With great compassion he called the other’s name again and again:

Severin! Severin!

VIII


Doctor Konrad was dead. After a night of loud revelry, on which his guests gathered together for the last time, he put a bullet in his brain. Death had come to him with the same casual absurdity that had characterized his life. He lay on the floor next to the Turkish sofa, amid broken glasses and cigar ash that was still damp from spilled wine. Blood ran from the small wound in his temple onto the parquet floor. On this night he had spent the last of his inheritance. After the guests left, he shot himself dead.

It was a bright and motley group of mourners that paid him his last respects. Young academics in threadbare greatcoats, their frost-reddened hands buried in their pockets. They looked at the coffin before them with sincere compassion. The one they now accompanied to his grave had always held his hand open to them. Idlers with artists’ hats and unshaven faces. Little ladies in tightly fitting skirts that let their legs show when they walked. Elegant women with furs and enormous hand-muffs and men with carefully smoothed top hats, who swayed coquettishly in the fashionable waistlines of their winter coats. Blonde Ruschena was walking behind the hearse. Severin went up to her and silently offered her his hand. She answered with a spiteful, flickering glance, but said nothing. Her smooth face, on which she wore a little too much powder, had nothing in it to suggest that she had been more to the dead man than any of the others. Severin searched her eyes, but she turned her head away.

Karla was walking beside a large, thin-lipped man. Her tall figure was slightly stooped forward, and she had become, if possible, even more slender. Her broad coat hung loosely from her shoulders and she walked with tentative and shuffling steps, with none of the proud grace Severin remembered. Her face had become old and stern in the few weeks since he had last seen her. And he could not tell if the color of her cheeks came from the cold or from rouge. The procession stopped in front of the museum at the top of Wenceslaus Square. The priests began to say a blessing and the group of participants thinned out. Only Doctor Konrad’s closest acquaintances took cabs and followed the hearse to the cemetery.

Severin went with them. Ice was starting to form around the edges of the windows, and he wiped it away with his handkerchief. Outside he saw the bleak and monotonous panorama of Wolschaner Strasse. He had not been to a burial since childhood. He remembered how the carriage he had been sitting in with his parents had come upon a group of Czech demonstrators who had buried one of their martyrs in the churchyard and were now returning home. A revolutionary song, sung by a thousand voices, advanced with them threateningly, and made the horses rear and stop, trembling.