It did not occur to me to wonder how they had come to be here. My eyes were swollen with the weight of hundreds of uncried tears, and I could see again every image of Anja I had ever witnessed, every scene I had enacted with her. They moved past me one after the other like pictures in a gallery. Her face was as clear to me as though it were projected onto the blank wall above the writing table.
I stuffed the folded papers back into the drawer and sat down in the chair. The papers on the desk swam together under a film of tears and I ran my hand over them as if over the surface of the ocean. A patch of cream PAPER stood out against the sea of white and I pulled it out and held it before my eyes. ‘My darling Franz, my love.’ I closed my eyes against it, the sheet of Anja’s writing.[27] I could feel the tears pushing against my eyelashes as though they were grains of salt, hard little stones. A coldness rolled down through my body and filled me with ice.
So Franz had won in the end. And it was the end. He had used me like a parasite. He had wormed his way into my life, into my love, and had eaten them hollow, leaving only a calcified, empty shell. Even my writing[28] had been sapped by him in some mysterious way. I was like a mother who gives birth in the bloom of youth, unwillingly, and is left haggard and exhausted, having passed the energetic spark of her life on to her child. For in some ways Franz was like my child. An unwanted one.
And what was left to me now? A book I had sweated and toiled over, certain at the outset that it would be a masterpiece, which had been a complete failure. Anja was lost to me. I was nothing more now than a crippled worker at the Prague post office. Anja, Anja. Fresh tears pressed in my throat at the thought of her. Now I was left with only Uta. Uta. Her coarse face leered at me and the muscles in my ears clenched at the thought of her voice of affected childishness.
The sound of the watch was now so loud that it was shaking the room, as though the walls of the building were being struck by a battering ram. The legs of the furniture jumped and scratched over the floor. Loose sheets of paper snowed from the bed and the writing table and the clothes on the rail began to jerk their arms and legs in a phantom dance. I still had my hand wrapped around the watch, but with each beat it was becoming more and more painful to hold, and I was afraid that if I let it go I would be deafened in an instant. I waited for the space between two beats and then took the watch out, still wrapped in the useless handkerchief, and flung it onto the floor. It spun on its back like a golden beetle and I brought my foot down upon it with all my force. I felt its hard form resist painfully under my heel. The beat slowed and I seized a chair and smashed it down again and again onto the tiny metal object, until its innards, miniature wheels and cogs, all spilled out onto the floorboards in a small golden pool. In the spreading silence I could hear the tinkling music of these tiny mechanical components rolling away into cracks in the floorboards.
I went back to the bed. Franz’s whole BODY was still and lay there among the bedclothes like the discarded skin of a reptile. All the life that he yet contained had become distilled in his quivering eyes and eyelids. He was whispering something to me, the same phrase again and again, but his dry lips were two rigid straps and he could not form the words. I leaned closer and held my breath, afraid to inhale his contagion.
‘It was me she loved.’[29]
His stale breath dampened my face as he spoke, and he said it again and again. I hissed at him to be quiet, to hold his tongue. I leaned further over him and took one of the pillows from beside his head. His eyes were closed with the effort of speaking his phrase and I hugged the pillow to my chest and let myself fall onto him, into him, the pillow between my chest and his FACE. I could feel his lips still mouthing through the layer of feathers and cloth. I leaned harder. I thought that I would crush his BONES with my weight; I could feel them rising from the mattress like a fragile construction built of twigs and paper. I closed my eyes and held my breath, and then there was nothing but darkness.[30]
25.
[31]THE NEXT THING I REMEMBER IS WAKING TO THE SONG OF A BIRD and light pressing on my closed eyes, illuminating the dense network of pink veins that threaded through the insides of my eyelids. I could hear soft rustling sounds and breathing, which seemed to come from close by. There was, too, a nagging feeling that something was missing, or that I had forgotten something. I opened my eyes and the light from the window flooded the whole room with whiteness. When the features of the room came to me, I saw that I was in a completely white room, lying in a narrow bed. There was a small table next to the bed and a picture on the wall opposite of a boy holding a dog in his arms. The soft sounds came again and attached themselves to a woman, who I noticed was hunched over in one corner of the room. As I looked at her she slowly began shuffling along sideways with her face to the wall and her back to me. This animal scuttling motion of hers frightened me and made me nauseous, until I realised that she held a cloth in one hand and was cleaning the dust from a kind of picture rail that ran along the wall. She turned swiftly and when she saw me looking at her hurried out of the room.
There were several other beds in the room, all empty, and I recognised it as a hospital ward. I realised that I must have been injured; perhaps I had been in some kind of accident. I scanned my body for areas of pain, but could find none. I looked down at my arms and lifted them up in front of my face. I turned my hands this way and that, I tested my legs and the motion of my neck, but all seemed to be in order. From the bed I cast my eyes about, but nowhere in the room was there any machinery that might be used to straighten my back, which was the next explanation that came to mind. I even sat up in the bed and looked at the headboard for some traction device that might be located there, but all I could see was a small white card with a name on it that was not mine. I must have been put in the wrong bed by mistake, I thought. Although I knew it was just an administrative error, I couldn’t help feeling uneasy, as if I were being mocked.
I swung my legs out from under the bedclothes and hoisted myself to sit on the edge of the bed, preparing to get up. I noticed that my clothes had gone and I was wearing only a white nightgown. It was an effort to stand. I made my way slowly around the room looking at the labels on the other beds, in case I would find my name on one of these, but the spaces to hold the cards were all blank. I stood looking at the mislabelled bed. ‘Certainly an administrative error,’ I told myself.
The room, on closer inspection, was very bare. Nowhere was there any medical equipment to measure my vital signs, no charts to record them nor medicine to treat any illness. I had begun to shiver with cold, and turned back to the bed, but the idea of getting into that bed, which after all was labelled as not my own, was suddenly loathsome to me; like wearing another man’s clothes. I was still standing there, shivering and hesitating, when I heard steps approach the door, causing me to jump with alarm. I leaped into the bed, forgetting its irksomeness, and pulled the cover up over my insubstantial gown.
30
This section is followed by several pages of illegible text: heavily crossed-out writing with some pages torn and missing.
31
The following sections are written in a smaller notebook, which has some water damage, but the text is still legible.