The Sleepwalkers

by Hermann Broch

  They turned into Mother Hentjen’s restaurant, and to Esch it seemed again as though Teltscher possessed some secret knowledge, and might suddenly turn on him and say, “Murderer.” He was afraid to look round the room. At last he raised his eyes and beheld a white patch, edged with cobwebs, where Hentjen’s portrait had hung. He glanced across at Teltscher, but Teltscher said nothing, for he obviously had not noticed anything, had not noticed anything at all! Esch felt almost exultant; partly out of high spirits, partly to distract Teltscher’s attention from the disappearance of the portrait, he went up to the orchestrion and set it noisily going; in response to the din Mother Hentjen appeared, and Esch felt a strong temptation to greet her with affectionate and tempestuous ardour; he would have liked to introduce her as Frau Esch, and if he refrained from this tender jest, it was not only because he felt grateful to her and prepared to respect her shyness, but also because Herr Teltscher-Teltini was quite unworthy of such a mark of intimacy. On the other hand Esch did not feel in the least bound to push discretion too far, and when after lunch Teltscher prepared to leave he did not accompany him as usual, to return afterwards by circuitous ways, no, he said quite openly that he would stay for a little and read his papers. He pulled the newspapers out of his pocket, put them back again, and remained sitting with his hands resting peacefully on his knees. He did not want to read. He contemplated the white patch on the wall. And when everything was quiet he went up the stairs. He felt grateful to Mother Hentjen and they had a pleasant afternoon. They spoke again of selling the business, and Esch thought that perhaps Oppenheimer might find a purchaser. And they tenderly discussed their marriage. There was a spot on the ceiling of the alcove that looked like a dark butterfly, but it was only dirt.

  In the evening he dutifully set out on his search for girls. On his way it struck him that he should first look in to see what that lad Harry was doing. His search was in vain and he was about to leave the wretched place when Alfons entered. Fat Alfons presented a comical picture; his greasy dishevelled hair was sticking to his skull, his silk shirt was open, showing his white hairless breast, and one was reminded somehow of rumpled pillows. Esch could not help laughing. Alfons sat down beside a table near the door and groaned. Esch went up to him still laughing, yet in doing so it was as though he were trying to stifle something: “Hullo, Alfons, what’s the matter?” The fat musician gazed at him with dull and hostile eyes. “Have a drink, and tell me what’s wrong.” Alfons drank a glass of brandy and remained silent. Finally he said: “Good God … it’s past belief … he’s to blame for it himself, and he asks what’s wrong!” “Don’t talk nonsense. What is wrong?” “Good God! Why, he’s dead!” Alfons put his hands under his chin and gazed in front of him; Esch sat down at the table. “Well, who is dead?” Alfons stammered: “He loved him too much.” Now it sounded funny again. “Who loved whom?” Alfons’s voice suddenly broke: “Don’t talk like that; Harry’s dead.…” So, Harry was dead. Esch could not really take it in and gazed somewhat blankly at the fat musician, down whose cheeks tears were running: “You put him quite beyond himself with your silly talk last time … he loved him too much … when he read it in the papers he locked himself in … this afternoon … and now they’ve found him … veronal.” So, Harry was dead; in some way that fitted in, it was bound to come. Only Esch could not see how it fitted in. He said, “Poor chap,” and suddenly he saw it and was filled with relief and joy because that forenoon he had handed in his letter at the police headquarters; here murder and counter-murder, debit and credit cancelled each other, here was for once an account that balanced itself perfectly. Funny to think that in spite of this he himself seemed to be in some way to blame. He said again: “Poor chap … why did he do it?” Alfons glared at him in blank astonishment: “But he saw it in the newspapers.…” “Saw what?” “There,” Alfons pointed to the bunch of newspapers peeping from Esch’s coat-pocket. Esch shrugged his shoulders—he had forgotten the newspapers. He pulled them out; there it was, in large letters, and with many circumlocutions, on the black-bordered last page, for all the firms with which he was connected, and his staff officials, and his workers, had insisted on the melancholy privilege of divulging the sad news that Herr Eduard von Bertrand, Chairman of the Board of Directors, a knight of various distinguished orders, etc., after a short serious illness had passed away. On the front page, however, along with a highly eulogistic obituary notice, was the information that, it was supposed in a sudden fit of mental aberration, the deceased had put an end to his life with a revolver shot. Esch read all this, but it did not very much interest him. It merely proved to him how right it was that the portrait had been removed that day. Funny that a man like this musician, who was not implicated at all, could make such a song about it. With a faint ironical grimace he clapped the fat musician benevolently and comfortingly on the flabby shoulder, paid for the brandy, and went back to Frau Hentjen. Stepping out complacently with long strides, he thought of Martin and reflected that now the cripple would no longer pursue him and menace him with his hard crutches. And that too was good.

  Alone, Alfons put his head between his hands and stared in front of him. Esch seemed to him a bad man, like all men who sought women in order to possess them. He had learned by experience that all men of that type sowed evil. They seemed to him like savages running amok, raging through the world so that at their approach all one could do was to step aside. He scorned those men who rushed about in such a stupid fury, greedy not for life, which they obviously did not see, but for something which lay outside it, and to gain which they destroyed it in the name of this love of theirs. The musician was too dejected to think this out clearly; but he knew that although those men spoke with great ardour of their love, all that they meant by it was possession, or what is usually understood by that term. Of course he himself did not count, for at best he was a thoughtless chap, a poor devil of an orchestra player; but he knew that one did not attain the absolute by a long way when one decided for some woman. And he forgave the malignant rage of men, for he saw quite well that it sprang from fear and disappointment, saw that these passionate and evil men hid themselves behind a remnant of eternity to shield themselves from the fear that was always at their backs, telling them they must die. A stupid and thoughtless orchestra player he might be, but he could play sonatas from memory, and, versed in all kinds of knowledge, in spite of his sadness he could smile at the fact that human beings in their thirst for the absolute yearn for eternal love, imagining that then their lives can never come to an end, but will endure for ever. They might despise him because he had to play potpourris and polkas; nevertheless he knew that these hunted creatures, seeking the imperishable and the absolute in earthly things, would always find no more than a symbol and a substitute for the thing which they sought, and whose name they did not know: for they could watch others dying without regret or sorrow, so completely were they mastered by the thought of their own death; they furiously strove for the possession of some woman that they might in turn be possessed by her, for in her they hoped to find something steadfast and unchangeable which would own and guard them, and they hated the woman whom in their blindness they had chosen, hated her because she was only a symbol which they longed to destroy in their anger when they found themselves once more delivered over to fear and death. The musician felt pity for women; for although they wished for nothing better, yet they were not subject to that destructive and stupid passion for possession, they were less goaded by fear, and were thrilled more deeply when music was played to them, and stood in a more intimate and trustful relation to death: and in that women were like musicians, and even if one were oneself only a fat homosexual orchestra player, yet one could feel akin to them, could acknowledge that they had a faint divination that death was a sad and beautiful thing; for when they wept it was not because they had lost a possession, but simply because something that they had touched and seen had been good and gentle. Oh, those whose hearts thirsted for possession did not know the rapturous chaos
of life, and the others knew little more of it; yet music divined it, music the melodious symbol of all that could be thought, music that annulled time so that it might be preserved in rhythm, that annulled death so that it might rise anew in sound. One who divined this, like the women and the musicians, might accept the disgrace of being thoughtless and stupid, and the musician Alfons ran his fingers over the rolls of fat on his body as though they were a good soft covering through which he could feel the presence of something precious and worthy of love; people could despise him and jeer at his effeminacy, well, he was only a poor devil, but nevertheless he was capable of surrendering himself more blissfully and passively and submissively to all the diverse manifestations of the eternal than those who jeered at him and yet made out of a tiny scrap of mortality the symbol and goal of their wretched striving. It was he who should despise the others. He was sorry even for Esch, and he could not help thinking of the heroic battle-music to whose strains the gladiators entered the arena, that the warrior, his courage stimulated, might forget that death stood at his back. He considered whether he should watch by Harry’s bed, but he shuddered at the thought of the waxen face, and he decided instead to get drunk and watch the waiters and the customers, who moved about and yet bore on their faces the stamp of death.—

  At the same hour that night Ilona rose from her bed and by the light of the tiny red lamp under the image of the Virgin regarded the sleeping form of Balthasar Korn. He was snoring, and when the sound ceased it was like the cessation of the music in the theatre before her act; and presently in the whistling of his breath the thin whizzing of the hurtling knives could be heard. Really she was not thinking of this at all, although she had received Teltscher’s letter calling her back. She regarded Korn and tried to picture how he would have looked as a little boy and without his black moustache. She did not know clearly why she was doing this, but it seemed to her that then the Mother of God gazing from the wall would be readier to forgive her sin. For sin it was to have employed him for her unholy lust under the holy eyes of the Virgin, and if she had not been infected with disease as a young girl she too might have had children. That she had to forsake Korn left her indifferent, for she knew that someone else would succeed him; and that she had to return to Teltscher also left her indifferent; it did not give her a moment’s thought that he was waiting for her in Cologne and counting on her; she simply knew that he needed her so that he might have someone at whom to throw his daggers. Also the fact that she was to go to America left her indifferent. She had travelled about too much already, and America was a place like any other place. She was without hope and without fear. She had learned to leave men, but for to-night she felt that she still belonged to Korn. She bore a scar on her neck, and she felt that the man to whom she had been unfaithful that time had been justified in trying to kill her. If Korn had been unfaithful to her, however, she would not have killed him, but merely thrown vitriol at him. Yes, in matters of jealousy such an apportionment of punishment seemed to her fitting, for if one possessed another one would want to destroy, but if one merely employed another one could content oneself with making the object unfit for use. That held good for everybody, even for a queen. For all human beings were the same, and no one could do any good to another. When she stood on the stage it was light, and when she lay with a man it was dark. One lived to eat, and ate to live. Once a man had killed himself because of her; it had not touched her very deeply, but she liked to remember it. Everything else sank into shadow, and in the shadow human forms moved like darker shadows which melted into one another and struggled to detach themselves again. Everybody did nothing but evil, it was as though they could not help punishing themselves for seeking enjoyment in one another. She was a little proud that she too had brought fatality, and when that man killed himself it had been like an act of expiation and a compensation from God for her barrenness. Many things were incomprehensible, indeed all. One could not brood over the meaning of happenings; but when children came into the world the shadows seemed to thicken and become corporeal, and then it was as though a sweet music filled the world of shadows from end to end. That too perhaps was why Mary bore the Christ-Child up there above the red lamp. Erna would marry and have children: why had Lohberg not taken her, instead of that skinny sallow little thing? She contemplated Korn and found in his face nothing of what she sought; his hairy hands lay on the sheet and had never been tender and young. She shuddered at the sight of his red-lit fleshy face with the black moustache, and went softly on her bare feet across to Erna’s room, slipped gently and insinuatingly in beside her, tenderly pressed herself against that angular body, and in this posture fell asleep.

  Esch now comported himself already almost as a prospective husband, or, more correctly, a protector, for though they had not yet let fall any hint of their engagement, Esch knew what was due to a weak woman, and she allowed him to guard her interests. He was empowered to deal not only with the man who brought the mineral water and ice, but also with Oppenheimer, who at his suggestion had been entrusted with the disposal of the business. For in addition to his theatrical work the enterprising Oppenheimer undertook, whenever he got the chance, the disposal of real estate, and acted for various kinds of agencies, and he was of course delighted to devote all his attention to this matter. For the moment, it was true, his mind was distracted by other cares. He came to look over the house, but half way up the stairs he remained standing and said: “Quite inexplicable, this business of Gernerth; I hope to God nothing has happened to him … well, why should I bother, it isn’t my business.” And although he repeated this again and again as though to quiet his mind, he returned just as often to the fact that Gernerth had now been away for eight days, now, at the very moment when they were about to wind up the wrestling business and would need the money for the salaries and the rent, which was in arrears. That Gernerth, such a scrupulous fellow, should have allowed the rent to get into arrears, he could never have believed it. And when they had done so splendidly until recently, yes, quite splendidly. At present, of course, they weren’t even covering their expenses. Well, high time that it was wound up. “And that ass Teltscher has let him go away without even leaving the desk key, and can’t do anything. And Gernerth has all his money in the Darmstadt Bank! … too lofty and artistic, of course, Herr Teltscher, to bother his head about such matters.”

  Esch had listened indifferently until now, especially as it seemed quite understandable to him that Teltscher should be more interested in the American project than in the wrestling, which was coming to an end. But now he pricked up his ears: money in the Darmstadt Bank? He flew at Oppenheimer: “My friends’ investments are in that money in the Darmstadt Bank; it must be handed over!” Oppenheimer wagged his head: “Really it isn’t any concern of mine,” he said, “but to make sure I’ll send a telegram to Gernerth in Munich. He must come and put things in order. You’re right, there’s no use in beating about the bush.” Esch approved of the idea, and the telegram was sent off; they got no reply. Anxious now, they sent two days later a telegram to Frau Gernerth, reply prepaid, and learned that Gernerth had not returned to Munich at all. That was suspicious. And at the end of the week they must settle up all the accounts! There was nothing for it but to notify the police; the police discovered that three weeks before all the money that remained in the Darmstadt Bank had been lifted by Gernerth, and now no more doubt remained; Gernerth had absconded with the money! Teltscher, who had stuck up for Gernerth to the last moment, and now called himself the stupidest Jew in the world for being diddled again by a rotter, Teltscher was suspected of having played into Gernerth’s hands. In view of the theatre properties which Gernerth had left him in pledge, it took him all his time to prove his innocence; but that he succeeded in doing so really helped him very little—he had hardly enough money left to tide him over the next few days. Helpless as a child, he blamed himself and the world at large, kept on repeating tiresomely that Ilona would have to come, and several times a day pestered Oppenheimer with
requests for an immediate engagement. Oppenheimer took the blow more philosophically, for it was not his money that had been lost; he comforted Teltscher: things weren’t so bad after all, as owner of the theatre properties a man with the name of Teltscher-Teltini would make a splendid theatre manager; if he could only get hold of some working capital everything would be all right again, and he would have many dealings yet with old Oppenheimer. Teltscher saw the idea at once, and recovered his old vigour so quickly and so completely that in a jiffy he had hatched out a new plan and straightway run with it to Esch.