By Stefan Zweig
The ship, delayed by the storm, was not able to land in the small French port town until late in the evening; the night train to Germany was missed. So an unexpected day remained in a strange place, an evening without any other attraction than that of a melancholy ladies’ music in a suburban amusement club or a monotonous conversation with the completely random travel companions. The air in the small dining room of the hotel seemed unbearable to me, greasy with oil, dull with smoke, and I felt its dull impurity twice, because the pure breath of the sea was still salty and cool on my lips. So I went out, at random along the bright, wide street to a place where a community guards band was playing, and then on again amid the casually flowing wave of strollers. At first it was good for me, this willless rocking in the current of indifferent and provincial dressed people, but soon I couldn’t bear it anymore, this impulse of strangers and their broken laughter, these eyes that attacked me, amazed, strange or grinning, these touches that imperceptibly pushed me on, this light breaking from a thousand small sources and the incessant scraping of steps. The seafaring had been turbulent, and a tumbling and gently drunk feeling was still fermenting in my blood: I could still feel the sliding and swaying under my feet, the earth seemed to move as if breathing and the road swung up to the sky. All of a sudden I felt dizzy from this loud confusion, and in order to save myself, without looking for its name, I turned into a side street and from there into a smaller one, in which the senseless noise gradually subsided, and went now aimlessly further into the maze of these lanes branching out like veins, which became darker and darker the further I moved away from the main square. The great electric arc lamps, those moons of the broad boulevards, no longer flamed here, and beyond the sparse lighting one finally began to see the stars again and a black, overcast sky.
I had to be near the harbor, in the sailors’ quarter, I felt it in the rotten fish smell, in that sweet smell of seaweed and putrefaction, like the algae pulled ashore by the surf, in that peculiar haze of rotten smells and unventilated rooms, who lies dull in these corners until the great storm comes and brings you breath. The uncertain darkness did me good and this unexpected loneliness, I slowed my pace, now looked at street after street, one always different from her neighbor, here a peaceful one, there a courtier one, but all dark and with a muffled noise of music and voices, which swelled so mysteriously from the invisible, from the breast of its vault, that the subterranean source could hardly be guessed. Because they were all locked and only blinked with a red or yellow light.
I love these alleys in strange cities, this dirty market of all passions, this secret accumulation of all seductions for the sailors who stop here for one night from lonely nights on strange and dangerous seas to fulfill their many and sensual dreams in one hour. You have to hide somewhere in the lowlands of the big city, these small side streets, because they say so boldly and obtrusively what the bright houses with shiny windows and elegant people in a hundred masks are hiding. Music sounds and lures here from small rooms, cinematographers promise unimagined splendor with bright posters, small square lights crouch under the gates and wink at a very clear invitation with confidential greetings, bare flesh shimmers under gilded tinsel between the opened crack of a door. The voices of the intoxicated roar from the cafés and the squabbles of the players rumble. The sailors grin when they meet each other here, their dull looks are glaring with much promise, because here is everything, women and games, drink and show, adventure, dirty and big. All this, however, is shy and yet treacherously muffled behind the hypocritically lowered shutters, everything only inside, and this apparent seclusion excites with the double seduction of secrecy and accessibility. These streets are the same in Hamburg and Colombo and Havana, here and there as well as the great avenues of luxury, because the top and bottom of life have the same shape. The last fantastic remnants of a sensually unregulated world, where the instincts are still brutally and unbridled, a dark forest of passions and thickets and full of instinctual animals are these unbourgeois roads, exciting because of what they reveal and alluring because of what they hide . One can dream of them.
And so was the one in which I suddenly felt trapped. At random I had followed a couple of cuirassiers who clinked their sharpening sabers over the bumpy pavement. Women called them from a bar, they laughed and shouted rude jokes at them, someone knocked on the window, then a voice cursed somewhere, they walked on, the laughter grew further, and soon I couldn’t hear them anymore. The alley was silent again, a couple of windows blinked vaguely in a misty glow from the dull moon. I stood and breathed in this silence, which seemed strange to me because behind it something whirred of mystery, lust and danger. I felt clearly that this silence was a lie and that something of the rottenness of the world glimmered under the hazy haze of this alley. But I stood and stayed and listened into space. I no longer felt the city and the alley, not its name and not mine, just felt that I was a stranger here, wonderfully detached in a stranger, that there was no intention in me, no message and no relationship, and yet all of me felt this dark life around me as full as the blood under my skin. I only felt this feeling that nothing happened for me and yet everything belonged to me, this blissful feeling of the deepest and truest experience through indifference, which belongs to the living sources of my inner being and always overcomes me like a pleasure in the unknown. Suddenly, listening as I stood in the lonely alley, expecting something that had to happen, something that would push me away from this moonstruck feeling of listening into the void, I heard muffled from the distance or a wall, very dimly from somewhere Sing a German song, that very simple-minded dance from the “Freischütz”: “Beautiful, green maiden wreath”. A woman’s voice sang it, very badly, but it was a German melody, German here somewhere in a strange corner of the world and therefore brotherly in a sense of its own. It was sung from somewhere, but still, like a greeting, I felt it, the first native word for weeks. Who, I asked myself, speaks my language here, who is driven by a memory from within, to lift this poor song out of the heart in a winding, overgrown alley? I felt for the voice, one house after the other of all those who stood here half asleep, with closed shutters, behind which, however, there was a telltale blink of light and sometimes of a waving hand. There were bright headlines on the outside, screaming posters, and ale, whiskey, beer promised a hidden bar here, but everything was locked, forbidding and yet again inviting. And in between – a few steps from afar – the voice kept trilling the chorus lighter and closer and closer: I recognized the house. I hesitated a moment, then kicked the inner door, which was tightly draped with white curtains. But then, when I leaned down resolutely, something in the shadow of the hall suddenly came to life, a figure who had apparently lurked there, pressed close to the pane, winced in shock, a face doused by the red of the overhanging lantern and yet pale in horror , a man stared at me wide-eyed, mumbled something like an apology, and disappeared into the twilight of the alley. This greeting was strange. I looked after him. Something seemed to be stirring from him in the fading shadow of the alley, but indistinctly. Inside the voice still sounded, even lighter it seemed to me. That attracted me. I clicked the door open and entered quickly.
The last word of the song fell as if cut by a knife. And with a start, I felt an emptiness in front of me, a hostility to silence, as if I had smashed something. Only gradually did I find my way around the room, which was almost empty, a bar and a table, the whole thing evidently only a vestibule to other rooms backwards, which quickly revealed their real purpose with half-open doors, dimmed lamps and ready beds. At the front of the table, leaning on her elbows, was a girl, made up and tired, at the back of the bar the landlady, stout and dirty-gray, with another girl who was not unattractive. My greeting fell hard into the room, a bored echo came back very late. I was uncomfortable having stepped into the void like that; into such a tense, dreary silence, and I would have liked to leave again, but my embarrassment found no excuse, and so I sat down at the table in front of me, resigned. The girl, now conscious of her duty, asked me what I wanted to drink, and I immediately recognized the German from her harsh French. I ordered a beer, she left and came back with that limp gait that betrayed even more indifference than the shallowness of her eyes, which glimmered limply under her lids like dying lights. Very mechanically, as was customary in those rooms, she placed a second glass for herself next to mine. Her gaze passed me emptyly as she drank it to me: that way I could look at her. Her face was actually still beautiful and even in features, but as if it had become mask-like and mean through an inner exhaustion, everything fell limply, the eyelids were heavy, the hair loose; the cheeks, blotchy with bad make-up and blotchy, were already beginning to give way and wrinkled wide to the mouth. The dress, too, was slung casually, the voice burned out, harsh with smoke and beer. In everything I felt a person who is tired and just out of habit, as it were, lives on without feeling. I threw down a question with embarrassment and horror. She answered without looking at me, indifferent and dull, her lips barely moving. I felt unwelcome. The landlady yawned backwards, the other girl was sitting in a corner and looking, waiting, as it were, until I called her. I would have liked to go, but everything about me was difficult, I sat in this rich, smoldering air, stumbling dully like the sailors, captivated by curiosity and horror; because this indifference was kind of irritating.
Suddenly I started up, startled by a loud laugh next to me. And at the same time the flame swayed: from the draft I felt that someone must have opened the door behind my back. “Are you coming again?” Sneered the voice next to me, loudly and in German. “Are you crawling around the house again, you stingy you? Well, just come in, I won’t hurt you. “
I spun around, first to her, who was shouting this greeting so loudly, as if the fire was breaking out of her body, and then to the door. And before it was fully opened, I recognized the shivering figure, recognized the humble look of this person who had previously been glued to the door. He held the hat in his hand, shyly like a beggar, and trembled under the garish greeting, under the laughter that suddenly seemed to shake her heavy form like a spasm and was accompanied by the landlady from behind, from the bar, with quick whispers.
“Sit down there, at Françoise,” she said at the poor, as he now stepped closer with a cowardly, shuffling step. “You see, I have a master.”
She shouted this to him in German. The landlady and the girl laughed loudly, although they couldn’t understand anything, but they already seemed to know the guest.
“Give him a bottle of champagne, Françoise, the expensive one,” she shouted, laughing, and again scornfully to him: “If it is too expensive for you, stay outside, you wretched knicker. I guess you want to stare at me for free, I know you want it all for free. “
The long figure melted as it were under this evil laugh, the hump rose crookedly, it was as if the face wanted to hide like a dog, and his hand trembled when he reached for the bottle and spilled the wine in the pouring. His gaze, which always rolled up to her face, could not get away from the floor and felt for the tiles there in a circle. And only now did I see this emaciated face clearly under the lamp, worn and pale, the hair damp and thin on the bony skull, the joints loose and as if broken, a mournfulness without strength and yet not without malice. Everything in him was crooked, shifted, and crouched, and the look that he now raised once and immediately threw back in shock, crossed by an evil light.
Don’t bother about him, ”the girl snapped at me in French and gripped my arm roughly as if she wanted to pull me around. “It’s an old thing between him and me, it’s not from today.” And again with bare teeth, as if ready to take a bite, loudly over to him: “Just listen, you old lynx. Wanna hear what i’m talking about. I said that I would rather go into the sea than with you. “
The landlady and the other girl laughed again, broadly and stupidly. It seemed like normal fun for her, an everyday joke. But it was creepy to me now to see how this other girl suddenly huddled up to him with false tenderness and flattered him, before which he shuddered without the courage to fend them off, and I was startled when his staggered gaze met me, anxiously embarrassed and cringing. And I dreaded the woman next to me, who had suddenly awakened from her slackness and sparkled so wickedly that her hands trembled. I threw money on the table and wanted to leave, but she didn’t take it.
“If he embarrasses you, then I’ll throw him out, the dog. He has to parry. Take another glass with me. Come over!”
She pushed her way up with a sudden, fanatical kind of tenderness that I knew at once was only pretend to torment the other. With each of these movements she looked over quickly, and it was repulsive to see how, with every gesture she made to me, he began to twitch, as if he could feel fire steel on his limbs. Without paying attention to her, I just stared at him and shuddered to see how something was growing inside him of anger, anger, envy and greed, and yet crouched down straight away, she just turned her head. She now pushed herself very close to me, I felt her body, it was trembling from the wicked pleasure of this game, and I dreaded her bright face, which smelled of bad powder, from the haze of her crumbly flesh.
To ward it off from my face, I reached for a cigar, and while my gaze was still searching the table for a match, she was already barking at him: “Bring a fire!”
I was even more frightened than he was at this mean expectation of helping me, and quickly struggled to find one myself. But as soon as she said it, like a whip, he stumbled over with his crooked steps and quickly put his lighter on the table, as if he could burn himself with a touch of the table. I crossed his gaze for a second: it was infinite shame and gritting bitterness. And that bonded look met the man, the brother, in me. I felt the humiliation by the woman and was ashamed for him.
“Thank you very much,” I said in German – she winced – “You didn’t have to bother.” Then I offered him my hand. A hesitation, a long one, then I felt wet, bony fingers and suddenly, spasmodically, a sudden pressure of thanks. For a second his eyes shone in mine, then they ducked under the droopy eyelids again. Out of spite, I wanted to ask him to take a seat with us, and the welcoming gesture must have slipped into my hand because she hurriedly barked at him: “Sit down again and don’t bother here.”
Suddenly I was seized with disgust at her caustic voice and at this torment. What was this smoky dump, this disgusting whore, this idiot, this smoke of beer and smoke and bad perfume supposed to mean to me? I thirsted for air. I shoved the money over to her, got up, and vigorously moved away when she came closer to me in a flattering manner. It disgusted me to play along with this humiliation of a person, and through the determination of my defense I clearly showed how little it could seduce me sensually. Now her blood was twitching viciously, a wrinkle crept nastily around her mouth, but she was careful not to utter the word and turned with a jerk of undisguised hatred against him, which, however, awaiting the worst, hurriedly and as if chased by her threat reached into his pocket and pulled out a wallet with trembling fingers. He was afraid of being left alone with her now, that was obvious, and in his haste he could not easily untie the knot of the purse – it was a purse, knitted and studded with glass beads, as the peasants wear and the common people. It was easy to notice that he was unaccustomed to spending money quickly, in contrast to the sailors who pull it out of the jingling pockets with one hand and throw it on the table; he must obviously be used to counting carefully and weighing the coins between his fingers. “How he trembles over his dear, sweet pennies! Is it going too slowly? She sneered and took a step closer. He shrank back, and when she saw his shock, she said, shrugging her shoulders and looking with indescribable disgust: “I won’t take anything from you, I’ll spit on your money. Yes, you know, they are numbered, your good pennies, no one is allowed too much into the world. But first ”- and she suddenly tapped him on the chest -“ the little papers that you have sewn so that nobody steals them from you! ”
And really, just as a person with heart disease suddenly seizes his chest in a cramp, so pale and trembling put his hand on a certain part of the skirt, involuntarily his fingers felt there for the secret nest and then fell back calmly. She spat. But then suddenly a glow flew into the face of the tortured man, he tossed the wallet with a jerk to the other girl, who first cried out in fright, then laughed brightly, and stormed past her, out the door as if from a fire.
For a moment she stood erect, brightly sparkling in her angry rage. Then the eyelids fell limply again, languor bent the body out of the tension. She seemed to get old and tired in a minute. Something uncertain and lost dampened the gaze that met me now. She stood there like a drunk who wakes up, numb with a feeling of shame. “Outside he will complain about his money, maybe run to the police, we would have stolen from him. And tomorrow he’s back. But he shouldn’t have me. Everyone, just not him! “
She went to the tap, tossed down coins, and swung down a glass of brandy. The evil light glimmered in her eyes again, but dim as if tears of anger and shame. Disgust seized me in front of her and tore my pity apart: “Good evening,” I said and left. “Bon soir,” answered the landlady. She didn’t look around and just laughed, loudly and scornfully.
The alley, it was only night and sky when I stepped out, a single sultry darkness with the cloudy, infinitely distant shine of the moon. I greedily drank the warm and yet strong air, and the feeling of horror dissolved into the great astonishment at the multitude of fortunes, and I felt again – a feeling that can make me happy up to tears – that always behind every window pane Fate is waiting, every door opens with experience, the manifold of this world is omnipresent and even the dirtiest corner is teeming with already formed experience as the decay from the zealous shine of the beetles. Far away was the disgusting encounter and the tense feeling pleasantly resolved into a sweet tiredness that yearned to transform everything that had been lived into a more beautiful dream. Involuntarily I looked around, searching to find my way home through this tangle of winding alleys. Then – he must have come up inaudibly – a shadow moved up to me.
“Excuse me,” – I immediately recognized the humble voice – “but I think you will not find your way around here. May I … may I show you the way? The Lord lives …? “
I named my hotel.
“I’ll go with you … if you will,” he added at once, humbly.
The horror seized me again. This creeping, ghostly step at my side, almost inaudible and yet hard on me, the darkness of the Sailor Alley and the memory of what I experienced gradually gave way to a dreamlike, confused feeling without evaluation or resistance. I felt the humility of his eyes without seeing them, and noticed the twitching of his lips. I knew that he wanted to talk to me, but did nothing for it and nothing against it physical drowsiness mingled surging. He cleared his throat several times, I noticed the choked approach to the word, but any cruelty that had mysteriously passed over to me from this woman enjoyed this struggle of shame and emotional distress: I did not help him, but left this silence black and heavy between us. And our steps sounded, his own shuffling and old, mine strong and rough with the intention of escaping this filthy world, tangled together. I felt the tension between us growing stronger and stronger: this silence was shrill, full of inner scream and already like an excessively taut string until it finally – and how terribly hesitant at first – it broke in one word.
“You have … you have … sir … seen a strange scene in there … pardon … pardon me if I talk about it again … but it must have been strange to you … . and I am very ridiculous … this woman … it is … “
He stopped again. Something choked his throat thickly. Then his voice became very small, and he whispered hastily: “This woman … it is my wife.” it was my wife … five, four years ago … in Geratzheim over in Hessen, where I am at home … I don’t want you to think badly of her, sir … maybe it’s my fault that she is like that. She wasn’t always like this … I … I tortured her … I took her even though she was very poor, she didn’t even have the canvas, nothing, nothing … and I’m rich … that means, wealthy … not rich … or at least it was me then … and, you know, sir … maybe I was – she’s right – thrifty … but it used to be me, Sir, from the misfortune, and I curse it … but my father was like that and mother, everyone was like that … and I worked hard for every penny … and she was light, she liked beautiful things … and yet was poor, and I kept telling her about it … I shouldn’t have done it, I know now, sir, because she is proud, very proud … You mustn’t believe that she is the way she gives herself … that’s a lie, and she hurts herself … just … just to hurt me, to torment me … and … because … because she is ashamed … Maybe she turned out bad, too he I … I don’t believe it … because, sir, she was very good, very good … “
He wiped his eyes and stopped in his overwhelming excitement. Involuntarily I looked at him, and suddenly he no longer seemed ridiculous to me, and I no longer felt even this strange, servile address, “Sir,” which in Germany only belongs to the lower classes. His face was fully formed by the inner effort to speak, and his gaze stared, as he stumbled heavily forward again, rigidly at the pavement, as if he were reading in the swaying light with difficulty what was tearing itself so tormentingly from the spasm of his throat.
“Yes, sir,” he uttered now, breathing deeply, and in a completely different, dark voice that somehow came from a softer world of himself: “She was very good … also to me, she was very grateful that I had redeemed her from her misery … and I also knew that she was grateful … but … I … wanted to hear it … over and over … over and over … it did me good to hear this thank you … sir, it was so, so infinitely good, to feel, to feel that you are better … if … when you know that you are the worse … I would have given all my money to hear it again and again … and she was very proud and wanted it less and less when she realized that I was asking him for this thank you … Therefore … just because, sir , I always let her ask … I never gave voluntarily … It was good for me that she had to come and beg for every dress, every ribbon … I tormented her like this for three years, more and more … but, sir, it was only because i got you l Dear … I was fond of her pride, and yet I always wanted to enslave him, I madman, and if she wanted something, I was angry … but, sir, it wasn’t me at all … I was blessed every opportunity to humiliate her, because … because I didn’t even know how I loved her … “
Again he paused. He went staggering. Apparently he had forgotten me. Mechanically, as if from sleep, he spoke in an increasingly louder voice.
“That … I only knew that, as I did back then … on that damned day … I had refused her money for her mother, very, very little … that is, I had it ready, but I wanted her to come again … ask me again … yes, what did I say? … yes, I knew it back then, when I came home in the evening and she was gone and only a note on the table … ‘Keep your damned money, I don’t want anything more from you’ … it said , nothing else … Lord, I’ve been mad for three days, three nights. I had the river searched and the forest, I gave hundreds to the police … I ran to all the neighbors, but they just laughed and jeered … Nothing, nothing was to be found … Finally I got a message said about the other village … he saw her … on the train with a soldier … she went to Berlin … on the same day I followed her … I left my earnings … thousands I lost … I was stolen from me, my servants, my stewards, everyone, everyone … but, I swear to you, sir, I didn’t care … I stayed in Berlin, it has a week Took it until I found her in this vortex of people … and went to her … “He was breathing heavily.
“Sir, I swear to you … I didn’t say a harsh word to her … I cried … I was on my knees … I offered her money … all my fortune, she should.” Manage it because I already knew then … I can’t live without her. I love every hair on her … her mouth … her body, everything, everything … and it’s me, I who pushed her down, me alone … She was pale as death when I was came in, suddenly … I had bribed her landlady, a matchmaker, a bad, mean woman … she was like the lime on the wall … She listened to me.
Lord, I think she was … yes, she was almost glad to see me … but when I talked about money … and I just did it, I swear to you to show her that I don’t think about it anymore … then she spat out … and then … because I still didn’t want to go … then she called her lover and they laughed at me … But, sir , I kept coming back, day after day. The house people told me everything, I knew that the rascal had left her and she was in need, and so I went there again … again, sir, but she hit me and tore up a note that I was secretly on the table, and when I came back she was gone … What haven’t I done, sir, to investigate her again! A year, I swear to you, I didn’t live, just always felt, paid agencies, until I finally found out that she was over in Argentina … in … in a bad house … “He hesitated Moment. The last word was like a rattle. And his voice grew darker.
“I was very scared … at first … but then I remembered that it was me, it was only me who had pushed her down there … and I thought how much she must suffer, the poor … because proud is she above all … I went to my lawyer, who wrote to the consul and sent money … without her finding out who was there … only that she would come back. I was telegraphed that everything had gone well … I knew the ship … and I waited in Amsterdam … I arrived three days early, so I was burning with impatience … At last it came, I was blessed, how only the smoke from the steamer was on the horizon, and I didn’t think I could wait until he pulled up and docked, so slowly, slowly, and then the passengers came over the jetty and finally, finally they … I didn’t recognize her right away … she was different … made up … and already like that … the way you saw it … and the way she saw me waiting … she went pale … two Sailors had to hold her, otherwise she would have fallen off the jetty … As soon as she was on land, I went to her side … I said nothing … my throat was closed … She didn’t speak either … and saw don’t bother me … The porter carried the luggage, we went and went … Suddenly she stopped and said … Lord, how she said it … It hurt me so painfully, it sounded so sad … ‘Do you still want me to see your wife, now too?’ … I took her hand … She was trembling, but she said nothing. But I felt that everything was all right now … Lord, how happy I was! I danced around her like a child when I had her in the room, I fell at her feet … I must have said foolish things … because she smiled through tears and caressed me … very hesitantly, of course … but Lord … how it did me good … my heart melted. I ran upstairs, downstairs, ordered a dinner at the hotel … our wedding feast … I helped her to get dressed … and we went down, we ate and drank and were happy … Oh, she was so cheerful, a child, so warm and good, and she spoke of home … and how we wanted to take care of everything again … There … “His voice suddenly became hoarse, and he made a gesture with his hand as if he were wanted to break someone.
“There … there was a waiter … a bad, mean person … who thought I was drunk because I was great and danced and rolled over me laughing … while I was just so happy … Oh, so happy, and there … when I paid, he gave me back twenty francs too little … I drove up to him and asked for the rest … he was embarrassed and put the gold piece down … There. … then she suddenly began to laugh brightly … I stared at her, but it was a different face … sneering, hard and angry all of a sudden … ‘How accurate you still are … at yourself our wedding day! ‘she said, very coldly, so sharply, so … pityingly. I was shocked and cursed my embarrassment … I tried to laugh again … but her cheerfulness was gone … was dead … She asked for a room of her own … what I would not have given her … and I lay alone the night and just pondered what to buy the next morning … give her presents … show her that I am not stingy … never again against her. And in the morning I went out, I bought a bracelet very early, and when I stepped into her room … there was … there it was empty … just like back then. And I knew there would be a piece of paper on the table … I ran away and prayed to God it might not be true … but … but … it was lying there … and it said … . “
He hesitated. Involuntarily I stopped and looked at him. He ducked his head. Then he whispered hoarsely:
“It said … ‘Leave me alone. You are disgusting to me – ‘“
We had reached the harbor and suddenly the rumbling breath of the nearby surf rushed into the silence. The ships lay there with blinking eyes like large black animals, near and far, and singing came from somewhere. Nothing was clear and yet much could be felt, an immense sleep and the difficult dream of a strong city. Beside me I felt the shadow of this person, he twitched ghostly at my feet, soon flowed apart, soon he crawled together in the changing light of the dim lanterns. I could not say anything, no consolation, and had no questions, but felt his silence cling to me, heavy and dull. Suddenly he took my arm, trembling.
“But I’m not going away from here without her … After months I found her again … She tortures me, but I don’t want to get tired … I swear to you, sir, talk to her … I do she must have, tell her … she can’t hear me … I can no longer live like this … I can no longer see men go to her … and wait outside in front of the house until they come down again … laughing and drunk … the whole street already knows me … they laugh when they see me waiting … it makes me crazy … and yet every evening I stand there again … Sir, I swear you … talk to her … I don’t know you, but for God’s mercy … talk to her … “
Involuntarily I wanted to free my arm. I dreaded. But he, as he sensed that I was resisting his misfortune, suddenly fell on his knees in the middle of the street and grabbed my feet.
“I swear to you, sir … you must speak to her … you must … otherwise … something terrible will happen … I have spent all my money looking for her and I am not letting her here … not alive … I bought a knife … I have a knife, sir … I won’t leave her here anymore … not alive … I can’t stand it … speaking You with her, sir … “
He rolled over in front of me like a madman. At that moment two policemen came down the street. I tore it open with force. For a moment he stared at me in amazement. Then he said in a very strange, dry voice:
“Turn into the alley there. Then you’ll be at your hotel. ”Once more he stared at me with eyes in which the pupils seemed to have melted into a horrible white and emptiness. Then he disappeared.
I wrapped myself in my coat. I shivered. I only felt tiredness, a confused drunkenness, numb and black, a walking, purple sleep. I wanted to think something and reflect on it all, but this black wave of fatigue always rose from me and carried me away. I groped into the hotel, fell into bed, and slept like an animal.
The next morning I no longer knew which of it was a dream or an experience, and something in me resisted knowing it. I woke up late, a stranger in a strange city, and went to see a church in which ancient mosaics were said to be of great fame. But my eyes stared at her blankly, the encounter of the previous night rose more and more clearly, and without resistance I was driven away, I looked for the alley and the house. But these strange streets only live at night; during the day they wear gray, cold masks, under which only the familiar will recognize them. I didn’t find her as hard as I looked. I came home tired and disappointed, haunted by images of madness or memory.
My train left at nine in the evening. I left the city with regret. A porter picked up my luggage and carried it to the station in front of me. Suddenly, at a crossroads, I was torn around: I recognized the cross street that led to that house, told the porter to wait and went – while he was first amazed and then laughed impudently – to take another look into this adventure street.
It lay there dark, dark as it was then, and in the dull moon I saw the door glass of that house shine. I wanted to step closer again when a figure rustled out of the darkness. With a shudder, I recognized him crouching on the threshold and beckoning me to come closer. But a horror seized me, I fled quickly from the cowardly fear of getting entangled here and missing my train.
But then, on the corner, before I turned, I looked back one more time. When my gaze met him, he jerked himself, pulled himself up, and jumped against the door. Metal flashed in his hand as he was now ripping it open: from a distance I couldn’t tell whether it was money or the knife that glinted treacherously between his fingers in the moonlight …
