Schoolboys and fifteen-year-olds — half-children — killed themselves because they could no longer bear living. Severin did not understand it. Solitary and defiant, he looked at the long row of unfortunates who had gone under because of hatred or love. In the legal pages of the dailies he read about troubled people who reeled between destinies, unnerved. The tally of victims and conquerors in this struggle rose before his eyes, and he knew that when he was on the street he was walking next to people with burning souls, gamblers who set their happiness on a card, bankrupts who could not go on.

Nikolaus listened to him thoughtfully and pushed the skin beneath his fingernails with a small ivory blade. And when Severin talked about Zdenka and Susanna, about the women he knew, about how he had waited in vain for the ecstasy of his blood in the arms of the waitresses, in the bed of the Jewess, in Karla’s embraces, Nikolaus said:

Stories about women are nothing to you. I think something greater awaits you.

Severin was startled. He remembered the strange prophecy Nikolaus had read from the lines of his palm at their first meeting in Doctor Konrad’s atelier. He felt the beating of his pulse and, with opposition and horror, the proximity of an undefined fate that he strove toward with all his senses and knew nothing about.

VI


Winter had come suddenly, without any warning. One day, when the remains of dawn were still spread out over the city, Severin left the house to find snow whirling in the air and covering the footpaths and rooftops. It was eight o’clock. Slowly and noisily, the merchants were opening their shops. The wind blew a light chill into the snow-covered streets, and Severin felt a little cold in his thin overcoat. He had been caught unprepared, and walked slowly down a narrow lane that led indirectly to his office. For the first time in years the knowledge returned that snow had a distinct smell, like apples that have lain between the windowpanes for a long time. Even as a child he had possessed a sentimental awareness of the aromas that characterized particular objects and particular times. He thought of the days at the beginning of school, when he entered the classroom for the first time since vacation and was met by the damp smell of chalk. He remembered the pleasure he had felt when, in the morning, after long and severe frosts, he smelled the thaw through the cracks in the door. He went outside and sipped the ice water that ran from the trees and ledges in glittering strands, which tasted milder and completely different in the sun than they did in the shadows. His youth was filled with the joy of many different smells which pleased or oppressed him, which accompanied the seasons and signified continuation and return. He was happy that the autumn was over and that winter was here. To him it was as though something new would be decided by it, something he had long felt the absence of.

He sat quietly in the office, his head bent behind the high top of the desk, and looked through the dirty panes at the white stars that fell in the courtyard. On the way here he had passed people selling things for St. Nikolaus’s Day. The carved devils stuck out their red flannel tongues at him, and on the streetcorners whole bushes of golden branches had been piled up, covered with bright paper flowers. Saints with starched robes and cotton beards stood on lacquered green boards.

In the evening he was walking on Old Town Square, where the annual market was being held. People crowded around the gingerbread horsemen, yellow trumpets, and colorful children’s drums, and girls pushed through the throng in pairs. The torches reeled over the sweets that were on display and shone flickeringly on the red turbans of the men who were selling Turkish delight. Zdenka was leaning in front of the low tent of a waxworks and staring at the Moor who was sitting at the cashbox and collecting money from the people who went in. It had been a long time since Severin had seen her.