Bright Magic

by Alfred Doblin

  At night the clocks ticked in her room. There were two hanging on the wall: One ponderously swallowed the time and bleated every half hour, then it was sated but kept chewing anyway; next to it, the cuckoo clock chuckled, flapped, ran out of breath, and almost tumbled over when it let out its pitiful cry. The canoness jumped out of bed and stopped the pendulum. As she lay unmoving in bed again, the little clock twitched and the face of the big one grimaced. Then she threw on her clothes and ran out the door, into the park. Her eyes were fixed on the black, tangled bushes: “I must die, I must die.” Standing by the water that misted in the dawn light, she stared vacantly into space with a flickering gaze. She waded in, with loud gasps and screams, with desperately closed eyes, splashed the water’s surface with her little hands, her scrawny hands, suddenly turned around, and fled between the black trees back into the building. The old maiden stood looking out the window. When it grew brighter, there was again a frequent trembling around her mouth, all her limbs shook again, her lips clamped shut, and she fell back onto the bed. But she huddled like a brick in the middle of the bed. Her jaws were clenched. She groaned. Her eyes flashed, now at the window, now at the door. Mutely she pulled the covers up over herself.

  On the following days, she walked around quietly, continued to sprinkle her little room with nice-smelling cologne at night, but gradually resumed her old activities. Praying, embroidering, cards. She also sat alone again for long periods behind her glasses of hyacinths. She smiled there, now and then, shuddering deeply. She spoke with the other women even less than before, to the point where they began to talk among themselves about her vain nature. The gaze that ranged over the women at the table was in fact sometimes puzzled, sometimes prickly and superior.

  The days grew warmer. Now she would walk for hours down thickly overgrown park paths; wherever she walked, wherever she stopped, a dreaming was walking around. Cried now and then, in a soft, streaming way that sounded like a young song. Then the old maiden looked at the lines in her hands, wiped her hands across the dry sagging skin of her face in front of the mirror, gingerly felt her haggard breasts with her fingers, moved them around as though rummaging for something. She stood stock-still like that for almost half an hour when she undressed. When she lay down, she would feel chilly again, like before, and she wanted to clutch the bed frame tight, but before long she shifted against the wall, left a little space free next to her, and hesitantly draped her arm over it, then took her arm away again, put it back, it was a game. Arm pressed against her chest, hot gaunt face turned to the empty space on the pillow, neck outstretched. As during the first nights, her barren body shook; soon her fingers probed across the pillow, her lips pursed.

  When the green young leaves covered all the paths, she started dressing and grooming herself for her walks: She put on a light blue blouse, held flowers, mignonettes she had cut herself, long-stemmed roses, in her white-gloved hands. She walked more upright, more springily, in the grass. When she was in the thick shrubbery and no one was listening, she curtsied politely, tittered into her flowers, minced around with a sweet little mouth. Yes, she wrote delicate letters on rose paper, full of coy hints, coquettish and playful, opening: “To my dear strict lord, Death”; she held them up to her open window, slipped them under her door at night, buried them in the bushes. The sisters often watched from the building; they never saw whoever it was that the gray-haired maiden was dressing up for. They saw only her, always sauntering and stopping. She walked with a show-offy look on her face past the women leering with curiosity. The sisters said to one another, more and more convinced by the day, that the canoness was bearing sinful cravings, and occasionally they suggested she be expelled from the order.

  Meanwhile the spring advanced; it grew warmer and warmer. And one night the old canoness came back to her room from a walk, with red clover she had picked, willow branches, catkins. Her face beamed. She sang to herself in a soft voice, left the door and window open. She put the flowers under the picture of the Virgin Mary. When she had arranged the flowers, she started back in alarm from the picture of the Blessed Virgin, fell to her knees, and prayed. But with a mischievous smile she hung up the branches and leaves above the picture so that the face of the Queen of Heaven was entirely hidden.

  She trilled out into the warm spring night with her face abloom, then lay down.

  She fell asleep. Woke up in darkness. Brawny footsteps in the room. The bed creaked. In one leap, Death jumped into bed next to her. There was room for him. He grabbed for her knees. She tried to fight him off. Like a country peasant he struck her shoulders with open hands. Then his balled fist fell upon her chest, her body, her body, and her body again. Her lips pleaded. A retch came. Her tongue rolled back in her throat. Her body stretched out.

  Then Death stood up and pulled the canoness by her cold little hands behind him, out through the window.

  [1] A canoness is a member of a Christian community of women living under a rule but not under vows like a nun. The German is Stiftsfräulein; Fräulein means girl, Miss, maiden.—Trans.

  Part 2

  LATE TALES

  A FAIRY TALE OF TECHNOLOGY

  THIS IS a true story, and one that shows that miracles are still possible, even in the most enlightened age.

  There was a little Jewish village in the Ukraine, and a father lived there with his children. It was still before the war. The tsar ruled in Petersburg, but in the Ukraine there was the Black Hand and they ruled too. And one day some people needed money again, and look, here were some Jews, and their businesses had been doing well lately, so people set some stories going around, about Easter, about how a bad word had been said about the pope and a Jew had laughed, the way another one had said something about the Holy Madonna of Częstochowa, and with this and other such items the groundwork was laid, but then the Black Hand built upon these foundations, everything including the fact that the police were celebrating a holiday just then and the commissioner was sitting at the public banquet on just that day. And what will happen, they’ll band together and riot, some word has already leaked out but it doesn’t help, pogroms will be pogroms, blood flows, but the Jewish people aren’t children, blood eventually flows on the other side too, one doesn’t let oneself be torn to pieces by wicked beasts.

  And a father lived in that village, who had guarded his house very well, very well, and he had had an ax too during the pogrom, and there were probably several people who would have seen that ax—and then the father thought: It’s better if we don’t wait for the search and the trial, and he upped and left with his family, and because they had to do it in secret, he separated his two big sons and said “Lvov!” and gave them money. But only one did he see again. The other, who already could sing so beautifully, never returned. Not a word was heard from him, not a syllable. The beloved son, swallowed whole by the earth. Father and mother moved to a small town, their relatives did what they could for them, prosperity returned, they got through the war too. But neither father nor mother was ever happy again. Their dear son was gone.

  They talked it all over a thousand times. “You were a bad example for him,” the mother wailed, “he’ll have picked up an ax or a knife too, a Jew should just lay low.” “So, I should have let myself get cut down, and all of you with me?” “Ach, there are lots of people back home who are still alive.”

  Time passed, the mother died, the father got worse, the son supported them, the relatives helped. But the father always went to listen wherever there was singing, and thought, Oh, how my Yitzhak used to sing, what a beautiful, beautiful voice, where are there voices like that anymore today. But that he listened so much and went to concerts was the dispensation of God. Mother had died, she was gone, but the father should know that God still lived and had not forgotten him.

  Then the head of the community gave him a gramophone, when he turned seventy, and he had people play it for him, and his eldest son brought him the newest thing too, a radio, with which you could hear from far, far away, wherever there
was singing, wherever there was singing anywhere in the whole world, sung by anyone. But his son Isaac was not singing along.

  And day after day he listened in on all the voices, so many, such bellowing and braying, and the hits they were recording now, that people danced to.

  And one day around noon his radio was playing again and his daughter-in-law was cooking in the kitchen when the door flew open and the old father, yarmulke aslant on his bald head, came out screaming, his eyes were wide, wide, and he screams, “Rosalie, come listen, come listen!” God’s sake, what’s gotten into him, I’ll go get Yankel. “Come listen, Rosalie, he’s singing, it’s Yitzhak! Rosalie, my child, come listen, Isaac, it’s Isaac!” And she had to hold him up and bring him to a kitchen chair, the old man, the music had ended, it was a psalm, now there was a popular song on, she wanted to turn it off, don’t turn it off, maybe it’ll come on again.

  What more is there to tell. They listened to the old man, his son traveled with him to Warsaw, they found the record and on the record was his name, an English name, he was an American cantor, a famous man, they found another record by him in Warsaw too.

  And then telegrams went back and forth, and truly, it was Yitzhak. He had gone right to America, had tried to find his parents in Russia but then the war came, and how could he look for them then.

  And the radio did this thing, and that is technology, and it led a son back to his father, and both of them know that God lives and is a rock to build upon for whoever believes in Him.

  A LITTLE FABLE

  ONCE UPON a time there was a continent called Allbark and Nobite, and in it a country called the Kingdom of Tongue-Tied. The sun and the moon shone their light upon it, in their customary alternating fashion, but mighty rivers flowed through and rugged mountains towered above it, giving rise to a sense of the exceptional and heroic. The kingdom was named Tongue-Tied following the wishes of its own people, since there was nothing they respected as much as language. Because of their idolatrous worship of language, they used it as little as possible. Education was therefore directed primarily toward vigorous exercise, business, and sports, and also music, and noise, but with no words or meaning. Language, they taught, was not worthy of a true Tongue-Tiedian; precise thinking was likewise not held in very high esteem. People made themselves understood with looks, short nods, or hand gestures, and deaf-mutes enjoyed great honor throughout the land.

  Every city in the kingdom had at least one newspaper, consisting of sixteen white pages and a similarly expressive advertising supplement. The editors were carefully screened but there was hardly a flood of applicants for the jobs, since it was a difficult, arduous task to present the text and advertising in new and interesting ways and keep everybody happy. The familiar ABC letters of the alphabet, as well as the type in the typesetters’ cabinets and printing presses, had had to be replaced by the corresponding mutescript, or white-letters; the white color had had to be delicately modulated—snow white, lamb white, egg white, and so on—with whole generations of typesetters devoting their lives to the task, while the sharply edged black-letters of an earlier era were taken out of circulation. These newspapers were read with different-colored eyeglasses—that was all the variety people got. There were mutephones in the editorial offices: When a call came in, a black light on the device blinked against a black background. Trained telephone operators (almost exclusively men; under the new conditions, women were no longer suited to this old occupation of theirs) took down the news, which was at once set in whiteprint and disseminated throughout the country on posters and placards. Crowds of people stood in front of the sturdy placard pillars or lines of lights running around the buildings; bill posters tore down old newssheets and pasted up new ones under police protection. Excitement filled the air, though everyone kept their self-control.

  The candor of the historian obliges me to report that this great tradition in the kingdom was eventually carried on almost exclusively by official bodies; the general population gradually fell back into idle chatter. But tradition was preserved in the government’s dealings with the people. Gradually, the sacred whitescript (scriptura alba regia) and honorable mutespeech came to be, for all intents and purposes, reserved for government matters, taking on a kind of cultic character not unlike that of Latin in the past. Important news affecting the life of the people, negotiations with neighboring states, royal intentions, and suchlike were communicated solely mute and in whitescript, as befit the seriousness of the content. (Once, a new young king felt the need to institute a change: He felt that, instead of speaking mutely and writing in whitescript, people could just as well scream, shout, and sing random words, or print random words in black; but they quickly stopped doing such things and he was removed from office—the old ways were better.) The government had also gotten the people accustomed to filing their complaints about abuses of power in whitescript and mutespeech, which was likewise how such complaints were promptly resolved.

  The countries that love to prattle have named their representative bodies “Parlamente”; the Tongue-Tiedian assemblies were called Silencorias. They were held, once the members were elected, in a grand hall across from the ministry. People greeted each other in friendly fashion, drank beer and light tea paid for by public funds, spent half an hour bowing in all directions—to each other, to the minister, to the king’s portrait on the wall (the auditoriums were known as “gymnastics halls” from all this bowing, and older citizens were encouraged to run for office for that very reason)—everyone stayed silent, smiled, and looked around, until a bell, rung by the presiding representative, signaled that the discussion was over. There were people who, unfamiliar with the country’s way of life, claimed that the royal government was perfectly happy with this arrangement, wanting nothing more than to prohibit speech and then act however it wanted. But reasonable people pointed out that the Tongue-Tiedians had everything other countries had: Order and abuses, justice and corruption, in fact they had even more abuses and corruption than other places so why should they bother going back to speeches and blackprint?

  Now the neighboring state to the south of this kingdom was the Duchy of Freedom. And just as people in the Kingdom of Tongue-Tied respected the word and honored language so highly, those of the duchy to the south celebrated freedom so much that they kept it locked up in an undisclosed location in the ruler’s own castle and never let anyone get near it. Once a year, the Freedomards marched in an annual procession to the castle, sang their thundering songs, and praised the prince for protecting freedom at whatever the cost. Then the prince himself stepped out onto the balcony, said that he wanted to tell them all about freedom’s state of health, and proceeded to do so. The people could well believe that the prince was serious about freedom, because he set up jails and penitentiaries throughout the duchy as a defense against the attacks on it people were always launching. If they wanted to hear how the freedom they personally had among them looked at the time, the answer was, according to castle employees, that she was a little old lady with a bad cough who walked bent over and spit up into her handkerchief, the duke led her around by the arm, she was practically blind and walked with a cane. She was, to hear several courtiers tell it, not unattractive, down-at-heel as she was. The duke told her all about what was happening in the country as they ate their meals together, and the old lady picked at her food, smiled a melancholy smile, and dreamily said, “What do they still want with me? I don’t understand. After all, there’s a time and a place for everything. I’m only a prejudice.” The duke continued to think of her with respect and deference, however, and saw her as his most valuable possession, the jewel in his crown. He always kept his jails and penitentiaries full in her honor, for where can anyone learn to respect freedom better than there, he said, where they have to do without it. Therefore, everyone had to take their turn passing through jail once; the duke granted no exceptions. And whenever anyone, furious that he’d have to go to jail anyway, committed an actual crime, the duke immediately chopped off
his head for being pushy. The Kingdom of Tongue-Tied and the Duchy of Freedom maintained good relations with each other and used to trade a certain percentage of their populations annually, in order to rear as great a race of good citizens and exemplary human beings as possible. These two states lasted a very long time, and it is even possible that they still exist today, but little is known on that topic since our geography and history focus primarily on the stratosphere.

  TRAFFIC WITH THE BEYOND

  IN THE midsize English city of E., during the war, a spiritualist society finally managed to find an excellent medium who drew large crowds to the society and its events. He was an elegant young man, staying in a sanatorium outside the city to recover from a nervous shock and occasionally relaxing with a few drinks in the local nightclub; it was said he gambled. One day, he was invited along to a private society event, involving table turning, etc., and there, for the first time, and to young Wiscott’s own amazement, his mediumistic abilities were revealed. He was rather alarmed, indeed outraged, at how they congratulated him on his rare gift, and in the following days and weeks they had to drag him almost violently from his sanatorium to a session in the city. He tried to take refuge behind his doctor, but the latter himself took a lively interest in the experiments.