The Sleepwalkers (18 page)

When he was a cadet and learning to swim he had balked at jumping in, until one day he was summarily thrown into the water by the swimming instructor; and after all it was simply pleasant in the water, and he had laughed. Ruzena came in like a whirlwind and flew to embrace him. It was pleasant in the water, and they sat hand in hand, exchanging kisses, and Ruzena babbled on about things that seemed irrelevant. None of his uneasiness remained, and his happiness would have been almost cloudless had not his vexation at forgetting Ruzena’s present suddenly obtruded itself with renewed force. But since God had arranged everything for good, if not for the best, He led Joachim to the cupboard in which the lace handkerchiefs had been lying unremembered for months. And while Ruzena, as usual, made ready their supper, Joachim found tissue-paper and a light blue ribbon and slipped the package under Ruzena’s plate. And before they knew where they were they had gone to bed.

It was not until next day that Joachim recollected how soon he must depart again. Hesitatingly he broke the news to Ruzena. But the outbreak of misery or anger that he had expected did not follow. Ruzena merely made the simple statement: “Can’t go; stay here.” Joachim was struck; she was right after all, why shouldn’t he stay? What spell could it have been that made him stray aimlessly about the yard at home and keep out of his father’s way? Moreover, it seemed imperatively necessary to wait in Berlin for Bertrand. Perhaps this was a breach of good form, a kind of civilian irregularity, into which Ruzena was enticing him, but it gave him a slight sense of freedom. He decided to sleep on the matter, and since he did so in Ruzena’s company he wrote next day to his mother saying that his military duties would keep him longer in Berlin than he had anticipated; a duplicate of the letter, which he enclosed, was for her to give to his father should she think it expedient. Later he reflected that there wasn’t much sense in doing that, since his father opened all the letters anyhow; but by that time it was too late; the letter was posted.

He had reported himself for duty, and was standing in the riding-school. The riding-masters were a sergeant-major and a corporal, each
with a long whip, and along the walls was ranged a restive chain of horses mounted by recruits in coarse linen tunics. The place smelt like a vault, and the soft sand in which one’s feet sank reminded him with a faint nostalgia of Helmuth and the dust he had strewn upon him. The sergeant-major cracked his whip and ordered a trot. Rhythmically the linen-clad figures by the wall began to bob up and down. Elisabeth would soon be coming to Berlin for the autumn season. But that was not quite true: they never came until October, nor could the house possibly be ready for them yet. And indeed it wasn’t really Elisabeth he was waiting for, but Bertrand; of course it was Bertrand he meant. He saw Bertrand and Elisabeth riding before him at a trot, both rising and sinking in their stirrups. It was amazing how Elisabeth’s face had melted into the landscape and how he had strained to recapture it again. He wondered if the same could have happened to Bertrand’s face; he tried to imagine that one of the figures along the wall was Bertrand rising and sinking in his stirrups, but he abandoned the attempt; it was somehow blasphemous, and he was glad that Helmuth’s face had been hidden from him. Now the sergeant-major ordered a walking pace, and the white jumping-posts and hurdles were brought out. He was involuntarily reminded of clowns, and suddenly he understood a saying of Bertrand’s, that the Fatherland was defended by a set of circus clowns. It was still incomprehensible to him how he had managed to come a cropper over that tree.

He drove once more past Borsig’s engineering works. Once more there were workmen standing about. He had really had enough of that kind of thing. It wasn’t his world, and he had no need to barricade himself from it behind a gay uniform. True, Bertrand belonged to it, perhaps reluctantly, but still he was acclimatized; well, he had had enough of Bertrand too: the best thing after all would be to return to Stolpin. In spite of that, however, he stopped his carriage at Bertrand’s door, and was delighted to hear that Herr von Bertrand was expected that evening. Good; he would look in anyhow for a few minutes, and he left a note to that effect.

They went together to the theatre, where Ruzena displayed her mechanical gestures as a chorus girl. During the interval Bertrand said: “That’s no job for her; we’ll have to find her something else,” and Joachim once more had a feeling of security. When they were at supper Bertrand turned to Ruzena: “Tell me, Ruzena, you’re going to become
a famous and marvellous actress now, aren’t you?” Of course she was, wasn’t that just what she was going to do!“Ah, but what if you should think better of it and change your mind? We’ve gone to a lot of trouble to give you the chance of becoming famous, and what if you should suddenly leave us in the lurch and make us look silly? What shall we do with you then?” Ruzena became reflective and suggested: “Well, there’s the Jäger Casino.” “No, no, Ruzena, one should never turn back when one has begun to climb. It must be something better than the theatre.” Ruzena began to cry: “There’s nothing at all for poor girl like me. He is bad friend, Joachim.” Joachim said: “Bertrand’s only joking, Ruzena.” But he himself was uncomfortable and thought that Bertrand was overstepping the limits of tact. Bertrand, however, laughed: “There’s no need to cry just because we’re considering how to make you rich and famous, Ruzena. You’ll have to keep all of us then.” Joachim was shocked; one could see how commercial life vulgarized a man.

Later he said to Bertrand: “Why do you torment her?” Bertrand answered: “Well, we have to prepare her, and one can operate only on a healthy body. Now’s the time.” He spoke like a surgeon.

What Joachim had half feared had now happened. His letter had fallen into his father’s hands, and the old man had obviously begun to rave again, for his mother wrote that there had been a fresh stroke. Joachim was amazed by his own indifference. He felt no obligation to go home, there was still plenty of time for that. Helmuth had charged him to stand by his mother, but it was little that one could do to help her; she would have to bear alone the fate she had taken upon herself. He wrote that he would come as soon as he could and stayed where he was, leaving things to take their own course, performing his duties, taking no steps whatever to make a change, and with an inexplicable fear thrusting aside every thought that suggested change. For it often required an actual effort to hold things firmly in their proper shapes, an effort so difficult that many a time all those people who bustled about as if all was in order seemed to him limited, blind and almost crazy. At first he had not thought much about it, but when for a second time he saw the military spectacle in terms of a circus he decided that Bertrand was to blame for everything. Why, even his uniform refused to sit upon him as well as formerly: the epaulets on his shoulders suddenly worried
him, and the cuffs of his shirt, and one morning before the glass he asked himself why it should be on the left side that he had to wear his sword. He took refuge in thoughts of Ruzena, telling himself that his love for her, her love for him, was something exempt from all ambiguous conventions. And then, when he gazed long into her eyes and stroked her eyelids with a gently caressing finger, and she took it to be love, he was often merely losing himself in an agonizing game, letting her face grow dimmer and more indefinite, until it touched the boundary at which it threatened to lose its human character, and the face became no face at all. Things were elusive as a melody that one thinks one cannot forget and yet loses the thread of, only to be compelled to seek it again and again in anguish. It was an uncanny and hopeless game to play, and with angry irritation he wished that Bertrand could be saddled with the blame for that queer state of mind as well. Had he not, indeed, spoken of his demon? Ruzena divined Joachim’s irritation, and her suspicion of Bertrand, which had rankled in her since that last evening, flared out after a long, sullen silence with clumsy abruptness: “You not love me any more … or have to ask friend’s permission … or has Bertrand already forbidden?” And although they were angry and wounding words, Joachim was glad of them, for they came as a relief, confirming his own suspicion that the demonic root of all his afflictions was in Bertrand. And it even seemed to him like the final emanation of such an evil, Mephistophelian and treacherous influence that the aversion Ruzena shared with him should bring her no nearer, but rather, by provoking rude and uncontrolled outbursts, should put her more on a level with Bertrand and his equally offensive jokes; between his mistress and his friend, both unstable, between these two civilians, he felt as if caught and helplessly ground between two millstones of tactlessness. He felt the smell of bad company, and often could not tell whether Bertrand had led him to Ruzena, or Ruzena had been the means of bringing him to Bertrand, until in alarm he realized that he was no longer capable of grasping the evanescent, dissolving mass of life, and that he was slipping more and more quickly, more and more profoundly, into brain-sick confusion, and that everything had become unsure. But when he thought of finding in religion some way out of this chaos, the abyss opened afresh that parted him from the civilians, for it was on the other side of the abyss that there stood the civilian Bertrand, a Freethinker, and the Catholic Ruzena,
both beyond his reach, and it almost looked as if they exulted in his isolation.

He was glad that he was due for church parade on Sunday. But even into this military rite he was dogged by civilian values. For the faces of the rank and file who had marched, as enjoined, in two parallel columns into the House of God, were the everyday faces of the drill-ground and the riding-school; not one of them was devout, not one was solemn. The men must have been recruited from Borsig’s engineering works; real peasants’ sons from the country would not have stood there so indifferently. Except for the non-commissioned officers, standing piously at attention, not one of them was listening to the sermon. The temptation to label this ritual, too, a circus came affrightingly near. Joachim shut his eyes and tried to pray, as he had tried to pray in the village church. Perhaps he was not praying, but when the soldiers joined in the anthem, his voice raised itself among the others, although he did not know it, for with the hymn that he had sung as a child there rose also the memory of a picture, the memory of a small, brightly coloured holy picture, and once the picture was clearly imaged he remembered, too, that it was the black-haired Polish cook who had brought it to him: he heard her deep, sing-song voice and saw her seamed finger, with its chapped tip, tracing its way over all that brightness, pointing out that here was the earth on which men lived, and up above it, not too remotely above it, the Holy Family sat peacefully together on a silvery rain-cloud portrayed in the brightest of colours, and the gold that adorned their garments rivalled in splendour their golden haloes. Even now he did not dare to recall how blissful it had been to imagine oneself as a member of that Catholic Holy Family, reposing on that silver cloud in the arms of the virgin Mother of God or in the lap of the black-haired Pole … that was a point he could not now decide, but he was sure that the rapture was permeated by fear at its blasphemous presumption and at the heresy in a born Protestant’s yielding to such a wish and such imagined bliss, and that he had not dared to make room for the wrathful Father in that picture; he did not want Him there at all. And while he strained his attention and bent his will to realize the picture more closely, it was as if the silver cloud floated up a little higher, as if it even began to evaporate upwards, and with it the figures that rested upon it; they seemed lightly to dissolve and float away on the melody of the anthem, a soft effluence that in no way effaced the remembered imagery, but
rather illumined and defined it, so that for a moment he was even inclined to believe that it was the needful resolution into evangelical truth of a Catholic holy picture: the Virgin’s hair, too, seemed no longer dusky, and she was less like the Polish woman, nor was she Ruzena, but her locks brightened and became more golden, and might almost have been the maiden tresses of Elisabeth. All that was a little peculiar and yet a deliverance, a ray of light and the promise of coming grace in the midst of obscurity; for was it not an act of grace that permitted a Catholic picture to resolve itself into evangelical truth? And the fluidity of the figures, a fluidity as gracious as the murmuring of rain or the mist on a drizzling spring evening, made him aware that the dissolution he so feared of the human face into a blankness of mobile heights and hollows might be the first step towards its new and more radiant integration within the blissful company in the cloud, no mere rough copy of earthly features but an initiation into the pure image, the crystalline drop that falls singing from the cloud. And even if this more exalted countenance wore no earthly beauty or familiarity, but was at first alien and alarming, perhaps still more alarming than the blending of a face with a landscape, yet it was the first step upwards, the presentiment of an awful divinity, but also the surety for that divine life in which all earthly life is resolved, dissolving like the face of Ruzena and the face of Elisabeth, perhaps even dissolving like the shape of Bertrand. So it was no longer the childish picture of old, with an actual father and mother, that now displayed itself: true, it hovered still on the same spot, floating in the midst of the same silver cloud, and he himself still sat in the same way at the feet of the figures as once he had sat at his mother’s feet, himself a boyish Jesus; but the picture had grown in meaning, no longer the imagined wish of a boy, but the assurance of an attainable end, and he knew that he had taken the first painful step towards that end, that he had entered upon his probation, although only on the threshold of what was to come. His feeling was one almost of pride. But then the blissful picture faded; it vanished like an imperceptibly ceasing rain, and that Elisabeth was part of it came as a final drop of realization from the veiling mist. Perhaps that was a sign from God. He opened his eyes; the anthem was closing, and Joachim thought that he saw many of the young men gazing up to heaven with the same trust and resolute ardour as himself.