Nikolaus never did anything to put these apocryphal tales to rest.

The story of the young man’s mysterious death made an enormous impression on Severin. On evenings at Nikolaus’s apartment he regarded the face of his new acquaintance with undisguised awe while sipping the strong spirits his host brought to him in frosted glasses. Again and again his glances went to the elegant ladies’ desk, where sharply whetted daggers lay among books and papers, where behind the yellow brass locks he imagined the presence of the gun that had conjured death into this room. Death. Something in the rasping sound of the word seemed more exciting, richer in associations than all the sleepy utterances of a sheltered life. A small and perverse envy crept along the surface of his soul and left cloudy, lingering blisters. An envy for Nikolaus, who played with the opal ring on his finger with serene hands and discussed books and journals while it was possible that the carpet beneath his feet still retained the dried blood of the man who had died on it. He felt the supremacy of a personality that, irreproachable and blasé, remained closed to the world, and that, in spite of Nikolaus’s youth, had none of the formlessness that characterized his own.

Sometimes Karla also came with him to Nikolaus’s. Since meeting Severin she followed his every step. She knew how to arrange things so that she saw him almost every day. For her sentimental soul, tried by frosts and fires, he was a new fever, not yet savored, under whose power she had fallen, and to which she succumbed. She courted him with a tenacious amorousness, with the genuine, unrefined yearning of her sorrowful existence, with the practiced arts of a reckless coquetry. Severin could not resist the influence of her personality, but his experience with her was no different than any of the others he had had up to this point. There were moments when his heart believed it was on the threshold of something nameless, of which he had only a blind, groping knowledge. Then his hands trembled; then everything that happened to him had a significant, golden radiance; then he sat quiet and motionless and the world around him took on an enchanting beauty. Then the hours returned when grace was completely lost to him. With grief and resentment he realized that his mood had deceived him. He saw the lights in Karla’s eyes, her tall slender body, her languid arms and legs. He saw the pandering shadows of twilight, which clung palely and uncertainly to a world that no longer contained anything of wonder. And he kissed Karla’s mouth and took her as he had taken Susanna and would take Ruschena when she asked him to.

He spoke to Nikolaus about his heart. He told him everything he thought to himself as he wrote the figures on the gray paper at the office in the morning while the naked light of the electric bulb shimmered on the damp ink. He talked about the book he had read as a boy, and about the fear that sometimes seized him when he stood in front of the closed door of his apartment and, for minutes at a time, did not dare to open it, as though the action might decide something terrible. He confided in him about his love affairs, insofar as he could remember everything that had happened in the nights of drunken revelry, in the bars and cheap suburban dance-halls. He had always believed that his innermost being would be able to detect the great and unintentional event that overwhelmed everyone else, that drove women into the Moldau and forced pistols to the brows of men. He had once been present on the riverbank at Podskal when the raftmen pulled a woman’s body out of the water. She was a young person from the lower classes, a servant or a laborer, and the wet clothes that clung to her rigid body lay tightly around her powerful thighs and round breasts. Severin arrived when the people were gathering around the corpse and the policeman was filling out his report. He looked at her death-stiffened face and bluish mouth and asked himself what state must this person’s life have been in, what brutalities and privations had brought her to this end. Every day he read something in the newspaper about a suicide. Recently two people had shot themselves in a hotel room, recently a girl had taken poison and died in agony.