Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics)

by Unknown

  On a bank of pebbles swept up by the tide she descended from her horse, the poor beast being unable to go on; observing the flood-waters getting swampier and swampier, she was gripped by a pang of fear, for she knew that this was a sign of the rising current and she saw no way out of this hostile landscape, a world of willow, wind and water; slowly she led her horse along, crushed by this realm of solitude, an impassable and bewitched realm she’d wandered into. She started looking for a spot to spend the night, as the sun was setting and the monstrous life force of this river grew ever more insistent in its raging rush and roar, its clapping, its swelling laughter washing up against the stones swept aside, its faint whisper in a quiet bend, its rapids hissing, its never-ending grinding against the rocky riverbed, and all the other sounds on the surface. Flocks of grey cranes swooped in as evening fell and the cormorants started scouring the banks for food; storks fished in the current and swamp birds of every description circled round, piercing the air with their fervent, far-echoing craw.

  The princess had heard tell as a child of this grim region on the Danube, of its bewitched islands where one died of hunger but where one also had visions and experienced the greatest rapture in the delirium of one’s own demise. The princess felt as if the island moved along with her, and yet it was not the thundering current that made her tremble – rather, she was gripped by a commingling of alarm and amazement and a sense of unrest, never before experienced, that came from the willows. Something deeply threatening emanated from them and weighed heavy on the princess’s heart. She had come to the end of human habitation. The princess bent down to her horse, which collapsed in exhaustion and also gave off a plaintive sound, for he too felt that there was no way out and he begged her forgiveness with a dying look for no longer being able to carry her through and over the water. The princess stretched herself out in the hollow beside the horse, feeling a dark foreboding as never before; the willows whispered more and more, they murmured, they laughed, they cried out shrilly, howled and moaned. No troop of enemy soldiers was hot on her heels now, but she was surrounded by an army of alien beings, myriad leaves fluttered over the bushy tails of the willows; she lay in the bend of the river that led to the land of the dead and she had her eyes wide open as the mighty columns of shadow beings swept over her; one moment she buried her head in her arms to blot out the howl of the fearsome wind and the next moment she leapt up again, roused by a terrible tapping, scraping sound. She could not press forward or turn back – her only choice was to be smothered by the willows or drowned by the water – but in the blackest night a light flickered before her; and since she knew that it could not be a human light, but had to be a ghostly light, she approached it with a deathly fear, albeit enchanted, entranced.

  It was no light; it was a flower, redder than red, not grown in the earth but burst into bloom in the free flow of night. She reached her hand out to touch the flower, but what she touched, along with strange petals, was the palm of another hand. The wind and the laughter of the willows went silent, and in the eerie white light of the rising moon that shone over the slackening current of the Danube she recognized the stranger in the black coat standing before her. He held her hand in his and pressed two fingers of his other hand over his mouth so that she would not ask him again who he was, but he smiled down at her with his dark, warm eyes. He was darker than the night that surrounded her before, and, cradled in his arms, she sank into the sand at his feet, and he laid the flower on her breast as one does with the dead, and drew his coat over her and him.

  The sun had already risen high in the sky when the stranger awakened the princess from her deathlike slumber. He had made the real immortals, the elements, be silent. The princess and the stranger started talking, as if they’d known each other for ever, and when one spoke the other smiled. They talked of darkness and light. The high water fell to a gentle flow, and before the sun went down the princess heard her horse rise and snort and trot through the brush. Startled in her heart of hearts, she said: I must move on, I have to ride upriver, come with me, never leave me again! But the stranger shook his head, and the princess asked: must you return to your people?

  The stranger smiled: my people are older than all the peoples in the world and are scattered by the winds of time.

  Then come with me! cried the princess, pained and impatient.

  But the stranger replied: patience, be patient, you know now, you know.

  In the night the princess had grown a second face, and so she said, tears streaming from her eyes: I know we’ll see each other again.

  Where, smiled the stranger, and when? Endless is the ride ahead.

  The princess peered down at the wilted flower, its lustre extinguished, left lying on the ground, and whispered, with eyes shut tight, on the edge of dreams: let me see!

  Slowly she started to tell: it will be further upriver, the peoples will resume their migration, it will be in another century, let me guess, it will be more than twenty centuries from now, you will say as people do: beloved …

  What is a century? asked the stranger.

  The princess picked up a handful of sand and let it run swiftly through her fingers; she said, that’s about twenty centuries, then the time will come when you return and kiss me.

  Then it will be soon, said the stranger, go on!

  It will be in a city and in this city it will be on a street, the princess continued, we’ll be playing cards, I will close my eyes, in the mirror it will be Sunday.

  What are city and street? asked the baffled stranger.

  Stunned, the princess replied: we’ll soon find out, I only know the words, but we’ll see what they are when you drive thorns through my heart, we’ll be standing before a window, let me finish, it will be a window filled with flowers, a flower for every century, more than twenty flowers, that’s how we’ll know that we’re in the right place, and all the flowers will look like this one!

  The princess swung herself onto her horse, no longer able to endure the clouds, for the stranger silently plotted out her and his first death. He sang her no word of farewell, and she rode towards her country with its blue hills that loomed in the distance in a terrible silence, for he had already driven the first thorn through her heart; and, ringed by her faithful attendants in the castle courtyard, she fell, bleeding, from her horse. But there was a smile on her feverish lips as she stammered: I know now, I know!

  Conversation

  1984

  Jürg Laederach

  The phone refuses to ring. I sit here on 82nd Street, no, on 83rd, no, on 81st; I forget where I am. The phone refuses to ring, to tear me out of this enforced solitude, which I know only too well. This solitude that makes me sick and stirs me to tears, but surely not tears of compassion. A call is bound to come any minute now up from The Village and afford me the company I desperately desire. The phone isn’t ringing, the bell doesn’t work.

  I have no other recourse now but to resort to the sharpest provocation, as a consequence of which the phone always rings, because it cannot do otherwise: to strip myself naked, place the phone far out of reach and lay myself in the bathtub, full of bathwater, of course. It is a characteristic of mine that in undressing, I never get naked; I can undress myself as long as I like. On countless occasions I’ve tried, to strip myself, naked, that is, but it has never worked for me.

  I spend more time getting undressed than most. Since I tend to toss my clothes in a heap supported by a chair (or in this case, since I only recently moved in, without a chair) my clothes pile up to a considerable height; it’s quite a heap I have lying around. It is perfectly possible that beneath the clothes I just took off, several layers deeper, more clothes are being bred at this very minute; either my skin produces these clothes, or the new clothes grow between two layers of older, already worn clothing. In any case, I never get naked. One can only imagine what might happen were I ever to succeed.

  Such are my bodily needs. Obviously, everything goes into my clothes, though I can’t feel it, and
it isn’t noticeable to others. Just once in my life to see a little skin; for this I pray.

  While most human beings crave to see another naked beside them, I harbour this same wish in regard to myself; but my energies are not up to the fulfillment of my wish. I know what I look like; had myself x-rayed, though not too deeply; the rays peeled off the excess layers, revealing no abnormality, which makes my condition all the more inexplicable.

  I spend hours getting undressed; that’s the truth. I made a pledge: every time an attempt to catch a glimpse of myself lies in the normal course of events of my day, I condone it with restrained enthusiasm, of course. I spend hours getting undressed, as a consequence of which I will have to spend as many hours getting dressed again. The traditional lowly clown’s costume just made its appearance, stripped away, followed by the oil-smeared mechanic’s cover-all, stripped away, followed by the cutaway, the tail-less tux, that is, which disintegrated as I stripped it off. The white pants of the poultry chef have just emerged, how busy the kitchen was today.

  I’ll have to spend hours, an entire night at least, getting dressed again as soon as the phone call comes. As soon as I climb into the bath, the water rises to the rim, and the cook that I am swells up like a soufflé, his clothing inflates.

  This time the extended invocatory technique doesn’t work. I lie in the tub, covered with soap, after climbing back and forth into and out of the tub for several hours now, each time removing another layer of clothing, till I dropped exhausted into the tub where I now lie beneath the jet of water, the water level rising perilously close to the edge, and my two knees, bedecked with leather patches, poking up out of the foam. And it’s here at the knees of these leather-patched cook’s pants soaring up out of the iridescent suds that I shiver with the cold.

  I can’t stand it much longer. Ever since I moved up here to 79th, no, to 76th Street – can’t remember which – that is, ever since I started wondering why the phone never rang, I’ve changed completely, become so much more defenseless and susceptible. Perhaps I ought to get myself x-rayed again, things might have changed beneath the surface too. I’ll let a little more water in.

  The fundamental issue is clear. I am applying the sharpest means to provoke that phone call that refuses to come. I can’t understand it: though millions of people are thinking of me at this very moment, that phone refuses to ring. Perhaps they don’t dare call me. And whereas before it was the most natural thing imaginable that though millions thought of me, they never actually called me, it is completely incomprehensible to me now that the phone should not ring, now that I’ve taken such pains to provoke it.

  The millions of prospective callers fear that millions of others are ahead of them on line, that there’s no getting through to me; thus the phone remains unused. There is another reason for this disuse: I have obviously not properly applied my conjuring technique. I didn’t take it far enough. It is still too easy for me to climb out of the tub and, with dripping cook’s pants, approach the telephone. And if a phone call should come and I’m standing there right in front of the phone, I can reach for the receiver immediately. Under such propitious circumstances no call will come through.

  The telephone must first be placed further away from the tub. Were I to be able to get to it immediately when it rings, my reply to the prospective caller and the ensuing conversation would be assured. In which case, of course, no call would come through. Such conditions are not conducive to the satisfactory completion of a call, but rather, at best, to the telephone’s empty ringing. I’m rather wet today, soaked through to several layers of clothing; not all the way to the skin though, I’m still dry below it all, my skin cannot get wet.

  My own x-ray device reveals that the wetness has seeped all the way down to my forester’s duds that fit me tightly several layers below. I may very well be the wettest person to ever lie in a tub. Water does not flow over me as it does over others, but rather, once it has settled around me, it seeps into my uppermost fabric and weighs me down. It is high time I climbed out of the tub, I tell myself, and I proceed to do so. Don’t fall, I think to myself, and immediately trip over something: a spongy mass. A bad habit, this duplication of thought into action, better drop it.

  I try to block out consciousness, for the disappointments are unending. Impossible to get used to it. I may in fact be the single individual most prone to duplicate my thinking via my actions. I think, and then I do what I think. I feel much better really when I’m not thinking, and consequently, not doing anything, since I am by nature immovable and can only be impelled into motion by a flood of redundant ideas. Now it’s time to move, I think, and immediately replicate the thought in action. Out of the tub!

  This is how I think, and this pre-phone call stage of my cognitive process propels my body out of the tub, my sub-exponentially variable body that is coated with a light film of suds and draped in cook’s pants and shirt. Here between 73rd and 75th Street, but more likely at 80th Street, this body of mine can never take centre-stage, and is invariably hidden from the public eye, in the sight of which it remains forever wrapped in all these clothes. It should, however, be noted that the very person to whom it never shows itself, namely me, couldn’t care less about it. With a contraction, the body wrapped in wet cook’s clothes whips itself out of the tub as a preliminary to setting in place those additional hindrances blocking the bather from the telephone, such that – as soon as I can no longer reach the receiver – the call will definitely come through and tear me out of this hermetic communion with myself.

  For its own dissimulation’s sake, this body has laid too long in water. Once out of the water, its clothes hide it. The only way it can discover, that is, reveal itself to itself is by lunging at the receiver if a phone call comes. Then I can tell it all, confess everything which I now keep secret from myself. Only then, driven instinctively, can I find the words and ways to approach that which although close, remains infinitely far, wrapped in fabric, the tailored and ironed, albeit soaked, superfluous fabrics of my being.

  Having strode, dripping, to the still-silent telephone on New York’s Upper West Side, I pick up the telephone to a place even further out of reach. I drag its cord behind me. The cord grins back at me as I carry the receiver to the most distant corner of this curious New York apartment. The apartment has a horseshoe shape.

  A majestically narrow horseshoe shape. Divided in three. It has a center and two wings. In the center stands the tub; I carry the phone towards one of the wings, the east wing. I drag that miserable device into the farthest corner of the east wing. The walls of the apartment are white. The sun is blinding. A call could come through now; it doesn’t.

  I deposit the phone in the farthest corner of the east wing of the apartment, walk back through the center, through the winter garden, back to the tub into which I allow myself to sink. A little worse for wear and tear perhaps on my outmost surface, my cook’s surface. The tail-less tux, the cutaway lies on the chair beside me. I am calm again in my bathwater; its waves have stopped beating. I sit up and am wet. Wet and alone: this is my essential truth. New York refuses to call; that galls me, and not only that. It depresses me. Here I sit – don’t recognize myself any more, I only know that tears of recognition will not fall; all my tears have run dry.

  Seated back in the tub again, it’s still too easy to get to the phone. My possible paths to it are likewise component parts of its scheme. In the short time we have matched wits, the telephone has perfected its perfidious methods. It saw right through my emergency measures. Never again will I permit a phone call to break through into my ever-congealing seclusion, my isolation, my solitude that dwells on nothing else but how to break out of itself; the telephone watches over all my possible paths, which, according to my calculations, are indeed too readily accessible.

  Under these circumstances, no call can get through, no other New Yorker can reach me, no living soul to whom I might reveal, or rather, from whom it might be worth hiding my radical stance. The key to the satisf
actory completion of this method of picking up the receiver (a method that has, after all, been in effect for half an eternity, several minutes, that is), lies, I firmly believe, in the time it takes to climb out of the tub. I can, if I have to, be slow about reaching the receiver, but quick, on the other hand, at leaving the tub. I have achieved record time as warm-water sprinter, and must, therefore, complicate the process.

  I pour a bucket of suds over myself, grab a big brush and start scraping off the cook’s layer of my being; the second cutaway surfaces, and I tear into it, launching into a lengthy cleaning process that can no longer be interrupted, except, of course, by a phone call. New York sullies its citizens to such an extent that only the most thorough mythologizing has any beneficial effect; and in any case, you’re still stuck in New York; no one will uninvite you once you’re here, this city is after all the Mecca of the most exotic masters of deceit. Still no phone call, even though I have succeeded, little by little, in tearing through the cutaway and I expect any minute now the appearance of my own skin.