Despair (20 page)

There are mysterious moments and that was one of them. Like an author reading his work over a thousand times, probing and testing every syllable, and finally unable to say of this brindle of words whether it is good or not, so it happened
with me, so it happened—But there is the maker’s secret certainty; which never can err. At that moment when all the required features were fixed and frozen, our likeness was such that really I could not say who had been killed, I or he. And while I looked, it grew dark in the vibrating wood, and with that face before me slowly dissolving, vibrating fainter and fainter, it seemed as if I were looking at my image in a stagnant pool.

Being afraid to besmirch myself I did not handle the body; did not ascertain whether it was indeed quite, quite dead; I knew instinctively that it was so, that my bullet had slid with perfect exactitude along the short, air-dividing furrow which both will and eye had grooved. Must hurry, must hurry, cried old Mister Murry, as he thrust his arms through his pants. Let us not imitate him. Swiftly, sharply, I looked about me. Felix had put everything, except the pistol, into the bag himself; yet I had self-possession enough to make sure he had not dropped anything; and I even went so far as to brush the footboard where I had been cutting his nails and to unbury his comb which I had trampled into the ground but now decided to discard later. Next I accomplished something planned a long time ago: I had turned the car and stopped it on a bit of timbered ground slightly sloping down, roadward; I now rolled my little Icarus a few yards forward so as to make it visible in the morning from the highway, thus leading to the discovery of my corpse.

Night came sweeping down rapidly. The drumming in my ears had all but died away. I plunged into the wood, repassing as I did so, not far from the body; but I did not stop any more—only picked up the bag, and, unflinchingly, at a smart pace, as if indeed I had not those stone-heavy shoes on my feet, I went round the lake, never leaving the forest,
on and on, in the ghostly gloaming, among ghostly snow.… But how beautifully I knew the right direction, how accurately, how vividly I had visualized it all, when, in summer, I used to study the paths leading to Eichenberg!

I reached the station in time. Ten minutes later, with the serviceableness of an apparition, there arrived the train I wanted. I spent half the night in a clattering, swaying third-class carriage, on a hard bench, and next to me were two elderly men, playing cards, and the cards they used were extraordinary: large, red and green, with acorns and beehives. After midnight I had to change; a couple of hours later I was already moving westwards; then, in the morning, I changed anew, this time into a fast train. Only then, in the solitude of the lavatory, did I examine the contents of the knapsack. Besides the things crammed into it lately (blood-stained handkerchief included), I found a few shirts, a piece of sausage, two large apples, a leathern sole, five marks in a lady’s purse, a passport; and my letters to Felix. The apples and sausage I ate there and then, in the W.C.; but I put the letters into my pocket and examined the passport with the liveliest interest. It was in good order. He had been to Mons and Metz. Oddly enough, his pictured face did not resemble mine closely; it could, of course, easily pass for my photo—still, that made an odd impression upon me, and I remember thinking that here was the real cause of his being so little aware of our likeness: he saw himself in a glass, that is to say, from right to left, not sunway as in reality. Human fat-headedness, carelessness, slackness of senses, all this was revealed by the fact that even the official definitions in the brief list of personal features did not quite correspond with the epithets in my own passport (left at home). A trifle to be sure, but a characteristic one. And under “profession,” he,
that numbskull, who had played the fiddle, surely, in the way lackadaisical footmen in Russia used to twang guitars on summer evenings, was called a “musician,” which at once turned me into a musician too. Later in the day, at a small border town, I purchased a suitcase, an overcoat, and so forth, upon which both bag and gun were discarded—no, I will not say what I did with them: be silent, Rhenish waters! And presently, a very unshaven gentleman in a cheap black overcoat was on the safer side of the frontier and heading south.

Since childhood I’ve loved violets and music. I was born at Zwickau. My father was a shoemaker and my mother a washerwoman. When she used to get angry she hissed at me in Czech. Mine was a clouded and joyless childhood. Hardly was I a man than I set forth on my wanderings. I played the fiddle. I’m a left-hander. Face—oval. Not married; show me one wife who is true. I found the war pretty beastly; it passed, however, as all things pass. Every mouse has its house.… I like squirrels and sparrows. Czech beer is cheaper. Ah, if one could only get shod by a smith—how economical! All state ministers are bribed, and all poetry is bilge. One day at a fair I saw twins; you were promised a prize if you distinguished between them, so carroty Fritz cuffed one of the two and gave him a thick ear—that was the difference! Golly, what a laugh we had! Beatings, stealings, slaughter, all is bad or good, according to circumstances.

I’ve appropriated money, whenever it came my way; what you’ve taken is yours, there is no such thing as one’s own or another’s money; you don’t find written on a coin: belongs to Müller. I like money. I’ve always wished to find a faithful friend; we’d have made music together, he’d have bequeathed me his house and his orchard. Money, darling money. Darling small money. Darling big money. I roved about; found work
here and there. One day I met a swell fellow who kept saying he was like me. Nonsense, he was not like me in the least. But I did not argue with him, he being rich, and whoever hobnobs with the rich can well become rich himself. He wanted me to go for a drive in his stead, leaving him to his business in queer street. I killed the bluffer and robbed him. He lies in the wood, there is snow on the ground, crows caw, squirrels leap. I like squirrels. That poor gentleman in his fine overcoat lies dead, not far from his car. I can drive a car. I love violets and music. I was born at Zwickau. My father was a bald-headed bespectacled shoemaker, and my mother was a washerwoman with scarlet hands. When she used to get angry—

And all over again from the beginning, with new absurd details.… Thus, a reflected image, asserting itself, laid its claims. Not I sought a refuge in a foreign land, not I grew a beard, but Felix, my slayer. Ah, if I had known him well, for years of intimacy, I might even have found it amusing to take up new quarters in the soul I had inherited. I would have known every cranny in it; all the corridors of its past; I could have enjoyed the use of all its accommodations. But Felix’s soul I had studied very cursorily, so that all I knew of it were the bare outlines of his personality, two or three chance traits. Should I practice doing things with my left hand?

Such sensations, however nasty, were possible to deal with—more or less. It was, for example, rather hard to forget how utterly he had surrendered himself to me, that soft-stuffed creature, when I was getting him ready for his execution. Those cold obedient paws! It quite bewildered me to recall how pliant he had been. His toenail was so strong that my scissors could not bite in at once, it screwed round one blade
as the jag of a tin of corned beef envelops the key. Is a man’s will really so powerful as to be able to convert another into a dummy? Did I actually shave him? Astounding! Yes, what tormented me above all, when recalling things, was Felix’s submissiveness, the ridiculous, brainless, automatous quality of his submissiveness. But, as said already, I got over that. Far worse was my failure to put up with mirrors. In fact, the beard I started growing was meant to hide me not so much from others as from my own self. Dreadful thing—a hypertrophied imagination. So it is quite easy to understand that a man endowed with my acute sensitiveness gets into the devil of a state about such trifles as a reflection in a dark looking glass, or his own shadow, falling dead at his feet,
und so weiter
. Stop short, you people—I raise a huge white palm like a German policeman, stop! No sighs of compassion, people, none whatever. Stop, pity! I do not accept your sympathy; for among you there are sure to be a few souls who will pity me—me, a poet misunderstood. “Mist, vapor … in the mist a chord that quivers.” No, that’s not verse, that’s from old Dusty’s great book,
Crime and Slime
. Sorry:
Schuld und Sühne
(German edition). Any remorse on my part is absolutely out of the question: an artist feels no remorse, even when his work is not understood, not accepted. As to that premium—

I know, I know: it is a bad mistake from the novelist’s point of view that in the whole course of my tale there is—as far as I remember—so very little attention devoted to what seems to have been my leading motive; greed of gain. How does it come that I am so reticent and vague about the purpose I pursued in arranging to have a dead double? But here I am assailed by odd doubts: was I really so very, very much bent upon making profit and did it really seem to me so desirable,
that rather equivocal sum (the worth of a man in terms of money; and a reasonable remuneration for his disappearance), or was it the other way round and remembrance, writing for me, could not (being truthful to the end) act otherwise and attach any special importance to a talk in Orlovius’s study (did I describe that study?).

And there is one other thing I would like to say about my posthumous moods: although in my soul of souls I had no qualms about the perfection of my work, believing that in the black and white wood there lay a dead man perfectly resembling me, yet as a novice of genius, still unfamiliar with the flavor of fame, but filled with the pride that escorts self-stringency, I longed, to the point of pain, for that masterpiece of mine (finished and signed on the ninth of March in a gloomy wood) to be appreciated by men, or in other words, for the deception—and every work of art is a deception—to act successfully; as to the royalties, so to speak, paid by the insurance firm, that was in my mind a matter of secondary importance. Oh, yes, I was the pure artist of romance.

Things that pass are treasured later, as the poet sang. One fine day at last Lydia joined me abroad; I called at her hotel. “Not so wildly,” I said with grave warning, as she was about to fling herself into my arms. “Remember that my name is Felix, and that I am merely an acquaintance of yours.” She looked very comely in her widow’s weeds, just as my artistic black bow and nicely trimmed beard suited me. She began relating … yes, everything had worked as I had expected, without a hitch. It appeared she had wept quite sincerely during the crematory service, when the pastor with a professional catch in his throbbing voice had spoken about me, “…  and
this
man,
this
noblehearted man, who—” I imparted to her my further plans and very soon began to court her.

We are married now, I and my little widow; we live in a quiet picturesque place, in our cottage. We spend long lazy hours in the little myrtle garden with its view of the blue gulf far below, and talk very often of my poor dead brother. I keep recounting to her new episodes from his life. “Fate, kismet,” says Lydia with a sigh. “At least now, in Heaven, his soul is consoled by our being happy.”

Yes, Lydia is happy with me; she needs nobody else. “How glad I am,” she says sometimes, “that we are forever rid of Ardalion. I used to pity him a good deal, and gave him a lot of my time, but, really, I could never stand the man. Wonder where he is at present. Probably drinking himself to death, poor fellow. That’s also fate!”

In the mornings I read and write; maybe I shall soon publish one or two little things under my new name; a Russian author who lives in the neighborhood highly praises my style and vivid imagination.

Occasionally Lydia receives a line from Orlovius—New Year’s greetings, say. He invariably asks her to give his kindest regards to her husband whom he has not the pleasure of knowing, and probably thinks the while: “Ah, here is a widow who is easily comforted. Poor Hermann Karlovich!”

Do you feel the tang of this epilogue? I have concocted it according to a classic recipe. Something is told about every character in the book to wind up the tale; and in doing so, the dribble of their existence is made to remain correctly, though summarily, in keeping with what has been previously shown of their respective ways; also, a facetious note is admitted—poking sly fun at life’s conservativeness.

Lydia is as forgetful and untidy as ever.…

And left to the very end of the epilogue there is,
pour la bonne bouche
, some especially hearty bit, quite possibly having
to do with an insignificant object which just flicked by in some earlier part of the novel:

You may still see on the wall of their chamber the same pastel portrait, and as usual, whenever he looks at it, Hermann laughs and curses.

Finis. Farewell, Turgy! Fairwell, Dusty!

Dreams, dreams … and rather trite ones at that. Who cares, anyway? …

Let us return to our tale. Let us try to control ourselves better. Let us omit certain details of the journey. I remember that when I arrived at Pignan, almost on the Spanish border, the first thing I did was to try and obtain German newspapers; I did find a few, but there was nothing in them yet.

I took a room in a second-rate hotel, a huge room, with a stone floor and walls like cardboard, on which there seemed to be painted the sienna-brown door leading into the next room, and a looking glass with only one reflection. It was horribly cold; yet the open hearth of the preposterous fireplace was no more adapted to give heat than a stage contrivance would be, and when the chips brought by the maid had burned out, the room seemed colder still. The night I spent there was full of the most extravagant and exhausting visions; and as morning came, and feeling sticky and prickly all over, I emerged into the narrow street, inhaled the sickening rich odors and was crushed among the southern crowd jostling in the marketplace, it became quite clear to me that I simply could not remain in that town any longer.