Homo Faber

by Max Frisch

Sabeth asked questions.

  Why did he do it?

  He didn’t tell us, he just hung there like a doll and stank and rotated in the warm wind…

  That’s how it was.

  When I stood up I knocked over my chair, there was a crash, people looked round, but the girl picked my chair up as though nothing had happened and wanted to take me to my cabin, but I didn’t want to go there.

  I wanted to go on deck.

  I wanted to be alone…

  I was drunk.

  If I had mentioned his name, Joachim Hencke, everything would have come to light. Evidently I didn’t even mention his first name, but simply talked about a friend who hanged himself in Guatemala, about a tragic accident.

  Once I filmed her.

  When Sabeth finally noticed, she put her tongue out; I filmed her with her tongue out, until, really angry, she bawled me out properly. ‘What’s the big idea?’ she asked me straight out: ‘What do you want with me anyway?’

  That was in the morning.

  I should have asked Sabeth if she was a Moslem, or had some other superstitious fear of being filmed. The impudence of the girl! I was perfectly willing to take the film (together with the telescopic shots of Ivy waving) out of the camera and ruin it by holding it up to the sun. What angered me most was the tone of voice in which she said:

  ‘You keep watching me all the time, Mr Faber, I don’t like it.’

  This remark kept ringing in my ears all the morning, and I wondered what the girl took me for when she made it.

  She didn’t like me.

  That much was obvious, and any illusions I might have had were dissipated later when, soon after lunch, I reminded her of my promise to tell her when I was going to look over the engine-room.

  ‘Now?’ she asked.

  She had to finish a chapter.

  ‘Very well,’ she said.

  I wrote her off. Without feeling offended. I’ve always taken it that way; I don’t like myself when I’m a burden to other people, and it’s never been my practice to run after women who don’t like me; frankly, I never needed to…

  The engine-room of a ship like this is as big as a fair-sized factory; the major element is the big diesel power unit and besides this there are the generating, warm-water and ventilating plant. Although there was nothing out of the ordinary for even the expert to see, I nevertheless found the installation as such, conditioned as it was by the shape of the hull, worth looking at, quite apart from the fact that it is always a pleasure to watch machinery in operation. I explained the main control panel, without going into details; I explained briefly what a kilowatt is, what hydraulics is, what an ampère is, things Sabeth had learnt at school and forgotten, of course, but she had no difficulty in understanding them again now. What impressed her most were all the pipes, never mind what they were for, and the great stair-shaft with a view up through five or six floors to the sky behind a criss-cross of iron bars. She was worried by the fact that the engine-room crew, all of whom she thought so friendly, sweated all the time and spent their whole lives on the ocean without seeing the ocean. I noticed how they stared when the girl (whom they obviously took for my daughter) clambered from one iron ladder to another.

  Ça va, mademoiselle, ça va?’

  Sabeth climbed like a cat.

  ‘Pas trop vite, ma petite…’

  I found their male grimaces impertinent, but Sabeth noticed none of all this, Sabeth in her black jeans with the once white seams, the green comb in her back pocket, the reddish pony-tail dangling over her back, the two shoulder blades under her black pullover, the groove in her taut, slim back, then her hips, her youthful thighs in the black trousers that were crumpled at the calves, her ankles – I found her beautiful, but not provocative. Just very beautiful. We were standing at the glass peephole of a diesel burner, which I explained briefly, my hands in my trouser pockets to avoid taking hold of her near arm or shoulder as the Baptist had done at breakfast.

  I didn’t want to touch the girl.

  I suddenly felt very senile.

  I took hold of both her hips as her foot sought in vain for the lowest rung of an iron ladder, and lifted her straight down on to the floor. Her hips were remarkably light and at the same time strong, gripping them was like gripping the steering wheel of my Studebaker, the same slenderness, exactly the same diameter – just for a second, then she was standing on the landing of perforated sheet metal; she didn’t blush in the least, but thanked me for my unnecessary help and wiped her hands on a bundle of brightly coloured cotton waste. I hadn’t felt stirred by the contact either, and we walked on to the big propeller shafts, which I wanted to show her before we went back on deck. Problems of torsion, index of friction, fatigue of the steel through vibration and so on, I only thought of these things in my own mind, amidst a noise so loud you could scarcely speak – I merely explained to the girl where we were; namely at the point where the propeller shafts leave the hull to drive the screws outside. We had to shout. We must have been roughly twenty-five feet below sea level. I said I would inquire. ‘Roughly,’ I shouted. ‘It might be only twenty feet.’ I pointed out the considerable pressure of water this structure had to stand up to. This was too technical again – her childish imagination was already outside with the fishes, while I was still discussing shipbuilding. ‘Here,’ I shouted taking her hand and placing it on the two and three-quarter inch rivets, so that she could understand what I was talking about. ‘Sharks?’ That was the only word I caught. ‘What do you mean, sharks!’ I shouted back. ‘I’ve no idea.’ I continued to talk about the construction of the ship. Her eyes were staring.

  I had wanted to give her something.

  Our voyage was drawing to an end, I thought it a pity, suddenly the last little thread on the chart of the Atlantic, a remnant of three inches – an afternoon and a night and a morning…

  Mr Lewin was already packing.

  We discussed tipping.

  When I pictured how we should all be saying good-bye in twenty-four hours, good-bye with humorous good wishes on all sides – Mr Lewin, best of luck in agriculture! And our Baptist, best of luck in the Louvre! And the girl with the reddish ponytail and the indeterminate future, best of luck – was troubled by the thought that we should never hear of one another again.

  I sat in the bar.

  Shipboard friendships!

  I grew sentimental, which wasn’t like me, and there was a big dance, which was evidently the usual thing, this was the last evening on board and it happened to be my fiftieth birthday; naturally, I didn’t mention this.

  It was my first offer of marriage.

  I was really sitting with Mr Lewin, who didn’t care for dancing either; I had invited him to a burgundy, the best thing to be had on board (you’re only fifty once, I thought): Beaune 1933, a magnificent bouquet, a bit lacking in flavour, too brief, and unfortunately a trifle cloudy, which didn’t worry Mr Lewin, who even enjoyed Californian burgundy. I was disappointed (I had pictured my fiftieth birthday rather differently, to be frank) with the wine, but otherwise quite contented, Sabeth just joined us for a moment every now and then to take a sip from her citron pressé, then along came another dancing partner, her illustrator with the moustache, and in between ship’s officers in dress uniform, as spick and span as in an operetta, Sabeth in her unchanging blue evening frock, not in bad taste, but cheap, too childish… I wondered whether to go to bed, I could feel my stomach, and we were sitting too near the orchestra, there was an infernal din and on top of it this tumultuous carnival wherever you looked – Chinese lanterns, blurred in the haze from cigarettes and cigars like the sun over Guatemala, streamers, paper chains everywhere, a jungle of red and green frippery, gentlemen in dinner jackets, as black as zopilotes, whose plumage gleams in just the same way…

  I didn’t want to think of that.

  The day after tomorrow in Paris – that was about all I could think of in this racket – I would go to a doctor and have my stomach examined at last.

&n
bsp; It was a queer evening.

  Mr Lewin, the gigantic fellow, grew positively witty, being unused to wine, and suddenly gained the courage to dance with Sabeth; she came up to his ribs, while he had to duck his head to avoid getting tangled up in streamers. Mr Lewin didn’t possess a dark suit and danced a mazurka to everything, because he was born in Poland and had spent his childhood in the Ghetto and so on. Sabeth had to stretch up in order to take him by the shoulders, like a schoolgirl strap-hanging in the underground. I sat swilling the burgundy around in my glass, determined not to get sentimental because it was my birthday, and drinking. All the Germans on board were drinking champagne; I couldn’t help thinking of Herbert and the future of the German cigar, and wondering what Herbert could be doing all alone among the Indians.

  Later I went up on deck.

  I was completely sober, and when Sabeth came and joined me I said straight away that she would catch cold in her thin evening frock. She wanted to know whether I was melancholy. Because I wasn’t dancing. I think they’re fun, their modern dances, existentialist jigs, in which everyone dances on his own, cuts his own capers, tangled up in his own legs, shivering as though with the ague, all rather epileptic, but fun, full of go, I must admit, but I can’t do it.

  Why should I be melancholy?

  England wasn’t in sight yet.

  When I gave her my jacket so that she shouldn’t catch cold, her pony-tail simply wouldn’t stay at the back of her head, the wind was blowing so hard.

  The red funnels gleamed in the searchlight.

  Sabeth thought it ‘dandy’, a night like this on deck, with the wind whistling through the ropes and flapping the canvas covers on the lifeboats and blowing the smoke from the funnels.

  The music was almost inaudible.

  We talked about constellations – the usual thing, when two people haven’t yet discovered which one knows less about the stars than the other; the rest is romantic fantasy, which I can’t bear. I showed her the comet which was visible at that time in the north. I was within an ace of telling her it was my birthday. Hence the comet! But it wasn’t even true as a joke; the comet had been visible for several weeks already, though never so clearly as on that night, from at least 26 April. So I didn’t say anything about my birthday, 29 April.

  ‘I’ve got two wishes,’ I said, ‘now that we’re saying good-bye. First, that you shouldn’t become an air hostess…’

  ‘And second?’

  ‘Second,’ I said, ‘that you shouldn’t hitchhike to Rome. Seriously. I’d rather pay your fare by rail or plane…’

  At the time I never thought for a moment that we should be driving to Rome together, Sabeth and I, since I really had no reason for going to Rome.

  She laughed in my face.

  She misunderstood me.

  After midnight there was a cold buffet, as usual – I pretended I was hungry and took Sabeth below, because she was shivering, as I could see, in spite of my jacket. Her chin was shivering.

  Down below they were still dancing.

  Her supposition that I was melancholy because I was alone put me out of humour. I’m used to travelling alone. I live, like every real man, in my work. On the contrary, that’s the way I like it and I think myself lucky to live alone, in my view this is the only possible condition for men, I enjoy waking up and not having to say a word. Where is the woman who can understand that? Even the inquiry as to how I have slept vexes me, because my thoughts are already beyond that, I’m used to thinking ahead, not backwards, I’m used to planning. Caresses in the evening, yes, but I can’t stand caresses in the morning, and frankly more than three or four days with one woman has always been for me the beginning of dissimulation, no man can stand feelings in the morning. I’d rather wash dishes!

  Sabeth laughed.

  Breakfast with women, yes, as an exception while on holiday, breakfast on a balcony, but frankly I have never been able to stand it for longer than three weeks, it’s all right on holiday, when you don’t know what to do with the whole day anyhow, but after three weeks (at the latest) I long for turbines; a woman with time on her hands in the morning, a woman who wanders about before she is dressed, for example, rearranging flowers in a vase and talking about love and marriage, is something no man can stand, I believe, unless he dissembles. I couldn’t help thinking of Ivy. As far as I am concerned every woman is like clinging ivy. I want to be alone. The very sight of a double room, unless it’s in a hotel I can leave again soon, a double room as a permanent arrangement, sets me thinking about the Foreign Legion…

  Sabeth thought me cynical.

  But I was only telling the truth.

  I stopped talking, although I don’t think Mr Lewin understood a word; he put his hand over the glass when I went to fill it up, and Sabeth, who thought me cynical, was fetched away to dance…. I’m not cynical. I’m merely realistic, which is something women can’t stand. I’m not a monster, as Ivy said, and I have nothing against marriage in principle; as a rule the women themselves considered I wasn’t suited to it. I can’t have feelings all the time. Being alone is the only possible condition for me, since I don’t want to make a woman unhappy, and women have a tendency to become unhappy. Being alone isn’t always fun, you can’t always be in form. Moreover, I have learned from experience that once you’re not in form women don’t remain in form either; as soon as they’re bored they start complaining you’ve no feelings. Then, to be quite frank, I’d rather be bored on my own. I admit that I’m not always in the mood for television either (although, by the way, I am convinced that television will become even better in the next few years) and am sometimes prey to low spirits, but then especially I’m glad to be alone. One of the happiest moments I know is the moment when I have left a party, when I get into my car, shut the door and insert the ignition key, switch on, turn on the radio, light my cigarette with the built-in lighter and put my foot down; people are a strain as far as I’m concerned, even men. As to my fluctuating spirits, I pay no attention to them. Sometimes you feel low, but you pick up again. Fatigue phenomena! As in steel. Feelings, I have observed, are fatigue phenomena, that’s all, at any rate in my case. You get run down. Then writing letters doesn’t help you to feel less lonely either. It doesn’t make any difference; afterwards you still hear your own footsteps in the empty flat. The radio announcers boosting dog food, baking powder or what have you, and then suddenly falling silent after wishing you good-bye ‘till tomorrow morning at 6 o’clock’. And now it’s only two o’clock. Then gin, although I don’t like gin on its own, in the background voices from the street, cars hooting or the rumble of the underground trains, every now and then the roar of an aeroplane, sounds like that. Sometimes I just fall asleep, the newspaper on my lap and my cigarette on the carpet. I pull myself together. What for? Somewhere there is a late broadcast with symphonies, which I switch off. What else? Then I just stand there with gin, which I don’t like, in my glass, drinking; I stand still so as not to hear steps in my flat, steps that are after all only my own. The whole thing isn’t tragic, merely wearisome. You can’t wish yourself good night…

  Is that a reason for marrying?

  Sabeth, when she came back from her dance to drink her citron pressé, snubbed me. Mr Lewin, the gigantic fellow, was asleep, smiling as though he could see the whole carnival even in his sleep, the streamers and the couples busily engaged in bursting one another’s balloons.

  She asked what I was thinking all the time.

  I didn’t know.

  I asked what she was thinking.

  She knew at once:

  ‘You ought to get married, Mr Faber.’

  Then her friend turned up again, after hunting for her all over the ship, to ask her for a dance. He looked at me.

  ‘Please go ahead,’ I said.

  I only kept her handbag.

  I knew exactly what I was thinking. There were no words for it. I swilled the wine round in my glass in order to smell it and tried not to think of the way men and women couple, in
spite of the picture that sprang unbidden to my mind accompanied by a feeling of amazement and the sudden shock that jerks you out of a doze. Why just like that? Looking at it from the outside, why just with the abdomen? When you sit watching dancers and visualize it with complete detachment, it doesn’t seem humanly possible. Why just like that? It’s absurd, when you’re not impelled to it yourself by your instincts, it makes you feel you must be crazy even to have such an idea, positively perverse.

  I ordered beer…

  Perhaps the fault is in me.

  The couples, incidentally, were in the process of dancing with an orange held between their noses…

  What is it like for Lajser Lewin?

  He was actually snoring, I couldn’t speak to him; his half-open mouth looked like the red mouth of a fish against the green aquarium glass.

  I thought about Ivy.

  Of Ivy when I embraced her and thought to myself, I must get my films developed, or ring up Williams. I could have solved a chess problem in my head, while Ivy was saying, I’m happy, oh dear, so happy, oh dear, oh dear! I felt her ten fingers round the back of my head, I saw her epileptically happy mouth and the picture on the wall that was crooked again, I wondered what the date was today, I heard her ask, Are you happy? and I closed my eyes in order to think about Ivy, whom I was holding in my arms, and I accidentally kissed my own elbow. Afterwards everything seems forgotten. I forgot to ring Williams, although I had been thinking about it all the time. I stood by the open window smoking my cigarette at last, while Ivy made tea outside, and I suddenly knew the date. But it didn’t make any difference what the date was. Everything was as though it had never happened. Then I heard someone come into the room and turned round, and it was Ivy in her dressing gown bringing our cups, and I went up to her and said Ivy! and kissed her, because she was a good kid, although she couldn’t understand that I would rather be alone…

  Suddenly our ship came to a stop.

  Mr Lewin, suddenly awake, although I hadn’t said a word, wanted to know whether we had reached Southampton.

  There were lights outside.