Bertolt Brecht

by Bertolt Brecht

  One afternoon Brown came into his galley and instantly saw there was something missing. There were others in the galley besides me, and Brown knew we were observing him.

  All his photographs had gone. Everyone on board knew there was nothing in the world the cook cared about more than his photographs. We watched his face closely. Brown slowly looked round and took in the empty walls. He stood there quite calmly and looked at each in turn. He seemed rather thoughtful, that was all.

  Then he glanced indifferently at us and went over to the stove to make tea.

  We found it all very disappointing.

  Next day the cook stopped sending for me, and from then on one of the ship’s boys hauled his coal for him. The officers, so I noticed, started treating me worse. He must have put them up to it.

  I thought he must have realised he’d get nowhere with me, and decided it wasn’t worth wasting his time with such a fellow. With his connections he could easily arrange for me to be paid off at Constantinople.

  Two or three days later, however, as I was hanging over the rail who should come up behind me but Brown, and when I turned round he was smiling. Then he asked if I felt like coming into the galley and having a cup of tea with him. What’s more, when I came into the galley he really did make tea for me and drank it with me.

  I thought he was going to start talking about the photographs. I might perhaps have given them back to him. But he said nothing about the photographs at all. He spoke of the weather and told me about San Francisco.

  I can’t think how he managed not to put me on my guard. We came together every day and he told me his stories. After a few days had gone by I started wanting to talk about his photographs, in very general terms of course. I told him I was so sorry, didn’t he miss them and wouldn’t he like to get them back?

  He gave me a friendly look and changed the subject. He no longer seemed to give a damn about those photographs of his.

  In Constantinople I was paid off and left behind. It was an embarrassing position for the cook. He had managed to get me chucked out, but in the meantime he had made friends with me and there was nothing he could do about it.

  We went ashore together at Constantinople, and Brown advised me not to throw my money away. He spoke most emphatically and appealed to my conscience. He told me he resented every single bottle of wine we were fools enough to pour down our gullets. I should be saving my money till I had enough to do something with.

  Next day he came back and told me he too was fed up with this particular ship and had found someone who could get him a berth on another boat which was carrying liquor to Trinidad. And I could come along as second cook. Of course I straightaway agreed. We settled everything. First of all the ship was going to put into London.

  In London I learnt why the cook wanted to have me with him. While still on the ship I didn’t realise; I thought it was just that he liked me. He had bought himself a fresh lot of photos in Constantinople, and I thought the main point of his putting them up in his new galley was to convince me that he wasn’t missing the old ones. The latter meantime were all present and correct in my sea chest.

  In London my idea had been to push off and use what money I’d saved to make a short visit home. It was not to be, for I was involved in a battle, and to make matters worse I didn’t know it. My friendship with the cook was merely the second instalment of our battle: it was far and away the more dangerous.

  Brown was really charming to me. He organised little exhibition bouts on deck, supposedly to demonstrate my strength which had so impressed him. Actually we wrestled more than we boxed. Brown would sit there on a small stool looking at me with a fascinated grin and continually drawing the spectators’ attention to some trick of mine or something of that sort. He liked feeling my muscles, what’s more, and praising them like a connoisseur.

  He was a dangerous fellow. In London he finished me off. It was our very first day there, a lovely day with a disastrous finish. Over a glass of rum I had confided to my friend Brown that I meant to jump ship in London, and he had strongly recommended me to take my things ashore the very first day. He’d help me; he was as good as his word, and so we parked my chest in a cheap lodging house and went off arm in arm for a bit of a stroll.

  We had various drinks together in various establishments, and together we visited various dance halls; between times we ate together and incidentally, as I well remember, went together to a photographer’s at the express wish of the cook. There Brown had my picture taken in some kind of boxing pose with my sleeves rolled up. Together we collected the picture a few hours later, and Brown insisted on paying for it. After that we foundered in an absolute Atlantic Ocean of whisky – together, or so I thought.

  Next morning however when I woke up in my bunk I realised it was only me that had foundered, for the cook appeared fresh as a daisy and in good order. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t have a wet cloth round his head like me. It wasn’t till that afternoon when I went to my lodging house that I began to get the point.

  My chest had gone. I had come in a cab and collected it myself, in a very drunken state, so the landlord said. Presumably I had left it in the cab.

  I went straight back on board. The first person I ran into was Brown the cook. He looked remarkably pleased with life, and before I could even open my mouth he told me he had come across his old photos in a crappy old chest which he had promptly thrown away. As he said this he gave me a frank and concerned look. I still recall how there wasn’t the slightest semblance of anger in me at that moment; I simply felt lousy.

  I walked past him without speaking and lay down in my hammock. I’d had enough of this world.

  For a few days I never left the deck, and then the ship sailed on to Trinidad. That whole voyage was one I prefer not to speak about. (At the end of it all Brown made me pay four shillings, supposedly for burning one of his pans.) I had to digest my lesson, which was that this strength business has got two sides to it. It’s the weaker that get the knocks, true enough, but it’s the smarter that get the cash.

  That nigger now had all his precious pictures back in chest, plus an extra one, a new picture of a fresh-faced, exceptionally stupid young fellow with very strong muscles.

  The next time we made London I had had quite enough of the sea. Having again managed to save about twenty pounds I decided I would go home.

  I bought myself a suit of good thick material, a big cap and some smart shoes, and went off to Hamburg.

  I went first class.

  In Hamburg I checked the train connections, found my train didn’t go till that evening and decided to go up to St. Pauli as I ‘might as well have a look and see what was going on’.

  There I remained for four days.

  A lot of people were more or less to blame for that.

  The ‘Cathedral’ was in full swing just then, and I drove along the Achterbahn with lots of other people, went with a whole gang to the underground hippodrome and was one of a group of at least ten who saw all the world’s accidents depicted in the Panorama.

  A whole army of nice friendly people who had the highest regard for me gobbled up my twenty pounds.

  At the end of those four days they began to be less nice and less friendly and to hold me in somewhat lower regard. Till finally they just didn’t know me and had never seen me. Even that wasn’t quite so unpleasant as the fact that I could no longer see my money.

  There was one particular lot of swing-boats I and my kind friends had singled out to honour with our custom. After the first three days the owner insisted on serving me in person. He couldn’t let just any old swing-boat attendant serve so distinguished a guest as me.

  I now turned to him, and he was decent enough to take me on as a swing-boat attendant. I got one mark per day and I worked there eight days. My friends found me the very first day, and of course it was a special treat for them to have me swing them. They brought along any number of fellows who were as able to pay as I had once been and were particularly
anxious to have me serve them.

  It was pleasant for them to order me about peremptorily; they tried to brake the swing-boats as I was getting them in motion, and bawled me out for only getting them up to a decent height once the music was half over; what’s more they never tipped me. ‘The man’s as rich as sin,’ they said, ‘he could pay for the whole lot of us if he wanted to.’ So once again the owner made a small fortune out of me.

  Really there are two reasons why I am telling this story. In the first place I imagine many of you would have been upset to find yourselves serving the very same people you had just been standing rides to. But I didn’t care. I served them as willingly as I would anyone else, they were no skin off my nose, it wasn’t a bad thing that I should attract custom. It was stupid of them not to realise that at times you’re lucky and at times less so.

  The second reason is that of course I still had some money left when I began working. I didn’t let myself run right out. I was stupid, but not so stupid that it would no longer have helped if I started to have some sense. Money is like driving a car, as I found when I had a taxi in New York. You and your cab can get into a situation where you’d give a lot to be able to stop it. But you can’t let the engine conk out. Once you do this your car is useless.

  By the time eight days had passed I’d got enough for a ticket (fourth class) to Bremen. And in Bremen I got a berth as a coal trimmer on the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse bound for New York. Things weren’t so good in Bremen, but I’d never have signed on on the Kaiser if it hadn’t been a way of getting to New York. In those days anything that took one a step further was like a free ticket.

  Admittedly the first time we put into New York I didn’t manage to get away. You always had to sign on for the return trip. The second time, though, I managed to get my foot a bit jammed between the cutter and the ship’s side, so they had to send me to the Hoboken hospital. I wasn’t too badly hurt. One day after the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse had left dock I was fit to be discharged.

  But I wasn’t yet able to settle in America. I still had to make a number of voyages. I was successively with the Atlas Line, which carries bananas from the West Indies, the Morgan Line, which carries cotton from New Orleans, and the Clike Line which used to run to Charleston. These last two are American lines, and from then on I only went on American ships. On American ships the money’s better, the food’s better, there’s more work and more sport than on any others even including the German.

  Around that time – it must have been about 1907 – I happened to find myself sailing to Africa on a big four-master. She belonged to Standard Oil and was supposed to be carrying paraffin for South Africa.

  We took two whole months to get there. There were about thirty crew all told and the work was extremely hard. As coal trimmers we used to do four-hour shifts, but now we spent all our time ‘in the fresh air’. What’s more a sailing ship is by no means stable. It’s a bloody queer business if you ask me. I’m against them.

  Once we’d made Cape Town I had no desire whatever to travel back on that old bucket, and a lot of others shared my views. They and I spent a week in the small harbour there working as fishermen. But it was a job with few prospects, and when there turned out to be no other ship that might have been going, say, to India and could have taken the lot of us we went back on her after all. We just carried ballast, mainly stones and muck.

  We had one further item of ballast on board, a negro called Congo. This black man was a real boxer, probably the first I got to know at all well. He was actually a pretty good man; he had had a lot of fights in Africa but ran through all his money and so he was working his passage back to America.

  From time to time he would do nothing but drink for four weeks on end. If you said anything about it to him he’d tell you that drinking made him a much improved man, one not to be compared with the ordinary sober workaday Congo.

  He organised his whole life around these drinking spells. Though he forgot everything else, his periods of drunkenness were registered on his memory. He could never remember what had occurred in any particular year – where he’d worked, where he’d boxed, where he’d lived – but he knew that in such and such a month he’d been drinking in New Orleans or Cape Town or Montreal.

  And I don’t think he lied about his drinking, though he was a fearful liar in every other respect. He was the kind might tell you with a completely straight face how a shark had bitten off his left arm and when his listeners pointed to the perfectly sound arm in question would just say ‘Yes, strange things happen, don’t they?’

  But there was something splendid about him: the way he did all kinds of jobs on that sailing ship for instance, without knowing anything about it, and worked so hard that he kept on coughing and looking forward to a new spell of drinking in America. It was he that first showed me how to box.

  Fragment

  Editorial Notes

  The Principal Collections of Brecht’s Short Stories

  1 General

  Brecht grouped his short stories in three main collections, of which the first two never reached the stage of publication. They were

  Die Gesichte (The Visions).

  9 Kurzgeschichten (Nine Short Stories).

  Kalendergeschichten (Tales from the Calendar), 1949.

  Since his death four further collections have appeared containing previously unpublished material:

  Geschichten (Stories), 1962.

  Prosa 1 and 2, 1965.

  Gesammelte Werke 11, Prosa 1, edited by Herta Ramthun, 1967.

  Grosse kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe 18, 19 and 20 (GBFA), under the general editorship of Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei and Klaus-Detlef Müller (the complete works in thirty volumes published between 1988 and 1998).

  The notes that follow give a short account of all these. For details of first publication in newspapers or magazines, see the notes on individual stories in the next section.

  2 The Visions (1919–1949)

  ‘From the Visions’ (‘Aus den Gesichten’) was a prose collection Brecht mentioned in a diary entry of 21–26 January 1920. He completed only two stories for the collection, ‘Das Tanzfest’ and ‘Absalom reitet durch den Wald’ (GBFA 19, 48–50), but they were never published during his lifetime. In the later plan of 1942 for the Steffinsche Sammlung (Steffin’s Collection), the last section was to be called ‘From the Visions’ (‘Aus den Visionen’) and was to include five prose poems written around 1940 (in Poems 1913–1956, pp. 323–327) along with the contemporaneous ‘Appeal by the Virtues and Vices’ from Conversations between Exiles. Several poems and prose poems written between 1940 and 1949 were variously assigned by Brecht to ‘Visions’ (in German Brecht referred to them as ‘aus den Gesichten’ or ‘aus den Vorstellungen’): ‘Begräbnis eines Schauspielers’ (1940, in Poems 1913–1956, p. 394), ‘Begräbnis eines Chamäleons’ (1941), ‘Das neue Schweisstuch’ (1943, in Poems 1913–1956, p. 392), ‘Der Städtebauer aus den Gesichten’ (1945), and three fragments written around 1949, ‘Ach, wie doch einst ich sie sah’, ‘Und ich sah ein Geschlecht’ (also referred to as ‘Widersprüche’, in Poems 1913–1956, p. 388), and ‘Und ich sah eine Stadt’.

  3 Nine Short Stories (c. 1930)

  For The Threepenny Opera and Happy End Brecht went to a new theatrical publisher-cum-agent, the Berlin firm of Felix Bloch then headed by Fritz Wrede. In view of the success of the former work (and perhaps of its impending film version), he wanted some of his stories to be circulated to theatres and editors wishing to publish examples of his writing. Accordingly he and Elisabeth Hauptmann persuaded the firm to compile and distribute a set of nine duplicated stories to potential customers in Germany and abroad.

  The nine stories were, in order,

  1 Letter about a Mastiff (p. 63).

  2 The Monster (p. 107).

  3 The Death of Cesare Malatesta (p. 49).

  4 The Blind Man (p. 21).

  5 North Sea Shrimps (p. 77).

  6 Conversations a
bout the South Seas (p. 61).

  7 Too Much Luck is No Luck (i.e. Four Men and a Poker Game, p. 94).

  8 Müller’s Natural Attitude (p. 72).

  9 The Lance-Sergeant (p. 38).

  All of them had already been published in some form. The selection may possibly reflect Brecht’s own preferences among his work, but it is also quite conceivable that it was determined by the availability of the typescripts.

  4 Tales from the Calendar (1949)

  The Kalendergeschichten, published in January 1949 by Gebrüder Weiss Verlag in West Berlin and in February 1949 by Mitteldeutscher Verlag in Halle (East Germany), was the only collection to appear during Brecht’s lifetime. It comprised eight stories in the following order:

  1 The Augsburg Chalk Circle (p. 188).

  2 Two Sons (p. 200).

  3 The Experiment (p.153).

  4 The Heretic’s Coat (p. 162).

  5 Caesar and His Legionary (‘Cäsars letzte Tage’ in Texte für Film II, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1969, p. 372).

  6 The Soldier of La Ciotat (p. 129).

  7 Socrates Wounded (p. 139).

  8 The Unseemly Old Lady (p. 178).

  Each story was followed by a poem: respectively ‘Ballad of Marie Sanders’ (Poems 1913–1956, p. 251), ‘Parable of Buddha of the Burning House’ (ditto, p. 290), ‘The Tailor of Ulm’ (ditto, p. 243), ‘Children’s Crusade’ (ditto, p. 368), ‘The Carpet-Weavers of Kujan-Bulak’ (ditto, p. 174), ‘Questions from a Worker’s Reading’ (ditto, p. 252), ‘Mein Bruder war ein Flieger’ (GW 9, p. 647) and ‘Legend of the Origin of the Book Tao-Tê-Ching’ (Poems 1913–1956, p. 314). After the concluding poem came 24 pages of Keuner anecdotes.

  Though the Brecht-Archive holds no correspondence about the publication of this volume, there is a preliminary scheme which shows a slightly different arrangement. This left out ‘The Unseemly Old Lady’ and reshuffled the other stories in the order 4, 1, 6, 7, 3, 2 and 5. ‘Lucullus’s Trophies’ (p. 170) then followed ‘The Experiment’, while the penultimate story was to have been ‘The Strange Illness of Mr. Henri Dunant’ (‘Die seltsame Krankheit des Herrn Henri Dunant’ in Texte für Filme II, p. 406), which was then crossed out. In place of the ‘Ballad of Marie Sanders’, ‘Children’s Crusade’ and ‘Mein Bruder war ein Flieger’, the poems nominated were ‘Ruuskanen’s Horse’ (Poems 1913–1956, p. 353), ‘Song of the Flock of Starlings’ (ditto, p. 204), ‘To the German Soldiers on the Eastern Front’ (ditto, 373), which again was crossed out, and ‘Von den Osseger Witwen’ (GW 9, p. 643). There was no mention of any Keuner anecdotes.