Читать книгу The Goose Man - Jakob Wassermann - Страница 23

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Daniel’s money was about at an end. The new sources on which he had hoped to be able to draw were nowhere to be discovered. He defiantly closed the doors against care; and when fear showed its gloomy face, he shut up shop, and went out to drown his sorrows with the brethren of the Vale of Tears.

Schwalbe, the sculptor, had made the acquaintance of Zingarella, then engaged in singing lascivious couplets at the Academy, and invited the fellows to join him.

The Academy was a theatre of the lowest description. Smoking was, of course, permitted. When they arrived the performance was over. People were still sitting at many of the tables. Reeking as the auditorium was with the stench of stale beer, it left the impression of a dark, dank cavern.

With an indifference that seemed to argue that Zingarella made no distinction between chairs and people, she took her seat between the sculptor and the writer. She laughed, and yet it was not laughter; she spoke, and her words were empty; she stretched out her hands, and the gesture was lifeless. She fixed her eyes on no one; she merely gazed about. She had a habit of shaking her bracelet in a way that aroused sympathy. And after making a lewd remark she would turn her head to one side, and thereby stagger even the most hardened frequenter of this sort of places. Her complexion had been ruined by rouge, but underneath the skin there was something that glimmered like water under thin ice.

The former winsomeness of her lips was still traceable in the sorrowed curves of her now ravaged mouth.

At times her restless eyes, seeking whom they might entangle, were fixed on Daniel, then sitting quite alone at the lower end of the table. In order to avoid the unpleasant sensation associated with the thought of going up to such a distinguished-looking person and making herself known to him, she would have been grateful had some one picked her up and thrown her bodily at his feet. There was an element of strangeness about him. Zingarella saw that he had had nothing to do with women of her kind. This tortured her; she gnashed her teeth.

Daniel did not sense her hatred. As he looked into her face, marked with a life of transgression and already claimed by fate, he built up in his own soul a picture of inimitable chastity. He tried to see the playmate of a god. The curtain decorated with the distorted face of a harlequin, the acrobat and the dog trainer at the adjacent table, who were quarrelling over their money, the four half-grown gamblers directly behind him, the big fat woman who was lying stretched out on a bench with a red handkerchief over her face and trying to sleep, the writer who slandered other writers, the inventor who discoursed so volubly and incessantly on perpetual motion—to all of this he paid not the slightest bit of attention. For him it could just as well have been in the bottom of the sea. He got up and left.

But as he saw the snow-covered streets before him and was unable to decide whether he should go home or not, Zingarella stepped up to him. “Come, be quick, before they see that we are together,” she whispered. And thus they walked along like two fugitives, whose information concerning each other stops short with the certainty that both are poor and wretched and are making their way through a snow storm.

“What is your name?” asked Daniel.

“My name is Anna Siebert.”

The clock in the St. Lorenz Church struck three. The one up in the tower of St. Sebaldus corroborated this reckoning by also striking three and in much deeper tones.

They came to an old house, and after floundering through a long, dark, ill-smelling passage way, entered a room in the basement. Anna Siebert lighted a lamp that had a red chimney. Gaudy garments of the soubrette hung on the wall. A big, grey cat lay on the table cover and purred. Anna Siebert took the cat in her arms and caressed it. Its name was Zephyr. It accompanied her wherever she went.

Daniel threw himself on a chair and looked at the lamp. Zingarella, standing before the mirror, stroked the cat. Gazing distractedly into space, she remarked that the manager had discharged her because the public was no longer satisfied with her work.

“Is this what you call the public?” asked Daniel, who never once took his eyes from the lamp, just as Anna Siebert kept hers rigidly fixed on the desolate distances of the mirror. “These fathers of families who side-step every now and then, these counter-jumpers, the mere looks of whom is enough to snatch your clothing from your body, this human filth at the sight of which God must conceal His face in shame—this is what you call the public?”

“Well, however that may be,” Anna Siebert continued in a colourless voice, “the manager rushed into my dressing room, threw the contract at my feet, and said I had swindled him. How on earth could I have swindled him? I am no prima donna and my agent had told him so. You can’t expect a Patti on twenty marks a week. In Elberfeld I got twenty-five, and a year ago in Zürich I even drew sixty. Now he comes to me and says he doesn’t need to pay me anything. What am I to live off of? And you’ve got to live, haven’t you, Zephyr,” said Anna as she picked up the cat, pressed its warm fur to her cheek, and repeated, “You’ve got to live.”

She let her arms fall to her sides, the cat sprang on the floor, hunched up its back, wagged its tail, and purred. She then went up to Daniel, fell on her knees, and laid her head on his side. “I have reached the end,” she murmured in a scarcely audible voice, “I am at the end of all things.”

The snow beat against the window panes. With an expression on his face as though his own thoughts were murdering each other, Daniel looked into the corner from which Zephyr’s yellowish eyes were shining. The muscles of his face twitched like a fish on being taken from the hook.

And as he cowered in this fashion, the poor girl pressed against his body, his shoulders lowered, past visions again arose from the depths of the sea. First he heard a ravishing arpeggio in A-flat major and above it, a majestic theme, commanding quiet, as it were, in sixteenth triads. The two blended, in forte, with a powerful chord of sevens. There was a struggling, a separating, a wandering on, and out of the subdued pianissimo there arose and floated in space a gentle voice in E-flat minor. O voice from the sea, O humanity on earth! The eighth note, unpitiable as ever in its elemental power, cut into the bass with the strength that moves and burrows as it advances, until it was caught up by the redeemed voice in E-flat major. And now everything suddenly became real. What had formerly been clouds and dreams, longing and wishing, at last took shape and form and stood before him. Indeed he himself became true, real, and conscious of his existence in a world of actualities.

On his way home he covered his face with his hands, for the windows of the houses gaped at him like the hollow eyes of a demi-monde.