The Sleepwalkers (6 page)

Yet though now the rain beat on their faces, they dared not hasten, for that would have dispelled the charm, and they only became sure of themselves again when they were drinking coffee in the little inn. Now the rain ran faster and faster down the panes of the rustic veranda, and splashed thinly from the gutters. Whenever the landlady left the room Ruzena set down her cup, took his out of his hand, and seizing his head drew it quite close to hers, so close—and they had not yet kissed—that their glances melted together, and the tension was quite unendurable in its sweetness. But when, as in a dark cave, they sat in the droshky under the covered roof with the rain-flaps let down, the faint soft drumming of the raindrops on the stretched leather above them, seeing nothing of the world save the coachman’s cape and two wet grey strips of roadway through the opening on either side, and soon not even seeing that, then their faces bowed towards each other, met, and melted together, dreaming and flowing like the river, lost irrecoverably, and ever found again, and again sunk tunelessly. It was a kiss that lasted for an hour and fourteen minutes. Then the droshky stopped before Ruzena’s door. Yet when he made to enter with her she shook her head, and he turned to go; but the pain of parting from her was so great that after a few steps he turned back, and driven by his own dread and drawn by hers, seized her hand, which was still motionlessly outstretched in longing; and as if already dreaming they ascended like sleepwalkers the dark stairs, which creaked under their feet, crossed the dark entrance-room, and in
her bedroom, which lay in the gloom of the early rainy twilight, sank on the dark rug that covered the bed, seeking once more the kiss from which they had been torn, their faces wet with rain or with tears, they did not know which. But then Ruzena freed herself and guided his hands to the fastenings that held her dress at the back, and her singing voice was dark. “Open that,” she whispered, tearing at the same time at his necktie and the buttons of his vest. And as if in sudden, precipitate humility, whether towards him or towards God, who can say, she fell on her knees, her head against the foot of the bed, and quickly unfastened his shoes. Oh, how terrible that was—for why should they not sink down together, forgetting the casings in which they were held?—and yet how grateful he was to her that she made it easier, and so touchingly; oh, the deliverance of the smile with which she threw open the bed into which they flung themselves. But the sharp-cornered starched plastron of his shirt, cutting against her chin, still irked her, and opening it and squeezing her face between the sharp angles she ordered: “Put that off”; and now they felt release and freedom, felt the softness of their bodies, felt their breathing stifled by the urgency of emotion, and their delight rising up out of their dread. Oh, dread of life streaming from the living flesh with which the bones are clothed, softness of the skin spread and stretched over it, dreadful warning of the skeleton and the many-ribbed breast frame which he can now embrace, and which, breathing, now presses against him, its heart beating against his. Oh, sweet fragrance of the flesh, humid exhalation, soft runnels beneath the breasts, darkness of the armpits. But still Joachim was too confused, still they were both too confused, to know the delight they felt; they knew only that they were together and yet that they must still seek each other. In the darkness he saw Ruzena’s face, but it seemed to be flowing away, flowing between the dark banks of her hair, and he had to put out his hand to touch it and assure himself that it was there; he found her brow and her eyelids beneath which the hard eyeballs rested, found the satisfying curve of her cheeks and the line of her mouth opened for his kiss. Wave beat against wave of longing; drawn by the flood his kiss found hers; and while the willows of the river grew up and up, stretching from bank to bank, enclosing them as in a sacred grotto in whose profound peace the security of the eternal sea slumbers, it was—so faintly did he say it, stifled and no longer breathing, but only seeking for her breath—it was like a cry that she
heard: “I love you”; and she opened, like a shell in the sea she opened, and he sank drowning into her.

Without warning the news reached him that his brother was dead. He had fallen in a duel with a Polish land proprietor. Had it happened a few weeks before Joachim might not have been so shaken. In the twenty years which he had spent away from home the image of his brother had faded more and more, and when he thought of him he saw only the fair-haired lad in his boy’s suit—they had always been dressed alike until Joachim had been sent into the cadet school—and even now the first thing that came into his mind was a child’s coffin. Yet immediately, side by side with it, rose Helmuth’s masculine blond-bearded form, the same form which had come to him that evening in the Jägerstrasse when he had been afraid that he saw something more in a girl’s face than was there: oh, then the clear eyes of the huntsman had rescued him from the nightmare into which another had wished to draw and entangle him, and those eyes which had been lent him then Helmuth had closed now for ever, perhaps in order that he himself might have them always. Had he required this of Helmuth? He had no feeling of guilt, yet it was as if his brother’s death had come about for his sake; yes, as if he had been the cause of it. Strange that Helmuth had worn Uncle Bernhard’s beard, the same short beard which left the mouth free; and now it seemed to Joachim that he had always held Helmuth responsible for the cadet school and his military career, and not Uncle Bernhard who was really to blame. Still, Helmuth had been allowed to stay at home, and besides he had played the hypocrite—that was probably the explanation; yet all this was very confusing, and the more so because Joachim had known for a long time now that his brother’s life was not enviable. He saw the child’s coffin before him again, and a feeling of bitterness against his father rose up in him. So the old man had succeeded at last in driving his other son out of the house too. It gave him an acrid feeling of relief to throw the responsibility for his brother’s death on his father.

He returned to Stolpin for the funeral. When he arrived a letter from Helmuth was awaiting him: “I don’t know whether I shall come alive out of this rather unnecessary affair. Naturally I hope so; still it is almost a matter of indifference to me. I recognize that there is something called a code of honour which in this shoddy life gives a hint of some
higher idea to which one may submit oneself. I hope that you have found more value in your life than I have found in mine. I have often envied you your military career; in the army one serves at least something greater than oneself. I don’t know, of course, how you think about it, but I’m writing you to warn you (in case I should fall) not to give up your career for the sake of taking over the estate. You’ll have to do that sooner or later of course, but as long as father is alive it would be better, all things considered, for you to stay away, unless mother should need you. I send you lots of good wishes.” Here followed a varied list of instructions for Joachim to carry out, and at the end, somewhat unexpectedly, the wish that he might be less lonely than Helmuth had been.

His parents were remarkably collected, his mother no less than his father. His father gripped his hand and said: “He died for honour, for the honour of his name,” and with his sharp, purposive stride walked in silence from end to end of the room. Soon he repeated again: “He died for honour,” and went out through the door.

They had laid the coffin in the big drawing-room. In the antechamber Joachim already could smell the heavy perfume of the flowers and wreaths: too heavy for a child’s coffin—a stubborn and meaningless thought—and yet he remained hesitating within the heavily curtained door, and did not dare to look across, but stared at the floor. The floor he knew well, knew the triangular parquet which bordered the threshold, knew the recurring pattern that ran across the room, and when he followed it with his eyes, as he had often done as a child picking his steps along the geometrical figures, his glance reached the black cloth spread under the bier. A few leaves, fallen from the wreaths, were lying there. He had a longing to walk along the pattern again, took a few steps, and looked at the coffin. It was not a child’s coffin, and that was good; but he still shrank from looking with his own seeing eyes into those dead ones, into eyes which must be so completely quenched that the face of the boy would be drowned in them, perhaps drawing himself after it, the brother to whom those eyes had now been given; and the fancy that he himself was lying there grew so strong that it was like a release and piece of good fortune when, stepping nearer, he saw that the coffin was covered. Someone said that the dead man’s face had been mutilated by the bullet. He hardly listened to this, but remained standing beside the coffin, his hand resting on the lid. And seized by the impotence that overcomes human beings in the presence of the dead
and the silence of death, where all accepted things recede and fall away, where the long familiar breaks and falls and is frozen in its fall, where the air becomes thin and incapable of supporting one, it seemed to him that he would never be able to move from his station beside the bier, and it caused him a great effort to remember that this was the big drawing-room, and that the coffin was standing in the place usually occupied by the piano, and that behind it there must be a strip of parquet never yet walked on; he went slowly over and touched the black-draped wall, felt under the gloomy hangings the picture-frames and the frame of the case where the Iron Cross hung, and this refound fragment of actuality transformed death in a novel and almost exciting way into a matter of drapery, accommodating almost cheerfully the fact that Helmuth in his coffin, decked with all his flowers, had been introduced into this room like a new piece of furniture, thus once more reducing the incomprehensible so radically to the comprehensible, the certain and assured, that the experience of those few minutes—or had it been only seconds?—passed over into a soothing feeling of quiet confidence. His father appeared accompanied by several gentlemen, and Joachim heard him once more saying repeatedly: “He died for honour.” But when the gentlemen had left and Joachim thought he was alone, suddenly he heard again: “He died for honour,” and saw his father, small and forlorn, standing beside the bier. He felt it his duty to go up to him. “Come, father,” he said, leading him away. At the door his father looked into his face and said: “He died for honour,” as if he wished to learn the words by heart, and wished Joachim also to do so.

Then a great number of people arrived. The village fire brigade were standing in the yard. The neighbouring military associations also put in an appearance, making an orderly show of top-hats and frock-coats on which not infrequently an Iron Cross was to be seen. Carriages from the houses in the vicinity drove up, and while the vehicles were being directed to a place where they could remain in the shade, Joachim had to greet the visitors and do the honours beside his brother’s coffin. Baron von Baddensen arrived alone, for his wife and daughter were still in Berlin, and as Joachim greeted him he was seized by the thought, angrily dismissed at once, that this gentleman might well now regard the only remaining son at Stolpin as a desirable son-in-law, and he felt ashamed for Elisabeth. From the gable of the house a black flag hung motionlessly, almost reaching down to the terrace.

His mother descended the stairs on his father’s arm. The visitors were astonished at her calmness, indeed admired her. But her calmness was probably due simply to the slowness of feeling that characterized her. The funeral procession formed up, and as the carriages turned into the village street, and the house of God lay before them, everyone was heartily glad that they could now step out of the dust and heat of the afternoon sun, which had burned fiercely on their thick mourning-suits and uniforms, into the cool white church. The pastor gave an address in which the quality of honour was much stressed and by adroit turns linked with the honour that is due to God: to the pealing of the organ their voices rose, acknowledging that from our loved ones we must part … with pain and smart, and Joachim kept waiting for the rhyme to see that it came. Then on foot they proceeded to the cemetery, over whose portal glittered in golden letters: “Rest in Peace,” and the equipages followed slowly in a long-stretching cloud of dust. The sunny sky arched, a violet-blue, over the dry, crumbling earth that was waiting for them to give Helmuth’s body into its keeping; though indeed it was not the earth, but only the family vault, a little open cellar, that was yawning as if in boredom for the newcomer. When Joachim had three times emptied the little spade into the hole he looked down, saw the ends of his grandfather’s and his uncle’s coffins, and thought that it was because they had to keep a place for his father that they had not buried Uncle Bernhard here. But then as the shovelled earth fell on the lid of Helmuth’s coffin and the stony sides of the tomb, standing there with the toy shovel in his hand he could not help thinking of days spent as a child in the soft river-sand, and he saw his brother again as a boy, saw himself lying on the bier, and it seemed to him that the dryness of this summer day was cheating Helmuth not only out of his parents, but out of death itself. For Joachim thought of a soft rainy day for his own death, a day in which the heavens themselves would sink to receive his soul, so that it might flow away as in Ruzena’s arms. Unchaste thoughts, out of place here, but it was not he alone who was responsible for them, but all the others to whom now he gave place at the graveside, yes, even his father shared in the blame for them: for all their religion was a sham, was brittle and dusty and at the mercy of the sun and the rain. Could one not almost wish for the negro host, so that they might sweep all this away, and the Saviour might arise in new glory and lead men back to His kingdom? A Christ hung on the marble
cross over the tomb, clothed only with the rag that covered His loins and the crown of thorns from which the bronze blood-drops fell, and Joachim too felt drops on his cheeks; perhaps they were tears that he had not noticed, perhaps however it was only the oppressive heat; he did not know, and went on shaking the hands that were held out to him.