The Storyteller (11 page)

From Where? Where? Whither? (Woher? Wo? Wohin?)
, 1940.

V
ery few people on the train read books which they have taken from their shelf at home, preferring, instead, to buy something that presents itself at the last minute. They mistrust the appeal of novels that have been earmarked in advance, and rightly so. Furthermore, they may set store by making their purchase from the colourfully decorated trolley right on the tarmac of the platform. After all, everyone knows the cult to
which it bids. At one time or another everyone has reached for the swaying tomes that it displays, less out of a pleasure in reading them than out of the dim sense of doing something to please the gods of the railway. He who buys there knows that the coins which he consecrates to this offertory box recommend him to the protection of the boiler god who glows through the night, to the smoke Naiads who romp all over the train, and to the demon who is lord of all the lullabies. He knows all of them from dreams, just as he knows the succession of mythical trials and perils that present themselves to the zeitgeist as a ‘train ride', and the unpredictable flight of spatio-temporal thresholds which it passes: from the famed ‘too late' of the person left behind – the archetype of all that has been missed – to the loneliness of the compartment, the fear of missing the connection and the dread of the unknown hall into which he draws. Unsuspectingly, he feels entangled in a gigantomachy and recognises himself as the mute witness of the struggle between the gods of the railway and the station gods.

Similia similibus
. The numbing of one fear by the other is his salvation. Between the freshly separated pages of the detective novels he searches for the idle, indeed, virginal trepidations that could help him overcome the age-old anxieties of travel. In this way he may approach frivolity by making travel companions of Sven Elvestad with his friend Asbjörn Krag, Frank Heller and Mister Collins. But such smart company is not to everyone's taste. In honour of the timetable, one may wish for a more accurate companion, such as Leo Perutz, who composed the powerfully rhythmic and syncopated narratives, whose stations one flies through – clock in hand – like the provincial backwaters along one's route. Or one may wish for someone with a greater understanding of the uncertainty of the future that
one is travelling towards, and the unsolved riddles that one has left behind; then one would travel in the company of Gaston Leroux and, while hunching over
The Phantom of the Opera
and
The Perfume of the Lady in Black
, one might soon feel like a passenger on
The Ghost Train
that dashed across the German stage last year. Or one might think of Sherlock Holmes and his friend Watson, how they would bring to bear the uncanny familiarity of a dusty second-class railway coupé – both passengers immersed in silence, one of them behind the screen of a newspaper, the other behind a curtain of smoke clouds. One might also think that all of these spectral forms dissolve into nothing before the image of the author that emerges from the unforgettable detective books of A.K. Green. She must be imagined as an old lady in a capote bonnet, who is on equally familiar ground in the tangled relations of her heroines as in the giant, creaking wardrobes in which – according to the English proverb – every family has a skeleton. Her short stories are just the same length as the Gotthard Tunnel and her great novels,
Behind Closed Doors, That Affair Next Door
, bloom like night-violets in the purplish-tinted light of the coupé.

So much for what the reading affords the traveller. But what does the journey
not
afford the reader? When else is he so focussed on reading that he can feel with some assurance the existence of his hero intermingled with his own? Is his body not the shuttle which, in keeping with the rhythm of the wheels, tirelessly pierces the warp – the hero's book of fate? One did not read in the stagecoach and one does not read in the car. Reading is as related to rail travel as stopping at train stations is. As is well known, many railway stations resemble cathedrals. We, however, want to give thanks to the movable, garish little altars that an acolyte of curiosity, absentmindedness and sensation chases past the train screamingly – when for
a few hours, snuggled into the passing countryside, as though into a streaming scarf, we feel the shudders of suspense and the rhythms of the wheels running up our spine.

—

Translated by Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie and Sebastian Truskolaski
.

First published in
Literaturblatt der Frankfurter Zeitung
, 1 June 1930;
Gesammelte Schriften IV
, 381–3.

The Chirping Machine (Die Zwitscher-Maschine)
, 1922.

‘T
he time in which even he who has no home lives' becomes, for the traveller who left none behind, a palace. For three weeks, a series of halls, filled with the sound of the waves, stretched northwards. Gulls and towns, flowers, furniture and statues appeared on their walls, and through their windows fell light, day and night.

Town

I
f this sea is the Campagna, then Bergen lies in the Sabine Mountains. And so it is; for the sea rests in the deep fjord, forever smooth, and the mountains take on the forms of those around Rome. The town, though, is Nordic; everywhere in it there are beams and creaking. Things are bare: wood is wood, brass is brass, brick, brick. Cleanliness drives them back into themselves, makes them identical to their core. So they become proud, want little to do with the outside. Just as the inhabitants of remote mountain villages can be related by marriage even upon death and infirmity, so too the houses have stacked themselves like stairs and chevrons. And where some sky may still be seen, two flagpoles are now about to lower themselves from either side of the street. ‘Stop, if the approach of the cloud becomes noticeable!' Otherwise the sky is entrapped in tabernacles; small wooden cells, Gothic, red, in which hangs a bell-pull, with which one can summon the fire brigade. Outdoor leisure is nowhere provided for; where bourgeois homes have a garden in front, it is so densely cultivated that no one is tempted to linger in it. Perhaps this is why the girls know how to stand on the threshold, how to lean in the doorway, as they rarely do in the South. The house still has strict boundaries. A woman, who must have wanted to sit in front of the door, yet hadn't placed her chair perpendicular but rather parallel to the front of the house, in the niche of the door – daughter of a lineage that two hundred years ago still slept in cupboards. Cupboards, now with revolving doors and now with drawers; up to four places in one and the same trunk. Therefore love was badly provided for – fulfilled love, that is. All the better, at times, for unfulfilled love, for it must have been a frustrated lover at whose sleeping quarters I saw
the inside of the door filled with a large portrait of a woman. A woman separated him from the world: no one can say much more about his own best night.

Flowers

W
hile the trees turn shy, barely letting themselves be seen unguarded by fences, one can encounter in flowers an unexpected hardness. They are certainly not more vividly coloured than those in a temperate climate but paler if anything. Yet how much more decisively their colours distinguish themselves from all that surrounds them. The small flowers, pansies and mignonettes, are wilder; the large ones, and above all the roses, more meaningful. Women carefully transport them through the vast wasteland from one port to another. But as soon as they stand in pots, straining against the windowpanes of the wooden houses, they are less a greeting of nature than a barrier against the outside. When the sun breaks through, all comfort ceases. One probably cannot say in Norwegian that the sun means well. It uses the moment of its cloudless reign despotically. For ten months of the year everything here belongs to darkness. Once the sun comes, it roars, snatching things from the night into its possession; in gardens, it roll-calls the colours – blue, red and yellow – the sheer guard of the flowers, shaded by no canopy.

Furniture

T
o learn anything about the ancient inhabitants by looking at their ships, one ought to at least know how to row. In Oslo there are two Viking ships to see, but whoever cannot row is better off contemplating the chairs to be found in the Museum
of Folklore, not far from one of the ships. Anyone can sit, and some will come to see in those chairs what really matters. It is a huge mistake to think that back and armrests were originally there for comfort. They are enclosures, namely of the space the sitter occupies. Among these wooden structures from the earliest of times was one whose improbably spacious seat was surrounded by a fence, as if the buttocks were an abounding quantity that needed to be reined in. Whoever sat there, did so for many. All the surfaces of the ancient seats are closer to the floor than ours are. How much more importance, however, is attached to this smaller gap, while, at the same time, the surface stands in for the soil. One can recognise in all of these seats how much they determined each time the posture, knowledge, esteem and counsel of those who would sit upon them. Take this seat, for example: a small, very low stool, the seat, a trough, the back, a trough, everything pushes, surges forward. It was as if fate had flushed he who sat here into the room. Or the armchair with the chest under the seat. Not a fine piece of furniture, rather an intrusive one; the seat of a poor man perhaps – but whoever sat there knew what Pascal later recognised: ‘No one dies so poor that he leaves nothing behind.' And that throne there: behind the circular seat without arm supports towers the smooth, polished, concave arch of the backrest like the apse of a Romanesque cathedral, from whose height the enthroned looks down. In these regions, which welcomed the fine arts – sculpture and painting – later than all others, the building spirit has defined the furniture – cupboard, table, and bed, down to the lowliest stool. They all are aloof; and in them live still to this day, as genius loci, occupants by whom they were truly possessed centuries ago.

Light

T
he streets of Svolvær are empty. And behind the windows the paper blinds are lowered. Are the people sleeping? It is after midnight. From one house come voices; from another, the sounds of a meal. And every sound that reverberates across the street makes this night turn into a day that is not in the calendar. You have entered the warehouse of time and you look upon the stacks of unused days, which the earth put, millennia ago, on ice. A person uses up their day in twenty-four hours – the earth uses up its own only every half year. This is why things remained intact. Neither time nor hands have touched the shrubs in the windless garden and the boats on the smooth water. Two twilights meet over them, splitting into their domains as clouds do, and send you home empty-handed.

Gulls

I
n the evening, the heart heavy as lead, full of trepidation, on deck. At length I track the play of gulls. There is always one sitting on the tallest mast, tracing the oscillation, which it jerkily sketches into the sky. But it is never one and the same for long. Another comes, with two beats of its wings, it has – I don't know – invited or chased off the other. Until, all at once, the masthead is empty. But the gulls have not stopped following the ship. Conspicuous as ever, they trace their circles. It is something else that brings order among them. The sun has long since gone down; in the East it is very dark. The ship sails southwards. Some brightness remains in the West. Whatever befell the birds – or me? – happened on the strength of the place, which I so commandingly, so lonely in the middle of the quarterdeck, chose for myself out of melancholy. All at once
there were two tribes of gulls, one of the East, one of the West, left and right, so very varied that the name ‘gulls' fell away from them. The birds on the left retained against the background of the dying sky something of their brightness, bolting up and down with every turn, tolerating or avoiding each other and weaving in front of me an uninterrupted, ineffably shifting series of symbols, seemingly unceasingly; a whole, unspeakably variable, fleeting mesh of wings – but a legible one. Only I slipped, finding myself invariably anew with the others on the right. Here nothing more was lying ahead of me, nothing spoke to me. No sooner had I observed those in the East than they – in flight against a last shimmer, a few deep black, sharp wings – lost themselves in the distance and came around, so that I could no longer describe their procession. So completely did it seize me that I returned to myself – blackened from what I had suffered, a silent host of wings – from the distance. On the left everything had still to unravel itself and my fate hung on every wingflap; the right was already of the past, a single silent wave. This counterplay lasted a long time, until I myself was only the threshold, over which the unnameable messengers exchanged black and white in the air.

Statues

A
chamber with moss green walls. All four are covered with statues. In between, a few decorated beams, which through traces of gold upon traces of colour let ‘Jason' or ‘Brussels' or ‘Malvina' be deciphered. On the left-hand side, as one enters, a wooden figurine, a kind of schoolmaster in robes, a tricorne on his head. He has his left forearm instructively raised, but just below the elbow it breaks off; the right hand and the left foot are also missing. A nail goes through the man,
who stares stiffly upwards. Coarse, plain, ordinary crates line the walls. On some is written ‘Lifebelt'; on most, nothing at all. One can measure out the room with them. Two or three crates along, and there a towering woman in a richly adorned white formal dress, which lets her ample bosom half free. Upon this mighty base, a full wooden neck. Full cracked lips. Beneath the belt, two holes. One through the pubic bone, one deeper in the bulky robe that lets no legs be discerned. Like her, all the figures around her grow out of vague, hardly articulated forms. They are on a bad footing with the floor, their support lies in their back. All colourful between the faded, cracked busts and statues stands another one, unblemished by all weathering, his yellow coat lined with green, his red robe stitched with blue, his sword green and grey, his horn yellow, he wears a Phrygian cap and, squinting, he holds his hand over his eyes – Heimdallr. And again another female figure, even more ladylike than the first. An Allonge wig lets its curls fall over a blue bodice. Instead of arms, volutes. To imagine the man who gathered them all, gathered around him, who had sought them over lands and seas, in the knowledge that only in him would they find, only in them would he find rest. No lover of fine art, no, but a traveller who sought fortune in the remote distance, as it was once to be found in the home, and then later made his home among those most mistreated by distance and journey. They all, faces weathered by salty tears, gazes directed upwards from crushed, wooden caves, arms, when still there, imploringly crossed over the chest – who are they? – so unspeakably helpless and protesting – these Niobes of the Sea? Or its Maenads? For they stormed over whiter combs than those of Thrace and were beaten by wilder paws than the beasts, the following of Artemis – they, the galleons. They are galleons. They stand in the chamber of the galleons in the Maritime Museum in Oslo.
But right in the middle of the chamber rises a ship's wheel on a platform. Will even here these travellers find no rest, and should it be out with them again into the beating of the waves, which is eternal like hellfire?

—

Translated by Sam Dolbear and Antonia Grousdanidou
.

The drafting of this cycle was concluded on 15 August 1930 and published in the
Frankfurter Zeitung
, 18 September 1930.
Gesammelte Schriften IV
, 383–7.