Collected Stories (14 page)

‘So you’ve been lying in wait for me!’ cried Georg.

His father said pityingly, in an offhand manner: ‘I suppose you wanted to say that sooner. But now it doesn’t matter.’ And in a louder voice: ‘So now you know what else there was in the world besides yourself, till now you’ve known only about yourself! An innocent child, yes, that you were, truly, but still more truly have you been a devilish human being! – And therefore take note: I sentence you now to death by drowning!’

Georg felt himself urged from the room, the crash with which his father fell on the bed behind him was still in his ears as he fled. On the staircase, which he rushed down as if its steps were an inclined plane, he ran into his charwoman on her way up to do the morning cleaning of the room. ‘Jesus!’ she cried, and covered her face with her apron, but he was already gone. Out of the front door he rushed, across the roadway, driven toward the water. Already he was grasping at the railings as a starving man clutches food. He swung himself over, like the distinguished gymnast he had once been in his youth, to his parents’ pride. With weakening grip he was still holding on when he spied between the railings a motor-bus coming which would easily cover the noise of his fall, called in a low voice: ‘Dear parents,
I have always loved you, all the same,’ and let himself drop.

At this moment an unending stream of traffic was just going over the bridge.

Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

A
S
K
ARL
R
OSSMANN
, a poor boy of sixteen who had been packed off to America by his parents because a servant girl had seduced him and got herself with child by him, stood on the liner slowly entering the harbor of New York, a sudden burst of sunshine seemed to illumine the Statue of Liberty, so that he saw it in a new light, although he had sighted it long before. The arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and round the figure blew the free winds of heaven.

‘So high!’ he said to himself, and was gradually edged to the very rail by the swelling throng of porters pushing past him, since he was not thinking at all of getting off the ship.

A young man with whom he had struck up a slight acquaintance on the voyage called out in passing: ‘Not very anxious to go ashore, are you?’ ‘Oh, I’m quite ready,’ said Karl with a laugh, and being both strong and in high spirits he heaved his box onto his shoulder. But as his eye followed his acquaintance, who was already moving on among the others, lightly swinging a walking-stick, he realized with dismay that he had forgotten his umbrella down below. He hastily begged his acquaintance, who did not seem particularly gratified, to oblige him by waiting beside the box for a minute, took another survey of the situation to get his bearings for the return journey, and hurried away. Below decks he found to his disappointment that a gangway which made a handy short-cut had been barred for the first time in his experience, probably in connexion with the disembarkation of so many passengers, and he had painfully to find his way down endlessly recurring stairs, through corridors with countless turnings, through an empty room with a deserted writing-table, until in the end, since he had taken this route no more than once or twice and always among a crowd of other people, he lost himself completely. In his bewilderment,
meeting no one and hearing nothing but the ceaseless shuffling of thousands of feet above him, and in the distance, like faint breathing, the last throbbings of the engines, which had already been shut off, he began unthinkingly to hammer on a little door by which he had chanced to stop in his wanderings.

‘It isn’t locked,’ a voice shouted from inside, and Karl opened the door with genuine relief. ‘What are you hammering at the door for, like a madman?’ asked a huge man, scarcely even glancing at Karl. Through an opening of some kind a feeble glimmer of daylight, all that was left after the top decks had used it up, fell into the wretched cubby-hole in which a bunk, a cupboard, a chair and the man were packed together, as if they had been stored there. ‘I’ve lost my way,’ said Karl. ‘I never noticed it during the voyage, but this is a terribly big ship.’ ‘Yes, you’re right there,’ said the man with a certain pride, fiddling all the time with the lock of a little sea-chest, which he kept pressing with both hands in the hope of hearing the wards snap home. ‘But come inside,’ he went on, ‘you don’t want to stand out there!’ ‘I’m not disturbing you?’ asked Karl. ‘Why, how should you disturb me?’ Are you a German?’ Karl asked to reassure himself further, for he had heard a great deal about the perils which threatened newcomers to America, particularly from the Irish. ‘That’s what I am, yes,’ said the man. Karl still hesitated. Then the man suddenly seized the door handle and pulling the door shut with a hasty movement swept Karl into the cabin.

‘I can’t stand being stared at from the passage,’ he said, beginning to fiddle with his chest again, ‘people keep passing and staring in, it’s more than a man can bear.’ But the passage is quite empty,’ said Karl, who was standing squeezed uncomfortably against the end of the bunk. ‘Yes, now,’ said the man. ‘But it’s now we were speaking about,’ thought Karl, ‘it’s hard work talking to this man.’ Lie down on the bunk, you’ll have more room there,’ said the man. Karl scrambled in as well as he could, and laughed aloud at
his first unsuccessful attempt to swing himself over. But scarcely was he in the bunk when he cried: ‘Good Lord, I’ve quite forgotten my box!’ ‘Why, where is it?’ ‘Up on deck, a man I know is looking after it. What’s his name again?’ And he fished a visiting-card from a pocket which his mother had made in the lining of his coat for the voyage. ‘Butterbaum, Franz Butterbaum.’ ‘Can’t you do without your box?’ ‘Of course not.’ ‘Well, then, why did you leave it in a stranger’s hands?’ ‘I forgot my umbrella down below and rushed off to get it; I didn’t want to drag my box with me. Then on top of that I got lost.’ ‘You’re all alone? Without anyone to look after you?’ ‘Yes, all alone.’ ‘Perhaps I should join up with this man,’ the thought came into Karl’s head, ‘where am I likely to find a better friend?’ ‘And now you’ve lost the box as well. Not to mention the umbrella.’ And the man sat down on the chair as if Karl’s business had at last acquired some interest for him. ‘But I think my box can’t be lost yet.’ ‘You can think what you like,’ said the man, vigorously scratching his dark, short, thick hair. ‘But morals change every time you come to a new port. In Hamburg your Butterbaum might maybe have looked after your box; while here it’s most likely that they’ve both disappeared.’ ‘But then I must go up and see about it at once,’ said Karl, looking round for the way out. ‘You just stay where you are,’ said the man, giving him a push with one hand on the chest, quite roughly, so that he fell back on the bunk again. ‘But why?’ asked Karl in exasperation. ‘Because there’s no point in it,’ said the man, ‘I’m leaving too very soon, and we can go together. Either the box is stolen and then there’s no help for it, or the man has left it standing where it was, and then we’ll find it all the more easily when the ship is empty. And the same with your umbrella.’ ‘Do you know your way about the ship?’ asked Karl suspiciously, and it seemed to him that the idea, otherwise plausible, that his things would be easier to find when the ship was empty must have a catch in it somewhere. ‘Why, I’m a stoker,’ said the man. ‘You’re a stoker!’ cried Karl delightedly, as if this surpassed all his expectations, and
he rose up on his elbow to look at the man more closely. ‘Just outside the room where I slept with the Slovaks there was a little window through which we could see into the engine room.’ ‘Yes, that’s where I’ve been working,’ said the stoker. ‘I have always had a passion for machinery,’ said Karl, following his own train of thought, ‘and I would have become an engineer in time, that’s certain, if I hadn’t had to go to America.’ ‘Why did you have to go?’ ‘Oh, that!’ said Karl, dismissing the whole business with a wave of the hand. He looked with a smile at the stoker, as if begging his indulgence for not telling. ‘There was some reason for it, I suppose,’ said the stoker, and it was hard to tell whether in saying that he wanted to encourage or discourage Karl to tell. ‘I could be a stoker now too,’ said Karl, ‘it’s all one now to my father and mother what becomes of me.’ ‘My job’s going to be free,’ said the stoker, and to point his full consciousness of it, he stuck his hands into his trouser pockets and flung his legs in their baggy, leather-like trousers on the bunk to stretch them. Karl had to shift nearer to the wall. ‘Are you leaving the ship?’ ‘Yes, we’re paid off today.’ ‘But why? Don’t you like it?’ ‘Oh, that’s the way things are run; it doesn’t always depend on whether a man likes it or not. But you’re quite right, I don’t like it. I don’t suppose you’re thinking seriously of being a stoker, but that’s just the time when you’re most likely to turn into one. So I advise you strongly against it. If you wanted to study engineering in Europe, why shouldn’t you study it here? The American universities are ever so much better than the European ones.’ ‘That’s possible,’ said Karl, ‘but I have hardly any money to study on. I’ve read of someone who worked all day in a shop and studied at night until he became a doctor, and a mayor, too, I think, but that needs a lot of perseverance, doesn’t it? I’m afraid I haven’t got that. Besides, I wasn’t a particularly good scholar; it was no great wrench for me to leave school. And maybe the schools here are more difficult. I can hardly speak any English at all. Anyhow, people here have a prejudice against foreigners, I think.’ ‘So you’ve come up against that kind of
thing too, have you? Well, that’s all to the good. You’re the man for me. See here, this is a German ship we’re on, it belongs to the Hamburg-American Line; so why aren’t the crew all Germans, I ask you? Why is the Chief Engineer a Roumanian? A man called Schubal. It’s hard to believe it. A measly hound like that slave-driving us Germans on a German ship! You mustn’t think’ – here his voice failed him and he gesticulated with his hands – ‘that I’m complaining for the sake of complaining. I know you have no influence and that you’re a poor lad yourself. But it’s too much!’ And he brought his fist several times down on the table, never taking his eyes from it while he flourished it. ‘I’ve signed on in ever so many ships’ – and he reeled off twenty names one after the other as if they were one word, which quite confused Karl – ‘and I’ve done good work in all of them, been praised, pleased every captain I ever had, actually stuck to the same cargo boat for several years, I did’ – he rose to his feet as if that had been the greatest achievement of his life – ‘and here on this tub, where everything’s done by rule and you don’t need any wits at all, here I’m no good, here I’m just in Schubal’s way, here I’m a slacker who should be kicked out and doesn’t begin to earn his pay. Can you understand that? I can’t.’ ‘Don’t you put up with it!’ said Karl excitedly. He had almost lost the feeling that he was on the uncertain boards of a ship, beside the coast of an unknown continent, so much at home did he feel here in the stoker’s bunk. ‘Have you seen the Captain about it? Have you asked him to give you your rights?’ ‘Oh, get away with you, out you get, I don’t want you here. You don’t listen to what I say, and then you give me advice. How could I go to the Captain?’ Wearily the stoker sat down again and hid his face in his hands.

‘I can’t give him any better advice,’ Karl told himself. And it occurred to him that he would have done better to go and get his box instead of handing out advice that was merely regarded as stupid. When his father had given him the box for good he had said in jest: ‘How long will you keep
it?’ and now that faithful box had perhaps been lost in earnest. His sole remaining consolation was that his father could hardly learn of his present situation, even if he were to inquire. All that the shipping company could say was that he had safely reached New York. But Karl felt sorry to think that he had hardly used the things in the box yet, although, to take an instance, he should long since have changed his shirt. So his economies had started at the wrong point, it seemed; now, at the very beginning of his career, when it was essential to show himself in clean clothes, he would have to appear in a dirty shirt. Otherwise the loss of the box would not have been so serious, for the suit which he was wearing was actually better than the one in the box, which in reality was merely an emergency suit that his mother had hastily mended just before he left. Then he remembered that in the box there was a piece of Veronese salami which his mother had packed as an extra tit-bit, only he had not been able to eat more than a scrap of it, for during the voyage he had been quite without any appetite, and the soup which was served in the steerage had been more than sufficient for him. But now he would have liked to have the salami at hand, so as to present it to the stoker. For such people were easily won over by the gift of some trifle or other; Karl had learned that from his father, who deposited cigars in the pockets of the subordinate officials with whom he did business, and so won them over. Yet all that Karl now possessed in the way of gifts was his money, and he did not want to touch that for the time being, in case he should have lost his box. Again his thoughts turned back to the box, and he simply could not understand why he should have watched it during the voyage so vigilantly that he had almost lost his sleep over it, only to let that same box be filched from him so easily now. He remembered the five nights during which he had kept a suspicious eye on a little Slovak whose bunk was two places away from him on the left, and who had designs, he was sure, on the box. This Slovak was merely waiting for Karl to be overcome by sleep and doze off for a minute, so that
he might maneuver the box away with a long, pointed stick which he was always playing or practicing with during the day. By day the Slovak looked innocent enough, but hardly did night come on than he kept rising up from his bunk to cast melancholy glances at Karl’s box. Karl had seen this quite clearly, for every now and then someone would light a little candle, although it was forbidden by the ship’s regulations, and with the anxiety of the emigrant would peer into some incomprehensible prospectus of an emigration agency. If one of these candles was burning near him, Karl could doze off for a little, but if it was farther away or if the place was quite dark, he had to keep his eyes open. The strain of this task had quite exhausted him, and now perhaps it had all been in vain. Oh, that Butterbaum, if ever he met him again!