The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man Page 10

“So what do you intend to do?” I asked, and tried to get up. I couldn’t; two younger animals behind me had clamped their teeth into my jacket and shirt; I had no choice but to stay sitting. “They’re holding your train,” the old jackal explained seriously. “It’s a mark of respect.”

  “Tell them to let go of me,” I shouted, turning back and forth between the old jackal and the younger ones.

  “Of course they will,” said the old one, “if that’s what you what. It’ll take a little while, because, as is customary, they’ve bitten deep and will need a moment to unclamp their jaws. In the meantime, please hear our plea.”

  “Your behaviour hasn’t made me especially well disposed to it,” I said.

  “Don’t let our clumsiness count against us,” he said, and now for the first time, he employed his voice’s natural whine. “We’re poor animals, all we have is our jaws; for everything we want to do, good or bad, it’s our jaws or nothing.”

  “So what do you want?” I asked, only a little mollified.

  “Sir,” he cried, and all the jackals howled; I got a faraway sense that it was some kind of melody. “You must end the feud that divides the world in two. You are how the ancients described the one who would come to do that work. We must have peace from the Arabs; breathable air; our sight cleansed of their presence as far as every horizon; no more lamentation from the sheep the Arabs stab to death; all animals will die peacefully; we’ll drink them dry without being disturbed and clean them all the way down to the bone. Cleanliness, cleanliness is all we want”—and now they were all crying, sobbing—“How can you stand it in this world, with your noble heart and sweet innards? Their white is dirty; their black is dirty; their beards are a horror; the look of their eyes makes you sick to the stomach; and if they raise their arms, a veritable hell opens up in their armpits. That’s why, dear sir, oh, dearest sir, you must use your hands that can do anything, your hands that can do anything at all, to cut through their necks with these scissors!” He jerked his head and another jackal came forward; with one of his incisors he was holding a little rust-covered pair of sewing scissors.

  “So finally the scissors—and that’s enough!” shouted the Arab leading our caravan, who’d crept up to us from downwind and now cracked his enormous whip.

  They all ran away at once, but then huddled together again at a distance, the many animals so close together and so still that they looked like they were in a narrow pen with a strange light flickering around them.

  “So now you’ve seen and heard this performance as well, sir,” said the Arab and laughed as happily as his people’s reticence allowed.

  “You know what the animals wanted?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “Everybody knows. That pair of scissors has been wandering the desert for as long as Arabs have existed, and it’ll wander along behind us until the end of days. It’s offered to every European who passes through so he can carry out their great work; each time, they think it’s this European who’s destined to do it. They’re full of crazy hope, these animals; they’re fools, real fools. That’s why we love them; they’re our dogs, lovelier than yours. Just watch: a camel died in the night and I’ve had it brought over.”

  Four bearers came and dropped the heavy cadaver in front of us. Hardly had they done so but the jackals lifted up their voices. As if pulled irresistibly forward by invisible tethers, each of them inched closer, hesitating, their bellies brushing the ground. They’d forgotten the Arabs, forgotten their hatred; the all-eclipsing presence of the pungent carcass bewitched them. One of them was already hanging on to the camel’s neck and found its artery with the first bite. Each of the muscles in the jackal’s body pulled and jerked in its place, like tiny, frenzied pumps trying eagerly but hopelessly to extinguish an enormous fire. Soon the other jackals had piled up on top of the cadaver and set about the same task.

  Then the caravan leader slashed his whip hard across their backs. They lifted their heads, between delirium and unconsciousness; saw the Arabs standing in front of them; got the whip again across their muzzles; leapt backwards and ran a little way off. But the camel’s blood already lay in steaming puddles, its body had been torn wide open in many places. They couldn’t resist; they came back; the leader lifted his whip again; I touched his arm.

  “You’re right, sir,” he said. “We’ll leave them to their work; it’s time for us to break camp. Anyway, you’ve seen them now. Wonderful animals, aren’t they? And how they hate us!”

  THE SILENCE OF THE SIRENS

  PROOF THAT BASIC, even childish, methods can sometimes save you:

  To protect himself against the sirens, Odysseus stuffed wax in his ears and had himself shackled to the mast. Of course, every other sailor before him could have done the same thing—except for those the Sirens had managed to seduce from far away—but the whole world knew that doing these things wouldn’t help at all. The Sirens’ song could pierce anything, and the passion of those they seduced would have burst through more than just some chains and a mast. But that’s not what Odysseus was thinking of, even though he’d presumably heard about it. He entrusted himself completely to a handful of wax and his chains, and sailed towards the Sirens full of innocent delight with his little trick.

  But as it happens, the Sirens have a weapon even more terrible than their singing, namely their silence. It may never have happened, but it is at least conceivable that someone could save himself from their singing; not so from their silence. The feeling of being able to overcome them with your own strength and the consequent reckless hubris would overwhelm any restraint on earth.

  And in fact, when Odysseus came, those terrible singers didn’t sing, whether because they believed that their opponent could only be reached by silence, or because the sight of the joy on Odysseus’s face as he thought about his wax and his chains made them forget all about their singing.

  Odysseus, however, if I can put it like this, didn’t hear their silence; he believed that they were singing and that he alone was being protected from hearing them. At first, he saw their throats straining, their chests rising and falling, the tears in their eyes, their half-opened mouths, and thought that this was all part of the arias dying away unheard around him. But soon these things faded from his sight as he fixed his gaze into the distance; the Sirens all but melted away before his determination, and at the very moment when he was closest to them, his mind was already on other things.

  But they—more beautiful than ever—stretched themselves and turned to follow him with their eyes, letting their gruesome hair blow in the wind and relaxing the grip of their claws on the rock. They didn’t want to seduce him any more, all they wanted was to gaze on Odysseus’s bright face for as long as they could.

  If the Sirens had had a consciousness, that moment would have annihilated them. But as it was, they stayed there and Odysseus was the only one who ever escaped them.

  A short postscript to this story has also been handed down. Odysseus, they say, was so cunning, he was such a sly fox, that even the goddess of fate couldn’t see into his heart of hearts. It’s possible—even though it goes beyond human understanding—that he actually did notice that the Sirens weren’t singing, and put on this whole performance as a shield against them and the gods.

  THE STOKER

  WHEN THE SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD Karl Rossmann, whose unfortunate parents had sent him to America because a servant girl had seduced him and had his child, sailed into the harbour at New York, he saw the Statue of Liberty, who’d already been visible for a while, suddenly bathed in a new light, as if the sunshine had grown stronger. The sword in her hand seemed only just to have been raised aloft, and the unchained breeze blew freely around her figure.

  ‘It’s so high!’ he said to himself and, even though he’d momentarily forgotten all about disembarking, the swelling crowds of porters gradually pushed him up against the ship’s railing.

  A young man he’d got to know slightly on the crossing said as he went past, “Hey, don’t you wan
t to get off?”

  “I’m ready,” said Karl, laughing at him, and because he was a strong boy and feeling exuberant, he lifted his suitcase up to his shoulder. But as he looked past his acquaintance, who was swinging his stick and already starting to move off with the others, he realized with dismay that he’d forgotten his umbrella below decks. He quickly asked the acquaintance, who didn’t look too happy about it, to do him a favour and watch his suitcase for a few minutes, then glanced around so that he’d be able to find this spot again, and hurried off. Unfortunately, when he got below he discovered that the most direct passageway had now been closed, probably something to do with the passengers disembarking, and he had to go searching down staircases that just led to more stairs, through constantly branching corridors, through an empty room with an abandoned writing desk, until, eventually, having only ever gone this way once or twice before, and then always as part of a big group, he was completely and utterly lost. Bewildered, meeting no one and hearing only the scrabbling of thousands of human feet above him, along with, far off, as if carried on a breeze, the last workings of the stopped engines, he began to bang on a little door that he’d come across as he wandered around.

  “It’s open!” someone shouted from inside, and Karl opened the door with a sincere sigh of relief. “Why are you banging on the door like a maniac?” asked an enormous man, barely glancing at Karl. From some overhead shaft, a murky light that had lost its lustre higher up the ship fell into the wretched cabin, in which a bed, a cupboard, a chair and the man stood pressed against each other as if in storage. “I’ve lost my bearings,” said Karl. “I didn’t really notice on the crossing, but it’s such a big ship.”

  “You’re right there,” the man said with some pride, and carried on tinkering with the lock on a small suitcase, which he kept shutting with both hands so he could listen to it clicking into place. “But come on in,” said the man, “Surely you’re not just going to stand out there!”

  “I’m not disturbing you?” asked Karl.

  “Come off it, how would you be disturbing me?”

  “Are you German?” Karl tried to reassure himself, having heard a lot about the dangers that awaited new arrivals in America, especially from Irishmen.

  “I am, I am,” said the man. Karl still hesitated. The man abruptly grabbed the door handle and, closing it rapidly, pulled Karl into the room with him. “I hate it when people look in at me from the corridor,” said the man, who’d gone back to working on his suitcase. “Everybody just walks past and looks inside, I can’t put up with that.”

  “But the corridor’s completely empty,” said Karl, who was squashed uncomfortably against the bedpost.

  “It is now,” said the man.

  ‘But now is what we’re talking about,’ thought Karl, ‘This man’s hard to have a conversation with.’

  “Lie on the bed, you’ll have more space,” said the man. Karl squirmed over as well as he could and laughed out loud at his first failed attempt to swing himself into it. But hardly was he in the bed than he cried, “Oh God, I’ve totally forgotten my suitcase!”

  “Where is it?”

  “Up on the deck, someone I met is keeping an eye on it. Oh, what’s his name again?” And he pulled a calling card out of the secret pocket his mother had sewn into the lining of his coat for the journey. “Butterbaum. Franz Butterbaum.”

  “Do you really need the things in your suitcase?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then why did you give it to a stranger?”

  “I forgot my umbrella below decks and came down to fetch it, but didn’t want to lug the suitcase around with me. And then I got lost.”

  “You’re by yourself? Not with anyone?”

  “Yes, by myself.” ‘Maybe I should stick with this man,’ went through Karl’s head, ‘Where could I quickly find a better friend?’

  “And now you’ve lost the suitcase too. To say nothing of the umbrella.” The man sat down on the chair as if Karl’s affairs had become more interesting.

  “I’m sure the suitcase is still there.”

  “Be as sure as you like,” said the man, and had a good scratch at his short, dark, thick hair, “but on a ship the way people behave changes with each port. In Hamburg maybe your Butterbaum really would have watched your suitcase, here it’s most likely they’ve both already vanished.”

  “But then I’ve got to go up and look for it,” said Karl, glancing around for how to clamber back out.

  “Just stay,” said the man, and thrust his hand against Karl’s chest, almost roughly, pushing him back onto the bed.

  “But why?” asked Karl angrily.

  “Because there’s no point,” said the man. “In a little while I’ll be going too, then we can go together. Either the suitcase has been stolen, in which case it can’t be helped, or your Butterbaum left it standing there, in which case it’ll be all the easier to find once the ship’s empty. The same goes for your umbrella.”

  “Do you know your way around the ship?” asked Karl distrustfully, and it seemed to him that this generally convincing idea, that it would be easiest to find his things when the ship was empty, had a hidden catch.

  “I’m one of the ship’s stokers,” said the man.

  “You’re a stoker!” cried Karl happily, as though that surpassed all his expectations, and, propping himself up on his elbows, he took a closer look at the man. He said, “Just next to the cabin where I was sleeping, near the Slovak, there was a hatch where you could see into the engine room.”

  “Yes, that’s where I was working,” said the stoker.

  “I’ve always been interested in machinery,” said Karl, following his own train of thought, “and I would definitely have become an engineer if I hadn’t had to go to America.”

  “Why did you have to go?”

  “Never mind,” said Karl, and waved the whole story away. While doing so he smiled at the stoker, as if asking him to be lenient about this thing Karl hadn’t admitted.

  “There will have been a reason,” said the stoker, and it wasn’t clear whether he wanted to hear the story or deflect it.

  “Now I suppose I could be a stoker too,” said Karl, “My parents don’t care at all any more about what I end up doing.”

  “My job’s coming up,” said the stoker, then coolly put his hands in his pockets and slung his legs, clad in wrinkled, leathery, iron-grey trousers, onto the bed to stretch them out. Karl had to shift closer against the wall.

  “You’re leaving the ship?”

  “Absolutely, we’re going ashore today.”

  “Why? Don’t you like it?”

  “Well, it’s a question of circumstances, it’s not always about whether you like it or not. But as it happens, you’re right, I don’t like it. You’re probably not seriously thinking about becoming a stoker, but that’s exactly the state of mind in which you’re most likely to become one. I strongly advise you against it. If you wanted to study when you were in Europe, why don’t you want to study here? The American universities are so much better than the European ones.”

  “You might be right,” said Karl, “but I’ve hardly got enough money for studying. I did read about someone who worked in a shop during the day and studied at night until he became a doctor and I think the mayor of a town, but you need a huge amount of stamina for that, don’t you? I’m worried I don’t have it. Also I wasn’t an especially good pupil; having to leave school wasn’t something I was particularly sad about. And the schools here are maybe even stricter. I can barely speak English at all. And people here are so much against foreigners, I think.”

  “Have you noticed that already? Well, that’s all right. Then you’re the man for me. Look here, we’re on a German ship, aren’t we, it belongs to the Hamburg–America Line, why aren’t we all Germans? Why is the chief engineer a Romanian? He’s called Schubal. It’s unbelievable. And this lousy bastard orders us Germans around on a German ship! Don’t think,”—he ran out of breath and flapped his hands in
the air—“that I’m complaining just for the sake of complaining. I know you don’t have any influence and you’re just a poor young lad yourself. But it’s too much!” And he banged his fist several times on the table, watching it as he did so. “I’ve already served on so many ships”—he listed twenty names as if they were a single word, which Karl couldn’t follow—“and I’ve distinguished myself on them, been praised, been a worker the captains liked, I even stayed on the same merchant clipper for years”—he lifted himself up as if this were the high point of his life—“and here on this tub, where they lead you around by the nose, where you don’t need any brains, here I’m not worth anything, here I’m always in Schubal’s way, I’m a slacker, I deserve to be thrown out and I only get my pay out of pity. Does that make sense to you? It doesn’t to me.”

  “You can’t stand for that,” said Karl, getting worked up. He felt so at home here on the stoker’s bed that he’d almost forgotten he was on the uncertain ground of a ship moored to the coast of an unknown continent. “Have you been to see the captain? Have you asked him for your rights?”

  “Oh, go away, why don’t you leave? I don’t want you here. You don’t listen to what I’m saying and then you give me advice. How am I supposed to go to the captain!” The stoker wearily sat back down and put his face in his hands.

  ‘I’ve got no better advice to give him,’ Karl said to himself. And he was starting to think he’d be better off going to find his suitcase than staying down here to give advice that wasn’t wanted. When his father handed him the suitcase to keep for ever, he’d asked, as a joke, “How long will you have this for?” and now that expensive suitcase was perhaps already lost in earnest. Karl’s only consolation was that there was no way his father could ever find out about the situation he was in, even if he did try to make enquiries. That Karl had come as far as New York was all the shipping line would be able to tell him. It pained Karl that he hadn’t even really used some of the things in the suitcase, even though, for example, he’d needed to change his shirt for a while now. He’d scrimped in the wrong place there; at the start of his American career, just when he most needed to present himself in clean clothes, he’d have to turn up in a dirty shirt. If it hadn’t been for that, the loss of the suitcase wouldn’t have been so bad, because the suit he was wearing was actually better than the one in the case, which was really just an emergency suit that his mother had quickly darned right before he left. He also remembered that there’d been a piece of Verona salami in there, which his mother had packed as a treat and which he’d eaten very little of, because he’d had hardly any appetite at all on the crossing and the soup they’d doled out in steerage had been more than enough for him. He would have liked to have the salami handy so he could give it to the stoker as a present. People like that are easily won over if you slip them something small; Karl had learnt that from his father, who gave out cigars and so won over all the low-ranking staff he dealt with in his work. The only thing Karl had left to give away was his money, and since it looked like he’d already lost his suitcase, he wanted to leave that where it was for the time being. His thoughts kept coming back to the suitcase, and now he simply could not understand why he’d watched his suitcase so closely on the crossing that it had almost ruined his sleep, only to then let that same suitcase be so easily taken away from him. He thought of the five nights in which he’d been absolutely convinced that a small Slovak lying five bunks to his left had his sights on his suitcase. This Slovak was just waiting for the moment when Karl, overcome by fatigue, finally nodded off for a minute, so that he could pull the suitcase towards himself using a long pole which he played and practised with from morning till night. By day the Slovak looked innocent enough, but as soon as night fell, he started getting up from time to time and glancing sadly across at Karl’s suitcase. Karl could see that very clearly, because here and there someone suffering the emigrant’s restlessness would always strike a little light, despite that being against the on-board regulations, and try to decipher the incomprehensible prospectuses of migration agencies. If one of those lights was nearby, Karl could doze a little, but if it was far off, or if the room was dark, then he had to keep his eyes open. The effort had worn him out and now it had perhaps all been for nothing. That Butterbaum—if Karl ever got hold of him again!