Mother Night

22: The Contents of an Old Trunk ...

'Look,' I said to my Helga in Greenwich Village, after I had told her what little I knew about her mother, father, and sister, 'this attic will never do for a love nest, not even for one night We'll get a taxi. Well go to some hotel. And tomorrow we will throw out all this furniture, get everything brand new. And then well look for a really nice place to live.'

'I'm very happy here,' she said.

'Tomorrow,' I said, 'well find a bed like our old bed, two miles long and three miles wide, with a headboard like an Italian sunset Remember — oh Lord, remember?'

'Yes,' she said.

'Tonight in a hotel,' I said. 'Tomorrow night in a bed like that'

'We leave right now?' she said.

'Whatever you say,' I said.

'Can I show you my presents first?' she said.

'Presents?' I said.

'For you,' she said.

'You're my present,' I said. 'What more would I want?'

'You might want these, too,' she said, freeing the catches on a suitcase. 'I hope you do.' She opened the suitcase, showed me that it was full of manuscripts. Her present to me was my collected works, my collected serious works, almost every heartfelt word ever written by me, the late Howard W. Campbell, Jr. There were poems, stories, plays, letters, one unpublished book — the collected works of myself as a buoyant, free, and young, young man.

'How queer this makes me feel,' I said.

'I shouldn't have brought them?' she said.

'I hardly know,' I said. 'These pieces of paper were me at one time.' I picked up the book manuscript, a bizarre experiment called Memoirs of a Monogamous Casanova. 'This you should have burned,' I said.

'I would just as gladly burn my own right arm,' she said.

I put the book aside, took up a sheaf of poems. 'What does this young stranger have to say about life?' I said, and I read a poem, a poem in German, aloud:

Kuhl und hell der Sonnenaugang,

leis und suss der Glocke Klang.

Ein Magdlein hold, Krug in der Hand,

sitzt an des tiefen Brunnens Rand.

In English? Roughly:

Cool, bright sunrise —

Faint, sweet bell.

Maiden with a pitcher

by a cool, deep well.

I read that poem out loud, and then I read another. I was and am a very bad poet. I do not set down these poems to be admired. The second poem I read was, I think, the next-to-the-last poem I ever wrote. It was dated 1937, and it had this title: 'Gedanken ?ber unseren Abstand vom Zietgeschehen,' or, roughly, 'Reflections on Not Participating in Current Events.'

It went like this:

Eine machtige Dampfwalze naht

und schwartz der Sonne Pfad,

rollt uber geduckte Menschen dahin,

will keiner ihr entfliehn.

Mein Lieb und ich schaun starren Blickes

das Ratsel dieses Blutgeschickes.

'Kommt mit herab,' die Menschheit schreit,

'Die Walze ist die Geschichte der Zeit!'

Mein Lieb und ich gehn auf die Flucht,

wo keine Dampfwalze uns sucht,

und leben auf den Bergeshohen,

getrennt vom schwarzen Zeitgeschehen.

Sollen wir bleiben mit den andern zu sterben?

Doch nein, wir zwei wollen nicht verderben!

Nun ist's vorbeti! — Wir sehn mit Erbleichen

die Opfer der Walze, verfaulte Leichen.

In English?

I saw a huge steam roller,

It blotted out the sun.

The people all lay down, lay down;

They did not try to run.

My love and I, we looked amazed

Upon the gory mystery.

'Lie down, lie down!' the people cried.

'The great machine is history!'

My love and I, we ran away,

The engine did not find us.

We ran up to a mountain top,

Left history far behind us.

Perhaps we should have stayed and died,

But somehow we don't think so.

We went to see where history'd been,

And my, the dead did stink so.

'How is it,' I said to Helga, 'that you have all these things?'

'When I went to West Berlin,' she said, 'I went to the theater to see if there was a theater left — if there was anyone I knew left — if anyone had any news of you.' She didn't have to explain which theater she meant. She meant the little theater where my plays had been produced in Berlin, where Helga had been the star so often.

'It got through most of the war, I know,' I said. 'It still exists?'

'Yes,' she said. 'And when I asked about you, they knew nothing. And when I told them what you had once meant to that theater, someone remembered that there was a trunk in the loft with your name on it.'

I passed my hand over the manuscripts. 'And in it were these,' I said. I remembered the trunk now, remembered when I'd closed it up at the start of the war, remembered when I'd thought of the trunk as a coffin for the young man I would never be again.

'You already have copies of these things?' she said.

'No,' I said. 'Not a scrap.'

'You don't write any more?' she said.

'There hasn't been anything I've wanted to say,' I said.

'After all you've seen, all you've been through, darling?' she said.

'It's all I've seen, all I've been through,' I said, 'that makes it damn nearly impossible for me to say anything. I've lost the knack of making sense. I speak gibberish to the civilized world, and it replies in kind.'

'There was another poem, your last poem, it must have been — ' she said, 'written in eyebrow pencil on the inside of the trunk lid.'

'Oh?' I said.

She recited it for me:

Hier liegt Howard Campbells Geist geborgen,

frei von des Korpers qualenden Sorgen.

Sein leerer Leib durchstreift die Welt,

und kargen Lohn dafur erhalt.

Triffst du die beiden getrennt allerw?rts

verbrenn den Leib, doch scheme dies, sein Herz.

In English?

Here lies Howard Campbell's essence,

Freed from his body's noisome nuisance.

His body, empty, prowls the earth,

Earning what a body's worth.

If his body and his essence remain apart,

Burn his body, but spare this, his heart

There was a knock on the door.

It was George Kraft knocking on my door, and I let him in.

He was very jangled because his corn-cob pipe had disappeared. It was the first time I'd seen him without the pipe, the first time he showed me how dependent he was on the pipe for peace. He was so full of anxiety that he whined.

'Somebody took it or somebody knocked it down behind something or — I just can't imagine why anybody would have done anything with it,' he whined. He expected Helga and me to share his anxiety, to think that the disappearance of the pipe was the most important event of the day. He was insufferable.

'Why would anybody touch the pipe?' he said. 'What good would it do anybody?' He was opening and shutting his bands, blinking often, sniffling, acting like a dope addict with withdrawal symptoms, though he had never smoked anything in the missing pipe. 'Just tell me — ' he said, 'why would anybody take the pipe?'

'I don't know, George,' I said testily. If we find it, well let you know.'

'Could I look around for myself?' he said. 'Go ahead,' I said.

And he turned the place upside down, rattling pots and pans, banging cupboard doors, fishing back of the radiators with a poker, clangingly.

The effect of this performance on Helga and me was to wed us — to urge us into an easy relationship that might otherwise have been a long while coming.

We stood side by side, resenting the invasion of our nation of two.

'It wasn't a very valuable pipe, was it?' I said.

'Yes it was — to me,' he said. 'Buy another one,' I said.

'I want that one,' he said. 'I'm used to it. That's the pipe I want' He opened the breadbox, looked inside.

'Maybe the ambulance attendants took it,' I said.

'Why would they do that?' he said. 'Maybe they thought it belonged to the dead man,' I said. 'Maybe they put it in the dead man's pocket.' That's it cried Kraft, and he scuttled out the door.