[25] The devouring of immortality

[25] The devouring of immortality

 

Stand on a sidewalk within sight of Poland Station for ten minutes and count all the people who pass – the ones tumbling out of the factories, the downlooking streetsweepers, the mail carriers and horseless carters, the junior assistant clerks with paper collars, the shoeblacks and beggars and petty thieves. They won’t always be with us. Most of them will be dead within five years by bullets or bombs or the great pestilence. Bullets will be the easiest way to go, if they’re accurate – they kill like magic, you don’t even hear crack. Bombs will be just as sure if you’re close enough but horribly uncertain if you’re not. Pestilence … You don’t want to die that way. You get pestilence and people won’t want to know or remember you. For an experiment, walk down this same sidewalk this year shouting, ‘The end of the world is nigh.’ You’ll be laughed at, you’ll be punched in the face, you’ll be locked up and scolded. Because imagination takes money, must you know? The people of the Inner World know it’s coming because they’re the ones who want it. The people around the Poland Station don’t have money and wouldn’t know what to do with it beyond spending it as quickly as they can in a lokal beneath the Great Wheel. A mile north, vineyards climb the tree-bordered fields, shaded lanes climb gentle hills, bankers and owners shut out the world in stuccoed villas. A mile to the west, the empire’s heart is still beating in the breast of a senile God-King for whom the past blocks all view of the future. And a mile to the east, the great plain begins, one thousand marches deep, always a wind there, would you listen. No one looks that way – the horizon has always been empty, what’s the point. Much better to look to the south. And a half-mile to the south, well, yes, imagine that – a Mighty Wheel. Because in the Dream City, if you’re poor, the amusement park is the centre of your existence. Life in the new century will be not short but fast. And with its speed it will overtake and trample the powerless, and here is where they are stockpiled.

On a side street off the tram line is a hostel for workers with a touch more money than none at all. If they are moral gentlemen and have a stamped form that says so, they find a haven. It is a small, perfect world for the lucky. They’re in storage here for the steel rain. They find life here regimented but not oppressively, and most of them are glad for the routine it enforces in a world whose fever is about to spike just out of their view. Single men in labourers’ jobs, junior clerks, can just afford it. They leave in the dark for their twelve-hour day, return in the dark for their bed and their roof. Many can’t find work and stay until their money runs out. Then a few have a scam going. During the day, the lounge is the place for them. There’s one, cutting silhouettes out of black paper – the Council House, the Parliament, a woman in a bonnet with a high collar and pert nose. People will pay for these? There’s another, mending an umbrella. He collects broken ones from the rubbish tips, straightens the ribs, resews the rubberized cotton, and sells them to corner shops.

There’s nothing remarkable here, not here. So let’s look instead at the first dog we see … that one. No dogs are allowed in the men’s hostel, but the residents feed this one scraps every day and pet him as they go in and out. None of the residents know his name. Just that he’s a little guy with one crooked ear and a pointed muzzle and ribs showing where his yellow coat is falling out in patches. His back right leg is always half-cocked and trembling. Unless he’s eating a bit of pork or half a salt roll, he’s usually on his haunches, licking his sores. It’s eight-thirty in the morning. We know this because Wolfie is slouching and cringing his way along the pavement through the soot-covered snow in his greasy overcoat and long, curled-up hair with a bottle of milk in one hand and a bleached-flour roll in the other. He puts the milk bottle down on the sidewalk and grins. He thinks he’s grinning. What he does really is open his mouth wide to make an oval and sigh through it. His cornflower-blue eyes, slightly popped, make eye contact with the little guy, who crouches down even lower with his tail beating between his legs.

‘Little dog, what’s your name, eh? Still don’t know? Do you know how to bark? Do you want to bark for me?’

The little guy tries to lick the hand with the roll in it. Wolfie jerks his hand back and sees two children coming by.

‘He wants your breakfast,’ the boy says.

‘I need it myself,’ Wolfie tells them. ‘So much work, never enough time.’ He stares at the two children, a blond boy and a blonde girl, Hansel and Gretel in an industrial scrubland. They’re eating this week – the father must have found a day job. The boy, the older one, glances at the hostel sign. Mother warns him and his sister about those people in there, and now there they’ve gone, speaking to one. Now it’s too late not to talk to him. They’ve met his eye, you see, and this one has a way of looking at children that locks them in place: I know how to frighten people, but I won’t frighten you. They think they see a humourless clown with a buttress nose and popped eyes, dressed in a baggy coat, but what do they know about what Wolfie himself sees?

And truly, he would never frighten a child on purpose. He misses being one too much for that. He remembers childhood games of Cowboys and Indians, Boers and British, and wonders if they would play if he got up the nerve to ask.

‘Then give us the roll,’ the girl says.

Wolfie’s mouth gapes silently again, his lips pulled down over his crooked brown teeth. ‘I can’t do that either, child,’ he says. ‘My father, he was a tax inspector in Passau. For the Emperor, see? He always taught me to work for my bread. I worked all yesterday for this loaf, and now I’ll work all today for the next one.’ Thank goodness for children, he tells himself. You can talk sensibly to them, and that thought he just expressed was a profound one to him. ‘You like dogs, do you? One day you’ll have one. This one doesn’t have a name.’

‘Yes he does,’ the girl says. ‘His name’s Hero. He’s Mr Becker’s dog.’

The look on his face, when he turns to them again, makes the little girl begin to cry and the boy throw out his arm to protect her while they both back away. Yet Wolfie has done nothing but look at her, just her, and imagine what power to erase her must be like. His mouth begins to flap open and shut. He wrenches his head from the sound of her words and blinks them out of his mind. When he looks up they are gone.

He is battling a sour mood when he takes his chair in the breakfast room a half-hour later. He has scrubbed his bone-pale face in the communal washroom and dressed neatly in weeks-old underwear and a flannel jacket from the last century, which he has buttoned to the neck to hide his flabby chest. Now he sits down and takes his tea-with-the-duchess pose, straight-backed and knees together, and pushes his almost black hair out of his left eye with the palm of his right hand. He lines up his table easel in the winter windowlight, opens his watercolour box to count the pencils and brushes and little pots of paint, and places his ruler and compass just there along the edge of the table. He glances around the table – yes they’re all there, most of them anyway. Joe the baker, young Ivor just back from Szeged, Robert the socialist clerk, and Sol the educated one. Hans is missing, gone who knows where, but he is learning to tolerate life’s inconsistencies. No, he tells himself, I’m not going to give the missing Hans a thought. After all, what difference does it really make if Hans is there or not? Hans can go wherever he wants to. Yes, there are two types of people in the world, no matter what axe you use to break it, there are always only two. Breakfast is in front of him: a plate of cold rice pudding he made in the kitchen the night before and a jar of milk he has warmed on the stove. He delights in his food, which is always the same and always white. He will go for weeks on nothing but rice pudding and milk and a bleached roll. Then binge on vanilla éclairs and go hungry for three days after that. Robert is eyeing a newspaper on the window ledge, and Wolfie reaches quickly to get it first, the fastest anyone sees him move. The Christian Worker, never mind. He begins rattling the pages, looking for something he can agree with, whether it takes all day. And even if he can’t agree, the lies he reads will remind him of the truth. It is a man’s unwavering duty to know the truth of his enemy. Yes, his rigid and unwavering duty. He will be sitting here until at least the late morning, as long as it takes him to read the papers stacked up from yesterday, and then begin to draw the Council House with his rulers and compass. His mates are watching him. When he looks up they’ve leaned closer.

‘Hey, Wolfie, I didn’t know you read the Worker.’

As if he didn’t expect this. That’s somebody from the other table, who moved in last week and – he can tell – wants his chair. He won’t get it – every new arrival wants his chair, but Wolfie has been in the hostel longer than anyone, and this newcomer will learn that quickly enough. No, the other old-timers agree, the place just wouldn’t be the same without Wolfie in that chair. But the new guy hasn’t given up yet – he’s been goading him for three days and is still searching for his number, certain (as he well should be) that there is one.

‘Christian Worker,’ someone else says. ‘That’s some kind of con, isn’t it, Wolfie? I thought all the socialists were Jews.’

‘Only most of them,’ Wolfie says. ‘And then some Germans fall for their lies. What power can a lie have if no one believes it? It’s a tragedy, I know, that people are distracted by the lies in this. I’m saying that you have to be special to read this sheet for the lie it is.’ And he certainly is special, but everyone already knows that.

‘No more of that talk,’ Robert says to the next table. This happens too often, and sometimes it’s even funny, even to Wolfie’s faction. There are the guys at Wolfie’s table, who have learned to live with his eccentricities, and there are the guys at the other tables, who prod him as a sport, scoring points when he loses control. There is almost always something that will do it. Two guys from the next table have silently stepped behind him, on either side of his chair, blocking the windowlight, and are breathing on his neck while they read the paper over his shoulder. Wolfie shivers at their presence but doesn’t turn around.

‘Look at this,’ he says, ‘the parliamentary debates. These are always an education. How much longer do we have to endure this? The empire should have fallen apart decades ago. All the Czechs and Poles and Slovenes who demonstrate about wanting their freedom – you’re all too blind to see. They’re doing more to keep this corpse from rotting than anyone else. Never mind their displays – they like things just the way they are, with the government pandering to them. Parasites, I tell you. They’re going to keep feeding on us till we throw them out in one body. All at once, in one body, I tell you. That’s the only way. I’ve often wondered why every empire in history except this one has always collapsed.’

‘There’s a question,’ someone says. ‘Maybe it’s a matter of – ’

‘I have often wondered,’ Wolfie interrupts, and gives the interlocutor a venomous stare – he almost lost it there – ‘why every other empire in history has always collapsed. One day when I have time I’m going to spend a week in the library and find out. Unfortunately, there aren’t any good books on the subject. Books lie just as easily as people. The best school is still the hardest one, and by that I mean experience.’

One of the men behind him is leaning on the table, brushing the protractor out of kilter. Wolfie flips a hand at them dismissively and straightens it again. The longer he’s lived here, more better he’s learned to expect this from the people around him.

‘It’s getting hot in here, isn’t it, Wolfie,’ says the other while the rest of the room watches with half an eye. There’s a campaign going on, and those can be fun till they work.

‘By parasites, do you mean the Jews, Wolfie?’ That’s the next table again, and a silent groan wafts up from Wolfie’s table. His circle has seen this too often. Watch the other table … heads huddled, entertaining themselves by looking for a stick to prod him into a tantrum. If the socialists don’t work, try the Jews or the Czechs, and if those don’t work, try the prostitutes. But it has to be something that Wolfie doesn’t see coming, and by now he’s almost immune to their usual sorties.

‘I’ve got nothing against Jews,’ Wolfie shrugs. ‘Sol, tell those people if I’ve ever said a word against your people.’

‘You don’t hate Jews more than any other German I don’t know,’ Sol tells him. ‘That makes you and me almost brothers, Wolfie.’

The irony flies over Wolfie’s head, the way it always does. ‘There, you see? Ah, there’s Hans for us.’ It’s Hans who sells Wolfie’s little watercolours for him. Wolfie is no good at all at that – too shy around strangers. When he tries to sell them for himself, he stands outside the shop window for an hour with his hands cupped over his groin, pretending to be a lamppost, fear, shame, and anger all fuelling one another. The tax inspector’s son from Passau is humiliated by the thought of working. So Wolfie is the artist of the German soul, and Hans is Wolfie’s agent. Hans glances at the other table. The four of them over there have stood up in a chorus line. Each is slouched over, knock-kneed, his left hand covering his groin, the right one pushing his hair from his left brow.

‘Knock it off,’ Hans tells them. ‘He has to work today. You are working today, aren’t you, Wolfie?’

‘Of course,’ Wolfie tells him. ‘Right now I’m too busy. Is that the German Call over there? Now that’s a newspaper.’

Someone from a third table tosses it to him, and Wolfie tosses the Christian Worker back. The lead story in the Call is about a police raid on a brothel staffed by under-age Aryan girls. There has been no time to prepare an illustration – the caption says – but it will be provided in the next day’s issue. At last the truth, Wolfie sighs to himself. The others are watching him read. Tonight he will borrow Hans’s coat and line up at the Court Opera for standing tickets to The Flying Dutchman. That’s why they can do little to upset him today, not even those fools at the next table, or the ones behind him: the overture is already playing in his head. He’ll have to sleep outside on the steps tonight for missing the evening curfew, but he won’t care.

‘This is the paper that will answer all your questions,’ he announces.

‘Life just wouldn’t be the same without you to read The Call for us,’ Sol tells him. Some of the others nod, missing the irony again.

‘The vibration of the German soul,’ he says.

‘What’s that, Wolfie?’ Hans asks, eyeing the easel and waiting for Wolfie to follow his gaze.

‘I’m thinking, that’s all. Pity is useless for girls like the ones here.’ He taps the newspaper article with his finger. ‘There’s no use in pity. Anger, now that’s something that can do some good. It’s shameful that the government is too corrupt to stop these things at the seed.’

‘Where was the brothel?’ someone asks.

‘Where do you think? Ten minutes’ walk towards the fairgrounds.’ He shivers. ‘Oh, yes, you all know about that street, don’t you?’

‘A guy like you doesn’t have any time for women,’ says Ivor, at his own table.

‘Certainly not,’ Wolfie says. He ignores their sniggers, too busy reading to notice the others leaning closer. Ivor mops his brow with a soiled handkerchief and drops it over Wolfie’s pencil case. Wolfie only shakes his head and flicks it aside to the floor.

His long coat is much too big for him. He hasn’t taken it off in months. He could dress better, but in the days when he had no choice but to dress like a tramp, he learned to endure rags like these. His jet-brown hair has been growing since September until now it is making ringlets at his shoulders, a camel tail over his left eye. His face is fastidiously shaven except for a handlebar mustache that brushes his ears. Face, ghost pale; chin, weak and soft; nose, an oversized pyramid. His eyes are practising a game only he knows, staring fixed at Hans, the whites showing all around. They are pale to the point of translucence and they always shock people. When he learned that people often stared at them, he developed a game out of staring back, learning how to hold the stares he received. When he catches someone looking into them he … He doesn’t know himself what locks them to him. He just knows how, and that to hold a stare sends a blast of warmth through him. It’s the only power he has found in this world. Behind those eyes breeds a perfect stillness, immaculate certainty. The world rejected him years ago, but having driven him as low is it could, it also stopped punishing him. It has moved on to other victims and left him with this familiar chair in this dull building on a workers’ street, where he can be left alone as long as he chooses, dabbing out four kroner a week and dreaming of a world as perfect as the one he phantasizes. There is no secret to the peace he has found in this small world – rather, there is, but only he has learned it: one simply needs not care about others. A soul is a fragile thing, and he has killed his own, and having done that, he can go out in the world without fear of suffering by it. That is the power he has learned: to arrest people with his stare and tell them you mean nothing, and even more, to know that it’s become true.

He is eerily happy at that moment. His eyes are already softening to the music’s spell. Whatever feelings he still has are beginning to vibrate with it. What is he thinking? One can’t say he ever thinks. It isn’t his nature to wonder at things. For him, nothing is hidden; the world is no more than its surfaces and he has already convinced himself that he reads them perfectly.

‘Change,’ he says, and the others turn to stare at him in unison. How does he make them all do that? Not even Wolfie himself knows. ‘The world changes or it dies. But if it changes for the worse, better that it dies. Look at me – I threw my cigarettes into the river last year. I was smoking twenty-five or even thirty every day. Then one day I spent one of my last two groschen on a piece of bread and went looking for cigarettes to feed my habit. But then I thought, instead I could have a piece of ham with my bread. And that’s when I threw them into the river. A man has to change every day, something about himself every day. If we all did that the world would be better in a week.’

In fact, nothing around him ever changes, and he flees from change whenever he can.

The ones who know him haven’t paid attention to his words. They are exactly what he has said at breakfast at least once a week for months. The newer residents are listening for the first time. He looks back without blinking, but he doesn’t try to hypnotize them today.

‘I’m like Lohengrin,’ he says. ‘Nobody knows my real name. That’s what killed him in the end – he told people who he really was, and then they learned all the rest. Let that be a lesson – never keep secrets. When you let the truth out immediately, it can do you no harm. When you hold it back, it destroys you when it comes out. No one can hide it forever.’

Few think ill of him here – even the Jewish residents have an exasperated grin for him. He has eccentricities and contorted opinions and occasional tantrums, but who doesn’t have those, a place like this? He is the one who takes the collection plate around when one of the long-timers can’t make the week’s rent. The one men turn to with complaints about conditions (few enough), and then he takes them to the hostel’s director. Three years have placed him among the elite here. No one sits in his chair, no one complains of him. He has no friends, but these strangers let him hide among them and give him an audience when he looks for one.

‘You’re a simple man, right,’ says Carl, another old-timer, with the off-hand intonation of someone calling for another round. Even the other table has stopped goading him in order to listen.

‘And lucky to be one,’ he says. ‘For a simple man, the world is simple. You must be careful what you read, for example. Never the Free Press. The very ink in that rag curdles my blood. Oh yes, it doesn’t take long to learn all there is to learn from the Free Press. But that’s this city for you – this cacaphony. This plague – that’s what it is. The hatching ground for the plague of the twentieth century. Oh, there’s some who understand. Lanz von Liebenfehls in Ostara, for example – he knows who’s who, let me tell you. Where two bloods come together, there is always pollution. Both sides weaken. How can they anything else? Purity is the greatest strength and there is less of that here in this city than anywhere else in Germandom. The other day I ran into a young woman I recognized, by pure fate. I believe in fate, you know. Yes, fate and purity.’

He stops a moment – don’t say hesitate, for when he’s in the mood to expound and the audience is there, he never hesitates. But he stops to turn the two words over in his mind, finds a gap for them between two other polished thoughts. The others sit back and wait for him to go on, wondering whether it will end with a bang, because sometimes he talks himself into a tantrum before anyone needs to help him.

‘A Jewess she was, the red-haired type, and he was some kind of painter, though I can’t say whether he was a good one or not. We have to doubt it, since nothing good can come from the culture of this city, for reasons I don’t have time to discuss. And there she was – his wife now. I know her parents’ home. A friend took me to it once when we arrived in this city a few years ago. He was a chamber musician for hire, a violist, and this Jewess was their daughter. Do you see now? That’s what Jews do nowadays – they surround themselves with German culture but as soon as a Jew gets hold of it, he degrades it. Fifty years ago the emperor built the Great Boulevard out there to revive his empire, and yes, there was hope then to turn his kingdoms into a showcase of the German folk. But look what happened. All of this empire’s Jews and Czechs and Hungarians and Poles discovered a good thing and came flooding in. Oh, yes, they want what every good German wants, exactly the same things. One mustn’t blame them for that. But as soon as they touch it, it isn’t worth wanting any more. They change it, you see. It makes all the difference whether a German owns a Makart canvas, or a Jew. A wealthy man her father was. A manufacturer of something light. When I walked through their rooms I saw everything that anyone of culture would want. It was exquisite. But because a Jew owned it, all of it was tainted. It’s like that everywhere in this city. Whenever you see something ugly here, look for one of them. If a Jew hasn’t made it, he’s bought it or he’s sold it. Something beautiful that a German made is suddenly ugly because a Jew touched it.’

Some are listening, some have left, some are eating breakfast.

‘A beautiful apartment they had, looking down on the boulevard, close to the Council House. Full of solid German furniture, fine German crystal and tapestries, and in the music room a rosewood piano by Heitzing. But the people I saw there? It made me sour, I tell you, because the soul of a people can only be degraded by exposure to aliens. One needed only look once to tell that real Germans weren’t there. A Jew can only play at being a German, he always gets it wrong. It’s like sending monkeys to school. They can’t learn anything there except to become apes, so the education system can’t help but be destroyed, because no German can learn anything around monkeys except to become a monkey himself.

‘So a few days ago I’m over at Rosemeyr’s selling one of my watercolours, and in comes the daughter on the arm of this Sudeten Czech, which as you know is almost a German. They even had a baby with them. Of course, if I hadn’t known she was a Jew, I would have had to wonder. Really, you have to train yourself to notice some of the Westernized ones. But my point: What hope does their child have? There’s a life without a future, being neither one thing nor the other, belonging nowhere. And the two parents? They were obviously miserable, trapped in a loveless marriage. It isn’t as if one should blame the parents for mixing their blood like that. It’s the fault of the state itself, for tearing up the laws forbidding them to marry. One can’t expect everybody to avoid the worst thing when the state tells them it’s acceptable. I remember her now, sitting on a stool while her mother played the piano, turning the sheet music. I don’t know if she’s beautiful, I don’t try to judge such things. She saw me staring at her, and it frightened her. I was only trying to be sure what she was, but to be looked at by a true German like me was enough to shame her. I was feeling sorry for her, like anyone would who sees a young girl who will never belong anywhere. She fled the room, poor child, when she saw me staring.

‘Now years later, there she is again. Who knows why fate brought us together a second time? She was not a happy woman. The perfect example of a miserable Jew. Saddled with a husband she had no right to marry (and she must know that now), a child who can belong nowhere, a society she can only survive in by hiding. I have no complaint against her personally. I only wish her kind would go away. And if they don’t, where is the plan? Because we Germans must act in the end. This empire now is too weak to ever do that. In Berlin or Munich, perhaps one day, but we here are too far gone down this road. I tell you, we recognized each other, and I frightened her again, just like the first time, except now instead of running, she fainted. I don’t blame her for being what she is. My contempt is only for the empire for allowing people like her to exist.’

‘Fate and purity,’ intones some guy at the other table.

‘Exactly,’ Wolfie tells him with a look and a nod, while the others keep listening. ‘Fate and purity.’

‘Well okay,’ says the guy. ‘So what’s the third?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You said there were three things that matter. Right, didn’t he, guys?’

‘Three, definitely,’ comes the chorus.

‘So come on, Wolfie, what’s the third?’

‘Oh no,’ Hans mutters, staring at the blank postcard on the easel while the other table starts chanting ‘Three! … Three! … Three! …’ That bastard genius. You can hear the triumph in their voices: got you, Wolfie. Who is already on his feet, swinging his ruler like a sword, his back arched at the ceiling.

‘You know nothing!’ he screams. ‘You are nothing! Why do I waste my time with ignorant scum like you? The whole pile of you will never amount to anything. Do you know what you all deserve? Well do you?’ For moment he doesn’t know either. ‘You aren’t worthy!’ His voice rises to shrillness. ‘The shame I feel at the sight of you would make you shrivel up if you had the brains or the soul to feel it in yourself. You deserve to be rubbed out! Do you hear me, rubbed out, rubbed out, rubbed out! You worthless scum, God would give you paradise and you throw it away on … on –’

The others at his table have fallen back in their chairs, each thinking, ‘Don’t look in his eyes.’ The guys at the other table are looking ashamed of themselves, and two of them sneak away while others come to the doorway to watch. Everyone knows about this, yet people still come to watch. In five minutes it is over, and it is always over the same way. He pushes back his hair, and slams down his ruler, and wipes his mouth with his coat collar, and screams – the only clearly spoken words he has uttered for the last moments, and the only ones that sound human –

‘How much more of you do you think I can take!’ he sobs. ‘I’m sick of wasting my time on worthless shit like you!’

And slams out the door.

The echoes take a moment to die. Two or three of the guys take their cupped hands from their ears.

‘Did you look in his eyes?’ someone asks Hans.

‘Do you think I’m crazy?’ he gasps. ‘I’d have to be crazier than he is. Hey, did anybody look in his eyes?’