The Dedalus Meyrink Reader E-Book

Gustav Meyrink

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

An anthology of Meyrink' s work, novels, short stories & essays. Gustav Meyrink is one of the most important and interesting authors of early 20th-century German Literature. To establish his reputation in the English-speaking world Dedalus has translated his five novels plus a collection of his short stories and published the first ever English-language biography of Meyrink. Now is the time to produce an overview of Meyrink in a single volume. The Dedalus Meyrink Reader has excerpts from all the translated books and a whole section of hitherto untranslated material, including the stories from the collection Fledermäuse and autobiographical articles. This volume is perfect companion for both the Meyrink scholar and the first-time Meyrink reader, containing as it does the whole gamut of Meyrink's writing from his love of the bizarre, the grotesque and the macabre to the spine-chilling occult tales and his quest to know what is on the Other Side of the Mirror. Novelist, satirist, translator of Charles Dickens, dandy, man-about-time, fencer, rower, banker and mystic seer, there are many, sometimes contradictory aspects to Gustav Meyrink, who must also be the only novelist to have challenged a whole army regiment to a duel. He has left behind a unique body of work, which can be sampled and enjoyed in The Dedalus Meyrink Reader.

Leseprobe

Dedalus would like to thank The Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture for its assistance in producing this book.

Contents

Title

Dedication

Foreword

The Editor

      Part 1 (Previously untranslated works)

SHORT STORIES

1.Cricket Magic

2.How Dr Job Paupersum Gave his Daughter Red Roses

3.Amadeus Knödlseder, the Incorrigible Bearded Vulture

4.J. H. Obereit’s Visit to the Time-Leeches

5.Cardinal Napellus

6.The Four Moon Brethren

7.My Torments and Delights in the World Beyond

8.Herr Kuno Hinrichsen, Businessman, and the Penitent, Lala Lajpat-Rai

9.The Clockmaker

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ARTICLES

10.The City with the Secret Heartbeat

11.The Pilot

12.The Transformation of the Blood

UNFINISHED NOVEL

13.The Alchemist’s House — Chapter 3 ‘Ismene’

      Part 2 (Extracts from previously translated works)

NOVELS

14.The Golem — extract from the chapter ‘Ghosts’

15.The Green Face — ‘Conclusion’

16.Walpurgisnacht — Chapter 3: ‘The Dalibor Tower’

17.The White Dominican — Chapter 3: ‘The Nightwalk’

18.The Angel of the West Window — ‘The Conjuration of the Angel of the West Window’

STORIES* (Translated by Maurice Raraty)

19.Petroleum, Petroleum

20.Blamol

21.Dr Cinderella’s Plants

22.The Ring of Saturn

BIOGRAPHY

23.Vivo: The Life of Gustav Meyrink — ‘The Duel Affair’

‘Prison’

24.Editor’s Notes

Copyright

*All translations are by Mike Mitchell unless otherwise stated.

The Editor

For many years an academic with a special interest in Austrian literature and culture, Mike Mitchell has been a freelance literary translator since 1995. He is one of Dedalus’s editorial directors and is responsible for the Dedalus translation programme.

He has published over fifty translations from German and French, including Gustav Meyrink’s five novels and The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy. His translation of Rosendorfer’s Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize after he had been shortlisted in previous years for his translations of Stephanie by Herbert Rosendorfer and The Golem by Gustav Meyrink.

His translations have been shortlisted three times for The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize: Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen in 1999, The Other Side by Alfred Kubin in 2000 and The Bells of Bruges by Georges Rodenbach in 2008.

His biography of Gustav Meyrink: Vivo: The Life of Gustav Meyrink was published by Dedalus in November 2008. He has recently edited and translated The Dedalus Meyrink Reader.

Foreword

The Dedalus Meyrink Reader contains both material that has not previously been published in English and extracts from works that have already appeared in English. The new material comprises the stories from the anthology Fledermäuse (Bats), apart from ‘Meister Leonhard’, which is contained in The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy: 1890-2000, ‘The Clockmaker’, a chapter from the unfinished novel The Alchemist’s House and three autobiographical articles. Fledermäuse, published in 1916, signifies a move away from the style of Meyrink’s early stories, with their emphasis on the satirical, the grotesque and the macabre, to a more intense engagement with the occult; some also reflect his response to the horrors of the First World War.

The autobiographical articles were written in the later 1920s, though ‘The Pilot’, unpublished in Meyrink’s lifetime, was probably written in 1930/31. The longest of these pieces, ‘The Transformation of the Blood’ goes into great detail about Meyrink’s lifelong preoccupation with esoteric knowledge, especially yoga.

These articles are followed by extracts from Meyrink’s five novels, as well as four stories from his earlier period, which were collected in Des deutschen Spießers Wunderhorn (The German Bourgeois’ Magic Horn, 1913).

Part 1

Cricket Magic

‘Well?’ the men asked with one voice when Professor Goclenius entered, walking faster than usual and looking noticeably distraught, ‘Well, did they release the letters? — Is Skoper already on his way back to Europe? — How is he? — Have his collections come as well?’ The questions all came at once.

‘Only this here,’ the Professor said. Beside the bundle of letters he put on the table, he placed a small jar containing a whitish dead insect the size of a stag beetle. ‘The Chinese ambassador himself handed it over. He said it had arrived today, having for some reason come via Denmark.’

‘I fear he’s heard bad news about poor old Skoper,’ a clean-shaven man whispered behind his hand to the man sitting next to him, an elderly scholar with flowing locks who — both prepared specimens for the Science Museum — had pushed his spectacles up onto his forehead and was examining the insect with keen interest.

It was a strange room where the six men, all specialists in entomology, were sitting. There was a musty smell of camphor and sandalwood, which only served to intensify the exotically macabre atmosphere created by the porcupine fish hanging from the ceiling — goggle-eyed, like the cut-off heads of a ghostly audience — by the garishly painted red and white demon masks of savage island tribes, by the ostrich eggs, hyraxes, narwhal tusks, contorted monkeys’ bodies and all the other grotesque shapes from distant zones.

Hanging on the walls above worm-eaten brown cupboards that had a somewhat monastic look, in the putrid evening light pouring in from the overgrown museum garden through the potbellied barred window, were faded, larger-than-life pictures of bark beetles and mole crickets, lovingly framed in gold like revered ancestral portraits.

Crooking its arm invitingly, an embarrassed smile playing round its goitrous nose and circular, glassy eyes, the museum assistant’s top hat on its head and dry snakeskins dangling round it, a sloth leant forward from its corner, perfectly aping an ancient village schoolmaster being photographed for the first time.

Its tail disappearing in the distant shadows of the corridor and its vital parts, following a request from the minister of education, in the course of being varnished, the pride of the institute, a forty-foot-long crocodile, stared in through the connecting door with its perfidious feline gaze.

Professor Goclenius had sat down, untied the string round the bundle of letters and glanced through the first lines, muttering to himself.

‘It’s dated from Bhutan, 1 July 1914 — that is four weeks before the war broke out — so it must have taken more than a year to get here,’ he said to the assembled group. ‘Our old colleague, Johannes Skoper, writes:

I will give a full account of the wealth of specimens I have found on my long journey from the Chinese border, through Assam, to the so far unexplored country of Bhutan in my next report. Today I just want to describe briefly the bizarre circumstances surrounding the discovery of a hitherto unknown white cricket — Professor Goclenius pointed to the insect in the jar — which the shamans use for their superstitious practices. It is called Phak, which is also an insulting name for anything resembling a European or other person of white race.

One morning I heard from some Lamaist pilgrims, who were heading for Lhasa, that not far from my campsite was a very high dugpa — one of those satanic priests feared throughout Tibet. They can be recognised by their scarlet caps and claim to be direct descendants of the demon of the fly agaric. However that may be, the dugpas are said to belong to the ancient Tibetan religion of the Bhons, of which we know as good as nothing, and to be descended from a foreign race, the origins of which are lost in the mists of time. This dugpa, the pilgrims told me, whirling their little prayer wheels in superstitious awe, was a Samtsheh Mitshebat, that is a being that can no longer be described as human with the power to ‘bind and loose’, a being, to put it briefly, with the capacity to see time and space for the illusions they are and for whom, therefore, nothing was impossible here on earth. There were, I was told, two ways to climb the steps leading beyond humanity: one, the ‘path of light’, leading to union with the Buddha, and a second one taking the opposite direction, the ‘path of the left hand’, to which only a born dugpa knew the entrance, a spiritual path full of horror and dread. Although very infrequent, they went on, such ‘born’ dugpas were to be found in all parts of the world and, strangely enough, were almost always the children of especially pious people.

‘It is as if the Lord of Darkness had grafted a scion onto the tree of saintliness,’ the pilgrim who told me this said. ‘There is only one way by which one can tell that a child is spiritually part of the clan of dugpas: if the whorl of hair on the crown of its head goes from left to right instead of from right to left.’

I immediately expressed the wish — purely out of curiosity — to meet this dugpa, but my guide, himself from East Tibet, resisted the idea stubbornly. It was all nonsense, there were no dugpas at all in Bhutan, he kept shouting, and anyway a dugpa, especially a Samtsheh Mitshebat, would never reveal his arts to a white man.

The man’s dogged resistance made me all the more suspicious and after hours of argument that went to and fro I got him to admit that he was a member of the Bhon religion himself and knew very well — from the reddish colour of the fumes the soil gave off, he tried to tell me — that there was an ‘initiate’ dugpa living in the vicinity.

‘But he’ll never reveal his arts to you,’ was his constant refrain.

‘Why ever not?’ I finally asked.

‘Because he will refuse to accept responsibility.’

‘What responsibility?” I insisted.

‘The disruption he created in the realm of causes would mean he would once more be caught up in the maelstrom of reincarnation, if not something even worse.’

I was keen to learn more about the mysterious Bhon religion, so I asked, ‘According to your faith, does a human have a soul?’

‘Yes and no.’

‘How do you mean?’

In answer the Tibetan plucked a blade of grass and made a knot in it. ‘Has the blade of grass a knot now?’

‘Yes.’

He undid the knot. ‘And now?’

‘Not any more.’

‘In just the same way a human has a soul and has no soul,’ he said simply.

I tried a different way of getting a clear idea of his views. ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘let’s assume you fell off that narrow mountain pass we crossed recently’ — it wasn’t more than a foot wide — ‘would your soul have lived on or not?’

‘I wouldn’t have fallen off.’

Trying another tack, I pointed at my revolver and said, ‘If I were to shoot you dead, would you live on or not?’

‘You can’t shoot me dead.’

‘Yes I can.’

‘Try it, then.’

I’ll do nothing of the sort, I thought, a fine mess that would leave me in, wandering round these boundless highlands without a guide. He seemed to be able to read my thoughts and gave a scornful grin. I remained silent for a while.

He suddenly went on: ‘It’s just that you can’t “will” anything to happen,’ he said. ‘Behind your will there are wishes, some you’re aware of and others you’re not, but both are stronger than you are.’

‘So what is the soul according to your faith,’ I asked, irritated. ‘Have I a soul, for example?’

‘Yes.’

‘And will my soul live on after I die?’

‘No.’

‘But you think yours will live on after you die?’

‘Yes. Because I have a name.’

‘What do you mean, a name? I’ve got a name too.’

‘Yes, but you don’t know your true name, so you don’t possess it. What you think of as your name is just an empty word that your parents thought up. You forget it when you sleep. I don’t forget my name when I sleep.’

‘But when you’re dead you won’t know it any more,’ I objected.

‘No. But the Master will know it and not forget it, and when he calls it, I will rise again. But only me, not anyone else, for only I have my name, no one else has it. What you call your name you share with many others — just like dogs,’ he muttered contemptuously to himself. I could understand what he said, but didn’t show it.

‘What do you understand by the “Master”?’ I asked with apparent casualness.

‘The Samtsheh Mitshebat.’

‘The one near here?’

‘Yes, but the one nearby is only his reflection. The one he really is, is everywhere. He can also be nowhere if he wills it.’

‘So he can make himself invisible?’ I couldn’t repress a smile. ‘You mean now he’s inside the universe, now outside? Now he’s there, now he isn’t?’

‘But a name’s only there when it’s spoken and not there when it’s not spoken,’ the Tibetan countered.

‘And can you, for example, become a “Master” as well?’

‘Yes.’

‘So then there’ll be two Masters, eh?’

Inwardly I was jubilant. To be honest I was fed up with the fellow’s intellectual arrogance and now I’d caught him out, I thought my next question would have been: if one of the masters wants to make the sun shine and the other wants it to rain, who’ll win? I was, therefore, all the more nonplussed by his strange answer: ‘If I am the Master, then I am the Samtsheh Mitshebat. Or do you think there can be two things that are completely alike, without them being one and the same thing?’

‘But there would still be two of you, not just the one. If I were to meet the pair of you, I would meet two people, not one,’ I objected.

The Tibetan bent down and searched among the piles of calcspar crystals lying around until he found a particularly transparent one and handed it to me, saying mockingly, ‘Hold that in front of your eye and look at the tree over there. You can see two of them, can’t you? But does that mean it’s two trees?’

I couldn’t think of an immediate answer and, anyway, I would have found it difficult to pursue a reasoned discussion of such a complex subject in Mongolian, which we were speaking, so I let him enjoy his little victory. Inwardly, however, I could not overcome my astonishment at the mental agility of this semi-savage with his slanting Mongol eyes and filthy sheepskin coat. There is something strange about these highland Asians, outwardly they look like animals, but once they open up their minds to you, a philosopher appears.

I returned to the starting point of our whole conversation. ‘So you think the dugpa wouldn’t reveal his arts to me because he refuses to accept the responsibility?’

‘That’s right, he wouldn’t.’

‘But what if I were to accept the responsibility?’

For the first time since I’d known him, the Tibetan lost his composure. He could scarcely control the agitation which animated his features. His expression wavered between inexplicable, savage cruelty and gloating malice. During our many months together we had confronted all kinds of extreme danger, we had traversed terrifying abysses on swaying bridges of bamboo not more than a foot wide that froze the blood in my veins, we had almost died of thirst crossing deserts, but never had he lost his inner calm, not even for a moment. And now? What could it be that had sent him into such turmoil? I could almost see the thoughts buzzing round and round in his head.

‘Take me to the dugpa,’ I said insistently, ‘you’ll be well rewarded.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ he answered after some reflection.

In the middle of the night he woke me in my tent. He was ready to do it, he said.

He’d saddled two of our shaggy Mongol horses, that aren’t much bigger than large dogs, and we rode off into the dark. The men in my caravan were lying, fast asleep, round the glowing embers of the fire.

Hours passed without a word being said between us. The characteristic musky smell given off by the Tibetan steppes on July nights and the monotonous swish of the broom as the horses’ legs swept through it was almost overpowering; to stay awake I had to keep my eyes fixed on the stars which, in these savage highlands, have a blazing, flickering quality, like burning scraps of paper. They have a disturbing influence, filling one with unease.

When dawn crept over the mountain tops, I noticed that the Tibetan’s eyes were wide open and permanently fixed, without blinking, on a point in the sky. He was, I could tell, in a trance.

Did he know the place where the dugpa was staying so well that he didn’t need to look where he was going? I asked several times without getting a reply. Finally he spoke, his voice slurred, as if he were asleep: ‘He draws me to him, just as a lodestone attracts iron.’

We didn’t even stop for lunch, without a word he kept spurring his horse on. I had to eat the few pieces of dried goat’s meat I had with me in the saddle.

Towards evening we came round the foot of a bare hill and stopped by one of those fantastic tents that are sometimes to be seen in Bhutan. They are black, pointed at the top, hexagonal below, with the sides curled up at the bottom. Supported by tall poles, they look like giant spiders with their bellies on the ground.

I had expected to meet a grubby shaman with matted hair and beard, one of those crazy or epileptic creatures that are frequently to be found among the Mongols and Tungus. They drug themselves with a decoction of the fly agaric mushroom and see imaginary spirits or utter incomprehensible prophecies. Instead, the man standing before me — motionless — was a good six foot tall, strikingly slender in build, clean shaven, with an olive-greenish sheen to his complexion, a colour I’ve never previously seen on the face of a living man, and eyes that were slanting and unnaturally far apart — a racial type completely unknown to me. His lips, like the skin of his face perfectly smooth as if made of porcelain, were bright red, razor-thin and so curved, especially where they rose up high at the corners in what seemed like a pitiless frozen smile, that they looked as if they’d been painted on.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the dugpa, not for a long time; thinking back to it, I’m tempted to say that I felt like a child, breathless with horror at the sight of a fearful mask suddenly emerging from the darkness.

On his head the dugpa had a close-fitting scarlet cap with no brim; otherwise he was entirely clothed in a costly sable fur dyed orange which came down to his ankles.

There were no words spoken between him and my guide, but I assume they communicated by secret gestures for, without asking what I wanted, the dugpa turned to me and said, unprompted, that he was ready to show me whatever I wanted, but I had to agree to accept all the responsibility, even if I did not know what that entailed.

I — naturally — immediately expressed my readiness.

As a token of that he demanded I touch the ground with my left hand.

I did so.

Without another word he set off in front of us and we followed for a short distance until he told us to sit down. We squatted by a small mound resembling a table.

Did I have a white cloth?

In vain I looked through my pockets, but all I could find was a faded old folding map of Europe in the lining of my coat — it must have been hidden there all the time I was travelling round Asia. I spread it out between us and explained to the dugpa that it showed the place where I came from.

He exchanged a quick glance with my guide and once more the Tibetan’s face was briefly suffused with the expression full of hatred and malice that had struck me the previous evening.

Would I like to see cricket magic?

I nodded. It was immediately clear to me what was to come, a well-known trick, luring insects out of the ground by whistling or something like that.

And I wasn’t wrong. With a little silver bell these shamans carry hidden about their person the dugpa made a soft, metallic chirping noise and immediately a mass of crickets came swarming out of their holes in the ground and crawled up onto the faded map.

More and more.

Countless insects.

I was starting to get annoyed, having endured a tedious ride for a trivial display I’d seen often enough in China, but then I realised that what I was seeing was ample compensation for all the discomfort: the crickets were not just a hitherto unrecorded species — which was interesting enough in itself — but their behaviour was highly unusual. Scarcely had they crawled onto the map than they started running round and round aimlessly in circles, then they formed into groups which surveyed each other suspiciously. Suddenly a rainbow of light appeared in the middle of the map — it came from a prism the dugpa was holding up to the sun, as I quickly established — and within a few seconds the hitherto peaceful crickets had turned into a mass of insect bodies tearing each other apart in the most horrible way. It was such a revolting sight, I prefer not to describe it. The buzzing of the thousands upon thousands of wings produced a high humming note which went right through me, a shrill mixture of fiendish hatred and mortal anguish I shall never be able to forget.

I commanded the dugpa to put an end to it immediately. Having already returned the prism to its pocket, he simply shrugged his shoulders.

In vain I tried to force the crickets apart with a stick; the blind frenzy of killing was unstoppable. New hordes kept arriving and the foul, wriggling mass grew bigger and bigger until it was the height of a man. As far as the eye could see, the ground was teeming with maddened insects. A whitish swarm, squashed together, pressing towards the middle, impelled by just the one thought: kill, kill, kill.

Some of the crickets that fell off the pile were so seriously maimed they couldn’t crawl back up and tore themselves to pieces with their pincers. At times the humming note was so loud and so horribly shrill that I felt I couldn’t stand it any longer and put my hands over my ears.

Finally, thank God, the insects grew fewer and fewer, the swarms crawling out of the earth seemed to get thinner and eventually stopped entirely.

‘What’s he doing now?’ I asked my guide, when I saw that the dugpa was showing no sign of moving. Instead he seemed to be making great efforts to concentrate his thoughts on something. He had drawn up his top lip so that I could clearly see his sharpened teeth. They were pitch black, presumably from the betel chewing that is customary here.

‘He is binding and loosing,’ I heard the Tibetan reply.

Despite the fact that I kept telling myself that it was only insects that had died there, I felt completely drained and close to fainting, so that his voice sounded as if it came from far away: ‘He is binding and loosing.’

I didn’t understand what he meant by that and I still don’t understand today. Nothing more worth mentioning happened, but I continued to sit there, perhaps for hours, why I couldn’t say. I had lost the will to stand up, that’s the only way I can describe it.

Gradually the sun sank and the clouds and countryside all around took on that improbably lurid red and orange colour familiar to all those who have been to Tibet. To give an impression, the only comparison is the crudely painted walls of the menageries of travelling circuses in Europe.

I could not get the words ‘He is binding and loosing’ out of my mind, little by little they built up into fearful imaginings: the twitching heap of crickets turned into millions of dying soldiers. I was so weighed down with an immense, mysterious feeling of responsibility I could hardly breathe, and what made it all the more tormenting was the fact that I looked in vain for the cause.

Then it seemed as if the dugpa had suddenly disappeared, to be replaced by a repulsive statue, all scarlet and olive green, of the Tibetan God of War. I fought against it until my eyes could fix on the real world again, but it did not seem real enough to me: the fumes rising from the ground, the jagged icy peaks of the mountains soaring above the distant horizon, the dugpa with his red cap, myself in my half European, half Tibetan clothes, the black tent with the spider’s legs — all that could surely not be real. Reality, imagination, vision? What was truth, what was illusion? And the abyss that kept yawning in my thoughts whenever the choking fear of the incomprehensible, terrible feeling of responsibility welled up inside me once more!

Later, much later, on the journey back, the incident grew in my memory like some rampant poisonous plant which I couldn’t pull up, try as I would.

At night, when I can’t get to sleep, a dreadful suspicion of what ‘He is binding and loosing’ might mean slowly starts to dawn on me. I try to stifle it, just as you try to smother a fire that has broken out, to stop it being spelt out explicitly. But it’s no use resisting, in my mind’s eye I can see reddish vapour rising from from the heap of dead crickets and forming banks of cloud which, darkening the sky like the grim harbingers of the monsoon, are pouring westwards.

And now, as I write this, once more I’m overcome with — with —

‘The letter appears to break off at that point,’ Professor Goclenius said. ‘And unfortunately it is now my sad duty to tell you what I learnt at the Chinese embassy about the unexpected death of our dear colleague, so far away in Asia …’ The professor got no farther, he was interrupted by a loud cry: ‘Incredible! The cricket’s still alive! After a whole year! Incredible! Catch it. It’s flying away.’ The men were all shouting at once. The scholar with the flowing locks had opened the little jar and shaken the apparently dead insect out.

The next moment the cricket had flown out of the window into the garden.

The entomologists were in such a hurry to catch it, they almost knocked Demetrius, the old museum attendant, flat on his back as he came in to light the lamp.

Shaking his head, the old man watched them prancing around outside with their butterfly nets. Then he looked up at the evening sky and muttered, ‘What strange shapes the clouds have during these terrible days of war. There’s one there that looks just like a man with a green face and a red cap. If his eyes weren’t so far apart it could almost be a human being. It’s enough to make a man superstitious after all these years.’

How Dr Job Paupersum gave his Daughter Red Roses

Sitting motionless and staring into space late one night in the sumptuous Café Stefanie in Munich was an old man of the most remarkable appearance. The threadbare tie, that had taken on a life of its own, and the massive domed forehead with hair flowing down to the back of his neck indicated a distinguished scholar.

The old gentleman possessed little in the way of worldly goods, apart from a sparse silver Vandyke, which, from its source among seven warts on his chin, just reached down to that point of his waistcoat where unworldly thinkers generally have a button missing.

If truth be told, that was the sum total of his worldly possessions. When, therefore, the snappily dressed professional gentleman with the pince-nez and black waxed moustache at the corner table diagonally opposite, who up to that point had devoured a portion of cold salmon, lifting each mouthful to his lips on the point of his knife (each time a diamond the size of a cherry glinted on his elegantly extended little finger) and now and then casting protuberantly searching glances in his direction — when, therefore, this gentleman wiped his lips, stood up, crossed the almost empty café, bowed and said, ‘Would you be interested in a game of chess, sir? At one mark per game, perhaps?’ Paupersum’s reaction was all the more eager.

Vivid phantasmagoria of all kinds of opulence and indulgence appeared before the scholar’s mind’s eye and even as an inner voice whispered, ‘God must have sent me this chump,’ his lips were already commanding the waiter, who had just come bustling up and set off, as was his wont, a range of faults in the electric light bulbs, ‘Julius! A chessboard. ’

‘If I’m not mistaken, it’s Dr Paupersum I have the pleasure of addressing?’ was the opening conversational gambit of the professional gentleman with the waxed moustache.

‘Job … yes, er, yes, Job Paupersum,’ the scholar admitted abstractedly, for he was spellbound by the magnificence of the whopping great emerald, in the shape of a car headlamp, on the tie-pin adorning the throat of his opponent. Only the arrival of the chessboard released him from the spell and in no time at all the pieces were set up, the loose knights fixed with spittle and the missing castle replaced by a bent matchstick.

After his third move the professional gentleman divested himself of his pince-nez, adopted the classical thinker’s pose and fell into brooding lucubration.

‘He must be trying to find the most stupid move on the board. I can’t think why else he’s taking so long,’ Paupersum muttered to himself, staring absent-mindedly at the lady in lurid green silk, the only other living being in the room apart from himself and the professional gentleman, who was sitting in solitary splendour on the sofa, like the goddess on the front page of Over Land and Sea, attacking a plate of cream horns, her cool woman’s heart secure behind a hundred pounds of fat.

‘I give up,’ the gentleman with the emerald headlamp finally announced, pushed the pieces together, produced a gold case from somewhere inside his jacket, fished out a visiting card and handed it to Paupersum, who read:

Zenon Savanievski

Impresario for Freak Shows

‘Hmm. Yeees. Hmm — for freaks hmm — for freaks.’ For a while Paupersum kept repeating the word vacuously, then, his mind on building up capital, he raised his voice and asked, ‘But don’t you fancy a few more games?’

‘Certainly. Of course. As many as you like,’ the professional gentleman said politely, ‘but shouldn’t we discuss some more lucrative business first?’

‘Some more — more lucrative business?’ the scholar exclaimed, faint wrinkles of suspicion appearing at the corners of his eyes.

‘I happen to have heard —’ the impresario went on, ordering with graphic gestures a bottle of wine and one glass from the waiter, ‘— quite by chance I happen to have heard that despite your eminence as a scientist you have no position at the moment?’

‘Oh yes I have. I spend the day wrapping comforts for the troops and putting stamps on them.’

‘And that keeps body and soul together?’

‘Only insofar as licking the stamps provides a certain amount of carbohydrates for my organism.’

‘But then why don’t you make use of your knowledge of languages instead? As an interpreter in a prisoner-of-war camp, for example?’

‘Because I’ve only learnt Old Korean, regional variants of Spanish, Urdu, three Eskimo languages together with a few dozen dialects of Swahili and at the moment we are unfortunately not at war with those peoples.’

‘Serves you right for not learning French, Russian, English and Serbian,’ the impresario muttered.

‘If I had, it would just mean the war would have broken out with the Eskimos instead of the French,’ the scholar objected.

‘Really? Hmm.’

‘Yes, my dear sir, there’s no hmm about it, that’s the way things are.’

‘Personally, in your situation, Herr Doktor, I’d have tried to place articles on the war with some newspaper or other. All made up, of course, you wouldn’t have to leave your study.’

‘I’ve tried that,’ the old man wailed, ‘reports from the front, concise and factual, touchingly simple in tone, but —’

‘Are you crazy?’ the impresario broke in. ‘Reports from the front concise and simple in tone?! When you write reports from the front you pull out all the stops. You should have —’

Dr Paupersum dismissed his advice with a wave of the hand. ‘I’ve tried everything humanly possible. When it was impossible to find a publisher for my book On the Probable Use of Sand for Blotting in Prehistoric China, an exhaustive four-volume treatment of the subject, I turned to chemistry’ — simply watching the other man drink the wine loosened Dr Paupersum’s tongue — ‘and quickly invented a new way of hardening steel…’

‘Well that must have brought in the money!’ the impresario exclaimed.

‘No. A manufacturer I showed my invention advised me not to bother patenting it (later on he patented it himself). He said you could only earn money with small inventions that didn’t attract your colleagues’ notice and arouse their envy. I took his advice and invented the famous folding confirmation chalice with automatic rising bottom to make it easier for the Methodist missionaries to convert savage tribes.’

‘And?’

‘I was sent to prison for two years for blasphemy.’

‘Go on, Herr Doktor,’ the impresario said encouragingly, ‘this is all fascinating.’

‘Oh, I could go on for days about hopes that came to nothing. For example, in order to get a scholarship a well-known patron of science had announced, I spent several years studying in the Museum of Ethnology. The result was a book that attracted a great deal of attention: How, According to the Shape of the Palate in Peruvian Mummies, the Incas Would Probably have Pronounced the Word Huitzitopochtli, if the Word had been Current in Peru instead of in Mexico.’

‘And were you awarded the scholarship?’

‘No. The patron of science told me — this was before the war — that at the moment he was short of money. Moreover, he was a pacifist and had to save up because the most important thing was to consolidate Germany’s good relations with France in order to preserve the humanitarian work and ideals that had been established at such great effort.’

‘But then when the war broke out you’d have prospects of getting the scholarship?’

‘No. He said said that now he had to save more than ever so he could make his own small contribution to making sure the old enemy was vanquished for good.’

‘Well, I’m sure your luck’ll be in once the war’s over, Herr Doktor.’

‘No. Then he’ll say he really has to save so that all the humanitarian work and ideals, that have been destroyed, can be built up again and good relations between the nations can be re-established once more.’

The impresario thought for a long while, then asked in sympathetic tones, ‘How is it you’ve never shot yourself?’

‘Shot myself? To earn money?’

‘No, no. I mean … er, well … I mean it’s remarkable that you’ve never lost heart, that you keep going back into the fray.’

At once Paupersum became restless. A fearful flicker animated his expression, which up to that point had been fixed, as if carved from wood. A similar wild glint, a look of agony, of profound, mute hopelessness, can be seen in the eyes of frightened animals on the edge of the cliff, with their pursuers behind them, before they plunge into the abyss so as not to fall into the hands of their tormentors. Twitching, as if with repressed sobs, his skinny fingers scrabbled round on the table, seeming to look for something to hold on to. The crease running from his nose to his mouth suddenly lengthened and stiffened, twisting his lips as if he were fighting against paralysis. He swallowed a few times.

‘Ah, now I know,’ — the words came haltingly, as if he had to struggle to stop himself slurring them — ‘now I know, you’re selling insurance. I’ve spent half my life trying to avoid meeting someone like you.’ (In vain the impresario tried to interrupt, and raised both his hands and eyebrows in protest.) ‘You’re implying I should take out insurance and then find some way of killing myself so that — yes, so that my child at least can live and won’t have to starve to death with me. Don’t say anything. Do you think I don’t know that nothing can be kept secret from you people? You’ve dug invisible passages from house to house and you peer, beady-eyed, into the rooms where there’s money to be made, so that you know everything about us: where a child’s been born, how many pennies this or that man has in his purse, whether he’s thinking of getting married or going on a dangerous journey. You keep tabs on us and you sell each other our addresses. And you, you look into my heart and read the thought that has been eating away at me for ten long years. Do you think I’m such a miserable egoist that I wouldn’t have long since taken out insurance and shot myself for my daughter’s sake — off my own bat and without any of you, who intend to cheat us and cheat your own company, who cheat here, there and everywhere, telling me how to do it so that nothing would come out? Do you think I don’t know that when … when the deed’s done you’d be off in a flash to tell them — for another cut, of course: “It’s a case of suicide, you don’t need to pay out.” Do you think I can’t see — as everyone can — my dear daughter’s hands getting whiter and whiter and more transparent with every day that passes, do you think I don’t know what it means when she has dry, feverish lips and coughs during the night? Even if I were a scoundrel like you people, in order to buy medicine and nourishing food I’d have long since… But I know what would happen, the money would never be paid out and… and then… no, no, it doesn’t bear thinking about!’

Again the impresario tried to interrupt to allay the suspicion he was an insurance broker, but his courage failed him when the scholar clenched his fist threateningly.

After a series of gesticulations which were totally incomprehensible, Dr Paupersum muttered, ‘No, I must consider some other way of finding help,’ — it was clearly the end of a train of thought that had been going through his mind — ‘the business with the Ambras giants, for example.’

‘The Ambras giants! That’s it! That’s what I wanted to ask you about.’ Now there was no stopping the impresario. ‘What is this business with the Ambras giants? I know you once wrote an article about them. But why aren’t you drinking, Herr Doktor? Julius, quick, another glass.’

Immediately Dr Paupersum was once more the scholar.

‘The Ambras giants,’ he said in a voice now devoid of emotion, ‘were misshapen people with immense hands and feet. The only place they occurred was the Tyrolean village of Ambras, which suggested it was a very rare form of disease caused by a pathogen which would only be found in that one place, since it obviously didn’t thrive elsewhere. But I was the first person to prove that the pathogen was to be found in a local spring, which in the meantime has almost dried up. Certain experiments I carried out indicate that I could prove this by using myself as a guinea pig; within a few months my own body — despite my advanced age — would show similar and even more extreme malformations.’

‘Such as?’ the impresario asked eagerly.

‘My nose would undoubtedly grow longer by eight or nine inches and start to resemble a trunk, perhaps somewhat like that of the South American capybara, my ears would expand to the size of plates, and in three months at most my hands would be the size of an average palm leaf (lodoicea sechellarum), whilst my feet would unfortunately scarcely exceed the dimensions of the lid of a 100-litre barrel. My theoretical calculations concerning the expected bulbous growths on the knees, in the manner of the Central European bracket fungus, are still in progress so I cannot absolutely guarantee —’

‘Enough, enough! You’re the man for me,’ the impresario broke in breathlessly. ‘No, please don’t interrupt. To put it in a nutshell: are you willing to carry out the experiment on yourself if I guarantee you a yearly income of half a million, with an advance of a few thousand — well, let’s say… let’s say five hundred marks?’

Dr Paupersum was struck dumb. He closed his eyes. Five hundred marks! Was there that much money in the world?

For a few minutes he visualised himself transformed into an antediluvian monstrosity with a long trunk; already he could hear a negro, in the gaudy attire of a fairground barker, bawling out at a sweaty, beer-sodden crowd, ‘Roll up, roll up, ladies an’ gen’lmen! Only a measly ten pfennigs to see the most ’ideous monster of the century!’ Then he saw his darling daughter, restored to health, dressed in white silk, blissfully kneeling at the altar, the bridal wreath round her hair, the whole church radiant with light, the statue of the Virgin resplendent… and… and… suddenly his heart stood still for a moment: he would have to hide behind a pillar, he couldn’t kiss his daughter again, couldn’t even let her see him in the distance to give her his blessing from afar, he, the most repulsive being in the whole wide world. If he did, he would scare the bridegroom away! From now on he would have to be a creature of the dusk, avoiding the light, carefully keeping himself hidden by day. But what did that matter? Not a jot if only his daughter could once more be healthy. And happy! And rich! He fell into a silent ecstasy. Five hundred marks! Five hundred marks!

The impresario, interpreting the long silence as indicating that Paupersum couldn’t make up his mind, started to deploy all his powers of persuasion: ‘Listen to me, Herr Doktor. Don’t say “no”. That would be turning your back on Fortune when she’s smiling on you. Your whole life has taken a wrong direction. Why? You’ve crammed your head full of learning. Learning’s a load of nonsense. Look at me. Have I ever bothered with learning? That’s something for people who’re born rich — and they don’t really need it. A man should be humble and, well, what you might call stupid, then Nature will look kindly on him. After all, Nature’s stupid too. Did you ever see a stupid man going bankrupt? You should have worked on the talents your Good Fairy gave you at birth. Or have you perhaps never looked in a mirror? A man with your appearance — even now, without having tasted the Ambras drinking water — could have been making a decent living as a clown for years. My God, the signs Mother Nature gives are so obvious even a child can understand them. Or are you perhaps afraid that as a freak you’d have no friends to talk to? I can tell I’ve put together a sizeable ensemble — and all people from the top drawer. There’s an old gentleman, for example, who was born with no arms or legs. I’m going to exhibit him to Her Majesty the Queen of Italy as a Belgian infant who’s been mutilated by the German generals.’

Dr Paupersum had only taken in the last couple of sentences. ‘What’s all this nonsense?’ he snapped. ‘First you say he’s an old gentleman, then you’re going to exhibit him as a Belgian infant!’

‘That only increases the attraction!’ the impresario countered. ‘I simply tell them he aged so rapidly out of horror at having to watch his mother being eaten alive by a Prussian uhlan.’

‘Yes, well, if you say so,’ said Dr Paupersum cautiously, disconcerted by the impresario’s quick-wittedness. ‘But tell me one thing: how do you propose to exhibit me before I’ve got a trunk, feet like dustbin lids and so on?’

‘Nothing simpler. I’ll smuggle you to Paris via Switzerland on a false passport. There you’ll be put in a cage where you’ll have to roar like a bull every five minutes and eat a few live grass snakes three times a day — don’t worry, we’ll manage, it just sounds a bit revolting. Then in the evening we’ll put on a special show: an actor masquerading as an explorer will demonstrate how he captured you with his lasso in the Berlin jungle. And outside there’ll be a poster with: “Genuine German Professor! Guaranteed!” After all, that’s the truth, I won’t have anything to do with fraud. “Live for the first time in France!” And so on. My friend d’Annunzio will be happy to compose the text, he’ll give it the right poetic pizzazz.’

‘But what if the war should be over by then?’ Paupersum objected. ‘With my bad luck…’

The impresario smiled. ‘Don’t you worry, Herr Doktor, the day will never come when a Frenchman won’t believe anything that’s to the detriment of the Germans. Not in a thousand years.’

Was that an earthquake? No, it was just the trainee waiter dropping a tin tray full of glasses as a musical prelude to his night shift.

Somewhat flustered, Dr Paupersum looked round the café. The goddess from Over Land and Sea had disappeared. Her place on the sofa had been taken by an incorrigible theatre critic who, mentally panning a premiere that was to take place in a week’s time, licked his forefinger to pick up a few breadcrumbs off the table and chewed them up with his front teeth, giving a good imitation of a polecat as he did so.

It gradually dawned on Dr Paupersum that he was sitting with his back to the rest of the café and had presumably been doing so all the time, so he must have seen everything he had just experienced in the large wall mirror, from which his own face was now staring at him pensively. The snappily dressed gentleman was still there too and he really was eating cold salmon — with his knife, of course — but he was sitting right over there in the corner, not at Paupersum’s table.

‘How did I come to be in the Café Stefanie?’ he asked himself.

He couldn’t remember.

Then he slowly worked it out: ‘It comes from starving all the time and then seeing other people eating salmon and drinking wine with it. My self split in two for a while, it’s not unknown and perfectly natural. Suddenly it’s as if we’re among the audience in the theatre and performing on the stage at the same time. And the roles we play are made out of the things we’ve read and heard and — secretly — hoped. Oh, yes, hope is a cruel playwright indeed! We imagine conversations we think we’re having, we see ourselves make gestures until the outside world grows thin and everything around us takes on different, delusory forms. We don’t think the words and phrases that come out of our brain in the way they usually do; they come wrapped in observations and explanations, as in a short story. A strange thing, this “self”. Sometimes it falls apart like a bundle of sticks when you untie the string…’ Again Dr Paupersum found his lips were murmuring, ‘How did I come to be in the Café Stefanie?’

Suddenly all his brooding vanished as a cry of delight swept through him. ‘But I’ve won a mark at chess! A whole mark! Now my daughter will get well again. Quick, a bottle of red wine, and some milk and —”

Wild with excitement, he searched through his pockets. As he did so his eye fell on the black armband round his sleeve and at once he remembered the awful, naked truth: his daughter had died during the night.

He clasped his head in his hands. Yes, died. Now he knew how he came to be in the café — he had come from the graveyard, from the funeral. They had buried her that afternoon. Hastily, soullessly, sullenly. Because it had rained so hard.

And then he had wandered round the streets, for hours on end, gritting his teeth, desperately listening to the clatter of his heels and counting, counting, from one to a hundred, then starting again, to stop himself going mad from the idea that his feet might unwittingly take him back home, back to his bare room with the pauper’s bed where she had died and which was now empty. Somehow or other he must have ended up here. Somehow or other.

He clutched the edge of the table to stop himself collapsing. Disjointed words and phrases kept popping up in his scholarly mind: ‘Hmm, yes, I should have… blood… transfusions. I should have transferred blood to her from my veins… blood from my veins…’ he repeated mechanically a few times. Then a sudden thought gave him a start: ‘But I can’t leave my child all by herself, out there in the wet night.’ He wanted to scream it out loud, but all that came was a low whimper.

Another thought jolted him: ‘Roses, a bouquet of roses, that was her last wish. I won a mark at chess, so at least I can buy her a bouquet of roses.’ He rummaged through his pockets again and dashed out, hatless, into the darkness, in pursuit of one last, faint will-o-the-wisp.

The next morning they found him on his daughter’s grave. Dead. His hands thrust deep into the earth. He had slashed his wrists and his blood had trickled down to the girl sleeping below.

His pale face shone proudly with the peace that can never be disturbed by hope again.

Amadeus Knödlseder, the Incorrigible Bearded Vulture

‘Out of the way, Knödlseder,’ Andreas Humplmeier, the Bavarian golden eagle, said, snatching the piece of meat the keeper was holding invitingly through the bars.

‘Bastard!’ the bearded vulture croaked, beside himself with fury. He was well advanced in years and had already grown short-sighted during his long period in captivity; all he could do was fly up onto his perch and send a thin jet of spittle in the direction of his tormentor.

It was like water off a duck’s back to Humplmeier. Keeping his head well out of range in the corner, he devoured the meat, just putting up his tail feathers in a gesture of contempt. ‘Come on, then, if you want a good thrashing,’ he mocked.

It was the third time Amadeus Knödlseder had had to go without his dinner. ‘Things can’t carry on like this,’ he muttered, closing his eyes to shut out the sneering grin of the marabou stork in the adjoining cage who was sitting motionless in a corner, supposedly ‘giving thanks to God’ — an occupation which, as a sacred bird, he felt it incumbent upon himself to pursue tirelessly.

‘Things can’t carry on like this.’ Knödlseder went over the events of the past week. At first even he had had to laugh at the eagle’s typically Bavarian sense of humour. One instance in particular stuck in his mind: two haughty, pigeon-chested types, strutting like stiff-legged storks, had been put in the next cage and the golden eagle had cried out, ‘Hey, what the hell’s that? What are you supposed to be?’

‘We’re demoiselle cranes,’ came the answer.

‘Oh, how very naice,’ the eagle replied in a prissy voice. ‘And what’re they, when they’re at home?’

‘Anthropoides virgo.’

‘Virgo? Well I never! I believe you, thousands wouldn’t,’ the eagle said, to general hilarity.

But Amadeus Knödlseder himself had soon become the butt of the vulgar bird’s coarse mockery. Once, for example, he’d hatched a plot with a raven, with whom the vulture had got on very well until then. They’d pinched a red rubber tube from a pram, which the nursemaid had carelessly left too close to the bars of the cage, then placed it in the food trough. Humplmeier had jerked his thumb at it and said, ‘There’s a sausage for you, Maddy.’And he — Knödlseder, the royal bearded vulture, who until then had been unanimously esteemed as the crowning glory of the zoo — had believed him, had flown with the tube onto his perch, grasped it in his claws and pulled and pulled at it with his beak until he was quite long and thin himself. Then the elastic material had suddenly snapped and he’d fallen over on his back, twisting his neck horribly. Knödlseder automatically rubbed the spot; it still hurt. Again he was seized with fury, but he controlled himself so as not to give the marabou the satisfaction of schadenfreude. He shot him a quick glance. No, the obnoxious fellow hadn’t noticed, he was still sitting in his corner ‘giving thanks to God’.

‘Tonight I escape,’ was the decision the bearded vulture came to after turning the alternatives over in his mind for a while. ‘Better freedom and all the worries about where the next meal’s coming from than one more day in the company of these base creatures.’ A brief check confirmed that the trapdoor in the roof of the cage still opened easily — the hinges were rusted through, a secret he’d been aware of for some time.