Two Women and a Poisoning

by Alfred Doblin

  Not far away, in Mrs D.’s house, his wife felt calmer, glad to be in Grete’s hands. She hadn’t gone to her parents’ this time. Her friend was close by; all was plain and clear. She went to see a lawyer, Dr S., and told him of the maltreatment. The lawyer applied for a temporary injunction that would permit her to live apart from her husband and charge him with paying her a monthly allowance and advance court costs. The medical certificate and a statutory declaration from Mrs Bende and her mother were presented as substantiation. On 19 January the temporary injunction was granted without a hearing. Divorce proceedings were fixed for 9 February.

  That was Elli’s course of battle. She was all set to free herself, to sever her ties with Link. Things would have continued along this path. But a few houses down the road—tormented, full of self-reproach and morbidly unhappy—Link was steadying his nerves with beer and schnapps, and demanding his wife. His sense of urgency was such that he stopped writing letters and took it upon himself to travel by train to her parents in Braunschweig. He couldn’t let her go. He was plunging headlong, unrestrained. Just as, previously, he had beaten his wife, drunk himself into a stupor, ripped things to shreds and smashed furniture, he now felt compelled to write letters and dash to the station. It wasn’t an urge to improve anything or to change himself, but a bleak, unrestrained surrender. A grinding compulsion.

  His in-laws were not welcoming. Elli’s letters had upset them. Her mother was in two minds. Her father maintained his old patriarchal view: a woman belongs to her husband. He gave Link Elli’s address. And when Link’s beseeching, almost humble letters received cold, disdainful replies, Elli’s father accompanied Link to Berlin.

  The ring around Elli and Link was tightening. The two men saw to that. The only question was which of the pair would survive, Elli or Link.

  On her own initiative—and urged on by Grete—Elli had set the process of separation in motion. But as she sat alone in her room or with her friend, she began to have second thoughts. And when her family became insistent and Link turned up with her father, those thoughts grew stronger. Elli was repelled by the terrible Link—by the bullying, the rape, the black moods—but she was beginning to feel trapped by Grete and her thirst for love. There were also things she missed. It seemed to her that Grete had less to offer than Link. She couldn’t give her a home or social dignity, not to mention financial support or the normal sexual life which, in spite of everything, she had adapted to. She’d jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. That wasn’t what she wanted. She had no desire to be tied to Grete, to give herself up to her so completely. Shame and guilt at their relations throbbed away in her constantly. It reached a climax when her father arrived.

  What she really wanted was to flit around a bit, enjoy a not overly rigid marriage, and stay close to her father and mother. Although she’d gone her own way at an early age, she had never quite left the parental home, always remained the daughter. Her love of fun, too, was that of a maiden daughter who is dismissive, and even fearful, of all things sexual.

  Her father was accompanied by Link. She had known he would come looking for her and that he’d do his damnedest to find her. Grete was right, he was a boorish scoundrel. Elli took pleasure in upbraiding him in front of her father. In these altercations, too, she showed herself her father’s daughter; she was more than a match for the simple man from Braunschweig. Link was soft, admitted his guilt. Feeling triumphant—and giving vent to her hatred and vindictiveness—Elli continued to heap him with accusations of boorishness and depravity. She was of one mind with her father.

  It wasn’t long since she had run to the lawyer to petition for a divorce. Now she changed tack. Her father remained firm: a woman belongs to her husband. Seeing her father was, once again, an event for her; he was her family, her home soil; she stooped to the well-spring and drank. She had worked off most of her recent agitation. She would and must obey her father. She had to. Now, more than ever, she was intimately bound up with him. It was he who had married her to Link. Link took on a new face. Elli’s relations with Margarete emerged in a clearer and very disagreeable light. Watching and listening to her father, she was ashamed of her hateful male wildness. Link was tame; her parents were taking care of her: it might all end well. It would all end well.

  Her father left. She promised him she would return to Link. But there remained within her—especially after her father’s departure—a certain unease, a lingering doubt. There was something unsatisfactory about deciding to go back. Elli felt discontent as she relented; her fear and anxiety and misgivings vented themselves in scenes of strife. It was two days before she gave up her room at Mrs D.’s. For two days she remained undecided, torn. It was a relief to her when, on the third day, her husband flew into a rage and threatened her. She went back with him to their flat. She did as she was told. Father and husband had decided for her. She felt strangely little shame before Grete; her feelings for her friend had strangely faded over the last few days.

  •

  Once Link had her back, he felt better again. The compulsion had released its hold on him—or perhaps he was sated. His mind was at ease. He could sleep and work and laugh and be glad with her. What a good wife he had! And she respected him. She was ebullient. They walked arm in arm. Elli rarely thought of Grete. She thought she might let her go. These were days almost happier than the time of her engagement. Ten days. The two of them were deep in wilful obfuscation, an almost dreamlike state which was partly an act and couldn’t be sustained.

  It was little things that brought them to themselves and opened their eyes to each other. It began with the return of a certain tone of voice, with bouts of ill humour, petty squabbles. They both began to slide. Soon they were back on the well-worn path.

  They had fallen back to earth. That was how it felt. They hadn’t bettered themselves—only forgotten themselves. And what a fall. Everything in smithereens. Raging with disappointment, Elli stood there in awful fury and thought angrily of her father—but it wasn’t her father she was thinking of now. She’d only just escaped and that husband of hers had fetched her back; divorce proceedings were already underway and he’d brought her back—for this. He too was angry and didn’t see that he hadn’t had the strength of will for reconciliation any more than she had. He was determined not to spare her in any way. She’d made him run after her and fetch her back by force. Now she must pay for it.

  Link felt as if he’d recovered his freedom. Such was his confusion. But Elli too felt as if she were her own person again. Link let himself go. Let himself loose on his wife. Drinking gave him courage, impetus. The awful and destructive spirit that inhabited him—the spirit of disappointment and rejection—drove him again and again to beer and schnapps. At such times, he cast off all restraint. The woman must be brought to her knees, shown who was master. He was relentless, forcing her lower and lower. He plagued her like an insect. He tipped food into their bed. He threw punches at her and laid into her with rubber truncheons and walking sticks. He didn’t do it for pleasure. He was an unhappy man. He did it compulsively—blindly destructive, bitterly distressed, wracked by torment. Sometimes, after these fits of rage—after beating and insulting her, ripping up clothes and bed linen—he would emerge tired and calm from his dark savage mood. Usually, though, he felt a vain struggle inside him. A dull urge for release. He often went for her with a knife. And afterwards, when she’d freed herself from him, begging and hitting and kicking—one night he even tried to throw her out of the window naked—after-wards, he would pace about, rage some more, then walk out of the room, and before long she would hear a rattling sound and he’d be hanging on the sitting-room door or the broom-cupboard door by a rope, already blue in the face. Horrified, she would cut the noose and lay him down, filled with loathing and disgust.

  At about this time, the fate of Link’s father, who had died by hanging, began to insinuate itself into his life with growing persistence. The further Link deteriorated, the more he fell prey to that old fate, the more he
came to embody it. Even without his wife’s efforts, Link was heading for death. He was a wreck. He began to show signs of epileptic degeneration.

  His sexual urge was heightened. His attempts to humiliate his wife grew fiercer and more frequent. Once again he led her on, driving her into the dark sphere of hatred, arousing in her the urges that would later be so hideously turned against him. It was, ultimately, his own compulsive hatred that killed him. He rooted around in her body, eking sensuality out of every fold of her skin. He felt the urge to devour her, literally, almost physically. It was no mere turn of phrase when he told her in these fits of gluttony that he had to have her faeces—to eat them, swallow them. This happened when he was drunk, but it also happened without alcohol. It was self-flagellation, submission, mortification, penance for his inferiority and depravity. But at the same time, it was an attempt to cure himself of his sense of inferiority—by eliminating ambiguity. Quite apart from that, there was his wild lust—a murderous rage, cloaked in brutish tenderness.

  In the savage sphere of hatred he engendered, she was soon as one with him, although she continued to resist outwardly, trying to push things away. Wasn’t he, she would ask, ashamed to treat her in such a way? ‘You’re my wife, aren’t you?’ was the cynical reply. ‘Shouldn’t have married a workhorse, if you don’t like it.’ She would withdraw into her shell and hide when he spoke like that. But she had drawn him into her shell with her.

  What was to happen now? Elli had often begged her husband for a child. He told her that if she had one, he’d put it straight out on the ice or stick a needle in its skull. She was on her own. Overcoming the shame she felt towards Grete for going back to Link, she again threw herself at her friend. She was uneasy to begin with. But she needed Grete—to talk, to give vent to her feelings and she didn’t know what else. Everything was churning away inside her. So much so that she was often muddled, didn’t know where she was or what she was doing. She felt confused anger at having gone back to Link—and because he had broken his word to her and her father that he would live at peace with her. And she felt boundless, tumultuous hatred towards the man who had abused her father’s authority and now said to her, tauntingly, when they argued: you won’t get away from me again. There was a constant rankling in her mind, she later said; she couldn’t fight it. The sphere of hatred overwhelmed her, sucking up all her energy. To punish Elli for her forgetfulness, her bickering, her sexual rejection, Link stopped her allowance. But he wouldn’t let her go to work. For all he cared, he said, she could earn money from men.

  •

  When Link had turned up at Mrs D.’s, Grete Bende had worried for Elli. She was bitter when she heard the next day that Elli was already back at home, perhaps lying in Link’s arms even as she fretted. They didn’t see much of each other in the week that followed. Elli avoided Grete, and if they chanced to meet on the street, Elli would abandon her friend after a brief, awkward conversation, and Grete would hurry home to take up her beloved pen and complain about this hurtful treatment, ‘when you alone know that I cling to you like a burr on a dress. Why must you make me feel it so keenly when you’re getting along well with Link? I could cry every time, my love, when I think of the cheerful way you went off with him.’ Grete’s grief didn’t last long. She took Elli back as a repentant sinner. She was piqued that Elli had treated her as she had. But her love was fierce.

  Elli was distraught, confused, downcast. She clutched at her friend, certain of only one thing: she needed her, wanted her, had to have her now. Her one desperate thought was that she must punish her husband—cast off the insult and disgrace that he had inflicted on her and her father. There must be an end to Link. He had roused wild feelings in her. Elli suddenly loved her friend with a passion. She was surprised at herself. She loved Grete the way a fugitive loves his hiding place or his gun, and threw herself furiously, ominously into her love. At the same time, she clung to her friend to preserve herself from the worst, for she already had some notion of what her lust for revenge might prompt her to do, and wanted to wrap herself about in fierce love, to make herself deaf and blind. Elli was already using the mysterious, obfuscating words that she would later repeat tirelessly: she wanted to prove her love to Grete.

  This ardent love for Grete that was stirring in Elli was not a strong impulse that had been lying dormant, but a passion engendered and created by these particular circumstances. They unearthed something that lay atrophied inside her, an old, run-down mechanism. As people drowning in a shipwreck will perform monstrous deeds that it is almost impossible to believe their own, Elli was for some time at the mercy of an ineluctable force that sprang up inside her. It was the terrible man she had taken into her being and now had to cast out again.

  The two women stoked their feelings of love with a constantly replenished hatred of their husbands—or, more precisely, of Link, for Grete’s hatred of her husband was a pale imitation of Elli’s; it was all show. Their thoughts of hatred served to justify and conceal the unmentionable peculiarity of their love, which they themselves considered criminal and punishable. Elli found an especial strength and security in their conversations, embraces, caresses. She felt just as Grete had when she once wrote: ‘It is a real tragedy that we should be saddled with such types and have to do ourselves such violence.’ She felt peace and security in a particular zone of her psyche—a zone to which she banished herself to contend with her husband. It was a zone consistent with her self: dangerous thoughts of revenge were at work in her; she wanted to do secret, criminal things. Throwing herself at Grete Bende was the first real step into forbidden territory.

  The idea came to Elli first: Link must take to his bed so that he’d see what a woman was worth. This was already a clear wish for murder, but Elli disguised that from herself. Consciously, she was not yet ready to do away with him. Consciously, she was still wondering: How can I make him change his ways? The two women were now very restless. Their husbands kept them apart; Link was more brutal than ever. The women didn’t know what to do. They went to fortune tellers who made the usual vague intimations about the future. Elli toyed with the idea of divorce, but again abandoned it. Why? Because she was already pondering a different solution in her mind; she said she doubted she’d find a lawyer who would agree to divorce them. In her letters, she often expressed shame at having returned to Link and caused her friend such pain: ‘But you alone, you alone shall see, I will show you—I will sacrifice everything, even if it costs me my life.’

  •

  In these weeks with Grete, clear-headed, sober-minded Elli entered a strange and fanciful state of romantic exhilaration. It was something like the mood that had bound her to Link for a fortnight, only much more so—first dreamlike and then delirious. There was a complete shift in her inner outlook, a change in her emotional timbre. This was the effect of two powerful forces at work inside her: her indomitable hatred of Link—a feeling she wanted to drive out—and her passionate love for Grete. Elli’s love in particular raised her to heroic heights, drove her to manliness and heroism. ‘I’ll prove my love to you,’ she insisted, over and over. The two extreme and closely coupled emotions fascinated her. She fell under the spell of this fascination; it was to be some time before she emerged. She was often in a state of rapture and in this state it seemed to her that she lived only for Grete: ‘Cost what it will, my only wish is to be happy and absorbed in my love.’ She wouldn’t listen when Grete tried to blame herself: ‘No, I lay no blame on you.’ Meanwhile, that other emotion kept surfacing: ‘I want revenge and nothing more.’ On whom did she want to take revenge, whom did she mean to punish, why did her urge for vengeance assume such fantastical forms? By this time, it was no longer an individual she was attacking—no longer the real-life man, Link.

  At first, the sphere of hatred he had created within her drew to it the most powerful forces in her psyche; it expanded of its own accord, growing, looking for objects to fix on. But her old, underlying emotions took up position against this sphere, this alien p
ower that had been hammered into her. She’d been in a state of inner balance that hadn’t been easy to establish. The hatred had destroyed this balance, knocked her off kilter. Now the fine play of static forces was disturbed and the mechanism was working hard to readjust, to return to its old, secure state. Elli had to push away the new, top-heavy load and seek to re-establish order in her inner forces. She felt this task to be all the more urgent, because the sphere of hatred seemed to her alien, wicked, dangerous and frightening—out to destroy her inner purity, her liberty, her virginity. For, in a sense, Elli was and always would be virginal. She was engaged in an act of purging; a mass of pus was collecting around the infectious foreign body within her. The subliminal will to act had already taken root inside her. It thrived on Elli’s fascination, her dreamlike state. It needed them. They were ideal conditions for its growth. And Elli, who had been drifting for some time, let it happen—indeed, she rushed into it. It was as if she were taking refuge in a trance or sleep.