The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man Read online

  ‘If only I’d come quicker instead of looking out of the window,’ Karl said to himself, then bowed his face away from the stoker and clapped his hands against the seams of his trousers as a sign that every hope was at an end.

  But the stoker misunderstood, somehow getting the idea that Karl was secretly criticizing him, and, hoping to win him round, he—on top of everything—started to quarrel with Karl. He did so at a point when the men at the round table had long since become resentful of the unnecessary noise disturbing their important work, when the chief purser was beginning to find the captain’s patience incomprehensible and was on the brink of erupting, when the steward had reverted to being entirely his bosses’ man and was weighing up the stoker with a wild look in his eye, and when the gentleman with the bamboo cane, to whom the captain occasionally sent a friendly glance and who was by now totally indifferent to the stoker, even disgusted by him, took out a small notebook and, evidently preoccupied with something else entirely, let his attention wander back and forth between the notebook and Karl.

  “I know, I know,” said Karl, who was finding it difficult to defend himself against the tirade that the stoker had now directed at him, but nevertheless still kept up an amiable smile for him. “You’re quite right, absolutely, I never doubted it.” He would have liked to grab the stoker’s gesticulating hands, for fear of being struck, but would have liked even more to push him into a corner and whisper a few quiet, comforting words that no one else would have needed to hear. But the stoker was totally beside himself. Karl began to take some solace from the thought that, if need be, the stoker would be able to subdue all seven men present with the strength of his despair. On the desk, however, there was a raised section with far too many buttons, all connected to the electrical system; simply pressing a hand down on it would have roused the whole ship and filled its corridors with people hostile to them.

  At that moment, the seemingly indifferent man with the bamboo cane approached Karl and asked, not loudly, but in a voice distinct despite all the stoker’s yelling, “What’s your name?” At the same time, as if someone had been waiting for the man to speak, there was a knocking at the door. The steward looked to the captain, who nodded. The steward went to the door and opened it. Outside in an old military-style coat stood a man of middling build who, judging by his appearance, didn’t seem very well suited to working with machines, yet was in fact Schubal. If Karl hadn’t realized that from the way everyone looked at him, betraying a certain satisfaction that even the captain wasn’t above, he couldn’t have missed, to his shock, that the stoker tensed his arms and balled his fists as if these fists were the most important thing about him, for which he would have sacrificed whatever he had in life. All his strength, even what kept him on his feet, had gone there.

  And so that was the enemy, free and fresh in his smart clothes, with a book of accounts under his arm, probably the stoker’s hours and pay, and he looked each of them in the eye in turn, not afraid to let them see that he was gauging their mood. All seven were already on his side, because although the captain had had certain reservations about him, or pretended to have them after feeling nettled by the stoker, Schubal now seemed above even the smallest criticism. You couldn’t be strict enough with a man like the stoker, and if Schubal had done anything wrong, it was that he’d failed to break the stoker’s wilfulness before he could dare present himself in front of the captain.

  You might have assumed that a confrontation between the stoker and Schubal before this group of people would have the same effect as one before a higher court, and that even if Schubal was good at disguising his real character, he wouldn’t be able to keep it up till the end. A brief flash of malice would be enough of a demonstration for these men, and Karl wanted to make sure it happened. He’d been able to pick up a little about the acumen, weaknesses and temper of each of the men, and, seen from that perspective, the time he’d spent here had not been wasted. If only the stoker would make a better impression, but he seemed completely unable to stand up for himself. If you’d held Schubal within his reach, the stoker would presumably have managed to bash in his hated skull with his fists. But just to take a few steps over to Schubal would have been beyond him. Why hadn’t Karl predicted what was so easily predictable, namely that Schubal would eventually have to appear, either under his own impetus or called in by the captain. Why hadn’t Karl and the stoker worked out a precise plan of attack on the way here rather than walking in hopelessly unprepared simply because the door was in front of them? Was the stoker even still capable of speech, of saying yes and no when required to in the impending cross-examination, which, at this rate, they would be lucky even to get to? He was standing there with his legs apart, his knees unsteady, his head lifted slightly, with the air going in and out of his mouth as if he had no lungs left to absorb it.

  Karl, meanwhile, felt stronger and more lucid than he perhaps ever had back home. If his parents could only see him now, in a foreign country, championing a just cause in front of distinguished persons, and although he hadn’t won yet, he was ready to make a final push. Would that change their opinion of him? Would they sit him down between them and praise him? Look him once, just once, in the eyes that gazed at them with such devotion? What dubious questions and what an inopportune moment to start asking them!

  “I’ve come because I believe that the stoker is accusing me of some kind of dishonesty. A girl from the kitchens told me she’d seen him on his way here. Captain, gentlemen, I’m ready to disprove any allegation by referring to my records and, if necessary, with the testimony of impartial and independent witnesses, who are waiting outside the door.” Thus spoke Schubal. It was the clear speech of a mature man, and from the change in the expression of his listeners you might have thought this was the first time in a long time they’d heard a human voice. They certainly didn’t notice that even this fine speech was riddled with holes. Why was the first specific charge that occurred to him “dishonesty”? Perhaps the stoker’s allegations should have started there rather than with his national prejudices? A girl from the kitchen had seen the stoker on the way to the office and Schubal had understood at once what was going on? Wasn’t it guilt that sharpened his powers of understanding? And on top of that he’d immediately brought along a gang of witnesses, whom he had the nerve to call impartial and independent? It was a racket, one big racket! And these gentlemen were letting it go on and clearly even considered this the right way to behave? Why had Schubal let so much time pass between getting the message from the girl in the kitchens and showing himself here? Surely for no other reason than to let the stoker wear everybody out until it fogged their judgment, which Schubal had good reason to be afraid of. Hadn’t Schubal, who must have been standing outside the door for a long time already, only knocked when that gentleman had asked an unrelated question, which suggested that the stoker was finished?

  It was all crystal clear and Schubal was giving himself away despite everything, but these gentlemen still needed it put to them even more straightforwardly. They needed to be shaken up. ‘Karl,’ he thought, ‘it’s time to act, before the witnesses come in and swamp the conversation.’

  But right at that moment, the captain waved Schubal away, and he—since his affairs seemed to have been postponed for a little while—stepped aside and began a hushed conversation with the steward, who’d joined him at once, a conversation with no shortage of sidelong glances at the stoker and Karl, nor of emphatic hand gestures. Schubal looked to be preparing his next big speech.

  “Didn’t you want to ask this young man something, Mr Jakob?” said the captain to the man with the bamboo cane over the general hush.

  “Indeed,” he said, thanking the captain for this courtesy with a slight bow. And then he asked Karl again, “What’s your name?”

  Karl, who believed it was in the interest of their cause to dispense with this interlude and his stubborn questioner as quickly as possible, answered curtly, breaking his habit of introducing himself by presenting h
is passport, which he would anyway first have had to find: “Karl Rossmann.”

  “But,” said the man the captain had called Jakob, immediately taking a step back, smiling almost in disbelief. The captain, the chief purser, the ship’s officer, even the steward also appeared to be inexplicably astonished by Karl’s name. Only the men from the port authority and Schubal didn’t react.

  “But,” Mr Jakob repeated, coming over to Karl on stiff legs, “that means I’m your Uncle Jakob and you’re my dear nephew. I suspected it from the very start!” he said to the captain, before putting his arms around Karl and kissing him, while Karl silently let it happen.

  “What’s your name?” Karl asked after being released, speaking very politely but not feeling at all moved, and trying to predict what the consequences of this new development might be for the stoker. For the time being, there seemed no reason to believe that Schubal would be able to turn it to his advantage.

  “Try to understand how lucky you are, young man,” said the captain, who thought that Karl’s question had wounded the dignity of Mr Jakob, who’d gone over to the window, evidently so that the others wouldn’t see the emotion on his face, which he was dabbing with a handkerchief. “The man who’s just told you he’s your uncle is Senator Edward Jakob. From now on, a glittering career awaits you, presumably quite in contrast with what you’d been expecting. Try to grasp that as well as you can right now, and get a hold of yourself!”

  “I really do have an Uncle Jakob in America,” said Karl to the captain, “but if I’ve understood correctly, Jakob is the senator’s surname.”

  “That’s right,” the captain said, and waited for him to go on.

  “Well, my Uncle Jakob, who’s my mother’s brother, it’s only his Christian name that’s Jakob, and his surname must obviously be the same as my mother’s, whose maiden name is Bendelmayer.”

  “Gentlemen!” cried the senator, coming back very cheerfully from his restorative break by the window, and referring to what Karl had just explained. All of them, with the exception of the port officials, burst out laughing, some seeming genuinely touched, others more inscrutably.

  ‘What I said wasn’t that ridiculous,’ Karl thought to himself.

  “Gentlemen,” repeated the senator, “without your meaning to, or my meaning you to, you are witnessing a little family scene, and I feel I owe you some explanation for it, since, I believe, only the captain”—this mention elicited an exchange of bows—“knows the full story.”

  ‘Now I’ve really got to pay attention to every word,’ Karl said to himself and, looking over his shoulder, he was happy to see that the figure of the stoker was coming back to life.

  “For all the long years of my American sojourn—the word sojourn isn’t actually quite right for someone who’s an American citizen, as I am with every part of my soul—but for all these long years I’ve been living entirely estranged from my European family, for reasons that are firstly not relevant here, and secondly would be too distressing to relate. In fact, I’ve already begun to dread the time when I will have to explain it to my dear nephew, a task that will make it impossible not to say some frank words about his parents and their friends.”

  ‘He’s my uncle, no doubt about it,’ Karl said to himself, and listened. ‘He must have just changed his name.’

  “My dear nephew’s parents have—let’s call this thing what it is—simply got rid of him, the way you put a cat outside when it annoys you. I certainly don’t want to play down what my nephew did to elicit that punishment, but his misdemeanour is such that just describing it excuses him.”

  ‘I’d like to hear that,’ thought Karl, ‘but I don’t want him to tell it to everyone. And aside from that, he can’t know anything about it. How could he?’

  “What happened,” continued his uncle, leaning his weight onto the bamboo cane and rocking back and forth a little, which removed some of the unnecessary solemnity that this subject would otherwise have certainly taken on, “what happened is that he was seduced by a serving maid, Johanna Brummer, a woman of around thirty-five. It’s not my intention to embarrass my nephew with the word ‘seduce’, but it’s hard to find another that fits.”

  Karl, who had moved to stand quite close to his uncle, turned around at that moment to read the effect of the story on the faces of those present. Nobody laughed, all of them listened patiently and seriously. After all, you don’t laugh about the nephew of a senator just like that. If anything, you would have thought that the stoker was smiling very faintly at Karl, which was both gratifying as a new sign of life and excusable in him because, when they’d been together in his cabin, Karl had tried to keep secret this thing that was now being made so public.

  “Then this Brummer,” his uncle continued, “had a child by my nephew, a healthy boy, baptized with the name Jakob, doubtless as a reference to myself, who must have made a strong impression on the girl in what I’m sure were merely passing mentions by my nephew. And a good thing too, I say. Because since his parents wanted to avoid maintenance payments or whatever other aspects of the scandal would have touched them—I must emphasize that I’m not familiar with either the laws over there or his parents’ general circumstances—but since they wanted to avoid maintenance payments and a scandal, they had their son, my dear nephew, shipped off to America with an irresponsible lack of material provisions, as you can see, meaning that, had it not been for one of the miracles that can apparently still happen in America, the boy would have immediately met his death in some New York back alley, except that the serving girl wrote me a letter which, after many detours, arrived in my possession yesterday, telling me the whole story as well as providing a description of my nephew and—very sensibly—the name of this ship. If I wanted to entertain you, gentlemen, I could just read out some choice passages from that letter”—he pulled two enormous, closely handwritten sheets of paper from his pocket and waved them around. “I’ve no doubt you would find it affecting, since it’s written with a certain amount of quite crude but well-meaning guile, and with a great deal of love for the father of her child. But it’s neither my purpose to entertain you more than is necessary to explain what you’re witnessing, nor, in this moment of welcome, to run the risk of injuring any feelings that my nephew may still have for her, especially as, if he likes, he can read the letter for his own information in the privacy of the room that’s already been prepared for him.”

  Karl, however, didn’t have any feelings for that girl. Amid the confusion of an ever more distant past, she was sitting in her kitchen with one elbow propped on the dresser. She looked at him when he came into the kitchen now and then to fetch a glass of water for his father or to run an errand for his mother. Sometimes she was writing a letter from her cramped position next to the dresser, and would draw her inspiration from Karl’s face. Sometimes she covered her eyes with one hand and then nothing he said could reach her. Sometimes she got onto her knees in her narrow little room next to the kitchen and prayed to a wooden cross; Karl would watch her shyly through the crack of the door as he went in and out. Sometimes she raced around the kitchen and, if Karl got in her way, she’d flinch backwards, cackling like a witch. Sometimes she closed the door to the kitchen after Karl had come in and held on to the handle until he asked to be let out. Sometimes she brought him things that he didn’t even want and silently pressed them into his hands. But once she said “Karl” and, amid sighs and grimaces, led him—still astonished by being addressed in this unexpected way—to her room, and locked the door. She flung her arms around his neck tight enough to choke him and, although she asked him to undress her, she actually undressed him and laid him on her bed as though from now on she would keep him all to herself and caress and care for him until the end of the world. “Karl, oh my Karl!” she cried as if she’d just seen him and was reassuring herself that she had him, while he couldn’t see a thing and felt ill at ease among the mass of warm bedclothes that she seemed to have heaped up for his sake. Then she lay down next to him and w
anted to hear some kind of secrets, but he couldn’t think of anything and she got cross, whether joking or for real, shook him, listened to his heart, offered her breast for him to listen to, pressed her naked stomach against his body, sent her hand searching between his legs so horribly that Karl shook his head and neck free of the pillows, then thrust her stomach against him several times—it seemed as if she’d become a part of him and perhaps for that reason he was gripped by a terrible helplessness. In tears, and after many tender goodnights on her part, he’d finally got back to his own bed. That was all it had been and somehow his uncle was turning it into this whole big story. And it seemed the cook had been thinking of him and had written to tell his uncle he was coming. That was very good of her and he would be sure to make it up to her some day.

  “And now,” cried the senator, “I want to hear it from you, am I your uncle or not?”

  “You are my uncle,” Karl said, then kissed his hand and was kissed on the forehead in return. “I’m very happy that I met you, but you’re wrong to think that my parents only have bad things to say about you. There were also a few other mistakes in what you said, I mean, it didn’t actually all happen like that. But from over here you couldn’t really have got a good sense of what was going on and I don’t think it’s a big problem if these gentlemen have got a few incorrect details about something that can’t mean very much to them.”

  “Well spoken,” said the senator, then led Karl over to the visibly emotional captain and asked, “Don’t I have a splendid nephew?”

  “I’m delighted,” said the captain with the kind of bow that only comes from military training, “to have met your nephew, Senator. It’s a special honour for my ship to have been the place where you met. I’m just sorry to say that the crossing must have been very uncomfortable in steerage, you never know who’s being carried along down there. We do everything possible to make the crossing as pleasant as possible for our steerage passengers, far more than our American counterparts, for example, but to make that journey an actual pleasure is unfortunately something we haven’t yet managed.”