He opened it and looked at the signature. And then he held blonde Ruschena’s letter over the flame, unread.

VII


An indomitable restlessness won control over Severin after he took the powder from his friend’s cabinet of poisons. Now he was completely alone again and had no contact with anyone. He did not go to Nikolaus’s, and it had been weeks since he had visited old Lazarus. The last time he had seen him was on the day when they met on the street and went to Doctor Konrad’s atelier. He heard nothing more of Susanna. There had been no news of her since the autumn evening when she had ignited him with a sudden flame and led him to her room. He intentionally stayed away from her father’s shop, in accordance with his preference for half-complete, unresolved experiences. He was afraid that a normal continuation would dull his memory of the Jewess and take away her attraction. The murky wishes of an epicure who is able to regard his own life at a distance forced themselves into his mind. It was convenient that she had made no attempt to reach him; he had ended things with Karla and Zdenka. A trembling longing bored constantly into his confused heart. As before, when he came home from the office in the afternoon he lay down to an insensible sleep that lasted for hours. At night he lay in bed with his eyes open and looked into the darkness. He counted the chimes of the clock in the neighbor’s apartment and struggled against the fear that assailed him. In the morning he went to the office with circles under his eyes.

Sometimes he rose in the middle of the night and had to get dressed. He could no longer bear being in the tousled bed, in the long low room which the darkness found difficult to leave, which remained black even when the strands of morning were moving across the sky. It was often past two or three when he closed the door of his apartment and groped his way down the dark steps to the street. He knew every part of the city, but now it gained a timid, unfamiliar power over him. It pulled him from frightful dreams and pressed him to its bosom. Freezing, with a charred cigarette between his lips, he walked past the sleeping houses, looked in at the lights burning late in solitary windows, and listened to the songs of revelers on their way home and the heavy tread of constables. There was a time when he too had been in the habit of returning home late at night, worn out by the noise in bars, his eyes hot from wine. Now he noticed the difference for the first time. His senses were clear and alert; he saw how the night transformed everything, how everything lived a separate, different life than it did by day. He saw how it made melancholy landscapes from the bleak, empty squares, and dark subterranean dungeons from the narrow lanes. His unrest drove him to the outermost borders of the suburbs, where the tenements stood in endless rows, and into the fifth district, where it was possible to get lost in the tedious modern streets even by the light of day. Now and then a few ruins from the old Jewish Quarter crept from the darkness. The cloister of the monk hospitallers pushed its colossal bulk against the rising new buildings, which were still covered in scaffolding. A few isolated lamps were burning on the Ufer des Frantischek, and the water beat heavily and evenly against the bridge.

In the late night bars the musicians played on raucous violins. Severin stopped in front of the dim windowpanes and peered inside through the draperies.