Two Women and a Poisoning

by Alfred Doblin

  •

  Elli had a special nature, though not a rare one. There was a naïve freshness about her; she was as blithe as a canary, as fun-loving as a child. She took pleasure in leading men on. Perhaps she yielded to one or other of them—out of curiosity, out of fascination for the other sex, or because she liked an innocent romp. She was surprised and amused at how seriously the men took it, how excited they grew. It struck her as funny. They came running along and you gave them a spin and sent them on their way. Then came Link, the young carpenter.

  Link was dogged and earnest. He was an avid Communist and talked about political things Elli didn’t understand. He fastened onto her, attracted by her shock of blond hair, her full, healthy cheeks, her cheerful outlook on life. She was sometimes so exuberant it made his heart swell. He wanted this woman as his wife. He wanted her at his side.

  She saw nothing funny in that. Link was different from the men she was used to. He worked in the same profession as her father; she understood him when he talked shop. This somewhat constrained her behaviour. She couldn’t play her usual little games. She felt pleased and honoured to be courted by him; she was in familiar waters. But at the same time, she was going to have to change; he had her in his grasp.

  Elli sent home tentative reports: she had a good, steady position and was being wooed by a Mr Link, a hard-working carpenter with a decent income. This news earned her praise. Father and Mother were delighted. And, as Elli thought things over, she herself felt a certain pleasure. Really, she was quite fond of Link. He intended to provide for her, to let her keep house. It seemed to her that a marriage was something awfully droll, but nice. He wants to provide for me, she thought, and he’s pleased at the idea. She really was quite fond of him. Still, she continued to have the occasional secret fling.

  Link was in thrall to her. The longer they were together, the clearer this became to Elli. At first she thought nothing of it. All men were like that. But then it became irksome. It was so pronounced in him—so persistent. Almost imperceptibly, something took shape inside her; she began to resent him. Link prevented her from pursuing the fantasies she had begun to weave. She had fancied him a serious man, of the same stamp as her father; she had hoped to raise a family with him. Now he sank to the level of her previous lovers—no, lower still, because he hung on to her so, clung to her with such awful tenacity. Annoyed and pained, she realised that you could play games with him. He positively invited it.

  She stayed with him. Things were already running their course. But the more time passed, the more aggrieved she felt. It was galling. Link had put on a front; she’d seen herself rising in the world. Now she was ashamed, not least of herself. It was a hideous disappointment.

  This came out in occasional fits of rage. She was often not nice to him, rounding on him fiercely, shouting at him as if he were a dog. He was appalled. She wants rid of me, he thought.

  She brushed things aside. He wants to marry me—why not? The prospect of keeping house was not to be sniffed at. And then he was so pitiful; she felt sorry for the man. She’d manage him somehow. She spent hours happily fantasising about married life. She would be a wife, with a family like her own. Her husband had a good position, he loved her, he was a serious man. They married in November 1920. She was twenty-one and he was twenty-eight.

  •

  They went to live with Link’s mother. Elli was given no hand in the housekeeping. Her mother-in-law had said she would move out, but she didn’t. She was not very kind to her son and he didn’t much care for her. She wouldn’t budge an inch to accommodate her young daughter-in-law. Every time they quarrelled, Link took his wife’s side, deferring to her and hurling abuse at his mother. Young Elli listened, afraid that he might one day treat her like that. When she told him this, he grumbled at her. What are you on about? His income began to dwindle and he allowed her to take hairdressing customers. That strengthened her position against her mother-in-law. Now Elli kept house and managed the finances during the week. The old woman was allowed to step into the breach on Saturdays and Sundays, when Elli helped out in the business.

  Then came a time when Link began to go out a great deal in the evenings. Soon he was going out alone every evening, leaving his young wife at home. She felt neglected. She complained that there was no pleasing him. He had rushed her into marriage. What had gone wrong?

  He had grown up with his mother in an atmosphere of hard work and peevishness. He was keen to better himself. His fun-loving, tousle-headed wife had no fellow feeling with him; she remained as wayward as ever, following her whims, chopping and changing. One moment she clung to him, the next it was as if he didn’t exist. Who is this man? she asked herself. He was a coarse fellow, fond of calling himself a workhorse. Now, wanting to possess her entirely, he drew closer to her—physically.

  She had been involved with plenty of men in the past, but here was a man thrusting himself on her, who couldn’t be shaken off with a laugh or a gesture of exasperation when things got too much. Here was a man making demands on her, a man who could claim a husband’s rights. The physical contact distressed her. She suffered it in silence; there was something unpleasantly exciting about it. She forced herself to suffer her husband because she knew it was part of being married, but she would have preferred it if that particular part hadn’t existed. She was always glad when she was once more lying alone.

  Link had married a sweet young woman. He had thought himself lucky to have found her. Now he was cursing himself. What was this nonsense? She took her childish games too far; she wasn’t good to him. He could be as nice as he liked to her during the day—and she was often bad enough then—but at night, in his embrace, she was dead. He resented her. She wasn’t changing; now he had no home. He could treat her as tenderly as a doll, but when he tried to unite himself with her in order to win her entirely, she remained aloof, wouldn’t let him near her.

  She sensed his unease and it gave her pleasure. A gloating pleasure. He should just leave her alone. The next moment, she would try to be a wife to him again, to change the way she felt. But she couldn’t. She realised anxiously that she was out of her depth. The thought flitted through her mind; more than once it drove her to yield to him. But her reluctance—that I don’t want to—was growing stronger, and she felt a vast sense of revulsion.

  In the evenings he escaped to his meetings—the more active and radical the better. The old sense of unworthiness reared its head. I’m not good enough for her, he told himself. She’s putting on airs. He worried away at the thought. At other times, trembling with emotion, he determined to get the better of her. He was profoundly shaken by her sexual aversion.

  •

  Now when they faced one another, their positions had changed. He was disappointed, cheated of his expectations. Elli gave this violent and deeply divided man no joy, no fresh, new impetus; she withheld from him the warm, nurturing love she had shown him in earlier days—the love for which he had courted her. It was a disappointment similar to hers when she realised: This is not the serious man I want to follow. He shouted and made scenes in an attempt to shake it off. Then he began to fight. The matter was vital to him. He would not give Elli up. At first he took advantage of the situation to settle old scores: he lost all restraint, raged over nothing. His vengefulness was something of a boon to him; it almost reconciled him to her. This was in the first half of 1921. They had been married only a few months. He wanted to keep the nice, fun-loving girl he had married; she still had her old ways, her charm that reminded him of better times. He wanted to hang on to that. He wanted to hang on to her. He wanted to love her. He fell into bad ways.

  Without knowing how or why, and with considerable inner resistance, he began to indulge in rough sexual treatment of her. To make violent, wild, extreme demands. There was a jolt in their relations; something shifted inside him. He couldn’t resist the foul impulse. It wasn’t until later that he realised he was treating her like a flirt, only more fiercely, more passionately. He was trying to h
ide his troubles behind his wild behaviour. He was trying to punish Elli, to degrade her in the very province in which she eluded him. She didn’t like it—so much the better: her reluctance aroused him, heightened the thrill. He wanted anger. And deep down inside him, another emotion was stirring: by coming to her with his old reviled ways, he was subjugating himself to her all over again. He was exposing himself to her, seeking her approval. He wanted her to approve him, to improve him. If not one way, then the other.

  She understood, read the signs right. She was already used to going along with a certain amount to punish herself for her sexual inadequacy; there were times when she wasn’t comforted by the all-consuming feeling of revulsion that made her husband seem unclean, gave him a bad smell. Now, although repelled and even afraid, she sensed that he was changing and wouldn’t, in spite of everything, loose his grasp on her—that he was, once again, the old, supplicant lover, subjugating himself to her in a new way. She sensed that between all the ranting and raging and beating, he was once more yielding submission to her. And although she couldn’t devote herself to him body and soul, this suited her better. When he came to her now, she felt an anxious but not unpleasurable excitement. She was pleased that he came and pleased that he suffered because he couldn’t have her. It was, as it were, a continuation of their quarrel, their way of bringing the fight to a conclusion. It was more brawl than embrace. Gone was the sweet, pitiful, foolish behaviour of the past, the unmanly whisperings. He had opened up new territory inside her.

  And so a quivering peace was made between them. He was led home in a new way and bound to her, as he wished to be. He had refused to give her up—and she had been swept along by him. There was no denying they had grown closer. But it was a path beset by dangers.

  It didn’t stop at fierce embraces. Husband and wife continued to change. Their wild behaviour flickered on into the day. They both grew more unbalanced and more in need of balance. They grew increasingly bad-tempered, irritable, fraught. She kept a beady eye on him, watching and waiting to see what he would do next.

  He was filled with a feverish desire to let himself go. He raged in her presence, ripped clothes to shreds, tipped baskets of washing on the floor, all the time conscious of the pleasure it gave him. Best she saw him the way he was. He exposed himself more and more, telling himself in answer to his self-reproach that she must be punished, that he was master in his own house. He had wanted to start a new life with Elli; now there were times when he realised with disappointment that he was falling back into his old habits, powerless to stop himself. Sometimes he was seized with panic, filled with misery at himself, at Elli, at the state of his marriage. Distressed at the course things had taken. It was better when he wasn’t at home. In those months halfway through the first year of their marriage, he spent almost all his evenings in public houses, cramming his head with radical political ideas. He took to drink. In inebriation he recovered his old freedom and peace of mind; he wasn’t always longing for other things. He’d go home drunk and there was his wife. She had to submit to him—with or without beatings. And all was well.

  •

  As these changes took place in him, Elli grew quieter. She felt outmanoeuvred. Was she not, in fact, already defeated? Hatred stirred in her. Link began to beat her more often. They were sometimes up arguing until three in the morning and their quarrels were no longer subliminal embraces. Their wildness had almost entirely lost its old seductive purpose and given way to sheer brutality. And when he fell on her, the sexual, too, was bereft of emotion; Elli felt nothing but awful revulsion, swelling outrage and hatred. Elli, who had skipped into marriage with a smile and a sneer, had met with a brutal master.

  They were still in Link’s mother’s flat and the old woman took a gleeful interest in developments. Link no longer sided with Elli; his mother was turning him against his young wife.

  Elli was consumed with anger. She wanted to get away from Link. When she told him so in one of their daily arguments, he scornfully threw her trunk at her feet. But if she was angry at Link, she was angrier still at his stirrer of a mother. Elli warned that something would happen if things didn’t change soon. Her mother-in-law felt guilty—she was afraid of the girl. Once she drank a cup of coffee Elli gave her. She thought it smelt sharp and acrid, and when she tried it with the tip of her tongue, it stung unpleasantly. You’re trying to poison me! she flung at her daughter-in-law.

  Elli tried the coffee herself and shrugged. You can live to be a hundred with me. The old woman told her neighbours about it; she told her son, who grew very sombre.

  But now Elli changed tack. In June 1921, not long after the coffee incident, she left the flat in Berlin and went to her parents’ house in Braunschweig. In a fit of vindictiveness, she took with her all the money she could lay hands on—even what her husband had got for selling his bicycle, even the coppers from the gas meter.

  •

  Elli was in Braunschweig for a fortnight. She explained the domestic situation as best she could and her simple, petty bourgeois parents shook their heads. They didn’t dwell on the subject. They thought she was exaggerating; she should calm down and stop being so childish. Elli herself was anxious to leave the horrors behind. She tried, with near violence, to resume life in her old surroundings. Her parents wouldn’t own that she was right, but then, she was used to yielding to their calm opinions.

  Her crabby husband, meanwhile, was left alone in the flat in Friedrichsfelde, listening to his mother grousing on about his bad, runaway wife. He roared at her, furious with her, furious with Elli, distressed with himself. But no amount of shouting could soften the blow he had been dealt; he was deeply sobered. Letters from him arrived in Braunschweig. In one of them, Elli thought she detected the voice of her mother-in-law. There had been terrible arguments in Berlin over that cup of coffee; now Link brought it up again: ‘You must promise you won’t do that to Mother, then everything will change.’ He wrote in tentative, vaguely conciliatory tones. Her parents urged her to go back—he was waiting for her. She was beginning to feel freer. Her father was glad when, very reluctantly, she left, eager to please her parents. Her mother couldn’t quite reconcile herself to the look of hesitation, the strained expression on her daughter’s usually sunny face.

  And no sooner were they together in Berlin than all hell broke loose again. It was as if they picked up their exchange where they had left off. Realising, almost as soon as they saw each other, that nothing had changed between them, they rushed headlong into their old quarrels. Now, though, Link had additional grievances to cover up and make good: anger at Elli for running away, humiliation at being left, shame at having fetched her back. Elli stood up to him, but before long she was quivering, suffering. Her parents hadn’t wanted to keep her. Her husband beat her and she was no physical match for him. She couldn’t face the endless, painful struggle. She felt that she was becoming a stranger to herself. She thought of the past, of all that had happened to her, of her life at home in Braunschweig. She thought of the person she had been at home and in Wriezen, and of the person she had become since. She sat there helpless, listless and sick of herself one moment, capable of anything the next.

  He noticed her hostility. It gave him a jolt. He was shaken, called back to himself. He berated her. Why was she crying? It was her own fault. He went about feeling resentful and guilty, sometimes struggling with his old tenderness. Something had to happen. Something had to change. He acted on the resolve he had made in Elli’s absence and arranged for them to move, to leave his mother’s flat. We’ll move away from Mother, he thought. That will help.

  In early August 1921, they took a furnished flat in W. Strasse let by a Mrs E. They also began to go out together sometimes. On 14 August, Link took Elli along with him to Mr E.’s public house, the Hunting Lodge, to see a man he’d met not long before. This man was a railway guard called Bende. Like Link, he had brought his wife along with him. Margarete, she was called. Grete.

  She was twenty-five, three years ol
der than Elli, with sharply cut, almost severe features, brown eyes, a tall, rather bony figure. She sat beside her husband, a former sergeant, a stalwart, strapping man. He wasn’t gloomy and troubled like Link, wasn’t after Margarete as Link was after Elli. He had ways of his own. He was brisk and adroit, a man who had his wife under his thumb and liked to indulge himself. Margarete Bende was more reserved than Elli. There was nothing light-hearted or vivacious about her. She lived with her mother, to whom she was much attached. During the war she had become engaged to Bende, rapturous at joining herself to him. ‘O blessed hours, o sweet felicity,’ she wrote to her dear Willi at the front in September 1917. ‘When, oh when, will you come back to me?’ She signed herself his devoted Grete. In May 1918 they had married. The marriage had been very unsettled. It was hard for Margarete to prevail against her husband. If it hadn’t been for her mother, she would have been pushed right into the background.

  Elli was looking about her at that time. She needed something to lean on.

  The women talked. While their husbands drank and made coarse jokes, they looked at one another, probing each other with their eyes. Margarete saw Elli’s distress, but more than that, she saw her childlike manner, her slight figure, her shock of blond hair. They left together. They both lived in W. Strasse and arranged to meet. In the Bendes’ flat Elli also met Margarete’s mother, Mrs Schnürer, a kindly elderly woman with blue eyes. In the Bendes’ flat they grew closer.

  Mother and daughter noticed that Elli liked visiting them. And Elli saw that the two women held together against Bende. Mrs Schnürer was a calm, maternal woman and Grete good to Elli in a warm, affectionate way. For a short while, they sounded each other out. Then, on both sides, there was a release, an unburdening. Haltingly, in fits and starts, Elli told Margarete what she could and Margarete listened feelingly. Elli had accomplished something: she was taken in, given protection. She didn’t need to go to Braunschweig. It was a complete transformation, a liberation. She had rediscovered the old part of her soul, the good part—no longer screamed at or sat about helpless when Link raged, sure in the knowledge that she wouldn’t challenge him. Soon she was seeing things as she had in the beginning: wasn’t this the man who had fastened onto her, clung to her? Living under him, she had grown almost weak—no, loathsome. She pushed the shameful memories away. Cleaved instead to the image of Margarete, thought of her when she went home.