Night Games: And Other Stories and Novellas (43 page)

"Oh, it's you," Dr. Adler greeted him, still a little annoyed, but at
the same time surprised. "To what do I owe the honor of your visit at
such an unusual hour?"

"Forgive me for disturbing you," said Fridolin. "You're just in the
middle of work?"

"Unfortunately," answered Adler in the sharp tone that he retained
from his student days. And a little more softly he added, "What else
could one be doing in these sacred halls around midnight? But you're not
disturbing me in the least. What can I do for you?"

And since Fridolin didn't immediately answer him, he added, "That
Addison case you sent down to us today is still lying upstairs, untouched.
Dissection is tomorrow morning at 8:30."

When Fridolin indicated with a gesture that this was not the reason
for his visit, he went on, "Oh yes, of course-the pleural tumor. Wellthe histological examination has unmistakably shown sarcoma. So you
needn't get any grey hairs over that one."

Fridolin shook his head again. "It's not a matter of any-official
matter."

"Well, so much the better," said Adler. "I was beginning to think that a bad conscience was driving you here at a time when others are
sleeping."

"Well, it does actually have something to do with a bad conscience,
or at least with conscience in general," answered Fridolin.

"Oh!"

"Well, to be brief'-he tried for a dry and offhand tone-"I'm trying to get some information about a woman who died tonight of a morphine overdose in the Second Clinic and who is likely to be down here
now, a certain Baroness Dubieski." And he quickly added, "I have a feeling that this so-called Baroness Dubieski is someone I knew casually
years ago. And I'd like to know if I'm right."

"Suicidium?"

Fridolin nodded. "Yes, suicide," he translated, as though he wished
to restore the matter to a personal plane.

Adler jokingly pointed his finger at him. "Unhappily in love with
yours truly?"

Fridolin denied it a little angrily. "The suicide of this Baroness Dubieski doesn't have anything to do with me personally."

"Please, please, I don't mean to be indiscreet. We can see for ourselves at once. As far as I know, no request from the coroner has come
tonight. At any event--

A postmortem examination ordered by the court flashed across
Fridolin's mind. That might easily be the case. Who knows if the suicide
was a voluntary one? He thought again of the two men who had so suddenly disappeared from the hotel after they had found out about the suicide attempt. This affair might well still develop into a criminal case of
great importance. And wouldn't he-Fridolin-perhaps be called as a
witness-indeed, wasn't it in fact his duty to report to the police?

He followed Dr. Adler across the hallway to the door opposite,
which was ajar. The bare, high-ceilinged room was dimly lit by the two
open, lowered flames of a two-armed gas fixture. Only a few of the
twelve or fourteen morgue tables were occupied. A few bodies lay there
naked, and others were covered with linen sheets. Fridolin stepped up to
the first table beside the door and carefully drew back the sheet from the head of the corpse. A piercing beam from Dr. Adler's electric flashlight
suddenly fell upon it. Fridolin saw the yellow, grey-bearded face of a
man and immediately covered it up again with the shroud. On the next
table lay the naked, haggard body of a young man. From another table
Dr. Adler said, "Here's a woman between sixty and seventy; she can't be
the one either."

Fridolin, however, as though irresistibly drawn, had gone to the end
of the room, where a woman's body gleamed faintly in the darkness. The
head was hanging down on one side; long, dark strands of hair fell almost all the way to the floor. Instinctively Fridolin reached out his hand
to put the head in its proper position, but with a dread which, as a doctor,
was otherwise foreign to him, he hesitated. Dr. Adler had come up to him
and, pointing behind him, said, "All those are out of the question-is this
the one?" And he pointed his flashlight at the woman's head which
Fridolin, overcoming his dread, had just seized with both hands and
lifted up a little. A white face with half-closed eyelids stared at him. The
lower jaw hung down limply, the narrow upper lip was drawn up, revealing bluish gums and a row of white teeth. Whether this face had ever,
even as recently as yesterday, been beautiful, Fridolin could not have
said-it was now a face without expression; empty. A dead face. It could
just as easily have belonged to an eighteen-year-old as to a thirty-eightyear-old.

"Is it her?" asked Dr. Adler.

Fridolin bent lower, as though his piercing look could wrest an answer from the rigid features. And he knew immediately that if it were her
face, her eyes, the same eyes that had shone at him yesterday with such
passion and life, he would not, could not-and in the end he didn't really
want to know. And he gently laid the head back on the table and let his
eyes roam over the dead body, led by the wandering beam of the electric
flashlight. Was it her body-that wonderful, voluptuous body for which
only yesterday he had felt such agonizing desire? He saw a yellowed,
wrinkled neck; he saw two small and yet already somewhat limp girl's
breasts between which-as though the work of decomposition was already beginning-the breastbone already stood out with terrible clarity from the pale skin; he saw the rounding of her brown-tinged abdomen;
he saw how the well-formed thighs now opened indifferently from a dark
and now secret and meaningless shadow; saw the kneecaps, slightly
turned outward, the sharp edges of the calves and the slender feet with
the toes turned inward. All of these disappeared one after the other into
the darkness, since the light of the flashlight went back the way it had
come, swiftly, until finally it remained, trembling slightly, on the pale
face. Instinctively, as though compelled by and directed by an invisible
power, Fridolin touched the forehead, the cheeks, the shoulders, and the
arms of the dead woman with both hands, and then entwined his fingers
with those of the corpse as though in love play. Rigid as they were, it
seemed to him that the fingers tried to move, to seize his, yes, it seemed
to him as though from underneath the half-closed eyelids a vague and
distant look was searching for his eyes, and as though pulled by a magic
force, he bent over her.

Suddenly he heard a voice whisper behind him, "What on earth are
you doing?"

Fridolin came to his senses instantly. He freed his fingers from
those of the dead body, clasped the slender wrists, and with great care,
even a certain pedantry, he laid the ice-cold arms alongside the trunk.
And it seemed to him as though she had just now, just now this moment,
died. Then he turned away, directed his footsteps to the door and across
the resounding hallway back into the workroom they had just left. Dr.
Adler followed him silently and locked up behind them.

Fridolin walked over to the wash basin. "With your permission," he
said, and cleaned his hands carefully with Lysol and soap. Meanwhile
Dr. Adler seemed anxious to take up his interrupted work without further
ceremony. He had switched the necessary lights on again, turned the
micrometer screw, and looked into the microscope. As Fridolin walked
over to him to say goodbye, he was already completely absorbed in his
work.

"Do you want to have a look at this preparation?" he asked.

"Why?" asked Fridolin, absentmindedly.

"Well, to quiet your conscience," said Dr. Adler-as though he as sumed that, after all, Fridolin's visit had been only a medical-scientific
one.

"Can you make it out?" he asked as Fridolin looked into the microscope. "It's a fairly new staining technique."

Fridolin nodded without lifting his eye from the glass. "Almost
ideal," he remarked, "a most colorful picture, one could say."

And he inquired about various details of the new technique.

Dr. Adler gave him the desired explanations, and Fridolin told him
that these new methods would probably be useful for the work he was
planning for the next few months. He asked permission to come again
the next day or the day after to get more information.

"Always at your service," said Dr. Adler. He accompanied Fridolin
across the resonating flagstones to the outer door, which had by now
been locked, and unlocked it with his key.

"You're staying?" asked Fridolin.

"But of course," answered Dr. Adler, "these are the best hours for
work-from about midnight until morning. Then at least one is fairly
certain not to be disturbed."

"Well-" said Fridolin, with a slight, almost guilty smile.

Dr. Adler placed his hands on Fridolin's arm reassuringly, and then
asked with some reserve, "Well-was she the one?"

Fridolin hesitated a moment, then nodded wordlessly and was
hardly aware that his affirmation might in fact be a falsehood. Because
whether the woman who was now lying in the morgue was the same one
he had held naked in his arms twenty-four hours ago while Nightingale
played his wild piano, or whether the dead woman was someone else, a
stranger he had never met before, he knew: even if the woman whom he
had sought, desired, perhaps loved for an hour, was still alive and no
matter how she now lived her life-he knew that what was lying behind
him in that arched room, illuminated by the light of flickering gas flames,
was a shadow among shadows, dark, without meaning or mystery like all
shadows-and meant nothing to him, could mean nothing to him except
the pale corpse of the past night, doomed to irrevocable decay.

VII

Fridolin hurried home through the dark and empty streets, and a few
minutes later, after undressing in his consultation room as he had done
twenty-four hours earlier, entered his bedroom as silently as possible.

He heard Albertine's calm and even breathing and saw the outline
of her head pressing into the soft pillow. Unexpectedly, a feeling of tenderness, even of protectiveness, filled his heart. And he decided to tell
her the story of the past night soon, perhaps even tomorrow, but to tell it
as though everything he experienced had been a dream-and then, only
after she had first felt and understood the utter futility of his adventures,
he would confess to her that they had been real. Real? he asked himself-and at that moment he noticed, near Albertine's face, on the nextthat is, on his-pillow something dark and defined, like the shadowy
features of a human face. For a moment his heart stopped beating, but an
instant later he knew what it was, reached down to the pillow, and picked
up the mask he had worn the night before. It must have slipped down
without his noticing it when he was making his bundle this morning and
found either by the maid or by Albertine herself. He couldn't doubt that
Albertine, after finding this, suspected something, and presumably many
more and much worse things than had actually happened. But the manner
in which she intimated this to him-placing the dark mask next to herself
on the pillow, as though it were his face, the face of the husband that now
had become an enigma to her-this playful, almost joking manner, in
which both a gentle warning and a readiness to forgive seemed to be expressed, gave Fridolin the hope that she, probably remembering her own
dream, was inclined to take whatever might have happened not all too seriously. But Fridolin, suddenly at the end of his rope, let the mask drop to
the floor, and, letting a loud and painful sob escape him-quite unexpectedly-sank down beside the bed and cried softly into the pillows.

After a few seconds he felt a soft hand stroking his hair. He lifted
his head and from the depths of his heart it escaped from him: "I'll tell
you everything."

She raised her hand as if to stop him; he took it and held it in his, and looked at her both questioningly and beseechingly; she nodded in
agreement, and he began.

A grey dawn was already creeping through the curtains when
Fridolin finally finished. Albertine hadn't once interrupted him with a curious or impatient question. She probably felt that he neither would nor
could keep anything from her. She lay there calmly, her arms folded
under her head, and remained silent long after Fridolin had finished. Finally-he was lying stretched out beside her-he leaned over her, and
looking into her immobile face with the large, bright eyes, in which
morning also seemed to be dawning, he asked in a voice of both doubt
and hope, "So what should we do now, Albertine?"

She smiled, and with a slight hesitation, she answered, "I think that
we should be grateful that we have come away from all our adventures
unharmed-from the real ones as well as from the dreams."

"Are you sure we have?" he asked.

"Just as sure as I suspect that the reality of one night, even the reality of a whole lifetime, isn't the whole truth."

"And no dream," he said with a soft sigh, "is entirely a dream."

She took his head with both her hands and pressed it warmly to her
breast. "But now I suppose we are both awake," she said, "for a long
time to come."

Forever, he wanted to add, but before he could say the word she put
a finger on his lips and whispered almost as if to herself, "Don't tempt
the future."

So they both lay silently, dozing a little dreamlessly, and close to
each other-until there was a knock on the door, as there was every
morning at seven; and the new day began with familiar noises from the
street, a victorious ray of light through the opening in the curtain, and
bright childish laughter from the next room.