Chapter 4

For six months I have been living in the house. None of the inhabitants has noticed anything. I am careful.

The white suit brings me luck. I earn enough. And I have begun to save; for I feel that one's powers decline. I am tired frequently; sometimes I have pain. I shall also become fat and old. I don't like to put make-up on-I am no longer being supervised. Kuno Kohn has made me free. I am thankful to him.

Kuno Kohn is repugnant; he has a hunchback. His hair is the color of brass, his face is beardless, and worn with furrows. His eyes seem old, encircled with shadows. A scar, like a stream of rain, runs from his nose. One of his legs is swollen. Kuno Kohn said once that he has an abscess in the bone.

The first meeting had been strange:

It was raining. The streets were wet and dirty. I stood under a street lamp and looked at my wet clothes. When the wind blew, I was chilled. My feet ached in my shoes.

Few people were on the street. Most of them on the other side. Protected by the trees. With their coat collars up. With the hat crooked over the forehead. No one was watching me; I was standing there, sad. The gravel crunched beneath me. Hard and sudden, so that I cried out. A

policeman came by, hands behind his back. He moved slowly. He looked at me suspiciously, proud of his authority. With a stark look, he felt that he was master. He moved further on. I laughed scornfully; he did not look back. The policeman despised me.

I yawned: it had become late.--Along came a man who was small and deformed. He stopped when he saw me. He had unhappy eyes; on his lips was an embarrassed smile. He hid part of his face behind scrawny fingers. And he rubbed his right eye-lid, like someone ashamed of himself. And he coughed slightly... I went up close to him, so that he felt me. He said: "Well--: I said: "Come, little one." He said: "I'm actually homosexual."

And he took my hand. And kissed with cold lips.

Mabel Meier

It was late. I heard the sounds of trucks passing frequently. In the distance I saw people. On a corner two people were standing who... felt ashamed as I drew near.

Girls came, who were late. A few, who wanted to earn money. I saw the tall whore, who worked this area every night. I recognized her by her slip.

A detective was watching me. In front of me a woman was walking, who stood still often and wailing.

I did not think about it. I looked up at the stars and found nothing to wish for. I looked at myself with indifference, like a foreign object. I shook my head, that the old man was walking alone so late... and murmured to the stars.. and it's so strange.

I met a woman who said: "Ah--" I said: "may I accompany you?" The woman said: "Please." It was quite dark.

We went along together; the woman said that her name was Meier; but her first name was Mieze. She lived with relatives; they employed a doorman. In addition, she sang in a chorus.

The woman was neither beautiful nor young, but she seemed approachable. I had no reason to be shy.

In front of the house in which the woman lived we stopped.

I suggested that we look for a hotel. The woman was not averse; she said: "No-" I said: "Why?" The woman said: "Papa" I said: "The you don't want--" A smile came over the woman's face. She looked at a street lamp--

Siegmund Simon

Nine doctors claim that Samuel Simon is suffering from delusions. I am of the same opinion.

For 29 years I have been in the mental institute. They are friendly to me. I can do what I want. When it's warm, I go into the garden and listen to the hours die. When it is cold, I sit at the window and let my mind drift towards the sky. Often I watch the people, when they call or work or are sad... I am glad that I am far away. I do not miss life. I am glad if no one does anything to me or wants anything from me. I don't envy people.

Nine times a year my pale wife brings me flowers. My son Siegmund never comes. The last time I saw him was when I was buried. On my 49th birthday-I lay in a plain wooden coffin. I was placed on a wagon-like catafalque. Nine pall-bearers dressed in black walked beside me. Behind me was the pastor, Leopold Lehmann, and at his side my wife Frieda and my nineteen-year-old son Siegmund. Behind them were a few relatives, who were contented, and were speaking about the plague of caterpillars.

The sun cast warm light. Wind blew from time to time. It crawled over the gravel, tickling the women's breasts and calves. We stopped before the open grave. The coffin was lowered, and a few formalities and

prayers were taken care of. Then the pastor, Leopold Lehmann, began, at the behest and at the expense of my wife, to deliver a memorial speech. He said:

"Dear sisters and brothers! Once again a kindly fate has robbed us of the life of a dear person. In grief we stand at the grave of the departed and remember him sadly."

My son Siegmund bit his lips. The pastor said:

"The earth, which has singled out the body so that it might lead its own life for a short while, has taken it back into the bosom of the mother. A noble man has gone home--"

A fit of laughter overcame my son Siegmund. His face became red and serious... He laughed until he was gasping.

My wife shrieked.

A pall-bearer dropped a bottle of whiskey, which broke on the coffin. The pall-bearer regretfully cast his eyes down.

The relatives were outraged. They were ashamed of my son Siegmund. Some women cried into genuine lace handkerchiefs.

I was completely still.

The pastor said:

"If one does not how to behave, he should not come to a burial--Amen."

He threw some sand over the broken bottle of whisky. And left. Proud. Offended. The pastor. Leopold Lehmann.

My son Siegmund cleaned his fingernails.

The Friend

I love the dead days. They have no glow; they are colorless and filled with yearning. The houses stand like scenery before the grey clouds; the people move as though in a film: in the evening they move no differently from the way they moved in the morning. All things are more ponderous. And my room seems as though someone has died in it.

Whenever these days occur, a mindless desire to work grows irresistibly in me. I carry out my daily tasks as though as I were performing a mass. And I lose myself while doing so. Almost the way dreamers have lost themselves. But sometimes I notice that I have become motionless and inwardly rigid.

Then I become very alert, and I can no longer do tasks. I go to the window, where I have wonderful thoughts. But usually they occured only at night.

I feel out of place in all matters. They press upon me as though they don't know me: the streets and the people and the doors to the houses and the thousand movements. Wherever I look I become confused.

My little death torments me; there were many, greater deaths. And that I am alone. And that everywhere something inconceivable is threatening. And that I do not find my way.. And all the remaining sadnesses, for which there is no doctor, and which should not be revealed. Each must submit to them alone, and in his own way. Talking about them is ridiculous, but many die of them. I am afraid that I am so at odds with myself and so powerless. Until memories come. Unbidden. But kind. From somewhere. They numb me.

I smile when I find a child crying or the mother's death, which was hideous and is unspeakable, or the other bloody delights, dear things. I smile when the eyes of my friend suddenly come to life in the silky shadows, that they shine as though out of a haze, and they reveal their most inner secrets. No one has said it to me, and you will call me a fool... but I know that his death has always been in the eyes, the way for someone else it is in the lungs or in the spinal cord...

His eyes were miserable and lost and painfully hopeless, so that people laughed when he looked at them. He was ashamed of his eyes, as if they betrayed sinful adventures, and he hid them under yellowed lids. But he felt how he was stared at when he entered someplace where he was not expected. Or he sat down where his presence needed no explanation. He watched in an exaggerated manner, like a petitioner. Coughed and held his hand in front of his mouth, drew his cheeks in and pushed one of them outward with his tongue. Was embarrassed. Unhappy. Would have preferred to have been alone... in the dark.

Children bent their heads when his gaze caught their eyes. And turned red. And grinned shyly and silently. Women giggled, and looked innocuous, and slapped each other on the thigh or on the bare shoulders and kissed their ravaged men. In the night they lay awake and their thoughts were white hot. But the young girls avoided him.

Konrad Krause

Not once during the night do I have rest here. Often a hand or a word tears me from sleep. Because everything is dark, I often do not know in the morning who was with me.

I must get up early, to clean the clothes and polish the boots. My legs are heavy, and my eyes are still very weary. But the young masters are hard when I neglect something, and cruel. But at night they are friendly and caress me as though I were a grand lady.

Only old Mr. Konrad Krause is good during the day as well. When he wants something, he speaks without humiliating me; and something in the sound of his voice makes me happy. He does not permit anything nasty to be said about me in his presence. I like him very much.

Recently I had a laugh over him. I was awoken by noise coming from the corridor outside my room. It was a conversation. I detected two voices: I missed much of what one said, for it whispered; what I caught was young and rough. One I caught without trying; clear as if it were a body. I felt that it was too fat and had wrinkles.

From the rough voice I heard: "Do you also want to go to her, father?"

From the fat voice I heard, "Go first, my son--"

When Mr. Heinz came into the room, he made a frightened sound, because I was laughing so much. And then he had to sneeze...

But I will soon forget this. I can no longer even remember when the old Mr. Konrad Krause said he liked me. That was still nicer.

I only remember that the writing-table at which he sat was already dark when I brought the tea. He asked who was in the house; I said: "No one"--and wanted to pour the tea.. But he pointed to his thigh and said: "sit down"--I said: "If I may"--and I sat down. He said: "Put the teapot on the writing-table." I did that. And then we looked at each other ardently, but I was very bashful. Suddenly he took my hand and pressed it to his stomach. He said: "Beloved."

We trembled violently.

The Family

The family all come together once every month. The women with the children meet in the afternoon.

Coffee is drunk. The children are sent away. The should play. They must not hear everything.

But the women whisper. Their faces show concern. They are speaking of someone who is very sick.

At twilight they tell stories about ghosts and miraculous cures. They become frightened. They call the children. They press the children to their breasts.

Then fruit is eaten.

The men come. Conversations about hair styles, about business. And so on. The conversation moves haltingly. Suddenly stops, like a defective clock. Fear that it will stop entirely. A young girl blushes-But at one point everything is still. It feels suffocating. It feels unsafe, like in a swing, helpless, like in a slide... it feels ridiculous. One hears something like the wind sweeping across the roofs. Rain beats against the grey windows.

Still silence.

There-Is it really so bad... with him--how should it turn out... People avoid each other's eyes.

Leopold Lehmann

I am an employee of a bank. Because I have no patron, and I am not especially hard-working, I am not getting ahead. For more than 30 years I have been shifting the same kind of papers around in the same department. For this reason I am considered conscientious.

For the last six months I have had a new assistant. His name is Leopold Lehmann. He knows everything better than I. He is the nephew of the deputy director. He calls himself a trainee. He likes to hear himself talk. Most of all he likes to talk about himself. As a result, I know the story of his life.

Leopold Lehmann, as he emphasizes, was drawn in a clumsy manner from the womb with a forceps. His head is misshapen, like a noodle. His nose also. He has gone through the usual illnesses. He enjoys a complicated form of syphillis. It has eaten holes the size of fists in Lehmann's body.

Leopold Lehmann wishes to give up his duties in the bank, to study theology. I believe that he has already given notice.

Lehmann associates exclusively with theologians and with me. And with the deputy director.

He has sclerosis of the spinal cord.

Conversation about Legs

When I was sitting in the coupé, the gentleman opposite me said:

"Nobody can step on your toes."

I said: "How so?"

The gentleman said: "You have no legs."

I said: "Is it noticeable?"

The gentleman said: "Of course."

I took my legs out of my backpack. I had wrapped them in tissue paper. And taken them with me as a memento.

The gentleman said: "What is that?"

I said: "my legs."

The gentleman said: "You have a leg up and yet get nowhere."

I said: "Unfortunately."

After a pause the gentleman said: "What do you think you’re really going to do without legs?"

I said: "I haven’t racked my brain much about that yet."

The gentleman said: "Without legs even committing suicide is difficult."

I said: "Yet that’s a bad joke."

The gentleman said: "Not at all. If you want to hang yourself, first you’ve got to get up on the window sill. And who will open the gas jet for you if you want to poison yourself? You could only buy a revolver secretly through a servant. But suppose the shot misses? To drown yourself you’ve got to take an automobile and have yourself carried down to the river on a stretcher by two attendants who have to haul you to the far bank."

I said: "That’s for me to worry about."

The gentleman said: "You’re wrong, I’ve been thinking since you’ve been siting here how one might get rid of you. Do you think that a man without legs makes a sympathetic picture? Has the right to live? On the contrary, you create a terrible disturbance for the aesthetic feelings of your fellow human beings."

I said: "I am a full professor of ethics and aesthetics at the university. May I introduce myself?"

The gentleman said: "How are you going to do that? Clearly you cannot imagine how impossible you are, in your condition."

I looked sadly at my stumps.

II

Soon the lady opposite me said:

"To have no legs must be a very odd feeling."

I said: "Yes."

The lady said: "I would not like to touch a man who had no legs."

I said: "I am very clean."

The lady said: "I must overcome a great erotic disgust to speak with you, not to mention looking at you."

I said: "Really..."

The lady said: "I don’t believe that you are a criminal. You might be a wise and, in your original condition, nice person. But I could not, with the best will in the world, have relations with you, because you have no legs."

I said: "One gets used to everything."

The lady said: "That a man has no legs causes a naturally sensitive woman to feel an inexplicable, profound terror. As though you had committed a disgusting sin."

I said: "But I am innocent. I lost one leg in the excitement of assuming my professorial chair for the first time, the other I lost when, sunk in thought, I found that important aesthetic law which led to basic changes in our discipline."

The lady said: "What is the name of that law?"

I said: "The law says: everything depends on the structure of the soul and the mind. If soul and mind are noble, a body must be considered beautiful, no matter how humped and misshapen it may be."

The lady ostentatiously lifted her dress and revealed, right up to the top of her thigh, sheathed sumptuously in silk, wonderful legs, that towered, like branches, from her ripe body.

At the same time the lady finally said: "You may be right, although one might as easily argue the opposite. In any case, a person with legs is totally different from one without them."

Then, striding proudly away, she left me sitting there.

Savior of the theater

Theaters should stop competing with the cinema. By doing so, they are thereby achieving –--rejoice, friends of the theater – the opposite of what they want: they are perishing.

The best way for these theaters to maintain themselves is to make concessions to the cinema; they make neither concessions in the selection of plays, nor in scope. This can be explained. What movies – giving in to the instincts of the crowd – offer can never be produced in the same dimensions and amount by theater, bound as it is by its limits. Shaking its head, the public notices the helpless effort. And runs to the movies. For what should bind the public most to the theater: art, is for the most part shamefully neglected. (As when makers of felt hats had the idea, when straw hats were worn by everyone, to bring to the market felt hats shaped and colored like straw hats.)

Before movies came along, the many second-class theaters were by far a much greater danger to the theater. Characteristically organizations of this kind are threatened most by movies. Some will remain for a while, because of the skill of their directors or through other accidents. Second-class theater undoubtedly will die out in a short time. The public, which found this sort of thing to their taste, has, in the movies, a much more luxurious substitute: death and homicide in abundance. Comedy until you burst. Juicy melodrama. And the movie actor with his heavy-handed emphases – for example, in a tragic, many-colored story of adultery (in period costumes) – surpasses the hammy Hamlet in heart-gripping effect.

Theaters that want to survive are compelled to think again about what they are doing. Directors must cultivate the pure art of theater. Actors – in contrast to "filmers", or better still "ciners" or "cinekers" – to maintain their reputations, must abandon all tricks and gimmicks. The public that goes to the theater in spite of movies is discriminating and can’t be taken in.

There cannot be too many movies. As a member of the cultural police I would order that half a dozen be opened on every street.

The more people rush into the movies, the more a part of the fraud will become tiresome. Of the hundred thousands who throng the movies, a few hundred every year will return once more to the theater.

The number of theaters in the future will be smaller, but their average quality will be disproportionately better. The incompetent directors, dramatists, and other squabblers, who until now were parasites on the theater, will find in movie-making a place more suited to their capabilities. The many mediocre and bad actors who now help keep prices down and block the way will become wonderful cinikers. A talented shoemaker in the future will not go to theater schools but to film schools. Lispers, cripples, hunchbacks, mutes, and similar handicapped mimes will be able, more easily and more happily, to find relief in the movies.

(The cinema of boundless possibilities…)

But the theater, thanks to the movies free of hindering ballast and harmful influences, will have to return to the sacred dramatic art.

CHAPTER FROM A FRAGMENTARY NOVEL translated by Harry Radford

Doctor Bryller did become a senior teacher after all. A furious enemy of his had predicted such a destiny years ago, in the out-of-date periodical "The Other A". At that time he was deeply distressed about this insight of his enemy, the truth of which, after thinking intensely about it, he could not deny. He wrote an intemperate article which was not accepted for publication anywhere. And one evening he got a little drunk on French sparkling wine, to kill the innate fear which prevented him from beating up his enemy. But his cowardice did not leave him, even in drunkenness. Unspeakably unhappy, he gave up the idea of taking revenge.

Now in earnest he began to live a solitary and transfigured life. He let this be known in an in flammatory manner, just as he had so often done when announcing the agenda of a new trend in art. And with the profoundest solemnity, as though he were at an important funeral. He even exploited his failure in order to feel superior. In point of fact, he lived hardly differently than before. The only change was that he had actually become more hopeless in an emotional sense. Now he had to calm himself with the thought: Even if I could achieve what I wanted to, I would achieve nothing. While previously his line of thinking ran: Unfortunately it is indeed true that I can achieve nothing, but what I can achieve is rather good.

Practically minded as Berthold Bryller was in certain ways, he was able to cast his weaknesses in common human terms, so that the despair, which at first had revealed itself in hysterical attacks of a special kind, soon gave way--except in rare conditions--to a feeling of lofty indifference. He still wrote his impudent and careless letters, which did him considerable harm; he published particularly clever, slightly demented essays in the few journals with whose editors he didn't happen to be quarreling with; he founded both clubs which then expelled him, and periodicals in which he was attacked. Everywhere, and in other ways, he continued to make himself impossible even by his very presence. The uninitiated might interpret his absence from the Café Klößchen as a sign of his inward transformation, if it were not for a poster fixed to the door of the Cafe:

No admittance to Bryller!

which suggested that an argument with the manager was the reason for his absence.

But gradually the hopelessness of his literary existence became inescapable to Doctor Bryller, who was certainly no idiot. In addition, his funds for the foreseeable future were exhausted. So, incapable of killing himself if it were to become necessary, he had to focus his energy on working to earn a living. His writing activity was financially unsuccessful. He would not have the heart to take a permanent literary job--something like an editorship--aside from the fact that no one would take him. What other option did he have but to use the rest of his money to continue his interrupted university training, take the necessary state examinations, and then find himself a secure and pleasant position as a senior teacher. In point of fact, this profession seemed thoroughly comfortable to him. Convinced of the incorrigibility of human imperfection, which he had experienced first hand, and utterly convinced of the complete uselessness of physical and intellectual striving, he gladly gave free rein to any and all base impulse. He could satisfy his cravings for power, his other ambitions, even his erotic needs, most readily as a senior teacher.