Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics) (35 page)

Its silent operation practically made the device elude notice. The traveller glanced over at the soldier and the condemned man. The latter was the livelier of the two; every aspect of the machine intrigued him, as he alternately bent down and stood on tiptoe, with his index finger all the while outstretched, pointing out something to the soldier. The traveller found it
hard to take. He was determined to stay to the bitter end, but the sight of the two carrying on as they did was intolerable. ‘Go home,’ he said. The soldier might well have been inclined to do so, but the condemned man took the order as a kind of punishment. He pleaded with folded hands to be allowed to stay, and when, shaking his head, the traveller still refused, the condemned man went down on his knees. Fathoming that orders were of no avail, the traveller wanted to go over and chase them away. Whereupon he heard a strange sound coming from the inscriber and looked up. Was that faulty cog acting up after all? No, it was something else altogether. Slowly the inscriber lid lifted and then opened completely. The teeth of a cogwheel reared up and revealed its metallic intent. Soon the entire trundle emerged, and it was as if some powerful force pressed down on the inscriber so that there was no room left for this orphaned wheel that whirled out to the rim of the inscriber, dropped down and rolled upright in the sand, before falling over. But already another cogwheel flashed its teeth, and others followed, big wheels, small wheels, the one largely indistinguishable from the other, and the same thing happened to each; and time and again, when it seemed as if the inscriber had spat out its last, yet another particularly profuse series of parts reared up, dropped down, rolled and fell flat in the sand. This spectacle made the condemned man completely forget the traveller’s order; so entranced was he that he wanted to touch every expelled part, at the same time egging the soldier on to help, but always pulling back his hand in initial terror when yet another cog came flying after it.

The traveller, on the other hand, was deeply disturbed; the machine was clearly self-destructing, its smooth functioning being an illusion; it seemed to him as if he had to act on behalf of the officer, as the latter could no longer call the shots. But since the fall of the cogwheels had consumed his entire attention, he had failed to pay attention to the rest of the machine; and now that the inscriber had spat out the last cogwheel and he finally bent over the harrow, the traveller had another, more worrisome surprise. The harrow did not write, but simply pricked, and the bed failed to roll the body, but, merely vibrating,
lifted it into the path of the needles. The traveller wanted to intercede, if possible to bring the entire mechanism to a halt – this was no instructive torture as the officer conceived it, but plain ordinary murder. He stretched out his hand. But the harrow had already lifted the skewered body to the side, as it was only supposed to do at the twelfth hour. The blood flowed in a hundred streams (undiluted with water, since the water spigots had once again failed to function). And now the last part malfunctioned too: though bleeding profusely, the body would not disengage from the long needles, and just hung over the pit without falling. The harrow sought to return to its original position, but since the mechanism registered that it was not yet relieved of its load it remained hanging over the pit. ‘For heaven’s sake, help!’ the traveller cried out to the soldier and the condemned man, himself grabbing hold of the officer’s feet. He wanted to tug at the feet, have the two grab the officer’s head on the other side, and so to lift him slowly from the needles. But the two could not get it together to act; the condemned man went so far as to turn his back; the traveller had to go over and nudge them towards the officer’s head. Whereupon, almost against his will, he saw the face of the corpse. It was as it had been in life (with no sign of the promised salvation); what all the others were supposed to have found in the machine the officer did not find; his lips were pressed tightly together, his eyes were open with the expression of life, his look was quiet and determined, the tip of the great iron spike pierced his forehead.

When the traveller came to the first houses of the colony, with the soldier and the condemned man walking behind him, the soldier pointed to one structure and said: ‘Here’s the café.’ On the ground floor was a deep, low-ceilinged, cave-like room, its walls and rafters blackened with smoke. Its entire width was open facing the street. Even though the café differed little from the other houses in the colony, all of which, except for the commandant’s complex, were rather run-down, it nevertheless evoked for the traveller an historic aura and he felt the might of former times. He came closer and, with his two companions
following behind, stepped between the unoccupied tables that stood outside lining the street, and inhaled the cool, musty air that wafted from within. ‘The old man’s buried here,’ said the soldier, ‘the priest refused to let him have a plot in the cemetery. They were undecided for a while where to put him, finally they buried him here. I bet the officer didn’t tell you that, it wasn’t exactly something he was proud of. He tried several times at night to dig the old man up, but every time they chased him away.’

‘Where is the grave?’ asked the traveller, who couldn’t believe his ears.

Whereupon the two, the soldier and the condemned man, ran forward and pointed to the spot with outstretched hands. They led the traveller to the rear wall, where, at several tables, customers sat talking. They were probably dockworkers, muscular men with short, shiny, black beards. None wore coats, their shirts were torn, they were poor, humble folk. When the traveller approached a few got up, pressed themselves against the wall and stared. ‘It’s a stranger,’ the word went around in a whisper, ‘he wants to see the grave.’

They shoved aside one of the tables, beneath which there really was a tombstone. It was a simple stone, small enough to be hidden under a table. It bore an inscription with such minuscule letters the traveller had to kneel down to read it. It read: ‘Here rests the old commandant. His followers, who now have no name, dug the grave and set the stone. There is a prophecy that in a few years’ time the commandant will rise again and from this humble house lead his followers to take back the colony. Believe and wait!’ Once the traveller had finished reading this and got up again he saw the men standing around him and smiling, as though they had read the inscription along with him, found it ridiculous and pressed him to share their opinion. The traveller pretended not to notice, distributed a few coins, waited till the table was pushed back over the grave, left the café and went to the harbour.

The soldier and the condemned man met acquaintances who held them back with idle chatter. But they must soon have said their goodbyes, since the traveller had only reached the middle
of the long stairway leading down to the landing boats when he noticed them running after him. They probably wanted to persuade him at the last minute to take them along. And while the traveller bargained with a boatman over the price to row him out to the steamer, the two went stumbling down the steps in silence, as they didn’t dare scream. But once they reached the dock the traveller was already seated in the rowing boat and the boatman was just pulling off. They could still have leapt in, but the traveller picked up and threatened them with a thick mooring rope, and thereby kept them from jumping.

1913

Robert Walser

What wondrous thing have I dreamt? What befell me? What curious visitation came upon me suddenly last night, lightning-like from on high as I lay here lost in sleep? Suspecting nothing and wanting nothing and completely unconscious, a slave of sleep, that held me locked in its dark limbo, I lay there unprotected and unarmed, without expectations and without responsibilities (for we are wholly irresponsible in sleep), when that beautiful and horrible, that great and sweet, that kind and awful, that entrancing and terrifying thing came upon me, as though wanting to suffocate me with its crush and kiss. Sleep has inner eyes, and so I must confess that I saw the thing that struck me with a sort of second or alternate set of eyes. I saw it fly with the speed of wind and lightning, slicing through the infinity of space, shooting down from the immeasurably vast and distant heights to my mouth. I saw it and was horrified, and yet I could not budge or resist. I even heard it approaching. I heard it. I saw and heard that never before seen and never before experienced kiss which cannot be described with words, just as our language has no words to describe the shudder and delight that shook me. The kiss of dreams has nothing in common with the gentle, soft, mutually willed and desired kiss that lovers share. It was not a mouth that kissed me, no, it was a solitary and free-flying kiss. A kiss that was completely and absolutely pure kiss and nothing else. Something autonomous, spectral, like the soul. And once struck by that comprehensible and then again completely incomprehensible thing, I was already dissolving in such an all-consuming – I would like to say, grandiose – rapture which I dare not describe in any greater
detail. Ah, that was a kiss, what a kiss! The pain it caused me forced me to give off a cry of distress, and at the very same instant I received that kiss with its heavenly and hellish effect, I woke up but could not for a long while thereafter get a grip on myself. What is a man, what is Man? What is the kiss I give gladly in broad daylight or in moonlight, in the sweet-satisfying lover’s night under the trees or elsewhere, compared to the frenzy of that imagined-inflicted kiss, kissed by the demons?

1935

Robert Musil

The two men whom I must mention in order to relate three little stories, in which the narrative pivots around the identity of the narrator, were friends from youth; let’s call them Aone and Atwo. The fact is that such early friendships grow ever more astounding the older you get. You change over the years, from the crown of your head to the soles of your feet, from the skin’s soft down to the depths of your heart; but, strangely enough, your relationship with each other stays the same, fluctuating about as little as the communion we each carry on with that diverse host of sirs successively addressed as
I
. It is beside the point whether or not you still identify with that little blond numbskull photographed once long ago; as a matter of fact, you can’t really say for sure that you even like the little devil, that bundle of ‘I’. And so, too, you may very well both disagree with and disapprove of your best friends; indeed, there are many friends who can’t stand each other. And in a certain sense, those friendships are the deepest and the best, for, without any admixtures, they contain that indefinable essence in its purest form.

The youth that united the two friends Aone and Atwo was nothing less than religious in character. While both were brought up in an institution that prided itself on the proper emphasis it placed on the religious fundamentals, the pupils of that institution did their best to ignore those selfsame principles. The school chapel, for instance, was a real, big, beautiful church, complete with a stone steeple; it was reserved for the school’s exclusive use. The absence of strangers proved a great boon, for while the bulk of the student body was busy according
to the dictates of sacred custom, now kneeling, now rising at the pews up front, small groups could gather at the rear to play cards beside the confessional booths, or to smoke on the organ steps. And some escaped up to the steeple, whose pointed spire was ringed by a saucer-like balcony on the stone parapet of which, at a dizzying height, acrobatics were performed that could easily have cost the lives of far less sin-burdened boys than these.

One such provocation of the Lord involved a slow, muscle-straining elevation of the feet in mid-air while, with glance directed downwards, you grasped at the parapet, balancing precariously on your hands. Anyone who has ever tried this stunt on level ground will appreciate just how much confidence, bravery and luck are required to pull it off on a foot-wide stone strip up at the top of a tower. It must also be said that many wild and nimble boys, though virtuoso gymnasts on level ground, never did attempt it. Aone, for instance, never tried it. Atwo, on the other hand – and let this serve to introduce him as narrator – was, in his boyhood, the creator of this test of character. It was hard to find another body like his. He didn’t sport an athletic build like so many others, but seems to have developed muscles naturally, effortlessly. A narrow, smallish head sat atop his torso, with eyes like lightning bolts wrapped in velvet, and teeth that one would sooner have associated with the fierceness of a beast of prey than the serenity of a mystic.

Later, during their student days, the two friends professed a materialistic philosophy of life devoid of God or the soul, viewing man as a physiological or economic machine – which, in fact, he may very well be, though this wasn’t the point as far as they were concerned – since the appeal of such a philosophy lies not in its inherent truth, but rather in its demonic, pessimistic, morbidly intellectual character. By this time their relationship had already become that special kind of friendship. And while Atwo studied forestry, and spoke of travelling as a forest ranger to the far reaches of Russia or Asia as soon as he was through with his studies, his friend Aone, who scorned such boyish aspirations, had by then settled on a more solid pursuit, and had at the time already cast his lot with the rising labour movement. And when
they met again shortly before the Great War, Atwo already had his Russian adventure behind him. He spoke little about it, was now employed in the offices of some large corporation and seemed, despite the appearance of middle-class comfort, to have suffered considerable disappointments. His old friend had in the meantime left the class struggle and become editor of a newspaper that printed a great deal about social harmony and was owned by a stockbroker. Henceforth the two friends despised each other insuperably, but once again fell out of touch; and when they finally met again for a short while, Atwo told the following story the way one empties out a sack of memories for a friend, so as to be able to push on again with a clean bill of lading. It matters little under the circumstances how the other responded, and their exchange can perhaps best be related in the form of a monologue. It would be far more important to the fabric of the tale were it possible to describe exactly what Atwo looked like at the time (which is easier said than done), for this raw impression of the man is not without bearing on the gist of his words. Suffice it to say that he brought to mind a sharp, taut and narrow riding crop balanced on its soft tip, leaning up against the wall; it was in just such a half-erect, half-slouching posture that he seemed to feel most at ease.