Youth Without God

by Odon Von Horvath

  “Don’t forget that.”

  “I shan’t.”

  4. BREAD

  WHEN I AGAIN ENTERED THE CLASSROOM IN which I had permitted myself to say something in favour of the negroes, I experienced the sudden feeling that all was not well. Had these gentry smeared ink on my chair? No. Why were they looking at me like that, as if they were quietly revelling in the thought of my discomfiture?

  Some one raised his hand. What did that mean? He came up to me and made a little bow as he handed me a letter. Then he went back to his place.

  What was wrong?

  I opened the letter, glanced over it, and though I should have liked a minute longer, I controlled my curiosity and gave the impression of having read enough. Yes, every one had signed it—the whole twenty-five. W was still poorly.

  “We do not wish”—that letter read—“to be taught by you, for after what has occurred we, the undersigned, have lost our confidence in you, and would prefer another teacher.”

  I glanced at “the undersigned.” My eyes went from one to another of them. They were silent and avoided my gaze. I counted ten, and asked as casually as I could:

  “Who wrote this?”

  No one came forward.

  “Don’t be such cowards!”

  My words had no effect.

  “Good,” I went on, rising from my table, “it doesn’t interest me at all, any more than it does you, which of you is responsible for writing this, since every one of you has signed it. And I too have not the slightest wish to go on teaching a class which has lost confidence in me. Believe me, with the best conscience in the world, I—”

  I stopped, having suddenly noticed one boy writing behind his desk.

  “What are you writing down there?”

  He tried to keep the paper hidden.

  “Bring it here.”

  I took it from him. He smiled scornfully. He had put down in shorthand every word I had said.

  “Ah! So you want to spy on me?”

  They grinned.

  Grin on, I despise you! By God, I’ve nothing more to lose here. Let some other fellow try and grapple with you …

  I went to the Head, told him what had happened and made my request to be given another class. He smiled.

  “D’you think the others will be any better?”

  He accompanied me back to my classroom. He stormed, he shouted, he raved—a magnificent piece of acting! It was an outrage, he roared, a mean, caddish trick—they had no right whatever, the louts, to ask for another teacher, had they all gone mad—and so on and so on … And then he left me alone with them.

  There they sit facing me, full of hatred. They’d like to ruin me—to blot out my whole existence, because they can’t bear to think that niggers are human too! Are they—human? No.

  But wait, my friends. I’m not going to get into any trouble on your account, and I’m certainly not going to lose my job—and have nothing to eat, eh? No clothes, no shoes! No roof over my head? Wouldn’t you like that! But from now on, I’ll let you believe that there are no human beings besides yourselves, I’ll go on drumming that into you until the niggers come and roast you! That’s what you’re asking for, and you shall get it.

  5. PESTILENCE

  THAT NIGHT I HAD NO WISH TO GO TO BED. Those shorthand notes were still in my mind’s eye. Yes, they wanted to destroy me.

  If they were Indians, they’d have tied me to a post and had my scalp, without the slightest thought that they might be wrong.

  They’re so confident that they’re doing the right thing.

  They’re a nasty crowd.

  Or is it that I don’t understand them? I’m thirty-four: am I too old for them already? Is there a deeper gulf between us than between other generations?

  I think it’s an unbridgeable gulf.

  If these fellows merely rejected everything that’s still sacred to me—well, that wouldn’t be so bad. What hurts is that they put it aside without even having known it. Worse still, they haven’t the slightest desire to know it.

  Thinking is a process they hate.

  They turn up their noses at human beings. They want to be machines—screws, knobs, belts, wheels—or better still, munitions—bombs, shells, shrapnel. How readily they’d die on a battlefield! To have their name on some war memorial—that’s the dream of their puberty.

  Steady, though—isn’t there something admirable there—in that readiness for the supreme sacrifice?

  Yes—if the cause is a just one.

  But what would be their cause?

  Whatever benefits our race is right, drones the radio. Whatever hinders us is wrong.

  So everything is permissible? Murder, robbery, arson, perjury—these are not only allowed, there simply can be no wrong in them if they are in the interest of the cause.

  The attitude of the lawless.

  When the rich plebeians in old Rome feared that the people might succeed through their plan to reduce taxes, they sheltered behind a dictatorship. And they condemned to death for high treason the patrician Manlius Capitolinus, who with his riches had tried to free their plebeian debtors from their debts. They hurled him down from the Tarpeian Rock.

  Since the very existence of human society, the need for self-preservation has driven men to commit crimes. But those crimes were secret deeds, men hushed them up and were ashamed of them.

  But to-day men are proud of them. There is a pestilence among us.

  All of us are tainted, friend and foe alike. Our souls are great black sores, and life is dying in them. They die, and we live on. And my soul too is poor and weak … When I read in the paper that one of them has died, my mind finds words—“Too few are dead, too few.”

  To-day—even to-day—haven’t I been thinking, “Die—all of you. Get out!”

  But I don’t want to keep thinking that …

  I had a wash and went out to a café I know, where you are bound to find some one to play chess with. I wanted to be free of my room, to be outside its narrow walls.

  The flowers my landlady gave me for my birthday had faded. They would soon be withered.

  To-morrow was Sunday.

  In the café I found no one I knew. Not a soul. What should I do next? I went into the cinema. And in the news-reel I saw the rich plebeians. They were unveiling memorials to themselves, they were turning the first sods and inspecting their life-guards on parade. Then followed a cartoon, with Mickey out-witting the most formidable of cats. And then a thrilling crime picture, in which a good deal of shooting went to further the principle that good must triumph in the end.

  When I came out of the cinema, it was night. But I didn’t go home. My room held fears for me.

  Across the road was a little bar—a minor night-club. I thought I’d step inside for a drink, if it didn’t turn out to be too dear.

  I found it quite cheap.

  I went inside. A lady wanted to keep me company.

  “You are all alone?” She smiled.

  “Yes—unfortunately—”

  “No.”

  She drew back—slunk back as if hurt. I didn’t wish you any harm, really! You shouldn’t have let it hurt you.

  I was alone.

  6. THE AGE OF THE FISH

  SOME ONE OUGHT TO INVENT A WEAPON which should nullify the effectiveness of any other weapon—the opposite of a weapon, in fact. Ah, if only I were an inventor, what wouldn’t I invent! What a happy place I’d make the world. So ran my thoughts as I swallowed my sixth schnapps.

  But I wasn’t an inventor—would this world have missed anything if I’d never seen its light? What would the sun have had to say? And I wondered who would be living in my room now.

  Don’t wonder such rubbish, I told myself. You’re drunk, drunk. If you hadn’t been born, how would you know that your room existed? Your bed might still have been a piece of wood or a tree. Shame on you, old fool, asking metaphysical questions like a schoolboy who hasn’t digested his first experiences. Don’t probe into hidden secrets. You’re
drunk. Drink down your seventh schnapps.

  I drank it, and went on. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m no friend of peace. I’d like to see us all killed off. But not a simple death. An involved death. Torture ought to be introduced again, eh? The rack. Man can’t confess to guilt enough, for man is vile.

  With the eighth schnapps, I was nodding to the pianist in a very friendly fashion, although his music had struck me as rather curious at the sixth. I was quite unaware that the man standing in front of me had already spoken to me twice. Not until his third attempt did I glance up.

  I recognized him at once—our Julius Caesar.

  Once a respected colleague—senior language master in a girls’ high school—a nasty scandal had lost him his position. The party involved was a girl beneath the age of consent. He was sent to prison. For a long time we saw nothing of him: then I heard that he was hawking cheap goods from door to door. He wore an enormous tie-pin—a death’s head in miniature, in which, by means of an electrical device, one solitary eye glowed red whenever he pressed a button in his pocket. Such was the humour of this shipwrecked life.

  I’m still rather hazy as to how he suddenly came to be sitting beside me, engaged in a heated argument. I was very drunk, you see: all I can recollect is a few disjointed phrases.

  “Everything you’re telling me, dear colleague,” Julius Caesar was saying, “is a lot of infantile trash. It is high time you fell in with a man who’s got nothing left to hope for, and who can therefore view the transition between the generations with a perfectly open mind. Now you and I, colleague, according to Adam Riese, form two generations, and those scummy fellows make another. So altogether, according to Adam Riese, that’s three generations. I’m sixty, you’re, say, thirty, and those creatures are about fourteen. Now, the experiences of puberty are decisive over the entire course of a lifetime, especially for the male sex …”

  “You’re boring me,” I said.

  “Even if I am, you’d better listen, if you want me to keep my temper. And so—the one great problem facing my generation in its puberty was the other sex—women—the women we didn’t get. For we didn’t, in those days. So our outstanding everyday experience was self-gratification, with all that it implied in those times—anxiety over the loss of one’s health, et cetera—groundless fears, of course, but we didn’t know that then. In other words, women formed our stumbling-block, and we slipped into the world war. But during your puberty, colleague, the war was well under way. There weren’t any men, and the ladies weren’t so hesitant. You didn’t have to waste your time wondering, all the unsatisfied women threw themselves onto your dawning virility. For your generation, women ceased to mean anything sacred: and so they’ll never mean enough to you and your like, you’ll always be hankering after something cleaner, finer, more unattainable: in other words—self-gratification. In this case, we see women finding a stumbling-block in you youngsters, and slipping into masculinity.”

  “Colleague,” I stammered, “you’re an ero—an erotomaniac.”

  “How so?”

  “Because you behold all creation from the point of view of sex. It’s characteristic of your generation, especially in its old age. But don’t spend your days covered up in bed. Get out, pull the curtains aside, let in the light and have a look out. Have a look out.”

  “And what do we see outside?”

  “Nothing very fine, but still—”

  “It strikes me you’re a romantic in disguise—I beg of you to stop interrupting me. Sit down. We’re coming now to the third generation; for them, women simply constitute a problem no longer, for there aren’t any women nowadays, all we’ve got is a lot of monsters who study, row, and march and develop their muscles. Has it ever occurred to you that the charm of women becomes less and less and less?”

  “You’re biased!”

  “Who could wax enthusiastic over a Venus with a rucksack? Not I. Ah, yes, the unhappy part of it for the youth of to-day is that they no longer have any puberty, in the right sense—an erotic, political, moral experience—they don’t get it, it’s all pitched overboard. And besides that, too many defects are celebrated as victories, and too often the innermost feelings of youth are laughed at: while in other ways they’re made too comfortable. They’ve got to take down what the radio bellows out and then they get top marks. But there are still a few here and there, thank God—”

  “Who are they?”

  He looked mournfully round, crouched closer to me, and very quietly went on:

  “I know a woman whose son goes to the high school. His name’s Robert, and he’s fifteen years old. Lately he’s been reading a certain book—in secret. No, it’s nothing erotic. Nihilistic. The title’s this—The Worth of Human Life—and it’s strictly forbidden.”

  We glanced at each other as we raised our drinks.

  “So you think some of them put in a bit of secret reading?”

  “I’m sure of it. There’s quite a little cénâcle gathers round at this woman’s house, she’s often quite beside herself. The little fellows read everything. But they only read to criticize and condemn. They live in their paradise of stupidity and scorn is their ideal. Cold times are coming, my friend—the Age of the Fish.”

  “The Fish?”

  “I’m only an amateur in astrology, but I know the earth’s moving into the zone of the Fish. The souls of men, my friend, will become as rigid as the face of a fish.”

  And that is all I can recollect of my long argument with Julius Caesar. I well remember that while I was talking, he would light up his death’s head from time to time to irritate me. But I didn’t let him, although I was fearfully drunk—

  Then I woke up in a strange room. It wasn’t my own bed. In the darkness. I was aware of another person’s breathing. A woman, asleep. Was she blond or a brunette? Red-headed or black? I couldn’t remember. I wanted to see her. Should I turn on the light?

  No, I’d just go to sleep.

  But I left the bed cautiously and went over to the window.

  Still night. And I could see nothing. No streets, no houses. Nothing but mist. Far off there was a lamp shining and the mist lay like water under its glimmer. My window might have looked out over the sea.

  I didn’t wish to see more.

  Or the Fish might swim up to the window and gaze in.

  7. THE GOALKEEPER

  WHEN I WENT BACK TO MY ROOM NEXT DAY, MY landlady was waiting for me. She was in a very excitable state.

  “There’s a gentleman to see you,” she said. “He’s been waiting twenty minutes already. I showed him into the drawing-room. Where were you—?”

  “With some friends. They live a good way out and I lost the last train, so I stayed the night.”

  I went into the drawing-room.

  My visitor stood by the piano—an unassuming little man. He was flicking over the pages of a music-album. I didn’t recognize him at once. His eyes were red. Up all night, I thought. Or could he have been crying?

  “I’m W’s father,” he said. “You must help me, sir, something awful’s happened. My boy’s dying.”

  “What!”

  “He caught a terrible cold at the Stadium last week, and the doctor says only a miracle could save him now. But miracles don’t happen. His mother doesn’t know the worst. I couldn’t find it in me to tell her. My son’s only conscious from time to time, sir, then he’s off again. Delirious. But when he’s conscious he’s always asking to see somebody—”

  “Not me?”

  “No, not you, sir. It’s the goalkeeper he wants to see—the man who played such a fine game last Sunday, he says. He’s my son’s hero. And I thought you might know where we could get hold of this goalie, we might ask him to come—”

  “I know where he lives,” I answered. “I’ll see him. You go home. I’ll bring him along.”

  W’s father left me.

  I picked up my coat and went out.

  The goalkeeper lived quite close. I knew the sports-goods shop kept by his sister.

/>   It was a Sunday and the shop was shut, but the man had a flat above it.

  I found him at breakfast, in a room glittering with trophies. He was ready to come straight away. He left his breakfast and ran down the stairs ahead of me. He called a taxi. He wouldn’t let me pay.

  W’s father met us at the door. He seemed to have grown even smaller.

  “He’s not conscious,” he murmured. “The doctor’s there. But come in, sir. Thank you—thank you for coming.”

  The room was half dark. A bed stood in the corner. There lay W. His face was flushed deeply, and it struck me that he was the smallest fellow in my class. His mother too was a tiny woman.

  The big goalie stood by, a little embarrassed. So here lay one of his most ardent admirers. One of the thousands who had cheered him, who knew the story of his life, who asked him for autographs, who loved to take their place waiting behind his goal, to be dispersed by the officials. He sat down quietly near the bed and looked down at the child.

  His mother bent over him.

  “Henry!” she said. “Henry! The goalie’s here!”

  His eyes opened and blinked at his hero.

  “Fine!” He smiled.

  “You wanted to see me, didn’t you?” the other said. “Well, here I am.”

  “When are you playing England?”

  “That’s a secret of the gods. There’s a split in the league among the powers that be. We’re having trouble over the date. I think it’s likelier we’ll be playing Scotland.”

  “You’ll walk over them!”

  “Oho! The Scots can shoot as quick as lightning, and from any point.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  And the goalie told some of his stories. He told of famous victories and unmerited defeats, of hostile referees and corrupted linesmen. He got up, took two chairs to make a goal and showed W how he had made two successive saves. He pointed to a scar on his forehead that he’d got in a crazy game in Lisbon. He spoke of foreign lands where he had watched over his goal as closely as if the posts had been made of gold; of Africa, where the Bedouins bring their weapons into the grandstand, and of the lovely little island of Malta, where the ground is made of stone—