Amerika Read online

  Now it was just a matter of finding his way down to the salon, where, in his initial distraction, he had probably also left his hat in some unsuitable place. He would take the candle with him of course, but even with its light, it wouldn’t be easy to find the way. For example he didn’t even know whether this room was on the same floor as the salon or not. Klara had kept pulling him on the way here, so that he had been unable to look around. He had also been distracted by the servants with their candelabras, in short, he really didn’t know if they had climbed one flight of stairs or two, or none at all. Judging from the view, the room was quite high up, and he tended therefore to imagine that they had climbed some steps, but then there were steps leading up to the front door, so perhaps that accounted for the height on this side of the house. If only there was a glimmer of light from a doorway or a faint voice in the corridor.

  His wristwatch, a present from his uncle, showed eleven o’clock as he took up the candle and went out into the corridor. In case his search should be unsuccessful, he left his door open, so that he would at least be able to find his room again, and thereby, in an extreme emergency, Klara’s as well. Lest the door should fall shut, he pushed a chair in the way. In the passageway Karl found that he had to contend with a draught – naturally he had turned left, away from Klara’s door – that was quite weak, but still well capable of extinguishing the candle, so that Karl had to shield the flame with his hand, and also to stop at intervals to allow the guttering light to recover. He made slow progress, and the way back seemed to be twice as long. Karl passed great stretches of wall that had no doors at all, so that one couldn’t imagine what lay behind them. Then it was one door after another, he tried several of them, but they were all locked, and the rooms evidently unoccupied. It was an extraordinary waste of space, and Karl thought of the eastern districts of New York, which his uncle had promised to show him, where one small room apparently housed several families and a corner was home to a whole family, with the children huddling round their parents. And here there were so many empty rooms, whose sole purpose was to make a hollow sound when you knocked on their doors. Karl thought Mr Pollunder had been led astray by false friends, besotted with his daughter, and thus corrupted. His uncle had surely judged him correctly, and only that principle of his of not influencing Karl’s own judgements was responsible for this visit and his wanderings along these passages. Karl decided to tell his uncle all this straight out tomorrow, because his uncle’s own principle meant that he would listen to his nephew’s opinion, even of himself, calmly and gladly. That principle was perhaps the only thing that Karl didn’t like about his uncle, and even that feeling was not unqualified.

  Suddenly the wall on one side of the corridor came to an end, and was replaced by an ice-cold marble balustrade. Karl put the candle down on it and carefully leaned forward. Empty darkness blew towards him. If this was the entrance hall of the house – by the light of the candle he saw what seemed to be a bit of vaulted ceiling – why hadn’t they come in through it? What was this large and lofty room for? It was like standing in the gallery of a church up here. Karl almost regretted that he couldn’t stay in the house till morning, he would like to have had a guided tour of it by daylight from Mr Pollunder.

  The balustrade did not go on for very long, and soon Karl was swallowed up by the enclosed corridor again. Suddenly it made a sharp turn, and Karl walked smack into a wall, only the vigilance with which he held the candle upright kept it from falling from his grasp and being extinguished. As the corridor seemed never ending, without a window anywhere and no sign of movement either high or low, it occurred to Karl that he was going round in a circle, he hoped to come upon the open door of his room soon, but neither that nor the balustrade returned. So far Karl had refrained from calling out, as he was reluctant to make a noise in a strange house at this late hour, but he now realized that it would be a forgivable thing to do in this unlit house, and he was just about to halloo loudly down the corridor in both directions, when he saw, from where he had come, a small light coming ever nearer. Karl’s joy at this salvation was so great that he forgot all his caution and started running towards it, which caused his candle to go out after a few steps. He didn’t care, he didn’t need it any more, here came an old retainer with a lantern who would show him the way.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked the retainer and held the lantern in Karl’s face, thereby simultaneously lighting up his own. His face seemed rather stiff on account of a long white beard which only broke up into silky ringlets when it hit his chest. He must be a trusty servant to be allowed to wear such a beard, thought Karl, and he stared at its length and breadth, without being inhibited by the fact that he was being stared at himself. He replied right away that he was a guest of Mr Pollunder’s, that he had left his own room to go back to the dining-room, but had been unable to find it. ‘Oh yes,’ said the servant, ‘we haven’t introduced electric light yet.’ ‘I know,’ said Karl. ‘wouldn’t you care to light your candle at my lantern?’ asked the servant. ‘Yes please,’ said Karl, and did so. ‘There is such a draught in the corridors,’ said the servant, ‘a candle is easily extinguished, and so I have a lantern.’ ‘Yes, a lantern is far more practical,’ said Karl. ‘You’re all spattered with wax too,’ said the servant, passing the lantern over Karl’s suit. ‘I never noticed that,’ said Karl, and he was very sorry as it was his black suit, which his uncle had said fitted him best of all his suits. The fight with Klara couldn’t have done much for the suit either, he now thought. The servant was kind enough to give the suit a quick clean; Karl kept turning round in front of him, drawing more stains to his attention, which the servant duly removed. ‘Why is there such a draught here?’ asked Karl, once they were on their way again. ‘There’s a lot of building work still to be done,’ said the servant, ‘they’ve begun on the conversion, but it’s going very slowly. And now the building workers have gone on strike, maybe you’ve heard. A building job like that is nothing but trouble. They’ve made a couple of major openings, but there’s no one to wall them up, and so there’s a draught all over the house. If I didn’t have cotton wool in my ears, I wouldn’t be able to survive.’ ‘Would you like me to speak up?’ said Karl. ‘No, your voice is very clear,’ said the servant. ‘But to get back to the building, the draught is quite intolerable, especially here in the vicinity of the chapel, which will certainly have to be separated from the rest of the house later.’ ‘So the balustrade you pass in this corridor opens out into the chapel?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I thought so right away,’ said Karl. ‘It’s well worth seeing,’ said the servant. ‘If it hadn’t been there, I doubt whether Mr Mack would have bought the house.’ ‘Mr Mack?’ asked Karl, ‘I thought the house belonged to Mr Pollunder.’ ‘Yes, it does,’ said the servant, ‘but Mr Mack was the moving force behind the purchase. Do you not know Mr Mack?’ ‘Yes I do,’ said Karl. ‘But what is his relationship with Mr Pollunder?’ ‘He is the young lady’s intended,’ said the servant. ‘I had no idea of that,’ said Karl, and stopped. ‘Does it come as such a surprise to you?’ asked the servant. ‘I just want to take account of it. If you’re not aware of such relationships, you can make very serious blunders,’ replied Karl. ‘I’m surprised you weren’t informed about it,’ said the servant ‘No I wasn’t,’ said Karl, embarrassed. ‘They probably thought you knew about it,’ said the servant, ‘it’s not a recent development. By the way, we’ve arrived,’ and he opened a door, behind which a flight of steps led steeply down to the back door of the dining-room, which was brightly lit, as it had been on their arrival. Before Karl had entered the dining-room, from which the voices of Mr Green and Mr Pollunder could be heard, as they could two hours previously, the servant said: ‘If you like, I’ll wait here for you, and take you back to your room. It is difficult to find your way around on your first evening with us.’ ‘I won’t be going back to my room,’ said Karl, and he didn’t know why the statement made him feel sad. ‘Surely it’s not that bad,’ said the servant, smiling in a gently superi
or way and patting him on the arm. He probably took Karl to mean that he intended to spend the whole night in the dining-room, talking and drinking with the gentlemen. Karl didn’t want to make any admissions, and besides, he thought this servant, whom he liked better than any of the others, might be able to show him the way to New York later, and so he said: ‘If you wouldn’t mind waiting here, that would be very kind of you, and I’m happy to accept. I’ll be out in a little while, and tell you what’s to be done then. I think I’ll be needing your help.’ ‘Very good,’ said the servant, and set the lantern down on the floor and seated himself on a low plinth, whose unoccupied condition was probably something to do with the conversion of the house, ‘I’ll be waiting for you here.’ ‘You can leave the candle with me too,’ he added, as Karl was about to enter the salon with his burning candle in his hand. ‘I am being absent-minded,’ said Karl, and passed the candle to the servant, who merely nodded to him, although it wasn’t clear whether it was deliberate, or merely the result of stroking his beard.

  Karl opened the door which rattled loudly, not through his own fault, but because it consisted of a single pane of glass which almost broke when the door was quickly pulled open held only by the handle. Karl let go of the door in fright, because he had meant to make a particularly quiet entrance. Without turning round, he noticed how behind him the servant must have got off his plinth to close the door carefully, without making the slightest noise. ‘Excuse the interruption,’ he said to the two gentlemen, who stared at him with large astonished faces. At the same time he scoured the room to see whether he might not quickly find his hat lying somewhere. But it was nowhere to be seen, the table had been cleared, there was the disagreeable possibility that it had been carried off into the kitchens. ‘What have you done with Klara?’ asked Mr Pollunder, who seemed to welcome the interruption, as he straightaway shifted in his chair to face Karl. Mr Green feigned indifference, pulled out his wallet, by size and thickness a monster of its kind, and seemed to be looking for some particular item in its various compartments, but as he looked he also perused whatever else came to light. ‘I’ve got a favour to ask you, you mustn’t take it amiss,’ said Karl, and he went hurriedly across to Mr Pollunder, and to be as close as possible to him he laid his hand on the armrest of his chair. ‘What favour is that?’ asked Mr Pollunder, looking candidly at Karl. ‘Of course it’s already granted,’ and he put his arm round Karl, and made him stand between his legs. Karl didn’t mind, although he thought he was generally a little too old for such treatment. But it made it harder to ask the favour. ‘How do you like it here with us?’ asked Mr Pollunder. ‘wouldn’t you agree that the country has a liberating effect, when you come here from the city. In general’ – and he sent an unambiguous look at Mr Green, half-obscured by Karl’s body – ‘in general I feel like that every time I come here in the evening.’ ‘The way he talks,’ thought Karl, ‘it’s as though he didn’t know about the big house, the endless corridors, the chapel, the empty rooms, the darkness everywhere.’ ‘Now then!’ said Mr Pollunder. ‘That favour!’ and he gave Karl a friendly shake as he stood there silently. ‘The favour,’ said Karl, and however much he tried to lower his voice, he was unable to prevent everything he said from being overheard by Green, who might construe his request as an insult to Pollunder so that Karl would have dearly liked to keep it from him – ‘the favour I want to ask is to let me go home right now, tonight.’ And since the worst had been spoken, everything else tumbled out too, he spoke, without any recourse to lying, things he hadn’t even thought previously. ‘More than anything I want to go home. I will be happy to come on another occasion, because anywhere you are, Mr Pollunder, I am glad to be myself. Only today I can’t stay. You know that my uncle didn’t willingly give me permission for this visit. He must have had his reasons too, as he does for everything, but I ventured, against his superior understanding, to force his permission. I simply abused his love for me. It doesn’t matter any more why he was against the visit, I just know that there was nothing in his reasons to cause you any offence, Mr Pollunder, because you are the best, the very best of my uncle’s friends. None of my uncle’s other friends can remotely compare with you. That’s the only excuse for my disobeying him, but it’s not a sufficient excuse. Your understanding of the relationship between my uncle and me may not be very thorough, so let me just mention some salient points. Until my English studies are complete, and I have seen something of the workings of business, I am utterly dependent on the kindness of my uncle, which as a blood-relation I have a certain right to enjoy. You must bear in mind that I am as yet unable to make my own way in life respectably – and may God save me from all else. Unfortunately my education has been too unpractical for that. I have had four years as a middling pupil at a European secondary school, and in terms of a qualification for earning money, that means less than nothing, because our schools follow a very antiquated syllabus. If I told you what I’d studied it would only make you laugh. If you continue, and finish the secondary school and go on to university, then everything probably balances out somehow and you end up with a decent education that is of some use, and also gives you the resolve to go out and earn money. Unfortunately I was plucked out of such a coherent education prematurely, at times I believe I know nothing at all, and everything I might possibly know would still be too little for America. In my home country a few progressive secondary schools have recently been introduced, where modern languages and perhaps some business studies are taught, but at the time I left elementary school they didn’t yet exist. My father was keen for me to learn English, but firstly I had no way of knowing what catastrophe would befall me, and with what urgency I would need English, and secondly I had to study hard at secondary school, so that it didn’t leave me with much time for other pursuits – I tell you all this to show you how dependent on my uncle I am, and correspondingly how indebted to him. You will surely agree that under such circumstances I could not permit myself to do the slightest thing against his wishes, or even his presumed wishes. And that is why to try and partly atone for my transgression against him, I must go home right away.’ Mr Pollunder had listened carefully to Karl’s long speech, he had pressed Karl to himself imperceptibly, especially when the uncle was mentioned, and occasionally and as though expectantly and seriously looked over to Green, who continued to be engaged with his wallet. Karl though, the more his position towards his uncle had become clear to him as he spoke, had become more and more restless, and tried involuntarily to break away from Mr Pollunder’s hold, everything here was constricting him, the way to his uncle through the glass door, down the stairs, through the avenue, along the country roads, through the suburbs to the big thoroughfare, ending up in his uncle’s house, seemed to him to constitute an indivisible entity, lying empty, smooth and ready for him, and it called out to him in a loud voice. Mr Pollunder’s goodness and Mr Green’s vileness blurred together, and he wanted nothing more from this smoky room than permission to leave it. He felt impervious to Mr Pollunder and ready to fight Mr Green, and yet he was filled with the sensation all around him of a vague fear, whose throbbings dimmed his eyes.

  He took a step back and was now equidistant from Mr Pollunder and Mr Green. ‘Didn’t you have something to say to him?’ Mr Pollunder asked Mr Green, as though imploringly taking Mr Green’s hand. ‘I wouldn’t know what I had to say to him?’ said Mr Green, finally pulling a letter from his wallet, and laying it on the table. ‘It’s all very laudable of him to want to go back to his uncle, and one might go so far as to predict that he will give his uncle great pleasure by so doing. Unless, that is, he has previously so angered his uncle by his disobedience, which is also possible. In that case, he would be better advised to stay here. It’s difficult to say anything definite, both of us are friends of his uncle’s, and it would be a tricky thing to establish some pecking order between my friendship with his uncle and Mr Pollunder’s, but finally we can’t see inside the uncle, least of all so many miles away from New York.’ ‘Mr
Green, please,’ said Karl, and overcoming his reluctance, he approached Mr Green, ‘I understand you to be suggesting that the best course for me would be to return right away as well.’ ‘That’s not what I meant at all,’ said Mr Green, and focused his attention on the letter, sliding two fingers up and down the edge of it. He seemed to be suggesting with that that he had been asked a question by Mr Pollunder and given him his reply, and that he had nothing to do really with Karl.

  In the meantime Mr Pollunder had gone up to Karl and had gently pulled him away from Mr Green to one of the big windows. ‘Dear Mr Rossmann,’ he said, bending down to Karl’s ear, giving his face a preparatory wipe with his handkerchief, stopping at his nose, which he blew. ‘Surely you can’t believe that I want to detain you against your will. There’s no question of that. I am afraid I can’t put the car at your disposal, because it is kept at a public garage some way from here, as I have yet to build my own garage here, where everything is still at an early stage. Moreover, the chauffeur doesn’t sleep here either, but somewhere near the garage, I’m not exactly sure where myself. Besides it’s no part of his duties to be here, all he has to do is to pick me up at the right time each morning. But all of that needn’t impede your immediate return home in any way because, if you insist, I will accompany you straightaway to the nearest suburban line railway station, although that is actually so far away from here that you wouldn’t arrive home much earlier than if you came along with me in the morning – we leave by seven o’clock – in the car.’ ‘That being so, Mr Pollunder, I’d still like to take the train,’ said Karl. ‘I never thought of the train. You just said yourself that I’d get there quicker by train than if I came in the car in the morning.’ ‘It’s only a very tiny difference.’ ‘Never mind, Mr Pollunder, never mind that,’ said Karl, ‘remembering your kindness to me, I will always be very glad to come here, assuming of course that after my behaviour of today you will still want to invite me, and perhaps in the future I will better be able to explain why every minute by which I might see my uncle the sooner is so vital to me.’ And, as though he had already been granted permission to leave, he added: ‘But you mustn’t accompany me. It’s quite unnecessary. There is a servant outside who will be happy to walk me to the station. Now I just have to find my hat’ And with these last words, he started across the room, just for one last look to see where his hat might be. ‘Perhaps I could help you out with a cap,’ said Mr Green, pulling a cap out of his pocket, ‘maybe this one fits you.’ Karl stopped in astonishment and said: ‘I’m not about to deprive you of your cap. I can perfectly well go bareheaded. I don’t need anything.’ ‘It’s not my cap. Go on take it!’ ‘In that case, thank you,’ said Karl so as not to delay matters, and he took the cap. He pulled it on, and then he had to laugh because it fitted so well, then he took it in his hand and looked at it, but he couldn’t find whatever feature he was looking for; it was a completely new cap. ‘It fits so perfectly!’ he said. ‘Good, it fits!’ said Mr Green and pounded the table.