Homo Sapiens: In the Maelstrom by Stanislaw Przybyszewski and translated by Joe E Bandel
X.
In the small room of the “Green Nightingale” sat only one man. He held his head pressed in both hands and brooded.
Falk was badly startled.
Good God, was it not Grodzki? How had he come here? He had to be in Switzerland now… And alone!
He became restless and his heart beat violently. He sat down at the table and examined him silently.
But Grodzki seemed not to know that someone was near him.
“Well, are you sleeping?” Falk pushed him impatiently. He suddenly felt irritated without knowing why.
Grodzki looked at him without changing his position, calmly with lusterless, fixed eyes, then began to examine his glass attentively.
“Can you not say a word?” Falk cried angrily at him. Grodzki looked at him again and smiled maliciously.
Falk wanted to say something, but in the same moment he noticed that Grodzki was quite uncannily changed. His face was deathly pale, the eyes sunken and peculiarly fixed.
“Are you sick?”
Grodzki shook his head. “What is wrong with you?”
“Hm; you would probably like to do your experiments on decadence and degeneration with me again? Well, the time is over when I was subject to your influence like a medium.”
Falk seemed to overhear everything.
“Strange that I spoke about you today, about your attack of madness in the African Cellar… You behaved quite ridiculously then…”
Falk became furious.
“Say now finally why you screamed so then? What? By the way, it is very unpleasant for me to meet you here…”
Grodzki looked at him again and smiled.
“Me too,” he said. “I should have known that one can meet you in the nights everywhere.” He laughed maliciously. “Have you not yet stopped your debaucheries?”
Falk shrugged contemptuously and ordered wine. He felt the fever shivers again, it burned in his throat and sometimes it became black before his eyes. But it passed again immediately. He wiped the sweat from his forehead.
“You probably have fever?” asked Grodzki smiling. Falk became quite helpless.
“Yes, yes; I am probably a little sick, I don’t actually know… That passes; but I am so restless…”
He suddenly felt the desire to speak much, he also wanted to ask Grodzki about many things, but he forgot what actually.
“No, no, it means nothing… Yes, right! I have not seen you for so long, not since your scandal story… I also have fever attacks often now.”
He recollected.
“Yes, your scandal story… You namely drove away with the woman, what is her name only—how are you here again? Why are you here? Where is she then?”
“She is probably dead,” said Grodzki thoughtfully.
“Dead? Dead? No, excuse me, I did not understand you… She is probably dead! you said.”
“Yes, I don’t know exactly.” Grodzki spoke unusually slowly. “I really don’t know exactly. I told her she was a burden to me, and so she went. Then shortly after I lost consciousness because I got a strong brain fever, and then I could no longer distinguish my visions from reality. They told me nothing because I asked no one, they probably also wanted to spare me; by the way, I drove away immediately… I can tell you no more,” he added after a pause… “Well, it is also indifferent to me, I have become finished with it.”
Falk stared at him anxiously.
“Is that true?”
“I don’t know myself if it is true, it also doesn’t interest me to learn the truth.”
They were silent. Both sat probably ten minutes without speaking. “You Falk, do you believe in the immortality of the soul?”
“Yes.”
“How do you imagine that?”
“Faith imagines nothing. By the way, I don’t believe in it at all. I believe neither that it is mortal nor that it is immortal. I believe in nothing… But do you really know nothing more of her?”
“Of whom?” “Of her!”
“No!… Hm, faith—faith… I actually also believe in nothing, but I have a strange fear.”
“Fear?”
“Yes, great fear. One never thinks seriously about it, life is so long. But when one wants to die, one constantly thinks about what could come then. I namely want to make an end with life now,” he said after a pause with a strange smile.
“So, so; you want to die. That is very reasonable, that is the best you can do.”
Falk observed him curiously.
“It is actually no fear; no—something quite different. In the moment when I want to do it, I suddenly lose consciousness. I cannot think, I cannot exactly control what I do. I get fever, and I want to die with full, cold consciousness… That seems very hard to be… There is namely a method, namely suddenly, in the moment when one says one will not do it, to pull the trigger, thus to surprise oneself… That is probably what most do. But I don’t want to surprise myself. I want to die with will.”
Falk looked at him fixedly. He actually wondered that Grodzki’s speech made not the slightest impression on him. He was only interested in his face. It was the face of a mask. Especially the smile was strange. The lips distorted slowly and quite mechanically, without a single muscle seeming to take part in it. He thought. What was going on with Grodzki? What did he want only?
“Why do you actually want to kill yourself?”
He felt his heart beat violently and restlessly.
“Why? Why? With the same right I could ask you why you still want to live. That is much stranger yet. I have understood you only now. I thought very much about you. You played a great role in my life… Why do you still want to live with your despair and your bad conscience?”
He laughed soundlessly.
“Everything you do, you do from your bad conscience, and when you ruin someone, you do it only to have accomplices, to see others suffer too. You don’t have pride enough to suffer alone. By the way, you suffer too much. Isn’t that so?”
They looked at each other long. Falk suddenly felt a mysterious rage against this person, which also seemed to communicate itself to Grodzki, for he saw how his eyes began to liven and stared at him with a furious expression of hate. They bored into each other with their furious eyes. Falk felt his face begin to twitch; he stood up involuntarily and sat down again. It was a moment in which he wanted to jump on the other, then he had desire to cry out, he felt that he could not tear his eyes loose now.
Then suddenly the spell broke… Grodzki laughed hoarsely.
“Ha, ha: you are now harmless, dear Falk. You lack strength to do evil. There are only ruins left of you… I once loved you very much, more than you can imagine.”
In the same moment his face became serious. Falk stared incessantly at this mask face. He hardly heard what Grodzki spoke. He devoured with his eyes this face to read something out of it, a secret that must be stuck in there…
“Yes, I loved you very much. In my eyes you were a god, but now I see that you are only a human too. It is to me as if I had suddenly awakened from a hypnotic sleep… Only a human,” he said thoughtfully, “a higher species of ape… a scoundrel, a small scoundrel you are. No, I no longer love you. I actually have no reason for it… Yes, yet: I love no one. I also did not love her. You will perhaps experience that yourself one day. We
cannot love: that is all only self-lie… No, I actually always hated you much more than loved you. I actually always guarded myself against the stupid trick of nature to chain humans to life through love…” He was silent for a while.
Yes, Falk, you are a small person. What do you actually concern me? He looked Falk fixedly in the eyes and played mechanically with the
wine glass.
“I also have nothing more to say to you. It is a stupid coincidence that I met you…”
He smiled maliciously.
Perhaps,—yes, perhaps I would get respect for you if you also wanted to make an end with your miserable life… I don’t want to play the sharp psychologist at all, but there are moments when one can read so clearly, so clearly in the soul of the other… I see so clearly your despair, your disgust of life… But in the end it concerns me nothing…
“Don’t repeat that so often, otherwise I will believe the opposite,” Falk countered maliciously.
Grodzki suddenly became very restless and seemed not to know himself what he spoke. He forgot what he said a while ago.
“No, I only meant, or you will think that one cannot want such a thing; well: you can do it because you must… It comes to the same whether one wants it or must… Why should one not let the brain have the proud satisfaction that it once, one single time wanted something? Why not? One also doesn’t need to wonder that it only wanted something one single time. It is enormously hard to want something. I wanted to do it yesterday, and I bit my finger in fear and despair without knowing it. Something resists terribly against death. It torments itself so madly, it suffers so unheard-of that the hair stands on end. It helps nothing. My brain once wanted something, and it wants death.”
He was silent again. Falk looked at him with increasing fear and horror. “Only one must not do it in despair…”
Grodzki spoke half-loudly with himself.
“That is what every servant does who is badly treated in the military,—no, in calm, in perfect calm one must do it.”
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