on the street from which a person could look over the dead-end wall at the panorama beyond.
After that, I heard Zann every night. He kept me awake, but I was fascinated by the strangeness of his music. I knew little of this art myself, but I was sure that his music had no relation to music I had heard before. I thought he was a highly original composer, a genius. The longer I listened, the more I was fascinated. Then, one week later, I finally decided to meet with the old man.
One night, as Zann was returning from his work, I stopped him in the hallway and told him that I would like to know him and be with him while he played. He was a small, thin, bent person. He had shabby clothes and an ugly face, and his head was almost bald. At first, my words made him angry and frightened. But then my friendliness softened him, and he grudgingly showed to me to follow him up the dark and creaking attic stairs.
His room was on the west side of the attic. Its only curtained window was facing the high wall at the end of the street. The room was big in size, but mostly because it was almost empty. Of furniture there was only a narrow iron bed, a dirty washstand, a small table, a large bookcase, a music-rack, and three old chairs. Sheets of music were lying everywhere on the floor. The walls were bare, and dust and cobwebs made the place seem uninhabited. Clearly, Erich Zann’s world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of his imagination.
Showing me to sit down, the dumb man closed the door, locked it, and lighted a candle. He took his viol and sat in one of the chairs. He did not use the music-rack, but played from memory and enchanted me for more than an hour with tunes I had never heard before. It is impossible to describe them. But in them I didn’t hear any of the queer notes I had heard from my room below on other nights.
I had remembered those weird notes, and I had often hummed and whistled them to myself. So when the old man put down his bow, I asked him if he could play some of them. As I began saying that, the wrinkled face of the musician started showing the same strange mixture of anger and fright which I had noticed when I first met him. I was insistent and even tried to whistle a few of the tunes which I had listened to the night before. But in a moment, when the dumb musician recognized the notes I whistled, his face suddenly changed, and his long, cold, thin hand reached out to make me stop. As he did this, he glanced toward the window, as if he was afraid of someone. It was absurd because the attic was high above all the other roofs, and surely no one could ever get in through that window from which, as the concierge had told me, one could see over the wall at the end of the street.
The old man’s glance suddenly made me want to look out over the wide panorama of the roofs and city lights beyond, which only this old musician could see. I walked toward the window and wanted to draw the curtains aside, when the frightened old man stopped me again. This time he showed me toward the door and even tried to nervously drag me there with both hands. Furious, I ordered him to let go of me and told him that I would leave at once. He calmed down, but then, seeing my anger, he led me to a chair, this time in a friendly way. He went to the little table and wrote something with a pencil in the poor French of a foreigner.
The note which he finally gave me was an apology. Zann said that he was old, lonely, and had strange fears and nervousness, connected with his music and with other things. He had liked it when I was listening to his music and wanted me to come again. But he could not play to me his weird notes and could not stand hearing them from another person. Also he did not like it when other people touched things in his room. He had not known that I could hear his playing in my room and now asked me if I wanted to take another room where I would not hear him in the night. He would then, he wrote, help me with the rent.
As I sat reading the note and trying to understand his poor French, I felt more and more sorry for the old man. He was suff ering physically and mentally, just like I was, and my studies had taught me to be kind. In the silence of the room there came a slight sound from the window – it was probably just the wind moving the shutters – and for some reason I was so startled that I almost jumped, as did Erich Zann. So when I had finished reading, I shook the old man’s hand and left as a friend.
The next day Blandot gave me a more expensive room on the third floor. There was no one on the fourth floor.
Soon I found out that Zann’s wish for my company was not as great as it had seemed while he was telling me to move down from the fifth floor. He did not ask me to visit him, and, when I came, he looked annoyed and played very little. This was always at night because in the day he slept. I did not like him much, but the attic room and the weird music were still fascinating for me. I also wanted to look out that window, over the wall and down at the roofs which must be there. Once I even went up to the attic during theatre hours, when Zann was away, but the door was locked.
What I still could do was to listen to the old man playing at night. At first I tiptoed up to my old fifth floor, and then I even climbed the last creaking stairs to the attic door. There, in the narrow hallway, I often heard mysterious sounds which filled me with horror. The sounds were not horrible, no, but their vibrations were something not of this world, and sometimes it seemed to me they were produced by more than one player. Of course, Erich Zann was a genius. As the weeks passed, the playing became wilder and wilder, while the old musician looked more and more exhausted. He did not want me to visit him at any time now, and even ignored me when we met on the stairs.
Then one night, as I listened at the door, I heard the viol explode into a madness of sounds, and from behind that door came a horrible cry of the old man. I knocked at the door several times, but there was no answer. I waited and waited in the black hallway, shivering with cold and fear, until I heard the poor musician trying to get up from the floor with the help of a chair. I thought he had fainted, and so I started knocking and calling his name at the same time. Finally, I heard Zann walk to the window and close the shutters, then to the door which he unlocked to let me in. I could tell that this time he was really glad to see me.
Shaking violently, the old man led me to one chair, while he sat into another. His viol and bow lay on the floor. He sat for some time as if listening to something. Then, satisfied, he walked to the table and wrote a short note. He gave it to me and returned to the table where he began to write something very quickly. The note asked me in the name of God to wait there while he wrote in German about all the strange things happening to him. I waited as the dumb man was writing down his story.
About an hour later, while I still waited and while the old musician continued to write, I saw Zann suddenly startle as from a horrible shock. He was looking at the curtained window and listening carefully. Then I thought I heard a sound myself. It was not a horrible sound. It was a low and very distant musical note, as if the player was in one of the neighboring houses, or in some house beyond the wall over which I had never been able to look. The effect it produced on Zann was terrible. He dropped his pencil, got up, took his viol and began the wildest playing I had ever heard.
I cannot describe the playing of Erich Zann on that night. It was more horrible than anything I had ever heard. I could see the expression of his face, and this time it was just fear. He was trying to make a noise to ward something off or drown something out[22]. I could not understand what it was. The playing became fantastic, crazy, and hysterical, yet it was of supreme genius which this strange old man had.
Louder and louder, wilder and wilder the viol was screaming. The player was sweating and twisting like a monkey, always looking at the curtained window. And then I thought I heard another note, that was not from the viol, a mocking note from far away.
At this moment the shutters began to rattle in the nightwind. Zann’s screaming viol now produced sounds I had never thought a viol could produce. The shutters rattled more wildly, opened and started beating against the window. Then the glass broke, and the cold wind rushed in. The sheets of paper on the table where Zann had begun to write his horrible secret were flying all over the room. I looked at Zann and saw that he was unconscious now. His blue eyes were open and glassy, but he was still playing blindly and mechanically.
отвести от себя или заглушить нечто
