The Sleepwalkers (90 page)

Marie sometimes visits me, brings me gifts of food as she does to her other invalids, and I accept them. Recently she arrived when Litwak and
Nuchem were with me. According to her normal custom she greeted them with a friendly “God bless you” and Litwak responded with his usual answer: “A hundredfold.” Marie coughed and he put on a solicitous face: “You should be careful,” he said, from which it remained uncertain whether he meant the presumable presence of lung trouble in Marie or the danger of infection to which he saw Nuchem exposed. He offered also to examine Marie free of charge, and when she declined he said: “You should at least go out walking as much as you can in the fresh air … and take him with you, he’s anæmic.” Nuchem stood about and glanced through my books. For the rest, Litwak was always prescribing new medicines for me, and when he handed me the prescription he would laugh: “You won’t take it in any case, but a doctor must prescribe something.” We had arrived at a kind of mutual understanding.

What was the point of contact between us? why had I to stay with these people? why had this provisory Jewish domicile become a permanency for me, which I could no longer imagine myself leaving? why did I yield so obediently to those Jews? everything was provisory, these refugees were provisory, yes, so was their whole existence, and Time itself was provisory too, as provisory as the war, which was lingering on past its own end. The provisory seems to have become the definitive; incessantly it cancels itself and yet remains. It pursues us and we come to terms with it, in a Jewish house, in a hostel. But it lifts us above the past, it holds us suspended in a happy, almost euphorian hovering state in which everything looks towards the future.

Finally I obeyed Dr Litwak and went out for walks whenever Nuchem or Marie could accompany me.

These autumn days were very beautiful and I sat with Marie under the trees. And as everything had a radiant candour, and as words were of no consequence, I asked her:

“Are you a fallen woman?”

“I was one,” she replied.

“And are you chaste now?”

“Yes.”

“You know that you’ll never save Nuchem?”

“Yes, I know.”

“Then you love him?”

She smiled.

Mirror of itself, symbol of a symbol! to what bourne can the continuous chain of symbols lead us if not to death!

“Listen, Marie, I’ve made up my mind to kill myself, to shoot myself or jump into the Landwehr Canal … but you must go with me, by myself I won’t move a step.”

That sounded like a joke, but it was seriously meant. She must have guessed that, for without smiling, almost matter-of-factly, she replied:

“No, I won’t do that, and you mustn’t kill yourself either.”

“But your love for Nuchem is quite hopeless.”

She was unable to draw any consequences from that; she simply fixed her eyes questioningly on me, searching for the possibility of an understanding between us. Her eyes were colourless.

It was not a very pleasant game that I was playing with her, and yet the understanding between us must have been already established, for she said:

“We are in the joy of the Lord.”

I said:

“Nuchem will not kill himself, he daren’t, he is under the law, but we are in the joy of the Lord … we can dare to do it.”

Perhaps the thought that Nuchem was preserved from all danger of suicide reassured her, for now she smiled again, yes, she even crossed her legs like a lady and the superior complacency of a lady was written on her face:

“We too are under the law.”

I could not take offence at her Salvation Army phrases, it may be because while one is in a provisory state every phrase loses its meaning, it may be because then it takes on a new meaning beforehand and fits the case. It may be that words too can hover between the past and the future, that they too hover between the law and the joy of the Lord, taking refuge from the contempt which is their deserved fate in a new meaning in the unstable flux.

Yet I did not want to hear anything about the law, for it had recalled me back to reality; I did not want to hear anything about the law, I wanted to maintain intact my own state of suspension, and I asked:

“You’re happy, in spite of your hopeless love?”

“Yes,” she said.

Irretrievably lost is our home, inaccessibly stretches the distance before us, but our grief is eased more and more, becomes more and
more transparent, perhaps even invisible; nothing remains but a painful echo of what has once been. And Marie said:

“The sorrow in the world is great, but the joy of the Lord is greater.”

I said:

“Oh, Marie, you have known what estrangement is and yet you are happy … and you know that death alone, that your last moment alone, will annul that estrangement, and yet you desire to live.”

She replied:

“Whoever lives in Christ is never alone … come to us.”

“No,” I said, “I belong to my Jewish quarters, I’m going to Nuchem.”

But that no longer made any impression on her.

A man whose arms have been amputated is a torso. This thought was the bridge which Hanna Wendling was accustomed to employ when she endeavoured to find her way back from the general to the individual and the concrete. And at the end of this bridge stood not Heinrich, but, swaying a little, Jaretzki with his empty sleeve tucked into the pocket of his army coat. It took a long time before she was able to recognize this fancy clearly, and still longer before she grasped that it might in some way correspond to an actual reality. And then another considerable time passed before she summoned the decision to ring up Dr Kessel.

This extremely retarded process was certainly not caused by a particularly strong moral sense; no, it was simply that she had lost any feeling for time or tempo, it was a slowing down of the life-stream, yet not at all a damming up of it, but rather an evaporation into nothingness, an oozing away into a completely porous ground, a vanishing without remembrance of her thoughts as she thought them. And when Dr Kessel as arranged called for her in his buggy to take her to the town, it seemed to her that she had called in the doctor on account of some strange anxiety, which she could not formulate, about her son, and only with an effort did she manage to get her memory to work. Then, it is true, she asked at once in sudden apprehension, which she immediately forgot again—they were just crossing the garden—who the one-armed lieutenant in the hospital really was. Dr Kessel was at a loss for a moment, but when he had helped her into the buggy and groaning a little sat down beside her he suddenly recollected: “Of course, you mean Jaretzki, of course … 
poor young fellow, he’s to be sent to an institution for nervous cases now, I believe.” With which the Jaretzki episode was finished for Hanna. She dispatched her purchases in the town, sent off a parcel to Heinrich, absolved a visit to Röders. She had asked Walter to meet her there; then they were to walk home together. Her inexplicable anxieties about Walter were all at once gone. It was a mild and peaceful autumn evening.

It would not have been surprising if Hanna Wendling had dreamt that night of a Greek torso buried in the river mud or a block of marble or—even that would have sufficed—a pebble washed by the stream. But as she remembered no such dream it would be neither honest nor relevant to express any opinion on the matter. On the other hand it is certain that she passed a restless night and often awoke and peered across at the open window, waiting for the venetian blinds to be raised and the masked head of a burglar to appear. Next morning she thought of furnishing the storeroom beside the kitchen for the use of the gardener and his wife, so that there should be at any rate a man in the house whom one could summon in case of anything happening, but she rejected the plan, for the weakly little gardener would be really no protection, and all that remained was a residue of violent indignation against Heinrich for putting the gardener’s house at such a distance from the villa; also he had neglected to have bars fixed over the windows. Yet she herself had to admit that all this uneasiness had hardly anything to do with real fear; it was not so much fear as a sort of exasperation at the lonely and isolated position of the villa, and although Hanna would certainly have felt and expressed a repugnance to any house where she was in closer contact with her neighbours, yet the empty space which surrounded the villa was so empty, the dead landscape, which looked as though it had been patched together out of scraps and bits, was so dead, that it became as it were a ring of vacancy which coiled itself more and more closely round her loneliness, a ring which could be broken only by a violent stroke, by bursting it, by an assault from inside or an invasion from outside. Shortly before she had read something in the newspaper about the Russian Revolution and the soviets, under the heading “The Invasion from Below”; she had remembered this phrase during the night and it returned again and again to her mind like the refrain of a popular song. In any case it would be well to get an estimate for affixing bars to the windows from Krahl the locksmith.

The nights grew longer and the cold moon lay in the sky like a pebble.
In spite of the piercing cold Hanna could not summon up the resolution to close the window. Still more than the appearance of a noiseless burglar she dreaded the crash that would be made if the window panes were forced in, and this strange tension, which was not actually fear, yet was on the point at any moment of toppling over into panic, betrayed her into quasi-romantic gestures. So now almost every night she leaned against the open window and gazed out at the dead zone of the autumn, curiously attracted, almost drawn out of herself into the vacancy of the landscape, and her fear, which by that attraction was denuded of all fear, became a light bubble—her heart bore itself as lightly as a flower, and the rigidity of her isolation opened out in the released freedom of her breathing. And that was almost like a blissful infidelity towards Heinrich, it was a state which she experienced as the diametrical opposite of another and past state … yes, but what state? and then she became aware that it was the opposite of what she had once called the physical experience. And the best of it was that at those moments the physical experience was completely forgotten.

Esch’s fears were destined to be realized: Huguenau got the Major into fresh trouble. It must be admitted, however, that Huguenau’s rôle at first was a passive one.

At the beginning of October there arrived on the Major’s desk one of those lists which the Army Command issued from time to time in its attempt to track down all soldiers missing from their regiments, including suspected deserters; and among the names there was that of a certain Wilhelm Huguenau from Colmar, a private in the Fourteenth Fusiliers.

The Major had already laid the list aside when he grew aware that something was bothering him. So he picked it up once more; being far-sighted he held it out at arm’s-length, turning it to the light, and read again: “Wilhelm Huguenau,” a name that he surely had heard before. He looked up questioningly at the orderly whose duty it was to wait while the day’s post was examined; he was just able to see that the man, obviously expecting some order, had drawn himself up at attention, and was just able to collect his strength sufficiently to say, “You may go,” but once he was alone he sank forward over the desk with his face buried in hishands,

From this blank confusion he started up with the thought that the orderly was still standing by the door and that the orderly was Esch. At first he did not dare to look and see, but when he finally assured himself that there was no one there he said aloud in the empty room: “Well, it doesn’t matter …” as if that settled it. But that did not settle it, the image of Esch still stood by the door gazing at him, gazing at him as if it had just discovered that he was a branded man. It was a stern reproachful look that rested upon him, and the Major was ashamed because he had watched Huguenau dancing. But that remembrance died away and suddenly he heard Esch’s voice: “There’s always a traitor among us.”

“There’s always a traitor among us,” repeated the Major. A traitor is a dishonourable man, a traitor is a man who betrays his fatherland, a traitor is a man who is false to his fatherland, false to his fatherland and his comrades … a deserter is a traitor. And while in this manner his thoughts were gradually drawing closer to some veiled and hidden preoccupation, suddenly the veil was rent and all at once he knew everything, everything: he himself was the traitor, he himself, the Town Commandant, had allied himself with a deserter and had looked on while the man danced, he had allied himself with a deserter so that he might be invited into an editorial office, so that the deserter might pave the way for him into civilian affairs, into friendships with men who were not comrades … the Major put his hand up to the Iron Cross and tore at its ribbon: a traitor had no right to a decoration, a traitor must be deprived of his decoration, could not be buried with it on his breast … a deed of dishonour could be paid for only with a pistol bullet … one had to take the punishment on one’s own shoulders … and the Major, rigidly immobile, with a frozen look in his eyes, said: “The unchivalrous end.”

His hand was still touching the buttons of his uniform; mechanically he assured himself that they were all fastened, and that was a strange reassurance, a kind of hope that one could still return to duty, to one’s own secure life, even although Esch’s image had not yet vanished. It was a glittering and uncanny image, it stood in the other world and yet in this, it was both good and evil, it was bright and assured and yet had all the unreliability of the civilian, of the man who has his waistcoat open at the neck and lets his shirt be seen. And the Major, his fingers still on his uniform buttons, drew himself up, smoothed the
wrinkles out of his coat, passed his hand over his forehead and said: “Phantasms.”

He would have liked to send for Esch; Esch was the man to clear everything up … he longed to do it, but that would be a fresh deviation from the path of duty, a fresh deviation into civilian affairs. That must not happen. Besides … one must decide things for oneself: all these suspicions might prove groundless … and, on reflection, it was certain that this Huguenau had always behaved in a correct and patriotic manner … perhaps everything would be cleared up yet and turn out well.