When he had been drinking, the sky was all blue, there wasn’t a cloud, everything was beautiful, so fine and mild, you stepped ahead like a white horse, you were satisfied with everything, even with death.
Whether God forgave him or not is pretty uncertain, for a lot used to happen in our billets; but the captain did, and he was a conscientious man. He was short and thickset, an impeccable horseman whom carried himself excellently and dressed with astonishing elegance. Under the heaviest fire he would walk around with a little stick, making a show of his equanimity among the guns. It was said that he was bullet-proof, that the Tommies were likelier to hit a fly than him. But he had murdered many men who he took with him on his excursions and didn’t bring back; returning to the dugout with equanimity and no companions. He showed no trace of consideration or forbearance, but he didn’t interfere with the drunks around Borg.
Sometimes it wasn’t all that easy for him. For instance, when he got hauled out at first light because Borg and Mayer were ‘murdering’ each other, at first light and under the bleary eyes of the whole battery. When the captain arrived they were standing in an open space fifty metres apart, each with a carbine raised to his shoulder, and were sniping at each other in the half-light. Neither was in any danger, for they were dreadfully drunk. But everyone else was in mortal danger since the two of them, fervently and with trembling hands, were shooting holes into the morning.
If the captain had been incompetent he would have yelled and punished them but he only said: ‘You’re not hitting anything, why not beat each other up, that would make better sense.’ After which they had a drunken brawl which was a pleasure to watch. Incidentally, this story has an appendage. For pastyfaced Mayer was weaker than Borg, but Borg was drunker than Mayer and so Borg got more blows, more than he could stand. So he got up and shouted that he was going to transfer to the infantry, he wouldn’t stand for it any longer. Everyone laughed and he went up the line to the infantry, over the terrain which was under fire, up to the infantry. He woke up in a ditch and since he was sober he started trembling all over, he got a horrible fright and had to be brought back like a wounded man. For he was as scared as a child to go back alone and they didn’t have schnaps available for a cowardly lance-sergeant from the artillery.
He and pastyfaced Mayer were always seen in each other’s company, they drank and didn’t have to talk when they were together, and besides they had developed the fine art of whistling duets, they did it with tunes which neither of them had ever heard and they did it without practising. That’s how they passed the gloomy hours in their dugout; it entertained the others too.
For a long time the two of them had amazing luck, they were together the whole winter and drank their way through everything. But in the spring of ’17 pastyfaced Mayer was killed in a barrage. He was hit in the chest – he wasn’t wearing his lady’s shift that day – he died as a man and behaved accordingly. Mayer slumped forwards silently, his pince-nez fell off and he lay fully conscious for an hour without saying anything before he died. He had nothing more to say. He had only sort of turned a little pale, but with him you didn’t notice that.
Borg wasn’t with the battery that day because he had sprained his ankle. He didn’t come until the next evening, by which time pastyfaced Mayer already had the earth scratched over him. Borg didn’t notice anything until Bernauer failed to look him in the eye, but slunk away instead. Then when they told him, he took it calmly. But that evening he drank more than usual even for him and around two in the morning the others were woken up by the sergeant singing at the top of his voice. He sang: ‘Never have I felt so good!’ and it sounded bad.
The days following the barrage were very quiet, a warm dark wind was blowing, the sky was full of damp clouds, everything was bare and it looked as if the war was never going to end. What’s more, there was nothing to drink, only Borg had something because he had connections which he kept strictly secret. Things were going worse then ever for Borg, he staggered and cursed all day and had a new quirk: he insisted everyone should salute him like in barracks, and out here you didn’t even salute officers. That’s when the men got to hate him, for one thing because his appearance was going to the dogs. At night he lay quietly and studied the stars, he did whistle now and again but only for a short time, as if he’d forgotten himself. That’s why the griping Bernauer said Borg was mourning for his mate.
And then the day came when things went wrong for Borg. One night he left the dugout and fell into a shell-hole, drunk. There he lay, probably unconscious, until morning. In the grey dawn he was found and brought in. His internal injuries were too severe for him to be evacuated.
He lay the whole day in the dugout without speaking; it was a day when not a shot was fired. He was conscious, his eyes wandered restlessly over the timbers. At night Bernauer sat and watched over him. But towards midnight he went to sleep because Borg didn’t need anything and was lying still. Bernauer was woken by a thin, shrill whistling; Borg lay stretched out flat with a swollen red face and an untidy moustache and was whistling. ‘Do you want something?’ asked Bernauer in surprise. Only a miserable oil lamp was burning and in that light the lance-sergeant looked like a bundle of old clothes. He made a face and opened his mouth wide and just when you thought a roar was going to come out there came a murmur, you could hardly hear it and it said: ‘let me have it, Mayer’. Then Bernauer understood that Mayer was with him and he was asking for a bottle that wasn’t there. At least he realised it would be silly to interrupt a conversation between friends, one of whom had come a specially long way, but after all these were the last hours, and you never knew. So he said to Borg: ‘If you want schnaps, there’s none here but perhaps you have other things to settle. One never knows.’ But Borg couldn’t hear properly and didn’t understand very well and anyway he was talking to Mayer, who was closer to him and had come specially in the dark warm spring wind and even so had forgotten the schnaps. It must have been like that, for he said in a frail voice: ‘Stop that and let me have it!’ This made it certain that Mayer was telling dirty jokes and Borg couldn’t get involved, for he knew about his condition. When Bernauer had worked this out, he listened with a strange turn of his head, and for a moment heard the wind in the timbers and felt the misery in his heart, and he was a rough man. He looked across at the face of the drinker, on which lay a torment too great to be safely accommodated. The lance-sergeant lay there like a bundle and hadn’t been consulted but had been left in the dark, and now he wasn’t going to get a schnaps either which he really needed in order to remain in the dark, something that would have been an achievement.
That and no other way is how Bernauer saw it. Lance-sergeant Borg had to die without any schnaps and Corporal Mayer had to watch him doing it.
Message in a Bottle
I am twenty-four years old. People say that is an age strongly inclined to melancholy. All the same I don’t think my melancholy is a reflection of my age. My story is as follows.
At the age of twenty I got to know a young man in whose vicinity I felt lighter; and since he also seemed happy in my presence our union depended only upon the consent of our parents, who agreed without much hesitation. The evening after this had been decided, he told me that before we were joined in wedlock he meant to spend several years travelling in the tropics. Being ill placed to force myself on him, I made no attempt to hold him back; indeed with bitter pride I promised as calmly as I could to wait for him. Next day he informed me that his journey would keep him away longer than he anticipated, I would not have sufficient patience, his sense of honour forbade him to make such demands on me, and so he was releasing me from my promise. Deeply shocked but not without composure, I accepted a letter from his hands, and in a failing voice promised not to open it until three years had passed. We parted coolly. A few days later he left the town without saying goodbye, nor did we meet again. I know that the story of my love is commonplace, indeed banal, but that does not make it any less bitter. For three years I put the le
tter away as the writer had desired, for you cannot take what does not belong to you. After three years I opened it and found a blank page. It is white and thin and smells of nothing at all, not a single stain on it. It makes me very unhappy.
To start with, of course, I just felt like a blank piece of paper. But since then I have thought a lot about it and have gradually become more and more disturbed. I still blush at the thought that anyone might want to mock a woman in her bereavement. Nor can I believe it was chance since that would make me look ridiculous. For a while the following thought comforted me: sailors who go down off the coast of Chile bequeath to the sea a bottle containing notes on their last hours, then twenty years later perhaps Chilean fishermen will uncork the bottle and, though not able to understand the foreign characters, nevertheless feel what it is like to drown in alien seas. Water and spray may have dispersed the writers, but the characters, fresh as the day they were written, do not betray how long ago that was. Think how ridiculous the message would be if it were legible; for how impossible it is in one’s lifetime to find words that won’t shatter the silence following a death, nor say anything nasty.
But in the long run this thought did not satisfy me, being too deliberately comforting to be true. Soon I was convinced that during those three years the characters might have faded: time heals wounds. Perhaps I may be excused at this point if I mention a thought which might sound far fetched but which has been haunting me since I first had it. As you know, there is such a thing as magic ink which is legible for a specific period and then disappears, surely anything worth writing down ought to be written with such ink. I would also just like to add that about a year ago – that is, roughly two years after giving me the letter which is only a blank piece of paper – my beloved disappeared completely from my sight, presumably for ever. After waiting patiently for three years for a message which was less and less meant for me, I can only say that I always thought that love was outside any lover’s control, and that it was the lover’s business and nobody else’s.
A Mean Bastard
Novella
When Martin Gair was taking the air one afternoon in a fashionable street under the good September sun he noticed the widow Marie Pfaff, clothed in bright muslin, striding past the shop windows on her sturdy legs. She was tall and vigorous, and blessed with a full bosom and evidently soft hips which the clinging material emphasised suggestively. She had a pale healthy face and her thick brown tresses were swept up into a bun at the back of her head. He liked that, so he followed her for a while. Then he accosted her, and asked if he might accompany her. Since he looked at her very boldly, and since he was a tall gaunt bastard with brown skin, she was frightened at first and didn’t answer, but made him walk faster to keep up with her. He for his part said nothing more, and so, gradually regaining her composure, she got rid of him by turning sharply sideways on her heel into a lingerie shop which she left again presently through a back door. She failed to see Gair, who was standing behind a projecting wall. He then followed her nonchalantly at a distance until she reached her apartment. After that he went to a somewhat dubious restaurant for a meal and devoured a half-raw beefsteak with which he had ordered three eggs. After this meal he knocked back a small glass of schnaps, dug into his black stumpy teeth with a toothpick and cleaned his nails with the same instrument. He paid the bill, added a five per cent tip and left the restaurant. Pulling the bell of Frau Marie Pfaff’s apartment, he walked past a pretty maidservant into the dark hallway and asked to speak to Frau Pfaff. Astonished, she came out, recognised him immediately, said to her maid at the door, ‘I am not at home to the gentleman’ and went back into her living-room where her half-eaten evening meal lay steaming-on the table. ‘What gentleman?’ said Gair. The maidservant propped herself trembling against the door-post and quickly thought of the latest sex murder reported in the newspaper – one carried out with unparalleled cruelty. Finally she said ‘The gentleman is not here. Frau Pfaff is a widow.’ These last words were dragged out of her against her will by the black eyes of the intruder; she threw them in his teeth, hoping he might spare her because she was honest. He moved towards the door, opened it and stepped into the living-room. He didn’t linger for one moment on the threshold but walked straight over to the window opposite, which was hung with white muslin, and said ‘I love you. But please finish your meal. I have already eaten.’ The widow had sat down again, after listening breathlessly and with heaving bosom to the scene in the corridor. Now a slight weakness came over her. She heard Gair saying ‘You are a widow, so the cream has been skimmed off. But there is still something left for me to take over.’ She lent against the chairback half conscious, then rose slowly as if hypnotised and tried to reach the door. But Gair forestalled her and pressed the bell above the table. When the maidservant appeared Gair said severely in a voice of iron, ‘There’s been a misunderstanding. Frau Pfaff wishes you to clear the table and wash up.’ He looked at Marie Pfaff all the time, he was a tall black bastard with angular features but a soft solid body. Frau Pfaff drew herself up, pulled herself together and said with passable self-control ‘Clear the table, Anna!’ Then she turned towards her guest and pointed wordlessly to a chair. Sitting down at once, he manoeuvred his chair so that his face remained in the dark. The maid cleared the table in silence. Meanwhile Marie Pfaff went to the mirror and straightened her hair; she also took something out of a small box. She had brought her voice almost entirely under control by the time the girl had left. In almost singing tones she asked with a mixture of outraged severity and dignified irony, what the gentleman wanted. Gair took in every inch of her full figure with his penetrating gaze. ‘You’, he said. Her answer sounded less certain, although he was sitting in the leather chair, slightly bent and relaxed and obviously satisfied. ‘I don’t understand you at all.’ At that he stood up. He stood there, dark against the muslin, broad, tall and strong. Then he sat down again: that was his answer. ‘What do you really want?’ she murmured. ‘Is your memory all that bad? Put that revolver down!’ She laid it silently on the table. ‘Sit down.’ She obeyed. ‘My time is my own and I have good muscles. I am going to live here and you are going to keep house for me.’ She sat there quite crushed, not daring to say more than ‘But I don’t even know you.’ ‘First of all I’m going to have a wash,’ he replied, ‘then we can get to know each other.’ As he spoke he rose, walked up to her and seized her with his strong arms. ‘That trembling doesn’t matter; in fact it’s a good sign. I am neither a murdering rapist nor a matrimonial swindler. I am a lover.’ He didn’t kiss her, but let her sink back into the chair from which she had half-risen. When she made no move to get up, however, he fell upon the semiconscious woman, carried her in silence to the couch, raised her arms and crossed them over her head. Then he left her there panting. She got up without a word, turned left into the bathroom and prepared the bathtub. He carried her to bath and bed, to which she steered him feverishly without knowing his name. In the half-dark of the alcove she learnt in torment and bliss to love his hard hands, and she surrendered herself to them body and soul.
When she opened her somewhat swollen eyelids the next morning, she felt akin to this strange bastard and she loved him, dirty underwear and all. She got up quietly, without waking him. She hummed as she washed herself; doing her hair she thought about the nocturnal paradise into which he had led her. But once he woke up the work began. He looked no worse in the daylight, he was so strong and had brown skin and much else besides. He wouldn’t let her draw back the heavy yellow window curtains; that tall dark-skinned bastard felt good in the golden light. At night, as he tumbled with her, he had been like a pale fat fish in its pond and now he was lying high and dry in the golden warmth, sunning himself, strong and evil. He took his coffee in bed, and she saw his knees and thighs under the thin blanket and felt dizzy. But he was lazy and had had enough. Let her work for him. The improbable nature of their acquaintanceship no longer struck her, and she took no thought for the morrow. A new life was beginn
ing. The bastard never budged from her rooms; he lay around, smoked or fooled about with the goldfish which shone only faintly in the dull light. She for her part went out to fetch cigars, she served him strong liquor, she smothered him in newspapers. Her life had acquired a meaning; she was a mother by day and a mistress by night. He knew his job. They were happy. The past didn’t exist.
This lasted for half a week, three days and four nights, then he’d had enough. He simply needed a change. The lady of the house was well built; however, he could make do with the same liquor and the same cigar, but not with the same woman. So he took to reading the newspaper in bed, and impregnated paradise with the smell of tobacco. She found fear of his cold eyes replacing love of his brown chest; it was fright that made her work, he became increasingly relentless. In the course of the fourth night, towards morning, about five o’clock, it couldn’t have been completely light, he embraced her for the last time. At midday he had yet another bath, then after the meal turned his back on her tormented eyes and left the apartment. She waited for him at the window, not daring to draw the curtains for fear he might step in and find the light too bright; she held on to them with both hands for half the afternoon. He strolled around the town, drank in various bars (he had pocketed some money), tipped like a lord and sometime after six that evening stopped a girl who was leaving a shop. She was shy and pale. He took her by the arm, they went to a third-rate restaurant and had a substantial dinner. Her confidence grew; he said practically nothing, but for the sake of the change he was after, adopted a flattering manner. Then they walked through the parks for two hours during which he kissed her pale arm, once among the dark bushes and once again in the white light of the asphalt streets; then when nine o’clock came he took her home with him. The widow Pfaff in person opened the door, then recoiled – but quite lightly as if on springs. His hand on her arm he led the girl through the hallway into their room. Then he looked at the widow and she went out. He sat down with the girl at the table, then with a rolling gait he brought cognac and sweet wine and some pastries too. They ate, he kept looking fixedly at her knee, she slowly got drunk, began singing and laughing, finally she was shouting. He led her to a leather sofa and told her to sleep it off. ‘The bed is too classy for you,’ he said. Whereupon he got into bed himself with his boots on. Meanwhile the widow spent the night in the bathroom out of embarrassment at what the maidservant might say.
Bertolt Brecht Page 6