The exception to this was the few stations the train passed, which were like little lighted islands in the night. They were always empty, with not even a porter or a conductor visible, and I could never see the sign with the station’s name. I lost count of the number of stations we passed and then the train stopped. It stood still for a long time, hissing steam, and I got off and saw I was at Berlin’s Schlesischer Bahnhof.
The station was as bright and as crowded as though it were a busy morning with people hurrying to offices and shops and schools, but when I exited the station I was surrounded again by darkness and silence. I asked a passing MAN the way to Nostitzstrasse, and he pointed down the road without speaking. I walked a long way, always finding someone to direct me when the road that I was on came to an end.
I walked along wide alleys lined with plane or linden trees, down dirty cobbled lanes, I crossed rivers and parks. In my pocket, my watch beat like the heart of a wild animal, echoing between the stone faces of the buildings and shaking the leaves of the trees. I was afraid of the noise disturbing the inhabitants of those silent streets, so I took out the watch and wrapped it in my handkerchief to dull the sound, but this made no difference. From time to time I took Anja’s letter from my pocket and looked at the address again, even though I already knew it by heart.
I crossed a small bridge and then I saw the sign for Nostitzstrasse, which stretched out ahead of me. I stood and looked down it. There were only a few lighted windows in the houses, on the upper floors, and as I walked along the houses slowly fanned past.
Number 70 had heavy double street doors and the list of names next to the bells did not include Anja’s. I chose a name at random and rang the bell. I could hear its chime sound on the floor above, but just then I saw that the street door was ajar and I went in. The entrance hall was dusty and littered with dead leaves and the tiles were cracked and broken. It seemed unthinkable that I would find Anja in a place such as this. There was no light, and I began to ascend the staircase, stopping at each door to peer at the nameplate, but I reached the top of the house without finding Anja’s.
As I walked back down, I passed a door from beyond which came a familiar sound. It was difficult to hear anything with the monstrous beat of my watch constantly in my ears, so I stood close to the door and pressed my ear against it.
The sound was a scratching scuffle, like small animals burrowing in the dry undergrowth, and it stopped and resumed at IRREGULAR[22] intervals.
I wondered if it might be MICE, or some burrowing insect in the wooden panels of the door, before I recalled the many times I had stood outside our hotel room at Karlsbad, listening to that same sound as Franz’s pen scratched across the paper inside the room. The memory immediately brought with it a wave of the sulphurous air of that town. As I had used to do with the hotel-room door, my fingers slowly reached out for the door handle, gently settled upon it and then steadily gripped it with increasing firmness to silently slide the door’s mechanism into itself to open it.
The door was not locked, and a yellow-lighted slit appeared next to my hand, slowly widening to reveal the very small entrance hall of the apartment. I put my hand in my pocket to muffle the sound of the watch and then I stepped inside. The scratching sound that I could hear from outside the apartment was much louder inside and had no clear point of origin; it seemed to come from the WALLS themselves, or up through the uneven floorboards.
There were two closed doors leading off the hall and I approached each in turn and listened. It was difficult to determine where the sound was louder, so in the end I chose the left-hand door at random. I opened it with less care than I had the front door. Inside I found a small bedsitting room. The scrabbling sound echoed around the room and formed a musical pattern with the watch, which was like a metronome, keeping time. The room was empty. Along one wall was a narrow bed, with a heap of bedclothes piled on it. In the corner was a small writing table strewn with papers and books, and a chair pushed back, as though someone had just risen from it. Next to this was a rail on which some clothing hung. I recognised FRANZ’S hat. The shirts and jackets were moulded STILL in the shape of the wearer, the elbows slightly bent, the holes for the neck hanging open like round mouths.[23] There was no sign of Anja.
The scratching paused and was replaced by a softer rustling, and then the pile of bedclothes shifted. I crossed the small room in one stride and looked down into the bed. The bedclothes and pillows were pressed in around a small, shrunken figure and littered with sheets of paper and flecked with spots of blue ink.
Loose sheets of writing paper spilled off the bed and onto the floorboards around it. I looked down and saw some of the crumpled pages underneath my shoes, dirty and torn. The smudged lines of blue ink looked familiar to me. I thought it looked like my own handwriting. I stooped down to pick up one of the crumpled pages, and it looked like the story I had written that night so long ago. I read a few lines, but the words had changed and I could no longer remember what I had written before. The figure in the bed sighed and shifted. It leaned its head back onto the pillows to look up at me.
I knew that it was Franz, but it was difficult to find any feature that anchored him to this identity. The bones of his face pushed out painfully like the blades of knives against the inside of the skin and his face seemed to have widened and flattened. His eyes were DARK animals hiding in shrunken hollows, his hair a mass of dirty cobwebs spread over the skull. His hands were crowded with large bones, too heavy for his bird-like limbs, and they lay abandoned on the bedclothes. He smelled of death, of earth and mould and dark silence.
I was conscious of the sound of the watch in my pocket. I was still holding my hand curled around it, afraid to let go and release the deafening sound into the room. I asked him where Anja was, and my voice trumpeted out of me and hurt my head. He did not respond—perhaps he did not hear me—but only sank further back onto the pillows and closed his eyes.
It seemed impossible that Anja could be in any of the rooms of that dingy apartment. I remembered suddenly the other door that opened off the entrance hall. I imaged Anja inside, sitting silently, or tied up, gagged, being kept PRISONER. I went to it and threw the door open so hard that it bounced off the wall behind it. I was faced with a MAN[24] standing on the other side of the room, watching me. I froze, but then saw that it was only my reflection in the black window. The room was completely bare, empty of furniture, with the naked glass of the window like a great eye looking in. The sound of the watch bounced from the hard surfaces into my face like physical shocks.
I went back to FRANZ’S[25] room and shouted at him to tell me where Anja was. My mouth stretched with crude savageries and my hot breath hissed against my teeth. I leaned over him, into the fog of pestilent air that hung about the bed. But Franz looked completely unaffected by my outburst, and his only reaction was to stretch his white lips over his teeth in a caricature of a smile. Slowly, he raised one of his limp hands from the bedclothes and pointed across the room. His dry voice was in my ears; it hissed and sighed like a sibilant Eastern language, it rustled like paper, and I could not understand his words. The beats that came from the watch fell onto his words and sliced them into pieces of animal noise.
He began to speak and gesture more insistently, and I could see that he was pointing at the writing table. I went towards it and looked down at the sheets of paper covered with his spiked writing. I remembered the letter from Anja that I had found in Karlsbad and the letter in my pocket. Had he written these to lure me to him? Or was Anja somewhere here, behind one of the closed doors on the landing? I leafed through the papers on the table with one hand and read a few phrases here and there. I opened the drawers of the writing table at random and scooped the contents out onto the floor. My fingers found a tightly bound stack of folded paper. I pulled out a sheet and saw that it was covered with my own handwriting. It was a page from one of my letters to Anja, my outpourings of love for her, which I had written all those months ago in Karlsbad.[26] There was a pain in my stomach like a wound. I opened another sheet from the stack, and it was the same. The whole drawer was full of these little folded parcels, a stockpile, a mausoleum of my useless affection.
23
The description of the room is an addition to the text given in the margins. The ink is the same as that used throughout the text.
26
‘Anja, Anja, Anja’ is repeated here for four lines in Brod’s writing. This had been omitted in the interest of fluency and coherence.