Issuu

though they were mourning in a requiem...and the flattering whisper of invisible lips mingled with all of this. * — — — where I saw that today... And he stopped and tried to remember but could not remember where he had noticed that seemingly irritated red spilled into the black of night. And only as from a deep sleep did he recall what he had been doing that night. And everything was so remote, cold, unclear: all of his memories were interrupted and cut off, as though the man who had been dreaming until that moment were not the same man who had awakened and was now aware of his surroundings. And he stopped again. He was in a narrow street, and the heavy breath of times long past, a smell as from crypts and tombs wafted over him. It was the fixed, inert, and dead mood of the old, neglected, rundown streets, which still remained, as though preserved by some miracle, from old, medieval Prague, with dreary houses, with portals and stone adornments, narrow corridors and steep, creaking stairs, blackened and heavy, surrounded by the magic of everything that is soon to die. He stared fixedly into the corner where he had strayed so unaware, then fixed his gaze on all of the forms that so many people before him had seen, so many perished and decayed lives in long-lost times. He felt their being diffused on all of those walls, dank and sweating the sharp smell of mold; he sensed their touch clinging to every stone, to all of the doors and windows. He mingled his living being of that night with those long-dead souls, with the rhythm of their breath, which they had left here when they had filled graveyards, long-forgotten, longvanished graveyards, with their dead bodies. He evoked and revived them, all of them, those dead faces, those dead bodies, of which nothing is left, nothing at all but nameless dust, dispersed and blown around in extensive space, dust, whirled sometimes by windstorms and then filling the city, delicate and sorrowful dust, settling on the cobblestones, the roofs, carrying its grayness to ever corner, every curve, every crevice of the houses, those ancient houses that had gone through everything, survived everything, always again and again bathed in the light of new days, always again and again opening their dark entryways to new people. And the high, massive houses, full of bizarre stone ornamentation, narrowed now, oppressing and pressing him with their silent gates, the sorrow of their small, narrow windows, where the gas lamps were reflected in feeble strips—and suddenly a kind of stupor overcame him: he couldn’t catch his breath, he felt the proximity of the high walls, the indestructible ramparts of the powerful ashlars, and he was quickening his pace to flee this oppressive atmosphere, when a sudden cry suddenly brought him to a halt again, and then a tumult of mixed sounds from the door of the small godforsaken, rundown pub, recognizable in the darkness only by the red light spilling through the curtains on its low but quite wide doors. He stopped and listened. The barroom was evidently full, and he heard the protracted, weeping, lightly rippling voice of a harmonica from it, playing a favorite hackneyed song, accompanied by a whole chorus of hoarse voices. And all of that, here outside, in the desolation of the night, in the cold air, seemed to express a slinking, oppressive sorrow, that late-night cheerfulness of drunken people who were having fun so as to bend beneath the yoke again in the morning, insensitive and exhausted. As he