The Sleepwalkers (59 page)

On one of the following afternoons Huguenau again visited Herr Esch. “Well, Herr Esch, what do you think: the thing’s as good as done!”

Esch was correcting proofs and raised his head: “What thing?”

Imbécile, thought Huguenau, but he said:

“Why, the sale of your newspaper.”

“Depends on whether I agree to it.”

Huguenau became suspicious:

“Now, look here, you can’t let me down … or are you negotiating with someone else?” Then he noticed the child whom he had seen outside the printing-office in the morning:

“Is that your daughter?”

“No.”

“Indeed … well, then, Herr Esch, if I’m to sell your paper for you, you must at least show me round the premises.…”

Esch waved his hand to indicate the room in which they were sitting; Huguenau tried to draw a smile out of him:

“So the little girl’s included, is she?…”

“No,” said Esch.

Huguenau pressed his point; he did not really know why he was so interested:

“But the printing-shed, that’s included … you must at least show me round the printing-shed.…”

“I don’t mind,” said Esch, getting up and taking the child by the hand, “let’s go into the printing-shed, then.”

“And what’s your name?” asked Huguenau.

The child said:

“Marguerite.”

“Une petite française,” said Huguenau.

“No,” said Esch, “only her father’s French.”

“Interesting,” said Huguenau, “and her mother?”

They were clambering down the ladder. Esch said in a low voice:

“Her mother’s dead … her father was an electrician here in the paper factory, but now he’s interned.”

Huguenau shook his head:

“A sad business, very sad … and you’ve taken the child?”

Esch said:

“You’re not inquisitive, are you?”

“I? no … but the child must surely live somewhere.…”

Esch said gruffly:

“She lives with her mother’s sister … she only comes here sometimes for dinner … her people aren’t well off.”

Huguenau was content, now that he knew everything:

“Alors tu es une petite française, Marguerite?”

The child looked up at him, a glimmer of recollection played over her face, she let Esch go and took Huguenau’s finger, but she made no reply.

“She can’t speak a word of French … it’s four years since her father was interned.…”

“How old is she, now?”

“Seven,” said the child.

They went into the printing-shed.

“This is the printing-room,” said Esch, “the press and the setting-plant alone are worth several thousands.”

“A bit old-fashioned,” said Huguenau, who had never seen a printing-press before. The composing-room was to the right. The grey-painted type cases did not interest him, but the printing-press took his fancy. The tiled floor, strengthened here and there with great patches of concrete, was saturated and brown with oil all round the press. The machine stood there heavy and stolid, its cast-iron parts lacquered black, its steel bars shining, and its joints and supports bound with rings of brass. An old workman in a blue blouse was rubbing up the steel bars with a handful of waste, paying no heed to the intruders at all.

Esch said:

“Well, that’s all, let’s go … come, Marguerite.”

He went out without another word, leaving his visitor simply standing. Huguenau stared after the unmannerly lout, but was quite pleased; he could now examine things at his leisure. There was a pleasant effect of quietness and solidity. He took out his cigar-case, selected a cigar that was somewhat frayed, and offered it to the workman at the machine.

The printer looked at him incredulously, for tobacco was rare and a cigar at the best of times an acceptable gift. He wiped his hands on his blue garment, took the cigar, and because he was at a loss for adequate words of thanks he said:

“One doesn’t often see these.” “Yes,” replied Huguenau, “it’s a bad look-out for tobacco nowadays.” “It’s a bad look-out for everything,” asserted the printer. Huguenau pricked up his ears: “That’s just what your chief says.” “It’s what everybody says.” The answer was not quite what Huguenau would have liked. “Well, light up,” he ordered. The man bit off the end of the cigar with strong brownish teeth, somewhat as if he were cracking a nut, and lit up. His working blouse and his shirt were wide open, showing the white hair on his chest. Huguenau felt that he should get some return for the cigar; the man owed him something; so he encouraged him, saying: “A fine little machine.” “It’ll do,” was the laconic answer. Huguenau’s sympathies were with the machine, and he felt hurt by this grudging approval. And since he could think of no other way of breaking the silence, he asked: “What’s your name?” “Lindner.” Then silence settled definitely upon them, and Huguenau wondered if he shouldn’t go away,—but suddenly his finger was clasped again by a childish hand; Marguerite had run in noiselessly on her bare feet.

“Tiens,” he said, “tu lui as échappé.”

The child looked up incomprehendingly.

“Oh, of course, you don’t speak French … tut, tut, you’ll have to learn it.”

The child made a contemptuous gesture, the same gesture that Huguenau had already remarked as characteristic of Esch:

“The one upstairs can speak French too.…”

She said: the one upstairs.

Huguenau was pleased and said in a low tone:

“Don’t you like him?”

The child’s face grew sullen and her lower lip protruded, but then she noticed that Lindner was smoking.

“Herr Lindner’s smoking!”

Huguenau laughed and opened his cigar-case.

“Would you like one too?”

She pushed the case away and answered slowly:

“Give me some money.”

“What! It’s money you want, is it? What do you want money for?”

Lindner said:

“They begin young nowadays.”

Huguenau had drawn out a chair for himself; he sat down and took Marguerite between his knees:

“I need money myself, you know.”

“Give me some money.”

“I’ll give you some sweets.”

She was silent.

“What do you want money for?”

And although Huguenau knew that “money” was a very important word, and although he could not get it out of his head, yet he was suddenly incapable of seeing any meaning in it, and had to ask himself with an effort:

“What does anybody want money for?”

Marguerite had braced her arms on his knees and stood very rigid. Lindner growled:

“Oh, send her away,” and to Marguerite, “out you get, the printing-room is no place for children.”

Marguerite gave him an angry side-glance. She clutched Huguenau’s finger again and began to pull him to the door.

“More haste, less speed,” said Huguenau, rising up. “It’s quietly that does it, eh, Herr Lindner?”

Lindner was polishing his machine again without a word to spare, and all at once Huguenau felt that there was some vague kinship between the child and the machine, almost as if they were sisters. And as if his assurance might comfort the machine he said quickly to the child before he reached the door:

“I’ll give you twenty pfennigs.”

When she thrust out her hand he was again aware of that curious doubt about the value of money, and cautiously, as if the affair were a
mystery that concerned only the two of them and must not be overheard by anyone, not even the machine, he pulled the child close to him and whispered in her ear:

“What do you want the money for?”

The little one said:

“Give it to me.”

But as Huguenau still delayed, she drew down reflective brows. Then she said: “I’ll tell you,” escaped from his arm and pulled him out through the door.

It had grown really cold by the time they were out in the courtyard. Huguenau would gladly have carried in his arms the little girl whose warmth he had so lately felt; it was not right of Esch to let a child run round barefooted at this time of the year. He was a little embarrassed, and polished his eyeglasses. Only when the child again thrust out her hand and said “Give it to me,” did he remember about the twenty pfennigs. But he forgot to ask again what she wanted them for, opened his purse and extracted the two coins. Marguerite grabbed them and ran off, and Huguenau, left alone, could think of nothing else to do but to run his eye once more over the yard and the buildings. Then he too departed.

As soon as Ludwig Gödicke of the Landwehr had gathered the most essential parts of his soul round his ego, he discontinued the painful struggle. It could be argued that all his life Gödicke had been a primitive kind of creature, and that a further struggle on his part would not have availed to increase the dimensions of his soul, since not even in the most dramatic moments of his life had there been many elements at the disposal of his ego. But that Gödicke was ever a primitive creature is a mere assertion that cannot be proved—and this alone invalidates the objection—nor could his new personality have been described as primitive; least of all, however, can one assume that the soul of a primitive and the world he sees are meagre and, so to speak, rough-hewn. One has only to remember how much more complicated is the structure of a primitive language than that of civilized peoples, in order to see that such an assumption is nonsensical. It is impossible to determine, therefore, whether Gödicke’s choice among the elements of his soul was
comprehensive or not, how many he admitted into his new personality, and how many he excluded; all that can be said is that Gödicke went about with the feeling of having lost something that formerly belonged to him, something that was not absolutely essential to his new life, but something nevertheless that he missed and yet dared not find again lest it should kill him.

And that there really was something missing was easily discernible from the economy of his utterances. He could walk, although with difficulty, could eat, although without appetite, and his very digestion, like everything connected with the crushed lower part of his body, gave him severe trouble. Perhaps his difficulty in speaking was in the same category, for it often seemed to him that the same oppression lay on his breast as on his bowels, that the iron rings constricting his belly were also bound round his chest and hindered him from speaking. Yet his incapacity to bring out even the shortest of words certainly sprang from that very economy with which he had composed his ego, and that provided for only the minimum of activity, so that any further demand upon it, let it be only the breath required for a single word, would have meant an irreplaceable loss.

So he hobbled about the garden on two sticks, his brown beard down on his chest, and his brown eyes above the deeply pitted hairy furrows on his cheeks gazing into vacancy; he wore the hospital overall or his soldier’s cloak according as the Sister laid out one or the other for him, and he was certainly unaware that he was in a hospital or living in a town the name of which he did not know. Ludwig Gödicke the bricklayer had, so to speak, built a scaffolding for the house of his soul, and as he hobbled about on his sticks he felt himself to be merely a scaffolding with supports and stresses on all sides; meanwhile he could not decide, or rather, it was a sheer impossibility for him, to assemble the tiles and bricks for the house itself, and all that he did, or more precisely all that he thought—for he did nothing—was concerned with the mere scaffolding, with the elaboration of that scaffolding and all its ladders and gangways, a scaffolding that grew more perplexing daily and needed careful underpinning: a scaffolding that existed in itself and by itself, though none the less its purpose was a real purpose, since invisibly in the centre of the scaffolding, and yet also in every single supporting beam, the ego of Ludwig Gödicke was precariously suspended and had to be preserved from dizziness.

Dr Flurschütz often thought of handing the man over to a mental hospital. But the Senior Medical Officer, Surgeon-Major Dr Kühlenbeck, was of the opinion that the patient’s state of shock was merely the result of his experiences, and not organic, and so would pass off in the course of time. And since he was a quiet patient, easy to deal with, they agreed to keep him until he had completely recuperated from his bodily injuries.