When morning shone grey and milky through the coloured glass the conflict in her soul began to call for a decision. She won. She got up and went into the hall. She took her coat and hat, left the house. When she came back around ten the girl had gone, the man was lying on the couch. The room was in a mess, as if there had been an orgy. He was in a bad mood and greeted her with bitter irony. Had she slept well? Hadn’t she seen the ghost on the leather sofa? There’d been one animal lying on the leather sofa and another in the bed – hadn’t there? Liquor was ripe for drinking but his love was just in its early stages. Liquor, to be sure, would have to be procured at once. He hoped she was in possession of ready money and if not she should stick at nothing to procure some. She stood by the table watching him. He sat up and observed that she was looking at him. A gaunt muscular bastard with mean features. His power was gone. It had been a kind of intoxication. Hadn’t she been drinking schnaps? Now she saw it all: the stained furniture, the bed, the ransacked sideboard. Her head was heavy but it sat on her shoulders. She said ‘Get up and button your shirt!’ Involuntarily he obeyed. ‘What’s the matter with you,’ he said. ‘Nothing. You can go, If you need anything ring for the maid!’ He got up, large as life. All the same, the room was spacious enough for him. He said ‘Stay here!’ in a ringing voice – and away she went. He dropped into the chair and laughed, but that wasn’t enough to suppress the revolution. She walked to the door and then she went out, on her sturdy legs. He stayed seated for a while and looked at the furnishings. There were several attractive pieces. Then he went out. For inside his skull he had seen a light. He seized a small box of cigars, took his bowler hat from the rack and left the apartment whistling, box under his arm, that was all. That was how he had come. (Apart from the box; but it was only half full.)
The widow Marie Pfaff took a bath. She washed vigorously, sat down to lunch in her dining room which had been tidied up, rang loudly for the maid and checked the household accounts before the meal. Then the bell rang and the man came back. He wanted to make a brutal entry straightaway but this time he didn’t have the right momentum, he drew back, no doubt he smelt something fishy. He heard the woman say: ‘Give him something to eat in the kitchen.’ After that he whistled softly while the girl led him into the kitchen. He was hungry and something had struck him. As she drank her coffee the woman asked whether that ‘bastard’ had gone. She no longer felt any embarrassment. The maidservant said yes and the widow Pfaff went out. She went to a café where she found lady friends. There was a silence as she stepped up to their table. It was awkward; the group had been informed, they could smell it on her. She had gone to the dogs. She didn’t stay long, she soon got up, she went for a walk. First she went round the shops without buying anything, then to the gardens and then even further afield. She had remembered the bastard, and she felt a weakness in her knees. She wandered around till evening. It was September, mild air, wide sky. At nine o’clock a man accosted her. He was a young person, rather slender with good-natured eyes. He was not insolent. She let him take her arm. They walked for another hour in the park. On every bench there were couples, making strange shapes, the leaves didn’t always conceal them completely. They didn’t speak much. He talked about his German studies. The stars shimmered damply. They went home. She thought ‘I cannot spend the night alone. The first step is the hardest.’ She thought of him. Her knees thought. So the young man was allowed to go upstairs with her. He didn’t refuse.
They felt their way along the hallway, stepped into the room. The woman avoided switching on the light. In the dark they were closer. She took the young man by the arm and, pressing close to him, led him to the alcove. She pulled back the curtain and uttered a small weak scream. There lay the dark-skinned bastard with the maidservant. The young man recoiled to the middle of the room. The woman sank down on her knees, lowered her head on the bed, and her body shook with tears. The bastard was asleep.
The Death of Cesare Malatesta
At fourteen Cesare Malatesta was already ruling the town of Caserta; and historians of the Campagna place in his seventeenth year his murder of a brother two years younger than himself. Over two decades he steadily increased his fame and his possessions through his boldness and ingenuity, and his name awakened fear even among those who loved him – though on account not so much of the blows he imparted as of those which he was able to endure. In his thirty-first year however he got involved in a small, embarrassing affair which not many years later was to cause his death. Today throughout the Campagna he is accounted the disgrace of Italy, the affliction and ordure of Rome.
It came about in the following way.
During a conversation with Francesco Gaja – a man famous for his elegant way of life and utter nastiness – Malatesta, among various jests which greatly entertained his guest, made a witty remark about a distant relative of the Pope, unaware that he was at the same time a distant relative of Gaja’s. Nothing in his guest’s behaviour indicated that this was the case. The two men parted on the friendliest terms after exchanging elegant courtesies and making plans to go hunting together in the autumn. Following this conversation Cesare Malatesta had another three years to live.
Gaja had meanwhile become a Cardinal, and whether it was that he was busy with financial affairs or whether he was disinclined to spend his time in the open air, for two years Cesare Malatesta heard nothing more from him apart from a few courteous but cool lines apologising that he could not keep their appointment to go hunting. Two and a half years after their talk, however, Francesco began to gather an army. Nobody in the Campagna suspected the purpose of these preparations, and he himself gave away nothing about his plans. Since the Pope was not restraining him, it had to be against the Turks or the Germans.
When he discovered that the march of the Cardinal’s army would bring him close to the town of Caserta, Cesare Malatesta sent emissaries to him with courteous invitations. They did not return. Around this time Cesare was having trouble with a shameless monk who, in a little place not far from Caserta, spoke about him to any visiting Casertans in an unseemly and stylistically barbarous manner. He had had the monk seized and thrown into the dungeon; but after only a few days he fled, and his guards with him. From then on, thanks to the monk’s provocations, there was no lack of talk in Caserta about Cesare’s murder of his brother. The fact that four of his best people had run away with a prisoner who had insulted him seemed even more amazing when three more servants went missing one morning, including one who used to dress his father. In the evenings, as he walked down from the citadel to the wall, he often saw people standing around and talking about him. Only when Gaja’s army was encamped a mere two hours from Caserta did Cesare learn from a local peasant that Gaja’s campaign was aimed against himself. Nor did he believe this until some rabble one night nailed a paper to the gate of the citadel saying that Francesco Gaja summoned all Malatesta’s mercenaries and servants to forsake him without delay. This same piece of paper told Cesare that the Pope had excommunicated him and condemned him to death. That morning the last people disappeared from the citadel.
And now began that strange siege of a single individual which the people of the time considered a successful jest and recounted with merriment.
Walking round Caserta at midday, the worried Cesare discovered there was not a soul to be found in any of the houses. Only a large number of ownerless dogs followed him when he returned to his deserted citadel, walking more hurriedly than usual and feeling like a complete stranger in his native city. From the tower that evening he could see the ring which Gaja’s army was beginning to lay around the abandoned town.
With his own hands he locked and barred the heavy wooden gate of the citadel and went to bed without having eaten (from midday on there had no longer been anybody there to serve him a meal). He slept badly and rose restlessly soon after midnight to have a look at the largish force which was attacking him like an unexplained illness. Despite the lateness of the hour he could see camp fires still burning an
d hear drunken singing wafted across.
In the morning he cooked some corn, which he half burned and consumed hungrily. As yet he had no idea how to cook. He was to learn, however, before he died.
He spent the day barricading himself in. He heaved boulders on top of the wall, placing them in such a way that if he ran along it he could throw them down without much difficulty. With the help of his two remaining horses, he pulled up the wide drawbridge which he could not raise on his own; just one narrow plank remained which could be removed with a kick. He stopped going into the town in the evening because from then on he was afraid of being attacked. During the following days he lay up in his tower watching; he noticed nothing remarkable. The town remained lifeless, and the enemy before the gates was evidently settling down for a long siege. Once when Cesare went for a walk on the wall (for he was beginning to get bored) some sharpshooters shot at him. He laughed, believing they were unable to hit him – he had not yet realised they were deliberately practising not hitting him.
All this happened in the autumn. The harvest was being gathered in the fields of the Campagna and he could see clearly how they were bringing in the grapes on the heights opposite. The songs of the harvesters intermingled with those of the soldiers, and not one of the people who had been living in Caserta a week earlier ever returned there. In a single night a plague had arisen and consumed all but one of them.
The siege lasted three weeks. Gaja’s intention, and the point of his jest, was to give the besieged man enough time to review his whole life and find where the rotten spot lay. Besides, he wanted to wait until all the men of the whole Campagna had arrived to witness the spectacle of Cesare Malatesta’s execution. (They came from as far away as Florence and Naples, often with their wives and children.)
All through those three weeks crowds of country- and townsfolk stood outside Caserta’s walls, pointing their fingers and waiting, and all through those three weeks, each morning and evening, the besieged man went walking on the wall. Gradually his clothing came to seem neglected; he appeared to have slept in his clothes and his gait became slower and heavier because of the poor food. His face could not be recognised on account of the great distance.
At the end of the third week those outside saw him lower the drawbridge, and for three and a half days he stood on the tower of his citadel and shouted in all directions words that were incomprehensible because the distance was too great. All this time he didn’t put a foot beyond the walls and he did not come out.
During the last days of the siege – that is to say in the fourth week, when the whole of the Campagna and many people from every station in life had arrived in the camp around Caserta – Cesare rode his horses along the wall for hours at a time. In the camp they assumed, probably with good reason, that he was already too weak to walk.
Many recounted later, when it was all over and the people had gone home again that there were some who crept up to the wall at night in defiance of Francesco’s strict orders and had seen him standing on the wall and heard him screaming to God and the Devil that they should rather kill him. It seems certain that up to and including his last hour he did not know why all this was happening, and certain that he did not ask.
On the twenty-sixth day of the siege with great difficulty he lowered the drawbridge. Two days later, before the eyes of the whole enemy camp, he relieved himself upon the wall.
He was despatched by three executioners on the twenty-ninth day of the siege, at about eleven o’clock in the morning, with no resistance on his part. By the way, Gaja, without waiting for this last and rather cheap twist to his joke, had ridden off and ordered a memorial column erected in the market place on which was written: ‘Here Francesco Gaja ordered the execution of Cesare Malatesta, the disgrace of Italy, the affliction and ordure of Rome.’
In this way he managed to honour a distant relative by forcing Italy to remember the latter’s calumniator – a man of some achievements – merely as the originator of a single witticism, the point of which Gaja claimed to have forgotten but could not let go unpunished.
The Berlin Stories (1924–1933)
The Answer
There was once a rich man, and he had a young wife who was worth more to him than all his worldly goods, which were not inconsiderable. She was no longer very young and neither was he. But they lived together like two turtle-doves, and he had two good hands, and they were her hands, and she had a good head, and it was his head. She often said to him, ‘I can’t think well, husband dear, I just blurt things out.’ But he was sharp as a razor and so his possessions grew and grew. It happened that one day a man’s debts fell due, and that man was not a good man and he had property the rich man sorely needed. So he gave him short shrift and seized his property. The man was to spend one more night in the house where he had lived all his days in such a way that he would now have to go among strangers; the next day everything was to be confiscated.
That night the rich man’s wife could not sleep. She lay thinking beside her husband, and then she got up. She got up in the middle of the night and went across to their neighbour whom her husband was evicting. For she felt that she could not insult her husband by helping their neighbour with his knowledge. Nor could she bear to see the man suffering. The man was awake too, so she had guessed right so far. He was sitting in his own four walls enjoying these hours to the full. When he saw her he took fright, but she only wanted to give him her jewellery.
Now because she took some time to do this, or because her husband sensed in his sleep that she was not by his side, he awoke, and he too got up, went all over the house and called her, and he was afraid and went into the street. There he saw a light in his neighbour’s house and went across to see if the man was burying something which no longer belonged to him, and in so doing, as he looked through the window, he saw his wife in his neighbour’s house in the middle of the night. He could hear nothing, nor could he see the casket in her hand, and so the blood rushed to his head and he doubted his wife. At the same time he grasped his knife in his pocket and wondered how he could kill the pair of them. Then he heard his wife say, ‘Just take it; I don’t want my husband to burden himself with such a sin, nor do I want to wound him by helping you; for you are an evil man.’ With that she moved towards the door, and the husband had to be quick to conceal himself, for she came out quickly and ran across to her house.
He followed her in silence, and once inside he told her he had not been able to sleep and had gone out into the field because his conscience was troubling him for wanting to take away his neighbour’s house. His wife fell upon his breast and wept, such was her joy. But as they were sleeping together the man’s conscience began to prick him and he was much ashamed, for he had now been petty twice, once in mistrusting her and a second time in lying to her. Such was his shame that he convinced himself he was no longer worthy of her, and got up and went down into the living room, and sat there a while, just like his neighbour in his house across the road. Then matters got worse, for he had no one to help him, and he had indeed been found wanting. With this on his mind he went out of the house towards morning while it was still dark and drifted off aimlessly like the shifting breeze.
He walked for a whole day without stopping to eat, along a road that led to a desolate region, and when he came to a village, he circled round it. In the evening he came to a black river beside which he found a deserted, dilapidated hut, and since lush herbs grew in the fields all around and the river was full of fish, he stayed for three years and spent the time collecting herbs and fishing. Then it became too lonely for him there, which is to say, the voices of the water became too loud for him and the thoughts, which are said to be like birds that cast their droppings on your food, grew too numerous. So he went into a town, then from town to town, following no direction, and begged and knelt in the churches.
But as time went by his thoughts tightened their hold on him and tortured him greatly. So he began to drink and run around like a dog that is not worth chaining
up. He spent many years in this way. And once it came to pass, at a time when he had forgotten his own name, that he, by now half-blind, returned to the town where he had once lived those many years ago. He did not even recognize it and went no further than the outskirts, where he lay down in the yard of an inn.
Now one day about noon a woman came by and turned into the yard and spoke to the innkeeper. When the beggar heard her voice he started and his heart beat faster, like that of a man who has come by mistake into a room where there is beautiful music to which, however, he has no right. And the man saw that it was his wife who was speaking and he was unable to utter a single word. He just stretched out a hand as she passed. But the woman did not recognize him for he no longer looked like the man he had been, not in one single feature; so changed indeed was his face that one could not even see the torture he had undergone. So the woman was on the point of passing, for there were so many beggars about, and this one was quite without shame. Then the man managed to part his jaws and utter something that sounded like ‘wife!’
Bertolt Brecht Page 7