On Monday morning, I attended Nösel’s lecture in the Hall of Medals. I’ve never figured out the reason for that name. It was a low-ceilinged, completely undecorated room whose waxed walls reflected our blurred images. The topic of that day’s class was the rhythmic structure of the first part of Kant’z Theus, the great national poem that’s been passed down from generation to generation for nearly a thousand years. Nösel was speaking without looking at us. I believe he spoke mostly to himself when he lectured, carrying on an odd conversation for solo voice without much concern for our presence and even less for our opinions. As he expounded passionately upon pentasyllables and hexameters, he applied cream to his hair and mustache, filled his pipe, methodically scratched at the various food particles on his jacket lapels, and cleaned his fingernails with a pocketknife. Barely ten of us were paying attention to him; most of the others were dozing or examining the cracks in the ceiling. Nösel stood up, went to the blackboard, and wrote two verses that are still in my memory because the old language of the poem resembles our dialect in so many ways:
Stu pekart in dei mümerie gesachetet
Komm de Nebe un de Osterne vohin
They shall arrive in a murmur
And shall disappear into fog and earth
At that moment, the door of the lecture room opened violently and slammed against the wall, making an enormous, reverberating noise. We all snapped our heads around and saw bug-eyed faces, gesticulating arms, and mouths screaming at us: “Everybody outside! Everybody outside! Vengeance for Ruppach! The traitors will pay!” There weren’t more than four or five individuals in the doorway, no doubt students — their features seemed vaguely familiar — but we heard behind them the murmur of a considerable crowd, pushing and supporting those in the front line. Then they disappeared as suddenly as they had come, leaving the door open like the hole in a stone sink, and almost all the students in the room, who a few seconds earlier had been sitting around me, were sucked out through that hole as though by some imperious physical force. There was a great racket of overturned chairs and benches, shouts, insults, cries, and then, suddenly, nothing. The wave had rolled on and was now getting farther and farther away, carrying off brutality to spread it throughout the city.
There were only five of us left in the Hall of Medals: Fritz Schoeffel, an obese fellow with very short arms, who couldn’t climb three steps without gasping for air; Julius Kakenegg, who never spoke to anyone at all and always breathed through a perfumed handkerchief; Barthéleo Mietza, who was deaf as a post; me; and, of course, Nösel himself, who’d observed the entire scene with one hand raised, still holding the chalk. He shrugged his shoulders and went on with the class as if nothing had happened.
XXVI
—
spent the rest of that strange day inside the walls of the University. I felt protected there. I didn’t want to leave. I heard horrible sounds coming from outside, followed by great silences which dragged on and on, giving rise to uneasiness as intense as what was caused by the noise. I stayed in the library the whole afternoon. I knew Amelia was safe at her place, the furnished room she shared with another embroiderer named Gudrun Osterick, a ruddy-faced young woman with hair like sheep’s wool. The previous evening, I’d promised them I wouldn’t venture out.
I don’t remember much about the book I was trying to read during those bizarre hours in the library. It was the work of a physician, Doctor Klaus Reinhold Maria Messner, on the propagation of the plague across the centuries. The book contained tables, charts, and figures, as well as striking illustrations that contrasted with the scientific detachment of the inquiry, for they illuminated it with a sort of macabre and precious romanticism. One of the illustrations that I found particularly unsettling showed a narrow, poor city street. Uneven paving stones constituted the roadway, and the doors of all the houses were wide open. Dozens of big, black, hirsute rats ran grimacing from the houses while three men dressed in long, dark robes, their heads hidden by peaked hoods, piled stiff corpses onto the bed of a handcart. In the distance, plumes of smoke streaked the horizon, while in the foreground, as if he wished to escape from the picture, a child in rags sat on the ground with his face in his hands. Curiously, none of the three men paid any attention to him, already considering him as good as dead. The only creature contemplating him was a rat. Standing on its rear legs, it seemed to be addressing a malicious, ironic question to the child’s hidden face. I stared at the picture for a long time, wondering what its engraver’s real purpose had been and why Doctor Messner had wanted it reproduced in his book.
Around four o’clock, the daylight suddenly grew dim. Snow clouds had filled the sky, and they began dumping their load on the city. I opened one of the library’s windows. Big flakes immediately struck my cheeks and melted. I saw silhouettes coming and going in the streets, walking at a normal pace; the city seemed to have regained its ordinary appearance. I collected my jacket and left the University. At that moment, I didn’t know that I would never set foot in it again.
To return to my room, I had to cross Salzwach Square, go down Sibelius-Vo-Recht Avenue, traverse the Kolesh quarter — the oldest part of the city, a maze of narrow streets lined by innumerable storefronts — skirt Wilhem Park, and walk past the lugubrious buildings that housed the thermal baths. I stepped ahead briskly, not raising my head too much. I passed many shadows that were doing the same thing and then a group of men who seemed rather drunk, talking very loud and laughing a lot.
In Salzwach Square and on Sibelius-Vo-Recht Avenue the snow was already sticking to the ground, and the pedestrians left black tracks as they moved along, scurrying like insects. Looking at those places, one could have believed that nothing had happened, that the city had experienced an ordinary Monday, and that the untimely emptiness of the streets was due to nothing more than the cold, the bad weather, and the night itself, which had fallen a little too early.
But to realize that none of that was true, one had only to enter the labyrinth of the Kolesh quarter. What I noticed first was a sound. The sound of glass, of the broken glass I was treading on. I was on a narrow street littered with broken glass, and glinting shards, here and there half buried by snow, covered the ground as far as my eyes could see. I couldn’t stop myself from imagining that someone had scattered precious stones by the handful all over the Kolesh quarter. The thought gave the little street a new dimension, sparkling, marvelous, magical, like the setting of a fairy tale; my task was to find the plot and the princess. But that first vision vanished at once when my eyes focused on the shop windows gaping like the jaws of dead animals, the looted interiors of the stores, the smashed barrels spilling out marinated herrings, dried meats, gherkins, and wine, the befouled stalls, the strewn merchandise. The sounds of groans and weeping mingled with the crunch of footsteps on the glass carpet. I couldn’t tell where the human sounds were coming from, as there wasn’t a living creature in sight. By contrast, three corpses, their heads grotesquely swollen and bruised from the blows they’d been struck, were stretched out in front of a tailor’s shop. Stuck on the door, which was hanging from the frame by its single remaining hinge, was a piece of paper with the words SCHMUTZ FREMDËR, “dirty foreigner” (but the word Fremdër is ambiguous, as it can also mean “traitor,” or in a more colloquial usage, “scumbag,” “filth”), crudely lettered in red paint. The paint had run on many of the letters, which looked as though they were dripping blood. Rolls of cloth had been piled up anyhow and an attempt made to set them on fire. Some shards of glass were still attached to the window jambs, forming a star with incredibly slender, fragile rays.