The next morning Mersault killed Zagreus, came home and slept all afternoon. He awoke in a fever. That evening, still in bed, he sent for the local doctor, who told him he had flu. A man from his office who had come to find out what was the matter took Mersault’s resignation to Monsieur Langlois. A few days later, everything was settled: a report in the newspa-per, an investigation. There was every motive for Zagreus’ ac-tion. Marthe came to see Mersault and said with a sigh: ‘Some-times there are days when you’d like to change places with him.
But sometimes it takes more courage to live than to shoot your-self.’ A week later, Mersault boarded a ship for Marseilles. He told everyone he was going to France for a rest. From Lyons, Marthe received a letter of farewell from which only her pride suffered.
In the same letter Mersault said he had been offered an exceptional job in central Europe. Marthe wrote to him, at a general-delivery address, about how much she was suffering. Her letter never reached Mersault, who had a violent attack of fever the day after he reached Lyons, and took the first train for Prague. As it happened, Marthe told him that after several days in the morgue, Zagreus had been buried and that it had taken a lot of pillows to wedge his body into the coffin.
Part Two, Conscious Death
Chapter One
‘I’D like a room,’ the man said in German.
The clerk was sitting in front of a board covered with keys and was separated from the lobby by a broad table. He stared at the man who had just come in, a grey raincoat over his shoulders, and who spoke with his head turned away. ‘Certainly, sir. For one night?’
‘No, I don’t know.’
‘We have rooms at eighteen, twenty-five and thirty crowns.’ Mersault looked through the glass door of the hotel out into the little Prague street, his hands in his pockets, his hair rum-pled. Not far away, he could hear the trams screeching down the Avenue Wenceslas.
‘Which room would you like, sir?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mersault said, still staring through the glass door. The clerk took a key off the rack and handed it to Mersault.
‘Room number twelve,’ he said.
Mersault seemed to wake up. ‘How much is this room?’ ‘Thirty crowns.’
‘That’s too much. Give me a room for eighteen.’
Without a word, the man took another key off the rack and indicated the brass star attached to it: ‘Room number thirty-four.’
Sitting in his room Mersault took off his jacket, loosened his tie, and mechanically rolled up his shirtsleeves. He walked over to the mirror above the sink, meeting a drawn face slightly tanned where it was not darkened by several days’ growth of beard. His hair fell in a tangle over his forehead, down to the two deep creases between his eyebrows which gave him a grave, tender expression, he realized.
Only then did he think of looking around this miserable room which was all the com-fort he had and beyond which he envisioned nothing at all.
On a sickening carpet huge yellow flowers against a grey background a whole geography of filth suggested a grimy universe of wretchedness. Behind the huge radiator, clots of dust: the regulator was broken, and the brass contact-points exposed. Over the sagging bed dangled a fly-specked flex, at its end a sticky light-bulb. Mersault inspected the sheets, which were clean.
He took his toilet things out of the overnight bag and arranged them one by one on the sink. Then he started to wash his hands, but turned off the tap and walked over to open the uncurtained window. It overlooked a courtyard with a washing-trough and a series of tiny windows in the walls. Washing was drying on a line stretched between two of them.
Mersault lay down on the bed and fell asleep at once. He awak-ened with a start, sweating, his clothes rumpled, and walked aimlessly around the room. Then he lit a cigarette, sat down on the bed, and stared at the wrinkles in his trousers. The sour taste of sleep mingled with the cigarette smoke. He stared at the room again, scratching his ribs through his shirt. He was flooded by a dreadful pleasure at the prospect of so much des-olation and solitude.
To be so far away from everything, even from his fever, to suffer so distinctly here what was absurd and miserable in even the tidiest lives, showed him the shameful and secret countenance of a kind of freedom born of the sus-pect, the dubious. Around him the flaccid hours lapped like a stagnant pond — time had gone slack.
Someone knocked violently, and Mersault, startled, realized that he had been awakened by the same knocking. He opened the door to find a little old man with red hair, bent double under Mersault’s two suitcases, which looked enormous in his hands.
He was choking with rage, and his wide-spaced teeth released a stream of saliva as well as insults and recriminations. Mersault remembered the broken handle which made the larger suitcase so difficult to carry. He wanted to apologize, but had no idea how to say he had never thought the porter would be so old. The tiny creature interrupted him: ‘That’s fourteen crowns.’ ‘For one day’s storage?’ Mersault asked, surprised. Then he understood, from the old man’s laborious explanations, that the porter had taken a taxi.
But Mersault dared not say that he himself could also have taken a taxi in that case, and paid out of sheer reluctance to argue. Once the door was shut, Mersault felt inexplicable sobs swelling his chest.
A nearby clock chimed four times. He had slept for two hours. He realized he was separated from the street only by the house opposite his window, and he felt the dim, mysterious current of life so close to him. It would be better to go outside. Mersault washed his hands very carefully. He sat down on the bed again to clean his nails, and worked the file methodically. Down in the courtyard two or three buzzers rang out so emphatically that Mersault went back to the window. He noticed then that an arched passageway led through the house to the street.
It was as if all the voices of the street, all the unknown life on the other side of that house, the sounds of men who have an address, a family, arguments with an uncle, preferences at dinner, chronic diseases, the swarm of beings each of whom has his own personality, forever divided from the monstrous heart of humanity by individual beats, filtered now through the passageway and rose through the court-yard to explode like bubbles in Mersault’s room.
Discovering how porous he was, how attentive to each sign the world made, Mersault recognized the deep flaw that opened his being to life. He lit another cigarette and hurriedly dressed. As he buttoned his jacket, the smoke stung his eyes. He turned back to the sink, put cold water on his eyes and decided to comb his hair. But his comb had vanished. He was unable to smooth the sleep-rumpled curls with his fingers. He went downstairs as he was, his hair sticking up behind and hanging down his forehead.
He felt diminished even further. Once out in the street, he walked around the hotel to reach the little passageway he had noticed. It opened on to the square in front of the old town hall, and in the heavy evening that sank over Prague, the gothic steeples of the town hall and of the old Tyn church were silhouetted, black against the dim sky. Crowds of people were walking under the arcades lining the old streets. Each time a woman passed him, Mersault waited for the glance that would permit him to consider himself still capable of playing the delicate and tender game of life.
But healthy people have a natural skill in avoiding feverish eyes. Unshaven, his hair rumpled, in his eyes the expression of some restless animal, his trousers as wrinkled as his shirt-collar, Mersault had lost that wonderful confidence bestowed by a well-cut suit or the steering-wheel of a new car. The light turned coppery, and the day still lingered on the gold of the baroque domes at the far end of the square. He walked to-wards one of them, went into the church, and overcome by the ancient smell, sat down on a bench.
The vaults above him were quite dark, but the gilded capitals shed a mysterious golden liq-uid which flowed down the grooves of the columns to the puffy faces of angels and grinning saints. Peace, yes, there was peace here, but so bitter that Mersault hurried to the threshold and stood on the steps, inhaling the evening’s cooler air, into which he would plummet. In another moment, he saw the first star appear, pure and unadorned, between the steeples of Tyn.
He began to look for a cheap restaurant, making his way into darker, less crowded streets. Though it had not rained during the day, the ground was damp, and Mersault had to pick his way among black puddles glimmering between the infrequent paving-stones. A light rain started to fall. The busy streets could not be far away, for he could hear the newspaper sellers hawking the Narodni Politika. Mersault was walking in circles now, and suddenly stopped.
A strange odour reached him out of the darkness. Pungent, sour, it awakened all his associa-tions with suffering. He tasted
