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-
XXXIX
IMPORTANT MATTERS, supremely important affairs of state, often now oblige me to undertake confidential conferences with Bianka. I prepare for them scrupulously, sitting late into the night at my desk over those dynastic affairs of the most sensitive nature. Time passes. The night quietly pauses in the open window beyond the table lamp. Ever more ceremonial and late, it consumes ever later and darker layers, reaches beyond ever deeper degrees of initiation, and is discharged, forceless in the window, in unutterable sighs. In long, leisurely gulps, the darkening room drinks whole sections of the park into its depths. In cool transfusions it relinquishes its contents in exchange for those of the great night, which now sets in, suffused with darkness, and for a propagation of feathery seeds, dark flecks, and plush, noiselesss moths, which fly in quiet panics about the walls. Wallpaper thickets bristle with fright in the darkness, flaring up and silvery, sieving through their sprinkling leafage those erratic and lethargic shudders, those cool ecstasies and ascents, the transcendental fears and naïveties that a May night is replete with beyond its margins, long after midnight. Its transparent glass fauna crowds me as I lean over my papers, its airy plankton of mosquitoes overgrowing all of space, higher and higher with that delicate, foaming white embroidery that the night, long after midnight, is stitched with. Grasshoppers and mosquitoes, made more or less from a limpid tissue of nocturnal speculations, settle on the papers — glass farfarels, thin monograms, ingenious arabesques concocted by the night, ever larger and more fantastic, like bats, vampires, created from the calligraphy and the very air. The curtain swarms throughout with that wandering tracery, that quiet invasion of imaginary white fauna.
On such a marginal night, knowing no bounds, space loses its meaning. In the midst of that bright, whirling dance of mosquitoes, with my bundle of papers finally in order, I take a few steps in an indeterminate direction, into the blind alley of the night, at the far end of which is a door — Bianka’s white door. I push the handle and enter, as if from one room to the next. Even so, my black Carbonaro hat is flapping, as if from the winds of some remote movement. My fantastically knotted cravat rustles in the draught as I cross the threshold. I clasp my binder, full of supremely secret documents, to my chest. I have stepped as if from night’s anteroom into true night! This nocturnal ozone is so easy to breathe! Here is the lair. Here is the core of the night, suffused with jasmine. Only here does its real story begin. A great lamp with a pink lampshade burns at the head of the bed, and in its pink half-light Bianka lies amid enormous pillows, borne by her bedclothes, which swell like a nocturnal tide under the wide open, transpiring window. Bianka is reading, leaning on her pale forearm. She answers my low bow with a fleeting look from over her book. Seen at close quarters, her beauty, as if holding itself in check, sinks into itself like a lamp turned down low. I observe with sacrilegious joy that her nose is not quite so nobly shaped as I had thought, that her complexion, while certainly fine, is far from the ideal. I observe this with a certain relief, although I know that her radiance is restrained in this way merely out of her pity, as it were, in order not to take my breath away and rob me of speech. And then, through the medium of distance, that beauty is quickly regenerated, and becomes painful, unbearable, and beyond any measure.
Encouraged by her nod, I sit by the bed and begin my account, occasionally referring to my documents. Through the open window beyond Bianka’s head, the frantic rustle of the park flows, a whole forest, crammed in beyond the window, flows in pageants of trees. It penetrates the walls, and spreads, ubiquitous and all-embracing. Bianka listens to me somewhat distracted. It is truly annoying that she does not even break off from her reading. She leaves me to consider each matter from every angle, to outline all the pros and cons. And then, raising her eyes from her book, fluttering her eyelashes a little frantically, she reaches a cursory decision, quickly, casually, and with astounding accuracy. Attentive to her every word, I eagerly seize on the tone of her voice in order to gain some insight into her concealed intentions. Then I humbly hand over the decrees for her to sign. And Bianka adds her signature, her eyelashes lowered and casting a long shadow. And from beneath those lashes, with faint irony, she observes me as I counter-sign.
It may be that the late hour, long past midnight, is not conducive to concentration on affairs of state. Having transgressed its ultimate limit, the night is now rather inclined to profligacy. As we talk, the illusion of a room becomes ever more disrupted. We are, in fact, in a forest. Tufts of fern enfold every corner. Just here, behind the bed, the brushwood wall begins to stir, mobile and tangled, and from that leafy wall huge-eyed squirrels, woodpeckers and other nocturnal creatures emerge into the lamplight, and gaze into the light, frozen to the spot, with shining, bulging eyes. Since a certain moment we have been encroaching on an illegal time, a night out of control, and subject to all manner of pranks and nocturnal caprices. Whatever happens now is beyond reckoning, full of triviality, irresponsible transgressions and nocturnal frolicking, and counts for nothing. Only to this can I ascribe the strange alterations that have taken place in Bianka’s temperament. Always so controlled and serious, the very personification of beautiful discipline, she is now all fickleness, contrariness and irresponsibility. The papers are spread over the great flat plain of her coverlet, and Bianka picks them up nonchalantly, casts a casual eye over them, and lets them fall indifferently from her limp fingertips. Pouting, her pale arm thrown behind her head, she postpones her decision, and forces me to wait. Or else she turns her back to me and blocks her ears with her hands, deaf to my entreaties and persuasions. Suddenly, without a word, with one shake of her leg under the coverlet, she knocks all the papers to the ground, and looks on with enigmatically widened eyes, peeping over her forearm from the heights of her pillows, as I diligently pick them up, bent double and blowing pine needles from them. These caprices, however full of charm as they may be, make no easier for me the already so difficult and responsible role of regent.
During our conversations, the sounds of the forest wander through the room, suffused with cool jasmine, in entire miles of landscapes. Ever new stretches of forest unfold and meander, pageants of trees and shrubs; entire, broadening woodland scenes flow through the room. It is now clear that we have, in fact, from the outset been in a kind of train, a forest night-train in a wooded region of the town, trundling slowly along the edge of a ravine. Hence that deep and intoxicating draught which flows throughout these compartments, in an ever new thread, drawing out in an endless perspective of presentiments. Even a conductor emerges from somewhere, carrying a lantern. He pushes his way out of the trees, to punch our tickets with his pincerlike device. And so we travel onward into the ever deepening night. We throw wide open its ever new enfilades, filled with draughts and slamming doors. Bianka’s eyes deepen, her cheeks redden, and an enchanting smile parts her lips. Does she want to confide something to me? Some most secret thing? Bianka speaks of treason, and her face burns with ecstasy. Her eyes narrow in a surge of delight as she insinuates — writhing like a lizard under the coverlet — my betrayal of the holiest of missions. She surveys my pallid face obstinately with her sweet eyes, which narrow slowly. ‘Do it,’ she whispers urgently. ‘Do it, and you will become one of them, those black Negroes...’ And when I desperately put a finger to my lips in an imploring gesture, her face suddenly turns evil and venemous. ‘You are funny with your steadfast faithfulness, this whole mission of yours. God only knows why you consider yourself to be indispensable. And what if I were to choose Rudolf? I prefer him to you a thousand times over, you tedious pedant. Ah, he would be obedient, obedient to the point of crime, to the point of obliterating his very existence, to self-annihilation...’ Then suddenly, with an air of triumph, she asks: ‘Do you remember Lonka, the daughter of Antosa the washerwoman, with whom you used to play when you were small?’ I look at her in astonishment. ‘That was me,’ she says, giggling. ‘Only I was still a boy at the time. Did you like me then?’
Oh, there is something rotten and dislocated at the very core of spring. Bianka! Bianka! Must even you disappoint me?
> -XL- >