Turning a corner, he understood: an old woman was selling cucumbers soaked in vinegar, and it was their fragrance which had assaulted Mersault. A passer-by stopped, bought a cucumber which the old woman wrapped in a piece of paper. He took a few steps, unwrapped his purchase in front of Mersault, and as he bit into the cucumber, its bro-ken, sopping flesh released the odour even more powerfully. Nauseated, Mersault lent against a post and for a long moment inhaled all the alien solitude the world could offer him.
Then he walked away and without even thinking what he was doing entered a restaurant where an accordion was playing. He went down several steps, stopped at the foot of the stairs, and found himself in a dim cellar filled with red lights. He must have looked peculiar, for the musician played more softly, the conversations stopped, and all the diners looked in his direc-tion. In one corner, some whores were eating together, their mouths shiny with grease. Other customers were drinking the brown, sweetish Czech beer.
Many were smoking without having ordered anything at all. Mersault went over to a rather long table at which only one man was seated. Tall and slender with yellow hair, he sprawled in his chair with his hands in his pock-ets and pursed his chapped lips round a matchstick already swollen with saliva, sucking it noisily or sliding it from one corner of his mouth to the other.
When Mersault sat down, the man barely moved, wedged his back against the wall, shifted the match in Mersault’s direction and squinted faintly. At that moment Mersault noticed a red star in his buttonhole. Mersault ate the little he had ordered rapidly. He was not hungry. The accordionist was playing louder now, and staring fixedly at the newcomer. Twice Mersault stared back defiantly and tried to meet the man’s gaze. But fever had weakened him.
The man was still staring. Suddenly one of the whores burst out laughing, the man with the red star sucked noisily on his match and produced a little bubble of saliva, and the musician, still staring at Mersault, broke off the lively dance tune he had been playing and began a slow melody heavy with the dust of centuries. At this moment the door opened and a new customer walked in.
Mersault did not see him, but through the open door the smell of vinegar and cucumbers pressed in upon him, immediately filling the dark cellar, mingling with the mysterious melody of the accordion, swelling the bubbles of saliva on the man’s matchstick, making the conversations suddenly more meaningful, as if out of the night that lay upon Prague all the significance of a miserable suffering ancient world had taken refuge in the warmth of this room, among these people. Mersault suddenly felt the flaw he carried within himself yield, exposing him still more completely to pain and fever.
Unable to bear another moment he stood up, called to the waiter, and understanding nothing of his explanations overpaid the bill, re-alizing that the musician’s gaze was once again fixed upon him. He walked to the door, passing the accordionist, and saw that he was still staring at the place at the table Mersault had just left. Then he realized that the man was blind; he walked up the steps and, opening the door, was entirely engulfed by the omnipresent odour as he walked through the little streets into the depths of the night.
Stars glittered over the houses. He must have been near the river; he could detect its powerful mutter. In front of a lit-tle gate in a thick wall covered with Hebrew characters, he realized that he was in the ghetto. Over the wall stretched the branches of a sweet smelling willow. Through the gate he could make out big brown stones lying among the weeds: it was the old Jewish cemetery of Prague.
A moment later.Mersault realized he had been running and was now in the square in front of the old town hall. Near his hotel he had to lean against a wall and vomit, retching painfully. With all the lucidity extreme weakness affords, he managed to reach his room without making any mistakes, went to bed, and fell asleep at once.
The next day he was awakened by the newspaper sellers. The day was still overcast, but the sun glowed behind the clouds. Though still a little weak, Mersault felt better. But he thought of the long day which lay ahead of him. Living this way, in his own presence, time took on its most extreme dimensions, and each hour seemed to contain a world. The important thing was to avoid crises like the one yesterday. It would be best to do his sightseeing methodically. He sat at the table in his pyjamas and worked out a systematic schedule which would occupy each of his days for a week.
Monasteries and baroque churches, museums and the old parts of the city, nothing was omitted. Then he washed, realized he had for-gotten to buy a comb, and went downstairs as he had the day before, unkempt and taciturn, past the clerk whose bristling hair, bewildered expression and jacket with the second button missing he noticed now, in broad daylight. As he left the hotel he was brought to a halt by a childish, sentimental accordion tune.
The blind man of the night before, squatting on his heels at the corner of the old square, was playing with the same blank and smiling expression, as though liberated from himself and entirely contained within the motion of a life which exceeded him. Mersault turned the corner and again recognized the smell of cucumbers. And with the smell, his suffering.
That day was the same as those which followed. Mersault got up late, visited monasteries and churches, sought refuge in their fragrance of crypts and incense, and then, back in the daylight, confronted his secret fears at every corner, where a cucumber seller was invariably posted. It was through this odour that he saw the museums and discovered the mystery and the profusion of baroque genius which filled Prague with its gold magnificence.
The altars which glowed softly in the darkness seemed borrowed from the coppery sky, the misty sunlight so frequent over the city. The glistening spirals and scrolls, the elaborate setting that looked as if it were cut out of gold paper, so touching in its resemblance to the crèches made for children at Christmas, the grandiose and grotesque baroque perspectives affected Mersault as a kind of infantile, feverish and overblown romanticism by which men protect themselves against their own demons.
The god worshipped here was the god man fears and honours, not the god who laughs with man before the warm frolic of sea and sun. Emerging from the faint fragrance of dust and extinction which reigned under the dim vaults, Mersault felt he had no country. Every evening he vis-ited the cloister of the Czech monks, on the west side of the city. In the cloister garden the hours fluttered away with the doves, the bells chimed softly over the grass, but it was still his fever which spoke to Mersault. Nonetheless, the time passed. But then came the hour when the churches and monuments closed and the restaurants had not yet opened.
That was the dangerous time. Mersault walked along the Vltava’s banks, dotted with flowerbeds and bandstands, as the day came to an end. Little boats worked their way up the river from lock to lock. Mersault kept pace with them, left behind the deafening noise and rushing water of a sluice-gate, gradually regained the peace and quiet of the evening, then walked on to meet a murmur which swelled to a terrible roar. At the new lock, he watched the bright little boats vainly trying to pass over the dam without capsizing until one of them passed the danger point and shouts rang out above the sound of the water.
The rising and falling river with its burden of shouts, tunes, and the fragrance of gardens, full of the coppery glow of the setting sun and the twisted, grotesque shadows of the statues on the Charles Bridge, made Mersault bitterly conscious of his desolation: a solitude in which love had no part. Coming to a standstill as the fragrance of leaves and water reached him, he felt a catch in his throat and imagined tears which did not come.
Tears would be for a friend, or for open arms. But tears gave way to the world without tenderness in which he was im-mersed. Some evenings, always at the same times, he crossed the Charles Bridge and strolled through the Hradcany district above the river, a deserted and silent neighbourhood though only a few steps from the busiest streets in the city. He wandered among these huge palaces, across enormous paved courtyards, past ironwork gates, around the cathedral.
His footsteps echoed in the silence between high walls. A dim noise from the city reached him here. There was no cucumber seller in this district, but something oppressive in the silence, in the grandeur of the place. So that Mersault always ended by walk-ing back towards the odour or the melody which
