Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf (13 page)

“Let’s go shake a foot, Lina; and not go into a pig-pen like that again. I’ve had enough of it. they smoke and smoke, and there’s a little goldfinch in there and it could easily pass out. for all they care.” And he explains to her how entirely right he had been just now, and she agrees. They take the street-car and ride down to the Jannowitz Brücke to Walterchen’s dance-hall. He is going just as he is and Lina, even, is not to change her dress, she is nice enough like that. In the car stout Lina takes a little rumpled paper out of her pocket. She brought it along to show him, it’s a Sunday paper, the
Peace Messenger.
Franz remarks he doesn’t handle that paper, he squeezes her hand, admires the nice title and headline on the first page: “Prom Misfortune to Happiness.”

With our little hands we go clap, clap, with our little feet we go tap, fish, fowl, all day long, paradise.

The car jolts along. With their heads together, they read by the dim light the poem on the first page which Lina had marked with a pencil: “Walking is best when we’re two,” by E. Fischer: “When we walk alone, it’s a walk of woe, The foot oft stumbling, the heart bowed low: Walking is best when we’re two. And if you fall, who’ll take your arm, If weary, who’ll ward off all harm? Walking is best when we’re two. You silent rover through space and time, Take Jesus as your mate sublime. Walking is best when we’re two. He knows the road, he knows the lane, with word and deed he heals your pain, Walking is best when we’re two.”

At that I’m still thirsty, thinks Franz in the meantime, as he reads, two glasses wasn’t enough, and talking so much dries your throat. And then he remembers his song, he feels at home, and presses Lina’s arm.

She scents the morning air. On the way through Alexanderstrasse to Holzmarktstrasse she softly clings to him: How about getting properly engaged soon?

Dimensions of this Franz Biberkopf. He is a Match for old Heroes

This Franz Biberkopf, formerly a cement-worker, then a furniture-mover, and so on, and now a newsvender, weighs around two hundred pounds. He is strong as a cobra and has again joined an athletic club. He wears green putties, hobnail boots, and a leather jacket. As far as money is concerned, you won’t find a great deal on him, his current income arrives always in small quantities, but just let anyone try to get near him.

Is he hounded by things in his past, Ida and so on, by conscientious scruples, nightmares, restless sleep, tortures, Furies from the day of our great-grandmothers? Nothing doing. Just consider the change in his situation. A criminal, an erstwhile God-accursed man (where did you get that, my child?), Orestes, killed at the altar Clytemnestra, hardly pronounceable that name, eh? anyhow, she was his own mother. (Which altar do you really mean? Nowadays you could run around a long lime looking for a church that’s open at night) I say, times are changed, up and at him, hey, terrible brutes, trollops with snakes, then dogs without muzzles, a whole repulsive menagerie, they snap at him, but don’t get near him, because he stands at the altar, that’s a Hellenic conception, and the whole pack of them dancing angrily around him, the dogs amongst them. Without harps, as the song says, the Furies dance, they wind themselves about the victim in a mad frenzy, a delusion of the senses, a preparation for the booby-hatch.

But they don’t hound Franz Biberkopf. Let’s admit it, here’s how, with his arm-band in his pocket he drinks one mug after another at Henschke’s or somewhere else, and in between a Doornkaat, and his heart grows warm. Thus our furniture-mover, newsvender, etc., Franz Biberkopf, of Berlin N. E., differs from the famous old Orestes in the end of 1927. Who would not rather be in whose skin?

Franz killed his fiancee, Ida, the family name does not matter, in the flower of her youth. This happened during an altercation between Franz and Ida, in the home of her sister Minna, where, first of all, the following organs of the woman were slightly damaged: the skin on the end of her nose and in the middle, the bone and the cartilage underneath, a fact, however, which was noticed only after her arrival at the hospital and later played a certain role in the court records, furthermore the right and left shoulder sustained slight bruises, with loss of blood. But then the discussion became lively. The expressions “son of a bitch” and “whorechaser” were extremely upsetting to Franz Biberkopf who, albeit very dissipated and at that time excited for other reasons, was nevertheless very sensitive about his honor. His muscles jiggered up and down. All he had taken in his hand was a small wooden cream-whipper, for he was in training then and had recently wrenched his hand. And with a twice repeated, terrible lunge, he had brought this cream-whipper with its wire spiral, in contact with the diaphragm of Ida, who was the second party to the dialogue. Up to that day Ida’s diaphragm had been entirely intact, but that very small person, who was very nice to look at, was herself no longer quite intact--or rather: the man she was supporting, suspected, not without reason, that she was about to give him his walking papers in favor of a man recently arrived from Breslau. The diaphragm of this dainty little girl, at any rate, was not adapted to contact with cream-whippers. At the first blow she cried “ouch” and no longer called him “you dirty bum,” but “oh, man,” instead. The second encounter with the cream-whipper occurred with Franz holding an upright position after a quarter turn to the right on Ida’s part. Whereupon Ida said nothing at all, but merely opened her mouth, pursing her lips curiously, and jerked both arms in the air.

What happened to the woman’s diaphragm a second before, involves the laws of statics, elasticity, shock, and resistance. The thing is wholly incomprehensible without a knowledge of those laws. We shall therefore have recourse to the following formulæ

Newton’s first law which says: Every body perseveres in its state of rest or of moving uniformly in a straight line, except so far as it is made to change that state by external force (this applies to Ida’s ribs). Newton’s second law of motion: Change of motion is proportional to the impressed force, and takes place in the direction in which the force is impressed (the impressed force is Franz, or his arm, and his fist, together with the contents thereof). The magnitude of the force is expressed by the following formula:

f=c lim (
Ä
v
/Ä
t
) =
cw.

The acceleration effected by the force, that is, the degree of the disturbance of rest thus effected, is expressed by the following formula:

Ä
v
= (I/
c
)
f
Ä
t
.

The natural and actual result is as follows: the spiral of the cream-whipper is pressed together and the wooden part encounters something. On the other side, the side of inertia and resistance: fracture of the 7th and 8th ribs in line with the left shoulder-blade.

Thanks to such timely consideration, we can dispense entirely with Furies. We can follow, step by step, what Franz did and what Ida suffered. There is no unknown quantity in the equation. There remains only to enumerate the continuation of the process which was thus inaugurated: We have the loss of the vertical position on Ida’s part, a transition to the horizontal, this being the effect of the rude shock received, at the same time, respiratory impediment, violent pain, terror, and physiological disturbance of the equilibrium. Franz would nevertheless have killed this damaged person, whom he knew so well, like a roaring lion, if her sister had not come bouncing in from the next room. Before this woman’s abusive talk he retreated, and in the evening they nabbed him during a police raid in the vicinity of his home.

“Up and at him, whoa,” shriek the old Furies. Horror, oh, horror, to see a God-accursed man at the altar, his hands dripping with blood! How they snort: Dost thou sleep? Thrust slumber away. Up, up. Agamemnon, his father, had started many years ago from Troy. Troy had fallen, and thence shone the signal fires, from Ida over Athos, oil-torches constantly blazing towards the Cytherean forest.

How splendid, be it said in passing, this flaming message from Troy to Greece! Isn’t that grand, this march of fire across the sea, this is light, heart, soul, happiness, rejoicing!

The dark-red fire, flaming red over the Gorgopis lake is seen by a watchman who shouts with joy, ah, that’s life, and fresh fires are lighted to pass on the news, the excitement and joy, everything together, and with a leap over a gulf, in a stormy race to the heights of Arachneon, this outcry continues, this madness, which you see, flaming red: Agamemnon is coming. We can’t compare ourselves with this way of doing things. Here again we’re inferior.

Let us use for purposes of information a few results from the experiments of Heinrich Hertz, who lived in Karlsruhe, died at an early age, and who, at least in the photo of the Munich Graphic Collection, wore a full beard. We telegraph by wireless. We produce high frequency alternating currents through transmitters in big stations. We produce electric waves by oscillations of a vibrating circle. The vibrations spread out spherically, as it were. And then there is also an electron-tube of glass and a microphone the disk of which vibrates in alternating degrees, thus reproducing tones, precisely as when they entered the machine, and that is astonishing, clever. tricky. It’s hard to get enthusiastic about all this; it functions, and that’s all.

Quite different the oil-torch with its message of Agamemnon’s return.

It burns, it blazes, it speaks, it feels, at every moment, in each place, and the joy is general: Agamemnon is coming. A thousand men are aglow in each place: Agamemnon is coming, and now there are ten thousand, across the bay, a hundred thousand.

And then, to get to the point, he arrives home. Things change. Things change considerably. The disk turns. When the wife gets him home, she sticks him into the bath. She shows then and there that she is the worst bitch on record. She plunks a fish-net over him in the water, so that he can’t do anything, and she has brought an ax along, presumably to chop wood. He groans heavily: “Woe is me, I am undone!” Outside they ask: “Who is bemoaning himself?” “Woe is me, and again woe.” The Hellenic beast finishes him off, without batting an eye, and outside she even has the nerve to yelp: “I have achieved it, I threw a fish-net over him, and struck twice, and with two sighs he was laid out. Then, with yet a third blow, I sent him to Hades.” Whereupon the senators are grieved, but nevertheless they remark appropriately: “We bow before the boldness of your speech.” It was this woman then, this Hellenic beast who, as the result of conjugal amusement with Agamemnon, had become the mother of a boy who was called Orestes at his birth. She was subsequently killed by this fruit of her joys, after which he was tortured by the Furies.

Our Franz Biberkopf, however. is in a different position. Five weeks later his Ida, too, is dead in the Friedrichshain hospital, complicated fracture of the ribs, rupture of the pleura, small rupture of the lung, with the resultant empyema, pleurisy, pneumonia, the dickens the fever won’t go down, how badly you look now, get a mirror, baby, you’re done for, you’re finished, you can pack up and go. They dissected her, put her in the earth in the Landsberger Allee, three yards under ground. She died with a feeling of hatred against Franz, he was stinkin’ mad at her even after her death, her new friend, the one from Breslau, paid her a visit before she died. Now she lies below, five long years already, horizontally on her back, the planks are beginning to rot, she is dissolving in manure-juice, she who once danced in white canvas shoes with Franz in the Paradiesgarten of Treptow, who loved and gadded about now she lies quite still, she is no more.

But he has done his four years. He who killed her is walking about, alive and flourishing, boozing, swilling, spilling his semen, continuing to disseminate life. Even Ida’s sister did not escape him. He’ll get it in the neck, too, some day. For didn’t what’s-his-name die? But that’s a long time off. He knows that. In the meantime, he will go on breakfasting in the cafes and praising the sky over the Alexanderplatz in his own sweet way: Since when does Grandma play the trombone, and: My parrot don’t eat hard-boiled eggs.

And where is now the red prison wall of Tegel, which had made him so afraid that he could hardly get his back away from it? The guardian stands at the black iron gate, which once excited such abhorrence in Franz, it is still hanging on its hinges, it does not bother anybody, there is always a good draft there, at night it is closed, as is the case with every good gate. Now in the morning the guardian stands in front smoking his pipe. The sun shines, it is always the same sun; you can predict exactly when it will reach a given place in the sky. Whether it shines or not depends upon the cloud formation. A few persons are just leaving car No. 41, they are carrying flowers and small parcels, they are probably going to the sanatorium, straight ahead to the left, down the Chaussee, all of them well-nigh freezing. The trees stand in a black row. Inside, the convicts are still cowering in their cells, bustling about in the work-rooms, or marching in goose-step on the promenade grounds. Strict orders to appear during recreation hour with shoes, cap, and muffler only. Inspection of cells by the old man: “How was the soup last night?” “It could have been better and a bit more wouldn’t hurt.” Doesn’t want to hear that, pretends to be deaf: “How often do you get clean bed-linen?” As if he didn’t know.

One of the convicts in solitary confinement has written: “Let sunlight in. This is the call that resounds throughout the world today. Only here, behind prison walls, it has not found an echo. Don’t we deserve to have the sun shine on us? The penal institutions are so constructed that certain wings do not receive the rays of the sun during the entire year, on the northeast frontage. Not a ray of sun strays into these cells to bring greetings to their occupants. Year in, year out, these people have to work and wither without the vivifying light of the sun.” A commission is about to inspect the building, the guardians run from cell to cell.

Another prisoner: “To the District Attorney. During my trial before the High Criminal Bench of the District Court, the President, Director of the District Court, Dr. X, informed me that an unknown person removed various articles from my home, 76 Elizabethstrasse, after my arrest. This fact has been established by court records. Since this has been established by court records, a perquisition must necessarily have been made by the police or the district attorney’s office. I was not informed in any way about the theft of my articles after my arrest until I learned it at the trial. I beg the district attorney to inform me about the result of the inquiry, or else to send me a copy of the report as recorded, in order that I may subsequently start a suit for damages, if my landlady has acted with negligence.”