The clock ticked in the background.
“Maybe this belief is too difficult,” Emmenberger said, since Barlach was still silent. He stepped up to the bed. “Maybe you have an easier, more ordinary faith. Say this: I believe in justice and in the humanity this justice should serve. For its sake, and only for its sake, have I, who am old and sick, taken upon me this adventure of entering the Sonnenstein, without secondary motives of fame and personal triumph. Say it, it is an easy, decent faith that can still be expected of today’s humanity, say it and you are free. I’ll be satisfied with your faith, and I’ll think, if you say it, that you have as great a faith as mine.”
The old man was silent.
“Perhaps you don’t believe that I will set you free?” Emmenberger asked.
No answer.
“Say it any way you can,” the doctor suggested. “Confess your faith, even if you don’t trust my words. Perhaps you can only be saved if you have faith. Perhaps this is your last chance, the chance to save not just yourself, but Hungertobel. There’s still time to call him. You have found me and I have found you. At some point, my game will be over, at some point my account will not balance. Why shouldn’t I lose? I can kill you, I can let you go, which would mean death. I have reached a point from which I can deal with myself as with a stranger. I destroy myself, I preserve myself.”
He stopped and looked at the inspector intently. “It doesn’t matter what I do,” he said, “a more powerful position cannot be attained: to conquer this Point of Archimedes is the highest achievement of which man is capable, it is his only sense in the nonsense of this world, in the mystery of this dead matter, this measureless carrion that keeps bringing forth new life and new death without end. But I bind your release—that is my malice—to a lousy joke, a childishly easy condition: that you show me a faith as great as mine. Show it! Surely faith in the good must be at least as strong in man as faith in evil! Show it! Nothing will amuse me more than to watch my own ride to hell.”
The only sound was the ticking of the clock.
“Then say it for its own sake,” Emmenberger continued after waiting a while, “for the sake of God’s son and your faith in him, for the sake of justice.”
The clock, nothing but the clock.
“Your faith,” screamed the doctor, “show me your faith.” The old man lay there, with his hands clutching the blanket. “Your faith, your faith!”
Emmenberger’s voice was like brass, like trumpet blasts bursting through an infinite vault of gray sky.
The old man was silent.
Then Emmenberger’s face, which had been greedy for an answer, became cold and relaxed. Only the scar above his right eye remained reddened. It was as if he were shaken by some kind of disgust as he turned away from the sick man, tired and indifferent, and went out the door, which closed softly, leaving the inspector enveloped by the glowing blue light of the room, in which only the round disk of the clock continued to tick as if it were the old man’s heart.
A NURSERY RHYME
And so Barlach lay there and waited for death. Time passed, the hands of the clock advanced in the circle, came to rest in the same spot, separated again. Twelve thirty passed, one o’clock, five after one, twenty to two, two o’clock, ten after two, two thirty. The room lay there, immobile, a dead space in the shadowless blue light, the glass cupboards full of strange instruments that vaguely reflected Barlach’s hands and face. Everything was there, the white operating table, Dürer’s picture with the mighty, rigid horse, the metal plate across the window, the empty chair with its back turned toward the old man, everything lifeless except for the mechanical tick-tock of the clock. Now it was three o’clock, and then four. No noise, no moans, no talking, no screams, no steps penetrated to the old man lying there on a metal bed, motionless except for the rising and falling of his abdomen as he breathed. There was no longer an outside world, no revolving earth, no sun, and no city. There was nothing but a greenish round disk with indicators that moved, changed their positions relative to each other, caught up with each other, came to rest in the same spot, strove apart. Four thirty came around, five twenty-five, thirteen minutes to five, five o’clock, one minute after five, two after five, three after five, four after five, six after five. With a great effort Barlach had raised himself to a sitting position. He rang once, twice, several times. He waited. Maybe he could talk to Nurse Kläri. Maybe an accident would save him. Five thirty. He turned his body. Then he fell. He remained lying by the side of the bed for a long time, on a red rug, and above him, somewhere above the glass cupboards, the clock was ticking, its hands pushing on, thirteen to six, twelve to six, eleven to six. Then, dragging himself along with his lower arms, he slowly crawled to the door, reached it, tried to raise himself up, to grab the handle, fell back, lay there for a while, tired again, a third time, a fifth time. In vain. He scratched at the door when he was no longer able to strike it with his fist. Like a rat, he thought. Then he lay without moving again and finally dragged himself back into the room, raised his head, and looked at the clock. “Another fifty minutes,” he said into the silence, so loudly and clearly that it frightened him. “Fifty minutes.” He wanted to return to the bed; but he felt that he no longer had the strength. So he lay there in front of the operating table, waiting. Around him the room, the cupboards, the knives, the bed, the chair, the clock, again and again the clock, a burned-out sun in the blue glow of a rotting universe, a ticking idol, a face without mouth, eyes, or nose, with two constantly shifting wrinkles that were drawing closer together and were now becoming one—twenty-five to seven, twenty-two to seven—seemed inseparable for a while but were now separating after all … twenty-one to seven, nineteen to seven. Time passed, marched on, with faint vibrations in the unswerving pulse of the clock, which alone was unmoving, the magnetic center of inexorable motion. Ten to seven. Barlach half raised himself and leaned his upper body against the operating table, an old, sick man, alone and helpless. He grew calm. Behind him was the clock and before him the door. He stared at it, resigned and humble, this rectangle through which he would come, he for whom he was waiting, he who would kill him, as slowly and as precisely as a clock, cut by cut with his gleaming knives. And so he sat. Now time was within him, the ticking was within him, now he no longer needed to look at the clock, now he knew he had only four minutes to wait, three more, two more: now he was counting the seconds that had become one with the beating of his heart, a hundred more, sixty-more, thirty. So he counted, babbling with white, bloodless lips, a living clock, staring at the door, which opened now, at seven o’clock, with a blow: presenting itself to him as a black cave, a wide-open maw, in the middle of which he vaguely sensed a huge, dark, ghostly presence, but it wasn’t Emmenberger; for out of that yawning gorge came a hoarse, scornful rendition of an old children’s song:
“Hänschen klein
ging allein
in den grossen Wald hinein,”*
* “Little Hans
went alone
into the great big forest”
sang the piping voice, and in the doorframe, filling it, broad and powerful in a black caftan hanging in rags from his mighty limbs, stood Gulliver, the Jew.
“Greetings, Commissar,” said the giant, closing the door. “So I find you again, sad knight without fear or blemish, who set out to fight evil with the power of the spirit, sitting in front of a gurney similar to the one I once lay on in that lovely village of Stutthof near Danzig.” And he lifted the old man so that he rested against the Jew’s breast like a child, and laid him on the bed.
“Spent!” He laughed when the inspector still could find no words, but lay there, deathly pale. Then he pulled a bottle and two glasses out of the folds of his caftan.
“I don’t have any vodka left,” said the Jew as he filled the glasses and sat down on the bed next to the old man. “But in a tumbledown farmhouse somewhere in the Emmental, in a crashing storm full of darkness and snow, I stole a few dusty bottles of this stout potato schnapps. It’s almost as goo
d. That’s permissible for a dead man, isn’t it, Commissar? When a corpse like myself—a firewater corpse, so to speak—fetches his tribute from the living by night and fog, as provender, till he crawls back into his tomb in Soviet-land, it’s all right. There, Commissar, drink.”
He held the glass to his lips, and Barlach drank. It felt good, even though he thought it was medically quite unsound.
“Gulliver,” he whispered, groping for his friend’s hand. “How could you know that I was in this damn mousetrap?”
The giant laughed. “Christian,” he replied, and the hard eyes in his scarred, hairless face glittered (he had drunk several glasses by now). “Why else would you call me to the Salem hospital? I knew right away that you must have formed a suspicion, that maybe the inestimable possibility existed of finding this Nehle still among the living. I didn’t believe for a moment that only a psychological interest made you ask about Nehle, as you claimed on that night full of vodka. Was I supposed to let you rush off to disaster alone? We can’t fight evil alone any more, like knights setting forth against some dragon. Those times are over. It takes more than a little ingenuity to catch the criminals we’re dealing with. You fool of a detective; time itself led you ad absurdum! I never let you out of my eyes, and last night I appeared to our good Doctor Hungertobel in person. I had quite a job on my hands getting him out of his fainting spell, that’s how scared he was. But then I knew what I wanted to know, and now I am here to restore the old order of things. For you the mice of Bern, for me the rats of Stutthof. That’s how the world is divided.”
“How did you get here?” Barlach asked quietly.
The giant’s face twisted into a grin. “Not hidden under a seat of the Swiss Railroad Company, as you are imagining,” he replied, “but in Hungertobel’s car.”
“He’s alive?” asked the old man, who had finally regained his composure, breathlessly staring at the Jew.
“In a few minutes he will take you back to the old, familiar Salem,” said the Jew, drinking the potato schnapps in mighty drafts. “He’s waiting in front of the Sonnenstein in his car.”
“The dwarf!” screamed Barlach, pale as death in the sudden realization that the Jew could not have any knowledge of this danger. “The dwarf! He will kill him!”
“Yes, the dwarf,” laughed the giant, drinking his schnapps, uncanny in his wild raggedness. Putting the fingers of his right hand in his mouth, he produced a shrill, piercing whistle, as if summoning a dog. Then the metal plate covering the window was pushed up, and a little black shadow leaped into the room with a daring somersault, uttering incomprehensible gurgling sounds, glided with lightning speed toward Gulliver, and jumped on his lap, pressing his ugly, ancient dwarf ’s face against the Jew’s tattered chest and wrapping his crippled little arms around the mighty, hairless head.
“Why, there you are, my little monkey, my little beast, my little monster from hell,” cried the Jew with a singing voice, fondling the dwarf. “My poor Minotaur, my tortured little gnome, you who so often fell asleep in my arms, weeping and whining, the only companion of my soul in those blood-red nights of Stutthof. My little son, you, my mandrake root. Bark, my crippled Argos, Odysseus returns to you on his endless peregrination. Oh, I thought it was you who sent poor drunk Fortschig into another life, that you slipped down that light shaft, my big newt. Didn’t that evil magician Nehle, or Emmenberger, or Minos, whatever his name was, train you for stunts like that in our city of slaves? There, bite into my finger, my puppy! And as I sit in the car next to Hungertobel, I hear a joyful whining behind me, like that of a mangy cat. It was my poor little friend, Commissar, whom my fist pulled out from behind that seat. What shall we do with this poor little beast, who is human, after all, this little man who was degraded to an animal, this little murderer who is the only innocent among all of us, and in whose sad, brown eyes we see the misery of all living creatures?”
The old man had sat up in his bed and looked at the ghostlike pair, the tortured Jew and the dwarf, whom the giant let dance on his knees like a child.
“And Emmenberger?” he asked, “what about Emmenberger?”
The giant’s face became like a gray primeval stone, into which the scars had been hammered with a chisel. With a swing of his powerful arm, he hurled the empty bottle into the cupboards, splintering their glass. The dwarf squealed with fear like a rat, leaped across the room, and hid under the operating table.
“Why do you ask, Commissar?” hissed the Jew, but immediately he controlled himself—only the terrifying slits of his eyes sparkled dangerously. With a leisurely gesture, he pulled a second bottle from his caftan and started drinking again in wild drafts. “It makes you thirsty, living in a hell. Love your enemies as yourself, someone said on the stony hill of Golgotha, and let himself be nailed to the cross, and hung on its miserable, half-rotted wood, with a flapping cloth around his loins. Pray for Emmenberger’s poor soul, Christian, only audacious prayers are pleasing to Jehovah. Pray! He is no longer, the one you are asking about. My trade is bloody, Commissar, I must not think of theological studies when I carry out my work. I was fair and just according to the law of Moses, just according to my God, Christian. I killed him the way Nehle was killed in some eternally damp hotel room in Hamburg, and the police will conclude that it was suicide just as infallibly as they did then. What shall I tell you? My hand led his hand. Clamped in my embrace, he pressed the deadly capsule between his teeth. Ahasuerus’s mouth is sparing of words, and his bloodless lips remain closed. What happened between us, between the Jew and his tormentor, and how the roles had to be reversed according to the law of justice, how I became the tormentor and he the victim—let no one know this except for us two and God, who allowed all this to happen. We must take leave of each other, Commissar.”
The giant stood up.
“What will happen now?” Barlach whispered.
“Nothing will happen,” replied the Jew, grabbing the old man by the shoulders and pulling him up so that their faces were close together, eye to eye. “Nothing, nothing at all,” the giant whispered again. “No one knows, except for you and Hungertobel, that I was here; inaudibly, I glided, a shadow, through the corridors, to Emmenberger, to you, no one knows that I exist, only the poor devils I have saved, a handful of Jews, a handful of Christians. Let the world bury Emmenberger and let the newspapers publish their eulogies and memorials for this dead man. The Nazis wanted Stutthof; the millionaires, this hospital; others will want other things. We can’t save the world as individuals, that would be a task as hopeless as that of poor Sysyphus; it is not up to us, nor is it up to any man of power, or any nation, or the devil himself, who is surely more powerful than anyone; it is in the hand of God, who makes his decisions alone. We can only help in particular cases, we cannot affect the whole. Those are the limits of the poor Jew Gulliver, those are the limits of all human beings. Therefore, we should not try to save the world, but we must endure it. This is the only true adventure left to us at this late hour.” And carefully, like a father with his child, the giant lowered the old man back into his bed.
“Come, my little monkey,” he called, and whistled. With one tremendous leap, whining and babbling, the dwarf dashed out from beneath his hiding-place and settled on the Jew’s left shoulder.
“That’s right, my little murderer,” the giant praised him. “We two will stay together. After all, we’re both outcasts, you by nature and I because I belong to the dead. Farewell, Commissar, we’re off on a nocturnal journey through the great Russian plain, off to venture a new dark descent into the catacombs of this world, into the lost caves of those who are persecuted by the mighty.”
Once again the Jew waved to the old man. Then he reached with both hands into the bars, bent them apart, and swung himself out the window.
“Farewell, Commissar,” he laughed again with his strangely singing voice, and only his shoulders and his powerful naked skull were visible, and by his left cheek that ancient face of the dwarf, while the nearly full moon appea
red on the other side of the huge head, so that it looked as if the Jew was carrying the whole world on his shoulders, the earth and humanity. “Farewell, my knight without fear or blemish, my Barlach,” he said, “Gulliver is moving on to the giants and the dwarves, to other countries, other worlds, constantly, without cease. Farewell, Commissar, farewell,” and with that last farewell, he was gone.
The old man closed his eyes. The peace that descended on him felt soothing; especially since he now knew that Hungertobel was standing in the slowly opening door, and that he was here to take him back to Bern.
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Suspicion was first published as Der Verdacht in Der Schweizerische Beobachter 1951/2, and published in a revised version by Benziger Verlag, Einsiedeln Zurich, 1953
Original text © 1986 by Diogenes Verlag AG Zurich
English translation by Joel Agee © 2006 by Diogenes Verlag AG, Zurich
First published in English by Jonathan Cape in 1962
First published by Pushkin Press in 2017
978-1-78227-352-3
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The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion Page 11
