Posthumous Papers of a Living Author

PICTURES

Flypaper

Tangle-foot flypaper is approximately fourteen inches long and eight inches wide; it is coated with a yellow poison paste and comes from Canada. When a fly lands on it — not so eagerly, more out of convention, because so many others are already there — it gets stuck at first by only the outermost joints of all its legs. A very quiet, disconcerting sensation, as though while walking in the dark we were to step on something with our naked soles, nothing more than a soft, warm, unavoidable obstruction, and yet something into which little by little the awesome human essence flows, recognized as a hand that just happens to be lying there, and with five ever more decipherable fingers, holds us tight.

Here they stand all stiffly erect, like cripples pretending to be normal, or like decrepit old soldiers (and a little bowlegged, the way you stand on a sharp edge). They hold themselves upright, gathering strength and pondering their position. After a few seconds they’ve come to a tactical decision and they begin to do what they can, to buzz and try to lift themselves. They continue this frantic effort until exhaustion makes them stop. Then they take a breather and try again. But the intervals grow ever longer. They stand there and I feel how helpless they are. Bewildering vapors rise from below. Their tongue gropes about like a tiny hammer. Their head is brown and hairy, as though made of a coconut, as manlike as an African idol. They twist forward and backward on their firmly fastened little legs, bend at the knees and lean forward like men trying to move a too-heavy load: more tragic than the working man, truer as an athletic expression of the greatest exertion than Laocoön. And then comes the extraordinary moment when the imminent need of a second’s relief wins out over the almighty instincts of self-preservation. It is the moment when the mountain climber because of pain in his fingers willfully loosens his grip, when the man lost in the snow lays himself down like a child, when the hunted man stops dead with aching lungs. They no longer hold themselves up with all their might, but sink a little and at that moment appear totally human. Immediately they get stuck somewhere else, higher up on the leg, or behind, or at the tip of a wing.

When after a little while they’ve overcome the spiritual exhaustion and resume the fight for survival, they’re trapped in an unfavorable position and their movements become unnatural. Then they lie down with outstretched hindlegs, propped up on their elbows, and try to lift themselves. Or else seated on the ground, they rear up with outstretched arms like women who attempt in vain to wrest their hands free of a man’s fists. Or they lie on their belly, with head and arms in front of them as though fallen while running, and they only still hold up their face. But the enemy is always passive and wins at just such desperate, muddled moments. A nothing, an it draws them in: so slowly that one can hardly follow, and usually with an abrupt acceleration at the very end, when the last inner breakdown overcomes them. Then, all of a sudden, they let themselves fall, forward on their face, head over heels; or sideways with all legs collapsed; frequently also rolled on their side with their legs rowing to the rear. This is how they lie there. Like crashed planes with one wing reaching out into the air. Or like dead horses. Or with endless gesticulations of despair. Or like sleepers. Sometimes even the next day, one of them wakes up, gropes a while with one leg or flutters a wing. Sometimes such a movement sweeps over the lot, then all of them sink a little deeper into death. And only on the side, near their legsockets, is there some tiny wriggling organ that still lives a long time. It opens and closes, you can’t describe it without a magnifying glass, it looks like a miniscule human eye that ceaselessly opens and shuts.

Monkey Island

In the Villa Borghese in Rome, a tall tree stands without bark or branches. It is as bald as a skull, pealed clean by sun and water, and yellow as a skeleton. It stands erect without roots and is dead, and, like a mast, is implanted in the cement of an oval island the size of a small steamboat, and separated from the kingdom of Italy by a smooth, concrete-covered ditch. This ditch is just wide enough, and on the outer side, just deep enough, so that a monkey could neither climb through it nor jump over it. From the outside in, it could probably be done, but not the other way around.

The trunk in the middle offers very good grips, and as tourists like to say, is ideal for free and easy climbing. But up on top, long, firm branches grow out horizontally; and if you were to take off your shoes and socks and with inward-hugging heels, with your soles pressed fast to the rounded branch, and your hands grasping firmly, one in front of the other, you’d have no trouble reaching the end of one of these long, sun-soaked branches that stretch out over the green, ostrich-feathered peaks of the pines.

This wonderful island is settled by three families of varying size and number. About fifteen sinewy, nimble boys and girls, all about the size of a four-year-old child, inhabit the tree; while at the foot of the tree, in the only building on the island, a palace, the shape and size of a doghouse, a couple of far mightier monkeys live with a very small son. This is the island’s royal couple and the crown prince. Never do the old ones wander far from home; like watchmen, motionless, they sit to the right and left of him and stare down their snouts into the distance. Only once every hour the king rouses himself and mounts the tree for a perambulating look around. Slowly he then steps along the boughs, and it doesn’t seem that he cares to notice how reverentially and distrustfully everyone shrinks back, and — to avoid a stir — they slink over sideways till the end of the branch permits no further retreat, and nothing but a perilous leap down to the hard concrete is left. So the king strides the length of the boughs, one after the other, and the most acute attentiveness cannot decipher whether all the while his face evinces the discharge of a ruler’s duty or a survey of the grounds. Meanwhile, on the palace roof the crown prince sits alone, for astonishingly his mother also always departs at the same time, and through his thin, wide, stuck-out ears the sun shines coral-red. Seldom can one see a thing so dumb and pathetic, and yet so much encompassed by an invisible dignity, as this young monkey. One after the other, the tree monkeys, who were chased to the ground, file past him, and could easily twist off his skinny neck with a single grip: They’re in an awful mood, but they make a wide detour around him and display all the reverence and reserve that his family is due.

It takes a long time to notice that aside from these beings who live such a well-ordered life, still others inhabit the island. Driven from the surface and the air, a large population of little monkeys live in the ditch. If one of them even shows his face on the island above, he is chased by the tree monkeys back into the ditch, under severe reprisals. At feeding time the little ones must sit timidly to the side, and only when the others are full and mostly at rest up in the tree, are they permitted to sneak over to the crumbs. They’re not even allowed to touch what’s thrown to them. A nasty boy or a tricky girl are often just waiting for the chance. Though with a wink they may feign indigestion, they carefully slip down from their perch, as soon as they notice that the little ones are having too good a time. Those few who dared climb up onto the island are already scurrying screaming back into the ditch; and they mingle with the others; and the howling outcry begins. And now they all press together, so that a single surface of hair and flesh and mad, dark eyes well up against the outer wall like water in a tipped-over tub. The persecutor, however, only walks along the edge and shoves the wave of shuddering terror back away from himself. Thereupon the little black faces stir. They throw up their arms and stretch out their palms in supplication before the evil foreign eye that gazes down from the edge. And soon this gaze attaches itself to one individual; he shoves backwards and forwards, and five others do it with him, who can’t yet make out which one of them is the target of this long look; but the weak, fear-crippled mass of monkeys does not budge. Then the long, indifferent gaze nails its arbitrary victim; and at last it’s completely impossible to control oneself any longer, not to show either too much or too little fear: And from one moment to the next the lapse of self-control swells, while one soul digs into another till the hate is there, and the crack gives way, and without shame or poise a creature whines under torture. With the release of a scream, the others rush apart on down the ditch; they flicker dimly about like the damned souls in the flames of purgatory, and gather chattering cheerfully as far from the scene as possible.

When it’s all over with, the persecutor climbs with a feathery grip up the big tree to its highest branch, strides out to the very end of the branch, peacefully seats himself, and serious, erect, and ever so long, he stays like that without rousing. The beam of his glance glides over the Pincio and Villa Borghese; and where it leaves the gardens behind, there beneath it lies the great yellow city, over which, still swathed in the green shimmering cloud of the treetop, it floats, oblivious to all, suspended in midair.

Fishermen on the Baltic

On the beach they’ve dug out a little pit with their hands, and from a sack of black earth they’re pouring in fat earthworms; the loose black earth and the mass of worms make for an obscure, moldy, enticing ugliness in the clean white sand. Beside this a very tidy looking wooden chest is placed. It looks like a long, not particularly wide drawer or counting board, and is full of clean yarn; and on the other side of the pit another such, but empty, drawer is placed.

The hundred hooks attached to the yarn in the one drawer are neatly arranged on the end of a small iron pole and are now being unfastened one after the other and laid in the empty drawer, the bottom of which is filled with nothing but clean wet sand. A very tidy operation. In the meantime, however, four long, lean and strong hands oversee the process as carefully as nurses to make sure that each hook gets a worm.

The men who do this crouch two by two on knees and heels, with mighty, bony backs, long, kindly faces, and pipes in their mouths. They exchange incomprehensible words that flow forth as softly as the motion of their hands. One of them takes up a fat earthworm with two fingers, tears it into three pieces with the same two fingers of the other hand, as easily and exactly as a shoemaker snips off the paper band after he’s taken the measurement; the other one then presses these squirming pieces calmly and carefully onto each hook. This having been accomplished, the worms are then doused with water and laid in neat little beds, one next to the other, in the drawer with the soft sand, where they can die without immediately losing their freshness.

It is a quiet, delicate activity, whereby the coarse fishermen’s fingers step softly as on tiptoes. You have to pay close attention. In fair weather the dark blue sky arches above and the seagulls circle high over the land like white swallows.

Inflation

Once there was a better time, when you rode a wood-stiff pony pedantically ever returning around the same circle, and with a short rod poked for copper rings held still by a wooden arm. That time is gone. These days the fishermen’s boys drink champagne mixed with cognac. And little swings hang in a circle on four times thirty little iron chains, one circle on the inside and one outside, so that as you fly side by side, you grab each other by the hand, leg, or apron, and shriek fiendishly. This carousel stands on the little square with the memorial for the fallen soldiers, next to the linden tree where the geese like to roost. It has a motor that revs up at the right time, and chalk-white spotlights over many little warm lights. If in the darkness you happen to grope your way closer, the wind’ll fling shreds of music, lights, girls’ voices and laughter at you. The orchestrion cries with a sob. The iron chains screech. You fly round in a circle, but also, if you wish, upward or downward, outward or inward, back to back or between the legs. The boys spur on their swings and pinch the girls where they can feel it, or tear the shrieking damsels along with them; and the girls also grab each other in flight, and then in pairs they scream just as loud as if one of them were a boy. So they all swing through the cone of light into the darkness and are suddenly thrust back into the light; paired off anew, with foreshortened limbs and black mouths, whizzing, bedazzled bundles of clothing, they fly on their backs or on their bellies or obliquely toward heaven or hell. After a very short while of this wild gallop, the orchestrion quickly falls back into a trot, like an old circus horse, then it paces and soon stands still. The man with the pewter plate makes the rounds but you stay seated or maybe switch girls. And unlike in the city, no ever-changing crowd frequents the carousel the few days it’s around; because here always the same ones fly from the advent of darkness on, for two to three hours, all eight or fourteen days, up until the man with the pewter plate grows tired of it all and one morning has moved on.

Can a Horse Laugh?

An acclaimed psychologist wrote: “. . for animals don’t know how to laugh or smile.”

This emboldens me to admit that I once saw a horse laugh. Till now I assumed that this was nothing special and I didn’t dare make a big deal of it; but if it is such a rarity, I will gladly elaborate.

Well, it was before the war; it could be that since then horses no longer laugh. The horse was tied to a sedge fence that surrounded a little yard. The sky was dark blue. The air was particularly mild, even though it was February. And in contrast to this heavenly calm, there was no human presence. To make a long story short, I found myself near Rome, on a country road just outside the city limits, on the border between the city’s humble outskirts and the first fringe of the peasant Campagna.

The horse also was a Campagna horse: young and graceful, of that shapely, tiny breed with nothing pony-like about it, on the back of which, however, a big rider looks like a grown-up on a little doll’s stool. It was being brushed by a fun-loving stable boy, the sun shone on its hide, and it was ticklish under the shoulders. Now a horse has, so to speak, four shoulders, and perhaps for that reason, is twice as ticklish as a man; besides which, this horse also seemed to have a particularly sensitive spot on the inside of each of its haunches and every time it was touched there, it could hardly keep from laughing.

As soon as the currycomb came close, it drew back its ears, became uneasy, wanted to edge over with its mouth, and when it couldn’t do this, bared its teeth. But the comb marched merrily on, stroke after stroke, and the lips revealed ever more of the teeth, while the ears lay themselves farther and farther back, and the horse tipped from one leg to the other.

And suddenly it started to laugh. It flashed its teeth. With its muzzle it tried as hard as it could to push away the boy who was tickling it — just like a peasant girl would do with her hand, and without trying to bite him. It also attempted to turn itself around and to shove him away with its entire body. But the stable boy held the advantage. And when with the currycomb he arrived in the vicinity of its shoulders, the horse could no longer control itself; it shifted from leg to leg, shivered all over and pulled back the gums of its teeth as far as it could. For a few seconds then, it behaved just as a man tickled so much that he can’t even laugh anymore.

The learned skeptic will object here that a horse couldn’t laugh after all. One must admit to the validity of his objection, insofar as, of the two, the one who whinnied with laughter was the stable boy. The ability to whinny with laughter seems in fact to be exclusively a human talent. But nonetheless, the two of them were obviously playing together, and as soon as they started it all over again from the beginning, there could be no doubt that the horse wanted to laugh and was already anticipating the sequence of sensations.

So learned doubt defines the limitations of the beast’s ability, that it cannot laugh at jokes.

This, however, should not always be held against the horse.

Awakening

I shoved the curtain aside — the soft night! A gentle darkness lies in the window cutout of the hard room darkness like the water surface in a square basin. I don’t really see it at all, but it’s like in the summer when the water’s as warm as the air and your hand hangs out of the boat. It’s going on six o’clock, November 1.

God woke me up. I shot up out of sleep. I had absolutely no other reason to wake up. I was torn out like a page from a book. The moon’s crescent lies delicate as a golden eyebrow on the blue page of night.

But on the morning side at the other window it’s getting green. Parrot-feathery. The pale reddish stripes of sunrise, they too are already streaking the sky, but everything’s still green, blue and silent. I jump back to the other window: Is the moon still there? She’s there, as though in the deepest hour of night’s secret. So convinced is she of the effectiveness of her magic, like an actress on stage. (There’s nothing stranger than to step out of the morning streets into the illusion of a theater rehearsal.) The street’s already pulsing to the left, and to the right the moon is in rehearsal.

I discover strange fellows, the smokestacks. In groups of three, five, seven and sometimes alone, they stand up on the rooftops; like trees in a landscape. Space winds like a river around them and into the deep. An owl slips past them on its way home; it was probably a crow or a pigeon. The houses stand helter-skelter; curious contours, steep sloping walls; not at all arranged by the streets. The rod on the roof with the thirty-six porcelain heads and the twelve stretched wires, which I count without comprehension, stands as a completely inexplicable secret structure up against the early morning sky. I’m wide awake now, but wherever I look, my eyes glide over pentagons, heptagons and steep prisms: So who am I? The amphora on the roof with its cast-iron flame, ridiculous pineapple by day, vulgar, disgusting thing — now, in this solitude, it soothes the heart like a fresh trace of humanity.

At last two legs come through the night. The step of two woman legs in my ear: I don’t want to look. My ear stands like a gateway on the street. Never will I be so at one with a woman as with this unknown figure whose steps disappear ever deeper in my ear.

Then two women. The one sordidly slinking along, the other stamping with the disregard of age. I look down. Black. The clothes of old women have a form all their own. These two are bound for church. At this hour, the soul has long since been taken into custody, and so I won’t have anything more to do with it.

Sheep, As Seen in Another Light

As to the history of sheep: Today man views the sheep as stupid. But God loved it. He repeatedly compared man with sheep. Is it possible that God was completely wrong?

As to the psychology of sheep: The finely chiseled expression of exalted consciousness is not unlike the look of stupidity.

On the heath near Rome: They had the long faces and the delicate skulls of martyrs. Their black stockings and hoods against the white fur reminded of morbid monks and fanatics.

When they rummaged through the low, sparse grass, their lips trembled nervously and scattered the timber of a quivering steel string over the earth. Joined in chorus, their voices rang out like the lamentations of prelates in the cathedral. But when many of them sang together, they formed a men’s, women’s and children’s choir. In soft swells they lifted and lowered their voices; it was like a wandering train in the darkness, struck every other second by light, and the children’s voices then stood on an ever-returning hill, while the men strode through the valley. Day and night rolled a thousand times faster through their song and drove the earth onward to its end. Sometimes a solitary voice flung itself up or tumbled down in fear of damnation. Heaven’s clouds were recreated in the white ringlets of their hair. These are age-old Catholic animals, religious companions of mankind.

Once again in the South: Man is twice as big as usual in their midst and reaches like a church spire up toward heaven. Beneath our feet the earth was brown, and the grass like scratched-in gray-green stripes. The sun shone heavy on the sea as on a lead mirror. Boats were busy fishing as in Saint Peter’s time. The cape swung the view like a running board up toward heaven and broke off into the dark yellow and white sea as in wandering Odysseus’ day.

Everywhere: When man approaches, sheep are timid and stupid; they have known the beatings and stones of his insolence. But if he stands stock still and stares into the distance, they forget about him. They stick their heads together then, ten or fifteen of them, and form the spokes of a wheel, with the big, heavy center-point of heads and the otherwise-colored spokes of their backs. They press their skulls tightly together. This is how they stand, and the wheel that they form won’t budge for hours. They don’t seem to want to feel anything but the wind and the sun, and between their foreheads, the seconds striking out eternity that beats in their blood and signals from head to head like the hammering of prisoners on prison walls.

Sarcophagus Cover

Somewhere to the rear of the Pincio, or already in the Villa Borghese, two sarcophagus covers of a common sort of stone lie out in the open between the bushes. They constitute no rare treasure, they’re just lying around. Stretched out on top of them, the couple who once as a final memento had themselves copied in stone, are at rest. One sees many such sarcophagus covers in Rome; but in no museum and in no church do they make such an impression as here under the trees, where as though on a picnic, the figures stretched themselves out, and seem just to have awakened from a little sleep that lasted two thousand years.

They’ve propped themselves up on their elbows and are eyeing each other. All that’s missing between them is the basket of cheese, fruit and wine.

The woman wears a hairdo of little curls — any minute now she’ll arrange them according to the latest fashion from the time before she fell asleep. And they’re smiling at each other: a long, a very long smile. You look away: And still they go on smiling.

This faithful, proper, middle-class, beloved look has lasted centuries; it was sent forth in ancient Rome and crosses your glance today.

Don’t be surprised that even in front of you it endures, that they don’t look away or lower their eyes: This doesn’t make them stone-like, but rather all the more human.

Rabbit Catastrophe

No doubt the lady had just the day before stepped out of the window display of a department store; her doll’s face was so dainty, you would have liked to stir it up with a teaspoon just to see it in motion. But you yourself wore shoes with showy, slick, honeycomb soles, and knickers as if tailor-made to measure. At least you delighted in the wind. It pressed the dress against the lady and made a sorry little skeleton of her, a dumb little face with a tiny mouth. Of course she feigned a dauntless look for the benefit of the observer.

Little jackrabbits live unawares beside the white pleats and the thin-as-teacups skirts. Dark green like laurel, the island’s epic surrounds them. Flocks of seagulls nest in the heath hollows like snow blossoms swept by the wind. The lady’s little, white-fur-collared, miniature, long-haired terrier is rummaging through the bush, its nose a finger’s width above the ground; far and wide there’s no other dog to sniff out on the island, there’s nothing here but the vast romance of many little, unknown paths that crisscross the island. In this solitude the dog grows huge, a hero. Aroused, he barks dagger-sharp and bares his teeth like some sea monster. Hopelessly, the lady purses her lips to whistle; the wind tears the tiny attempt at a sound from her mouth.

I’ve already covered glacier paths with just such an impetuous fox terrier; we humans smoothly on our skis, him bleeding, his belly collapsed, cut up by the ice, and nonetheless enlivened by a wild, insatiable bliss. Now this one here has picked up the scent of something; his legs gallop like little sticks, his bark becomes a sob. It’s amazing at this moment how much such a flat, sea-swept island can remind one of the great glens and highlands of the mountains. The dunes, yellow as skulls and smoothed by the wind, sit like craggy peaks. Between them and the sky lies the emptiness of unfinished creation. Light doesn’t shine on this and that, but spills out over everything as from an accidentally overturned bucket.

One is always astonished that animals inhabit this solitude. They take on a mysterious aspect; their little, soft, wooly and feathery breasts shelter the spark of life. It’s a little jackrabbit that the terrier is chasing. A little, weather-beaten mountain type; he’ll never catch him, I bet. A memory from geography class comes to mind: island? Are we actually standing here on the peak of a high ocean mountain? We ten or fifteen idly observant vacationers, in our colorful madhouse jackets, as the fashion prescribes. I change my mind again and say to myself, it would all be nothing but inhuman loneliness: Bewildered as a horse that has thrown its rider is the earth wherever man is in the minority; moreover, nature proves itself to be not at all healthy, downright mentally disturbed in the high mountains and on tiny islands. But to our amazement, the distance between the dog and the hare has diminished; the terrier is catching up, we’ve never seen such a thing: a dog catching up with a hare! This will be the first great triumph of the canine world! Enthusiasm spurs on the hunter, his breath sobs in gulps, there’s no longer any doubt that in a matter of seconds he will have caught his prey. The hare pirouettes. Here I recognize in a certain softness, because the crucial cut is missing in its turn, that it’s not a grown rabbit at all, but a harelet, a rabbit child.

I feel my heart; the dog turned too and hasn’t lost more than fifteen steps; in a matter of seconds the rabbit catastrophe will occur. The child hears the hunter hot on its tail, it is tired. I want to jump between them, but it takes such a long time for the will to slide down my pant pleats and into my smooth soles; or perhaps the resistance was already in my head. Twenty steps in front of me — I would have had to have imagined it, if the baby rabbit hadn’t stopped in despair and held its neck out to the hunter. He dug in with his teeth, swung it a few times back and forth, then flung it on its side and buried his mouth two or three times in its breast and belly.

I looked up. Laughing, heated faces stood around. It suddenly felt like four in the morning after you’ve danced through the night. The first one of us to wake up from this blood lust was the little terrier. He let go, squinted diffidently to the side, pulled back; after a few steps he fell into a short, timid gallop, as though he expected a stone to come flying after him. But the rest of us were motionless and disturbed. The insipid air of cannibalistic platitudes hovered around us, like “fight for survival” or “the brutality of nature.” Such thoughts, like the shoals of an ocean bottom, though risen from great depths, are shallow. I would have loved to go back and slap the silly little lady. This was a noble sentiment, but not a good one, and so I kept still and thereby joined the general uncertainty and the swelling silence. But finally a tall, well-to-do gentleman picked up the hare with both his hands, showed its wounds to the onlookers and carried the corpse, swiped from the dog, like a little coffin into the kitchen of the nearby hotel. The man was the first step out of the unfathomable and had Europe’s firm ground beneath his feet.

The Mouse

This miniscule story, that in fact is nothing but a punch line, a single tiny tip of a tale, and not a story at all, happened during the first World War. On the Swiss Fodora Velda Alps, more than three thousand feet above inhabited ground, and still much farther off the beaten track: There, in peacetime, somebody had put up a bench.

This bench stood untouched, even by the war. In a wide, right hollow. The shots sailed over it. Silent as ships, like schools of fish. They struck far back where nothing and no one was, and for months, with an iron perseverance, ravaged an innocent precipice. No one knew why anymore. An error of the art of war? A whim of the war gods? This bench was abandoned by the war. All day long, from way up in its infinite altitude, the sun sent light to keep it company.

Whoever sat on this bench sat firm. The moon rose no more. Your legs slept a separate sleep, like men who, having flung themselves down close together, exhausted, forgot each other in the same instant. Your own breath was strange; it became an occurrence of nature; no, not “nature’s breath,” but rather: If you noticed at all that you were breathing — this steady, mindless motion of the breast! — something of man’s swooning at the blue colossus of the atmosphere, something like a pregnancy.

The grass all around was left over from the previous year; snow-bleached and ugly; bloodless, as though a huge boulder had been rolled away. There were innumerable humps and hollows near and far, knee-high timber and alpine meadow. From this motionless turmoil, from this decayed, yellow-green frothy break of ground, again and again your glance was flung ever upwards at the high, red, overhanging cliff which sliced off the landscape in front and from which your glance retreated, shattered into a hundred vistas. That jagged cliff was not all that high, yet above it loomed nothing but ancient light. It was so savage and so inhumanly beautiful, as we imagine in the ages of creation.

Near the bench, which was seldom visited, a little mouse had dug itself a system of running trenches. Mouse-deep, with holes to disappear and elsewhere reappear. She scurried around in circles, stood still, then scurried round again. A terrible silence emanated from the sullen atmosphere. The human hand dropped off the armrest. An eye, as small and black as the head of a spinning needle, turned to look. And for an instant you had such a strange twisted feeling, that you really no longer knew: Was it this tiny, living black eye that turned? Or the stirring of the mountain’s huge immobility? You just didn’t know anymore: Had you been touched by the will of the world, or by the will of this mouse, that glowed out of a little, lonesome eye? You didn’t know: Was the war still raging or had eternity won the day?

So you might have continued at length to ramble on about something you felt you could not know; but that’s all for this little story, that had already come to an end every time you tried to end it.

Clearhearing

I went to bed earlier than usual, feeling a slight cold, I might even have a fever. I am staring at the ceiling, or perhaps it’s the reddish curtain over the balcony door of our hotel room that I see; it’s hard to distinguish.

As soon as I’d finished with it, you too started to undress. I’m waiting. I can only hear you.

Incomprehensible, all the walking up and down; in this corner of the room, in that. You come over to lay something on your bed; I don’t look up, but what could it be? In the meantime, you open your closet, put something in or take something out; I hear it close again. You lay hard, heavy objects on the table, others on the marble top of the commode. You are forever in motion. Then I recognize the familiar sounds of hair being undone and brushed. Then swirls of water in the sink. Even before that, clothes being shed; now, again; it’s just incomprehensible to me how many clothes you take off. Finally, you’ve slipped out of your shoes. But now your stockings slide as constantly back and forth over the soft carpet as your shoes did before. You pour water into glasses; three, four times without stopping, I can’t even guess why. In my imagination I have long since given up on anything imaginable, while you evidently keep finding new things to do in the realm of reality. I hear you slip into your nightgown. But you aren’t finished yet and won’t be for a while. Again there are a hundred little actions. I know that you’re rushing for my sake; so all this must be absolutely necessary, part of your most intimate I, and like the mute motion of animals from morning till evening, you reach out with countless gestures, of which you’re unaware, into a region where you’ve never heard my step!

By coincidence I feel it all, because I have a fever and am waiting for you.

Slovenian Village Funeral

My room was strange. Pompeian red with Turkish curtains; the furniture had rents and seams in which the dust had gathered like tiny boulder beds and bands. It was a delicate dust, unreal rocks in miniature; but it was so very simply there, so uninvolved in any action, that it reminded of the great solitude of the mountains, bathed only in the rising and falling of flood light and darkness. In those days I had many such experiences.

The first time I set foot in the house, it was completely saturated with the stench of dead mice. Into the shared antechamber that separated my room from that of the teachers, they threw everything that they no longer loved or cared to keep: artificial flowers, food scraps, fruit peels, and torn dirty laundry no longer worth the effort of being cleaned. Even my servant complained when I asked him to clean it up; and yet one of the teachers was prettier than an angel, and her sister was gentler than a mother, and every day she painted her sister’s cheeks with naive rose colors, so that her face would be as beautiful as the peasant madonna in the little church. They were both loved by the little schoolgirls who came to visit; and I myself learned to appreciate this, when once I was sick and they gave me to feel of their goodness like warm herb cushions. But once during the day, when I entered their room to ask for something, for they were my landladies, both of them lay in bed, and as soon as I turned to leave, they jumped out from under the blankets fully dressed and ready to help; they even kept their filthy street shoes on in bed.

This then was the apartment in which I stood as I watched the funeral; a fat woman had died, who had lived diagonally across from my window on the other side of the wide, and here somewhat bulging, thoroughfare. In the morning the carpenter’s boys brought the coffin; it was winter, and they brought it on a little handsled, and because it was a lovely morning, they slid down the street with their spiked shoes, and the big black box behind them jumped from side to side. Everyone who watched had the feeling, what handsome boys they were, and all waited expectantly to see if the sled would topple over or not.

But by afternoon the last of the escort already stood in front of the house: top hats and fur caps, fashionable haberdashery and winter kerchiefs dark against the light snow-gray of the sky. And the priests in black and red, with crenulated white shirts on top, came walking across the snow. And a young, big, shaggy brown dog chased after them and barked as though at a car. And if one may be permitted to say so, the dog did not express an altogether false perception; for, in fact, at that moment there was nothing particularly holy or even human about the approaching figures, but one was simply struck by the heavy motion of the mechanical side of their existence sweeping over the slippery ice-slick that covered the street.

But then the mood turned suddenly divine. A quiet bass intoned a wonderfully soft, sad song, in which I understood only the foreign words for sweet Mary; a baritone, shimmering light-brown like chestnuts, joined in, and still another voice; and a tenor soared over all the rest, while women with black kerchiefs flowed out of the house in an unending stream; the candles burned pale golden against the winter sky and all the implements sparkled. One would have wanted to cry then, and for no other reason than that one already was a human being over thirty.

Perhaps also just a little bit because the boys poked and punched each other behind the party of mourners. Or because the upstanding young man, to whom the dog belonged, stared motionlessly over everyone’s head at the holy service, and you couldn’t say why. Everything was just so full of facts that didn’t quite sit right, as in a china cabinet. And to tell the truth, I could hardly control myself and didn’t know where to turn, when by coincidence, in the midst of the crowd, I once again noticed that the deeply touched young man held one hand behind his back and his big brown dog began to play with it. Playfully he bit at it and tried to wake it up with his warm tongue. Impatiently I waited to see what would happen. And finally, after a long time, while the whole of the young man’s body remained frozen in unsettled exaltation, the hand freed itself behind his back and began playing with the dog’s mouth, without the man’s knowing it.

This once again made my soul regain its balance, without any real reason. At that time, in those surroundings where I forced myself to hold out, my soul slipped easily into chaos or order at the slightest upset. I was shot through with eagerness and anxiety in anticipation of the handshake that my housemates would offer me after the funeral, together with a little glass of their suspect homebrew and a few fitting words that were not to be contradicted: maybe, that misfortune brings people closer together, or something like that.

Maidens and Heroes

How lovely are you servant girls with your peasant legs and those peaceful eyes, about which you just can’t tell, do they wonder about everything or about nothing?! You lead the master’s dog by the leash like a cow on the line. Are you thinking about how the bells back in the village are ringing now, or are you thinking that the movie’s about to begin? The only sure thing is that you sense in some secret way that more men live in between the corners of the city than in all your country and you move at every moment through this male dominion, even if it doesn’t belong to you, as though through a farm field that brushes up against your skirts.

But are you aware, while your eyes pretend to know nothing, that it’s a man you lead by the leash? Or don’t you realize at all that Lux is a man, that Wolf and Amri are men? A thousand arrows pierce their hearts at every tree and lamppost. Men of their breed have left as their mark the dagger-sharp smell of ammonia, as though they’d stuck a sword into a tree; combats, brotherhoods, braveries, and desire, the whole heroic world of man unfolds itself into their sniffing imagination. How they lift a leg with the noble poise of a warrior’s salute, or the heroic sweep of a beer-glass-toasting arm at a drinking bout! With what earnest do they carry out their duty, that is surely a consecrated drink-offering like no other! And you girls? So thoughtlessly you drag these dogs after you. Tug on the leash; don’t grant them time, without even looking back at them. It’s a sight that’d make one want to throw stones at you.

Brothers! On three legs Lucky or Wolf hop after the girls; too proud, too injured in their pride to howl for help; incapable of any other protest than headstrong and stubbornly, in desperate farewell, not to let the fourth leg drop, while the leash drags them ever onwards. What inner-dog dismay must come of such moments, what desperate neurasthenic complexes lie buried there! And the main thing: Do you sense the sad comradely look he casts at you when you pass such a scene? In this way, he even loves the soul of these thoughtless girls. They aren’t heartless; their heart would be moved if they knew what was happening. But they just don’t know. And aren’t they for that very reason so ravishing, these hard-hearted things, because they know nothing at all about us? Thus speaks the dog. They will never understand our world!

Boardinghouse Nevermore

There once was a German boardinghouse in Rome. (Though besides this one there were also many others.) In those days in Italy, the German boardinghouse was a specific term that encompassed many varied and singular types. Even today I shudder when I think back to another one where I once lived; everything was so impeccable there you wanted to cry. But it wasn’t like that at the boardinghouse I am talking about. When I first stepped into the office and asked for the man of the house, his mother replied: “Oh, he can’t make it now; it’s his corns, you know!” I’d like to call him Mr. Nevermore. His mother, Mrs. Nevermore, was a matron of mighty proportions whose flesh had slipped back a bit over the years, so that her corset traced an uneven ring in the air around her. Over her corset a blouse was spanned; somehow she reminded me of an overturned, abandoned umbrella, the kind you sometimes find in vacant lots. Her hair, as far as I could tell, was never combed between Easter and October, that is, outside the tourist season. During the season it seemed to be white. Another one of her idiosyncrasies involved a skirt with an unusually long slit that stayed open from top to bottom when it was hot. Perhaps it was cooler like that, or perhaps it was a special feature of the house. For even Laura, the chambermaid, who served at the table, put on a clean blouse which, for this express purpose, closed at the back; but during the time I spent in Rome only the bottom two of all the hooks were ever done, so that above this Laura’s camisole and also her lovely back were presented on a chalice.

Still they were outstanding hosts, the Nevermores; their old-fashioned, luxurious rooms were well-kept, and whatever they cooked had a special touch. During meals Mr. Nevermore himself stood by as the head waiter beside the serving table and supervised the staff, which consisted, however, only of Laura. Once I heard him complain to her: “Mr. Meier fetched a spoon and the salt for himself!” Frightened, Laura whispered: “Did he say anything?” And with the quiet reserve of a royal steward, Mr. Nevermore replied: “Mr. Meier never says anything!” To such pinnacles of his profession could he raise himself. He was, so far as I can remember, tall, lean, and bald, with a watery look in his eyes and a prickly stubble on his cheeks that slowly shifted upwards and downwards when he bent over toward a guest with a bowl to discreetly point out something particularly delicious. They simply had their own ways, the Nevermores.

And I jotted down all these little details because even then I had the feeling that there will never be the likes of such an establishment again. I certainly don’t mean to imply that there was something particularly rare or precious about the place; it merely had something to do with a coincidence of time, a phenomenon difficult to describe. If twenty clocks are hanging on one wall and you suddenly look at them, every pendulum is in a different place; they all tell the same time and yet don’t, and the real time flows somewhere in between. This can have an uncanny effect. All of us who at the time boarded at the Pension Nevermore had our own particular reasons for being there; we all had something more to do in Rome than just spending time, and since the summer heat only permitted us to carry out a tiny portion of our task each day, we met each other again and again at our home away from home. There was, for instance, the little old Swiss gentleman; he was here to represent the interests of a Protestant sect, not much larger than himself, a group that wanted to build a Protestant chapel in papal Rome, of all places. Despite the burning sun, he always wore a black suit; on the second vest button lower down hung a black medallion in which a golden cross was set. His beard really sat to the right and left of him; it sprouted so thinly from his chin that you only noticed it from a distance. In the proximity of his cheeks, this beard completely lost itself, just like on his upper lip, which was naturally beardless. The hair on this old gentleman’s head was blond-gray and unbelievably soft; and his complexion might well have been rosy, but since it was white, it was as white as freshly fallen snow, in which a pair of gold-rimmed glasses are lying. Once when we were all chatting in the parlor, this old gentleman said to Mme. Gervais: “Do you know what you need? You need a king in France!”

I was surprised and wanted to come to Mme. Gervais’ assistance: “But aren’t you Swiss and a republican yourself!?” I insisted. And here the little man radiated out over his golden glasses and answered us: “Oh, that is quite another matter! We’ve been a republic for six hundred years, and not for forty-five!” So much for the Swiss gentleman who was building a Protestant church in Rome.

With her sweet smile, Mme. Gervais responded: “If there were no diplomats and newspapers, we would have eternal peace.” “Excellent, vraiment excellent!” the old gentleman, pacified again, agreed and nodded with a titter that sounded so very refined and unnatural, as though he had a young goat trapped in his throat; he had to lift one leg from the ground to lean back in his easy chair toward Mme. Gervais.

But only Mme. Gervais could offer such sage responses. The first time I saw her, the profile of her delicate Titus-head on her slender neck, adorned with a dainty ear, stood out in relief against the dining room window, in front of which she sat like a rose-colored stone set in sky-blue silk. Her fastidious hands equipped with knife and fork, her arms drawn in upon themselves, she shaved the skin off the body of a peach she had speared. Her favorite words were: ignoble, mal élevé, grand luxe, and très maniaque. She also often said digestion and digestif. Mme. Gervais liked to tell how she, the good Catholic, was once in a Protestant church in Paris on the emperor’s birthday. “And I assure you,” she added, “it was much more refined than ours. Much simpler. None of that undignified pomp!” — That is what Mme. Gervais was like.

She argued in favor of a German-French accord, because her husband was a hotelier. More accurately, he was making a hotel career: One needs to experience everything, dining room, bar, room service, office. “Just as an engineer needs to work the vice!” she put it. She was an enlightened woman. She was enraged at the memory of how a black prince, a complete gentleman, was snubbed by Americans at a Paris hotel. “So he just went like this!” she demonstrated, enacting a delightfully disdainful turn of the lips. The classical, noble ideals of humanity, internationalism, and human dignity combined in her with the precepts of the hotel business to create a perfect unity. She did like to add, however, that as a girl she took automobile trips with her parents, and that she went here and there in the company of this or that attaché or consular secretary, or that her acquaintance, the Marquis So-and-so, had said this and that. But when talking of the hotel business she made no less of a to-do that a friend of her husband, in an establishment that prohibited tips, took in 800 Deutsch marks in tips a month, whereas her husband, in a place that permitted tips, made only 600 Deutsch marks. She always had fresh flowers with her and traveled with a dozen doilies, with the aid of which she made a little home of every hotel room. There she welcomed her husband when he was not working, and she had an arrangement with Laura, who would wash her stockings for her as soon as she took them off. She was in fact a brave woman.

Once I noticed that her little mouth could also appear fleshy, although the overall effect of her person was that of a somewhat elongated, extremely delicate angel; if you looked closely, her cheeks also rose much too high above her nose when she laughed; but strangely enough, though I found her less pretty thereafter, we spoke more seriously with each other from that point on. She told me of the sadness of her childhood, of her early and lengthy illnesses and of the torments she had to endure from the moods of a paralytic, invalid stepfather. Once she even confessed to me that it was for this reason that she married her husband without loving him. Just because it was time to take care of herself, she said: “Sans enthousiasme, vraiment sans enthousiasme!” But this she only confessed to me a day before my departure: She always knew just the right thing to say, and addressed her listeners from the depths of her soul.

I would like to be able to say something similar about the lady from Wiesbaden, who likewise belonged to our household; but unfortunately, I have forgotten a lot about her, and the little that I do remember leads me to believe that the rest would not suit my intention. The only thing I still recall is that she used to wear a skirt with vertical stripes, so that she looked like a high wooden lattice on top of which an unpleated white blouse hung. When she spoke, it was invariably to contradict, and this usually happened in approximately the following manner: someone said, for instance, that Ottavina was beautiful. “Yes” — she immediately added — “a noble Roman type.” Meanwhile she looked at you with such certainty, that for the sake of preserving world order, you had to correct her, whether you wanted to or not; for Ottavina, the chambermaid, was from Tuscany. “Yes” — she replied — “from Tuscany. But a Roman type! All Roman women have noses attached directly to the brow!” Now Ottavina was not only from Tuscany, but she also did not have a nose attached directly to her brow; nonetheless, the lady from Wiesbaden possessed such a lively spirit that a preconceived notion always popped out of her head simply because other preconceived notions elbowed it out. I am afraid she was an unhappy woman. And perhaps she was not a woman at all, but a girl.

She had traveled by boat around Africa and wanted to visit Japan. Apropos of this, she told of a girlfriend who had drunk several glasses of beer and smoked forty cigarettes, and she called her a swell chum. When she talked like this, her face looked terribly dissolute, with too much skin and crooked slits for a mouth, nose, and eyes; you thought at the least that she smoked opium. But as soon as she no longer felt herself observed, she had a perfectly proper face that stuck in the other like little Tom Thumb in seven-league boots. Her highest ideal was the lion hunt, and she asked us all if we thought one needed a great deal of strength to go on one. Courage — she said — of courage she had plenty, but was she also up to the hardships? Her nephew was trying to talk her into it because he would just love to be taken along; but for such a twenty-two-year-old rascal it was a different matter altogether, was it not? The good world-traveling aunt indeed! I am convinced that under the African sun, she will give her nephew a good strong slap on the shoulder, and that the lion will slip away, as did Mme. Gervais and I whenever we got the chance.

Then I sometimes snuck over to Mrs. Nevermore’s office or slipped down the hallway in search of Ottavina. I could just as well have cast a glance at the stars in heaven, but Ottavina was more beautiful. She was the second chambermaid, a nineteen-year-old peasant girl who had a husband and a little son at home; she was perhaps the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Let no one tell me there are many different beauties, beauty of many types and degrees: I know all that. In fact, I never even held much by Ottavina’s type of beauty; it was Raphael’s type, to which I even have an aversion: But despite this beauty, what overpowered my eye was Ottavina’s beauty! Fortunately, I can permit myself to say that for those who have never seen the like, it is impossible to describe. How revolting are the words harmony, symmetry, perfection, noble bearing! We have stuffed them so full of meaning, they stand before us like fat women on tiny feet and cannot even move. But once you have seen real harmony and perfection, you are astounded how natural it is. It is down to earth. It flows like a stream, not at all evenly, with the unabashed self-regard of nature, without straining for grandeur or perfection. If I say about Ottavina that she was big, strong, aristocratic, and elegant, I have the feeling that these words were borrowed from other people. She was big, but no less graceful. Strong, but in no way staid. Aristocratic without any loss of originality. At once a goddess and the second chambermaid. I never succeeded in speaking with the nineteen-year-old Ottavina, because she found my broken Italian unsuitable, and to everything I said, responded only with a very polite yes or no; but I think I worshipped her. Of course I don’t even know for sure, because with Ottavina, everything meant something else. I did not desire her, I suffered no loss, I did not swoon; quite the contrary, every time I saw her, I tried to make myself as inconspicuous as a mortal who has stumbled into the company of the gods. She could smile without a wrinkle forming on her face. I imagined her in a man’s arms in no other way than with that smile and a soft blush that spread out over her like a cloud, behind which she escaped the onslaught of desire.

Ottavina did after all have a legitimate son, and often without waiting for her, I slipped off to old Mrs. Nevermore’s office to attempt in conversation with the old lady to reestablish my equilibrium with reality. When she moved through the room, she let her arms hang down, with the backs of her hands facing forward; she had the wide back and belly of a matron who no longer attempted to improve upon life. If, driven by the need to know, you asked whether her black cat Michette was in fact a he or a she, she looked at you thoughtfully and responded philosophically: “Oh my! You can’t really say; it’s an it!” In younger years Mrs. Nevermore’s heart possessed a native Roman paramour, Sor Carlo, and whenever you moved in Mrs. Nevermore’s proximity, you could, at the end of a perspective of doorways, make out a seated Sor Carlo. Between Easter and October, you understand; for he was a wreck, and even now, outside the season, he was known to all the guests, but not openly acknowledged, as a ghost. He always sat motionlessly propped up against some wall or other, dressed in a filthy light-colored suit, his legs thick as columns from top to bottom, his proud face with his black-dyed Cavour beard distorted by fat and sadness. Only when I came home at night did I ever see him in motion. When all the eyes that otherwise stood guard over him were shut, then he dragged his gasping self through the corridors from bench to bench, and did battle with his faltering breath. He lived out his life here. I never failed to greet him, for which he thanked me with dignity. I don’t know if he was grateful for Mrs. Nevermore’s charity, or if, out of protest against her ingratitude and because of his injured pride, he seemed to sleep all day with his eyes open. He also revealed nothing of what Mrs. Nevermore felt for her old Sor Carlo. One ought probably to assume that for her the tender equanimity of age long since outweighed the importance that young people place on such matters of the heart. On one occasion at least I found her with Sor Carlo in her office: Sor Carlo sat against one wall and directed his sleepy look through the opposite wall at infinity, and Mrs. Nevermore sat on her table and stared through the open door into the darkness. These two steady gazes, separated by approximately a yard’s width, passed parallel to each other, and just beneath their periphery, beside the table legs, sat Michette, the cat, with the two house dogs. The blond Pomeranian Maik, with the soft balding hair and the onset of arthritis at the back, attempted to perform with Michette what dogs usually do with other dogs, and meanwhile, the fat, rusty-blond Pomeranian Ali good-naturedly nibbled on her ear; nobody tried to stop this, neither Michette nor the two old people.

If anyone would have stopped it, it would certainly have been Miss Frazer; though it is to be assumed that she would not have permitted Maik to start anything like that in her presence in the first place. Every evening Miss Frazer sat with us in the parlor on the edge of an easy chair; with her torso she leaned back straight as a board, so that it touched only the upper rim of the head rest. She stretched her legs out straight so that only her heels grazed the ground; in this position she crocheted. When she was finished, she sat herself down at the oval table in the midst of our conversation and did her daily lesson. This having been completed, with quick fingers she played two rounds of solitaire. And when the solitaire was over, she said good night and disappeared. It was then ten o’clock.

A deviation from the norm only occurred when one of us opened a window in the tropical heat of the parlor; then Miss Frazer stood up and shut it again. She probably couldn’t stand the draft. We learned as little of the source of her aversion to the breeze as we knew of the contents of her daily lesson or the object of her handiwork. Miss Frazer was an old English spinstress; her profile was as knightly and sharp as that of a nobleman. On the other hand, her face, when viewed from the front, was round and red as an apple, with a sweet sprinkling of girlishness beneath her white hair. Whether she was also sweet-natured, no one knew. Except for the unavoidable civilities, she never exchanged a word with us. Perhaps she despised our idleness, our prattle, our immorality. Not even the Swiss gentleman, who for the last six hundred years had been a republican, did she grace with an intimate exchange. She knew everything about us, for she was always in our midst, and was the only person of whom we had no idea why she was there. All in all, with her crocheting, her lessons, and that red-apple smile, she might well have been there for no other reason than for pleasure and to share our company.