The Metamorphosis and Other Stories Page 15

  Despite the apparent haste with which he removed his uniform coat and then undressed completely, he still handled each article of clothing very carefully, even running his fingers over the silver lacing on his tunic and shaking a tassel into place. It hardly suited this diligence, however, that as soon as he finished handling each article, he immediately threw it with a reluctant jerk into the pit. The last thing that remained was his short sword with its sling. He pulled his sword from its sheath, broke it, then gathered everything together—the pieces of the sword, the sheath, and the sling—and threw them away so violently that they clanked together down in the pit.

  Now he stood there naked. The traveler bit his lip and said nothing. He knew what was going to happen, but had no right to prevent the officer from doing anything. If the criminal procedure to which the officer was so attached really was so close to being abolished—possibly as a result of the traveler’s intervention, to which, for his part, he had felt obligated—then the officer was now acting entirely correctly; in his place, the traveler would not have acted any differently himself.

  The soldier and the condemned man understood nothing at first; initially they were not even watching. The condemned man was delighted to have his handkerchiefs back, but could not delight in them for long because the soldier snatched them away with a quick, unpredictable movement. The condemned man then tried in turn to pull the handkerchiefs out from the soldier’s belt, behind which they had been tucked, but the soldier was alert. And so they squabbled, half in play. Not until the officer was completely naked did they become attentive. Especially the condemned man seemed struck by the notion of some great reversal. What had happened to him was now happening to the officer. Perhaps it would be carried out like this to the very end. The foreign traveler had probably given the order for it. So it was revenge. Without having suffered to the end, he was being avenged to the end. A broad, inaudible smile now appeared on his face and did not disappear.

  The officer, however, had turned to the machine. If it was already clear before how well he understood the machine, it was now almost astounding to see how he handled it and how it obeyed him. His hand only needed to approach the Harrow for it to raise and lower itself several times until it had reached the right position to receive him; he touched only the edge of the Bed and it already began to vibrate; the felt gag came to meet his mouth, but although one saw that the officer actually did not want to have it, the hesitation lasted only a moment; he soon resigned himself and accepted it. Everything was ready. Only the straps hung down on the sides, but they were obviously unnecessary, as the officer did not need to be strapped in. The condemned man then noticed the loose straps; in his opinion, the execution was not complete if the straps were not fastened. He beckoned eagerly to the soldier, and they ran over to strap the officer in. The officer had already stretched out a foot to kick the crank that was to set the Scribe in motion, then he saw that the two had come, so he pulled his foot back and let himself be strapped in. But now he could no longer reach the crank. Neither the soldier nor the condemned man would find it, and the traveler was determined not to move. It was not necessary; the straps had hardly been fastened when the machine already began to work; the Bed vibrated, the needles danced on his skin, the Harrow hovered up and down. The traveler had already been staring at it for a while when he remembered that a wheel in the Scribe should have been screeching, but everything was silent, not the slightest humming was to be heard.

  The machine was working so quietly that it almost became unnoticeable. The traveler looked over at the soldier and the condemned man. The condemned man was the livelier one; everything about the machine interested him; one moment he was bending down, the next he was stretching up; he constantly had his index finger stretched out to show the soldier something. The traveler found it awkward. He was determined to stay here until the end, but he would not have stood the sight of those two for much longer. “Go home,” he said. Maybe the soldier would have been willing, but the condemned man perceived the order as outright punishment. He begged imploringly with folded hands to be allowed to stay and as the traveler shook his head refusing to concede, he even knelt down. The traveler saw that orders were futile here, and was about to go over and chase the two away when he heard a noise up in the Scribe. He looked up. Was the cogwheel causing problems after all? But it was something else. The Scribe’s lid rose slowly and then opened completely. The teeth of a cogwheel appeared and rose, and soon the entire wheel was visible; it was as though some great force was pressing the Scribe together, so that there was no room left for this wheel. The wheel rolled to the edge of the Scribe, fell to the ground, rolled upright for a while in the sand, and then fell over. But another one was already rising up above, and after it were many more—large, small, and hardly distinguishable ones—and the same thing happened to all of them. One always thought the Scribe must already be empty when a new, especially numerous group appeared, rose, fell to the ground, rolled in the sand, and fell over. This process caused the condemned man to completely forget the traveler’s order; the cogwheels thoroughly delighted him. He kept trying to catch one, simultaneously urging the soldier to help him, but withdrew his hand in fright, for the new wheel that immediately followed it frightened him, at least as it first began to roll.

  The traveler, on the other hand, was quite disturbed. The machine was obviously collapsing; its quiet operation was an illusion; he had the feeling that he must now see to the officer, who could no longer take care of himself. But while the falling cogwheels were claiming all of his attention, he had failed to oversee the rest of the machine; and now, after the last cogwheel had left the Scribe, he bent over the Harrow to find a new, even more terrible surprise. The Harrow was not writing, but only stabbing; the Bed was not turning the body, but only vibrating and lifting it into the needles. The traveler wanted to intervene, to possibly bring the whole thing to a standstill. This was not the torture, after all, that the officer was aiming for; this was outright murder. He stretched out his hands. The Harrow, however, was already rising with the impaled body to one side, as it usually did only after the twelfth hour. The blood flowed in a hundred streams, not mingled with water; this time, the little water pipes had also failed. And now the final part failed as well; the body did not detach itself from the needles, blood was streaming from it, but it hung above the pit without falling. The Harrow was trying to return to its old position, but as if it realized itself that it was not free of its load, it remained above the pit after all. “Help me, won’t you!” shouted the traveler to the soldier and the condemned man, himself grabbing hold of the officer’s feet. He wanted to push against the feet on this side, while the other two took hold of the officer’s head on the other side, and in this way slowly lift him off the needles. But the two of them could not make up their minds to come; the condemned man even turned his back; the traveler had to go over to them and urge them toward the officer’s head by force. In doing so, he saw the corpse’s face almost against his will. It was as it had been in life; no sign of the promised redemption was to be found. Whatever all the others had found in the machine, the officer had not found; his lips were firmly pressed together, his eyes were open, had the expression of life, his gaze was calm with conviction, his brow was pierced by the point of the great, iron spike.

  When the traveler, followed by the soldier and the condemned man, reached the first houses of the colony, the soldier pointed to one of them and said: “Here is the teahouse.”

  On the ground floor of one house was a deep, low, cavernous room, its walls and ceiling blackened by smoke. Along its entire width, it was open toward the street. Although the teahouse differed very little from the other houses in the colony, which, aside from the palatial buildings of the commandant’s headquarters, were all very dilapidated, it nevertheless gave the traveler the impression of an historical memory, and he felt the power of earlier times. He approached more closely, walking, followed by his companions, among the unoccupied tables that st
ood on the street in front of the teahouse, and breathed in the cool, dank air that came from within. “The old man is buried here,” said the soldier. “He was denied a place in the cemetery by the priest. For a time, they were undecided about where to bury him; in the end they buried him here. Surely the officer didn’t tell you anything about that, for of course that was what he was most ashamed of. He even tried several times to dig up the old man at night, but he was always chased away.” “Where is the grave?” asked the traveler, who couldn’t believe the soldier. At once, both the soldier and the condemned man walked in front of him with outstretched hands pointing to the grave’s supposed location. They led the traveler all the way to the back wall, where guests were sitting at a few tables. They were probably dockworkers—strong men with short, shining black beards. All were without coats; their shirts were torn, they were a poor, humiliated people. As the traveler approached, several of them rose, pressed themselves against the wall, and looked at him. “He is a foreigner,” they whispered around the traveler. “He wants to see the grave.” They pushed one of the tables aside, under which a gravestone could be seen. It was a simple stone, low enough to be hidden under a table. It bore an inscription with very small letters; the traveler had to kneel down in order to read it. It read: “Here rests the old commandant. His followers, who may no longer carry a name, have dug him this grave and raised this stone. There is a prophecy that the commandant will arise after a certain number of years and lead his followers in recapturing the colony. Have faith and wait!” As the traveler had read this and risen, he saw all around him the men standing and smiling as though they had read the inscription with him, found it ridiculous, and challenged him to share their opinion. The traveler acted as though he hadn’t noticed, distributed a few coins among them, waited until the table had been pushed over the grave, then left the teahouse and went to the harbor.

  The soldier and the condemned man had found acquaintances in the teahouse who had held them back. They must have torn themselves away soon, however, for they were already running behind the traveler when he had only reached the middle of the long flight of stairs leading to the boats. They probably wanted to force the traveler at the last minute to take them with him. While the traveler was down below negotiating the ferry to the steamer with a boatman, the two raced down the stairs in silence, for they did not dare to shout. But by the time they reached the bottom, the traveler was already in the boat, and the boatman was just casting off from the bank. They might still have been able to leap into the boat, but the traveler lifted a heavy, knotted rope from the floor and threatened them with it, thereby preventing them from leaping.

  A COUNTRY DOCTOR

  I was in a quandary: I had an urgent journey ahead of me; a gravely ill patient was waiting for me in a village ten miles away; a great flurry of snow filled the wide space between him and me; I had a light carriage with large wheels, just the kind entirely suited to our country roads; wrapped up in my fur coat, my instrument bag in hand, I stood ready to depart in the courtyard; but the horse was missing. My own horse, as a result of the strain of this icy winter, had perished the night before; my servant girl was now running around the village looking for a horse to borrow; but I knew it was in vain, and, with more and more snow piling upon me as I became more and more rigid, I stood there uselessly. The girl appeared at the gate, alone, swinging the lantern; of course, who would lend someone his horse now for such a journey? I crossed the courtyard once again; I saw no possibility; absentminded, distressed, I kicked at the battered door of a pigsty that had been unused for years. It opened and swayed back and forth on its hinges. Warmth and a smell like that of horses emerged. A dim stable lantern swung inside from a rope. A man, crouching in the low shed, showed his open blue-eyed face. “Shall I harness up?” he asked, crawling out on all fours. I didn’t know what to say and bent down only to see what else was in the sty. The servant girl stood next to me. “One never knows what kind of things one has in one’s own house,” she said and we both laughed. “Hey brother, hey sister!” called the groom, and two horses—powerful animals with strong flanks—forced themselves through the doorway, which they filled completely, solely with the strength of their twisting haunches, one after another, their legs tucked closely against their bodies, lowering their well-formed heads like camels. But they stand upright at once, with long legs and heavily steaming bodies. “Help him,” I say, and the willing girl hurries to pass the groom the harness for the carriage. But hardly had she reached him, when the groom grabs her and thrusts his face against hers. She screams out and seeks refuge with me; on her cheek are two rows of teeth impressed in red. “You brute,” I shout angrily, “are you asking for a whipping?” but I remind myself right away that he is a stranger; that I don’t know where he is from, and that he is helping me of his own free will, whereas everyone else has failed me. As if he knows of my thoughts, he is not offended by my threat, but, still busied with the horses, he turns around only once to look at me. “Climb in,” he says then, and indeed: everything is ready. I have never traveled with such a fine horse and carriage, I realize, and climb in cheerfully. “But I shall drive; you don’t know the way,” I say. “Certainly,” he says, “I am not even coming along; I am staying with Rose.” “No,” Rose screams and runs into the house, rightly anticipating the inevitability of her fate; I can hear the clanking of the door chain as she fastens it; I can hear the lock catching into place; I can see her as she also extinguishes all lights in the hallway, and rushes further through the rooms, to make it impossible to be found. “You’re coming along,” I say to the groom, “or I shall forgo the journey, urgent though it is. I wouldn’t think of handing over the girl to you as payment for the journey.” “Gee up!” he says and claps his hands; and the carriage is swept away like wood in the current. I can still hear the door to my house bursting and splintering under the groom’s onslaught, my eyes and ears are then filled with a roaring that equally pervades all my senses. But this is only for a moment; I have arrived already, as though my patient’s yard were directly before the gate to my courtyard; the horses are standing calmly; it has stopped snowing; moonlight all around; the patient’s parents hurry out of the house; his sister behind them; I am almost lifted out of the carriage; from their confused words, I can gather nothing; in the sickroom, the air is barely breathable; the neglected oven is smoking; I will push the window open; but first I want to see the patient. Gaunt, without fever, not cold, not warm, with empty eyes, shirtless, the boy pulls himself up from his feather-bed, flings his arms around my neck, and whispers in my ear: “Doctor, let me die.” I look around; no one heard it; the parents are bent forward in silence awaiting my judgment; the sister has brought a chair for my handbag. I open the bag and search among my instruments; the boy continues to reach out toward me from his bed to remind me of his plea; I take a pair of tweezers, check them in the candlelight, and put them back down. “Well,” I think blasphemously, “the gods help in such cases; send the missing horse, add a second one due to urgency, and, as though that weren’t enough, even donate a groom.” Only now did I remember Rose; what can I do, how can I save her, how can I pull her from beneath that groom, ten miles away from her, with uncontrollable horses in front of my carriage? These horses, who have now loosened their straps somehow, push the windows open, I don’t know how, from the outside; each one sticking its head through a window, observing the patient, undeterred by the family’s cries. “I’ll drive back right away,” I think, as though the horses were summoning me for the journey, but I allow the sister, who believes that I am dazed by the heat, to take my fur coat. I am provided with a glass of rum; the old man pats me on the shoulder, as though surrendering his treasure justifies this familiarity. I shake my head; I become nauseous in the old man’s circle of thought; this is my only reason for refusing to drink. The mother is standing by the bed and beckoning me; I follow her and, while one horse whinnies loudly at the ceiling, I lay my head on the chest of the boy, who shivers beneath my w
et beard. What I know is confirmed: the boy is healthy; his circulation is somewhat weak, soaked in coffee by his doting mother, but healthy and best turned out of bed with a shove. I am no world reformer and let him lie. I am appointed by the district authorities and fulfill my duty to the limit; up to where it is almost too much. Poorly paid, I am nevertheless generous and willing to help the poor. I must take care of Rose and then the boy may be right and I too will wish to die. What am I doing here in this endless winter! My horse has perished and there is no one in the village who will lend me his. I have to drag my team out of the pigsty; had they not happened to be horses, I’d have to travel with swine. That’s the way it is. And I nod to the family. They know nothing about it and if they did, they wouldn’t believe it. Writing prescriptions is easy, but otherwise it is difficult to communicate with people. Well, my visit would be over at this point; once again I have been troubled unnecessarily, I am used to that; the entire district torments me with the help of the night bell; but that I also have to hand over Rose this time—that lovely girl, who has lived in my house for years, whom I have hardly noticed—this sacrifice is too great and I must somehow figure it out in my head temporarily with subtleness in order to avoid taking it out on this family, who cannot give Rose back to me with the best will in the world. But as I close my handbag and wave for my fur coat, the family stands together; the father sniffing the rum glass in his hand; the mother, whom I have probably disappointed—well, what do these people expect?—tearfully biting her lips; and the sister waving a blood-soaked towel. I am somehow possibly willing to admit that the boy may be sick after all. I go to him; he welcomes me with a smile, as though I were bringing him the heartiest of soups,—oh, now both horses are whinnying; perhaps the noise, ordained by a higher authority, is supposed to make the examination easier—and now I find: yes, the boy is sick. In his right side, in the area of his hips, a wound the size of the palm of my hand has opened. Rose-colored, in many different shades; dark in the depths, growing light towards the edges; softly granulated, with irregularly accumulating blood, open like a mine at the pithead. So it looks from a distance. Up close, a complication also becomes apparent. Who can look at this without whistling softly? Worms, as thick and long as my little finger, rosy on their own and also splattered with blood, hold tight on the inside of the wound, with little white heads and many little legs, squirming towards the light. Poor boy, there is nothing to be done for you. I have discovered your great wound; this blossom in your side will destroy you. The family is happy, they see me being active; the sister tells the mother about it, the mother tells the father, the father tells several guests, who come in through the moonshine of the open door, on the tips of their toes, balancing with outstretched arms. “Will you save me?” the boy whispers sobbing, entirely dazed by the life in his wound. That’s what the people in my area are like; always demanding the impossible of their doctor. They have lost their old faith; the pastor sits at home and picks his vestments apart, one by one; but the doctor is supposed to accomplish everything with his soft surgeon’s hand. Well, as they please: I did not volunteer; if you are using me for holy purposes, I’ll even allow that to happen to me; what more do I want, old country doctor, robbed of my servant girl! And they come, the family and the village elders, and undress me; a school choir with their teacher at the head stands before the house and sings an utterly simple melody to the text: