First published in 1917, Walpurgisnacht is again set in Prague and, like The Green Face, at a time of cataclysmic events, which reflect those taking place on the battlefields of Europe at the time. The novel moves between the ossified Habsburg bureaucrats and aristocrats in the castle district, which towers above the left bank of the Moldau, and the nationalist and revolutionary elements in the city below. Ottokar Vondrejc is the unacknowledged illegitimate son of Countess Zahradka; when the revolution breaks out, urged on by a drum made from the skin of the Hussite leader, Jan Žižka, Ottokar becomes the symbol of the nationalist movement. He is seated on Wallenstein’s stuffed horse and carried through the streets, only to be shot by his mother, Countess Zahradka.
Extract from Chapter 3 of Walpurgisnacht: The Dalibor Tower
The shadows of the old lime trees were already slanting across the quiet, walled courtyard of the Dalibor Tower, the grey dungeon on the Hradschin. For a good hour now the tiny warden’s cottage where the veteran soldier, Vondrejc, lived with his arthritic wife and his adopted son Ottokar, a nineteen-year old student at the conservatoire, had been enveloped in the cool afternoon shade.
The old man was sitting on a bench, counting copper and nickel coins and sorting them into piles on the rotting wood beside him. It was the tips that the day’s visitors to the tower had given him. Every time he reached ten, he made a line in the sand with his wooden leg.
He finished with a discontented grunt and muttered, ‘Two crowns, seventy-eight kreutzer,’ to his adopted son, who was leaning against a tree, desperately trying to brush out the shiny patches on the knees of his black suit; then he shouted it out loud, like a military report, through the open window, so that his bedridden wife could hear it in the living room.
That accomplished, Vondrejc, wearing his field-grey sergeant’s cap on his completely bald head, sank into a deathlike stupor, like a jumping jack whose string had broken, his half-blind eyes fixed on the fallen blossoms strewn over the ground like so many dead damsel flies.
He did not even move a muscle when his son picked up his violin-case from the bench, put on his velvet cap and made his way to the barrack-sized gate with its official yellow and black stripes. He did not even respond to his ‘Goodbye’.
The violin student set off down the hill, towards Thungasse where Countess Zahradka lived in a narrow, dark town house. After a few seconds, however, he stopped, as if an idea had suddenly struck him, had a quick look at his scratched pocket-watch, then hurried back up the hill, cutting the corners of the path up out of the Stag Moat as much as possible, to the New World, where, without knocking, he went into the room of Lizzie the Czech.
The old woman was so wrapped up in the memories of her youth, that it was a long time before she understood what he wanted.
‘The future? What do you mean: the future?’ she mumbled absent-mindedly, only taking in the last word of what he said. ‘The future? There’s no such thing as the future!’ Slowly she looked him up and down, obviously confused by his braided student’s jacket. ‘Why don’t they have gold braid nowadays? He is the Lord Chamberlain, you know,’ she said to the room at large in a low voice. ‘Oh! It’s Pan Vondrejc mladsi, young Mr. Vondrejc wants to know the future. So that’s it.’ Only now did she realise whom she was talking to.
Without another word, she went over to the sideboard and fished out from under it a plank covered with reddish modelling clay, placed it on the table and handed Ottokar a wooden stylus, saying, ‘Now, Pane Vondrejc, prick it from right to left — but without counting! Just think of what you want to know. Do sixteen rows, one below the other.’
Ottokar took the stylus, knitted his brows and hesitated for a while, then suddenly went deathly pale with excitement and, his hand trembling, feverishly stabbed the soft clay full of tiny holes.
He watched her eagerly as she counted them up, wrote them down in columns on a board and then drew geometrical shapes in a quadrilateral divided up into a number of squares, chattering mechanically all the while as she did so.
‘These are the mothers, the daughters, the nephews, the witnesses, the Red Man, the White Man and the Judge, the dragon’s tail and the dragon’s head, all just as they should be according to the good old Bohemian Art of the Dots. That’s what we learned from the Saracens, before they were wiped out in the Battle on the White Mountain. Long before Queen Libussa. Yes, yes, the White Mountain is soaked in human blood. Bohemia is the source of all wars. It was this time and it always will be. Our leader Jan Žižka, Žižka the Blind.’
‘What’s that about Žižka?’ Ottokar interrupted feverishly, ‘Does it say anything about Žižka?’
She ignored his question. ‘If the Moldau did not flow so fast it would still be red with blood, even today.’ Then all at once she changed her tone, speaking as if in bitter amusement, ‘Do you know, my son, why there are so many leeches in the Moldau? From the source until it flows into the Elbe, wherever you lift up a stone on the bank, you will always find little leeches underneath. That’s because at one time it was a river of blood. And they are waiting because they know that the day will come when it will feed them again … What is that?’ With a cry of astonishment she dropped the chalk and looked from the figures on the board to the young man and back again. ‘What’s that? You want to become Emperor of the World?’ She looked searchingly into his dark, flickering eyes.
He gave no answer, but she noticed that he was clutching the table to stop himself falling. ‘Would it be because of that woman there?’ she said, pointing to one of the geometrical figures. ‘And I always thought you were sweet on that Božena from Baron Elsenwanger’s?’
Ottokar gave a violent shake of the head.
‘Is that so? It’s all over is it, son? Don’t worry, a real Czech girl never bears a grudge, even if she’s pregnant. But you beware of her,’ again she pointed to the shape, ‘she’s a bloodsucker. She’s Czech as well, but she belongs to the old race, the dangerous race.’
‘That’s not true,’ said Ottokar in a hoarse voice.
‘She is of the blood of the Borivoj, I tell you. And you,’ she gave the young man’s narrow, brown face a long, thoughtful look, ‘you are of the Borivoj line as well. Two such as you are drawn together like iron and magnet. There’s no need to waste my time reading the signs,’ and she wiped her arm over the board before Ottokar could stop her. ‘Just you be careful it’s not you that’s the iron and she the magnet, otherwise you’re lost, son. Among the Borivoj murder and incest were standard practice. Remember good King Wenceslas!’
Ottokar tried to smile. ‘Saint Wenceslas was no more from the line of Borivoj than I am. My name is Vondrejc, Frau … Frau Lisinka.’
‘Don’t keep on calling me Frau Lisinka!’ In her fury the old woman thumped the table with her fist. ‘I’m no Frau, I’m a whore!’
‘What I would like to know … er, Lisinka, is what you meant by “becoming Emperor of the World” and what you said about Jan Žižka?’ asked Ottokar timidly.
A creaking noise from behind made him stop. He turned round to see the door slowly open and in the frame a man appeared with a large pair of dark spectacles on his face, an incredibly long coat, which had something carelessly stuffed between the shoulders to make him look like a hunchback, his nostrils flared wide from cotton wool that had been stuffed up them, and a carroty wig and whiskers which one could tell from a hundred yards were stuck on.
‘Prosím. Milostpane. Milady.’ The stranger addressed Lizzie the Czech in a voice that was obviously disguised. ‘Do hexcuse me, Ma’am, for the disturbance, but would I be right in thinkin’ that ’is Majesty’s Physician, Doctor von ’Alberd was ’ere a while ago?’
The old woman twisted her mouth in a silent grin.
‘Do hexcuse the hinterruption, but I did ’ear ’e was ’ere, Ma’am.’
Still nothing but the corpselike grin. The strange visitor was clearly perplexed.
‘You see, I ’ave to hinform ’is Excellency —’
‘I don’t know of any Majesty’s Physician,’ Lizzie the Czech suddenly yelled at him. ‘Get out, and make it quick, you pest.’
Like lightning, the door was shut, and the dripping sponge that the old woman had taken from the slate and hurled at her visitor fell to the floor with a damp thud.
‘That was only Stefan Brabetz,’ she said, anticipating Ottokar’s question. ‘He’s an informer, works on his own account. He dresses up differently every time and thinks nobody knows who he is. If there’s anything going on, he soon picks it up. Then he’d like to demand money, but he doesn’t know how to go about it. He comes from down below. From Prague. They’re all like that down there. I think it must be a result of the mysterious air that comes up out of the ground. They all become like him in time, some sooner, some later — unless they die first. Whenever they meet someone, they give a sly grin, so the other will believe they know something about them. Have you never noticed, son’ — she became oddly uneasy and began to walk restlessly up and down the room — ‘that everything is crazy in Prague? Crazy from all the secrecy? You’re mad yourself, son, you just don’t know it. Of course, up here on the Hradschin it’s a different kind of madness. Quite different from down there. More a kind of … of fossilised madness. Everything up here’s turned into a fossil. But once the storm breaks, these giant fossils will come back to life and smash the city to smithereens … At least,’ her voice sank to a low murmur, ‘that’s what my grandmother used to tell me when I was a girl. Well, I suppose that Stefan Brabetz can smell that there’s something in the air up here on the Hradschin. Something’s going on.’
Ottokar went pale and gave a shy, involuntary glance at the door. ‘How do you mean? What’s supposed to be going on?’
Lizzie the Czech stared straight in front of her. ‘Yes, believe me, sonny, you’re mad already. Perhaps you really do want to become Emperor of the World.’ She paused. ‘And why should it not be possible? If there weren’t so many madmen in Prague, how could all the wars start there?! Yes, you stay mad, son. In the end why shouldn’t a madman rule the world? Why, I became the mistress of King Milan Obrenovic, simply by believing it was possible. And how close I was to being Queen of Serbia!’ It was as if she suddenly woke up. ‘Why are you not in the war, son. Oh? A weak heart, is it? Hmm. And why do you think you are not a Borivoj?’ She gave him no time to answer. ‘And where are you off to now, sonny, with your violin?’
‘To Countess Zahradka’s. I’m to play to her.’
The old woman gave him a surprised look and once more subjected his face to a long and detailed scrutiny, then, like someone who is now certain, she said, ‘Hmm. Well. Borivoj. And does she like you, Countess Zahradka?’
‘She’s my godmother.’
Lizzie the Czech laughed out loud. ‘Godmother, hahaha, godmother!’
Ottokar did not know what to make of her laughter. He would have liked to ask his question about Jan Žižka again, but he saw there was no point.
He had known the old woman too long not to be aware that her impatient expression meant that she wanted the interview to end. With a shy mumble of thanks, he slipped out of the door.
He had scarcely caught sight of the old Capuchin Monastery dreaming in the glow of the setting sun, than he heard, just beside him as if in greeting, the ancient bells of the Loretto Church casting their spell over him like a magical orchestra of aeolian harps. The air, vibrant with melody and fragrant with the scent of the flowers in the nearby gardens, enfolded him in the gossamer caress of some invisible, ethereal realm. Enchanted, he stopped and listened, and seemed to hear the tones of an old hymn, sung by a thousand voices. And as he listened, he felt at times that it came from within him, then as if the notes were hovering round his head, to echo and die away in the clouds; sometimes it was so near, he thought he could recognise the Latin words of the psalm, at others, drowned by the sonorous boom of the bronze bells, it sounded like faint chords rising from underground cloisters.
Deep in thought, he crossed the Hradschin Square with its feast-day decoration of silver-birch twigs, passing in front of the Castle; the noise of the bells crashed in resounding waves against its rock-hewn ramparts, making his violin in its wooden case vibrate, like a body in a coffin coming back to life.
Then he was standing at the top of the New Castle Steps, looking down the balustrade-girt flight of two hundred granite steps onto a sea of sunlit roofs, from the depths of which, like a gigantic black caterpillar, a procession was crawling slowly up. It seemed to raise a silver head with purple-spotted feelers, searching for its way, as, under the white canopy carried by four priests in albs and stoles, the Prince-Archbishop, with the little red cap on his head, red silk shoes on his feet and gold-embroidered chasuble round his shoulders, led the singing crowd upwards, step by step.
In the warm, still evening air, the flames over the candles carried by the servers were almost invisible ovals trailing thin black threads of smoke through the bluish clouds from the swinging thuribles. The setting sun lay on the city, streaming over the long bridges in a blaze of crimson and flowing past the piers with the current, gold transformed into blood. It flared up in a thousand windows, as if the houses were on fire.
Ottokar stared at the scene; he could still hear the old woman’s words, how she had said the Moldau once ran red with blood. And the magnificent spectacle of the procession coming ever closer up the Castle Steps! For a moment he was in a daze: that was how it would be, when his mad dream of being crowned emperor was fulfilled! He closed his eyes so as not to see the people who were standing beside him to watch the procession; for a few minutes more he wanted to block out the sight of the everyday world.
Then he turned round and passed through the Castle courtyards, in order to make his way to Thungasse by another, deserted route. As he came round the corner by the Provincial Diet he was surprised to see the huge gates of the Wallenstein Palace wide open. He hurried along, to try and catch a glimpse of the gloomy garden covered in ivy with branches as thick as a man’s arm, and perhaps see the wonderful renaissance hall and the historic grotto behind it. As a child he had seen all these marvels from close to, and the memory was deeply engraved on his soul, as of a visit to a fairy kingdom.
Lackeys in silver-braided livery and with close-cropped whiskers and clean-shaven upper lips were silently dragging the stuffed horse, that had carried Wallenstein when it was alive, out into the street. He recognised it by the scarlet blanket and its staring yellow eyes, which, he suddenly remembered, had often appeared in his childhood sleep, as a mysterious omen which he had never been able to interpret.
Now the stallion stood before him in the golden-red rays of the setting sun, its hooves screwed to a dark-green board, like a gigantic toy sent from a dream-world to these prosaic times, to this age which has stolidly accepted the most terrible of all wars: the war of men against demonic machines, compared with which Wallenstein’s battles seem no more than alehouse brawls.
Once again, as at the sight of the procession, an icy shiver ran down his spine when he saw the riderless horse that seemed only to be waiting for some determined man, some new master, to leap into the saddle. He did not hear the passers-by commenting disparagingly on its moth-eaten hide. The mocking question from one of the lackeys — ‘Would it perhaps please my Lord Marshal to mount?’ — made his bowels churn and his hair stand on end, as if it were the voice of destiny coming from the primal depths. He was impervious to the scorn behind the servant’s words. Only an hour ago, the old woman had said to him, ‘You’re mad yourself, son, only you don’t know it,’ but had she not gone on to say, ‘In the end, why shouldn’t a madman rule the world?’
He could feel his heart beating in his throat with wild excitement; he tore himself away from his fantasies and raced to Thungasse.
When spring arrived, old Countess Zahradka used to move into the small, dark mansion of her late sister, Countess Morzin, whose rooms were never brightened by a single ray of light. She hated the sun and even more she hated the month of May, with its soft, voluptuous breath and the cheerful people in their Sunday best. At that time, her own house, close to the Premonstratensian monastery at the highest point of the city, was fast asleep behind closed shutters. The stairs Ottokar was rushing up were of bare brick, and led, directly and without passing through a hall, into the stone-cold corridor with marble flags onto which the doors of the various rooms opened.
There were rumours — though God only knows where they came from — that the house, which resembled nothing more than a county courthouse, was haunted and, moreover, concealed an immense treasure. They had probably been invented by some wag to emphasise the contempt for all romantic fancies which seemed to emanate from its every stone. Ottokar’s daydreams certainly vanished from his mind the moment he set foot on the steps. He was filled with such a sense of his own poverty-stricken insignificance that he gave an involuntary bow before he knocked and entered.
The room in which Countess Zahradka, sitting in a chair covered entirely in grey hessian, was waiting for him, was the most uncomfortable imaginable: the stove of Meissen porcelain, the sofas, sideboards, chairs, the chandelier of Venetian glass, that must have had a hundred candles, a suit of armour, were all covered with sheets, as if awaiting an auction; even the countless miniatures, which covered the walls from ceiling to floor, were veiled in gauze; ‘to keep the flies off’, Ottokar remembered the Countess telling him when once, as a child, he had asked her about the reason for these bizarre protective covers. Or had he only dreamed it? The many times he had been here he could never remember having seen a single fly.
He had often wondered what might be outside the clouded window-panes, by which the old lady used to sit. Could it be a courtyard, a garden, a street? He had never attempted to ascertain what it was; to do so, he would have had to go past the Countess, and the very idea was unthinkable. The eternal sameness of the room stifled any resolutions he might have made. The moment he entered, he was transported back to the time when he had had to make his first visit here, and he felt as if he himself were sewn up in hessian and linen, to protect him against non-existent flies.
The only object that was not draped, or at least only partially so, was the one lifesize portrait among all the miniatures; a rectangular hole had been cut in the calico, which covered picture and frame, revealing the bald, pear-shaped head, the staring, watery-blue fish-eyes and flabby cheeks of the old lady’s late husband, the Lord High Chamberlain.
Although he had long since forgotten who had told him, Ottokar Vondrejc had heard from somewhere that the Count had been cruel and harsh, pitiless not only towards the sufferings of others, but also towards his own. It was said that as a child he had hammered a nail through his foot into the floor, merely to amuse himself!
The house was full of cats, all of them old, slow, creeping creatures. Often Ottokar would see a dozen or so walking up and down the corridor, grey and quiet, as if they were witnesses waiting to be called into court. They never entered the room, however; if, by mistake, one did put its head round the door, it would immediately withdraw it in haste, as if it quite agreed it was not time for it to give evidence yet.
Countess Zahradka’s attitude to Ottokar was strange. Sometimes he would detect in her look something of the tender caress of a mother’s love, but it would only last for a few seconds; the next moment he would feel a wave of icy contempt, almost hatred.
Her love, if it was that, was never expressed in words, but often enough her cruel arrogance found eloquent expression, even if it was more in the tone of what she said than in the actual meaning of her words.
He had first been commanded to perform before her on the occasion of his first communion, playing the Czech folk-song ‘Andulko, mé díte, já vás mám rád’ on his half-size violin. Later he had played other tunes, love songs and hymns until, as his playing and technique improved, he could perform Beethoven sonatas; but never, no matter whether his performance was good, bad or indifferent, had he seen the slightest sign of approval or disapproval on her face. Even now, he had no idea whether she appreciated his playing.
Sometimes he had tried to appeal to her emotions by improvising, to see if he could sense, from the rapid fluctuations of her response, whether his music had found the key to her heart; but he often felt her love when he was playing out of tune, and hatred when he reached the heights of virtuosity.
Perhaps the unbounded arrogance of her blood responded to the perfection of his playing as to an intrusion on her aristocratic privileges and flared up in hatred; perhaps it was her Slav instinct only to love what was weak and feeble; perhaps it was merely chance, but there was always an insurmountable barrier between them, and he very soon gave up the idea of trying to remove it, just as it never occurred to him to push past her to look out of the windows.
He gave her a mute, respectful bow, opened his violin-case, tucked his instrument under his chin and raised the bow to the strings, which prompted her stock, offhand response, ‘Well then, Pane Vondrejc, play your fiddle.’ Perhaps it was the contrast between the excitement he had felt as he stood outside Wallenstein Palace and the feeling of being trapped in the past which overcame him in this grey room, that led him, without thinking, to play the silly, sentimental song from the days of his first communion, ‘Andulko …’ As soon as he heard himself play the first few notes, he started in confusion, but the Countess looked neither surprised nor annoyed; she was merely staring into space, like the portrait of her husband.
Gradually he began to improvise on the tune, following the inspiration of the moment. He would regularly allow himself to be carried away by his own playing, which he then listened to in astonishment, as if it were another person playing, not himself, a different person who was inside him and yet not himself, a person of whom he knew nothing except that he guided the bow. Ottokar would be so carried away by his music that the walls about him disappeared and he would find himself wandering round a dreamworld filled with shimmering colours and sounds, where he plunged into uncharted depths and surfaced with mellifluous jewels. Then it would sometimes happen that the dull windows became crystal-clear, and he knew that beyond them was a glorious fairy realm, filled with the flutter of glistening white butterflies, living snowflakes in the middle of summer; and he would see himself walking down unending avenues of overarching jasmine, drunk with love, his spirit bathed with the scent from the skin of the young woman in bridal white whose warm shoulder was pressing in intimate embrace against his own.
Then, as so often happened, the grey linen masking the portrait of the dead Count would turn into a cascade of ash-blond hair beneath a sunny straw hat with a pale-blue ribbon, and he would see a girl’s face with dark eyes and half-open lips gazing down at him.
Dreaming, waking, sleeping, he felt those features within him, as if they were his true heart; and every time he saw them come alive, the ‘other person’, who was inside him, seemed to obey a mysterious command, which came from ‘her’, and his music took on the dark tones of a wild, alien cruelty.
The door to the adjoining room was suddenly opened and the young girl who had been in his thoughts entered quietly.
Her face resembled the portrait of the young lady in the Rococo crinoline in Elsenwanger House, she was just as young and beautiful. Behind her a horde of cats peeked in.
Ottokar looked at her as calmly as if she had been there all the time. What was there to be surprised at? She had simply stepped out of his mind and appeared before him.
He played and played, self-absorbed, lost in his dreams. He saw himself standing with her in the deep darkness of the crypt of St. George’s, the light from a candle carried by a monk flickering on a barely life-sized statue in black marble: the figure of a dead woman, half decayed, her dress in tatters over her breast, her eyes shrivelled and a snake with a horrible, flat, triangular head curled up inside her torn-open stomach in place of a child.
And the music of his violin changed into the words, as monotonous as a ghostly litany, which the monk in St. George’s would repeat every day to visitors to the crypt:
‘Many years ago, there was a sculptor in Prague who lived with his mistress without the blessing of the Church. And when he saw that she was with child, he no longer trusted her and, believing she had deceived him with another man, he strangled her and threw the body down into the Stag Moat. The worms had already gnawed at her when they found it. They locked the murderer in the crypt with the corpse and, as penance for his sin, compelled him to carve her likeness in stone before he was broken on the wheel.’
All at once Ottokar came to, and his fingers stopped on the strings as his waking eye suddenly caught sight of the girl standing behind the old Countess’ chair and smiling at him. He froze, incapable of movement, the bow raised in his hand.
Countess Zahradka took up her lorgnette and slowly turned her head. ‘Carry on playing, Ottokar. It’s only my niece. Don’t disturb him, Polyxena.’
Ottokar did not move, only his arm fell loosely to his side, as if under the effect of a heart spasm.
For a good minute there was complete silence in the room.
‘Why have you stopped playing?’ asked the Countess angrily.
Ottokar pulled himself together, scarcely knowing how to hide the fact that his hands were trembling; then, softly, shyly, the violin began to whimper:
Andulko,
My little child
I do love you.
A purring laugh from Polyxena brought the melody to a halt. ‘Won’t you tell us, Herr Ottokar, what that marvellous tune was that you were playing before? Was it an improvisation? It — called — up,’ after each word Polyxena paused meaningfully; her eyes were lowered, and she plucked at the fringes of the chair, apparently lost in thought, ‘a — vivid — picture of — St. George’s — crypt, Herr … Herr … Ottokar.’
The old Countess gave an almost imperceptible start. There was something about the tone in which her niece spoke the name Ottokar which aroused her suspicions.
The bewildered student stammered a few embarrassed words. There were two pairs of eyes fixed upon him, the one full of such consuming passion that they seemed to scorch his brain, the other penetrating, razor sharp, radiating suspicion and deadly hate at the same time. He could not look at either without either hurting the one deeply or revealing his innermost feelings to the other. ‘Quick! Play! Just keep on playing!’ screamed something inside him. Hastily he raised his bow. Beads of sweat were forming on his forehead. ‘For God’s sake, not that blasted “Andulko” again!’ As he drew the bow across the strings he felt to his horror that it was inescapable … everything began to go black … then the sound of a hurdy-gurdy from the street outside came to his rescue and, with crazed, mindless haste, he rushed into the music-hall song with the chorus:
Pale as the lily
Never should marry,
My mother said;
Lips like the cherry,
Rosy and merry,
Kiss and soon wed.
After one verse, he stopped; the gust of hatred that came from Countess Zahradka almost knocked the bow out of his hand.
Through a veil of mist he saw Polyxena dart over to the grandfather clock by the door, pull the linen cover aside and push the finger round until it pointed to VIII. He realized it was a way of telling him the time for their rendezvous, but the joy froze in his throat at the fear that the Countess had seen through the stratagem.
He saw her long, skinny, old woman’s fingers rummaging in the knitting bag hanging from the back of the chair and sensed that she was about to do something that would be unimaginably humiliating for him, something so terrible he dared not even guess what it might be.
‘Capital — music — Vondrejc — capital,’ said the Countess, spitting out each word separately, took two crumpled notes from the bag and handed them to him. ‘There’s — a tip — for you. And buy yourself — a pair of — better — trousers on my account before the next time, those are all worn and shiny.’
Ottokar’s heart almost stopped beating with the shame. His last clear thought was that he had to take the money, if he did not want to give himself away. Before his eyes the whole room dissolved into a cloud of grey: Polyxena, the clock, the face of the late Chamberlain, the suit of armour, the armchair, only the dusty windows stood out, whitish rectangles bursting through the gloom. He realised that the Countess had drawn her own grey cover over him — ‘as a protection against the flies’ — and that he would never be able to rid himself of it until death.
He found himself out in the street, with no memory of how he had come down the stairs. Had he been in the upstairs room at all? A burning wound deep within him told him that he must have been. And he was still clutching the money in his hand. Unthinking, he thrust it into his pocket.
Then he remembered that Polyxena would come to him at eight o’clock; he heard the towers strike the quarter; a dog yapped, it struck him like a whiplash across his face: Did he really look so shabby that the dogs of the rich barked at him?
He clenched his teeth together, as if he could grind his thoughts into silence, and raced on trembling legs towards his home. At the next corner he stopped, swaying to and fro. ‘No, not home. Away, far away from Prague.’ He was consumed with shame, ‘The best would be to throw myself into the river!’ With the decisiveness of youth he immediately set off for the Moldau, but the ‘other person’ inside him slowed his steps, whispering that he would surely betray Polyxena, if he were to drown himself, and concealing from him the fact that it was the vital urge within that was holding him back from suicide.
‘Oh God, my God, how can I look her in the face when she comes?’ he sobbed to himself. ‘No, no, she won’t come, it’s all over.’ At that the pain in his breast sunk its fangs even more deeply into his soul: if she did not come to him any more, how could he go on living?
He went through the black and yellow striped gate into the courtyard of the Dalibor Tower, aware that the next hour would be an endless torment as he counted each minute. If Polyxena came he would shrivel before her with shame; if she did not come, then the night of madness would swallow him up.
He shuddered as he glanced over at the dungeon tower with its round, white hat, towering up from the Stag Moat behind the crumbling wall. He had a dim feeling that the tower was still alive: how many victims had already succumbed to madness in its stone belly, but still the Moloch was not satisfied; now, after a hundred years of deathlike sleep, it was awakening again.
For the first time since his childhood he saw it not as the work of human hands, but as a granite monster with fearsome entrails that could digest flesh and blood, just like those of some nocturnal predator. It had three stories with a round hole down the middle like a pipe from gullet to stomach. In the dreadful darkness of the top floor, year after lightless year had gnawed at the condemned prisoners, until they were let down by ropes into the middle room for their last loaf of bread and jug of water, after which they would die of thirst, unless, crazed by the reek of decay from below, they flung themselves through the hole to join the stinking cadavers.
The courtyard of limes breathed the dewy damp of the evening twilight, but the window of the keeper’s cottage still stood open. Ottokar sat down on the bench, as quietly as possible so as not to disturb the old, gout-ridden woman who, so he believed, was sleeping on the other side of the wall. He wanted to clear his mind of all that had happened for a moment, before the torture of waiting began: a childish attempt to outwit his heart.
He was suddenly overcome with a feeling of weakness; it needed all his strength to hold back the sobs which gripped him by the throat and threatened to suffocate him. From inside the room, he heard a toneless voice, which sounded as if someone were speaking into a pillow, ‘Ottokar?’
‘Yes, mother?’
‘Aren’t you going to come in for your dinner?’
‘No, mother. I’m not hungry; I — I’ve already had something to eat.’
For a while the voice was silent.
In the room the clock chimed a soft, metallic half past seven. Ottokar pressed his lips together and clenched his hands. ‘What should I do? What should I do?!’
Again he heard the voice. ‘Ottokar?’
He did not reply.
‘Ottokar?’
‘Yes, mother?’
‘Why … why are you crying, Ottokar?’
He gave a forced laugh. ‘Me? Whatever are you thinking, mother! I’m not crying. Why ever should I cry?’
The voice fell silent, unbelieving.
Ottokar raised his eyes from the shadow-dappled courtyard. ‘If only the bells would finally ring out and break this deathly silence!’
He stared at a crimson gash in the sky, and felt that he had to say something.
‘Is father in there?’
‘He’s at the inn,’ came the answer after a pause. He stood up quickly. ‘Then I’ll go and join him for an hour or so. Goodnight, mother.’ He picked up his violin case and looked at the tower.
‘Ottokar?’
‘Yes? Should I close the window?’
‘Ottokar! Ottokar, I know you’re not going to the inn. You’re going in the Tower, aren’t you?’
‘Yes … well … later. It … it’s the best place for practising. Goodnight.’
‘Is she coming to the Tower again tonight?’
‘Božena? Who knows. She might. If she’s free she sometimes comes and we have a chat. Is there any message for father?’
The voice became even sadder, ‘Do you think I don’t know it’s someone else? I can tell by her tread. No one who has been working hard all day would step so lightly and so quickly.’
‘You do get funny ideas, mother!’ He tried to laugh.
‘Well, I’ve said my piece. And you’re right, you’d better close the window. It’s better like that, then I won’t be able to hear those awful songs you always play when she’s with you. I … I wish I could help you, Ottokar.’
Ottokar held his hands over his ears, then he put the violin case under his arm, hurried across to the gap in the wall and ran up the crumbling stone steps and across the little wooden footbridge into the top floor of the Tower. The semicircular room where he was standing had a narrow window, really no more than an enlarged slit for bowmen to shoot through, in the three-foot thick wall; it looked out to the south and in it the silhouette of the cathedral hovered over the ancient castle. For the visitors who came to visit the Dalibor Tower during the day there were a few rough wooden chairs, a table with a jug of water on it and an old, faded sofa. In the darkness, they looked as if they were rooted to the ground. A small iron door with a crucifix on it led into the adjoining chamber where, two hundred years ago, a Countess Lambua, Polyxena’s great-great-grandmother, had been imprisoned. She had poisoned her husband and before she died, in her madness she had bitten open the arteries of her wrist and painted his portrait in blood on the wall.
Behind it was a dark cell, scarcely six foot square, where, with a piece of iron, a prisoner had scratched a cavity in the stone blocks of the wall, deep enough for a man to squat inside. He had scraped away for thirty years; a handsbreadth more and he would have been free — free to throw himself into the Stag Moat below. But he had been discovered in time and moved to the middle of the tower, where he had starved to death.
Restless, Ottokar paced up and down, sat in the window, stood up again; one minute he was certain Polyxena would come, the next he was convinced he would never see her again; each possibility seemed more dreadful than the other, each contained his hopes and fears together.
Every night Polyxena’s image accompanied him in his dreams, waking and sleeping it filled his life. He thought of her when he played the violin, when he was alone he held imaginary conversations with her. He had built the most fantastic castles in the air for her, but what did the future hold? In the boundless despair of youth, such as only a heart of nineteen years can feel, he saw it as an airless, lightless dungeon.
The idea that he might ever play on his violin again seemed an utter impossibility. There was a faint, scarcely audible voice inside him, telling him that everything would turn out quite differently from his imaginings, but he did not listen, refused to listen to it. Often pain can be so overpowering that comfort, even if it comes from within, only makes it burn all the more.
The gathering darkness in the deserted room only increased his agitation until it was unbearable. He kept on imagining he heard soft noises outside, and his heart stood still at the thought that it must be ‘her’. Then he would count the seconds until, according to his calculation, she should have found her way in through the darkness, but every time his expectation was disappointed, and the thought that she might have turned back on the threshold drove him almost to distraction.
He had become acquainted with her only a few months ago. It seemed to him like a fairytale come true when he thought back to it. Two years before that he had seen her, but as a picture, as the portrait of a lady from the Rococo period with ash-blond hair, narrow, almost transparent cheeks and a strange, cruelly lascivious expression round her half-open lips, behind which glistened the white of tiny, bloodthirsty teeth. The picture hung in the portrait gallery of Elsenwanger House, and one evening, when he had been sent to play to the guests there, he had seen it looking down at him from that wall, and it had branded itself on his mind so that whenever he closed his eyes and thought of it, it appeared clearly before him. Gradually it had come to dominate his youthful yearning and so captured his whole being that it had gradually come to life, so that in the evenings, when he sat on the bench beneath the limes dreaming of her, he could feel it nestling against his breast like a creature of flesh and blood.
It was the portrait of a Countess Lambua, he had been told, and her first name was Polyxena.
From then on he invested that name with all the beauty, joy, glory, happiness and sensuality his youthful imagination could dream up, until it became a magic word, which he only needed to whisper for him to feel the presence of its bearer like a caress which scorched him to the marrow. In spite of his age, and the fact that until then he had enjoyed perfect health, he sensed that the heart condition that suddenly began to trouble him was incurable and that he was doomed to die young, a feeling that never filled him with sadness, but was more like a foretaste of the sweetness of death.
From his childhood on, the strange, unworldly setting of the Dalibor Tower with its gloomy stories and legends had encouraged him to build castles in the air, in contrast to which the world around, with its poverty and oppressive narrowness, seemed a hostile dungeon. It never occurred to him to try to connect his dreams and longings with his everyday reality. Time stretched ahead of him, empty of plans for the future.
He had had very little to do with children of his own age. For a long time his world had been bounded by the Dalibor Tower with its lonely courtyard, his taciturn foster-parents and the old tutor, who had taught him until well past childhood because the Countess, who paid for his upbringing, did not want him to attend school.
His cheerless existence, and his separation from the world of ambition, the race for fame and fortune, would probably have turned him, before his time, into one of those solitary eccentrics wrapped up in their own daydreams who were so common on the Hradschin, had not something happened which had turned his soul upside down, something so uncanny and yet at the same time so real, that with one blow it had demolished the wall separating his inner life from the world outside, turning him into a man who had moments of ecstasy in which even his wildest fantasies seemed within easy grasp.
It had happened in the cathedral. He was sitting among old women saying their rosaries; he had been staring at the tabernacle, oblivious to his surroundings, not noticing their comings and goings, until all at once he realised the church was empty apart from someone sitting beside him — the very image of Polyxena. It was the very same face he had been dreaming of all this time, right down to her delicately chiselled nostrils and the curve of her lips.
For a moment, the gap between dream and reality closed, but only for a moment; a second later he was fully aware that it was a living girl he could see beside him on the bench. But that single moment was enough to give fate the purchase it needs to prize a person’s destiny for ever off its predetermined path of rational decision and to send it careering into that boundless world where faith can move mountains.
In the confused, sensual ecstasy of one who finds himself face to face with the idol of his yearning, he had flung his arms wide and thrown himself down before the physical incarnation of all his dreams, he had called out her name, embraced her knees, covered her hands with kisses; trembling with excitement, he had told her, in a tumbling cascade of words, what she meant to him, that he had known her for a long time, without ever having seen her in the flesh.
And there in the church, surrounded by the golden statues of the saints, they had both been seized by a wild, unnatural love, which had carried them away like a hellish whirlwind, raised by the sudden stirring of a ghostly line of depraved ancestors, who for centuries had been confined to the portrait gallery.
As if by some satanic miracle, the young girl, who entered the cathedral an innocent virgin, had, by the time she left, also been transformed into the spiritual likeness of her ancestress, who had borne the same name of Polyxena and whose portrait now hung in Baron Elsenwanger’s town house.
Since that day, they had met whenever they had the opportunity, without prior arrangement and without ever not finding the other. It was as if there were some magic attraction in their passion that drew them together; they acted instinctively, like dumb animals on heat who do not need understanding, because they understand the call of the blood. Neither of them found it at all surprising when chance led to their paths crossing at the very moment when their lust for the other was at its strongest. For Ottokar, each time he saw that it was Polyxena, and not merely her image, in his arms, it was the constant renewal of a miracle, such as had been repeated but an hour ago.
When he heard her steps approaching the tower — this time it really was her — his torment had already disappeared, had faded away like the memory of some illness he had long since recovered from. When they were in each others’ arms he was never sure: had she come through the door, or through the wall, like some apparition? She was with him and that was all that he knew, or wanted to know; anything that had happened before had been swallowed up in the abyss of time.
And that was how it was now.
He saw her straw hat with the pale-blue ribbon appear in the darkness of the room, then it was thrown carelessly into a corner, and everything else followed; her white dress was like a cloud of mist on the table, the rest of her clothes were scattered around the chairs; he felt her hot skin, her teeth biting into his neck, heard her groans of pleasure: everything happened too quickly for him to grasp, like a series of lightning images, each one displacing the last, each one more overwhelming. He was in an ecstasy of voluptuousness which blotted out all sense of time. Had she asked him to play his violin for her? He had no idea, could not recall her saying so.
All he knew was that he was standing upright before her, her arms embracing his loins; he could feel Death sucking the blood from his veins, could feel his hair stand on end, his skin freeze, his knees tremble. He was incapable of rational thought, at times he felt he was about to fall backwards, then, at that very moment, he would wake, as if she were holding him up, and hear a song from the strings that his bow and his hand must have been playing, but that also came from her, from her soul and not from his, a song in which lascivious desire was mingled with fear and horror.
Half unconscious, unable to resist, he listened to the story the music told: everything Polyxena imagined, in order to whip herself up into an even greater frenzy of lust, he saw as a series of vivid images; he felt her thoughts pass into his mind, watched them come to life and then read them in elaborate letters on a stone slab: it was the extract from an old chronicle on which the picture ‘The Man Impaled’ was based, just as it is inscribed in the Little Chapel on the Hradschin, in memory of the gruesome end of one who tried to seize the crown of Bohemia:
‘Now one of the knights who had been impaled went by the name of Borivoj Chlavec, and his stake had come out by the pit of his arm, leaving his head unharmed. This Sir Borivoj prayed most fervently until the evening, and during the night his stake broke off at his backside and he went, with the rest of the stake still inside him, up to the Hradschin and lay down upon a dung-heap. In the morning he went straight to the house that stands beside the Church of St. Benedict and sent for a priest from the castle clergy, in whose presence he most fervently confessed his sins before the Lord our God and told him that without confession and receipt of the Holy Sacrament of one kind, as ordered by the Church, he could not die; it had been his custom every day to say a short prayer in honour of Almighty God and an Ave Maria in honour of the Blessed Virgin, and it had ever been his assurance that through the power of this prayer and the intercession of the Blessed Virgin he would never die without first receiving the sacrament of Holy Communion.
The priest spake, “My son, tell me that prayer,” and he began, saying, “Almighty God, I beseech Thee, grant me the intercession of Thy most holy martyr, Saint Barbara, that I shall not die a speedy death but shall receive the Holy Sacrament before mine end, that, protected from all enemies, both visible and invisible, and preserved from evil spirits, I may at the last be brought to eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour, amen.”
After these words, the priest administered the Holy Sacrament, and he died the same day, and there was much wailing among the people when he was buried in the Church of St. Benedict.’
Polyxena had gone, and the tower lay lifeless and grey beneath the glittering stars of the night sky; but in its stony breast beat a tiny human heart that was full to bursting with the oath it had sworn not to rest and rather to share a thousandfold the cruel torture of the impaled knight than to die before he had laid at his lover’s feet the highest prize that human will can aspire to.