Every sound that appears in the here and now has many echoes, just as every object has one large shadow and many small shadows. But this voice no longer had any echoes, they must have long since died away and disappeared.

I had read the book right to the end and was still holding it in my hands, and yet I felt as if I had been searching through my brain and not leafing through a book!

Everything the voice had said to me I had carried within myself all my life, only it had been obscured and forgotten, had kept itself hidden from my thoughts until this day.

I looked up.

Where was the man who had brought me the book?

Gone!?

Will he return when it’s ready? Or am I to take it to him?

But I could not remember him saying where he lived.

I tried to recall his appearance, but failed.

What had he been wearing? Was he old, was he young? And what had been the colour of his hair, his beard?

Nothing, I could see nothing with my mind’s eye. Every picture I tried to conjure up disintegrated inexorably, even before it was properly fixed in my mind. I closed my eyes and pressed my hand against my lids in an attempt to catch just one tiny scrap of his portrait.

Nothing, nothing.

I stood in the middle of the room, looking at the door, just as I had been doing before, when he arrived, and pictured the scene: now he’s coming round the corner, now he’s crossing the red brick landing, now he’s reading the nameplate – Athanasius Pernath – on my door, and now he’s coming in. All to no avail. Not the faintest trace of a memory of what he looked like stirred within me.

I looked at the book lying on the table and tried to summon up in my mind the hand that went with it, that had taken it out of the pocket and handed it to me. I could not even remember whether it had a glove on or was bare, whether it was young or wrinkled, had rings on its fingers or not.

Then I had a curious idea. It was like an irresistible inspiration.

I put on my coat and hat and went out into the corridor and down the stairs, then walked slowly back to my room, slowly, very slowly, just as he had done when he came. And when I opened the door, I saw that my chamber was shrouded in dusk. Had it not been broad daylight when I went out a few seconds ago?

How long must I have stood down there, lost in thought, oblivious of the time?!

I was trying to imitate the gait and expression of the unknown man when I could not even remember them. How could I expect to imitate him if I had no clue at all as to what he looked like!

But what happened was different, completely different from what I imagined. My skin, my muscles, my body suddenly remembered, without revealing the secret to my brain. They made movements that I had not willed, had not intended.

As if my limbs no longer belonged to me!

All at once, when I took a few steps into the room, I found myself walking with a strange, faltering gait. That is the way someone walks who is constantly in fear of falling forward on to his face, I said to myself.

Yes, yes, yes! That was the way he walked!

I knew quite clearly: that is the way he is.

I was wearing an alien face, clean-shaven, with prominent cheek-bones; I was looking at my room out of slanting eyes. I could sense it, even though I could not see myself.

I wanted to scream out loud that that was not my face, wanted to feel it with my hand, but my hand would not obey me; it went into my pocket and brought out a book, just as he had done earlier.

Then, suddenly, I was sitting down again at the table, without my hat and coat, and was myself, I – I, Athanasius Pernath.

I was shaking with terror, my heart was pounding fit to burst and I knew that ghostly fingers had been poking round the crevices of my brain. They had left me a moment ago, but I could still feel the chill of their touch at the back of my head.

Now I knew what the stranger was like, and I could have felt him inside me, whenever I wanted – if I had wanted. But to picture him, to see him before me, eye to eye, that I still could not do, nor will I ever be able to.

I realised that he is like a negative, an invisible mould, the lines of which I cannot grasp, but into which I must let myself slip if I want to become aware of its shape and expression.

In the drawer of the desk I kept an iron box. I decided to lock the book away in it and only take it out again when this strange mental derangement had left me. Only then would I set about repairing the broken capital I.

So I picked up the book from the table: it felt as if I had not touched it at all.

I took the box in my hand – the same feeling. It was as if my sense of touch had to pass through a long tunnel of deepest darkness before it surfaced in my consciousness, as if the objects were separated from me by a seam of time a year wide and were part of a past which had long since left me.

The voice, which is circling round in the darkness, searching for me to torment me with the stone or the lump of fat, has passed me by without seeing me. I know that it comes from the realm of sleep. But everything that I have just experienced was real life, and I sense that is why it could not see me, why its search for me was vain.

PRAGUE

 

Standing beside me was Charousek, the collar of his thin, threadbare coat turned up; I could hear his teeth chattering. The poor student will catch his death of cold in this icy, draughty archway, I said to myself, and invited him to come over to my room with me, but he declined. “Thank you, Herr Pernath”, he murmured, shivering, “but unfortunately I have not much time left. I have to get to the city as quickly as possible. Anyway, we’d be soaked to the skin after a couple of steps if we went out into the street now. This downpour just won’t let up!”

Showers of water swept across the roof-tops, streaming down the faces of the houses like floods of tears.

If I turned my head a little I could see my window on the fourth floor across the street; with the rain trickling down, the panes looked like isinglass, opaque and lumpy, as if the glass were soggy. A filthy yellow stream was coursing down the street, and the archway was filling up with passers-by, who had all decided to wait for the storm to die down.

Suddenly Charousek said, “There goes a bridal bouquet”, pointing to a spray of withered myrtle floating past in the dirty water. Someone behind us gave a loud laugh at this remark. When I turned round I saw that it was an elegantly dressed, white-haired old gentleman with a puffy, frog-like face.