The next morning Dr K. crossed the Adriatic in somewhat stormy weather, afflicted with slight seasickness. For a considerable time after he had made land, if that is the right expression, in Venice, the waves were still breaking within him. From the Sandwirth Hotel, where he was staying, he wrote to Felice in Berlin, in an optimistic mood that probably came upon him as his queasiness receded, saying that however tremulous he might feel, he now proposed to plunge into the city and all that it could offer a traveller such as himself. Even the pouring rain, which veiled every outline and shape in an even grey-green, would not deter him; no, quite the contrary, he averred, for the days in Vienna would be washed away all the better. However, there is no evidence to suggest that Dr K. did leave the hotel on that 15th of September. If, as he believed, it was impossible to be here at all, how much more was it impossible for him, on the brink of disintegration, to venture out beneath this watery sky under which the very stones dissolved. So Dr K. remains in the hotel. Towards evening, in the sombre lobby, he writes once more to Felice. Now he no longer makes any reference to exploring the city. Instead, set down in hasty lines underneath the hotel's letterhead with its pretty steam yachts, there are references to his mounting despair. That he was alone
and exchanged not a word with a living soul excepting the staff, that the misery within him was almost overflowing, and that — this much he could say with certainty — he was in a condition in keeping with his nature and ordained for him by a justice not of this world, a condition that he could not transcend and which he would have to endure till the very last of his days.
How Dr K. passed his few days in Venice in reality, we do not know. At all events, his sombre mood does not appear to have lifted. Indeed, he felt it was only this state of mind that sustained him when confronted with such a city as Venice, a city which must have made a deep impression upon him, despite there being newly wedded couples everywhere whose very presence seemed to make a mockery of his mournfulness. How it is beautiful, he wrote, with an exclamation mark, in one of those somewhat awry formulations in which language for a moment gives free rein to the emotions. How it is beautiful, and how we undervalue it! But more precise details Dr K. does not disclose. We know, as I have said, nothing of what he really saw. There is not even a reference to the Doge's Palace, the prison chambers of which were to play so prominent a part in the evolution of his own fantasies of trial and punishment some months later. All we know is that he spent those four days in Venice and that he then took the train from Santa Lucia to Verona.
On the afternoon of his arrival in Verona he walked from the station along the Corso into town, and then wandered among its narrow streets until, in weariness, he went into the Church of Sant'Anastasia. After resting in the cool, shadowy interior for a while, with feelings of both gratitude and distaste, he set off once more, and as he left, just as one might ruffle the hair of a son or younger brother, he ran his fingers over the marble locks of a dwarfish figure which, at the foot of one of the mighty columns, had been bearing the immense weight of a holy-water font for centuries. Nowhere is there anything to suggest that he saw the fine mural of St George painted by Pisanello over the entrance to the Pellegrini chapel. It might be shown, though, that when Dr K. stood in the porch once again, on the threshold between the dark interior and the brightness outside, he felt for a moment as if the selfsame church were replicated before him, its entrance fitting directly with that of the church he had just left, a mirroring effect he was familiar with from his dreams, in which everything was forever splitting and multiplying, over and again, in the most terrifying manner.
With the approach of evening, Dr K. began to be aware of the growing numbers of people out on the streets, apparently solely for their pleasure, all of them arm-in-arm in couples or groups of three or even more. Perhaps it was the bills, still posted throughout the city, announcing the spettacoli lirici all'Arena that August and the word AIDA displayed in large letters which persuaded him that the Veronese show of carefree togetherness had something of a theatrical performance about it, staged especially to bring home to him, Dr K., his solitary, eccentric condition — a thought he could not get out of his head and which he was only able to escape by seeking refuge in a cinema, probably the Cinema Pathé di San Sebastiano. In tears, so Dr K. recorded the following day in Desenzano, he sat in the surrounding darkness, observing the transformation into pictures of the minute particles of dust glinting in the beam of the projector. However, there is nothing in Dr K.'s Desenzano notes to tell us of what he saw on that 20th of September in Verona. Was it the Pathé newsreel, featuring the review of the cavalry in the presence of His Majesty Vittorio Emanuele III, and La Lezione dell'abisso, which, as I discovered in the Biblioteca Civica, were shown that day at the Pathé and which are both now untraceable? Or was it, as I initially supposed, a story that ran with some success in the cinemas of Austria in 1913, the story of the unfortunate Student of Prague, who cut himself off from love and life when, on the 13th of May, 1820, he sold his soul to a certain Scapinelli? The extraordinary exterior shots in this film, the silhouettes of his native city flickering across the screen, would doubtless have sufficed to move Dr K. deeply, most of all perhaps the fate of the eponymous hero, Balduin, since in him he would have recognised a kind of doppelgànger, just as Balduin recognises his other self in the dark-coated brother whom he could never and nowhere escape. In one of the very first scenes, Balduin, the finest swordsman in all Prague, confronts his own image in the mirror, and presently, to his horror, that unreal figure steps out of the frame, and
henceforth follows him as the ghostly shadow of his own restlessness. Would this sort of scenario not have struck Dr K. as the description of a struggle in which, as in the contest he himself had set against the backdrop of the Laurenziberg, the principal character and his opponent are in the most intimate and self-destructive of relationships, such that, when the hero is driven into a corner by his companion he is forced to declare: I am betrothed, I admit it. And what alternative does a man so cornered have but to try and rid himself of his dumb attendant by means of a shot from a pistol? — a shot which, in the silent film, is visible as a puff of smoke. In that moment, in which time itself seems to dissolve, Balduin is released from his delusions. He breathes freely once more and, realising in the same instant that the bullet has penetrated his own heart, dies a dramatic, not to say ostentatious death, the whole scene like a flickering light about to be extinguished, representing the soundless aria of the hero's demise. Final contortions of this kind, which regularly occur in opera when, as Dr K. once wrote, the dying voice aimlessly wanders through the music, did not by any means seem ridiculous to him; rather he believed them to be an expression of our, so to speak, natural misfortune, since after all, as he remarks elsewhere, we lie prostrate on the boards, dying, our whole lives long.
On the 21st of September Dr K. is in Desenzano on the southern shore of Lake Garda. Most of the townspeople have gathered in the market square to welcome the Deputy Secretary of the Prague Workers' Insurance Company. Dr K.,
