Severin's Journey Into the Dark

It was the autumn of Severin’s twenty-fourth year. In the afternoons he came home exhausted by tormenting office work, threw himself on the black leather sofa in his room, and slept until nightfall. As soon as the lanterns were lit, he went out onto the street. The sun only shone on his paths through the city during the long and burning days of summer, or on Sundays, when the entire day belonged to him and, during his wanderings, he thought of the short time he had spent as a student.

After two or three semesters Severin had given up his studies and found a job. In the mornings he sat in the miserable office and held his sickly, beardless young face bent over the rows of figures. A nervous and unhealthy discontent crept through his body with the room’s chill, and unrest awoke within him. The relentless monotony made his hands tremble. A disturbing weariness bored into his temples and, with his fingers, he pushed his eyeballs into his head until they started to hurt.

For an entire rainy October week he had not seen Zdenka. Every day her letters begged him to come to her, but he pushed them aside with irritation and did not answer them. Zdenka could not fulfill the wishes that had begun to stir in the half-articulated rhythm of his blood. A tense expectation, a singular and unruly curiosity, always came over him when, numbed by sleep, he stepped onto the street in the evening. With his eyes wide open he looked into the city, where people were moving like phantoms. The noise of the carriages and the rattling of the trams blended with the voices of the people to make a harmonious clamor in which a distinct cry or shout occasionally sounded. He listened with careful attention, as though something important were eluding him. His favorite streets were the ones that lay apart from the great commotion. When he squinted and looked through his half-closed eyelids the houses took on a fantastic appearance. He walked past the walls of the large gardens that enclosed the hospitals and institutes. He was struck by the smell of decaying leaves and damp earth. He knew of a church somewhere nearby. In the early evening it was usually deserted here, although someone would pass by from time to time. Severin stood in the shadows of the balconies and wondered why his heart was pounding.

Was it because of this city, with its dark facades, the silence over its large squares, its decayed passion? He always felt as though invisible hands were brushing against him. He remembered days when he had gone into neighborhoods he had long known and been comfortable in and found them completely unfamiliar. On Sunday mornings he had sometimes passed the hospital for incurables and the Karlshof Kirche as he descended the Sluper Gründe. He was astonished to think that he had lived here since childhood. When the sun shone and glittered on the crumbling steps, it made him think of the winter evenings when the snow floated into the streets and the lamps shimmered in the puddles of slush. It seemed to him that he was marked by a curse. Within him grew an angry longing to free himself of the curse and transform it.

He often believed he had to despair in the face of his own wretchedness. There was a bitterness in him that clung to feeble imprecations, and a lethargy that longed for accursed hours. Zdenka knew nothing about any of this. Unhappily, with his lips pressed together and the collar of his coat upturned, he walked through the city along streets that led indirectly to the Moldau, where she was waiting for him.

For years he had made his way to school along the long bustling street where he was now walking. Here, on his way home, he had smoked his first cigarette and discussed the great battles that were fought against the Czech boys in the old fortifications of Weinberge. He had never distinguished himself as a great hero or leader in these conflicts, but neither had he betrayed his cowardice. For him, offering his brow to the stones hurled by the enemy had a voluptuous and puzzling allure. Here the stories of knights and adventures of sailors that he read at home became a small but genuine reality that brought heat to his face and hands and stifled his breath in mute agitation. Since that time his youth had contained no experience of equal worth. But the blind compulsion that had driven him to the skirmishes in the abandoned fortifications had grown beyond all proportion over the years and began to press at his throat. Sometimes he was overcome by a senseless fear and a horror that his life would amount to nothing. Since he had become an adult and started earning his own bread, bleak and vapid walls had risen around him and blocked his view. All around, everywhere he looked, he saw dull and mundane convention. He went to the office early in the morning and went home at noon; the rest of the day he spent sleeping. He felt like someone standing in a pit with a shovel. He digs and digs, but the fine, pliable sand keeps running back and filling the hole.

As a child he had owned a book that had never completely left his thoughts. It was the first volume of a novel about the Hussite wars. The second volume was missing, but Severin did not bother to look for it. The way the book ended, in the middle of the course of great events, seemed perfect to him. There were gypsies who had a robbers’ den in the crevices of the Devil’s Wall near Hohenfurt, savage warriors who threw dice for their girls in taverns, moonlit nights when people dug in forests for the mandrake root. There was a magic garden where malformed dwarves mocked those who had lost their way, where marvelous grottoes opened and clanging metal lions sank into the depths when someone approached. And the comet shone blood red in the sky and there was war in Bohemia. Severin thought of this book as he went to meet Zdenka.

On Karlsplatz it was silent except for a few pairs of lovers whispering behind the bushes. Severin pushed his foot through the dead leaves on the path. The electric lamps were already burning and hung over the trees like moons. Severin looked for the first stars between the lights. An unpleasant restlessness held him captive and drove him back to the park, although Zdenka was already waiting for him. He took his hat in his hand and the wind dampened his hair. The clock on the tower of the Ministry of Justice struck, and the chimes echoed slowly through the boughs. Severin listened to them with a bitter heart. A soft and feeble desire for a radiant and intense life like the one described in the chapters of the book leapt within his soul. A colossal and violent existence rose before him in fiery light. Beyond the edge of Karlsplatz he felt the city.

Severin stepped out of the dim light of the park and into the next street. Again he listened carefully to the sounds and tried to make out people’s voices. He began to feel an awareness that people are what give life meaning, that they were connected to everything that he fancied to be splendor and meaning and awe. Nights of comets and tremors and the mysteries of the heart. With exquisite fright he thought of the evening when he and a friend had gone to see a performance by a suburban Czech theatre. He had never been very particular about such entertainments. The cloying sentimentality that the audience of lowbrows and philistines had cooed over was the right stimulus for his senses as well. In the gestures of the pathetic comedians and the laughter and tears of the badly made-up women he detected more of the hot and neglected desires of his soul than he did anywhere else. A girl who had moved the crowd with her disappointed love had attracted his attention. In the way she turned her slender body, in the lines of her shoulders and throat, there was much that reminded him of Zdenka. He had gone home in a state of peculiar and unacknowledged confusion. It was the feeling that always plagued him during the pauses in the music in cafés, when he listened into the self-conscious silence, or when, reluctant and tense, he loitered on streetcorners in the evening. The feeling that something was close to him, something so strong and corporeal that it made the air begin to tremble softly, and yet was impossible to grasp.

Ferdinandstrasse shone before him, and the glare from the shopwindows blinded him. It was already late and he began to hurry. He saw Zdenka standing by the National Theatre, and her sweet face greeted him from the crowd, smiling.