‘Max?’ came her voice.
I froze, still clinging to the bannister, and my heartbeat light and fast. There came a dense rustling of fabric and Uta appeared in the doorway of the living room.
‘My darling!’ she shouted up at me, making a stiff operatic gesture with one hand. She advanced.
My eyes darted around, looking for a way out. I wondered if it were possible for me to simply dodge her and run out of the room, out of the house. Her bulk blocked the stairwell. She climbed up a few steps.
‘Your face,’ she said when she stood a few steps below me, looking up. ‘His face!’ she called back to the room she had just left. ‘His face is white! Like a ghost.’
She darted forward to seize my arm and escorted me into the living room. There was quite a crowd. Along with Sophie and my parents were Felix and Kurt, and Oskar—the cousin from Brünn whose letter I had read that morning—together with his wife. There was no escape.
I let myself be propelled into the middle of the sofa, where I slumped, dazed. Someone handed me a cup of coffee. Its warmth was welcome in my hands, but when I brought it to my face the smell that rose up with the steam was like poisonous fumes. I abruptly put down the cup and spilled coffee over my shoes and trousers. It burned at first, and was quite painful, but then rapidly cooled. People jumped up and called for towels and cloths but I just sat and watched the brown stain widen into the carpet and drip from my shoe leather.
In our family, what we call ‘magazines’* are a tradition. For each family occasion we join together and take various kinds of submissions to assemble a little book, filled with poems, spoof newspaper articles and caricatures of the person who is being celebrated. I had always dreaded these magazines when it was my turn to receive them. I imagined the conversations among my family members when it was being assembled, and all the things that were not said as they carefully sifted through safe subjects to tease me about.
I could see my birthday magazine was sitting, ostentatiously wrapped, among the cakes and fruit on the table. When it could be avoided no longer, I took it down and unwrapped it. Everyone was watching me expectantly. The cardboard cover was overlaid with chequered fabric and covered with designs of cut-out felt figures.
Someone—probably Sophie, I thought—had spent a lot of time on it. Uta exclaimed loudly and craned her neck the better to see it. I opened it to the first page with a feeling of foreboding. The eyes of the room were on me, watching me for my reaction.
The first few pages were quite harmless, with a sketch by my mother and a spoof newspaper article written by Sophie. There was also a little poem, gaudy and overblown, which I thought must be from Felix. On the following page was a drawing in dark ink, which at first I could not identify. The heavy lines suggested a kind of haystack blown by the wind. I glanced around at the faces of the guests and saw that Oskar was nodding encouragingly as though the drawing were his. When my eyes found the paper again, the lines had resolved into the figure of a hunchback, clutching a swooning damsel in one hand; Quasimodo rescuing Esmeralda. Everyone was looking at me.
I cleared my throat, but could think of nothing to say. ‘Quite a resemblance,’ I managed after a moment. My voice sounded very loud in the room. Everyone’s eyes had been fixed on me, but now they bounced away in shame.
‘Quasimodo,’ Sophie said by way of explanation, ‘is a man of gentle heroism and a pure heart. Like you, Max.’
I found the truth of this comment to be negligible, but poor Sophie’s face radiated such concern that I tried to smile at her.
‘He is quite like you, Max,’ Uta broke in, examining the drawing. ‘Very like.’ There was a silence. ‘That muscular back, those strong hands.’ Her faltering voice crashed around the room and then dropped away, and no one filled the emerging silence.
I turned the page and everyone exclaimed and laughed too loudly over the next piece, a long ballad that recounted my achievements of the year in the style of a heroic saga.
After the ordeal of the magazine was over I wanted nothing more than to retire to my room. My body felt frayed and ragged and at the back of my mind the problem of Anja’s letter called for my attention. I could feel the sharp edges of the paper in my pocket, and it crackled with every movement I made. More cake was passed around and then Oskar came and sat beside me on the sofa. He seemed wholly unaware of having caused any offence with his drawing; on the contrary, he thought it was a great joke, and was, moreover, pleased with himself at having surprised me with his attendance at the party. The long letter I had read that morning had been a carefully designed ruse to make me unsuspecting of his visit.
He asked me familiarly what I was working on, and then without waiting for me to reply told me that he had heard that I was helping Franz write a travelogue and wondered what it was like to work with such a celebrated writer. I was too tired to do anything but nod. I was lucky, he said, to have the support of such a well-known literary figure. I just nodded. Yes. Very lucky.
There was no escape. From the corner of my eye I could see Uta hovering a short distance away, waiting for the moment she could break into the conversation. I looked at her and felt a great weariness. Her face was fat and shiny and framed by her frilly pink collar and yellow hair. She was my fate; perhaps there was no reason to continue to struggle. I thought of Oskar’s drawing and I imagined the life of Quasimodo in that church, ringing the bells and, dog-like, feeling only devotion. I had never read the novel, afraid that I would recognise in it a too-accurate portrait of myself, but somehow, despite this, the story had still filtered through to my awareness. That afternoon, in the overheated room filled with the cloying smell of oily pastries and close bodies, loud laughs and voices echoing from the walls, a solitary life in a damp church or upon some mountaintop seemed an idyll beyond imagining.
Oskar was still speaking to me, but I had stopped listening to him long ago. Now I turned and smiled at Uta and she joined us on the sofa. Uta and Oskar’s voices issued from their mouths and rose up into the air, like sticky condensation that adhered to the surfaces of the room and the skin on my face. I was much too tired to think now of anything except lying down, and fortunately my illness was a ready excuse for me to soon retire to my room.
__________________
* The birthday ‘magazine’ to which Brod refers has been located among the manuscripts, and will be made available online.
24.
THAT NIGHT, DESPITE MY FATIGUE, I COULD NOT SLEEP. I LAY ON my bed and looked at the patterns that the light from the streetlamp made on the ceiling and the walls of the room. I had put the letter on my night table, where it glowed like a little moon. As I lay there, my head full of night-time terrors, the awful thought came to me that Franz might be in Berlin with Anja. Perhaps it had been he, gloating, who had asked her to send me the stories. I thought of the house in Berlin, its thick walls enclosing the bodies of Franz and Anja. I found that at first I could consider this horror with a degree of equanimity, but the more I pictured it, the more uncomfortable I became. The thought that they could be, at that very moment, in the unknown house, living, breathing, perhaps sleeping, perhaps reading, was as strange and awful as considering the unknowable details of one’s own death.
I had put my watch on the night table and took it up from time to time to squint at its face, but it had become an indecipherable object, its hands indicating an illogical sequence of hours. The ticking of the watch became louder and louder and, it seemed to me, slower as the hours passed. The interval between each tick became longer and within this suspended space a host of other mechanical noises made by the watch gradually came to my attention: clicks and whirrings and the musical notes of tiny springs, like the calls of metallic birds.
In the dark, the dimensions of the room altered themselves and became strange to me. In the short time between closing and opening my eyes the distance between the pieces of furniture became unfamiliar, as though I were seeing the room for the first time. The wardrobe was like a dark elongated b
ox rearing precariously over me, and the legs of the dressing table had grown long and spindly.
I thought of Franz and Anja moving through the house in Nostitzstrasse, going from room to room. The house became like a dolls’ house, with one wall that swung open so I could easily observe the pair and manipulate them like miniature dolls. I pictured the Franz doll and the Anja doll arranged in different tableaux, in all kinds of vulgar embraces and poses, while their faces smiled silently at me and the ticking of my watch reverberated around the room.*
I threw off the bedclothes and looked down along my body spread on the white sheet. It looked just like a normal, straight BODY. I shifted my feet back and forth and they obeyed me. I had made up my mind. Without turning on the lamp, I gathered my clothing from where I had discarded it around the room and dressed. I put the letter and the now-booming watch in my pocket and left the house.
Then I was at the train station and the little lighted cabins of my train pulled up and I got on and there was no one in my compartment but me. My watch was making a slow thud from my pocket and my whole BODY vibrated with each shift of the little golden hand. I placed my hand over my pocket to dull the sound. I sat next to the window but could see nothing of the dark landscape that passed, and even if I pressed my face up against the glass all that was visible to me was a series of rushing shapes, like night ghosts, that formed a shifting background to the image† of my own white face looking back at me.
The exception to this was the few stations the train passed, which were like little lighted islands in the night. They were always empty, with not even a porter or a conductor visible, and I could never see the sign with the station’s name. I lost count of the number of stations we passed and then the train stopped. It stood still for a long time, hissing steam, and I got off and saw I was at Berlin’s Schlesischer Bahnhof.
The station was as bright and as crowded as though it were a busy morning with people hurrying to offices and shops and schools, but when I exited the station I was surrounded again by darkness and silence. I asked a passing MAN the way to Nostitzstrasse, and he pointed down the road without speaking. I walked a long way, always finding someone to direct me when the road that I was on came to an end.
I walked along wide alleys lined with plane or linden trees, down dirty cobbled lanes, I crossed rivers and parks. In my pocket, my watch beat like the heart of a wild animal, echoing between the stone faces of the buildings and shaking the leaves of the trees. I was afraid of the noise disturbing the inhabitants of those silent streets, so I took out the watch and wrapped it in my handkerchief to dull the sound, but this made no difference. From time to time I took Anja’s letter from my pocket and looked at the address again, even though I already knew it by heart.
I crossed a small bridge and then I saw the sign for Nostitzstrasse, which stretched out ahead of me. I stood and looked down it. There were only a few lighted windows in the houses, on the upper floors, and as I walked along the houses slowly fanned past.
Number 70 had heavy double street doors and the list of names next to the bells did not include Anja’s. I chose a name at random and rang the bell. I could hear its chime sound on the floor above, but just then I saw that the street door was ajar and I went in. The entrance hall was dusty and littered with dead leaves and the tiles were cracked and broken. It seemed unthinkable that I would find Anja in a place such as this. There was no light, and I began to ascend the staircase, stopping at each door to peer at the nameplate, but I reached the top of the house without finding Anja’s.
As I walked back down, I passed a door from beyond which came a familiar sound. It was difficult to hear anything with the monstrous beat of my watch constantly in my ears, so I stood close to the door and pressed my ear against it.
The sound was a scratching scuffle, like small animals burrowing in the dry undergrowth, and it stopped and resumed at IRREGULAR‡ intervals.
I wondered if it might be MICE, or some burrowing insect in the wooden panels of the door, before I recalled the many times I had stood outside our hotel room at Karlsbad, listening to that same sound as Franz’s pen scratched across the paper inside the room. The memory immediately brought with it a wave of the sulphurous air of that town. As I had used to do with the hotel-room door, my fingers slowly reached out for the door handle, gently settled upon it and then steadily gripped it with increasing firmness to silently slide the door’s mechanism into itself to open it.
The door was not locked, and a yellow-lighted slit appeared next to my hand, slowly widening to reveal the very small entrance hall of the apartment. I put my hand in my pocket to muffle the sound of the watch and then I stepped inside. The scratching sound that I could hear from outside the apartment was much louder inside and had no clear point of origin; it seemed to come from the WALLS themselves, or up through the uneven floorboards.
There were two closed doors leading off the hall and I approached each in turn and listened. It was difficult to determine where the sound was louder, so in the end I chose the left-hand door at random. I opened it with less care than I had the front door. Inside I found a small bedsitting room. The scrabbling sound echoed around the room and formed a musical pattern with the watch, which was like a metronome, keeping time. The room was empty. Along one wall was a narrow bed, with a heap of bedclothes piled on it. In the corner was a small writing table strewn with papers and books, and a chair pushed back, as though someone had just risen from it. Next to this was a rail on which some clothing hung. I recognised FRANZ’S hat. The shirts and jackets were moulded STILL in the shape of the wearer, the elbows slightly bent, the holes for the neck hanging open like round mouths.± There was no sign of Anja.
The scratching paused and was replaced by a softer rustling, and then the pile of bedclothes shifted. I crossed the small room in one stride and looked down into the bed. The bedclothes and pillows were pressed in around a small, shrunken figure and littered with sheets of paper and flecked with spots of blue ink.
Loose sheets of writing paper spilled off the bed and onto the floorboards around it. I looked down and saw some of the crumpled pages underneath my shoes, dirty and torn. The smudged lines of blue ink looked familiar to me. I thought it looked like my own handwriting. I stooped down to pick up one of the crumpled pages, and it looked like the story I had written that night so long ago. I read a few lines, but the words had changed and I could no longer remember what I had written before. The figure in the bed sighed and shifted. It leaned its head back onto the pillows to look up at me.
I knew that it was Franz, but it was difficult to find any feature that anchored him to this identity. The bones of his face pushed out painfully like the blades of knives against the inside of the skin and his face seemed to have widened and flattened. His eyes were DARK animals hiding in shrunken hollows, his hair a mass of dirty cobwebs spread over the skull. His hands were crowded with large bones, too heavy for his bird-like limbs, and they lay abandoned on the bedclothes. He smelled of death, of earth and mould and dark silence.
I was conscious of the sound of the watch in my pocket. I was still holding my hand curled around it, afraid to let go and release the deafening sound into the room. I asked him where Anja was, and my voice trumpeted out of me and hurt my head. He did not respond—perhaps he did not hear me—but only sank further back onto the pillows and closed his eyes.
It seemed impossible that Anja could be in any of the rooms of that dingy apartment. I remembered suddenly the other door that opened off the entrance hall. I imaged Anja inside, sitting silently, or tied up, gagged, being kept PRISONER. I went to it and threw the door open so hard that it bounced off the wall behind it. I was faced with a MAN° standing on the other side of the room, watching me. I froze, but then saw that it was only my reflection in the black window. The room was completely bare, empty of furniture, with the naked glass of the window like a great eye looking in. The sound of the watch bounced from the hard surfaces into my face like physical shocks.
I
went back to FRANZ’S∞ room and shouted at him to tell me where Anja was. My mouth stretched with crude savageries and my hot breath hissed against my teeth. I leaned over him, into the fog of pestilent air that hung about the bed. But Franz looked completely unaffected by my outburst, and his only reaction was to stretch his white lips over his teeth in a caricature of a smile. Slowly, he raised one of his limp hands from the bedclothes and pointed across the room. His dry voice was in my ears; it hissed and sighed like a sibilant Eastern language, it rustled like paper, and I could not understand his words. The beats that came from the watch fell onto his words and sliced them into pieces of animal noise.
He began to speak and gesture more insistently, and I could see that he was pointing at the writing table. I went towards it and looked down at the sheets of paper covered with his spiked writing. I remembered the letter from Anja that I had found in Karlsbad and the letter in my pocket. Had he written these to lure me to him? Or was Anja somewhere here, behind one of the closed doors on the landing? I leafed through the papers on the table with one hand and read a few phrases here and there. I opened the drawers of the writing table at random and scooped the contents out onto the floor. My fingers found a tightly bound stack of folded paper. I pulled out a sheet and saw that it was covered with my own handwriting. It was a page from one of my letters to Anja, my outpourings of love for her, which I had written all those months ago in Karlsbad.ª There was a pain in my stomach like a wound. I opened another sheet from the stack, and it was the same. The whole drawer was full of these little folded parcels, a stockpile, a mausoleum of my useless affection.
It did not occur to me to wonder how they had come to be here. My eyes were swollen with the weight of hundreds of uncried tears, and I could see again every image of Anja I had ever witnessed, every scene I had enacted with her. They moved past me one after the other like pictures in a gallery. Her face was as clear to me as though it were projected onto the blank wall above the writing table.
The Lost Pages Page 18