From that moment on, a change took hold of me, one that would steer the course of my entire life. From that moment, I believed in my own uselessness, my futility. There were times when I seemed to return to life, when I thought I was living. Even a few days after these thoughts, a brand-new situation swept me up and occupied me for a while.
But deep in a corner of my soul, this conviction—that the world had no need of me—settled in for good. No action of mine ever escaped its influence. And even today, after so many years have passed, I remember every detail of that moment, which utterly crushed my courage and drove me away from everyone around me. And I see that I was not mistaken in the judgment I passed on myself back then...
I ran to the asphalt road and started walking toward Berlin. I hadn't eaten anything since the previous evening, but instead of hunger, I felt a kind of nausea in my stomach. My legs weren't tired, but a tension spread through my body. This time I walked slowly, lost in thought. As I got closer to the city, my despair grew. I couldn't accept that my days from now on would pass without her. I found the possibility absurd, laughable, impossible... I could never bow my head and go beg. Such a thing was beyond me and would be useless anyway... I imagined things that resembled the fantasies of my childhood but were crazier, more senseless, and bloodier than those: At night, just when she was performing her number at the Atlantik, calling her to the phone, apologizing for disturbing her, then saying a brief farewell and shooting myself in the head at the receiver—how wonderful that would be! When she heard that dreadful sound, she would pause for a moment, not understanding what had happened, then shout like a madwoman, "Raif! Raif!" trying to get an answer from me. As I breathed my last on the floor, I would probably hear those cries and die smiling. Because she wouldn't know where I was calling from, she'd flounder in helplessness, unable to notify the police, and the next day, with trembling hands, she'd leaf through the newspapers reading the details of this unsolved tragedy, her heart pounding with remorse and despair, realizing she could never forget me, that I had bound myself to her memory with blood.
I had reached the city. I passed under and over the same bridges again. Evening was falling. I didn't know where I was going. I entered a small park and sat down. My eyes were burning. I tilted my head back and looked at the sky. The snow was freezing my feet. Even so, I sat for hours. A strange numbness spread through my body. To freeze here and be buried somewhere without a sound the next day... What would Maria do when she happened to hear about it days later? What expression would cross her face? How she would regret everything she had done!
My thoughts kept circling around her. I got up and set off again. I still had to walk for hours to reach the center of the city. On the way, I started muttering to myself. I was addressing her the whole time. Just like in the first days we met, a thousand beautiful, charming, persuasive ideas rushed into my head. It was impossible that these words wouldn't affect her, wouldn't change her mind. With tears in my eyes and my voice trembling, I told her about the closeness between us, about the impossibility of us separating for such meaningless reasons in a world where it was so hard for two people to find each other... At first, my sudden outburst—me, always so calm, so accepting of everything—seemed strange to her. But then, slowly, she took my hands, smiled, and said, "You're right!"
Yes... I had to see her and tell her all of this. The terrible decision I had accepted so easily that morning had to be changed... It would change. Maybe she was even surprised that I had left her house almost without objection, maybe she was angry. I had to see her immediately, that very evening.
I wandered until eleven o'clock, then in front of the Atlantik, I paced back and forth, waiting for her. But she didn't come. Finally, I asked the man in gold braid standing at the door. "I don't know, she didn't come tonight!" he said. Then I guessed her illness had gotten worse. I ran all the way to her house. There was no light in her window. She must be sleeping. Thinking it wouldn't be right to disturb her, I returned to the boarding house.
For three consecutive days, I waited for her on the street in the same way, then went to her door, looked at the dark windows, and turned back without daring to do anything. Every day I sat in my room and tried to read. I turned the pages without registering a single letter, sometimes starting over from the beginning, resolved to pay attention, but after a few lines I saw that my mind had wandered elsewhere again. During the day, I accepted events as they were and understood that her decision was final, that there was nothing I could do but wait for some time to pass. But at night, my imagination came alive and, like a feverish patient, made me think of impossible things. Finally, contrary to all my daytime resolutions, I would rush out of the house late at night and wander the streets she might take and around her house. I was now too embarrassed to ask the gold-braided doorman, so I contented myself with watching from a distance. Five days passed like this. Every night I saw her in my dreams, closer than ever.
On the fifth day, when I realized she still wasn't going to work, I called the Atlantik from a café and asked for Maria Puder. They said she hadn't come for several days because she was sick. So she was truly that ill. Had I doubted it? Why had I waited for such confirmation to believe in her illness? She wouldn't change her work hours to avoid me or give instructions to the doormen to turn me away!... I decided to wake her even if she was asleep and headed for her house. The bounds of our relationship were wide enough, after all, to give me that right. It wouldn't be right to attach so much importance to the scene on the morning after a drunken night.
I climbed the stairs breathlessly, and to avoid hesitating and backing out, I immediately reached for the bell, rang it briefly, and waited. There was no movement inside. Then I rang again, several times, long rings. I didn't hear the footsteps I was waiting for. Only the door of the apartment opposite opened a crack, and a sleepy-looking maid asked:
"What do you want?"
"The person who lives here!"
After looking closely at my face, she said curtly:
"No one's there!" My heart leaped.
"Did they move somewhere else?"
My anxiety and excitement seemed to have softened her a little. She shook her head and replied:
"No, her mother still hasn't come from Prague. She got sick herself, and since she had no one to look after her, the health insurance doctor had her taken to the hospital!"
I rushed toward the girl who said this:
"What's her illness? Is it serious? Which hospital did they take her to? When?.."
Taken aback by the barrage of questions, the maid stepped back and said:
"Don't shout, you'll wake the household... They took her two days ago; I think they took her to the Charité!"
"Her illness?"
"I don't know!"
Without even thanking the astonished maid, I bounded down the stairs four steps at a time. I asked the first policeman I met where the hospital they called Charité was. I went there without knowing why. The huge stone building, hundreds of yards long, sent a chill through me. But without hesitation, I went to the main entrance and called the porter out of his office.
The porter, who showed perhaps a bit more courtesy than I deserved to a visitor arriving after midnight in this terrible cold and disturbing him, had no information to give me. He knew nothing about such a woman arriving, nor about her illness, nor where she had been admitted. To every question, he replied, trying to smile despite his annoyance: "Come back at nine tomorrow, you'll find out then."
That night, as I wandered around the high stone walls until morning, thinking only of her, I understood fully how much I loved Maria Puder and how madly attached I was to her. I looked at the windows from which a pale yellow light shone out among many others, trying to guess which one was hers; I felt an irresistible desire to be beside her, to serve her, to wipe the sweat from her forehead with my own hands.
That evening I understood that one human being can bind himself to another with ties far stronger than those that bind him to life itself. That same evening I also understood that after losing her, I could only roll and drift through the world like an empty nutshell.
The wind blew the snow from one wall to another and filled my eyes. There was no one in the streets. Occasionally a white car entered the hospital gate and left again a little later. A policeman, passing by me for the second time, stared at me hard, and on his third pass asked me why I was hanging around here. When I said I had a patient inside, he advised me to go rest and come back tomorrow; but on subsequent encounters, he passed me by in sympathetic silence.
When the sky began to lighten, the streets slowly came to life. Soon the number of white cars entering and leaving the hospital's many gates increased. At exactly nine o'clock, even though it wasn't visiting day, I obtained permission from the duty doctor to see the patient. No doubt the haggard look on my face was the reason for this exception.
Maria Puder was in a private room. The nurse who came with me said I shouldn't stay long, that it wasn't good for the patient to get tired. She had pneumonia. But the doctor didn't find it very dangerous. When Maria turned her head and saw me, she immediately smiled. But her expression suddenly changed and became anxious. As soon as the nurse left the room and we were alone, she asked:
"What happened to you, Raif?"
Her voice hadn't changed at all. Only her face had taken on a pale, yellowish tint. I came closer to her:
"What happened to you? You see?" I said.
"It's nothing... It'll pass, I'm sure... But you look terribly worn out!"
"I learned you were sick from the Atlantik tonight. I went to your house, and the maid in the opposite apartment said they brought you here. They wouldn't let me in at night, so I waited for morning!"
"Where?"
"Here... Outside the hospital!"
She let her gaze run over me. She was very serious. She made a move as if to say something, then stopped.
The nurse opened the door a crack. I said goodbye to the patient. She nodded, but didn't smile.
Maria Puder stayed in the hospital for twenty-five days. They might have kept her longer, but she told the doctors she was bored there and could take good care of herself at home. With long recommendations and stacks of prescriptions, she left the hospital and came home on a snowy day. I don't remember much now about what I did during those twenty-five days. I think I did nothing except visit her and stand by her bedside, watching her sweating face, her eyes that occasionally drifted to the side, and her chest that breathed with great difficulty. I didn't even live; because if I had, I would have at least a tiny memory of those days. Only one feeling gripped me when I was near her: a terrible fear of losing her. Her fingers sticking out from the edge of the bed, her feet making a lump under the blanket—they already seemed dead. Even her face, her lips, and her smile seemed to be waiting for a small opportunity, a single moment, to undergo that terrible transformation... What would I do then? Yes, I would keep my composure, attend to the final arrangements, choose the site of her grave, console her mother, who would have returned from Prague by then, and finally, with a few people, I would lower her into a pit. I would leave with everyone else, and after a while I would come secretly to the graveside and be alone with her. And then everything would begin. That's when I would truly lose her. What would I do then? Up to that point, I could think of every detail, but beyond that I could imagine nothing at all. Yes, after I had placed her in the ground and the people at her grave had dispersed, leaving me alone with her—what could I do then?... Since all matters concerning her would be finished at that moment, there could be nothing as ridiculous and pointless as my continued existence on earth... My whole soul was in a terrible void. After she began to recover, she said to me one day:
"Talk to the doctors, let them release me now." Then, as if it were something ordinary, she murmured:
"You'll take better care of me."
Without answering, I rushed out. The specialist wanted her to stay a few more days. We agreed. Finally, on the twenty-fifth day, I wrapped her in her fur coat, took her arm, and led her down the stairs. I brought her to her house in a taxi. As we took her upstairs, the driver also helped by holding one arm; even so, when I undressed her and put her to bed, she was exhausted.
From that moment on, I truly took care of her alone. An elderly woman came until noon to clean the house, light the large tile stove, and cook a meal for the patient. Despite all my insistence, Maria would not agree to have her mother called. With trembling hands, she wrote letters: "I'm fine, enjoy yourself and spend the winter there."
"She wouldn't be of any help to me if she came," she said, "because she needs help herself... She'd only worry for nothing, and she'd worry me too." Then, with that same dismissive tone, she murmured:
"Well, you're taking care of me, aren't you? Or are you tired, fed up?"
But she didn't smile when she said this; she wasn't joking. In fact, since her illness, she had hardly smiled at all. Only on the first day I saw her in the hospital had she greeted me with a smile; after that, she maintained a stubborn seriousness. When she asked for something, when she thanked me, when she spoke about any matter, she was always serious and thoughtful. I would stay by her bedside until late at night and come back early in the morning. Later, I brought a large divan from the other room and her mother's bedspreads and began sleeping in the same room. The incident between us on the morning of New Year's Day—or rather, it couldn't be called an incident, that little conversation—was never mentioned, not even with a single word. Everything—my visits to the hospital, my bringing her home, our life here—was considered so natural that it needed no discussion. We both avoided the slightest allusion to those matters. But she was certainly thinking about something. As I busied myself with chores around the room or read aloud to her, I felt her eyes constantly following me, resting on me without tiring. It was as if she were searching for something in me. One afternoon, under the light of the desk lamp, I was reading her a long story by Jacob Wassermann called "The Unkissed Mouth." It was about a teacher who had never been loved by anyone in his life and had grown old waiting for love, for human affection, without ever admitting it to himself. The poor man's spiritual loneliness, the hopes that rose only within him and died quickly without being noticed by anyone, were depicted with a masterful pen. After the story ended, Maria closed her eyes and was silent for a long time. Then she turned to me and said in an indifferent voice:
"You never told me what you did on the days we didn't see each other after New Year's."
"Nothing," I replied.
"Really?"
"I don't know..."
Another silence fell. For the first time, she was touching on that subject. But I wasn't surprised. In fact, I realized I had been expecting that question for a long time. But instead of answering, I fed her dinner. Then I covered her well, sat down again by her bedside, and...