Night Games: And Other Stories and Novellas (32 page)

"Of what?" the writer replied distractedly.

"Of what could have motivated him to send for us, the three of us in
particular?"

The writer found it superfluous to look for a particular reason. "Our
friend," he declared, "felt he was near death, and even though he was living rather reclusively, at least lately-in such an hour, those of a basically sociable character feel the need to have close friends around them."

"But he did have a lover," remarked the businessman.

"A lover?" repeated the writer, lifting his eyebrows contemptuously.

Then the doctor noticed that the middle drawer of the desk stood
half open. "I wonder if his will is in here," he said.

"That's none of our business," the businessman said, "at least not
now. Anyway, he has a married sister in London."

The servant entered the room. He felt free to ask for advice about
the laying out, the funeral arrangements, and the death certificate. As far
as he knew, there was a will filed with the master's lawyer, but he
doubted that it contained directives about these things. The writer felt the
room to be stiflingly muggy. He drew the heavy red drapes away from
one of the windows and opened both shutters. A broad, dark-blue strip of
spring air streamed in. The doctor asked the servant if he knew why the
deceased had sent for the three of them, since, when he really thought
about it, he had not been called to this house in his capacity as a doctor
for many years. The servant acted as though he had expected this question, pulled a very large portfolio from his jacket pocket, took out a piece
of paper, and explained that his master had written down the names of the friends that he wanted to see assembled around his deathbed seven
years ago. Therefore, even if his master had no longer been conscious,
the servant would have been able to send for them on his own authority.

The doctor took the piece of paper from the servant's hand and
found five names written on it: aside from those of the three of them, one
was a friend who had died two years ago, and the other was someone unknown to them. The servant explained that the latter was an industrialist
with whom the bachelor had kept company nine or ten years ago but
whose address was now either lost or forgotten. The men looked at one
another self-consciously and filled with emotion. "What do you make of
this'?" asked the businessman. "Did he intend to make a speech in his last
hour'?"

"Maybe give his own eulogy," the writer added.

The doctor was looking at the open desk drawer and suddenly three
words in large Roman letters jumped out at him from an envelope: "To
my friends."

"Oh," he exclaimed, took the envelope, lifted it up, and showed it to
the others. "That's for us," he said, and, turning to the servant, he indicated to him with a toss of his head that his further presence would be unnecessary. The servant left. "For us!" said the writer wide-eyed. "There's
no doubt," said the doctor, "that we are authorized to open it." "Obligated," said the businessman, and buttoned his overcoat.

The doctor took a letter opener from the glass cup, opened the envelope. put the letter down, and put on his pince-nez. The writer took advantage of the moment to take up the paper and unfold it. "Since it's for
all three of us," he remarked apologetically, and leaned on the desk so
that the light of the ceiling lamp fell over the paper. The businessman
stood next to him. The doctor remained seated. "Read it out loud," said
the businessman. The writer began:

"To my friends." He interrupted himself, smiling. "Yes, he's written
it here again, gentlemen," and then continued reading without stopping.
"A quarter of an hour ago, more or less, I breathed my last. You are assembled around my deathbed and are preparing to read this letter together-if the letter still exists in the hour of my death, I'll add. Because
it could happen that a better impulse could move me ..."

"What?" asked the doctor.

"A better impulse could move me," repeated the writer and continued to read: ". . . and that I would decide to destroy this letter, since it
can't do me any good and will cause you at the very least some unpleasant hours, if it doesn't destroy the life of one or the other of you."

"Destroy our lives?" repeated the doctor questioningly, and wiped
the lenses of his pince-nez.

"Faster," said the businessman in a hoarse voice.

The writer continued reading:

"And I ask myself what kind of strange mood is now driving me to
my desk and pushing me to write down words whose effect on you I will
no longer be able to see'? And even if I could, the pleasure would be too
small to count as an excuse for the monstrous pettiness which I am making myself guilty of right now-and with a feeling of great contentment."

"Ho," cried the doctor in a voice that he didn't recognize himself.
The writer cast him a quick and hostile glance and continued reading,
more quickly and more tonelessly than before.

"Yes, it's just a whim, nothing more, because at bottom I really
have nothing against you. I even like you all, in my way, just as you like
me in yours. I don't even think badly of you, and if I have made fun of
you at times, I have never sneered at you. Not even, yes, least of all, in
those hours that you will soon picture in the most lively and painful way.
Where does this mood come from, then? Could it not after all stem from
a deep and at bottom noble wish not to leave the world with too many
lies? I could make myself believe that, if I had ever felt even once the
slightest hint of what men call `remorse."'

"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.

In the hallway the businessman said to the servant: "Concerning the
funeral-it's possible that the will at the lawyer's will have more detailed
instructions after all."

"And don't forget," added the doctor, "to wire your master's sister
in London."

"Certainly not," answered the servant as he opened the door for the
men.

The writer overtook them while they were still on the steps. "I can
take both of you with me," said the doctor, who was awaiting his carriage. "Thanks." said the businessman, "but I prefer to walk." He shook
hands with both of them, walked down the street toward the city, and allowed himself to be comforted by the mild and gentle night.