“If he annoys you I’ll throw him out, the bastard. He must do as he’s told. Come along, drink another glass with me!”
She pressed close to me with a wild, abrupt kind of tenderness which I knew at once was only pretended, to torment the other man. At every movement she quickly looked askance across the table, and it was dreadful to me to see how he began to wince whenever she paid me some little attention, as if he felt hot steel branding his flesh. Without paying any attention to her, I stared only at him, and shuddered to see something in the nature of anger, rage, envy and greed arising in him, yet he cringed again if she so much as turned her head. She now pressed very close to me, her body trembling with her vicious pleasure in this game, and I felt horror at her garishly painted face with its smell of cheap powder, at the fumes emanating from her slack flesh. I reached for a cigar to keep her away from my face, and while my eyes were searching the table for a match she ordered him, “Bring us a light!”
I was more horrified than he was at such an imposition, making him serve me, and quickly set about looking for a light myself. But he snapped to attention at her words as if at the crack of a whip, came over to us, reeling, with unsteady footsteps, and put his own lighter on the table quickly, as if he might burn up if he touched the table-top. For a second I met his eyes: there was boundless shame in them, and crushing embitterment. That servile glance of his struck a chord in me as another man, a brother. I felt the force of his humiliation at the woman’s hands and was ashamed for him.
“Thank you very much,” I said in German—she started at that—“but you shouldn’t have troubled.” Then I offered him my hand. A hesitation, a long one, then I felt damp, bony fingers, and suddenly, convulsively, an abrupt pressure in thanks. For a second his eyes shone as they looked at mine, and then they were hidden again by those slack eyelids. In defiance of the woman, I was going to ask him to sit down with us, and I must already have begun to trace the gesture of invitation, for she quickly ordered him, “You sit down again and don’t disturb us here.”
All at once I was overcome by disgust at the sound of her caustic voice and this scene of torture. What did I care for this smoky bar, this unpleasant whore and the feeble man, these fumes of beer, smoke and cheap perfume? I craved fresh air. I pushed the money over to her, stood up and moved away with decision as she came flatteringly closer to me. It revolted me to help her humiliate another human being, and the determined manner of my withdrawal clearly showed how little she attracted me sensually. Her blood was up now, a line appeared around her mouth, but whatever word sprang to her lips she took care not to utter it, just turning on him and flouncing with undisguised hatred. But he was expecting the worst, and at this threatening movement he rapidly, with a hunted look, put his hand in his pocket and brought out a purse. It was obvious that he was afraid of being left alone with her now, and in his haste he had trouble untying the purse-strings—it was the kind of knitted purse adorned with glass beads that peasants and the lower classes carry. Anyone could see that he wasn’t used to throwing his money about, unlike the sailors who produce the coins clinking in their pockets with a sweeping gesture and fling them down on the table; he was clearly in the habit of counting money carefully and weighing the coins up in his fingers. “How he trembles for his dear, sweet pfennigs! Are we going too slowly for you? Wait!” she mocked, and came a step closer. He shrank back, and seeing his alarm she said, shrugging her shoulders and with unspeakable revulsion in her eyes, “Oh, I won’t take anything from you, I spit on your money. I know you’ve counted all your dear, nice little pfennigs. No one in the world must have too much money. And then of course,” she added, suddenly tapping his chest, “there’s the banknotes you’ve sewn in there so that no one will steal them!”
Sure enough, like a man with a weak heart suddenly clutching at his breast, he reached with a pale and trembling hand for a certain place on his coat, his fingers instinctively felt for the secret hiding-place and came away again, reassured. “Miser!” she spat. But then, suddenly, a flush rose to her victim’s face; he threw the purse abruptly at the other girl, who first cried out in alarm, then laughed aloud, and he stormed past her and out of the door as if escaping from a fire.
For a moment she still stood there, eyes flashing with fury. Then her eyelids fell apathetically again, weariness relaxed her body from its tension. She seemed to grow old and tired within a moment. Something uncertain and lost blurred the gaze now resting on me. She stood there like a drunk waking up, feeling numb and empty with shame. “He’ll be weeping and wailing for his money outside. Maybe he’ll go to the police and say we stole it. And he’ll be back tomorrow, but he won’t have me all the same. Anyone else can, but not him!”
She went to the bar, threw coins down on it and swallowed a glass of brandy in a single draught. The vicious light was back in her eyes, but blurred as if by tears of rage and shame. I felt nauseated by her, and that destroyed pity. “Good evening,” I said, and left. “Bonsoir,” replied the landlady. She did not look round but just laughed, shrill and scornful laughter.
When I stepped outside there was nothing in the alley but night and the sky, a sultry darkness with the moonlight veiled and endlessly far away. I greedily took great breaths of the warm yet reviving air, my sense of dread turned to amazement at the diversity of human fate, and I felt again—it is a feeling that can make me happy to the point of tears—how fate is always waiting behind every window, every door opens on new experience, the wide variety of this world is omnipresent, and even its dirtiest corners swarm with predestined events as if with the iridescent gleam of beetles decomposing. Gone was the distasteful part of the encounter, and my tension was pleasantly resolved, turning to a sweet weariness that longed to turn all I had just seen and heard into a more attractive dream. Instinctively I looked around me, trying to work out my way back through this tangle of winding alleys. Then a shadow—he must have come close without making any noise—approached me.
“Forgive me,”—and I immediately recognised that humble tone of voice—“but I don’t think you know your way around here. May I—may I show you which way to go? You are staying, sir, at …?”
I told him the name of my hotel.
“I’ll go with you … if you’ll permit me,” he immediately added humbly.
Dread came over me again. This stealthy, spectral step, almost soundless yet close beside me, the darkness of the sailors’ alley and the memory of what I had just witnessed all gradually turned to a dreamlike confusion of the emotions, leaving me devoid of judgement and unable to say no. I felt without seeing the subservience in his eyes, and noticed how his lips trembled; I knew that he wanted to talk to me, but in my daze, where the curiosity of my heart mingled uncertainly with physical numbness, I did nothing to encourage or discourage him. He cleared his throat several times, I noticed that he was trying and failing to speak, but some kind of cruelty which had, mysteriously, passed from the woman in the bar to me enjoyed watching him wrestle with shame and mental torment, and I did not help him, but let the silence lie black and heavy between us. And our steps, his quietly shuffling like an old man’s, mine deliberately firm and decided, as if to escape this dirty world, sounded odd together. I felt the tension between us more strongly all the time; it was a shrill silence now, full of unheard cries, and it already resembled a violin string stretched too taut by the time he at last—and at first with dreadful hesitation—managed to bring out his words.
“You saw … you saw … sir, you saw a strange scene in there. Forgive me … forgive me if I mention it again … but it must seem strange to you … and I must look very ridiculous. That woman, you see …”
He stopped again. Something was constricting his throat. Then his voice sank very low, and he whispered rapidly, “That woman … she’s my wife.” I must have given a start of surprise, for he quickly went on as if to apologise. “That’s to say, she was my wife … four or five years ago, it was in Geratzheim back in Hesse where I come from … sir, I wou
ldn’t like you to think ill of her … perhaps it’s my fault she’s like that. She wasn’t always … I … I tormented her. I took her although she was very poor, she didn’t even have any household linen, nothing, nothing at all … and I’m rich, or that’s to say well off … not rich … at least, I was then … and you see, sir, perhaps—she’s right there—perhaps I was tight-fisted with money … but then I always was, sir, before this misfortune … and my father and mother before me, we all were … and I worked hard for every pfennig … and she was light-minded, she liked pretty things … but she was poor, and I was always reproaching her for it … I shouldn’t have done it, I know that now, sir, for she is proud, very proud. You mustn’t think she’s really the way she makes out … that’s a lie, and she does herself violence only … only to hurt me, to torment me … and … and because she’s ashamed. Perhaps she’s gone to the bad, but I … I don’t think so, because, sir, she was very good, very good …”
He wiped his eyes in great agitation and stood still. Instinctively, I looked at him, and he suddenly no longer struck me as ridiculous. I found that I could even ignore his curiously servile manner of speech, the way he kept calling me “sir”, as only the lower classes do in Germany. His face was greatly exercised by his internal struggle to put his story into words, and his eyes were fixed as he began walking unsteadily forward again, on the roadway itself, as if there, in the flickering light, he were laboriously reading the tale that so painfully tore its way out of his constricted throat.
“Yes, sir,” he uttered now, breathing deeply, and in quite a different voice, a deep voice that seemed to come from a gentler world within him, “yes, she was very good … to me too, she was very grateful to me for saving her from poverty … and I knew that she was grateful, too, but … but I wanted to hear her say so … again and again, again and again … it did me good to hear her thank me … sir, it was so good, so very good, to feel … to feel that you are a better human being, when … when you know all the same that you’re not … I’d have given all my money to hear it again and again … and she was very proud, so when she realised that I was insisting she must be grateful, she wanted to say so less and less. That’s why … that, sir, is the only reason why I always made her ask … I never gave anything of my own free will … I felt good, making her come to beg for every dress, every ribbon … I tormented her like that for three years, I tormented her more and more … but it was only because I loved her, sir … I liked her pride, yet I still wanted to make her bow to me, madman that I was, and when she wanted something I was angry … but I wasn’t really, sir … I was glad of any chance to humiliate her, for … for I didn’t know how much I loved her …”
He stopped again. He was staggering as he walked now, and had obviously forgotten me. He spoke mechanically, as if in his sleep, in a louder and louder voice.
“And I didn’t know … I didn’t know it until that dreadful day when … when I’d refused to give her money for her mother, only a very little money … that is, I had it ready for her, but I wanted her to come and ask me once again … oh, what am I saying? … yes, I knew then, when I came home in the evening and she was gone, leaving just a note on the table … ‘Keep your damned money, I want no more to do with you,’ it said … nothing more … sir, I was like a lunatic for three days and three nights. I had the river searched and the woods, I gave the police large sums of money, I went to all the neighbours, but they just laughed and mocked me … there was no trace of her, nothing. At last a man came with news from the next village … he said he’d seen her … in the train with a soldier, she’d gone to Berlin. I followed her that very day … I neglected my business, I lost thousands … they stole from me, my servants, my manager, all of them … but I swear to you, sir, it was all the same to me … I stayed in Berlin, I stayed there a week until I found her among all those people … and went to her …” He was breathing heavily.
“Sir, I swear to you … I didn’t say a harsh word to her … I wept, I went on my knees … I offered her money, all my fortune, said she should control it, because then I knew … I knew I couldn’t live without her. I love every hair on her head … her mouth … her body, everything, everything … and I was the one who thrust her out, I alone … She was pale as death when I suddenly came in … I’d bribed the woman she was staying with … a procuress, a bad, vicious woman … she looked white as chalk standing there by the wall … she heard me out. Sir, I believe she was … yes, I think she was almost glad to see me, but when I mentioned the money … and I did so, I promise you, only to show her that I wasn’t thinking of it any more … then she spat … and then … because I still wouldn’t go … then she called her lover, and they both laughed at me … But, sir, I went back again day after day. The people of the house told me everything, I knew that the rascal had left her and she was in dire need, so I went once again … once again, sir, but she flew at me and tore up a banknote that I’d secretly left on the table, and when I next came back she was gone … What didn’t I do, sir, to find her again? For a year, I swear to you, I didn’t live, I just kept looking for her, I paid detective agencies until at last I found out that she was in Argentina … in … in a house of ill repute …” He hesitated a moment. The last words were spoken like a death rattle. And his voice grew deeper yet.
“I was horrified … at first … but then I remembered that it was I, no one else, who had sent her there … and I thought how she must be suffering, the poor creature … for more than anything else she’s proud … I went to my lawyer, who wrote to the consul and sent money … not telling her who it came from … just so that she would come back. I received a telegram to say it had all succeeded … I knew what the ship was, and I waited to meet it in Amsterdam … I was there three days early, burning with impatience … at last it came in, I was so happy just to see the smoke of the steamer on the horizon, and I thought I couldn’t wait for it to come in and tie up, so slowly, so slowly, and then the passengers came down the gangplank and at last, at last she was there … I didn’t know her at first … she was different, her face painted … and as … as you saw her … and when she saw me waiting … she went pale. Two sailors had to hold her up or she’d have fallen off the gangplank. As soon as she was on shore I came up to her … I said nothing, my throat was too dry … She said nothing either, and didn’t look at me … The porter carried her bags, we walked and walked … Then, suddenly, she stopped and said … oh, sir, how she said it … ‘Do you still want me for your wife, even now?’ I took her hand … she was trembling, but she said nothing. Yet I felt that everything was all right again … sir, how happy I was! I danced around her like a child when I had her in the room, I fell at her feet … I must have said foolish things … for she laughed through her tears and caressed me … very hesitantly, of course … but sir … it did me so much good. My heart was overflowing. I ran upstairs, downstairs, ordered a dinner in the hotel … our wedding feast … I helped her to dress … and we went down, we ate and drank and made merry … oh, she was so cheerful, like a child, so warm and good-hearted, and she talked of home … and how we would see to everything again … And then …” His voice suddenly roughened, and he made a movement with his hand as if to knock someone down. “There … there was a waiter … a bad, dishonest man … who thought I was drunk because I was raving and dancing and laughing madly … although it was just that I was happy, oh, so happy. And then, when I paid him, he gave me back my change twenty francs short … I shouted at him and demanded the rest … he was embarrassed, and brought out the money … And then she began laughing aloud again. I stared at her, but her face was different … mocking, hard, hostile all at once. ‘How pernickety you still are … even on our wedding day!’ she said very coldly, so sharply, with such … such pity. I was horrified, and cursed myself for being so punctilious … I went to great pains to laugh again, but her merriment was gone, had died. She demanded a room of her own … what wouldn’t I have given her? … and I lay alone all night, thinking of nothing
but what I could buy her next morning … what I could give her … how to show her that I’m not miserly … would never be miserly with her again. And in the morning I went out, I bought a bracelet, very early, and when I went into her room … it … it was empty, just the same as before. And I knew there’d be a note on the table … I went away and prayed to God it wasn’t true … but … but it was there … And it said …” Here he hesitated. Instinctively, I had stopped and was looking at him. He bent his head. Then he whispered, hoarsely:
“It said … ‘Leave me alone. I find you repulsive.’”
We had reached the harbour, and suddenly the roar of the nearby breakers broke the silence. There lay the ships at anchor, near and far, lights winking like the eyes of large black animals, and from somewhere came the sound of singing. Nothing was distinct, yet there was so much to feel, an immensity of sleep, with the seaport dreaming deeply.
I sensed the man’s shadow beside me, a flickering, spectral shape at my feet, now disintegrating, now coming together again as the light of the dim street lamps changed. I could say nothing, I could give no comfort and had no questions, but I felt his silence clinging to me, heavy and oppressive. Then, suddenly, he clutched my arm. He was trembling.
“But I won’t leave this place without her … I’ve found her again, after months … She torments me, but I won’t give up … I beg you, sir, talk to her … I must have her, tell her that, she won’t listen to me … I can’t go on living like this … I can’t watch the men going in to her … and wait outside the house until they come down again, drunk and laughing … The whole alley knows me now, they laugh when they see me waiting … it drives me mad … and yet I go back again every evening. Sir, I beg you, speak to her … I don’t know you, but do it for God’s merciful sake … speak to her …”