Homo Faber

by Max Frisch

  Sabeth thought me funny.

  Nevertheless, she liked me a little, I believe; anyhow, she nodded when she saw me on deck, she was lying in her deck-chair and immediately picked up her book, but she nodded…

  ‘Hello, Mr Faber.’

  She called me Mr Faber, because I was so used to the English pronunciation of my name that that was how I introduced myself; the rest of the time, we spoke German.

  I often left her in peace.

  Really I ought to have been working.

  A sea voyage is a funny situation. Five days without a car! I’m used to working or driving my car, it’s no holiday for me if there’s no mechanism running, and in any case anything unusual makes me edgy. I couldn’t work. We sailed and sailed, the engines chugged away day and night, I could hear them and feel them, we sailed incessantly, but only the sun moved, or else the moon, the idea that we were sailing along might have been an illusion; however much our tub pitched and threw up waves, the horizon remained the horizon and we remained in the centre of a chalk circle, as though fixed, only the waves slid by, I don’t know at how many knots, anyway pretty fast, but nothing changed – except that we grew older!

  Sabeth played ping-pong or read.

  I roamed about half the day, although it’s impossible to meet someone who isn’t on board; I hadn’t walked so much in ten years as I walked on that ship; sometimes the Baptist joined in the childish game of pushing wooden disks around, just to pass the time, I had more time than ever before and yet I didn’t even get around to reading the ship’s newspaper.

  TODAY’S NEWS…

  Only the sun moved.

  PRESIDENT EISENHOWER SAYS…

  I should worry!

  The important thing is push your wooden disk into the right square, and it is quite certain that no one can turn up who is not already on board, Ivy for example, one is simply out of reach.

  The weather was fine.

  One morning, while I was having breakfast with the Baptist, Sabeth sat down at our table, which really pleased me, Sabeth in her jeans. There were plenty of empty tables all around, I mean if the girl couldn’t stand me. I was really pleased. They talked about the Louvre in Paris, which I didn’t know, and meanwhile I peeled my apple. Her English went splendidly. Again I felt amazed at her youthfulness. At moments like this you wonder whether you were ever that young yourself. The ideas she had! There simply couldn’t be such a thing as a man who didn’t know the Louvre because it didn’t interest him; Sabeth thought I must be pulling her leg. But it was the Baptist who pulled my leg.

  ‘Mr Faber is an engineer,’ he said.

  What irritated me was not his stupid jokes about engineers, but the way he flirted with the young girl, who hadn’t come over to the table on his account, the way he laid his hand on her arm, then on her shoulder, then on her arm again, his fleshy hand. Why did he keep touching the girl all the time? Just because he was an expert on the Louvre.

  ‘Listen,’ he kept saying, ‘listen.’

  Sabeth: ‘Yes, I’m listening.’

  And yet the Baptist had nothing to say, the sole object of all his talk about the Louvre was an excuse to paw the girl in his old-gentlemanly way, while he poked fun at me.

  ‘Go on,’ he said to me, ‘go on.’

  I took the standpoint that the profession of technologist, a man who masters matter, is a masculine profession, if not the only masculine profession there is. I told them we were on a ship, that is to say a product of technology…

  ‘True,’ he said, ‘very true.’

  And all the time he held her arm, pretending to be interested and attentive merely so as not to have to let go of the girl’s arm.

  ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘go on.’

  The girl came to my aid. As I hadn’t seen the sculptures in the Louvre she brought the conversation around to my robots; but I didn’t feel like talking about them and merely said that sculptures and things like that are nothing more (to my way of thinking) than forbears of the robot. Primitive peoples tried to annul death by portraying the human body – we do it by finding substitutes for the human body. Technology instead of mysticism!

  Fortunately Mr Lewin joined us.

  When it turned out that Mr Lewin had never been to the Louvre either, the conversation changed, thank goodness. Mr Lewin had been over the engine-room the day before. This led to a split in the conversation: the Baptist and Sabeth went on talking about Van Gogh, Lewin and I discussed diesel engines, during which time I, though interested in diesel engines, did not take my eyes off the girl. She listened attentively to the Baptist while she took his hand and laid it down beside her like a table napkin.

  ‘Why do you laugh?’ he asked me.

  I was simply laughing.

  ‘Van Gogh was the most intelligent fellow of his time,’ he told me. ‘Have you ever read his letters?’

  Sabeth added: ‘He really knows a lot.’

  But as soon as Mr Lewin and I started talking about electricity, our Baptist and cock of the walk didn’t know anything any more, but sat peeling his apple without a word.

  Eventually we discussed Israel.

  Afterwards, on deck, Sabeth (without any pressure from me) expressed the wish to look over the engine-room – with me; I had merely said I intended to look over the engine-room too some time. I didn’t want to be a nuisance to her. She wondered why I hadn’t got a deck-chair and immediately offered me hers, because anyhow she had a ping-pong date.

  I thanked her and she was gone.

  After that I often sat in her deck-chair, the steward used to get her chair out the moment he saw me, open it up and greet me as Mr Piper, because her chair was labelled MISS E. PIPER.

  I told myself that probably every young girl would somehow remind me of Hanna. I had begun to think a great deal about Hanna again lately. Where was the likeness? Hanna had black hair, Sabeth reddish blonde, and it seemed to me very far-fetched to compare the two of them. I did it out of sheer idleness. Sabeth was young, as young as Hanna had been in those days, and moreover she spoke the same High German, but after all (I told myself) there are whole ethnic groups that speak High German. I lay for hours in her deck-chair with my legs on the rails which trembled, gazing out to sea. Unfortunately I had no engineering periodicals with me and I can’t read novels; I preferred to ponder over the problem of what caused this vibration and why it couldn’t be eliminated, or else I calculated Hanna’s present age and wondered whether her hair would already be white. I closed my eyes to sleep. If Hanna had been on deck I should have recognized her at once, no doubt about it. Perhaps she is on deck! I thought. And I got up and wandered around among the deck-chairs, without seriously believing Hanna was really on deck. It was just to pass the time. All the same (I admit) I was afraid she might be there, and I calmly studied all the ladies who were no longer young girls. You can do that when you’re wearing dark glasses; you stand smoking and studying people, unnoticed by those you are studying, quite calmly, quite objectively. I estimated their ages, which wasn’t at all easy; I paid less attention to the colour of their hair than to their legs and feet, in so far as they were uncovered, and noticed especially their hands and lips. Here and there, I came across full and rosy lips accompanied by a throat that recalled the folded skin of lizards, and I could imagine that Hanna was still very beautiful, I mean lovable. Unfortunately I couldn’t see their eyes, because of the sun glasses. All sorts of worn-out goods lay there, all sorts of organisms that had probably never blossomed, American women, the products of cosmetics. I knew Hanna would never look like that.

  I sat down again.

  The wind whistled in the funnel.

  The waves frothed and foamed.

  Once a cargo boat appeared on the horizon.

  I was bored, hence all this musing about Hanna; I lay with my legs resting on the white railing that never stopped vibrating, and what I knew about Hanna was just enough for the description of a wanted person that would be no use if the person wasn’t there. I couldn’t se
e her, not even with my eyes shut.

  Twenty years is a long time.

  Instead (I opened my eyes, because someone had bumped into my chair) I saw again the young thing called Fräulein Elisabeth Piper.

  She had finished playing ping-pong.

  What struck me most was the way she threw back her pony-tail to emphasize her disagreement in conversation (and yet Hanna never wore a pony-tail), or the way she shrugged her shoulders when it really wasn’t a matter of indifference to her, simply out of pride. But above all it was the small, brief wrinkling of her forehead between the eyebrows, when I made a joke at which she had to laugh but really thought stupid. It struck me, it occupied my mind. I liked it. There are gestures you like, because you have seen them somewhere or other before. I am always sceptical when people talk about a likeness; from experience. How often my brother and I used to laugh ourselves silly, when good people, with no idea of the facts, remarked on our striking resemblance! My brother was adopted. When anyone (for example) puts his right hand around the back of his head to scratch his left temple, it catches my attention, I immediately think of my father, but it would never occur to me to take someone for my father’s brother merely because he scratched himself like this. I believe in reason. I’m no Baptist or spiritualist. How could I guess that a girl called Elisabeth Piper was Hanna’s daughter? If I had the slightest suspicion on the ship (or later) that there might be any real connection between the young girl and Hanna, who was understandably on my mind after the business with Joachim, of course I should immediately have asked: Who is her mother? What is her name? Where does she come from? I don’t know how I should have acted, but anyhow differently, that’s obvious, I’m not pathological, I should have treated my daughter as my daughter, I’m not a pervert!

  It was all so natural.

  A harmless shipboard friendship.

  Once Sabeth was rather seasick; instead of going up on deck, as she was advised, she insisted on going to her cabin, then she was sick in the corridor, her friend with the moustache laid her on her bunk, as if he was her husband. Fortunately I was there. Sabeth in her black jeans, with her face turned to one side on account of her pony-tail, lay a limp heap with her legs spread out and her face as pale as china clay. He held her hand. I immediately unscrewed a port-hole to let more air in, and fetched water.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, as he sat on the edge of her bunk; then he unlaced her rope-soled shoes, playing the Good Samaritan. As though her sickness came from her feet!

  I stayed in the cabin.

  Her red belt was far too tight, you could see that, but I didn’t think it was our business to loosen the belt…

  I introduced myself.

  We had no sooner shaken hands than he sat down on the edge of her bunk again. Perhaps he was really her boy friend, Sabeth was already a proper woman, when she lay like that, not a child; I took a blanket from the upper bunk, in case she was cold, and covered her up.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  I was simply waiting till the young man also felt there was no more to be done and that it would be better to leave the girl by herself now.

  ‘Ciao!’ he said.

  I saw through him, he wanted to lose me on deck somewhere and then go back to her cabin alone. I challenged him to a game of ping-pong…. He wasn’t as stupid as I had expected, though I didn’t take to him at all. Why do people grow moustaches? We couldn’t play ping-pong, because both the tables were occupied again; instead I got him involved in a conversation – in High German, of course! – about turbines; he was an illustrator by profession, an artist, but businesslike. As soon as he saw that painting and the theatre and that sort of thing cut no ice with me, he talked in business terms, not unscrupulous, but businesslike, a Swiss, as it turned out…

  I don’t know what Sabeth saw in him.

  There was no reason for feelings of inferiority on my part. I’m no genius, but all the same I have an important position, only I find it less and less easy to put up with these young people, their way of talking, their genius, though all the time they have nothing but dreams of the future to preen themselves about; they don’t give a damn for what we have already achieved in this world; if you tell them, they just smile politely.

  ‘I don’t want to keep you,’ I said.

  ‘Will you excuse me?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said…

  When I brought the tablets that had helped me, Sabeth wouldn’t let anyone into her cabin. It was funny, because she was dressed, as I could see through the crack of the door. I had promised her the tablets earlier on, that was the only reason I came. She took the tablets through the crack of the door. I don’t know whether he was in the cabin. I begged the girl really to take the tablets. I only wanted to help her; for holding hands and taking off her shoes hadn’t helped her. I really wasn’t interested in whether a girl like Sabeth (her lack of inhibitions always puzzled me) had been with a man yet or not. I merely wondered.

  What I knew at the time was this:

  A year at Yale on a scholarship, now on her way home to mother, who lived in Athens, Herr Piper, on the other hand, in East Germany because he still believed in Communism, her main concern at the moment to find a cheap hotel in Paris – then she wanted to hitchhike to Rome (which I thought crazy) and didn’t know what she was going to be, a pediatrician or an industrial designer or something like that, or perhaps an air hostess so that she could fly a lot, and whatever happened she wanted to see India and China. Sabeth (in response to my inquiry) guessed my age at forty, but when I told her I was just on fifty she showed no surprise. She was twenty. What impressed her most about me was the fact that I could personally remember Lindbergh’s first flight over the Atlantic in 1927, when I was twenty. She had to work it out before she would believe me. At my age, as seen by Sabeth, I don’t think it would have made any difference if I had talked in the same tone about Napoleon. I generally stood at the rail, because I couldn’t let Sabeth (who was generally in a bathing costume) sit on the floor, while I lay in the chair; that was too avuncular for my liking. On the other hand, it would also have been funny if Sabeth lay in the chair while I sat beside her with my legs crossed…

  In no case did I want to impose myself on her.

  I played chess with Mr Lewin, whose mind was on agriculture, or with other passengers who were checkmated after twenty moves at most; it was boring, but I preferred boring myself to boring the girl! What I mean is, I only went to Sabeth when I could really think of something to say.

  I forbade her to become an air hostess.

  Sabeth was generally absorbed in her thick book, and when she talked about Tolstoy I really wondered what a girl like that actually knew about men. I don’t know Tolstoy. Of course she was teasing me when she said:

  ‘Now you’re talking like Tolstoy again!’

  And yet she admired Tolstoy.

  Once, in the bar, I suddenly told her – I don’t know why – about my friend who couldn’t stick it, and how we found him: fortunately behind closed windows, otherwise the zopilotes would have torn him in shreds like a dead donkey.

  Sabeth thought I was exaggerating.

  I drank my third or fourth Pernod, laughed and told her what a man looks like hanging on a wire – both feet off the ground, as though he could fly…

  The chair had fallen over.

  He had a beard.

  I don’t know why I told her all this, Sabeth thought me cynical, because I couldn’t help laughing; but he was really as stiff as a doll…

  I was also smoking a great deal.

  His face was black with blood.

  He rotated like a scarecrow in the wind.

  Moreover he stank.

  His finger-nails were purple, his arms grey, his hands whitish, the colour of sponges…

  I didn’t recognize him.

  His tongue was also bluish…

  There was really nothing to tell, it was simply an accident, he rotated in the warm wind, as I have said, the part above the wire was bloa
ted…

  I didn’t want to talk about it at all.

  His arms were as stiff as two stakes…

  Unfortunately my Guatemala films hadn’t been developed yet, you can’t describe it, you have to see what a man looks like dangling at the end of a wire.

  Sabeth in her blue evening frock…

  At times I suddenly saw my friend hanging before my eyes, as though we hadn’t buried him, all of a sudden – perhaps because there was a radio playing in this bar too, he hadn’t even switched off his radio.

  That’s how it was.

  When we found him, as I have said, his radio was on. Not loud. At first we thought somebody was speaking in the room above, but there wasn’t any room above, my friend lived quite alone, and when the voice was followed by music we realized it must be the radio and of course we turned it off, because it was unsuitable, because it was dance music…