Brecht Collected Plays: 7: Visions of Simone Machard; Schweyk in the Second World War; Caucasian Chalk Circle; Duchess of Malfi (World Classics)

by Bertolt Brecht

  They leave with him.

  SCHWEYK: So your job is pinching men, is it?

  5

  Lunch time in the Prague goods yards. On the rails sit Schweyk and Baloun, now shunters in the service of Hitler, guarded by a German soldier armed to the teeth.

  BALOUN: I’d like to know what’s happened to Mrs Kopecka with our dinner. I hope she’s not got into trouble.

  SERVICE CORPS LIEUTENANT passing, to Soldier: Guard! If anyone asks which is the waggon for Bavaria, remember it’s that one there, number 4268.

  SOLDIER at attention: Yessir.

  SCHWEYK: It’s all organization with the Germans. They’ve got things better organized than anyone ever before. Hitler presses a button and bang goes—China, let’s say. They’ve got the Pope in Rome on their list, with all he’s said about ’em, he’s had it. And even lower down the scale, take an SS commander, he’s only got to press the button and there’s the urn with your ashes being handed to your widow. We can thank our stars we’re here with a well-armed guard to stop us sabotaging something and getting shot.

  Mrs Kopecka enters with enamel dishes. The soldier studies her pass absently.

  BALOUN: What is it?

  MRS KOPECKA: Carrot cutlet and potato sausages. As the two of them eat the food with their plates on their knees, softly: That dog must go. It’s become a political matter now. Don’t gobble, Mr Baloun, you’ll get ulcers.

  BALOUN: Not from potatoes I shan’t, from a nice fat chicken maybe.

  MRS KOPECKA: It said in the paper the disappearance of Councillor Vojta’s dog was an act of vengeance by a section of the population against a pro-German official. Now they’re looking for it so they can smoke out the nest of subversive elements. It must be got out of the Chalice, and today.

  SCHWEYK: It isn’t very convenient at the moment. Only yesterday I sent Lieutenant Bullinger an express letter saying I wanted 200 crowns for the dog and I wouldn’t let him have it till I got the money.

  MRS KOPECKA: Mr Schweyk, you’re taking your life in your hands writing letters like that.

  SCHWEYK: I don’t think so, Mrs Kopecka. Bullinger’s a swine, but he’ll find it quite natural that business is business, otherwise nothing’s sacred, and he needs the dog for his wife in Cologne, I’m told. A collaborationist doesn’t work for nothing, just the opposite, he even gets paid more these days because his own people despise him, I have to be compensated for that, why else do it?

  MRS KOPECKA: But you can’t do business while you’re stuck here.

  SCHWEYK amiably: I’m not wasting my time here. I’ve already cost them one waggonload of soap. It isn’t difficult. In Austria once, when they banned strikes, the railwaymen stopped traffic for eight hours just by carrying out all the safety regulations to the letter.

  MRS KOPECKA energetically: All the same, that dog must be got out of the Chalice, Mr Schweyk. I have a certain amount of protection from Mr Brettschneider, who’s still hoping to start something with me, but that won’t go far. Schweyk is only half listening to her, as two German soldiers have been taking a great steaming cooking-pot past and serving goulash into the guard’s aluminium plate. Baloun, who has long since finished eating, has stood up, and as if in a trance is following the trail of the food, sniffing.

  SCHWEYK: I’ll come and get him. Just look at that!

  GERMAN SOLDIER shouting sharply at Baloun: Halt!

  MRS KOPECKA to Baloun, as he comes back discontented and upset: Do pull yourself together, Mr Baloun.

  SCHWEYK: In Budweis there was a doctor who had diabetes so bad that all he was allowed to eat was a tiny bit of rice pudding, and him a great barrel of a man. He couldn’t keep it up and went on eating the leftovers in the pantry on the quiet. He knew just what he was doing and after a bit he decided it was all too silly, so he told his housekeeper to cook him a seven-course meal, pudding and all, and she cried so much she could hardly dish it up, and he put a funeral march on the gramophone to go with it and that was the end of him. It’ll be just the same with you, Baloun, you’ll finish up under a Russian tank.

  BALOUN still shivering from top to toe: They’re handing out goulash.

  MRS KOPECKA: I’ve got to go. She picks up the dishes and leaves.

  BALOUN: I only want to have a look. To the soldier, who is cating: Are the helpings always as big as that in the army, soldier? That’s a nice big one you’ve got. But maybe it’s only when you’re on guard, so you can keep wide awake, or else we might clear off, eh? Could I just have a sniff maybe?

  The soldier sits eating, but between bites he moves his lips.

  SCHWEYK: Don’t bother him with questions. Can’t you see he’s got to learn the number by heart, or he’ll be sending the wrong waggon off to Bavaria, you idiot? To the soldier: You’re right to make sure you know it, anything can happen. They’ve stopped putting the destinations on the waggons now because saboteurs used to rub them off and write the wrong address on. What was that number: 4268, wasn’t it? Look, you don’t need to keep saying it under your breath for half an hour, let me tell you what to do, I got this tip from an official in the department where they issue licences to traders, he was explaining it to a pedlar who couldn’t remember his number. I’ll show you how it works for yours and you’ll see how easy it is. 4268. The first figure is a 4, the second a 2. So the first thing to remember is 42. That’s twice two, or starting the other way round, it’s 4 divided by 2, and there you’ve got your 4 and your 2 next to each other again. Don’t get alarmed now; what’s twice 4? 8, isn’t it? Right, fix in your memory that the 8 in 4268 is the last in the series, and the only other thing you need remember is that the first figure is a 4, the second a 2, the fourth an 8, and then you just need some good way of remembering the 6 that comes before the 8. It’s dead easy. The first figure is a 4, the second a 2, 4 and 2 is 6. So you’re quite clear that the second number from the end is a 6, and now, as the man at the licensing office would have said, the order of the figures is permanently fixed in our memory. You can get the same result even easier. He explained this method to the pedlar too. I’ll do it again for you with your number.

  The soldier has been listening wide-eyed. His lips have stopped moving.

  SCHWEYK: 8 less 2 is 6. So there’s your 6. 6 less 2 is 4, so there’s your 4. 8 and the 2 in between gives you 4-2-6-8. It’s easy enough to do it another way again, using multiplication and division. This is how you get the answer then: he said you must remember that twice 42 is 84. There are 12 months in a year. So you take 12 from 84, that leaves us with 72; take off another 12 months, that’s 60. So that’s our 6 fixed, and we cancel the nought. Now we’ve got 42-6-84. Since we’ve cancelled the nought we also cancel the 4 at the end, and there we’ve got our number complete again. You can do it with division too, like this. What was our number, by the way?

  VOICE OFF: Guard, what’s the number of the waggon for Bavaria?

  SOLDIER: What is it?

  SCHWEYK: Right, just a moment, I’ll work it out by the system with the months. There are 12 of them, aren’t there—agreed?

  SOLDIER desperately: Tell me the number.

  VOICE: Guard! Are you asleep?

  SOLDIER shouts: I’ve forgotten it. For-got-ten! To Schweyk: To hell with you!

  VOICE roughly: It’s got to go with the 12.50 to Passau.

  SECOND VOICE further off: Let’s take this one then, I think that’s it.

  BALOUN satisfied, indicating the soldier, who is looking upstage appalled: He wouldn’t let me sniff his goulash.

  SCHWEYK: For all I know a waggonload of machine-guns is on its way to Bavaria now. Philosophically: But by that time perhaps what they’ll need most in Stalingrad will be combine-harvesters and it’ll be Bavaria’s turn to want machine-guns. Who can tell?

  6

  Saturday night at the Chalice. Among the customers Baloun, Anna, Kati, Young Prochazka and two SS men on their own. Dancing to the music of a player piano.

  KATI to Baloun: I told Mr Brettschneider at the inquiry that I�
��d already heard the SS were after the dog. I didn’t mention your name, only your friend Mr Schweyk’s. And I didn’t say anything about Mr Schweyk pretending he didn’t know you so he could get into conversation with us. Was that all right?

  BALOUN: Anything’s all right as far as I am concerned. I won’t be with you much longer. They’ll not half be surprised to see me.

  ANNA: Don’t be so gloomy, Mr Baloun, it doesn’t help. And that SS man over there will ask me to dance again if I go on sitting around like this. You ask me.

  Baloun is about to get up when Mrs Kopecka comes downstage and claps her hands.

  MRS KOPECKA: Ladies and gentlemen, it’s coming up to half past eight, time for the Beseda—partly to the SS men—our traditional dance we dance among ourselves, it mayn’t please everyone but we like it. The music’s on the house.

  Mrs Kopecka puts a coin in the piano and the company dance the Beseda, stamping very loudly. Baloun and Anna join in. The aim of the dance is to get rid of the SS men, and so their table is barged into, etc.

  BALOUN sings:

  When the midnight churchbells ring

  Feel your oats and have a fling.

  Yupp-i-diddle, yupp-i-day

  Girls come out to play.

  THE OTHERS join in:

  Let you pinch their rosy cheeks

  Most of them have four cheeks each

  Yupp-i-diddle, yupp-i-day

  Girls come out to play.

  The SS men stand up swearing, and push their way out. After the dance Mrs Kopecka comes in again from the back room and goes on rinsing her glasses. Kati brings the first customer of scene 3 over to her table.

  FIRST CUSTOMER: Folk dancing’s a new idea at the Chalice. Very popular it is; the regulars know Mrs Kopecka listens to Radio Moscow while it’s going on.

  BALOUN: I shan’t be dancing with you much longer. Where I’m going they don’t dance the Beseda.

  ANNA: I’m told we were very rash to go into the Moldau gardens. It’s dangerous because of the German deserters who set on you.

  FIRST CUSTOMER: They only go for men. They’re after civilian clothes. There’s German uniforms being found every morning now in Stromovka Park.

  KATI: And anybody loses his suit that way doesn’t find it so easy to get a new one. They say the Clothes Rationing Bureau have stopped clothes and hats being made out of paper now. Because of the paper shortage.

  FIRST CUSTOMER: Clothes Rationing Bureau! The Germans just love bureaus, they spring up like mushrooms all over the place. It’s a matter of making jobs for themselves so they aren’t called up. They’d rather torment us Czechs with milk rationing and food rationing and paper rationing and all the rest. Scrimshankers.

  BALOUN: They’ll finish me off. I can see only one future for me.

  ANNA: What on earth are you talking about?

  BALOUN: You’ll find out soon enough, Anna. I suppose you know that song ‘Myriad doors and gateways’ about the painter who died young. Would you sing it for me, it’s my case exactly.

  ANNA sings:

  Myriad doors and gateways he could paint you straight-ways

  Loved his decorating, kept no lady waiting.

  You won’t see him around, he’s six feet underground.

  —You mean that one?

  BALOUN: That’s it.

  ANNA: But heavens, you’re not going to make away with yourself, Mr Baloun?

  BALOUN: What I’m going to do to myself will fill you with horror, Anna. I’m not taking my life but something much worse.

  Enter Schweyk with a parcel under his arm.

  SCHWEYK to Baloun: Here I am with your goulash meat. You needn’t thank me, because I’m having that camp bed in your kitchen in exchange.

  BALOUN: Show me, is it beef?

  SCHWEYK energetically: Take your paws off it. It’s not to be unpacked here. Good evening, ladies, are you here too?

  ANNA: Good evening. We know all about it.

  SCHWEYK pulling Baloun into a corner: What have you been letting out now?

  BALOUN: Only that we know each other and it was a trick pretending we didn’t. I didn’t know anything to let out. You’re welcome to my camp bed. You’ve saved a friend from the edge of the precipice, just let me sniff it through the paper. Mrs Mahler from across the road offered me 20 crowns for it, but I’m not interested. Where did you get this?

  SCHWEYK: On the black market, from a midwife who got it from the country. About 1930 she delivered a farmer’s child with a little bone in its mouth, and she burst into tears and said ‘That means we’ll all go hungry’, that’s what she predicted long before the Germans were here, and every year the farmer’s wife sends her a food parcel so she won’t go hungry, but this year the midwife needs the money to pay her taxes.

  BALOUN: Let’s hope Mrs Kopecka has some real paprika.

  MRS KOPECKA who has joined them: Go back to your table, in half an hour I’ll call you into the kitchen. And in the meantime act as if nothing was happening. To Schweyk, when Baloun has gone back to his table: What sort of meat is this?

  SCHWEYK reproachfully: Mrs Kopecka, I’m surprised at you.

  Mrs Kopecka takes the parcel out of his hand and looks into it carefully.

  SCHWEYK at the sight of Baloun talking to the girls with huge excited gestures: Baloun is too worked up for my liking. Put plenty of paprika in it, so it tastes like beef. It’s horse. She fixes him sternly. All right, it’s Mr Vojta’s pom. I had to do it, because the Chalice’ll get a bad name if one of your regulars is so hungry he has to join the Germans.

  CUSTOMER AT THE BAR: Service, please!

  Mrs Kopecka gives Schweyk the parcel to hold, in order to serve the customer quickly. At this moment a heavy vehicle is heard drawing up and then SS men enter, headed by Lieutenant Bullinger.

  BULLINGER to Schweyk: Your landlady was right when she said you’d be in the pub. To the SS men: Clear a space! To Schweyk, while the SS men push the other customers back: Where’ve you got that dog, you swine?

  SCHWEYK: Beg to report, sir, it said in the newspaper the dog had been stolen. Didn’t you see it?

  BULLINGER: Ah, taking the mickey, are you?

  SCHWEYK: Beg to report sir, no sir. I only wanted to suggest you read the papers, otherwise you might miss something and then not be able to take drastic measures about it.

  BULLINGER: I don’t know why I stand here listening to you, it’s sheer perversity on my part, I probably just want to see how far a character like you will go before he’s hanged.

  SCHWEYK: Yes, lieutenant, that’s why, and because you want the dog.

  BULLINGER: You admit you wrote me a letter asking 200 crowns for the dog?

  SCHWEYK: Lieutenant Bullinger, sir, I admit that I wanted the 200 crowns, because I should have had expenses if the dog hadn’t been stolen.

  BULLINGER: We’ll have something more to say about that at Gestapo headquarters. To the SS men: Search the whole place for a pomeranian dog. Exit an SS man.

  Off stage furniture can be heard being overturned, things being broken, etc. Schweyk waits in philosophic calm, his parcel under his arm.

  SCHWEYK suddenly: They keep quite a good slivovitz here too.

  An SS man bumps against a little man as he goes past. As the latter steps back he treads on a woman’s foot and says ‘I beg your pardon’, whereupon the SS man turns round, knocks him down with his truncheon and, together with one of the other SS men, drags him off at a nod from Bullinger. Then the SS man who has been searching comes back with Mrs Kopecka.

  SS MAN: House searched, sir. No dog found.

  BULLINGER to Mrs Kopecka: This is a nice little hornet’s nest of subversive activity you’re passing off as a pub. But I shall smoke it out.

  SCHWEYK: Yes indeed sir, Heil Hitler. Otherwise we might get too big for our boots and say to hell with the regulations. Mrs Kopecka, you must run your pub in such a way that everything is as transparent and clear as the water of a running spring, like Chaplain Vejvoda said when he …


  BULLINGER: Silence, swine. I’m thinking of taking you along with me and closing your establishment down, Mrs Koscheppa!

  BRETTSCHNEIDER who has appeared at the door: Lieutenant Bullinger, may I have a private word with you?

  BULLINGER: I don’t know what we could have to discuss. You know what I think you are.

  BRETTSCHNEIDER: It concerns new information with regard to the whereabouts of the Vojta dog, which we have received at Gestapo headquarters and which should interest you, Lieutenant Bullinger.

  The two men go into a corner and begin to gesticulate wildly. Brettschneider seems to imply that Bullinger has the dog, he seems to say ‘me?’ and to get angry, etc. Mrs Kopecka has returned indifferently to rinsing her glasses. Schweyk stands there in amiable unconcern. Then unfortunately, Baloun starts a successful attempt to get his parcel. At a sign from him a customer takes it from Schweyk and passes it on. It reaches Baloun, who turns it round in his hands recklessly. An SS man has been watching the parcel’s peregrinations with some interest.

  SS MAN: Hey, what’s going on there?

  In a couple of strides he reaches Baloun and takes the parcel away from him.

  SS MAN handing the parcel to Bullinger: Sir, this parcel was just being smuggled to one of the customers, that man there, sir.

  BULLINGER opens the parcel: Meat. Owner step forward.

  SS MAN to Baloun: You there! You were opening the parcel.

  BALOUN troubled: It was pushed into my hands. It don’t belong to me.

  BULLINGER: So it don’t belong to you, don’t it? Ownerless meat, apparently. Suddenly shouting: Then why were you opening it?

  SCHWEYK when Baloun can find no answer to this: Beg to report, Lieutenant Bullinger, that this stupid fellow must be innocent because he’d never have looked inside the parcel if it had been his as he’d already have known what was in it.

  BULLINGER to Baloun: Where did you get it from?

  SS MAN when Baloun again does not reply: I first noticed that man—pointing to the customer who took the parcel from Schweyk—passing the parcel along.

  BULLINGER: Where did you get it?