I had understood she was beginning to get a bit drunk. She had gotten up from the chair across from me and sat beside me, putting her arm on my shoulder. My heart was beating rapidly like a coughing bird’s heart. She thought me sad. But I wasn’t. Now, I was too happy to laugh and was taking my happiness seriously.
A waltz began to play. I bent slowly to her ear:
“Come on…” I said. “But I don’t know very well…”
She acted as if she hadn’t heard the second part of my words; jumping up from her place:
“Come on!” she said.
We began turning in the crowd. This wasn’t dancing or anything; it consisted of being dragged here and there subject to the pleasure of bodies pressing us from all four sides. But neither of us complained about this. Maria had fixed her eyes on me. In these black and absent eyes, something I couldn’t understand occasionally flashed and astonished me. From her chest spread a light but wonderfully beautiful skin scent. Above all these things was being close to her, knowing I was something to her:
“Maria,” I whispered. “How is it that one person can make another person so happy?.. What tremendous powers must be hidden inside a person!”
That flash passed through her eyes again. But after looking at me carefully for a while longer, she bit her lip. Her gaze was foggy and meaningless:
“Come on, let’s sit!” she said. “What a crowd! I think I’m beginning to get bored!”
She drank wine again and repeatedly. At one point, getting up from her place:
“I’m coming now!” she said and moved away, swaying.
I waited a long time. Despite all her insistence, I had avoided drinking too much. Rather than drunk, I was dazed. My head ached. Although close to fifteen minutes had passed, she didn’t come back. I began to worry. I went and toured all the restrooms lest she had fallen and remained somewhere. In these places were women trying to pin the torn parts of their dresses with needles or refreshing their toilettes before mirrors. I didn’t encounter Maria in any of them. I looked one by one at the women curled up and dozing on the couches at the edges of the halls. I couldn’t find her. Inside me began an anxiety that suddenly intensified extremely. Bumping into sitting and standing people, I ran from one hall to another. Jumping several stairs at once, I descended to the lower floor and searched. She wasn’t there.
At this time my eye caught outside through the foggy windows of the casino’s revolving door. A white thing seemed to be standing there. I threw myself at the door, and when I went outside, I let out a cry. Maria Puder, bringing both her arms side by side to the level of her head, had leaned against one of the trees right before the door and pressed her face there. On her back was nothing but a thin woolen dress. Snowflakes were falling slowly on her hair and the nape of her neck. Hearing my voice, she turned her head and smiled:
“Where were you!” she said.
“Where were you? What are you doing? Have you gone mad!” I shouted.
Bringing her finger to her lips:
“Hush!..” she said. “I want to get air and cool off. Come on, let’s go!”
I brought her inside almost by force; I found a chair and sat her down. Going upstairs, I paid the bill and brought my coat and her fur coat from the cloakroom. Our feet sinking into the street’s snow, we began walking.
She was holding my arm very tightly and trying to go fast. On the streets were many drunk couples. The main avenues were filled with crowded groups of people. Women dressed so thinly as to give the feeling of having gone out into the street in summer clothes were laughing with cheerful laughter, singing songs, as if they had gone out for spring fun at this weather and two or three hours after midnight.
Maria was pulling me to pass faster through these cheerful and drunk people. She was responding with a superficial smile to those calling out to her on the road, those wanting to embrace her neck, slipping skillfully from their hands and dragging me. I understood how mistaken I had been in supposing she was drunk enough not to stand.
When we came to somewhat more deserted streets, she slowed down. She was breathing frequently and strongly. She drew a deep “oh!”, then turned to me:
“Well? Are you pleased with this evening? Did you have fun? Ah, I had so much fun, so, so much fun…”
She began laughing with laughter. Suddenly she was seized by a cough. She was writhing as if choking; her chest was shaking, but she wasn’t letting go of my arm. When she found a bit of calm:
“What happened to you? See, you caught cold!” I said.
Smiling with her whole face:
“Ah, I had so much fun!..” she said.
I was afraid she would almost cry; this time I was the one wanting to take her home and leave her as soon as possible.
Toward the end of the road, her steps began to wander. Her strength and will seemed to have left her. Yet the cold air had completely sobered me. I was taking her by the waist, occasionally stepping on her feet. While crossing from one sidewalk to the opposite side, we almost rolled onto the snow. Now in a barely audible voice she was murmuring jumbled words. At first I thought she was trying to sing to herself; then understanding she was addressing me, I listened:
“Yes… This is how I am…” she was saying. “Raif… Dear Raif… This is how I am… Didn’t I say?.. That my one day doesn’t fit my other day… But there’s no need to grieve. You’re a very good boy… Certainly you’re a good boy!..”
Suddenly she was beginning to sob, then complaining again:
“No, no, there’s no need to grieve…”
Half an hour later we came before her door. Giving her back to the staircase wall, she waited.
“Where are the keys?” I asked.
“Don’t be angry, Raif… Don’t be angry at me!.. There… they must be in my pocket!”
Putting her hand inside her fur, she extended a bunch consisting of three keys.
I opened the door; when I turned to take her upstairs, she slipped away and began running up the stairs.
“You’ll fall!” I said.
Panting, she answered:
“No… I’ll go up myself!”
Because the keys were with me, I went after her. From one of the upper floors, she called to me from the darkness:
“I’m here… Open this door!”
I opened it by groping. We entered inside together. She turned on the electricity in her room. Old but rather well-preserved furniture and a beautiful oak bed caught the eye at first glance.
I was standing motionless in the middle of the room. While taking off her fur coat and leaving it in a corner, showing me a chair:
“Sit down!” she said.
Then she herself perched on the edge of the bed. With great speed she took off her shoes, her stockings, pulled her dress off over her head and threw it on a chair, and entered under the quilt.
I got up from where I was sitting; without saying anything, I extended my hand to her. She looked me over as if examining a person she was seeing for the first time; a drunken smile spread on her face. I lowered my eyes. When I looked again, I saw she had straightened up a bit in bed and opened her eyes as if in great anxiety and occasionally blinked as if trying to wake from sleep. Her right shoulder and arm shooting out from under the white covers were as pale and white as her face. She had propped her left elbow on the pillow.
“You’ll be cold!” I said.
She pulled my arm quickly and sat me on the edge of her bed. Then she approached, held both my hands at once, placing her face into my palms:
“Ah, Raif,” she said, “so you can be like this too?.. You’re right… But what can I do? If you knew… Ah, if you knew… But we had fun, didn’t we? Certainly… No, no, I know! Don’t pull your hands away… I had never seen you like this. How beautifully serious you can be! But what’s the reason?”
I raised my head. Kneeling in bed, she sat beside me, put her hands on both my cheeks:
“Look at me!” she said. “What you’re thinking isn’t true… I’ll prove this to you… I’ll prove it mainly to myself… Why are you staying like this?.. Don’t you still believe? Do you still doubt?”
She closed her eyes. As if trying to catch something escaping here and there inside her head and unable to be caught at all, she was making effort; her forehead and the space between her eyebrows were wrinkling. Seeing her bare shoulders trembling, I pulled the quilt, wrapped it around her back and held it with my hand so it wouldn’t slip.
She opened her eyes. Smiling confusedly:
“Like this… You’re laughing too, aren’t you?..” she said, then unable to continue her words, she began looking at a corner of the room.
Her hair had fallen on her forehead. The electric light striking from the side was casting the shadow of her lashes on the upper part of her nose. Her lower lip was trembling slightly. Her face at this moment was more beautiful than the one in the painting, than Raphael’s Madonna. With the arm holding the quilt, I pulled her toward me.
I felt her body trembling. Breathing in gasps:
“Of course… Of course!” she said. “Of course I love you. And I love you very much… Is there any possibility it could be otherwise?.. I certainly love you… I definitely love you. But why are you astonished? Did you suppose it would be otherwise? I understand how much you love me… I too doubtlessly love you that much…”
She pulled my head toward herself and drowned my whole face in kisses like fire.
In the morning when I woke, I heard her deep and regular breaths. She had put her arm under her head, turned her back to me, and was sleeping. Her hair was spread in waves on the white pillow.
Her mouth was slightly ajar and at the edge of her lips were very fine hairs. As she breathed, the wings of her nose moved; several strands of hair falling on her mouth were flying up and falling again.
I left my head on the pillow and began waiting, fixing my eyes on the ceiling. Inside me was an impatience. I was curious about how she would look at me when she woke, what she would say to me, but without knowing the reason, I was afraid of her waking. Inside me wasn’t the calm and security I had hoped to find as soon as I opened my eyes.
I couldn’t understand the reason for this at all. Why was my inside still trembling, like an accused waiting for the judgment to be passed on him?
What more could I want from her? What more was I waiting for? Hadn’t all my desires been fulfilled to their final limit?
I felt there was an empty part left inside me and this emptiness was giving me almost a physical oppression. Something was lacking, but what was this?
I was distressed like a person who, after leaving home, notices he’s forgotten something and pauses, but unable to find at all what he’s forgotten, searches his memory and pockets, and finally, when he loses hope, continues on his way with steps unwilling to go forward, his mind behind.
For a while I had noticed Maria’s regular breathing had stopped. I slowly raised my head and looked.
She had fixed her eyes on an indiscernible point and was looking. She hadn’t moved at all, hadn’t even pulled the hair falling on her face. Although she knew I was watching her, she continued looking at that unknown place without turning her head. She wasn’t blinking.
I understood she had been awake for quite some time, and I felt the anxieties inside me suddenly grow, an invisible band almost surrounding and squeezing my chest.
The more I thought that all these meaningless feelings, groundless fears had no necessity at this moment, that there was no reason to darken the brightest day of my life with delusions and evil premonitions, the more my heart sank completely.
Without turning her head, she asked:
“Did you wake up?”
“Yes!.. Has it been long since you woke?”
“A moment ago!”
Her voice gave me courage again. This voice, which had been the sweetest familiar of my ears for a long time and awakened only good memories in me, had brought relief into me like a trustworthy friend suddenly appearing. But this effect lasted only a day.
She had said to me “Did you wake up?” True, in recent days we were sometimes addressing each other randomly as “you” familiar or “you” formal. But on the morning of this night, should she speak to me like this?
Perhaps her sleep still hadn’t cleared.
She turned toward me in bed. She was smiling. But this wasn’t her usual sincere, close smile. It more resembled those she spent on customers at the Atlantik.
“Aren’t you getting up?” she said.
“I’m getting up!.. You?”
“I don’t know… I don’t feel very well. I have a bit of ache… Perhaps also from the drink… My back hurts too…”
“Perhaps you caught cold last evening too!” I said. “What was there to wander the streets stark naked?”
She shrugged her shoulders and turned her back again.
I got up, washed my face and dressed very quickly. I had sensed she was following me from the corner of her eye where she lay.
There was a distressing air in the room. Wanting to make a joke in my own mind:
“A silence has fallen on both of us… What’s happening to us? Have we really begun to be bored with each other like married people?”
She looked at my face with eyes not understanding what I meant.
I was even more embarrassed and fell silent. Then I approached the bed: I wanted to caress her, to break the ice between us before it grew stronger. She too straightened up, dangled her feet down and took a thin cardigan on her back. She continued looking at my face. In her state was something preventing me from approaching more. Finally, in a very calm voice:
“Why are you embarrassed?” she said. Suddenly a pinkness I had never seen before covered her pale face. Her chest continuing to rise and fall heavily:
“What more do you want? Can you want something else?.. But I want… I want many things and can’t obtain any of them… I resorted to every means; no use… You can be content now! But what should I do?”
Her head fell forward. Her arms hung down lifelessly. The tips of her bare feet were touching the carpet. She was raising her big toe up, curling her other toes down.
I pulled a chair and sat across from her. I grabbed her hands. Like a person about to lose his most valuable treasure, the reason for his life, my voice trembling from excitement:
“Maria,” I said. “Maria! My Madonna in a Fur Coat! What suddenly happened? What did I do to you? I had promised I wouldn’t want anything. Didn’t I keep my word? At this moment when we should be closer to each other than ever, what are you saying?”
Shaking her head:
“No, my friend, no!” she said. “We’re farther from each other than ever! Because I have no hope anymore. This was the end… Let me try this once too, I said. Perhaps this was lacking, I thought. But no… That emptiness is still inside me… Even bigger… What shall we do? The fault isn’t yours… I’m not in love with you. Whereas I know very well that in the world I should fall in love with you, that after not falling in love with you too I can love no one, that I must abandon all my hopes… But it’s not in my hands… So this is how I am… There’s no other solution but to accept this as it is… How I wished… How I wished to be otherwise… Raif… My good-hearted friend… Be sure I wanted to be otherwise as much as you, even more than you… What can I do? I feel nothing in my mouth but the bitterness of last night’s drinks, nothing on my back but increasingly growing pains.”
She was silent for a while. She closed her eyes. A sweet softness came to her face. In a voice as sweet as telling a fairy tale from her childhood:
“Last evening, especially after coming here, what hopes I had for a moment… I had thought I would be completely changed by a magical hand, that I would feel in my soul innocent excitements like little girl children but at the same time strong enough to embrace all my life, that this morning I would wake from sleep as if being born to another world. But how different reality is… The weather is overcast as always; my room is cold… Beside me, despite everything foreign to me, despite all closeness separate from me, a different person from me… Tiredness in my muscles and pain in my head…”
Entering her bed again, she lay on her back. Covering her eyes with her hand, she continued:
“So people can only approach each other up to a certain limit, and after that, every step taken to draw closer distances more. How I wished the closeness between you and me had no boundary, no end. What mainly saddens me is this hope’s coming to nothing… After this there’s no need to deceive ourselves… We can no longer speak openly as before… Why, for what did we sacrifice these things? Nothing!.. While trying to possess something nonexistent, we lost what existed… Is everything finished? I don’t think so. I know neither of us is a child. Only it’s necessary to rest for a while and stay away from each other. Until we feel strongly the need to see each other again… Come on now, Raif. When this moment comes, I’ll search for you; perhaps we’ll be friends again and this time we’ll act more wisely. We won’t expect or want from each other more things than we can give… Come on now, go… I want to be alone so much…”
She had removed her hand from her eyes. She was looking at my face almost pleadingly; she extended her arm. I held the tip of her fingers and said: “Goodbye.”
“No, no, it can’t be like this… You’re leaving angry at me… What did I do to you?” she shouted.
Making a tremendous effort to be calm:
“I’m not angry, I’m distressed!” I said.
“Am I not distressed? Don’t you see me?.. Don’t go like this… Come!..”
Pulling my head toward her chest, she caressed my hair. She rubbed her cheek on my face:
“Smile at me once and then go!” she said.
I smiled and, covering my face with my hand, burst outside.
On the street I began walking randomly. The surroundings were deserted; most of the shops were closed. I was going in the southern direction. Tramways, omnibuses with foggy windows were passing beside me.
I walked… Dark-faced houses, paved sidewalks began… I continued on my way… Because I had sweated, I opened the front of my coat. I had come to the end of the city. I walked again… I walked under railroad bridges, over frozen canals… I kept walking. I walked for hours. I wasn’t thinking anything. I was blinking my eyes from the cold and advancing with steps as fast as running. On both my sides were regularly planted pine forests. Occasionally pieces of snow were falling from branches to the ground with a pat.
Bicyclists and a train shaking the places from afar were passing beside me. I walked… On the right side I saw a rather large lake and a crowd skating on it. Turning among the trees, I went that way. Throughout the forest were long, intertwined ski tracks. In groves surrounded by wire fencing, tiny pine saplings were trembling like children with white capes, with the snow loaded on them. In the distance was a two-story, wooden country casino. On the lake, short-skirted girls and young men with tied trouser legs were skating without stopping. They were raising one of their feet into the air, turning in place, holding hands and moving away toward a cape behind. The girls’ colored neck scarves and the men’s blond hair were flying from the wind; their bodies were bending right and left with regular movements; with each step their heights seemed now to extend, now to shorten.
I was paying attention to all these things. Walking with snow up to my ankles, I was paying attention to everything. Going around behind the country casino, I went toward the trees on the opposite side. I remembered having seen these places once before, but I couldn’t find at all when I had come or where this place was. A few hundred meters beyond the casino, in a rather high place, were several old trees. I stopped there. I began watching the crowd on the lake again.
Perhaps I had been walking for four hours. I wasn’t aware of why I had left the road and turned here, why I hadn’t gone back. The burning of my head had decreased; the tingling I felt at the root of my nose had passed. Only inside me was a feeling of tremendous emptiness. A period of my life I had thought most full, most meaningful had suddenly emptied, had lost all its meaning. My insides were sinking like a person waking from a dream in which he saw the realization of his sweetest hopes to bitter reality. I wasn’t really angry at her; I wasn’t angry at all. I was only distressed. “This shouldn’t have been like this,” I was saying. So she couldn’t love me at all.
She was right. No one in my life had ever, ever loved me. Besides, women were very strange creatures. When I wanted to pass judgment by gathering all my memories, I was reaching the conclusion that women could never truly love. Woman doesn’t love when she can love; she only grieves for unsatisfied desires, wants to repair her broken ego, burns for lost opportunities, and these appear to her under the face of love. But I quickly understood I was being unfair to Maria by thinking this way. Despite everything, I couldn’t consider her such a creature. Then I had seen how much she too suffered. There was no possibility she was so upset purely because she pitied me. She too was burning for something she searched for and couldn’t find. But what was this?
What was lacking in me, or rather in the relationship between us?
To see that when we suppose a woman has given us everything, she actually has given us nothing; to be forced to admit that at the moment we thought her closest to us, she was as far from us as beyond all distances—this is a bitter thing.
This shouldn’t have been like this. But, as Maria also said, there was nothing to be done; especially from my side…
What right did she have to do this to me? For years, without clearly seeing its emptiness, I had lived a so-so life; even if I fled from people, I had attributed this to my nature’s strangeness and been swept along, but I also had no idea about a life that would please me. I felt my loneliness and was upset, but I didn’t hope it was possible to escape from this. When Maria, or rather her painting, appeared before me, I was in this state. She had suddenly separated me from my silent and dark world, had taken me to light and truly living. I had only then noticed I had a soul. Now, as causeless and sudden as she came, she was withdrawing and going. But for me there was no longer any possibility of returning to the old sleep. As long as I lived, I would travel various places, meet people whose languages I knew and didn’t know, and everywhere, in everyone, I would search for her, Maria Puder, the Madonna in a Fur Coat. I already knew I wouldn’t find her. But it wouldn’t be in my hands not to search. She was condemning me to search all my life for an unknown, for something nonexistent. She shouldn’t have done this…
The years before me seemed unbearably sad. I couldn’t find a reason to bear this burden. Right at this point in my thoughts, it was as if a curtain lifted from my eyes. I remembered where the place I was in was. This lake was Wannsee. One day when going with Maria Puder to Potsdam to tour the park of Frederick the Second’s “Carefree” palace, she had shown this place from the train window, had said that under these trees where I now was, more than a hundred years before, the unfortunate German poet Kleist and his lover had committed suicide together.
What had brought me here? When walking randomly, when my eye caught these parts, why had I immediately turned? In fact, why had I, as soon as leaving home, headed in this direction and come here as if by agreement? After separating from the creature I trusted most in the world and listening to her saying that two people could only approach each other up to a certain limit, was I giving her a kind of answer by coming to the place where these people who went even to death together departed from life?
Or had I simply wanted to convince myself, to remember that in the world there could also be loves that didn’t stop halfway? I don’t know. In fact, I can’t determine well whether I even thought these things at that time. But the place where I was had suddenly begun to burn under my feet! I was as if seeing them lying side by side, with a pistol bullet each in the woman’s chest and the man’s head. I was imagining stepping on their blood flowing twistingly among the grasses and joining in a pool. Like their fates, their blood too had mixed with each other.
And here, a few steps ahead, they were lying. They were still together… I began running back the way I had come…
From below, from over the lake, laughter was coming. Couples holding each other by the waists were going around without stopping, as if they had set out on an endless journey. From the casino’s door opening every other moment, music sound and foot clatter were striking outside. Those tired from skating were climbing the slope toward the casino; they certainly wanted to heat up by drinking grog and dance a bit.
They were having fun. They were living. And I understood that by withdrawing into my head and only my own soul, I was not above but below them. I was feeling that, contrary to what I had thought until now, separating from the mass meant not a peculiarity, an excess, but a deficiency. These people were living as one must live in the world; they were doing their duties, adding something to life. What was I? What was my soul doing but gnawing at me like a tree worm? These trees, the snow covering their branches and hems, this wooden building, this gramophone, this lake and the ice layer on it, and finally these various kinds of people were busy doing a work life gave them. Every movement of theirs had a meaning, a meaning not visible at first glance. I, however, was swaying like a wheel that had shot off its axle and was rolling idle, and was trying to derive privileges from this state of mine. I was certainly the world’s most unnecessary man. Life wouldn’t lose anything by losing me. No one had any expectation from me and I had any expectation from no one.
From this moment on began the change dominating my life’s direction. From this moment on I believed in my unnecessariness, my uselessness. Occasionally I seemed to return to life again; I thought I was living. In fact, a few days after thinking these things, a completely new situation took me under its influence and occupied me for a while. But in the deepest corner of my soul, this conviction—the conviction that the earth didn’t need me—settled and remained for all time. No action of mine could escape its influence; and today too, although so many long years have passed between, I remember all the details of that moment that broke my courage completely and made me completely distant from my surroundings, especially; I see I wasn’t mistaken in the judgments I passed on myself at that time…
I came running to the asphalt road and began walking toward Berlin. I hadn’t eaten anything since last evening, but in my stomach I felt a kind of nausea rather than hunger. In my legs was not tiredness but a tension spreading toward my body. This time I was going slowly and plunged in thoughts.
As I approached the city, my hopelessness increased. I absolutely couldn’t accept that my coming days would pass separated from her; I found this possibility far from seriousness, ridiculous, impossible…
I could never go begging with my head bowed. Such a thing was both beyond me and would be of no use… I was imagining things resembling the dreams I built in childhood but, compared to them, more mad, more absurd and more bloody: At night, exactly when she was performing her number at the Atlantik, to call her to the telephone, after apologizing for disturbing her, to shoot a bullet in my head at the microphone after briefly saying goodbye—how beautiful that would be! When hearing this terrible sound, at first not understanding what it was, she would pause for a while, then like mad would shout “Raif! Raif!” and try to get an answer from me. While giving my last breath on the ground, I would probably hear these sounds too and die smiling. Because she didn’t know where I was calling from, she would struggle in helplessness, couldn’t inform the police, and the next day while searching through newspapers with trembling hands and reading the details about this tragedy whose mystery couldn’t be solved, her heart would struggle in remorse and despair; she would understand she would never be able to forget me for the rest of her life, that I had bound myself to her memory with blood.
I had approached the city. I passed under and over the same bridges again. It was beginning to be evening. I didn’t know where I was going. I entered a small park and sat down. My eyes were burning. Throwing my head back, I looked at the sky. The snow was freezing my feet. Despite this, I sat for hours. A strange numbness spread through my body. To freeze and remain here, and the next day to be buried quietly in some place… When Maria heard this by chance days later, what would she do? What shape would her face take? How she would regret everything she had done?
My thoughts all circled and wandered around her.
I got up and set out on the road again. I had to walk hours more to come to the middle of the city. On the road I began speaking to myself. I was always addressing her. As in the first days we met, a thousand kinds of beautiful, attractive, convincing ideas were attacking my head. There was no possibility these words wouldn’t affect her, wouldn’t change her mind. With my eyes tearing and my voice trembling, I was explaining to her the closeness between us, the impossibility of our separating for such meaningless reasons in this world where two people finding each other was so difficult… That a person like me, always calm, ready to accept everything, suddenly becoming passionate at first seemed strange to her, then slowly holding my hands she was smiling and saying: “You’re right!”
Yes… I had to see her and tell her all these things. She must change the terrible decision I had accepted so easily in the morning… She would change it. In fact, perhaps she had been astonished at my leaving her house without almost any objection, had been upset. I had to see her immediately, this very evening.
I wandered until eleven o’clock and at night, walking up and down before the Atlantik, I began waiting for her. But she didn’t come. Finally I asked the man in gold embroidery standing at the door: “I don’t know, she didn’t come this evening!” he said. Then I guessed her illness had increased. Running, I went to the front of her house. There was no light in her window. She was certainly sleeping. Thinking it wouldn’t be right to disturb her, I returned to the pension.
For three days in a row I waited for her on the road the same way, then went before her door, looked at her dark windows and returned unable to dare do anything. Every day I sat in my room, trying to read books. I was turning pages without noticing even a single letter; sometimes, resolving to pay attention, starting from the beginning, but after a few lines I was seeing my mind was again wandering in other places. During days I was accepting events as they were, understanding her decisions were final, that I could do nothing but wait for some time to pass. But with night my imagination would begin activity, making me think impossible things like a feverish patient. Finally, contrary to all my daytime decisions, I would burst from home late, wander on the roads where she would pass and around her house. Because I was now embarrassed to ask the gold-embroidered doorman, I was contenting myself with looking from afar. Five days passed this way. Every night I saw her in my dream, closer than before.
On the fifth day, when I understood she again hadn’t gone to work, I called the Atlantik from a casino and asked for Maria Puder. They said she hadn’t been coming for several days because she was sick. So she was really this sick. Was I doubting this? Why had I waited for such confirmation to believe in her illness? She wouldn’t change her work hours to escape from me or give instructions to doormen to turn me away!.. With the decision to wake her even if asleep, I headed toward her house.
The boundary of our relationship was wide enough, despite everything, to give me the right to do this. It couldn’t be right to give so much value to the morning scene of a drunken night.
I climbed the stairs out of breath and immediately brought my hand to the bell so as not to hesitate and give up; I rang briefly and waited. There was no movement inside. After that, several more times, I rang long. The footstep I waited for wasn’t heard. Only the door of the opposite apartment opened ajar; a sleep-dazed maid asked:
“What do you want?”
“The person living here!”
After looking at my face carefully, in a surly manner:
“There’s no one there!” she said. My heart leaped:
“Did they move elsewhere!”
My panic and excitement seemed to have softened the person across from me a bit; shaking her head, she answered:
“No, her mother still hasn’t come from Prague. She herself also got sick; because there was no one to look after her, the health insurance doctor had her taken to the hospital!”
I ran toward the girl saying these things:
“What’s her illness? Is it serious? Which hospital did they take her to? When?..”
The maid, confused before the attack of my questions, withdrew a step and said:
“Don’t shout, you’ll wake the household… They took her two days ago; I think they took her to Charité!”
“Her illness?”
“I don’t know!”
Without even thanking the maid girl looking after me in astonishment, I jumped down the stairs four by four. From the first policeman I encountered, I learned where this hospital they called Charité was. Without knowing for what purpose, I went there. The big stone building hundreds of meters long gave me shivers inside. But I went toward the big door without any hesitation and brought the doorman out of his room.
The doorman, who perhaps showed a bit more courtesy than deserved to the visitor who came after midnight and disturbed him in this terrible cold, had no information he could give me. He had no news of whether such a woman had come, or her illness, or where she had been admitted. To each of my questions, trying to smile although annoyed, he responded by saying: “Come at nine tomorrow, you’ll learn!”
How much I loved Maria Puder and how madly attached I was to her—I understood this completely in this night when I wandered around the high stone walls until morning and always thought of her. I was looking at the windows from many of which dull and yellow light struck outside, trying to guess in which of these she was; I felt an irresistible desire to be beside her, to serve her, to wipe the sweat on her forehead with my hands.
This evening I understood that a person could sometimes be bound to another person with ties much stronger than being bound to life.
Again this evening I understood that after losing her, I could only roll and be dragged in the world like a hollow walnut seed.
The wind was sweeping snow from one wall to another and filling my eyes. There was no one on the streets. Occasionally a white automobile would enter through the hospital’s door, exit again after a bit. A policeman, when passing beside me the second time, looked at me intently, and the third time asked why I was wandering around here. When I said I had a patient inside, he advised me to go rest and come tomorrow; but in his subsequent encounters, he passed beside me with a silence pitying my state.
When the surroundings began to lighten, the streets slowly came alive. After a bit, the white automobiles entering and leaving through the hospital’s multiple doors multiplied. At exactly nine o’clock, although it wasn’t visiting day, I obtained permission from the duty doctor to see the patient. Certainly the wretched expression of my face had caused this exception to be made for me.
Maria Puder was in a single-bed room. The nurse who came with me said I shouldn’t stay inside long, that it wouldn’t be right for the patient to tire. The illness was pneumonia. But the doctor didn’t find it very dangerous. When Maria turned her head and saw me, she immediately smiled. But her face suddenly changed and took on an anxious state.
As soon as the nurse left the room and left us alone:
“What happened to you, Raif?” she asked.
Her voice hadn’t changed at all. Only her face’s paleness had taken on a yellowish state. Approaching beside her:
“What happened to you? Look, see?” I said.
“It’s nothing… It will certainly pass… But you look very worn out!”
“I learned you were sick last night from the Atlantik. I went home; the maid of the opposite apartment said they brought you here. They didn’t let me inside at night; I waited for morning too!”
“Where?”
“Here… Around the hospital!”
She ran her eyes over me. She was very serious. She made a movement as if about to say something, then gave it up.
The nurse opened the door ajar. I said goodbye to the patient. She nodded her head but didn’t smile.
Maria Puder stayed in the hospital twenty-five days. Perhaps they would have kept her longer, but she told the doctors she was bored here, that she would look after herself well at home too. With lengthy advice and bunches of prescriptions, on a snowy day, she left the hospital and came to her house. During these twenty-five days I don’t remember very well now what I did. Probably I did nothing except for the times I went and saw her, stood at her bedside and watched her sweating face, her eyes occasionally sliding to the side, and her chest breathing with great difficulty. In fact, I didn’t even live; because if I had lived, now I would have at least a tiny memory belonging to these days in my mind. Only when beside her would a tremendous fear, the fear of losing her, surround my insides. Her fingers shooting out from the edge of the bed, her feet swelling the end of the cover, had already taken on a dead state. In fact, her face, her lips and her smile too seemed to be waiting for a small opportunity, a moment, to be subject to this terrible change… Then what would I do? Yes, maintaining my calm, I would deal with her final affairs, would choose the place of her grave, would console her mother who would have returned from Prague by this time, and finally would leave her into the pit with a few people. I would leave there with everyone, after a while would come secretly to the head of the grave and remain alone with her. And everything would begin at this moment. From this moment on I would have actually lost her. Then what would I do? Up to here I was thinking everything in all its details, but I could never imagine after this. Yes, after putting her under the earth and after those at the head of her grave dispersed and I remained alone with her, what could I do?.. Since at this moment all affairs belonging to her would be finished, there could be nothing as ridiculous, as causeless as my being on earth… My whole soul was a state of terrible emptiness.
After she began recovering, one day she said to me:
