by Vicki Baum
“Splendid. Tip-top. First class,” Kringelein replied as he sat down beside him with a nonchalant air. He took off his pince-nez and rubbed his eyes with his finger and thumb. It was a habit of his when fatigued.
It had just occurred to him that he would no longer be around by the time the last installment came due.
•
Gaigern’s fingers were all impatience. At the street crossings there were red and green and yellow lights to direct the traffic, and policemen stood there laughingly holding out warning arms. The car shot along past houses, trees, advertisement kiosks, swarms of pedestrians at street crossings, past fruit stands, billboards, and timid old ladies who went tripping across the street at the wrong moment dressed in long black skirts in the middle of March. The sun gleamed moist and yellow on the asphalt. Whenever a great clumsy bus was in the way the little four-seater gave two honks. It sounded like the barking of excited dogs.
There were many people in Fredersdorf who had never been in an automobile. Anna, for example, had never been in a car. But Kringelein was in one now. His lips were tightly compressed, his elbows and shoulder joints were rigid, and the rush of air made his eyes water. Taking the corners made a severe demand on his nerves and his heart went up and down beneath his new silk shirt. It was the same fearful joy as in his childhood when the merry-go-round was erected on Mickenau Heath and you could have three rides for a penny.
Kringelein stared at Berlin as it streaked past. He was beginning to feel fairly familiar now with the great city. For example, he recognized the Brandenburg Gate from afar and also the Gedächtniskirche, which he greeted with a respectful glance.
“Where are we going?” he shouted into Gaigern’s right ear, for the noise of the engine seemed deafening and he felt he was in the midst of an uproar of the elements.
“A little way out, to have lunch, along the Avus,” Gaigern answered unconcernedly.
The street raced to meet the car with ever-increasing swiftness. They drew near the radio tower, the Funkturm. Kringelein had been there the evening before with Doctor Otternschlag as night was closing in. He had been exhausted by then and incapable of grasping anything. The remarkably smooth surfaces of the new and only half-finished pavilions in this neighborhood had pursued him in his dreams, and now reality and dream lay superimposed one on the other, half menacing and half incomprehensible.
“Are they going to finish building that?” Kringelein shouted and pointed to the exhibition buildings.
“It is finished,” was the answer. Kringelein marveled. It was all bare like a manufacturing plant, but it did not look ugly like the factory at Fredersdorf.
“An odd city,” he said shaking his head and peered at it even harder. He felt a shock that contracted the skin of his scalp, but it portended nothing. Gaigern had merely stopped at the north gate of the Avus and now he was already off again.
“Now we can let it rip,” he said, and, before Kringelein understood what he meant, he had done so.
At first the wind grew colder and colder, blowing harder and harder, until at last it beat like a fist against his face. The engine sang on a rising note and at the same time something ghastly happened to Kringelein’s legs. They were filled with air. Bubbles rose in his joints as if they would burst. For several seconds that seemed to last an incredible time, he could not breathe, and for several moments he thought, Now I’m dying. This is what it’s like then. I am dying.
His chest caved in and he gasped for breath. The car swallowed up one object after another before it could be recognized, streaks of red, green, and blue. A patch of red barely turned out to be a car before it vanished into nothingness behind them, and all the while Kringelein could not breathe. He felt now an unimagined sensation in his diaphragm. He tried to turn his head towards Gaigern. Strange to say he succeeded without finding it torn from his shoulders. Gaigern sat a little forward over the wheel and he was wearing his kid gloves though they were not buttoned up. This for some reason was reassuring. Just as what was left of Kringelein’s stomach strove to escape at his throat, Gaigern’s closed lips began to smile. Without taking his eyes off the Avus highway whirling past like an unwinding spool, he pointed somewhere with his chin, and Kringelein obediently followed the direction with his eyes. Having some intelligence he realized after a guess or two that the speedometer was what he saw before his eyes. The little pointer trembled slightly as it pointed to 110. Good Lord, thought Kringelein, and swallowing down his fears he bent forward and gave himself up to the rush of speed. Suddenly the new and appalling joy of danger overcame him. Faster! cried a frenzied Kringelein within him whom he had never known before. The car complied with 115. For a few moments it went up to 118, and Kringelein finally gave up all thought of breathing. He would have liked now to whirl on and on into darkness, on and on in the shock of explosion, and to get right beyond and out of time. No hospital bed, he thought, better a broken skull. Billboards still whirled past the car, but the spaces between them began to alter. Then the gray ragged streaks beside the road became pine woods. Kringelein saw trees eddying more slowly to meet the car and stepping back into the woods like people as the car went by. It was just as it was on the merry-go-round in Mickenau when it slowed down. Now he could read the names of oils, tires, and makes of cars on the billboards. The rush of air relaxed and streamed in his throat. The speedometer sank to 60, trembled a little, then 50–45, and then they left the Avus by the south gate and drove along soberly between the villas of Wannsee.
“There—now I feel better,” said Gaigern and laughed all over his face.
Kringelein took his hands from the leather cushion into which till now he had dug his fingers and carefully relaxed his jaws and shoulders and knees. He felt completely tired and completely happy. “So do I,” he answered truthfully. He spoke very little once they were sitting on the empty glass-roofed terrace of a restaurant looking out at the Wannsee and watching the sailboats rock at their moorings. He had to think about the experience he had been through. What is speed? he thought. It can’t be seen or taken hold of, and, if it can be measured, that too is probably only a trick. How is it then that it goes through and through you, and is even more beautiful than music? Everything was still revolving in circles around him, but this was just what pleased him. He had the bottle of Hundt’s Elixir with him, but he did not take any of it.
“I must offer you my heartiest thanks for this wonderful drive,” he said, trying hard to express himself in a manner befitting the circles in which he now moved. Gaigern—who had chosen very plain fare, an egg on spinach—made light of the obligation. “It amused me,” he said. “It was your first time and it’s so seldom you find anyone who is experiencing something for the first time.”
“But you do not give one the impression of being blasé yourself, if I may say so,” Kringelein replied very aptly. He was quite at home in his new clothes and in his silk shirt. He sat and he ate in a different manner, and his thin hands emerging from the cuffs of his shirt gave him particular satisfaction. They had been manicured that morning by a pretty girl in the hotel basement.
“Good Lord! I, blasé!” Gaigern said delightedly. “No, certainly not. Only, a man like me has a full life.” He had to smile. “Though you’re right. There are things that even a man like me experiences for the first time—funny things,” he added to himself. He clenched his fine teeth softly together and thought of Grusinskaya. He was devoured by impatience for the moment when he would have her in his arms again with all her tender need of him, hearing again the sad twittering notes of her birdlike voice. The hours till then were a desert. He gave himself three days, inwardly fretting with impatience, in which to raise the few thousand marks that would keep his associates quiet and enable him to set off for Vienna. In the meanwhile he paid every attention to Kringelein and hoped that things would take a favorable turn.
“What is the next item on the program?” asked Kringelein and blinked at him with a sincere and grateful look from his blue eyes. Gaigern to
ok to this quiet fellow from the provinces, who sat like a child at a Christmas party. Human kindness and warmth were so much a part of his nature that his victims always received their due share of them.
“Now we are going to fly,” he said in the soothing tone of a nanny. “It’s very jolly and not dangerous, not half so dangerous as driving so fast in a car.”
“Was that very dangerous?” asked Kringelein with surprise. Now that he had overcome it he was conscious of his fear only as a pleasure.
“Can’t be otherwise,” said Gaigern. “One hundred and eighteen kilometers is no trifle, and the road was wet. You never know when you may strike a slippery patch, and the car could skid at any moment. Check, please,” he said amiably to the waiter and paid for his modest dish of spinach and poached eggs. There were still twenty-four marks left in his wallet. Kringelein paid too. He had only had a few spoonfuls of soup, for he suspected his stomach had rebellious and mischievous designs. As he put back his wallet—it was the old shabby one from his Fredersdorf days—he had a fleeting and now meaningless vision of his black oilcloth-covered account-book. Up to that morning, ever since he was nine years old, he had entered every penny he spent in such a little book. It was not worth doing now. The time for it was past. A thousand marks in one morning was altogether beyond entering. A part of Kringelein’s world had collapsed noiselessly and without a sign. Kringelein, as he followed Gaigern down from the empty restaurant terrace to the car, moved his shoulders luxuriously in his new coat, new suit and new shirt. Now everyone stood with a bow to let him pass. I wish you good morning, Herr Generaldirektor, he thought and saw himself flattened to the greenish-gray wall of the second floor of the accounting office in Fredersdorf. He put away his pince-nez once he had taken his seat beside Gaigern, exposing his naked eyes to the bright March sunshine. It was with a pleasant excitement and confidence that he felt the engine starting up.
“The avenue or the Avus again?”
“Oh, the Avus,” replied Kringelein, “and at the same speed,” he added more softly.
“Ah, you’re brave,” said Gaigern and accelerated.
“Yes, that I am,” said Kringelein, leaning forward with taut muscles, ready with parted lips to enjoy life to the full.
•
Kringelein stands leaning against the white and red rails of the aerodrome, trying to get the hang of this astounding world he’s been caught up in since this morning. Yesterday—it seems a hundred years ago—yesterday he had ascended in the elevator, tired, half asleep, as if in a dream, to the Radio Tower restaurant; it wasn’t enjoyable, and Doctor Otternschlag’s pessimistic comments made it all even more unreal and spooky. The day before yesterday—and that seemed a thousand years ago—he was junior clerk in the accounting office of the Saxonia Cotton Company at Fredersdorf, a little miserable employee among three hundred other miserable employees, in a gray wool suit, who had been given sick leave on a mere pittance. Today, now, here he is waiting for a pilot to take him up on a long special flight at a price correspondingly high. It was one of those thoughts that you can’t really think to the end of, although Kringelein’s mind was alert and collected as it had never been before.
It was quite untrue that he was brave. The pleasure confronting him has thrown him into an absolute panic. He doesn’t want to fly. Not in the least. He would have liked to go home, home—not to Fredersdorf, but home to his room, No. 70, with the mahogany furniture and the silken down quilt. He wants to lie in bed and not to have to fly.
When Kringelein set out to seek life, something misty and formless hovered before his eyes, something at the same time well upholstered and filled out, with plenty of draperies and fringes and a profusion of ornaments: soft beds, heaped plates, voluptuous women, both painted and real ones. Now that he was really seeing life, now that he was beginning, as it seemed, to be swimming in the middle of it, it had quite another aspect. Demands were made of him, a keen wind whistled about his ears, and he had to break through walls of anguish and danger before one small drop of its sweet and intoxicating experience could reach his lips.
Flying, thought Kringelein. He knew it already from his dreams. His dream of flying went like this: Kringelein stands on the platform of Zickenmeier’s Hall with the members of the glee club round him, and he is singing a solo. He hears his own fine tenor voice rising higher and higher and higher. It cost him not the least effort. It was a pure spontaneous pleasure that came of itself. Finally he lies down on the highest note and flies away on it, accompanied by music of the clouds while the members of the club look up at him. At first he hovers beneath the ceiling of Zickenmeier’s Hall, and then he flies quite alone and there is nothing whatever all around him. And only at the very end does he realize that it was all a dream and that he must return to the bed where Anna was sleeping the frowsy sleep of slovenly and bad-tempered middle age. The comedown is frightful, and waking up is like a scream of horror into the dark stuffy room with the small window, the cupboards smelling of mothballs and the little extinguished iron stove with a pot of water standing on it.
Kringelein blinked. Flying, he thought and shrank into himself standing there at Tempelhof Airport. Here, too, as around the Radio Tower and along the Avus were the same glaring colors—yellow and blue and red and green. Mysterious towers rose into the air. Everything was attenuated and spare. The wind blew silvery clouds of dust fitfully over the expanse of asphalt beyond the rails, and cloud shadows raced across the takeoff area. The little machine in which the ascent was to be made was already there. Three men were busy with it. The engine clattered and the propeller revolved idly. Blocks had been placed in front of the low wheels, and the ribbed silver wings vibrated to the throb of the engine. Others were landing, greeted by the hoarse note of a siren (like the one that was sounded at the Fredersdorf factory at seven in the morning, so perhaps all this was only a dream?), others were taking off, heavy on the ground, light once they were in the air; silver ones with metal wings, golden ones with rigid wings of wood, and great white ones with four wings and three whirling propellers. The airport was so very large and so wonderfully still, and all the men there were slim and bronzed, happy and silent, and they wore white flying suits with close-fitting caps. Only the machines had voices as they trundled over the ground barking hoarsely like great dogs.
Gaigern approached with the pilot, a polite fellow with the bow-legs of an ex-cavalry officer. Gaigern appeared to be in his element out here. Everyone greeted him and seemed to know him.
“We’re taking off shortly,” Gaigern announced.
Kringelein, who had had some experience of what Gaigern meant by “taking off,” was horribly alarmed. Help, he thought. Help! I don’t want to fly,—but he wouldn’t for the world have said it out loud. “Oh, are we pushing off already?” he asked, like a man of the world. He was proud of the expression “pushing off,” which he used for the first time in his life.
Then Otto Kringelein was sitting strapped into a comfortable leather seat in the little cockpit and “pushing off” into the gray-blue of the March sky. Next to him sat Gaigern whistling softly, and that was some consolation in this moment of utter vulnerability.
At first it was no different than a bumpy ride in a car, and then the machine began to make a furious and appalling racket. Suddenly it pushes off from the earth beneath it and climbs. It did not by any means soar. It was not such a simple business as Kringelein’s dream flights on his tenor notes. It sprang up into the air by jumps as though up steps—sprang and sank, sprang and sank. This time the sense of uneasiness was not in his legs as during the car ride at 120 kilometers an hour, but in his head. Kringelein’s temples hummed. They became thin. Became quite glassy, and he had to shut his eyes for a moment.
“Airsick?” asked Gaigern, shouting into his ear, wondering whether he could then and there prevail on Kringelein to give him 5,000 marks—or only 3,000—or even a miserable 1,500, with which to pay his hotel bill and buy a ticket for Vienna. “Do you feel bad? Have you had enough?�
� he added kindly.
Kringelein pulled himself together manfully and courageously and replied with a cheery no. He opened his eyes in his humming glassy head and fixed them first on the floor of the airplane, as if it were a fixed point, then raised them to the little oval glass pane in front. Through this he saw again the numbers and the trembling pointer. The pilot turned his sharp face around and smiled at Kringelein as to a friend and comrade. Kringelein was much encouraged and highly honored by this glance.
“Three hundred meters up at a hundred and eighty an hour,” Gaigern shouted into his humming and deafened ears. Then all at once everything became gentle, light, and smooth. The machine was no longer climbing. It banked to the tune of its metallic engine voice and soared like a bird above the city lying dwarfed beneath. Kringelein ventured to look out.
The first thing he saw was the sunlit, ribbed metal sheets of the wings, and they seemed to quiver with life; then—far below—Berlin divided into tiny squares, with green cupolas and a ridiculous toy railway station. A patch of green was the Tiergarten, a patch of blue-gray with four white specks of sails was the Wannsee. The edge of the little planet lay far beyond, rising in a gentle curve. Over there were mountains and forests and brown, ploughed land. Kringelein relaxed his cramped lips and smiled like a child. He was flying. He had stuck it out. He felt fine. He had a new and vigorous sense of his own being. For the third time that day his fear had left him and given place to happiness.
He tapped Gaigern on the shoulder and in response to a questioning look said something that was swallowed up unheard in the noise of the engine.
“It is not so bad after all,” Kringelein said. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. It isn’t so bad.”
And with this Kringelein included not only the monstrous tailor’s bill, the wild drive on the Avus, and the flight in the airplane, but everything else as well and in particular the fact that he would soon die, die right out of this little world, leaving all its terrors behind and climbing perhaps even higher than airplanes can fly . . .