The Sleepwalkers (53 page)

Yes, what else remained to be done? For it was all as it should be. Erna would have a child born in wedlock, and he would marry Mother Hentjen, and the restaurant would be freshly painted and laid with brown linoleum. And nobody guessed all that lay concealed behind the fine smooth surface, nobody knew by whom the child had been begotten who would now bear Lohberg’s name, or that the perfect love in which he had sought salvation was nothing but a cheat and a lie, a blatant swindle to gloss over the fact that he was merely one among an indeterminate number of the snippety tailor’s successors, he who had dreamt of flight and the joys of freedom, and yet now was condemned to rattle the bars of his cage. It was growing darker and darker, and the mists beyond the ocean would never thin away.

He began to avoid the house; it had become cramped and unfamiliar. He wandered along the banks of the Rhine, studied the rows of sheds, and gazed after the ships as they slowly floated down the river. He came to the Rhine Bridge, strolled on past the police headquarters to the Opera House, and reached the people’s park. To stand on a seat and sing, with girls beating tambourines in front of one, yes, perhaps there was something in that, after all; to sing of the captive soul which could be set free through the power of redeeming love. Probably they were right, these Salvation Army idiots, in saying that first of all one must find one’s way to this true and perfect love. Even the torch of liberty could not light one to redemption, for Bertrand, in spite of all his American and Italian journeys, had not been saved. It was simply no use trying to cheat oneself, one remained orphaned, one remained standing shivering in the snow, waiting for the redeeming grace of love gently to descend. Then, yes, then at last the miracle might descend, the miracle of perfect fulfilment. The home-return of the orphan child. The miracle of an ingemination of the world and of individual fate—and the child for whose sake Bertrand had stepped aside would not be a child of Erna’s, but of another who in spite of everything would yet bring forth new life! Soon the snow would be coming, soft feathery snow. And the captive soul would be redeemed, hallelujah, would stand up on the bench, higher than he had stood who was accustomed to stand
so high. And in his spirit Esch for the first time named that other who was to bear him the child by her Christian name: Gertrud.

Every time he came home he looked in her face. Her face was friendly, and her mouth conscientiously enumerated all the things that she had cooked that morning. And if August Esch had not any great hunger he turned away. It horrified him to think, and the knowledge was inescapable, that her womb was killed, or worse still that only a misbegotten monstrosity was to be expected from it. Only too well did he know the curse, only too well the murderous fury that was wreaked, and would continue to be wreaked, by the dead on women. Again the question tortured him so deeply that he did not dare to pose it … had children been denied to her, or had he and his predecessors only served her lust? His covetous rage against Mother Hentjen mounted, and once more he was in no state of mind to call her by the name by which the dead man called her, and he vowed that that name would not cross his lips until she had understood all that was involved. She did not understand, however. She received him submissively and matter-of-factly, and left him alone in his isolation. He tried to submit to fate; it was not perhaps a question of the child so much as of her readiness to have one, and he waited for some signs of that. But there too she failed him, and when, to prompt her, he dropped a hint that after their marriage they would want to have children, she merely returned a dry and matter-of-fact “Yes,” but she did not give him the sign he was waiting for, and in their nights she did not cry that he must give her a child. He beat her, but she did not understand, and remained silent. Until he reached the knowledge that even that would not have availed; for even then the doubt would have remained, the ineluctable doubt whether she might not have begged Herr Hentjen too for a child, and the child whose father he longed to be might just as well have been one from Hentjen’s loins as from his. No woman can hope to help a man caught in the despairing agonies of the unprovable. And deeply as he tormented himself, she could only look on in incomprehension; nevertheless it was only an unavailing gesture now, it was only, so to speak, a symbol and an intimation, when he beat her. His resistance was broken.

For he recognized that in the actual world fulfilment could never be achieved, recognized ever more clearly that even the farthest away places lay in the actual world, that all flight thither was senseless, as well as all hope of seeking there sanctuary from death, and fulfilment
and freedom—and that the child itself, even if it came alive out of its mother’s body, signified nothing more than the fortuitous cry of pleasure with which it was conceived; a dying and long since vanished cry which was of no significance for the existence of the lover who evoked it. The child would be a stranger, strange as that long past cry, strange as the past, strange as the dead and as death, wooden and empty. For unchangeable was the earthly though it might appear to change, and even were the whole world born anew, in spite of the Redeemer’s death it would never attain a state of innocence in this life until the end of Time.

True, this knowledge was not very clear, but it sufficed to move Esch to organize his earthly life in Cologne, to seek a decent job and go about his business. Thanks to the excellent credentials which he possessed, he secured a prouder and more responsible position than he had yet occupied, and now once more earned all the pride and admiration which Mother Hentjen kept ready to expend on him. She had the restaurant laid with brown linoleum, and now that the danger of emigration seemed finally to be banished, she herself began to speak of their American castles in the air. He entered into her mood, partly because he felt that she was talking in this way to please him, and partly out of a sense of duty; for though he could hardly hope to see America now, he was resolved never to forsake the way that led towards it, never to turn back in spite of the invisible presence that followed him with the spear ready to strike, and an inward knowledge, hovering between dream and divination, told him that his way was now only a symbol and an intimation of a higher way which one had to walk in reality and in truth, and of which this one was only the earthly reflection, wavering and uncertain as a reflection in a dark pool. All this was not completely clear to him, indeed even the words of holy men, in which fulfilment and the absolute might be sought, did not help him. But he recognized that it was mere chance if the addition of the columns balanced, and so after all he could contemplate the earthly as from a higher coign of vantage, as from an airy castle rising from the plain, shut off from the world and yet open like a mirror to it; and often it seemed to him as though all that had been done or spoken or had come about was no more than a procession on a dimly lit stage, a representation which was soon forgotten and never palpably present, a thing already past which no one could lay hold on without increasing earthly suffering. For fulfilment always failed one in the actual world, but the way of longing and of freedom was endless
and could never be fully trod, was narrow and remote like that of the sleepwalker, though it was also the way which led into the open arms and the living breast of home. So Esch was strange in his love and yet more at home in the earthly world than formerly, so that it made no difference and everything still remained in the super-earthly, even if for the sake of justice much still remained to be done for Ilona in the sphere of the earthly. He talked to Mother Hentjen of America, the land of freedom, and of the sale of the business, and of their marriage, as to a child whom one wants to please, and sometimes he could call her Gertrud again, even if she remained nameless to him in the nights when he lay with her. They went hand in hand, although each walked a different and endless road. When presently they got married, and the business was knocked down for an absurdly low price, these were stations on their symbolical road, yet at the same time stations on the road leading them nearer to the lofty and the eternal, which, if Esch had not been a Freethinker, he might even have called the divine. But he knew nevertheless that here on earth we have all to go our ways on crutches.

When the theatre in Duisburg went bankrupt and both Teltscher and Ilona were once more left destitute, Esch and his wife put almost the whole of what remained of their means into the theatrical business, and soon they had finally lost their money. Yet Esch now secured a post as head book-keeper in a large industrial concern in his Luxemburg home, and for this his wife admired him more than ever. They went their way hand in hand and loved each other. He still sometimes beat her, but less and less, and finally not at all.

H
UGUENAU
, whose forefathers might well have been called Hagenau before Alsace was occupied in 1692 by Condé’s troops, had all the characteristics of the town-bred Alemanni. He was thick-set, inclined to be fat, and had worn glasses since his boyhood, or, to be more precise, since the time when he had attended the commercial school in Schlettstadt, and now that he was approaching his thirtieth year at the outbreak of the war he retained no trace of his youth either in face or behaviour. He did business in Baden and Württemberg, partly in branch establishments of his father’s textile firm, André Huguenau, Colmar, Alsace, partly on his own account and as a representative of various Alsatian factories for which he acted as agent in that section of the country. In these provincial circles his reputation was that of an energetic, prudent and reliable man of business.

There is no doubt that with his capabilities he would have done better at smuggling, which the times made more profitable, than at soldiering. But he submitted without further ado when in 1917 his extreme shortsightedness was summarily ignored and he received a call to arms, as the phrase went. True, even while he was being trained in Fulda he did manage to wind up a tobacco business here and there, but soon enough he dropped everything. Not only because his military duties made him tired or inapt for other things. It was simply so pleasant not to have to bother about anything at all, and it reminded him vaguely of his schooldays; the boy who was once at school, Huguenau (Wilhelm), could still remember his last Speech Day in the Schlettstadt Academy, and how he and his class-mates had been dedicated by the Head to the serious issues of life, serious issues which hitherto he had coped with well enough and now had to abandon again in favour of a new schooling. Once more he was pinned down to an endless succession of duties that had been forgotten in the course of years, once more he was treated as a pupil and shouted at, had a similar attitude to the common lavatories as in his boyhood, and attached the same importance to food, while the ceremonies of respect and the ambitious competition in which he found
himself involved gave a completely infantile stamp to the whole. As if that were not enough, he was quartered in a school building, and before falling asleep could see the two rows of lights with their green-and-white shades and the blackboard that had been left where it was. All this confused his schooldays and his soldiering days in an inextricable tangle, and even when the battalion set off at last to the Front, singing childish songs and bedecked with little flags, crowded into primitive sleeping-quarters in Cologne and Liège, Huguenau the fusilier could not get rid of the notion that he was on a school excursion.

It was evening when his company moved into the front line. They were posted in a fortified trench which was approached by long covered passage-ways. Unexampled filth reigned in the dug-outs, the floors were covered with spittle both fresh and dry, there were streaks of urine on the walls, and it could not be determined whether the prevailing stench was that of fæces or of corpses. In any case Huguenau was too tired to realize the actual sights and smells around him. Even while trotting in single file through the approach trenches all the men already had the feeling of being outcasts from the sheltering warmth of comradeship and common life, and hardened as they were to the complete lack of cleanliness, little as they missed the conventions of civilization with which humanity seeks to banish the stench of death and corruption, however surely the repression of their disgust advanced them one step towards heroism (a step that links heroism most strangely with love), long as most of them had been accustomed to live among horrors during the years of war, so that they merely joked and swore as they made their beds, yet there was not one among them who did not know that he was posted there as a solitary creature to live alone and to die alone in an overwhelmingly senseless world, so senseless that he could not comprehend it or rise beyond describing it as “this bloody war.”

It was at a time when the various general staffs had reported that in the Flanders section complete quiet prevailed. The company that had just been relieved also asserted that there was nothing doing. And yet as soon as darkness fell the artillery on both sides began a cannonade that was severe enough to banish their weariness from the newcomers. Aching in every bone, Huguenau sat on a kind of camp-bed, and only after a fair length of time did he remark that his limbs were all trembling and twitching. The other men were in no better case. One of them was weeping. Some of the old soldiers, indeed, were merely amused: this
was just a game the batteries played every night, it meant nothing, one soon got used to it; and taking no further notice of their weaker brethren they were actually snoring in a minute or two.

Huguenau would have liked to remonstrate with somebody: this was not at all what he had bargained for. Sick and faint as he was, he yearned for fresh air, and when his knees began to tremble less he tottered to the entrance of the dug-out, sat down there on a box and stared with vacant eyes at the firework display in the sky. Time and again he thought he saw the figure of a man flying up to Heaven with one hand raised in an orange cloud. Then he remembered Colmar, and that his school class had been taken one day to be lectured on art in the Museum; it had been rather boring, but there was one picture, standing like an altar in the middle of the floor, that had terrified him. It was, moreover, a Crucifixion. He detested crucifixions. That reminded him that years ago he had had to put in a Sunday in Nürnberg, between visits to customers, and had gone to see the torture chamber. Now that had been interesting. There was a fine collection of pictures too. One of them showed a man chained to a kind of camp-bed, a man who, the inscription said, had murdered a clergyman in Saxony by stabbing him repeatedly with a dagger, and now had to lie on that bed waiting to be broken on the wheel. To be broken on the wheel was a punishment sufficiently explained by other exhibits in the place. The man had a good-humoured expression, and it was just as unimaginable that he had stabbed a pastor and was doomed to be broken on the wheel, as that Huguenau himself should have to sit where he was, on a camp-bed in a stench of corpses. No doubt the man had ached all over too, and was bound to befoul himself since he was chained down. Huguenau spat, and said “Merde!” He went on sitting at the door of the dug-out like a sentry; he leaned his head against a post, he had turned up his coat-collar, he was no longer cold, he was not asleep, but neither was he awake. The torture chamber and the dug-out blended and sank more profoundly into the sordid and yet brilliant colours of Grünewald’s altar-piece, and while in the palpitating orange light of the distant cannonade and the shooting rockets the boughs of naked trees stretched their arms towards Heaven, a man with uplifted hand soared through the illuminated vault of the sky.