The Sleepwalkers (17 page)

The doctor came and sent Herr von Pasenow to bed. He administered bromide and spoke of a cold-water cure; it was simply a nervous breakdown following on the death of his son. Yes, yes, that was the doctor’s banal explanation. But it was no explanation. There was more in it than that, and it could not be mere coincidence; the accident to Helmuth’s horse had been a kind of preliminary warning, and now when, in spite of everything, Joachim was about to triumph over Bertrand, now when Elisabeth for his sake had rebuffed Bertrand and he was making ready to play Bertrand false and to play Ruzena false, ostensibly in obedience to his father, now was the hour for fate to strike. An accomplice who betrayed his fellow-accomplices; accused, and rightly accused, by his father of plotting with Bertrand! Must not the whole web now fall to pieces, and treachery cancel treachery? And Bertrand must appropriate Ruzena again to convince the father that he was no longer the son’s accomplice and to avenge himself for Elisabeth’s refusal! In all the foul and hateful suspicion with which Joachim now regarded Bertrand’s departure to Berlin, he saw only his own departure postponed indefinitely, and that tormented him more than his anxiety about his afflicted father. The tangled web unravelled itself only to be knotted in fresh tangles. Was this what his father had in mind when he had pressed him to visit Lestow? And besides, it was impossible to discover what had happened between his father and Bertrand. Perhaps it might have been cleared up if he could have mentioned to Bertrand the old man’s dark insinuations, but he had to confine himself to announcing his sudden illness. He begged Bertrand to explain the situation to Ruzena; in any case he would himself come to Berlin soon for a few days, to get his leave extended and see to other things. Well, said Bertrand, as Joachim escorted him to the station, well, and what was to become of Ruzena now? Of course it was to be hoped that Herr von Pasenow would soon
recover, but Joachim’s presence in Stolpin would none the less become more and more indispensable. “She ought to be provided with some regular occupation,” he observed; “something she enjoys doing; that would help her over the difficult times ahead.” Joachim was offended, for after all that was his own affair; he said hesitatingly: “But the theatre you got her into, she enjoys herself there.” Bertrand dismissed this statement with a wave of the hand, and Joachim stared at him uncomprehendingly. “But don’t you worry, Pasenow, we’ll find something or other.” And although it was a worry that had not previously occurred to Joachim, he was now sincerely glad to have it so lightly taken off his shoulders by Bertrand.

Since the old man’s illness, which still kept him in bed the greater part of the day, life had become curiously simplified. Joachim could now reflect more quietly on many things, and some of the riddles appeared less obscure, or at least more approachable. But now an almost insoluble problem confronted him, and it was no use trying to decipher it in Elisabeth’s face, for her face itself constituted the problem. Lying back in her chair she was gazing at the autumn landscape, and her up-tilted face, thrown back almost at a right angle to the taut line of the throat, was like an irregular roof set upon the pillar of her neck. One could perhaps say just as well that it rested like a leaf on the calyx of the throat, or that it was a lid covering the throat, for it was really no longer a face, merely a continuation of the throat, an extension from the throat, with a far-off resemblance to the head of a serpent. Joachim followed the line of her throat; the chin jutted out like a hill, behind which lay the landscape of her face. Softly rounded the rim of the crater which was her mouth, dark the cavern of the nose, divided by a white pillar. Like a miniature beard sprouted the hedge of the eyebrows, and beyond the clearing of the forehead, cut by finely ploughed furrows, was the edge of the forest. Joachim was again forced to ask the question why a woman can be desirable, but nothing gave him an answer; it remained insoluble and perplexing. He shut his eyelids a little and peered through the slits at the landscape of that extended face. It blended at once with the real landscape, the woodland verge of the hair bordered the yellowing leaves of the forest, and the glass balls that decorated the rose-beds in the garden glittered with the same light as the jewel that in the shadow of the cheek—ah, was it still a cheek?—shone as an ear-ring.
This was both startling and comforting, and when the eye combined these separate things into a unity so strange, past all disjoining, one was curiously reminded of something, transposed into some mode that lay beyond convention far back in childhood, and the unsolved riddle was like a sign that had emerged from the sea of memory.

They were sitting in the shady front garden of the little inn; their horses were in the yard behind with the groom. From the rustling of the leaves above them one could tell that it was September. For it was no longer the clear, soft purling of spring leafage, nor yet the full note of summer: in summer the trees simply rustle without much variation, but in the early days of autumn a sharper, silvery metallic tone is already perceptible, as if the broad harmony in the flowing sap were breaking up. When autumn begins the midday hours are quite motionless; the sun still shines with summer warmth, and when a lighter, cooler breeze comes wandering through the branches there is, as it were, a streak of spring in the air. The leaves that drop from the trees on to the rough inn table are not yet yellowed, but dry and brittle for all their greenness, and the summer-like sunshine seems then doubly precious. With its bow pointing upstream the fisherman’s boat lies in the channel; the water glides past smoothly, as if moving in broad planes. These autumn days have none of the drowsiness of summer noons; a soft and watchful serenity lies over everything.

Elisabeth said: “Why do we live here? In the south there would be days like this all the year round.” Joachim recalled the southern face of the Italian with the black moustache. But in Elisabeth’s features it was impossible now to descry those of an Italian, or even of a brother, so removed were they from humanity, so akin to the landscape. He tried to find in them again their ordinary shape, and when it suddenly reappeared, when the nose became a nose again, the mouth a mouth, the eye an eye, the transformation was once more startling, and he was comforted only by the smoothness of her hair, which was not too insistently waved. “Why? Don’t you like the winter?” “Your friend’s right; one ought to travel,” was her answer. “He wants to go to India,” said Joachim, and thought of its olive-skinned races and of Ruzena. Why had he never once thought of travelling abroad with Ruzena? He was aware of Elisabeth’s eyes on his face, felt caught, and turned aside. But if anyone was to blame for this fever for travel it was Bertrand. His need to compensate himself for the lack of an ordered life and to
deaden his regrets by business deals and exotic journeys was infectious, and if Elisabeth was yearning for the south it was perhaps because she regretted—even though she had refused Bertrand—that she was not travelling by his side. He heard Elisabeth’s voice: “How long have we known each other?” He cast it up; it wasn’t so easy to determine; when he was a twelve-year-old boy home for the holidays he had often visited Lestow with his parents. And at that time Elisabeth was only a few weeks old. “So I’ve known you always, all my life,” decided Elisabeth, “and yet I’ve never really been aware of you; I’ve always counted you among the grown-ups.” Joachim said nothing. “And I suppose you’ve never been aware of me either,” she went on. Oh yes, he said, he had, one day when she suddenly blossomed out as a young lady, all at once and most surprisingly. Elisabeth said: “But now we’re almost contemporaries.… When is your birthday, by the way?” And without waiting for an answer she added: “Can you still remember what I looked like as a child?” Joachim had to think back; in the Baroness’s drawing-room there hung a portrait of Elisabeth as a child that obstinately displaced the actual memory. “It’s queer,” he said; “I know very well what you looked like, and yet …” He wanted to say that he could not find the child’s face in hers, although of course it must be there, but as he looked at her once more her face ceased to be a face at all, and was simply hill and valley again, covered with something called skin. As if she wanted to challenge his thoughts she said: “With a little effort I can see what you looked like as a boy, in spite of the moustache.” She laughed. “That’s really funny; I must try to do it with my father too.” “Can you see me as an old man as well?” Elisabeth eyed him keenly: “That’s queer; no, I can’t … but wait a minute, yes, I can: you’ll be still more like your mother, with a nice, round face, and your moustache will be white and bushy.… But what about me as an old woman? Shall I create a very dignified impression?” Joachim declared himself incapable of imagining it. “Oh, don’t be gallant, do tell me.” “Excuse me, I’d rather not. There’s something unpleasant in suddenly looking like one’s parents or one’s brother or anything else than oneself … it makes so many things meaningless.” “Is that your friend Bertrand’s opinion too?” “No, not so far as I know: why should you think so?” “Oh, only that it would be like him.” “I don’t know, but Bertrand seems to me so much concerned with the external details of his busy life that he simply never thinks of things like that. He is never fully himself.”
Elisabeth smiled. “You mean that he always sees things from a great distance? Through the eyes of a stranger, as it were?” What was she thinking of? What was she hinting at? He despised himself for his curiosity, he felt that he was unchivalrous, and at the same time realized anew that it was an unchivalrous proceeding to let a woman fall into another man’s hands instead of shielding her, shielding her from everybody. Yet he was really pledged to marry Elisabeth. But Elisabeth looked far from unhappy as she said: “It has been lovely; but now we must go home for lunch, they’re expecting us.”

They rode homewards, and the tower of Lestow was already in sight when she said, as if she had been reflecting on their conversation: “It’s queer, all the same, how closely intimacy and strangeness are knit together. Perhaps you are right in not wanting to think of growing old.” Joachim, preoccupied with thoughts of Ruzena, did not understand her in the least, but this time he did not concern himself about it.

If there was one thing that contributed to Herr von Pasenow’s recovery it was the mail-bag. One morning while he was still in bed the thought struck him: “Who’s looking after the post-bag? Joachim, I suppose.” No, Joachim wasn’t bothering about it. He grumbled that Joachim never bothered about anything, but seemed relieved, insisted on getting up, and slowly went to his study. When the messenger appeared the usual ritual was gone through, and it was rehearsed as usual from that day on. And if Frau von Pasenow happened to be in the room she had to listen to the usual complaint that nobody wrote to him. He asked often enough if Joachim was about the place, but he refused to see him. And when he heard that Joachim had to go for a few days to Berlin he said: “Inform him that I forbid it.” Sometimes he forgot this, and complained that not even his own children wrote to him; and this put the idea into his wife’s head of getting Joachim to write a letter of reconciliation to his father. Joachim remembered the congratulations that he and his brother had had to inscribe on rose-bordered paper whenever his parents had a birthday; it had been a frightful torment to him. He declined to submit to it again and announced that he was going away. They could conceal it from his father if they liked.

He set off without enthusiasm; if he had once objected to having a marriage prescribed for him, he now rebelled in the same way against the fact that his three days’ sojourn in Berlin plighted him to three
nights with Ruzena. He found it degrading for Ruzena too. He would have preferred to put off their meeting as long as possible, and to prevent her at least from coming to the station he had omitted to mention the time of his arrival. In the train it occurred to him that he ought to bring her a present of some kind; but since neither partridges nor other game would have been suitable, the only thing he could do was to buy her something in Berlin; so it was a good thing she would not be at the station. He tried to think of a suitable gift for her, but his imagination lagged; he could not hit upon anything and wavered back and forward between perfume and gloves; oh, well, in Berlin he would find something or other.

When he reached his flat the first thing he did was to write a note to Bertrand, who would certainly be glad to have at last an opportunity of discussing with him the weird events of his last day at Stolpin. He wrote to Ruzena also, and sent both notes by a messenger with instructions to wait for an answer. He felt pleasantly at home in his flat. The warmth of summer still brooded captive behind the shuttered windows. Joachim opened a shutter and basked in the stillness of the street; it was late afternoon, rain might fall before night, there was a grey wall of cloud in the western sky. The vines on the fences of the front gardens were red, yellow chestnut leaves lay on the pavement, and the horses in the shafts of the four cabs at the corner of the street stood with their forelegs bent in peaceful resignation. Joachim leaned out of the window and watched his valet open the others; if the man had leaned out too Joachim would have smiled and nodded to him along the house-front. And while his bags were being unpacked he stayed there at the window, gazing at the quiet, darkening street. Then he drew his head in; the rooms had become cooler, only here and there a stray patch of summer still lingered in the air, filling him with a sweet melancholy. But it did him good to feel his uniform on him again; he walked about among his private belongings, surveying them and his books. Yes, he would do more reading this winter. Then he winced; in three days’ time he was due to leave all this again. He sat down as if to show that he was a settled occupant, ordered the windows to be shut, and asked for tea. Some time later the messenger, whom he had forgotten, came back: Herr von Bertrand was not in Berlin, but was expected in the next few days, and the lady had given no answer except simply that she was coming at once. To Joachim it was as if some slight hope had finally
vanished; he could almost have wished that the messages were reversed and that it was Bertrand who was to come at once. Besides, he had intended to go out and buy a present. In a few minutes, however, the door-bell rang; Ruzena was there.