The shouting of drunkards rang through the streets and the moonlight glittered on the windowpanes. The moon hung over the city like a flame and shrouded it in white smoke. Severin felt as though something miraculous had happened, something sweet and powerful, like the adventures in the book from the Bohemian wars. He bent to Zdenka and searched for her mouth. As he kissed her, a deafening noise sounded from the moonlit night, a rumbling clap, as though the earth had split.

On the Moldau the ice had started to break up.

Book 2

The Spider

I


The summer had slowly returned. One cloud after another passed imperceptibly over Severin’s life without shaking his heart from the lethargy into which it had strayed at the end of the previous winter. On the evening when he stopped at Zdenka’s apartment in desperation and tears, he had no longer believed in peace. But now he possessed a marvelous tranquility that sharpened his senses and made him walk around smiling, like someone who had just recovered from a serious illness. A tender concern awoke in him, and he considered the world in its thousand minor details with constant amazement, like a stranger to whom everything is new. Every morning he woke from a sound sleep and the hot and radiant sun rose in his window. He would open his eyes and shut them again, blinded. The warm rain he loved so much pattered against the wall, and the air from outside filled his room with sweet vapors.

He now spent all his time with Zdenka. Now and then he was assailed by the memory of winter, and at these times his love sought help from her. He enjoyed her company with childish devotion, and on Sundays, as before, they went to parks in the city and in the suburbs. They sat together in beer-gardens and listened to the concerts of the military bands that played, one after another, selections from Verdi and Wagner, popular songs from Viennese operettas, and “The Reservist’s Dream.” The chestnut leaves spread a green skylight up above and threw dancing flecks of sun on the tablecloths, which were still damp and smelled of clothespins. Severin looked into Zdenka’s beautiful face and, with the languor of a convalescent, brought the cigarette to his mouth. The voices of people talking at nearby tables did him good. In the fragments of conversation that reached him he heard the orderly, comfortably stifled tempo of a life in which he was happy to have lost himself.

It seemed to him that the summer this year had completely transformed the city. He still felt the circulation of its blood in his own body, but was no longer frightened by it. In the afternoon, before he went to fetch Zdenka from the office, he walked through the sunny streets. He watched the men who watered the pavement and was pleased when little fountains leapt from the leaky hoses, or when a colorful rainbow lit up behind the atomized drops. On Franzenskai the acacias were in bloom. Severin sat on a bench at the edge of the riverbank. The Moldau flowed beneath him, and a sailboat drifted slowly toward the mills. A swarm of fantastic clouds moved over the sky, occasionally blocking out the sun.

Severin knew this image from his boyhood. Under the acacias that lined the embankment he and his father had sometimes waited for his Aunt Regina. A musty recollection dawned sleepily in his brain, and the dark room on the ground floor where his aunt had lived with the old maid appeared before him. He had always enjoyed visiting here. Behind the white tulle curtains hung a weather house with a little man holding a red tin umbrella in front of the door. The old maid was ill; cancer was devouring her fragile body.