Madame Snow, Stella Snow in the days of laced boots, parasols and Grand
Balls, had loved white prancing horses, square-shouldered men with spikes rising from their
helmets, and sleek sausages that bulged like pig’s hind legs, hanging in the kitchen large
as a palace. She had breasts for a young girl, and had sat many times in a golden opera box,
her legs growing rigid as if she were posing for a picture. The food in her father’s house
was served encased in layers of fat and from a basket at the side of her bed she had eaten a
hybrid kind of giant pear. She went out with young men dressed in black who could ride a
horse up to the point of death on a winter’s day and leave him to freeze, feeling the hand
of hell’s angel, or went with moustached students with orange bands about their caps. She
craved candies imported from France and Holland, heard lovers sing in raucous voices, and
punting, seemed the image of the passing swan. She had a mouth that inverts envied, and when
the first thuds of cannonade rocked the country, the mouth closed and she began to read. She
loomed like a waxen noncommittal saint when her mother fell before her in the street from
marketing, a piece of metal jutting from the bosom, while the airplane crashed. The
policeman blew his whistle and people ran from every hole, looming like roaches before her
startled eyes. It was then that she imagined marble bannisters and the candelabra of several
generations before, and saw strange men embarking in ice-covered ships. Machine guns slowly
rattled in
the raked forests. Her sister, young and sullen, tore pages
from books and leaped in the snow. Stella took to cards, gambling, to singing, and finally
back to cards, and in the meantime crossed barbaric swords hung over her head and she swept
through ironclad centuries, a respected crone.
Doors clamped shut and single lamps were lit. Jutta fondled the unformed
girl while her son, awkward as a doll, ran over the cold earth. Many boys had been crushed
under the tread of monsters and there were no martial drums to roll, though women pulled up
their skirts to catch the tears. The shadows about the child seemed like beasts of the
circus, groaning out of the empty doorways with nothing to mangle in their jaws. About him
the wind began to scream as through the slots of airplane wings. The child ran, but only a
sharp eye would have told that he was a boy, for his face, hands and hair were as flat as
his sister’s, and the light from his eyes was as limpid and sullen as the night. Still, the
Duke hooked his cane over his arm, adjusted his suede gloves, and followed, his trouser
cuffs becoming wet with mud. The child ran all the faster when the light went out of the
butcher shop.
The shutters on the Mayor’s house were closed as they had been ever since
the time of air raids. The collar of his nightshirt was dirty and tom and he pulled the
covers over his head. He smelled damp wood, the stone, goose feathers. And when he heard the
footsteps running in the street below he shivered; for as a Hun, only
he
knew
responsibility and the meaning of a coat of arms, the terror of a people left without
tribunal and with privation. The Duke walked past the Mayor’s house, unafraid of a hand in
the dark, whistling softly to himself, but his eyes
were sharp and he was
keen on the scent. Then out of the blackness came a man, fresh from an alley, his hands
still wet, breath strong with spirits. He reeled and they bumped below the Mayor’s bedroom
window. It was the drunken Census-Taker. He stepped back, looked up at the tall figure. “Ah,
Herr Duke,” he said, and his eyes searched the face. “You are mistaken,” said the Duke and
pushed on.
There was no sound. It was years since the people had stopped talking,
except for fragments of a sentence, “Madame Snow told me to die …” And these words were only
uttered in the strictest of confidence and in the lowest voice, for they had all the same
experience, yet expected an alien ear, waited for disbelieving eyes. Even when the butcher
shop door slammed shut, it seemed to say, “Quiet. I am not really closed.” “Believe only in
ten Gods,” most people said. “For Evil is a punctual being; our mothers and fathers founded
the State; our prisons have since become empty; the Crown must pass from hand to hand; and
Stintz is a good devil with our children. Our money will not burn forever; even the sow’s
hoof is armed; one of our devils is just the time of day. We recall the rites of Wittenberg,
and our tempestuous wives beat the fair young girls.” When they spoke of the darkness of the
weather, or of the lack of clothes, they were referring to one of the ten Gods of Loss whom
they could not trust. And when they spoke their lips hardly moved and they were unable to
believe their own words, expecting some agent to rise out of the middle of the table and
condemn or laugh. Of Nordic stock, they were silent, the tribal cry long dead from their
rolling tongues.
The Census-Taker moved away, drunken but conscious,
fearing to make a sound. His belt sagged round his waist, his eyes rolled as with columns of
figures. In the back of his mind he turned over a hatred for the Mayor, who had witnessed
executions with his eyes closed. Pulling his cap more over his ears, he knocked softly on
the door of the
Crooked Zeiturtg
, the town newspaper. At the end of every evening
he stopped at the Paper, and it was then that his heart grew bright and the old excitement
returned. Each letter in the plates of type was butchered into the next, all the plates had
been smashed with hammers, and throughout the office was the smell of gum and the half-light
from broken eye shades. The roll-top desks were smashed open and mice crawled over the
bottles piled in the corners.
Jutta’s husband had owned the Paper, but he was lost among thousands in
Siberia, and I, Zizendorf, his friend, sat through every hour of the day thinking of the
past. I too awaited this hour after midnight when my visitor would come, when I could cease
thinking of lines of inverted print, and of the spoils I had found but had never seen again
in Paris. I alone was editor, but my fingers were too blunt to punch the keys and I had no
paper.
“Good evening, Editor,” said the Census-Taker, “and how are you
tonight?”
“Sit down for a moment,” I said.
We always talked for an hour, then left together. We drank together and our
pale eyes took in the cobwebs and then we would think of songs now unsingable. But we knew
that there was something to do after our few words. We could talk of nothing and yet there
were smiles hidden under our faces. We adjusted our clothes, drank slowly and carefully,
both knowing we would leave when the time was right.
“Well, we still have no government,” I said. My eyes looked over the steel
glasses.
“My friend, I can only think of plenty tonight. I remember festive costumes
and bright lights. But you are right, we have nothing.”
We both smiled, legs stretched limply before us, smoke rising from saved
cigarettes. The kerosene burned low and problems were as flimsy as its slight flames. We
heard our own breathing. I sometimes thought of Jutta’s husband, who had been a good fellow,
of spring and beerhalls, but more often I thought of the Pastor I had shot to death, of
perfumes and earrings, and the keys that would not work, words that would not come. We heard
the distant sound of the low water in the canal, felt our hunger growing stronger. The
shadows grew larger in the printing office. “Shall we go?” asked the Census-Taker. He could
feel the warmth creeping upon him. I strapped the pistol under my arm, blew out the lamp,
and we left.
Jutta’s girl was named Selvaggia and she was like a small white statue when
she was undressed. Her widespread eyes were always afraid, even though the only person she
feared in all the world was Herr Stintz. That man, one floor below, was playing a dirge on
his tuba, his shiny head reflected from its bell, the sounds falling chromatically down and
down. The mother held her child at arm’s length, and the child seemed to grow like the pit
of a fruit from the dotted kimono sleeves, straddled, as if she could never fall, on the
woman’s knee. The mother was starved for food, a woman who had gorged herself on nuts,
cream, shanks of meat and chocolate, but
now filled herself at night in a
way that her daughter, or son, could not. Her head belonged to a man, but though the face
was male, her breast was still a woman’s. The flat couch filled almost all the room and
became her larder. Jutta was like her father, a Prussian mouth, a Roman nose, strong legs
now, years after her illness, but her daughter was unlike any of them, a child on a poster.
Stella Snow resented Selvaggia and her brother for bearing no resemblance to the family, and
they would not speak to her. Jutta hated Stella from the first day her small man’s face
looked up from the crib to see her older sister staring down, mouth too filled with tongue
to speak. The candle flickered and Jutta and child heard the double pairs of boots on the
stairs, heard the sound clumping up like drummers’ flams out of the silence. Selvaggia ran
off to the second room to wait alone for her brother. She was wide-awake. She heard the
opening of the door, the words
“Guten Abend,”
then shut them all out of her mind.
In the next room the three of us lay on the couch.
Madame Stella Snow combed her half-white, halfgold hair, hung her black gown
from a hook on the wall and crawled into the bed. A resident of the town for twenty years,
knowing them all more closely than the Mayor, she felt the pain more acutely than he, even
with her heart more like stone. Even though there was no Post, even though no one came or
went and they all had lived or died for many centuries, even though there was no wireless,
she felt the vastness of community that was like burial, spreading over all borders and from
family to family. No drainpipes, chemicals to cleanse, flames to heat, no word, no food for
the young or old, she was puzzled. Despite her years she could not find where
it had all begun, for she was aristocratic to the end. Stella was capable of anything
with a cold heart, but she could not bear the mutilation of any part of her. So she would
not see her son. Distorted trees and rattling windows, dirty uniforms and an individuality
that meant death flowed in a dangerous stream through
das Grab
. Even she, feeling
the hunger, sometimes hesitated bringing the goblet to her lips. She had spent an oddly
sexual decade and was now more unlike her sister than ever. Limbs of trees scraped against
the window; she remembered that her sister’s boy was still out in the night. She lay in the
dark. Then she heard the scratching at the cellar door.
All Germany revolved around Balamir. His feet were in the boots of an
Emperor’s son, he felt the silver sword of time and tide and strength against his hip.
Growing weak and cold, he was the result of commands coming down out of the years. From the
farm where he was born to the institution and munition works, he felt that people bowed as
he passed. How he sought to be that image, how the Kaiser’s ghost needed him, how he would
be Honor in the land he had become. But how well he knew it was a reign of terror and felt
like pulling his beard as his father would have done. Potentate of the north, he scowled on
his subjects, the trees, the chips of broken glass, brass casings and beaten fuse ends, but
alone he smiled on his castle walls. He was the true and unknown Prince of
Spitzen-on-the-Dein
, followed by the castrated and the disillusioned, guided by
an unknown hand around the signs of the skull and cross-bones planted above the mines. He
had crept about the door of the Duke’s apartment, watched the tall man come and go. He used
to walk in the institution’s garden, and now, in the last days of the
decline of his kingdom, he was befriended in the home of twittering birds.
The vapors of the canal grew stronger, the Duke gained a hundred feet and
eased his pace, cracks and holes in the earth filled with night dew.
I unstrapped my pistol and put it on the floor.
More insistently Balamir’s fingers scratched at the door, and hunched on the
top step he thought of a balcony and an armored knight. Germany lay below in the
darkness.
“Come in, you poor creature,” she whispered, and the trenches of the
countryside were suddenly seen by the light of her candle.
To countenance the sickle over the wheat, to sweep out of the years the
mellow heartbreak or the grand lie, to strike forward barehanded to a very particular and
cold future, a diminutive but exact ending, a final satisfactory faith that is cruel and
demonic, is to suffer the highest affection and lose it, to meet the loss of life and the
advent of a certain reality. Madame Snow, having once reached the full period of life with
her husband Ernst, and having fallen, alone, from such a richness, had met and lingered on
this exact desolate end. Whereas Jutta, kin in place only, having spent a barren rigid past,
was just now reaching the turn in the road where nakedness seemed to hang like a hundred
apples, pink, wet, and running with sweet stiff worms, and she would probably never in her
own time recognize the lifeless segments of Germany threaded on a string before an open
window. She indulged herself where her sister Stella had entered with daring.
The Census-Taker, stretched full length on the flat of his back, attuned to
every breath over the bed and with his soul dissociated from the actual room, felt a
persistent gentle quiver through the sheets, a rippling noise from the most infantile
spaces. The curtains that hung over the window, not around it, the covers that hung from the
foot of the couch, were not at all princely, but were washed clean and sparse. They were
passed over many counters,
spun from an ordinary thread. He had no heart
for rebellion, still wearing the blue cap of an official crushed under one ear, had no
ability to desire or to crush the tingling noise or presumptuous motion. While Jutta and I
needed, in a skinned momentary manner, this vague ordeal, he was only able to absorb some
faintly gross misunderstanding of already abnormal passions, some slight frightening
tendency toward reversion, darkness and pleasure. The single globe overhead, burning at the
end of a current without direction, diffused a light through the wings of moths, yellow,
soft—a reality clear enough to see. The floor was swept clean for the children. Jutta did
not seem to know of the Census-Taker’s presence, did not feel his cold shoes against her
bare feet, or the rough stubble on the back of his hands, but moving in an artifice, a play
she well knew, pursed her lips into an act, an act to rid herself.
No one could dislike Jutta, though she was as nervously strong in her adult
years as Stella was in her turning girlhood; she was as kind as a maternal spirit with a
patriarchal plain nature, and whatever wisdom she may have felt lay restless, lost beneath
the sheets. To me she lay in beauty, and into the Census-Taker she breathed a tense
laughter, still trying to complete in her middle year some joyless cycle. And to the others,
the cold white ravenous men and trunks of women, without age, without passion, she was the
younger sister of Madame Snow, half-warm, half-friendly. She persisted in believing that
both her children were her own, could not admit their creation with any man, and believed
that they both loved her with the clarity of children who have not yet reached the size of
youth. She breathed closer into my ear, traced the smooth canals, followed those
old repeating dreams and murmured words. I was a counterfeit, a
transformer for several delicate whims and exasperating needs, was an image for the moment
made from past respectable devices. I rolled up on my side as if awake, and I saw in her
body something that was not there, something that graced, I thought, the nibbling lips of
the goat.
The Census-Taker, feeling the unnoticeable height of his own small passion,
moving with stealth and awe as a child before the hanging sock, moving as if he held it in
his hands and would not fracture it, slid from the bed and walked tiptoe to the corner
chair, hung for a second, then turned to see. The most sensitive pulsations trembled at the
corners of his eyes, and leaning slightly forward, verdant under the yellow light, he
watched. His pleasure broke for a moment remembering a week the Americans had occupied the
town and he had been forced to watch, deadly drunk, eyes red, while the Mayor, wretched and
awkward, looked the other way and dropped the handkerchief that ended Pastor Miller’s life
at the stake. He concentrated and the steady movement returned, broken with the intricate
strokes of pleasure. His memories were not as frequent or particular as my own. But I,
Zizendorf, had now forgotten all under my undramatic and specialized dark guise, and I
looked into the white of the sheets.
“What are you doing?”
“Why, I don’t remember. Does it matter?”
“No.”
A haunch rose above the white, then receded like an iceberg drawn just below
the surface, the springs making hardly any noise, interest waiting for the chance to
disappear. Night after night we waited for this summoning of flagged energy, hands cold,
eyes closed, while in other beds and lofts the sleepers could not awake,
could not breathe. My need to recreate, with amazing frequency, some sort of pastime similar
to my comrades’ habits, a cyclic affection that had finally, in Paris, become fatal to their
health, led me to the quite real bargain of Jutta on the top floor. I, the Editor, did not
recognize the head in the hay or fathom the posed deep slumber of the houses I passed on my
nightly journey. And somehow the Census-Taker was my relic-brother, whose actions and
despairs, whose humorous awkward positions and dry attempts were similar to mine. The
Census-Taker, who had stature only through responsibilities that had gone, was muddled and
lopsided as the badge of his marine cap, was unable to count or to repeat the names. He
sought the appearance of love in the lives of his friends, retaining out of his official
experience a disgust only of death. He lived the smallest chip of illusion, bearing along
his drunk path a recognition of the way, a small dropsy formula that might in the end lead
him out, beyond the overt sorrow of his partially thrilled, sitting figure.
My first days in Paris had been difficult. “Dear Sister,” I wrote, “I’m
having a bad time and cannot seem to get started in enjoying myself. I find the women very
hard to get—the release here has broken down all our official routine and rank, and in
consequence I do not seem to have anything with which to gain their respect …” Now with
Jutta it was different, more like the second part of my Paris trip when I’d somehow found my
nerve and hence perfume and boudoir parties. I enjoyed the Census-Taker watching us from the
chair.
A low repressed rumble from the cold radiator
sounded
like the beating of crickets’ wings, his increased breathing slowly died down while our
activity on the bed at his feet remained at a constant low level, consistent and unvaried
without end. Gradually he sank back in the chair, his knees spread, belt pulled in, while he
brushed with one hand at the image of Miller.
The Duke, shortening the pace, picked his way carefully by the cliff of
fallen walls and poked with his cane into the dark crevices, hoping to stick the crouched
body of his prey, to light upon the thin fox. He came legitimately by his title, and when he
had commanded three tanks in the second war, was known as a fearless man. A father much
older than himself still stalked far away in Berlin where I had never been, and as his
father would have done, he recognized with taste and profound respect the clear high and
stable character of Madame Snow. The night was so black that the red lights from the hatches
of his tanks would have reflected against the clouds and brought death. Free of the debris
he again approached in the path of the child, not quite able to visualize the kill.
Jutta did not know the Duke, did not like him, and immediate instinct told
her to beware the second floor, for she feared his clean standing, feared his aristocratic
caliber which she, through her own fault, had not grasped from her family. She spoke of most
intimate life with her daughter, tried to instill in her son ideas of manhood, and spent a
certain part of the day sweeping dust into a little bin and rubbing with a damp cloth. She
left her apartment very seldom, but even the Duke, in his most precise manner, had noticed
her gentle convolvulaceous long legs. Large and perfect in every detail but not a
woman, sensible and sometimes calm but not a man, she failed to understand
the German life, failed as a mother, at least for her son. She had never been quite able to
allow a love for her country to intrude within her four walls, had never been loyal, and
though she gave herself like segments of a fruit, she never envisioned the loyalty due her
State. Tears sometimes appeared on her cheeks after our long embrace which I was never able
to recognize. Thirty years is not enough time to measure the complete crystallization of a
nation, though partially lost; to measure the greatest advance of communal men, though
partially destroyed, and Jutta, far removed from the rise, fall, and eventual rise, was far
from being within the thirty years, far from being successful or adored.
“Again?” She spoke under my arm. “Perhaps you are right. You certainly are,
here …” There was hardly a break as the wheel turned, sustaining the light ardor. No
movement could be carried long enough to last over to the first minute after, beneath the
yellow globe.
Tonight she seemed lovely, now propped against the pillows, resting a knee
against my side, her eyes passing once over the sleeping Census-Taker, then towards the door
of the other room, robe-top arrested and wrinkled below her waist, lovely, but far from the
majesty of Madame Snow, who looked very old. She was never able to tell when I would come,
but at a moment she would find me. Now she relaxed while I touched her arm with the flat of
my cheek.
Yesterday she had gone for a walk, down the steep loose stairs of the
boarding house, grey shawl over the bent shoulders, bringing with love and kindness
her daughter Selvaggia, who followed behind. She reached back for the long
hand to guide the child in the darkness, pushed open the door with her foot, and outside
they found that the town was partially destroyed, that a cold spring sun was cut through by
a rough steel shoulder, that cold ruts of mud were beginning to thaw. Her face had no color
under the sunlight, mother and daughter walked in the same slow stride, feeling their way
forward in a place they did not know, and the child spoke now and then in a friendly way.
Jutta drew the shawl closer, tried to keep her black shoes free of the mud.
“What were the invaders like?” asked Selvaggia.
“They were bad people, but they didn’t stay long.” The child had been
protected from their sight the week that the Americans had stopped in the town; now they had
scurried on to the further cities, and only a man on a motorcycle came occasionally to
Spitzen-on-the-Dein
. His saddlebags were full and his handsome machine roared
across untraveled roads with authority. But his face was covered with goggles and Selvaggia
had only seen him bouncing quickly, noisily, through the streets.
“You shouldn’t even think about them,” said Jutta, and she vaguely hoped
that her child would not.
In the sunlight Jutta’s hair was not so pretty, pinhead eyelets of dirt were
on her nose, spots in the loose dress had run, her legs were large and stiff under the
re-stitched swinging hem. Her daughter’s face narrowed to a thin point at the chin and it
seemed likely that the child would never have breasts. Under the narrow fish-bone chest
where they might have been, her heart beat autonomously, unaffected by the sight of the hill
of sliding moist
clay. The tar-paper houses on top of the hill were
sunken at the ends, jewels of tin cans littered the indefinable yards without lawns or
bushes, and hostile eyes watched mother and daughter from behind the fallen poles. A dense
unpleasant smell arose from beneath the ruins about two standing walls and drifted out
across the narrow road on the chilly wind.
“Tod,”
said the mother under her breath.
Side by side they stared down the uneven grey slopes to where the brick-red remains of the
institution sprawled in the glittering light.
“What’s that?” asked Selvaggia.
“That’s where they used to keep the crazy people.” The pointed head
nodded.
Many, many years before, a woman doctor had spoken to Balamir in those same
buildings:
“What’s your name?”
“Will you tell me what day this is?”
“Weiss nicht
.”
“Do you know what year this is?”
“Do you know where you are?”
“Weiss nicht
.”
“You’re going to have a good time here.”
“Weiss nicht, weiss nicht!
”
As they went down the hill the bright sun had become more cold, their feet
were wet, and they had been very glad to get back to the quiet of the rooms.
The yellow walls flickered as the electric globe dimmed, rose, dimmed but
did not go out, as the generator sputtered and continued to drone far beneath us in
Balamir’s basement. Below her stomach the white flesh puffed into a gentle mound, then
dissolved into the sheets, while her fingers against my arm traced over the silken outlines
of a previous wound. Her mind could only see as far as immediate
worry
for her son, never awoke in anticipation for the after-dark, or in fear to rise in light;
and as the thought of the child slipped downwards and ceased, every moment hence was plotted
by actions circled about in the room. She tapped my arm as if to say, “I get up, but don’t
bother,” and left the couch, the top of the robe swinging behind from the waist. She poured
the cold water into the basin, washed carefully and left the water to settle. In the other
room to get a light for my cigarette, she said,
“Schlaf’,”
to her daughter at the
window and returned with the lighted splinter. In his sleep the Census-Taker heard a few low
mournful notes of a horn, as if an echo, in a deeper register, of the bugles that used to
blast fitfully out among the stunted trees in the low fields on the south edge of town.
Once, twice, then Herr Stintz stood his instrument in a corner and sat alone in the dark on
the floor below. The apartment on the second floor was dark.