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. Ready at last, 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 once more into the mirror 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 felt deeply calm and determined. After all, it was for Bianka’s sake, 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, incapable of raising himself above the commonplace. I had grown tired of that face, growing pale and numb with consternation, with which he greeted my every new revelation.
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 cool region of the great year. The black branches of the trees were branching into an unconnected and separate time; the black twigs of their still leafless tops forked into the white sky of some other, alien zone, drifting above me, shut in between avenues on either side, cut off and forgotten like a gulf with no egress. Bird calls, lost and muted in the faraway expanses of that immense sky, cut the cloth of the silence in a different way — spread it pensively on their workbench, heavy, grey and mirrored upside down in silent ponds — and the world lay reflected and without memory, and gravitated blindly, full of impetus, toward that great universal grey thought, those pulled out corkscrews of endlessly fleeing trees, that windblown paleness with no limit or scale.
Holding my head high, very calm and composed, I demanded to be announced, and I was conveyed to a semi-lit hall. Duskiness prevailed there, resounding with the silence of 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 the room of someone’s death bed. By those quiet influxes — the lightly swelling atmosphere of the garden invisibly penetrating the gently breathing filter of the curtains — the objects in the room were revivified, awoken by its sighs, and glittering agitation ran in anxious rivulets through rows of Venetian glasses in deep display cases; wallpaper leaves rustled, startled and silvery.
Then the wallpaper faded, crept into shadow and its own anxious thoughts; it was set free at last after years crammed in among those thickets full of dark speculation, its imagination running wild in a blind delirium of aromas, like old herbiaries through whose dry pairies ‘V’ formations of humming-birds flew, and herds of buffalo, the fires of the steppes, and hunts 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 — those same situations are laid out in endless variations, turned out in every direction by the wallpaper’s infertile dialectic. How that silence decomposes, thoroughly debauched and demoralised, in thoudsandfold contemplations, in lonely deliberations, madly circuiting the wallpaper in lightless lightning flashes. Why the secrecy? Can they not be assuaged here, night after night, these inordinate perturbations, these accumulated paroxysms of fear — released 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. He was descending the stairs, preceeded by a valet — short and compact, economical in his movements and blinded by the glare in his great horn-rimmed spectacles. I stood before him face to face for the first time. He was inscrutable, but after my first few words I noticed, not without satisfaction, that two furrows of worry and bitterness deepened his wrinkles. Although he hid his face with a mask of magnificent seclusion, I perceived behind the blinding glare of his spectacles, among the folds of that mask, pale panic shooting stealthily past. His interest steadily grew, and it became apparent from his increasingly attentive expression that he had only just now begun to hold me in regard. He invited me into his studio, lying adjacent. Upon our entrance a female figure in a white dress sprang away from the door, startled, as if she had been evesdropping, and withdrew into the depths of the apartment. Was it Bianka’s governess? It seemed to me, stepping over the threshold of that room, that I was entering a jungle. The muddy-green half-light of that room was striped aqueously with shadows cast by the drawn, slatted Venetian blinds at the windows. The walls were hung with botanical engravings; tiny coloured birds flitted about in vast cages. Apparently playing for time, he explained to me the specimens of ancient weaponry, javelins, boomerangs and tomahawks, which 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 considerable care — to make no sudden movements, and I backed up my warning with my suddenly drawn pistol. Somewhat disconcerted, he smiled unpleasantly and returned the weapon to its place. We sat down at the huge ebony desk. I declined the cigar he offered me, explaining that I did not smoke. Such abstemiousness, however, met with his approval. With his cigar dangling in the corner of his mouth, he looked at me with menacing kindliness, which inspired no confidence. Then suddenly, with an air of absent-mindedness, nonchalantly leafing through a cheque book, he proposed to me a compromise, mentioning a sum with many zeroes, while his pupils darted to the corners of his eyes. My ironic smile persuaded him to hastily abandon the topic. With a sigh, 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 by our every word. I regarded him without a tremor, my ironic smile never leaving my lips. At length he leaned helplessly on the handrests of his chair. ‘You are intractable,’ he said, as if to himself. ‘What do you really want?’ I began once more to speak. I spoke in a subdued voice, with curbed fire. A flush rose to my cheeks. Trembling, I spoke Maximillian’s name repeatedly; I referred to him with emphasis, each time observing that my adversary’s face grew a shade paler. At last, breathing heavily, I was finished. He sat crushed. He could no longer control his expression; he suddenly looked 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, and facts again...’
His hand trembling, he made to reach for a bell. I stopped him with a movement of my hand and backed out of the room, my finger on the trigger of my pistol. A servant handed me my hat at the exit. I found myself on a terrace flooded with sunshine, my eyes still full of whirling duskiness and vibrations. I descended a stairway, not turning around, filled with triumph, confident that no barrel of an assasin’s double-barrelled shotgun was poking out through the closed shutters of the palace behind me.
> -XXXIX- >