Havoc

by Havoc (retail) (epub)

  And suddenly Black Else leaned out of the bed, drew Jastrau toward her, and whispered:

  “She thinks I have a rich man friend. She doesn’t know that we’re no longer on good terms—my friend and I. Hush!”

  “But then you’ll have to—take to the streets again,” Jastrau said.

  “I!” Black Else exclaimed with indignation. “No, never! May I never sink so low! Rather than that, I’ll—I don’t know what—hang myself.” And she let her tongue hang far out of her mouth, as if she were choking.

  “Yes but—”

  “You’ll say I’m a fool, and so I am. But I’m hopping mad. Yesterday my husband showed up—that mug. He’s one-quarter suicidal. He created a scene and threw himself on the floor in there, and I flung the door open so that it banged against his silly head while he lay stretched out full-length and moaning. And then I went out and drank and drank and drank—well, you know the story much better than I do.”

  “So you’re still married,” Jastrau said matter-of-factly. He stared at her as if she were some strange animal. Her cheekbones stood out prominently beneath her eyes.

  “My God, yes!”

  “And the man who’s really your friend—does Kopf know about him?”

  “I don’t know what Kopf knows. Kopf is a soft-headed fool, and so for that matter is my friend—a real soft-headed old fool of a pharmacist, and I’ve told him so. Hush!”

  Fru Lund entered silently with a tray.

  “Will the Herr Editor move just a little?” she asked, placing a small table between him and the bed.

  Jastrau shifted his chair, and his foot struck something that made a slight noise. Had he dropped something? He bent over. It was a leather strap, and he picked it up.

  When Fru Lund had quietly floated out of the room, Black Else sat up in bed.

  “God! How Jansen, the waiter, will bawl me out tomorrow,” she said, laughing and quivering inside the kimono as she raised the steaming coffee cup to her lips.

  “What a reckless person you are,” Jastrau remarked, shaking his head in despair. “Keep this up, and you’ll end on the street.” And in order to give moral emphasis to his words, he hit the table with the strap.

  Black Else hastily set aside her cup. “What’s that? Let me see. Here, give it to me.” She grabbed the strap, looked at it, and fell back in the bed with a shrill laugh.

  “What’s the matter?” Jastrau asked in perturbation. Suddenly he felt ill at ease. There in the sepia twilight lay this girl, who resembled a Moroccan, tossing back and forth in the bed. He could follow the violent movements of her legs beneath the eiderdown. She was the buxom type, actually coarse of build, and lacking in any intoxicating charm. But she brandished the strap in the air and followed its movements with glistening eyes.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “On the floor.”

  She laughed again and swung the strap to and fro in the semidarkness. It was as if she were playing with a grass snake. And it crackled slightly, almost inaudibly.

  Jastrau felt chilled at this incomprehensible display of feminine ungovernability. She was shaken as if by convulsions, and kept laughing.

  “Do you know what it’s used for?” she panted.

  Jastrau did not reply. He had a foreboding of shadows lurking in the brownish half-light and experienced a subdued feeling of alarm and repugnance.

  “I tie the pharmacist with it,” she said, and laughed again.

  “The pharmacist?” Jastrau repeated breathlessly. He was being assailed by suspicions.

  “Yes—my rich friend. He’s old and queer—that way. He has to have it—like that, and that, and that.” She swung the strap wildly, beating the air around her in a fit of ecstasy and laughter. The bed quivered, and the eiderdown resounded under the blows. “Like that, and that, and that—then he howls and screams and becomes young again. I tie his hands behind his back with this, and I have a dog whip in there. He gave it to me himself. Oh, he’s crazy.” And with a final savage laugh she flung the strap across the room so that it struck the wall and fell to the floor.

  “Oh, it’s disgusting!” Out of breath, she fell back onto the bed.

  “You say he is a pharmacist?” Jastrau ventured quietly.

  “Yes, and very rich. It was he who gave me all the furniture. Isn’t it nice here? It’s almost elegant, wouldn’t you say? Have you really had a look at my living room?”

  She moaned as she paused for breath.

  “It’s driving me completely daffy, I tell you,” she sighed, pressing her hand to her heart as she lay with her mouth open, breathing audibly.

  Jastrau did not dare to speak. He was fearful of having his suspicions confirmed, and a sinister shadow fell over him like a shroud—the shadow of a person he did not know, a person from chaos, from the generation preceding him. Will we all become like that? he asked himself. Oh God! He raised his hands to his head and hid his face. Is this the cursed infinitude of the soul?

  “Do you understand now why I became rip-roaring mad?” said Black Else, gasping for breath. “Because then his wife died—”

  Jastrau bent forward with his face still hidden in his hands.

  “He came up here—dressed in black—wearing a high hat—”

  Yes, that was the shadow. It was he. A distorted life. And he wrote about Jesus. Wherefore Hast Thou Forsaken Me?

  “And then he became—well, just like a nineteen-year-old—”

  Yes, Steffensen had encountered him. Yes, dressed in mourning. Steffensen had not known that his mother was dead.

  “Because he was in mourning, of course—the old—”

  The urn in the briefcase.

  “And then afterwards he got sentimental and cried about his dead wife, and then I couldn’t take it any longer, but told him off. I couldn’t take it any longer—damned if I could.”

  Jastrau straightened up. He did not want to look at Black Else. He did not want to do anything.

  “But just the same, I was a fool,” Black Else said in a matter-of-fact tone, “because I haven’t heard from him since. And Vera is laughing at me.”

  “But look,” she exclaimed suddenly, sitting up in the bed, “I’m hungry. Shouldn’t we go somewhere and have a bite to eat?”

  “I don’t know,” Jastrau said uneasily. “I’m short of money—and it seems I have to go to Berlin. I don’t know, but—”

  He reached into his breast pocket for his wallet.

  From force of habit Black Else took the wallet, opened it, removed the bills, and spread them out on the eiderdown.

  “There could be more here,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “But so what? I have some money, and we need food.”

  She handed him the empty wallet and gathered up the bills.

  “You’re a pal,” she said as her bare legs slipped out from beneath the bed covers.

  “Is that an up-to-date expression for a—?”

  She looked at him without understanding.

  7

  A SOUND like a pistol shot—and a tinkling of glass.

  Jastrau awoke in a daze, aware of complete darkness around him and conscious of the odor of a strange room. Next to him lay a naked body breathing and exuding warmth. From out of the darkness far below came the noise of a crowd. Voices shouted and echoed as in a cellar passageway. And in the background of all the voices and commotion there was a devouring sound like that of a sprint race being run through the underbrush of a forest floor. It grew louder and louder, and it was not a dream. For a moment the darkness whirled about him, but then up became up and down became down. The commotion came from the street, and the sound reached the bedroom, which looked out on the courtyard.

  Black Else stirred restlessly in her sleep.

  Then he heard the wail of a siren piercing the night air. The sound spread like fire through tinder and kindled a phosphorescence in his blood as he stared out into the darkness of the room and listened. The blood surged through his veins. Racing along on a bicycle, a boy with his tongue
hanging out of his mouth, racing along after the fire engines.

  Suddenly he sat up. There was a rustling in the next room, and at once he became aware of a thin, fiery-red streak in the darkness, as if he had been staring too long into a carbon-filament lamp. He shifted his glance. The fiery-red streak was still there. It did not shift with the movement of his eyes. It was real. The door panel must have sprung a crack.

  “Fire!” he shouted. He sprang out of bed and almost stumbled over an empty port wine bottle, which went rolling across the floor. What a jolly time they had had, sitting in bed and drinking. The darkness whirled again like a globe seen from within. He managed to fling open the door to the living room, and remained standing stock still, blinded by the flickering light of long licking tongues of flame outside the window. Was there a fire on the floors below? Were they already enveloped in flames—in a bowl of fire? Or was the fire across the street?

  “What’s the matter? Oh, my God!”

  It was Black Else. Naked, she sprang out of bed.

  “Fire! Fire! Help!”

  But Jastrau stood in the doorway, open-mouthed and continuing to stare. The window curtains fluttered, and now and then the flames behind them seemed veiled and unreal. But his nose could detect the hot scorched odor that drifted in through the open window.

  “There’s a fire over at my house,” he said almost in a whisper.

  Suddenly the flames shot up as if they had been replenished with fuel, and he saw a spark dancing like a firefly on the curtains. Quickly he ran over and smothered it, crushing it as if it were an insect. A scrap of charred paper fluttered to the floor like a black butterfly.

  “Close the window!” Black Else shouted.

  He pulled the curtain aside and slammed the open window shut, but the glass came clattering out of the frame. The pane had been cracked by the heat. And he laughed. What had he accomplished? Now they were right where they had been before. The sparks could fly in and set fire to the room. A blast of hot air made him gasp for breath. His chest felt scorched. He was naked.

  But then he forgot everything except the fire.

  He could only gaze helplessly at the red flames, as if hypnotized. Yes, it was his apartment that was burning over there. Only now did he comprehend it fully. Something within him seemed to open up. The dining room was a sea of flames, like a blazing fire behind an open stove door. In the living room the fire alternately flared up and subsided, bursting forth like a volcanic eruption as a curtain went up in flames, then dying down only to erupt again, while the black smoke made its way out through the broken windowpanes, forcing the fragments of glass loose so that they fell away like scales. And it was with a purely instinctive, unconscious impulse that he reached for the curtain and modestly hid his nakedness behind it, as if to shield himself from the prurience of the flames.

  “There’s a fire over at my place,” he repeated in a trance.

  Black Else stood by his side.

  “Your place?” she said with lack of comprehension.

  He looked at her. The heat was making his eyes water, and red shadows danced before them—fiery shadows, bloody shadows. The naked female body floated upright but obliquely through purple waves, arms outstretched above its head. A greenish darkness lurked in the shadowy armpits. Black Else! Her breasts became so full in the reflection of the red light flickering on the yellowish skin. Feminine curves. Just then a tongue of flame shot up across the way and ignited another curtain—an elongated feminine arm, a demanding feminine body, supple, alluring, devouring. A raging fire. Yes—a woman.

  “Your place?” she repeated breathlessly.

  He stood with the curtain wrapped about him. Was it because of her that he was being modest? In the fiery glow she looked appallingly red, like meat hung up in a butcher shop. Her breasts were altogether too big.

  “Yes, I live over there,” he panted, meeting her eyes, which sparkled from the heat. The red fire was reflected in the tears that rolled from his eyes. Everything shone. Everything looked strange and blurred.

  “Everything’s burning up, damned if it isn’t,” he said, gesticulating dramatically with a bare arm as he stood there wrapped in his toga. “It’s burning up!” he shouted jubilantly, his voice assuming an ecstatic, literary quality. “All the ships are burning.”

  And his ears were deafened by the noise that came from the street, incessantly as the pealing of a bell. Down there everything was gleaming. Police helmets. Firemen’s helmets. Pavement and sidewalks glistened with water and had the dark-red color of mahogany. Long, gray hoses lay writhing on the pavement, with torrents of water issuing from their nozzles. And in the middle of the street stood a truck with a ladder rising vertically from it and slowly moving in against the wall of the building and the burning window frames where the flames darted back and forth like grass snakes, forcing their way through the space between the brick and the woodwork.

  “What shall we do, Fru?”

  It was Fru Lund’s whimpering voice. She was wearing a peignoir, and her hair was an owl’s nest of curlpapers.

  “My God—stark naked!”

  She disappeared with a virtuous scream.

  “We can’t stand here like this,” Black Else shrieked, and ran into the bedroom. But Jastrau only turned and laughed. The room was alive with red and green light. His home, his furniture—everything was burning. Whew! The fire was reflected on Else’s back. Her flesh quivered in the red glow as she ran with her ridiculous feminine gait. Slack and flabby, it quivered as she ran.

  But he could not remain standing there either, naked among the strange furnishings. The hot air swept against his skin in waves. The smoke in the air was beginning to tickle his nostrils.

  And coughing, he too ran into the bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

  Else was dashing around in the dark. Jastrau heard the sound of her bare feet. The empty bottles rolled about on the floor as in a ship’s cabin. He fumbled for his clothes.

  “You have to get over there,” she groaned.

  “Why?” He laughed and stood on one leg, trying to put on his pants.

  “Your furniture.”

  “It isn’t mine.”

  “I never knew you lived over there.”

  “Ha ha, ha ha!”

  “My God! What shall we do, what shall we do?”

  It was Fru Lund, who stuck her head into the room. She had turned on the light in the hallway, and a narrow shaft of light penetrated into the dark bedroom. The endpapers were silhouetted about her temples like a wreath of vine leaves.

  “It’s burning fine, isn’t it, Fru Lund?” Jastrau danced around on the other leg. He could still feel the effects of the port.

  “The curtains might catch on fire,” Fru Lund lamented. “The sparks are flying right in the window.”

  “Yes, yes. I’ll be there in a minute. Hell—right in the middle of a sound sleep!”

  Black Else’s voice was husky.

  Then she ran out, her red kimono flapping. Jastrau caught a glimpse of it as she dashed through the shaft of light that came from the hallway. He bent over to pick up his jacket. The door to the living room was flung open again. As he straightened up, the glow from the flames illuminated the canopied bed in rosy red. Oh, cupids and angels’ wings! A suffocating cloud of smoke penetrated the room.

  “You’ll choke!” he shouted. “You’ll choke!”

  Now he had his pants and shirt on. Fate had taken him by surprise while he was naked. He began to whistle.

  “Why don’t you come and help us, you stupid man?” Black Else shouted above the din from the street, which could be heard through the broken panes. She and Fru Lund hovered for a moment like dark shadows against the red, agitated, smoky background. His home! It was burning, burning. All the way to the ground. What a relief. What a feeling of liberation. And he went on whistling deliriously, monotonously, in rhythm with the roar of the flames as they climbed higher and higher. The two dark shadows stood balancing on chairs. Long curtain-rods dipped
like the yardarms of a ship, and the curtains flapped. For a moment a constellation of sparks glittered, caught in one of the curtains, and a little tongue of flame shot forth. A scream. Then it was extinguished. And suddenly the glare from the flames came garishly into the room. The curtains had been taken down, and the mahogany shone in the darkness. The furniture reflected the fire as if wine had been spilled over it.

  A wild, monotonous whistling. It was burning, burning. All the furniture, everything in his home, chairs, tables, books.

  It was all on fire.

  There was a photograph of his mother. It was burning. There was a photograph of his son. The glass was cracked—a crack in the shape of a pitchfork. It had been jabbed into his heart. And everything was afire. Had new frosted panes been put into the hallway door? The phonograph, the rococo chairs, the Shrove Monday rod—up in flames. And the oak furniture. Ah, ha ha. It was burning, burning.

  He might just as well put on all his clothes.

  And the fire-insurance policy had been inscribed to Lundbom. He could have it. Yes, yes, little brother-in-law. Where is the fire-insurance policy? Tomorrow, when you read the newspaper, little brother-in-law, you’ll open and close your mouth like a fish.

  He kept whistling incessantly.

  The two women were moving furniture. Jastrau tied his necktie carefully before a mirror in which there was a blood-red glow.

  “You idiot! Why don’t you help us?” groaned Else, who was standing helplessly at the head of the sofa with its inflammable cushions.

  “Now—”

  He did not get to say more. The words were lost in a fit of coughing. A black cloud of smoke whirled about in the midst of the flames, a belching cloud of darkness, and suddenly a thick, heavy bubble of soot and smoke forced its way out through the middle window—a black orb which at contact with the air from the street burst apart and like a broad banner of factory smoke unfurled itself, blackening the façade of the building as it rose until it concealed the roof.

  Jastrau came to their aid. But he handled everything so recklessly.

  “It’s his apartment that’s burning,” Black Else said with a nod in his direction as she struggled with the table.