Once again, as at the sight of the procession, an icy shiver ran down his spine when he saw the riderless horse that seemed only to be waiting for some determined man, some new master, to leap into the saddle. He did not hear the passers-by commenting disparagingly on its moth-eaten hide. The mocking question from one of the lackeys — ‘Would it perhaps please my Lord Marshal to mount?’ — made his bowels churn and his hair stand on end, as if it were the voice of destiny coming from the primal depths. He was impervious to the scorn behind the servant’s words. Only an hour ago, the old woman had said to him, ‘You’re mad yourself, son, only you don’t know it,’ but had she not gone on to say, ‘In the end, why shouldn’t a madman rule the world?’
He could feel his heart beating in his throat with wild excitement; he tore himself away from his fantasies and raced to Thungasse.
When spring arrived, old Countess Zahradka used to move into the small, dark mansion of her late sister, Countess Morzin, whose rooms were never brightened by a single ray of light. She hated the sun and even more she hated the month of May, with its soft, voluptuous breath and the cheerful people in their Sunday best. At that time, her own house, close to the Premonstratensian monastery at the highest point of the city, was fast asleep behind closed shutters. The stairs Ottokar was rushing up were of bare brick, and led, directly and without passing through a hall, into the stone-cold corridor with marble flags onto which the doors of the various rooms opened.
There were rumours — though God only knows where they came from — that the house, which resembled nothing more than a county courthouse, was haunted and, moreover, concealed an immense treasure. They had probably been invented by some wag to emphasise the contempt for all romantic fancies which seemed to emanate from its every stone. Ottokar’s daydreams certainly vanished from his mind the moment he set foot on the steps. He was filled with such a sense of his own poverty-stricken insignificance that he gave an involuntary bow before he knocked and entered.
The room in which Countess Zahradka, sitting in a chair covered entirely in grey hessian, was waiting for him, was the most uncomfortable imaginable: the stove of Meissen porcelain, the sofas, sideboards, chairs, the chandelier of Venetian glass, that must have had a hundred candles, a suit of armour, were all covered with sheets, as if awaiting an auction; even the countless miniatures, which covered the walls from ceiling to floor, were veiled in gauze; ‘to keep the flies off’, Ottokar remembered the Countess telling him when once, as a child, he had asked her about the reason for these bizarre protective covers. Or had he only dreamed it? The many times he had been here he could never remember having seen a single fly.
He had often wondered what might be outside the clouded window-panes, by which the old lady used to sit. Could it be a courtyard, a garden, a street? He had never attempted to ascertain what it was; to do so, he would have had to go past the Countess, and the very idea was unthinkable. The eternal sameness of the room stifled any resolutions he might have made. The moment he entered, he was transported back to the time when he had had to make his first visit here, and he felt as if he himself were sewn up in hessian and linen, to protect him against non-existent flies.
The only object that was not draped, or at least only partially so, was the one lifesize portrait among all the miniatures; a rectangular hole had been cut in the calico, which covered picture and frame, revealing the bald, pear-shaped head, the staring, watery-blue fish-eyes and flabby cheeks of the old lady’s late husband, the Lord High Chamberlain.
Although he had long since forgotten who had told him, Ottokar Vondrejc had heard from somewhere that the Count had been cruel and harsh, pitiless not only towards the sufferings of others, but also towards his own. It was said that as a child he had hammered a nail through his foot into the floor, merely to amuse himself!
The house was full of cats, all of them old, slow, creeping creatures. Often Ottokar would see a dozen or so walking up and down the corridor, grey and quiet, as if they were witnesses waiting to be called into court. They never entered the room, however; if, by mistake, one did put its head round the door, it would immediately withdraw it in haste, as if it quite agreed it was not time for it to give evidence yet.
Countess Zahradka’s attitude to Ottokar was strange. Sometimes he would detect in her look something of the tender caress of a mother’s love, but it would only last for a few seconds; the next moment he would feel a wave of icy contempt, almost hatred.
Her love, if it was that, was never expressed in words, but often enough her cruel arrogance found eloquent expression, even if it was more in the tone of what she said than in the actual meaning of her words.
He had first been commanded to perform before her on the occasion of his first communion, playing the Czech folk-song ‘Andulko, mé díte, já vás mám rád’ on his half-size violin. Later he had played other tunes, love songs and hymns until, as his playing and technique improved, he could perform Beethoven sonatas; but never, no matter whether his performance was good, bad or indifferent, had he seen the slightest sign of approval or disapproval on her face. Even now, he had no idea whether she appreciated his playing.
Sometimes he had tried to appeal to her emotions by improvising, to see if he could sense, from the rapid fluctuations of her response, whether his music had found the key to her heart; but he often felt her love when he was playing out of tune, and hatred when he reached the heights of virtuosity.
Perhaps the unbounded arrogance of her blood responded to the perfection of his playing as to an intrusion on her aristocratic privileges and flared up in hatred; perhaps it was her Slav instinct only to love what was weak and feeble; perhaps it was merely chance, but there was always an insurmountable barrier between them, and he very soon gave up the idea of trying to remove it, just as it never occurred to him to push past her to look out of the windows.
He gave her a mute, respectful bow, opened his violin-case, tucked his instrument under his chin and raised the bow to the strings, which prompted her stock, offhand response, ‘Well then, Pane Vondrejc, play your fiddle.’ Perhaps it was the contrast between the excitement he had felt as he stood outside Wallenstein Palace and the feeling of being trapped in the past which overcame him in this grey room, that led him, without thinking, to play the silly, sentimental song from the days of his first communion, ‘Andulko …’ As soon as he heard himself play the first few notes, he started in confusion, but the Countess looked neither surprised nor annoyed; she was merely staring into space, like the portrait of her husband.
Gradually he began to improvise on the tune, following the inspiration of the moment. He would regularly allow himself to be carried away by his own playing, which he then listened to in astonishment, as if it were another person playing, not himself, a different person who was inside him and yet not himself, a person of whom he knew nothing except that he guided the bow. Ottokar would be so carried away by his music that the walls about him disappeared and he would find himself wandering round a dreamworld filled with shimmering colours and sounds, where he plunged into uncharted depths and surfaced with mellifluous jewels. Then it would sometimes happen that the dull windows became crystal-clear, and he knew that beyond them was a glorious fairy realm, filled with the flutter of glistening white butterflies, living snowflakes in the middle of summer; and he would see himself walking down unending avenues of overarching jasmine, drunk with love, his spirit bathed with the scent from the skin of the young woman in bridal white whose warm shoulder was pressing in intimate embrace against his own.
Then, as so often happened, the grey linen masking the portrait of the dead Count would turn into a cascade of ash-blond hair beneath a sunny straw hat with a pale-blue ribbon, and he would see a girl’s face with dark eyes and half-open lips gazing down at him.
Dreaming, waking, sleeping, he felt those features within him, as if they were his true heart; and every time he saw them come alive, the ‘other person’, who was inside him, seemed to obey a mysterious command, which c
ame from ‘her’, and his music took on the dark tones of a wild, alien cruelty.
The door to the adjoining room was suddenly opened and the young girl who had been in his thoughts entered quietly.
Her face resembled the portrait of the young lady in the Rococo crinoline in Elsenwanger House, she was just as young and beautiful. Behind her a horde of cats peeked in.
Ottokar looked at her as calmly as if she had been there all the time. What was there to be surprised at? She had simply stepped out of his mind and appeared before him.
He played and played, self-absorbed, lost in his dreams. He saw himself standing with her in the deep darkness of the crypt of St. George’s, the light from a candle carried by a monk flickering on a barely life-sized statue in black marble: the figure of a dead woman, half decayed, her dress in tatters over her breast, her eyes shrivelled and a snake with a horrible, flat, triangular head curled up inside her torn-open stomach in place of a child.
And the music of his violin changed into the words, as monotonous as a ghostly litany, which the monk in St. George’s would repeat every day to visitors to the crypt:
‘Many years ago, there was a sculptor in Prague who lived with his mistress without the blessing of the Church. And when he saw that she was with child, he no longer trusted her and, believing she had deceived him with another man, he strangled her and threw the body down into the Stag Moat. The worms had already gnawed at her when they found it. They locked the murderer in the crypt with the corpse and, as penance for his sin, compelled him to carve her likeness in stone before he was broken on the wheel.’
All at once Ottokar came to, and his fingers stopped on the strings as his waking eye suddenly caught sight of the girl standing behind the old Countess’ chair and smiling at him. He froze, incapable of movement, the bow raised in his hand.
Countess Zahradka took up her lorgnette and slowly turned her head. ‘Carry on playing, Ottokar. It’s only my niece. Don’t disturb him, Polyxena.’
Ottokar did not move, only his arm fell loosely to his side, as if under the effect of a heart spasm.
For a good minute there was complete silence in the room.
‘Why have you stopped playing?’ asked the Countess angrily.
Ottokar pulled himself together, scarcely knowing how to hide the fact that his hands were trembling; then, softly, shyly, the violin began to whimper:
Andulko,
My little child
I do love you.
A purring laugh from Polyxena brought the melody to a halt. ‘Won’t you tell us, Herr Ottokar, what that marvellous tune was that you were playing before? Was it an improvisation? It — called — up,’ after each word Polyxena paused meaningfully; her eyes were lowered, and she plucked at the fringes of the chair, apparently lost in thought, ‘a — vivid — picture of — St. George’s — crypt, Herr … Herr … Ottokar.’
The old Countess gave an almost imperceptible start. There was something about the tone in which her niece spoke the name Ottokar which aroused her suspicions.
The bewildered student stammered a few embarrassed words. There were two pairs of eyes fixed upon him, the one full of such consuming passion that they seemed to scorch his brain, the other penetrating, razor sharp, radiating suspicion and deadly hate at the same time. He could not look at either without either hurting the one deeply or revealing his innermost feelings to the other. ‘Quick! Play! Just keep on playing!’ screamed something inside him. Hastily he raised his bow. Beads of sweat were forming on his forehead. ‘For God’s sake, not that blasted “Andulko” again!’ As he drew the bow across the strings he felt to his horror that it was inescapable … everything began to go black … then the sound of a hurdy-gurdy from the street outside came to his rescue and, with crazed, mindless haste, he rushed into the music-hall song with the chorus:
Pale as the lily
Never should marry,
My mother said;
Lips like the cherry,
Rosy and merry,
Kiss and soon wed.
After one verse, he stopped; the gust of hatred that came from Countess Zahradka almost knocked the bow out of his hand.
Through a veil of mist he saw Polyxena dart over to the grandfather clock by the door, pull the linen cover aside and push the finger round until it pointed to VIII. He realized it was a way of telling him the time for their rendezvous, but the joy froze in his throat at the fear that the Countess had seen through the stratagem.
He saw her long, skinny, old woman’s fingers rummaging in the knitting bag hanging from the back of the chair and sensed that she was about to do something that would be unimaginably humiliating for him, something so terrible he dared not even guess what it might be.
‘Capital — music — Vondrejc — capital,’ said the Countess, spitting out each word separately, took two crumpled notes from the bag and handed them to him. ‘There’s — a tip — for you. And buy yourself — a pair of — better — trousers on my account before the next time, those are all worn and shiny.’
Ottokar’s heart almost stopped beating with the shame. His last clear thought was that he had to take the money, if he did not want to give himself away. Before his eyes the whole room dissolved into a cloud of grey: Polyxena, the clock, the face of the late Chamberlain, the suit of armour, the armchair, only the dusty windows stood out, whitish rectangles bursting through the gloom. He realised that the Countess had drawn her own grey cover over him — ‘as a protection against the flies’ — and that he would never be able to rid himself of it until death.
He found himself out in the street, with no memory of how he had come down the stairs. Had he been in the upstairs room at all? A burning wound deep within him told him that he must have been. And he was still clutching the money in his hand. Unthinking, he thrust it into his pocket.
Then he remembered that Polyxena would come to him at eight o’clock; he heard the towers strike the quarter; a dog yapped, it struck him like a whiplash across his face: Did he really look so shabby that the dogs of the rich barked at him?
He clenched his teeth together, as if he could grind his thoughts into silence, and raced on trembling legs towards his home. At the next corner he stopped, swaying to and fro. ‘No, not home. Away, far away from Prague.’ He was consumed with shame, ‘The best would be to throw myself into the river!’ With the decisiveness of youth he immediately set off for the Moldau, but the ‘other person’ inside him slowed his steps, whispering that he would surely betray Polyxena, if he were to drown himself, and concealing from him the fact that it was the vital urge within that was holding him back from suicide.
‘Oh God, my God, how can I look her in the face when she comes?’ he sobbed to himself. ‘No, no, she won’t come, it’s all over.’ At that the pain in his breast sunk its fangs even more deeply into his soul: if she did not come to him any more, how could he go on living?
He went through the black and yellow striped gate into the courtyard of the Dalibor Tower, aware that the next hour would be an endless torment as he counted each minute. If Polyxena came he would shrivel before her with shame; if she did not come, then the night of madness would swallow him up.
He shuddered as he glanced over at the dungeon tower with its round, white hat, towering up from the Stag Moat behind the crumbling wall. He had a dim feeling that the tower was still alive: how many victims had already succumbed to madness in its stone belly, but still the Moloch was not satisfied; now, after a hundred years of deathlike sleep, it was awakening again.
For the first time since his childhood he saw it not as the work of human hands, but as a granite monster with fearsome entrails that could digest flesh and blood, just like those of some nocturnal predator. It had three stories with a round hole down the middle like a pipe from gullet to stomach. In the dreadful darkness of the top floor, year after lightless year had gnawed at the condemned prisoners, until they were let down by ropes into the middle room for their last loaf of bread and jug of water, after which th
ey would die of thirst, unless, crazed by the reek of decay from below, they flung themselves through the hole to join the stinking cadavers.
The courtyard of limes breathed the dewy damp of the evening twilight, but the window of the keeper’s cottage still stood open. Ottokar sat down on the bench, as quietly as possible so as not to disturb the old, gout-ridden woman who, so he believed, was sleeping on the other side of the wall. He wanted to clear his mind of all that had happened for a moment, before the torture of waiting began: a childish attempt to outwit his heart.
He was suddenly overcome with a feeling of weakness; it needed all his strength to hold back the sobs which gripped him by the throat and threatened to suffocate him. From inside the room, he heard a toneless voice, which sounded as if someone were speaking into a pillow, ‘Ottokar?’
‘Yes, mother?’
‘Aren’t you going to come in for your dinner?’
‘No, mother. I’m not hungry; I — I’ve already had something to eat.’
For a while the voice was silent.
In the room the clock chimed a soft, metallic half past seven. Ottokar pressed his lips together and clenched his hands. ‘What should I do? What should I do?!’
Again he heard the voice. ‘Ottokar?’
He did not reply.
‘Ottokar?’
‘Yes, mother?’
‘Why … why are you crying, Ottokar?’
He gave a forced laugh. ‘Me? Whatever are you thinking, mother! I’m not crying. Why ever should I cry?’
The voice fell silent, unbelieving.
Ottokar raised his eyes from the shadow-dappled courtyard. ‘If only the bells would finally ring out and break this deathly silence!’
He stared at a crimson gash in the sky, and felt that he had to say something.
‘Is father in there?’
‘He’s at the inn,’ came the answer after a pause. He stood up quickly. ‘Then I’ll go and join him for an hour or so. Goodnight, mother.’ He picked up his violin case and looked at the tower.
The Dedalus Meyrink Reader Page 25