Bertolt Brecht

by Bertolt Brecht

  When we got up on deck we locked the Clubfoot of St. Marie in a wooden cage where a monkey had once been imprisoned. We let Bargan walk about, for what’s the use of talking with a man who has a disease and thinks about the stars? We hoisted the sails and put out of the bay.

  In the evening we celebrated our return with a few good gulps of brandy and also commemorated our dear corpses which now, as one of us put it rather nicely, were swimming up from the depths under the mild light of the stars, face upwards, towards some goal or other which had been forgotten and like someone who has no home and is homesick none the less. Bargan didn’t show himself, it wasn’t until right at the end when most were asleep that he came up to me as I sat on guard in front of the wooden crate, and he said: would you let me into the crate, or have you some objection? He was standing in the starlight, I can still see him and hear him too, and he’s surely been decapitated a long time now or perhaps not, who knows. And the question cost him a lot of effort. We didn’t look into the cage but the Clubfoot was sitting inside, listening to every word. So with no lessening of the respect I had always had for him, because he was far the best buccaneer captain from here to Ecuador, I said: wouldn’t you rather go to your cabin? He thought about it and said: I suppose you don’t think much of this ship? I said: I’d give a great deal for it. He thought again and said: I love that man in there. Then I understood him, but I still couldn’t contain myself properly and said: so you wouldn’t give much for the ship? Now he didn’t understand, so after a while he said: but I beg you, let us go! I have to admit I had some brandy under my belt but I really was deeply affected by the fact that he wanted to leave the ship and couldn’t speak about it and only said ‘but’, which covered everything he could suggest; and he certainly read all this on my face, for he continued: if I leave all of you the ship and you give me that man there, then we’re quits, I mean as far as I’m concerned, because I haven’t got much else that I could give for him. I considered the matter and he added: of course it would be an act of mercy too; and that word was a thrust with a good knife into my crocodile hide. I considered it for a long time, and all the while, as under a light wind we rocked over the water which you could hear, he stood there quietly and I couldn’t see his face which was in the dark. And although every breath of wind took us farther out to sea and away from the land where he wanted to go, he said nothing to hasten my decision.

  But that night I thought of his whole fate and everything lay before me like a meadow in the full light of morning which is slowly being devoured by a forest and is only there temporarily. This man had put all his money on one card and now he was defending it. But the card was a loser and the more he put on, the more he lost; he knew all about it, but he probably just wanted to get rid of his money, he couldn’t help it any more. That’s what happened to him, this great man, a special effort on God’s part, and it’s what could happen to any of us: you get assaulted in broad daylight, that’s how secure we all are on this planet.

  And then I opened up the cage and carried fat Croze into the little boat with my own hands and Bargan followed behind me. He didn’t look to left or right when he got into the boat, and yet it was his ship where for ten years he hadn’t always done good, though good had been done too, but at least he had lived and worked a lot and had been just and had stood in good repute, he didn’t look at it as he joined his friend in the small boat, and he didn’t say anything either.

  And that night as he slowly rowed away and I watched him go (I never saw him again or heard any news of him or the clubfoot) many things occurred to me concerning life on this planet, and I came closer to God than in a lot of dangers I myself had been through.

  For all of a sudden I understood God, who, for a scabby fat dog not worth wasting your knife on, that you wouldn’t have butchered but should have left to die of hunger, sacrificed a man like Bargan who was incomparable, who was just made for conquering Heaven. And who now, merely because he needed something he could be useful to, had attached himself to this lump of mange and given up everything for him, and was probably even glad that it wasn’t a good man he loved but an evil, gluttonous child that sucked him dry like a raw egg in a single draught. For I’ll be hanged, drawn and quartered if he didn’t actually enjoy destroying himself and everything that was his for the sake of that little dog he’d set his eyes on, and that’s why he gave up everything else.

  Story on a Ship

  For four days we had been rolling around under a grey-green soapy sky; it wanted to gobble us up straightaway hair and hide, and our hide was thick and we were down to our last hairs, we had already lost so many. But on the evening of the fourth day which I’ll never forget, with the indifference of its waters and the failing light above the hatches, we prepared for the night like widowers wanting to marry for the last time without being too happy about it, particularly about the accompanying fuss. We finished off the last of the whisky and lit the last candles and put on the best faces we could, and persuaded ourselves not to pump water in our last hour because it was undignified and anyway not worth the trouble.

  So light spread over everything, a particularly good and expensive light; there wasn’t a dark corner in any of us, nor in the old floating coffin which was a blank we had drawn, and we too had probably been blanks, and the light too likewise was dwindling. But once we were sitting together in the dining saloon with our candles and our whisky and our very special light, everything changed again and it was no longer necessary to have such a special light, such exceptionally expensive light for a few corpses, and we created a little darkness and didn’t look into the corners, for it was no longer worth the trouble to trouble ourselves. And we stopped speaking crudely and awkwardly like greenhorns who think that you have to have the last word on everything and that speaking the truth is always permissible, which is nothing more than a way of excusing brutes and schoolteachers. That’s why we spoke in a refined kind of way, as best we could manage, for we cursed like demons, believe you me, but with enormous care and delicacy. ‘Dicky’ we said and ‘good old fellow’ and nothing about the wind which ended after us or about the floating coffin which was coming to an end with us, or the water which was without end. Yes, with some whisky which there was no point in saving we even managed to spread a specially dense darkness over these particular things and though we didn’t waste a syllable on tomorrow or the like, a sort of tacit supposition arose, that we’d be able to talk about it the day after tomorrow, and everyone tried his best to encourage the others in the belief that there was nothing so permanent as himself and that a dining saloon was not a nice place to be. Manky, for example, said we absolutely shouldn’t save up the whisky, since we couldn’t father any children and heirs on board, in view of the total absence of those longhaired creatures which the process calls for. And all in all, and taking the special circumstances into account, that was a good remark of Manky’s.

  But now I’m coming to the matter I wanted to talk about and the reason why I’m gassing so much; you’ll see in a minute that it was necessary. For one of us – his name no longer carries any weight on this planet, it refers to nothing, though once it introduced a man who wasn’t all that fat, with red hair and two teeth missing and a faint talent for cooking – one of us, I say, now said something which we noted carefully and still recall many years afterwards, and I don’t intend to forget it today. On the contrary, I can still remember him standing up with his glass and walking up to the bulkhead and carrying the glass along and putting it on a small table as he said it, and doing so in such a way that it wasn’t quite certain whether he was putting much thought into it. He said: Well, I’m fed up. I’m fed up with this rolling around. I’m going home. Yes, that was all.

  It may not seem all that much to you people now, and none of you grew any paler as I said it, although I had my special way of laying such stress on it: but here you’re not in a dining saloon and that wind isn’t blowing and so on, and I doubt if you can really understand how after that remark silen
ce spread, as if one or ten men saw a light in the darkness and then it fizzled out and was a cigar-end. Of course Ferry – and now I’ve mentioned his name after all – understood pretty well, just looking took his breath away, you could see how he immediately turned pale, paler than the bulkhead he was standing by. And then he immediately left the comfortable saloon, which was bloody crazy with those waves, and he never came back again and up till now none of us has ever asked where he went. He had a home, a little house in the state of Arkansas with a wife in it, but he didn’t go there, as we knew very well when he said it, just as we knew that we ourselves would never go anywhere else on this planet, we who had no ‘home’. And although we knew that neither he nor we would ever go anywhere at all, and that water is just as wet for everybody, our hatred was still so great that he immediately felt it and walked out into the water; for we didn’t know that the wind was going to stop towards morning, and the water was calm in a few hours, and we finished the voyage with no cook and no whisky.

  The Revelation

  A middle-aged man was taking a walk one evening in the avenue of poplars when, on seeing a large dog chasing pigeons beside a black stream, he observed that he was not welcome. He went home at once.

  Nothing special had occurred that day. His business was doing well, his mistress was the only girl among his acquaintances who was not stupid. At the barber’s that morning somebody had told the story of the thirteen year old Apfelböck who had shot his parents. Now the man’s knees were shaking as he climbed the stairs.

  As he went back to thinking about the Apfelböck case – the boy had kept his parents’ corpses in a chest for seven days – it struck him that he could easily kill the dentist tomorrow, with a knife, say. The dentist had a stout white neck. But he could equally well not kill him.

  He wanted to sit down at the piano and play Haydn; but Apfelböck had waited seven days, during which time (because of the weird smell) he had moved first of all to the living-room and then to the balcony. Haydn couldn’t disguise that.

  The man prowled around the dark room, from one window to another, stared into the void and down at the blue roofs far below, and he wrung his hands. It was unendurable. By now seven days had passed.

  Then he got into bed. We’re not responsible, he thought. This planet is a temporary affair. It’s whizzing with all kinds of other ones, a whole range of planetary stuff, towards a star in the Milky Way. On that kind of a planet we’re not responsible, he thought. But then it grew too dark in bed.

  He had to get up and light candles. He found five; these he took and lit and placed at the corners of the bed, two at the head, two at the foot, and one on the bedroom table. Five candles in all. It must mean something, he thought.

  After going to all that trouble, he smelt the corpse smell of his parents. Shouldn’t he move on to the balcony? He definitely would not. These were figments of the imagination. Anyway there was no balcony.

  If I were to die, the man said to himself; but it’s a vicious circle. I am helpless. The carpet is red even if I don’t like it. After my death it will still be red. The carpet is stronger than I am. It clearly has no wishes. It can’t behave foolishly.

  The flies buzzed. He caught one. He knelt up in bed to do it and his hand skimmed the wall with shirtsleeves flying. Lit by five candles. Having caught it, he thought what a useful thing to do in your dying moments.

  Suppose I did die, he thought. I’d like to have a child. Perhaps I have got a child. If I die nobody will give a damn. If I stay alive nobody will give a damn either. I can do what I like, nobody gives a damn.

  Troubled, the man got up and put on an army greatcoat over his shirt. Thus clad, he went out into the street. It was not all that dark; clouds passed, visible, damp, compact. Stiffly the black chimney-pots pierced the sky.

  The man walked on, his hands in his pockets. He hummed: ‘How gently falls the bridal tear, When the bridegroom slugs her on the ear.’ Then he walked faster, past the other people, in the end singing loudly in his shirtsleeves; for he threw off his coat; on a planet like this nobody needed a coat.

  Loudly intoning, he strode through the streets, and no longer understood anything.

  The Foolish Wife

  A man had a wife who was like the sea. The sea changes in response to every breath of wind, but it does not grow larger or smaller, nor does it change colour, nor taste, neither does it grow harder, nor softer; but when the wind has passed then the sea lies still again and has grown no different. And the man had to go on a journey.

  When he went away, he gave his wife everything that he had, his house and his workshop and the garden round his house and the money he had earned. ‘All of this is my property and it also belongs to you. Take good care of it.’ Then she threw her arms around his neck and wept and said to him: ‘How shall I do that? For I am a foolish woman.’ But he looked at her and said: ‘If you love me, you can do it.’ Then he took leave of her.

  Now that the wife was left alone, she began to fear for everything that had been entrusted to her poor hands, and she was very much afraid. And she turned to her brother, who was a dishonest man, and he deceived her. Thus her possessions dwindled, and when she noticed it she was in despair and resolved to stop eating lest they decrease still more, and she did not sleep at night and as a result fell ill.

  Then she lay in her chamber and could no longer take care of the house and it fell into ruin, and her brother sold the gardens and the workshop and did not tell the wife. The wife lay on her cushions, said nothing and thought: if I say nothing, I shall not say anything foolish, and if I eat nothing, then our possessions will not decrease.

  And so it came about that one day the house had to be auctioned. Many people came from all around for it was a beautiful house. And the wife lay in her chamber and heard the people and how the hammer fell and how they laughed and said: ‘The roof leaks and the walls are falling in.’ And then she felt weak and fell asleep.

  When she awoke she was lying in a wooden chamber on a hard bed. There was only a very small window high up, and a cold wind was blowing through everything. An old woman came in and snapped at her viciously, telling her that her house had been sold but her debts were not yet met, that she was feeding on pity, although it was her husband who deserved it. For he had nothing left at all now. When she heard this the wife became confused and her mind was slightly touched and she got up and began to work in the house and the fields from that day on. She went around in poor clothes and ate almost nothing, yet earned nothing either, for she demanded nothing. And then one day she heard her husband had come back.

  Then she was seized by a great fear. She went indoors quickly and tousled her hair and looked for a clean shift but there wasn’t one there. To cover up she ran her hand over her chest and found her breasts had shrivelled. And went out through a small back door and set off, blindly.

  After she had been walking for a while it occurred to her that he was her husband and they had been joined together and now she was running away from him. She turned round at once and walked back, not thinking any longer of the house and the workshop and the shift, and saw him from afar and ran towards him and clung to him.

  But the man was standing in the middle of the road and from their doorsteps the people laughed at him. And he was very angry. His wife was clinging to him and would not lift her head from his chest nor take her arms from around his neck. And he felt her trembling and thought it was from fear because she had lost everything. But then she finally raised her face and looked at him, and he saw it was not fear but joy, she was trembling because she was so glad. Then he realised something and he too faltered and put his arm around her, felt unmistakably that her shoulders had grown thin, and kissed her on the middle of her mouth.

  The Blind Man

  A simple man lived decently for thirty years, without excesses, then he lost his sight. He could no longer dress himself properly, and washing too proved difficult. Things came to such a pass that death would have been a release –
and not only for him.

  And yet he bore the beginning with a certain composure. This lasted about as long as he remained able to see at night in his dreams. Then things got worse.