The Sleepwalkers

by Hermann Broch

  Then Joachim arrived and Elisabeth had a second disappointment, for her memory held an image in uniform, and now he was dressed in hunting kit. They were distant and embarrassed towards each other, and even when with the others they had returned to the drawing-room, and Elisabeth was standing before the canary’s cage amusing herself by pushing a finger through the wires and seeing the little creature pecking wrathfully at it, even while she was deciding that in her own drawing-room—if she ever should marry—she would always have a little yellow bird such as this one, even then she could no longer associate Joachim with the idea of marriage. Yet that was actually rather pleasant and reassuring and made it easier for her as she said good-bye to arrange that they should at an early date go out riding together. Before that, of course, he must pay them a call.

  Bertrand had at last found time to comply with Pasenow’s invitation, and on the way down stepped out of the evening train for a two days’ stay in Berlin. Naturally enough he wanted to have news of Ruzena; so he made straight for the theatre and sent his name, along with a bouquet of flowers, to her dressing-room. Ruzena was delighted when she got his card, delighted too with the flowers, and it flattered her that Bertrand should be waiting for her at the stage door at the end of the performance: “Well, little Ruzena, how are you getting on?” And Ruzena replied in one breath that she was getting on splendidly, splendidly, oh, really very badly, because she longed so much for Joachim; but now of course she felt all right because she was so delighted that Bertrand had called for her, for he was such an intimate friend of Joachim’s. But when they were sitting opposite each other in the restaurant, having talked a great deal about Joachim, Ruzena, as often happened with her, became suddenly sad: “Now you go to Joachim and I have stay here: world is unjust.” “Of course world is unjust, and far worse than you have any conception of, little Ruzena”—it seemed to both of them natural that he should address her as “du”—“and it was partly my anxiety about you that brought me here.” “What you mean by that?” “Well, I don’t like your being in this stage business.” “Why? It very nice.” “I was too hasty in giving in to you both … just because you were romantic and had formed God knows what picture of the stage.” “I not understand what you mean.” “Well, never mind, but it’s out of the question for you to stay in it. What can it lead to finally? What is to become of you, child? Someone must look after you, and that can’t be done with romantic notions.” Ruzena replied stiffly and on her dignity that she could quite well look after herself, and Joachim could just go if he wanted to be rid of her, he could just go, “and you bad man, to come here just to speak ill of friend”; then she cried and gave Bertrand hostile looks through her tears. He found it difficult to reassure her, for she persisted that he was a bad man and a bad friend who wanted to spoil her happy evening. And all at once she grew very pale and fixed terrified eyes upon him: “He sent you to say he finish with me: all over!” “But, Ruzena!” “No, you can say ten time no, I know it; oh, you bad, both two of you. You brought me here, so to shame me.” Bertrand saw that by rational means nothing could be done; yet in her untutored suspicions there was perhaps a divination of the real state of affairs and its hopelessness. She looked as desperate as a little animal that does not know where to turn. And yet perhaps it would be good for her to regard the future more soberly. So he merely shook his head and replied: “Tell me, child, couldn’t you go back to your own home and stay there while Joachim is away?” All that she could draw from this was that she was going to be sent away. “But, Ruzena, who wants to send you away? Only it would be much better for you to be with your people than alone here in Berlin in this silly stage life.…” She would not let him finish: “I have nobody, all bad to me … I have nobody, and you want send me away.” “But be reasonable, Ruzena: when Pasenow is in Berlin again you can come back too.” Ruzena would not listen any more to him and said she was going. But he did not want to let her go like that, and considered how he could turn her thoughts in a happier direction; at last he hit upon the idea that they should write Joachim a letter between them. Ruzena agreed at once; so he had notepaper brought and wrote: “In warm remembrance of a happy evening with you, kindest greetings from Bertrand,” and she added: “And lots of luv from Ruzena.” She pressed a kiss on the letter, but she could not restrain her tears. “All over,” she repeated again and asked him to take her home. Bertrand gave in. But so that he might not have to leave her too soon to her melancholy fancies he suggested that they should go on foot. To calm her—for words were useless—he took her hand like a kind and skilful doctor; she snuggled close to him gratefully and as if seeking support and with a faint pressure left her hand in his. She’s just a little animal, thought Bertrand, and hoping to cheer her he said: “Yes, Ruzena, am I not a bad friend and an enemy of yours?” But she did not reply. A slight but tender irritation at her confused thinking arose in him and extended to take in Joachim too, whom he held responsible for Ruzena and her fate, and who yet seemed no less confused than the girl herself. It may have been because he could feel the warmth of her body that, at any rate for the space of a moment, he had the malicious thought that Joachim deserved to be betrayed with Ruzena: but he did not entertain this seriously and soon found again the affectionate good will which he had always cherished for Joachim. To him Joachim and Ruzena seemed creatures who lived only with a small fraction of their being in the time to which they belonged, the age to which their years entitled them; and the greater part of them was somewhere else, perhaps on another star or in another century, or perhaps simply in their childhood. Bertrand was struck by the fact that the world was full of people belonging to different centuries, who had to live together, and were even contemporaries; that accounted perhaps for their instability and their difficulty in understanding one another rationally; the extraordinary thing was that, nevertheless, there was a kind of human solidarity and an understanding that bridged the years. Probably Joachim, too, only needed to have his hand stroked. What should and what could he talk to him about? What object was there really in this visit to Stolpin? Bertrand felt irritated, but then he remembered that he would have to talk to Joachim of Ruzena’s future; that gave a rational meaning to the journey and the waste of time, and once more restored to good spirits he squeezed Ruzena’s hand.

  They said good-night before her door; then they stood facing each other dumbly for a few moments, and it looked as though Ruzena were still expecting something. Bertrand smiled and before she could give him her mouth kissed her somewhat avuncularly on the cheek. She touched his hand lightly and was about to slip away, but he kept her for a moment in the doorway: “Well, Ruzena, I’m leaving to-morrow morning. What message am I to give to Joachim?” “Nothing,” she replied quickly and crossly, but then she reflected: “You bad, but I come to station.” “Good-night, Ruzena,” said Bertrand, and again the slight feeling of exasperation rose in him, but as he could still feel on his lips the downy softness of her cheek he continued walking to and fro in the dark street, gazing up at the block and waiting for a light to appear behind one of the windows. But either her light had been burning before or her room looked out on the back yard—Joachim might surely have got her better lodgings—at any rate Bertrand waited in vain, and after he had regarded the block for some time, he decided that he had done quite enough for the cause of romanticism, lit a cigar and went home.

  While the reception-rooms were provided with parquet-flooring, the guest-rooms on the first floor had merely polished boards, huge planks of soft white wood separated from each other by somewhat darker connecting boards. The trunks from which those planks were once cut must have been gigantic ones, and although the wood was rather soft, yet their size and uniformity witnessed to the opulence of the man who had had them laid here. The joinings between the planks and the boards were closely fitted, and where they had widened on account of the shrinking of the wood they were so neatly plugged with chips that one scarcely noticed it. The furniture had obviously been made by the village c
arpenter and probably dated from the time when Napoleon’s armies had passed through the vicinity; at least it forced one to think of that time, remotely reminding one of that style which is usually called Empire; however, it may have belonged to a slightly earlier or later period, for it diverged with all sorts of bulging lines from the severity of that norm. Here, for instance, was a wardrobe whose mirrored front was violently divided in two by a vertical strip of wood, and there were chests of drawers which, by possessing too many or too few shelves, offended against the laws of pure symmetry. Yet even although these furnishings were ranged against the walls almost without plan, even although the bed was stationed in the most inconvenient way between two doors, and the great white-tiled stove in the corner was squeezed between two cupboards, yet the spacious room had a comfortable and easy look, very pleasant when the sun shone through the white curtains, and the window, with its cross-bars, was mirrored on the glittering polish of the furniture. At such moments, indeed, it could actually happen that the great crucifix which hung on the wall over the bed no longer seemed a mere ornament or a customary article of furniture, but became once more what it had originally been when it was brought here: an admonition and reminder to the guest, warning him that he was in a Christian household, in a house which, it was true, provided in hosts of ways for his bodily comfort and from which he could ride out to the hunt in a merry company and return to devote himself to a hearty supper with abundance of strong wines, a house too where the roughest of practical jokes was permitted him, and where, at the time when the furniture in this room was joinered, an eye was closed if he should take a fancy to one of the maids; but a house nevertheless where it was considered inevitable that the guest, no matter how heavy he might feel after his wine, would have on retiring a desire to remember his soul and to repent of his sins. And it was in accordance with this essentially austere way of thought that over the sofa covered with green repp should be hung a sober and austere steel-engraving which in many of the guests’ minds awakened thoughts of Queen Luise, for it represented a stately lady in antique robes—La Mère des Gracches was the title of the picture —and not only did this costume remind them of the Queen, but the altar towards which she was lifting her arms also suggested the altar of the Fatherland. Certainly the majority of the huntsmen who had slept in this room had led a worldly life, seizing advantage and enjoyment wherever they offered, not scrupling to screw from the dealers the most they could for their grain and their pigs, devoted to a savage pastime in which God’s creatures were shot down barbarously in heaps, many of them, too, filled with lust for women; but insolently as they claimed the arrogant and sinful life they led as an obvious right and privilege granted by Heaven, they were prepared to sacrifice it at any moment for the honour of the Fatherland or the glory of God, and even if the opportunity should never arise, yet this readiness to regard life as something secondary and scarcely worth considering was so potent that its sinfulness hardly counted for anything in the balance. And they did not feel that they were sinful when in the morning mist they strode through the faintly crackling undergrowth, or when at evening they climbed a steep, narrow ladder to a look-out perch, and gazed across bush and clearing, where the midges still wove their dances, to the edge of the wood. Then when the moist fragrance of grass and tree rose up to them and along the dry bulwark of the perch an ant came running and vanished in the bark, then sometimes in their souls, though they were pragmatic fellows with their feet firmly planted on the earth, something awoke that rang like music, and the lives they had lived and had still to live were concentrated so intensely into one moment that they could still feel the touch of their mother’s hand on their hair as if for eternity, while another shape already stood before them, separated from them no longer by any span of time, any span of space, the shape which they did not fear: Death. Then all the woods around might turn for them into the wood of the Cross, for nowhere do the magical and the earthly lie closer together than in the heart of the hunter, and when the buck appears on the border of the clearing, then the illumination is bodily present and life seems to be timeless, evanescent and eternal, held in one’s closed hand, so that the shot which kills a strange life is like a symbol of the need to save one’s own life in the arms of grace. Always the hunter goes out to find the Cross in the antlers of the deer, and for that illumination the price even of death seems to him not too high. And so, too, when after his abundant supper, he returns to his room, he can presume to lift his eyes again to the crucifix, and, though from afar off, to think of the eternity in which his life is embedded. And perhaps in front of that eternity even the cleanliness of his body weighs no more in the balance than the sinfulness of his earthly life: on the wash-table stands a basin whose smallness is in ludicrous contrast to the size of the hunter and the customary dimensions of his life, and the jug, too, holds far less water than the wine he is accustomed to drink. Even the small commode beside the bed, which in the guise of a cupboard gives hospitality to a night-vessel, merely ratifies the inadequate proportions of the rest. The hunter employs it and flings himself on the groaning bed.

  In this chamber, admirably suited to the needs of hunters for generations past, Bertrand was installed during his stay at Stolpin.

  Among the remarkable memories which Bertrand brought back with him from his stay at Stolpin his picture of old Herr von Pasenow was not the least strange. On his very first day, immediately after breakfast, he was invited by the old gentleman to accompany him on his walk and be shown over the estate. It was a dull, thundery morning; the air was motionless, but the stillness was broken by the muffled thud of the flails coming from the direction of the two threshing-floors. Herr von Pasenow seemed to find pleasure in the rhythm; several times he remained standing and kept time with his stick. Then he asked: “Would you like to see the byres?” and set off towards the long, low sheds; but in the middle of the yard he stopped, shaking his head: “No use, the cows are out grazing.” Bertrand inquired politely what breeds they were; Herr von Pasenow first gazed at him as though he did not understand the question, then said with a shrug of the shoulders “It doesn’t matter,” and led his guest out through the gate: all round the little hollow in which lay the farm hills broadened in field after field, and everywhere the harvest work was in progress. “It all belongs to the estate,” said Herr von Pasenow, making a proud circular sweep with his stick; then his uplifted arm with the stick remained motionlessly fixed in one direction; Bertrand followed it with his eyes and saw the village church tower rising behind a hill. “That’s where the post office is,” Herr von Pasenow confided to him, making straight for the village. The heat was oppressive; the dull thudding of the flails fell gradually into silence behind them, and only the hissing of the scythes, the sound of blades being sharpened, and the rustling of the falling grain still hung in the air. Herr von Pasenow came to a stop: “Are you sometimes afraid too?” Bertrand was startled, but felt sympathetically touched by this very human question: “Me? Oh, often!” Herr von Pasenow grew interested and came nearer: “When are you afraid? When everything is still?” Bertrand saw that there was something wrong here: “No, stillness is sometimes wonderful: I simply love this stillness over the fields.” Herr von Pasenow seemed put out and annoyed: “You don’t understand.…” After a pause he began again: “Have you any children?” “To the best of my knowledge, no, Herr von Pasenow.” “Well, then.” Herr von Pasenow looked at his watch and peered into the distance; he shook his head: “Incomprehensible,” he said to himself, then to Bertrand: “Well, then when are you afraid?”—yet he did not wait for an answer, but looked again at his watch: “But he should have been here by now.” Then he looked Bertrand full in the face: “Will you write to me sometimes when you’re on your travels?” Bertrand said yes; he would be glad to do so, and Herr von Pasenow seemed greatly pleased. “Yes, do write to me, I’m interested, I’m interested in lots of things … write and tell me too when you’re afraid … but he isn’t here yet; you see nobody writes to me, not
even my sons.…” Then far away a man with a black bag became visible. “There he is!” Herr von Pasenow set off at a brisk pace, stick and legs going together, and as soon as the man was within hearing distance he screamed at him: “Where have you been idling all this time? This is the last time that you’ll go for the post … you’re dismissed, do you hear? you’re dismissed!” He had grown red and waved his stick in the man’s face; while the latter, obviously used to such encounters, calmly took the bag from his shoulder and handed it to his master, who almost docilely drew the key from his waistcoat-pocket and with trembling fingers turned it in the lock. With a trembling hand he dived into the post-bag, but when he drew out only a few journals it looked as if his fit of rage were about to repeat itself, for he held his mail speechlessly under the messenger’s nose. But thereupon he evidently recollected the presence of his guest, for he showed the journals to Bertrand: “Here, you can see for yourself,” he grumbled and put them back in the bag, locked it, and said as they walked on again: “I’ll have to go and live in the town this year, I’m afraid: it’s too quiet for me here.”