The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy;1890-2000

by Mike Mitchell

  I know I will learn that some time, and soon! The vague corporeal darkness below my neck is developing an outline. I already have a picture of my body, though an unclear, blurred one, and this picture is becoming more definite, more precise, by the minute. At the same time there is the painful mingling of the fluids from my two component parts. And suddenly I feel as if I had two heads … and this second head, a woman’s head, bloody, disfigured, distorted, I can see before me, completely covered with small enamelled nails. That is the head that belongs to this body, and at the same time it is my head, for in my skull and my brain I can clearly feel the hundreds of little points. I want to roar with pain. Everything around me merges into a red veil, which ripples as if it were torn back and forth by violent gusts of wind.

  I can feel now that I am a woman, only my mind is masculine. And now an image is emerging from the red veil … before me I can see myself in a room decorated with sumptuous extravagance. I am lying down, buried in soft white furs and … naked. Before me, bending over me, is a man with the harsh, coarse features of one from the common mass of the people, with the work-calloused hands and weather-beaten skin of a sailor. He is kneeling over me, pricking my soft flesh with a sharp needle to make his strange design. It hurts and yet causes me a strange, sensual pleasure at the same time … I know that the man is my lover.

  Then a short, needle-sharp pain makes my whole body contract in a quiver of delight. I wreathe my white arms round the man’s neck and pull him down to me … I kiss him and place his hard, calloused hands on my shoulders, on my breasts, and kiss him again in a wild frenzy and wrap myself round him and clutch him tight so that he gasps and groans.

  Now I have my teeth round his brown throat, round the throat I love, the sight of which has often sent me into raptures, my tongue is licking his throat in a moist caress … and now … now I must press my teeth into the hard brown flesh … I cannot help it … I must bite into his throat … I bite and I bite … his groans become a death rattle … I feel the man twist and turn convulsively in my arms … but I do not let go … his body becomes heavy, heavy … a warm stream flows down my body. His head falls back … I let him slip from my arms … with a muffled thud he lands on his back on the soft carpet, a thick stream of blood pouring from the bite in his neck. Blood, blood everywhere, on the soft white polar-bear skins, on me, everywhere.

  I start to scream, hoarse rough sounds come from my throat. The chambermaid rushes in, she cannot have been far away, perhaps by the door in the next room … was she eavesdropping? For a moment she stands rigid, as if unconscious, then, without a word, she throws herself over the body of the dead man … without saying a word, without shedding a tear, she buries her face in the blood streaming down his chest. But I see her clench her fist; now I know everything…

  And then I see another scene…

  Again I can see myself, and yet at the same time it is I myself who am sitting in the wooden tumbril which is taking me to the guillotine. Then I am standing up there on the scaffold, looking at the sun for the last time, and as I turn round I catch sight of a young woman who has pushed her way right to the front of the crowd … that woman … the lover of the man who was the instrument of my pleasure … in a red skirt, her bodice loose, her face pale and twitching, hair streaming … her eyes have a savage gleam, like a beast of prey, moist, as if from stifled grief, and with a lustful sparkle, as if in expectation of pleasure. She raises her clenched fists to her face, her lips move … she wants to speak, to mock me and curse me, but all that comes is a strangled, incomprehensible cry … I lay my head below the blade.

  Now I know everything.

  I know whose head it was that, in the night, by the blazing light of the bonfire, suffered a gruesome vengeance that reached beyond the grave. I know, too, who the young woman was, who, in the same night, in the darkened courtyard, was crushed and torn limb from limb by wild beasts … my head aches from the hundreds of sharp nails … I am tied to this body … to this body wracked with horrible memories and terrible pains, to this beautiful body steeped in sin that has tasted all the delights of hell.

  I am being torn apart by my two conflicting halves … oh, but not for long … I feel a slackening in all my limbs, my flesh softens, falls away, my internal organs are becoming spongy, dissolving … decomposition is beginning…

  Soon night will embrace me and my two conflicting selves … the night of decay … the bodies will disintegrate and the spirit will be free.’

  The hand stopped writing and vanished.

  The Ghost of the Jewish Ghetto

  Paul Leppin

  Only ten years ago, in the middle of Prague, where today tall, airy apartment blocks form wide boulevards, stood the Jewish quarter: a squint, gloomy jumble of nooks and crannies from which no storm was strong enough to blow away the smell of mould and damp masonry and where, in summer, the open doors exhaled a poisonous miasma. Filth and poverty each outstank the other, and the eyes of the children that grew up there had a dull, cruel glint of depravity. Alleys would sometimes pass under low, vaulted viaducts through the belly of a house, or they would suddenly twist to one side to come to an abrupt end at a blind wall. The sharp-faced junk dealers, who piled up their wares on the bumpy cobbles outside their shops, would accost passers-by. Girls with painted lips leant against the house entrances, full of coarse laughter, whispering in the men’s ears and lifting up their skirts to show their yellow or lime-green stockings. Ancient, slack-jawed bawds, their hair streaked with white, shouted from the windows, hammered, waved and gurgled with gratified zeal when a man took the bait and came closer.

  Fornication had made its home here, and in the evening its red lamps lured men in. There were streets where every building was a house of ill repute, low dives where vice shared its bed with hunger, where consumptive women carried on a meagre trade with their withered charms, secret chambers where villainy, with whispers and sly winks, violated school-age girls and sold their helpless, bewildered innocence for a few pieces of tarnished silver. There were smart, luxuriously furnished taverns where one’s foot sank into the carpets and where well-fed, voluptuous whores strutted about in long silk gowns.

  Not far from the synagogue, beside the squalid shacks of Gypsy Lane, was a two-storey building which housed the Salon Aaron. In this seedy environment it had an almost well-cared-for look, in spite of the fact that part of the plaster was crumbling from the walls and the dust and rain had smeared gaudy stripes across the blind windows. By day it was quiet; only rarely did a customer slip up the worn steps into the dark vestibule, to emerge an hour later, furtively, his coat-collar turned up around his ears. But at night here loud, bright, quivering life welled up from some secret spring. The windows glowed, and inside, the laughter fluttered round like a bird trapped in a cage.

  Johanna’s laughter was part of it. It was a hot, throaty purring, that rubbed itself up against you; it could be clearly distinguished from the voices of the other girls, and sometimes it would even echo through the morning silence like a happy, infatuated lark. Johanna was happy because the men came to her. They desired her more than her colleagues because she gave each and every one of them something of the fearful, tormenting, restless sweetness which filled her and which was absent from the lethargic bodies of the others. Their profession, which to the other women in the house seemed a boring, irksome chore, aroused within her an ecstatic yearning for love, was a spur she could feel goading her flesh and which brought a virginal lustre to her eyes. With lips that were cracked and sore from kissing, she would slake this thirst on the mouths of men, again and again imbued with the bridal ecstasy that had accompanied her first lovemaking. In the intervals afforded by her promiscuous activity – and unbearably long and lonely they seemed to her – she listened for the steps of the passers-by outside the house, and when the bell over the door jingled, she would flush and sigh. There were often days when she enjoyed the delights of love until she was sated with it; but as she lay in bed, with heavy head and aching
limbs, her mind went back to this lover and then to that one, savouring the memory, luxuriating in it, and she would smile in the darkness. Sometimes, especially in the summer, when she finally made her way to her bed in the last hours before morning, her restlessness would turn into torment. Then she would go to the open window in her nightdress and look down onto the Jewish quarter. She would stretch out her bare arms, feeling the warm rain like drops of blood on her skin. The streets below were where she belonged: the ghetto where the sleepy lights of the brothels twinkled, where bulky shadows crouched in sordid alleyways, whilst in the distance the whine of a violin or the harsh tinkling of the pianolas were making one last effort to entice revellers. A rapturous melancholy bathed her face in tears. Tenderly, the night wind fondled her breasts, and she would let her head fall back and her lips would purse in a kiss.

  In the evenings, beneath the festive lights of the Salon Aaron, as the wine-glasses chinked on the marble tables, she would dance to the music. The sensuality that she suffered from made her limbs soft and relaxed, goading her, skirts swirling, into an urgent abandon that suffused her rigid features with a strange beauty which was more provocative, more enticing, than all the wiles of the other women. She danced alone or with the customers. Her slim figure would bend back in the arms of her partners, press up against them insistently, tremble and shiver; and if one had danced with the blonde Johanna, he was sure to go up to her room with her as well. Her lips were greedy and feverish. The more men that found their way to her door, the more unbridled was the lust with which she fell upon them; her desire had the power to move men and leave them dazed; her passion was a willing instrument that could blaze up into sheer bliss.

  Then came the day when disease demanded its penance from her body. It welled up from the decaying walls of the ghetto, from its debauched streets, and poisoned her kisses. It burnt up her blood and made her veins dry and cracked; it choked the laughter and the amorous murmurs in her throat; it disfigured her body with red blotches and dragged her through the gauntlet of the vituperation of the foul-mouthed whores to the fear and trembling of the hospital. There she lay in a hot bed, and the thoughts fell from the ceiling onto her forehead like heavy drops. She thought of the women who were sitting at that moment in the Salon Aaron, drinking the yellow wine from thin glasses. She thought of the music and of the scarlet petticoat she had worn when dancing. She opened her arms and threw back her head onto the pillows, but there was no one there to kiss her. A pining sadness roused the sobs in her throat and sent her into despair.

  The cowardly weeks drew out time in a spiteful, lingering pretence. Johanna’s disease had broken out with unexpected virulence. The antidote with which the doctors tormented her was powerless against it. It lodged in every tissue, it flickered under her skin, it scratched open festering sores in the pits and hollows of her flesh, it refused to move. It paralysed her thoughts and soiled her sleep with lustful dreams, from which she started up, groaning, to recognise the dreadful, hateful reality around her. Johanna missed men. Her febrile body twitched under the torture of deprivation. Every day of burning torment, every hour increased her agony. Until she could bear it no longer. One night she made her escape from the hospital. She jumped out of the window into the garden and barefoot, with just her coat over her nightdress, she climbed over the wall and into the street.

  She ran through the city, burning with unearthly, sultry anticipation. Her hair, undone, fluttered round her face, and her eyes shone. One bright, marvellous thought drove her on, filling her with happiness: she was going to find the men! Her muscles strained and her feet flew over the cobbles. The shadows of belated night owls swayed across her path, and she started at the harsh light of sudden street-lamps; she was intoxicated with a delicious, heavy, tantalising sweetness. The twin spires of the Tyn Church appeared before her, standing pale among the stars. She was as good as home! There was the street where the raucous music blared behind curtained doors, and where the women’s laughter beat with its wings against the red window-panes…

  She stopped and stared, dazzled, at the squint-eyed moon stuck against the sky which was shining down on splintered beams and rubble. The Salon Aaron had disappeared. Pick and shovel had demolished the house piece by piece, and the stones were stacked beside the synagogue. One single, jagged crest of masonry rose up among the ruins, and Johanna recognised her bedroom wall. Numb with horror, her eye followed the line of the street. The gaudy lights of the houses of pleasure had been extinguished, and dust rose like smoke from the blasted roofs. Everywhere ruins emerged from the darkness. While she had been wrestling with the disease in her damp bed in the hospital, they had destroyed her home.

  A scream detached itself from her throat and quivered its hideous way through the deserted quarter. Her hair spilled over her coat; the night breeze blew it open and fumbled her under her nightdress. A bunch of tipsy soldiers came along. Unable to control herself, she fell to her knees before them, moaning confused words of love. And among the ruins of the demolished brothel, she gave herself to the men that chance had thrown into her path. She gave herself to them, one after the other, and her wretched body, wasted with disease, did not tire but, shuddering in the ecstasy of love, dug itself ever deeper into the rubble.

  Between one summer and the next, the ghetto was torn down. New houses pressed down on the dark, unhealthy crannies, which for centuries had been the haunt of misery and vice. Clattering along on its high-heeled shoes, debauchery fled to the farthest edges of the suburbs. A city for the rich and respectable grew up over the old squares. But never in the history of Prague were the ravages of syphilis so terrible, so devastating as in that year. It invaded family life and struck the young mothers with terror. It hung on the smile of love, turning it into a leaden grin. Young boys killed themselves and old men cursed life.

  Pour avoir bien servi

  Leo Perutz

  I heard this strange story some time ago in the saloon of a French steamer, which was taking me from Marseilles to Alexandria. We were not able to go up on deck very much; we had constant bad weather and had to find some way or other of passing the time. Of all the discussions and conversations I heard during those days, what particularly stuck in my mind was the story from a Mr. J. Schwemmer, an engineer from Kiev, who told it after a long and heated debate in order to dispute the claim that the modern doctor has the right, nay, even the duty, forcibly to terminate the sufferings of a patient who has no hope of recovery.

  I cannot say why this story in particular made such a deep impression on me; in fact, as soon became apparent, it was only marginally connected with the topic under discussion. Perhaps it was the sudden appearance, in the midst of all our banal and superficial discussions, of the dreadful reality of two pale, suffering human beings, their lips twisted and quivering with pain. Even today I sometimes see the young woman in my mind’s eye, see her leaning back wearily in her wheelchair, her fearful, longing glance resting almost tenderly on the green vase on the mantelpiece. And in my dreams I still sometimes hear her husband’s cry, it rings in my ears with a terrible sound that freezes me to the marrow, even though in reality I never heard the cry from the lips of the husband himself, but from a weak, croaking, old man’s voice that belonged to the aforementioned Mr. Schwemmer from Kiev.

  This is the story told by the old engineer, and I will recount it as he told it to us on board the Héron, a little more briefly, perhaps, but I am sure I have not omitted any essential details: Years ago I lived in Paris. I shared an apartment in a small, one-storey building in a side-street in an out-of-the-way suburb with a former student friend whom I had not seen for several years and then, to my delight, come across in Paris. In the years in between he had completed a doctorate at a German university, published two books on art and obtained, shortly before his marriage, a position as librarian to some count. He was still young, thirty at the most, and it was only his wife’s misfortune that could have made him so tired and prematurely aged.

  His wife was ill. S
he was paralysed; she had been attacked by one of those nervous disorders whose victims, or so I believe, come mostly from people who overexert themselves intellectually: as a girl she had studied medicine in Zurich. By day she sat in her wheelchair, usually silent and without complaining much, but the nights! Those nights! One night her screams were so dreadful that the concierge’s two children dashed out into the street in sheer terror and refused to come back for the rest of the night. During such nights the doctor and her husband did everything they could to comfort her, promised that the pain was bound to lessen soon and that in a short time she would be well again; but she, as a former medical student, knew better than any of us that there was no cure for her suffering, that the resistance her young body put up to the disease was in vain, that one day the end would come but, and that was the worst thing about it, not all that soon.

  And her husband loved her. His work only occupied him for a few hours each day, but he soon came to hate it, to feel it irksome. As a young student, he had found his subject fulfilling, satisfying, almost intoxicating even – to the rest of us his passion for old books and rare manuscripts had seemed almost morbid – now he had lost all interest in it. In his study, in the street, in the omnibus, wherever he was there was but one thought in his mind: to return home as quickly as possible! Basically, his whole day was a detour on the way to his wife. Several times he told me what the reason for his unease was: his wife possessed a revolver. She had had it since she was a girl and it was concealed somewhere in the flat, of that he was quite certain. But he had never been able to discover the hiding-place, however often he had searched through the rooms. Of course, she was paralysed and could not reach the revolver herself. ‘But once, just imagine, she tried to bribe the maid!’