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.
Laundry was drying on a cord stretched between two of them. Mersault lay down on the bed and fell
asleep at once. He wakened 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 trou-
sers. 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 desolation 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 suspect, the shady. 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 he 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 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 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 courtyard 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 over 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
onto the square of the old town hall, and in the heavy evening that sank over Prague, the Gothic steeples
22
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, Mer-sault 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 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 toward 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
liquid 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 vendors hawking the Narodni Politika. Mersault was
walking in circles now, and suddenly stopped. A strange odor reached him out of the darkness. Pungent,
sour, it awakened all his associations with suffering. He tasted it on his tongue, deep in his nose; even his eyes, somehow, tasted it. It was far away, then it was at the next streetcorner, between the now-opaque
sky and the sticky pavement it was there, the evil spell of the nights of Prague. He advanced to meet it,
and as he did so it became more real, filling him entirely, stinging his eyes until the tears came, leaving
him helpless. 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 broken, sopping flesh released the odor even more
powerfully. Mersault leaned against
a post, nauseated, 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 direction. 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 was sprawled in his chair with his
hands in his pockets 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,
but through the open door the smell of vinegar and cucumbers pressed in upon him, immediately filling