The Sleepwalkers (60 page)

It was very seldom that Hanna Wendling went into the town. She hated the way there, not only the dusty main road, which would have been quite understandable, but the path along the river as well. Yet the path took barely twenty-five minutes, and the main road only a quarter of an hour. She had always had a deep dislike for the road into the town, even at the time when she was still daily calling for Heinrich at the office. Later there had been the car, but only for a few months, for then the war broke out. To-day it was Dr Kessel who had taken her to the town with him in his buggy.

She made some purchases. Her new frock reached only as far as her ankles, and she felt as if people were staring at her feet. She had an intuitive feeling for fashions, and had always had it; she anticipated a coming fashion somewhat as certain people know that they will awaken at a certain time without having to look at the clock. Fashion journals for her had always been merely a belated corroboration. And the fact that people were staring at her feet now was also a sort of corroboration. There are of course lots of people who are able to waken to the minute, and many women with an intuitive feeling for the immanent logic of fashion, yet the man or woman who possesses a gift of this kind generally regards himself or herself as unique. So Hanna Wendling was feeling a
little proud of herself now, and even if she had only a vague inkling that her pride was unjustified, yet a slight feeling of guilt assailed her when she saw the haggard women standing in queues before the bakers’ shops. But when she reflected that any woman with the smallest sense of fashion could quite well shorten her skirt, for it could be done practically without expense—the housemaid had fixed hers up in an hour in spite of the new edging—then her pride did not seem unjustified after all, and as pride puts one in a good humour Hanna Wendling was not irritated by the greengrocer’s dirty finger-nails, nor by the flies buzzing round his shop, and for the moment even the fact that her shoes were covered with dust scarcely troubled her. As she strolled through the streets, stopping now at one shop window, now at another, she had incontestably that virginal or nun-like appearance—it was often to be remarked during the war—that is to be seen in women who have been parted from their husbands for a long time and have remained faithful to them. Yet simply because Hanna Wendling felt a little proud at the moment, her face had opened out, and that indefinable soft veil which can fall over such women’s faces like a stealthy premonition of approaching age was drawn aside by some invisible hand. Her face was like the first spring day after a long and severe winter.

Dr Kessel, who had to make several visits to patients in the town and thereafter to drive out to the hospital, had promised to set her down again at her door; she had arranged to meet him at the chemist’s. When she reached it the buggy was already standing before the door, and Dr Kessel was chatting with Paulsen the chemist. Hanna Wendling had no need to be told what to think of Paulsen; indeed, she probably possessed the knowledge, extending far beyond his particular case, that all men who know that they are betrayed by their wives are wont to display a conspicuous and curiously empty gallantry towards other women; and yet she felt flattered when he rushed up to her with the words: “What a charming visit! Like a fresh spring day.” For ruthlessly as Hanna Wendling was accustomed to avoid and cut people in general, to-day, because she felt free and unconstrained she was susceptible even to the empty compliments of the chemist,—it was an oscillation from one extreme to the other, a vacillation between complete reserve and complete lack of it, an immoderation of bearing such as often appears in cramped natures and is not in the least the immoderation of the Renaissance popes, but simply the instability and insignificance of an ordinary bourgeois
who lacks a sense of values. At least it may be asserted that it was the lack of a sense of values which now made Hanna Wendling, as she sat on the red plush-covered settle in the shop, shower dazzling and friendly glances on the chemist, and supply his lyrical phrases with a content in which she at once believed and did not believe. Indeed she felt quite cross with Dr Kessel, whose duty called him back to the hospital, when he was forced to suggest that they should leave, and when she sat beside him in the buggy the veil was once more drawn over her face.

She was monosyllabic on the way, monosyllabic at home. Once more she could not comprehend why she had refused so absolutely to return to her father’s house in Frankfort for the duration of the war. The objection that food was easier to procure in the little town, that she could not leave the house standing empty, that the air here would be better for the boy; these were subterfuges which merely served to cloak the curious state of estrangement into which she had fallen, and to which she could not shut her eyes. She was shy of people, she had said so to Dr Kessel; “Shy of people,” she repeated the words, and as she uttered them it was as though she were putting the responsibility for her shyness on Heinrich, just as she had blamed him when the brass pan in the kitchen had to be given up to be melted down for the war. Even with regard to the boy she was not immune from this mysterious feeling of estrangement. When she woke up in the night she found it difficult to realize that he was sleeping in the next room, and that he was her son. And when she struck a few chords on the piano, it was no longer her hands that did it, but unfeeling fingers which had become strange to her, and she knew that she was losing even her music. Hanna Wendling went to the bathroom to wash away her morning in the town. Then she contemplated herself carefully in the mirror, looking to see whether the face there was still hers. She found it, but she found it curiously veiled, and although she was in reality pleased by this, nevertheless she blamed Heinrich for it.

Moreover she often discovered now that his name did not come to her at once, and then even to herself she called him by the same name that she employed before the servants: Dr Wendling.

I had lost sight of Marie, the Salvation Army girl, for some weeks. Berlin at that time resembled—well, what did it resemble? the days were hot; the asphalt soft, even gaping in places, for nothing was repaired; women were everywhere in charge as conductresses and the like; the trees in the streets wilted in the very spring-time, looking like children with old men’s faces, and whenever the wind blew, dust and scraps of paper went whirling; Berlin had grown more countrified, more natural, as it were, and yet that made it all the more unnatural, as if it were an imitation of itself. In the house where I lodged there were two rooms occupied by Jewish refugees from the neighbourhood of Lodz, whose number and relationship to each other I was never able to make out; there were old men in Russian boots and ritual curls, and one that I happened to meet had buckled shoes and white stockings to the knee under his caftan, in the fashion of the eighteenth century; there were men who merely wore their coats rather long to suggest the caftan, and young men of remarkably mild appearance with woolly blond beards growing like false theatrical beards. Now and then a man in service grey uniform turned up, and even his uniform had a hint of the caftan about it. And sometimes there came a man of indefinite age, in ordinary town clothes, and his brown beard was shaven to a square fringe like Oom Paul Kruger’s, and left unshorn only at the temples. He always had a stick with an old-fashioned crook handle, and a pince-nez on a black cord. I took him at once for a doctor. Of course there were women too, and children, matrons with false fronts, and young girls dressed, curiously enough, in the height of fashion.

In time I picked up a few words of the Yiddish German they spoke. But I never, of course, really understood it. Still, they seemed to think that inconceivable, for whenever I drew near they broke off the guttural gibberish that came so queerly from the mouths of such dignified ancients, and regarded me with sidelong shyness. In the evenings they mostly sat together in their unlighted rooms, and when in the mornings I came into the hall that was always crammed with garments of all kinds, in the middle of which the maid brushed shoes, I often used to find one of the older men standing at the window. He had his phylacteries bound on brow and
wrists, he swayed his torso in time to the shoe-brush, and from time to time kissing the fringes of his cloak, recited at passionate speed with his faded lips faded, passionate prayers out of the window. Perhaps because the window faced east.

I was so fascinated by the Jews that I spent many hours daily quietly observing them. In the hall there hung two chromolithographs of rococo scenes, and I could not help wondering if the Jews could really see these pictures and many other things with the same eyes as ours, and read the same meaning into them. And obsessed by such preoccupations I completely forgot Marie of the Salvation Army, although in some way I felt that she was not unconnected with them.

Lieutenant Jaretzki’s arm had been amputated. Above the elbow. When Kühlenbeck did a thing he did it thoroughly. What was left of Jaretzki sat in the hospital garden beside the shrubbery, regarding the blossoming apple-tree.

A round of inspection by the Town Commandant.

Jaretzki rose to his feet, felt for his diseased hand, felt nothing but emptiness. Then he stood to attention.

“Good-morning, Herr Lieutenant: well on the road to recovery, I see?”

“Yes, sir, but there’s a good bit of me missing.”

It almost seemed that Major von Pasenow felt himself responsible for Jaretzki’s arm as he said:

“It’s a terrible war … won’t you sit down again, Herr Lieutenant?”

“Thank you, Herr Major.”

The Major said:

“Where were you wounded?”

“I wasn’t wounded, sir … gas.”

The Major glanced at the stump of Jaretzki’s arm:

“I don’t understand … I thought gas suffocated a man.…”

“It can do this kind of thing too, sir.”

The Major thought it over for a while. Then he said:

“An unchivalrous weapon.”

“Quite so, sir.”

Both of them remembered that Germany too was employing that unchivalrous weapon. But they did not mention it.

The Major said:

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-eight, sir.”

“When the war began there wasn’t any gas.”

“No, sir, I believe not.”

The sun illumined the long yellow wall of the hospital. A few white clouds hung in the blue sky. The gravel of the garden-path was firmly embedded in the black earth, and at the edge of the lawn crawled an earthworm. The apple-tree was like an enormous nosegay.

The Senior Medical Officer in his white overall came out of the house towards them.

The Major said:

“I hope you’ll be all right soon.”

“Thank you very much, sir,” said Jaretzki.

The horror of this age is perhaps most palpable in the effect that its architecture has on one; I always come home exhausted and depressed after a walk through the streets. I do not even need to look at the house-fronts; they distress me without my raising my eyes to them. Sometimes I fly for consolation to the so highly commended “modern” buildings, but—and here I’m certainly at fault—the warehouse designed by Messel, who is none the less a great architect, strikes me only as a comic kind of Gothic, and it is a comic effect that irritates and depresses me. It depresses me so much that looking at buildings in the classical style scarcely suffices to restore me. And yet I admire the noble clarity of Schinkel’s architecture.

I am convinced that no former age ever received its architectural expressions with dislike and repugnance; that has been reserved for ours. Right up to the development of classicism building was a natural function. It is possible that people never even noticed new buildings, much as one scarcely notices a newly planted tree, but if a man’s eye did light upon them he saw that they were good and natural; that was how Goethe still saw the buildings of his time.

I am not an æsthete, and unquestionably never was one, although I
may unwittingly have given that impression, and I am just as little addicted to the sentimentality that yearns for the past, transfiguring dead-and-gone epochs. No, behind all my repugnance and weariness there is a very positive conviction, the conviction that nothing is of more importance to any epoch than its style. There is no epoch in the history of all the human race that divulges its character except in its style, and above all in the style of its buildings; indeed no epoch deserves the name except in so far as it possesses a style.

It may be objected that my weariness and irritation are the results of my under-nourishment. It may be pointed out that this age has its own very suggestive machine-and-cannon-and-concrete style, and that some generations must pass before it will be recognized. Well, every age has some stylistic claim; even the experimental ages in spite of their eclecticism had a kind of style. And I am even willing to admit that in our day technique has simply outrun creative effort, that we have not yet wrested from our new material its adequate forms of expression, and that all the disquieting lack of proportion arises from imperfectly mastered purpose. On the other hand, no one can deny that the new kind of building, whether because its material is recalcitrant or its builders incapable, has lost something, has even quite deliberately abandoned something that it could not help abandoning, the lack of which distinguishes it fundamentally from all previous styles: the characteristic use of ornament. Of course that renunciation can be praised as a virtue, on the assumption that we are the first to discover principles of structural economy that enable us to dispense with ornamental excrescences. But is not that term “structural economy” merely a modern catchword? Can it be maintained that the Gothic or any other style was not built with structural economy? To regard ornament as merely an excrescence is to mistake the inner logic of structure. Style in architecture is logic, a logic that governs the whole building from the plan of its foundation to its skyline, and within that logical system the ornament is only the last, the most differentiated expression on a small scale of the unified and unifying conception of the whole. Whether it is an inability to use ornament or a renunciation of it makes no difference; the result is that the architectural structures of this age are sharply distinguished from all previous styles.