Flight Without End

XXI

From time to time the conductor visited some larger or smaller nearby town on the Rhine, stayed away for a few days, and returned pale and in need of recuperation.

‘Poor George, he has to have a change of air,’ said Klara.

‘I need relaxation,’ said the conductor.

His excursions, as soon emerged, were for amorous purposes. He was like a bird which hops from branch to branch, and pours forth a little song from each. The young girls in the ancient centres of culture venerate the high-priests of art, together with boxers and gymnasts. In this they differ from their sisters in the larger cities, where barbarism is indigenous.

The conductor’s marriage resembled a still lake over which blew a constant cool breeze. The child swam merrily between father and mother, as if between two harbours. She was never ill, she never even had whooping-cough. She did not cry. She was not moody. She had imbibed her mother’s placid unintoxicating milk and formed her character correspondingly. She was the very model of a little girl. She played with dolls made from sponges with which she could be washed at the same time. She said Papa and Mama and referred to all adults as aunt and uncle with an equal friendliness.

In the conductor’s house one ate a lot of vegetables and eggs, cream and fruit, and many desserts that tasted of paper. One drank wholesome table-wines and rose from table as light as an air-balloon. All the same, the conductor slept after meals, he lay down on his sofa, yet it seemed as if he was not asleep but had merely withdrawn to be alone with his private culture.

One made and received a few calls.

Within the town, itself a cultural centre, there were also houses which were smaller cultural centres. There were artists who lived in studios and played the bohemian. There was a lawyer who invited Christian fellow-citizens for the Jewish festivals, and so established an oecumenical atmosphere, at least in the higher spheres. There was a Christian designer who made his living out of Jewish ornamentation and traced the family trees of all the old Rhenish families for the appropriate fee. There was a stamp-collector who, every few weeks, organized exhibitions of his best specimens together with festivities which, now and then, resulted in a marriage. There were descendants of the old poets of the second Romantic school, who had interesting unpublished letters to show. There was a live lyric poet of repute who lived in a small room in a museum, and an old professor who sat all day in a church tower and operated the famous carillon which is mentioned in Baedeker. There was an old churchyard where the students from the Art School would spend entire mornings in order to portray the picturesque gravestones in their sketchbooks. There were a few historic old fountains which the municipality had collected one day and brought together as a single group in the city park, because it was convenient and because there was already a war-memorial there erected in 1920 and a Bismarck oak, dating from 1872 and surrounded by barbed wire, which rustled throughout the summer. There were also many owners of bicycles, which were known as the little man’s motor-car.

In the end, the esteem enjoyed by the conductor extended itself to Franz, who was occasionally called on to recount his Siberian experience. To the fifty quarto pages he added a further thirty. He had already invented a miscellany of adventures; it was a simple matter for him to become a renowned Siberian expert.

My utter indolence does not distress me in the least in this town [he wrote in his journal]. If I were to work even less here, I would still consider myself very useful. There are no working people among the people I come across, with the possible exception of the manufacturers. Not even the businessmen work. It seems to me that the men still have their feet on the ground, the whole of their lower portion is of the earth, but from their hands upwards they no longer live in an earthly atmosphere. Each exists of two halves. In each case the upper half is ashamed of the lower. Each considers his hands as better than his feet. Each leads two lives. Eating, drinking and loving is carried out by the lower, the inferior, parts, professional life by the upper.

When George conducts, he is a different George from the one who sleeps with his little devotees. Yesterday a lady informed me that she had been to the cinema, and had almost decided to keep her face veiled. She went to the cinema only with the lower, inferior part of her body, she watched the film only with a pair of vulgar eyes suited to vulgar purposes, eyes which were at her disposal like an opera-glass or a lorgnette. I slept with a woman who woke me after an hour in order to ask me if my spiritual love for her corresponded to my physical performance. For without the spiritual side she considered herself ‘degraded’. I found that I had to get dressed very quickly, and while I was searching for my collar-stud, which had rolled under the bed, I explained to her that my soul always resided in that part of my body which I was using to carry out a particular activity. Thus, in my feet when I went for a walk, and so on.

‘You are a cynic,’ said the woman.

I felt much better among my stupidest comrades at the Cadet School and later in the regiment. The female auxiliaries, second class, at the base were more sensible than these ladies. The only concession they make to reality is their gymnastic exercises every morning at six o’clock. Only the gymnastics are not called gymnastics, but eurhythmics. Otherwise they would consider themselves degraded at every kneesbend.

My sister-in-law reminds me of Natasha. I would never have fallen in love with Natasha if I had taken the opposite road, from my brother’s house to Russia. Natasha sacrificed to the revolutionary idea, Klara sacrifices partly to culture, partly to the social conscience. But whereas Natasha obviously behaved against her nature, Klara does not have to force herself at all. Nothing comes to her more naturally than this social conscience, which causes her to care for the health of her servants, to treat waiters like war comrades and myself as if we had sucked at the same breast. I sometimes think that she is a creature under a spell, that she might be turned in a healthy direction, that one might make a woman of her. But that is as improbable as a love affair with a vacuum-cleaner, which they push over the carpets every morning in this country.

My brother probably denies my moral justification for living. I have no vocation and earn no money. I even consider myself guilty because I eat his bread and butter. Anyway, I am quite unfitted to hold down a job anywhere unless they were to pay me for getting angry at the world. I am not even in harmony with any of the ruling ideologies.

Some days ago I got to know a woman, a writer and a communist. She has married a Rumanian communist, also a writer, whom I find untalented and stupid but who is crafty enough to conceal his stupidity in his communist convictions and to justify his laziness on political grounds. This couple lives on the support of a capitalist uncle, a banker, and by writing articles for radical magazines. The young woman wears low-heeled shoes and sneers at the society that provides her with a living. She talks to her own daughter like the warden of a reformatory to an inmate who is still a minor, regards her as an ill-tempered offshoot of the family and condones her bad behaviour. She wears an infinitely superior expression, associates with some literary people, is acquainted with a Berlin night-club, and once lived in a working-class district, out of protest and from conviction. After three months her uncle sent her money and she moved to the West. Since then she has become acquainted with the heights and depths of society and has written novels of working-class life. If one addresses her as Madam, one suffers her scorn, and if one calls her Frau Tedescu, she is shocked. She despised me from the outset because I did not remain in Russia. Naturally she is not aware that I fought in the civil war, and would probably never have believed me capable of doing so. Courtesy she considers a bourgeois vulgarity. I have discovered a special way of dealing with her. I firmly clasp her delicate little hand, shake it, call her comrade and talk bluntly of the sexual matters which she discusses in her novels. At times she is near to tears.

The only times when I become tender and melancholy are when I think of Irene. She is not even the Irene, my betrothed, whom I knew when I was still a stupid first lieutenant and her fiancé. It is some unknown woman I love, who lives I know not where.

When George told me he had heard that she was in Paris, I felt hot and cold, I was dazzled, it was like that time in Baku when the lady told me of the ridiculous shop windows of the Rue de la Paix. It is as if I had been seeking Irene all my life and every now and again someone told me he had come across her. But in reality I don’t seek her at all. I don’t even yearn for her. Perhaps she really is something quite different from the rest of the world; and thinking of her is the least residue of my credulity. It’s probably necessary to be a writer to express this accurately.

From time to time I feel that it is necessary for me to seek her out. If I went to Paris I would perhaps run into her. That would take money. But I can’t accept anything from George. That is a ridiculous inhibition. He would probably give it me and rejoice into the bargain that I was leaving him. But, though I may take George’s money for other reasons, I won’t for this one.

And it’s about time that I earned something. In this kind of world it is not important for me to work, but it is necessary for me to have an income. A man without an income is like a man without a name or like a shadow minus its body. One feels like a phantom. This does not contradict what I have written above. I have no pangs of conscience as regards my indolence, it is just that my indolence brings in no money whereas the indolence of everyone else is well remunerated. Only money confers the right to live.