The Sleepwalkers (74 page)

Since the hospital was one only for light cases, death was not hushed up there as in larger hospitals. On the contrary it was treated as a solemn event. Before the coffin was borne to the cemetery it was laid on the bier in front of the entrance to the hospital, and there consecrated. Those patients who were not confined to bed put on their uniforms and formed up in order, and there were a good many people from the town. The Surgeon-Major pronounced a stirring eulogy, the priest stood beside the coffin, a boy in a red soutane with a white tunic swung the censer. Then the women knelt, many of the men too, and once more they told over their rosaries.

Gödicke had remained in the hospital garden. When he noticed the crowd assembling he hobbled up on his two sticks and joined it. The spectacle he now saw was familiar to him, and consequently he refused to countenance it. He thought deeply; he wanted to destroy what he saw, to tear it to bits as one tears to bits a piece of paper or cardboard—and how that was to be done had to be vigilantly and keenly thought out. When the women plumped down on their knees like charwomen, a laugh rose into his throat, but he dared not make a sound, that was forbidden him. Supported on his two sticks, he stood in the midst of the kneeling women, he stood there like a scaffolding, and rammed his supports into the ground and pressed the sound back into his throat. But now the women had finished their Paternoster and their three Aves and came to the passage, “descended into Hell, and rose again from the dead on the third day”; then—it seemed in a lower storey of the scaffolding, and as though spoken by a ventriloquist he had once heard—words began to form just above his tortured and compressed abdomen, and instead of roaring them out, so reluctantly did the words emerge that it was perhaps inaudibly that the bricklayer Gödricke said: “Arisen from the dead,” and immediately fell silent again, so terrified was he at what had taken place in the lower storey of his scaffolding. No one was regarding him; they had raised the
coffin; the coffin with the crucifix fastened to it swayed on the bearers’ shoulders; the watchmaker Samwald, small and a little bent, fell in with the other relatives behind the bearers; then followed the doctors; then came the rest of the procession. Last of all hobbled the bricklayer Gödicke on his sticks, wearing his hospital overall.

Sister Mathilde caught sight of him as they were going along the boulevard. She made straight for him: “But, Gödicke, you can’t come like this … what are you thinking about, in your overall …” but he paid no attention to her. Even when she fetched the Surgeon-Major to support her he refused to be shaken, but simply stared steadily through them both and went straight on. At last Kühlenbeck said: “Oh, let him come, war is war … if he gets tired one of the men must stay with him and take him back.”

It was a long road that Ludwig Gödicke travelled in this way; the women round about him were praying, and there were bushes beside the road. When one group reached the end of their Aves, another took them up, and from the wood came the cry of a cuckoo. Some of the men, the little watchmaker Samwald among them, wore black suits like carpenters. Many things came nearer and closed up, especially when at the turnings the procession slowed down and the mourners’ bodies were pressed closely together; and the women’s skirts were like his own overall; their skirts struck against their legs when they walked; and a woman away in front was walking with her head bowed and her handkerchief before her face. And even if Gödicke did not look at anything, but held his eyes immovably fixed on the wheel tracks in front of him, trying, indeed, every now and then actually to keep his eyes closed just as firmly as his teeth were clenched, so that the parts of his soul crowded together still more closely, threatening to stifle his ego; yes, though he would actually have preferred to come to a stop, to ram his crutches into the ground and force all these people to keep still and say nothing, or to scatter them all to the four winds; nevertheless he was drawn on, borne on, and he swam and floated, himself a swaying coffin, on the wave of ever-recurring prayer that accompanied him.

In the cemetery, when the body had once more been consecrated, and over the opened grave into which it was lowered the litany once more began: “Arisen from the dead,” and while the little watchmaker Samwald stood rigid, gazing into the hole and sobbing, and one by one the people went up to fling a spadeful of earth on the dead warrior and to shake the
watchmaker by the hand, suddenly, uplifted before the eyes of all, the gigantic form of Gödicke, supported on his two sticks, in his long grey hospital overall, his long beard waving, appeared on the edge of the grave beside the little watchmaker and ignored the hand offered him, but said with a great effort, yet clearly enough for everybody to understand, his first words: “Arisen from the dead.” And thereupon he laid his sticks aside, yet not to take the spade and throw a little earth down into the grave; no, he did not do that, he did something quite different and unexpected; he addressed himself to the task of climbing down into the hole, he began laboriously and systematically to clamber down into it, and already by good luck had one leg over the edge. Naturally his intentions were incomprehensible to all the bystanders; they thought that without the support of his sticks he had simply fallen down out of sheer weakness. The Surgeon-Major and a few others rushed across, pulled him out of the hole and carried him to one of the benches. Perhaps by now the man Gödicke was really forsaken by his strength; in any case he offered no resistance, but sat there quite quietly with his eyes shut and his head a little to one side. But the watchmaker Samwald, who had run to him with the others and would have gladly helped to carry him, now stayed beside him; and as a great sorrow may sometimes shake up a man’s soul, Samwald divined that something very strange had happened to his companion; sitting beside the bricklayer Gödicke, he spoke to him comfortingly as to one who was bearing a sorrow, a heavy sorrow, and he spoke too of his own dead brother, who had had a beautiful and early and painless death. And Gödicke listened to him with his eyes shut.

Meanwhile the local celebrities advanced to the grave, among them, as was fitting, Huguenau in a blue suit, a stiff black hat in one hand, a wreath in the other. And Huguenau looked about him in extreme indignation because the deceased’s brother was not at hand to admire the wreath, a beautiful garland of oak-leaves sent by “The Moselle Memorial Association,” a really beautiful wreath with a ribbon on which could be read: “From the Fatherland to its brave soldier.”

The Major was somewhat disagreeably surprised when the orderly reported that Herr Editor Esch wished to see him. Was this newspaper man an ambassador of Huguenau? an emissary of the pit and the underworld? This question made the Major almost forget that Huguenau had drawn a distinct line between himself and the presumably politically suspect Esch, and since a few moments’ reflection suggested nothing decisive he said at last:

“Well, it doesn’t matter … tell him to come in.”

Esch certainly looked like neither an emissary from hell, nor a politically suspect individual; he was embarrassed and confused, like a man who was already regretting the step he had taken:

“Herr Major, my business is … Herr Major, in short, your article made a deep impression on me.…”

Major von Pasenow told himself that he must not allow himself to be taken in by hypocritical speeches, gratifying as it might be to believe that his words had had an effect.

“And if by the devil who must be driven out, the Herr Major meant me …”

Whereupon the Major found it necessary to make clear that a Biblical quotation implied no personal point or insinuation, for that would indeed be a degradation of the Bible, and that at every turning-point of our lives, if it was for the better, we had to put behind us a part of the devil. So that if Herr Esch had come to demand explanation or satisfaction, he could rest content with this statement.

While the Major was speaking Esch had regained his composure:

“No, Herr Major, that was not what I came about. I would even take that about the devil on my own shoulders, but not because my paper has been confiscated repeatedly,” he made a disdainful gesture, “no, Herr Major, I can’t be reproached for ever having run my paper less decently than I do now. I’ve come with another request.”

And he demanded no more and no less than that the Major should point out the way of salvation to him and his friends, or the brethren, as in his excitement he called them.

As he stood there before the Major’s desk, his hat in his hands, a red flush of excitement showing on each cheek-bone, a red that ebbed into
the brownish hollows beneath, Esch reminded the Major of his estate steward. What right had a steward to talk about religion? and the Major had the feeling that concern with religious questions was a prescriptive right of landowners. Pictures of the religious life he knew rose up in him, he saw the church to which he and his family drove in the high-wheeled coach over the dusty summer roads, in the low sledge well covered with furs during winter; he saw himself holding the usual Bible service for his children and the servants at Christmas and at Easter, saw the Polish maids walking in their red head-cloths and wide skirts to the Catholic Church in the neighbouring village, and as that church reminded him that Herr Esch belonged to the Roman Catholic persuasion, Esch was thus brought into an unpleasantly close relationship with the Polish land-workers and that disturbing atmosphere of unreliability with which, partly from personal experience, partly because of their politics, partly out of pure prejudice, he was accustomed to accredit the Polish nation. And as it is a fact that questions of conscience in a fellow-man very often throw us into embarrassment, as though he were exaggerating something that is not nearly so important to him as he makes out, the Major, while inviting Esch to be seated, did not make any reference to the theme he had opened, but merely inquired after the well-being of the paper.

Esch, however, was not a man to be so easily deflected from his purpose. “For the sake of the paper itself, Herr Major, you must listen to me”—and in answer to the Major’s questioning look—“ … yes, you, Herr Major, have prescribed a new policy for the
Kur-Trier Herald
 … even though I’ve always said myself that order must be made in the world and that even an editor must do his part in it, that is, if he doesn’t want to be an anarchist and a conscienceless swine … Herr Major, everybody seeks salvation, everybody is afraid of evil poison, everybody is waiting for redemption to come and injustice to be destroyed.”

He had begun to shout and the Major looked at him in surprise. Esch pulled himself together again: “You see, Herr Major, Socialism is only one sign among many others … but since your article in the new issue … Herr Major, it’s freedom and justice in the world that’s at stake … one mustn’t take human life lightly, something must happen, otherwise all the sacrifice will have been in vain.”