“For God’s sake, read the ending,” commanded the doctor in a new voice. The businessman reached over, took the letter from the writer, who was feeling a kind of paralysis creep into his fingers, quickly dropped his eyes down to the end of the letter, and read these words:
“It was fate, my friends, and I can’t change it. I have possessed all your women. All.”
The businessman suddenly stopped and leafed back through the pages. “What are you doing?” asked the doctor.
“The letter was written nine years ago,” said the businessman.
“Read on,” commanded the writer. The businessman read:
“They were of course very different kinds of relationships. With one of them I lived almost as though married, for many months. With another it was more like what is called a wild adventure. With the third it went so far that I wanted to die together with her. The fourth I threw down the stairs because she betrayed me with another. And another was my lover just once. Are you all breathing in relief again, my friends? Don’t. It was perhaps the most beautiful hour of my … and of her life. So, my friends. I don’t have any more to say. I am now folding this piece of paper and putting it in my desk, and here may it wait either until I destroy it while in another mood, or until you get it in the hour that I’m lying on my deathbed. Goodbye.”
The doctor took the letter out of the businessman’s hand and seemed to read it carefully from beginning to end. Then he looked at the businessman, who stood there with his arms crossed, looking down with a scornful smirk. “Even though your wife died last year,” the doctor said calmly, “this applies to her also.”
The writer paced up and down in the room, occasionally shaking his head back and forth as though he had a cramp; suddenly he hissed between his teeth, “Scoundrel,” and followed the word as though it were a thing that dissolved in the air. He tried to recall the image of the young creature that he had once held in his arms as wife. Other images of women appeared, both those often remembered and those believed long forgotten, but the one he desired he could not force into his memory. For his wife’s body was now faded and odorless for him, and it had been all too long since she had been his beloved. But she had become something else for him, something more and something nobler: a friend and a companion, proud of his accomplishments, full of sympathy for his disappointments, full of insight into his deepest being. It appeared to him not impossible that the old bachelor in his meanness had attempted nothing less than to rob him, his secretly envied friend, of his companion. Because all the other things-what did they really mean in the end? He remembered certain adventures from recent and from more distant times that he could hardly have avoided in his successful artist’s life, adven tures that his wife had either smiled or wept away. Where were they all now? They had wilted just as had the distant hour in which his wife had thrown herself into the arms of an unworthy man, perhaps without consideration, without thought; almost as faded as the memory of this same hour was in that dead brain that was resting in the other room on the painfully rumpled pillows. Perhaps in the end it was a lie after all, everything written in the testament? Perhaps a pathetic ordinary man who knew he was condemned to be eternally forgotten had taken his last revenge on the chosen man over whose works death had no power. That could be the case. And even it were true-it still was a petty revenge and one that failed to succeed.
The doctor stared at the piece of paper in front of him, and he thought about the aging, gentle, and yes, kind woman who was now sleeping at home. He also thought about his three children: the eldest, who was just now serving his year of voluntary military service; the oldest daughter, who was engaged to a lawyer; and the youngest daughter, who was so charming and attractive that a famous artist had recently asked to paint her while she was at a ball. He thought about his comfortable home, and everything that was said in the dead man’s letter seemed to him not so much untrue as mysteriously, even exaltedly, irrelevant. He hardly felt that he had learned anything new at this moment. He remembered a peculiar episode of his life some fourteen or fifteen years ago, a time in which he had experienced certain problems with his medical career, and when, morose and finally reduced to a state of confusion, he had planned to leave his town, his wife, and his family. At that time he had begun to lead a kind of wild and thoughtless existence in which a peculiar and hysterical woman had played a role, a woman who had later committed suicide over another lover. How his life after that had gradually resumed its regular course he could not remember now at all. But it had to have been in that miserable epoch, which had passed just as it had arrived, like an illness, that his wife had deceived him. Yes, it had to have been then, and it was clear to him that he had really always known it. Wasn’t she once near to telling him about it? Didn’t she drop hints? Thirteen or fourteen years ago … on what occasion … ? Wasn’t it once in summer, on a vacation trip-late one evening on a hotel terrace? In vain he tried to remember the faded words.
The businessman stood at the window and looked into the gentle, white night. He tried with the best will in the world to remember his dead wife. But as much as he strained his inner senses, at first he only saw himself standing between the frame of an open door, in the light of a grey morning, wearing a black suit, accepting and reciprocating sympathetic handshakes, he remembered the flat odor of carbolic acid and flowers in his nose. Only gradually did he succeed in recalling her image. But at first it was only the image of an image. For he could really see only the large gold-framed portrait that was hanging in the salon over the piano at home, which showed a proud woman of about thirty in ballroom dress. Only then did she herself appear to him as the pale and shy young girl who had accepted his courtship almost twenty-five years ago. Then the image of a blossoming woman appeared before him, enthroned next to him in a box at the theatre, her eyes fixed on the stage and far from him emotionally. Then he remembered an eager woman who had received him with unexpected passion when he had returned from a long trip. Right after that he remembered a nervous, teary person with green, dull eyes, who had spoiled his days with all sorts of bad moods. Then once more he saw an anxious tender mother in a light morning robe, watching over the bed of a sick child who had also had to die. Finally he saw a pale being lying in bed with the corners of her mouth drawn in pain, cold drops of sweat on her forehead, in a room filled with ether, which had filled his soul with painful sympathy. He knew that all these images and a hundred others, which were now racing through his mind at incredible speed, were one and the same person, the person who had been lowered into the grave two years ago, whom he had mourned, and after whose death he had felt liberated. He felt as though he had to choose one of the images in order to arrive at some nameless feeling, because right now free-floating anger and shame were scanning a void. Indecisively he stood there and looked at the houses that were floating yellow and reddish in the moonlight in the gardens opposite, houses that seemed to be pale painted facades behind which there was nothingness.
“Good night,” said the physician and stood up. The businessman turned around. “I have nothing more to do here either.” The writer had taken the letter. put it unnoticed in his jacket pocket, and now opened the door to the next room. Slowly he went up to the deathbed, and the others saw how he looked silently down at the body, his hands behind his back. Then they left.
Extracts 