Bertolt Brecht

by Bertolt Brecht

  This is what happened. The inhabitants of Well Lane had been woken between twelve and one o’clock at night and drawn to their windows by a revolver shot in the street. In the middle of the lane, outside Number Seven where Meier the engineer lived, stood a man with a bicycle, holding a revolver. The neighbours opposite saw Meier come to the window in his shirt and the man shouted something up at him.

  As he told this story, the fishmonger opened the door to his shop and stepped out into the dark room where the fish corpses were floating in their tubs. He opened a window which gave on to the street and said in an undertone: ‘He must have been standing over there and shouted very loudly in the night.’ But I didn’t feel like walking past those fish, and was well able to imagine the man on the corner, likewise the engineer who was now lying stiff in the house opposite, probably under a linen sheet drawn up to his chin if not further.

  The man had shouted: ‘Don’t forget Java, Hut 17 and poor Lizzie, and don’t you leave town!’ Then the man had mounted his bicycle and ridden off.

  They had found Meier the engineer that morning, hanged, a short way from the path through a coppice where he used to go for a walk every day. The rope had parted, snapped in the middle, one end was swinging from the branch, the engineer was lying on the ground. The newspapers said the reason for his suicide was obscure, ‘to be found perhaps in the impenetrable forests of far-off Java where Meier had once worked on the construction of a bridge.’

  The fishmonger continued deftly drawing initials as he reported the story without embellishing it in any way. Then his tortoiseshell eyes looked at me and he said: ‘Actually it’s as clear as daylight even if a few details are missing. Perhaps I should add that it didn’t rain this morning, that the branch which Java Meier was hanging from was a thick one and that Java Meier had originally intended – at least yesterday evening he did – to make a short trip to Frankfurt. Doubtless you can see straightaway from all this that it is certainly a case of murder.’

  Whereupon Kascher stood up in his brown suit and walked again through his shop to the window to look out. He had a crafty way of dramatising his horror stories, carefully making use of the stinking fish, the darkness of the unlit room and the white curtain, nor was he above using the brutal trick of leaving me sitting on my own.

  ‘I don’t see it. You can skin me alive! It’s straightforward suicide. The man wants to travel, and doesn’t, so he has a bad conscience sparked off by a cry of alarm from that man the night before. That’s all.’

  In the room next door the fishmonger half turned and said somewhat tonelessly, ‘Some people think the man wanted to warn him’. I noticed clearly how my idea was gaining ground:

  ‘I see; so Java Meier respected this so-called warning enough to refrain from leaving town but didn’t think enough of it to forgo his usual walk?’

  ‘It seems to me,’ said the fishmonger impatiently, ‘you’re forgetting that he was only warned not to leave town; so he could perfectly well have taken that warning seriously and still gone for a walk around here.’

  ‘You admit that, do you? Right. A fine warning, wasn’t it? A really excellent sort of warning to stay put, after which the fellow who stays put gets strung up . . . How about it? That’s not really what you meant, is it?’

  ‘Well, the murderers could have been here and not yet in Frankfurt, could have heard about it or waited at the station this morning in vain. Besides, the man himself could have been involved in the plot, couldn’t he?’

  ‘Really, Kascher? Can you imagine anyone thinking you can do away with a man more easily on a journey than in his own home town, which follows his doings, and in the middle of his daily routine, which can be observed? Suppose he had really wanted to warn him, what a public, theatrical way of doing it; how ineffectual, about as good as shouting into the murderer’s ears! And how imprecise! “Don’t forget.” No, my dear fellow, he wanted to scare the daylights out of him, that’s all.’

  ‘I think so too,’ said the fishmonger in a monotone. ‘It was probably something like that.’

  ‘If you frighten somebody it is usually harder to kill him, wouldn’t you say? He keeps a lookout, hears every leaf rustle, stops going into the wood where the thick branches are. Incidentally, how do you know this particular branch happened to be thick?’

  ‘The milkman was there, and I asked him.’

  ‘So you weren’t there?’

  ‘Did you think I was? I’m not a dog. The milkman gave me a full account.’

  ‘Yet this business has been on your mind all day long. Anyhow, why did you ask about it at this particular moment?’

  ‘Because it wasn’t raining.’

  ‘I don’t understand you. I think you’re too keen to create an effect. Who do you think is the murderer, then?’

  ‘The murderer is the man with the bicycle.’

  ‘The man whose warning led to what you call the murder? And who showed himself to the whole street in order to keep his man here (where he was undoubtedly more difficult to kill than anywhere else), and yet could hardly have meant his appearance to prevent his victim from stomping into the woods, presuming the latter had a bad conscience and was therefore bound to recognise him.’

  ‘Yes, that leaves some points to be cleared up, or just one really. It wasn’t among those you mentioned. But let’s forget about it. This business isn’t over yet. It’s a splendid case, believe you me.’

  After Samuel Kascher had seen me out and I had walked down the dark narrow lane, I passed by Java Meier’s house. There it stood looking sombre.

  When I went to the fish shop again three days later, it was full of people, as fresh cod had just arrived. The fishmonger quickly fetched me the paper I wanted and asked, without showing much interest:

  ‘By the way, did you know that Meier the engineer – you remember, Java Meier – that Java Meier was Italian by birth? Yes, his mother was an Italian and married a German engineer. What does that signify? Like to know? Come round again. I’ve got some new cuttings.’

  Kascher cut out interesting cases from the newspapers, and I went round to his place that same evening. He was still cleaning up in the shop.

  ‘Did I ever tell you that I originally wanted to be a soldier?’ he began. ‘It came to nothing because I couldn’t get a room of my own to sleep in. I couldn’t bear it. Here at least there’s only the smell of fish.’

  ‘I’m not all that surprised,’ I said with interest. ‘You must have a cruel streak, I suppose. And your face is so gentle.’

  ‘You see, I had been reading too much Stendhal. And the world is not aristocratic enough. It’s turning more and more to the fish business.’ He dragged a barrel of cod into the corner.

  I laughed and enquired about Java Meier.

  ‘They’ve buried him,’ he said. ‘What’s more, it was the wrong one.’

  ‘You said this morning he was an Italian. What difference does it make?’

  ‘That was what needed clearing up, in my view. But the housekeeper herself told me.’

  ‘Don’t you think it was his bad conscience that made him give himself away?’ I asked a little impatiently.

  The fishmonger grew a little uneasy. He looked up from his barrel, sizing me up.

  ‘Oh yes, I’d say so. Have you worked it out?’ He sounded disappointed. He loved to create an effect.

  ‘I mean, it was after that that he hanged himself. He must have been thoroughly frightened, surely?’

  ‘Certainly.’ The fishmonger sighed in relief. ‘He was just as badly shaken as everybody else in the street. I’m glad I didn’t look out of my window. I’d have been frightened too.’

  ‘What do you mean? He didn’t go on his journey?’

  ‘Right. And he went for a walk before dinner. By the way, he would have had fish for dinner; he’d bought some of my dried cod, the idiot.’

  ‘What’s up with you?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. It’s a little annoying something like that should have happened to him. Like a prin
ter’s error.’

  ‘To whom? Java Meier?’

  ‘No, to the murderer.’

  ‘Whose error?’

  ‘Yours, saying Java Meier must have been stung by his conscience, if he didn’t go away. That’s idiotic. Oh yes, I wanted to ask you a favour, it’s for someone else, I mean it’s really for me. I wanted to ask you to put a small ad. in the Engineer’s Journal. Something on the lines of: “Engineer named Meier, formerly active bridge-building Java. Contact undersigned.” Would you do that?’

  ‘Yes, but for God’s sake why?’

  ‘He’ll write to you, give his address or something. At any rate the town where he is living.’

  ‘And what do you want to do there?’

  ‘Subscribe to the newspaper.’

  ‘Are you . . . is this supposed to be a trick? Enquiring about Meier when he’s dead? I don’t get it.’

  ‘It’s for the living one. The living Java Meier. Not a case of mistaken identity. The still living tangible flesh-and-blood Java Meier.’

  ‘Oh, to hell with your mysterious secrets! What are you really up to? Are you or are you not going to put your cards on the table?’

  ‘No. Sooner not. You’re too energetic. Too strong-minded. You’re a little too enterprising, let’s say too western. A little, a trifle too western.’

  ‘What are you on about now? Do you want to sleep alone again? Does your fish stink better than me?’

  ‘You’ve got me wrong. It’s nothing so complicated. Do you or do you not want to hear a story?’

  ‘Yes of course; you know I do. Go ahead!

  ‘No. Just because you want a story you’ll have to wait for it. Meanwhile put the ad. in.’

  ‘I don’t understand you, Kascher.’

  ‘People who understand everything get no stories.’

  Damn me if I didn’t put an ad. in the Engineer’s Journal. That was Tuesday; it was due to appear the following Monday. On Saturday the fishmonger beckoned to me.

  ‘Your story is finished, everything’s all right, here, the whole thing in print. It was a little sooner than I had anticipated. He was an idiot, but this will get him out of it. With luck he’ll be all right.’

  ‘What’s it all about?’

  The fishmonger led me into the shop. It was getting dark. He didn’t light the gas, but he did light a candle.

  ‘If you stand up in a hurry,’ he said, placing a tub of carp in front of my stool, ‘mind the tub.’

  ‘Is this about Java Meier?’ I asked. ‘I haven’t had any response yet.’

  ‘You won’t get one my friend, Hamburg is the town, and I’ve ordered the newspaper from there. But shall we go over the story again from the beginning? Although the point is quite a simple one, namely, that the rope had snapped. Get that firmly in your head, would you? Why did it snap, what was the reason, eh, given that it hadn’t rained? Either a rope doesn’t hold, in which case you can’t hang yourself with it, or else it does, in which case you have to pull it apart if it is supposed to have snapped. It had snapped, so this affair wasn’t a suicide. Don’t say a word, not yet; I know the murderer’s behaviour was most unusual, even apart from the way he pulled his victim down again – he was able to, the branch was thick, a thick branch – he showed himself in public, he shouted in the street for everyone to hear, in order to get a gentleman who had been in Java to come to the window by night with a candle in his hand. True enough, he shouted at him to be so good as to stay at home because of Lizzie, because of a certain Lizzie. Although it would have been better if the gentleman had gone away; not because he could have been done in more easily, but because he wouldn’t have had to be done in at all. The question is simply: did the man feel inclined to stay here on Lizzie’s account? And now we come to a big surprise, my friend; which is that the gentleman really did stay. Yes indeed, he didn’t leave town, he went for a walk instead, although Lizzie had nothing to do with it, I’d swear he didn’t even know her any more than you or I. But did his behaviour suggest that he knew her? Only to an idiot. The man stayed at home because he was shaken and surprised and had been woken up, denied his sleep. This is amply proved by his going unsuspectingly to the park and getting slaughtered without a murmur. Yes, he had shown himself in a particular way, as one never saw him on the street, holding a candle at the window and looking rather frightened. And then he didn’t leave town; that was enough for the murderer. But don’t ever hang anybody on the basis of such proof, let me tell you, such a shadow of a proof, you mightn’t be able to cut him down again, not alive at least. Yes, nothing – neither the performance that night, nor the punishment for Java Meier’s seemingly bad conscience – points as clearly to the murderer’s terrible uncertainty – to his quite unbelievable and ridiculous uncertainty – as does the victim’s descent from the tree after he had been hanged; and the uncertainty concerning Java Meier. It was the wrong man. That is the point, a rather bloody one if you like, but very special, selected with cunning. You may ask what it was in the short interval between the murder and the murderer’s return that made it clear to him, after having first been quite sure that the Meier he had was the Meier he wanted, that it was the wrong Meier, this Meier who was seemingly stung by his conscience and had been revealed by the flickering light of the candle and had now been murdered. And that brings us to the nub.’

  The fishmonger went into the dark shop and paced back and forth, peering into the dark. Then he continued rather wearily: ‘It seems certain that it wasn’t easy to reconstruct the right Meier in his pursuer’s brain. The man’s knowledge of him was probably quite inadequate; he only had a vague idea of him, no matter how strongly he hated him . . . Java is a long way off. And yet Meier must have done something in the brief period of his previous existence that sank into his pursuer’s mind, something indelible, more distinct than a face, more recognisable than the movement of a hand in fright, something that could be done in a very short time, that was done in great agitation and that – pay attention, would you – that you do again in the moment of your death, with the result that it didn’t strike the murderer straightaway, not at the moment of the murder, of all that hard work – just try stringing up a heavy man on a tree – but soon afterwards, on his way through the bushes, almost immediately afterwards all but in the nick of time. As I told you, this was an obscure point until I heard that Java Meier was an Italian by birth so that his mother tongue was Italian. You understand? He cried out before he died. He said something relevant, he spoke about the project, he probably got excited. And he spoke Italian. It was his natural instinct to speak his other tongue when he felt about to be strangled; at least I imagine that is what happened. And the other Meier, the real Java Meier, who knew Lizzie and Hut 17, shouted in a different language when he in turn appeared at the window in such a state of agitation.’

  The fishmonger was silent again, but was breathing rather heavily; his breath trembled a little. He probably saw it all fairly clearly. He had not left his shop, yet he had seen everything in the dark while he was working.

  I wanted to say something, if only to break the silence.

  ‘What do you suppose happened in Java?’

  He brushed his hand across his forehead:

  ‘They were building a bridge. They were bridge builders down there, there were quite a lot of them, there were more than 17 huts and I assume that Meier had a wife, or the murderer, maybe the murderer also had a wife. It seems certain to me that in the process something happened to Lizzie: whether she was Meier’s wife living in Hut 17 and the murderer was with her when Meier came home, or the other way round, it’s pretty much the same. Anyway the murderer was standing down below and saw Meier up at the window either storming in or running away, probably running away, definitely for the first time in his life, and anyway something then happened to Lizzie, most likely she hanged herself or she was strung up, it doesn’t matter which. Anyway Meier was to hang as well, that seemed the logical conclusion.’

  ‘Tell me,’ I said after a while,
‘why didn’t you go and look at the corpse and study the scene of the murder if the affair interested you so much?’

  ‘What was the point? Perhaps I am too eastern, perhaps I still felt I was too western. Corpses sour you. They are bad for objectivity. I didn’t see Lizzie hanging. If I had seen her murderer hanging, I could easily have misjudged his. And that was when Java Meier was still among the living; the sun still shone on him.’

  ‘So he’s dead now?’

  The fishmonger passed me the paper. On an inside page I learned that an engineer called Meier had been found hanged in a hotel under strange circumstances. And I heard the fishmonger saying in his gentle way:

  ‘In case you stand up in a hurry, please mind the tub. This is my business. It’s my business to sell fish.’

  The Lance-Sergeant

  Karl Borg was a lance-sergeant in the artillery and all the scum of the regiment were concentrated in his battery. They were always drinking, and even when schnaps wasn’t to be had anywhere else you would find drunks there who should have been in the cells. They’d have found schnaps to requisition in a shot-up graveyard.

  There was pastyfaced Mayer, who had captured a French lady’s shift near St. Quentin and used to stand by the guns in laces and silk, with some sort of a bosom, a ridiculous ghost except that he handled a gun well. He also had a small pince-nez which he perched on his nose like a professor of chemistry inspecting his test-tube. But Mayer put it on when he was adjusting the gun.

  Bernauer, with his griping idealism, also belonged to the battery; when drunk he would sing ‘Off to battle for Kaiser and Country’ and ‘I’m a Prussian, do you know my colours’, preferably at night so that nobody could sleep until he had finished.

  There were a few more of that sort, and with any other captain but Captain Memming there would have been hell to pay. As it was, things were tolerable, the battery endured its misery with dignity.

  Lance-sergeant Borg himself was the worst, the Lord have mercy on him. He came to a bad end. He said he was a coward and that that was why he drank. ‘What else can I do?’ he asked. ‘God will forgive me, I have to fight for the Kaiser and I can’t do it. He created swine, so he can’t complain about them.’