The mud was still damp and all I succeeded in doing was rubbing the stain up and down the lengths of my arms and legs. My heart began to hammer with panic at the thought that someone entering the hall—Franz worst of all—would see me crouched there, cleaning my clothes. I could see how I would appear to others as I stood there: a hunchbacked animal in a dirty jacket, furtively trying to clean itself. For a moment, with my arms and upper back restricted in their movements by my jacket, my limp legs, my weak arms, I felt myself to be the insect Gregor: I was him. Despite myself, I had to commend Franz for the keenness of his perception of me.
No matter how hard I brushed I could not remove the traces of mud from my clothes. I no longer wanted to be at that party, covered in the dirt that was like a badge of my own ineptitude. I stood hovering at the door, uncertain. All the eyes in that room terrified me and I could hear the name ‘Gregor’ again and again, bobbing like a cork on the sea of talk.
‘What are you doing, hiding away in here?’
Kurt and Felix stood in the doorway. Kurt held a tray of schnapps. I let them hustle me into the room and they drank and toasted each other and me. Gustav was lost from view, the invisible centre of a small crowd.
I heard the door open and close, and my muscles tensed like a boxer’s. I was standing facing the door, but the view was blocked by Kurt’s head. I shifted around, trying to see who had come in, not listening at all to the conversation of my friends. But it was only a man, not Franz, and I could relax again. Felix and Kurt were looking at me expectantly and I realised that someone had asked me a question.
‘So, was it you?’ Felix said, repeating his question. I was stunned by the barefaced way he asked me, not lowering his voice at all.
‘What?’ I asked, and then began to stammer that I didn’t know what he was talking about, that I hadn’t read it yet.
He interrupted me. ‘I mean, I’d heard that Franz sent you the manuscript. Was it you who edited it?’
When I realised that I had misunderstood him I felt even more ashamed.
Felix’s expression shifted and he exchanged a look with Kurt, only for a fraction of a second, but I knew that I had only succeeded in bringing the comparison of Gregor and myself to his attention. Or had I imagined that too? I took another schnapps from the tray and drank it in a gulp. I didn’t know. I had forgotten for a moment about Franz, but suddenly no longer cared whether he arrived or not. I began to drink steadily and dreaded the moment that I would be left alone in the crowd, at the mercy of all those eyes.
Some time later Theodor came over to join us. By this stage I had drunk a great deal and the world had retreated behind a pleasant, rosy mist. Theodor had left Gustav in the grip of a crowd of people whom I could see huddled around him, each talking at him louder than the other. I had a nagging sense that I should somehow be worried about this, but could not recall the reason why. Theodor clapped me on the back, hard, and put an arm around my shoulders.
‘Congratulations, Max,’ he said. His face was very close to mine and I could see all the details and imperfections of his skin. I gazed at him in wonder. ‘You have done a great thing for literature. You have brought us Gregor. He would not exist without you.’
Gregor. It all came back to me. Had Franz told Theodor as much? Or was it so obvious to everyone? Kurt and Felix were standing there, smiling at me. Their lips seemed uncannily rubbery and large, stretched wide like the pink insides of shellfish. Theodor too seemed to have grown and the three men loomed over me, huge and distorted, their heads rising up like the tops of tall trees, bent slightly towards one another to form a canopy over my head, enclosing me. I fought my way free of them. Gregor, Gregor. I could hear the name issuing from a hundred lips like a murmured chorus.
I struggled hard to get to the other side of the crowded room, but there was no escape. Bodies pressed in on me from all sides and seemed deliberately to hinder my way. Shards of other people’s conversations broke into my awareness, and everywhere I heard my name together with Gregor’s. Every laugh, every whisper, was directed at me. I shrunk within my mud-encrusted clothing. I seemed to have become very small, or perhaps it was the room that had grown. It suddenly seemed to be of an immense size, large enough to contain all the inhabitants of Prague. The ceiling was lost from my view, unimaginably high up, wreathed in clouds. I struggled to breathe. Raised voices and laughter rained down on me like physical blows. The lights were suddenly too bright and dazzled me. They were reflected from a million points in the room: from the glasses held in warm hands, from jewels on the necks of the women, from shining eyes. The bright points burned into my eyes and left a cloud of black spots in their wake.
I was still holding a glass of schnapps, of which only the dregs remained, and I stared at it to steady myself. The glass was cut with a bevelled edge that reflected colours from the room in its sharp lines. I gripped it in my fist and watched the skin of my palms and fingers turn white where the wall of the glass pressed into it. I tried to breathe regularly. The walls of the glass were cooler than the air in the room and I pressed the glass to my face and rolled it over my cheeks and forehead. I began to feel calmer. The scale of the room returned to normal.
I felt something touch my arm, and I shrugged it off without turning my head. It took so much effort to control my body.
‘Max,’ someone said, and I turned slowly, my eyes leading the way. Uta stood in front of me. I instinctively looked around for a means of escape, but I was held fast in the press of bodies. I closed my eyes, as though this would make me disappear. The touch on my arm came again, together with a nervous laugh.
‘Maxelein.’
I shuddered at her use of the endearment but I peeled my eyes slowly open. She stood there smiling at me. Her hair was arranged in a complicated fashion and glistened as though it had been doused in some kind of oil.
‘Aren’t you a regular Sleeping Beauty?’ She laughed. I wondered for a moment what she was talking about, then I remembered her many visits to me when I was ill. I shuddered at the thought of her entering my room and seeing me there in my bed, with crumpled sheets and dented pillows in the intimate pose of sleep, feigned or not.
‘Or maybe we two are Beauty and the Beast?’ Again she gave that laugh, like two sharp hoots of a bird.
Had she actually said that? I wasn’t sure. Conversations hummed in the air all around me, punctuated by loud laughter, making it difficult to hear her. She was speaking in a deliberately low tone—contrived, I knew, to entice me to lean closer to her. She continued to speak but the thread of her voice was suddenly like a foreign language and I could only catch a few fragments of what she said. Her fat mouth moved in a way that was both repellent and hypnotic. There was a small patch of transparent hair below her lower lip that bristled as her lips undulated to form words, and I could not keep my eyes from constantly straying to that place.
She edged closer to me and I shuffled slowly backwards to maintain the distance between us, but I had not gone far before I felt the warm resistance of another back pressing against my own. I put my good foot out in front of my body as a barrier and stood behind it, poised like a grotesque dancer.
The perfume she wore had begun to seep out into the stagnant air around her, and I breathed through my mouth to minimise its effect on me, but even so I could still taste it at the back of my throat.
I thought longingly of my soft bed, waiting for me. I thought of Anja, lying in her own bed, her cheeks flushed perhaps with fever, her hair damp, sticking in strands to her smooth skin. The party suddenly appeared to me to be the most inhospitable corner of the earth. Uta was still edging closer and now I had my head tilted up to try to snatch at the unperfumed air above my head.