No Man's Land (42 page)

*
A very rough brandy (
trans
.).

*
Dobropol, now Dobro Pole in the Republic of Macedonia, was the site of a decisive battle on 15 September 1918 at the end of the long Serbian campaign. French and Serbian troops defeated the Bulgarians who had occupied the town since 1915 and who as a result signed an armistice and withdrew from the war. Eg˘ri Palanka (then in Bulgaria) is now Kriva Palanka (in Macedonia). The story of the missing sheep that follows here takes place in towns and villages around the Serbia/Bulgaria border, so that Tsaribrod, where the sheep were collected, then in Bulgaria, is now Dimitrovgrad in Serbia, and Zaïtchar, where they were eventually delivered, is now Zaječar in Serbia. Pirot, where the sheep went missing, is still Pirot and still in Serbia. And, despite an awful lot of historical cartographical research, I still have no idea where Grechowatz was, or is! (
trans
.)

*
John, like most of the other
tirailleurs sénégalais
in this novel (who despite the name given to them in the French army did not only come from Senegal but also from other French colonies in West Africa and sometimes other parts of Africa too), speaks a very simplified French adaptation of the Bambara language which was used as a kind of Esperanto in the army, and given the rather racist name
petit-nègre
. My English version is partly based on a guide for white French officers published in 1916 called
Le français tel que le parlent nos tirailleurs sénégalais
(
trans
.).

*
‘golden isles' here probably refers specifically to the little Île d'Or just off the coast at Saint-Raphaël and to the four Îles d'Hyères, also known as the Îles d'Or, just to the west (
trans
.).

*
Amagni
is the general word for ‘bad' in Bambara (
trans
.).

ROBERT MUSIL

THE BLACKBIRD

from
Posthumous Papers of a Living Author

translated by Peter Wortsman

P
LEASE BE ASSURED
then that my reason is still the equal of your enlightened mind.

Then, two years later, I found myself in a tight fix, at the dead angle of a battle in the south Tyrol, a line that wound its way from the bloody trenches of the Cima di Vezzena all the way to Lake Caldonazzo. There, like a wave of sunshine, the battle line dove deep into the valley, skirting two hills with beautiful names, and surfaced again on the other side, only to lose itself in the stillness of the mountains.

It was October; the thinly-manned trenches were covered with leaves, the lake shimmered a silent blue, the hills lay there like huge withered wreaths; like funeral wreaths, I often thought to myself without even a shudder of fear. Halting and divided, the valley spilled around them; but beyond the edge of our occupied zone, it fled such sweet diffusion and drove like the blast of a trombone: brown, broad and heroic out into the hostile distance.

At night, we pushed ahead to an advanced position, so prone now in the valley that they could have wiped us out with an avalanche of stones from above; but instead, they slowly roasted us on steady artillery fire. The morning after such a night all our faces had a strange expression that took hours to wear off. Our eyes were enlarged, and our heads tilted every which way on the multitude of shoulders, like a lawn that had just been trampled on. Yet on every one of those nights I poked my head up over the edge of the trench many times, and cautiously turned to look back over my shoulder like a lover: and I saw the Brenta Mountains light blue, as if formed out of stiff-pleated glass, silhouetted against the night sky. And on such nights the stars were like silver foil cutouts glimmering, fat as glazed cookies; and the sky stayed blue all night; and the thin virginal moon crescent lay on her back, now silvery, now golden, basking in the splendor. You must try to imagine just how beautiful it was: for such beauty exists only in the face of danger. And then sometimes I could stand it no longer, and giddy with joy and longing, I crept out for a little nightcrawl around, all the way to the golden-green blackness of the trees, so enchantingly colorful and black, the like of which you've never seen.

But things were different during the day; the atmosphere was so easygoing that you could have gone horseback riding around the main camp. It's only when you have the time to sit back and think and to feel terror that you first learn the true meaning of danger. Every day claims its victims, a regular weekly average of so-and-so many out of a hundred, and already the divisional general staff officers are predicting the results as impersonally as an insurance company. You do it too, by the way. Instinctively you know the odds and feel insured, although not exactly under the best of terms. It is a function of the curious calm that you feel, living under constant crossfire. Let me add the following, though, so that you don't paint a false picture of my circumstances. It does indeed happen that you suddenly feel driven to search for a particular familiar face, one that you remember seeing several days ago; but it's not there anymore. A face like that can upset you more than it should, and hang for a long time in the air like a candle's afterglow. And so your fear of death has diminished, though you are far more susceptible to all sorts of strange upsets. It is as if the fear of one's demise, which evidently lies on top of man forever like a stone, were suddenly to have been rolled back, and in the uncertain proximity of death an unaccountable inner freedom blossoms forth.

Once during that time an enemy plane appeared in the sky over our quiet encampment. This did not happen often, for the mountains with their narrow gaps between fortified peaks could only be hazarded at high altitudes. We stood at that very moment on the summit of one of those funereal hills, and all of a sudden a machine-gun barrage spotted the sky with little white clouds of shrapnel, like a nimble powder puff. It was a cheerful sight, almost endearing. And to top it off, the sun shone through the tricolored wings of the plane as it flew high overhead, as though through a stained-glass church window, or through colored crepe paper. The only missing ingredient was some music by Mozart. I couldn't help thinking, by the way, that we stood around like a crowd of spectators at the races, placing our bets. And one of us even said: Better take cover! But nobody it seems was in the mood to dive like a field mouse into a hole. At that instant I heard a distant ringing drawing closer to my ecstatically upturned face. Of course, it could also have happened the other way around, that I first heard the ringing and only then became conscious of the impending danger; but I knew immediately: It's an aerial dart. These were pointed iron rods no thicker than a pencil lead that planes dropped from above in those days. And if they struck you in the skull, they came out through the soles of your feet, but they didn't hit very often, and so were soon discarded. And though this was my first aerial dart – bombs and machine-gun fire sound altogether different – I knew right away what it was. I was excited, and a second later I already felt that strange, unlikely intuition: It's going to hit!

And do you know what it was like? Not like a frightening foreboding, but rather like an unexpected stroke of good luck! I was surprised at first that I should be the only one to hear its ringing. Then I thought the sound would disappear again. But it didn't disappear. It came ever closer, and though still far away, it grew proportionally louder. Cautiously I looked at the other faces, but no one else was aware of its approach. And at that moment when I became convinced that I alone heard that subtle singing, something rose up out of me to meet it: a ray of life, equally infinite to that death ray descending from above. I'm not making this up, I'm trying to put it as plainly as I can. I believe I've held to a sober physical description so far, though I know of course that to a certain extent it's like in a dream where it seems as though you're speaking clearly, while the words come out all garbled.

It lasted a long time, during which I alone heard the sound coming closer. It was a shrill, singing, solitary, high-pitched tone, like the ringing rim of a glass, but there was something unreal about it. You've never heard anything like it before, I said to myself. And this tone was directed at me; I stood in communion with it and had not the least little doubt that something decisive was about to happen to me. I had no thoughts of the kind that are supposed to come at death's door, but all my thoughts were rather focused on the future; I can only say that I was certain that in the next second I would feel God's proximity close up to my body – which, after all, is saying quite a bit for someone who hasn't believed in God since the age of eight.

Meanwhile, the sound from above became ever more tangible; it swelled and loomed dangerously close. I asked myself several times whether I should warn the others; but let it strike me or another, I wouldn't say a word! Maybe there was a devilish vanity in this illusion that high above the battlefield a voice sang just for me. Maybe God is nothing more than the vain illusion of us poor beggars who puff ourselves up in the pinch and brag of rich relations up above. I don't know. But the fact remains that the sky soon started ringing for the others too; I noticed traces of uneasiness flash across their faces, and I tell you – not one of them let a word slip either! I looked again at those faces: fellows, for whom nothing would have been more unlikely than to think such thoughts, stood there, without knowing it, like a group of disciples waiting for a message from on high. And suddenly the singing became an earthly sound, ten, a hundred feet above us and it died. He – it – was here. Right here in our midst, but closer to me, something that had gone silent and been swallowed up by the earth, had exploded into an unreal hush.

My heart beat quickly and quietly; I couldn't have lost consciousness for even a second; not the least fraction of a second was missing from my life. But then I noticed everyone staring at me. I hadn't budged an inch but my body had been violently thrust to the side, having executed a deep, one hundred-and-eighty degree bow. I felt as though I were just waking from a trance, and had no idea how long I'd been unconscious. No one spoke to me at first; then, finally, someone said: ‘An aerial dart!' And everyone tried to find it, but it was buried deep in the ground. At that instant a hot rush of gratitude swept through me, and I believe that my whole body turned red. And if at that very moment someone had said that God had entered my body, I wouldn't have laughed. But I wouldn't have believed it either – not even that a splinter of His being was in me. And yet whenever I think back to that incident, I feel an overwhelming desire to experience something like it again even more vividly!

One of the greatest German-language writers of his time,
Robert Musil
was born in Klagenfurt in Austria-Hungary in 1880 and died in Geneva in 1942, in flight from the Third Reich. From 1930 onwards, Musil worked on his masterpiece
The Man without Qualities
, which remained unfinished at his death. This piece was included in his
Posthumous Papers of a Living Author
, published in 1936 and banned by the Nazis in 1939. Musil was always searching for a way in his writing to fuse the imaginative and the philosophical. Writing about the
Posthumous Papers
, Musil worried that

In fact, what he achieves in
The Blackbird
is something very special – to make universal his personal experiences of the war in the South Tyrol. In the face of death, he has a near-religious epiphany. All Musil's writings reflect his attempt to find a literary form to express the cataclysmic events of the first half of the 20th century that marked the lives of millions including his own.

LIVIU REBREANU

TO THE ROMANIAN FRONT