Jarmila (6 page)

T
HE SHIP
, the
Manhattan,
set sail without my friend and his child. I had grown very fond of him, and so I dared one last attempt. I advised him to return the child to his parents. Perhaps it was fear of the voyage, so overwhelming in the eyes of a child, that had made Jaroslaus fall ill or compelled him to play his little games. If the lawful father got the child unharmed, he might be lenient. I hoped he would then allow the natural father to see the child from time to time, to give him presents and so forth. I reminded my friend he had destroyed the old man’s happiness. My friend had felt sorry for him even back in the days when he still had a wife and child. Now with his wife dead and his child gone, what was left for the poor, old, cuckolded husband but despair? None of this moved my friend. His love was unrelenting. He didn’t want to share. He couldn’t understand me and became even colder towards me. Once he swept the old, abandoned watch, the cause of our friendship, off my desk. Jaroslaus, polite as ever, bent down to pick it up, wiping the dust from its face, a dust-trap without the glass. His father ignored me. He was sleeping badly at night. The child was acting strangely. He refused to
leave the apartment. If it was sunny he claimed it was too hot, if there was the slightest breeze, it was too cold. His father always let him have his way. He also didn’t want to leave the apartment, nor his beloved child. He had traded his tickets for a ship with a later departure date. Instead he busied himself with watch repairs that the concierge, eager-to-please, commissioned from the various lodgers in the building. His prices were very cheap and he worked very efficiently. His charming child looked over his shoulder with great interest and tried to follow everything his talented father did.

It was on one of those days when I was on my balcony that I saw a peculiar group approaching the building. Flanked by two policemen was a man who seemed familiar, but I was slow to recognise him. It was the old man, grey-haired no longer, but white, and his back even more crooked than in Prague. Yet his head with its thick white hair was thrust forward determinedly like a buffalo’s. Behind him and next to a well-dressed man in civilian garb, was his wife. I ran back to the room where my friend was fully immersed in his work and shook him by the shoulder. “You’ve got to leave right now,” I shouted at him. “The people from Prague are here. I saw them from the balcony: the old man, his wife, the police.” He looked at me, his expression vacant.

“That’s impossible,” he said, “No one knows I am here.”

“Damned fool,” I cried out passionately. “What are you waiting for? Run down the stairs, past the lot of them, pull your hat low over your face, they won’t recognise you, they haven’t seen you since the fire, wait for me, wait for me …”—I stopped myself for I’d noticed the child, his happy eyes observing us. I whispered an address into the ear of my friend,
pushing
money into his hand, pressing an old hat with a wide brim over his forehead. But he didn’t budge. He held tight to the table top. All my labours were in vain. There was a hammering at the door, the child darted out, opened it himself, and we heard his silvery voice, obviously beside himself with delight. Gone was the polite, muted ‘
Non Kohoutek, oui Papa
!’ Now from deep in his chest he cried: “
Tatínek! Maminka!
Father! Mother!” The lawful parents approached the
natural
father. The child was clinging to the neck of his father, the old, dried-up stepmother was patting him affectionately on his back. All three were crying. My friend could still have escaped. But he stayed. Perhaps he was right to for what was his life without Jarmila and his child? And yet I would have given anything to spare him the sight of the police officer holding the card his son had written in his beautiful school-boy’s script to the old man (obviously with the money I had given him for the ice-cream). It gave our address and his assurance that, come what may he would wait for
Tatínek
and
Maminka
and they shouldn’t worry about him. And he had waited. The old man was so happy to see the child again that he said nothing to Bedřich. He didn’t even look at him.

My friend was arrested. I was threatened with various charges. Supposedly I was an accomplice to kidnapping. My friend attempted to clear my name. In Czech he told the man in civilian clothes, a civil servant from the Czech consulate, that I was
innocent
and should be left in peace. I will never forget his look—directed not at me, nor at his child, nor at his former bride, nor at his old enemy—but at the wretched old watch. The woman took me to one side. I could see her happiness wasn’t as absolute as that of the old man and Jaroslaus. Perhaps some warm
feelings
remained for her old love. Later I heard that she had protected my friend as far as possible. She had prevented the old man from immediately pursuing Bedřich, correctly surmising that Jaroslaus felt a strong bond to them and would return. The police, of course, had been informed straight away, but had not been given any details. All that was known was a young man had collected the child from school. What made the child go with him? Why had the child betrayed his
kidnapper?
He seemed so open and honest, and yet his natural father hadn’t been able to read him!

The watchmaker held out his hand to me in
farewell
. 
I squeezed it tightly and promised I would help him. I knew someone who was friends with a famous defence lawyer. For someone with a stable
temperament
all would not have been lost. But for him it was. I must confess that even now I did not fully
understand
him. He appeared to be transfixed by the watch? I gave it to him. I was able to tell the police officer that its glass was missing—and so he was allowed to take it, for even a desperate prisoner awaiting trial needs some sort of tool to sever his arteries. As for the small sharp spring inside … well, that didn’t enter my thoughts.

I was given permission to see the unfortunate man’s corpse. And yet was he really that unfortunate? As long as he had been a man he had known love. Perhaps it was better to die of love than of gout.

O
N THE
16
TH JUNE,
1940, as the German troops were invading Paris, the writer Ernst Weiss attempted to take his own life in the Hotel Trianon, rue de Vaugirard, and died in the early hours of the following day in the Hôpital Lariboisière: among the modest possessions in his small room were almost certainly several manuscripts. In all likelihood one of them would have been the next
instalment
of his last novel,
Der Verführer
(The Seducer), a project he had abandoned the previous year, as well as another almost finished novel banished to “the deepest drawer of my writing desk” in the spring of 1937, as he commented to Stefan Zweig. Among the unpublished texts apparently destroyed subsequent to the Ernst Weiss’ suicide, including the author’s diaries, was the tale of Jarmila.

Born in Brno
1
in 1882, the writer and medical doctor was only rediscovered in the sixties after a long period of oblivion: his posthumous novel
Der Augenzeuge
(The
Witness
) created a sensation in 1963. The title character of the work comes into contact with a psychopath named Hitler in his early days and unwittingly helps propel him on the path to power. Weiss had been part of Kafka’s circle in Prague and left for Berlin in the early twenties. There, after his expressionist phase, he made his name as a writer of novels such as
Männer in der Nacht
(Men In the Night),
Boetius
von Orlamünde
and
Georg Letham.
He left the German
capital
at the start of 1933 after the burning of the Reichstag, returned to Prague and then from April 1934 he lived in Paris, frequently changing address.

The author would already have encountered great difficulty in placing his writings with the few
remaining
publishers of exile literature in those early years of emigration, but by 1937 his position was even more precarious. In a letter to Stefan Zweig with whom he corresponded for decades, he described himself as a person who “is defending both his internal and
external
life with dwindling strength” (19th April, 1937). He also revealed he had almost “perished due to internal bleeding” and requested that Zweig—in view of his possible demise—act as “executor of his literary will”. Complaints about poor health—in 1935 Weiss was diagnosed as having a stomach ulcer—make a more
frequent
appearance in his letters from 1937 onwards. As do increasingly open references to his financial worries, articulated by his grateful acknowledgement of monies received from Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig and, from the beginning of 1938, the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom.

Regardless of all his troubles, even in those dark times of exile Ernst Weiss continued to be productive and,
defiant
in the face of adversity, refused to give up being a writer. During this period of attempted self-assertion, he was reliant on a few close friends, Stefan Zweig in
particular.
He was the one, unbeknown to him, to plant the seed that became the late work
Jarmila.
In mid-October, 1936, Weiss wrote a letter to his “dear friend” as he liked
to address Zweig, thanking him for the two volumes of novellas,
Kaleidoskop
(Kaleidoscope) and
Die Kette
(The Necklace) “which had brought him immense pleasure” and had “shown him that the old world we love isn’t yet dead after all”. He added in reference to those works by Zweig, comforting himself in a way: “Although
everything
now is hurtling towards the abyss with spine-chilling speed I have not lost a kind of hope and confidence”.

The story of Jarmila certainly conjures up this “old world we love” depicted in Zweig’s novellas: in a letter dated 16th June, 1937, Weiss told his writer-friend, who resided predominantly in London, all about it. He also informed Zweig he’d had to vacate his hotel room as the price had risen steeply, that he had moved in with friends, and that his expansive novel-in-progress,
Der
Verführer
(The Seducer), was making slow progress. “In the meantime”—so his missive continues—“inspired by your volume of novellas I have written a story myself, about sixty typed pages.”

It is not only out of reverence for Zweig, who was always ready to help and had been supporting him financially for quite some time, it is meant as genuine appreciation when Weiss measures his own new piece of prose against his friend’s talent for the novella:

“It is the first time I recognised”, so the letter goes, “what precision and subtlety and inner control this form requires and I admired you very much. May I send my piece along to you, not that there’s much likelihood it can be used in any way at the moment? It’s called
Jarmila
and, more or less ironically, it bears the subtitle: ‘A Love Story from Bohemia’.”

In the writings of Ernst Weiss that survive there is no further specific reference to this tale. Unless of course it is the “unpublished novella” mentioned by the author in a letter dated 18th August, 1939, to his erstwhile fellow countryman from Prague, F C Weisskopf, at that time an émigré in the United States. If that is the case, and it would fit the bill on several counts, then Weiss had sent his tale with its Slavonic milieu to the exile magazine
The Word
published in Moscow. It was never printed there, however. At least the author received a fee for its
omission
which enabled him “to have ten days at the sea”, he told Weisskopf.

More than sixty years after its creation, having proven true the writer’s supposition that “it couldn’t be used” during his period of exile,
Jarmila
is now published for the first time.
2
It certainly wasn’t chance that led Weiss to the surroundings depicted in the text, surroundings he also evoked in his shorter prose works at that time such as the fragment
Sered
which is set in Prague, and in the
Messe in Roudnice
(Mass in Roudnice). As well as relating
particular
incidents, the author was concerned with conveying atmospheric values of that “old world we loved” as he had referred to it to Stefan Zweig: a bulwark, as it were, against the “abyss”, the impending barbarism already obvious to shrewd onlookers.

The qualities which Ernst Weiss so admired in the novellas of his friend Zweig—precision, subtlety and above all an internal unity—are also in evidence in his own story
Jarmila.
It can even be regarded as a model example of the novella genre: it has a central conflict, a tightly-executed plot, and a sharply-drawn climax and turning-point. According to particularly rigorous theory, an accomplished novella should have a “hawk”, a
reference
to a story in Boccaccio’s
Decameron,
a so-called “organizing focal point”, a clearly identifiable motif or a symbol of particular pertinence.

In
Jarmila
the persistent central motif is, without doubt, the cheap nickel watch: the first person narrator purchases it in a Paris shop and its capriciousness tests him sorely in Prague but also leads to him making the acquaintance of a wretched man, the fate of whom is the main concern of the text. Again and again the broken watch crops up in the course of the story, and ultimately it is a part of the watch, the “small sharp spring” with which the unhappy “hero” of the tale takes his own life. It is not, however, with the aid of this timepiece alone that Weiss organises his novella: the story-teller works with a whole system of motifs and clues which are artfully
developed
and decoded one by one.

Almost as important as the watch itself is the motif of feathers that derives from it (
die Feder
in German meaning both “feather” and “spring”): the watch spring gives way to “feathers”, and vice versa, and from
feathers
it is just a small leap to geese, and from there to other associations. The narrator contemplates the
gruesome
plucking of live geese at the beginning of the tale,
thus anticipating the situation of the watchmaker in his love-hate relationship with Jarmila as he feels squeezed between “her sweet, plump knees” like the poor
animals
from which she rips the down. The interweaving of associations is so deft and coherent that a circle of motifs is often rounded off and completed, when small feathers gather round the feet of the dead Jarmila, for example, the toy trader is reminded of his very first encounter with the village beauty: she was sitting on a cloth plucking geese, warming her feet in the feathers which floated to the ground.

Weiss worked plenty of clues into the framework story set between the wars. He signals the fatal
outcome
of the action early on, and certain warnings flare at suitable points in the text. While the watchmaker is attempting to repair the watch, the spring makes a noise “like … a revolver being cocked”, and this corresponds to a similar noise when the watchmaker—and lover—wants to more softly cushion the head of Jarmila who has plunged to her death, her neck snapping “like the spring of a broken watch”. When the first-person
narrator
supposes to read in the expert hands of the man that “he has never killed anyone”, his misinterpretation becomes a leading clue as the watchmaker only
mumbles
and averts his eyes—bad signs indeed. There is talk at various points of instinct and “strange” premonition which heighten the impression that the reader is witness to a fated doom.

The title character of the “love story from Bohemia” is one of those peculiar female characters often
encountered
in Weiss’ work. He has chosen to endow her with
demon-like characteristics, a desire-driven creature, who, while she is capable of kindling love and receiving it, cannot return love in the true sense of the word. This Jarmila, who almost openly parades her adultery for the whole village to see and proudly “[gives] a frivolous toss of her beautiful blonde hair”, appears as a siren who draws the obedient watchmaker into the feather loft again and again with her “cooing, enticing, husky voice”: that place that will be her ruin. She abandons herself to the man in a manner otherwise unknown among “country girls” and he is powerless in the face of her unrestrained ways which both attract and repel him.

The watchmaker can only defend himself verbally in his dilemma by accusing her of being “cold”—a popular idea—and shouting after her in death that she “has gone to hell without a soul, or to heaven”.

When Ernst Weiss was writing
Jarmila
in his room in the Hotel d’Albret in Paris in the summer of 1937 and sending a fictitious trader of “average grade Bohemian apples” on a journey from the French capital to Prague, he would still have been able to undertake the journey through Nazi-Germany himself, had the money and motive not been lacking. Although regarded as a Jew and a writer of “decadent” works by the Third Reich, the brown-clad wielders of power couldn’t simply have arrested him at the border, for at that time his Czech passport was still protection from such assault. He had
made use of this two years earlier and spent some time in Berlin to receive a “free” medical examination, as he informed his correspondents.

As his “strength dwindled” the author undertook instead a journey of the imagination with his love story into Czechoslovakia, the country which had once been his home when it was part of the old Austrian empire. He transported himself back to the Bohemian
countryside
on a slow passenger train; he recalled the harvested fields and the battalions of geese; once again he strolled through Wenceslas Square and accompanied his hero along the river Vltava. But he also tasted the dark beer of the region and sampled the famous ham, the variations on how it is served given in a mouth-watering list that runs over several lines. In his frugal exile this would have been sweet torture, for the only thing that eased what he referred to as permanent “hunger pangs”, a symptom of his stomach problems, was eating and this he could only afford to do in moderation.

The author entrusted the typing of this journey in his mind to Mona Wollheim, a German emigrant whom he had met through a mutual Paris friend. She wrote about it in a slim volume entitled
Encounter with Ernst Weiss—Paris 1936–1940
(1970). In her memoirs Mona Wollheim confuses certain things about her first
commission
from the writer—she would later type up his novels
Der Verführer
(The Seducer) and
Der Augenzeuge
(The Witness)—giving it the wrong title,
Irgendeine
Jarmila
(Someone Called Jarmila), and muddling up the plot somewhat. But certain passages in her
memoir
contain interesting details. It is Mona Wollheim
who records Stefan Zweig’s response to the work which Weiss had sent him—the relevant letter from Zweig had gone missing along with all the rest of Weiss’
possessions.
“The novella
Jarmila
is one of your strongest,” Zweig purportedly commented.

Almost more significant is Mona Wollheim’s
indication
that the author had written a second version of the story which probably only affected the ending. The
existence
of this version is confirmed by the
Jarmila
typescript discovered in the Czech Literature Archive in
Prague-Strahov
in 1995. From the fifteenth chapter onwards a typewriter is used with characters that are obviously different.

Why and when exactly Weiss reworked the ending of his Bohemian love story has as yet not been possible to verify with the materials available. There is however a notable characteristic which differentiates the original typescript from the later one. The reworking contains lead words which stand out in the text, a device which is typical of
Der Augenzeuge
(The Witness), the author’s last novel. In that novel he emphasised words like “that which crushes” (
das Zermalmende
), “the base soul” (
die Unterseele
) and “the dreadful” (
das Füchterliche
) by writing them in block capitals, thus creating an atmosphere of
oppressive
hopelessness; in
Jarmila
the word “borders” is given the same treatment. In longhand he writes the word in capital letters and this was not on a whim, for when Weiss incorporated this change and wrote about “[questions of the] best routes, escape points and borders, which had gained considerable significance recently”, the subject was of burning relevance.