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

by Unknown

  Following this announcement, the matter was promptly forgotten. There were absolutely no reports of the success of collective playthings in other cities. Clearly the entire undertaking had to be chalked up as a complete and utter flop. Which only goes to prove that children are the most determined, perhaps the last real individualists.

  The Dandelion*

  1947

  Wolfgang Borchert

  The door closed behind me. It is often the case that a door is closed behind you – and you can even imagine it being locked. House doors, for instance, are locked, and you then either find yourself shut in or shut out. Even house doors have something final, impassable, surrendering about them. And so the door was shoved shut behind me, yes, shoved, since it’s an inordinately thick door, so thick it can’t be slammed shut. An ugly door marked with the number 432. That’s what’s special about this door, that it has a number and is iron-plated – that’s what makes it so haughty and unapproachable; it’s immovable, oblivious to the most heartfelt prayers.

  And so they left me alone with that thing – no, not only left me alone, but locked me in with it, that thing I fear the most: myself.

  Do you know what it’s like to be left to yourself, to be left alone with yourself, to be left to your own devices? I cannot say that it’s necessarily awful, but it is one of the strangest experiences you can have in this world: to encounter yourself. Naked, helpless, aware of nothing but yourself, without attribute or distraction and without the possibility of action: that’s how it is in Cell 432. And that is the most degrading thing of all: to be totally incapable of action. Not to have a bottle to drink from or to smash, no towel to hang, no knife to break out or cut your veins, no pen to write with – to be reduced to nothing – nothing but yourself.

  That’s damned little to be left with in an empty room with four naked walls. It’s less than the lot of a spider that squeezes a scaffold out of its rear end and can risk its life scrambling between the abyss and the net. What net catches us if we fall?

  Our own inner strength? Does God catch us? God – is that the force that lets a tree grow and a bird fly – is God life? Then he must sometimes be able to break our fall – if we want it badly enough.

  When the sun pulled its fingers from the lattice and night crawled out of the corners, something stepped out of the darkness towards me – and I thought it was God. Had someone opened the door? Was I no longer alone? I sensed that there was something there, something breathing, something growing. The cell felt too tight – it felt as if the walls would have to yield before this force that I called God.

  You, Number 432, my little man – don’t let the night make you lose it! It’s your fear locked in the cell with you, that’s all! Your fear in night’s embrace. But fear is a monster, and the night can be as fearful as a phantom if you’re left to face it alone.

  The moon went into a tailspin over the rooftops and lit up the walls, you idiot, that’s all! The walls are as tight as ever, and the cell is as empty as an orange peel. God whom they call good – no trace of him here. And the thing that was here, the thing that spoke to you, was inside you. Maybe it was the God in your gut – it was you! You’re God too, so is everything, even the spider and the mackerel are God. God is life – that’s all. But that’s so much he can’t be anything more. There’s nothing else. But that nothing all too often overwhelms us.

  The cell door was as tight as a nut – as if it were permanently closed, and never would open on its own, the only way to open it would be to break it down. That’s how tight it felt. And left alone with myself, I tumbled into the bottomless abyss. But then the spider chewed me out like a sergeant: weakling! The wind had torn up its web and with insect zeal she got to work squeezing out another one, and caught me, a hundred-and-twenty-pounder, in its silken threads. I thanked her for saving me, but she didn’t give a damn.

  So I gradually grew accustomed to myself. We’re a pushover for other people, but we can’t stand ourselves. But little by little I found myself quite amusing and delightful – every day I made the most remarkable discoveries about myself.

  But over time I lost all ties to life, to the world. The days dripped by quickly and with a stultifying regularity. I felt reality slowly draining from my consciousness while I filled up with myself. I felt myself straying ever further from this world where I had just recently arrived.

  The walls were so cold and dead that I became sick with despair and hopelessness. For a few days you scream out your distress – but the will to make your misery known soon fades for lack of a response. Sure you pound for a few hours on wall and door – but when they don’t open, your fists soon get bloody and that sore then becomes your sole pleasure in this desolate place.

  But there is nothing final in this world. For the accursed door did open, and many others too, and each door spat out a meek, ill-shaven man into a long line of men and flushed them out into a yard with green grass in the middle and grey walls all around.

  Then a barking exploded around us and at us – a hoarse bark of blue dogs with leather leashes round them. They kept us on the move and were themselves forever on the move, barking fear into our bellies. But once we’d had our fill of fear and calmed down a bit, we recognized that the dogs were men in blue faded uniforms.

  We ran around in circles. Once the eye grew acclimatized to the first re-encounter with the sky and got used to the sun again, you could see with a squint that there were many trotting around like you, detached and panting – seventy or eighty men maybe.

  Round and round again they ran – to the rhythm of their wooden clogs, helpless, terrorized, and yet for a fleeting half-hour taking a tenuous solace. If the barking blue uniforms weren’t always in your face, you could have kept running around for ever – without past or future: completely wrapped up in the present: breathing, seeing, walking!

  That’s how it was at first. A festivity almost, a pinch of pleasure. But in the long run – after months of mindless merriment – the mind starts to wander. That pinch of pleasure’s not enough – you’ve had it, and the fat drops of your bitter lot fill your glass to the brim. And then comes the day when the running around in endless circles turns into torment, when you feel the sky insulting you, when the man in front and the man behind are no longer brothers and fellow sufferers but dancing cadavers only there to instil disgust – and between whom you’re latched in like a faceless picket in an endless picket fence, and, good God, do they make you sick. That’s what happens after months of running around, penned in by grey walls, fed up with being barked at by faded blue uniforms. The man in front of me had died long ago. Or else he’d escaped from a choky, hounded by a comic demon, and was pretending to be normal – even though he was definitely long since dead. Damn right! Take his bald spot, for instance, surrounded by a frazzled bush of filthy grey hair, it lacked the greasy glimmer of a living bald spot in which sun and rain might still be sadly mirrored – no, this bald spot was lustreless, matt and dried out, as if it was made of cloth. If that strange composite there before me that I couldn’t quite call human, that imitation human, weren’t moving, one might well have taken that bald spot for a hairpiece. And not even the hairpiece of a man of learning or a high-living lush – no, at best the hairpiece of a stationer or a circus clown. But it’s a strong-willed wig, I’ll give it that – stays put out of spite, because it senses that I, the hind man, hate it as I do. And I do hate it so. Why must Hairpiece – let me hereby dub him, it’s simpler that way – why must he keep walking and living, while young sparrows that haven’t yet learnt to fly fall to their death from the gutter on the roof? And I hate Hairpiece for his cowardice – how cowardly he is! He feels my hatred burning the back of his head while trotting around there before me, always in the circle, the same damned little circle surrounded by grey walls, heartless walls, if they had a heart they’d up and scram one night and go and surround some palace inhabited by our ministers of state.

  I’ve been wondering a long time why Hairpiece landed in
the clink – what kind of crime could he have committed – that scruff of hair too cowardly to turn and look at me, even though I keep tormenting him. For I do indeed torment him: I keep stepping on his heels – deliberately, of course – and make a foul sound with my mouth, as if I were spewing hashed calves’ lungs by the quarter-pound all over his back. And every time Hairpiece squirms, greatly pained. Even so, that miserable tuft won’t dare turn all the way around to face his tormentor – no, he’s much too cowardly for that. He only turns himself a few stiff-necked degrees in my direction, not daring the half-turn it would take to make our eyes meet.

  What might that scruffy mop have done? Was it embezzlement or maybe theft? Or did that hairless patch dishonour itself with a sexual attack? Yeah, that must be it. Just once, aroused by a bumpy burst of Eros, he managed to slip out of his cowardice into dumb lust – touché! – and now he trots in front of me, quietly content and traumatized at having dared do something once in his life.

  But now I think old Hairpiece is secretly all in a huff, ’cause he knows I’m on his case, me, his murderer! Oh how simple to be over and done with it in a snap, and nobody would notice. All I would have had to do is stick my foot out, and he’d have gone tumbling over with his stiff wicket-like stilts, and probably knocked a hole in his head and then all the air would’ve gone rushing out with a phlegmatic pfff … just like out of a bicycle tyre tube. Hairpiece’s head would’ve split down the middle like pale yellow wax, and the few drops of red ink that spilt out would’ve looked ridiculously artificial, like stains of raspberry juice on the blue silk blouse of an actor shamming a knifing.

  And so I hated Hairpiece, whose face I’d never seen, whose voice I’d never heard, whom I knew only by the musty, mothball smell he emitted. He must, I imagined, have a mild, deadbeat voice without a hint of passion, as meek as a milky finger. Surely he had calf-like protruding eyes and a thick drooping lower lip dying forever to munch on pralines. He wore the mask of a man about town, without any stature and with all the spunk of a stationery salesman whose midwife-ish hands often did nothing all day but take in seventeen pfennig for a notebook.

  Enough, not a word more about Hairpiece! I really hate him so much I could easily work myself up into a fit of rage that’d make me bare my soul. That’s it. Not another word about him, ever, I swear!

  But when someone you’d like to erase from consciousness keeps traipsing right there in front of you in the knock-kneed monotonous melody of a melodrama, you can’t get him out of your mind. He keeps bothering you like a back itch you can’t reach, so you can’t stop thinking of him, hating him.

  I think I’ll just have to kill Hairpiece. But I’m afraid the corpse would play a grisly trick on me. With a vulgar laugh he would suddenly recall that he was once a circus clown, and would rear upright, dripping in blood. Perhaps a bit embarrassed, as if he weren’t able to hold his blood the way others can’t hold their bladder. He’d run headlong through the prison wall, first goading the guards to madness and turning them into bucking mules, before, with feigned fear, flying at the wall. From where he would then wag his tongue like a wet mop at us and disappear for ever.

  It is impossible to imagine all that would happen if everyone suddenly fathomed just who and what he actually is.

  Don’t think for a moment that my hatred of Hairpiece, the man in front of me, is hollow and groundless – you can work yourself up into a certain state where you’re so infused with hate, so swept beyond your normal limits, that afterwards, once it’s spent, you can hardly find your way back – that’s how all-consuming my hatred was.

  I know it’s hard to hear me out, to put yourself in my place. And I don’t want you to listen as if I were reading you something by Gottfried Keller or Dickens. I want you to accompany me, to join the tight little circle hemmed in by those merciless walls. Not to think yourself beside me – no, but to put yourself behind me as the next in line. And then you’ll see how quickly hatred will take root. ’Cause when you’re one of us (notice I now say ‘us’, it’s the one thing we have in common), when you wobble along in our weak-kneed circle, you’re so drained of love that hatred explodes like a vintage champagne. And you let it bubble over so as not to feel the terrible void. And don’t delude yourself for a moment that an empty stomach and a barren heart will fire you up to extraordinary acts of altruism!

  Devoid of all goodness, you’ll diddle along behind me month after month, always at my mercy, your gaze forever fixed on my narrow back, my far too flabby neck and my empty trousers, in which, anatomically speaking, I’m a bit lacking. But most of all you’ll fix on my legs. Every hind man peers at the legs of the guy in front, and you’re compelled to listen and toddle along in lock-step, even if the rhythm is strange and ill suited. Yes, and then hatred will assail you like a jealous woman, when you notice that I have no step to follow. No, I have no way of walking. There are indeed people like that – they have many modalities that never meld into a melody. I’m one of those. That’s why you’ll hate me, just as senselessly and determinedly as I hate Hairpiece, because I’m your front man. As soon as you get used to my somewhat uncertain, stumbling step, you are suddenly stopped dead in your tracks by my shift to a forthright get-up-and-go. And no sooner do you get acclimatized to this new gait than, several steps later, I’m back to a harum-scarum, languid totter. Mark my words, you will feel no fondness or friendship for me. You have to hate me. Every hind man hates his front man.

  Everything would perhaps be different if the front men ever turned to face the hind men, to get acquainted. But that’s how every hind man is – all he sees is the back of the front man and hates him for his faceless effrontery. But he, in turn, ignores the man behind him – before whom he feels the superiority of a front man. That’s how it is in our circle behind the grey wall – but it’s like that elsewhere too, maybe everywhere.

  Damn it, I should’ve killed Hairpiece. One time he burned me up so bad, my blood started boiling. That’s when I made the discovery. No big deal really. Just a teensy weensy discovery.

  Did I already tell you that for a half-hour every morning we trot around a filthy green patch of grass? Smack in the middle of the dancing pony show of this curious circus there was a pale tuft of grass, each blade colourless and faceless. Just like us in this suffocating stockade. Desperately searching for something alive and colourful, my eye passed despondently and altogether haphazardly over these few forlorn blades that, feeling themselves gazed at, instinctively ruffed themselves together and nodded – and that’s when I discovered in their midst an unlikely yellow spot, a miniature geisha mingling in the meadow. I was so taken aback at my discovery, thinking everyone must have noticed it too, that my gaze was frozen to that yellow something, and I suddenly looked up with a start and with great interest at the clogs of my front man. But just as you can’t keep your eyes off the spot on the nose of the man you’re talking to, and so drive him mad – my eyes longed for that yellow dot. And when I came closer, I did my best to make my gaze seem nonchalant. It was a flower, a little yellow flower. A dandelion* – a little yellow dandelion.

  It stood about half a metre to the left of our path, to the left of the circle in which every morning we paid solemn homage to fresh air. I literally trembled with fear, convinced that one of the blue coats was already tracking my gaze with his steely eyes. But as much as our watchdogs were accustomed to reacting to every jerk and gesture inside the stockade with a fierce barking, no one had yet detected my discovery. The little dandelion was still completely mine.

  But I could only take true delight in it for a few days. I was determined to make her mine. Every time our exercise period came to an end I had to tear myself from her by force, and I would have given my daily bread ration (and that’s saying a lot!) just to possess her. The longing to have a living thing in the cell with me became so overwhelming that the flower, that timid little dandelion, soon took on the consequence of a human being, a secret lover: I could no longer live without her – in there, locked i
nside those dead walls!

  And then came the business with Hairpiece. I started out slyly. Every time I passed my flower I took a small step, as unobtrusively as possible, from the path onto the patch of grass. We all have a hefty dose of herd instinct in us, and that’s what I was counting on. My hunch proved right. The man behind me, the man behind him, and the one after – and so on and so forth – they all followed slavishly in shuffle step. And so I succeeded in four days’ time to push our path so close to my dandelion that, had I bent over, I could have reached out and grabbed it with my hand. Though some twenty blanched blades of grass died a dusty death, trampled underfoot by a horde of wooden clogs – but who gives a hoot about sacrificing a couple of miserable blades of grass when you want to pluck a wild flower!

  I came ever closer to the fulfilment of my wish. As a test, a couple of times I let my left sock slip, stooped down with noticeable annoyance and harmlessly pulled it back up. No one took issue. Tomorrow then, I said to myself!

  You mustn’t laugh at me if I confess that I strode into the yard with a pounding heart and sweat-soaked, tingling palms. It was just so inconceivable, the prospect, after months of solitude and loveless longing, suddenly, unexpectedly, to have a beloved in the cell with me.

  We had almost ended our daily dose of clip-clopping rounds – I planned it for the next to last lap. That’s when Hairpiece stepped into action, indeed in the most cunning and low manner.

  We had just started into the next to last lap, the blue coats were already jingling the rings of giant keys, signalling our imminent departure, and I was fast approaching the place from which my flower looked fearfully back at me. Never in my life, I believe, did I feel so aroused as in those few seconds. Twenty steps more. Now fifteen, now ten, five …