It Cannot be Stormed

by Ernst von Salomon

  Ladies in fancy costume or in evening-dress were standing in front of long mirrors. Helene threw her wrap on the cloak-room table. Ive stood behind her and noticed how her brownish shoulders were drawn together with every movement she made. He took off his coat, folded it so that the torn lining would not show, and waited. Helene powdered her face. A girl with long, black-stockinged legs, a white frock and a cap with wide-spreading flaps, bent down to pull up her stocking. Mickey Mouse, thought Ive, and at the same moment noticed a hippopotamus in a tail-coat approaching Helene. That’s Jakobsohn, thought Ive. He took the cloak-room tickets and felt a sinking in his stomach. Blindly he felt in his pocket; but there was money. Helene must have put some there.

  He went up to Jakobsohn like a drunken man, pulling into place his ridiculous coat, sizes too large for him. He took a rather soft hand and smiled, and cursed himself for smiling. Then he trotted after the two of them. Heavens, he thought to himself, since when have I suffered from an inferiority complex? He caught himself trying to look at ease. That’s it, he thought, as soon as you can put a name to it, the thing exists, not before. Facts are created, not conquered, by consciousness of them. You don’t get classes until you get class-consciousness. The problem doesn’t exist till then. What class do I belong to? thought Ive. Certainly not to that one. Certainly not to the Mickey Mouse world. Nothing but shit, Claus Heim would say. Claus Heim. Ive no longer tried to look at ease. I should like to know what Dr. Siegmund Freud would make of Claus Heim, he thought, and smiled with delight at the idea. A waiter pushed a chair out of the way in front of him. Ladies and gentlemen passed by him. The ballroom had been artistically decorated with gay festoons in blue, red, and yellow. Jakobsohn had had two places reserved. Ive seized a chair for himself, expecting that any minute a gentleman would come and say: ‘Excuse me.’ But no one came. They sat exactly opposite the band of unemployed musicians in dinner-jackets; this was probably one of the usual charity balls that show a deficit. He looked attentively at the cellist. He was an elderly man with rimless glasses and a crushed expression. He was not smiling like the conductor and the man at the percussion instruments, who by knee gyrations and all sorts of contortions of the shoulder joints gave the impression of being in exceedingly high spirits. On the dance floor a number of couples were moving, a dense mass of bodies was circling round the small free space in the centre. But there was no uniformity to be seen in the steps, the couples merely moved to the rhythm of the music. A few of the men only were in fancy costume; most of them wore simple smocks, or white flannel trousers and light shirts with a scarf round their necks; a number of them had blue-and-white striped sailor-jerseys, with short sleeves, which made them look very audacious. The women leant back seriously in the crooked arms of their partners. From time to time, at a particularly long-drawn-out note of the muffled trumpet, one of them would raise her leg, stretch it out stiffly and then bring it gracefully down again. From time to time one of them would smile, throwing back her head, and straining on her narrow shoulder-straps.

  Helene was dancing with Jakobsohn. She was slightly taller than he was, and his arm was round her hips. Helene looked down at him, so that she seemed to have her eyes closed. The Mickey Mouse stuck her bottom out well away from her partner, and held the string of a green balloon in her hand. Many of the ladies had balloons, and the swaying of the gay-coloured globes above the monotonous swarm of heads gave the scene its appropriate character of movement and colour.

  Ive saw Schaffer in a black Russian blouse and a saucy beret, and he would have thought he was intended for an anarchist if he had not known his lamentable predilection for roller-skating. He was talking to a Communist, whom Ive knew, and who had turned up blatantly in a brilliant red silk shirt. Ive walked across between the dancing couples to greet Schaffer, but half-way across the room he stopped. Why should I? he asked himself, turned round, and pushed his way back through the crowd.

  As soon as the music stopped, there were a few seconds’ silence; the scraping of feet and hubbub of voices only began again slowly. On nearly all the tables there were a few bottles of wine and plenty of bottles of lemonade. Helene returned on Jakobsohn’s arm, flicking her ridiculous little whip in front of his eyes. Ive pushed back the glass that the waiter set in front of him. Helene nodded at him quietly, rested her chin on her hand, and looked silently into the room. Jakobsohn too was silent, smoking a very black cigar. In the adjoining box someone was saying:

  ‘You see, I’m of opinion that the Nazis should be given a chance, to see what they can pull off. . .’

  Jakobsohn looked across furiously. At one of the tables some girls in very daring evening-dress were laughing, and every head was turned in their direction. Now and again men would pass along the gangways behind the boxes, cigarettes held negligently in their hands, scanning the tables with astonishing equanimity, as though they were looking for someone, which, of course, was not so. Occasionally couples met friends, stopped, shook hands and laughed, asked hurried questions about things that didn’t interest them, nodded and passed on, turning round to wave good-bye. A gentleman spoke to the waiter, came up to Ive, and tapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, but Ive did not excuse him, going out of his way to be insolent.

  The gentleman seemed to have expected this. He shrugged his shoulders, took another chair, and went away.

  The music began again, and Helene rose to dance with Jakobsohn.

  ‘Don’t bother me with Communists,’ said someone in the adjoining box. ‘I tell you there isn’t any danger of Communism in Germany now. . .’

  Ive drummed with his fingers on the tablecloth, which was gradually getting soiled from ash and cigarette-ends. He drew a few lines on the cloth with a burnt match, and then looked again at the dancers on the floor. Schaffer too was dancing. The muscles of his face were set as he made his steps and he looked completely idiotic. He looked up and caught sight of Ive. For a moment it seemed as though he was going to leave his partner and come over, but, of course, he went on dancing. One gentleman was attracting attention because he was wearing very elegant brown evening clothes.

  ‘That’s the famous criminal advocate Schreivogel,’ said someone in the adjoining box, ‘he’s only famous because he turns up at every ball in brown evening-clothes. . .’

  A Hamburg carpenter, to the accompaniment of much laughter, was trying to drag a girl out to dance with him, but since he did not succeed, he sat down again and rocked backwards and forwards on his chair. Helene passed by. She was looking down at Jakobsohn, so that she seemed to have her eyes closed. What is Jakobsohn getting out of that? thought Ive. But he was dancing with obvious pleasure. Of course, he’s not an enemy, thought Ive, nor was the commissionaire an enemy. But is that a reason, he thought. . . in any case Helene possesses something that I wasn’t able to display— discipline.

  A lady in a close-fitting silver-lame dress, tall, fair and beautiful, stepped hesitatingly into the box, and gazed across over Ive’s head at the dancers. She stood thus for a little while, and then Ive noticed that she was leaning heavily against his chair. He turned round slowly and offered her a cigarette. She said, ‘Thank you,’ in a soft voice, and smiled at him. He gave her a light without speaking, and turned back towards the room. After a little while she walked away. He was sorry for this and rose, but sat down again thinking: My limbs feel as heavy as lead.

  Helene and Jakobsohn returned.

  ‘Enjoyed yourself?’ asked Helene.

  ‘Immensely,’ said Ive.

  ‘Let’s go to the buffet,’ suggested Jakobsohn.

  Helene thought a moment, and then said: ‘Later perhaps.’

  In the adjoining box someone said: ‘Now Brüning, he’s a man. Look how he dealt with the banks?’

  ‘He didn’t go far enough, unfortunately,’ said someone else. ‘If you went and asked for reasonable credit. . .’

  Jakobsohn fondled Helene’s hand. Helene withdrew her hand, but slowly. Jakobsohn looked fixedly in f
ront of him. All three of them stared into the empty room. On the broad, sweeping steps that led up to the orchestra-stand some couples were seated, the ladies with their legs stretched out, smoking and laughing.

  ‘In the present crisis,’ said someone in the adjoining box.

  Jakobsohn lost his temper:

  ‘What do they mean by crisis?’ he said. ‘It’s all a question of confidence. If everybody talks about a crisis, we shall never get on our feet again.’

  He looked at Ive.

  ‘The main thing is to get up off one’s backside somehow,’ said Ive brutally.

  Unpleasant fellow, thought Jakobsohn. The music started up a waltz.

  ‘Let’s dance,’ said Helene to Ive, and Jakobsohn leaned back, taking a very black cigar out of his case.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ive, going up behind Helene.

  Helene danced well, but she always tried to take the lead. She danced very quickly. Ive looked into her face. She looked down at his shoulder, and it seemed as though her eyes were closed. Ive stopped abruptly in the middle of the room.

  ‘Listen,’ he said excitedly, ‘this won’t do. You came here to sell the picture to Jakobsohn. Please be consistent.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Helene softly, and it sounded like a question.

  They danced. He could feel her tense muscles through the thin material of her dress. They danced quickly and distractedly. A wave of gaiety seemed to come over the crowd. Faces were flushed, and many were laughing. Jakobsohn was leaning over the side of the box and smiled at Helene. She nodded back to him gaily. They danced away from the other couples until they came to a clear space, where they twirled round wildly. Round and round, first to the left and then to the right. But Helene’s muscles retained that strange hardness, not the hardness of metal or bone, but like a frozen towel. When the music stopped, everybody clapped. But Helene went up to Jakobsohn while the others began to dance again. Ive followed her slowly. Jakobsohn was rocking to and fro on his chair, and happily blowing away on a toy trumpet. His cigar was burning away on the earthenware ash-tray. Helene stuffed her ears, laughing.

  ‘Manchuria showed us what the League of Nations is up to,’ said someone in the adjoining box. ‘What, Herriot, he’s a Philistine too. . .’

  Helene did not move her hand. She leant towards Jakobsohn and laughed awkwardly. The rouge on her lips had worn off, and remained only as a reddish shadow at the corners of her mouth. What lovely teeth, thought Ive. Helene fixed a small green cap on Jakobsohn’s bald patch, it slipped and sat askew on the back of his head. Jakobsohn made an amused grimace. He edged nearer to Helene, pushed his horn-rimmed glasses down on to the tip of his nose, and peered happily over the top of them.

  ‘Clown,’ said Ive very loudly.

  But beneath his layers of fat Jakobsohn concealed a first-class character.

  ‘I see,’ he said, suddenly serious, to Ive, ‘that you’re determined to insult me. Good God, I can understand that,’ he said. ‘It must be difficult nowadays for young men of your stamp. You can’t adjust yourselves to life.’

  Ive laughed aloud, and rejoiced that his laughter sounded as natural as it was.

  ‘No,’ he laughed, ‘I certainly can’t adjust myself to your life.’

  Jakobsohn turned to Helen and said quietly:

  ‘Well, dear lady, I am prepared to buy the picture. You mustn’t be offended if I tell you frankly that it doesn’t yet seem to me to be absolutely mature work. All the same I see the talent, and I consider it my duty to encourage talent. You’ve told me the price, and I am prepared to pay it. I think it’s a bit high, but everyone should know his own value.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Ive, ‘after all, art is not a luxury, but a favour towards the artist, from the dealer.’

  ‘Nomen est omen,’ said someone in the adjoining box, ‘General von Schleicher. . .’

  Jakobsohn wrote a cheque and, covering it with his hand, passed it to Helene. Helene hesitated and held it for a moment folded up in her hand.

  ‘Put it in your stocking,’ said Ive out loud.

  Helene suddenly looked like a helpless child. Why do I tease her? thought Ive. What a low-down swine I am. But Helene quietly put the cheque in her handbag.

  ‘You’re a very naughty boy,’ she said almost tenderly, ‘Thank you,’ she said to Jakobsohn, ‘that is a great help to me.’

  ‘I’ll talk to your husband about the exhibition later,’ said Jakobsohn, smiling at Helene with fatherly kindness. Ive sat back as though dazed.

  A group of young men were laughing and making a commotion between the tables. They were trying to burst the ladies’ balloons with their cigarettes. A very young girl in wide white trousers and a close-fitting jersey escaped from them and made a dash along the gangways. At last she came to a halt and leant, breathing quickly, against the wall of the box. Five cigarettes took aim at the balloon, which exploded with a weak report. Five young men, with their heads thrust forward, gazed breathlessly at the girl. She stood still a second, looking in front of her with narrowed eyes, then with a deft movement she pushed the cavaliers aside and ran off. A gentleman in a tail coat, with a small white rosette in his buttonhole, bowed to Helene and handed her a card.

  ‘Madam, you are requested,’ he said, bending his head, ‘to take part in the beauty competition. In ten minutes’ time, in the blue room.’

  Ive saw that there was an understanding between the gentleman and Jakobsohn.

  ‘Helene,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ said Helene, ‘I’m only being consistent.’ She said ‘Thank you,’ and took the card, rolling it between her fingers.

  Schaffer came into the box.

  ‘How are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Splendid, thank you,’ said Ive. ‘And you? Having a good time? A nice party,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I don’t know, on the whole I think it’s a bit stupid,’ said Schaffer, looking fixedly at Helene, obviously wishing to be introduced to her. But the idea never occurred to Ive.

  ‘Of course, your wife isn’t here?’ he said. ‘How is she?’

  ‘Thank you, very well, very well,’ said Schaffer. ‘Well, till Friday evening,’ and he departed.

  The Mickey Mouse had given rise to great amusement by losing her tail. Helene went off with Jakobsohn to dance. Ive got up clumsily, and paced through the gangways, his hands thrust into his coat pockets. Couples were camped out all over the stairs. Ive strode over them with wide steps.

  ‘Pardon me,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said a girl, brushing off the patches of dirt that the sole of Ive’s shoe had made on her sleeve. The lady in silver lamé was leaning heavily and blissfully against the chest of a very young Argintronian, her blonde head pillowed on his broad shoulder; they both sat motionless looking at the dancers. As Ive passed by he noticed that she was pregnant. He stood behind the bandstand, next to the cellist, and looked into the room. He tried to find Helene among the dancers, but he could not see her. Presently she passed close by him, coming up the steps accompanied by Jakobsohn, and disappeared with some other girls through a door.

  Ive leant over the balustrade of the steps and stared into the room. . . When we were marching back, in the war, he thought, we used to dance nearly every night. The chaps were crazy. Forty kilometres covered in the day and then, at night, instead of flinging themselves down exhausted, started dancing straight away. Sergeant Brückner was furious:

  ‘You can keep on the hop all night, but when it comes to changing guard, all at once you’re too tired.’

  In Kirchenhain the parish priest had warned the girls on Sunday from the pulpit that the soldiers were all infected; and in the evening what a shindy there was in front of his house. He had had to take back his words. But of course the padre had been right. . . That was an achievement, he thought, the way the scourge of venereal disease had been stamped out afterwards. . . He had learned to dance out there. In any old barn, the rain coming in at the roof and the wind blowing through the cracks. When the
y had had a runt ration, one of them would play on a comb covered with paper, and they caught hold of each other and stamped away in their hob-nailed boots and their dirty, crumpled trousers. Ive caught hold of his comrade’s sword buckle and looked at his bronzed, freckled neck emerging broad above his grey tie. One, two, three; one, two, three; it resounded on the floor of the barn. . . Odd that lately he so often thought about the war. Every night during the last few weeks had been filled with wild dreams about the war. I was never so frightened as I am in my dreams, thought Ive. Wait a bit, old chap, you were even more frightened, you were contemptibly frightened. Or is that a pose? The pose of an old soldier—everything is a pose. But always the feeling—that won’t do, the others are looking. But nobody was looking. When the mud used to spurt up in front of your eyes all over the place and you thought— you’ve got to go through that now. . . Say not the hardest task’s to act, the moment, the emotion gives you strength, the hardest task of all is to decide—something like that. Who was it said that? Grillparzer? Of course. Odd. . . But once over the top, it was finished, as though it had never been. As completely vanished as dream-terrors on awakening—all you feel is a huge astonishment. . . Then the fat old innkeeper’s wife brought breakfast. Miserable breakfast, two rolls and a lump of butter, and the refreshing beverage. You can only swallow down such loathsome things standing up and in a hurry. Every morning the flabby rolls made you long for the war bread, the dark, bitter hunk, already slimy or going green in the cracks, and turning into hard lumps in your mouth. But how they enjoyed it. Of course, they grumbled and longed for white, flabby rolls. And when they were hopping round in the barn, man with man, sweating like pigs, they probably thought of girls in evening-dress and ‘caressing dance music.’ God. The Guards may die, but they do not surrender.

  Whenever Ive rode on an omnibus, he always chose the seat on top, right in front, exactly over the driver, who was crouched down below in his little cabin stinking of oil and benzine, in an atmosphere of hot dust, in his black leather jacket, like the driver of a tank. And every time he thought of General Gallieni, who saved Paris by scraping up all the men he could find in the town, putting them into every kind of vehicle—taxis, carts, motor-buses—emptying the town of everyone who could fight, and bore down on the front with everything he could find that had wheels. Sale politique was written in Gallieni’s diary. The town which had come into being by traffic was saved by the instruments of traffic. And by the will of a soldier. And of all those who crouched on the rattling carts, every one knew what the object was. An astounding picture. And now, day after day this pointless riding hither and thither, and you always knew after all; you are only imagining that this is of any importance. Fruitless journeys, all fruitless journeys. Often, when he walked through the streets at night, passing the newsvendors, waiting taxis, the male prostitutes outside the Eldorado, the terrible pictures of the Skala, he dreamed of mine-throwers. If you stuck a knife in the barrel, the bolt always stuck in the breech, the mine fell down into the muzzle and sprang up again. Eight shots into the air, and the ninth in the barrel, until the first burst. Or, if the mine-thrower wasn’t constructed for spreading fire, you stood on the gun-carriage behind, took hold of the lanyards and pulled. Bang! The wheels jumped round quicker and quicker at every shot, you were flung back, then forward. Then for the next. If the mine burst in the barrel it was all up. You could see the projectiles flying, like black, shrieking, twittering birds, to the highest point of the trajectory, and then nothing more. But if you stood where they hit the earth, you could only see their fall—queer—why exactly? From Martin-Luther-strasse over the houses to Viktoria-Luise-platz. Berlin has never seen such a thing. From the Pariser-platz to the Kroll. If one of those things were to get to work here. Right in the middle of the crowds; Berlin has never seen such a thing. But we have seen it. . . Nobody wants to die. Why does nobody want to die? Is this better than dying? . . . Hush! Oh, the beauty competition. Everybody stands up, all eyes are turned upwards. First prize—elected as the beauty queen of the Porza Ball, Mrs. So-and-So—a doctor’s wife. Not Helene, of course, Mrs. So-and-So. Quite pretty, but bloodless. . . Where is Helene? . . . Second prize, third prize. . . Dancing. Would you perhaps like to die? Are you any better than anyone else? Where is Helene? What are you doing here? Is it any excuse that you find it revolting? Do you think that nobody else finds it revolting? They are masks and ghosts. And you, aren’t you a mask and a ghost? Is that all you learnt from the war, to be a mask and a ghost, and to dissipate your trivial days with trivial dreams? You must know what you’re dying for. You need not know anything. Jakobsohn knows. You have lived like a swine, a stupid swine, too grand to wallow in the mire; like an hygienic swine, that produces tasteless ham. Here you stand, and the music is playing, and down below Schaffer is dancing with Mickey Mouse. And you live in the ‘consciousness of the Reich,’ and Claus Heim lives in the consciousness of the prison cell. And you talk, and he is silent. And he is a man, and you are a weakling. . . Where is Helene? Why did you come here? Jakobsohn has bought the picture. . . Curse the picture, where is Helene? The box is empty. Perhaps in the buffet. . . The lady in silver lamé is still lying on the faithful breast of the Argintronian. . . Helene is not in the buffet. Helene isn’t dancing; Jakobsohn isn’t here either. . .