Wolf Among Wolves (5 page)

“You just said,” replied Minna, quite unmoved by this outburst, for such outbursts were part of the routine and her mistress calmed down as quickly as she flared up, “you just said that if you love someone you sometimes have to tell them disagreeable truths. Then I have to reply that Wolf isn’t Petra’s son.”

Whereupon Minna stalked off, the tray rattling in her hand, while as a sign that she expected to have peace and quietness in “her” kitchen, she slammed the door.

Frau Pagel understood quite well and respected her old servant’s familiar hint. She only shouted after her: “You old donkey. Always feeling insulted. Always losing your temper about nothing at all.” She laughed; her anger had evaporated. “Such an old donkey, imagining that love consists of saying disagreeable things to the other person.” She crossed the room. Her outburst had taken place only after she had finished her breakfast, and she was therefore in the best of spirits. The little quarrel had refreshed her. Stopping before a small
cabinet, she selected a long black Brazil cigar, lit it carefully, and went across to her husband’s room.

VI

On the door of the flat, over the brass bell-pull (a lion’s mouth) was a porcelain name plate: “Edmund Pagel—Attaché.” Frau Pagel was getting on for seventy, and it therefore didn’t look as if her husband had made much progress in his career. Attachés advanced in years are unusual.

Edmund Pagel, however, had gone as far as the most efficient councillor or ambassador—that is, as far as the cemetery. When Frau Pagel went into her husband’s room, it was not to visit him but only those reminders of him which were renowned far beyond the walls of the little home.

She flung the windows wide open; light and air flowed in from the gardens. In this small street, so close to the traffic that of an evening one could hear the elevated railway enter Nollendorfplatz station and the buses rumbling day and night, there was a straggle of old gardens with tall trees—long-forgotten gardens which had scarcely changed since the ‘eighties. Here it was good to live—for aging people. The elevated might thunder and the dollar climb—but the widowed Frau Pagel looked tranquilly into the gardens. Creeping vine had ascended to her windows; down below, everything grew, flowered, seeded—but the frenzied, restless people yonder with their turmoil and commerce did not know it. She could look and remember, she need not hurry, the garden would remind her. That she could live on here, that she did not need to hurry, was the doing of the man whose work was in this room.

Five-and-forty years ago they had seen each other for the first time, loved and married. Nothing was as radiant, as happy, as swift as Edmund, when she looked back. It always seemed as if she were running with him in a beautiful breeze down streets full of blossoms. Branches seemed to reach down to them over walls. They ran faster. The sky soared over them from the top of a hill full of houses.…

As long as they kept running, the blue silk curtain in front of them would continue to open.

Yes, what characterized Edmund was his speed, which had nothing hasty about it, but it came from his strength, his sense of perfect well-being. They reached a meadow with crocuses. For a moment they remained motionless on the festive green and purple carpet, and then bent to pick the flowers. But hardly had she had twenty in her hand then he came to her, swiftly, with no rush, light of step, with a whole big bouquet.

“How did you do that?” she asked breathlessly.

“I don’t know,” he said, “I feel so light, like I’m blowing in the wind.”

They had been married for quite a while when in her sleep the young wife heard a cry. She awoke. Her husband was sitting up in bed, looking altogether changed. She hardly recognized him.

“Is that you?” she asked, very softly lest her words turn the dream into reality.

The strange yet familiar man tried to smile, an embarrassed, apologetic smile. “Forgive me if I have disturbed you. I feel so strange. I can’t understand it. I’m really worried.” And after a long pause, while he looked doubtfully at her: “I can’t get up.”

“You can’t get up?” she asked skeptically. It was a joke, some nonsense of his, of course, a poor joke. “It’s impossible that all of a sudden you can’t get up.”

“Yes,” he said slowly and seemed not to believe it himself. “But I feel as if I had no legs. Anyhow, they are numb.”

“Nonsense,” she cried and jumped up. “You have caught a chill, or they’ve gone to sleep. Wait. I’ll help you.”

But even as she spoke, even as she walked round the bed to him, terror pierced her.… It’s true, it’s true, she realized.

Did she realize it? The old woman at the window shrugged her shoulders. How could she realize the impossible? The fleetest, the happiest, the most vivid creature in the world, not to be able to walk, not even to stand. Impossible to realize that!

But the icy sensation had remained; it was as if she were inhaling more and more of coldness with every breath. Her heart tried to resist, but it, too, was getting cold. Round it an armor of ice closed tightly.

“Edmund!” she called imploringly. “Wake up, get up!”

“I can’t,” he murmured.

He really could not. Just as he sat that morning in bed, so he had sat, day in and day out, year after year, in bed, in a wheeled chair, in a deck chair … sat, entirely healthy, without pain—but could not walk. Life which had started so flamboyantly, swift shining life, the smile of good luck, the blue sky and flowers—all was all gone and done with. Why could it not return? No answer. Oh, God, why not? And, if it had to be, why, then, so suddenly? Why without any warning? He had passed happily into sleep and had miserably awakened, to incredible wretchedness.

Oh, she had not lain down under it; no, she hadn’t given in for a moment. All the twenty years this had lasted she hadn’t given in once. When he had long
abandoned every hope, she still dragged him from physician to physician. Reports of a miraculous cure or a newspaper notice were enough to rekindle her optimism. In succession she believed in baths, electrical treatment, mud packs, massage, medicine, miracle-working saints. She wanted to believe in them, and she did believe.

“Don’t bother,” he smiled. “Perhaps it’s just as well as it is.”

“That’s what you’d like,” she cried angrily. “To give in, to bear it patiently. That’s too easy. Humility may be all right for the proud and fortunate who need checking. I hold with the ancients who fought the gods for their happiness.”

“But I am happy,” he said good-humoredly.

She didn’t want that kind of happiness, however. She despised it, it filled her with anger. She had married an attaché, an active man on good terms with his fellow men, a future ambassador. On the door she had fixed a plate: “Edmund Pagel, Attaché,” and it would stay. She would not have a new one made: “Pagel—Artist.” No, she had not married a color-grinder and a paint-dauber.

He sat and painted. He sat in his wheeled chair and smiled and whistled and painted. Angry impatience filled her. Did he not understand that he was wasting his life on these stupid paintings at which people only smiled?

“Let him alone, Mathilde,” said the relatives. “It’s very good for an invalid. He has occupation and amusement.”

No, she would not let him alone. When she married him there had been no talk of painting; she didn’t know that he had ever held a paintbrush in his hand, even. She hated it all, down to the smell of the oil paints. She was always knocking against the frames, the easel was always in her way; she never resigned herself to it. His pictures she left in boarding houses, at watering-places, in the attics of their flats; his charcoal sketches lay around and were lost.

Occasionally, in the midst of some work or worry, she would glance from the narrow prison of herself at one such picture on the wall as if seeing it for the first time. Then something seemed to want to lightly touch her, as if something asleep were waking.… Stop! Oh please stop! Everything was very bright. A tree, for instance, in the sun, in the air, against a clear summer sky. But the tree seemed to rise up, the wind to blow gently. The tree moved. Was it flying? Yes, the whole earth was flying, the sun, the play of light and air—everything was light, swift, soft. Oh, stop, you relentless, bright world! She came closer to the picture, and the curtain in front of the mysterious stirred. It was linen, smelling of oil paint, earth, firm earth. But the wind was blowing, the tree waved its branches, life was in movement.

Painted by a cripple, created out of nothing by a man who knew and loved movement, it is true, but who was now no more than a cumbersome body that had to be rolled out of bed into a chair. No, do not stop, we’re fleeing, we’re flying.

Yes, something stirred in the dreaming woman about to be illuminated by an intuition that in this picture her husband was living, immortal, brilliant, swifter than ever; but she turned from it. There was nothing left now but canvas and paint, a flat surface colored in accordance with certain rules; nothing of movement, nothing of the man.

More watering-places! Still more physicians! What did the world say? Two or three exhibitions—no one heard anything about them, saw anything of them; and no pictures were ever sold—thank God, there was no need of that. Now and then, on one of their restless journeys through the health resorts of the world, someone would seek them out; some young man, taciturn, awkward, gloomy, or another breaking out into a flood of words, with nervous movements, to announce a new era; such people did not encourage her to regard her husband’s pictures seriously.

“The day is so beautiful; let us go for a drive.”

“The light is good. I should like to paint another hour.”

“I almost forget what it’s like outside. I shall die for lack of air.”

“All right, sit by the window, open it—I’ve been wanting to paint you for a long time.”

That was his way—friendly, serene, never angry, but not to be moved either. She talked, implored, got furious, made it up again, used wiles, asked for forgiveness. He was as a field over which pass wind, storm, sunshine, night frost and rain, accepting everything without seeming to change, yet in the end producing a harvest.

Yes, the harvest came. But before it ripened something else happened, something for which she had fought, scolded, struggled, begged, for twenty years: one day he stood up, made a few steps, faltering at first, and then, with the same somewhat embarrassed, apologetic face of twenty years before, said: “I really think I can.”

The affliction vanished as it had come, just as incomprehensively. All her eagerness, her zeal, had not been able to effect its departure; it had been beyond human influence—it was enough to make one despair.

Meanwhile half a life—the better half—had passed. She was in her early forties, a forty-five-year-old husband at her side. An active life, an eager life without rest, full of plans, full of hopes, had slipped away. Now the hopes were fulfilled and there was nothing more to desire. All her plans, all her cares, had
lost their meaning. A whole life had crumbled to dust in the moment Edmund got up and walked.

Incomprehensible heart of woman! “Here is your painting, Edmund. It only wants a few more touches. Won’t you?”

“Painting, yes, painting,” he said absent-mindedly, glanced at it, and went out, where his thoughts had already gone.

No, there was no time now to paint for even half an hour. He had had time, twenty years, to be ill, patiently, without complaint; now he had not a minute to spare. Outside, the whole of life was waiting for him in a whirl of festivities each more splendid than the other, hundreds of people with whom it was glorious to talk, beautiful women, girls who were so bewitchingly young that a thrill went down one’s spine just to look at them …

And wasn’t he himself young, really? He was five-and-twenty; what had happened didn’t count, a mere waiting around. He was young, life was young; pick and taste the fruit. Stop, please stop! Go on.…

Painting? True, it had helped him, it had been an excellent pastime. Now nothing more was needed to pass away the heavy burden of time. Down its torrent raced, sparkling, shining from a thousand eyes, thrilling to a million songs—with him, still with him, forever with him. Sometimes he started up at night, supporting his burning temples in hot hands. He thought he could hear Time rustling by. He ought not to sleep; who dared sleep when Time glides away so quickly? To sleep was time lost. And softly, so as not to wake his wife, he got up, went into the town, went once more into the town where the lights shone. He sat at a table, looked frantically at the faces. That one? Or you—? Oh, don’t rush away—stay for a while!

She let him go. She heard him, but she let him go, in the day as well as the night. At first she had gone with him; she, whose hope was now fulfilled. She saw him at the garden party of a family with whom they were on friendly terms; at a dinner, immaculately dressed, slim, quick, laughing, with gray hair. He danced faultlessly, with assurance. “Forty-five,” something said within her. He chatted and joked always with the youngest, she observed. It was horrifying. Just as if a dead man had come to life, as if a corpse with its mouth full of dust were reaching out for the bread of the living. Stay for a while! That memory which her jealous heart had clung to for twenty years and which had been her happiness and life, that memory of early, splendid days faded now, and she could not recall them.

The night surrounded her like a prison wall without a gate. On the bedside table the clock ticked away a useless time which had to be endured. A trembling hand switched on the light, and his bright sketches greeted her from the walls.

She looked at them as if for the first time. In this she was like the world, which at that time had also begun to look at his pictures. Their day had suddenly come, but for their creator it was already over. Paradox indeed that, when he was creating for twenty long years, he was the only one who saw his work. Now came the world, with letters and reproductions, with art dealers and exhibitions, with money and golden laurels—but the once-flowing spring of his interest was dry.

“Yes, paintings,” he said, and went.

The woman who was expecting his child lay in bed, and now it was she who gazed at the paintings. It was she who now saw his true image in them. His fleetness, his cheerfulness, his interest—all had gone. Gone? No, they were here, enhanced by the glory that eternity gives to life.