Read The Master of the Day of Judgment Online
Authors: Leo Perutz
The Master of the Day of Judgment
MASTER OF THE
DAY
OF JUDGMENT
Leo Perutz
Translated from the German by Eric Mosbacher
Copyright © 1975 by Paul Zsolnay Verlag GmbH Translation copyright © 1994 by HarperCollins Publishers and Arcade Publishing, Inc.
Foreword instead of a Postscript
Foreword instead of a Postscript
I have finished the job, I have told the whole story, described in detail the whole sequence of tragic events with which I was so strangely associated in the autumn of 1909. I have told the whole truth, omitted nothing, suppressed nothing — why should I? I have nothing to hide.
I found while writing that my memory had distinctly and vividly preserved a mass of detail — much of it quite trivial — scraps of conversation, ideas that passed through my mind, minor events of the day. In spite of this an entirely false idea developed in my mind about the length of time involved. I still have the impression that it was several weeks. But that is wrong. I still know the exact date on which Dr Gorski took me to the Bischoff villa to play in a quartet. It was 26 September 1909, a Sunday. In my mind's eye I can still see everything that happened on that day. In the post that morning there had been a letter from Norway, and I tried to make out the postmark, thinking of the girl student who had sat next to me at dinner during the trip across the Stavanger fjord. She had promised to write, but when I opened the envelope it only contained the prospectus of a winter-sports hotel on the Hardanger glacier. A disappointment.
Later I went to the fencing club. On the way, in the Florianigasse I was caught in a sudden heavy shower. I sheltered in a doorway, and discovered a stone baroque fountain in an old garden that had run wild. An old lady spoke to me and asked whether a charwoman named Kreutzer didn't live there. I still remember all that as if it were yesterday. Then the rain stopped and the fine weather returned. I remember 26 September 1909 as a day with warm wind and a cloudless sky.
I lunched in a garden restaurant with two officers of my regiment. I didn't read the morning papers till the afternoon. They contained articles on the Balkan question and the policy of the Young Turks — it's extraordinary how distinctly I remember all that. There was a leader on the King of England's tour, and another on the plans of the Sultan of Turkey. The first few lines were preceded by "Abdul Hamid's Waiting Game" in bold type. The "news of the day" sections gave details of the careers of Shefket Pasha and Niazi Bey — who remembers those names today? Overnight there had been a big fire at the Northwest station. "Huge stocks of timber destroyed", the headlines proclaimed. An academic society announced a performance of Büchner's
Danton,
the
Götterdämmerung
was on at the Opera, with a guest singer from Breslau as Hägen. Pictures by Jan Toorop and Lovis Corinth were being exhibited at the Kunstschau, and the whole town flocked there to gaze at them in amazement. Somewhere or other, in St Petersburg, I think, workers were rioting and striking, a church had been broken into at Salzburg, and there had been rowdy scenes in the Consulta in Rome. There was also a brief item in small type about the failure of the Bergstein bank. To me this came as no surprise, I had seen it coming and I withdrew my money in good time. But I couldn't help thinking about an acquaintance of mine, the actor Eugen Bischoff, who had also entrusted his funds to that bank. I should have warned him, I said to myself. But would he have believed me? He always regarded me as a retailer of false information. Why meddle in other people's affairs? I also remembered a conversation I had had a few days before with the director of the court theatre, in which Eugen Bischoff's name had cropped up. "He's getting old, unfortunately, I can't help him," the director had said, and had added some remarks about the pressure of the rising generation. If my impression was correct, there was little hope of Eugen Bischoff's contract being renewed, and now on top of that there was the disaster of the collapse of Bergstein and Co.
The twenty-sixth of September 1909 stands out so clearly in my mind that I still remember every detail distinctly. It all makes it the more inexplicable that I should have shifted to the middle of October the date on which the three of us went to the house in the Dominikanerbastei. Perhaps it was the memory of withered chestnut leaves on the garden paths, the ripe grapes being offered for sale at the street corners and the first autumn frosts, the whole complex of unconscious memories that are somehow associated with that day, that led me astray. That may well have been the case. In fact 30 September was the vital day. I established that with the aid of notes from the time that are still in my possession.
Thus the whole sinister and tragic business lasted five days only, from 26 to 30 September. The dramatic hunt for the culprit, the pursuit of an invisible enemy who was not of flesh and blood but a fearsome ghost from past centuries lasted for just five days. We found a trail of blood and followed it. A gateway to the past quietly opened. None of us suspected where it led, and it seems to me today that we groped painfully step by step down a long dark passage at the end of which a monster was waiting for us with upraised cudgel. The cudgel came down twice, three times, the last blow was meant for me, and I should have been done for and shared Eugen Bischoff's and Solgrub's dreadful fate had I not been snatched back to life in the nick of time.
How many victims may this bloodthirsty monster have found on his way through the thorn bushes of the centuries, in the course of his wanderings through different ages and different countries? I now look at many past destinies with different eyes. On the inside cover of the book I found a half- vanished signature among the names of previous owners. Have I deciphered it correctly? Could Heinrich von Kleist ... ? No, there's no point in searching and guessing and invoking the names of the great and famous dead. They are shrouded in mist. The past remains silent, and no answer will ever come out of the darkness.
And it's not over yet, no, it's still there, visions still rise from the depths and force themselves upon me, at night and in broad daylight — though now, thank heaven, they are only pale and shadowy, insubstantial phantoms. The nerve in my brain has gone to sleep, but the sleep is still not deep enough. Sometimes sheer terror seizes me and sends me to the window, feeling that the dreadful waves of that terrible light must be rushing across the sky, and I cannot grasp the fact that overhead there's the sun, concealed in silvery mist or surrounded by purple clouds or alone in the endless blue and round me wherever I look are the old, familiar colours, those of the terrestrial world. Since that day I have never again seen that fearful trumpet red. But the shadows are there and keep coming back, they surround me, make as if to clutch me — will they never disappear from my life?
Perhaps. Perhaps the persecution is over. Perhaps I have got rid of the nightmare once and for all by writing it down. I have put my story, a pile of loose sheets of paper, behind me and said goodbye to it. What have I got to do with it now? I put it aside, as if someone else had been through all that or invented it, as if it had been written by someone else, not me.
There was also something else that prompted me to commit to paper everything that I wanted to forget and cannot.
Shortly before his death Solgrub destroyed a sheet of parchment that was covered with writing. He destroyed it to prevent anyone else from falling victim to that fearful error. But is it certain that that sheet of parchment was the only one of its kind? Is it not possible that in some forgotten corner of the world another copy of the Florentine organist's story may exist — yellowed with age, crumbling into dust, nibbled by rats, buried under piles of rubbish in a junk shop or hidden behind the tomes in an old library, or among the carpets, khanjars, and Koran covers on the floor of a bazaar in Erzingian, Diarbekir or Jaipur — may it be lying in wait there, ready for resurrection and lusting after new prey?
We are all creatures who have disappointed the Creator's grand design. Without suspecting it we have a terrible enemy inside us. He lies there motionless, asleep, as if he were dead. Woe if he comes back to life. May no human being ever again set eyes on the trumpet red which I, God help me, have seen.
That is why I wrote my story. The pile of sheets of paper covered with writing that lies before me now does not have a proper beginning, I am very conscious of that.
How did it begin? I was sitting at my desk at home with my pipe between my teeth, smoking shag and leafing through a book, when Dr Gorski dropped in.
Dr Eduard Ritter von Gorski. During his lifetime he was hardly known outside the circle of his close colleagues, and only after his death did he become world famous. He died in Bosnia of an infectious disease on which he was a specialist.
I can still see him standing in front of me, slightly hunchbacked, badly shaved, carelessly dressed, his knitted tie all askew, holding his nose between his thumb and forefinger.
He began by scolding me. "That damned pipe of yours again," he exclaimed. "Can't you live without it? That abominable stink. You can smell it all the way down to the street."
"It's the smell of foreign railway stations, and I like it," I replied, and rose to greet him.
"The devil take it," he grumbled. "Where's your fiddle? You're coming to play at Eugen Bischoff's. I've been sent to fetch you."
I looked at him in surprise.
"Haven't you read the newspaper today?" I asked.
"So you know too?" he said. "Everyone seems to know except Eugen Bischoff himself. He hasn't an inkling. It's a bad business. I think everyone wants to keep it from him. Just when he's having difficulties with his director, and they don't want him to know anything until that's been settled. You really should have seen Dina today. She stands over him like a guardian angel. Come along, baron. She'll be glad of any kind of distraction today."
I had a burning desire to see Dina. But I was very careful. I acted as if I couldn't make up my mind, I must think it over.
"Just a little chamber music," Dr Gorski said to encourage me. "I have my cello downstairs in the cab. Perhaps a Brahms piano trio, if you'd like it."
To win me over he quietly whistled the first few bars of the scherzo in B major.
ONE
The room in which we played was on the raised ground floor of the villa, and the windows opened on to the garden. When I looked up from my music I could see the green doors of the pavilion in which Eugen Bischoff used to shut himself whenever he was sent a new part. That was where he studied and memorised it. Often he would be invisible for many hours, and late in the evening his silhouette would appear behind the lit windows, making strange gestures and movements that his role required of him.
The gravelled garden paths lay in dazzling sunshine. The deaf old villa gardener was crouching on the lawn between the beds of fuchsias and dahlias, cutting the grass with a never-changing movement of his right arm that made my eyes tired. Children were noisily playing with sailing-boats and flying kites in the next-door garden, and an old lady was sitting on a bench in the afternoon sun and feeding the sparrows with breadcrumbs from a bag. In the distance people taking a Sunday outing were pushing prams and carrying sunshades, strolling along a path through a meadow leading towards the woods.
We began at about four o'clock, and we had already played two Beethoven piano and violin sonatas and a Schubert trio. After tea it was at last time for the B major trio, which I love, particularly the first movement with its solemn rejoicing, and that was why I was annoyed when there was a knock at the door just after we had begun. Eugen Bischoff called out in that sonorous voice of his "Come in", and a young man came in. His face immediately struck me as familiar, though I couldn't remember where and in what circumstances I had seen it before. He shut the door by no means quietly, in spite of his obvious efforts not to disturb us. He was tall, very fair, broad-shouldered, and had an almost square head. I disliked him at first sight, and somehow he reminded me of a whale.
Dina looked up fleetingly from the piano when this belated guest came in. To my great pleasure she merely nodded casually to him and went on playing, while her husband rose noiselessly from the sofa to greet him. Over my music I saw the two whispering, and then the whale inquired, with an almost imperceptible interrogative movement of his head in my direction, who I was and what I was doing there. I concluded that he must feel very much at home here if he could permit himself such informality.
Eugen Bischoff introduced me to him as soon as we had finished.
"Engineer Waldemar Solgrub, a colleague of my brother-in-law — Baron von Yosch, who has been kind enough to stand in for Felix."
Felix, Dina's younger brother, heard himself being mentioned and waved his left hand, which was covered in a white bandage. He had burnt himself in his laboratory, and this prevented him from playing the violin. To make himself useful in spite of this he was turning the pages of the score.
Next came the turn of that friendly, smiling gnome Dr Gorski, but the engineer wasted practically no time at all shaking hands with him behind his cello, and a moment later he was talking to Dina Bischoff; and while he bent over her hand — which he held much longer than was necessary, which was actually painful to watch — while he stood there bending over her hand and talking to her urgently, I noticed that he was not quite so young as he had seemed at first. His closely cut fair hair was greying slightly at the temples and, though he behaved like a young man of twenty, he was probably getting on for forty.