The Burrow: Posthumously Published Short Fiction Page 4

  A Young and Ambitious Student …

  A young and ambitious student, who had taken a great interest in the Elberfeld horses* and had diligently read and thought about everything that had been published on the subject, decided spontaneously to conduct his own experiments in that line, and to do so, moreover, in a wholly different, and as he thought, incomparably more correct way than his predecessors. Alas, his financial means were insufficient for him to conduct his experiments on any grand scale, and if the first horse he bought turned out to be mulish, which is something that can only be ascertained after two weeks of the most solid work, then that would have meant the end of his investigations for quite some time. But, because he backed his methods to cope with any degree of mulishness, he wasn’t unduly deterred. At any rate, as accorded with his cautious nature, he proceeded methodically to calculate his expenses and the means he would be able to raise. He concluded he would be unable to do without the sum that his parents – poor tradespeople in the provinces – sent him regularly every month to defray his living expenses, even though of course he would certainly have to give up his studies, which his parents were anxiously following from a distance, if he was to have any hope of the expected success in this new chosen field he was about to enter. That they would have any understanding for this work, or willingly support him in it was out of the question, so, difficult as it was for him, he would have to keep quiet about his intentions and leave his parents thinking he was pursuing his studies as before.

  This act of deception was only one of the sacrifices he was prepared to accept in the interests of the cause. To defray the expectedly large costs that would be involved in his project, his allowance from them would not be enough. Henceforth, then, the student decided to devote the greater part of his day, which thus far had been for his studies, to the giving of private lessons. The greater part of the night, meanwhile, would be devoted to his new work. It was not merely because he was compelled to it by financial exigencies that the student lit on the night-time for the training of his horse: the new principles he hoped to introduce pointed him for various reasons to the night. In his view, the merest break in the animal’s concentration would do irreparable damage to the project, and at night he could be reasonably safe from such a thing. The sensitivity that comes over man and beast both waking and working at night was an integral feature of his plan. Unlike other experts, he had no fear of the wildness of the animal, he positively encouraged it – yes, he sought to produce it, not through the whip admittedly, but by the irritation of his constant presence and constant teaching.

  He claimed that in the correct training of a horse there must be no incremental progress; incremental progress, for which various trainers had claimed such absurdly excessive credit of late, was nothing but a figment of the trainers’ imagination, or else – and this was actually worse – the clearest possible sign that there would never be any overall advance. He himself swore to avoid nothing so strenuously as incremental progress. The modesty of his predecessors in thinking they had achieved something with the teaching of pretty arithmetical tricks was incomprehensible to him. It was as if you wanted to make it your end in the education of children, to teach the child nothing but multiplication tables, no matter if the child was deaf, blind and insentient to the world beyond. All that was so foolish, and the mistakes of the other trainers sometimes struck him as so revoltingly obvious, that he would end up almost suspecting himself, because it was surely impossible that a single person, and an inexperienced one at that, albeit driven by a deep and positively wild, though still untested conviction, could be right in the teeth of all the experts.

  Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor …

  Blumfeld, an elderly bachelor, was one evening climbing up to his flat, which was a laborious process, because he lived up on the sixth floor. As he climbed the stairs, he thought to himself, as he had quite often lately, that this completely solitary life was burdensome indeed, the fact that he had to slink up these six flights of stairs to arrive in his empty room, there, secretly still, to slip into his dressing gown, light his pipe and browse a little in an issue of the French magazine he had subscribed to for several years now, while sipping at a cherry brandy of his own manufacture, and finally, after half an hour of this, to go to bed, which, to make matters worse, he had to comprehensively remake, because the cleaner, impervious to instruction, always left it any-old-how. Some companion, some spectator at these activities, would have been very welcome to Blumfeld. He had already wondered about the possibility of acquiring a little dog. Such an animal is diverting and, above all, loyal and grateful; one of Blumfeld’s colleagues had such an animal, he refuses to go with anyone but his master, and if he hasn’t seen him for a few moments, he welcomes him with loud barking, clearly an expression of joy at having re-found his extraordinary benefactor and master. Admittedly, a dog has his drawbacks too. However tidy you try and keep him, he’ll dirty your room. It’s impossible to avoid, you can hardly give him a bath in hot water before letting him in each time, that would undermine his constitution. But a dirty room is something Blumfeld can’t abide, the cleanliness of his room is indispensable to him, several times a week he has it out with the unfortunately not so scrupulous cleaner. Since she’s hard of hearing, he conducts her to those parts of the room whose cleanliness leaves something to be desired. Through such severity, he has secured a state of affairs where the condition of the room more or less accords with his wishes. Introducing a dog into it would be tantamount to inviting the dirt, so effortfully excluded, back into his room. Fleas, the constant companions of dogs, would appear. Then, once there were fleas, could the moment be far off when Blumfeld would have to leave his cosy room to the dog and go and live somewhere else? And dirt was only one drawback. Dogs get sick and who really understands animal diseases? Then you would have the animal crouched in a corner or limping around, whimpering, coughing or choking on some pain or other, you wrap him up in a blanket, whistle a tune to him, push a saucer of milk in front of him; in short, you look after him in the hope that, as is indeed possible, it’s a passing sickness, but it may turn out instead to be something seriously disgusting and infectious. And even if the dog stays healthy, he will one day grow old; you might not be able to decide in time to give the faithful animal away and so the moment comes when it’s your own life that’s looking back at you from those weeping dog’s eyes. Then you’re saddled with a half-blind, wheezing animal, so corpulent it can hardly move, and then the pleasures the dog afforded you back in the day are dearly bought indeed. However much Blumfeld would like a dog just at the moment, he would rather trudge up the stairs alone for another thirty years than be discommoded by an old dog like that later, who, groaning even louder than his master, drags himself from step to step.

  So Blumfeld will remain alone. He doesn’t have the physical yearnings of an old spinster, who craves some inferior being around her, for her to protect, on which she can exercise her tenderness, which she will constantly pamper, for which purposes a cat or a canary or even a few goldfish might do. And if she can’t have any of those, then she’ll make do with a flowerbox outside the window. Blumfeld, however, is out for a companion, an animal that doesn’t require much in the way of maintenance, that won’t mind the occasional kick, that will survive a night on the street, but that, should Blumfeld require it, will be on the spot with barking, leaping and licking of hands. That’s what Blumfeld is in the market for, but since, as he concedes, he can’t have it without considerable drawbacks, then he declines; though, in accordance with his methodical nature, he can’t but return to the idea from time to time, as for instance, this evening.

  Standing outside the door, and reaching into his pocket for his key, he is struck by a sound coming from inside. A strange clattering sound, but lively and above all regular. Since Blumfeld has just been thinking about dogs, he is put in mind of the sound of paws on parquet floors. But paws don’t clatter, so these aren’t paws. He hurriedly unlocks the door and turns on the elect
ric light. He isn’t prepared for what meets his eye. As if by magic, two little blue and white striped rubber balls are bouncing side by side on the floor; when the one hits the ground, the other is in mid-air, and they play tirelessly together. At school once, Blumfeld saw little balls bouncing like this in the course of an experiment with electricity, but these balls are pretty large, and are jumping freely around the room, and of course there is no electrical experiment. Blumfeld bends down to get a closer look at them. There is no doubt about it, they are ordinary balls, probably they contain some smaller balls within them, and they are what is producing the clattering sound. Blumfeld waves his hands to check that they aren’t secured to some sort of string or something, but no, their movement is perfectly independent. Too bad that Blumfeld isn’t a small boy, two balls like that would have been a wonderful surprise, whereas now the whole thing makes a faintly disagreeable impression on him. It’s not the worst thing, really, to be an obscure bachelor and lead an invisible life; now someone, never mind who, has found him out, and sent him those two strange balls.

  He tries to grab one of them, but they retreat from him, drawing him further into the room. ‘How undignified,’ he thinks, ‘to be chasing after a couple of balls,’ but then he stops and watches as, once his pursuit has slackened off, they stay in the same place. ‘I will try and catch them anyway,’ he thinks, and sets off after them. They straightaway flee, but a splay-footed Blumfeld shepherds them into a corner of the room, and in front of a trunk that’s standing there, he manages to catch one of the balls. The ball is small and cool to the touch, and spins in his hand, evidently trying to escape. And the other ball too, as though seeing the predicament of its fellow, starts jumping higher than before and jumps so high that it strikes Blumfeld’s hand. It strikes the hand, jumping up rapidly, changes its line of attack, then, unable to do anything to the hand that’s enclosing the ball, it jumps higher still, probably in an effort to reach Blumfeld’s face. Blumfeld could catch this ball too, and lock them both away, but just at that moment it strikes him as undignified to take such measures against two little balls. It’s fun too, isn’t it, to own two little balls; they’ll tire soon enough, roll under a cupboard somewhere, and keep shtum. In spite of his thought, Blumfeld, in an access of something like rage, flings the ball to the ground; it’s a wonder the thin, almost transparent veneer of celluloid doesn’t shatter. Without a second’s pause, the two balls resume their previous pattern of low, alternating bounces.

  Blumfeld calmly gets undressed, tidies his clothes away in the wardrobe – he usually likes to check the cleaner has left everything there in good order. Once or twice he looks over his shoulder at the balls – since he has given up pursuing them, they seem to be following him – they have moved closer and are bouncing just behind him. Blumfeld pulls on his dressing gown, and then crosses the room to fetch a pipe from the rack there. Involuntarily, before turning round, he kicks out a heel, but the balls succeed in staying out of the way and are not struck. As he goes for his pipe now, the balls join him right away. He shuffles along in his slippers, taking irregular steps, but almost without a break the balls follow him step by step. Blumfeld turns round suddenly – he wants to see how the balls cope with that. But no sooner has he turned than the balls move through a semicircle, and are once again behind him; this happens each time he turns. Like junior members of a retinue, they seek to avoid parading in front of Blumfeld. Thus far, the only reason they did so was to introduce themselves to him, but now they have entered his service.

  Up to this point, Blumfeld’s recourse on finding himself in exceptional situations that could not be mastered by sheer strength was to pretend he hadn’t noticed anything amiss. Often it helped; at least it improved his position. This is what he does again now, standing with a thoughtful pout in front of his pipe-rack, selecting a pipe, filling it with unusual thoroughness from the tobacco pouch also there, and just letting the balls bounce away to their hearts’ content behind him. Only he is reluctant to go to the table, he feels something akin to pain at the thought of their bouncing in time to his footfall. So he stands there, spending an unnecessarily long time filling his pipe, and gauging the distance between his position and the table. At last, he overcomes his weakness and covers the distance with such loud stamps of his feet that he doesn’t even hear the balls. When he is sitting down, admittedly, there they are, bouncing behind his armchair just as audibly as before.

  Within reach across the table by the wall is a shelf where the bottle of cherry brandy is kept, ringed by little glasses. Next to it is the stack of French periodicals. But instead of getting everything he needs, Blumfeld sits there quite still and stares into his unlit pipe bowl. He is on the alert, very abruptly his rigidity vanishes, and with a jerk he turns around in the armchair. But the balls are every bit as alert. Or else they unthinkingly follow the rule that governs their existence. At the moment Blumfeld turns, they too change their location and hide behind his back. Now Blumfeld is sitting with his back to the table, the cold pipe in his hand. The balls are now bouncing under the table, and because there’s a rug there, they are correspondingly quiet. This is much better; there are only weak dull sounds, you have to concentrate hard to even hear them. Blumfeld admittedly is concentrating hard, and he hears them all too well. But that’s just how it is now, probably in a little while he won’t hear them at all. The fact that they get so little change out of carpets strikes Blumfeld as a grave weakness in the balls. All you need do is push a rug or two under them, and they are almost powerless. Admittedly, only for a certain time, and moreover their mere being seems to constitute a sort of power in itself.

  Now Blumfeld really could use a dog, a healthy young animal that would make short work of those balls; he pictures the dog swiping at them with its paws, driving them away from their position; he chases them all round the room, and in the end gets them between his jaws. Yes, it’s quite possible that Blumfeld will be acquiring a dog shortly.

  But for the time being it’s only Blumfeld that the balls have to beware of, and he doesn’t feel like destroying them either, perhaps he lacks the resolve for that. He generally gets home in the evening tired out from work and now, just when he needs quiet, there is this surprise waiting for him. He starts to feel just how tired he is. He will destroy the balls, no question, and sooner rather than later, but not right away and probably not until tomorrow. If he were being dispassionate, he would have to say the balls are behaving pretty modestly. For instance they could be jumping out from time to time, showing themselves, and then go back to their place, or they could jump higher, to strike the underside of the table, thus making up for the muffling effect of the carpet. But they don’t do either thing; they don’t want to provoke Blumfeld needlessly, evidently they’re limiting themselves to the bare essentials.

  These essentials, admittedly, are enough to make Blumfeld feel ill at ease at his table. He has been sitting there for a few minutes, and already he’s thinking of going to bed. One of his reasons is that he is unable to smoke where he is, having forgotten his matches on the bedside table. So he would have to fetch them, and once he’s there, it’s probably better just to stay there and lie down. He has an ulterior thought, namely that the balls in their blind need to always be behind him, will jump up onto the bed, and then, intentionally or otherwise, he can easily crush them. The possible objection that the remnants of the balls might be able to jump too, he rejects. Even the extraordinary has its limits. Ordinary balls bounce as well, though not incessantly; fragments of balls never do, and they won’t in this case either.

  ‘Hup!’ he calls out, almost emboldened by the thought, and tramps off to bed with the balls following him. His hopes seem to be borne out; as he stands deliberately right beside the bed, one of the balls promptly jumps up onto it. Then something unexpected happens, namely the other ball goes underneath it. Blumfeld had not considered the possibility that the balls could bounce underneath the bed. He is a little dismayed by this one ball, even though he feels
it unfair of him, because by bouncing underneath the bed, this ball is perhaps discharging its duty even better than its fellow on the bed. Now it’s a question of where the balls decide to go, because Blumfeld doesn’t believe they are capable of operating separately for long. And in fact, a moment later, the lower ball now jumps up onto the bed. ‘Now I’ve got them!’ thinks Blumfeld, hot with joy, and he tears off his dressing gown to throw himself into his bed. But just then, that same ball jumps back under the bed. Excessively disappointed, Blumfeld slumps back. The ball probably just took a look at conditions on the bed and found it didn’t care for them. And, of course, now the other ball follows suit, and of course it stays under the bed, because under is better. ‘Now I’m going to be stuck with those two drummers all night,’ thinks Blumfeld, biting his lip and shaking his head.

  He feels sad, though he doesn’t know what the balls could do to harm him at night. His sleep is extremely sound; he will easily manage to ignore their slight noise. To be sure of this, as experience has already taught him, he pushes a couple of rugs under the bed. It’s as though he had a small dog there, and wanted to make sure it’s comfortable; and as though the balls were getting tired and sleepy too, their jumps becoming lower and slower than up until now. As Blumfeld kneels down by the bedside and shines a torch under the bed, he sometimes has a sense that the balls will stay forever on the carpets, that’s how feebly they’re falling, how slowly they’re rolling a few inches this way or that. Then, admittedly, they get a grip on themselves and perform. Still, Blumfeld thinks it perfectly possible that when he looks under the bed in the morning, he will find just two harmless and motionless toys.