Radical Shadows

by Bradford Morrow

  The conductors were completely bewildered.

  The paper that had arrived from the regional center was shiny, thick and official. And on the paper was printed: “He who comes upon a member of the Railroad Workers Union must greet him with a polite bow of the head and with the following words: ‘Greetings, comrade!’ You may add the name, if the latter is known.

  “And if it should so happen that a Member of the Imperial Family appears, you will salute him according to Ordinance No. 85 with the following words: ‘Long live your Imperial Highness!’

  “And if, beyond all expectations, it should turn out to be the Emperor himself, replace the word ‘Highness’ with the word ‘Majesty.’”

  Having received this paper, Khvostikov went home, and was so aggravated that he immediately fell asleep. And as soon as he fell asleep, he found himself on the platform of the railway station. Then the train came.

  “What a beautiful train,” Khvostikov thought, “I’d love to know what kind of person would arrive on a train like this!”

  And no sooner had he thought these words than the plate-glass windows blazed with electricity, the doors opened and out of the blue car stepped the Emperor in person. A shining crown sat rakishly on his head, and a white ermine fur with tails was wrapped around his shoulders. His retinue, spurs clicking and medals glittering, came shuffling along behind him.

  “Goodness gracious, what is going on here?” Khvostikov thought, and froze.

  “I say! What a surprise!” the Emperor said, staring right at Khvostikov. “If my eyes do not deceive me, we have here my former loyal subject, currently Comrade Conductor Khvostikov! Greetings, my dear fellow!”

  “Help … Long live … Good grief … Your … I’m finished, and my little children too … Imperial Majesty!” Khvostikov uttered, his lips turning completely blue.

  “Look cheerful, you swine, when you address the Emperor!” a voice from the retinue hissed.

  Khvostikov tried to put on a cheerful face. The cheerfulness looked rather bizarre. His mouth twisted to the right, and his left eye closed of its own volition.

  “So, how have things been with you, my dear Khvostikov?” the Emperor inquired.

  “My very humblest thanks,” Khvostikov, half dead, answered soundlessly.

  “Is everything all right?” the Emperor continued. “How is the Mutual Help Fund doing? Lots of general meetings?”

  “Everything in order!” Khvostikov reported.

  “Haven’t you joined the Party yet?” the Emperor asked.

  “Definitely not.”

  “But you do sympathize, don’t you?” the Emperor inquired with a smile that touched Khvostikov’s spine with a frost of at least five below zero.

  “Answer without stammering, you swine!” a voice from behind the Emperor suggested.

  “I do, but just a little,” Khvostikov said.

  “Aha! Just a little! So tell me, if you could, my dear Khvostikov. Whose portrait is that pinned to your breast?”

  “This is … this is, to some extent, Comrade Kamenev,” Khvostikov answered, covering Kamenev’s pin with his palm.

  “I see!” the Emperor said. “Very nice indeed. By the way, do you have any luggage ropes?”

  “Most certainly,” Khvostikov answered, feeling the chill in his stomach now.

  “Well then! Take this son of a bitch and hang him on the train brake with the luggage rope!” the Emperor ordered.

  “But why, Comrade Emperor?” Khvostikov asked, and all his thoughts turned topsy-turvy.

  “For everything!” the Emperor replied with gusto. “For the Trade Union, for ‘Rise all you accursed …,’ for the Mutual Help Fund, for ‘The world of oppression we will destroy,’ for the pin, for ‘To the very foundation’ and … for all the rest. Seize him!”

  “But I have a wife and small children, Your Comeraderie!” Khvostikov pleaded.

  “Don’t worry about your children and your wife,” the Emperor consoled him, “we’ll hang them, too. I have a strong feeling, and I can see it just by looking at you, that your children are Young Pioneers. Aren’t they?”

  “Pi …,” Khvostikov answered like a telephone receiver.

  Ten hands grabbed him.

  “Help!” Khvostikov screamed, as if his throat were being cut.

  And then he woke up.

  Bathed in cold sweat.

  Frana

  Hermann Broch

  —Translated from German by Susan Gillespie

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  THE GREAT VIENNESE WRITER Hermann Broch did not publish his first novel, The Sleepwalkers, until he was forty-four, after selling the family textile mill where he had worked for twenty-four years. He was a prodigious writer on philosophy, culture, ethics and politics and considered these activities more important than his epochal novels, including The Death of Virgil (1945). “Frana,” which was conceived in 1907 during a three-month study tour of cotton markets in the southern United States, belies his comment that he “learned nothing” on the trip. Broch, who was the son of wealthy Jewish parents with their roots in Moravia (hence the Czech grandmother), was a convert to Catholicism. He was jailed during the Anschluss, but was able to emigrate to America, where he spent the remainder of his life in Princeton, New Jersey, and New Haven, Connecticut.

  “Frana” was published in 1980 as part of the Suhrkamp Kommentierte Werkausgabe. It appears here for the first time in English.

  “OH LITTLE BIRD so swift, my little bird of parting …” Grandmother sang in Czech, and it sounded the way it did at home in Koniggratz.

  Home? Home was here in Alabama, home was this house, where you have been living for half a year, differently constructed from the houses in Koniggratz, with a different smell.

  Frana looks out the window. A horse-drawn tram with an open green car ambles past in the direction of town. Between the tracks are little dunes of yellow sand into which the horse’s hooves sink with every step, the soft dust rises to the dappled belly, which has already turned quite yellow.

  At home there was no horse-drawn tram. But no, home is here. And here you don’t have to go to school. And many things still recall the circus that came to Koniggratz two years before, black men and yellow manège dust and a music that is in the air even when you don’t hear anything. Like during the pauses in the circus. Too bad that all this is slowly fading.

  “Frana, Franischku!” Grandmother is calling.

  “Yes, Grandma,” Frana replies in Czech and once again he is surprised at this language, which begins to feel uncomfortable in your mouth. There were some things Grandmother had to say twice before you understood them.

  1901, September, nine years, two months and six days old; six months in a new domicile.

  Grandmother asks Frana to fetch her some vinegar and salt from the store, and Frana asks for money with which to do so. This is not so simple, for Grandmother still reckons in guilders, although this coin long ago fell into disuse in Austria and Koniggratz, Grandmother’s private currency. To be sure, she has taught it to Frana, but here you have to pay for your purchases in dollars and cents.

  Finally Frana clutches two dimes and a few pennies tight in his fist and sets off, down along the dusty road, whose opposite side has no sidewalk, but instead the tram track running along the ditch. Beyond the ditch stretches the barbed-wire fence of the factory. To the left, the sidewalk is flanked by a thorny hedge; there are some breaks in the latter, so you can observe the various sights of nature and culture, a grovelike plot of cleared land dotted with transparent trees of a kind not commonly found in Koniggratz, and scattered among them, although keeping somewhat closer to the road, were houses, tin-roofed shacks, wagon sheds, stalls, all strewn about in disorderly fashion without fence or enclosure. Frana notices this because his own house lies next to the road, neat and proper; if he had made his home here this would have become his natural, not mysterious stomping ground.

  Far below, a tram appears, going in the opposite direction to the one that ha
s just driven off down the hill. Frana crosses the street and lies down flat and long in the ditch. In the factory the spindles are humming, the setup machines drone dully, the flyers click brightly, from time to time one or several looms clatter, all against a background of rustling, rolling transmission belts. These are sounds that Frana can distinguish quite easily, he is familiar with them from Koniggratz, and since the mill began operating a few weeks ago—in the last few days a couple of looms have even started up—it seems to Frana as if his hometown were at the point of gradually taking shape here, like a stage set, and as if his father had been entrusted with this mission, for his father was the foreman at the spinning mill, and his mother was supposed to teach the black girls Bohemian weaving. That is a serious thing, and Frana in the ditch pricks his ears toward the factory and waits. Waits for the horse-drawn tram. This takes a fairly long time, even if only exactly six minutes pass before the horse brings the tram up to where he lies, but they are minutes filled with tension: ear to the ground to monitor the tram’s approach, first you hear the soft tap-tapping of the hooves, then the rolling of the iron wheels on the rails, their rhythmic beat as they strike the rails, then the muffled sound in the earth mingles with the open sound that travels through the air, with the squeaking and rasping of the springs, and now it is here, rattling—, the horse snorts, you see the hooves and the slightly matted legs, you wait for it to make a false step and strike you dead, the gray running boards of the tram glide away over you, you hear the voices of the passengers, one more especially hair-raising screech of the entire iron carriage, and then the whole exciting business is over, borne off toward East Hill, which lies in immeasurable distance, where the tramway turnaround is, a place only adventurers go. Frana lies there still for a few moments more before he crawls out of the ditch and sets off for town and the store.

  The store is on the left side of the street, near the end of the grove of trees, a big shed with barrels and sacks lying out front, open barrels with tomatoes and others with apples, on the Veranda hang the big bunches of bananas, six for ten cents, and in the store you get chewing gum. In Koniggratz there were neither bananas nor chewing gum, on the other hand there were people like Vilim Knize and Arne Skrensky, and there was Milena Zlinova, and not one of the three of them had ever heard of chewing gum or bananas. When Frana is rich, he will send Milena chewing gum and along with it he will write her a letter in English.

  Here, at least, there is Charley Buckle. He is the son of the proprietor and wears brown oVeralls; there are others too, above all a bunch of pickininnies, who, if you are seeing them for the first time, are hard to tell apart and although they are friendly and always ready to play—this Frana had already figured out—must be treated with disdain. A couple of them are forever standing in front of the store, and when they have money they buy sugar cane, whose availability is another charm of this circus country. And when Buckle the father steps out of the store they run away, for they have often stolen apples from the barrels, and the elder Buckle has set up a kind of standing criminal court for them; whenever he finds one of the black boys by the barrels, he boxes his ears.

  From all of them Frana has learned English, not a beautiful English, certainly no Oxford English, but a regular Southern drawl that he further embellishes with his singsong Czech accent and, when a word fails him, he patches with scraps of Czech expressions. But his reputation is none the worse for this, here people are accustomed to such things, and besides, fists are more important than language.

  Charley stands on the counter of the store arranging the whips that hang from the ceiling. This is an enviable activity, hence he turns a blind eye to the newcomer. Frana goes over to the man behind the counter, the greenish Thomas O’Donnors, whose breath usually smells, and makes his purchases. When he has paid, he gives the dignified Charles a good sharp pinch in the calves, just because they are so invitingly within reach there on the counter, hears with satisfaction the shout of rage, evades the kicking foot, and with as much dignity and as little acknowledgment as Charley had paid him before, he leaves behind the site of his mercantile and social activities, with the bottle of vinegar and the packet of salt in his hand.

  Three Poems

  Elizabeth Bishop

  —Edited by Alice Quinn

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  THESE PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED POEMS are among the many to be found in the author’s notebooks and papers bequeathed to the Vassar College Library.

  Bishop jotted “Seville, 1936” beside the title “In a Room,” dating it to a trip she and her friend Louise Crane took to Spain just three months before the Civil War was declared. (She wrote to a friend, “The prettiest Baroque chapel in Seville has just been saved from burning up—the ceiling all scorched.”)

  Around this time, she had begun translating Rimbaud. Her poem “The Man-Moth” had been accepted by Bryher’s new quarterly in London, Life and Letters Today. She was reading stories by Henry James, poems by D. H. Lawrence and Wallace Stevens’s new book, Ideas of Order. The two shorter poems here are undated, but Bishop’s longtime editor, Robert Giroux, says that “eye-fee” would be the local pronunciation of “hi-fi” in Brazil, where Bishop lived with her companion, Lota de Macedo Soares.

  “A Lovely Finish” is, most likely, a love poem to Lota written in Brazil in the 1950s.

  FOREIGN-DOMESTIC

  I listen to the sweet “eye-fee.”

  From where I’m sitting I can see

  across the hallway in your room

  two bare feet upon the bed,

  arranged as if someone were dead

  —a non-crusader on a tomb.

  I get up, take a further look.

  You’re reading a “detective book,”

  so that’s all right. I settle back.

  The needle in its destined track

  stands true and from the daedal plate

  an oboe starts to celebrate

  escape from the violin’s traps

  a bit too easily perhaps

  for twentieth-century taste, but then

  Vivaldi pulls him down again.

  Said Blake, “And mutual fear brings peace,

  Till the selfish loves increase …”

  A LOVELY FINISH

  A lovely finish I have seen

  upon a sand flat glassed with sky,

  or with a gold-leaf film of sea

  re-brushed, re-grained by random cloud.

  Can one accuse of artifice

  such finishes and surfaces?

  When in the dawn you turned to speak

  and waited for my teeth to touch

  the sugared coolness on that cheek

  —the other cheek—I found in such

  deliberation of caress

  the utmost of your worldliness.

  IN A ROOM

  There was a stain on the ceiling

  Over the bed

  Shaped like a rhinoceros head

  With a jagged horn and a trumpet in his mouth.

  The trumpet had blown, without “feeling,”

  All the gilt plaster-work, hoarsely

  From his jaw.

  In the morning I saw

  Over my head the brilliant results of his music:

  A molding, constructed as coarsely

  As an opera-house balustrade.

  Off-center because

  What was one room now was

  Three or four rooms of unequal sizes,

  The big chandelier displayed

  Its large branched star, snow-flake plan.

  Brassy-gold,

  But with no lamp to hold.

  Under the molding the two rusted pipes

  Of the plumbing arrangements ran

  To the closet in the corner and bored

  Within it.

  Several times every minute

  The hobgoblin toilet trickled and splashed,

  Flushed of its own accord.

  The floor was dark red stone, damp and uneven.

  Near one wall
>
  For no reason at all

  A heavy iron chain hung halfway down from the ceiling,

  Giving a medieval sensation of heaven.

  One electric light bulb alone was provided.

  Under the light

  Perpetually, day and night,

  All the time I lived there, five flies held a dance.

  In unhurried orbits they glided

  Like five planets, only both back and forwards:

  On the track

  They let themselves drift back.

  Then began again. Their sound was a boring sentence

  Emphasized over and over on the wrong words.

  I dried my stockings on the balcony and kept

  Untidy piles

  Of newspapers on the red tiles

  In the beautiful white marble fireplace, with its shelf

  Upheld on scallop shells. At night I slept

  On the great lumpy bed, in a range of mountains.

  And had

  The most remarkably bad

  Dreams of my whole life, while from the water-closet

  Came sounds of far-off squalls and fountains.

  When not sleeping, I observed that

  All night

  Fine gold whiskers of light

  Converged on the ceiling from the next room, pricking out

  That molding, like a curious cat.

  A man and his wife sat up late in there; I could hear

  Them fighting

  In low voices, and a continuous writing,

  “Scratch-scratch-scratch,” going on, while they drank

  Bottle after bottle of beer.

  In the darkness the five flies spoke

  Of Revelations

  In their hopeless conversations,

  Of the gilded beauties of heaven, and the blackness of hell, too, till thinking

  “But here I am in my room,” I awoke.

  —Seville, 1936

  Of Monotony

  Louis Couperus

  —Translated from Dutch by Duncan Dobbelmann