Flight Without End

XVII

It was ten at night.

On the platform stood men with umbrellas, their clothes damp. The arc-lights swayed and cast faint shadows on the damp stones. A great many gnats settled on the arc-lights and were rocked to and fro. They attracted attention because they noticeably dimmed the light emitted without, however, obscuring the fact that they were arc-lights.

Everyone was disconcerted by the poor illumination the lamps supplied, looked up and shook their heads at the insects’ insolence.

Tunda, a heavy bag in his hand, looked around for a familiar face.

Naturally, Klara had come to meet him. George had stayed at home for various reasons. In the first place, it was a Saturday night, when the Club met. This club was a meeting-place for the academicians of the Rhenish city, artists and journalists, and only those of other vocations who possessed an honorary doctorate. The city itself had a university which distributed honorary doctorates like admission cards to the Club, for it was not possible to revoke the rules which permitted only academicians to be enrolled. The pressure on the Club and on the honorary doctorates had gradually mounted to the extent that the University had had to institute a numerus clausus for benefactors from industrial circles, while another numerus clausus for foreign Jews had already existed for a number of years. This numerus clausus against foreign Jews had been carried by the native Jews, who maintained that their ancestors had deliberately travelled with the Romans to the Rhine before the time of the great migrations. The Jews almost appeared to be saying that their ancestors had allowed the Teutons themselves to settle by the Rhine, wherefore it was the grateful duty of the modern Germans to protect these Rhenish-Roman Jews from the Polish ones.

George was at this club today.

In the second place, he did not come to the station because he would thereby have deprived Klara of her old-established privilege of dealing on her own with all those affairs which, in other families, usually require a masculine hand.

In the third place, George did not come because he was a little nervous of his brother and because a peaceable brother, once he was in his room and possibly even in bed, was much less dangerous than one just getting off the train.

Klara was wearing a leather jerkin of brown calf, reminiscent of the leather shirts worn beneath their armour by the knights of the Middle Ages, She gave the impression that she had come from afar, had faced perils in gloomy forests, she conjured up civil war. She came up to Tunda with the frank and resonant cordiality of awkward upright persons.

‘I recognized you immediately,’ she said.

Then she kissed him on the mouth. She attempted to relieve him of his heavy bag. He could not wrest it away from her and ran beside her like a child collected from school by a maid-servant.

In front of the station he saw a maze of wires, arc-lights, automobiles; in the middle a policeman who extended his arms like an automaton — right, left, upward, downward — simultaneously signalling on a whistle and giving the impression that the very next moment he would have to use his legs, too, to regulate the traffic. Tunda admired him. Music issued from various taverns, filling the intervals occasionally left by the din of the traffic; the atmosphere was one of Sunday enjoyment, clinking of glasses, coal, industry, the big city and general well-being.

The station appeared to be a centre of civilization.

By the time Tunda had regained his senses, they had already stopped in front of the conductor’s villa.

A grille began to rumble as soon as a knob was pressed and at once glided smoothly open. A servant stood there in a blue livery and bowed like a nobleman. They walked over crunching wet gravel, it felt like sand between the teeth. Then came a few steps, at the top of which, under a silver lantern, stood a girl in white like an angel, with wings at the back of her head, soft brown eyes and knees that curtseyed. Then they entered a brown-panelled hall in which one looked in vain for antlers, but found a mask of Beethoven standing in for hunting-gear.

For the master of this house was a conductor.

‘You must be rich!’ said Tunda, who sometimes reverted to his former naivety.

‘Not rich!’ smiled Klara deprecatingly, her social conscience outraged more by the word than the fact.

‘It’s just that we live in a civilized fashion. It’s essential for George.’

George did not come home for an hour.

He was wearing a dinner-jacket, his cheeks were flushed and smoothly powdered, he smelled of wine and shaving-soap, which produced the effect of menthol.

Franz and George embraced for the first time in their lives.

Some years previously the conductor had bought a silver samovar from some Russian refugees, as a curiosity. In honour of his brother, who must have become a kind of Russian, this item of furniture was brought in on a trolley by the liveried servant. The servant wore white gloves and seized small pieces of charcoal with silver sugar-tongs to heat the samovar.

A stench as from a light railway locomotive arose.

At this juncture Franz had to explain how to manage a samovar. He had never used one in Russia, did not understand it, but relied on his intuition.

Meanwhile he noticed many Jewish appurtenances in the room — lamps, goblets, scrolls of the Torah.

‘Have you been converted to Judaism?’ he asked.

It emerged that in this city, where the oldest and most impoverished Jewish families dwelled, many costly artefacts of artistic value were to be had for a song. In addition, other rooms contained Buddhas, although no Buddhists lived anywhere near the Rhine; there were also Hussite manuscripts, a Lutheran bible, Catholic religious furniture, ebony madonnas and Russian ikons.

That’s how conductors live.

Franz Tunda slept in a room devoted to modern painting. But Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain lay on his bedside table.