They walked up the stairs; the presence of a stranger in the lift, a witness of their confusion, would have embarrassed them. They walked in silence, separated by a great distance, as if they were going upstairs to settle an old score. She sat down without removing her coat. Her small hat-brim shaded her eyes. Her coat was fastened up to her chin and her gaze held something valiant, ready for battle. She still felt the resolve with which she had got into the train. Friedrich walked over to the window, a movement made by every other man embarrassed by the presence of a woman in his room. ‘Why are you silent?’ she said suddenly. Anxiety trembled in her question. He heard the fear and, at the same time, the first Du that had passed between them. It was like the first lightning in spring. He turned round, thought, ‘Now she is going to cry’, and saw two moist eyes that gazed straight at him, fearless because armed with tears.
He wanted to say: ‘Why did you come here? He corrected himself. He considered which would be less hurtful, ‘why’ or ‘what for’, and finally settled for a harmless ‘how’ in conjunction with a Du. So he said: ‘How did you get here?’
With the rapid presence of mind that women achieve when they embark on a rash adventure, she had brought her father to assuage the vigilance of the Director General. This novelettish inventiveness alarmed him. So as not to be silent any longer, he said: ‘Then you’re here with your father?’
‘Say what you’re thinking,’ she began. ‘Say that you never expected me, that it was only a mood, that letter. You had probably been drinking when you wrote it.’
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘it was a sort of deep serious mood. I did not expect you. What I say now is in sorrow, not reproach: you should have come ten years ago. Too much has happened in between.’ ‘Tell me,’ she said.
‘It’s not possible straight off. I would not know where to begin. Neither would I know what was important. It occurs to me that the facts are less important than the things one can’t recount. For instance, what is more serious than any battle I have taken part in is the despair I go around in, or a word someone lets fall here and there that sometimes reveals human beings to me and sometimes humanity as a whole. But it will probably suffice to tell you the name under which I have lived for the past ten years.’ And he told her his pseudonym, of which he had been so proud.
As if this name, which she had heard and read without realizing whom it concealed, were conclusive evidence of her blindness and guilt, she began to cry. ‘Now I ought to go and kiss her,’ thought Friedrich. He noticed how, in the midst of her despair, she took off her hat and smoothed her hair, which she now wore cut short like everyone else, and he approached, glad that he had something to do, and took the hat from her hand.
She shook her head, rose, asked with her eyes for the hat, and said quietly: ‘I must go.’
‘I shall let her go,’ he thought.
But now, when she lifted both arms to put on her hat, she seemed to him in despair, and therefore doubly beautiful, as he had never seen her before. She was young, she had let the years pass by like zephyrs, she had borne children and was young. He saw her again in the softly rolling carriage and in the shop, trying on gloves, and in the café, beside him in the corner, and in the street in the rain. In this one movement, when she raised her arms, lay all her beauty. Her movement simultaneously evoked every aspect of beauty, supplication, disrobing, denial and submission. She lowered her arms. The right hand began to stretch a glove over the left with scrupulous care.
‘Stay!’ he said suddenly. And he added to this: ‘Don’t go!’, more gently, tenderly, and a little sharply, as he noticed in self-reproach a moment later.
‘All it needs is for me to turn the key, and it’s settled.’ He saw how Hilde glanced at the door and slowly and scrupulously stripped off her glove again. Now it was an unclothed hand, not just a naked one. It seemed as if he were seeing her for the first time. He took a single rapid step to the door and locked it.
7
Old Herr von Maerker was due to travel on for his cure the next day. Friedrich saw him that evening. The festive glow of the many lamps in the restaurants made his white-haired old age more venerable, his daughter’s beauty more radiant. Herr von Maerker looked older than he was, and more important. He resembled old portraits, faces that time has moulded more than nature or art, endowed with the lustre of a melancholy solemnity by the irrevocability of the vanished epochs which they mirror. Herr von Maerker had never been astute. Now, as occasionally happens, his age deputized for wisdom. And, because he was one of those men who have outlived their epoch, he evoked in Friedrich the courteous respect one owes to an old forgotten monument. He did not seem to suspect that Hilde’s encounter with Friedrich was other than pure coincidence. But even had he suspected, his respect for his daughter’s life and privacy was too great for him to seek to discern relationships that were not voluntarily disclosed to him. Like the men of his generation, he still took it for granted that wives and daughters had a natural instinct for the decorous and the unseemly, for honour and appearance, for reputation and worth. Herr von Maerker still belonged to the last generation of well-mannered Middle Europeans who cannot remain seated when a woman is standing in front of them, who, without venturing a reproof, are continually amazed by the manners of the young, who still speak gracefully while they are eating, and who can still say something sensible without being intelligent themselves, who are chivalrous and harmless and distribute compliments like little declarations of love committing them to nothing. He was aware of his daughter’s unhappy marriage, but it did not occur to him to reproach himself for having compelled the Director General to marry Hilde. He had not known his daughter for many a year. Now age made him clearsighted. But he kept silent, not only because he would have been embarrassed to ask, but because he would have been even more embarrassed to let it be noticed that he possessed the capacity to guess.
‘I remember you very well,’ he said to Friedrich. ‘You visited us once.’ Friedrich thought of the candid journalist who had so obstinately assured him that he did not recognize him. ‘Much has happened since then. And yet it seems to me that we knew it all beforehand. Year by year I was able to see with my own eyes how the country was disintegrating, how people were becoming indifferent. But malicious too, yes, malicious,’ he added. He said this with the hindsight of one beyond the tomb.
‘We made jokes, we all laughed at them,’ he continued. ‘I have to reproach myself for a few. Believe me, jokes alone are enough to destroy an ancient country. All races have mocked. And yet in my time, when the man was more important than his nationality, the possibility existed of making a homeland for all out of the old monarchy. It could have been the prototype in miniature of a great future world, and at the same time the last reminder of a great European era in which North and South had been united. It is all over,’ concluded Herr von Maerker, with a slight movement of the hand with which he seemed to disperse the last remnants of his recollections.
Even his sadness was accompanied by serenity. His sombre obituary on his fatherland did not prevent him from enjoying to the full, and with a mild deliberation, his black coffee and thin cigarette and it seemed as if he enjoyed life the more because it still continued beyond his own time, and as if he enjoyed each day, each evening, each meal that heaven granted him with the pleasure one derives from unexpected and unearned holidays. The destruction of the monarchy had put an end only to the active period of his life, he had only ceased to exist as a contemporary, but he continued to live on as the passive observer of a new era which, though it did not please him at all, did not bother him in the slightest because it did not in any way concern him.