Life Goes On: A Novel

by Hans Keilson

  He played in cafés, monthlong engagements or longer; sometimes he traveled out of town for a few days; and all the while he was still a student, which meant in his case that what he actually wanted to do was study.

  He met lots of young people who were earning their money like he was. When they got together, the first thing they brought up was always exams: everyone asked about them, and Albrecht very quickly realized why. They were hanging over everyone’s heads, they were merciless, coming closer and closer every day. The fact was, the students all wanted to pass their exams, even if they meanwhile had to play the trombone or the saxophone or what have you and neglect their studies. But what did that even mean: their studies? What were their prospects afterward? So they played music and lived on the money they made and supported their parents too. Weeks and months went by; Albrecht’s health suffered, but he was making money, he was a student—who knew what tomorrow would bring? He sometimes convinced himself that he had already found a career. He knew a lot of people who dropped out of school, including the trombonist he had noticed that first day because of his sad face. They were left behind, they decided on their own not to take their exams. Maybe it was for the best. But no one knew what would happen next.

  * * *

  At the end of every month, Frau Seldersen sat down with the books where all the customers’ debts were recorded and copied out long statements to send to the people who were overdue on their payments. But that wasn’t enough—what was much more important, she felt, were the accompanying notes she wrote. They had big bills to pay too, she admitted openly, and then she sharply and ruthlessly warned the customers to pay up—or warned them less drastically, she knew her audience. The shopgirl brought the letters around to the customers’ apartments.

  A few days passed before the customers started appearing in the shop. They had received a warning, that was fine, they understood, but it wasn’t on purpose, they weren’t staying away intentionally. They brought some money with them—not much—and gave roundabout apologies for not having more in hand; they promised to come back soon and were allowed to leave on good terms. They wanted to be able to get clothes there the next time they came back.

  But not all the people she wrote letters to came in, not by a long shot. A significant number never appeared. They lived outside of town, or in the housing developments or the tenements, and didn’t give a damn about any warnings. Why should they make the big trek into town just to stand helplessly in the store, since they didn’t have any money to bring? It was better just to stay away.

  Frau Seldersen accused Father of being much too nice, just giving anyone who walked in credit without checking up on them more closely.… Checking up on them! He laughed. Did she want him to conduct an investigation on them, when he already knew what the results would be anyway? And if he didn’t give them anything, they would just go somewhere else and get what they needed. Period.

  “But you go too far, it’s too much, and then later you’re too accommodating too. You need to be firmer with them.”

  Father laughed again. “What, I should repossess their things?” he asked lightly.

  “Yes,” Mother answered in a decisive voice.

  “Are you serious? They don’t have anything to repossess; I might as well save myself the expense.”

  But Frau Seldersen didn’t let up and eventually convinced him to try it, at least once, to see what happened.

  So Herr Seldersen wrote to the bailiff and sent him the addresses of many of his customers, with exact tallies of their debts, just to see what happened. After a while, he got a letter back, saying that there was no point, absolutely none, the bailiff had made sure. Only in one case had he discovered anything to impound: a sewing machine. And he asked for further instructions. A sewing machine!

  The woman who owned it came into the store and without beating around the bush started in with what she had to say. She was not angry or upset, not in the least, on the contrary she exuded an eerie calm that made Herr Seldersen uneasy, almost afraid.

  “So, my sewing machine,” she said with a little smile. “That old thing.” She told him how she had inherited it, how it sat in her kitchen and when she was done with her work—she was a cleaning lady, and delivered newspapers, but it still wasn’t enough, she had a lot of mouths to feed, including her husband’s—she would sit down and sew clothes for her own children, and for the neighbors’ and friends’ children. Sometimes she stayed up all night, but it brought in a little extra money.

  “If you take my sewing machine,” she went on, quite slowly, and almost as though it didn’t matter to her at all, “you’ll have less of a chance of getting your money from me than before, you’ll be taking away my income.” Didn’t he see that? What good would an old sewing machine do him, anyway? The couple of marks, at most, that he could sell it for…?

  “And my money? Your debts?” Herr Seldersen asked. “What about that?”

  “You’ll get your money,” the woman promised, “when it’s your turn.”

  “My turn,” he repeated.

  Surely he didn’t think that he was the only one who gave her credit? A person needed more to live on than what Herr Seldersen gave her!

  Hmm. True.

  But he did not want to give in so easily—he had decided to act merciless and ruthless, for once, the way everyone treated him. It was the principle of it: people needed to realize that he was no longer willing to be put off by their promises and assurances.

  But the woman kept fighting for her sewing machine too. When she saw that he wasn’t giving in, she said, as calmly as before (but Herr Seldersen had a good ear, he could pick up on subtleties): “Go ahead and take it. I’ll make sure everyone hears about it.”

  Then nothing. She waited. What would Herr Seldersen do?

  What could he do? Did he really want the woman to tell everyone she knew that he was impounding things from people’s apartments now? And who would she tell? Seldersen knew exactly who she’d tell: these friends of hers were his customers. No, he couldn’t seriously consider it, and what would he do with an old sewing machine? He wrote to the bailiff that same day, telling him not to repossess it, and sighed with relief.

  Then he stood in his store, with his wife restlessly pacing back and forth. She had listened to the whole conversation and she couldn’t think of anything else he could have done either.

  “I’m not going to take things out of anyone’s apartment,” he said solemnly.

  Frau Seldersen said nothing.

  “They’re my customers,” he went on. He was proud to have them.

  Frau Seldersen again said nothing. She had been figuring out all too much recently about who came into their store and who didn’t. Frau Lanz, from town, the wife of a high official, a good customer for years, and Frau Uhlfink, who owned a small farm down by the river—they didn’t come in anymore, they shopped at Herr Dalke’s, and a lot of others like them. Frau Seldersen could list them all. They had various reasons for staying away; each was involved in different circumstances and intertwined in different ways with the general course of events that the Seldersens were bound up with too. It was a sign, though. And the customers who took their place were in bad shape. One sewing machine among the lot as collateral, and you couldn’t even claim it! Those were their customers now.

  * * *

  Albrecht continued to follow his path, although he only vaguely knew what it was and could not foresee where it might be leading him. It was a lonely, painful path, but he kept the pain inside him as he followed it—it didn’t seem right for him to expect a harmonious whole when he hadn’t fully committed himself either. He kept himself under control—he found it disgusting the way so many other people let themselves go. He allowed himself no half measures, especially since he was forced in the course of his daily life into so many makeshift arrangements. He often found himself sitting on the edge of his bed in his bare room and wondering what it would be like if he was living farther south, in a university town, like so ma
ny people his age, wrapped up in tender memories of his small hometown, in groups of people he would be connected to with a firm, solid bond of friendship. But there was no point thinking about it—he had to stay here, where he could earn some money; he had to spend his nights flogging himself for other people’s pleasure. He had to stick to his post, stick it out … even if his studies went to hell in the process. He loved precision in everything he did—for him it was linked to an inexpressible idea of health and strength. And yet he could not attain it, since he was forced to live a chaotic and stressful life, his concentration scattered among thousands of things at the same time. What he still remembered from school, what he admired and strove to attain in himself, was the classical ideal: a healthy mind in a healthy body, the beauty of strength, the dignity of virtue. His longing for this ideal drove him to harden his body with running and sports, make it strong and hardy. That was as much a part of his life as playing the violin and reading books.

  But then came weeks when all sorts of more urgent things made him neglect his body altogether, not letting him recover. The stench of smoky, stuffy dance rooms was lodged in his clothes, and he felt when he wore them like he was in prison, miserable and abandoned. Then he would open the drawer and take out his diploma, with the athletic prizes he had won printed on it, and his eyes would rest on it for a long time, and he would think back with melancholy longing on the years when he had been able to spend time on such things, when he had not had any idea of what it meant to be forced to act and live in the real world.

  He didn’t rebel, didn’t kick and scream, or even raise his voice—that wasn’t his way. He preferred to keep quiet, observe, endure, rather than adding his own confusion and dissatisfaction to that of everyone around him. Even as a boy in school, he had internalized the notion—maybe originally born from exaggerated and presumptuous ideas about himself—that he was here on this earth to create order, to alleviate unease, to bring clarity to people’s chaotic, desperate lives. Yes, he even went so far as to decide—and he later had to laugh at himself for it—that it was his destiny to play for others’ dances but never to take part in such pleasures and dance for himself.

  And how did he feel about the age he was living in, and the events taking place all around him, which he could see in more and more different forms, ever more clearly? He didn’t walk around with his eyes closed, and his gaze was very analytical too: he saw right through external events to their causes, their motive forces, and saw the delicate cracks spreading and branching out behind the glittering, seemingly pristine facades that were rotten underneath. His heart went out to the oppressed and persecuted—but at the same time he didn’t take sides, he held himself back, almost as though he was floating high above everything, full of pride and a sense of his own worth. Since no one forced him to decide, he could continue to avoid taking a position, using as an excuse the fact that he didn’t have much time, he had more important things to do. The fool. He had not yet learned from life that a fully satisfactory content always brings with it an appropriate form, which matches it perfectly, leaving nothing left over.

  And there was something else too, a mysterious, dangerous art that he had devoted himself to for a year and a half at university already, one that never stopped yielding knowledge, along with an annihilating sorrow: the art (for only in the hands of an artist did it show its true face) of exploring the underlying basis of things, fusing their bodily, psychological, physical, and spiritual qualities in an unbelievably godlike fashion so that any human utterance or action, any event at all, could be seen to have developed from this unified inner source. He was overcome with the desire to look behind the curtain, uncover the great mysteries, and present them to the world naked and unashamed. With this knowledge, he gained great power over other people. But this same knowledge was also what embroiled him in so many doubts and kept him from simply emerging into a happy, healthy lust for life. He was disillusioned, plagued by an excess of knowledge, no question about it—that was the danger that threatened him. Would he see the threat and avoid it? He used to stand in front of the mirror, stare into his own face, and look for traces of age and experience there, but he never found any—nothing had changed, he was still waiting, still at the starting blocks, fundamentally lonely, unhappy, and full of longing. He felt excluded and neglected, disconnected, sometimes even that he didn’t belong in the time in which he lived. And then he would feel a wish to be with other people, so strong that he sprang up and went out to where he knew there would always be a big crowd.

  One afternoon he ended up in a part of the city that had been seething with unrest for a long time. A lot of things went on in the streets there. When Albrecht arrived, everything was in full swing. It was as if everyone had gone crazy … they were standing on the corners, howling and screaming, and every time a police car drove by, with teams of policemen on the running boards, clinging like burrs to the car—holding on with one arm, ready to jump down at once when the order came—the screams only got louder, echoing from one side of the street to the other. Meanwhile, all the ordinary street traffic went on—pedestrians who had nothing to do with the protests, cars driving, horses drawing carts; only the streetcar stops were moved elsewhere and the bicyclists had to dismount. The street had been cleared ten times already, with the police rushing in at full speed, swinging billy clubs in their hands, helmets strapped on tight, first the captain, then his whole squad. They would run down the street and it looked almost fun, running like that in their leather spats, wading like storks, driving people in front of them, beating whoever they could reach—children, women, old men. People stood on front steps or in doorways, lobbies, and basement entrances, frightened and laughing and furious, and they waited until the storm outside had blown over, or moved off to another street, then they started up again, coming out of wherever they’d been hiding, standing back on the streets and the street corners, with cars driving by until the police got another order. It’s like in school, Albrecht thought: when the teacher is standing at the front of the class, the back rows make noise, and if he goes to the back of the room, it starts up in the front. Mounted police with guns stood waiting on the square nearby—only in case of emergency. A short man in puttees, wool jacket, and peaked cap walked up the street full of pedestrians. He cupped his mouth and cried out in a monstrously loud voice, and ended what he was saying with a cheer; no one could hear what he’d said in between, but everyone enthusiastically cheered with him. The police blocked off the street on both sides and drove the people indoors. Their guns stayed holstered. Before long, everything was calm. People were standing around together on the streets like before. Then a young fellow broke free from one group, laughed, and walked slowly across the street in a leisurely zigzag with his hands in his pockets. A policeman was standing on the corner—young, still red and out of breath from running, tugging his belt into place with both hands. The fellow headed straight toward him, everyone could see it all clearly since they were on the corner where both streets met at right angles. He quickly touched his cap and asked the policeman a question. His comrades on the street corners elbowed one another and laughed, they had to hold their sides they were laughing so hard. It was too loud to hear what they were saying to one another; the fellow was asking the policeman something, maybe if he happened to know the time or how to get to such-and-such street from here—which was right around the corner—or if he by any chance had a light for a cigarette. The policeman looked at him, grabbed him, and shoved him onto the sidewalk. This wasn’t the time for jokes and games. The fellow pointed down at his jacket and said—you still couldn’t hear a word, but it was clear enough—that he was only asking a simple question. To which the policeman said (more or less): Was he trying to make fun of him? And he beat him over the shoulders with his billy club. Now the fellow wasn’t laughing. He hadn’t pictured it turning out quite like this. He stood there, dazed, and a bunch of other policemen came back from one of their expeditions—excited, out of breath—and gathered
there on the corner. The first two had heard the last words of the conversation and they started beating the fellow on the head and shoulders and back with their clubs. It all happened very fast. The man was on the street next to the curb, not saying a word anymore. The fourth policeman hit him on the head with his club, and the fifth hit him from behind in the back of his knees. He was still standing upright but swaying badly now. Then the sixth hit him on the head with the shaft of his club. The fellows on the other street corners had long since stopped grinning. The seventh kicked him in the backside, and the eighth knocked him over like a feather. Some first-aid volunteers came and dragged him away. The street was cleared, the hunt went on in the next street over, you couldn’t see anything anymore, you could only hear shouts, orders, and innumerable gunshots. Windows were hurriedly slammed shut. The medical volunteers ran toward the sounds as though possessed.