its trajectory came as an extreme disappointment. The week that it was due for release I eagerly watched the usual newspapers and journals for reviews, but nothing appeared. The day of the release came and went, and still the papers were silent. Surely, I felt, there had been some mistake. I furtively made a round of the bookshops and saw the book lying in all its printed glory in the ‘new release’ sections in the windows, but I never saw any browsing bookshop customer take up a copy.
Another week went past, and at last some reviews appeared. One was a critical piece in Der Neue Weg by that turncoat Franz Werfel, who labelled the book ‘a compendium of mediocre twaddle, clearly the product of a confused mind’. The same day there was another more neutral piece in the Bohemia, which commended the work on its meticulous research but concluded that it was an ‘essentially soulless work’, far inferior to Nornepygge. Apart from these two reviews, as far as I could see the novel was completely ignored. The sales were dismal. The book was moved to the regular shelves, and then away out of sight.
I could almost have laughed to think that I had devised this project as my great masterpiece, a work that would fix my place in the galaxy of literary intellectuals. I could not bring myself to look at it again; it was far too painful.
I tried not to dwell too much upon it. Although at that time I wished never to have to write another word, unfortunately I still had the travelogue to contend with. I had expected Franz to contribute to this, but having heard nothing from him I set about writing it up myself.
While I was sifting through the notes from Karlsbad, I pulled out a crumpled envelope with Franz’s name upon it. At first I thought that it might be a letter from Anja, and my heart tightened, but the envelope was too thin to be a letter. I opened it and saw that it was the cheque that Theodor had asked me to pass on to Franz. It was for an odd sum, not a rounded figure, and I thought that it might be some kind of reimbursement. It was also not made out to Franz in name, but to cash. It was quite a large sum: three hundred and fifty-three crowns and twenty-two heller.
There was no note or letter that might give any clue as to the reason for the payment. It certainly was a bit of money. I could have done with such a windfall. I put the cheque away and tried not to think about it. But, in the next days, my thoughts kept returning to it. It was so much money. It was most likely, I thought, that the cheque was for expenses incurred, or expected expenses, in Karlsbad. If that were the case, I reasoned, then I was entitled to at least a part of that sum. Most of it in fact. After all, I had been the one who had done almost all the work while we were there; I had been the one to pay for countless museums and tours of historical sites, and now here I was writing the thing up too. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed fair that I should keep a part of it. After a few more days of piecing together the travelogue, I had convinced myself that actually I deserved the whole sum. Probably, I told myself, this was what Theodor had intended by making the cheque to cash in any case. And besides, my finances were quite severely drained what with Karlsbad and the money I had spent on Gustav and Alexandr. I cashed the cheque and did not feel the tiniest bit of guilt.
21.
THE HEAT OF THE CITY WAS BECOMING UNCOMFORTABLE AND I fell into the usual state of depression that dogged me each summer. A heightened awareness of my body added to the dark thread of unhappiness that ran through my days. I shrank into myself and kept busy with my work at the post office.
In the mornings on the way to work I would stand on the tram and sweat into my padded jacket, too ashamed to remove it in public. I tried to ignore the looks thrown at me as I stood there with sweat running down my face and the imprint of my hand darkening the leather handles. I would smell the odour of the damp jacket, so often worn, gradually steeping the air around my seat, and I always tried to secure the place closest to the window to spare my fellow passengers.
On the hottest days I would forgo the tram, and instead walk the distance to the office. I would leave my house very early in the morning, just after it was light, at a time when the city was still waking for the day. Remnants of night-time mist clung to the sides of buildings, waiting to be burned up by the sun. The sky was stretched white over the rooftops and I breathed the stagnant air that was like a layer of damp cotton.
I told myself that the reason I took this early journey on foot was because the tram frequently broke down in hot weather and I wanted to be sure to get to my office early, to have some time alone in which to start my day. This was partly true, but it was only the varnish with which I covered my shame at the real truth of my unsightly self. However, walking at this hour was one of the rare times in the day that I was able to escape the harrying thoughts and unanswerable questions that plagued me. Anja and Franz would fall away and my body was significant only as a collection of sensory organs. The air moulded itself around me, as I propelled myself forward, and closed off behind me in my wake, like warm water around a swimmer. This relaxed me, and I was lulled into a trance as I walked.
When I was a child and had first learned to swim it was as though the world had finally opened to me; for the first time I had found a place where I felt at home. I had been a self-conscious child from the moment I noticed my difference from other children and realised it was not something that could be overcome with the passage of time. My lumbering movements were mimicked by the other children in the schoolyard, and adults and older children would look at me with a kind of fear. My offensiveness to them pained me, so I withdrew into myself and tried to erect boundaries with which to contain my difference. I tried to police my own movements and began the long process of learning to control them as much as I was able.
My mother, for the first years* after I was out of the harness, and after the death of my brother, Otto, guarded me as one would an invalid, which was how I thought of myself. I was not allowed to join the other children for games and sports at school, and, instead of allowing me to participate in the gymnastics lesson, the teacher ordered me home for the hour. Although this action on my mother’s part was motivated by a desire to protect me, it only served to emphasise my difference and exposed me even more to the cruel taunts and violence of the schoolyard. I hated returning home for that afternoon hour; every day it felt like coming home from a defeat. One spring, instead of going home, I began to spend the hour walking around the streets, or lingering in parks. I crossed and recrossed the Moldau on each of the bridges by turn.
I loved the river, and would find a quiet place on the bank where I would weave small boats from reeds and twigs and sail them in the shallows. Or I would just sit for a long time, silent and still, watching the birds and listening to their song, and that of the whirring insects and the wind hissing in the leaves. Sitting there, silently listening, I seemed to fade away into the undergrowth and lose awareness of myself. My body and my external life floated away from me and I became a part of the riverbank, another animal life among so many others, no more or less important.
As the weather grew warm, I would see the occasional swimmer making his way down the river. I would sit hidden in the long grass, transfixed. The swimmers were like other river animals, like larger otters; I didn’t relate to them as people. On warm days I would sit with my eyes on the water, looking out for them, and when one appeared I would creep quietly down to the water, as though I might scare them off if I made a sound. I would lean out over the water and watch them glide past, craning my neck to keep them in view for as long as possible. I drank up the sight of their sleek motion with a fierce envy that originated in my flesh and muscles rather than my mind. I would feel the beginnings of tears sting my eyes.
I wanted to rush out and join them, and indeed in my imagination I was already out there, swimming with them; water gurgling past me, cool against my face and with soft strings of bubbl
es rising from my lips like pearls. As the days passed I became determined to swim. I began to study the motions that the passing swimmers made with their arms and head, and practised them while lying face down on the grass. After a few days of this, I undressed and walked naked and shivering into the water, which was colder than seemed possible. I found a place with a partly submerged tree trunk that extended out into the river, and which I could hold on to as I ventured out into the deeper water.
At first, the touch of the water frightened me, but gradually I became accustomed to it. After a few days I was even quite comfortable with the sensation of the water lapping around my chin and lips, and even of being submerged, but I had great difficulty launching myself from my standing position into a horizontal one. This took many days of practice, and the unfamiliar orientation confused me at first, expelling the breath from my body like a reflex.
My difficulty was that, although I had learned from the passing swimmers to move my arms around and around like the wheels of a mill, I had no idea what to do with my legs. All I could see of the swimmers’ legs was a fizzing wake that seemed to propel them forward. My legs were the weakest part of me. At first, when I tried to kick off from the riverbed they would drift behind me like a heavy train, floating for a short while but then slowly sinking down to the sandy bottom again. I experimented with different movements; I tried rotating my legs as though on a bicycle, in time with my arms, or rotating my feet in tiny circles. It was extremely difficult for me to control my right leg, which was only a soft, spongy thing, lacking any muscle. Eventually I hit upon the notion of kicking my legs up and down, and I practised this motion first holding on to the tree trunk, which had become like a friend to me, its knots and footholds familiar and reassuring. Over the weeks of that summer I slowly learned to propel myself along.
Soon I could even swim few strokes underwater, my belly gliding close above the riverbed. I came up laughing; it was like flying, and for the first time in my life I did not feel restricted in space. I floated and rolled around in the river’s grip, and my limbs, glowing white through the dark water, no longer seemed to be objects of pity.
Hearing the clock in the Old Town square strike was the signal for me to return to school, and the sound of it was more awful to me than any early-morning alarm bell. The realities of my life came rushing back to me. Reluctantly, slowly, I would swim ashore; school, my mother, every hardship I endured seemed to be waiting for me on that riverbank. I would dress hastily and hurry back to school, late, my hair still wet, my toes inside my socks ringed with river mud.
So many years later, in my early-morning walking to the post office, I was able to regain the same sense of freedom that being in the river that long-ago summer had given me, and for at least a short while I could lose myself in the world. On those walks I was no longer anyone. I breathed the air, I felt it on my face and my hands, my feet moved along the cobblestones, and that was all. Only when the walls of the post office came into view did I come back into myself, and my life opened its wings again and enclosed me. The dull sound of the heavy double doors swinging closed behind me was like the sound of the clock chiming in my childhood, a grim herald of what it meant to be me.
After arriving at the office, I could usually count on having at least an hour to myself before the other workers began to arrive, and even then it was rare that anyone would bother me for another hour after that. If I was writing, I would allow myself fifteen minutes or so to read the newspaper or a review in a journal and drink a morning cup of coffee, before commencing work. At that time I had finished the travelogue, and Schopenhauer was done with, so I was casting feebly about for some new ideas.
On this particular morning I was preoccupied more than usual with Anja’s absence. I was certain that she was back in Prague. The last two times that I had stationed myself outside the house, there had been distinct movement within the apartment. I was sure of it. The arrangements of the curtain over the window had also changed. The concierge continued to dismiss me, but I thought I could discern some shift in his expression, another possible signal of the Železnýs’ return.
The idea that Anja might be there but that I could not reach her was maddening, and made me feverish and dizzy. Was the concierge barring me from the apartment out of spite? I regretted calling on Anja so persistently; the concierge perhaps felt he was protecting her from a nuisance, or perhaps even violence. For the first time Klopstock seemed a sympathetic figure to me, and it was with shame that I noted our similarities.
I was interrupted in my musings by a knock at the office door. No one had ever disturbed me at this hour before. It was disorienting. There was a long silence, and I began to wonder if I might have imagined the knock, or if the sound had come from somewhere else. But then it came again. I felt irrationally fearful, as if I were about to be visited by some supernatural presence.
‘Come in,’ I said.
Theodor came into the room. He was the last person I was expecting. I leaned back in the chair, relieved, and waved him to a chair, but he declined with a shake of his head. It was then I saw his angry face.
‘Three hundred and fifty-three crowns and twenty-two heller,’ he said. He had not taken off his hat. He stood in the centre of the room with his arms folded. He looked furious but also, I thought, confused.
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘The cheque.’ He must have spoken to Franz about it. I was thinking fast. The possibility of claiming to have lost it flashed through my mind, but I could not remember if I had signed anything at the bank when collecting it, and Theodor might have checked. Perhaps the best thing was just to admit it. ‘Yes, that was for expenses, isn’t that right?’
‘The cheque was for Franz,’ said Theodor.
‘Yes, but you had it made out to cash, and I thought, well, it must be expenses.’ My voice hung in the air. ‘Karlsbad, all those museums. And, you know, I was the one who wrote the whole thing up. Every word!’
There was a long silence. I tried to bring my eyes to Theodor’s face.
‘The cheque,’ said Theodor again, slower this time, ‘was for Franz.’
I could not meet his eye. ‘I see. Yes. It was a misunderstanding. You have my apologies.’
‘Just what exactly is your relationship to Franz?’ Theodor asked.
I was stunned, and did not know how to answer. To say, He is my rival and I wish to destroy him, was not a possible response, although it would have been the honest one. But Theodor was a man of heightened sensitivity and had no doubt already intuited my true feelings about Franz.
‘We are not so close,’ I managed eventually.
Theodor nodded, as though he was satisfied with this. ‘Please return my money,’ he said. ‘The exact sum.’
I assured him that I would and he left without saying goodbye. I picked up my cup of coffee, now almost cold, and saw that my hands were trembling. I felt ashamed now of having taken the money. Or, to be accurate, I was ashamed not of having taken it but of having been discovered. But, when I considered of all my dishonesties in the past months, taking the cheque seemed to me to be the most harmless. If I had to be discovered in one dishonesty, this was by far the best. Yet I did not feel reassured. Something about Theodor’s manner worried me.
It was still quite early, so I took the morning’s newspaper from my briefcase, hoping to distract myself. I skimmed through the political pages, my eyes moving superficially over the surface of the paper, taking nothing in. My thoughts circled constantly from Anja to Klopstock to Franz. Franz had become like a phantom to me, a nightmare figure. I saw him as an insatiably greedy monster, sucking up everything around him, all the women, adulation and attention, like someone emptying a glass through a straw. In my imagination he had become swollen, grotesque, with long, skinny limbs like a spider. I pictured him and Anja sitting in our little room at the Hotel Kroh, laughing together over my letters the way that Franz and I had laughed over Klopstock’s. They would take it in turns to read sections of the letters out, imitating my
voice, and fall about the room with mirthful tears squeezing out of their clenched eyelids.
The thought agitated me to the point where it became difficult to control my breathing. My clothing, damp with sweat, lay cold against my flesh. I could hear the sound of my heart as an external thing, as if it were an object in the room. Panic rose through my chest, and the connections in the world began to float, loose and elastic. To anchor myself, I riveted my eyes to one phrase in the newspaper—‘reliable sources brought to our attention’—and read it over and over, mouthing the words. My hands clamped onto the edge of the desk. When I dared to let go, I took a hurried swallow of coffee, which rolled down my throat like a stone. I turned the page, pretending to myself that I was feeling normal again.
Then I saw Franz’s face looking up at me. It was certainly Franz, but his face looked different to me now. His eyes, below his neatly combed hair, were like large black pools and they burned into mine. They seemed to regard me and dismiss me for some wrongdoing. His lips curled, about to speak. I stared at his face. It seemed to rise off the page, expand to an enormous size and engulf me.
Wildly, my eyes seized on the words of the headline: HAS THE SON ECLIPSED THE FATHER? My eyes travelled down the columns of print and there, at the bottom of the page, was a photograph of me, small and grainy, barely recognisable. I gripped the desk again, but this time I could not prevent the room from sliding away from me.†
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