Ahead of All Parting (18 page)

Mausoleum (Muzot, October 1924)

O Lacrimosa (Paris, May or June 1925)

[Ah, not to be cut off] (Paris, summer 1925)

[Now it is time that gods came walking out] (Muzot, mid-October 1925)

[Rose, oh pure contradiction] (In the testament of October 27, 1925)

Idol (First line: Paris, summer 1925; completed: Muzot, November, 1925)

Gong (Muzot, November 1925)

[Four Sketches] (Muzot, December 8, 1925)

For Veronika Erdmann (Val-Mont, March 10, 1926)

Elegy (Muzot, June 8, 1926)

[Dove that ventured outside] (Ragaz, August 24, 1926)

Have I said it before? I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It’s still going badly. But I intend to make the most of my time.

For example, it never occurred to me before how many faces there are. There are multitudes of people, but there are many more faces, because each person has several of them. There are people who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out, gets dirty, splits at the seams, stretches like gloves worn during a long journey. They are thrifty, uncomplicated people; they never change it, never even have it cleaned. It’s good enough, they say, and who can convince them of the contrary? Of course, since they have several faces, you might wonder what they do with the other ones. They keep them in storage. Their children will wear them. But sometimes it also happens that their dogs go out wearing them. And why not? A face is a face.

Other people change faces incredibly fast, put on one after another, and wear them out. At first, they think they have an unlimited supply; but when they are barely forty years old they come to their last one. There is, to be sure, something tragic about this. They are not accustomed to taking care of faces; their last one is worn through in a week, has holes in it, is in many places as thin as paper, and then, little by little, the lining shows through, the non-face, and they walk around with that on.

But the woman, the woman: she had completely fallen into herself, forward into her hands. It was on the corner of rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I began to walk quietly as soon as I saw her. When poor people are thinking, they shouldn’t be disturbed. Perhaps their idea will still occur to them.

The street was too empty; its emptiness had gotten bored and pulled my steps out from under my feet and clattered around in them, all over the street, as if they were wooden clogs. The woman sat up, frightened, she pulled out of herself, too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. I could see it lying there: its hollow form. It cost me an indescribable effort to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them. I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid of that bare flayed head waiting there, faceless.

When I think back to my home, where there is no one left now, it always seems to me that things must have been different back then. Then, you knew (or perhaps you sensed it) that you had your death
inside
you as a fruit has its core. The children had a small one in them and the grownups a large one. The women had it in their womb and the men in their chest. You
had
it, and that gave you a strange dignity and a quiet pride.

It was obvious that my grandfather, old Chamberlain Brigge, still carried a death inside him. And what a death it was: two months long and so loud that it could be heard as far away as the manor farm.

The long, ancient manor-house was too small for this death; it seemed as if new wings would have to be added on, for the Chamberlain’s body grew larger and larger, and he kept wanting to be carried from one room to another, bursting into a terrible rage if, before the day had ended, there were no more rooms that he hadn’t already been brought to. Then he had to go upstairs, with the whole retinue of servants, chambermaids, and dogs which he always had around him, and, ushered in by the chief steward, they entered the room where his dear mother had died. It had been kept exactly as she had left it twenty-three years before, and since then no one had ever been allowed to set foot in it. Now the whole pack burst in. The curtains were pulled back, and the robust light of a summer afternoon examined all the shy, terrified objects and turned around clumsily in the forced-open mirrors. And the people did the same. There were maids who, in their curiosity, didn’t know where their hands were loitering, young servants who gaped at everything, and older ones who walked around trying to remember all the stories they had been told about this locked room which they had now, incredibly, entered.

But it was especially the dogs who were excited by this place where everything had a smell. The tall, slender Russian wolfhounds loped busily back and forth behind the armchairs, moved across the rug swaying slightly in long dance-steps, stood up on their hind legs like the dogs on a coat-of-arms, and, leaning their slender paws on the white-and-gold windowsill, with sharp, attentive faces and wrinkled foreheads gazed right and left into the courtyard. Small, glove-yellow
dachshunds sat on the large silk easychair by the window, looking as if everything were quite normal. A wire-haired, sullen-faced setter rubbed its back on the edge of a gilt-legged table, and on the painted top the Sèvres cups trembled.

Yes, it was a terrible time for these drowsy, absentminded Things. Down out of books which some careless hand had clumsily opened, rose leaves fluttered to the floor and were trampled underfoot; small, fragile objects were seized and, instantly broken, were quickly put back in place; others, dented or bent out of shape, were thrust beneath the curtains or even thrown behind the golden net of the fire-screen. And from time to time something fell, fell with a muffled sound onto the rug, fell with a clear sound onto the hard parquet floor, but breaking here and there, with a sharp crack or almost soundlessly; for these Things, pampered as they were, could not endure a fall.

And if anyone had thought of asking what had caused all this, what had called down such intense destruction upon this anxiously protected room,—there could have been only one answer: death.

The death of Chamberlain Christoph Detlev Brigge at Ulsgaard. For he lay on the floor in the middle of the room, enormously swelling out of his dark blue uniform, and did not stir. In his large, strange face, which no one could recognize now, the eyes had closed: he no longer saw what was happening. At first they had tried to lay him on the bed, but he had put up a fight, for he hated beds ever since those nights when his illness had first grown. Besides, the bed in this room had turned out to be too small, so there was nothing left but to lay him on the rug; for he refused to go downstairs.

So now he lay, and one might think that he had died. As it slowly began to grow dark, the dogs had one after another slipped out through the half-closed door. Only the stiff-haired setter with the sullen face sat beside its master, and one of its wide, shaggy forepaws lay on Christoph Detlev’s large gray hand. Most of the servants were now standing outside in the white hallway, which was brighter than the room; but those who had stayed inside sometimes stole a glance at the large darkening heap in the middle of the room, and they wished that it were nothing more than a large blanket over some rotten inanimate object.

But there was something more. There was a voice, the voice that, seven weeks before, no one had known: for it wasn’t the Chamberlain’s
voice. This voice didn’t belong to Christoph Detlev, but to Christoph Detlev’s death.

Christoph Detlev’s death was alive now, had already been living at Ulsgaard for many, many days, talked with everyone, made demands. Demanded to be carried, demanded the blue room, demanded the small salon, demanded the great banquet-hall. Demanded the dogs, demanded that people laugh, talk, play, stop talking, and all at the same time. Demanded to see friends, women, and people who had died, and demanded to die itself: demanded. Demanded and screamed.

For, when night had come and, exhausted, those of the servants who didn’t have to sit up tried to get some sleep, Christoph Detlev’s death began screaming, it screamed and groaned, it howled so long and continuously that the dogs, which at first had howled along with it, fell silent and didn’t dare to lie down and, standing on their long, thin, trembling legs, were afraid. And when, through the huge, silvery Danish summer night, the villagers heard it howling, they got up out of bed as if there were a thunderstorm, dressed, and stayed seated around the lamp, without a word, until it was over. And the women who would soon give birth were brought to the most remote rooms and to the most inaccessible alcoves; but they heard it, they heard it, as if it were screaming from inside their own bodies, and they begged to be allowed to get up, and came, white and heavy, and sat down among the others with their blurred faces. And the cows that were calving then were helpless and miserable, and the dead fruit had to be torn out of one of them, along with all the entrails, since it refused to come out at all. And everyone did their daily work badly and forgot to bring in the hay because they spent the day dreading the arrival of night and because they were so worn out by the sleeplessness and the terrified awakenings that they couldn’t concentrate on anything. And when on Sunday they went to the white, peaceful church, they prayed that there might no longer be a master at Ulsgaard: for this one was a terrifying master. And what they were all thinking and praying, the minister said out loud up in the pulpit, for he too had no nights anymore and could no longer understand God. And the churchbell said it, having found a terrible rival which boomed out all night long and against which, even when it rang with all its metal, it could do nothing. Indeed, they all said it; and one of the young men dreamed that he had gone to the
manor-house and killed the master with his pitchfork; and they were so exasperated, so overstrained, that they all listened as he told his dream and, quite unconsciously, looked at him to see if he were really brave enough to do that. This is how people felt and talked in the whole district where, just a few weeks before, the Chamberlain had been loved and pitied. But though there was all this talk, nothing changed. Christoph Detlev’s death, which had moved in at Ulsgaard, refused to let itself be hurried. It had come for ten weeks, and for ten weeks it stayed. And during that time it was master, more than Christoph Detlev Brigge had ever been; it was like a king who is called the Terrible, afterward and for all time.