The Sleepwalkers

by Hermann Broch

  He was grateful to Elisabeth for the fact that she had not lost her composure, even if it was probably only an assumed composure; for she lingered out the hour for retiring and asked for supper, and they sat for a very long time in the dining-hall; the band which played for the diners’ entertainment had already put away their instruments, only a few guests were still left in the room, and grateful as any postponement of the hour was to Joachim, yet he felt again that cold, rarefied atmosphere diffusing itself through the room, that chill which on the evening of their betrothal had been like a dreadful foreboding of death. Perhaps even Elisabeth felt it, for she said that it was time now to retire.

  So the moment had come. Elisabeth had parted from him with a friendly “Good-night, Joachim,” and now he walked up and down his room. Should he simply go to bed? He regarded the bed, on which the sheets were folded down. Yet he had taken an oath to watch before her door, to guard her heavenly dreams, that for ever on her silvery cloud she might dream on; and now it had suddenly lost all sense and meaning, for everything seemed to point to the one conclusion, that he should make himself comfortable here. He glanced down at his clothes, and felt the long military coat as a protection; it was indecent for people to appear at weddings in frock-coats. All the same he must have a wash, and softly, as though he were committing an act of sacrilege, he pulled off his coat and poured water into the basin on the brown varnished washstand. How painful all this was, how senseless, unless it should be a link in the chain of trials laid on his shoulders; it would all have been easier if Elisabeth had locked the communicating door behind her, but out of consideration for him she had certainly not done that. Joachim vaguely remembered having been in the same position before, and now with crushing force came the memory of a locked door and a brown washstand under a gas-jet: dreadful because it was a memory of Ruzena, no less dreadful as raising the problem how, living with an angel, the thought of such a thing as a lavatory, no matter how discreetly it obtruded itself, was practically conceivable at all: in both cases a degradation of Elisabeth and a new trial. He had cleansed his face and hands gently and cautiously, so as to prevent the porcelain basin from making any sound against the marble top of the table, but now he was confronted with something quite inconceivable: for who could think of gargling in the immediate vicinity of Elisabeth? And yet he must immerse himself still more deeply in the purifying crystalline medium, must drown there, to walk forth from that utter purification as from baptism in Jordan. But how could even a bath help him here? Ruzena had recognized him for what he was and drawn the consequences. He slipped back hastily into his coat again, buttoned it up scrupulously, and walked up and down the room. There was no sound from the other room, and he felt that his presence must be an oppression to her. Why did she not scream at him to go away, as Ruzena had done behind the locked door? That time he had had the lavatory attendant at least to stand by him, but now he was alone and without support. All too prematurely he had rejected Bertrand and his easy assurance, and the fact that he had been capable of thinking it his duty to protect Elisabeth from Bertrand struck him now as hypocrisy. A terrible feeling of remorse came over him: it was not Elisabeth whom he had really wished to protect and save; he had merely hoped to save his own soul through her sacrifice. Was she kneeling on her knees in there praying that God might free her again from the fetters which she had assumed out of pity? Was it not his duty to say to her that he gave her her freedom, this very night, that if she commanded him he would drive her at once to her house in the west end, to her beautiful new house which was waiting for her? In great agitation he knocked at the communicating door and wished immediately that he had not done so. She said softly: “Joachim,” and he turned the handle. She was lying in bed, a candle was burning on the commode. He remained at the door, almost as if he were standing at attention, and said hoarsely: “Elisabeth, I only wanted to tell you that I give you your freedom: I can’t think of your sacrificing yourself for me.” Elisabeth was astonished, but she felt relief that he did not accost her as a loving husband. “Do you think, Joachim, that I’ve sacrificed myself?” She smiled faintly. “Really you’ve thought of that a little too late.” “It isn’t too late yet; I thank God it isn’t too late.… I didn’t realize it until now.… Shall I drive you out to the west end?” Then Elisabeth could not help laughing: now, in the middle of the night! What would the people in the hotel think? “Why not just go to bed, Joachim. We can discuss all that in peace and quietness to-morrow. You must be tired too.” Joachim said like an obstinate child: “I’m not tired.” The flickering flame of the candle lighted up her pale face, which lay between her loosened hair on the snowy pillows. A peak of the bolster rose in the air like a nose, and its shadow on the wall was exactly the same shape as the shadow of Elisabeth’s nose. “Please, Elisabeth, smooth down the corner of that pillow, to the left of your head there,” he said from the door. “Why?” asked Elisabeth in surprise, putting up her hand towards it. “It casts such a horrible shadow,” said Joachim; meanwhile another peak of the bolster had risen, showing another nose on the wall. Joachim was irritated, he wanted to set this matter right himself and took a step into the room. “But, Joachim, what’s wrong with the shadows that they annoy you? Is it right now?” Joachim replied: “The shadow of your face on the wall is like a mountain range.” “But that’s nothing.” “I can’t stand it.” Elisabeth was a little afraid lest this should be the prelude to putting out the candle, but to her pleasant surprise Joachim said: “We must have two candles for you, then there won’t be any shadows and you’ll look like Snow-white.” And he actually went into his room and came back with the second lighted candle. “Oh, you’re joking, Joachim,” Elisabeth could not help saying, “where are you to put the second candle? There’s no place for it on the wall. And besides, I would look like a corpse between two candles.” Joachim studied the position. Elisabeth was right, so he said: “May I set it on the commode?” “Of course you may …” she paused for a moment, and said hesitatingly and yet with a slight feeling of reassurance, “you’re my husband now.” He held his hand in front of the flame and carried the candle over to the commode, reflectively contemplated the two lights, and the quietness and semi-darkness of this wedding night striking him he said: “Three would be more cheerful,” as though with those words he were trying to excuse himself to Elisabeth and her parents for the quietness of the ceremony. She too gazed at the two candles; she had drawn the coverlet over her shoulders, and only her hand, caught at the wrist by a lace frill, hung languidly over the edge. Joachim was still thinking of the lack of display at their marriage; but he had held this hand in his in the carriage. He had become more composed, and had almost forgotten why he had come in here; now he remembered again and felt it his duty to repeat his offer: “So you don’t want to go to your house, Elisabeth?” “But you’re silly, Joachim; fancy my getting up now! I feel very comfortable here and you want to rout me out.” Joachim stood irresolutely beside the commode; suddenly he could not comprehend the way in which things changed their nature and vocation; a bed was a pleasant article of furniture for sleeping on, with Ruzena it was a coign of desire and inexpressible sweetness, and now it was a thing unapproachable, a something whose edge he scarcely dared to touch. Wood was wood and nothing more, but still one shrank from touching the wood of a coffin. “It’s so difficult, Elisabeth,” he said suddenly, “forgive me.” Yet he begged her forgiveness not merely, as she probably imagined, for expecting her to get up at that late hour, but because yet once more he had compared her with Ruzena, and—he admitted it to himself with horror—because he could almost have wished that Ruzena, and not she, were lying there. And he saw how deeply he was still stuck in the mire. “Forgive me,” he said again, and he knelt down so as to kiss a good-night on the white, blue-veined hand on the edge of the bed. She could not tell whether this might not mean the dreaded approach of intimacy, and remained silent. His mouth was pressed to her hand, and he became aware of his teeth, which were crushed against the
inner side of his lips, as the frontier of the hard bony skull which was hidden beneath his own skull and was continued in the skeleton. He felt too the warm breath in the cavity of his mouth, and the tongue embedded in the trough between his lower teeth, and he knew that now he must quickly remove all these, so that Elisabeth might not become inwardly aware of them. Yet he would not concede Ruzena this quick triumph, and so in silence he remained stubbornly on his knees beside the bed, until Elisabeth, as though to indicate that he should go, very gently pressed his hand. Perhaps he intentionally misunderstood this hint, for it gave him a remote memory of Ruzena’s caressing hands; so he did not free Elisabeth’s hand, although he was actually very impatient to leave the room. He waited for the miracle, the token of grace which God must grant him, and it was as though fear stood between the gates of grace. “Elisabeth, say something,” he begged, and Elisabeth replied very slowly, as though the words were not her own: “We aren’t strange enough, and we aren’t intimate enough.” Joachim said: “Elisabeth, do you want to leave me?” Elisabeth answered gently: “No, Joachim, I think we’ll go the same road together now. Don’t be unhappy, Joachim, it will all turn out for the best yet.” Yes, Joachim would have liked to answer, and that’s what Bertrand said too; but he was silent, not merely because it would have been unseemly to suggest such a thing, but because in her mouth Bertrand’s words were like a Mephistophelian sign from the demon and the Evil One, instead of the sign from God that he had expected and hoped for and prayed for. For a moment Bertrand’s image was faintly visible as at the bottom of a brown box, visible and yet hidden, and it was the Devil incarnate whose face and form threw the shadow of a mountain range upon the wall. And immovable and frozen as it was when it appeared, and swiftly, as at the tinkling of a bell, as it vanished again, yet it was a warning that the Evil One was not yet overcome, and that Elisabeth herself was still in his power, seeing that with her own words she had called him up, and seeing that she had not succeeded in scaring away those phantoms and sick fancies with words from God. But even if this was disappointing, yet it was also good, filling him with a sense of the pathos of the earthly and the human and of human weakness. Elisabeth was his heavenly goal, but the way on earth to such a goal he had himself, in spite of his great weakness, to find out and prepare for both of them: and meanwhile where in this loneliness was a guide to be found to that knowledge? Where could he find help? Clausewitz’s aphorism came into his mind, that men act only from a divination and instinctive feeling of truth, and his heart was prescient with the knowledge that in a Christian household their lives would be determined by the saving help of grace, guarding them so that they might not wander on the earth unenlightened, helpless and without meaning to their lives, and lose themselves in the void. No, that could not be called a mere convention of feeling. He straightened himself and ran his hand softly over the silk coverlet under which her body lay; he felt a little like a sick-room attendant, and distantly it was as though he were stroking his sick father, or his father’s deputy. “Poor little Elisabeth,” he said; it was the first endearment that he had ventured to utter. She had freed her hand, and now passed it over his hair: Ruzena had done that too, he thought. Nevertheless she said softly: “Joachim, we’re not intimate enough yet.” He had raised himself a little, and sat now on the edge of the bed and stroked her hair. Then with his head on his hand he contemplated her face, which still lay, pale and strange, not the face of a wife, not the face of his wife, on the pillow, and it so happened that gradually and without himself noticing it he found himself in a recumbent position beside her. She had moved a little to the side, and her hand, which with its befrilled wrist was all that emerged from the bedclothes, rested in his. Through his position his military coat had become disordered, the lapels falling apart left his black trousers visible, and when Joachim noticed this he hastily set things right again and covered the place. He had now drawn up his legs, and so as not to touch the sheets with his patent-leather shoes, he rested his feet in a rather constrained posture on the chair standing beside the bed. The candles flickered; first one went out, then the other. Now and then they heard muffled footsteps in the carpeted corridor, a door banged, and in the distance they could hear the sounds of the great city, whose gigantic traffic did not fully cease even at night. They lay motionless and gazed at the ceiling of the room, on which yellow strips of light from the slits of the window-blinds were pencilled, and they resembled a little the ribs of a skeleton. Then Joachim had fallen asleep, and when Elisabeth noticed it she could not help smiling. And then she too actually went to sleep.

  IV

  Nevertheless after some eighteen months they had their first child. It actually happened. How this came about cannot be told here. Besides, after the material for character construction already provided, the reader can imagine it for himself.

  Part Two

  THE ANARCHIST

  (1903)

  I

  THE 2nd of March 1903 was a bad day for August Esch, who was thirty years old and a clerk; he had had a row with his chief and found himself dismissed before he had time to think of giving notice. He was irritated, therefore, but less by the fact of his dismissal than by his own lack of resourcefulness. There were so many things that he could have flung in the man’s face: a man who didn’t know what was happening under his very nose, a man who believed the insinuations of a fellow like Nentwig and had no idea that the said Nentwig was pocketing commissions right and left—unless, indeed, he was shutting his eyes deliberately because Nentwig knew something shady about him. And what a fool Esch had been to let the pair of them catch him out like that: they had fallen foul of him over an alleged mistake in the books that wasn’t a mistake at all, now that he came to think of it. But they had bullied him so insolently that it had simply turned into a shouting match, in the middle of which he suddenly found himself dismissed. At the time, of course, he hadn’t been able to think of anything but guttersnipe abuse, whereas now he knew exactly how he could have scored. “Sir,” yes, “Sir,” he should have said, drawing himself up to his full height, and Esch now said “Sir” to himself in a sarcastic voice, “have you the slightest idea of the state your business is in …?” yes, that’s what he should have said, but now it was too late, and although he had gone and got drunk and slept with a girl he hadn’t got rid of his irritation, and Esch swore to himself as he walked along beside the Rhine towards the town.

  He heard steps behind him and, turning, caught sight of Martin, who was swinging along between his crutches with the foot of his game leg braced against one of them. If that wasn’t the last straw! Esch would gladly have hurried on, at the risk of getting a wallop over the head from one of the crutches—serve him right too if he did get one over the head—but he felt it would be a low-down trick to play on a cripple, and so he stood waiting. Besides, he would have to look round for another job, and Martin, who knew everybody, might have heard of something. The cripple hobbled up, let his crooked leg swing free, and said bluntly: “Got the sack?” So he had heard of it already? Esch replied with bitterness: “Got the sack.” “Have you any money left?” Esch shrugged his shoulders: “Enough for a day or two.” Martin reflected: “I know of a job that might suit you.” “No, you won’t get me into your union.” “I know, I know; you’re too high and mighty for that.… Well, you’ll join some day. Where shall we go?” Esch was going nowhere in particular, so they proceeded to Mother Hentjen’s. In the Kastellgasse Martin stopped: “Have they given you a decent reference?” “I’ll have to call for it to-day.” “The Central Rhine people in Mannheim need a shipping clerk, or something in that line … if you don’t mind leaving Cologne,” and they went in. It was a fairly large, dingy room that had been a resort of the Rhine sailors probably for hundreds of years; though except for the vaulted roof, blackened with smoke, no sign now indicated its antiquity. The walls behind the tables were wainscoted in brown wood half-way up, to which was fixed a long bench that ran round the room. Upon the mantelpiece was an ar
ray of Munich quart-jugs, among which stood an Eiffel Tower in bronze. It was embellished with a red-and-black-and-white flag, and when one looked more closely the words “Table reserved” could be deciphered on it in faded gold-lettering. Between the two windows stood an orchestrion with its folding-doors open, showing its internal works and the roll of music. Actually the doors should have remained closed, and anyone who wished to enjoy the music should have inserted a coin in the slot. But Mother Hentjen did nothing shabbily, and so the customer had merely to thrust his hand into the machinery and pull the lever; all Mother Hentjen’s customers knew how to work the apparatus. Facing the orchestrion the whole of the shorter back wall was taken up by the buffet, and behind the buffet was a huge mirror flanked on either side by two glass cabinets containing brightly hued liqueur bottles. When in the evening Mother Hentjen took her post behind the buffet, she had a habit of turning round to the mirror every now and then to pat her blond coiffure, which was perched on her round, heavy skull like a hard little sugar-loaf. On the counter itself stood rows of large wine and Schnapps bottles, for the gay liqueur bottles in the cabinet were seldom called for. And finally, between the buffet and the glass cabinet, a zinc washing-basin with a tap was discreetly let into the wall.