Severin listened to his explanations patiently, and looked distractedly over at Susanna, who was silently reading her book. Her brown hair was parted smoothly and the shadows of her long lashes played over her cheeks. Once she raised her face and their glances met.

From that time on Severin went to see Lazarus Kain often. The thought of the young Jewess would not let him sleep. Actually, Susanna was not beautiful. But an intriguing flame flickered in her eyes, in sharp contrast to her quiet mouth. In their velvet depths smoldered a treacherous devotion that disconcerted and excited him. Sometimes he had seen stars flicker like that when, worn out by an incomprehensible compulsion, he looked up into the sky as he made his way home late at night. Severin sought her eyes behind the smoke of his cigarette, behind her father’s bald avian head, behind the quick flutters of the raven, which jumped from one corner of the room to another as if in a cage. Susanna presented her eyes to him with an inexplicable seriousness, without ever taking part in the conversation or speaking a word to him. When he addressed her, her answers were curt and indifferent. This bothered him and made him stop trying. He continued speaking with Lazarus, and let him show him lithographs and photogravures.

One day when Susanna was not there, Lazarus promised Severin to introduce him at Doctor Konrad’s. He brought out the proposal cautiously, like the last part of a guarded confession. And in response to Severin’s amazed questions, he told him about the large atelier in one of the new buildings that were being constructed on the former site of the hovels of the Jewish Quarter. Here, with the last remains of a fortune that had been significant years before, Doctor Konrad had rented a painter’s workshop, which in reality served for entirely different purposes. Tapestries and potted palms gave the room an exotic appearance, and a few picture frames in the corner, an easel, and some studies of heads that were turned to the wall indicated the occupant’s métier. In reality it had been a long time since Doctor Konrad had touched a palette. He lay for hours on the comfortable Turkish sofa, rolled perfumed cigarettes in his hand, and let his servant bring him French cognac with seltzer. Sometimes he also listened to his mistress as she wearily strummed the mandolin. She was a blonde and spoiled creature named Ruschena. A swarm of guests came in the afternoons: Young gentlemen in dinner-jackets, with mouse-gray spats and patent leather shoes; old and experienced playboys in elegant street clothes, the ivory knobs of their riding crops at their mouths; artists with slouch hats and dirty linen; models in silk blouses and tight skirts who spent their free time here, drinking Doctor Konrad’s sweet liqueurs; and now and then a girl or a woman from better society, one shy and uncertain, the other with more impudence than was really necessary, brought here by the polymorphous attraction a dissolute life has to outsiders. That was what Lazarus talked about, and Severin guessed everything else from the old man’s suppressed excitement and fidgeting hands.

When he went back outside he met Susanna in the fog of the evening street. She looked at him with a smile, and his body began to shake, as though in terror. He took her warm hand mechanically, without flinching.

Come — she said to him, the smile still on her lips. He went with her into the house, where the stairs lay in darkness. Then he kissed her throat, which her dress left open to the nape of her neck.

Your father is downstairs in the shop — he said. Susanna only nodded and led him over the narrow steps and through the corridor into her room.

III


Last winter, on a clear and frosty evening, Zdenka had fallen in love with Severin. They had both been walking aimlessly among the bustling people, and the street had brought them together. The small locomotives of the chestnut vendors stood with red eyes on the edge of the roadway.