In the early afternoon of the day following the mermaid's departure, Dr K. lay resting as the establishment's rules required when he heard hurried footsteps in the corridor outside his room, and the customary silence had hardly returned than they were heard again, this time going in the other direction. When Dr K. looked out into the passage, to see what had occasioned this to-ing and fro-ing in breach of all the hydro's practices, he glimpsed Dr von Hartungen, his white coat flying and attended by two nurses, just turning the corner. Later that afternoon the mood in all of the reception rooms was curiously subdued, and at tea the staff were noticeably monosyllabic. The sanatorium patients exchanged glances in embarrassed consternation, like children forbidden to speak by their parents. At dinner, Dr K.'s right-hand table companion, retired General of Hussars Ludwig von Koch, whom he had come to look upon as an amiable permanent fixture and to whom he had hoped to turn for consolation after the loss of the girl from Genoa, was not in his place. Dr K. now had no neighbour at table at all, and sat quite alone at dinner, like a man with a contagious disease. The next morning the sanatorium management announced that Major General Ludwig von Koch, of Neusiedl in Hungary, had passed away in the early afternoon of the previous day. In answer to his concerned enquiries, Dr K. learned from Dr von Hartungen that General von Koch had taken his own life, with his old army pistol. In some incomprehensible way, Dr von Hartungen added with a nervous gesture, he had contrived to shoot himself both in the heart and in the head. He was found in his armchair, the novel he had always been reading lying open in his lap.
The funeral, which took place on the 6th of October in Riva, was a desolate affair. It had not proved possible to notify the only relative of the General, who had neither wife nor children. Dr von Hartungen, one of the nurses, and Dr K. were the only mourners. The priest, reluctant to bury a suicide, performed the office in the most cursory manner. The funeral oration was confined to an appeal to the Almighty Father in his infinite goodness to grant everlasting peace to this taciturn and oppressed soul — quest'uomo più taciturno e mesto, said the priest, his gaze upturned with a reproachful expression. Dr K. seconded this meagre wish and, once the ceremony had been concluded with a few more mumbled words, he followed Dr von Hartungen, at some distance, back to the sanatorium. The October sun shone so warm that day that Dr K. was obliged to take off his hat and carry it in his hand.
Over the years that followed, lengthy shadows fell upon those autumn days at Riva, which, as Dr K. on occasion said to himself, had been so beautiful and so appalling, and from these shadows there gradually emerged the silhouette of a barque with masts of an inconceivable height and sails dark
and hanging in folds. Three whole years it takes until the vessel, as if it were being borne across the waters, gently drifts into the little port of Riva. It berths in the early hours of the morning. A man in blue overalls comes ashore and makes fast the ropes. Behind the boatmen, two figures in dark tunics with silver buttons carry a bier upon which lies, under a large floral-patterned cover, what was clearly the body of a human being. It is Gracchus the huntsman. His arrival was announced at midnight to Salvatore, the podestà of Riva, by a pigeon the size of a cockerel, which flew in at his bedroom window and then spoke in his ear. Tomorrow, the pigeon said, the dead hunter Gracchus will arrive. Receive him in the name of the town. After some deliberation, Salvatore arose and set the necessary preparations in train. Now, entering the lord mayor's office in the light of dawn, his cane and top hat with its mourning band in his black-gloved right hand, he finds to his satisfaction that his instructions have been followed correctly. Fifty boys forming a guard of honour stand in the long hallway, and in one of the rear rooms on the upper storey, as he hears from the ship's master, who meets him at the entrance, Gracchus the huntsman lies upon his bier, a man, it now transpires, of wild, tangled hair and beard, his ravaged skin darkened to the colour of bronze.
We the readers, the sole witnesses of what was said between the huntsman and the deputy of the community of Riva, learn little of the fate of Gracchus, except that many, many years before, in the Black Forest, where he was on guard against the wolves which still prowled the hills at that time, he went in pursuit of a chamois — and is this not one of the strangest items of misinformation in all the tales that have ever been told? — he went in pursuit of a chamois and fell to his death from the face of a mountain; and that because of a wrong turn of the tiller, a moment of inattention on the part of the helmsman, distracted by the beauty of the huntsman's dark green country, the barque which was to have ferried him to the shore beyond failed to make the crossing, so that he, Gracchus, has been voyaging the seas of the world ever since, without respite, as he says, attempting now here and now there to make land. The question of who is to blame for this undoubtedly great misfortune remains unresolved, as indeed does the matter of what his guilt, the cause of his misfortune, consists in. But as it was Dr K. who conjured up this tale, it seems to me that the meaning of Gracchus the huntsman's ceaseless journey lies in a penitence for a longing for love, such as invariably besets Dr K., as he explains in one of his countless Fledermaus-letters to Felice, precisely at the point where there is seemingly, and in the natural and lawful order of things, nothing to be enjoyed.
The better to elucidate this somewhat impenetrable observation, Dr K. adduces an episode from "the evening before last", in which the son — now surely aged forty — of the owner of a Jewish bookshop in Prague becomes the focus of the illicit emotion described in this letter. This man, in no way attractive, indeed repulsive, who has had almost nothing but misfortune in life, spends the entire day in his father's tiny store, dusting off the prayer stoles or peeking out at the street through gaps between books which, Dr K. expressly notes, are mostly of an obscene nature; this wretched creature, who feels himself (as Dr K. knows) to be German and for that reason goes to the Deutsches Haus every evening after supper to nurture his delusion of grandeur as a member of the German Casino Club, becomes for Dr K., in that episode which occurred the day before yesterday, as he tells Felice, an object of fascinated interest in a way he cannot entirely explain even to himself. Quite by chance, writes Dr K., I noticed him leaving the shop yesterday evening. He walked ahead of me, every inch the young man I had in my memory. His back is strikingly broad, and he bears himself so curiously upright that it is hard to tell whether he is indeed straight as a ramrod or malformed. Do you now understand, my dearest, writes Dr K., can you understand (please tell me!) why it was that I followed this man down Zeltnergasse, veritably lusting, turned into the Graben behind him, and watched him enter the gates of the Deutsches Haus with a feeling of unbounded pleasure?
At this point Dr K. surely came within an inch of admitting to a desire which we must assume remained unstilled. But instead, remarking that it is already late, he hastily concludes his letter, one which he had begun with comments on a photograph of a niece of Felice's, writing: Yes, this little child deserves to be loved. That fearful gaze, as if all the terrors of the earth had been revealed to her in the studio. But what love could have been sufficient to spare the child the terrors of love, which for Dr K. stood foremost among all the terrors of the earth? And how are we to fend off the fate of being unable to depart this life, lying before the podestà, confined to a bed in our sickness, and, as Gracchus the huntsman does, touching, in a moment of distraction, the knee of the man who was to have been our salvation.