Severin's Journey Into the Dark by PAUL LEPPIN Page A

enemy had a voluptuous and puzzling allure. Here the stories of knights and adventures of sailors that he read at home became a small but genuine reality that brought heat to his face and hands and stifled his breath in mute agitation. Since that time his youth had contained no experience of equal worth. But the blind compulsion that had driven him to the skirmishes in the abandoned fortifications had grown beyond all proportion over the years and began to press at his throat. Sometimes he was overcome by a senseless fear and a horror that his life would amount to nothing. Since he had become an adult and started earning his own bread, bleak and vapid walls had risen around him and blocked his view. All around, everywhere he looked, he saw dull and mundane convention. He went to the office early in the morning and went home at noon; the rest of the day he spent sleeping. He felt like someone standing in a pit with a shovel. He digs and digs, but the fine, pliable sand keeps running back and filling the hole.
    As a child he had owned a book that had never completely left his thoughts. It was the first volume of a novel about the Hussite wars. The second volume was missing, but Severin did not bother to look for it. The way the book ended, in the middle of the course of great events, seemed perfect to him. There were gypsies who had a robbers’ den in the crevices of the Devil’s Wall near Hohenfurt, savage warriors who threw dice for their girls in taverns, moonlit nights when people dug in forests for the mandrake root. There was a magic garden where malformed dwarves mocked those who had lost their way, where marvelous grottoes opened and clanging metal lions sank into the depths when someone approached. And the comet shone blood red in the sky and there was war in Bohemia. Severin thought of this book as he went to meet Zdenka.
    On Karlsplatz it was silent except for a few pairs of lovers whispering behind the bushes. Severin pushed his foot through the dead leaves on the path. The electric lamps were already burning and hung over the trees like moons. Severin looked for the first stars between the lights. An unpleasant restlessness held him captive and drove him back to the park, although Zdenka was already waiting for him. He took his hat in his hand and the wind dampened his hair. The clock on the tower of the Ministry of Justice struck, and the chimes echoed slowly through the boughs. Severin listened to them with a bitter heart. A soft and feeble desire for a radiant and intense life like the one described in the chapters of the book leapt within his soul. A colossal and violent existence rose before him in fiery light. Beyond the edge of Karlsplatz he felt the city.
    Severin stepped out of the dim light of the park and into the next street. Again he listened carefully to the sounds and tried to make out people’s voices. He began to feel an awareness that people are what give life meaning, that they were connected to everything that he fancied to be splendor and meaning and awe. Nights of comets and tremors and the mysteries of the heart. With exquisite fright he thought of the evening when he and a friend had gone to see a performance by a suburban Czech theatre. He had never been very particular about such entertainments. The cloying sentimentality that the audience of lowbrows and philistines had cooed over was the right stimulus for his senses as well. In the gestures of the pathetic comedians and the laughter and tears of the badly made-up women he detected more of the hot and neglected desires of his soul than he did anywhere else. A girl who had moved the crowd with her disappointed love had attracted his attention. In the way she turned her slender body, in the lines of her shoulders and throat, there was much that reminded him of Zdenka. He had gone home in a state of peculiar and unacknowledged confusion. It was the feeling that always plagued him during the pauses in the music in cafés, when he listened