Spring: -I- -II- -III-
The Stamp Album: -IV- -V- -VI- -VII- -VIII- -IX- -X- -XI- -XII-
In the Municipal Park: -XIII- -XIV- -XV- -XVI-
Springtime Twilight: -XVII-
The Villa: -XVIII- -XIX- -XX- -XXI- -XXII- -XXIII- -XXIV- -XXV- -XXVI- -XXVII-
Bianka’s Lineage: -XXVIII- -XXIX- -XXX- -XXXI- -XXXII- -XXXIII-
Hiatus: -XXXIV- -XXXV- -XXXVI- -XXXVII-
Finale: (XXXVIII) -XXXIX- -XL-
XXXVIII
I DRESSED slowly and carefully that day. Finally ready, standing before the mirror, I composed my features into an expression of calm and staunch resoluteness. I carefully loaded my pistol before putting it in the back pocket of my trousers. I glanced into the mirror one last time, and ran my hand over the breast of my overcoat, where my documents were secreted. I was ready to meet him face to face.
I was deeply calm and determined. It was for Bianka’s sake, after all, and what would I not do for her! In no way, I had decided, would I confide in Rudolf. The better I had got to know him, the more strongly convinced I had become of his mediocrity, his incapability of raising himself above the commonplace. I had grown tired of the way he greeted my every new revelation with a face that went pale and numb with consternation.
I covered the short distance quickly, in deep reflection. As the great iron gate slammed shut behind me, juddering with deadened vibration, I stepped at once into another climate, into other draughts of air, in an unfamiliar and cooler region of that great year. The black branches of trees branched into a separate and unconnected time; the black twigs of their still leafless tops forked into the white sky, drifting above me, of some other, alien zone, shut in by avenues on either side, cut off and forgotten like a cove with no exit. Bird calls, lost and muted in the faraway expanses of that immense sky, cut the cloth of that silence in a different way — they pensively spread it on their workbenches, heavy and grey, and mirrored upside down in silent ponds. And the world flew into that unremembering reflection; it gravitated blindly, full of impetus, toward that great, universal grey thought, into those pulled out corkscrews of endlessly receding trees, into that great windblown paleness without limit or scale.
Holding my head high, very calm and composed, I demanded to be announced. I was conveyed into a semi-lit hall where duskiness prevailed, resounding with the silence of its sumptuousness. From a high open window, gentle waves of air blew in from the garden, as if through the holes of a flute — balmy, and restrained, as if into someone’s death-bed room. All the objects in the room were revivified with a sigh, awoken by the lightly swelling atmosphere of the garden, those quiet influxes invisibly penetrating the gently waving filters of the curtains. Anxious rivulets of glittering agitation coursed through rows of Venetian glasses deep inside their display cases. Wallpaper leaves rustled, startled and silvery.
Then the wallpaper faded, crept into shadow and its own anxious thoughts. After years crammed in amid that dense thicket, full of dark speculation, at last it was set free, its imagination running wild in a blind delirium of aromas, like old herbiaries, ‘V’ formations of humming-birds flying through their dry pairies, herds of buffalo, the fires of the steppes, and galloping chases with scalps streaming from saddles.
It is strange how these old interiors can find no peace in the light of their tempestuous dark past, how they go on silently attempting to stage anew their doomed and lost history. The same situations, turned out in every direction by the wallpaper’s infertile dialectic, are laid out in endless variations. How that silence decomposes, thoroughly debauched and demoralised, in thoudsandfold contemplations, lonely deliberations madly circuiting the wallpaper in lightless lightning flashes. Why the secrecy? Can they not be assuaged here, night after night, these unwarranted perturbations, these accumulated paroxysms of fear — relieved by injections of secret drugs, which would transport them into immense, soothing and gentle landscapes, full, in the midst of the parting wallpaper, of distant waters and mirrorings?
I heard a rustle. With a valet going before him, he was descending the stairs — short and compact, economical in his movements, and blinded by the glare in his great, horn-rimmed spectacles. I stood before him for the first time, face to face. He was inscrutable. But when I had spoken my first few words, I noticed, not without satisfaction, that two furrows of worry and bitterness deepened his wrinkles. Behind the blinding glare of his spectacles, although his face was hidden behind his mask of magnificent inaccessibility, I perceived pale panic shooting stealthily past, amid the folds of that mask. His interest in me grew by degrees, and it was apparent from his increasingly attentive expression that only just now had he begun to hold me in regard. He invited me into his studio, situated adjacent. As we entered, a female figure in a white dress sprang away from the door — startled, as if she had been eavesdropping — and withdrew into the depths of the apartment. Bianka’s governess? Stepping over the threshold of that room, I seemed to enter a jungle. Slatted Venetian blinds, drawn down at the windows, striped the dull green half light of that room with aqueous shadows. The walls were hung with botanical engravings; tiny, coloured birds flitted about in great cages. Seemingly playing for time, he showed me his collection of ancient weaponry, javelins, boomerangs and tomahawks that hung on the walls. My sharpened sense of smell detected the scent of curare. As he fingered a certain barbarian halberd, I advised him to take care, and to make no sudden movements, backing up my warning with my suddenly drawn pistol. Somewhat disconcerted, he smiled unpleasantly and returned the weapon to its place. We sat at his huge ebony desk. I declined the cigar he offered me, explaining that I did not smoke, and my abstemiousness, in fact, met with his approval. With his cigar dangling from the corner of his mouth, he looked at me with menacing kindliness, which inspired no confidence. Then, with an air of absent-mindedness, nonchalantly leafing through a cheque book, he suddenly proposed a compromise, mentioning a sum many zeroes long, his pupils darting into the corners of his eyes. My ironic smile persuaded him to abandon the topic at once. Sighing, he opened his ledgers. He began to explain his business matters to me. Not once was Bianka’s name mentioned between us, but she was implied in every word we spoke. I regarded him calmly, without a tremor, my ironic smile never leaving my lips. At length he leaned helplessly on the handrests of his chair. ‘You are inflexible,’ he said, as if to himself. ‘What is it that you really want?’ I began to speak again. I spoke in a subdued voice, with curbed fire. A flush rose to my cheeks. Trembling, I spoke Maximillian’s name repeatedly, referring to him with emphasis, observing that my adversary’s face turned a shade paler each time. At last, breathing heavily, I was finished. He sat crushed. He could no longer control his expression. He looked suddenly old and tired. ‘Your decision will show me,’ I concluded, ‘whether you have come to understand the new state of affairs, and whether you are prepared to support it by your actions. I demand facts. Facts, facts, and facts again...’
His hand trembling, he made to reach for a bell. I stopped him with a gesture, and backed out of the room, my finger on the trigger of my pistol. At the exit, a servant handed me my hat. I found myself on a terrace flooded with sunlight, my eyes still filled with whirling duskiness and vibrations. I descended the stairway, not turning around, filled with triumph, and confident that behind me, through the closed shutters of the palace, there was no assassin’s double-barrelled shotgun poking out.
> -XXXIX- >