The Sleepwalkers (49 page)

Yet just when he was on the point of picturing to himself how peaceful the world would be then, and already felt within himself the unequivocal desire for a woman, the sleepless Esch was pulled up by an idea which was at once a little comical and a little shocking: he dared not return to Erna, for then it would no longer be possible to tell who was the father of her child. So that was the inexplicable obligation, that was the threat which had made him start back when he saw Erna that afternoon! Yes, it all seemed to fit in; for there was one who had stepped aside to make place for another from whose advent the new dispensation of time was to begin, and it seemed right, too, that a messiah’s father should be a pure Joseph. Esch tried again to summon his ironical grimace, but he was unsuccessful this time; his eyelids were too tightly shut, and no one can laugh in the dark. For night is the time of freedom, and laughter is the revenge of those who are not free. Oh, it was just and right that he should be lying here sleepless and wide awake, in a cold and strange excitement which was no longer the excitement of desire, lying in a semblance of death as in a vault, since the unborn was lying motionless and undreaming likewise. Yet how could one believe that Bertrand had been sacrificed, so that out of the paltry earthly vessel that was called Fräulein Erna new life should spring? Esch cursed to himself, as the sleepless sometimes are accustomed to do, but while he cursed he suddenly realized that after all it did not fit in, inasmuch as the magical hour of death should be the
hour of procreation too. One could not be at the selfsame time in Badenweiler and Mannheim; so the conclusion he had drawn was a premature one, and everything was perhaps more complex and more noble.

The darkness of the room was cool. Esch, a man of impetuous temperament, lay motionless in his bed, his heart hammered time down to a thin dust of nothingness, and no reason could any longer be found why one should postpone death into a future which was in any case already the present. To the man who is awake such ideas may seem illogical, but he forgets that he himself exists for the most part in a kind of twilight state, and that only the sleepless man in his overwakefulness thinks with really logical severity. The sleepless man keeps his eyes closed, as though not to see the cold tomblike darkness in which he lies, not to see it, yet fearing that his sleeplessness may topple over into mere ordinary awakeness at the sight of the curtains which hang like woman’s skirts before the window, and all the objects which may detach themselves from the darkness if he were to open his eyes. For he wants to be sleepless and not awake, otherwise he could not lie here with Mother Hentjen cut off from the world and safe in his tomb, full of a desire which is lust no longer; yes, he was robbed of desire now, and that too was good. United in death, thought Esch, lying in his semblance of death, yes, united in death, and in truth that would have been comforting, if he could but have refrained from thinking of Erna and Lohberg, who were also in a way united now in death. But in what a way! Well, the sleepless man has no inclination left for cynical witticisms, he wants, as it were, to let the metaphysical content of experience work upon him, and to estimate justly the extraordinary distance that separates his couch from the other rooms in the house, wishes in all seriousness to meditate on the attainable final communion, on the fulfilment of his dream which will lead him to consummation; and as he cannot grasp all these things he becomes morose and aggrieved, becomes enraged and meditates now only on the question: how the dead can possibly give birth to the living. The sleepless man runs his hand over his closely cropped hair, a cool and prickling sensation remains in the palm of his hand; it is like a dangerous experiment which he will not repeat again.

And when by such means he has advanced to more difficult and remarkable feats, his rage waxes, and perhaps it is only the rage of impotent joyless desire. Ilona was committing self-murder in a peculiarly complicated and feminine fashion, suffering night after night the presence
of a dead lump of flesh, so that her face was already puffy as though it had been touched by corruption. And every night that that image of obscene lust was imprinted on her the corruption must increase. So that was the reason why he had feared to see Ilona that afternoon! The knowledge of the sleepless man grows into a clairvoyant foreshadowing dream of death, and he recognizes that Mother Hentjen is already dead, that she, the dead woman, can have no child by him, that for this reason alone she has written him a letter instead of coming to Mannheim, written it under the portrait of the man from whose hands she accepted death, just as now Ilona is accepting death from that animal Korn. Mother Hentjen’s cheeks too were puffy, time and death were embedded in her face, and the raptures of her nights were dead, dead as the automatic musical instrument which ground out its tune mechanically, one had only to press a lever. And Esch became furious.

The sleepless man does not know that his bed is standing in a certain position in a house in a certain street, and he refuses to be reminded of it. It is notorious that the sleepless are easily moved to anger; the rolling of a solitary tramcar through the night streets is enough to arouse them to fury. And how much stronger then must be their rage over a contradiction so colossal and so terrible that it cannot even be put down to a book-keeping error? In panic haste the sleepless man sets his thoughts flying to discover the meaning of the question which, coming from somewhere or other, from afar off, perhaps from America, now presses on him. He feels that there is a region in his head that is America, a region that is none other than the site of the future in his head, and yet that cannot exist so long as the past keeps breaking in so boundlessly into the future, the wrecked and annihilated overwhelming the new. In this storm that breaks in he himself is carried away, yet not only he, but everyone around him is swept away by the icy hurricane, all of them following the pioneer who has first flung himself into the storm, to be whirled away so that time may once more become time. Now there was no more time left, only an extraordinary amount of space; the sleepless man in his overwakefulness listens and knows that all the others are dead, and even if he shuts his eyelids ever so tightly so as not to see it, he knows that death is always murder.

So the word had appeared again, yet not flitting silently like a butterfly; but with the rattling clangour of a tramcar in the night streets the word murder had reappeared, and was shouting at him. The dead
handed death on. There must be no surviving. As though death were a child, Mother Hentjen had conceived it by the dead tailor fellow, and Korn was imparting it to Ilona. Perhaps Korn too was dead; he was as fat as Mother Hentjen, and of redemption he knew nothing. Or if he were not dead already, he would die—faint comforting hope—would die like the snippet of a tailor, after he had consummated his murder. Murder and counter-murder, shock on shock, the past and the future broke upon each other, broke in the very moment of death which was the present. That must be thought out very vigilantly and very seriously, for only too easily might another book-keeping error slip in. And already how immeasurably difficult it was to distinguish sacrifice and murder from each other! Must all be destroyed ere the world could be redeemed to a state of innocence? Must the deluge break in, was it not enough for one man to sacrifice himself, for one to step aside? Esch still lived, although like all the sleepless he was dead to all appearance, Ilona still lived, although death had already touched her, and only one man was bearing the burden of sacrifice for the new life and the creation of a world in which daggers might no longer be flung. That sacrifice could never be undone now. And as all abstract and universally valid generalizations are to be found in the state of sleepless overwakefulness, Esch arrived at the conclusion: the dead are murderers of women. But he was not dead, and on him lay the obligation to rescue Ilona.

Again arose in him the desire, the impatient desire, to receive death from Mother Hentjen’s hand, and the doubt whether it had not already happened. If he submitted himself to that death which came from the dead, he might propitiate the dead, and they might rest content with the one sacrifice. A comforting thought! And as the sleepless man can be more violently overcome with rage than the awake in their twilight state, so his happiness may be far more ecstatic, and he may experience it, one might almost say, with a sort of wild lightness of heart. Yes, that light and liberated feeling of happiness may become so bright that the very darkness behind the closed eyelids catches its radiance. For now it was absolutely certain that Esch, who was alive, a living man by whom women might conceive, if he resigned himself to Mother Hentjen and her body of death, must by this unprecedented measure not only consummate Ilona’s redemption, must not only put her for ever beyond the reach of the daggers, must not only retrieve her beauty for her and cancel from her flesh all trace of mortality, cancel it so completely that
she would regain a new virginity, but that by doing this he must also of necessity rescue Mother Hentjen from death, vivify again her loins, so that she might bear the one whose task it would be to renew Time.

Then it seemed to him as though his bed were returning with him from a great distance, until at last it rested again in a certain position in a certain alcove, and Esch, reborn in newly awakened longing, knew that he was at his goal, not, it was true, that final goal in which symbol and prototype return to their identity, yet none the less at that temporary goal with which earthly mortals must rest content, the goal that he termed love and that stood as the last attainable point on that coast beyond which lay the unattainable. And, as it were, in antithesis to the symbol and the prototype, women seemed curiously united and yet divided; Mother Hentjen might be sitting in Cologne waiting for him, Ilona might have receded into the unattainable and the invisible, and he knew that he would never see her again—but out there on that horizon where the visible and the invisible, the attainable and the unattainable became one, their ways crossed and their two silhouettes dissolved and merged into each other, and even if they were to separate, they would still remain united in a hope never to be fulfilled: the hope that, embracing Mother Hentjen in perfect love, bearing her life as his own, quickening and redeeming her from death in his arms, embracing in love this woman growing old, he might lift from Ilona the burden of approaching age and of memory, might create as a setting for Ilona’s new and virginal beauty the higher plane of his desire; yes, widely separated as the two women were, they yet became one, the reflected image of one, of that invisible entity to which he could never turn back, and which yet was home.

The sleepless Esch was at his goal. In his overwakefulness indeed he had already foreknown the outcome, and he saw that he had merely been spinning a logical chain round it, and had remained wakeful merely because the chain had grown longer and longer; but now he permitted himself to forge the last link, and it was like a complicated book-keeping task which he had solved at last, indeed even more than a book-keeping task; it was the real task of love in all its absoluteness that he had taken upon him in submitting his earthly life to Mother Hentjen. He would gladly have made this conclusion known to Ilona, but in view of her imperfect mastery of the German language he would have to abstain.

Esch opened his eyes, recognized his room, and then went contentedly to sleep.

He had decided for Mother Hentjen. Finally. Esch did not look out through the carriage window. And when he turned his thoughts to this perfect and absolute love of his it was like a daring experiment; acquaintances and customers would be drinking in the brightly lit restaurant; he would enter, and regardless of all those eyewitnesses, Mother Hentjen would run to him and fling herself on his breast. But when he arrived in Cologne the picture seemed to have altered strangely; for this city was no longer a city that he knew, and his way through the evening streets seemed to stretch for miles and was strange to him. Incredible that he had been away for only six days. Time had stopped, and the house that awaited his entry was quite indefinite, the restaurant quite indefinite in shape and size. Esch stood in the doorway and looked across at Mother Hentjen. She sat enthroned behind the buffet. Above the mirror a light burned under a red shade, silence hung in the air, not a customer was to be seen in the forlorn room. Nothing happened. Why had he come here? Nothing happened; Mother Hentjen remained behind the buffet and said at last in her usual phlegmatic way: “Good-evening.” And she glanced nervously round the room. Rage rose up in him, and all at once he could not understand why he had decided for this woman. So he too merely said, “Good-evening,” for although he somehow approved of her proud coldness, and knew also that he had no right to repay her in the same coin, yet he felt angry; a man who had decided in his heart for unconditional love was entitled at any rate to be met on an equal footing,—he rapped out: “Thanks for your letter.” She looked round the empty restaurant and said furiously: “What if anyone were to hear you?” and Esch, fully roused, replied with particular distinctness: “And what if they did … let this stupid mystery-mongering stop now, for heaven’s sake!” said it without point or object, for the restaurant was empty, and he himself did not know why he was there. Mother Hentjen became silent with terror, and mechanically put up her hand to her coiffure. Since she had accompanied him to the train she had keenly regretted being so forward, giving herself away so completely, and after sending that imprudent letter to Mannheim she had actually fallen into a genuine panic; she would have been grateful to Esch now for not mentioning it. But now that with a set, implacable
face he openly exploited his advantage, she felt herself again defencelessly caught in a grip of iron. Esch said: “I can go, of course, if you like,” and now she would really have issued from behind her counter if the first customers had not at that moment entered. So the two of them remained standing where they were in silence; then Mother Hentjen whispered in a contemptuous tone which was intended to show that she merely wished to carry their quarrel to a finish: “Come back to-night.” Esch made no reply, but sat down at his table before a glass of wine. He felt an orphan. His calculations yesterday, which had seemed so clear, had now become incomprehensible to him; how could his deciding for this woman help Ilona? he gazed round the restaurant and still felt it strange; it meant nothing to him now, he had left all those things too far behind. What was he doing in Cologne at all? he should have been in America long ago. But then his glance caught Herr Hentjen’s portrait, hanging above the insignia of liberty, and it was as though it suddenly reminded him of something; he asked for paper and ink, and in his most beautiful clerkly script wrote: “I beg to bring to the notice of the Chief Commissioner of Police that Herr Eduard von Bertrand, resident in Badenweiler, Chairman of the Central Rhine Shipping Company Limited in Mannheim, is guilty of illicit practices with persons of the male sex, and I am prepared to appear as a witness and furnish proof of my accusation.”