Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 4

by Bertolt Brecht

  She stops. A door opens. She hurriedly sees to her appearance. The husband comes in.

  THE HUSBAND: What are you doing? Tidying up?

  THE WOMAN: No.

  THE HUSBAND: Why are you packing?

  THE WOMAN: I want to get away.

  THE HUSBAND: What are you talking about?

  THE WOMAN: We did mention the possibility of my going away for a bit. It’s no longer very pleasant here.

  THE HUSBAND: That’s a lot of nonsense.

  THE WOMAN: Do you want me to stay, then?

  THE HUSBAND: Where are you thinking of going?

  THE WOMAN: Amsterdam. Just away.

  THE HUSBAND: But you’ve got nobody there.

  THE WOMAN: No.

  THE HUSBAND: Why don’t you wish to stay here? There’s absolutely no need for you to go so far as I’m concerned.

  THE WOMAN: No.

  THE HUSBAND: You know I haven’t changed, you do, don’t you, Judith?

  THE WOMAN: Yes.

  He embraces her. They stand without speaking among the suitcases.

  THE HUSBAND: And there’s nothing else makes you want to go?

  THE WOMAN: You know that.

  THE HUSBAND: It might not be such a bad idea, I suppose. You need a breather. It’s stifling in this place. I’ll come and collect you. As soon as I get across the frontier, even if it’s only for two days, I’ll start feeling better.

  THE WOMAN: Yes, why don’t you?

  THE HUSBAND: Things can’t go on like this all that much longer. Something’s bound to change. The whole business will die down again like an inflammation – it’s a disaster, it really is.

  THE WOMAN: Definitely. Did you run into Schöck?

  THE HUSBAND: Yes, just on the stairs, that’s to say. I think he’s begun to be sorry about the way they dropped us. He was quite embarrassed. In the long run they can’t completely sit on filthy intellectuals like us. And they won’t be able to run a war with a lot of spineless wrecks. People aren’t all that standoffish if you face up to them squarely. What time are you off, then?

  THE WOMAN: Nine-fifteen.

  THE HUSBAND: And where am I to send money to?

  THE WOMAN: Let’s say poste restante, Amsterdam main Post-Office.

  THE HUSBAND: I’ll see they give me a special permit. Good God, I can’t send my wife off with ten marks a month. It’s all a lousy business.

  THE WOMAN: If you can come and collect me it’ll do you a bit of good.

  THE HUSBAND: To read a paper with something in it for once.

  THE WOMAN: I rang Gertrud. She’ll see you’re all right.

  THE HUSBAND: Quite unnecessary. For two or three weeks.

  THE WOMAN who has again begun packing: Do you mind handing me my fur coat?

  THE HUSBAND handing it to her: After all it’s only for two or three weeks.

  10

  The spy

  Here come the worthy schoolteachers

  The Youth Movement takes the poor creatures

  And makes them all thrust out their chest.

  Every schoolboy’s a spy. So now marking

  Is based not on knowledge, but narking

  And on who knows whose weaknesses best.

  They educate traducers

  To set hatchet-men and bruisers

  On their own parents’ tail.

  Denounced by their sons as traitors

  To Himmler’s apparatus

  The fathers go handcuffed to gaol.

  Cologne 1935. A wet Sunday afternoon. The man, the wife and the boy have finished lunch. The maidservant enters.

  THE MAIDSERVANT: Mr and Mrs Klimbtsch are asking if you are at home.

  THE MAN snarls: No.

  The maidservant goes out.

  THE WIFE: You should have gone to the phone yourself. They must know we couldn’t possibly have gone out yet.

  THE MAN: Why couldn’t we?

  THE WIFE: Because it’s raining.

  THE MAN: That’s no reason.

  THE WIFE: Where could we have gone to? That’s the first thing they’ll ask.

  THE MAN: Oh, masses of places.

  THE WIFE: Let’s go then.

  THE MAN: Where to?

  THE WIFE: If only it wasn’t raining.

  THE MAN: And where’d we go if it wasn’t raining?

  THE WIFE: At least in the old days you could go and meet someone.

  Pause.

  THE WIFE: It was a mistake you not going to the phone. Now they’ll realise we don’t want to have them.

  THE MAN: Suppose they do?

  THE WIFE: Then it wouldn’t look very nice, our dropping them just when everyone else does.

  THE MAN: We’re not dropping them.

  THE WIFE: Why shouldn’t they come here in that case?

  THE MAN: Because Klimbtsch bores me to tears.

  THE WIFE: He never bored you in the old days.

  THE MAN: In the old days … All this talk of the old days gets me down.

  THE WIFE: Well anyhow you’d never have cut him just because the school inspectors are after him.

  THE MAN: Are you telling me I’m a coward?

  Pause.

  THE MAN: All right, ring up and tell them we’ve just come back on account of the rain.

  The wife remains seated.

  THE WIFE: What about asking the Lemkes to come over?

  THE MAN: And have them go on telling us we’re slack about civil defence?

  THE WIFE to the boy: Klaus-Heinrich, stop fiddling with the wireless.

  The boy turns his attention to the newspapers.

  THE MAN: It’s a disaster, its raining like this. It’s quite intolerable, living in a country where it’s a disaster when it rains.

  THE WIFE: Do you really think it’s sensible to go round making remarks like that?

  THE MAN: I can make what remarks I like between my own four walls. This is my home, and I shall damn well say …

  He is interrupted. The maidservant enters with coffee things. So long as she is present they remain silent.

  THE MAN: Have we got to have a maid whose father is the block warden?

  THE WIFE: We’ve been over that again and again. The last thing you said was that it had its advantages.

  THE MAN: What aren’t I supposed to have said? If you mentioned anything of the sort to your mother we could land in a proper mess.

  THE WIFE: The things I talk about to my mother …

  Enter the maidservant with the coffee.

  THE WIFE: That’s all right, Erna. You can go now, I’ll see to it.

  THE MAIDSERVANT: Thank you very much, ma’am.

  THE BOY looking up from his paper: Is that how vicars always behave, dad?

  THE MAN: How do you mean?

  THE BOY: Like it says here.

  THE MAN: What’s that you’re reading?

  Snatches the paper from his hands.

  THE BOY: Hey, our group leader said it was all right for us to know about anything in that paper.

  THE MAN: I don’t have to go by what your group leader says. It’s for me to decide what you can or can’t read.

  THE WIFE: There’s ten pfennigs, Klaus-Heinrich, run over and get yourself something.

  THE BOY: But it’s raining.

  He hangs round the window, trying to make up his mind.

  THE MAN: If they go on reporting these cases against priests I shall cancel the paper altogether.

  THE WIFE: Which are you going to take, then? They’re all reporting them.

  THE MAN: If all the papers are full of this kind of filth I’d sooner not read a paper at all. And I wouldn’t be any worse informed about what’s going on in the world.

  THE WIFE: There’s something to be said for a bit of a cleanup.

  THE MAN: Clean-up, indeed. The whole thing’s politics.

  THE WIFE: Well, it’s none of our business anyway. After all, we’re protestants.

  THE MAN: It matters to our people all right if it can’t hear the word vestry without bei
ng reminded of dirt like this.

  THE WIFE: But what do you want them to do when this kind of thing happens?

  THE MAN: What do I want them to do? Suppose they looked into their own back yard. I’m told it isn’t all so snowy white in that Brown House of theirs.

  THE WIFE: But that only goes to show how far our people’s recovery has gone, Karl.

  THE MAN: Recovery! A nice kind of recovery. If that’s what recovery looks like, I’d sooner have the disease any day.

  THE WIFE: You’re so on edge today. Did something happen at the school?

  THE MAN: What on earth could have happened at school? And for God’s sake don’t keep saying I’m on edge, it makes me feel on edge.

  THE WIFE: We oughtn’t to keep on quarrelling so, Karl. In the old days …

  THE MAN: Just what I was waiting for. In the old days. Neither in the old days nor now did I wish to have my son’s imagination perverted for him.

  THE WIFE: Where has he got to, anyway?

  THE MAN: How am I to know?

  THE WIFE: Did you see him go?

  THE MAN: No.

  THE WIFE: I can’t think where he can have gone. She calls: Klaus-Heinrich!

  She hurries out of the room, and is heard calling. She returns.

  THE WIFE: He really has left.

  THE MAN: Why shouldn’t he?

  THE WIFE: But it’s raining buckets.

  THE MAN: Why are you so on edge at the boy’s having left?

  THE WIFE: You remember what we were talking about?

  THE MAN: What’s that got to do with it?

  THE WIFE: You’ve been so careless lately.

  THE MAN: I have certainly not been careless, but even if I had what’s that got to do with the boy’s having left?

  THE WIFE: You know how they listen to everything.

  THE MAN: Well?

  THE WIFE: Well. Suppose he goes round telling people? You know how they’re always dinning it into them in the Hitler Youth. They deliberately encourage the kids to repeat everything. It’s so odd his going off so quietly.

  THE MAN: Rubbish.

  THE WIFE: Didn’t you see when he went?

  THE MAN: He was hanging round the window for quite a time.

  THE WIFE: I’d like to know how much he heard.

  THE MAN: But he must know what happens to people who get reported.

  THE WIFE: What about that boy the Schmulkes were telling us about? They say his father’s still in a concentration camp. I wish we knew how long he was in the room.

  THE MAN: The whole thing’s a load of rubbish.

  He hastens to the other rooms and calls the boy.

  THE WIFE: I just can’t see him going off somewhere without saying a word. It wouldn’t be like him.

  THE MAN: Mightn’t he be with a school friend?

  THE WIFE: Then he’d have to be at the Mummermanns’. I’ll give them a ring. She telephones.

  THE MAN: It’s all a false alarm, if you ask me.

  THE WIFE telephoning: Is that Mrs Mummermann? It’s Mrs Furcke here. Good afternoon. Is Klaus-Heinrich with you? He isn’t? – Then where on earth can the boy be? – Mrs Mummermann do you happen to know if the Hitler Youth place is open on Sunday afternoons? – It is? – Thanks a lot, I’ll ask them.

  She hangs up. They sit in silence.

  THE MAN: What do you think he overheard?

  THE WIFE: You were talking about the paper. You shouldn’t have said what you did about the Brown House. He’s so patriotic about that kind of thing.

  THE MAN: What am I supposed to have said about the Brown

  House?

  THE WIFE: You remember perfectly well. That things weren’t all snowy white in there.

  THE MAN: Well, nobody can take that as an attack, can they?

  Saying things aren’t all white, or snowy white rather, as I qualified it – which makes a difference, quite a substantial one at that – well, it’s more a kind of jocular remark like the man in the street makes in the vernacular, sort of, and all it really means is that probably not absolutely everything even there is always exactly as the Führer would like it to be. I quite deliberately emphasised that this was only ‘probably’ so by using the phrase, as I very well remember, ‘I’m told’ things aren’t all – and that’s another obvious qualification – so snowy white there. ‘I’m told’; that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily so. How could I say things aren’t snowy white? I haven’t any proof. Wherever there are human beings there are imperfections. That’s all I was suggesting, and in very qualified form. And in any case there was a certain occasion when the Führer himself expressed the same kind of criticisms a great deal more strongly.

  THE WIFE: I don’t understand you. You don’t need to talk to me in that way.

  THE MAN: I’d like to think I don’t. I wish I knew to what extent you gossip about all that’s liable to be said between these four walls in the heat of the moment. Of course I wouldn’t dream of accusing you of casting ill-considered aspersions on your husband, any more than I’d think my boy capable for one moment of doing anything to harm his own father. But doing harm and doing it wittingly are unfortunately two very different matters.

  THE WIFE: You can stop that right now! What about the kind of things you say yourself? Here am I worrying myself silly whether you make that remark about life in Nazi Germany being intolerable before or after the one about the Brown House.

  THE MAN: I never said anything of the sort.

  THE WIFE: You’re acting absolutely as if I were the police. All I’m doing is racking my brains about what the boy may have overheard.

  THE MAN: The term Nazi Germany just isn’t in my vocabulary.

  THE WIFE: And that stuff about the warden of our block and how the papers print nothing but lies, and what you were saying about civil defence the other day – when does the boy hear a single constructive remark? That just doesn’t do any good to a child’s attitude of mind, it’s simply demoralising, and at a time when the Führer keeps stressing that Germany’s future lies in Germany’s youth. He really isn’t the kind of boy to rush off and denounce one just like that. It makes me feel quite ill.

  THE MAN: He’s vindictive, though.

  THE WIFE: What on earth has he got to be vindictive about?

  THE MAN: God knows, but there’s bound to be something. The time I confiscated his tree-frog perhaps.

  THE WIFE: But that was a week ago.

  THE MAN: It’s that kind of thing that sticks in his mind, though.

  THE WIFE: What did you confiscate it for, anyway?

  THE MAN: Because he wouldn’t catch any flies for it. He was letting the creature starve.

  THE WIFE: He really is run off his feet, you know.

  THE MAN: There’s not much the frog can do about that.

  THE WIFE: But he never came back to the subject, and I gave him ten pfennigs only a moment ago. He only has to want something and he gets it.

  THE MAN: Exactly. I call that bribery.

  THE WIFE: What do you mean by that?

  THE MAN: They’ll simply say we were trying to bribe him to keep his mouth shut.

  THE WIFE: What do you imagine they could do to you?

  THE MAN: Absolutely anything. There’s no limit. My God! And to think I’m supposed to be a teacher. An educator of our youth. Our youth scares me stiff.

  THE WIFE: But they’ve nothing against you.

  THE MAN: They’ve something against everyone. Everyone’s suspect. Once the suspicion’s there, one’s suspect.

  THE WIFE: But a child’s not a reliable witness. A child hasn’t the faintest idea what it’s talking about.

  THE MAN: So you say. But when did they start having to have witnesses for things?

  THE WIFE: Couldn’t we work out what you could have meant by your remarks? Then he could just have misunderstood you.

  THE MAN: Well, what did I say? I can’t even remember. It’s all the fault of that damned rain. It puts one in a bad mood. Actually I’m the last person to say
anything against the moral resurgence the German people is going through these days. I foresaw the whole thing as early as the winter of 1932.

  THE WIFE: Karl, there just isn’t time to discuss that now. We must straighten everything out right away. There’s not a minute to spare.

  THE MAN: I don’t believe Karl-Heinrich’s capable of it.

  THE WIFE: Let’s start with the Brown House and all the filth.

  THE MAN: I never said a word about filth.

  THE WIFE: You said the paper’s full of filth and you want to cancel it.

  THE MAN: Right, the paper. But not the Brown House.

  THE WIFE: Couldn’t you have been saying that you won’t stand for such filth in the churches? And that you think the people now being tried could quite well be the same as used to spread malicious rumours about the Brown House suggesting things weren’t all that snowy white there? And that they ought to have started looking into their own place instead? And what you were telling the boy was that he should stop fiddling with the wireless and read the paper because you’re firmly of the opinion that the youth of the Third Reich should have a clear view of what’s happening round about them.