Within him he began to hear the music of the May devotions; the organ joined the choruses of the songs to Mary, and outside, in the linden tree that grew in front of the open church window, a bird began to twitter loudly, with a trembling throat.

He crossed the bridge and saluted the golden cruci-
fix with his hat. Suddenly he stood before the portal of Niklaskirche. Its green dome shone above the rooftops, and piercing and burning light lay on the steps before the door. Severin went in. The stone faces of the bishops looked at him from the colorful darkness and his steps echoed from the columns. The church was empty except for a woman in black who was kneeling near the door. She turned around when he entered, and he recognized the nun from the riverbank. Her face was white and her eyes burned beneath her cowl. Severin knelt next to her and, in a loud voice, prayed: Hail Regina, full of grace — — And he thought he saw a frightened smile pass over her mouth, behind her folded hands.

II


Karla and her new lover had opened a wine bar in the center of the city. The streetcorner began next to the German University, where students in bright caps stood before the enormous wooden gate. A cool breath of air came from the low passage entrances, and the smell of moldering leather and damp felt emerged from the shopkeepers’ cellars. Travelling merchants sometimes spent the night here, under the arcades of the Grünmarkt. They came to the city with baskets full of mushrooms and fresh berries and waited for the morning to come. It was lively here during the day. People crowded the narrow footpaths, secondhand dealers called out their wares in singsong voices, and carriages rattled over the uneven cobbles. At night the clamor retreated behind the dim panes of the dance halls, and it was quiet here except for an occasional group of inebriates or a watchman who, surrounded by people, stopped a drunken brawl.

A fiery arc lamp hung in front of the wine bar in the black lane. When one walked around the badly lit houses on the corner, the light stung one’s eyes, and the muffled sound of the piano came from the door. Karla had consulted young Nikolaus’s elegant and fertile taste for the furnishings of the rooms, and he was there every night among her guests. Through unrestrained dissonances, she had endowed the place with a strange and provocative beauty that suited her nature and that she did not want to live without. It was true that Nikolaus shook his head pensively the first time he entered the room. The dark tone of the tapestries was drowned in the scarlet blaze of the door curtains, and Karla had decided to have a bizarre, unsettling blood-red heart pattern embroidered on the adored blue-black velvet of the table runners and divans. But the unschooled temperament that expressed itself here thrilled and conquered. And when Karla, her unruly hair fastened with a chain, stood in the light of the electric lamp wearing a wild gypsy gown that displayed her beautiful bosom and arms, the wine flowed more sweetly from the engraved goblets, and there was a wonderful and beguiling sound in the music.

But the most delightful thing, what drew people and enticed them, was Mylada. Somewhere Karla had discovered this girl, whose origins no one knew and who had never been seen in Prague before. Now she sat in the wine bar every night, her gaunt face becoming no redder from drinking. She wore a simple green dress that sheathed her body like a thin shirt and showed her small pointed breasts. After a few weeks all the men had fallen in love with her. She had a manner no one could resist, which seduced the most silent into talking and conquered the most reserved. Her clear eyes, which sometimes became covered with cloud when she spoke, could fascinate the ponderous, intoxicate the capricious, and subjugate the depraved. She was a new and exciting trick in the dull nightlife of the city.