The Sleepwalkers (68 page)

For almost two years Heinrich Wendling had not been home on leave. Yet in spite of this Hanna was surprised, as surprised as though some irrational and incomprehensible event had burst in upon her, when the letter arrived in which he announced his homecoming. The journey from Salonika would take six days at least, probably even longer, but in any case it was only a matter of days. Hanna dreaded his arrival as though she had a secret lover to conceal from him. Every day’s delay was to her like an act of grace, yet every evening she went through her night toilet even more scrupulously than usual, and she lay in bed each morning too even longer than usual, waiting, dreading lest the returning wanderer might take possession of her immediately, filthy and
unshaven as he was. And even though she felt she should be ashamed of such fancies, and for that very reason hoped that some offensive or other accident might cancel his leave, yet she felt as well the presence of a still stronger, a very strange hope that lurked somewhere, a vague presentiment that she did not want to acknowledge and indeed did not acknowledge, and which was like one’s sensation before a grave operation: one had to submit to it in order to be protected from something fatal towards which one was involuntarily striving; it was like a last terrifying refuge, and dark as it was, yet it rescued one from a profounder darkness. To dismiss as masochism such an attitude of hopeful dread and terrified waiting would be to leave unexplored all but the mere surface of the spirit. And the only explanation that Hanna could find for her state, in so far as she was aware of it at all, was very like the fatuous conviction of old women that marriage is the sole means of putting an end once and for all to the various sufferings of anæmic girls. No, she could not dare to examine it more closely, it was a tangle into which she had no wish to penetrate, and though with one part of her she expected that as soon as Heinrich came in everything would be the same again, quite naturally, yet she divined with equal intensity that never would things be the same again.

Summer had really come at last. “Rose Cottage” did honour to its name, although in deference to the times vegetables were cultivated rather than flowers, and although the semi-invalid jobbing gardener was incapable of attending properly to his business. But the crimson ramblers did not allow even the war to restrain them and had climbed up to the cherubs at each side of the door; the beds of peonies were pink and white, and the rows of heliotrope and stock on the border of the lawn were in full blossom. In front of the house the green landscape stretched peacefully, the spacious sweep of the valley held one’s gaze and carried it to the edge of the woods; the forester’s house, exposed to the eye in winter so that every one of its windows could be seen, was again smothered in green; the vineyards too had greened over, the woods lay dark, darker than ever now that black clouds were approaching from the mountains.

In the afternoon Hanna had taken her chair outside. She lay back in it beneath the chestnut-trees and gazed at the advancing clouds, whose shadows marched across the fields, transforming the bright clear green into a dark and strangely restful greenish violet; as the shadow stretched across the garden and the air suddenly became cool and cellarlike, the
flowers, until now sealed up by the heat, began all at once to exhale their perfumes as though their breath had been released. Or perhaps it was the sudden coolness that now gave Hanna leisure to feel their scent; yet it was so sudden, so unique, so vehement, this breaking wave of sweet perfume, cool and magical as an evening in a southern garden, as the falling dusk on the rocky beach of a Tyrrhenian sea. So the earth lay on the shore of a sea of cloud that broke in waves of rain, the soft, thick rain of thunder-showers, and Hanna, standing at the open veranda door, could smell the south; and even though she breathed in almost greedily the soft humidity that felt so cool and fresh in her nostrils, yet with the memory of that southern fragrance there had also been wafted to her the fear which she had felt for the first time during her honeymoon, standing on the seashore one rainy evening in Sicily; the hotel lay behind her, the flowers in the hotel garden perfumed the air, and she did not know who the strange man was that stood beside her—he was called Dr Wendling.

She started; the gardener had hurried across the path to put the garden implements in a place of safety out of the rain; she started, because she could not help thinking that it was a burglar who had broken in, although she knew quite well what the man was about. If Walter had not come out to her she would have fled into the house and locked the door. Walter had seated himself on the door-step; he stretched out his naked legs into the rain and occupied himself in cautiously loosening the dried crust of a scar on his knee, afterwards contentedly stroking the new pink skin. Hanna too sat down on the door-step; she clasped her hands round her legs, her beautiful slender legs—she too wore no stockings when she was in the house or the garden—and her smooth shins felt cool to the touch.

By now the rain had beaten down the scent of the flowers which it had awakened at first, and the air smelt only of moist earth. The brown-flecked tiled roof of the garden-house gleamed with wet, and when the gardener once more trudged down the path the gravel no longer crunched dryly under his feet, but rattled its wet and separate pebbles. Hanna put her arm round her son’s shoulders,—why couldn’t they remain always sitting like this, calmly at rest in a cool and cleanly world? only a very little of her fear was left. All the same she said: “If there’s more thunder like this during the night, Walter, you can come in beside me.”

When Surgeon-Major Kühlenbeck and Dr Kessel entered the dining-room of the hotel, the Major was already sitting at his accustomed place. He was reading the
Cologne News
, which had just arrived. The two gentlemen said good-evening, and the Major rose and invited them to sit at his table.

The Surgeon-Major most tactlessly referred to the newspaper:

“Are we to have the pleasure, Herr Major, of reading you in other papers too?”

The Major simply shook his head, handed the paper across the table, and indicating the column containing the reports from the Front said:

“Bad news.”

Dr Kühlenbeck glanced over the reports:

“Really no worse than usual, Herr Major.”

The Major looked up questioningly.

“Herr Major, all news is bad except one thing, and that is—peace.”

“You’re right there,” said the Major, “but it must be an honourable peace.”

“Right,” said Kühlenbeck, lifting his glass, “then here’s to peace.”

The other two gentlemen clinked glasses with him and the Major repeated again:

“To an honourable peace … otherwise what should all those sacrifices have been made for?” As though he wanted to say something more, he still held his glass in his hand but remained silent; at last, however, he shook off his immobility and said: “Honour is by no means a mere convention … once upon a time poison-gas would have been rejected as a weapon of warfare.”

The gentlemen made no reply, and went on drinking their wine.

Then Dr Kessel said:

“What’s the good of all those beautiful theories about war-time food? … When I come home at night I can scarcely stand on my legs; for a man well on in years the food simply isn’t enough.”

Kühlenbeck said:

“You’re a defeatist, Kessel: it’s been demonstrated that diabetes has been reduced to a minimum, and with carcinoma it seems to be the same … it’s only your personal misfortune that you’re not a diabetic … 
besides, my dear chap, if you do feel pains in your legs … we’re none of us getting younger.”

Major von Pasenow said:

“Honour isn’t mere inertia of feeling.”

“I don’t quite understand, Herr Major,” said Dr Kühlenbeck.

The Major gazed into vacancy:

“Oh, it was nothing … as you know … my son fell at Verdun … he would be twenty-eight now.…”

“But he wasn’t your only son, Herr Major?”

The Major did not reply at once, it may be that he regarded the question as an indiscretion. Finally he said:

“Yes, there’s my younger son … and the two girls … the boy will soon be called up too … one must render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s …” he stopped, then he went on: “You see, the cause of all the evil is that we don’t render to God the things that are God’s.”

Dr Kühlenbeck said:

“We don’t even render to human beings the things that are theirs … it seems to me we should begin with that first.”

“God first,” said Major von Pasenow.

Kühlenbeck threw out his chin; his dark grey beard jutted out into the air:

“We doctors are blatant materialists, I’m afraid.”

The Major said deprecatingly:

“You mustn’t say that.”

Dr Kessel too dissented; a true doctor was always an idealist. Kühlenbeck laughed:

“It’s true, I forgot your panel patients.”

After a while Dr Kessel said:

“As soon as I have half a chance I’ll take up my chamber music again.”

And the Major remarked that his wife too loved her playing. He thought for a little and then he added: “Spohr, an excellent composer.”

Since it had been rumoured that Gödicke had laughed, his roommates had tried everything possible to make him laugh again. The grossest stories were dished up to him, and as he lay in bed hardly
anyone passed without hopefully shaking the bed until it bounced up and down. But it was of no avail. Gödicke did not laugh again. He remained dumb.

Until one day Sister Carla brought him a postcard: “Gödicke, your wife has written to you …” Gödicke did not stir, “I’ll read it to you.” And Sister Carla read out to him that his faithful wife had heard nothing from him now for a long time, that she and the children were well, and that they all hoped he would soon be coming back. “I’ll answer it for you,” said Sister Carla. Gödicke gave not a sign of comprehension, and one might have thought that he had really understood nothing. And probably he would actually have succeeded in concealing from any eyewitness the tempest in his soul, that tempest which jumbled together the constituents of his ego and in rapid succession heaved them to the surface to submerge them just as rapidly again in the dark waves, he might have succeeded in calming the storm and gradually laying it altogether, had not the practical joker of the ward, Josef Settler the dragoon, passed by at that moment and as usual caught hold of the foot of the bed to make it oscillate a little. At that Gödicke of the Landwehr gave a cry which by no means resembled the laugh that was expected of him and that he was really under an obligation to provide; he gave an angry and heavy cry, sat up, by no means so slowly and laboriously as he was accustomed to do, and he snatched the postcard from Sister Carla, and he tore the postcard to pieces. Then he sank back, for the violent movement had started his pains again, and clasped his abdomen with his hands.

So there he lay looking up at the roof, and tried to reinstate a minimum of order among his thoughts. He was conscious of having acted rightly; he had with full justification turned away the intruder. That this intruder was the servant-girl Anna Lamprecht with her three children was almost immaterial, and could be quickly forgotten again. Indeed he was very glad that the Gödicke who had made an honest woman of the servant-girl Lamprecht had been so expeditiously called to order and relegated to his place behind the dark barrier,—there he would have to wait until he was summoned. Nevertheless with that the matter was not settled; an intruder who comes once may come again, even though he is not summoned, and once one door is opened, then every other door may fly open of itself. With terror he felt, though he could not have formulated it, that this intrusion into one part of his soul had affected
all the other parts by sympathy, indeed that through it they were all being changed. It was like a humming in his ears, a humming of the soul, a humming of the ego that hummed so violently that he could feel it in all his body; but it was also as though a clod of earth had been pushed under one’s tongue, a stifling clod that deranged all one’s thoughts. Or perhaps it was something else, but in any case it was something beyond one’s power, something before which one felt helpless. It was as though one wanted to spread the mortar before laying a brick, and the mortar hardened on the trowel. It was as though a foreman were there driving one to work at an illegal and impossible speed, and causing the bricks to be piled with furious haste on the scaffolding, so that they towered in great heaps and could not be worked off. The scaffolding must collapse if one did not at once put the winch and the concrete-mixing machine out of action to stop the whole business. Best of all if one’s eyes could grow together again and one’s ears be sealed again: the man Gödicke must see nothing, hear nothing, eat nothing. If the pain were not so bad now he would go into the garden and fetch a handful of earth to stop up all the holes. And while he clasped his sore abdomen, from which his children had issued, while he pressed his hands down on it as though never again must anything issue from him, while he clenched his teeth and bit his lips so that not even a sigh of pain might escape them, it seemed to him that thus his powers were increased, and that those waxing powers must raise the scaffolding to ever higher and airier heights, that he himself was omnipresent on every level and storey of that scaffolding, and that at last he would manage to stand quite alone on the topmost storey, at the summit of the scaffolding; that he would be able to stand there, dare to stand there, released from all pain, singing as he had always sung when he was up aloft. The carpenters would be working beneath him, hammering and driving in nails, and he would spit down, as he had always spat, spit down in a wide arc over them, and where the spittle struck and rebounded trees would grow up, which, no matter how high they grew, would never reach the height where he stood.

When Sister Carla came with the washing basin and the towels, he was lying peacefully, and peacefully too let himself be packed into the compresses. For two whole days he again refused meat and drink. And then an incident happened that made him begin to speak.