The quarry, p.10
The Quarry, page 10
Barlach was silent.
In the background ticked the clock, without pause, the clock, steady, with merciless hands, which pushed toward their goals.
“You are silent,” Emmenberger said, and his voice had now lost the elegant, playful quality, and sounded clear and light. “You are silent. People of our time do not like to answer the question, ‘What do you believe?’ It’s become bad taste to pose that question. One doesn’t like to use big words, people say modestly. And least of all to give a definite answer—as for instance: I believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, as the Christians once answered, proud that they could answer. One likes to be silent today when one is asked—like a girl to whom an embarrassing question has been put. Of course, one doesn’t quite know either in what one actually does believe. It’s by no means nothing. Good God no. One believes in something—even though it’s quite vague, as if an uncertain fog hung over it all. One believes in something like humanity, Christianity, tolerance, justice, socialism, and love for one’s neighbors—things that sound a little bit empty. People admit it, too, but they also think the words don’t matter. What matters is to live decently and according to one’s best conscience. And that they all try to do—partly by struggling for it, partly by just drifting. Everything we do, deeds and misdeeds, happens by chance. Good and evil fall into our lap like lottery tickets. By chance you become good and by chance you become evil. But they’re always ready with the big word nihilist. It’s thrown—with much pathos and even more conviction—at those whom they fear.
“I know them, these people; they’re convinced it’s their right to maintain one plus one makes three, four, or ninety-nine, and that it would be unjust to demand of them the answer that one plus one is two. Anything clear appears narrow-minded to them, for clarity demands character. They have no notion that a determined Communist—to use a somewhat unusual example, for most Communists are Communists like most Christians are Christians, out of a misunderstanding—they have no notion, I say, that such a man who believes with his whole soul in the necessity of revolution and in the fact that only this road—though it may leave in its wake millions of corpses—will ultimately lead to salvation, to a better world, is much less of a nihilist than they. Than some Mr. Miller or Mr. Hoffman—who neither believes in a God nor disbelieves in one, but only in his right to make money—a belief which he is too cowardly to postulate as his credo. So they live like worms, with a foggy perception of something that is good and right and true—as if these things could exist in such a sticky mess.”
“I had no idea that a hangman is capable of such a flood of words,” said Barlach. “I had thought your kind to be rather tight-lipped.”
“Bravo!” Emmenberger laughed. “You seem to be regaining your courage. Bravo! I need courageous people for my experiments in my laboratory. And it’s a pity that my object lessons always end with the death of the pupil. All right, let’s see what kind of a belief I have and put it on a pair of scales, and then let’s see which of us has the greater faith, when we put yours on the other side. I, the nihilist—since you call me that—or you, the Christian. You came to me in the name of humanity or whatever other ideals, in order to destroy me. I think you can hardly reject my curiosity.”
“I understand,” answered the Commissioner. He tried to keep down the fear that rose in him—more and more threatening, more and more gigantic—with each movement of the hands of the clock. “Now you want to grind out your credo. Strange that even mass murderers have one.”
“It is after eleven o’clock,” replied Emmenberger.
“How kind of you to remind me,” groaned the old man, shaking with rage and helplessness.
“Man—what is man?” The doctor laughed. “I’m not ashamed to have a credo, I’m not silent as you were silent. Like the Christians, who believe in three things which are only one thing—the Trinity—I believe in two things which are one and the same, namely that something is and that I am. I believe in matter, which is simultaneously energy and mass, an incomprehensible universe and a globe, around which we can walk and which we can feel is like a child’s ball, on which we live and drift through the adventurous emptiness of space. I believe in matter (how shabby and empty it is by comparison to say, ‘I believe in a God’)—matter that is seizable as animal, as plant, or as coal, and not seizable, hardly calculable, as atom. It needs no God or whatever else is invented for it. Its only incomprehensible mystery is its being. And I believe that I am, a particle of this matter, atom, energy, mass, molecule—as you are—and that my existence gives me the right to do what I want. As a particle, I constitute only a moment, a mere incident, just as life in this gigantic world is only one of matter’s immeasurable possibilities, as much chance as I am—if the earth were a little closer to the sun, there would be no life—and my purpose consists of only being a moment. Oh, the tremendous night when I understood this! Nothing is holy but matter: man, animal, plant, the moon, the Milky Way, whatever I see, are accidental groupings, nonessentials, as the form of the waves of the water are something nonessential. It is indifferent whether things are or are not. They are interchangeable. If they are not, something else exists. When life on this planet dies out, it will appear somewhere in the universe on another planet. It is ridiculous to attribute permanence to man, for it will always be only the illusion of permanence. It is ridiculous to invent systems of power in order to vegetate for a few years as the head of some state or some church. It is senseless to strive for the welfare of man in a world structured like a lottery—as if it would make sense to have each ticket win a penny, as if there existed another yearning but this one —for once to be the singular, sole, unjust man who wins the whole lottery. It is nonsense to believe in matter and at the same time in humanism. One can only believe in matter and the I. There is no justice. How could matter be just? There is only freedom, which cannot be earned—for then there would have to be a justice; which cannot be given—for who could give it?—which can only be taken. Freedom is the courage to commit crime, for freedom itself is a crime.”
“I understand,” cried the Commissioner, shaking, a dying animal, lying on his white sheet as if on the edge of an endless, indifferent road. “You believe in nothing but the right to torture man.”
“Bravo!” answered the doctor, and clapped his hands. “Bravo! I call him a good pupil who dares to deduce the law under which I live. Bravo, bravo!” (And again he clapped his hands.) “I dared to be myself and nothing, nothing else. I devoted myself to that which made me free—murder and torture. For when I kill another human being—and I will do it again at seven—when I put myself outside all the order of this world, erected by our weakness—I become free, I become nothing but a moment. But what a moment! In intensity as gigantic, as powerful, as unjustified as matter. And the screams and the pain which flood toward me from glassy eyes and open mouths, the convulsing, impotent white flesh under my knife, reflect my triumph and my freedom and nothing else.”
He fell silent. Slowly he rose and sat down on the operating table.
Above him the clock showed three minutes to twelve, two minutes to twelve, twelve.
“Seven hours,” Barlach whispered, almost inaudibly, from the bed.
“Now show me your belief,” said Emmenberger. His voice was calm again and without emotion, no longer passionate and hard, as it had been toward the end of his long speech.
Barlach answered nothing.
“You are silent,” said the doctor. “Again and again you are silent.”
The sick man gave no answer.
“You are silent and silent,” stated the doctor, and put both hands on the operating table. “Unconditionally I put everything on one card. I was powerful because I was never afraid, because it made no difference to me whether I was discovered or not. I am even now prepared to gamble. I shall concede my defeat if you, Commissioner, can prove to me that you have a faith as great, as unconditional as mine.”
The old man was silent.
“Say something,” Emmenberger continued after a pause, while he looked tensely and greedily at the sick man. “Give me an answer. You’re a Christian. You were baptized. Say, ‘I believe with a certainty, with a power that overshadows the belief of a shameless murderer in matter like a sun of light overshadows a pitiful winter moon.’ Or say at least, ‘I believe with a power that equals his, in Christ, who is God’s Son.’”
The clock ticked in the background.
“Maybe this belief is too difficult,” said Emmenberger, for still Barlach was silent, and he stepped to the old man’s bed. “Maybe you have an easier, more popular belief. Say, ‘I believe in justice and in the humanity this justice is to serve. For its sake, and only for its sake have I, old and sick, taken it upon me to come here—without giving a thought to fame and triumph of my person over others.’ Say it, it is an easy, decent belief, which we can still demand of today’s mankind, say it and you are free. I will be satisfied with your belief, and when you say it, I will think that you have a belief as great as mine.”
The old man was silent.
“Maybe you don’t believe that I will let you go?” asked Emmenberger.
No answer.
“Say it anyway,” the doctor ordered the old man. “Confess your belief even if you do not trust my words. Maybe you can only be saved if you have a belief. Maybe now is your last chance, the chance not only to save yourself but Hungertobel as well. There is still time to phone him. You have found me and I, you. Someday my game will be over, somewhere the accounts won’t balance. Why should I not be the one to lose? I can kill you—I can let you go, which means my death. I have reached a point from which I can deal with myself as with a strange person. I destroy myself—I save myself.”
He stopped and looked at the Commissioner. “It does not matter what I do,” he said, “a more powerful position cannot be attained. To conquer this Point of Archimedes is the highest that man can win for himself. It is his only sense in the nonsense of this world, in the mystery of this dead matter, which again and again creates out of itself life and death, like a carrion. But I bind—that is my malice—your escape to a silly joke, a childishly simple condition, that you can show me a faith as great as mine. Show it! The belief in goodness ought to be as strong in man as the belief in evil! Show it! Nothing will amuse me more than to watch my own ride to hell.”
Only the clock could be heard.
“Then say it for the cause,” Emmenberger continued after some while, “for the belief in God’s Son, the belief in justice.”
The clock, nothing but the clock.
“Your faith!” screamed the doctor. “Show me your faith!”
The old man was lying there, his hands clutching the blankets.
“Your faith! Your faith!” Emmenberger’s voice was like bronze, like trumpet blasts, breaking through an endless gray sky.
The old man was silent.
Then Emmenberger’s face—which had been greedy for an answer—became cold and relaxed. Only the scar above the right eye was reddened. It was as if disgust shook him when he turned away from the sick man, tired and indifferent. He walked through the door, which closed softly, so that the Commissioner was enveloped by the gleaming blue of the room, in which only the round disk of the clock continued to tick as if it were the old man’s heart.
A NURSERY RHYME
And so Barlach lay there and waited for death. Time passed, the hands of the clock turned round, covered each other, separated again. Then it was twelve-thirty, one, five after one, twenty to two, two o’clock, ten after two, two-thirty. The room seemed suspended, motionless, dead space in the shadowless blue light, the cupboards full of strange instruments behind the glass which vaguely reflected Barlach’s face and hands. Everything was there, the white operating table, Durer’s painting with the mighty, rigid horse, the metal plate across the window, the empty chair with its back toward the old man—nothing alive except the mechanical tick-tock of the clock. Now it was three o’clock, then four. No noise, no moans, no talk, no screams, no steps, penetrated to the old man, who lay there on a metal bed, who did not move, whose body hardly rose and fell. There was no longer an outside world, no earth that revolved, no sun, and no city. There was nothing but a greenish round disk with hands that moved, overtook each other, covered each other, tore away from each other. It was four-thirty, twenty-five to five, thirteen to five, five, one after five, two after five, three after five, four after five, six after five. Barlach had painfully managed to sit up. He rang the bell once, twice, a few times. He waited. Maybe he could yet talk to Nurse Clari. Maybe an accident could save him. Five-thirty.
Carefully he twisted his body around. Then he fell. For a long time he stayed in front of the bed on a red carpet, and above him, somewhere above the glass cupboards, the clock ticked, the hands pushed on—thirteen to six, twelve to six, eleven to six. Then he crawled slowly toward the door, reached it, tried to get up, to clutch the knob, fell back, stayed on the floor, tried it once more, a third time, a fifth time. In vain. He scratched on the door, for he was too weak to hammer at it with his fists. Like a rat, he thought. Then he stayed motionless again, crawled back into the room, looked at the clock. Ten after six. “Another fifty minutes,” he said, loud and clear in the silence, so that it frightened him. “Fifty minutes.”
He wanted to crawl back into bed, but he felt that he no longer had the power. So he stayed on the floor, in front of the operating table, and waited. Around him were the room, the cupboards, the knives, the bed, the clock—again and again the clock, a burned sun in a blue rotting universe, a ticking idol, a face without a mouth, or eyes, or nose—but with two wrinkles that pulled together, became one—twenty-five to seven, twenty-two to seven—that did not seem to separate any more, that separated now after all—twenty-one to seven, twenty to seven, nineteen to seven. Time passed, marched on, in the impartial rhythm of the clock. Ten to seven.
Barlach sat up, leaned against the operating table—an old sick man, alone and helpless. He grew calm. Behind him was the clock and in front of him the door. He stared at it, resigned and humble, this rectangle through which he must come, he who would kill him, slowly and methodically like a clock, skillfully cutting with the gleaming knives. And so he sat. Now he himself had become time, he was the ticking—he needed no longer to look at the clock, now he knew that he only had to wait for minutes, for three, for two—now he counted the seconds, which were one with the beating of his heart, a hundred yet, sixty yet, thirty yet. So he counted, babbling with white bloodless lips; so he stared, a living clock, at the door, which opened now, at seven, all at once, offering him the vision of a black hell, an opened gorge. In its middle he sensed vaguely a gigantic dark figure, but it was not Emmenberger, as the old man believed. For out of the gaping abyss roared sarcastically and hoarsely an old children’s tune.
“Little Hans Went alone Into the big black forest!” sang a screechy voice. Filling the doorframe, mighty and powerful, in a black caftan hanging, torn, from huge limbs, stood the Jew Gulliver.
“Greetings, Commissar,” said the giant, and closed the door. “So here I find you again, you sad knight sans peur et sans reproche, who went out to slay the evil dragon with the force of his spirit, sitting in front of a trestle similar to the one onto which I was once chained in the pretty village of Stutthof near Danzig.” And he lifted the old man so that he rested against his chest like a child, and put him to bed.
“Greetings.” He laughed when the Commissioner still could not find words, but rested there, pale as death; then he pulled a bottle and two glasses out of the tatters of his caftan.
“I don’t have vodka any more,” said the Jew as he filled the glasses and sat down on the bed. “But in a rundown farmhouse somewhere in the Emmenvalley, a hole full of darkness and snow, I stole a few dusty bottles of this valiant potato brandy. It will do. One has to be lenient with a dead man, right, Commissar? When a corpse like myself—a firewater corpse, so to speak—fetches its tribute from the living in night and fog before crawling back into its cellar, it is perfectly in order. Here, Commissar, drink.”
He put the glass to Barlach’s lips, and the old man drank. It felt good, even though he thought it was hardly the proper medicine.
“Gulliver,” he whispered, and groped for the other’s hand. “How could you know that I was in this cursed mousetrap?”
The giant laughed. “Christian,” he answered, and the hard eyes in his scar-covered naked skull gleamed (he had drunk a few glasses meanwhile), “why else did you call me into the Salem? I knew right away that you had a suspicion, that maybe the inestimable possibility existed of finding this Nehle still among the living. I did not believe for a moment it was only psychological interest which made you ask after Nehle, as you maintained in that night full of vodka. Should I have let you go down the road to ruin alone? Today we no longer can fight evil alone, like the knights used to once upon a time with some dragon or other. The times are past where it is enough to be a little bit sharp in order to catch the criminals we are dealing with. You fool of a detective! Time itself has led you ad absurdum. From then on I never let you out of my sight again, and last night I appeared to the good Doctor Hungertobel in person. I really had to work to get him out of his fainting spell, he was so afraid. But then I knew what I wanted to know, and now I am here to get things back into their old order. For you the mice of Bern, for me the rats of Stutthof. That is the division of the world.”
“How did you get here?” Barlach asked in a whisper.
The giant’s face broke into a grin. “Not hidden under some seat of the Swiss Railroads, as you are thinking,” he replied, “but in Hungertobel’s car.”
“He’s alive?” asked the old man, who had finally regained his composure and stared breathlessly at the Jew.
“He’ll take you back to the old familiar Salem in a few minutes,” said the Jew, and drank the potato schnapps in huge gulps. “He’s waiting outside in the car.”
