PART TWO

Seven years later, in Ljubljana, he was walking towards the castle that seemed to float in the air like a silhouette, but he wasn’t entirely convinced that he was walking along the road. He could feel firm ground beneath his feet, while alongside him ran hazy lines that might have been the edges of the road, yet his sense of the hardness beneath his feet came and went. One moment it was stronger, the next it faded, and at times it disappeared altogether. Then he felt nothing. There was a mist before his eyes, in his ears. His thoughts were sinking as into a deep swamp: not a muddy one; more like quicksand. The only thing he could register was the fluctuating rise and fall of the temperature of his blood. It swung from incredible heat to intense cold, and was different in different parts of his body at the same time. As if he had his right hand in boiling water, his left hand in ice. And so he could neither evaluate the strength of his feelings nor identify their exact location.

He had no sense of time and could not determine how long this absence lasted, this sinking into his own blood. When the temperature fluctuations stabilised, he first of all felt his hearing becoming clearer. He could hear a church choir in the distance, accompanied by an organ, it sounded hollow, as if echoing off the walls of a deep well. The music flowed over him like the waves of hot and cold had before, then it began to settle and intensify, to float. And then the organ keys came to the fore, louder and sharper and crisper. Finally it was all repeated in an even tone. Then there was a sound like human steps. As the sound came nearer, it seemed to him again that he was walking along the road and the hollow steps he could hear were his own.

Almost at the same time, his sight began to clear. The mist condensed into patches and withdrew: to the left and right there were sometimes pulses of flashing light. He thought perhaps they were puddles and that sunlight was reflecting off their surface. But the mist did not lift completely, so he saw nothing with any clarity. The world intruded on him, but not as sharply as to awaken his tired, sunken thoughts. He had a slight feeling that things were moving in a particular direction, that they were going only forwards and not backwards or in many different directions at once. Objects swam around him like balloons, floating above and behind him, circling, approaching and retreating, sometimes seeming to swarm together. The whole time his perceptions remained coarse, hazy. Nothing around him changed, but rather moved at a certain distance, and if they did come nearer they did so only as outlines, never clearly visible. He perceived the reality around him, but found no connection between the outlines and himself. It was as if he was excluded from the real world; as if he could not touch things; as if he was floating on his own, to an extent determined by the flow of his blood, and that things were also floating independently, without contact with him, remaining outside him.

At such moments, more frequent in recent years, a wild restlessness always gripped him, the urge to leap and bang and hurl things around and smash them. He was aware of these feelings, but he never worked out at what level of withdrawal they occurred. Nor could he ever push them away, they had to disappear on their own. They were like pain, and his will was irrelevant. Whenever they appeared, his heartbeat increased, something reminiscent of extreme joy arose in his chest, a yell, but he was also full of other, very different feelings – hatred of his surroundings, wantonness, a craving for violence – he himself called it a craving for violence and nothing more, because he always had to take hold of something and break it, he had to rush around the room and shout and bang his feet on the floor, and only then could he calm down. But at times the attack would be so strong that he was left trembling when it passed. Sometimes he looked with relish at the windowpane and thought how it would be to smash his fist through it and reduce it to fragments – what a sense of relief he would feel! Mostly the mere thought of the act was enough.

He thought that perhaps the attic room where he was staying was at fault: There wasn’t a day when he didn’t look