Bright Magic

by Alfred Doblin

  When the judges laid out the findings at the second on-site hearing, they charged Bessie Bennet, a.k.a. Mike Bondi, with innumerable counts of murder by poison. They demanded that she show them without delay the powder she had used; if not, they would put her on the rack, a measure they would seek given the abominable nature of her crimes. They also commanded her to finally put aside her exaggerated modesty and look the judges in the face. Bessie, still in the black suit she always wore, smiled but her low brow reddened; she asked them to kindly untie her hands and release her. The judges, infuriated by this contempt, sent for the two bailiffs to have her whipped. The many spectators at the hearing were also furious at the devilish poisoner by this point; they stood up and started to push their way toward the shameless woman; the judges lost control of the crowd. Bessie stepped up before the judge once more and quietly, holding out her bound hands, said that she had no more time; they had to take off the ropes and let her go now.

  Someone rudely hit her from behind on the shoulder; the mob swarmed over their prey. At just that moment, a sudden tightness was felt in every breast. Someone, wheezing, broke a window but the fresh air didn’t help. A blue-lipped judge staggered to the door to the street, and collapsed. The ten judges sat on their chairs as though asleep. The old silence briefly reigned in the vault, interrupted by the echoing thuds of bodies. The audience rushed forward, clambering over the benches. The black-haired woman let her large, wide-open eyes roam around the room. She whistled angrily, piercingly, through her teeth. A man stumbled into the room from outside and grabbed her arm. She touched his hair and blew at his feet; a blaze of fire ignited his body and with a hoarse scream he staggered back and crashed to the ground.

  The black-haired woman had bent over. Now, straightening up, touching her temples, standing in the middle of the wide vault, she burned in a black flame up to the ceiling and rose above the house in a smoking column of flame.

  The heavy smoke suffocated people in all the nearby streets. The fire, more horrible than anyone had ever seen, lasted just two hours, incinerating roughly six hundred men, women, and children.

  The whole neighborhood lay in rubble. No one came near the poisonous smoke for days. The judges and the accused had disappeared together. From then on, no one saw a kind and peaceful death walking down the streets followed by its enormous white Borzoi striding in equal silence, looking around with empty eyes. Instead, the sick in their deliriums apparently said that the unleashed white beast had leapt onto their chests, frightening them with its empty eyes, pressing its long fangs into their throats.

  The legend of a kind and peaceful death, and of how she who helped it had been driven off, remained for many years alive in the land.

  THE WRONG DOOR

  AROUND four in the morning, the guard leaned his rifle against the high wall of the barracks courtyard, pulled the chain to extinguish the last gas lamp, and mumbled the short morning prayer, his fez pushed into his face and his forehead pointing toward Mecca. The vegetable carts clattered, the teams of donkeys pulling milk carts trotted down the gray lanes toward the sleeping city. The low windows of the officer’s casino still cast a wide swath of light all the way to the row of trees on the other side of the street. No breath of the sharp morning wind just then rising penetrated into the long dining hall and the game room; the overheated gentlemen moved in a thick smoke, lay in club chairs with the jackets of their uniforms loosened. They crowded in threes and fours around a circular green table, flung their cards diagonally across the table with wild looks in their eyes, and then, after a few minutes of breathless silence, broke out in a hue and cry, grabbing each other by the shoulders and dancing around the room.

  The evening was for the two Kyrias brothers, who were sitting with other hard drinkers at the head of a dining table utterly laid to waste, their honor goblets before them, reminiscing fondly about a Mediterranean voyage. The younger Kyrias, named Nick, dark-eyed like his brother but fiery, heavy-cheeked, with short bristly hair and a little mustache above his thick lips, bubbled over and babbled on in a soft high-pitched voice—a never-ending stream of things no one was listening to. Every now and then the elder Kyrias, full-bearded and hypochondriac, would let himself get carried away by his brother and would continue the story in a solemn, hesitant way, but give a start whenever he was about to get to the point, insecurely pick up a match and hold it between two fingers, stand up, smile, and leave it to Nick to finish. Nick told the group about the enormous sums the brothers had bet in Monte Carlo, and the tricks you had to use when gambling. He had kept his lucky talisman in his hand the whole time, or had secretly slipped off his boots under the table and played in his stocking feet; when these and many other things didn’t help, he had defiantly sent an ugly old woman to get more money from the bank on a Friday morning. The flute of champagne fell from his fleshy hand and bubbles fizzed onto his creased shirtfront.

  He was just beginning a story about how he had come to be so clever when First Lieutenant Irfen came out the gambling-room door and walked over and planted himself on a wicker chair across from Nick without a word. Nick had learned that, by placing small bets at first and observing the course of the game for about three hours, he could then start with a random combination that came to him on the spur of the moment and make little calculations of probability, and his chances would improve by approximately eighty percent. He took a white blotting pad from the bureau by the window and sketched out a chart on it with a piece of charcoal.

  Straddling his wicker chair, the tall first lieutenant stared at him. His extraordinarily angular face was shaved smooth and his upper lip protruded strongly and quivered severely. Bald skull. Pepper-gray hair jutting out from the sides and back of his head; eyebrows and bridge of his nose coming together at sharp angles. Only drunkenness gave his otherwise roving eyes this rigid stare and made a patchy flush shine through the sallow gray of his cheeks. Irfen was seen in this casino only rarely. Instead—his superiors knew it as well as the newest recruits—he hung around the meanest dives in the city, and in the morning his comrades-in-arms often had to go looking for him in the worst bars. But an unusual brilliance and iron diligence meant his strict discipline was unrivaled. A strange incident about three years earlier had led to his being transferred from the capital to this provincial garrison. Irfen had been recommended for a high-ranking position when a major advance was supposed to take place during the spring maneuvers. On the beautiful March night before his division was due to move out, he caroused through the villages, drank himself blind in a farmers’ pub, and ended the night with a notorious village witch, whose windows he had broken in first. The next morning, shortly before inspection, he turned up on the parade ground with a gray horse, unable to say how he had procured it and from whom. The commander rode past the officer sitting ramrod straight on his steed but with straw in his hair and with his left sleeve slashed open to the shoulder; the commander turned his horse around, rode back, and took a good look at him, amazed at first and then with an ironic smile. The next night, Irfen shot dead his own noble horse, forced his way into the commander’s stall, and shot the commander’s two valuable horses dead as well, after first maltreating the stable boy in vile fashion.

  Reaching across the table, he took the blotting pad and charcoal pencil out of young Nick’s hands and said, “Careful, comrade. Make sure your calculations are exactly right,” then closed his eyes and scribbled with the broad piece of charcoal all over the table, smearing the red padding around the edge.

  In response to the astonished, somewhat confused question asked by young Nick, who had leapt up at once, he broke out in a harsh, bleating laugh. Nick, standing bolt upright, snapped loudly back at him, but he met every challenge and demand that he explain himself with merely a mocking “Kismet—all is fate,” so that the conversation took on a painful earnestness and was noticed in the side rooms. But the gray first lieutenant suddenly and very deliberately turned his chair around, swept the table in front of him clear with both ar
ms, and lay across it, his head on his arms. He squinted his left eye, frowned with the left corner of his mouth, and his face took on a tense expression; he beat rhythmically against the tabletop with his left arm.

  “Say whatever you want, Nick, do whatever you want. I say, if you have luck on your side you can march your division backward through a stubble field and not one of them will fall down. If you don’t, then whatever you do, flog yourself, work yourself to death, it’s no use. It just won’t come, the luck. It doesn’t have the key to your door. There it is. Don’t even try; it will never darken your doorstep, never, even if you pull at the halter around its neck.”

  Nick’s face jerked into a sneer. The lieutenant calmly went on: “Let me tell you something. Get me another jug of Greek wine. When I go to sleep tonight, I’ll try it again. Yet again. Just because. But in my sleep. It’s pointless to do it while you’re awake, I know that. I’ll ask in my sleep, you understand, what I want to know or don’t want to know; I don’t know what, and I’ll wake up with the answer. Look here”—he had lain down with his upper body stretched across the whole table, his head on his left arm, and reached into the air with his other, open hand—“I’ll go to sleep just the way I am here, I’ll say Kismet, and consult the future, and it will answer my question.” A blow of his fist made the table boom; he spoke with absolute determination. It was barely half an hour later that, still slumped on the table, he fell asleep.

  He woke up at around two in the afternoon. As he walked through the hall without saying a word, young Nick teased him. Irfen remembered: He had not asked anything in his sleep and nothing had come to him. He went out into the city and came back at around eight, with a dark look on his face, to sit down and start drinking again.

  The little circle started boozing; as the noise grew louder, Irfen sat sunk in thought. Until, at around ten, he suddenly stood up, smashed his glass to pieces on the table, and stood wordless and stock-still, his gaze directed at the window and the flame of the gas lamp outside.

  “Stop, stop!” he screamed.

  His eyes remained fixed on the gas lamp. It didn’t flicker at all.

  “Number Six, Number Six.”

  “What the devil is wrong with him?”

  “Number Six I say.”

  “Fate,” Nick whispered to his shocked brother.

  “Which street, Irfen?” came a shout from the other end of the table.

  “It’s Number Six.”

  “Hey, Pera Street,” the same voice roared. “That’s where she lives!”

  Irfen stood in silence. He whispered something. “Pera Street,” he mechanically repeated, very soft. He sat down suddenly, very calm, drank down his glass in one gulp, and looked around.

  The amazement in the casino lasted another moment, then someone laughed, and soon everyone was roaring with laughter. Nick leapt up: “Fate has spoken, comrades. Let us smoke out our Pythia.” They crowded around the first lieutenant, pounded on the table like him, and shouted, “Bravo, prophet!”

  They pestered him to tell them what he had asked. He ran his hand over his bare skull and muttered; he couldn’t remember. The laughter went on and on.

  Indifferently, pouring himself another glass from a jug of the strongest Greek wine, he said that he would leave in an hour, Fate had spoken, he could only receive the message. They should choose a witness; he laughed contentedly when Nick suggested himself and was chosen, and the young people started joking around wildly. They dressed up in women’s clothes, paraded before him as the ladies of house Number Six, made the most horrific faces as they raised their coy veils, and roared, melodramatically and seductively, “Kismet, Kismet!”

  A little before eleven, the fellows in the casino draped Irfen and Nick with their coats, buckled on their swords and pistols, handed them their fezzes. Those who had decided to remain behind until they returned formed two rows, and the pair marched out the door between the ranks of their honor guard, first Irfen, gaze completely cold, as though leaving the casino as usual, and behind him, swaggering, somewhat drunk, and highly pleased, Nick.

  They took their first steps out into the brisk night air, Nick chatting away as he stumbled over the cobblestones; Irfen gave no answer. Then Nick stopped talking too. When he tried to give Irfen directions with a movement of his hand at the first street corner, he noticed that Irfen had let his head sink down over his chest so that his fez almost fell off and clumps of hair hung forward over his face. At a streetlamp, it seemed to him that the first lieutenant was walking with his eyes shut tight, that a deep tension was pulling down the corners of his mouth, and that the same imperturbable certainty had appeared once again on his face.

  The young man, already upset, now felt a paralyzing fear. When he stared again at the stony seriousness and doggedness striding alongside him, his hands sprang up with horror. “He is sinning” shot through his head; he wanted to stop, to run away, to tell someone what was happening. But he couldn’t stop. It was, after all, ridiculous too.

  Irfen walked ahead of him with dragging feet and did not let him go. He walked with unbelievable steadiness alongside the buildings, in little, shuffling footsteps. They turned off the wide main street into long narrow Pera Street. Not a lamp was burning. Without raising his head, the lieutenant stopped in front of a little old one-story house. He had not looked up once to find the building. They stood there in front of the little door, without a sound, for almost half a minute. It was Number Six; it was, in fact, Number Six.

  Irfen put his right hand on his forehead and said, without turning around, “Nick, I want to ask you to do something. Let us think of Allah for a moment; then we will have to forget Allah for a time.” He had already raised the metal doorknocker and let it fall against the wood. He stood there with his head sunk again, waiting.

  Nick stepped up beside him. Inside, someone tromped down a staircase, stopped right behind the front door, and grabbed the handle; the door made a noise and then opened with a loud creak. It was an attendant, a bareheaded, gray-bearded Croat in shirtsleeves, who held up a giant hand lamp to see the uniforms and politely asked what the gentlemen wanted.

  “Nothing,” Irfen answered, “let us up the stairs,” and he tried to push the Croat aside. Amazed, the Croat stationed himself one step farther up, legs spread, put his lamp down on the step next to him, looked at Nick again, and repeated his question. Meanwhile, the sound of a man’s thin scolding voice came from upstairs; a bald, feeble, bent-over little old man in a dressing gown came hobbling down the stairs, clutched his tassels together on catching sight of the two officers, and asked, very seriously, but still gruff, who had sent them and to whom they wished to speak.

  “No one sent me,” Irfen snapped back, “there’s someone in this house I have to see.” The little man stood up straight, looked searchingly into the motionless face of the haggard officer, and said, in a very uncertain, embarrassed voice, “Gentlemen, perhaps you have made a mistake about the street, or the building. I don’t know. There are only the ladies sleeping upstairs; no one else lives here; I can’t let anyone in now.”

  “Your ladies’ sleep is certainly important, but I have a mission here that cannot be delayed.”

  The Croat and his master exchanged quick looks. “You really mean Number Six, gentlemen? Six Pera Street? There must be a misunderstanding.”

  “Let me upstairs, sir,” Irfen insisted, “don’t worry about my business. If there’s nothing upstairs then I’m in the wrong. Don’t talk— let me up!”

  “I can’t let you into the ladies’ bedroom. I ask you to please leave this house!”

  “I won’t lay a finger on anything of yours.”

  “Please, go away. I will call the authorities, sir.”

  “Even if you alert the whole garrison, I’m going upstairs. Nick, stay here; you can help me now.”

  He pushed past the old man to the banister; the man said, “Please be so kind as to take your hand from the banister, and don’t touch me.”

  The Croat put
the lamp behind him on a higher step and stood right in front of Irfen, laying an iron hand on Irfen’s arm.

  “Nick, do me a favor and take care of these people. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. But you should see for yourself.”

  Hurried footsteps were heard upstairs, a rustling of clothes; a woman’s frightened voice cried, “Let him come up, for God’s sake, Kari.” But the Croat, trembling with rage, had given Irfen’s chest a sudden shove and sent him flying out the door, then slammed it shut behind him. Irfen braced himself, first pounded on the flimsy door with both fists, then, with two kicks, broke it in and sent pieces of wood and splinters flying, which hit the screaming people inside. At just that moment, Mr. Kastelli raised his arm high and bent double; the first lieutenant’s sharp sword swished over his head through the opening; and simultaneously a shot rang out down the stairs from the Croat’s revolver, followed by two more shots in quick succession. Outside, Irfen stretched his tall body up high and threw his arms into the air, fell backward onto the sidewalk, pulled himself to his feet again, ran diagonally across to the other side of the dark street leaving his fez lying behind him, pressed against the wall for another moment, and then with a dull thud fell forward onto his face. Nick, hit in the arm, was already kneeling at his side, trying to turn him over. When he turned Irfen’s head, he saw a small bullet hole in the forehead and the unchanged face of a gray man who had squinted his left eye shut, drawn down the left corner of his mouth, just laid down across a messy table, and said with a wave of the arm and imperturbable certainty, “Kismet.”

  Mr. Kastelli and his ladies followed the coffin at the funeral. There were three older ladies, relatives of the paterfamilias, and a gentleman who had been staying with him for a few days while passing through town. In the casino, whenever the case came up in conversation, they said what happened could essentially have been predicted in advance.