Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics)

by Unknown

  When the traveller came to the first houses of the colony, with the soldier and the condemned man walking behind him, the soldier pointed to one structure and said: ‘Here’s the café.’ On the ground floor was a deep, low-ceilinged, cave-like room, its walls and rafters blackened with smoke. Its entire width was open facing the street. Even though the café differed little from the other houses in the colony, all of which, except for the commandant’s complex, were rather run-down, it nevertheless evoked for the traveller an historic aura and he felt the might of former times. He came closer and, with his two companions following behind, stepped between the unoccupied tables that stood outside lining the street, and inhaled the cool, musty air that wafted from within. ‘The old man’s buried here,’ said the soldier, ‘the priest refused to let him have a plot in the cemetery. They were undecided for a while where to put him, finally they buried him here. I bet the officer didn’t tell you that, it wasn’t exactly something he was proud of. He tried several times at night to dig the old man up, but every time they chased him away.’

  ‘Where is the grave?’ asked the traveller, who couldn’t believe his ears.

  Whereupon the two, the soldier and the condemned man, ran forward and pointed to the spot with outstretched hands. They led the traveller to the rear wall, where, at several tables, customers sat talking. They were probably dockworkers, muscular men with short, shiny, black beards. None wore coats, their shirts were torn, they were poor, humble folk. When the traveller approached a few got up, pressed themselves against the wall and stared. ‘It’s a stranger,’ the word went around in a whisper, ‘he wants to see the grave.’

  They shoved aside one of the tables, beneath which there really was a tombstone. It was a simple stone, small enough to be hidden under a table. It bore an inscription with such minuscule letters the traveller had to kneel down to read it. It read: ‘Here rests the old commandant. His followers, who now have no name, dug the grave and set the stone. There is a prophecy that in a few years’ time the commandant will rise again and from this humble house lead his followers to take back the colony. Believe and wait!’ Once the traveller had finished reading this and got up again he saw the men standing around him and smiling, as though they had read the inscription along with him, found it ridiculous and pressed him to share their opinion. The traveller pretended not to notice, distributed a few coins, waited till the table was pushed back over the grave, left the café and went to the harbour.

  The soldier and the condemned man met acquaintances who held them back with idle chatter. But they must soon have said their goodbyes, since the traveller had only reached the middle of the long stairway leading down to the landing boats when he noticed them running after him. They probably wanted to persuade him at the last minute to take them along. And while the traveller bargained with a boatman over the price to row him out to the steamer, the two went stumbling down the steps in silence, as they didn’t dare scream. But once they reached the dock the traveller was already seated in the rowing boat and the boatman was just pulling off. They could still have leapt in, but the traveller picked up and threatened them with a thick mooring rope, and thereby kept them from jumping.

  The Kiss

  1913

  Robert Walser

  What wondrous thing have I dreamt? What befell me? What curious visitation came upon me suddenly last night, lightning-like from on high as I lay here lost in sleep? Suspecting nothing and wanting nothing and completely unconscious, a slave of sleep, that held me locked in its dark limbo, I lay there unprotected and unarmed, without expectations and without responsibilities (for we are wholly irresponsible in sleep), when that beautiful and horrible, that great and sweet, that kind and awful, that entrancing and terrifying thing came upon me, as though wanting to suffocate me with its crush and kiss. Sleep has inner eyes, and so I must confess that I saw the thing that struck me with a sort of second or alternate set of eyes. I saw it fly with the speed of wind and lightning, slicing through the infinity of space, shooting down from the immeasurably vast and distant heights to my mouth. I saw it and was horrified, and yet I could not budge or resist. I even heard it approaching. I heard it. I saw and heard that never before seen and never before experienced kiss which cannot be described with words, just as our language has no words to describe the shudder and delight that shook me. The kiss of dreams has nothing in common with the gentle, soft, mutually willed and desired kiss that lovers share. It was not a mouth that kissed me, no, it was a solitary and free-flying kiss. A kiss that was completely and absolutely pure kiss and nothing else. Something autonomous, spectral, like the soul. And once struck by that comprehensible and then again completely incomprehensible thing, I was already dissolving in such an all-consuming – I would like to say, grandiose – rapture which I dare not describe in any greater detail. Ah, that was a kiss, what a kiss! The pain it caused me forced me to give off a cry of distress, and at the very same instant I received that kiss with its heavenly and hellish effect, I woke up but could not for a long while thereafter get a grip on myself. What is a man, what is Man? What is the kiss I give gladly in broad daylight or in moonlight, in the sweet-satisfying lover’s night under the trees or elsewhere, compared to the frenzy of that imagined-inflicted kiss, kissed by the demons?

  The Blackbird

  1935

  Robert Musil

  The two men whom I must mention in order to relate three little stories, in which the narrative pivots around the identity of the narrator, were friends from youth; let’s call them Aone and Atwo. The fact is that such early friendships grow ever more astounding the older you get. You change over the years, from the crown of your head to the soles of your feet, from the skin’s soft down to the depths of your heart; but, strangely enough, your relationship with each other stays the same, fluctuating about as little as the communion we each carry on with that diverse host of sirs successively addressed as I. It is beside the point whether or not you still identify with that little blond numbskull photographed once long ago; as a matter of fact, you can’t really say for sure that you even like the little devil, that bundle of ‘I’. And so, too, you may very well both disagree with and disapprove of your best friends; indeed, there are many friends who can’t stand each other. And in a certain sense, those friendships are the deepest and the best, for, without any admixtures, they contain that indefinable essence in its purest form.

  The youth that united the two friends Aone and Atwo was nothing less than religious in character. While both were brought up in an institution that prided itself on the proper emphasis it placed on the religious fundamentals, the pupils of that institution did their best to ignore those selfsame principles. The school chapel, for instance, was a real, big, beautiful church, complete with a stone steeple; it was reserved for the school’s exclusive use. The absence of strangers proved a great boon, for while the bulk of the student body was busy according to the dictates of sacred custom, now kneeling, now rising at the pews up front, small groups could gather at the rear to play cards beside the confessional booths, or to smoke on the organ steps. And some escaped up to the steeple, whose pointed spire was ringed by a saucer-like balcony on the stone parapet of which, at a dizzying height, acrobatics were performed that could easily have cost the lives of far less sin-burdened boys than these.

  One such provocation of the Lord involved a slow, muscle-straining elevation of the feet in mid-air while, with glance directed downwards, you grasped at the parapet, balancing precariously on your hands. Anyone who has ever tried this stunt on level ground will appreciate just how much confidence, bravery and luck are required to pull it off on a foot-wide stone strip up at the top of a tower. It must also be said that many wild and nimble boys, though virtuoso gymnasts on level ground, never did attempt it. Aone, for instance, never tried it. Atwo, on the other hand – and let this serve to introduce him as narrator – was, in his boyhood, the creator of this test of character. It was hard to find another body like his. He didn’t sport an
athletic build like so many others, but seems to have developed muscles naturally, effortlessly. A narrow, smallish head sat atop his torso, with eyes like lightning bolts wrapped in velvet, and teeth that one would sooner have associated with the fierceness of a beast of prey than the serenity of a mystic.

  Later, during their student days, the two friends professed a materialistic philosophy of life devoid of God or the soul, viewing man as a physiological or economic machine – which, in fact, he may very well be, though this wasn’t the point as far as they were concerned – since the appeal of such a philosophy lies not in its inherent truth, but rather in its demonic, pessimistic, morbidly intellectual character. By this time their relationship had already become that special kind of friendship. And while Atwo studied forestry, and spoke of travelling as a forest ranger to the far reaches of Russia or Asia as soon as he was through with his studies, his friend Aone, who scorned such boyish aspirations, had by then settled on a more solid pursuit, and had at the time already cast his lot with the rising labour movement. And when they met again shortly before the Great War, Atwo already had his Russian adventure behind him. He spoke little about it, was now employed in the offices of some large corporation and seemed, despite the appearance of middle-class comfort, to have suffered considerable disappointments. His old friend had in the meantime left the class struggle and become editor of a newspaper that printed a great deal about social harmony and was owned by a stockbroker. Henceforth the two friends despised each other insuperably, but once again fell out of touch; and when they finally met again for a short while, Atwo told the following story the way one empties out a sack of memories for a friend, so as to be able to push on again with a clean bill of lading. It matters little under the circumstances how the other responded, and their exchange can perhaps best be related in the form of a monologue. It would be far more important to the fabric of the tale were it possible to describe exactly what Atwo looked like at the time (which is easier said than done), for this raw impression of the man is not without bearing on the gist of his words. Suffice it to say that he brought to mind a sharp, taut and narrow riding crop balanced on its soft tip, leaning up against the wall; it was in just such a half-erect, half-slouching posture that he seemed to feel most at ease.

  Among the most extraordinary places in the world – said Atwo – are those Berlin courtyards where two, three or four buildings flash their rear ends at each other, and where, in square holes set in the middle of the walls, kitchen maids sit and sing. You can tell by the look of the red copper pots hung in the pantry how loud their clatter is. From far down below a man’s voice bawls up at one of the girls, or heavy wooden shoes go clip-clop back and forth across the cobblestones. Slowly. Heavily. Incessantly. Senselessly. For ever. Isn’t it so?

  The kitchens and bedrooms look outwards and downwards on all this; they lie close together like love and digestion in the human anatomy. Floor upon floor, the conjugal beds are stacked up one on top of the other, since all the bedrooms occupy the same space in each building – window wall, bathroom wall and closet wall prescribe the placement of each bed almost down to the half-yard. The dining rooms are likewise piled up floor on floor, as are the white-tiled baths and the balconies with their red awnings. Love, sleep, birth, digestion, unexpected reunions, troubled and restful nights are all vertically aligned in these buildings like the columns of sandwiches at a vending machine. In middle-class apartments like these your destiny is already waiting for you the moment you move in. You will admit that human freedom consists essentially of where and when we do what we do, for what we do is almost always the same – thus the sinister implications of one uniform blueprint for all. Once I climbed up on top of a cabinet just to make use of the vertical dimension, and I can assure you that the unpleasant conversation in which I was involved looked altogether different from that vantage point.

  Atwo laughed at the memory and poured himself a drink; Aone thought about how they were at that very moment seated on a balcony with a red awning that belonged to his apartment, but he said nothing, knowing all too well what he might have remarked.

  I am still perfectly willing to admit today, by the way – Atwo added of his own accord – that there is something awe-inspiring about such uniformity. And in the past this sense of vastness, of a wasteland, brought to mind a desert or an ocean; a Chicago slaughterhouse (as much as the image may turn my stomach) is after all quite different from a flower-pot! But the curious thing was that during the time I occupied that apartment, I kept thinking of my parents. You recall that I almost lost contact with them – but then all of a sudden this thought came to me out of nowhere: they gave you your life. And this ridiculous thought kept coming back again and again like a fly that refuses to be shooed away. There’s nothing more to be said about this sanctimonious notion ingrained in us in early childhood. But whenever I looked over my apartment, I would say to myself: there, now you’ve bought your life, for so and so many marks a month rent. And sometimes maybe I also said: now you’ve built up a life for yourself with your own two hands. My apartment served as some amalgamation of a warehouse, a life insurance policy and a source of pride. And it seemed so utterly strange, such an inscrutable mystery, that there was something which had been given to me whether I had wanted it or not; and, moreover, that that something functioned as the very foundation of everything else. And I believe that that banal thought concealed a wealth of abnormality and unpredictability, all of which I had kept safely hidden from myself. And now comes the story of the nightingale.

  It began on one evening much like any other. I’d stayed home, and after my wife had gone to bed, I sat myself down in the study; the only difference that night was that I didn’t reach for a book or anything else, but this too had happened before. After one o’clock the streets started getting quieter; conversations became a rarity; it is pleasant to follow the advent of an evening with your ear. At two o’clock all the clamour and laughter below had clearly tipped over into intoxication and lateness. I realized that I was waiting for something, but I didn’t know what for. By three o’clock – it was May – the sky grew lighter; I felt my way through the dark apartment to the bedroom and lay down without a sound. I expected nothing more now but sleep, and that the next morning would bring a day like the one that had just passed. And soon I no longer knew whether I was awake or asleep.

  In the space between the curtains and the blind a dark greenness gushed forth; thin bands of the white froth of morning seeped in between the slats. This might have been my last waking impression or a suspended dream vision. Then I was awakened by something drawing near; sounds were coming closer. Once, twice I sensed it in my sleep. Then they sat perched on the roof of the building next door and leapt into the air like dolphins. I could just as well have said, like balls of fire at a fireworks display, for the impression of fireworks lingered; in falling, they exploded softly against the window-panes and sank to the earth like great silver stars. Then I experienced a magical state; I lay in my bed like a statue on a sarcophagus cover, and I was awake, but not like during the day. It is very difficult to describe, but when I think back, it is as though something had turned me inside out; I was no longer a solid, but rather a something sunken in upon itself. And the air was not empty, but of a consistency unknown to the daylight senses, a blackness I could see through, a blackness I could feel through, and of which I too was made. Time pulsed in quick little fever spasms. Why should something not happen now that normally never happens? It’s a nightingale singing outside! I said half aloud to myself.

  Well, maybe there are more nightingales in Berlin than I thought, Atwo continued. At the time I believed that there were none in this stony preserve, and that this one must have flown to me from far away. To me! I felt it and sat up with a smile. A bird of paradise! So it does indeed exist! At such a moment, you see, it seems perfectly natural to believe in the supernatural; it is as if you’d spent your childhood in an enchanted kingdom. And I immediately decided: I’ll follow the nigh
tingale. Farewell, my beloved, I thought – farewell, my beloved, my house, my city! … But before I had even got up out of bed, and before I had figured out whether to climb up to the nightingale on the rooftop, or to follow it on the street down below, the bird had gone silent and apparently flown away.

  Now he’s singing from some other rooftop for the ears of another sleeper, Atwo mused. You’re probably thinking that this was the end of the story? But it was only the beginning, and I have no idea what end it will take!

  I’d been abandoned, left behind with a heavy heart. That was no nightingale, it was a blackbird, I said to myself – just as you’d like to say to me right now. Everyone knows that such blackbirds imitate other birds. By this time I was wide awake and the silence bored me. I lit a candle and considered the woman who lay next to me. Her body had the colour of pale bricks. The white border of the blanket lay over her skin like a lip of snow. Wide shadow lines of mysterious derivation ringed her body – mysterious even though they must of course have had something to do with the candle and the position of my arms. So what, I thought, so what if it really was only a blackbird! The very fact that an ordinary blackbird could have such a crazy effect on me: that makes the whole thing all the more extraordinary! For, as you well know, while a single disappointment may elicit tears, a repeated disappointment will evoke a smile. And meanwhile I kept looking at my wife. This was all somehow connected, but I didn’t know how. For years I’ve loved you – I thought to myself – like nothing else in this world, and now you lie there like a burnt-out husk of love. You’re a stranger to me now, and I’ve arrived at the other end of love. Had I grown tired of her? I can’t remember ever having felt sated. Let me put it like this: it was as if a feeling could drill its way through the heart as though through a mountain, and find another world on the other side, a world with the same valley, the same houses and the same little bridge. In all honesty, I simply had no idea what was happening. And I still don’t understand it today. Perhaps it’s wrong of me to tell you this story in connection with two others that happened afterwards. I can only tell you how I saw it during the experience: as a signal from afar – so it seemed to me at the time.