by Hans Fallada
They were not modern—they were not those aquatic garments which reveal a different part of the anatomy at every movement and seem to consist only of open-work—as Sophie discovered with a certain regret. They were costumes which covered the body, which clothed and did not unclothe. But perhaps it was better so. Sophie had no intention of offering a spectacle to the adolescents of Neulohe. She knew the habit these young gentlemen had of spying on the bathing places on their free afternoons, in order to get a glimpse of the village girls. Sophie selected therefore a completely decent black costume with white embroidery and a minimum of open-work. She also bought a bathing cap.
The price which Otti Kujahn asked for these two things, after long hesitation (“Yes, what shall I take for them? They cost me under three marks”), corresponded perhaps to the postage of a local letter. Sophie was now of the opinion that the Kujahn needlework shop would not exist forever. At these prices Fräulein Kujahn could not survive the inflation, but would soon be sold out and starving.
The bicycle sang gently, the chain grated softly, in the afternoon silence the woods lay as if sleeping; the birds were quiet, the heather brushing the toes of her shoes swept off the dust. Something like happiness filled Sophie, a peacefulness she had not felt for a long time. The sun stood still, the day proceeded no further—her happiness remained.
Deep within the forest lay the crayfish ponds, a chain of little pools, reedy and muddy. Only in the large one was it possible to bathe. For a while Sophie lay in the sun. But she had to go into the water, feel its coolness, experience its freshness.
The fine sandy bottom sloped away gently; cool and fresh, cooler and fresher than anything on this earth, the water rose round her. Once she shivered, when the coolness reached her waist, but even this shiver was pleasant. And it was gone immediately. She went deeper. In a long swimming stroke she glided into the coolness, became one with it, as cool!
Now she strove to maintain her balance lying on her back, gently paddling with her hands. Lying in one element, part of it, her eyes closed, she felt the other element on her face, a heavenly greeting, fire. The warmth of the sun penetrated her, warmth that had nothing withering in it like the artificial flames of mankind. A puff of wind seemed to waft it away, but it was back again, penetrating, something nourishing, a divine nectar. Yes, this gentle warmth had something of life, of eternal life—it dispensed happiness.
But the happiness Sophie Kowalewski now felt had nothing in common with the childish joy remembered that morning. The child had danced through the woods, blissful, unselfconscious, laughing, singing. The rapture of existence had seized her, as it seizes a bird or a calf in the meadow. The happiness Sophie now felt was conditioned by many experiences. After months of tormented longing, her body was again for the first time in harmony with itself; she was no longer aware of it, it made no demands on her, no longer tormented her soul. Resting quietly on the surface of the water, it also rested quietly in the eternal ocean of desire, longing, craving.
The child’s blissful unconscious happiness can never be attained again. The gate had closed, innocence had departed—but life has many possibilities of happiness! She had thought it was in the cell, with him, in his arms.
And now it was here in the water, wave upon wave of warmth, of happiness …
In a dream she came out of the water and lay down on the sand, propped on one arm, her chin in her hand. She looks closely at the confusion of grasses. They fold into each other, creating little hollows. But she sees nothing. Real happiness has no name, no word, no picture. It is a gentle hovering in some indeterminate place; not a tune for the song “I am here!”—but something like a gentle lament to the words “I am I.” For we know that we must grow old and ugly, and have to die.
When she heard steps Sophie scarcely looked up. Lazily she pulled her costume over her naked breasts, murmuring, “Good afternoon.” At another time she would have welcomed the accident which brought her together here with the two new gentlemen from the estate. But now they were of no moment to her. In a few syllables she answered their inquiries: yes, this was the only bathing place, everywhere else was reedy. No, the gentlemen were not disturbing her. No, the water was not dangerous, no water plants.… She relapsed into silence. She hardly knew that the two of them were there. She looked again at the grass hollows, which then immediately vanished as if by magic, so she couldn’t see anything anymore. The sun was wonderfully warm. She pushed her costume down from her breast again, the voices of the two men came distantly from the water—oh, heavenly!
With all the cunning in the world Sophie Kowalewski could not have behaved more shrewdly than she did in ignoring, however thoughtlessly, the two gentlemen. It is undeniable that both Studmann and Pagel had not received a too favorable impression of her in the train, although the easily enthusiastic Rittmeister had praised this jewel of a girl to the skies. Both had recognized only too well that affected manner of speaking put on by little adventuresses wanting to play the great lady. They were both disgusted by her simultaneously dried out and puffy facial skin, which still smelled of powder. They were not leaving Berlin for the peace of the fields in order to burden themselves with such a companion. They had been very reserved. They thought a bit differently from the Rittmeister about the distance you should keep from your employees. When they saw Sophie, the thought didn’t go through their heads: in the end she’s only overseer’s daughter. That’s not how they wanted to see her. They had nothing against the girl, but they had strong objections to transplanting Berlin tart-shops to Neulohe.
When, therefore, Sophie did not exploit the present encounter, that yet offered so much incentive and possibility to an experienced girl; when she did not presume upon an acquaintanceship made in peculiar circumstances and did not seem minded to draw any inferences from it, Studmann said very cheerfully to Pagel as they went into the water: “As a matter of fact, the girl looks quite nice.”
“Yes, queer. She seemed quite different to me last time.”
“Did you see, Pagel?” Studmann asked after a while. “A perfectly decent bathing suit.”
“Yes,” agreed Pagel. “And no glad eye. I think I’ll never understand women.” With this light reference to the tragedy he had recently suffered, Pagel plunged into the water. Five or ten minutes, even a quarter of an hour, went by in swimming and diving and floating side by side and talking; minutes in which they both felt stronger, fresher, more conscious than for years. Until a noise from the bank caught their attention—a woman’s shrill voice, a man’s suppressed mumble.
“That’s Sophie,” said Studmann.
“Oh, forget her!” cried Pagel angrily. “It’s so nice here in the water. Probably some quarrel with a country lover. Ain’t love grand!”
“No, no!” said Studmann, the nursemaid who always had to intervene wherever anything threatened to go wrong. “She made a very nice impression on me just now.” And he swam rapidly toward the bank, followed by the reluctant Pagel.
Yes, there was Sophie shouting. “I say, you two! Here—he wants to take away your clothes!”
“Be quiet, Sophie, can’t you?” whispered the forester, trying to make off with his booty. “Nothing will happen to you. I only want the gentlemen’s clothes.”
“Herr von Studmann! Herr Pagel! Hurry up!” called Sophie all the more loudly.
“Now, what’s going on here?” asked von Studmann with extreme astonishment. And Pagel too looked more puzzled than was becoming to an intelligent face.
In the meadow stood the forester, whom they knew slightly, a worthy old dodderer, his gun over his shoulder, and under his arm the two men’s things in a bundle. Facing him Sophie Kowalewski, a charming sight in her rage, an Artemis. With one hand she held her bathing suit over her breast, with the other a trouser leg from the forester’s bundle—and von Studmann recognized that it was his.
“What’s this supposed to be?” he asked, still extremely astonished.
The forester was as red as a tomato, and became r
edder. Perhaps he wished to speak—all that was heard was a babbling in the depths of his beard. Yet he continued holding on to the clothes, and Sophie Kowalewski continued to tug at the trouser leg.
But she spoke, and what she said had certainly no ladylike affectation about it now.
“I’m lying here and thinking of nothing, and I hear something rustling and I think it’s a hedgehog or a fox and take no notice, and then I look over there and I’m flabbergasted. There’s Kniebusch creeping behind the reeds after the gentleman’s clothes, and sticks them under his arm. So I get up and say: ‘Kniebusch, what are you doing, those are the gentlemen’s clothes!’ But he says nothing, puts his finger on his lips and wants to slink away. So I make a grab and manage to get hold of the trousers. Will you let go of the trousers now! They’re not your trousers!” she screamed angrily at the forester.
“You seem fated to be our rescuer, Fräulein Sophie,” said Studmann, smiling. “Here you are again helping us out of an embarrassing situation. We are very grateful. But I think you can now let go of the trousers. Herr Kniebusch won’t run off with them under our eyes.” Sharply: “May I ask you, Herr Kniebusch, what is the meaning of this? In case you’ve forgotten, my name is Studmann, von Studmann, and this gentleman’s name is Pagel—we are employed by Rittmeister von Prackwitz.”
“That’s got nothing to do with me,” muttered Kniebusch, looking at the clothes which Pagel, without more ado, had pulled from under his arm. “Bathing is prohibited here, and if anyone bathes here his clothes are taken away!”
“Since when?” cried Sophie Kowalewski angrily. “That’s a new one!”
“Shut up, Sophie!” said the forester rudely. “It’s one of the Geheimrat’s orders, it’s been in force a long time.”
“If you tell me to shut up, then I’ll talk!” cried the warlike Sophie. “And anyway you’re lying. You told me specially that nothing would happen to me, you only wanted the gentlemen’s clothes!”
“That’s not true!” contradicted the forester hastily. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“You did mean it that way! I just want the clothes of the gentlemen, you said!”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“Let’s sit down!” suggested von Studmann. “Yes, you too, please, Herr Kniebusch. Pagel, give me the cigarettes from my jacket. Sit down, Kniebusch! That’s right. Cigarette, Fräulein Sophie? Yes, of course I know you smoke. We’re not as strict as the Rittmeister was in the train; we’re the younger generation. So you were specially ordered to confiscate our things, Herr Kniebusch?”
“I wasn’t! I always confiscate the things of people bathing here!” said the forester obstinately.
“Not those of Fräulein Sophie, for instance. Well, let’s drop that. How often have you confiscated clothes here, then, Forester Kniebusch?”
“I don’t have to tell you that. I’m employed by the Geheimrat, not the Rittmeister,” said the forester defiantly, squinting at the clothes, squinting at the forest, and feeling as if he were slowly roasting in hell—the heat from below supplied by Herr von Studmann, the heat above from the Geheimrat.
“I am only asking,” said Herr von Studmann, “because you must have already had a lot of unpleasantness with this confiscation, haven’t you?”
The forester maintained an obstinate silence.
“Or are you an auxiliary police official?”
Kniebusch remained silent.
“But perhaps you have been previously convicted. Then confiscating clothes without any legal right wouldn’t matter to you so much.”
Sophie burst out laughing, Pagel loudly cleared his throat, and the forester blushed to his eyes, which had become small and gloomy. He kept silent, however.
“You know us by name, you could have reported us for illegal bathing. If we had been convicted, we would, of course, have paid the fine. Why confiscation, then?”
The three of them looked at the forester fidgeting about, wanting to say something. Once more he looked at the forest close by. He half got up, but between him and the salvation of cover was young Pagel’s leg. The forester sat down again.
“Forester Kniebusch,” said Herr von Studmann, in the same pleasant, patient tone, as if he were explaining something to an obstinate child, “won’t you speak openly to us? Look, if you don’t tell us all about it, we shall go to Geheimrat von Teschow. I shall explain to him the situation in which we caught you here, and then we shall hear what this is all about.”
The forester had lowered his head; his face could not be seen.
“But if you tell us the truth, I promise you on my word of honor that we shall keep it to ourselves. I think I can also answer for Fräulein Sophie’s keeping quiet?” Sophie nodded. “Yes, we should like to help you to get out of this situation honorably.”
The forester raised his head. He stood up. In his eyes were tears, and while he spoke these tears broke free and ran down into his beard. Others followed. Tears of old age, a graybeard’s tears, flowing of themselves.
“Yes, gentlemen,” said Forester Kniebusch, “but no one can help me. I understand that you are being very friendly to me, and I accept with gratitude your promise to say nothing. But I am a finished man. I’m too old—and when one is too old, nothing goes right for him any more. Everything that once pleased him is gone.… I recently caught the worst poacher, Bäumer, and I want to tell the truth now. I didn’t do anything; he simply fell from his bicycle onto a stone and was knocked unconscious at once. Everything I said about a struggle was only to praise myself … I wanted to be clever, but an old man shouldn’t try to be clever.”
Sophie and Wolfgang stared in front of them. They were ashamed of the weeping old man who so shamelessly poured out his heart. Herr von Studmann, however, had directed his brown eyes attentively on him, and now and again he nodded.
“Yes, gentlemen,” continued the forester, “and now in the courts they want to twist a rope out of it for me, because Bäumer has a high temperature. And the only one who can defend me is the Geheimrat, and if I don’t do what he wants, he won’t defend me, but will even take away my livelihood. And what will then become of me and my sick wife?”
The forester stood as if he had forgotten what he wished to say, but at Herr von Studmann’s glance he pulled himself together. “Yes, and today after lunch he phoned me up and told me that the gentlemen had gone bathing and that I was to be certain to take their clothes away, otherwise he wouldn’t help me. But Sophie was sitting there and it came to nothing. Why he is so angry with the gentlemen I don’t know; he didn’t say a word about that.” Kniebusch stared disconsolately before him.
“Well, Herr Kniebusch, there are other ponds here, aren’t there? We needn’t have come here,” said Studmann.
The forester reflected, a glimmer of hope in his eyes. “In this direction it’s difficult,” he said. “Here, apart from this, it’s all forest and sand.”
“Birnbaum,” said Sophie.
“Yes, the gentlemen might have gone to the Birnbaum ponds. But then the gentlemen mustn’t be home before seven, because it’s so far. Would they like to sit in the forest as long as that?”
“Oh, of course we’ll do that,” said Studmann pleasantly. “The men can feed the cattle without us for once.”
“Then I thank the gentlemen very much,” said the forester, no longer tearful. “You are being very kind to an old man. But still, it won’t help much. I ought sometime to bring a real success home, but that’s asking too much of an old man. No young person knows what an old man feels like.” He stood a moment longer in thought. “However, through the kindness of the gentlemen, it hasn’t been a failure.”
He raised his hat and went.
Studmann gazed after him. Then he called out: “Wait, Herr Kniebusch, I’ll come along with you for a bit!” And he ran after him, barefooted, in bathing costume, without any regard for his rather tender feet. A true nursemaid, however, doesn’t think of h
erself when she sees others who need comforting.
Sophie and young Pagel were alone, and very pleasantly they conversed, first about Forester Kniebusch and then about the harvest. And because that afternoon Sophie was rested and happy, it did not occur to her to impress young Pagel with feminine tricks or even to make eyes at him, so that Wolfgang was continually obliged to marvel how wrongly he had judged this nice, intelligent girl in the train. And he was now tempted to blame his Berlin eyes for this false judgment.
As to the harvest, however, her father had said that in Neulohe they were at least three weeks behind, and they would never do it unless a proper reinforcement of strong men came. And no one in the village understood why the Rittmeister did not order a gang from Meienburg. They were the most industrious and most submissive of men, as long as they were given enough to eat and smoke. But the Rittmeister had to remember that all the farms in the neighborhood already had their gangs, and the prison was half empty. That’s what her father said, for of course she knew nothing about it, she had only just come to the district herself. But she was sorry about the harvest.…
Pagel thought this very intelligently spoken and thought it very good of the girl to worry about the Neulohe harvest, which after all did not matter a jot to a Berlin lady’s maid. He resolved to discuss the matter with Studmann that evening. Since, however, Studmann had not yet returned, they decided to go into the water once more.
There he saw that Sophie swam excellently, and that it was an effort for him to keep up with her. But he was able to show her something new, a style of swimming which had just begun to spread in Berlin, and which was called the crawl. It always does a young man good when he can do something a little better than a young girl; and if he can teach this young girl something he finds her extremely likeable.
