Young Gerber

by Friedrich Torberg

  A cart is just being loaded up with red bricks, and the horses are ready to be harnessed to it. Horses—the white palfrey—a trashy novel—the trashy novel of my life—who’s editing it?—all over, all over.

  One of the horses, a strong bay, is standing sideways on, almost at a right angle to the pole of the cart.

  Right angle—

  Now the horse is to be put between the traces. The carter comes up to it from behind and braces himself on the animal’s flank. Kurt can’t hear whether he calls a command to it.

  The horse obeys the pressure only very slowly. The carter gets impatient and hits it with his fist. As the horse is still reluctant to move faster, he takes the whip from the horse collar, turns it round and hits the horse’s flank with the handle.

  That gets the horse into the position he wants quickly. The carter fixes the traces in place, then swings himself up on the box, and the cart starts off.

  Kurt has watched this process enthralled, as if it were not an everyday occurrence. Why, he wonders, doesn’t the horse defend itself? A single kick from its strong hoof would have felled the carter to the ground. But the horse retreated and let itself be harnessed up. Now it is pulling the cartload of bricks and the carter.

  Why doesn’t it defend itself? Why?

  Kurt goes back to the classroom. Lengsfeld is standing by the teacher’s lectern, trying to persuade the bystanders to come together in a joint action and do something in self-defence, to resist, not put up with such treatment any longer—it would be shameful, he says, if such a thing could happen again.

  Only about half the class are listening to him. And as it is not clear what kind of resistance action he suggests, and as they know it won’t be carried out anyway, they soon drift away, and Lengsfeld is left with an audience of only two or three.

  The bell rings.

  Kupfer comes in. He is in a jovial mood, makes a couple of poor jokes, and begins testing, turning mainly to the better students and testing with unusual benevolence, with the result that even young Gerber benefits; and young Gerber answers a little mechanically, but as the questions happen to relate to fields that he was going through with Professor Ruprecht only yesterday, he gives the right answers, and for the first time in a very long while he has two positive marks to his credit in mathematics and descriptive geometry… and he is delighted.

  Delighted!

  He knows, oh, he knows very well that he has achieved this success by walking over the corpse of Zasche. He has just been fulminating indignantly against the man whose offer of a good mark he is now accepting without a moment’s hesitation. He is a deserter. He is climbing on the body of Zasche, like a hyena. “Yes, Gerber, good, you can sit down, next student!” And the hyena bows to the bloodhound—and is delighted.

  Zasche sits in the back row, quietly shedding tears.

  So he has skipped his lesson with Ruprecht, true. But you can’t go on for ever without a little lounging around, smoking and singing. It has been going on for five hours.

  Kurt decides to go to bed as soon as night falls. He sits by the open window, intending to wait for darkness as he looks up at the clouds, but the twittering of birds in the little garden outside becomes intolerable. He lowers the Venetian blind and gets into bed.

  It is fairly dark in the room.

  Kurt falls asleep while fearing that sleep may not come at such an early hour. His last clear thought is to wish he wouldn’t wake up until after the Matura…

  Abruptly waking from deep timelessness, Kurt sits up in bed, wide awake and feeling like a stranger to himself. His exhausted brain can make nothing of the darkness. Holding his hand in front of his face, he flaps it before his eyes. He can’t see anything. Blind. I’ve gone blind. The thought flashes through his mind in unthinking confusion. God in heaven, not this. Light. I want to see something. A glimmer of twilight. As if to catch it unaware, Kurt abruptly swings his head round—nothing. All the night in the world is lying on him, enormous, sultry, impenetrable. He doesn’t know which way round his bed is standing and where, doesn’t know where the door and the window are. Madness seizes on him. He strikes out with clenched fists—and his second blow hits something hard. He is so glad that he ignores the pain. So that’s where the wall is. Good, good wall. He can at least feel it. And he strokes the wallpaper, gratefully feeling its slightly embossed pattern. Then he pulls himself together: the wall is here, the bed is here. He is lying on his right side. Good. And the window is behind him. Slowly, eyes closed, he turns his head and opens his eyes, and—there! Thank God: light is filtering very tentatively through the cracks of the Venetian blind on the right, at the top. Kurt sinks back on his pillows, breathing a sigh of relief. Darkness is not so terrible now. Something is alive in it over there, and here—here a clock is ticking, or no, his watch—how late is it anyway? Kurt is aware of his right hand moving through the air, groping for—for the lamp, of course, the lamp on his bedside table, where else? To think that I forgot the lamp! Is it still there? Soon I’ll have bright light in the room, and everything will be all right.

  But his hand reaches out too hastily, still trembling. With a mocking clatter, the lamp falls to the floor.

  Now that he knows he isn’t blind, that doesn’t matter. He will go back to sleep again, he thinks, at once, quickly, before the thoughts come, those insidious thoughts eating away again.

  But here they come. They refuse to be kept at bay for long. With great difficulty, Kurt has dismissed them from his mind, clatter, clatter, the shutters roll down over it, no one at home. That was how he managed to get over the blue light reflected on the road yesterday, by simply extinguishing it, that was how he woke in the morning today in clear, untroubled readiness for torment, and that was how, so far, he has managed not to think of all these things. His head is in two parts: in the front room he is awake and active, and everything is done in the front room. No one and nothing is allowed into the second room, it is locked, just as what has happened is over and done with. His heart and mind live in the mortal silence of that room, it is where Kurt Gerber lives, and now he feels he can’t go on like this, he defends himself desperately against the thoughts pressing in on him, reaching out their thin hands to him like irritating petitioners, demanding, not to be turned away. The whole forecourt is full of them now, they are getting more and more insistent, Kurt wants to go away, to take flight from himself, so to speak, and give himself up to the devastation—but it is no good, they won’t let him out, he must open himself up to them.

  It is as if the thoughts find it hard to realize that they are being let in and out of the antechamber. Hesitantly at first, with some awkwardness, they take possession of him.

  Kurt tosses and turns in bed, still defending himself; he doesn’t want to think, he won’t, no, he will not think, it doesn’t help, and his brain needs peace and quiet to save itself for more important things… but what is more important? What? Kupfer? Lisa?

  It was all there before. What are you looking at, idiot? All of it was sketched out in the plan for the trashy novel.

  But why doesn’t the trashy novel go on?

  (So I’m thinking after all. Well, that’s good too.)

  Why does none of it hang together? I mean, if there were some connection between Lisa and Kupfer, if she were making a heroic sacrifice for me—but she has no such idea in mind. No. Wrong. Different. Kupfer has seduced Lisa, and I’m going to murder him. No, that’s wrong too. Kupfer and Lisa—no, nothing. There is nothing between Kupfer and Lisa.

  There is Kupfer, and there is Lisa.

  Lisa is an entirely different failure on my part.

  And if I get tested tomorrow, that again will be an entirely different failure. Self-contained. The end.

  All of a sudden Kurt sits up in bed. A great idea has come to him: he will simply stay away from school tomorrow, there’s no one at home to prevent him, not tomorrow, not the day after tomorrow, and if Kupfer sends the caretaker to find him—tell your Captain Kupfer he knows me. Slam the wind
ow shut. That will do. Excellent. That’s what Kurt will do.

  Then Kurt lies back again and knows he will do nothing of the kind, he will go to school tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. And he also knows why. Every letter he gets from his mother is full of it. “Are you sure you’re studying hard, my dear? Your father still isn’t well—do I have to tell you what’s at stake?”

  No, no one has to tell me. So why do they do it all the same? Why do they torment me? Why? I’m really doing all I can. I passed two brilliant tests today, in both subjects. It was a scary kind of wedding, the bloodhound and the hyena getting married. They will give birth to a majority of pass marks.

  In alarm, Kurt realizes that his thoughts are suddenly taking definite shape; he sees the bloodhound and hyena in animal form, and cannot tear himself away from the repellent picture of their embrace. Yet he is not dreaming, he is fully conscious, and no ghosts appear, no apparition of Kupfer brandishing a huge integral sign overhead; such things don’t happen, it is all so void of mystery, so normal, so horribly transparent and logical until in the end… Kurt knows, Kurt is wide awake and well aware that none of this is so; but it could be so, he could be dreaming that he is condemned to death for high treason, a unanimous vote for the death sentence; and there is the gallows, a right angle ; his escorts are moving towards it, all in black robes, waggling their heads back and forth, back and forth, their whole bodies waggle too; now they are surrounding him, and Kupfer asks if they have a last wish, and they’ll stand in a semicircle under the gallows from which Kurt is already hanging, and point their arms and spit at him, and then they all fall flat on their backs—what has happened? Was he really dreaming? Kurt strains his eyes, peering into the darkness as if he could find something left there, something tangible.

  There’s nothing there. Only blackness.

  But no, there is something: the hyena with the bloodhound. Get away, get away. Light! But the lamp is lying on the floor, broken.

  Their terrible coupling lasts a long time, up—down—up—down. As if they were human beings.

  And suddenly all the women who have ever been close to him are around him, lying in his bed, many naked bodies, and Lisa is somewhere among them, only a naked woman like the unknown woman at Paul’s studio party and the prostitute and all the others… only half reluctantly he imagines crazy happenings before his eye; now at least there is confusion and mad oblivion, and again and again something strange reels among these images, torn scraps of formulae, spat out like blood; he can’t bear it any more, he is too weak for this distress, he tosses back and forth, gasping in sombre torment, lies convulsed in the soft, soft pillows and buries his teeth in fabric wet with sweat, and feels his own body in a strange lustful state, knows why all this is happening, runs to oppose it, yet he wants Lisa, he is breathing stertorously, he wants Lisa… and she evades him again and again, and he chases her, an animal now, and then it’s another woman, any woman… And then he is thinking coldly again, lying there limp and spent, and burning shame comes over him in the trembling aftermath, and a gentle, melancholy pleasure is part of it because it wasn’t Lisa he’d been thinking of and that shakes him, all of it, shakes him thoroughly, until at last, at last he can sob, hot, beside himself…

  It is not restlessness that has driven him to get up, get dressed and leave the house.

  He simply had nothing more to do on that bed, churned up in the struggle. That’s finished and over.

  Only out of doors in the fresh air of the early summer night does he feel disgust at the sweetish smell in his room, and the soft pillows, and everything that happened there. He breathes in deeply.

  It is half-past eleven. Kurt does not feel sleepy. Indeed, he feels free and healthy as he strolls through the streets, and a thousand faraway things that he hasn’t thought of for a long time come into his mind.

  It’s so long since he has been in the company of other people!

  And then he has an idea that, admittedly, is a little unusual, but easier to put into practice than the idea of a joint resistance action at school.

  Last time it had been four in the morning before the company left Paul Weismann’s studio. So it could be another four hours. It’s worth a try. At worst there’ll be no one at home. That would be no disaster either.

  But he realizes, from his relief when the concierge of the building lets him in, if reluctantly, that for him it would have been; his fast breathing as he waits at the door tells him so, and his joy when it is opened.

  There are even a few coats and hats hanging in the front hall. For once he’s been in luck. About time, too.

  But now he has to pull himself together, and make his late visit plausible to Paul Weismann, who stands there looking surprised.

  However, Paul soon overcomes his surprise. Perhaps he is used to such things, perhaps he is one of those rare and precious people to whom appearances are of no importance—at any rate, he gives Kurt his hand without expressing any astonishment, and tells him at once that there’s nothing left to eat, all he can offer is a drink or black coffee.

  Oh, in that case, replies Kurt, joking, he has no business here and will leave again. So saying, he hangs his hat on a hook. But seriously, is Paul sure he isn’t being a nuisance?

  He could only be a nuisance, at the most, by asking such silly questions, Paul informs him.

  They go in. The room is dimly lit, the gramophone in the corner is playing the record by the crooner that he heard before—yes, that’s it—the first words of the refrain are heard. “I can’t give you anything but love, baby—”

  “But suppose she doesn’t want his love?” says Kurt, and he suddenly feels close to tears again.

  “That’s the only thing I’ve plenty of, baby,” the crooner sings on, wholly undeterred by the laughter of some of the company at Kurt’s remark, and their loud greeting.

  Kurt sits down on a divan. The unknown woman is here again. Lisa is not.

  Lisa isn’t here. And it was because of her that he came here. All because of her—

  After a while the unknown woman sits down beside him. “Nice of you to honour us with your company again. How are you?”

  Kurt was expecting something like that. And his voice is much less friendly than he meant it to be. “Why do you ask?” He wishes with all his heart that she would get up now, offended, and walk away. But she stays where she is. And Kurt knows that it is all decided.

  The unknown woman is not even surprised.

  “Because it interests me, my dear Kurt Gerber!” she says, pressing his hand.

  He realizes that his hand is still in hers, and quickly pulls it away. He is suddenly angry with this unknown woman, who wants to give herself to him although he doesn’t love her, who casts a light on the wretched nature of his self-deception by showing him his readiness to take her all the same.

  “And why does it interest you?”

  The room is almost dark, the crooner is singing, there is no one else on the divan.

  “Because you are so young and stupid,” says the unknown woman gently, caressing his arm. And as he says nothing, she puts her head close to his. “Little boy—”

  “I am not a little boy.”

  “Stupid little boy!” The unknown woman’s voice is vibrating close to his ear, mocking, lying in wait.

  Then Kurt has sunk his teeth into her mouth, and she falls back, and—

  “No—please—what are you thinking of?” she whispers sharply, firmly extricating herself.

  Kurt lets his arms drop. This is too much. Yet another failure here! He grinds his teeth, desperate, and lies motionless on the divan for minutes on end.

  Suddenly he feels a hand glide through his hair, first very gently, then harder and harder; finally she is pulling it as if to get him to stand up.

  Kurt has followed the unknown woman through the door covered with wallpaper, feeling weak at the knees, and he has come back through that door, still weak at the knees.

  But it was no longer his inflamed senses m
aking him tremble; once again it was that limp, degenerate shame, that pitiful weakness, through and through, endless, with no consolation.

  Except that now he can’t sob. Except that now his thoughts are streaming back in a torrent, to where all is without end and without comfort, and suddenly the great river mouth of the torrent opens up ahead of him.

  It seems to him as if he already knows what it feels like to have all eyes turned on him, gawping, as he feels them now.

  Of course he does. And he knows exactly where, too.

  There they sit, staring at him. Is he up in front of the class by the blackboard, unable to answer?

  He tries to get his bearings and be back here. It doesn’t work. Revulsion chokes him, aversion to everyone and everything.

  He is already at the door.

  “Please forgive me, I don’t feel well. I’d better leave.”

  And he turns abruptly and leaves the room, followed by baffled silence.

  Paul Weismann comes hurrying into the hall. “What’s the matter with you? Was it something to do with Lizzie? Are you crazy? Come back in!”

  “I have a headache,” says Kurt wearily. “Goodbye.”

  The people in there can think what they like. Yes, it was something to do with Lizzie. Just as, back before this, it was something to do with Lisa. So the unknown woman’s name is Lizzie. x equals Lizzie. I cross her out.

  Kurt is back in the street.

  No moon in the sky, only stars twinkling up there, fixed stars, never shaken from their courses.

  Come up to the front, Gerber. We have here Orion, its five trace points with their co-ordinates x1, y1, x2, y2 and z.

  We have here Orion. And it will always be there. Everything will always be there. I, Kurt Gerber, am of no importance at all.

  But it’s not about me.

  By chance, now, at this moment, I am on the agenda. And for a tiny span of time to come. Then that will be over. Then we will have Orion again. And again and again.