A Happy Death Read online

  Part Two

  Conscious Death

  1

  "I'd like a room," the man said in German.

  The clerk was sitting in front of a board covered with keys and was separated from the lobby by a broad table. He stared at the man who had just come in, a gray raincoat over his shoulders, and who spoke with his head turned away. "Certainly, sir. For one night?"

  "No, I don't know."

  "We have rooms at eighteen, twenty-five, and thirty crowns."

  Mersault looked through the glass door of the hotel out into the little Prague street, his hands in his pockets, his hair rumpled. Not far away, he could hear the streetcars screeching down the Avenue Wenceslas.

  "Which room would you like, sir?"

  "It doesn't matter," Mersault said, still staring through the glass door. The clerk took a key off the rack and handed it to Mersault.

  "Room number twelve," he said.

  Mersault seemed to wake up. "How much is this room?"

  "Thirty crowns."

  "That's too much. Give me a room for eighteen."

  Without a word, the man took another key off the rack and indicated the brass star attached to it: "Room number thirty-four."

  Sitting in his room, Mersault took off his jacket, loosened his tie, and mechanically rolled up his shirtsleeves. He walked over to the mirror above the sink, meeting a drawn face slightly tanned where it was not darkened by several days' growth of beard. His hair fell in a tangle over his forehead, down to the two deep creases between his eyebrows, which gave him a grave, tender expression, he realized. Only then did he think of looking around this miserable room which was all the comfort he had and beyond which he envisioned nothing at all. On a sickening carpet—huge yellow flowers against a gray background—a whole geography of filth suggested a grimy universe of wretchedness. Behind the huge radiator, clots of dust; the regulator was broken, and the brass contact points were exposed. Over the sagging bed dangled a flyspecked wire, at its end a sticky lightbulb. Mersault inspected the sheets, which were clean. He took his toilet things out of the overnight bag and arranged them one by one on the sink. Then he started to wash his hands, but turned off the tap and walked over to open the uncurtained window. It overlooked a courtyard with a washing trough and a series of tiny windows in the walls. Laundry was drying on a cord stretched between two of them. Mersault lay down on the bed and fell asleep at once. He wakened with a start, sweating, his clothes rumpled, and walked aimlessly around the room. Then he lit a cigarette, sat down on the bed, and stared at the wrinkles in his trou-

  sers. The sour taste of sleep mingled with the cigarette smoke. He stared at the room again, scratching his ribs through his shirt. He was flooded by a dreadful pleasure at the prospect of so much desolation and solitude. To be so far away from everything, even from his fever, to suffer so distinctly here what was absurd and miserable in even the tidiest lives showed him the shameful and secret countenance of a kind of freedom born of the suspect, the shady. Around him the flaccid hours lapped like a stagnant pond—time had gone slack.

  Someone knocked violently, and Mersault, startled, realized that he had been awakened by the same knocking. He opened the door to find a little old man with red hair bent double under Mersault's two suitcases, which looked enormous in his hands. He was choking with rage, and his wide-spaced teeth released a stream of saliva as well as insults and recriminations. Mersault remembered the broken handle, which made the larger suitcase so difficult to carry. He wanted to apologize, but had no idea how to say he had never thought the porter would be so old. The tiny creature interrupted him: "That's fourteen crowns."

  "For one day's storage?" Mersault asked, surprised. Then he understood, from the old man's laborious explanations, that the porter had taken a taxi. But Mersault dared not say that he himself could also have taken a taxi in that case, and he paid out of sheer reluctance to argue. Once the door

  was shut, Mersault felt inexplicable sobs swelling his chest. A nearby clock chimed four times. He had slept two hours. He realized he was separated from the street only by the house opposite his window, and he felt the dim, mysterious current of life so close to him. It would be better to go outside. Mersault washed his hands very carefully. He sat down on the bed again to clean his nails, and worked the file methodically. Down in the courtyard two or three buzzers rang out so emphatically that Mersault went back to the window. He noticed that an arched passageway led through the house to the street. It was as if all the voices of the street, all the unknown life on the other side of that house, the sounds of men who have an address, a family, arguments with an uncle, preferences at dinner, chronic diseases, the swarm of beings each of whom has his own personality, forever divided from the monstrous heart of humanity by individual beats, filtered now through the passageway and rose through the courtyard to explode like bubbles in Mersault's room. Discovering how porous he was, how attentive to each sign the world made, Mersault recognized the deep flaw that opened his being to life. He lit another cigarette and hurriedly dressed. As he buttoned his jacket, the smoke stung his eyes. He turned back to the sink, put cold water on his eyes, and decided to comb his hair. But his comb had vanished. He was unable to smooth the sleep-rumpled curls with his fingers. He went downstairs

  as he was, his hair sticking up behind and hanging over his forehead. He felt diminished even further. Once out in the street, he walked around the hotel to reach the little passageway he had noticed. It opened onto the square of the old town hall, and in the heavy evening that sank over Prague, the Gothic steeples of the town hall and of the old Tyn church were silhouetted, black against the dim sky. Crowds of people were walking under the arcades lining the old streets. Each time a woman passed him, Mer-sault waited for the glance that would permit him to consider himself still capable of playing the delicate and tender game of life. But healthy people have a natural skill in avoiding feverish eyes. Unshaven, his hair rumpled, in his eyes the expression of some restless animal, his trousers as wrinkled as his shirt collar, Mersault had lost that wonderful confidence bestowed by a well-cut suit or the steering wheel of a car. The light turned coppery, and the day still lingered on the gold of the baroque domes at the far end of the square. He walked toward one of them, went into the church, and, overcome by the ancient smell, sat down on a bench. The vaults above him were quite dark, but the gilded capitals shed a mysterious golden liquid which flowed down the grooves of the columns to the puffy faces of angels and grinning saints. Peace, yes, there was peace here, but so bitter that Mersault hurried to the threshold and stood on the steps, inhaling the evening's cooler air, into which he would plummet. In

  another moment, he saw the first star appear, pure and unadorned, between the steeples of Tyn.

  He began to look for a cheap restaurant, making his way into darker, less crowded streets. Though it had not rained during the day, the ground was damp, and Mersault had to pick his way among black puddles glimmering between the infrequent paving stones. A light rain started to fall. The busy streets could not be far away, for he could hear the newspaper vendors hawking the Narodni Politika. Mersault was walking in circles now, and suddenly stopped. A strange odor reached him out of the darkness. Pungent, sour, it awakened all his associations with suffering. He tasted it on his tongue, deep in his nose; even his eyes, somehow, tasted it. It was far away, then it was at the next streetcorner, between the now-opaque sky and the sticky pavement it was there, the evil spell of the nights of Prague. He advanced to meet it, and as he did so it became more real, filling him entirely, stinging his eyes until the tears came, leaving him helpless. Turning a corner, he understood: an old woman was selling cucumbers soaked in vinegar, and it was their fragrance which had assaulted Mersault. A passer-by stopped, bought a cucumber which the old woman wrapped in a piece of paper. He took a few steps, unwrapped his purchase in front of Mersault and, as he bit into the cucumber, its broken, sopping flesh released the odor even more powerfully. Mersault leaned against

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p; a post, nauseated, and for a long moment inhaled all the alien solitude the world could offer him. Then he walked away and without even thinking what he was doing entered a restaurant where an accordion was playing. He went down several steps, stopped at the foot of the stairs, and found himself in a dim cellar filled with red lights. He must have looked peculiar, for the musician played more softly, the conversations stopped, and all the diners looked in his direction. In one corner, some whores were eating together, their mouths shiny with grease. Other customers were drinking the brown, sweetish Czech beer. Many were smoking without having ordered anything at all. Mersault went over to a rather long table at which only one man was seated. Tall and slender with yellow hair, he was sprawled in his chair with his hands in his pockets and pursed his chapped lips round a matchstick already swollen with saliva, sucking it noisily or sliding it from one corner of his mouth to the other. When Mersault sat down, the man barely moved, wedged his back against the wall, shifted the match in Mersault's direction and squinted faintly. At that moment Mersault noticed a red star in his buttonhole.

  Mersault ate the little he had ordered rapidly. He was not hungry. The accordionist was playing louder now, and staring fixedly at the newcomer. Twice Mersault stared back defiantly and tried to meet the man's gaze. But fever had weakened him.

  The man was still staring. Suddenly one of the whores burst out laughing, the man with the red star sucked noisily on his match and produced a little bubble of saliva, and the musician, still staring at Mersault, broke off the lively dance tune he had been playing and began a slow melody heavy with the dust of centuries. At this moment the door opened and a new customer walked in. Mersault did not see, but through the open door the smell of vinegar and cucumbers pressed in upon him, immediately filling the dark cellar, mingling with the mysterious melody of the accordion, swelling the bubble of saliva on the man's matchstick, making the conversations suddenly more meaningful, as if out of the night that lay upon Prague all the significance of a miserable suffering ancient world had taken refuge in the warmth of this room, among these people. Mersault, who was eating some kind of over-sweetened compote, suddenly at the end of his endurance, felt the flaw he carried within himself yield, exposing him still more completely to pain and fever. He stood up abruptly, called to the waiter, and understanding nothing of his explanations overpaid the check, realizing that the musician's gaze was once again fixed upon him. He walked to the door, passing the accordionist, and saw that he was still staring at the place at the table Mersault had just left. Then he realized that the man was blind, walked up the steps, and, opening the door, was entirely engulfed by the omnipresent

  odor as he walked through the little streets into the depths of the night.

  Stars glittered over the houses. He must have been near the river; he could detect its muffled powerful voice. In front of a little gate in a thick wall covered with Hebrew characters, he realized that he was in the ghetto. Over the wall stretched the branches of a sweet-smelling willow. Through the gate he could make out big brown stones lying among the weeds: it was the old Jewish cemetery of Prague. A moment later Mersault realized he had been running and was now in the square of the old town hall. Near his hotel he had to lean against a wall and vomit, retching painfully. With all the lucidity extreme weakness affords, he managed to reach his room without making any mistakes, went to bed, and fell asleep at once.

  The next day he was awakened by the newspaper vendors. The day was still overcast, but the sun glowed behind the clouds. Though still a little weak, Mersault felt better. But he thought of the long day which lay ahead of him. Living this way, in his own presence, time took on its most extreme dimensions, and each hour seemed to contain a world. The important thing was to avoid crises like the one yesterday. It would be best to do his sightseeing methodically. He sat at the table in his pajamas and worked out a systematic schedule which would occupy each of his days for a week. Monasteries and baroque churches, museums and the old parts of the city,

  nothing was omitted. Then he washed, realized he had forgotten to buy a comb, and went downstairs as he had the day before, unkempt and taciturn, past the clerk whose bristling hair, bewildered expression, and jacket with the second button missing he noticed now, in broad daylight. As he left the hotel he was brought to a halt by a childish, sentimental accordion tune. The blind man of the night before, squatting on his heels at the corner of the old square, was playing with the same blank and smiling expression, as though liberated from himself and entirely contained within the motion of a life which exceeded him. Mersault turned the corner and again recognized the smell of cucumbers. And with the smell, his suffering.

  That day was the same as those which followed. Mersault got up late, visited monasteries and churches, sought refuge in their fragrance of crypts and incense, and then, back in the daylight, confronted his secret fears at every corner, where a cucumber vendor was invariably posted. It was through this odor that he saw the museums and discovered the mystery and the profusion of baroque genius which filled Prague with its gold magnificence. The altars, which glowed softly in the darkness, seemed borrowed from the coppery sky, the misty sunlight so frequent over the city. The glistening scrolls and spirals, the elaborate setting that looked as if it were cut out of gold paper, so touching in its resemblance to the creches made for children at Christmas, the

  grandiose and grotesque baroque perspectives affected Mersault as a kind of infantile, feverish, and overblown romanticism by which men protect themselves against their own demons. The god worshipped here was the god man fears and honors, not the god who laughs with man before the warm frolic of sea and sun. Emerging from the faint fragrance of dust and extinction which reigned under the dim vaults, Mersault felt he had no country. Every evening he visited the cloister of the Czech monks, on the west side of the city. In the cloister garden the hours fluttered away with the doves, the bells chimed softly over the grass, but it was still his fever which spoke to Mersault. Nonetheless, the time passed. But then came the hour when the churches and monuments closed and the restaurants had not yet opened. That was the dangerous time. Mersault walked along the Vltava's banks, dotted with flowerbeds and bandstands, as the day came to an end. Little boats worked their way up the river from lock to lock. Mersault kept pace with them, left behind the deafening noise and rushing water of a sluice gate, gradually regained the peace and quiet of the evening, then walked on to meet a murmur which swelled to a terrible roar. At the new lock, he watched the bright little dinghies vainly trying to pass over the dam without capsizing until one of them passed the danger point and shouts rang out above the sound of the water. The rushing river with

  its burden of shouts and tunes, the fragrance of gar-dens, full of the coppery glow of the setting sun and the twisted, grotesque shadows of the statues on the Charles Bridge, made Mersault bitterly conscious of his desolation: a solitude in which love had no part. Coming to a standstill as the fragrance of leaves and water reached him, he felt a catch in his throat and imagined tears which did not come. Tears would be for a friend, or for open arms. But tears gave way to the world without tenderness in which he was immersed. Some evenings, always at the same times, he crossed the Charles Bridge and strolled through the Hradcany district above the river, a deserted and silent neighborhood, though only a few steps from the busiest streets in the city. He wandered among these huge palaces, across enormous paved courtyards, past ironwork gates, around the cathedral. His footsteps echoed in the silence between high walls. A dim noise from the city reached him here. There was no cucumber vendor in this district, but something oppressive in the silence, in the grandeur of the place, so that Mersault always ended by walking back toward the odor or the melody which henceforth constituted his only country. He ate his meals in the restaurant he had discovered, for at least it remained familiar. He had his place beside the man with the red star, who came only in the evenings, drank a beer, and chewed on his matchstick. At dinner, too, the blind man played his accordio
n, and Mersault ate quickly, paid his check, and re-

  turned to his hotel and the unfailing sleep of a feverish child.

  Every day he thought of leaving and every day, sinking a little deeper into desolation, his longing for happiness had a little less hold over him. He had been in Prague four days now, and he had not yet bought the comb whose absence he discovered each morning. Yet he had the vague sense of something missing, and this was what he irresolutely waited for. One evening, he walked toward his restaurant down the little street where he had first smelled the cucumbers. Already he anticipated that odor, when just before he reached the restaurant, on the sidewalk opposite him, something made him stop, then come closer. A man was lying there, arms folded, head fallen on the left cheek. Three or four people were standing against the wall, apparently waiting for something, though very calm. One was smoking, the others were speaking in low voices. But one man in shirtsleeves, his jacket over his arm, hat pushed back on his head, was performing a kind of wild dance around the body, his gestures emphatic and disturbing. Overhead, the faint light of a distant streetlamp mingled with the glow from the nearby restaurant. The man tirelessly dancing, the body with its folded arms, the calm spectators, the ironic contrast and the inexplicable silence—here at last, combining contemplation and innocence, among the rather oppressive interplay of light and shadow, was a moment of equilibrium beyond which it seemed to

  Mersault that everything would collapse into madness. He came closer: the dead man's head was lying in a pool of blood. The head was turned so that it rested on the wound. In this remote corner of Prague, between the faint light on the moist pavement, the long wet hiss of passing cars a few steps away, the distant screech of occasional streetcars, death seemed insipid yet insistent too, and it was death's summons, its damp breath, that Mersault sensed at the very moment he began walking away rapidly, without turning back. Suddenly the odor, which he had forgotten, was all around him: he went into the restaurant and sat down at his table. The man was there, but without his matchstick. It seemed to Mersault that there was something distraught in his eyes. He dismissed the stupid notion that occurred to him. But everything was whirling in his mind. Before ordering anything he jumped up and ran to his hotel, went to his room, and threw himself on the bed. Something sharp was throbbing in his temples. His heart empty, his belly tight, Mer-sault's rebellion exploded. Images of his life rushed before his eyes. Something inside him clamored for the gestures of women, for arms that opened, and for warm lips. From the depth of the painful nights of Prague, amid smells of vinegar and sentimental tunes, the anguished countenance of the old baroque world which had accompanied his fever mounted toward him. Breathing with difficulty, seeing nothing, moving mechanically, he sat up on