Bertolt Brecht
Page 21
‘For a short while I stood there alone. Beside me the sacrifices still smouldered on the field altars. But even the priests were following the soldiers down to the river, I saw. A bit more slowly of course, on account of their being fatter.
‘Yielding to a preternaturally strong impulse I decided that I too would examine the dyke. Vaguely I felt the thing would have to be organised. I walked along, a prey to conflicting feelings. But soon I broke into a run because I was worried that the operation might be badly directed and the dyke still collapse. This, I suddenly realised, would mean the loss not only of the farm buildings but also of the fields with the half-grown corn. I had, you see, already been infected by everyone else’s feelings.
‘When I got there however everything was under control. The fact that our legionaries were equipped with spades for reverting the camp perimeter was a great help. No one thought twice about sticking his sword into the fascines to reinforce them. Shields were used for bringing up earth.
‘Seeing me standing there with nothing to do, a soldier grabbed me by the sleeve and handed me a spade. I started digging as directed by a centurion. A man beside me said, “Back home in Picenum there was a dyke burst in 82. The harvest was a total loss.” Of course, I realised, most of them were peasants’ sons.
‘Just once, so I remember, the idea of the enemy again crossed my mind. “Let’s hope the enemy doesn’t take advantage of this,” I told the man beside me. “Nonsense,” he said mopping his forehead, “it’s not the moment.” And true enough when I looked up I could see some of Mithridates’s soldiers further downstream working on the dyke. They were working alongside our men, making themselves understood by nods and gestures since of course they spoke a different language – which shows how exact the details of my dream were.’
The old general broke off his story. His little yellow shrivelled-up face bore an expression somewhere between cheerfulness and concern.
‘A fine dream,’ said the poet placidly.
‘Yes. Eh? No.’ The general’s look was dubious. Then he laughed. ‘I wasn’t too happy about it,’ he said quickly. ‘When I woke up I felt disagreeably disturbed. It seemed to me evidence of great weakness.’
‘Really?’ asked the poet, taken aback. There was a silence. Then Lucretius went on, ‘What did you conclude from your dream, at the time?’
‘That authority is an extremely shaky business, of course.’
‘In the dream.’
‘Yes, but all the same . . .’
Lucullus clapped his hands and the servants hastened to clear the dishes. These were still full. Nor had Lucullus eaten anything. In those days he had no appetite.
He proposed to his guest that they should visit the blue room, where some newly acquired objets d’art were on display. They walked through open colonnades to a lateral wing of the great palace.
Striking the marble paving hard with his stick, the little general continued:
‘What robbed me of victory was not the indiscipline of the common man but the indiscipline of the great. Their love of their country is just love of their palaces and their fishponds. In Asia the Roman tax-farmers banded together with the big local landowners to oppose me. They swore they would paralyse me and my army. In return the landowners handed the peasantry of Asia Minor over to them. They found my successor a better proposition. “At least he’s a real general,” they said. “He takes.” And they weren’t only referring to strongpoints. There was one king in Asia Minor on whom he imposed a tribute of fifty millions. As the money had to be paid into the state treasury he “lent” him that sum, with the result that he now draws forty per cent interest each year. That’s what I call conquests!’
Lucretius was scarcely listening to the old man, who had not done all that badly out of Asia himself – witness this palace. His thoughts were still focused on the dream, which struck him as an interesting counterpart to a true incident that had occurred during the capture of Amisus by Lucullus’s troops.
Amisus, a daughter city of glorious Athens and full of irreplaceable works of art, had been looted and set on fire by Lucullus’s soldiers even though the general – reputedly in tears – had besought the looters to spare the art works. There too his authority had not been respected.
The one event had been dream, the other reality. Should it be said that authority, having forbidden the troops the one, could not deny them the other? That was what Lucullus seemed to have felt, though hardly to have acknowledged.
The best of the new objets d’art was a little earthenware figure of Nike. Lucretius held it delicately in his skinny hand and looked at it, smiling.
‘A good artist,’ he said. ‘That carefree stance and that delicious smile! His idea was to portray the goddess of victory as a goddess of peace. This figure must date from before those peoples were first defeated.’
Lucullus looked mistrustfully at him and took it in his hand too.
‘The human race,’ he said abruptly, ‘tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What’s left of kisses? Wounds however leave scars.’
The poet said nothing, but in turn gave him a peculiar look.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked the general. ‘Did I surprise you?’
‘Slightly, to be honest. Do you really fear you’ll get a bad name in the history books?’
‘No name at all, perhaps. I don’t know what I fear. Altogether this is a month of fear, isn’t it? Fear has become rampant. As always after a victory.’
‘Though if my information is correct you should be fearing fame these days more than oblivion.’
‘True enough. Fame is dangerous for me. More than anything. And between you and me, that’s a strange business. I’m a soldier and I must say death has never scared me. But there has been a change. The lovely sight of the garden, the well cooked food, the delicious works of art bring about an extraordinary weakness in me and even if I still don’t fear death I fear the fear of death. Can you explain that?’
The poet said nothing.
‘I know,’ said the general a little hurriedly. ‘That passage from your poem is very familiar to me; in fact I think I even know it by heart, which is another bad sign.’
And he began in a rather dry voice to recite Lucretius’s famous lines about fear of death:
‘Death, then, is nothing to us, it is not of the slightest importance.
So when you see some man resenting his own destination
Either, when dead, to rot where his mortal body is buried
Or be destroyed by flames or by the jaws of predators
Then you can tell he’s a fraud whose heart is surely affected
By some latent sting, however he may keep denying
Any belief that death does not deprive one of feeling.
That which he claims to admit, he does not admit, nor its basis
Nor does he tear out his roots and hurl himself from this existence
But he makes something survive of himself, though he doesn’t know it.
For if someone who lives can see himself enter a future
Where when he’s dead wild beasts and birds will mangle his body
Then he pities himself, for he can’t see the thing with detachment
Nor can he stand back enough from the body that he has rejected;
Rather he stands beside it, infecting it with his own feelings.
So he fills with resentment at having been born a mere mortal
Failing to see true death can allow no new self to be, which
Living, could tell itself how much it regrets the deceased and
Standing, lament that, prone, either wounding or fire will consume it.’
The poet had listened carefully while his verses were recited. though he had to struggle slightly not to cough. This night air . . . However he could not resist the temptation to acquaint his host with a few lines which he had cut from the work so as not to depress his readers unduly. In them he had set out the reasons for
this same effort to cling to what is disappearing. In a hoarse voice, very clearly, slowed down by the need to remember, he spoke these verses:
‘When they complain their life has been stolen from them, they’re complaining
Of an offence both practised on them and by themselves practised
For the same life that they’ve lost was stolen by them in the first place.
Yes, when the fisherman snatches his fish from the sea, then the traders
Snatch it in turn from him. And the woman who’s hoping to fry it
Ruefully eyes the bottle and pours the oil with reluctance
Into the waiting pan. O fear of a shortage! The risk of
Never replacing what’s gone! The awful prospect of robbery!
Violence suited our fathers. And once their inheritance passes
See how their heirs will stoop to criminal acts to preserve it.
Trembling, the dyer will keep his lucrative recipe secret
Fearful of leaks. While in that circle of roistering writers
One will bite off his tongue on betraying some new inspiration.
Flattery serves the seducer to wheedle his girl into bed with
Just as the priest knows tricks to get alms from penurious tenants
While the doctor finds industrial disease is a goldmine.
Who in a world like this can confront the concept of dying?
“Got it” and “drop it” alone determine how life will develop.
Whether you snatch or you hold, your hands begin curving like talons.’
‘You know the answer, you versifiers,’ said the little general pensively. ‘But can you explain to me why it is only now, in these particular days, that I again start hoping that not everything I’ve done will be forgotten – even though fame is hazardous for me and I am not indifferent towards death?’
‘Perhaps your wish for fame is at the same time fear of death?’ The general seemed not to have heard. He looked nervously round and motioned the torchbearer to withdraw. When he was a few paces away he asked half-ashamedly, in something like a whisper:
‘Where do you think my fame might lie?’
They started walking back. A gentle puff of wind broke the evening stillness that lay over the garden. The poet coughed and said, ‘The conquest of Asia perhaps?’ He realised that the general was holding him by the sleeve and gazing round in alarm, and hastily added, ‘I don’t know. Perhaps also the delicious cooking of the victory banquet.’
After saying this casually he came to a sudden stop. Extending his finger he pointed at a cherry tree which stood on a small rise, its white blossom-covered branches waving in the wind.
‘That’s something else you brought back from Asia, isn’t it?’
The general nodded.
‘That could be it,’ said the poet intensely. ‘The cherry tree. I don’t suppose it will recall your name to anyone. But what of that? Asia will be lost once more. And it won’t be long before the general poverty forces us to give up cooking your favourite dishes. But the cherry tree. . . . There might all the same be one or two people who would know it was you that brought it. And even if there aren’t, even if every trophy of every conqueror has crumbled to dust, this loveliest trophy of yours, Lucullus, will still be waving each spring in the wind of the hillsides; it will be the trophy of an unknown conqueror.’
The Unseemly Old Lady
My grandmother was seventy-two years old when my grandfather died. He had a small lithographer’s business in a little town in Baden and there he worked with two or three assistants until his death. My grandmother managed the household without a maid, looked after the ramshackle old house and cooked for the menfolk and children.
She was a thin little woman with lively lizard’s eyes, though slow of speech. On very scanty means she had reared five of the seven children she had borne. As a result, she had grown smaller with the years.
Her two girls went to America and two of the sons also moved away. Only the youngest, who was delicate, stayed in the little town. He became a printer and set up a family far too large for him.
So after my grandfather died she was alone in the house.
The children wrote each other letters dealing with the problem of what should be done about her. One of them could offer her a home, and the printer wanted to move with his family into her house. But the old woman turned a deaf ear to these proposals and would only accept, from each of her children who could afford it, a small monetary allowance. The lithographer’s business, long behind the times, was sold for practically nothing, and there were debts as well.
The children wrote saying that, all the same, she could not live quite alone, but since she entirely ignored this, they gave in and sent her a little money every month. At any rate, they thought, there was always the printer who had stayed in the town.
What was more, he undertook to give his brothers and sisters news of their mother from time to time. The printer’s letters to my father, and what my father himself learnt on a visit and, two years later, after my grandmother’s burial, give me a picture of what went on in those two years.
It seems that, from the start, the printer was disappointed that my grandmother had declined to take him into the house, which was fairly large and now standing empty. He had four children and lived in three rooms. But in any case the old lady had only very casual relations with him. She invited the children for coffee every Sunday afternoon, and that was about all.
She visited her son once or twice in three months and helped her daughter-in-law with the jam-making. The young woman gathered from some of her remarks that she found the printer’s little dwelling too cramped for her. He, in reporting this, could not forbear to add an exclamation mark.
My father wrote asking what the old woman was up to nowadays, to which he replied rather curtly: going to the cinema.
It must be understood that this was not at all the thing; at least, not in her children’s eyes. Thirty years ago the cinema was not what it is today. It meant wretched, ill-ventilated premises, often converted from disused skittle-alleys, with garish posters outside displaying the murders and tragedies of passion. Strictly speaking, only adolescents went or, for the darkness, courting couples. An old woman there by herself would certainly be conspicuous.
And there was another aspect of this cinema-going to be considered. Of course, admission was cheap, but since the pleasure fell more or less into the category of self-indulgences it represented ‘money thrown away’. And to throw money away was not respectable.
Furthermore, not only did my grandmother keep up no regular association with her son in town, but she neither invited nor visited any of her other acquaintances. She never went to the coffee-parties in the little town. On the other hand, she frequented a cobbler’s workshop in a poor and even slightly notorious alley where, especially in the afternoon, all manner of none too reputable characters hung about: out-of-work waitresses and itinerant craftsmen. The cobbler was a middle-aged man who had knocked about the world and never made much of himself. It was also said that he drank. In any case, he was no proper associate for my grandmother.
The printer intimated in a letter that he had hinted as much to his mother and had met with a very cool reply. ‘He’s seen a thing or two,’ she answered and that was the end of the conversation. It was not easy to talk to my grandmother about things she did not wish to discuss.
About six months after my grandfather’s death the printer wrote to my father saying that their mother now ate at the inn every other day.
That really was news! Grandmother, who all her life had cooked for a dozen people and herself had always eaten up the leavings, now ate at the inn. What had come over her?
Shortly after this, my father made a business trip in the neighbourhood and he visited his mother. She was just about to go out when he turned up. She took off her hat again and gave him a glass of red wine and a biscuit. She seemed in a perfectly equable mood, neither particularly animated nor particularly sil
ent. She asked after us, though not in much detail, and wanted principally to know whether there were cherries for the children. There she was quite her old self. The room was of course scrupulously clean and she looked well.
The only thing that gave an indication of her new life was that she did not want to go with my father to the churchyard to visit her husband’s grave. ‘You can go by yourself,’ she said lightly. ‘It’s the third on the left in the eleventh row. I’ve got to go somewhere.’
The printer said afterwards that probably she had had to go to her cobbler. He complained bitterly.
‘Here am I, stuck in this hole with my family and only five hours’ badly-paid work, on top of which my asthma’s troubling me again, while the house in the main street stands empty.’
My father had taken a room at the inn, but nevertheless expected to be invited by his mother, if only as a matter of form; however, she did not mention it. Yet even when the house had been full, she had always objected to his not staying with them and spending money on an hotel into the bargain.
But she appeared to have finished with family life and to be treading new paths now in the evening of her days. My father, who had his fair share of humour, found her ‘pretty sprightly’ and told my uncle to let the old woman do what she wanted.
And what did she want to do?
The next thing reported was that she had hired a brake and taken an excursion on a perfectly ordinary Thursday. A brake was a large, high-sprung, horse-drawn vehicle with a seating capacity for whole families. Very occasionally, when we grandchildren had come for a visit, grandfather had hired a brake. Grandmother had always stayed behind. With a scornful wave of the hand she had refused to come along.
And after the brake came the trip to K., a larger town some two hours’ distance by train. There was a race-meeting there and it was to the races that my grandmother went.