Havoc

by Havoc (retail) (epub)

  “The kingdom of God is afraid of thieves and robbers—at night,” he growled contemptuously up at the dim, inaccessible structure.

  “We’ll get them to open up, you’ll see,” Jastrau said.

  And with animal-like haste they scrambled up the stairs to the janitor’s residence and rang the bell.

  They could hear the bell ringing through the empty hallways and staircases.

  “Again!” said Jastrau, and rang once more, violently and persistently. “You’ll see—we’ll wake them up.” And he rang again. Why didn’t they come running in there? The place should have been swarming immediately with dark figures of monks in flapping gowns, with angels, devils, and Jesuits. Couldn’t they hear that something was up? Like a thief in the night. The end of the world. Or a fire. A catastrophe. The bell rang and rang.

  “They’re apparently afraid of the dark,” Steffensen muttered. He stood back and leaned against the railing.

  Finally they heard slow, shuffling footsteps. A key was inserted in the lock from the inside, and the door was cautiously opened partway. A pale, frightened face appeared in the opening and stammered something unintelligible in a foreign accent.

  “We’d like to talk to Herr Father Garhammer,” Jastrau said politely with his hat in his hand and leaning close to the door without thinking of the liquor on his breath.

  The janitor’s nostrils dilated, and there was a sudden glint of fear in his eyes.

  “Who—who shall I say is calling?”

  “Editor Ole Jastrau. From Dagbladet.”

  The door was hastily closed. The key was carefully turned in the lock. And the shuffling footsteps retreated into the distance along the tile floor of the hallway.

  “A shut-up building,” Steffensen growled. “And here we stand.”

  “Yes, but just wait—just wait,” Jastrau whispered insistently. “And you mustn’t back down now. We’ll go right in. We’ll be converted tonight. Why not?”

  There they stood on an ordinary Copenhagen street, wanting to take the leap into eternity. It was almost impossible to stand still.

  “Isn’t he coming?” Steffensen asked impatiently.

  Finally they heard the dragging footsteps once more, and the door was opened again, even more cautiously than before.

  “Father is asleep,” came a very subdued whisper.

  “But—but—” Jastrau gasped for breath.

  It was as if the night had come crashing down about them.

  “What the devil—is God’s house locked up at night?” Steffensen exclaimed savagely. Jastrau did not hear how violent the muffled words sounded. He was not aware of any blasphemy, but only of a door being closed noiselessly, of the sound of the key turning in the lock, of being excluded when he had expected to be admitted to the infinite.

  “I won’t stand for this,” Steffensen went on. “I’ll make their ears hum.” And he rang again and again.

  It was like striking out in blind fury at a stone. What good would it do if all the priests were awakened? They would only lie abed and listen. It does no good to strike a stone, even a stone with a soul.

  “But—but Catholic churches are always open at night. They are open. Come on, Steffensen.”

  They ran back down to the iron fence. Jastrau climbed it with difficulty. He was too fat, and for a moment he was impaled on the iron pickets. “I think I’ve ripped my pants,” he groaned. A feeling of debasement. A person tore himself to pieces on the threshold of eternity, ripped his breeches. A cool breeze on his behind. And one became ridiculous, a laughingstock, here at the very portals of the All Highest.

  But Steffensen was already over the fence. He ran around like a man possessed, like a monkey in a cage. He tugged at the big main doors and the smaller side doors, cursed and threatened and roared.

  And at last Jastrau also got over. A breeze fanned the inner surface of one of his thighs. And he too had to try the doors. Perhaps Steffensen did not know how to open them. Oh, those stone piers! They hindered their movements, made it impossible to leap back and forth. They had to twist and turn, hop up and down. And pound they must, since the doors would not yield. With nothing but their fists, when what they should have had was a battering ram. Pitiful—as useless as children’s hands against a wall of rock. And no echo of their commotion from inside the church. No one in there could hear the noise. All was a dead silence. Their vain attempt at conversion, their impotent assault on infinity met with the same dark silence.

  And then Jastrau hurt his fingers and they began to smart. Ridiculous of him to hurt his fingers, but there were wrought-iron projections on the doors—hard, angular projections. They were armed, those doors.

  “Look, Steffensen,” Jastrau said spitefully, giving up the attack, “I know a bar that’s never closed at night.”

  “All right.”

  And they climbed back over the fence. The breeze blew through the hole in Jastrau’s pants. “I know a bar that’s open all night,” he repeated slowly in a voice filled with scorn.

  Steffensen was like an animal. He ran back and forth on the sidewalk. “Come on! Come on!” As he said it they passed a small display case in which the Nordisk Ugeblad, a weekly paper for Catholic Christians, was pasted up. Steffensen swung one leg back at it. An acrobatic performance. A manifestation of unbelief on one leg. And with unerring aim, his heel crashed through the glass.

  Jastrau did not stop. He was moving altogether too fast. No sound they made reached inside the church. He barely heard the pieces of glass tinkle against the sidewalk, but he was completely preoccupied with his new gospel of bitterness.

  “Come on, Steffensen. I know a bar that’s never closed.”

  And Steffensen followed him obediently.

  8

  “DON’T turn on the lights,” Jastrau groaned as he sank down on the sofa.

  The reflection from the advertising lights above Vesterbro drifted like a yellowish fog into the dark living room.

  “It’s recurrence—the whole business,” Steffensen scoffed. He sat stiffly and ill-tempered in one of the rococo chairs.

  But Jastrau closed his eyes as if racked by pain. He could feel his whole body quivering like the floor of a machine shop—a big, soft mass that trembled incessantly. His heart throbbed like a dynamo, and the blood, like rhythmically intermittent streams of yellow and reddish light, pulsated through his veins from deep inside the darkness of his chest out to the very edges of his eyelids. The flowers on the wallpaper floated along the surface of a sunlit brook while he lay on the bottom and with eyes shut stared up through the rippling water. Thus everything was transformed, and his nerves became visible to him as pictures. His sensitivity was of a supernatural order. He could even perceive the chemical processes going on in his intestines, tentatively and cautiously at first, then with a sudden rush, as if the functions each time had to pull themselves together for the effort. He lay on a glowing grill.

  “Recurrence, I tell you,” Steffensen repeated.

  “Now stop being a Catholic,” Jastrau moaned with his hands covering his eyes. “We’ve given that a try, you know.”

  “Recurrence, I tell you. Hurrah, hurrah! And have a drink,” Steffensen sneered. “And good morning, old boy. Have you had fun?”

  “Oh, cut it out!” Jastrau exclaimed as he writhed back and forth on the sofa.

  They had been drinking for twenty-four hours.

  “What a conversion!” Steffensen said, and then fell silent.

  “But it seems to me—” he said a little while later. He did not finish the sentence, but got up with difficulty and began to roam around through the rooms, muttering as he went. Jastrau heard him rummaging around in the bedroom and uttering short grunts. There was a sound of glass clinking.

  “Here they are—the janitor’s beer bottles. The ones we forgot about.”

  Steffensen had returned and set the bottles down hard on the black rococo table.

  “Now we’ll drink these, and then go to sleep.”

  Jast
rau opened his eyes and saw Steffensen’s tall dark figure stooped over the table like the shadow of a wolf on a cliff. He was supporting himself on two beer bottles as if they were a pair of front legs.

  Jastrau raised himself on the sofa with a sigh. With the effort, a glimpse of a universe with a foggy milky way rushed through his brain. Then his hand closed around one of the bottles.

  A cool and soothing liquid flowed through him. The glowing coals beneath the grill were extinguished.

  A deep groan came from over by the rococo chair.

  “Recurrence,” growled Steffensen. Now he was sitting there again. “It’s nothing but recurrence. How do you do? Gin and tonic. And we were the ones who wanted to bust right into infinity.”

  “Yes. What a bit of luck that we didn’t get there,” Jastrau said with a grin. He felt after the rip in his pants.

  “Luck, did you say?” Steffensen asked irascibly. The bottle glistened in the reflection from the advertising lights as he straightened up in his chair.

  “Yes, just think if we had been converted.” Jastrau shuddered and took a drink. “It gives you a crummy feeling just to think about it.”

  “Look here now—really!” Steffensen exclaimed in a threatening tone, and moved as if to get up. He sank back again with a thud.

  Jastrau did not answer. It was something he did not grasp. Steffensen was paralyzed from the effects of old stale liquor, but there was something decisive about his manner. He seemed to have made up his mind about something.

  “Look here now—really!” Steffensen went on in a tone of fury, his words coming in fits and starts. “You’re like my father. You both have this business about Jesus, and at the same time you don’t have it.”

  “Rubbish,” Jastrau snapped back wearily, trying to brush the conversation aside with a wave of his hand. But Steffensen went on unmoved. His voice became sharper and sharper.

  “Well, never mind the oldsters. They’re senile. Let them have their regrets about the pickle they’ve gotten the world into. But you senile fools in your thirties—you’re impossible—damn it!”

  “What’s the matter with us?” Jastrau asked, bending forward. The darkness floated about him, tinged with phosphorescence. The indefatigable Steffensen would not let him alone. “What’s the matter with us?” he repeated, watching Steffensen closely and lowering his forehead to attack.

  “With you and the others like you? You don’t want to think things through,” Steffensen snarled, waving the bottle in the air so that a bit of beer slopped onto the rug with a muffled splash. “Ha,” he laughed, “you want to swindle your way through—a little sympathy, a little justice, a little understanding for everyone concerned.”

  Jastrau was about to leap to his feet. But then came a remark that was like a flash in the darkness.

  “All the while you’ve wanted to understand me. Instead, you should have thrown me out—the second time as well.”

  And Steffensen dried the neck of the bottle with the palm of his hand and drank noisily.

  Jastrau sat blinking at him with a nervous smile. Then he bent still farther over the table, as if closing in on the dim hostile figure in the chair across from him.

  “You should remember that you’re an object of ridicule—forever,” he said slowly and insidiously.

  “I? I?” Steffensen exclaimed sharply. “But, damn it all, I’m not sentimental—the way you are about those.”

  And at the same time he took one of the brass beer-bottle caps and threw it over at the table where the two pictures of Jastrau’s mother and son could be dimly seen like luminous spots in the darkness. The bottle cap struck the glass so that one of the pictures slid down onto the tabletop.

  Jastrau let out an incoherent yell.

  “You can be glad the picture didn’t fall off the table.”

  “What can I be glad about?” Steffensen said, laughing and tossing another bottle cap. It landed in the corner by the stove. “Sentimentality,” he continued, getting up out of his chair. “His mother and his son! Ha—images of saints. A chapel. I’ll—” He reached out for the pictures with a shadowy arm, but at that instant Jastrau flew up from the sofa. His voice was shrill:

  “I guess you don’t know that your mother is dead!”

  There was a sudden silence. Jastrau and Steffensen stood opposite each other in the darkness and could feel each other’s breath. Their eyes were flashing. But otherwise they were like two belligerent figures who could not read the expressions in each other’s faces. Each had his hands extended as if the next moment he meant to grab the other by the throat and choke him.

  “Is Mother dead?” Steffensen moaned as his hands sank to his sides. “It isn’t true, is it?” he added hastily and savagely. “It can’t be true! Although the old man—Ah, that was the reason he was in mourning when I saw him down on the street here. And you didn’t tell me? You’ve known it all along, and you—you—”

  He rushed at Jastrau so unexpectedly that both of them fell against the table, overturning it. The telephone slid to the floor and a metal disc tumbled out of it. Steffensen, hard and raw-boned, was by far the stronger. But Jastrau rolled cautiously around with the sharp table edge cutting into him. A fist grazed his cheek so that he could feel it burn. In a rage, he kicked out at some legs. Then he kicked again and leaped up with a howl. It was a table leg that he had struck.

  Where was Steffensen? A groan sounded from between the table and the sofa. Then something grabbed him around the legs and began hauling itself up. He felt as if he were being drawn through a narrowing barrel hoop. But he would fix him. A clenched fist descended through the darkness, striking a shoulder. It did him good to throw a punch. Who was it that dared to come here and lay waste to his home? A chapel! He would give him a chapel down there in the darkness. Yes, indeed, it was a chapel with ruins and saints’ images. One saint’s image! Take that! Right in the face! Another blow, then still another!

  A piercing pain in his thigh. Jastrau screamed and tried to tear Steffensen loose. A big, black, gigantic leech that rose from the floor and was indistinguishable from the rug, the darkness, and the sofa, a shapeless creature, but one that would not be shaken loose.

  Steffensen had taken a firm hold with his teeth.

  Wild with fear, Jastrau shoved at the dark head down below, screamed and screamed and screamed, and kicked out with his legs. A creature without form. A warm animal body. Darkness with teeth.

  And suddenly Steffensen stood before him, drawn up to his full height.

  “My mother!”

  A hoarse inarticulate bellow. The voice exploded so that it was beyond recognition.

  There was nothing to do but rush him so that he could not bring his long muscular arms into play. They lurched about through the dark room. A chair creaked. There was a tinkling of glass. Now the large table with the two pictures on it was upset. Desecration of the saints. Was this any way to behave? To destroy everything, to trample everything? Wanton destruction! Havoc!

  They reeled out into the hallway, intertwined and groaning. Jastrau braced his stomach muscles, which were soft and flabby, and let himself fall forward with his body’s full weight so that Steffensen had to give way—give way before the heavy quilt that smothered him and restrained all his movements. And then suddenly Jastrau found a point of support for his heel. A wall behind him. And that gave him strength, invincibility. It was an Archimedean point. With a bestial and all-embracing force, Jastrau took hold of Steffensen by the shoulders, the whole man between his hands, and pushed him against one of the panes in the hallway door. Steffensen’s head went through. The pieces of glass fell tinkling onto the staircase.

  And at the same instant, Jastrau put his arms around his enemy and with a feeling of apprehension and horror let his hand glide caressingly over his neck. He felt an intoxicating friendliness well up within him, as well as grief, compassion, and fear that Steffensen might have been injured. He expected to see his hand wet with blood.

  “You aren’t hurt, ar
e you, my friend?” he exclaimed gently, leading Steffensen back into the large room so that he would not again succumb to temptation and without any reason shove his head through the other pane in the hallway door.

  Steffensen was dazed and confused.

  Again and again Jastrau passed his hand over Steffensen’s neck. “You’re not bleeding, my friend,” he rejoiced ecstatically and kissed him on both cheeks. Fervently he took Steffensen’s head between his two hands. Friendship and good feeling. Old, old, friendship that transcended all understanding. And then, suddenly, a wave of resentment again, and he gave him a resounding slap in the face.

  Then Steffensen drew himself up so that Jastrau reeled backward. Steffensen now had space around him. Jastrau’s stout body, his all-embracing arms, his weight no longer hemmed him in. He had room to swing, and he struck only one blow. Hard and direct, right on Jastrau’s chin.

  Jastrau fell backward and plunged down through darkness.

  There was a shower of glass fragments, a thin drizzle. A voice sounded uncertainly through the darkness. Then there were two voices. They fluttered in the air like two birds quarreling. And someone ran across the floor in bare feet.

  “Drunken louts!”

  And just then the lights were turned on.

  “Drunken louts!”

  Jastrau regained his senses for a moment and blinked. The room was floating in a sea of reddish light, and over near the light switch stood the red-haired janitor with nothing on but a shirt. He looked angry.

  “Behave yourself!” he snarled at Steffensen.

  Then they began wrangling again.

  The red light faded into a fog.

  “Shall we haul the carcass over on the sofa?”

  Jastrau felt himself being lifted into the air.

  “Ouch!” And the janitor grinned. “It isn’t easy being a barefoot dancer.”

  Jastrau surrendered to the desire to sleep.

  “Dancing on broken glass, so to speak—hee hee,” came the sound of a voice.

  And then again the patter of bare feet before the darkness and silence closed in around Jastrau.