The Class E-Book

Hermann Ungar

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 319

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2004

Beschreibung

Grotesque and unsettling novel about a Czech High School teacher

Das E-Book The Class wird angeboten von Dedalus und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

Contents

Title

The Author and The Translator

Foreword

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Copyright

THE AUTHOR

Hermann Ungar (1893–1929) was a German-speaking Jew from Moravia who was active as a writer in Berlin and Prague in the 1920s. Critics spoke of him in the same breath as Kafka, and he was feted in France after the publication of the translation of The Maimed in 1928.

After the war he was largely forgotten in Germany, despite praise from individual writers, but the reissue of the French translation in 1987 was again greeted with enthusiastic reviews: ‘Hermann Ungar is a great writer, unique … No history of literature should ignore his works.’

THE TRANSLATOR

Mike Mitchell is one of Dedalus’s editorial directors and is responsible for the Dedalus translation programme. His publications include The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy 1890–2000 and Austria in the World Bibliographical Series.

Mike Mitchell’s translations include all the novels of Gustav Meyrink, three by Herbert Rosendorfer, three by Grimmelshausen and the Plays and Poems of Oskar Kokoschka.

His translation of Rosendorfer’s Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck German Translation Prize.

Foreword

After the publication of his second novel, The Class, in 1927, the main Viennese newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse, called Hermann Ungar ‘the most important writer of the decade’. And that in one of the most hectic decades in German literature when, among the younger generation, figures such as Franz Werfel, Joseph Roth, Ernst Toller, Alfred Döblin, Bertolt Brecht, Leo Perutz, Paul Kornfeld, Ernst Weiss, Egon Erwin Kisch were active. Unlike another German-speaking Jewish writer from the region that was to become Czechoslovakia, Franz Kafka, with whom his name is often linked, Ungar was almost completely forgotten in Germany after the Second World War. In France, however, the issue of translations of his two novels and a volume with two short stories in 1987–88 (the stories and The Maimed had already appeared in France in the 1920s) was greeted with enthusiastic reviews and the recognition not only of his importance in the context of German literature between the wars, but of the abiding power of his portrayal of a world in which all the figures seem to be cripples: physical, psychological, emotional and moral cripples.

One critic, Vincent Ostria, declared that the excesses of punk musicians such as Sid Vicious looked ‘small beer’ compared to the extremes possible in literature as demonstrated by Ungar’s novels. Both French and German critics have insisted on seeing in his characters, in which full humanity has been reduced to fear and hatred – often the hatred of their own selves – an adumbration of figures which in 1933 would ‘step out of literary fiction and into reality’.

Hermann Ungar was born in 1893 in the Moravian town of Boskovice, into a wealthy, cultured Jewish family. His father owned a distillery and was mayor of the Jewish community, whose presence in the town went back to the 11th century. Boskovice was entirely Czech-speaking, but the Jewish community – until the end of the First World War the two parts of the town were separate – spoke German. Ungar grew up speaking both languages, but his education at high school and university was at German institutions.

The routine anti-semitism of some of his German fellow pupils in the high school in Brünn/Brno awakened an interest in Judaism and the Jewish religion, to which he had been largely indifferent until then. He decided to study Hebrew and Arabic in Berlin and joined the Jewish student corporation modelled on the German duelling fraternities, acting as its president in 1914, although by then he had transferred from Semitic languages to Law.

As with many other artists and writers, the war was an experience which fundamentally changed his outlook. He volunteered in 1914 and served for three years in the artillery before being seriously wounded and invalided out. He resumed his studies, completing his law degree at the (German) University of Prague in 1918. But this was a different Ungar. He abandoned the student fraternities, with their duels and colours, and renounced Zionism, which seemed to him in danger of becoming a new kind of nationalism.

He also seems to have thrown away or destroyed all his early writings, plays full of passion, violence and intrigue. It had always been Ungar’s ambition to be a writer and for a short while he worked in the theatre in Eger/Egra, hoping it would be a milieu conducive to writing, but after a short time took a position in a bank. This led to work for the Czech Export Agency in Berlin and finally, in 1922, a post as commercial attaché at the Czech embassy there. Though the work was not particularly congenial to him, the Czech foreign ministry treated him generously, apparently pleased to encourage a man making a name for himself in German literature. (A press attaché at the embassy was another Czech-German writer, Camill Hoffmann.) In 1928 he was moved to the foreign ministry in Prague; on 10 October 1929 he resigned from his post; on 28 October he died of peritonitis after an appendix operation.

The works he wrote around the end of the war did not reach the public: a novel has disappeared and a play called Krieg (War) was not published until 1990. Two stories, gathered together under the title Knaben und Mörder (Boys and Murderers), appeared in 1920. The Maimed was published in 1923, to a reaction of horrified admiration, and his second novel, The Class in 1927. In 1928 his play Der rote General (The Red General) was performed with great success in Berlin. The central figure is a Jewish general who is abandoned by the Communists, once he is no longer needed, and executed by the White Russians. Some saw it as a portrait of Trotsky, which Ungar denied. A second play, a comedy called Die Gartenlaube (The Arbour), had its premiere six weeks after his death.

The main character of The Class, Josef Blau, is a school-teacher who comes from a poor background, but teaches at a high school in a wealthy part of the town. Faced with a class of well-dressed, well-groomed pupils, he feels insecure. He is convinced they despise him and the rigid discipline he imposes on them is designed to prevent what he assumes is the contempt they feel for him from breaking out in ‘rebellion’. Just as Polzer, the hero of The Maimed, feels that ‘Once the order had been disrupted, ever increasing chaos was bound to follow,’ so Blau ‘fought with all the means at his disposal to maintain discipline. Once it was relaxed, everything was lost.’

But Blau’s rigidity is not merely a reflection of his social insecurity. It goes much deeper than that and informs his whole existence, public, private and personal. He believes our lives – his especially – are inextricably interwoven with others’ and subject to a fate which can be brought down on us by the slightest act: a movement, a word, even just breathing. His whole life is little more than an attempt to ward off, or at least delay what he sees as the inevitable. Everything he does may have consequences, for himself or for those around him, and therefore he feels everything he does involves him in guilt.

This attitude seems to be confirmed when the one positive action he takes leads to tragedy. He waits outside a brothel he has been told the pupil whom he regards as his chief enemy visits. He sees two pupils there and goes away believing he now has them under his control. For a short while he is transformed from the timid mouse into a masterful male. But one of the two boys commits suicide as a result of having been seen at the brothel, plunging Blau back into self-recrimination which erupts physically in a haemorrhage, a hereditary weakness.

Unlike The Maimed, The Class has a happy, or at least a conciliatory ending. Blau is not cured of his belief that he is inextricably involved in the fates of those around him, but when he is put, by a concatenation of ugly circumstances, in a position to help another pupil who is contemplating suicide, he at least sees that the involvement can also lead to good.

The theme of the schoolboy suicide is one that was surprisingly common, one might even call it a fashion, in the German literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Two of the early treatments of the theme are Emil Strauß’s Freund Hein (The Grim Reaper, 1902) and Hermann Hesse’s Unterm Rad (The Prodigy, 1906), and almost contemporary with The Class is Friedrich Torberg’s Der Schüler Gerber hat absolviert (Gerber Finishes School, 1930); the best-known example internationally is Frank Wedekind’s play Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening, 1891).

In these other works the emphasis is generally social and psychological. The tragedies resulting from intolerable pressures exerted by the school system and parental expectations reflect on the authoritarian nature of society. The Class, however, focuses on the authority figure, not on the victim. In this it resembles another famous German novel, Heinrich Mann’s Professor Unrat (1905), best known as the source of the film The Blue Angel. But whereas Mann’s tyrant is the vehicle for a biting satire on the values of Wilhelmine Germany, Ungar’s reflects an existential angst in which the social background is merely one contributory factor among many.

Another contributory factor is Blau’s old school-friend, the bizarre social rebel Modlizki. He is a servant who refuses to ‘take part’; for example, when his master plays table tennis, Modlizki does not ‘play’ but merely ‘returns the ball’. He believes this attitude of complying with everything, ‘but in a way that confuses those who give the orders’, will lead, if carried out on a large scale, to madness and despair among the ‘ladies and gentlemen’. Modlizki manipulates both Blau and some of his pupils to this end. He is also one of the main figures in Ungar’s comedy, Die Gartenlaube.

The Class also has its comic elements, but it is a grotesque comedy that arises from figures who are so one-sided, so dominated by one element of their make-up (Blau by his belief in fate, Modlizki his ‘rebellion’ against the social order, Uncle Bobek his appetites) that they become almost automata. The comic aspect only serves to emphasise the bleakness of the world of a figure whose exaggerated sense of guilt almost leads to the destruction of his whole life, including the wife and child he loves.

Chapter One

He knew the boys were watching his every move; the slightest chink in his armour could expose him to disaster. In that year he was faced with eighteen boys. They sat in front of him at their desks, two by two, and looked at him. He knew disaster would come. He had to resign himself to appearing to be cruel. He knew that he was not. He was fighting for his livelihood, he fought for every day of reprieve. His severity was one element in a system designed to put off the end. He, the teacher Joseph Blau, had to gain time. Any day he gained might enable him, by summoning up all his strength, to obtain a mitigation of what he had brought down on himself.

He fought with all the means at his disposal to maintain discipline. Once it was relaxed, everything was lost. Once the first stone was loosened, the whole building would collapse. He knew he would be buried beneath the debris. There were examples he had heard of from which he had learnt that leniency and indulgence were not the way to keep boys in check. That had led to the downfall of other teachers. Goodness and compassion, so people said, were characteristics of the human race; if that was so, then fourteen-year-old boys did not belong to the human race. They were cruel at heart. He knew that once the restraint of discipline had gone, everything would be in vain, whether the reminder of the threat to the teacher’s position or a plea for mercy. There would be no respite once they sensed, even for a moment, that their mocking laughter would pursue him when he was forced to flee, humiliated, head bowed, deprived of his livelihood.

The school was in a district of the town where the well-to-do part of the population lived. He himself came from a poor family. The boys were well-fed and well-dressed. He was aware of the freedom of movement and self-confidence a well-to-do background gave a person, if they enjoyed it from birth, and that it could not be replaced by education, not even by the acquisition of culture and wisdom. He was afraid this was where the first chinks in his armour might appear. He could feel the boys’ eyes scrutinising his movements and his clothes.

He stood facing the class, unmoving, his back against the wall. His eye held them, individually and as a whole. He knew that he must not miss the least flicker of a smile, however secretive, on one of the faces turned towards him. It could be a smile of arrogance and the beginning of the revolt. If he saw it in time, he could extinguish it with a look. He could also find some excuse to punish it. The most important thing was to keep concentrating for every moment of the lesson on the goal of not letting discipline slacken under any circumstances. That was why Blau avoided the habit other teachers had of walking up and down the classroom. It broke the tension, transformed motionlessness into motion, it was a release and released forces he could not control. It blurred the boundary between authority and the uniform block of those subject to it, the system was not rigid any more, movement made it flexible. The two weights could not shift spatially without endangering the balance. He knew that at his very first step the whole class would let out its breath, their taut bodies would relax. In addition to that, his own fixed position offered less chance of exposing his movements to the boys’ scrutiny than would be the case if he were walking up and down. Despite the danger of another pupil whispering the answer, he made the boys answer from their desks instead of making them come up to the blackboard, as was usual. That change, as with movement on his own part, would have created a new, disruptive grouping. The bipartite order would have become tripartite and the straight line of sight from them to him and from him to them would have been diverted by the third point, the third weight.

The classroom door was level with the first row of desks, facing the wall with the windows. The windows looked out onto the playground. Three paces from the desks, in front of the wall to which the blackboard was fixed, was the dais with Josef Blau’s desk. His desk was positioned at the edge of the dais closest to the windows. If Josef Blau, like other teachers, had gone across the room, through the narrow passageway between the podium and the boys’ desks, to hang his hat on the coat-stand intended for the teacher in the corner between his desk and the wall, he would have had his back to the eyes of some of the boys all the time. He avoided this by going straight from the door up onto the dais and across it to his seat. In doing so, he described a semi-circle, not only in his forward movement, but at the same time on his own axis, so that he did not have to let the boys out of his sight. He signed the class register, then positioned himself by the first window in such a way that the wall shielded his back from being seen from outside. He stayed there, facing the boys, until the end of the lesson. He left the room in the same manner in which he had entered it.

His clothes as well as his movements could give the boys just as much cause for mockery, if not more so. Nothing, Josef Blau felt, was more suspicious to well-to-do people than poverty. Even their compassion had an element of arrogance. He knew that good clothes were essential for him, even if it meant he had to make sacrifices to acquire them. At the beginning of each school year he had a new suit made. But despite the most painstaking care lavished on every article of clothing, he was aware – and ashamed – of how poorly dressed he was the moment he entered the classroom. He was so disturbed by the fear that the material on the seat of his trousers or his elbows might be shiny that he pulled his sleeves in towards his body a little and kept his arms pressed against his sides during the whole of the lesson.

Almost without exception the boys were dressed in blue sailor suits with wide open necks plunging to a point above their stomachs. The open neck revealed part of the chest and the white, hairless skin of their bodies. They wore tight-fitting trousers, which sometimes stopped well above the knee, and short socks, exposing even more flesh.

The way the boys were dressed filled Blau with revulsion. He felt it as a rejection of him, of his whole existence, it seemed to be directed against him, to be intended as a challenge to him. He was small and skinny. Since he found anything which flapped loose disturbing, and also from a sense of order, he wore his coat tightly buttoned up. His had thin legs, and he even concealed the skin of his neck with a high, starched collar. When awake he was visited by visions, as embarrassing as they were tormenting, of himself in a sailor suit being discovered by the boys, who mocked and shamed him, not least because of his hairy chest, till he wanted to crawl away and die.

In the boys’ eyes he saw the lustful desire to cross the barrier and come close to him. Since, as long as he did not lose hold of the reins, that was impossible by force, they tried it with cunning. They followed him in the street. In the long run it was impossible, whatever precautions he took, to prevent them from seeing Selma. They must know of her existence, and whilst they were looking at him, their teacher, with the taut expression of obedient attention, their minds might be indulging in lascivious thoughts about his marriage. They might be stripping him of the cover of his clothes, down to his gaunt flesh, and imagining him with Selma in those situations which brought him down to the level of a dog in the street. Once they knew Selma, once one of them had seen her in her close-fitting clothes which revealed her full, rounded shape, then these imaginings would have real flesh to feed on. They must not be allowed to see Selma. Like the commander of a besieged fortress, he must make the land all around, even fertile land, into a desert, using any means to render the enemy’s approach as difficult as possible.

There must be no other relationship between him and the boys than the professional one. The professional relationship had its norms, its fixed procedures. Once he had abandoned the ground on which these norms operated, a return was impossible. The impersonal relationship, independent of the individuals behind the roles of teacher and pupil, would have been replaced by a personal, individual one, and that for good. He had to be ruthless when the boys occasionally tried to entangle him, like a fish in the meshes of a net, in a private conversation. When they approached him, as he stood leaning against the wall in a corner of the long corridor during the break between lessons, he would turn them away with harsh words. He was not unaware of the articles people he had known as a student had published on the relationship between pupils and teachers. But there was no choice. The boys possessed the arrogance of the well-fed, the self-assurance of the well-dressed, their laughter would have destroyed him if they had been able to grasp the weakness they suspected within him.

There was one among them who did not wear a sailor suit. His name was Bohrer, Johann Bohrer. His father was a clerk in a lawyer’s office. Bohrer wore a brown jacket and long trousers. His sleeves had shiny patches at the elbows. His hands were not white like the other boys’, they were red, as if swollen by frost. Josef Blau avoided looking at this boy or addressing a question to him. He felt that Bohrer might suddenly get up from his seat, go up to Josef Blau, his teacher, and pat him familiarly on the shoulder, to roars of laughter from the rest of the class. He was afraid of the possibility that the boys might compare him, their teacher, with Bohrer, with whom they shared the food they brought for the break because they felt sorry for him. No one could understand his fear as well as Bohrer. Although he suspected what the answer would be, there was something stronger than him, something that brought him to the edge of the abyss, that made him ask Bohrer what he wanted to be when he left school. Bohrer did not raise his eyes as he replied in a low voice, as if he understood the shame it would bring Blau, that he wanted to be a teacher. For a moment Blau lost his composure. He felt for the wall behind him. He closed his eyes. But already a rustle of movement had arisen in the class and reached his ear. Was this the end? Did the boys now realise there was hardly any profession open to a clerk’s son who attended a high school than that of teacher? That Josef Blau’s profession was a profession for poor people? Would they see them together from now on, Josef Blau and Johann Bohrer with his hands swollen by frost? Would the shame remain with him for good?

He pulled himself together, his eye turned the restlessness back into rigidity. He realised he would have to resort to harsher measures in order to give his authority a firmer foundation. He thought of the means available to teachers of earlier generations, when they still had corporal punishment. They could have the punishment on one boy carried out by another, thus at the same time creating disunity among the boys, playing one off against the other, just as fate, to whom all humans are subject, plays one person off against another. Corporal punishment was more than other kinds of disciplinary action such as official reprimands, bad marks, detention or lines. They were punishments that did not hurt, that the boys’ arrogance could dismiss with a smile. Corporal punishment would have made the pupils’ physical subjection to the power of the teacher visibly apparent. Blau respected the principles that had led to the abolition of such punishments. He would nonetheless have employed them, had they been permitted, because the boys too would surely have used such means to destroy him. He would not have hesitated, since it was a matter of his livelihood. He had to suppress fits of leniency if he did not want to give up the fight for lost from the very outset. Josef Blau knew that the final catastrophe was inevitable but he fought for every hour of reprieve. He did not know where the horror would start. Danger loomed on many sides, in the world of the school and in the other world, which was not part of the school. Contact between these two worlds would have increased the danger, accelerated the catastrophe. He was aware he was grasping at straws in fighting against his fate. But straws were all there was to use against the law that was against him in all its cruel harshness.

He left the classroom with eighteen exercise books covered in blue paper under his arm. He heard the babble of voices that arose the moment the door closed behind him. Josef Blau could not see the boys any more, but he knew they had got up from their seats and were crowding round the desk where Karpel sat. At fifteen, Karpel was the oldest. Blau sensed that the enmity of the pupils towards him united and multiplied in Karpel. If the end were to come, and if it started here and not at home, the initial impulse would come from Karpel. Karpel’s face had lost the smooth, womanly look the other boys’ faces still had. It was pale and narrow, the nose was prominent and there were blue shadows under his eyes. The woolly black hairs sprouting from his cheeks made them seem grubby. The idea that this pupil’s body also already had male hair was disturbing, especially since Karpel wore the same low-cut suit as his classmates, as disturbing as the sight of a man dressed as a woman would be for a prudish person, since they would be afraid a part of the body with male hair might be exposed without warning.

Josef Blau felt the arrogance of this boy, who despised him, even if he had not yet expressed his contempt out loud. He was surely gathering his strength and his hatred of his teacher in order to let it break out when the time had come for him to give the others the sign to fall on their prey. The pupil had nothing to lose. If he was expelled from the school his rich father would find something else for him. But the teacher was armed. It was not going to be made easy for them under his gaze, which he never took off them, under his eye, which held and saw through them. Karpel lowered his head when Blau’s gaze met his. He hid his fingers under his desk when the teacher’s eye rested on him. Why did he not leave his hands, with their carefully manicured nails, lying there? What could the reason be for hiding them from the teacher’s view if not because he knew that Blau’s nails were not manicured, that the sight of his hands shamed the teacher and that the time to shame Blau had not yet come?

Josef Blau quickened his step. Already he could hear the noise of the boys approaching on the stairs above him. He went out into the street and stepped into the first entrance he came to. He wanted to let the boys pass him. Now they were coming out of the building. They did not see him, standing there in the dark archway. But he could see them, jumping down the steps from the school gate into the street, flexing and stretching their bodies. They swung their books fastened with a strap. They were standing opposite him, Karpel in the middle. Karpel said something and Blau, in the entrance on the other side of the street, heard the voices joined in laughter. Karpel stood there, his hands casually in his pockets, his books stuck carelessly under his left arm. That boy was experienced already. He had experienced forbidden lusts. Perhaps a woman even. Blau was ashamed of his pupil’s experience. Karpel was not ashamed. Karpel took a piece of paper out of his pocket. It went from hand to hand. The boys laughed. Without doubt it was an obscene drawing Karpel was showing them. Perhaps even one portraying him, Blau, their teacher drawn by the experienced Karpel, in a situation which exposed him to ridicule. Josef Blau could not step out, right in the middle of the boys, and confiscate the picture. He would have been crowded in from all sides. Scorn and arrogance in all of them. He would have been greeted with laughter, since for a moment they would still see him, the subject of the drawing, as Karpel had portrayed him. Out here there was no order to which the boys were subject, no order which kept the place facing the boys ready for him. Out here, among people, buildings, cars, in the noise of the street, he would have been forced to create that order. They were standing, their order was dissolved, they were in motion. Out here their victory over him was easy. He did not intend to let them achieve it like that.

Josef Blau waited. When the boys had gone he stepped out of the dark archway into the street.

Chapter Two

He had to cross the town to reach the house where he lived. He and Selma shared an apartment with her mother on the top floor of a tenement block. The building was black with the soot from the railway station opposite. Only where the plaster had come off the walls were there lighter patches among the darkness.

The whole of that side of the street was lined with similar buildings. Every floor was inhabited by several families. Red bedding hung out of the windows. Fat women without hats, their hair sparse and dishevelled, their blouses flapping loose round their waists, stood in the doorways carrying jugs and bags. Josef Blau went into the dark entrance. A smell of dampness and food permeated the whole building. The sound of voices, drowned by the long-drawn-out whining of small children and dogs, came from every apartment he passed.

Selma and her mother were not at home. Josef Blau ate his lunch in the living room. Martha, the maid, seventeen years old, small and flat-chested, the daughter of a neighbour, served his meal. On one side of the living room was the kitchen. Beyond the bedroom was Selma’s mother’s room, a narrow, one-windowed room with its own exit onto the landing. The living room had two windows. At one of the windows was Selma’s sewing table, where she had been working before she went out. There were pictures on the wall, one colour print showing a large assembly of men – a meeting of the Reichstag or a church council – and a few family photographs, a portrait of Selma’s mother when she was young and a picture of her late father, a powerfully built man with a shaggy moustache. The curtains were white, the walls decorated with a colourful pattern painted on the whitewash. Despite that, the room did not seem bright. The soot from the railway station came in through the windows, covering everything with a fine layer which took the shine off the colours and made them dull, grey, the one merging into the other. It was as if the colours lacked life, as if they had died under the layer of soot. They did not even come back to life when it was wiped off the furniture, pictures and walls with a duster. The windows faced north. The light was refracted in the station, its buildings, tracks, sheds and coal bunkers, before it could reach their apartment.

After Josef Blau had eaten, he spread the boys’ exercise books out on the table. He fetched red ink and a pen from a wooden shelf between the two windows. He cleaned the nib carefully on a piece of cloth he kept for that purpose and opened Blum’s exercise book, the first in alphabetical order.

It was quiet in the apartment. Josef Blau could hear nothing apart from the occasional clatter, as Martha put one plate on another in the kitchen, and the constant jumble of noise in the house. He tried not to think of Selma, of Selma coming up to him and pointing at her body, which was growing daily heavier, to drag a word out of him which he did not want to say. She did not understand that it was good to say nothing, apart from what was needful, since one never knew whether words might not turn into curses. He wanted to make use of the time before Selma came back with her mother. He wanted to go through the boys’ exercises calmly, book by book, mistake by mistake, to shut out everything else, only think of what was needful, required by duty, of the Latin sentences and nothing else.

He sat bent over the exercise books and drew red lines under what the boys had written. There were six simple sentences. But those who did not pay attention got caught in the traps the teacher had laid, one trap in each sentence. To his astonishment, Josef Blau saw that almost without exception the boys had avoided his traps. His astonishment was even greater when he noticed that all of them had fallen into one particular trap in the third sentence in the same way. He arranged the exercise books in the order in which the boys were seated in class. He was horrified. There was no doubt about it, they were all the same. Had the boys, under his gaze, which never left them for a moment, found a way of conspiring against him, had they used it? He realised that they were silently mocking him. He had proved weaker than their cunning. They sat there, only outwardly bent before him, only outwardly subject to him. The object of their cunning ruse was not to satisfy him with a correct piece of work, even if it was obtained by cheating. The object was to test him, his strength, his eye. He had failed the test. It could only make them bolder. It was doubtful whether Josef Blau could save himself, could suppress the imminent mutiny, even if he did manage to tear this plot apart the next morning and tried, with new, carefully thought out measures, to force the boys into subjection once more.

It was an underground conspiracy, a conspiracy under the desks, a conspiracy of naked calves when the upper bodies were bowed in obedience. There was only one possible way it had been done: the boys had put their legs together, stretched them forwards, sideways. The cribs were passed on and received stuck in their short socks and down the side of their boots. The rigidity and motionlessness was only above the desks, below the surface was movement and anarchy. His eye had no power underneath the desks. While the heads and chests obeyed, the naked legs were in revolt. It was the beginning. Discipline was crumbling from below, even while he was there, believing it was firm, believing no sign of movement could escape his notice. They did not fear him when he was standing facing them. What happened when they were removed from his gaze?

Josef Blau stood up. He went to the window. The tangle of rails as they converged in the station was spread out before him. He had not seen any of the pupils on his way home. They were not following his footsteps. But perhaps they were lurking round the house. Perhaps they were lying in wait for Selma, had already descended on Selma, whispered to her that he had a ridiculous nickname, that he was afraid of the pupils, but that the pupils would destroy him, without mercy, when the time came. Perhaps they had pushed pictures into her hand, pictures in which he, Josef Blau, was caricatured, was shown as a miserable, hairy bag of bones, perhaps together with her, who had been made gross and swollen by him. They would definitely sense that he was attached to her, that his life depended on her. The boys were cruel and lecherous. They would not spare Selma. Spurred on by the sight of her pregnant body, the boys’ lecherousness would wallow in images of her intercourse with him, the consequences of which were visible. Perhaps Karpel, who was experienced in lust, was whispering to Selma that other men were stronger in their virility and that she, Selma, was beautiful, had a magnificent body and would only wither beside him.

He was the son of a court usher in a small town. He was skinny, yellow and pathetic. His skin was rough, as if it were covered in semolina. His bobbling Adam’s apple stuck out of his scrawny neck like a second chin. He had never uncovered his body before her in the light. Her skin was white and smooth. Her body was rounded, with firm flesh. What did he want from her? He came up to her forehead, just below her fair hair, which was combed back and tied in a thick bun over her neck. When she walked, her broad hips swayed, like those of women carrying jars on their heads. Her red lips were always slightly parted, revealing the gleam of her moist white teeth. He knew that men turned to look at her when she passed them in the street. They were men with smiles on their faces, men who could make their flesh go rock hard when they flexed their muscles They were men who waved and smiled at women. Perhaps Selma was already comparing him with one who was taller, stronger, more virile than he was. Had she already realised how pathetic his body was and that his spirit was too weak to let him rise up and make her forget the feebleness of his body? He knew that he had to put up a fight if he did not want to lose Selma. Even if the man who would tear her away from him was bound to come, Josef Blau was determined to apply all his powers of reason and method to delaying the moment. He had to keep his eye on her, nothing must escape him, no change of expression, no look, he had to get to the deepest unconscious meaning of every word she spoke, every sigh she gave, if he was to see the sign that she was slipping away from him in time.