Despair (5 page)

On coming back from Prague to Berlin, I found Lydia in the kitchen engaged in beating an egg in a glass—“goggle-moggle,” we called it. “Throaty aches,” she said in a childish voice; then put down the glass upon the edge of the stove, wiped her yellow lips with the back of her wrist and proceeded to kiss my hand. She had on a pink frock, pinkish stockings, dilapidated slippers. The evening sun checkered the kitchen. Again she started to turn the spoon in the thick yellow stuff, grains of sugar crunched slightly, it was still clammy, the spoon did not move smoothly with the velvety ovality that was required. On the stove lay open a battered book. There was a note scribbled in the margin by some person unknown, with a blunt pencil: “Sad, but true” followed by three exclamation marks with their respective dots skidding. I perused the phrase that had appealed so much to one of my wife’s predecessors: “Love thy neighbor,” said Sir Reginald, “is nowadays not quoted on the stock exchange of human relations.”

“Well—had a good trip?” asked Lydia as she went on energetically turning the handle, with the box-part held firm between her knees. The coffee beans crackled, richly odorous; the mill was still working with a rumbling and creaking effort; then came an easing, a yielding; gone all resistance; empty.

I have got muddled somehow. As in a dream. She was making that goggle-moggle—not coffee.

“Could have been worse,” I said, referring to the trip. “And you, how are you getting on?”

Why did I not tell her of my incredible adventure? I, who would fake wonders for her by the million, seemed not to dare, with those polluted lips of mine, tell her of a wonder that was real. Or maybe something else withheld me. An author does not show people his first draft; a child in the womb is not referred to as Tiny Tom or Belle; a savage refrains from naming objects of mysterious import and uncertain temper; Lydia herself disliked my reading a book she had not yet finished.

For several days I remained oppressed by that meeting. It oddly disturbed me to think that all the time my double was trudging along roads unknown to me, and that he was underfed and cold and wet—and perhaps had caught a chill. I longed for him to find work: it would have been sweeter to know that he were snug and warm—or at least safe in prison. All the same it was not at all my intention to undertake any such measures as might improve his circumstances. I was not in the least keen to pay for his upkeep, and it would have been impossible to find him a job in Berlin, swarming as it was with ragamuffins. Indeed, to be quite frank, I found it somehow preferable to hold him at a certain distance from me as though any proximity would have broken the spell of our likeness. From time to time I might send him a little money lest he should slip and perish in the course of his far wanderings and thus cease to be my faithful representative, a live circulating copy of my face.… Kind but idle thoughts, for the man had no permanent address. So let us tarry
(thought I) until, on a certain autumn day, he calls at that village post office somewhere in Saxony.

May passed, and in my mind the memory of Felix healed up. I note for my own pleasure the smooth run of that sentence: the banal narratory tone of the first two words, and then that long sigh of imbecile contentment. Sensation lovers, however, might be interested to observe that, generally speaking, the term “heal up” is employed only when alluding to wounds. But this is only mentioned in passing; no harm meant. Now there is something else I should like to note—namely, that writing with me has become an easier matter: my tale has gained impetus. I have now boarded that bus (mentioned at the beginning), and, what is more, I have a comfortable window seat. And thus, too, I used to drive to my office, before I acquired the car.

That summer it had to work pretty hard, the shiny blue little Icarus. Yes, I was quite taken by my new toy. Lydia and I would often buzz away for the whole day to the country. We always took with us that cousin of hers called Ardalion, who was a painter: a cheery soul, but a rotten painter. By all accounts he was as poor as a sparrow. If people did have their portraits done by him, it was sheer charity on their part, or weakness of character (the man could be hideously insistent). From me, and probably also from Lydia, he used to borrow small cash; and of course he contrived to stay for dinner. He was always behind with his rent, and when he did pay it, he paid it in kind. In still life to be precise … square apples on a slanting cloth, or phallic tulips in a leaning vase. All this his landlady would frame at her own cost, so that her dining room made one think of an avant-garde, Philistine exhibition. He fed at a little Russian restaurant which, he said, he had once “slapped up” (meaning that he had decorated
its walls); he used an even richer expression, for he hailed from Moscow, where people are fond of waggish slang full of lush trivialities (I shall not attempt to render it). The funny part was, that in spite of his poverty, he had somehow managed to purchase a piece of ground, a three hours’ drive from Berlin—that is, he had somehow managed to make a down payment of a hundred marks, and did not bother about the rest; in fact, never meant to disgorge another penny, as he considered that the land, fertilized by his first payment, was henceforth his own till doomsday. It measured, that land, about two and a half tennis courts in length, and abutted on a rather beautiful little lake. A Y-stemmed couple of inseparable birches grew there (or a couple of couples, if you counted their reflections); also several black-alder bushes; a little farther off stood five pine trees and still farther inland one came upon a patch of heather, courtesy of the surrounding wood. The ground was not fenced—there had not been money enough for that. I strongly suspected Ardalion of waiting for the two adjacent allotments to get fenced first, which would automatically legitimate the boundaries of his property and give him an enclosure gratis; but the neighboring bits were still unsold. On the shores of that lake business was slack, the place being damp, mosquito infested, and far from the village; then also there was no road connecting it with the highway, and nobody knew when that road would be made.

It was, I remember, on a Sunday morning in mid-June that, yielding to Ardalion’s rapturous persuasions, we went there for the first time. On our way we stopped to pick up the fellow. Long did I keep toot-tooting, with my eyes fixed on his window. That window slept soundly. Lydia put her hands to her mouth and cried out in a trumpet voice: “Ar-dally-o-o!” In one of the lower windows, just above the
signboard of a pub (which, by its look, somehow suggested that Ardalion owed money there) a curtain was dashed aside furiously and a Bismarck-like worthy in frogged dressing gown glanced out with a real trumpet in his hand.

Leaving Lydia in the car, which by now had stopped throbbing, I went up to arouse Ardalion. I found him asleep. He slept in his one-piece bathing suit. Rolling out of bed, he proceeded with silent rapidity to slip on sandals, a blue shirt, and flannel trousers; then he snatched up a briefcase (with a suspicious lump in its cheek) and we went down. A solemn and sleepy expression did not exactly add charm to his fat-nosed face. He was put in the rumble seat.

I did not know the way. He said he knew it as well as he knew his Pater Noster. No sooner had we left Berlin than we went astray. The rest of our drive consisted of making inquiries.

“A glad sight for a landowner!” exclaimed Ardalion, when about noon we passed Koenigsdorf and then sped along the stretch of road he knew. “I shall tell you when to turn. Hail, hail, my ancient trees!”

“Don’t play the fool, Ardy dear,” said Lydia placidly.

On either side there stretched rough wasteland, the sand-and-heather variety, with a sprinkling of young pines. Then, farther on, the country changed a little; we had now an ordinary field on our right, darkly bordered at some distance by a forest. Ardalion began to fuss anew. On the right-hand side of the highway a bright yellow post grew up and at that spot there branched out at right angles a scarcely discernible road, the ghost of some obsolete road, which presently expired among burdocks and oatgrass.

“This is the turning,” said Ardalion grandly and then, with
a sudden grunt, pitched forward into me, for I had put on the brakes.

You smile, gentle reader? And indeed, why should you not smile? A pleasant summer day and a peaceful countryside; a good-natured fool of an artist and a roadside post.… That yellow post.… Erected by the man selling the allotments, sticking up in brilliant solitude, an errant brother of those other painted posts, which, seventeen kilometers farther toward the village of Waldau, stood sentinel over more tempting and expensive acres, that particular landmark subsequently became a fixed idea with me. Cut out clearly in yellow, amid a diffuse landscape, it stood up in my dreams. By its position my fancies found their bearings. All my thoughts reverted to it. It shone, a faithful beacon, in the darkness of my speculations. I have the feeling today that I
recognized
it, when seeing it for the first time: familiar to me as a thing of the future. Perhaps I am mistaken; perhaps the glance I gave it was quite an indifferent one, my sole concern being not to scrape the mudguard against it while turning; but all the same, today as I recall it, I cannot separate that first acquaintanceship from its mature development.

The road, as already mentioned, lost itself, faded away; the car creaked crossly, as it bounced on the bumpy ground; I stopped it and shrugged my shoulders.

Lydia said: “I suggest, Ardy dear, we push on to Waldau instead; you said there was a large lake there and a café or something.”

“That’s out of the question,” retorted Ardalion excitedly. “Firstly, because the café is only just being planned, and secondly, because I have a lake too. Come on, my dear fellow,” he continued, turning to me, “make the old bus move, you won’t be sorry.”

In front of us, on higher ground, at a distance of some three hundred feet, a pine forest began. I looked at it and … well, I can swear that I felt as if I had known it already. Yes, that’s it, now I am getting it clear—I certainly did have that queer sensation; it has not been added as an aftertouch. And that yellow post … How meaningly it looked at me, when I glanced back—as if it were saying: “I am here, I am at your service.…” And those pines facing me, with their bark resembling reddish snakeskin drawn on tight, and their green fur which the wind was stroking the wrong way; and that bare birch tree on the forest’s edge (now, why did I write “bare”? It was not winter yet, winter was still remote), and the day so balmy and almost cloudless, and the little stammering crickets zealously trying to say something beginning with z.… Yes, it all meant something—no mistake.

“May I ask,
where
you want me to move? I can’t see any road.”

“Oh, don’t be so particular,” said Ardalion. “Go ahead, old son. Why, yes, straight on. There, where you see the break. We can just manage it, and once in the wood, it’s quite a short run to my place.”

“Hadn’t we better get out and walk?” proposed Lydia.

“Right you are,” I replied, “nobody would dream of stealing a new car abandoned here.”

“Yes, much too risky,” she admitted at once, “but couldn’t you two go along” (Ardalion groaned), “let him show you his place while I wait for you here and then we can proceed to Waldau and swim in the lake and sit in the café?”

“How beastly of you,” said Ardalion with great feeling. “Can’t you see that I wanted to welcome you on my own land? There were some nice surprises in store for you. I am now very hurt.”

I started the car, saying as I did so: “Well, if we smash it you pay for repairs.”

The jolts made me jump in my seat, beside me Lydia jumped, behind us Ardalion jumped and kept speaking: “We shall soon (bump) get into the wood (bump) and then (bump-bump) the heather will make it easier (bump).”

We did get in. First of all we stuck in deep sand, the motor roared, the wheels kicked; at last we wrenched ourselves free; then branches came brushing against the car’s body, scratching its paint. Some sort of path did finally show itself, now getting smothered in a dry crackle of heather, now emerging again to meander between the close-set trunks.

“More to the right,” said Ardalion, “a little more to the right. Well, what d’you say to the smell of the pines? Gorgeous, eh? I told you so. Absolutely gorgeous. You may stop here while I go investigating.”

He got out and marched away with, at every step, an inspired waggle of his hindquarters.

“Hey, I’m coming too,” cried Lydia, but he was going full sail and presently the dense undergrowth hid him.

The engine clicked a little and was still.

“What a creepy spot,” said Lydia. “Really, I’d be afraid to stay here all by myself. One could get robbed, murdered—anything.…”

A lonely spot, quite so! The pines soughed gently, snow lay about, with bald patches of soil showing black. What nonsense! How could there be snow in June? Ought to be crossed out, were it not wicked to erase; for the real author is not I, but my impatient memory. Understand it just as you please; it is none of
my
business. And the yellow post had a skullcap of snow too. Thus the future shimmers through the past. But enough, let that summer day be in focus again: spotty sunlight;
shadows of branches across the blue car; a pine cone upon the footboard, where some day the most unexpected of objects will stand; a shaving brush.

“Is it Tuesday that they are coming?” asked Lydia.

I replied: “No, Wednesday night.”

A silence.

“I do only hope,” said my wife, “they don’t bring it with them as last time.”

“And even if they do … Why should you bother?”

A silence. Small blue butterflies settling on thyme.

“I say, Hermann, are you quite certain it was Wednesday night?”

(Is the hidden sense worth disclosing? We were talking of trifles, alluding to some people we knew, to their dog, a vicious little creature, which engaged the attention of all present at parties; Lydia only cared for “large dogs with pedigrees”; pronouncing “pedigrees” made her nostrils quiver.)

“Why doesn’t he come back?” she said. “He’s sure to have lost himself.”