The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy;1890-2000

by Mike Mitchell

  ‘Will you save me?’ whispers the boy with a sob, dazzled by the life in his wound. That’s just typical of people round here. Always demanding the impossible of their doctor. They’ve lost their old faith; the priest is sitting at home, plucking the vestments to pieces, one after another; but the doctor is expected to be able to do everything with his delicate, surgeon’s hands. Well, it’s up to you: it wasn’t my idea; if you insist on making a holy man of me, I’m happy to let you have your way. What else could I expect, an old country doctor who has been robbed of his servant girl! And they come, the family and the village elders, and undress me; the school choir led by the teacher is outside the house and sings, to an extremely simple melody:

  Undress him so that he can cure us.

  And if he can’t, then strike him dead!

  It’s only a doctor, only a doctor.

  Undressed, my fingers in my beard, my head bowed, I calmly look at the people. I am quite composed and superior to all of them, and I remain so, despite the fact that it is of no help to me, for now they have taken me by the head and by the feet and are carrying me to the bed. They lay me down along the wall, against the side with the wound. Then they all go out of the room; the door is closed; the singing falls silent; clouds cover the moon. The bedding is warm around me; the shadowy horses’ heads sway in the windows.

  ‘Do you know,’ I hear a voice in my ear, ‘I have very little faith in you. You didn’t come on your own two feet, someone just got rid of you. Instead of helping, you are taking up space on my deathbed. Most of all, I’d like to scratch your eyes out.’

  ‘Quite right,’ I say, ‘It’s a disgrace. But I am a doctor. What should I do? Believe me, it’s not easy for me either.’

  ‘You think I should content myself with that excuse? I suppose I’ll have to. I have to be content with everything. I came into the world with a handsome wound; that was all I was endowed with.’

  ‘My dear young friend,’ I say, ‘your fault is that you don’t see things from a wider perspective. I tell you – and I have visited every sickroom, far and wide – your wound is not that bad at all. Created with two blows of the axe at a sharp angle. There are many who offer their sides, but they hardly even hear the axe in the forest, let alone it coming nearer.’

  ‘Is that really so, or are you deceiving me in my fever?’

  ‘It is really so, take the word of honour of a medical officer of health with you to the other side.’ And he took it and fell silent. But now it was time to think of my escape. The horses were still faithfully at their posts. My fur and bag were quickly gathered up; I didn’t want to waste time dressing; if the horses made as good speed as on the way here I would jump straight from this bed into my own, so to speak. Obediently, one horse stepped back from the window; I threw the load into the carriage; the fur flew too far, just one sleeve caught on a hook. That would do. I jumped onto the horse. The reins trailing loose, one horse hardly hitched to the other, the carriage swaying to and fro, the fur coat at the rear dragging through the snow. ‘Gee up!’ I said, but they did not gee up; as slowly as old men we went through the snowy wastes; for a long time we could hear behind us the children’s new, but erroneous, song:

  Rejoice, ye patients all

  The doctor is laid in your bed!

  I’ll never get home like this; my flourishing practice is lost; a successor will steal everything, but to no avail, for he can never replace me; my house is tyrannised by the loathsome groom; Rosa is his victim; I refuse to visualise it. Here I am, an old man driving round and round, naked, exposed to the frost of this miserable epoch, with an earthly carriage, unearthly horses. My fur is hanging over the back of the carriage, but I cannot reach it and none of my nimble patients will lift a finger, the scum. Cheated! Cheated! Respond to a faulty night-bell just once and it can never be remedied.

  Gracchus the Huntsman

  Franz Kafka

  Two boys were sitting on the harbour wall playing dice. A man was reading a newspaper on the steps of a monument in the shadow of its sabre-wielding hero. A girl at the fountain was filling a tub with water. A fruit vendor was lying down beside his wares and looking out to sea. Through the empty openings of the window and door one could see two men at the back of the inn drinking wine. The innkeeper was sitting by a table at the front, dozing. Gently, as if it was being carried over the waves, a boat floated into the little harbour. A man in a blue smock came on land and pulled the ropes through the rings. Two other men in dark coats with silver buttons followed the seaman, carrying a bier on which there was obviously someone lying underneath the large silk cloth with a floral pattern and fringes.

  No one on the quay took any notice of the new arrivals. Even when they put down the bier to wait for the boatman, who was still occupied with the ropes, no one came up to them, no one asked any questions, no one had a good look at them.

  The boatman was held up a little longer by a woman who, a child at her breast and her hair all tousled, now appeared on deck. Then he came and pointed to the straight lines of a two-storeyed, yellowish house that stood on the left, close to the sea; the bearers picked up their load and carried it through the door that was low, but flanked with slim pillars. A small boy opened a window, just caught sight of the group disappearing into the house, and hastily shut the window again. Then the door was closed as well, it was made of neatly mitred planks of black oak. A flock of pigeons, that until that point had been flying round the bell-tower, landed in front of the house. As if their food was kept in the house, the pigeons gathered outside the door. One flew up to the first floor and pecked at the window-pane. They were brightly coloured, well-fed, lively birds. The woman on the boat threw them some seeds in a great arc; they picked them up and flew across to the woman.

  A man in a top hat with a black ribbon round it came down one of the steep, narrow alleyways leading to the harbour. He looked round attentively, everything worried him, the sight of rubbish in a corner made him frown. There was some peel on the steps of the monument, he flicked it off with his stick as he passed. When he reached the door, he knocked, at the same time taking his top hat in his black-gloved right hand. It was opened immediately; the long hallway was lined with at least fifty small boys, who bowed.

  The boatman came down the stairs, greeted the man, led him upstairs; on the first floor he walked with him round the delicate, flimsily built loggia encircling the courtyard and then both of them, the boys crowding along behind at a respectful distance, entered a large, cool room at the rear of the house which looked out not onto another house but a bare, grey-black rock-face. The bearers were setting up some long candles on either side of the bier and lighting them, but that did not create any light, the only effect was literally to rouse the sleeping shadows and send them flickering round the walls. The cloth was drawn back from the bier. On it lay a man with a tangle of hair and beard and a bronzed skin, more or less resembling a huntsman. He lay there motionless, apparently not breathing and with his eyes closed, yet it was only the surroundings that suggested he might be dead.

  The new arrival went to the bier, laid his hand on the forehead of the man stretched out on it, then knelt down and prayed. The boatman made a sign to the bearers to leave the room; they went out, clearing away the boys who had gathered outside, and closed the door. Even then the silence did not seem sufficient for the man at prayer, he glanced at the boatman, who understood and went out by a side door into the adjoining room. Immediately the man on the bier opened his eyes, turned, with a smile of pain, to face the man in black and said, ‘Who are you?’ He, not showing any surprise at all, got up from the floor and replied, ‘The Mayor of Riva.’

  The man on the bier nodded, indicated a chair with a weak gesture of his outstretched arm and said, after the mayor had accepted his invitation to sit down, ‘I knew, of course, but in the first few moments I always find I have forgotten everything, everything goes round and round, and it is better that I should ask, even if I know. And you probably also know that I am Gra
cchus, the huntsman?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said the mayor. The announcement came during the night. We had been asleep for some time. It was towards midnight that my wife called out, “Salvatore,” – that is my name –“look at the pigeon at the window.” It really was a pigeon, but the size of a cock. It flew over and said into my ear, “Gracchus, the dead huntsman, will come tomorrow, welcome him in the name of the town.”’

  The huntsman nodded and passed the tip of his tongue through his lips, ‘Yes, the pigeons fly on ahead. But, mayor, do you think I should stay in Riva?’

  ‘I cannot say yet,’ replied the mayor. ‘Are you dead?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the huntsman, ‘as you can see. Many years ago – many, many years it must have been – I fell off a cliff whilst I was chasing a chamois in the Black Forest, in Germany. Since then I have been dead.’

  ‘But you are alive, as well,’ said the mayor.

  ‘In a way,’ said the huntsman, ‘In a way I am still alive. My funeral barge went the wrong way. A false movement of the tiller, a momentary lack of attention on the part of the boatman, the distraction of the beauty of the Black Forest, I don’t know what it was, all I know is that I remained on earth, and that since then my barge has been travelling the waters of this earth. During my life I wanted no other home than my mountains and now, after my death, I am travelling through all the countries of the world.’

  ‘And you have no part in the world beyond?’ asked the mayor, wrinkling his brow.

  ‘I am still,’ replied the huntsman, ‘on the great staircase leading up. I roam the infinite space of this flight of steps, sometimes at the top, sometimes down below, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left, always in motion. The huntsman has become a butterfly. Don’t laugh.’

  ‘I’m not laughing,’ protested the mayor.

  ‘Very understanding of you,’ said the huntsman. ‘I am forever in motion. But if I pull myself up as far as possible until I can see the gate shining at the top, I always wake up in my old barge to find it drearily stuck in some earthly waterway. The basic mistake in my erstwhile death is grinning down at me from the walls of my cabin. Julia, the boatman’s wife, knocks and brings to my bier the morning drink of the country we happen to be travelling along. I lie on a bare wooden bed, wearing – I am not a particularly pleasant sight – a grubby shroud, my hair and beard, grey and black, are inseparably entangled, my legs are covered by a large, silk cloth with a floral pattern and long fringes, intended for a woman. At my head is a church candle which gives me light. On the wall opposite is a small painting, obviously representing a bushman, who is pointing his spear at me and concealing as much of himself as possible behind a magnificently decorated shield. You see all kinds of silly pictures on ships, but this is one of the silliest. Otherwise my wooden cage is quite empty. The warm air of the southern night comes in through a porthole in the side, and I can hear the water slapping against the old barge.

  I have been lying here ever since the time when I was still alive, was still Gracchus the huntsman and fell off a cliff while I was chasing a chamois in the Black Forest where I lived. Everything took its proper course. I chased, fell, bled to death in a ravine, and this barge was supposed to bear me to the afterlife. I can still remember how happy I was the first time I stretched out on these planks. The mountains never heard me sing as these four walls did, murky as they were even then.

  I had lived happily, and I was happy to die. Before I came on board I gladly threw away all the junk – shotgun, game bag, hunting rifle – that I had always been so proud to carry, and put on my shroud like a girl her wedding dress. I lay here and waited. Then the misfortune occurred.’

  ‘A dreadful fate,’ said the mayor, raising his hand as if to ward off a like evil. ‘And you are not at all to blame for it?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said the huntsman. ‘I was a huntsman – what is the blame in that? I was employed as a huntsman in the Black Forest where there were still wolves. I would lie in wait, shoot, kill, skin – what is the blame in that? My work was blessed with success. “The great huntsman of the Black Forest,” I was called. Where is the blame in that?’

  ‘It is not my place to decide on that,’ said the mayor, ‘but I don’t find anything to blame in it, either. But who is to blame, then?’

  ‘The boatman,’ said the huntsman. ‘Nobody will read what I am writing here, nobody will come to help me. If helping me were a set task, all the doors of all the houses would stay shut, all the windows would stay shut, everyone would lie in bed, the blankets pulled over their heads, the whole earth would be an inn at night. There is some point to that, for no one knows of me, and if they knew of me, they would not know where I was, and if they knew where I was, they would not know how to keep me there, they would not know how to help me. The idea of helping me is an illness and the cure is to stay in bed.

  I know that, so I don’t shout out for help, even if there are moments when I lose control, as just now for example, and think about it intently. But all I need to do to drive away such thoughts is to look around me and recall where I am and where, as I think I am justified in saying, I have been living for centuries.’

  ‘Extraordinary,’ said the mayor, ‘extraordinary. And now you propose to stay with us in Riva?’

  ‘I do not propose,’ said the huntsman, laying his hand, to excuse his irony, on the mayor’s knee. ‘I am here, that is all I know, that is all I can do. My barge has no tiller, it sails with the wind that blows in the lowest regions of death.’

  The First Hour after Death

  Max Brod

  The odd little incident occurred as the minister, Baron von Klumm, was leaving the Palace of the House of Representatives at the head of a largish group of leading diplomats.

  A frail man pushed his way through the ring of policemen and, in full view of everybody, ran very quickly, or rather tumbled, up the steps and fell to his knees at the top, crying, ‘Minister, grant justice to our enemies and we will have peace!’

  Baron von Klumm, not in the least put out, smiled his courteous smile and asked, ‘You are – ?’

  ‘Arthur Bruchfeß.’

  ‘And your profession?’

  The man flicked a lock of blond hair, that had fallen into his face as he ran, back from his forehead, ‘Chimney sweep.’

  ‘My dear Herr Bruchfeß, if you were to grant justice to your chimneys, do you think they would blacken you any the less?’

  By this time five, eight, fifteen policeman had run up panting and laid hold of the petitioner, who was looking bewildered.

  Von Klumm had already moved on, surrounded by the throng of dignitaries, who sighed with relief as they giggled belatedly at the minister’s witticism.

  A gaunt, bronzed old man went up to him, followed by a crowd of eager faces. ‘A statement for the press?’

  The minister looked up and glanced round uncertainly for a moment.

  The Head of the Secret Police had guessed what he was thinking. ‘Oh yes, minister, everyone saw what happened and took note of it.’

  The minister immediately began to dictate to the thin air: ‘Attacked by a mental defective; police on the spot; took necessary steps; would-be assassin taken to lunatic asylum; being examined by doctors; minister carried out his duties as usual – omit my little joke, of course. And now, if you’ll excuse me, commissioner – ’