The Sleepwalkers

by Hermann Broch

  Esch took a tram back to the town, was irritated by the sight of the conductor’s uniform, and collected his things from Fräulein Erna’s flat. She received him with every mark of affection. And in his rage at the confusion of the world he treated her overtures with scorn. Thereupon he took a brief farewell and hurried to the station to catch the night train for Müllheim.

  When desires and aims meet and merge, when dreams begin to foreshadow the great moments and crises of life, the road narrows then into darker gorges, and the prophetic dream of death enshrouds the man who has hitherto walked dreaming in sleep: all that has been, all aims, all desires, flit past him once more as they do before the eyes of a dying man, and one can well-nigh call it chance if that road does not end in death.

  The man who from afar off yearns for his wife or merely for the home of his childhood has begun his sleepwalking.

  Many preparations, it may be, have already been made, only he has not yet noticed them. As, for instance, when it strikes him on the way to the station that houses are composed of regular rows of bricks, that doors are made of sawn planks and windows of rectangular panes of glass. Or when he remembers the editor and the demagogue, both of whom pretend to know the difference between right and left, although that is known only to women, and by no means to all women. But a man cannot always be thinking of such matters, and so he quietly drinks a glass of beer in the station.

  Yet when he sees the train for Müllheim come roaring in, that great, long serpent darting so surely towards its goal, he is again struck down, suddenly struck by doubt of the engine’s reliability, for it might take the wrong road; struck by the fear that he, with evident and important duties to fulfil on earth, might be diverted from these duties and cast adrift perhaps even as far as America.

  In his perplexity he would gladly approach some uniformed official, as unpractised travellers do, and ask a question, but the platform is so extended, so immeasurably long and bare, that he can scarcely race along it, and must think himself lucky, breathless maybe but still lucky, to reach the train at all, whatever its destination. Of course he strives to make out the names of the towns posted on the carriages, but soon realizes that it is a useless effort, for the names are mere words. And the traveller hesitates a little uncertainly before his carriage.

  Uncertainty and breathlessness are quite enough to make a hasty-tempered man swear, still more when, startled by the signal for departure, he has to scramble up the inconvenient steps at a breakneck pace into the carriage, and barks his shin on one of them. He swears, he swears at the steps and their awkward construction, he swears at fate. Yet behind this rudeness there lurks a more relevant and even more maddening recognition, which the man could formulate if his mind were awake: mere human contrivances all these things are, these steps fitted to the bending and stretching of the human leg, that immeasurably long platform, these signboards with words upon them, and the locomotive’s whistle, and the glittering steel rails—no end to the human contrivances, and all of them engendered in barrenness.

  Vaguely the traveller feels that by such reflections he lifts himself above the trivial daily round, and he would like to stamp them on his mind for the rest of his life. For though reflections of that sort might be deemed general to the human race, yet they are more accessible to travellers, especially to hasty-tempered travellers, than to stay-at-homes who think of nothing, not even if they climb up and down their stairs ever so often daily. The stay-at-home does not observe that he is surrounded by things of human manufacture, and that his thoughts are merely manufactured in the same way. He sends his thoughts out, as if they were trusty and capable commercial travellers, on a journey round the world, and he fancies that thus he brings the world back into his parlour and into his own transactions.

  But the man who sends himself out instead of his thoughts has lost this premature sense of security: his temper rises against everything that is of human manufacture, against the engineers who have designed the steps precisely to those measurements and not to others, against the demagogues who prate of justice, order and liberty as if they could rearrange the world according to their theories, against all dogmatists who claim to know better than others his anger rises, now that there is dawning within him the knowledge of ignorance.

  He is painfully aware of a liberty allowing things to be otherwise. Imperceptibly the words with which things are labelled have lapsed into uncertainty: it is as if all words were orphan strays. Uncertainly the traveller walks up the long corridor of the carriage, a little bewildered to see glass windows like those in houses, and with his hand he touches their cool surfaces. The man who takes a journey can thus fall easily into a state of detached irresponsibility. And since the train goes roaring on at full speed, apparently darting towards a goal, apparently rushing into irresponsibility, and can be stopped in its career by nothing less than the emergency brake, and since beneath his very feet it is hurrying him off with great dispatch, the traveller who has not yet lost his conscience in the painful liberty of the open day makes an attempt to turn and walk in the opposite direction. But he arrives nowhere, for here there is nothing but the future.

  Iron wheels roll between him and the good firm earth, and the traveller in the corridor thinks of ships with long passages in which cabin is ranged beside cabin, floating on top of a mountain of water high over the sea-bottom that is the earth. Sweet, never-to-be-fulfilled hope! what boots it to crawl into the belly of a ship when nothing but murder can bring liberty?—never, ah, never will the ship anchor beside the castle in which one’s loved one dwells. The traveller in the corridor gives up his perambulations, and while he pretends to be looking at the landscape and the distant mountains he presses his nose flat against the window-pane as he used to do when he was a child.

  Murder and Liberty, as closely akin as Birth and Death! And the man who is pitched headlong into liberty is as orphaned as the murderer who cries for his mother as he is led to the scaffold. In the rushing train only the future is real, for every moment is given to a different place, and the people in the carriages are as content as if they knew that they were being snatched from expiation. Those who are left behind on the station platform have made a last effort, by waving handkerchiefs and uttering cries, to rouse the conscience of their departing friends and summon them back to their duties, but the travellers cling to their irresponsibility, shut the windows on the pretext that the draught might give them stiff necks, and unpack the eatables which they need not now share with anyone.

  Some of them have stuck their tickets in their hat-bands so that their innocence may be visible from afar, but the majority hunt with feverish haste for their tickets when the voice of conscience is heard and the uniformed official appears. The man who is thinking of murder is soon detected, and it avails him little that like a child he is gorging himself on a chaotic mixture of food and sweetmeats; it remains a meal in the shadow of the block.

  They are sitting on benches which the designers, with shameless and perhaps premature knowingness, have made to fit the twice-curved form of the seated body, they are sitting eight in a row, packed tight in a wooden cage, they roll their heads and hear the creaking of wood and the light squeak of rods above the rolling, pounding wheels. Those facing the engine despise the others who are looking back into the past; they are afraid of the draught, and when the door is thrown open they fear that someone might come in and make them look over their shoulders. For the man whose head is turned the wrong way can no longer judge between guilt and atonement, he doubts that two and two make four, doubts that he is his own mother’s child and not a changeling. So even their toes are carefully pointed forward in the direction of the business affairs that are to occupy them. For the occupations they follow bind them together in a community,—a community that has no power but is full of uncertainty and malice.

  The mother alone can assure her child that he is no changeling. Travellers, however, and stray orphans, all those who have burned their bridges behind them, are no longer cer
tain how they stand. Pitched headlong into freedom they must build up a new order and justice for themselves; they will no longer listen to the sophistries of engineers and demagogues, they hate the human factor in all political and technical constructions, but they do not dare to rebel against the stupidities of a thousand years and to invoke that terrible revolution of knowledge in which two and two will no longer be capable of addition. For there is no one present to assure them of their once lost and now recovered innocence, no one on whose bosom they may lay their heads, fleeing away into forgetfulness from the freedom of the open day.

  Anger sharpens the wits. The travellers have carefully arranged their luggage on the rack, and now they plunge into angry and critical discussion of the political institutions of the Empire, of public order and the nature of law; they cavil at existing things and institutions with nice precision, although in words of whose reliability they are no longer sure. And in the bad conscience of their new liberty they are afraid lest they may hear the terrible crash of a railway accident, which might spit them bodily on the iron rods of the carriage. One is always reading about that kind of thing in the newspapers.

  Yet they are like people who have been roused too soon from sleep into freedom, roused to catch the train in time. So their words become more and more uncertain and drowsy, and soon all conversation dies away in an indistinguishable muttering. One or the other remarks, indeed, that he would rather shut his eyes than go on staring at the racing landscape, but his fellow-travellers, escaping into their dreams, decline to listen. They doze into slumber with their fists clenched and their coats drawn over their faces, and their dreams are filled with rage against engineers and demagogues who, strong in the knowledge of infamy, call things by names that are false, so shamelessly false that the angry dreamer must give new and tentative names to everything, yet wistfully yearns that his mother could tell him the true names, and so make the world as secure as a settled home.

  Everything is too remote and too near, as it is in childhood, and the traveller who has committed himself to the train and from afar off yearns for his wife, or merely for the home of his childhood, is like one whose sight is beginning to fail him, and feels stirring within him the terror of blindness. Many things around him are clouded, at least he thinks that they are as soon as he has covered his face with his coat, and yet a new knowledge burgeons within him, a knowledge that may have lain unnoticed for some time. He has begun his sleepwalking. He still follows the road laid down by the engineers, but he walks only on the extreme verge of it, so that one cannot but fear that he will be precipitated headlong. He still hears the voice of the demagogue, but it comes as a mere unmeaning murmur. He stretches his arms sideways and forwards like a poor tight-rope dancer who, high above solid earth, knows of a better support. Tranced and compelled his captive soul presses on, and the sleeper soars upwards to where the pinions of the loved one are ruffled by his breath like the down that is laid on a dead man’s lips, and he desires to be asked, like a child, what his name is, so that in the arms of his woman, breathing deeply of home, he may sink into dreamlessness. He is not yet at a great height, but he is already on the first pinnacle of aspiration, for he knows no longer what his name may be.

  The desire that someone should come to pay the debt of sacrificial death and redeem the world to a new innocence: this eternal dream of mankind may rise to murder, this eternal dream may rise to clairvoyance. All knowledge wavers between the dreamt wish and the foreshadowing dream, all knowledge of the redeeming sacrifice and the kingdom of salvation.

  Esch spent the night in Müllheim. When he climbed into the little local train to Badenweiler the vaporous light of morning still lay on the green hills of the Black Forest. The world looked clear and near like a dangerous toy. The engine was so short of breath that one felt one wanted to let out a few hooks at its throat; but whether it was pulling the train rapidly or slowly it was impossible to tell. In spite of this Esch trusted himself to it unthinkingly. When it stopped the trees greeted him with a greater friendliness than ever before, and caressed by soft and fragrant airs a kiosk arose beside the railway buildings offering a large assortment of pretty picture postcards. Any of them would have looked effective in Mother Hentjen’s collection, and Esch chose one, a lovely card showing the Schlossberg, stuck it in his pocket, and sought a shadowy seat that he might write in peace. But he did not write. He remained calmly sitting, like one who has nothing more to trouble about, and his hands rested placidly on his knees. He sat like this for a long time, gazing through half-closed lids at the green leaves of the trees, sat so long that when at last he walked through the untroubled streets and saw human beings going to and fro, in his astonishment he could not tell how he came to be there. Before a house stood a sinister motor-car, and Esch regarded it closely to see whether it was big enough to sleep in. He looked round lazily at everything, for he felt the security and relaxation of the horseman who has reached his goal, and, turning in his saddle, sees the others still a long way behind; all his tension fell from him, and quite at his ease, almost hesitatingly, he addressed himself to the last stretch, ardently longing, indeed, for some unexpectedly high and difficult obstacle to rise before him ere his goal was reached and he could grasp his secure triumph. So it was almost a matter for grief to him—and propitious as the day was, it was unpropitious to grief—that he should be making towards Bertrand’s house with such certainty: without knowing the place and without asking, he knew all the turns to take. He climbed the gently winding avenue; the breath of the woods met him, caressed his brow, caressed his skin beneath his collar and shirt-cuffs, and to receive the coolness he took his hat in his hand and opened the buttons of his waistcoat. Now he went in through a park gate, almost unaffected by the discovery that the estate did not in the least resemble the grandiose vision that had floated before him in his dream pictures. And although in none of the high windows was Ilona to be seen in shimmering spangles, the more lovely foil to this lovely scene, already at her goal and languidly resting there, yet, though this was a deep disappointment, the dream picture remained unscathed, and it was as though what he saw palpably before him now were only a symbolical representation erected for a momentary and practical purpose, a dream within a dream. At the top of the sloping deep green sward, which lay in the morning shadow, stood the house, a villa executed in a severe and solid style, and as though the wayward and evanescent coolness of the morning, as though the symbolism of the scene wished once more to duplicate itself, at the end of the slope rose an almost soundless fountain, and its waters were like a crystalline draught which one longed to drink simply because they were so limpid. Out of the lodge covered with honeysuckle which stood behind the gate appeared a man in grey who asked what Esch wanted. The silver buttons on his coat were not the appurtenances of a livery or uniform, for they glittered softly and coolly, as though they had been sewed on expressly for this shimmering morning, and if yesterday Esch had still felt for a moment his self-confidence sinking, and doubted whether after all he would manage to penetrate to the Chairman, now all his doubts vanished, and he felt he might almost claim to belong to those who could go out and in here without hindrance. The behaviour of the lodge-keeper, who made no attempt to enter his name and business in a duplicate block, did not even surprise Esch, nor did it occur to him that perhaps it would have been more fitting for him to wait at the door; falling in step with the man he walked on by his side, and the man silently allowed it. They entered a cool and shadowy ante-room, and while the other vanished through one of the many white varnished doors, which softly opened before and softly closed behind him, Esch felt the soft yielding carpet under his feet and waited for the messenger, who presently returned and led him through several apartments, until they came to another door, at which with a bow his conductor left him. And although he had now no more need of a guide, it seemed to him that it would have been more fitting, and even more desirable, had the flight of rooms extended for a long distance still, perhaps into eternity, i
nto an unattainable eternity guarding the inner shrine, guarding the presence chamber so to speak; and he almost imagined that in some miraculous and unseemly and clandestine way he had indeed traversed an endless flight of endless rooms when he now found himself in the presence of this man who held out his hand to him. And although Esch knew that it was Bertrand, and that there could be no doubt about it, now or at any time, yet it seemed to him that this man was only the visible symbol of another, the reflected image of someone more essential and perhaps greater who remained in concealment, so simply and smoothly, so effortlessly did everything go. And now he was looking at this man, who was clean-shaven like an actor and yet was not an actor; the man’s face was youthful, and his wavy hair was white. There were a great many books in the room, and Esch sat down beside the writing-table as if he were in a doctor’s consulting-room. He heard the man’s voice, and it was sympathetic like that of a doctor: “What brings you to me?”

  And the dreamer heard his own voice saying softly: “I’m going to hand you over to the police.”

  “Oh! What a pity!” the reply came so quietly that Esch too did not dare after this to raise his voice. Almost as if speaking to himself he repeated:

  “To the police.”

  “Why, do you hate me?”

  “Yes,” Esch lied, and was ashamed of the lie.

  “That isn’t true, my friend, you like me very well.”

  “An innocent man is sitting in prison in your place.”