Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family

by Thomas Mann

  But Senator Gieseke was somewhat nettled. After all, he, too, was only the son of a fire chief. No, no—the only crown is the crown of merit. That was what it meant to be a republican. “And by the way, you shouldn’t smoke so many cigarettes, Buddenbrook. What good do you get from the sea air?”

  “Yes, I’m going to quit,” Thomas Buddenbrook said, tossing the mouthpiece away and closing his eyes.

  And while the rain inevitably picked up again and obscured the view, the conversation dragged sluggishly on. They got around to the latest scandal: some checks had been forged, and now Kassbaum, a wholesale merchant with P. Philipp Kassbaum & Co., was sitting behind bars. They were not outraged at all; Herr Kassbaum had simply made a foolish mistake—they laughed and shrugged their shoulders. Senator Gieseke told them that Kassbaum hadn’t lost his sense of humor. He had no sooner arrived at his new residence than he had demanded a shaving mirror, since there was none in the cell. “I’ll not be here for years, but for years on end,” he had remarked. Like Christian Buddenbrook and Andreas Gieseke, he had been a student of the late Marcellus Stengel.

  Without any change of expression, the gentlemen laughed again through their noses. Siegismund Gosch ordered a grog with rum, but in a tone of voice that seemed to say, “What’s the point in such a wretched life?” Consul Döhlmann was working hard on a bottle of aquavit, and Christian was back to brandy smashes, which Senator Gieseke had ordered for them both. It was not long before Thomas Buddenbrook lit another cigarette.

  And the conversation returned again and again to business, how business was going for each of them, but the tone was languid, dismissive, skeptical, and nonchalant, their mood lethargic and indifferent after all the food and drink and rain. Even this theme failed to rouse anyone.

  “Oh, there’s not much pleasure in it,” Thomas Buddenbrook said with a heavy sigh, laying his head back against his chair in disgust.

  “Well, what about you, Döhlmann?” Senator Gieseke inquired with a yawn. “You’ve been busy almost exclusively with aquavit, I see.”

  “Where there’s no smoke, there’s no fire,” the consul said. “I peek into the office every few days. Short hair is soon combed.”

  “And Strunck & Hagenström have all the important business in any case,” Gosch remarked gloomily, his elbows spread wide on the table and his wicked old gray head propped in one hand.

  “It’s hard to outstink a pile of manure,” Consul Döhlmann said with such studied vulgarity that his joyless cynicism only made them all the more gloomy. “Well, what about you, Buddenbrook—you doing anything these days?”

  “No,” Christian replied, “I can’t work anymore.” And, purely on the basis of his assessment of the general mood and a curious urge to make it worse, he pulled his hat down over his brow and suddenly proceeded to talk about his office in Valparaiso and Johnny Thunderstorm. “Ha, in this heat—good God! Work? No, sir, as you can see, sir.” And then they had all blown cigarette smoke in the boss’s face. “Good God!” And his face and gestures were absolutely perfect at expressing saucy defiance and goodhearted, lazy indolence. His brother did not stir.

  After making an attempt to raise his grog to his mouth, Herr Gosch set it back on the table with a hiss and banged his unruly arm with a clenched fist; then he grabbed the glass again and brought it to his thin lips, spilling a good deal of it and downing the rest in one angry gulp.

  “Oh, you and your shakes, Gosch,” Döhlmann said. “You should just let yourself go the way I do. This damn Hunyadi-Janos water. I’m in such bad shape that I’ll be at death’s door if I don’t drink a liter each day—and after I drink it, I really do feel like I’m at death’s door. Do you know what it’s like never to be able to pass your dinner—I mean once you’ve got it in your stomach?” And he treated them to several disgusting details, to all of which Christian Buddenbrook listened with gruesome interest and a wrinkled-up nose, and then countered with a brief, compelling description of his “ache.”

  It was raining harder than ever. It fell in thick sheets, and the sound filled the silence of the hotel gardens with an incessant, desolate, hopeless murmur.

  “Yes, life is rotten,” Senator Gieseke said—he had had a lot to drink.

  “I’ve had enough of it,” Christian said.

  “Blast it all!” Herr Gosch said.

  “Look, here comes Fika Dahlbeck,” Senator Gieseke said.

  She owned the cow barns, and as she passed by now with a pail of milk, she gave the gentlemen a smile. She was close to forty, plump, and sassy.

  Senator Gieseke watched her with lascivious eyes. “What a chest!” he said. And this provided an opening for Consul Döhlmann to tell a very obscene joke—but once again the only response was brief, dismissive snorts of laughter.

  Then the waiter standing nearby was called over.

  “I’ve finished with this bottle, Schröder,” Döhlmann said. “We might just as well pay up. We’ll have to sooner or later. What about you, Christian? Ah, but of course Gieseke will be paying for yours.”

  Senator Buddenbrook came to life. He had been sitting there wrapped in his caped coat, his hands in his lap, a cigarette in one corner of his mouth, taking little or no part. But now he suddenly sat up and said gruffly, “Don’t you have any money on you, Christian? Permit me, then, to lend you a little.”

  They opened their umbrellas and stepped out from under the awnings for a little stroll.

  Now and then Frau Permaneder came to visit her brother. They would walk out to Seagull Rock or the Temple of the Sea together, which for some unknown reason always put Tony Buddenbrook in an excited and vaguely rebellious mood. She would repeatedly assert the freedom and equality of all men, dismissing class hierarchy out of hand, castigating privilege and the abuse of power, and expressly demanding that the only crown be the crown of merit. And then she would begin to talk about her life. And she could do that very well—much to her brother’s amusement. During the course of her earthly sojourn, this fortunate creature had never once felt the need to swallow a defeat and overcome it in silence. Not one of life’s insults or compliments had ever left her at a loss for words. No matter what she had received, every joy and every sorrow, she had given it back in a flood of banal and childishly self-important words, which she found perfectly adequate for what she needed to express. Her digestion was not as sound as it should be, but her heart was light and free—more than she even knew herself. Nothing left unsaid gnawed at her; no unspoken emotions weighed her down. And so she did not have to carry her past around with her. She knew that her troubled life had dealt her hard blows, but they had not left her weary or depressed in the least—ultimately she did not even believe any of it. But since they were publicly acknowledged facts, she used them—by boasting of them and speaking about them with a terribly serious face. She would slip into curses and in righteous outrage name the names of the people who had been detrimental to her life—and thus to the Buddenbrook family as a whole. With the passing of time, their number had become quite imposing. “Teary Trieschke!” she cried, “Grünlich! Permaneder! Tiburtius! Weinschenk! Hagenström! The prosecutor! Severin! What scoundrels, Thomas. God will punish them one day, I firmly believe that!”

  They climbed to the Temple of the Sea, arriving just as dusk was falling. Autumn had settled in now. And they stood in one of the little niches that faced the sea and gave off the same woody smell as the changing cabins at the pier. Its rough plank walls were full of carved inscriptions, initials, hearts, and poems. Standing side by side, they gazed down the wet green slope and across the narrow, rocky band of beach to the troubled, tossing sea.

  “Broad the waves,” Thomas Buddenbrook said, “ah, see them surging, watch them breaking, ever surging, ever breaking, on they come in endless rows, bleak and pointless, filled with woes. And yet there’s something calming and comforting about them, too—like all things simple and necessary. I’ve learned to love the sea more and more—perhaps I preferred mountains at one time only because they wer
e so much farther away. I wouldn’t want to go there now. I think I would feel afraid and embarrassed. They’re too arbitrary, too irregular, too diverse—I’m sure I’d feel overwhelmed. What sort of people prefer the monotony of the sea, do you suppose? It seems to me it’s those who have gazed too long and too deeply into the complexity at the heart of things and so have no choice but to demand one thing from external reality: simplicity. It has little to do with boldly scrambling about in the mountains, as opposed to lying calmly beside the sea. But I know the look in the eyes of people who revere the one or the other. Happy, confident, defiant eyes full of enterprise, resolve, and courage scan from peak to peak; but when people dreamily watch the wide sea and the waves rolling in with mystical and numbing inevitability, there is something veiled, forlorn, and knowing about their eyes, as if at some point in life they have looked deep into gloomy chaos. Health or sickness—that is the difference. A man climbs jauntily up into the wonderful variety of jagged, towering, fissured forms to test his vital energies, because he has never had to spend them. But a man chooses to rest beside the wide simplicity of external things, because he is weary from the chaos within.”

  Frau Permaneder fell silent, feeling intimidated and uncomfortable, the way harmless people usually do when something fine and serious is said in the course of an ordinary conversation. “It’s best not to say such things out loud,” she thought, fixing her eyes firmly on the distance in order not to meet his gaze. And as a way of apologizing silently for feeling embarrassed for him, she drew his arm through hers.

  7

  WINTER HAD COME, Christmas was past—it was January of the year 1875. The snow on the sidewalks had become a firmly trodden mass of slush mixed with sand and ashes, and the high piles of it lining both sides of the streets were steadily turning grayer, growing more pockmarked and porous. There was thaw in the air. The cobblestones were wet and dirty, water dripped from the gray roofs—and above them the sky was a flawless pale blue. Millions of atoms of light seemed to flicker and dance like crystals in the azure air.

  The center of town was lively and crowded—it was Saturday, market day. The butchers had set up their stalls under the pointed arches of the town-hall arcades, and they weighed their wares with bloody hands. The stalls of the fish market, however, had been grouped around the fountain out in the market square itself. And there plump women sat, burying their hands in fur muffs half smooth from wear and warming their feet at charcoal burners; they guarded their cold, wet prisoners and called out in broad accents, inviting the strolling cooks and housewives to buy. There was no danger of being cheated. You could be sure that you were buying fresh fish—almost all these fat, muscular fish were still alive. Some of them had it good. They swam about in the rather cramped quarters of buckets, true, but they seemed to be in fine spirits and enduring no hardships. Others lay there in agony on planks with ghastly goggly eyes and laboring gills, clinging to life and desperately flapping their tails until someone grabbed them and a sharp, bloody knife cut their throats with a loud crunch. Long, fat eels twisted about and contorted themselves into fantastic shapes. Deep vats teemed with blackish masses of Baltic shrimp. Sometimes a sturdy flounder would contract in a spasm of mad terror and flip off its plank, landing among the offal on the slippery cobblestones, so that its owner would have to run after it and scold it severely before returning it to the line of duty.

  Around noon, there was a good deal of traffic on Breite Strasse. Schoolchildren with satchels on their backs came down the street, filling the air with laughter and chatter and throwing slushy snowballs at each other. Young commercial apprentices from good families, wearing Danish seaman’s caps or clad elegantly in the latest English style and carrying portfolios, passed by with considerable dignity, proud of having escaped secondary school at last. Stolid, gray-bearded, and highly respectable citizens strode along tapping their walking sticks and turning staunchly National Liberal faces toward the glazed-tile façade of the town hall, before whose portal a double guard was posted—the senate was in session. Dressed in greatcoats and with weapons on their shoulders, two sentries paced the designated distance, striding resolutely through the filthy slush under their feet. They met at the middle of the main door, looked at one another, exchanged a verbal salute, and marched off again in opposite directions. Sometimes an officer would pass by in a greatcoat with an upturned collar, both hands in his pockets, hot on the heels of some sweet young shopgirl, but quite aware, too, of the admiring glances of the other young ladies from good families; and then each sentry would stand in front of his guardhouse, inspect himself from top to bottom, and present arms. It would be a good while yet before they would have to salute the senators as they left the building—the session was only forty-five minutes old. They would probably be relieved before then.

  But then, suddenly one of the two sentries heard a short, discreet hissing sound from inside the building, and at almost the same moment he saw the flash of a red coat—bailiff Uhlefeldt, with his three-cornered hat and ceremonial sword, emerged, bustling with high officiousness, uttered a soft “Attention!,” and hastily withdrew again, as approaching footsteps echoed across the tile floor inside.

  The sentries came to attention—heels clicked, necks stiffened, chests expanded. They set their rifles at their sides, and then, with a few quick, snappy motions, they presented arms. A man of just barely average height strode between them in some haste; he tipped his hat slightly and raised one pale eyebrow—the tips of his long mustache extended out beyond his pallid cheeks. Senator Thomas Buddenbrook had left today’s senate session long before adjournment.

  He turned to the right, which meant he was not heading home. Correct, impeccably neat, and elegant, he walked along Breite Strasse with his characteristic, slightly skipping gait and was constantly forced to greet people as he went. He was wearing white kid gloves and carried his cane with its silver crook under his left arm. Bits of his white dress tie were visible under the thick lapels of his fur coat. He was carefully groomed as always, but he looked exhausted. As he passed, various people noticed that tears would suddenly well up in his eyes and that his lips were set tight, but in an odd, cautious, skewed sort of way. Sometimes he would swallow hard, as if his mouth were full of liquid, and they could tell from the muscles of his cheeks and temples that he was holding his jaw clenched tight.

  “What’s this, Buddenbrook, the senate’s in session and you’re playing hooky? Now, that’s something new,” said someone he had not seen coming, just as he reached the corner of Mühlen Strasse. And standing suddenly before him was Stephan Kistenmaker, his friend and admirer, who adopted Thomas’s opinions in all matters of public interest as his own. His graying beard was cut round and full; he had terribly bushy eyebrows and a long, spongy nose. Several years before, he had retired with a tidy sum in his pocket and had left the wine business in the hands of his brother, Eduard. He now lived the life of a private gentleman, but was a little ashamed of the fact; and so he constantly pretended to have more to do than he could possibly keep up with. “I’m wearing out,” he would say and stroke his hand across his graying hair, which he kept nicely waved with a curling iron. “But what’s a man put on this earth for if not to wear out?” He would stand around on the floor of the exchange for hours on end, looking very important—although he had not the least business there. He was a member of a great many insignificant boards; recently he had got himself appointed director of the municipal swimming pool. He was a diligent juror, broker, trustee, estate executor—and he wiped the sweat from his brow.

  “The senate’s in session, Buddenbrook,” he repeated, “and you’re out taking a walk?”

  “Oh, it’s you,” the senator said in a low voice, reluctantly moving his lips. “I’m in such terrible pain that I can’t see much of anything for minutes on end.”

  “Pain? What sort of pain?”

  “A toothache. I’ve had it since yesterday. I didn’t sleep a wink last night. I haven’t been to the dentist yet, because I
had some business to take care of this morning and I didn’t want to miss the session, either. But I couldn’t stand it any longer. I’m on my way to see Brecht.”

  “Where exactly is the pain?”

  “Here on the lower left. A molar. It’s decayed, of course. It’s unbearable. Adieu, Kistenmaker—you can understand that I’m in a hurry.”

  “Well, do you suppose I’m not? An awful lot to do. Adieu. And get well, by the way. Let him pull it. Get it out right now—that’s always the best way.”

  Thomas Buddenbrook walked on, his jaw clenched tight—although that only made matters worse. It was a savage, searing, piercing pain, an ugly agony that had spread from the diseased molar to the whole lower left side of his jaw. The throbbing infection felt like little red-hot hammers; tears came to his eyes and his face was flushed with fever. The lack of sleep had been a terrible strain on his nerves. It had taken all he could do to pull himself together just now and keep his voice from breaking as he spoke.

  On Mühlen Strasse, he entered a house painted a yellowish ocher and climbed to the second floor, where a brass plate on the door announced “Brecht, Dentist.” He did not even see the maid who opened the door for him. The hallway was warm and smelled of steak and cauliflower. Suddenly he inhaled the acrid odor of the waiting room into which he was now ushered. “Take a seat. One moment, please!” an old woman screeched. It was Josephus, who was sitting at the back of his shiny cage, head tilted, staring at him with little, nasty, spiteful eyes.

  The senator sat down at a round table and tried to enjoy the humor in a book of jokes and stories, but then shoved it away again in disgust; he pressed the cooling silver handle of his cane against his cheek, closed his burning eyes, and moaned. It was quiet all around him, except for the cracking, grinding sound Josephus made biting at the bars of his cage. Even when he wasn’t busy, Herr Brecht thought it incumbent upon him to let his patients wait a little.