The Last Bell

by Johannes Urzidil

  Jealously guarded by her mother, Magda, whose disposition and outward appearance both developed in a pleasing manner, was deprived of all contact with the opposite sex. Her female classmates, too, were an unwelcome intrusion as far as her mother was concerned, for they might have led Magda astray all too easily, to a world where disasters occurred, like the one that had befallen her. She had vowed to protect Magda from suffering a similar fate. And although this protective wall gave rise to the contrary desires to be approached and touched and magnetically steered in the finest and the most hidden things, as well as to a desire for the great wide open, transformation, diffusion, when her mother died and the painful family secret came out into the open she was suddenly gripped by a fear and shyness that effectively counteracted all of these desires. Maybe, so she thought sometimes, the deeper meaning of the telltale letter’s sudden appearance was to give her a justified warning against certain dangers and mistakes now that her mother’s care had finally come to an end. And so Magda went her way, alone.

  She had learned a few things, and worked as a kind of factotum at a law firm. The boss of this defense machine, which refashioned the accused into a just man with the help of generous down payments, was ominously called Dr Umtausch—that is to say, Dr “Conversion.” His two clerks were a very old and a very young man, both of whom were underpaid on account of their ages. The old clerk was the true soul of the office. He knew the porous boundaries of the law, he was familiar with the injustices of the justice system as well as the justice of injustice. Tiny paragraphs pulsed in his veins instead of blood corpuscles. He constructed his boss’s pleas in such a way that the state prosecutors, no matter how sound their arguments, feared for their reputation if Dr Umtausch took on the defense. His elderly law clerk, old-man clerk, as his younger colleague called him, never so much as looked at Magda. He was neither friendly nor unfriendly towards her. She took notes, typed, ran errands—and that was enough for him. Magda had never heard a private, personal, or for that matter human word come from the old man’s mouth.

  “I never get involved in that kind of thing,” he once confessed to his younger colleague, “considering that almost every desirable woman could potentially be my daughter or granddaughter, I live in constant danger of latent incest.”

  The young law clerk was already the fourth in a series of young trainees, each of whom had gone or been sent on his way after gaining some practical experience. Dr Umtausch was sizing up his young clerk, with his lone daughter in mind. The current young clerk seemed to fit the bill and knew it. He had an acquisitive eye for the daughter and the practice, and was therefore willing to put up with the meager pay. Young-man clerk, as his older colleague called him, was careful not to pay the least bit of attention to the secretary in the office of his presumptive father-in-law. Anyway, she was several years older than him. And so she sat or flitted to and fro between Dr Umtausch, old-man clerk and young-man clerk as if she were living in a fortress, completely inaccessible and oblivious to the male world, a damsel in an iron tower without a view, just a high little window that allowed her to see a piece of the unmoving heavens. In its fluctuating moments the sky showed her colorful and beguiling fata morganas, which Magda herself was quick to dismiss as weather-related, will-o’-the-wispy sentimentality.

  She hastened, seldom looking right or left, through the world outside her iron tower, in the early hours of morning, running the occasional errand, and on her dusky walks back home. This world had inflicted harm on Magda before she was even born, and she took it for granted that further calamity was lying in wait for an unguarded moment. And so she took precautions. But the fact is that all our resolutions and precautions have a limited influence on our fate; the important things have a mind of their own. If a human being wants to live he has to forget himself. Profound encounters take place unexpectedly. And so it is only natural that one day Magda’s gaze would come to rest on Siegelmann and—in spite of her background, her upbringing, her suspiciousness—would linger there. There might be gazes we can control. But there are also ones that command us.

  Before he met Magda, Richard Siegelmann had had about as much experience with women as he’d had with foreign places, namely zilch. From childhood on he’d encountered women daily, but they basically only existed in his imagination. In this, overall, he was no big exception, if only he had confronted this imagination with reality. Men all too easily forget that their mothers are actually women. It took an ancient tragedian to remind us of the mysterious catastrophes that possibly, indeed inevitably, follow from it. Just as it took a poet to utter the profoundly simple observation that we yearn for the stars while forgetting that we live on one.

  Richard could describe the female body in detail, like the ground plan of the Cathedral of Chartres or the layout of a distant city; he took a stroll on it, as it were, and knew its anatomical and functional properties just as he knew what time of day the daily downpours came in Java or when the British Library opened. He had read thousands of novels and psychological studies—written by men—about women: as virgin, wife, mother or whore.

  Although he knew about all these things, knowing and getting to know Magda was something completely new to him, something incomparable and disturbing—because it shook the foundations of his carefully constructed and theoretically reinforced notion of “woman,” and this by means of wholly incommensurable influences: a faint scent, the inflection of a word, a smile that animated her mouth. Would similar trifles be sufficient to call into question, or even destroy, his established idea of a city or landscape, the ones Siegelmann carried inside his head, the ones he shared with Magda?

  His colleagues at the travel agency had all seen a lot of the world, and yet each time they returned from a trip it turned out they’d missed the essential things. How was it possible to be in Rome and not see Villa Farnesina, to fail to visit Stonehenge in England? All they cared about was being somewhere; their travels added nothing new to their lives, didn’t change their lives at all. The way his colleagues were married was entirely in keeping with the way they resigned themselves to the world they traveled. You traveled and you married. Once you got married, you were married. Venice? It’s gotten pretty expensive there too. And what about Tintoretto’s infinitely stooping old men under the voice of God along the Jordan? No, it was too hot for a museum, and we were mainly on the Lido. Yes, but on the strip of land which closes the lagoon and separates it from the sea, didn’t you follow the sea on its beautiful bed at ebb-tide, just as it quitted the shore? Did you not witness the wonderful antics of periwinkles and pungar-crabs? Actually, no, and anyway, in terms of swimming, there’s not much difference between the Lido and the beach at Hirschberg Lake.

  That was the honeymoon of a young coworker, his first trip to the seaside. Of course you couldn’t tell that he now slept with his very own wife each night. If the sea didn’t impress him, why should his wife? And yet both of them were equally uncanny. But not for Herr Zimtstein. Nothing in this world was uncanny to Herr Zimtstein, neither the things he knew nor the things he didn’t. Siegelmann preferred the cottager in Birkenau who had once asked him: “How do you make your living?”—“I put together trips,” Siegelmann answered. “Trips,” asked the cottager, “what’s that?”

  Siegelmann didn’t quite know if the feelings he had for Magda could be classified as “love.” Was there such a thing as a summa amoris? There was no way of deciding unilaterally. But he had noticed two things about himself which he attributed to Magda. First, he didn’t take himself for a loser as often as he used to, and certainly not a complete loser. Second, he now cared about what Magda thought of him, whereas he used to be indifferent to how others judged him and whether or not they were making fun of him. Magda intimidated him, you might say. “One of these days she might think she’s caught me lying. But I don’t lie. I merely choose a convincing form for reality and truth. I don’t wish to appear important myself, I want the wonders of the world and of life to seem important. I just make the con
nections, unity expresses itself through me. But what happens if Magda become suspicious about some little detail or other? Details can be dangerous, they’re the levers of every disaster.”

  This concern, which signaled to Siegelmann a change of character, kept him company in the quiet hours. For sure, he was no longer lonely. But could that be taken as a genuine symptom of love for someone of the opposite sex? When he thought about it, it seemed to him that only among his own kind was there hope of not being lonely. A blasphemer—and all interpreters of the Holy Scriptures are none other than this, when you get right down to it—might claim that the biblical God made a cardinal error when he tried to cure man’s loneliness by giving him woman as a companion. Of course one might object that God the Eternal made Eve from Adam’s own body. Similia similibus curantur—like heals like. And so forth to this very day.

  To be sure, his relationship to Magda was not exactly passionate, didn’t cloud his senses, did not fill him with such an ardent desire that he was forced, for a moment, to forget himself just so he could touch her. Nothing like that had happened in his younger years either. Why should it happen now? But he had noticed that his travel accounts had acquired a particular stylistic verve thanks to Magda, that he had become creative, formed new and astonishing words and expressions, and it even seemed to him that his sentences followed a whole new syntax, one inherent to them alone. And when a person’s language changes and asserts its independence, this is generally an irrefutable indication that a change of character is in the making.

  Magda had no need to answer for her feelings towards Siegelmann and what he meant to her. Ever since the day when the content of what he was saying was suddenly less important to her than his saying it at all, she knew he was the man of her life. She merely listened, and lost all desire to talk herself or even to ask any questions. Because questions, after all, in their deepest depth are always born of a sense of mistrust. But she did have a desire for boundless absorption. She wanted to trust. She was clearly aware of the intensification going on in Siegelmann’s presence, that his storytelling was becoming more rich and lavish. And she too received and gave, the very best a person can give. Nevertheless it was she who suddenly and unexpectedly posed the fateful question: “And where are we going on our honeymoon?”

  It was sudden and unexpected because up to that point neither of them had even broached the topic of marriage or a wedding. And, anyway, according to custom, it should have been the man to pose a question like that and dissolve the mutual restraint between them. The woman would have to act surprised, astonished, possibly even stunned, shed a few tears and then answer, “Yes,” a monosyllable which in this case is best when whispered in a low voice, the semi-consonant at the start disappearing to express a fully vocalized sense of well-being. But Magda knew nothing of these sacred rites. She had also completely forgotten at this moment what her mother had always drummed into her: “Don’t talk if no one asks you to.”

  “Yes, well, the honeymoon,” answered Siegelmann in a completely businesslike tone, as if he were speaking about a matter they had long discussed, one there was no good reason to doubt. “Most people, like my colleague Zimtstein, travel to Venice, which for centuries has generally been considered an auspicious start, and where there is in fact a huge amount to see and admire. But, I ask myself, is that really appropriate to the actual occasion? You might say the Zimtsteins would have been right to let art be art for once this time. But they’ll do it every time. Those who marry think they need a wonder of the world as a backdrop or a counterweight—Venice, Niagara Falls, the sequoias.”

  “Incidentally, California,” Siegelmann continued after a pause, thus giving his words the nature of a court plea, “California has much to be said for it. The giant redwoods I mentioned already, whose tops seem to soar to such immeasurable heights that their treeness can only be made out in the bark of their trunks, the base of their roots, and the smell of pine resin, these trees with their three- or four-thousand-year-old rings are virtually symbols of eternal life. The ephemeral calliope hummingbird and sapphire-colored blue jay whizz between them. Western civilization comes to a jerking halt, as it were, it’s suddenly behind you when you reach the coast—you’re finally rid of it. You go through nothing but meadows of gold, through agate cliffs, the surf with its bleating sea monsters before you. And yet, what’s the use of it? We can’t think that far now. Let’s choose a middle way, my darling, a middle course between Venice and California. That would be my Birkenau.”

  It should be noted here that he had never before called Magda “darling” and that she had never seen “his” Birkenau. And yet how tactful it was of him to insert the word “darling” as a kind of self-evident truth, thus legitimizing, so to speak, her rash and almost brazen question about their honeymoon destination. But even if she’d been to Birkenau, this would have made no difference at a moment like this. She would have recognized Siegelmann’s Birkenau under any circumstances as the only and most magnificent possibility. She knew that Siegelmann’s proposal was not due to any kind of poverty. If California was too expensive, one Venice more or less wouldn’t really matter to such a well-traveled man, given the momentous occasion. He wanted to flatter her with an idyll and not oppress her with the gigantic. It was a tender gesture, really. Siegelmann himself, though, was panic-stricken by the possibility that the Venice of his dreams and its fantastic topographies would be overpowered and annihilated by reality. Pretending in front of Magda that he’d been to Venice a dozen times would not have been the problem. The real problem would have been that this world would no longer be his own; and of him there would have been nothing left but Richard Siegelmann, travel agent, who abandoned Birkenau without saving Venice. Much worse: Who would have sacrificed his genuine, higher and magical Venice to a naturalist version, a sham being propagated as reality. He was the skipper of his boat, which took him to all harbors. He was alarmingly intimate in dealing with his sailing vessel, like with a haughty and beautiful woman that no mere mortal can approach but who, for some strange reason, is submissive to her captain. Alas, his ship was in a bottle. He no longer knew how he’d gotten it inside. And to get it out, he’d have to break the bottle.

  They were married in a civil ceremony. The official muttered his sentences as if it were a requiem, and without so much as looking at bride and groom.

  Afterwards they went to a restaurant called “Zum Prinzen.” Dr Umtausch, the best man, felt he should propose a cheery toast. “Just like in the lottery,” he explained, “where only one can hit the jackpot, a few get lesser prizes, but the overwhelming majority ends up drawing a loser, so it is with marriages, too. So prove, ere thou’rt forever bound, if heart the kindred heart have found. Because it is forever, or at least lifelong, despite divorce. And even if you do get a prize, it all depends on whether or not you know how to use your winnings properly.”

  Siegelmann had hinted at his marriage in the office yet did not disclose where the honeymoon would be. He had no desire to hear any disparaging remarks about Birkenau. The newlyweds reached the station towards evening. There were no more summer vacationers. The deciduous trees were at the height of their color, the spruces had added abundant sepia and Prussian blue to their deep-green background hues. The forest had seemed to move closer to the town, which always happened when the city dwellers fled.

  The couple lodged with the Kalmus widow, whose husband had purchased from Siegelmann the small mortgaged house of his recently deceased father, under the condition that an attic room be reserved for him on a lifelong basis. Herr Kalmus passed away soon afterwards, and so Siegelmann continued to feel at home in Birkenau, because even the furniture had belonged to his father.

  Of course, the second bed that Frau Kalmus had put in the room disturbed the room’s previous harmony, the two beds more or less dominated the room completely now—high country beds with thick, fluffy pillows and big, bulging duvets, whose dependable warmth in this advanced season Frau Kalmus had effusively praised. The two
began to unpack their suitcases, each on their own bed. They did so in silence and bashfully. There was only one wardrobe and dresser. For the first time a feminine breeze wafted between Siegelmann’s mannish, if not to say boyish things, which cowered in a corner, dismayed, and sought refuge in remote drawers, even though Magda’s garments did not take up much space. She had taken her finest for the occasion, openwork lace and silk, form-fitting outfits in pastel tones, the fragrant and poetic, which now kept company with Siegelmann’s realistic underwear. These timid glimpses into reciprocal worlds were actually their first physical approach, which up until then had scarcely progressed beyond a goodnight kiss at the front door.

  Having finished unpacking, they both looked around to see what else there was to do. They weren’t in the mood to talk, but they weren’t really silent either, they simply avoided speaking. They each sensed that their old way of being together had now come to an end. Anxiously they groped for words to break the ice, but always recoiled, because it had to be completely different than before, an entirely new language. Only when Magda saw a number of travel guides on a shelf did she ask in spite of herself: “Souvenirs from your travels?”

  “Souvenirs? Fetishes? Idolatries? The thinking man always knows in advance what he will have to remember.”