My muscles ache and my thighs tremble. When I swing my hook I feel a heavy pressure on my right shoulder. The hook must lodge deep or the sack will tear and Zwonimir swears.
Once we came into the kitchen on a hot day, and on our benches some guards were sitting chatting. They were talking about politics and the minister and increased living allowances. Zwonimir asked them to make room, the officials felt themselves important and did not get up. Zwonimir throws over the long wooden table at which they are sitting. The guards yell and make as if to hit Zwonimir but he sweeps their caps out through the door. It looks as if he had beheaded them. With one movement of his long arms he had swept out half a dozen caps. The guards went after their caps and then stood there, looking miserable without their eagles on. They muttered and went away.
We work hard and we sweat. We smell our own sweat, our bodies all thrust together, we have blistered hands and feel our power and our pain together.
There are fourteen of us men, wrestling with heavy hopsacks destined for Germany. The shippers and the recipients earn more on these hopsacks than all fourteen of us put together.
Zwonimir tells us this every evening as we head for home.
We do not know the shipper, I only read his name on the waggons: Ch. Lustig, a charming name. Ch. Lustig lives in a beautiful house, like Phöbus Bohlaug, his son studies in Paris and wears polished shoes. ‘Lustig, don’t get excited!’ says his wife.
Who the recipient is I do not know but he has every reason to call himself Happy.
All fourteen of us worked as one man.
We all arrived at the same time, we all ate at the same time, we all made the same movements and the hopsacks were our common enemy. Ch. Lustig has welded us together in sweat. We notice anxiously that the hopsacks are coming to an end, and soon our work will cease with them. Our parting feels painful to us, as if we should have to be sliced apart.
And I am no longer an egoist.
After three days we had finished the job. We were already free by four in the afternoon, but we stood on at the goods station and watched our hopsacks rolling off to Germany.
XVII
Once again it is time for the returning soldiers.
They come in groups, many at a time. They come in shoals, like certain fish at certain times of year. They flow westwards, these returning soldiers. For two months there were none to be seen. Then, week after week they flow past out of Russia and Siberia and the border countries.
The dust of years of wandering lies on their boots and their faces. Their clothes are torn, their sticks rough and worn. They all come the same way, not by rail, but on foot. They must have wandered by the year before reaching this place.
They know about foreign countries and strange lives and like me they have brushed against many lives. They are tramps. Are they happy to be tramping home? Would they not have been happier staying on in the big world rather than returning to the small home of wife, child and fireside?
Perhaps it is not their intention to go home. They are being spilled westward like fish in their season.
Zwonimir and I stood by the hour on the outskirts of town, where the tenements are, seeking a familiar face among the returning soldiers. Many passed us whom we did not recognise, though we must have fired and starved alongside them. They look as alike as fish.
It is said that someone can go by unrecognised, someone with whom I have shared an hour of mortal danger. In the most deadly moment of our lives we were united in a single fear and now we do not recognise each other. I remember feeling this same sadness when I looked at a girl. We met in a train and I did not know whether I had slept with her or whether she had only ironed my laundry.
Many of these returning soldiers wished, like ourselves, to stay in the town. The Hotel Savoy took on a new lease of life. Even Santschin’s room was already occupied. Alexander had to give up his pied-à-terre for three days because the manager said it was his right to let unoccupied rooms.
As I turned in my key I overheard Ignatz and Alexander arguing.
Many who had not the money for the Hotel Savoy fixed themselves up in the hutments.
It looked as though a new war might be about to break out. So the cycle repeats itself. Smoke pours out of the tenement chimneys, potato peelings lie before the doorways along with fruit cores and rotting cherries, and washing flaps on the line.
It grew eerie in the town.
One saw old soldiers begging without shame. They had gone to war proud, strong men, but they could not break the habit of begging. Only a few looked for work. They stole from the peasants, grubbed potatoes out of the ground, killed chickens, wrung the necks of geese and plundered haystacks. They dragged everything into the tenements, cooked there but never cleaned out the lavatories. One could see them on the outskirts crouching and relieving themselves.
The town, which had no drains, stank in any case. On grey days, at the edge of the wooden duckboards, one could see in the narrow, uneven gullies, black, yellow, glutinous muck out of the factories, still warm and steaming. It was a town accursed of God. It was as if the fire and brimstone had fallen here, not on Sodom and Gomorrah.
God punished this town with industry. Industry is God’s severest punishment.
People here were used to periodical waves of returning soldiers and no officials troubled them. Perhaps the police were anxious about having so many displaced people; no one wanted trouble.
Neuner’s workmen, moreover, had already been on strike for four weeks. If this resulted in fighting, the soldiers would be in it.
They came out of Russia and brought with them the breath of the great revolution. It was as if the revolution, like some active crater, were spitting them out like lava into the West.
For a long time the hutments had lain empty. Now suddenly they became so full of activity that one could believe them capable of setting themselves in motion any day now. At night people lighted inadequate tallow candles but a wild gaiety took command of them. The girls came to the returning soldiers, everyone drank schnaps and danced and spread syphilis.
My friend Zwonimir visits the hutments, since he loves excitement and disturbance and adds to it. He tells the hungry about the rich, denounces Neuner the industrialist and describes naked girls in the bar of the Hotel Savoy.
‘Now you’re exaggerating,’ say I to Zwonimir.
‘You have to do that or they don’t believe you,’ says he.
He tells the story of Santschin’s death, as if he had been present.
His powers of description are such that his talk holds the true breath of life.
The soldiers listen, and then they sing, each sings the songs of his homeland and they all sound alike. Czech songs, German, Polish and Serbian songs, in all of them the same melancholy, in all the voices the same rawness and harshness. And yet … the tunes sound so beautiful, in the way that an old cracked hurdy-gurdy sometimes sounds beautiful on evenings in March, on Sundays in the early spring when the streets are empty and have been washed clean by the great bells ringing out in the morning across the city.
The homecomers eat in the soup kitchen and Zwonimir with them. He says he likes the food. We eat on two successive days in the soup kitchen and I see that Zwonimir is right.
‘America!’ says Zwonimir.
It was a thick bean soup and when one stuck a spoon in it stood upright like a spade in the ground. This is a question of taste. I love thick bean and potato soups.
The windows in the soup kitchen are never opened, and for that reason the aroma of old meals lingers in corners and rises from the table tops – which are never washed – when the steam from the freshly cooked food brings them back to life.
People sit close together at these tables, their elbows at war. Their spirits are at peace; their feelings are friendly but their arms are at war.
People are not bad when they have plenty of room. In big restaurants they nod amiably to each other because there is enough room. No one quarrels in the house of Phöbus Bohlaug
because people keep out of each other’s way when they are not in the mood. But when two people share a narrow bed their legs quarrel while they sleep and their hands tear the thin sheet which covers them.
We took up our position at half past twelve, at the end of a long queue.
Up in front stood a policeman and waved his sabre about because he was bored. Twenty were let in at a time. We stood in pairs, Zwonimir and I together. Zwonimir swore because things were going too slowly. He spoke to the policeman, who was reluctant to answer him because officials are supposed to be silent. Zwonimir addressed him as ‘thou’ and ‘comrade’ and at one moment declared that a policeman had no reason to be so silent.
‘You’re as mum as a fish, comrade,’ says Zwonimir, ‘not a live fish but a dead fish, the sort they stuff with onions in these parts. At home where I come from they only take on chatty people in the police, people like me.’
The working women are startled by this kind of talk and are afraid to laugh.
The policeman who sees that Zwonimir has got the better of him, twirls his moustache and says, ‘It’s a dull life, and there’s nothing to talk about.’
‘Look here, comrade,’ says Zwonimir, ‘that’s because you didn’t go to the war, but to the military police. If you’ve been lying in a trench, like us, you’ve enough to talk about until the day you die.’
A few of the returning soldiers laugh at this. The policeman says, ‘Our lives were in danger, too!’
‘Yes,’ answers Zwonimir, ‘when you’ve got hold of a tough deserter, certainly I believe you, then your life would be in danger.’
No doubt about it; the homecomers loved my friend Zwonimir, but the police did not.
‘You’re a stranger,’ the police say to him, ‘and yet you talk so much here.’
‘I’m a soldier coming home and I’m forced, my friend, to stay here, because for some reason or other my government has signed a pact with yours. You don’t know about that but there are enough of your lot in my country for my government to beat their heads in if you touch a hair of mine. At home in my country every policeman must take an exam in politics.’
These are effective arguments, and the police are silenced.
And Zwonimir was able to go on swearing day after day.
He swore when he was kept waiting a long time, and also when he was inside already holding his bowl in his hand. Either it was cold or needed more salt or had too much salt. His dissatisfaction needled everyone else’s, so that they were all grumbling, to themselves or aloud, and the cooks took fright behind their sliding windows and added a spoonful more than they usually did or were told to do. Zwonimir increased the discontent.
The workers’ women took the soup home in saucepans, for the evening.
It became so stiff and glutinous when cooled that they could have taken it home wrapped in newspapers, just as they did their quarter loaves. Nevertheless, it was a tasty soup and took a long time to eat and what with only twenty being let in at a time the meal lasted three hours.
One heard that the cooks were discontented and did not want to work all day long on a meagre wage. By the second day there was nothing to be seen of the lady volunteers who were supposed, pointlessly and for the honour of it, to supervise the proceedings.
‘If they do close the kitchen,’ says Zwonimir, ‘we’ll soon open it up again. Or we’ll have Herr Neuner invite us to lunch. His soup is certainly better.’
‘Ah, that Neuner!’ say the working women.
They were pale and miserable and the pregnant ones dragged their heavy bellies about as if they were a curse and a burden.
‘If one hauls a bundle of faggots out of the woods,’ says Zwonimir, ‘one is at least certain that the room will be warm.’
‘Neuner would have paid extra allowances for each child,’ moaned the women, ‘and if they hadn’t started the strike we would have managed somehow.’
‘You wouldn’t have managed,’ says Zwonimir, ‘not if Neuner was to make money.’
It was a broom-cleaning factory, in which the pig’s bristles were cleaned of dust and dirt and brooms made out of them for more cleaning. The workers, who spent all day combing and brushing out the brooms, breathed the dust and developed lung haemorrhages and died at fifty.
There was every sort of hygiene imposed by law, the workers were to wear masks, the workrooms were to be so many metres high and wide and the windows were to be open, but a renovation of the factory would have cost Neuner much more than doubling the children’s allowances. For that reason the army doctor was called to all dying workers and he would swear black and blue that they were not dying of tuberculosis or of blood poisoning, but of heart trouble. It was a race of people with bad hearts and all Neuner’s workmen died ‘as the result of heart failure’. The army doctor was a kindly man, and had to spend every day in the Hotel Savoy drinking schnaps and sending wine when it was too late to people like Santschin.
The foremen, too, lived poorly, but they fancied themselves as the mayors of the factory with Neuner as king. Nowadays they were constantly looking for more ways to reach Neuner.
He received them with wine and caviare rolls, gave them advances and comforted them with Bloomfield.
There was absolutely nothing that the industrialist Neuner could do about the work.
Bloomfield, whose arm was long and could reach across the Great Pond, had a finger in every factory in the old town of his birth.
If he were to come over once a year everything would sort itself out at no expense to Neuner.
Neuner waited for Bloomfield.
People waited for Bloomfield, and not only in the Hotel Savoy. In the whole town they waited for Bloomfield. They waited for him in the Jewish quarter, people held back their foreign currency, business was slack. They hoped for him to come; up in the top storeys of the hotel, Hirsch Fisch trembled for fear an accident might happen to Bloomfield and already he was dreaming of beautiful lottery tickets.
Furthermore Hirsch Fisch had been mistaken about my ticket. The draw was in two weeks’ time. I learnt this in the community centre.
Even in the soup kitchen everybody talked about Bloomfield. When he came he granted all requests and the earth assumed a new aspect. What did this kind of request mean to Bloomfield? In a day he would spend as much on cigars.
Everywhere they wait for Bloomfield. In the orphanage a chimney crashes down. No one puts it up again because every year Bloomfield gives something to the orphanage. Sick Jews do not go to the doctor because Bloomfield will be coming to pay the bill. There has been a subsidence at the cemetery, two merchants’ shops have been burned to the ground, they stand in the lane with their rolls of goods and it does not occur to them to have the shops put up again, otherwise what would they have to take up with Bloomfield? The whole world is waiting for Bloomfield. One refrains from changing one’s bedclothes, from taking mortgages out on houses, even from weddings.
There is great tension in the air. Abel Glanz says he now has the chance of picking up a good job. But he would prefer a job with Bloomfield. Glanz has an uncle in America and he could stay with him. Perhaps Bloomfield will give him his sea passage, without a job, and then he would make his own way through his uncle.
Glanz’s uncle sells lemonade in the streets of New York.
Even Phöbus Bohlaug needs money, to ‘expand’ his business. He is waiting for Bloomfield.
Bloomfield does not come.
Whenever a train comes in from Germany, lots of people are standing at the station: distinguished gentlemen with brown and yellow travelling rugs, with big leather trunks, rubber waterproofs and rolled umbrellas in their cases.
But Bloomfield does not come.
Even so people go to the station every day.
XVIII
All of a sudden Bloomfield was there.
It is always like this with great events, with comets and revolutions and royal weddings. Great events tend to take one by surprise, and anticipation only tends to postpone them.
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br /> Bloomfield, Henry Bloomfield, arrived at the Hotel Savoy at two in the morning.
At that hour no trains were circulating, but then Bloomfield definitely did not come by train. He drove from the frontier in his American saloon car, because he did not trust himself to trains.
Henry Bloomfield was one of those people: the biggest certainty seemed to him uncertain. Whereas everyone regarded rail travel as if it were a law of nature, like the sun, wind or spring, Bloomfield was an exception. He did not even believe in timetables, although they were the State’s business, stamped with an eagle and with the seals of various regional administrations and the result of much painstaking calculation.
Bloomfield came to the Hotel Savoy at two in the morning and Zwonimir and I witnessed his arrival.
It so happened that we returned at this time from the hutments.
Zwonimir drank a lot and kissed everyone. Zwonimir could drink a great deal. When he came out into the open he was sober again, the night air took all the drink out of him – The wind blows the liquor out of my head,’ says Zwonimir.
The town is silent. A clock strikes from a tower. A black cat runs across the pavement. One can hear the breathing of those who are asleep. All the hotel windows are dark, a nightlight looms red above the entrance, from the lane the hotel looks dark and gigantic.
Through the hotel’s glass doors one can see the porter. He has put aside his braided uniform cap. For the first time I observe that he has a skull, and the fact somewhat surprises me. The porter has a couple of tufts of grey hair, they grow around his bald pate, like a garland round a birthday cake.
The porter stretches both legs out in front of him. No doubt he dreams of being in bed. The clock in the porter’s lodge says three minutes to two.
At this moment a yell comes on the wind, as if the whole town were suddenly shouting.
There comes this yell, and another, and a third.