Bertolt Brecht

by Bertolt Brecht

  Then the woman bent down and looked at him and her knees began to quiver and she went very pale. And when the sound of his own heart-beats subsided he heard her, and what she said was, ‘My dear husband, how long you have kept me waiting, so long that I have now become ugly, and seven years have passed as pain passes and I almost lost faith in you.’

  Before the Flood

  Considerations in the rain

  My grandmother used to say when it had rained for a long time, ‘Today it’s raining. Will it ever stop? I hardly think so. At the time of the flood it did not stop.’ My grandmother would say, ‘What has happened once can happen again – and so can what hasn’t’. She was seventy-four years old and totally devoid of logic.

  On that occasion all the animals went into the Ark quite peacefully. That is the only time when all the creatures on earth have been peaceful. And all of them really did go in. But the icthyosaurus stayed away. He was told in a vague sort of way that he should get in, but he had no time during the days in question. Noah himself drew his attention to the fact that the flood was coming. But he said placidly, ‘I don’t believe it.’ He was generally unpopular by the time he drowned.

  ‘Aha, aha,’ they all said, as Noah, lighting the lamps on the Ark for the first time, observed ‘It’s still raining’, ‘aha, aha, he won’t come, not the icthyosaurus.’ That particular animal was the oldest of all the beasts, and given his long experience he was fully capable of telling whether anything like a flood was possible or not.

  It is quite possible that I myself might not go in in similar circumstances. I think that on that evening, as the night fell in which he perished, the icthyosaurus saw through the corruption and chicanery of providence, as well as the unspeakable stupidity of all earthly creatures, the moment he realised how necessary these things were.

  Fat Ham

  It is said of the ass that he was not in the Flood, and that God didn’t make him until much later, after all the other animals, on noticing a gap in Creation. That gap was to be filled by the ass. This view, it must be said, is contradicted by a Flood legend which circulates among the asses and has been handed down to the present day. It goes like this:

  Among the sons of Noah, Ham the Fat was particularly important. He was called Ham the Fat although he was only fat in one place, and the reason was this: that, as we know from other sources, the Ark was constructed entirely of solid cedar. Each plank had in fact to be as thick as a man.

  For several weeks during the building, Japheth, as we know, went around standing beside trees before they were felled. Trunks that were thinner than Japheth were just not used for the construction of the Ark. But then, at the last moment, when it was already raining terribly, Japheth decided he had had enough of standing around in cedar forests and asked his brother Ham to stand beside the cedars in his place.

  But Ham was the thinnest of Noah’s sons.

  Then the Flood came and the Ark began to float, and Noah perceived forthwith that the Ark was floating excellently well except for one place where she was too thin. The Ark was terribly long and broad, and she also had a mighty draught, and the place that was too thin was no bigger than the orb of the sun at noon. But it was here and here alone that the Ark shipped water.

  So Noah said to his sons, ‘Which of you has done this?’

  The sons said to Noah, ‘Ham has done this.’

  Thereupon Noah said to Ham, ‘Arise, Ham, and go to the place that is too thin, and get thee down and sit upon it.’

  Ham sat down, and the hole was plugged.

  The Bible records exactly how long Ham sat on that spot, for he sat there until the Flood was over. And when the Flood was over Ham stood up, and that portion of Ham which had covered the leaky spot in the Ark had grown very fat. Apart from that, however, Ham was just as thin as before. This peculiarity in his physical constitution rendered Ham pretty useless for a good many things, but if there is ever another flood, and they build an Ark with a thin spot, then Ham will be indispensable.

  It is this particular story of the Flood that has survived in the memory of the asses.

  Conversation about the South Seas

  At my publisher’s I met a man who had spent 15 years in Brazil.

  He asked me what was on in Berlin.

  When I told him, he advised me to head for the South Seas.

  He said you can’t beat it.

  I had no objection. I asked what should I take with me.

  He said, ‘Take a short-haired dog. That is man’s best friend.’

  I naturally thought for a moment of asking him whether a long-haired one would do if the worst came to the worst, but common sense told me that long hair would get terribly matted with coconut needles.

  I asked him what there is to do in the South Seas the whole day long.

  He said, ‘Nothing. You don’t have to work at all.’

  ‘Well yes,’ I said, ‘Work wouldn’t satisfy me either, but there must be something one can do.’

  He said, ‘Well, there’s always nature.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘but what is there to do, say at 8 a.m.?’

  ‘8 a.m.? You’d still be asleep.’

  ‘And noon? One o’clock?’

  ‘At one it’s too hot to do anything.’

  At this point I lost my temper. I gave him a nasty look and said, ‘The afternoon?’

  ‘Oh, you’re bound to have some way of filling in an hour.’

  At last he seemed to realise that I am not the sort of man who can busy himself on his own, and he made a suggestion. ‘Take a double-barrelled shotgun and get in some shooting.’

  I was now in a thoroughly bad mood and told him curtly, ‘Shooting is no pleasure to me.’

  ‘Well, how are you going to live?’ he asked me with a smile.

  I was getting steadily madder.

  ‘That is for you to tell me,’ I said. ‘It’s your job to make the suggestions. How am I to know anything about the South Seas?’

  ‘Would you like to fish?’ he proposed.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ I said huffily.

  ‘Good. Take a steel fly-rod, you can get one in any shop, and in five minutes you will have two fish on your hook. Then you can eat fish if you don’t want to go shooting.’

  ‘Raw?’ I asked.

  ‘You surely have your lighter with you?’

  ‘A fish cooked over a lighter is hardly a full meal,’ I said, appalled by such lack of experience. ‘Can I at least take photographs?’

  ‘Now there’s an idea,’ he said, visibly relieved. ‘You’ll have the whole of nature at your disposal. Nowhere else is there so much to photograph.’

  Now of course he’s got the upper hand. He’ll have me taking photographs all day long. It’ll keep me busy and leave him in peace.

  But you can take it from me that I have been put off the South Seas for years. And I never want to see another man like that again.

  Letter about a Mastiff

  One of the few events in my uneventful life that made an impression on me was the San Francisco earthquake – because of a dog.

  I was twenty-three and alone in the world when I got to know a mastiff in San Francisco. I was living on the sixth floor in a dilapidated block and shared a stinking, badly whitewashed hallway with the other tenants. It was there that I used to run into the mastiff several times daily. He belonged to a family of five who were living in a single room no bigger than mine. They were unkempt people with dirty habits who left bins full of stinking refuse standing outside their door for days. To describe the dog is more than I can bear.

  My first meeting with that mastiff I do not remember. But I think we can take it that the mastiff’s first emotion on seeing me was fear, and that I too experienced an unpleasant sensation (probably as a consequence). At any rate it was the beast’s obvious and totally unjustified antipathy that first drew my attention to him. On seeing me the dog, joyfully as he may have been romping around with the children (who were incidentally incredibly dirty),
would slink sullenly round the corner, or better still would creep with his tail between his legs into an open doorway. Indeed once when I tried to stroke him to dispel his stupid fears, which were already, I seemed to observe, making the children stare at me in awe, he even trembled, and – it is with some reluctance that I record this – his hackles must have risen, for I was taken aback momentarily by the stiffness of his coat, and it only occurred to me later that this must be what people mean when they say ‘His hackles have risen.’

  If a man had adopted this attitude to me I would have been inclined to think he was confusing me with somebody else. But a dog! Right from the start, I remember, I was far from underrating the matter. In the days that followed I now and again brought something for the mastiff – food or bones. He would slink away without so much as a sniff at the bones, look up with an indescribably reproachful and at the same time perplexed air, then make off. Usually he was skulking in the midst of a band of scrofulous children, who were all too obviously the sad offspring of the scum of the earth. The whole block smelt of children’s piss. I only rarely managed to get the mastiff on his own, and I was careful never to go near him in the presence of eyewitnesses. Nevertheless the children had some damn way of detecting my attempts to approach the dog, harmless though these undoubtedly were; and from then on, far from recognising my good nature, they began to point accusing fingers at me. All this time I was convinced that the people who owned the mastiff were not giving it enough to eat; it was probably not even getting the bare essentials. I had, of course, no time in which to study this dog. Since I was working by day in a car factory, I only had the evenings for my own entertainment. Nonetheless I was able to observe quite a few people in their dealings with the mastiff. There was, for example, the tenant next door who got along, if not like a house on fire, at least reasonably well with him. To attract him he snapped his fingers, as many people do. As a result he quite often got the dog rubbing himself without a qualm against his dirty trouser leg. I even practised this little trick myself, which incidentally anyone can master, but I had enough self-respect not to try it out. There was an old woman in the house whom the mastiff ran after whenever he saw her. This old woman, an unpleasant person with a piping voice which set your teeth on edge, simply could not bear the mastiff and always tried to shoo him away with her shopping bag, but never succeeded. To her annoyance she couldn’t get rid of him. A heavily made-up girl from our neighbourhood would often chat to the mastiff, fingering the folds under his jaw as she did so. Once when I stood opposite this girl on the bus – her trade, I would add, is her own affair – I noticed that she had bad breath. Such personal attributes, harmless and unimportant though they may be in themselves, are always indicative, in my opinion, of more deep-seated aberrations. It surprised me that a dog of thoroughly sound instincts, like the mastiff, took no notice of this flaw in the girl. This observation soon led me to doubt the dog’s instincts; I began to think it might be some quite superficial peculiarities of mine that were putting the mastiff off. It seemed improbable, but I wanted to overlook nothing. I changed both my suit and my headgear, and I even left my stick at home. All this I did, as you might imagine, with the utmost reluctance, aware, as I was, of the humiliation involved, but it seemed to me that there was nothing else for it. One decisive occurrence showed me how closely all this concerned me. This was a time when I had unfortunately to make a tedious trip to Boston, since I had reason to suspect my younger brother of using some remarkably artful dodges to get the better of me in the matter of our mother’s will. When I came back – without, I may say, settling anything, since there is no such thing as proof in this life, however blatant the injustice – the mastiff had gone.

  In the initial excitement I was particularly hurt that he had just run off, indeed I thought I would have been less disappointed if he had been sliced in half by a truck. That a dog in whom I had an interest should simply run away from his master was merely further proof for me of the planet’s unfair treatment of the life on it. Though his comments on my person seemed so ridiculously important to me, he himself of course was of an inferior breed. All the more distressing that I should be so upset when he failed to return. In the end my enquiries, coupled with the offer of a large reward, brought him back; but my mistrust accompanied him from that day on until his inglorious end.

  After the trouble I had taken to recover him, I naturally considered the dog as my property. That the family to whom he officially belonged, acted as if they did not know how much their mastiff had cost me just discredited them further in my eyes. I had no wish to go on being treated as if I were not there.

  Shortly after his return, I saw the mastiff going down the hall with the tenant next door. When the man stopped to fill his pipe by one of the windows that looked on to the yard, he again rubbed himself against his leg. The man took no notice. This struck me as most unpleasant. When I enquired, I discovered that he lived as a lodger with the family of five. In the next few days I casually asked the caretaker, whether to his knowledge it was permissible for tenants to take lodgers in their rooms. He told me in some embarrassment that he did not know, but would, if I thought fit, write a letter to the company. I left it up to him, since it was none of my business.

  A week later as I came home from work I noticed a hand-cart with some ramshackle furniture in front of the house. On the stairs I passed a girl with bad lungs coughing as she carried a chest downstairs. I concluded that the caretaker’s letter had done the trick; evidently it was indeed forbidden to take lodgers.

  As I looked on and pondered the matter, I decided that it was hard for these people, on top of all their other difficulties – and there was seemingly no shortage of these; you only had to look at their clothes – to have to face the expense of a removal. Nor could it have been out of arrogance or for pleasure that they shared their none too spacious room with a stranger. So as I stood in my doorway smoking my evening pipe and heard them discussing what to do with their mastiff it was perhaps not only my interest in the dog that made me listen somewhat too sympathetically; and on having thus been drawn into the conversation and asked for my opinion, I declared that I was prepared to take the mastiff in. It seemed that in these new circumstances they could no longer afford such a costly luxury, for that is what a mastiff undoubtedly is; so they agreed to hand him over to me.

  I admit that I was not dissatisfied with the way things had turned out, even if a certain ruthlessness had been involved. Especially as I have always been convinced that if one lets things take their course without interfering while at the same time snapping up any chances that may occur, things are bound to take care of themselves.

  It was not altogether easy for me to move the mastiff into my room. He resisted with all his might, though without making a sound or taking his eye off me. A stout leather strap which I had bought a week earlier did yeoman service now.

  The mastiff was not a pleasant sight. I kept him tied to the leg of my bed, and as long as I was in the room he always skulked under the bed, and whenever I went near him, or even when I went to bed, his whole body trembled. When I was out – or, more precisely, when I was watching him through the keyhole, he padded restlessly up and down in front of the bed, keeping as far away from it as the strap, which was not too long, permitted. For dog-lovers I would add that the tenacious fable about dogs mourning lost masters seems to be boloney. Though this rumour has been all too readily accepted, it is just another example of man’s vanity. I could see no sign of mourning in my mastiff.

  The fact that he would not eat anything was due to altogether different and, for me, unflattering reasons. He would take nothing from my hand. For three days he dumbly refused to look at the bones I bought for him, and on the third day he even scorned a piece of best beef. He ate none of the things I put down for him; nor did he eat anything I had touched.

  I confess that this caused me embarrassment (he got visibly thinner and began to drag his feet as he padded round). In moments of anger I thought I mi
ght execute him simply by handing him food that he would not eat. But I realised in cooler moments that mere violence solves nothing.

  So I brought home a young man I knew casually, a mechanic from the car factory, so that he could give him something to eat. Once I had got the man in my room it suddenly seemed uncommonly difficult to initiate him, and the conversation, in spite of my lemonade and cigarettes, moved haltingly. He was an unkempt fellow of poor breeding with rather too soft teeth and watery red hair. It was hard to stomach watching him sitting on my table, and listening to him talk almost made you sick. In addition to which he had a habit of laying hold of you constantly as he talked, which is something I cannot stand. After that he sensed that there was something wrong, and his malice knew no bounds. He poked slyly at the mastiff with his toe, talked hypocritically for a while as if he knew nothing, noticed my perplexity and finally blackmailed me, not without forcing me to go into a full explanation, into begging him to give the dog something to eat. (It is of course equally possible that he noticed nothing.)

  He complied in the most tactless fashion, scolding the mastiff and reproaching him for his unloving attitude to me. The dog was fed in this fashion every evening for two weeks.

  Oddly enough I could never abandon my vague hope, and it took an earthquake to convince me of the planet’s firm and unalterable attitude towards me. On June 23rd, 1912 the San Francisco earthquake took place. On that day many people in the trembling city lost their lives. All I lost was a suit, a pair of boots and some household equipment, and I might have forgotten the disaster more easily than most; but it was not to be. Amid the tremors which were getting more and more violent, in a house which was on fire, I stood in my shirt-tails looking straight into the eye of the implacable mastiff whose backside was trapped in a wall that had collapsed; then, as I went to his assistance, I saw in his lack-lustre eyes an indescribable fear of me, his saviour, and as I reached out to free him, he snapped at me.