The Sleepwalkers (45 page)

His second night in Erna’s bed he regarded as a formality that a free man was entitled to comply with. They had had a friendly talk about her marriage to Lohberg, and made love to each other almost tenderly and sentimentally, as if they had never fought tooth and nail. And after that long and wakeful night he rose with the pleasant feeling of having helped Erna and Lohberg to their joint happiness. For every man has many potentialities in him, and according to the chain of logic he
throws round them he can convince himself that they are good or bad.

Immediately after breakfast he started for the prison. In Lohberg’s shop he bought some cigarettes for Martin; nothing else occurred to him. The heat was sweltering, and Esch could not help thinking of that afternoon in Goarshausen on which he had pitied Martin because of the heat. In the prison he was shown into the visiting-room, which had barred windows giving on the bare prison yard, across which the yellow-washed buildings threw sharply cut shadows. The yard looked as if the executioner’s block might well be set up in the middle of it, that block by which the criminal had to kneel and wait for the keen edge of the axe that was to sever his head. When Esch had come to this conclusion he did not want to look at the yard any longer, and turned away from the window. He examined the room. In the middle stood a yellow-painted table with splashes of ink on it that told of previous use in an office; there were also one or two chairs. The room was like an oven although it was in the shadow, for the early morning sun had streamed into it and the windows were shut. Esch became drowsy; he was alone and he sat down; he was left to wait.

Then he heard footsteps in the paved corridor and the clacking of Martin’s crutches. Esch rose to his feet as if to greet a superior. But Martin came in exactly as if he were coming into Mother Hentjen’s. If an orchestrion had been at hand he would have hobbled over to it and set it going. He looked round the room and seemed pleased that Esch was alone, went up to him and shook his hand. “ ’Morning, Esch, good of you to come and see me.” He leaned his crutches against the table, just as he always did in Mother Hentjen’s, and sat down. “Come on, Esch, sit down too.” The warder who had escorted him was reminiscent of Korn in his uniform; he had remained standing by the door according to regulations. “Will you not take a seat too, Herr Warder? There’s nobody coming and I certainly won’t try to escape.” The man muttered something about the service regulations, but he came up to the table and laid down his huge bunch of keys. “So,” said Martin, “now we’re all comfortable,” and then they were silent all three, sitting round the table staring at the notches in it. Martin was rather yellower than usual; Esch did not dare to ask how his health was. But Martin could not help laughing at the embarrassed silence and said: “Well,
August, tell me all the news from Cologne, how’s Mother Hentjen, and everybody else?”

In spite of his burning cheeks Esch felt himself redden, for suddenly it struck him that he had exploited the prisoner’s absence to steal his friends from him. Nor did he know whether he should give them away before the warder. After all, few people care to be mentioned in connection with a criminal in the visiting-room of a prison. He said: “They’re all getting on well.”

Probably Martin had understood his constraint, for he did not insist on a more exhaustive answer, but asked: “And you yourself?”

“I’m on my way to Badenweiler.”

“To take the waters?”

Esch felt that Martin had no need to make fun of him. He answered dryly: “To see Bertrand.”

“Upon my soul, you’re getting on! He’s a fine chap, Bertrand.”

Esch was not certain if Martin was still joking or being somehow ironical. A fine sodomite was what Bertrand was, that was the truth. But he couldn’t say that in front of the warder. He muttered: “If he was really a fine chap you wouldn’t be sitting here.”

Martin looked a question.

“Well, you’re innocent, aren’t you?”

“I? I have it in black and white, and sworn to in a court of law, that I’ve already lost my innocence several times.”

“Oh, stop making silly jokes! If Bertrand’s such a fine chap he need only be told exactly what has happened to you. Then he’ll see to it that you’re let out.”

“Is it you that’s going to enlighten him? Is that why you’re making for Badenweiler?” Martin laughed and stretched his hand out over the table to Esch: “My dear August, what an idea! It’s a good thing you won’t find him there.…”

Esch said quickly: “Where is he?”

“Oh, he’s still on his travels, in America or somewhere.”

Esch was dumbfounded: so Bertrand was in America! Had got there first, was basking before him in the light of freedom. And although Esch had always suspected that the greatness and liberty of that far country had a very significant though not fully comprehensible connection with the greatness and freedom of the man he could never reach, he felt now as if Bertrand’s journey to America had annulled for ever
his own plan of emigration. And because of this, and because everything was so remote and inaccessible, he fell into a rage with Martin: “A chairman of a company can get easily enough to America … but Italy would do him just as well.”

Martin said peaceably: “Well, Italy, then, for all I care.”

Esch reflected whether he should ask in the inquiry office of the Central Shipping where Bertrand was to be found. But suddenly that seemed to him superfluous, and he said: “No, he’s in Badenweiler.”

Martin laughed: “Well, you may be right, but even so they won’t let you in … is there some girl or other behind all this, what?”

“I’ll soon find ways and means of getting in,” said Esch threateningly.

Martin scented trouble: “Don’t do anything silly, August, don’t worry the man; he’s a decent chap and should be respected.”

Obviously he has no idea of all that’s hidden behind Bertrand, thought Esch, but he did not dare to mention it and merely said: “They’re all decent enough; even Nentwig,” and after some consideration he added: “All dead men are decent too, but one can only find out what that decency was worth by looking at the legacies they leave behind them.”

“What do you mean?”

Esch shrugged his shoulders: “Nothing, I was just saying … yes, that it doesn’t matter in the long run whether a man’s decent or not; he’s always decent on one side; and that doesn’t come into question; the question is what did he do?” And he added angrily: “That’s the only way to keep yourself from being at sixes and sevens.”

Martin shook his head in amusement mingled with sorrow: “Look here, August, you have a friend here in Mannheim who’s always prating about poison. Seems to me he must have poisoned you.…”

But Esch continued undismayed: “For we don’t know black from white any longer. Everything’s topsy-turvy. You don’t even know what’s past from what’s still going on.…”

Martin laughed again: “And I know even less what’s going to happen.”

“Do be serious for once. You’re sacrificing yourself for the future; that’s what you told me yourself … that’s the only thing left to do, to sacrifice oneself for the future and atone for all that is past; a decent man must sacrifice himself or else there’s no order in the world.”

The prison warder’s suspicions were aroused: “You mustn’t make revolutionary speeches here.”

Martin said: “This man’s no revolutionary, Herr Warder. You’re more likely to be one yourself.”

Esch was astounded that his remarks could be so construed. So he had turned into a Social Democrat, had he? Well, so be it! And obstinately he went on: “Let them be revolutionary, for all I care. Anyhow, you yourself have always preached that it doesn’t matter whether a capitalist is a decent fellow or not, for it’s as a capitalist he has to be opposed and not as a man.”

Martin said: “Look at that, Herr Warder, do you think we should be allowed visitors? This man will poison me through and through with his heresies, and me just newly regenerated.” And he turned to Esch: “You’re the same old muddlehead, my dear August.”

The warder said: “Duty’s duty,” and since he was in any case too hot, he looked at his watch and announced that their time was up.

Martin took his crutches: “All right, lead on.” He gave Esch his hand. “And let me tell you again, August, don’t do anything silly. And many thanks for everything.”

Esch was not prepared for such a sudden break-up. He kept Martin’s hand in his own and hesitated about shaking hands with the hostile warder. Then he offered the man his hand after all, because they had been sitting at the same table, and Martin nodded his approval. Then Martin departed, and Esch was again amazed because he went exactly as if he were only leaving Mother Hentjen’s, and yet he was going into a prison cell! It seemed indeed as if nothing that happened in the world mattered at all. Yet there was nothing that wasn’t significant: one had only to force it to be so.

Outside the prison gate Esch drew a deep breath; he dusted himself as if to convince himself of his own existence, discovered the cigarettes he had intended for Martin, and once more felt that inexplicable and terrible rage against him, and once more his mouth was filled with curses. He even called Martin a ridiculous tub-thumper, a demagogue, as they said, although there was really nothing he could reproach the man with except, at the very most, that he had carried himself as though he were the chief figure in the drama, while there were much more important characters.… But that was what demagogues were like.

Esch took a tram back to the town, was irritated by the sight of the conductor’s uniform, and collected his things from Fräulein Erna’s flat. She received him with every mark of affection. And in his rage at the
confusion of the world he treated her overtures with scorn. Thereupon he took a brief farewell and hurried to the station to catch the night train for Müllheim.

The man who from afar off yearns for his wife or merely for the home of his childhood has begun his sleepwalking.

Many preparations, it may be, have already been made, only he has not yet noticed them. As, for instance, when it strikes him on the way to the station that houses are composed of regular rows of bricks, that doors are made of sawn planks and windows of rectangular panes of glass. Or when he remembers the editor and the demagogue, both of whom pretend to know the difference between right and left, although that is known only to women, and by no means to all women. But a man cannot always be thinking of such matters, and so he quietly drinks a glass of beer in the station.

Yet when he sees the train for Müllheim come roaring in, that great, long serpent darting so surely towards its goal, he is again struck down, suddenly struck by doubt of the engine’s reliability, for it might take the wrong road; struck by the fear that he, with evident and important duties to fulfil on earth, might be diverted from these duties and cast adrift perhaps even as far as America.

In his perplexity he would gladly approach some uniformed official, as unpractised travellers do, and ask a question, but the platform is so extended, so immeasurably long and bare, that he can scarcely race along it, and must think himself lucky, breathless maybe but still lucky, to reach the train at all, whatever its destination. Of course he strives to make out the names of the towns posted on the carriages, but soon realizes that it is a useless effort, for the names are mere words. And the traveller hesitates a little uncertainly before his carriage.

Uncertainty and breathlessness are quite enough to make a hasty-tempered man swear, still more when, startled by the signal for departure, he has to scramble up the inconvenient steps at a breakneck pace into
the carriage, and barks his shin on one of them. He swears, he swears at the steps and their awkward construction, he swears at fate. Yet behind this rudeness there lurks a more relevant and even more maddening recognition, which the man could formulate if his mind were awake: mere human contrivances all these things are, these steps fitted to the bending and stretching of the human leg, that immeasurably long platform, these signboards with words upon them, and the locomotive’s whistle, and the glittering steel rails—no end to the human contrivances, and all of them engendered in barrenness.

Vaguely the traveller feels that by such reflections he lifts himself above the trivial daily round, and he would like to stamp them on his mind for the rest of his life. For though reflections of that sort might be deemed general to the human race, yet they are more accessible to travellers, especially to hasty-tempered travellers, than to stay-at-homes who think of nothing, not even if they climb up and down their stairs ever so often daily. The stay-at-home does not observe that he is surrounded by things of human manufacture, and that his thoughts are merely manufactured in the same way. He sends his thoughts out, as if they were trusty and capable commercial travellers, on a journey round the world, and he fancies that thus he brings the world back into his parlour and into his own transactions.

But the man who sends himself out instead of his thoughts has lost this premature sense of security: his temper rises against everything that is of human manufacture, against the engineers who have designed the steps precisely to those measurements and not to others, against the demagogues who prate of justice, order and liberty as if they could rearrange the world according to their theories, against all dogmatists who claim to know better than others his anger rises, now that there is dawning within him the knowledge of ignorance.

He is painfully aware of a liberty allowing things to be otherwise. Imperceptibly the words with which things are labelled have lapsed into uncertainty: it is as if all words were orphan strays. Uncertainly the traveller walks up the long corridor of the carriage, a little bewildered to see glass windows like those in houses, and with his hand he touches their cool surfaces. The man who takes a journey can thus fall easily into a state of detached irresponsibility. And since the train goes roaring on at full speed, apparently darting towards a goal, apparently rushing into irresponsibility, and can be stopped in its career by nothing less
than the emergency brake, and since beneath his very feet it is hurrying him off with great dispatch, the traveller who has not yet lost his conscience in the painful liberty of the open day makes an attempt to turn and walk in the opposite direction. But he arrives nowhere, for here there is nothing but the future.