by Stefan Zweig
In dull bewilderment, he merely registered events as they happened. The conductor asked for his ticket; he had none, but in the voice of a sleepwalker named the town on the border as his destination, and passively changed to another train. The mechanism inside him did everything, and it had stopped hurting. At the Swiss customs office they asked to see his papers. He showed them what he had: only that one sheet of paper. Now and then some lost remnant of himself made a slight effort to think, murmuring as if in a dream, “Turn back! You’re still free! You don’t have to go.” But the mechanism in his blood that did not speak, and yet made his nerves and limbs move by force, thrust him implacably on with its invisible command, “You must.”
He was standing on the platform of the transit station where he had to change trains again for his native land. Over there, clearly visible in the dull light, a bridge crossed the river which was the border. His weary mind tried to understand the meaning of the word; on this side of the border you could still live, breathe, and speak freely, act as you liked, do work that mattered. Eight hundred paces further on, once over that bridge, your will would be removed from your body like an animal’s entrails being gutted, you would have to obey strangers and stab other strangers to death. And the little bridge there, a structure of just ten dozen wooden posts and two crossbeams meant all those things. That was why two men, each in a different, colourful and pointless uniform, stood one at each end with guns to guard the bridge. A sombre sensation tormented him, he knew he couldn’t think clearly any more, but his thoughts rolled on. What exactly were they guarding in the form of that wooden structure? They were preventing anyone passing from one country to the other, making sure no one got out of the country where men’s wills were gutted, and went to the country on the other side of the border. And was he himself going to cross the bridge? Yes, but the other way, out of freedom into …
He stood still, musing, hypnotized by the idea of the border. Now that he saw its intrinsic nature, a physical object guarded by two bored citizens in military uniforms, there was something in himself that he could no longer entirely understand. He tried to stand back and think: there was a war going on. But only in the country over there—the war was going on a kilometre away, or rather a kilometre minus two hundred metres away. Or perhaps, it occurred to him, it was ten metres closer than that, say a kilometre minus eight hundred metres minus ten metres away. He felt some kind of odd urge to find out whether there was still a war in progress on those last ten metres or not. The comical aspect of the idea amused him. There ought to be a line drawn somewhere, the dividing line. Suppose when you reached the border you had one foot on the bridge and one on the ground, what were you then—were you still free, or already a soldier? You’d have to be wearing a civilian boot on one foot and a military boot on the other. His confused thoughts became more and more childish. Suppose you were standing on the bridge, you were already over it, and then you ran back, were you a deserter? And the water under the bridge—was it warlike or peaceful? And was there a line drawn somewhere in the national colours? What about the fish, were they allowed to swim across into the war zone? What about the animals? He thought of his dog. If the dog had come along too, they’d probably have called him up as well, he’d have had to fire machine guns or go tracking down wounded men under a hail of bullets. Thank God the dog had stayed at home.
Thank God! The thought gave him a shock, and he shook himself. He sensed that since he had seen the border in physical form, a bridge between life and death, something in him that was not the mechanism was beginning to work, understanding and resistance were coming back to life in him. The train that had brought him in still stood on the opposite track, except that the locomotive had been moved and its gigantic glass eyes were now looking the other way, ready to pull the carriages back into Switzerland. It was a reminder that there was still time. He felt painful life return to the numbed nerve of his longing for his lost home, and the man he had once been began to revive. Over there, on the far side of bridge, he saw a soldier strapped into a strange uniform, he saw him marching pointlessly up and down with his gun over his shoulder, and he saw himself reflected in this stranger. Only now was his destiny clear to him, and now that he understood it he saw that it meant death and destruction. And life cried out in his soul.
Then the signals clattered, and the harsh sound shattered his still tentative feelings. Now, he knew, all was lost—if he got into the train just coming in and spent three minutes in it, travelling to the bridge and over it. And he knew that he would. Another quarter-of-an-hour and he would have been saved. He stood there feeling dizzy.
But the train did not come in from the distance into which he looked as he stood there trembling; it rumbled slowly over the bridge from the other side. And suddenly the station concourse was full of movement, people were streaming out of the waiting rooms, women crowded forward, crying out, pushing, Swiss soldiers quickly lined up. And all at once music began to play—he listened, amazed, he couldn’t believe it. But there it was, blaring out, unmistakeable: the Marseillaise. The enemy’s national anthem, sung on a train coming out of German territory!
The train thundered up, puffing, and stopped. And now everything was fast and frantic: carriage doors were flung open, pale-faced men stumbled out, delight in their glowing eyes—Frenchmen in uniform, wounded Frenchmen, enemies, enemies! In his dreamlike state, it was some seconds before he realized that this was a train with wounded prisoners being exchanged, freed from captivity over there, saved from the madness of the war. And they knew it, they all felt it; how they waved and shouted and laughed, although even laughter still hurt many of them! One man, staggering and hesitant, stumbled out on a wooden leg, clung to a post and shouted, “La Suisse! La Suisse! Dieu soit béni!” Sobbing women hurried from window to window until they found the beloved faces they were looking for, voices called out in confusion, sobbing, shouting, but all of them rising high in the golden moment of rejoicing. The music died away, and for some time nothing could be heard but great waves of emotion breaking over these people as they shouted and cried out.
Then they gradually calmed down. Groups formed, happily united in quiet joy and rapid talk. A few women were still wandering around, calling out names. Nurses brought refreshment and presents. The very sick were carried out on their stretchers, pale in white bandages, tenderly surrounded by care and comfort. The whole debris of suffering could be seen concentrated in those forms: maimed men with empty sleeves, the emaciated and half-burnt, the lingering remnants of youth gone to seed and growing old. But all eyes gleamed happily as they looked up at the sky; they all sensed that they were near the end of their pilgrimage.
Ferdinand stood as if paralysed amidst this unexpected throng of new arrivals; his heart was suddenly beating strongly again under the sheet of paper in his breast pocket. Standing alone and apart from the others, with no one expecting him, he saw a stretcher come to a halt. Slowly, with unsteady steps, he went over to the wounded man, who seemed to have been forgotten in the joy of all these strangers. The man’s face was white as a sheet, his beard straggled wildly, a limp, injured arm dangled from the stretcher. His eyes were closed, his lips pale. Ferdinand shivered. Gently, he raised the dangling arm and placed it carefully on the sick man’s breast. Then the stranger opened his eyes, looked at Ferdinand, and out of distant regions of unknown torment the man formed a grateful smile of greeting.
It came to Ferdinand like a flash as he stood, still trembling: was he to do such things himself? Injure people like this, look his fellow men in the eye with no emotion but hatred, take part in this terrible crime of his own free will? The truth of what he felt revived strongly again, breaking the mechanism inside him. Freedom rose up, great and blessed freedom, destroying obedience. Never, never! something in him cried in a primal, mighty, unknown voice. It struck him down. Sobbing, he collapsed beside the stretcher.
People hurried to him, thinking he must have had an epileptic fit; the doctor came along. But he was already g
etting slowly to his feet and refused help. His face was calm and cheerful. He found his wallet, took out his last banknote and placed it on the wounded man’s stretcher; then he took the call-up order and read it once more, slowly and deliberately. After that he tore it in two and scattered the scraps on the platform. People stared at him as if he were mad. But he was not ashamed any more. I am well again, he felt, and that was all. The music began once more. And his own heart drowned out all the musical notes with its resonant song.
Late that evening, he came home to his house. It was dark and closed, like a coffin. He knocked. Footsteps slowly made their way to the door; his wife opened it. When she saw him, she gave a start of surprise. But he gently took her arm and led her back to the doorway. They said nothing, just stood there, both of them trembling with happiness. He went into the living-room and saw his pictures in it. She had brought them all down from the studio so that she could be close to him through his work. He felt infinite love for her at this sign of her own for him, and realized how much he had just saved. In silence, he pressed her hand. The dog came racing out of the kitchen and jumped up at him; everything had been waiting for him, it seemed as if his real self had never left this place, and yet he felt like a man coming back from the dead.
Still they said nothing. But she took his hand gently and led him to the window. Outside, untouched by the self-inflicted torment of humanity run mad, lay the everlasting world, with endless stars shining for him under an endless sky. He looked up and saw, in a devout and solemn mood, that there was no law on earth for mankind except the law of humanity itself, that nothing unites men more truly than their own union. His wife’s breath close to his lips was sweet and blessed, and sometimes their two bodies trembled slightly in the pleasure of holding each other close. But still they said nothing. Their hearts soared freely in the eternal freedom of things, released from the confusion of words and man-made laws.
WONDRAK
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1899, the incredible, improbable news that that ugly creature Ruzena Sedlak, known to everyone far and wide as ‘the Death’s Head’, had had a baby aroused much mirth in the small Southern Bohemian town of Dobitzan. Her alarmingly and indeed distressingly ugly appearance had often enough caused amusement that none the less was more pitying than spiteful, but even the most inventive joker would never have ventured to speculate that such a battered, unattractive pot would ever find its lid. Now, however, a young huntsman had vouched for what was surely a miracle, if a miracle in the worst of taste. He had actually seen the baby in the remote part of the forest where Ruzena Sedlak lived, had seen it suckling happily from her breast, and the maidservants who heard this amazing news made haste to carry it back with their buckets to all the shops, inns and houses of Dobitzan. All that grey October evening, no one talked of anything but the unexpected infant and its presumed father. Forthright souls drinking at the regulars’ table dug one another meaningfully in the ribs, spluttering with laughter as they accused each other of that unappetizing claim to fame, and the pharmacist, who had a certain amount of medical knowledge, described the probable course of the amorous scene in such realistic detail that everyone had to put back another schnapps or so in order to recover. For the first time in her twenty-eight years, the unfortunate Ruzena had provided her fellow citizens with piquant and abundant material for jokes.
Of course Nature herself, long ago, had been the first to play a cruel and ineradicable joke on the poor monstrosity, the daughter of a syphilitic brewer’s man, by squashing her nose while she was still in the womb, and the derisive nickname that clung so terribly came into the world with her. For as soon as the midwife, who had seen plenty of strange and ugly creatures born in forty years, set eyes on the newborn baby she hastily made the sign of the cross and cried, losing all control of herself, “A death’s head!” For where the arch of the nose normally rises clear and distinct in a human face, protecting the eyes and shading the lips, dividing light and shadow on the human countenance, there yawned in this child only a deep-set, empty Nothing: just two breathing holes, black as bullet wounds and shockingly empty in the pink surface of flesh. The sight, which no one could stand for long, reminded people forcibly of a skull, where a similarly monstrous and disturbing void lies between the bony forehead and the white teeth. Then, recovering from her first shock, the midwife examined the baby and found that otherwise the little girl was well proportioned, healthy and shapely. The unfortunate child needed nothing to be the same as other babies but an inch of bone and gristle and a small amount of flesh. But Nature has made us so accustomed to the regularity of her laws that the slightest deviation from their familiar harmony seems repellent and alarming. Every mistake made by the creator arouses our bitter dislike of the failed creation—an injustice for which there is no remedy. Fatally, we feel revulsion not for the negligent designer but for the innocent thing it has designed. Every maimed and malformed being is doomed to suffer horribly not only from its own torment, but from the ill-concealed discomfort of those who are normally formed. And so a squinting eye, a twisted lip, a split palate, all of them just single mistakes of Nature, become the lasting torment of a human being, the inescapable misery of a soul—indeed, such diabolical misery that the sufferer finds it hard to believe in any sense or justice on the circling star we call the Earth.
Even as a child Ruzena Sedlak learned, to her shame, that she was known with good reason as the Death’s Head, at the same time as she learned to talk, and every second she was reminded yet again that because of that missing inch of bone she was mercilessly banished from the cheerful company of other human beings. Pregnant women quickly turned away if they met her in the street; farmer’s wives from the local countryside, bringing their eggs to sell at market, crossed themselves on seeing her, for these simple souls could not help thinking that the Devil himself had squashed the child’s nose. And even those who were more kindly disposed and talked to her kept their eyes obviously lowered as they talked; she could not remember ever having seen the pupil of an eye clearly and at close quarters, except in the eyes of animals, who sense only kindness and not ugliness in human beings. It was lucky that her mind was dull and lethargic, so that she suffered only vaguely from this injustice of God’s when she was with other people. She did not have the strength to hate them, or any wish to love them; she took little notice of the whole town, which remained strange to her, so she was very pleased when kind Father Nossal put in a good word for her and found her a post as housekeeper at a hunting lodge out in the forest. It was eight hours’ walk from town, and very remote from any human company. In the middle of his extensive woods, which reached from Dobitzan to the Schwarzenberg Forests, Count R had had a log cabin built in the foreign style for his guests, and apart from those few weeks in autumn when they came visiting, it was always empty. Ruzena Sedlak was installed as caretaker, with a ground-floor room to live in. Her only duties were to look after the hunting lodge, and feed the deer and the small game in hard winters. Otherwise her time was her own to use as she pleased, which she did by rearing goats, rabbits, chickens, and other small livestock, cultivating a vegetable garden, and trading a little in eggs, chickens, and kids. She lived entirely in the woods for eight years, and the animals, which she loved dearly, made her forget human beings. In their own turn human beings forgot her. Only the miraculous fact that some specimen of masculinity, either blind or dead drunk (no one could explain the aberration in any other way), had made the Death’s Head pregnant brought this forgotten creature of God back to the amused attention of the people of Dobitzan after many years.
One man in town, to be sure, did not laugh at the news but growled angrily, and that was the Mayor. For if Nature is unkind to one of her offspring now and then, and God forgets one of his creatures, an official would be no kind of official if he allowed himself to forget any human being, and there must be no omissions from a well-kept register. A child five months old and not yet registered, with no name in the records, grumbled the Mayor (who was a baker by pr
ofession) in great indignation. The priest was upset too: a child of five months and not yet baptised! These were heathen ways. After long discussion between the two of them, as representing the earthly and divine powers, the town clerk Wondrak was sent off to the forest to remind Ruzena Sedlak of her duty as a citizen. At first she told him roughly that the child was hers, no business of anyone else, and no concern of God or the Devil either. But when Wondrak, a sturdy figure and sticking to his point, replied that she was wrong there, the Devil would indeed take an interest in an unbaptised child, he’d carry its mother off to Hell if she failed to have the baby christened, the poor simple creature felt terrified of good Father Nossal, and she obediently brought the child to town next Sunday, wrapped in blue cotton. The baptism was celebrated early in the morning, to keep curious mockers away, the sponsors being a half-blind beggar woman and the good clerk Wondrak, who gave his own first name of Karel to the crying boy. The civil formalities proved a little more awkward, for when the Mayor asked as in duty bound for the father’s name, a small, unseemly smile escaped both him and the kindly Wondrak. Ruzena did not reply, but bit her lip. So the unknown man’s son was registered in her name, and thereafter was known as Karel Sedlak.
It was a fact that Ruzena, the Death’s Head, could not have said who Karel’s father was. One misty October evening the previous year, she had come back from town very late with her pannier on her back. Three fellows met her deep in the forest, out to steal timber, perhaps, or poachers or gypsies, at any rate not local men. The thick leaves cast far too much shade for her to tell their faces apart, and they could not make out who they had in front of them either (a sight which might have spared her their unwanted attentions). They saw only from her full, bell-shaped skirts that they were looking at a woman, and they attacked her. Ruzena quickly turned to run away, but one of them leaped at her from behind, moving faster than she did, and knocked her to the ground so hard that her back crashed down on her smashed pannier. Now she wanted to scream, but the three men quickly pulled her skirt up over her head, tore her shift in two, knotted the rags of it together and used them to tie her hands as she hit out wildly, punching and scratching. That was when it happened. There were three of them, she couldn’t tell one from the other with her skirts up over her face, and none of them said a word. She heard only laughter, deep, rumbling and spiteful, and then satisfied grunts. She smelled tobacco, felt bearded faces, hard hands inflicting pain, weight falling on her, and more pain. When the last man had finished with her she tried to get up and free herself, but one of them hit her on the head with a cudgel so hard that she fell down. They weren’t standing for any nonsense.