The old man looked around, he listened. Had the young lady already gone home? A light step, moving from the dish rack to the door, told him that she was still there. So he gathered himself together. One truly feels as if in a bone house when such a stiff old man rises again. “Hey you!” he called out, when he had collected himself. He had forgotten her name, even though this creature had been coming at the same time every day for half a year.
She heard him, too. With a hidden, not to say gloating smile (for young people often laugh out of harmless spite at the futile efforts of their superiors), she stood in the doorway, her hard-working hand resting firmly on the door handle. But while she sheltered herself, she directly exposed the old man to a wicked draft. And although he stood still, it seemed as if he were being blown by the wind. He seemed almost inanimate, the way he stood there pointing at the faded fire. One might feel the same way watching an unmanned sailboat cut an arbitrary path through the water.
The windows, which hadn’t been firmly latched, blew open again in the draft. The upper windows, they now saw, had been open all along.
But the old man wasn’t pleased to see how quickly everything was taken care of now that someone else was in charge: the young maid brought a small shovelful of glowing embers from the kitchen stove, and with that the job was done; it simply burned. And a couple of boxwood logs laid crosswise over the embers gave the whole thing a proper appearance. Surely that would generate heat. But we don’t know what a room is like when it has been truly chilled through, much less when it has also served as chamber for dying. Such a room will remain cold, it takes this as its solemn duty.
And even when you think it should grow warm, as log after log is consumed, a cold sweat condenses on the furniture. The mirror grows blind, the pictures obscure. And even the windows can let in no more light, they are clouded as if with breath. The same cold spirit does this that put out the matches’ small flame. Or is it just the warmth trying to emerge? So much the worse.
The worst thing of all, though, would have been to slump down on the settee in despair. Its rusty springs would only snap, as if to roughly and rudely cast him off. It was all enough to make you run away.
But the old man stayed where he was, silent and idle, set in his idleness. In fact, his whole existence came down to a sort of nonexistence: to this idleness. And yet he was banal, and real, and it seemed it would not have required any extraordinary effort for him to attend to his daily needs. And he did attend to them, but in such a lifeless way that it could inspire a sort of horror. And it wasn’t clear: was the sobriety of his actions the source of this horror, or did this horror of his bear a veneer of sobriety? It must be terrible to be such an old man. It was hard to believe that he was still human.
Now he pulled one of his armchairs, which had been joylessly arranged around the table, to the door of the oven and waited for its warmth. Darkness fell. Not until it was pitch black outside did he think to look for a lamp. Out of thriftiness, of course. To have both at once was wasteful. The fire had served as a lamp until now. That had practically been its only function. But because this lamp was burning in the oven, it only cast a narrow band of light that ran from the oven’s mouth to the closed door of the room, where it pulled up and continued to the ceiling. There its rays flickered down along the chain of a hanging lamp; faintly, just enough to reveal the lamp hanging there empty.
And the old man didn’t want to leave the doors to the adjacent rooms ajar when he went out to search for a candle, as you can well imagine. His hands felt their way through the dark rooms, through one after another. There was a lantern in the kitchen, but he didn’t find it. Other people had created an order there that only they understood, an order that went its own way, that shut him out. Then it suddenly occurred to the old man that there was a candlestick in his bedroom. It was easy to find in the dark. But he didn’t light the wick until he was back in the sitting room — the flame would only have died again and again beneath his hands if he had lit it out there, and he thought it had finally grown warm in the room. The evening stretched on. And the old man stayed on his spot again, almost as before. You couldn’t say he was waiting for anything. Except perhaps a certain hour when he would go to sleep. You couldn’t say that he was killing time, as can rightly be said of many other people. Perhaps his sin was that he never brought it to life. At least not in the evening, when he was so completely alone. And the world outside was just like his silent room when he finally rose and went to bed. He hardly ever slept. Only toward morning did a bit of twilight enter his gray eyes.
Spring can recede at times, especially in those hours when the earth has grown cold in the night, and the rising ball of fire is not yet radiating strength. Then it is truly freezing. Every young blade of grass is edged in white. Nature thinks back on recent days, and its hair turns white.
As if wearing a cold mask, one lies there and thinks, without any hope of sleep or dream. A dream, above all, is the living mountain of the soul in this otherwise deathlike state. The old man at least had to know that he could neither sleep nor dream. But since he was already in those years when memory occasionally fades altogether, it seemed, at least at times, that he was there and yet already departed. And when he was there again, he was so soberly focused on his daily existence that a bit of pain could even provide a noble contrast.
Every morning he went to an unremarkable little café. At least it was warm there. And there were daily papers lying about. A chance to occupy himself with others’ suffering. Oh, this flight from one misfortune into another! Who hasn’t experienced it at least once, when falling in the street, if nothing else. That icy joy of others’ sympathy. For there is hardly anything else to be found in those faces. These daily papers are the snowball that weak men roll into the avalanches that they take for the life of their soul.
The old man started with the government reports, as usual. And then he proceeded to those pages that depict life in the streets, or give the layout of a house in which something has happened. Then he read about business and the stock exchange. He had nothing to do with that anymore. Or perhaps we can say that he had never had anything to do with it. That was just it: everything was settled. There was an order in his life that could not be disturbed again, thanks to the natural coldness of his character. Only once in his life had he entered into a business transaction (everything else that he owned had been in his family for ages) — that business transaction was his marriage.
The woman in the café poured his coffee, pushing his newspaper aside with the coffeepot. There wasn’t much room for compliments there, it was an especially cheap establishment, and the patrons were unassuming. And the proprietress knew that, as people know all such worldly wisdom — and the stronger they are, the more they can turn it to their advantage. And we know, sadly, what sort of people the strong usually are. So the old man drank, he slurped, the brew was still hot. There were rolls in the basket, free for the taking; they also lent the room the air of a bakery, lit up early in the morning. Nonetheless, there were many things, things that were hard to pin down, that kept anyone from feeling at home here. After the breakfast hours were over, this woman wanted nothing more to do with the business. She sat down in the background and rattled off the stitches of her knit stocking. (This knit stocking was a sort of conversation in itself; and if that was her foundation, you can imagine the rest.) But this particular morning, for some reason, she started to chat. The old man was almost startled. For even if he seemed lifeless, and could give you chills, still he was no stranger to a good word. But he saw that there was no goodness in her words, only calculation. Yet her manner was somehow compelling, it was more than a match for the old man. She was only about forty-five years old, an age at which many women still have tremendous power. And especially (as contradictory as it may seem) when they are usually tight-lipped and unfriendly. Then the rare overture appears like a gleaming point of light, and those who carry sorrow in some corner of their hearts must light up as well. It is the sun of bad conscience, or the sadness of the fearful.