The Sleepwalkers (3 page)

“Well, well,” said Herr von Pasenow, “but it must be quite late! I’m afraid we must be going, gentlemen.” In the droshky father and son sat side by side, stiff and hostile, their sticks between their knees. At last the old man said: “Well, she accepted the fifty marks, all the same. And then she took to her heels.” What a wretch, thought Joachim.

On the theme of the military uniform Bertrand could have supplied some such theory as this:

Once upon a time it was the Church alone that was exalted as judge over mankind, and every layman knew that he was a sinner. Nowadays it is the layman who has to judge his fellow-sinner if all values are not to fall into anarchy, and instead of weeping with him, brother must say to brother: “You have done wrong.” And as once it was only the garments of the priest that marked a man off from his fellows as something higher, some hint of the layman peeping through even the uniform and the robe of office, so, when the great intolerance of faith was lost, the secular robe of office had to supplant the sacred one, and society had to separate itself into secular hierarchies with secular uniforms and invest these with the absolute authority of a creed. And because, when the secular exalts itself as the absolute, the result is always romanticism, so the real and characteristic romanticism of that age was the cult of the uniform, which implied, as it were, a superterrestrial and supertemporal idea of uniform, an idea which did not really exist and yet was so powerful that it took hold of men far more completely than any secular vocation could, a non-existent and yet so potent idea that it transformed the man in uniform into a property of his uniform, and never into a professional man in the civilian sense; and this perhaps simply because the man who wears the uniform is content to feel that he is fulfilling the most essential function of his age and therefore guaranteeing the security of his own life.

This is what Bertrand might have said; but though it is certain that not every wearer of uniform is conscious of such things, yet it may be
maintained that everyone who has worn a uniform for many years finds in it a better organization of life than the man who merely exchanges one civilian suit in the evening for another civilian suit during the day. True, the soldier has no real need to think deeply of these things, for a generic uniform provides its wearer with a definitive line of demarcation between his person and the world; it is like a hard casing against which one’s personality and the world beat sharply and distinctly and are differentiated from each other; for it is the uniform’s true function to manifest and ordain order in the world, to arrest the confusion and flux of life, just as it conceals whatever in the human body is soft and flowing, covering up the soldier’s underclothes and skin, and decreeing that sentries on guard should wear white gloves. So when in the morning a man has fastened up his uniform to the last button, he acquires a second and thicker hide, and feels that he has returned to his more essential and steadfast being. Closed up in his hard casing, braced in with straps and belts, he begins to forget his own undergarments, and the uncertainty of life, yes, life itself, recedes to a distance. Then, after he has finished by pulling down his tunic so that it stretches smooth and without a crease over chest and back,—then even the child whom he sincerely loves, and the woman in whose embrace he begot that child, recede into such a civilian remoteness that the mouths which they present to him in farewell are almost strange to him, and his home becomes something foreign, which in his uniform he dare not enter. Should he next proceed in his uniform to the barracks or to his office, it must not be thought pride that makes him ignore men otherwise clothed; it is simply that he can no longer comprehend that such alien and barbarous raiment can clothe anything even faintly resembling actual humanity as he feels it in himself. Yet this does not mean that the man in uniform has become blind, nor that he is filled with blind prejudices, as is commonly assumed; he remains all the time a man like you and me, dreams of food and love, even reads his newspaper at breakfast; but he is no longer tied to things, and as they scarcely concern him any longer he is able to divide them into the good and the bad, for on intolerance and lack of understanding the security of life is based.

Whenever Joachim von Pasenow was compelled to put on civilian clothes Eduard von Bertrand came into his mind, and he was always glad that mufti did not sit on him with the same assurance as on that man; yet he was very eager to know what Bertrand’s views were on the
question of uniform. For Eduard von Bertrand had of course every reason to reflect on the problem, seeing that he had laid aside the uniform once for all and decided for the clothing of a civilian. That had been astonishing enough. He had been passed out of the cadet school in Culm two years before Pasenow, and while there had acted exactly like the others; had like the others worn white trousers in summer, had eaten at the same table, had passed his examinations like the others; and yet when he became a second lieutenant the incomprehensible thing happened: without ostensible cause he quitted the service and vanished into a kind of life quite foreign to him—vanished into the labyrinth of the city, as people called it, into a labyrinth from which he emerged only now and then. If one met him in the street one was always a little uncertain whether to greet him or not, feeling that he was a traitor who had carried over to another world and there offered up something which had been a common possession, and that in confronting him one was exposed and naked, while he himself gave away nothing about his motives and his life, and maintained always the same equable friendly reserve. But perhaps the disturbing factor lay simply in Bertrand’s civilian clothes, in the fact that his white stiff shirt-front was so exposed that one really had to feel ashamed for him. Besides, Bertrand himself had once declared in Culm that no genuine soldier would ever allow his shirt-cuffs to appear below his sleeves, because everything connected with being born, sleeping, loving and dying—in short, everything civilian—was a matter of underclothing; and even if such paradoxes had always been characteristic of Bertrand, no less than the airy gesture with which he was accustomed, lazily and disdainfully, to disavow them afterwards, yet obviously he must have been troubled at that time by the problem of the uniform. And about the underclothing and the shirt-cuffs he may have been partly right: for instance when one reflected—and Bertrand always awakened such unpleasant reflections—that all men, civilians and Joachim’s father not excepted, wore their shirts stuck into their trousers. For that reason Joachim actually did not like to encounter anyone in the men’s barracks with his tunic open; there was something indecent about it, which gave one a vague inkling of the justification for the regulation that when visiting certain resorts and for other erotic purposes mufti must be worn; and more, which made it appear almost like an offence against the regulations that such beings as married officers and married non-commissioned officers should exist. When the married sergeant-major
reported for morning service and opened two buttons of his tunic so as to draw out of the opening, which laid bare his checked shirt, his huge red-leather book, Joachim generally ran his fingers over his own tunic buttons, and felt secure only when he had certified that they were all in order. He could almost have wished that the uniform was a direct emanation of his skin, and often he thought to himself that that was the real function of a uniform, and wished at least that his underclothes could by a distinctive pattern be made a component part of the uniform. For it was uncanny to think that every soldier carried about with him under his tunic the anarchical passions common to all men. Perhaps the world would have gone off the rails altogether had not someone at the last moment invented stiff shirt-fronts for the civilians, thus transforming the shirt into a white board and making it quite unrecognizable as underclothing. Joachim recalled his astonishment as a child, when, looking at the portrait of his grandfather, he had recognized that that gentleman did not wear a stiff shirt, but a lace jabot. But then in his time men had had a deeper and more intimate faith, and did not need to seek any further bulwark against anarchy. Of course all these notions were rather silly and obviously only an overflow from the kind of things Bertrand said, which had neither rhyme nor reason; Pasenow was almost ashamed of thinking of them in front of the sergeant-major, and when they surged up he thrust them aside and with a jerk resumed his stiff, official bearing.

But even if he thrust aside those thoughts as foolish, and accepted the uniform as a decree of nature, there was more in all this than a mere question of attire, more than a something which gave his life style at least, if not content. Often he fancied that by saying “Comrades in the King’s uniform” he could put an end to the whole question, and to Bertrand too, although in doing so he was far from desiring to express any extraordinary reverence for the King’s uniform or to indulge an overweening vanity; he was rather concerned that his elegance of figure should neither exceed nor fall short of a definitely demarcated and prescribed correctness, and he had actually been a little flattered when once some ladies expressed the opinion, which was well grounded, that the straight, wooden cut of the uniform and the glaring colours of the bright cloth went but indifferently with his face, and that the brown-velvet jacket and flowing necktie of an artist would suit him far better. The fact that in spite of this the uniform meant much more to him may be explained by the obstinacy which he inherited from his mother, who
always stuck immovably to a custom once formed. And sometimes it seemed that for him there could never be any other attire, although he was still full of resentment at his mother for submitting herself without a struggle to Uncle Bernhard’s opinions. And now, of course, it had all been decided, and if one has been accustomed to wear a uniform from one’s tenth year, sooner or later it grows into one’s flesh like the shirt of Nessus, and no one, and least of all Joachim von Pasenow, will be able to specify then where the frontier between his self and his uniform lies. For even if his military vocation had not grown into him, as he into it, his uniform would still have been the symbol for many things; in the course of years he had fattened and rounded it with so many ideas that, securely enclosed in it, he could no longer live without it; enclosed and cut off from the world and the house of his father in such security and peace that he could scarce distinguish, scarce notice, that his uniform left him only a thin strip of personal and human freedom no broader than the narrow strip of starched cuff which was all that an officer was allowed to show. He did not like to put on mufti, and he was glad that his uniform protected him from visits to questionable resorts, where he pictured the civilian Bertrand in the company of loose women. For often he was overcome with the uncanny fear that he too might slip into the same inexplicable rut as Bertrand. And that also was why he bore a grudge against his father for his having to accompany him, and in mufti at that, on the obligatory round of the Berlin night haunts with which ended, in accordance with tradition, the old man’s visits to the capital of the Empire.

When next day Joachim escorted his father to the train the latter said: “Well, as soon as you’re a captain, and that won’t be long now, we’ll have to think of finding a wife for you. How about Elisabeth? The Baddensens have a nice little property over there at Lestow, and it will all go to the girl some day.” Joachim said nothing. Yesterday he almost bought me a girl for fifty marks, he thought, and to-day he is trying to arrange a legitimate engagement. Or had the old man himself some hankerings after Elisabeth, as after the other girl, whose fingers Joachim could still feel on the back of his neck? But it was incredible to him that anyone at all should dare to think of Elisabeth with sensual desire, and still more incredible that any man should want to incite his son to violate a saint because he was unable to do it himself. Joachim almost felt like asking his father’s pardon for the monstrous suspicion; but
really the old man was capable of anything. Yes, it was one’s duty to protect all the women in the world from this old man, Joachim thought as they were walking along the platform, and while he saluted the departing train he was still thinking it. But when the train had disappeared his thoughts returned to Ruzena.

And in the evening he was still thinking of Ruzena. There are evenings in spring when the twilight lasts far longer than the astronomically prescribed period. Then a thin smoky mist sinks over the city and gives it the subdued suspense of evenings preceding a holiday. And at the same time it is as if this subdued, pale grey mist had netted so much light that brighter strands remain in it even when it has become quite black and velvety. So these twilights last very long, so long that the proprietors of shops forget to close them; they stand gossiping with their acquaintances before the doors, until a passing policeman smilingly draws their attention to the fact that they are exceeding the regulation closing-time. And even then a beam of light shines from many a shop, for in the back room the family are sitting at their supper; they have not put up the shutters as usual in front of the door, but only placed a chair there to show that customers cannot be served; and when they have finished their supper they will come out, bringing their chairs with them, and take their ease before the shop-door. They are enviable, the small shopkeepers and tradespeople who live behind their shops, enviable in winter when they put up the heavy shutters so as to enjoy doubly the warmth and security of the lighted room, through whose glass door at Christmastime the glittering Christmas-tree can be seen from the shop; enviable in the mild spring and autumn evenings when, holding a cat, or stroking the soft head of a dog, they sit before their doors as on a terraced garden.

Returning from the barracks Joachim walked through the streets of the suburb. It was not fitting for one of his rank to do this, and the officers always drove home in the regimental carriages. Nobody ever went walking here—even Bertrand would not have thought of it—and the fact that he himself was doing so now was as disturbing to Joachim as if he had made a false step. Was it not almost as if in doing so he were humiliating himself for Ruzena’s sake? Or was it an indirect humiliation of Ruzena? For in his fantasy she now occupied quite definitely a suburban flat, perhaps that very cellar-like little shop before whose dark entry greens and vegetables were spread for purchase; and perhaps it was Ruzena’s mother who squatted in front of it, knitting and talking in her dark
foreign speech. He smelt the smoky odour of paraffin lamps. In the low vaulted cellar a light shone out. It came from a lamp fixed into the dingy wall at the back. He felt he could almost sit there himself with Ruzena before the cellar, her hand ruffling his hair. But he was startled when he became conscious of this thought, and to drive it away he tried to imagine that over Lestow the same light grey dusk was settling. And in the park, silent under the mist and already fragrant with dewy herbs, he saw Elisabeth; she was walking slowly towards the house, from whose windows the soft light of the paraffin lamps shone out into the falling dusk, and her little dog was there too, and it, too, seemed to be tired after the day. But as he thought more intently and intimately it was Ruzena and himself that he saw on the terrace in front of the house, and Ruzena’s caressing hand was resting on the back of his head.