Free Severin's Journey Into the Dark by PAUL LEPPIN

silently:
    I’ve found a name for the place, a good name, one that will draw people in: The Spider.
    Severin stood up. Saliva rose bitterly in his throat and made him feel dizzy. Nathan’s closely shorn head was submerged in cigarette smoke, and for a few seconds Severin was oppressed by another image that appeared before him. There was the city, enormous, with deep streets and thousands of windows. And in the center the wine bar in the black lane. The lamp over the entrance gaped like an eye and people crowded in front of the door. They came one after another, like moths to a flame — — Mylada sat inside in her green dress — — Out of sight, hunched beneath the curved legs of the piano, skulked a shapeless being that the people of the night called joy —
    Severin shook himself and the image disappeared.
    Would you like to have a look at my laboratory sometime? — he heard Nathan Meyer ask.
    I don’t know — he said, and had to cling to the back of the chair to keep himself from falling.

V
     
    The days of rain came and washed away the last traces of summer. The water stood in large pools on the paths in the parks, and the leaves the wind tore from the trees clung to the benches. The cabs drove through the city with wet leather roofs, and boys splashed through the puddles barefoot and built small dams on the edges of the pavement with trash from the street. Behind the damp sky the evening descended more rapidly than was usual for that time of year.
    Severin stood at the window. The meager life of the suburban district where he lived moved through the afternoon slowly, with lingering pauses. A coal wagon clattered over the stones and the large packhorses sullenly lowered their heads. A man hurried past the houses with quick steps, his black umbrella shining with wetness. Now and then a dirty paper kite rose into the sky. A child was pulling it through the rain on a string. Then it began to flutter heavily and fearfully and fell to the earth. The doorbell rang in the shop on the corner; a young woman with waved bangs emerged and took stock of the weather. Then she lifted up her skirt so her pretty legs were visible up to her knees and walked down the street.
    Severin thought of the autumn rains of his childhood. Everything had been as it was today, and boyish wishes unearthed a plaintive homesickness in his heart. Even the merchant’s bell across from his paternal home had had the same sound. He waited impatiently for the door below to open again. As a small boy, long before he had to start going to school, he had once been ill with pneumonia. A queer feeling had sometimes come over him while he lay at home in bed and the slanting light from the street fell on the painted flowers on the ceiling. Outside, his mother was working in the kitchen, and from somewhere came the drawn-out tone of a barrel organ. Then the fever gnawed an odd, circular point in him, which was covered with a thin membrane and seemed to feel soft. A comparison also occurred to him; he remembered the bonbons he used to buy at the market for a kreuzer. When the sugar dissolved in his mouth, he probed the liquid filling beneath the paper-thin coating with his tongue. Long ago this feeling had been lost within him, and had not returned. Now it was there again, and he recognized it. The rainy day brought a multitude of familiar, long-forgotten images back to his memory. They rose up simultaneously, tangled by the course of years. The sooty walkway with the iron railing above the courtyard, where he and his brother dreamt up childish games and shot at the cats in the garden with a rubber slingshot. Old Julinka, who ate the bread of charity in the house and had to scrub the broken wooden stairs. The summer evenings in front of the open door, when the red clouds among the rooftops brought him his first incomprehensible tears, and the servant girls in neighboring courtyards who took up Czech songs, the banal sweetness of which still moved him.
    Mylada