The Sleepwalkers (73 page)

They sat for a long time together, for it was in a sense an inaugural celebration. Huguenau waited for an opportunity to get hold of the Major, and it came presently when they drank to the health and success of the new association and its patron, not forgetting, of course, the man who had originated the splendid idea, Herr Huguenau.

Huguenau, his glass in his hand, went the round of the table and in this manner reached Major von Pasenow:

“I hope Herr Major is satisfied with me to-night.”

He had never had any cause for dissatisfaction, replied the Major.

“Come, Herr Major, my report seems to have rather missed fire … but I hope you’ll take into consideration that the circumstances were very difficult. And then I have been working early and late reorganizing the paper; I hope you will not set it down to negligence that I haven’t been able to send you a second report.…”

The Major said firmly:

“I think it is scarcely worth while pursuing the matter any further; you have done already all that you were in duty bound to do.”

Huguenau was taken aback.

“Oh, not at all, not at all,” he muttered, and assured the Major that he would take up his work of surveillance really in earnest now.

As the Major made no reply to this, Huguenau went on:

“We’ll print the appeal for ‘The Moselle Memorial’ at once, to-morrow … in honour of the occasion will not the Herr Major pay our concern the honour of a visit, after so graciously standing godfather to it … that would be the most splendid propaganda for the new association.”

The Major replied that he would be only too delighted to pay the
Kur-Trier Herald
a visit; for the next day, however, all his arrangements were already made, but he presumed any day would suit equally.

“The earlier the better, Herr Major,” Huguenau ventured. “The Herr Major won’t find anything very remarkable to inspect … everything quite modest … and of course there aren’t many outward signs of the work that has been put into reorganizing it, but I can say with all modesty that the printing arrangements are in perfect order …”

Suddenly he had a new idea:

“The printing-press, for instance, would do splendidly for any printing required by the military authorities,” he caught fire, he would have liked to seize the Major by the coat-button. “You see, Herr Major, you see how Esch has neglected the business … it needed me to hit on that idea. We must get the custom of the army authorities, now that the paper is, so to speak, under your direct patronage, and we have put so much money into it … how else am I to squeeze a dividend out of it for the shareholders … considering the state I found the business in?” he said in despair, and he felt honestly embittered.

The Major replied somewhat helplessly:

“But that isn’t my province …”

“Quite, quite, Herr Major, but if the Herr Major seriously desired it … and once the Herr Major has seen the printing-office, he will certainly desire it.…”

He gazed at the Major alluringly and seductively and despairingly all in one. But then he pulled himself up, wiped his glasses, and cast a glance round the table: “It is obviously in the interests of all the gentlemen sitting here too … all you gentlemen are invited to inspect the place, of course that’s understood.”

But most of them knew Esch’s den already. Only they did not say so.

Since Heinrich Wendling had announced that he was coming home on leave, more than three weeks had passed. And although she still lay long in bed of mornings, Hanna scarcely believed now that Heinrich would really come. He suddenly arrived, however, neither in the evening, nor in the morning, but in the broad light of day. He had spent half the night in Coblenz station, and then had come on with a dawdling transport train. And as he was telling her this they stood opposite each other on the paved garden-path; the noonday sun shone down, and in the middle of the lawn a red garden-umbrella glowed warmly beside the camp-chair on which she had been lying; they could smell the hot, red cotton, and the leaves of her book, which had slipped down, fluttered in the light wind. Heinrich did not touch her, he had not even reached out his hand to her, but stared immovably in her face, and she, knowing that he
must be searching for a picture which he had carried in his mind for more than two years, kept quite still under his searching glance; and she too looked into the face turned towards her, seeking in her turn not, indeed, for a picture she had harboured, for there was no longer any picture in her mind, but for the traits because of which she had once been compulsively drawn to love that face. Strangely unaltered that face seemed to her now, she knew and recognized again the line of the lips; the arrangement and shape of the teeth, the dimple on the chin had remained unchanged, and the space between the eyes was a little too wide on account of the breadth of the skull. “I must see your profile,” she said and he turned his head obediently. And it was the same straight nose and long upper lip that she saw again, only every trace of softness had vanished, that was all. One had really to acknowledge that he was a handsome man, yet she did not find what had once so intensely delighted and attracted her. Heinrich asked: “Where’s the boy?” “He’s at school … won’t you come in?” They went into the house. Yet even now he still did not touch her, still did not kiss her, but simply gazed at her. “I must have a thorough wash first of all … haven’t had a bath since leaving Vienna.”

“Yes, we’ll turn on a bath.”

The two maids appeared to bid the master welcome. Hanna did not quite like that. She went up with him to the bathroom, and herself laid out the bath towels.

“Everything’s still in its old place, Heinrich.”

“Oh, everything’s still in its old place?”

She left the bathroom; there were all sorts of things to arrange and rearrange; she attended to them wearily.

She cut roses in the garden for the dinner-table.

After a while she returned softly to the bathroom door and listened to the splashing inside. She could feel her usual headache coming on. Supporting herself on the banister she descended once more to the hall.

At last the boy returned from school. She took him by the hand. At the bathroom door she cried: “May we come in now?” “Of course,” the reply came in a somewhat astonished voice. She opened the door a little, and peeped in through the opening: Heinrich was standing half dressed before the mirror, and she thrust one of the roses into the unwillingly opened hand of the child, pushed him in and ran away.

She waited for the two of them in the dining-room, and could not help averting her eyes when they entered. They looked absurdly alike, with the same eyes set wide apart, the same movements, the same crop of brown hair, except that Heinrich wore his quite short now. It was as though she had had no share at all in the child. A terrible mechanism; oh, it was terrible to have been loved. And at that moment her life seemed to her like one long imbecility, a despairing imbecility, which nevertheless she would never be able to change.

Heinrich said: “Home again” and sat down at his old place. Perhaps his words seemed stupid to him; he smiled uncertainly. The boy regarded him attentively and distantly.

There he sat, the father of the family, and spoilt everything.

The maid too could not keep her eyes off him; there was a hint of admiration and envy in her glance; and when she entered again Hanna said very distinctly:

“Should I telephone to Röders … about this evening?”

The advocate Röders was Wendling’s colleague in the office; he was over fifty and exempt from military service.

The English clock in its mahogany case struck a deep gong-like stroke.

With her little finger Hanna lightly touched the back of Heinrich’s hand, as though by the caress she were begging forgiveness for thinking of spending the evening with Röders, but warning him at the same time that she desired to avoid physical contacts.

Heinrich said:

“Of course, I’ll have to ring up Röders … I’ll fix it up, then.”

Hanna said:

“We’ll go out walking with papa in the afternoon and show ourselves.”

“Yes, let’s do that,” said Heinrich.

“Isn’t it lovely to have papa sitting here with us again?”

“Yes,” said the boy after some hesitation.

“You must look over his school books … he can write and count already. He wrote his letters to you quite by himself.”

“They were splendid letters, Walter.”

“They were only postcards,” said Walter shyly.

That they were appealing to the child between them, so as to find each other across his brown head, seemed to them both like an abuse of the child. Certainly it would have been more honest to say: we will
not kiss each other until our longing has become intolerable. But that longing was not really longing, it was only intolerable expectation.

They went up to the nursery, on whose panelled walls a childish fresco, intentionally gay, was painted. And with that second and clearer and somewhat wry intelligence which can arise from intensified expectation or from an agonizing headache, Hanna knew that all these lacquered furnishings and all this whiteness was also an abuse of the child, knew that it had nothing to do with his own life and nature, but that a symbol had been set up in this room, a symbol of her white breasts and of the white milk which they would produce after successful embraces. It was a very remote and very vague thought, and yet in it lay the reason why she had never been able to stay long in the nursery and had preferred that the boy should come to her. She said: “You must show papa your new toys too.” Walter brought the new box of bricks and the soldiers in field-grey. There were twenty-three men and an officer, who with one knee bent waved his drawn sword towards the enemy. None of the three noticed that Dr Heinrich Wendling also wore the field-grey uniform of an officer; each, it is true, had a different motive for not noticing it: Walter, because he felt that his father was an intruder, Heinrich, because it was impossible for him to identify the heroic gestures of the tin soldiers with real war, Hanna because, to her own horror, she suddenly saw this man naked before her, naked, and isolated in his nakedness. It was the same isolation as she had remarked in the pieces of furniture about her, that stood as though naked, with no connection with their surroundings, no relation to each other, strange and disturbing.

He too could not but feel it. And when they went out walking they took the child between them, and although Hanna held the boy’s hand and swung it gaily, and Heinrich often took the other hand, he was a barrier separating them. They did not look at each other, they were embarrassed, as if ashamed, they gazed straight ahead or at the fields where dandelions and purple clover, wild pinks and lilac scabious, were growing in the grass. The day was warm and Hanna was not used to walking in the afternoon. Yet it was not solely the heat that made her feel such an urgent need for a bath when she returned; every wish of hers now reached down in the most curious way to a deeper stratum of consciousness: it was as though the immersion of her body in the water would spread a great solitude around her, as if she had visions of that magical rebirth which
one experiences in the isolation of the water. More definite, certainly, than these thoughts was her repugnance at the idea of visiting the bathroom at bedtime in Heinrich’s presence. On the other hand the maid would think it queer if she were to take a bath in the middle of the day, and on the pretext that she had to change for the evening she asked Heinrich if he would order a car meanwhile and look after Walter. Then she went to the bathroom, intending to have a shower-bath at least. But when she got into the tub, to which a few drops from the midday bath still clung, for the douche was dripping, her knees grew weak and she had to let the cold water run over her until her skin was like glass and the points of her breasts grew quite hard. After that it was more endurable.

It was late when they drove over to Röders’; Heinrich dismissed the car since it was such a lovely evening, and Hanna was thankful for the suggestion that they should walk home—the later that happened, the better. And it was actually midnight when they left Röders! But when they were crossing the silent market-place on which nobody was to be seen except the sentry on duty at military headquarters, when the empty place surrounded by the dark houses, in which scarcely a light was burning, lay before them like a crater of isolation, like a crater of silence out of which recurring waves of peace flowed over the sleeping town, then Heinrich Wendling took his wife’s arm, and at that first physical contact she closed her eyes. Perhaps he too had closed his eyes and saw neither the deep summer night sky nor the white ribbon of the road that stretched in front of them as they walked in its dust, perhaps each of them saw a different firmament, both of them sealed like their eyes, each in a separate isolation, and yet united in the renewed knowledge of their bodies, which yielded at last to a kiss; and the veils dropped from their faces, that were lascivious in the consciousness of sex, yet chaste in the pain of a separation that could never end, that could never be abolished again no matter how tender they were with each other.

After Samwald’s funeral Gödicke of the Landwehr began to speak.

Samwald, a volunteer, was the brother of Friedrich Samwald the watchmaker, who had a shop in Römerstrasse. After a mass attack accompanied by a heavy bombardment, young Samwald had suddenly begun to cough and collapsed. He was a nice brave lad of nineteen, everybody
liked him, and so he had managed to get sent to the hospital of his native town. He did not arrive even in a hospital transport, but alone, like a man on leave, and Surgeon-Major Kühlenbeck said: “Well, as for you, my lad, we’ll soon put you to rights.” And although Dr Kessel never came to the hospital without looking up young Samwald, and although Samwald seemed quite restored to health, he was suddenly seized with another hæmorrhage and in three days he was dead. In spite of the brilliant sun smiling down from the sky.