The Sleepwalkers (7 page)

The military associations and the fire brigade had accorded the dead man the last honour of a march past and a sharp leftward turn of their heads; their boots rang sharply on the gravel of the path, and four abreast they marched stiffly out through the cemetery gates to the curt, military commands of their officer. Standing on the steps of the family vault, Herr von Pasenow with his hat in his hand, Joachim with his hand to his cap, Frau von Pasenow between them, they acknowledged the march past. The other soldiers present stood at attention with their hands raised in salute. Thereupon the equipages advanced, and Joachim and his parents stepped into their carriage, whose door-handle and other silver furnishings, no less than the silver of the harness, had been carefully covered with
crêpe
by the coachman; Joachim assured himself that the very whip had been decorated with a
crêpe
rosette. Now his mother was crying, and Joachim, who could think of nothing to say to comfort her, once more could not comprehend why it should have been Helmuth, and not himself, who had been hit by the fatal bullet. But his father sat stiffly on the black-leather seat, which was not hard and tattered like the seats of the Berlin droshkies, but flexible and well quilted with leather buttons. Several times his father seemed on the point of saying something, something to sum up the line of thought that obviously occupied and completely absorbed him, for he made as if to speak, but then fell into blank silence again, only moving his lips soundlessly; at last he said sharply: “They have accorded him the last honours,” lifted one finger as if he were waiting for something more, or wished to add something, then laid his hand back palm downwards on his knee again. Between the end of his black glove and his cuff with its great black cuff-link a strip of reddish-haired skin was visible.

The next few days passed in silence. Frau von Pasenow went about her business; she was in the byre at milking time, in the hen-house when the eggs were collected, in the laundry. Joachim rode out a few times into the fields; it was the horse that he had given to Helmuth,
and to take it out now was like a service of love to the dead. At evening the yard was swept and the servants sat on the benches before their wing enjoying the soft, cool breeze. Once during the night there was a thunderstorm, and Joachim realized with alarm that he had almost forgotten Ruzena. He had seen little of his father, who sat for the most part in his study reading the letters of condolence or registering them in a book. The pastor, who now arrived every day, often staying for dinner, was the only one who spoke of the dead, but as he brought out only a sort of professional platitudes they were but little regarded, and his only listener seemed to be Herr von Pasenow, for he now and then nodded his head and seemed on the point of saying something that lay very urgently on his mind; but he always finished merely by repeating the pastor’s last few words with a nod to emphasize them, as for instance: “Ay, ay, Herr Pastor, sorely tried parents.”

Then Joachim had to leave for Berlin. When he went to say good-bye to his father the old man began again to march up and down. Joachim remembered countless similar good-byes in this room which he disliked so much, well as he knew it, with the hunt trophies on the walls, the spittoon in the corner beside the stove, the writing equipment on the desk, which probably had stood as it was now since his grandfather’s time, the pile of sport journals on the table, most of them uncut. He waited for his father to stick his monocle in his eye as usual and dismiss him with a curt: “Well, a pleasant journey, Joachim.” But this time his father said nothing, but only continued to walk up and down, his hands behind his back, so that Joachim got up a second time. “Really, father, I must be going now, or I’ll miss my train.” “Well, a pleasant journey, Joachim,” the accustomed reply came at last, “but there’s something I want to say to you. I’m afraid you’ll have to come here for good soon. The place has become empty, yes, empty …” he looked round him … “but some people don’t see that … of course one must maintain one’s honour …” he had begun his walk again, then, confidentially: “And what about Elisabeth? We spoke about it before.…” “Father, it’s high time I was away,” said Joachim, “else I’ll lose my train.” The old man held out his hand, and Joachim took it unwillingly.

As he drove through the village he saw from the church clock that he was still in ample time for the train; indeed he had known that before. The church door chancing to be open, he ordered the coachman to stop. He had an offence to wipe off, an offence against the church which
had been merely a pleasantly cool place to him, against the pastor to whose well-meaning words he had not listened, against Helmuth whose burial he had dishonoured with profane thoughts; in a word, an offence against God. He entered and tried to recapture the feelings which as a child had been his when every Sunday he had stood here as before the face of God. At that time he had known a great number of hymns, and had sung them with ardour. But it would hardly do for him to begin singing now quite by himself, in the church. He must confine himself to assembling his thoughts and concentrating them on God and his own sinfulness, his littleness and wretchedness before God. But his thoughts refused to seek God. The only thing that came into his mind was a sentence from Isaiah which he had once heard in this place: “The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib: but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider.” Yes, Bertrand was right, they had lost their faith; and now he tried to say the Lord’s Prayer with closed eyes, being careful not to utter a single word emptily, but to grasp the meaning of each; and when he came to the words, “as we forgive our debtors,” the tender, apprehensive and yet trustful feelings of his childhood rose in him again; he remembered that he had always applied this passage to his father and from it had drawn the confidence that he would be able to forgive his father, yes, to feel all the love towards him which it was the duty of a child to feel; and now he remembered again that the old man had spoken of his loneliness, of which he was visibly afraid, and which one must make lighter for him. As Joachim left the church the words “uplifted and strengthened” came into his mind, and they did not seem empty to him, but full of new and encouraging meaning. He resolved to visit Elisabeth.

In the carriage the phrase arose in his mind again, again he thought “uplifted and strengthened,” but now it was associated with the image of a starched
¹
shirt-front and the joyful expectation of seeing Ruzena again.

A pedestrian was coming from the direction of Königstrasse. He was corpulent and square-built, indeed actually squat, and everything about him was so extraordinarily soft that one might have fancied that he was
poured into his clothes every morning. He was a serious pedestrian, he wore a grey-lustre coat over his trousers of black cloth, and his chest was covered with a brown beard. He was obviously in a hurry, yet his walk was not rapid and undeviating, but a sort of purposive waddle such as suited a soft-bodied purposive man who was in a hurry. But it was not only the beard that concealed his face; he wore eyeglasses as well, through which he shot severe glances at the passers-by; and it was literally impossible to picture to oneself that a man like this, waddling with such haste in pursuit of some urgent business and shooting out such sharp and severe glances in spite of his soft appearance, was probably a kind and affectionate fellow in some other sphere of his existence, and that there must be women to whom he unbent in love, women and children to whom the beard uncovered a kindly smile, women who might dare to seek in a kiss the rosy lips in their dark-bearded cave.

When Joachim caught sight of this man he had mechanically followed him. It did not matter to him in any case where he went. Since he had learned that Bertrand had a Berlin agent for his firm, and that the office was in one of the streets between the Alexanderplatz and the Stock Exchange, he had sometimes felt drawn to this neighbourhood as formerly he had felt drawn to the working-class suburb—and the fact that he no longer had any need to look for Ruzena out there was almost like a promotion for her. But he did not come here, all the same, on the chance of meeting Bertrand: on the contrary he avoided the place whenever he knew Bertrand was in Berlin, nor indeed had he any interest in Bertrand’s agent. It was simply so strange to him that these should be the surroundings in which one had to picture Bertrand’s real life; and when he walked through those streets it sometimes happened that he not only scrutinized the fronts of the houses, as if to discover what offices were concealed behind them, but even peeped under the hats of the civilians as if they were women. Sometimes he wondered at this himself, for he was unaware that he searched these faces to discover whether their existence was so totally different from his own, and whether they could give him a clue to any qualities that Bertrand might have adopted from them, but still kept concealed. Yes, the secrecy of this life of theirs was so complete that they did not even need beards to hide themselves behind. Indeed they would have looked a little more confidential and less hypocritical to him if they had worn beards, and
this may have been one of the reasons why he sauntered in the wake of the fat, hurrying man. Suddenly it seemed to him that the man in front of him fitted very strangely the picture he had always had of Bertrand’s agent. It was silly, perhaps, but when several passers-by greeted the man Joachim was quite delighted that Bertrand’s agent should enjoy so much respect. He would not have been excessively surprised if Bertrand himself, melodramatically transformed, small and corpulent and full-bearded, had waddled up to him: for why should Bertrand have preserved his former external appearance, seeing that he had slipped into a different world? And even though Joachim knew that what he thought was without sense or sequence, yet it was as though the apparently confused skein concealed a sequence: one had only to disentangle the threads which bound Ruzena to these people and find this deeper and very secret knot—and perhaps an end of one thread had lain in his hand that time when he had divined Bertrand as Ruzena’s real lover; but now his hand was empty, and all that he had to go on was that Bertrand had once excused himself on the plea that he had to spend the evening with a business friend, and Joachim could not rid himself of the idea that this man had been the business friend. Probably they had both gone to the Jäger Casino, and the man had stuck a fifty-mark note into Ruzena’s hand.

When a man follows another in the street, even if it is only mechanically and with ostensible indifference, he will soon find himself attaching all sorts of wishes, benevolent and malevolent, to the man he is following. Probably he will want at least to see the man’s face and wish that he should turn round, even though since his brother’s death he has thought himself invulnerable against the temptation to seek in every half-feared face the face of his mistress. In any case there is nothing to explain why the sudden thought should have come to Joachim that the erect bearing of all the people here in this street was quite unjustified, that it was incompatible with their better knowledge, or due merely to an abysmal unawareness that some time all their bodies would have to stretch themselves out in death. And yet the walk of the man in front was not in the least sharp, rapid or headlong, nor was there any fear that he might fall and break one of his legs, for he was far too soft for that to happen.

Now the man had stopped at the corner of Rochstrasse as if he were waiting for something; it was possible that he was waiting to get
the fifty marks back from Joachim. And Joachim was really in honour bound to give them back, and suddenly he felt a hot rush of shame at the thought that, for fear lest people might think he kept a paid woman, or because if he stopped to reflect on it he might begin to doubt Ruzena’s love, he had left her in her old hateful employment; and it was as if the scales had fallen from his eyes: he, a Prussian officer, was the secret lover of a woman who accepted money from other men. An offence against honour could be wiped out only by a pistol bullet, yet before he could think this out, with all its dreadful consequences, the knowledge swam up, swam up like an image of Bertrand, that the man was crossing Rochstrasse and that Joachim must not let him out of sight until he … yes, until he … that was not so easy to get right. Bertrand had it easy; he belonged to this world and the other as well, and Ruzena too had a foot in each world. Was that the reason why they by rights belonged to each other? But now his thoughts jostled each other like the people in the crowd round about him, and even though he saw a goal in front of him which he wanted them to reach, it swam and wavered and was lost to view like the back of the fat man before him. If he had stolen Ruzena from her legitimate possessor, then it was perhaps fitting that he should keep her hidden now as his stolen property. He tried to maintain a stiff and erect bearing, and no longer to look at the civilians. The dense crowd around him, the hubbub, as the Baroness called it, all this commercial turmoil full of faces and backs, seemed to him a soft, gliding, dissolving mass which one could not lay hold on. What did it all lead to? And with a jerk regaining his prescribed military bearing, he suddenly thought with relief that one could love only someone who belonged to an alien world. That was why he would never dare to love Elisabeth, and also why Ruzena had to be a Bohemian. Love meant to take refuge from one’s own world in another’s, and so in spite of his jealousy and shame he had left Ruzena in her world, so that her flight to him should be ever sweet and new. The garrison band was playing a little in front of him, and he held himself still more stiffly, as stiffly as when he attended church parade on Sundays. At the corner of Spandauerstrasse the man slowed down and hesitated at the edge of the thoroughfare; evidently a business man like this was afraid of the horses in the roadway. It was of course silly, the idea that he must refund money to this man; but Ruzena must be taken out of the casino, that was definite. In any case she would always remain a Bohemian,
a being out of another world. But where did he fit in himself? Whither was he sliding? And Bertrand? Again Bertrand rose before him, astonishingly soft and small, glancing severely through his eyeglasses, strange to Joachim, strange to Ruzena who was a Bohemian, strange to Elisabeth who walked in a still park, strange to them all, and yet familiar when he turned round and the beard parted in a friendly smile, inciting women to kiss the dark cave where his mouth was concealed. His hand on his sword-hilt, Joachim remained standing as if the nearness of the garrison band provided him with protection and new strength against the Evil One. Bertrand’s image arose, iridescent, uncanny. It emerged and vanished again: “vanished in the labyrinth of the city,” the words came back to Joachim, and “labyrinth” had a diabolically underworld ring. Bertrand was concealed in all those shapes, and he had betrayed everybody: Joachim, his fellow-officers, the women, everybody. But now he noticed that Bertrand’s representative had crossed Spandauerstrasse in good style at a sharp trot. Joachim thought with relief that henceforth he would keep Ruzena out of reach of them both. No, he could not be accused of stealing Ruzena; on the contrary it was his duty to protect Elisabeth as well from Bertrand. Oh, he knew, the Devil was full of wiles. But a soldier must never fly. If he fled he would deliver Elisabeth defencelessly to that man, he would himself be one of those who hid in the labyrinth of the city and were afraid of the horses’ hoofs; and it would be not only an avowal of his guilt as a thief, it would mean also the renunciation for ever of his attempt to tear from that man the secret of his treachery. He must follow him farther, yet not surreptitiously like a spy, but openly as was fitting; and he would not keep Ruzena concealed either. So in the middle of the Stock Exchange quarter, though admittedly in the vicinity of the garrison band too, everything suddenly grew quiet round Joachim von Pasenow, as quiet and transparent as the clear blue sky which looked down between the two rows of buildings.