I obeyed his order and left. The door shut behind me. I hid the envelope in my pocket and didn’t dare to take it out even to look at it, as if it were the trace of a serious crime, hunted by snooping noses, hidden curious eyes. But I turned it constantly between my fingers, as if I wanted to caress and fondle it endlessly or discover its secret. Why did grandfather pass this little packet to me like that? I pondered to myself. Had he really forgotten? Or did he never reach the decision, the whole time, whether to give the packet to me or not, and only at the last moment was he moved to do it?
As I debated this, I didn’t once call to mind the name of the only person who could have wanted me to have this envelope. I kept it from me like we keep the fear of death. I tried to remove it from mind the way even as I fondled it deep in my pocket. I tried instead to recall the words of the white-haired old man, but it was all forgotten except one thing: “The past is the only living, vital and life-giving period in the destiny of people and nations.” And I muttered to myself, “Only for the sake of the past should people live and die. Only for the past can and should one sacrifice everything.” All the way home I repeated these ideas in endless variations, as if I had nothing else to think about in the world. Actually I was repeating the ideas because they indirectly expressed what I had not yet dared to make explicit: Why am I still alive, when my past is dead? Why am I still myself, when she is not herself? Why do I move and think, while she is lying motionless and her mind is petrified? Why do I still have a present and a future, when she has only a past, or not even that – a mere emptiness, only what does not exist and which hitherto no human tongue has been able to name? Why? Why? That was what I really wanted to think on the way home, yet I didn’t dare to – not yet.
At home I found that the envelope contained a letter written on thin silk paper – no doubt silk paper because it would take up less space and could thus be hidden or forwarded more easily. The letter was in German and evidently written at intervals, as I could tell from the ink and from the fact that at the end it was written in pencil and the handwriting was so bad as to be almost illegible. There were no signs of a date, as if the author of the letter were thinking of eternity – no date, year or mention of a night, evening or morning. I reproduce the letter unchanged, although it may be that I have misinterpreted the end of the letter in translating it. Here it is as it was in my trembling hand.
“I’m writing these lines because I feel death approaching. But don’t think that I’m sick, that there is anything wrong with me or that I’m suffering. No, my fragile health is good and there is nothing wrong with my state of mind either, considering my mental and physical condition. And yet I feel the approach of death, maybe because the doctor told me last time in town that my condition is not quite normal, but possibly also because at our last meeting you talked about my mother, which somehow had a horrible effect on me. I know that sometimes a person can live with a horrible feeling in abnormal conditions much longer than in normal conditions without such a feeling, and yet I cannot get rid of my premonition, and therefore I thought of writing these lines to you. But they will reach your hand only when my premonition has become a fact. If it doesn’t, I will destroy them because what I want to write seems to me so terrible and unbelievable that for a quite some time it was beyond my powers to put it down on paper and keep it hidden somewhere. You too, if you ever read these lines, must destroy them when you have read through them. I’m writing them only to you, so that you will know how I have loved you and how I still do – that is the only purpose of these lines.
“But I don’t really know where to start, because at the moment it seems to me that it’s not at all easy for me to say where the beginning of love is, and where it ends. In writing these lines I believe quite firmly that I loved you even before we got acquainted, but I didn’t yet know then that it was you that I loved. I suspected it even in the first days of our friendship. But when you came to keep me company, to ask forgiveness for the landlady’s behaviour, I didn’t doubt it any more. And the next evening – it must really have been the next evening – when you were late and ran into me on the stairs, because I came back for something I’d forgotten – yes, if you hadn’t come at all then, I might well have managed to come up and knock on your door. At least I believe that now, because at the time I had not forgotten anything, but I wanted simply to see what was keeping you so long. And how my heart was trembling! Simply terrible!
“Do you still remember how once in the park you called yourself a wolf howling at the moon? And I was supposed to be the moon or a king’s daughter. At the time I felt so ashamed that I could say that only to my mother – those were my words then. But now I can tell you too, because what comes next is much worse. When you called me a king’s daughter or the moon come down to earth from the heavens, it reminded me that I have around my body something broken and torn, and I thought, what would you think of me and what would you say to me if you suddenly saw or found out what is torn in me and where. It was so terrible to think that you regard me as a king’s daughter or a bright moon, while around my body I carry something cracked and torn. I was also missing a button somewhere, in the place of which that morning I hurriedly put a tiny little safety pin. So, now you know why I was ashamed: a lousy king’s daughter and a white moon with a safety pin.
“There was one thing about you that I didn’t like at alclass="underline" your great politeness and respect toward me. You behaved with me as if I was – I don’t know what. But I didn’t feel anything special about myself, only love. That is what I wanted and expected. I came with you into the dark park only so that something would happen to me that would develop me, as I said at the time, but nothing happened. Sometimes I had a desire that you would be shameless and carefree towards me, that you would treat me as a thing and handle me, but you didn’t, and I was disappointed. Now that I have been handled, I am even more disappointed. And I haven’t developed either, for there is only one thing that develops me, and that is love. Now I know that, and I reproach you no more.
“But I did at the time. I did even when you visited grandfather and we met afterwards, and you told me in the park about your first lie told for love – do you still remember that? But both your lies and mine, up to that day, had been to protect our love, and therefore they were right, and not a sin or an injustice, as we thought at the time, first yours and then mine too. But what I did that evening went against our love and was an outright crime, and that’s perhaps the reason I ‘m now suffering this premonition of death, for a person can be forgiven all crimes, but not a crime against love. I at least will never forgive myself.
“Of course, to this day you don’t know what happened between me and grandfather after your visit. I didn’t talk about it because I had vowed not to, and others were unable to talk about it. And the fact that I kept my pledge to grandfather was itself a great crime I cannot forgive myself for. Of course I should have vowed to grandfather, but even more I should have broken that vow for the sake of myself and our love – told you everything there on the park bench, when you were kneeling before me; then I probably wouldn’t have needed to write this letter.