The Last Bell E-Book

Johannes Urzidil

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 236

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

A maid who is unexpectedly bequeathed her wealthy employers' worldly possessions when they flee the country after the Nazi occupation; a loyal bank clerk, who steals a Renaissance portrait of a Spanish noblewoman, and falls into troublesome love with her; a middle-aged travel agent, who is perhaps the least well-travelled man in the city and advises his clients from what he has read in books, anxiously awaiting his looming honeymoon; a widowed villager, whose 'magnetic' twelve-year-old daughter witnesses a disturbing event; and a tiny village thrown into civil war by the disappearance of a freshly baked cheesecake. These stories about the tremendous upheaval which results when the ordinary encounters the unexpected are vividly told, with both humour and humanity.This is the first ever English publication of these both literally and metaphorically Bohemian tales, by one of the great overlooked writers of the twentieth century.

Leseprobe

JOHANNES URZIDIL

THE LAST BELL

Translated from the German by David Burnett

PUSHKIN PRESS LONDON

CONTENTS

Title PageIntroductionThe Last BellThe Duchess of AlbaneraSiegelmann’s JourneysBorderlandWhere the Valley EndsAbout the PublisherCopyright

INTRODUCTION

IN 196 9, a year before his death, Johannes Urzidil recounted an anecdote from his early years as an émigré in the United States. Unable to earn a steady income through writing as a German- and Czech-speaking immigrant in New York, he decided on a whim to try his hand at leatherworking. It happened like this. Visiting a friend and fellow émigré one day, the sculptor Bernard Reder from Bukovina, he spotted a ragged three-volume edition of Rabelais on the artist’s mantelpiece. The Baroque-era edition had recently been used by Reder while making a series of woodcuts, hence its sorry state. Urzidil, ever the poor but loyal friend, offered to rebind the precious tomes in pigskin. So he took his meager savings of seven dollars—this was the early 1940s—and went to the leather dealers of Lower Manhattan to scrape up the scarce materials he needed. The writer-turned-craftsman worked hard, teaching himself as he went along, and only when he was done did he notice that the books, though handsome enough to the eye, had basically been glued shut. He presented them to his friend regardless, explaining their sole defect with some embarrassment. But the sculptor shrugged it off with the poise of a seasoned refugee: Never mind, said Reder, they’d served their purpose. The volumes were placed back onto the mantelpiece “between two blocks of marble, where, incidentally, they cut quite a figure, but served as a patent warning to me upon subsequent visits against all too daring exploits and experiments doomed to failure.”*

A closed book to the English-speaking world, glued shut and all but inaccessible—this is also an apt description of the writer Johannes Urzidil, a hidden treasure locked away in a language unknown to most of those around him, waiting to be plucked from the mantelpiece, rebound (hopefully this time with a little more skill) and placed into the hands of a new generation of readers. This volume, in other words, is a literary event: the first ever collection of fiction by Prague-born New York writer Johannes Urzidil to be published in English, the language of his adopted homeland.

In a sense, this collection is doubly belated, a minor Urzidil renaissance having occurred in the early 1990s in other parts of the world, with the fall of Communism and the rediscovery of “Magic Prague.” Well over a dozen collections of his fiction in translation reached lucky Czech, French, Italian and Spanish readers, but the English-speaking world was sadly overlooked. The present edition is the first step to rectifying this oversight.

Johannes Urzidil was born on February 3, 1896 in multiethnic Prague, capital of the Austro-Hungarian crownland of Bohemia. In 1918 he would witness—and welcome—the founding of the independent republic of Czechoslovakia, followed two decades later by the disaster of Nazi occupation. Forced to flee, he went first to Britain then to the United States, where he lived from 1941 until his death in 1970 on a reading tour in Rome; he was buried at Campo Santo Teutonico, “the Teutonic Cemetery,” in the Vatican, adjacent to St Peter’s Basilica. Catholic by faith, Urzidil was in fact the eighth child of a Jewish mother who died when young Johannes was not yet four, leaving him and his father with seven older half-siblings from her previous marriage. He later married the poet and daughter of a Prague rabbi, Gertrude Thieberger, whose brother was Kafka’s Hebrew teacher. (It was, incidentally, this brother-in-law of Urzidil who related the anecdote—retold by Ernst Pawel—about Kafka looking down at the Old Town Square from Thieberger’s window on Karpfengasse, saying, “this narrow circle encompasses my entire life.”) Urzidil’s father was an ethnic German from the Sudetenland, a patent-holding inventor and railroad official; his stepmother a national-minded Czech from Nymburk, “the poetic realm of Bohumil Hrabal.” He spoke Czech and German with equal fluency, though he mainly wrote in German.

Urzidil had already been a published author and journalist in the German-speaking world for over two decades when he was uprooted by historical events. Apart from penning short stories and poems, essays on art, culture and politics, as well as a few biographies, he had also worked for fifteen years as an employee of the German embassy in Prague, even taking on German citizenship in the early 1930s. To the newly arriving Nazis in Berlin, however, Urzidil was nothing but a “half-Jew” (Halbjude), whom they promptly dismissed from their payroll. He continued to eke out a meager existence writing for Swiss and Czech dailies until the Nazi invasion of Prague and the “rump of Czechoslovakia” in March 1939. Wanted by the Gestapo for his criticisms of the Reich and its Führer, in the summer of 1939 this prototypically Central European figure from the “literary stewpot” of Old Prague with its “roiling German-Czech-Jewish brew” (as Cynthia Ozick put it), this man with his own “tremendous world inside his head” escaped with his wife using forged passports. In his suitcase, a copy of his friend Franz Kafka’s first published book, Betrachtung, inscribed by the author; handwritten letters by Stifter and Goethe; a German Bible from 1568; and a Greek edition of Homer’s Odyssey.

From Trieste he managed to secure safe passage to Britain under the generous sponsorship of fellow writer Bryher (the nom de plume of Annie Winifred Ellerman). After a year and a half in the English countryside near Gloucester, in the village of Viney Hill, he arrived in New York in February 1941. New York City would be his home for the next three decades and would witness the true flowering of this pre-eminent prose stylist, a fiction-cum-memoir writer in German, living in the New World. Though never switching to the dominant language of his adoptive homeland, it was ultimately here, “in the stark shadows of New York skyscrapers and at the same time in the unspeakably bright free light of a new world, hungry for and abandoned to its energetic present,” that he found his mature voice in German, often looking back fondly—and critically—at the world he’d left behind. His was no sickly nostalgia. He had no illusions that this was a vanished world. With typical Urzidilian wisdom, he commented on this need to suffer, let go and move on as a natural part of life:

Should one really yearn for something that is long gone or has meanwhile changed completely? The exile changes too, and all he longs for is his own former self, which wouldn’t exist anymore, either, even if he could have remained in his homeland. One shouldn’t yearn for the lost beloved. Yet the heart pines for the sorrow of utter disappointment in order to finally find peace.

Indeed, it was a painful disappointment when two and a half million ethnic Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia in the late 1940s, resulting in thousands of deaths and suicides, as a result of the Beneš decrees (Urzidil had been an admirer and supporter of Edvard Beneš, the president-in-exile of Czechoslovakia, and there are even photos of the two men together). But it was the very irretrievability of his “Lost Beloved”—the title of his literary breakthrough in 1956 at the age of sixty—that fired his creative powers late in life and earned him the proud reputation of being “the great troubadour of a Prague forever lost,” coined by no other than Kafka’s greatest friend and advocate Max Brod. Visitors to today’s Prague will now find a giant plaque on bustling Na příkopě, in the heart of the city, describing Urzidil as the “last poet of the Prague Circle.”

Essentially Johannes Urzidil did the opposite of what Borges advised his fellow Argentine writers at the very same moment in history: “we should feel that our patrimony is the universe; we should essay all themes, and we cannot limit ourselves to purely Argentine subjects in order to be Argentine.”† Urzidil turned a world that would be no more, Old Austrian Prague and Bohemia, his patrimony, into a universe unto itself, handling his memories as a rich heritage and treasure. Whereas Kafka barely ever left his “narrow circle” in Prague (“Prague won’t let go… this little mother has claws”) and wrote a prose that was utterly devoid of place, his younger friend Urzidil had no choice but to be on the move, yet chose to put the bulk of his fiction in an eminently concrete historical setting: Bohemia of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was this very personal “world of yesterday” that Johannes Urzidil endeavored to rescue from oblivion and recreate in his diverse writing.

Urzidil knew his strengths as a writer and focused on the well-crafted, compact short form. In an essay on Van Gogh from the 1920s, he writes that artistic perfection is not achieved by tackling all-embracing themes but by limiting one’s subject (he also cites Dürer and Rembrandt as models, and in another essay refers to Michelangelo’s “fragmentarism”). Complexity runs the risk of being spread too thinly across the surface, whereas simplicity has depth. This principle is evident in his own work and his favored genre of the long story or novella. From his stormy, turgid expressionist beginnings, he increasingly achieved an almost classical purity, which late in life gave way to a more leisurely, conversational style, often focusing on small, anecdotal events or moments in his childhood and youth. It is this loving attention to detail that gives seemingly banal or absurd events a deeper significance and sometimes reveals the world to be a place of mystical interconnectedness and continuity. “We all live, I would venture to say, as provisional models of deeper realities, though not everyone has the good fortune to be cognizant of this,” he writes in one story in this collection. Far from being mere artifice, a willful tidying-up of the world and its inherent messiness, his stories are taken from observation; their truths are revealed to the observant eye and not construed by a wordsmith usurping the role of creator. The truth lies in the things themselves.

In an afterword from 1957, he expounded on his poetic principle as follows:

All the people I portray existed, all the events I relate were real in some way […] Maybe, so I hoped, my reality will be of use to this or that reader, and I will touch his heart with mine. There’s nothing I’ve concealed, not the tiniest glimmer of light in the deepest depth of every darkness, not the bitter dregs of every joy. I think I’ve learned that elements of consolation and cheer resonate everywhere, even among the lost and abandoned.

Urzidil is a realist and religious humanist in one, a writer who never lost his cosmic vision of life’s fundamental meaningfulness even in the face of brutality and death. “One does not escape from despair, helplessness, suicide by demonstrating with great diligence and accuracy how nauseating, shallow, stale and fruitless all our actions are, but by trying to believe in life by virtue of the absurd,” he wrote in 1965, in a book-length essay called “Literature as Creative Responsibility.” To his writer colleagues he once posed the rhetorical question: “Why do you write? Why do you live? In what way do you help others live? They certainly can die without your help.”‡ Fiction-writing, for Urzidil, is an office with an ethical function. Again, one thinks of Kafka, with his almost religious devotion to writing—Kafka the quintessential tortured soul who could only exist through his writing, in the hope that it might make him worthy of salvation. And yet the contrast couldn’t be more stark. Whereas Kafka doubted in his own credibility as a Jew writing in the German language, fearing his creations were a sham, “a literature impossible in every respect, a Gypsy literature that stole the German child from the cradle and hurriedly whipped it into shape, because someone had to walk the tightrope,” Urzidil blithely noted, “My homeland is my writing.” His writing seems to exude a sense of certainty, the warmth of a well-ordered universe; his style seems downright vigorous and well-rounded (traits reflected in his handwriting as well, as Claudio Magris, an early admirer and promoter of Urzidil, pointed out). Urzidil was assured of his language and his art.

Like Kafka’s, his surname is actually Czech. According to a theory put forth by his friend Max Brod, it means something akin to “he put things in good order,” an involuntary tribute—nomen est omen—to the great discipline and clarity of his poetic vision, his debt to the classics. As in Kafka’s case, there is also some debate about where to put him in terms of literary history. Urzidil was an outsider most of his life: as a stepchild, “half-Jew,” emigrant, and artist, but also, one might venture to say, as an old-fashioned humanist in an increasingly antihumanist world. His books went against the trends of the day, belonging neither to the politicized literature associated with the much-fêted postwar “Gruppe 47” nor to the self-indulgent navel-gazing, the “new subjectivity,” that would come to replace it. Urzidil was a mensch and thinker, a man of letters in search of continuity and order, in nature and human nature, immune to the ups and down of politics. He was a literary outlier in purely geographic terms too, living in the United States and publishing in Munich and Zurich. On top of which his original audience, whom he wrote for during the inter-war period, was murdered or driven away. So was he a Jewish writer or a German one, an Austrian or an American? Or simply a “writer in exile,” a representative of the vast Exilliteratur that resulted from the tragedy of twentieth-century European history?

The poet Mascha Kaléko, another displaced Central European, wrote the following poem in a letter to Johannes and his wife Gertrude sometime in the early 1950s, while she was living in Greenwich Village and the two of them in Queens:

When I heard the name the very first time

Back in Berlin—one said Or-tsi-dill

Was it the foreign sound that beguiled me:

… A summer evening, blue and starry-tranquil,

Only from far does one hear the murmur of an Urzidil.

What is an Urzidil? Can one comprehend it?

Is it an attribute? Abstract… concrete?

It seems there are no Urzidils in great masses

And yet you’re a textbook example.

Johannes Urzidil himself liked to quip, “Ich bin hinternational”—a neologism playing on the German preposition hinter and meaning something like “behind nations” or, perhaps more appropriately, among and beyond nations—“at once supranational and true to his roots,” as one admiring critic noted.

I have taken the liberty of gleaning from different collections for this volume, and I think this is not a disservice to Urzidil as a writer. Urzidil wrote and collected his stories as he went along, with little regard for their thematic coherence. “Urzidil’s works are all fragments of a single autobiography,” Peter Demetz has remarked. And yet the pieces in this collection are unique. Most of Urzidil’s fiction writing was in the first person and clearly centered on his own experiences. These pieces, however, shine the spotlight on other characters. Only in the last two selections does the narrator Urzidil intrude, albeit discreetly.

The protagonists of these stories are all misfits and outsiders in some way or another, like Urzidil himself, whose sympathy was always for the underdog. The narrator of the first story, “The Last Bell” (1968), chronologically the last in this collection in terms of both setting and publication date, is the Czech housemaid Marška, the only first-person female narrator in Urzidil’s oeuvre, and the rare first-person narrator that is clearly not a thinly veiled Urzidil. Marška is faced with the unexpected when her master and mistress flee the Nazi occupation, leaving everything behind: their worldy possessions, their savings, and a furnished, pre-paid apartment. Needless to say, things go sour when she naively invites her younger sister Joška to come live with her, alas for the wrong reasons.

The unassuming and upright bank clerk Wenzel Schaschek, the rather cranky hero of our second story, “The Duchess of Albanera” (1966), likewise courts misfortune by committing a lone act of daring, utterly out of character for him. (His name, incidentally, means “fool” in Czech.) Richard Siegelmann, too, the bookish protagonist of “Siegelmann’s Journeys” (1962), has his routine life as a bachelor interrupted when a female client falls in love with him and the white lie he tells, born of shame and modesty, eventually spins out of control.

But the true outsiders of this collection are Ottilie, the child of nature in “Borderland” (1956), and Alois, the village idiot, in “Where the Valley Ends” (1956). Ottilie—a homage to Stifter’s “Abdias”—is the victim of circumstances or, rather, of her uncomprehending surroundings, which can’t seem to make her conform to their rules: Instead of praying the “Our Father” she insists on “Our Mother.” Her otherworldliness coupled with the confusion of her awakening sexuality drive her to destruction.§ Alois, on the other hand, is the scapegoat blamed for a stolen cheesecake that causes a rift in a small Bohemian village and eventually unleashes downright warfare—a precursor of the ideological divides that would soon tear the village apart in the name of populism, first from the Right, then from the Left, before nature reclaimed it entirely.

In an essay on Kafka’s microstory “The Next Village,” a parable of action vs. reflection, Urzidil talks about the grandfather who’s astonished by young people making decisions—in this case, getting on a horse and riding to the next village, an inconceivable act of daring for this old man. Urzidil writes:

What the grandfather, who no longer acts but merely contemplates, can hardly seem to comprehend is the young man’s fearlessness and unscrupulousness, his uninhibited ability to come to a decision. The core of the parable, which formulates by way of narrative its lesson and its challenge at once, lies in the concept of responsibility as illustrated by Goethe’s maxim: “The man who acts is always without conscience; only the man of contemplation can ever have a conscience.”

The parable is his great astonishment. Astonishment that there are people—and apparently the majority of people—who dare to take a decision and carry it out, too, with no fear, reservations or pangs of conscience, people who do not even think to consider the far-reaching ramifications and possible consequences of their decision and its execution, who thus act beyond morality and seem to do just fine without it; indeed, that life itself—regarded as a happening—actually takes place outside the realm of thought and reflection, indeed must take place there, because only beyond the realm of thought can it have any color at all and be deserving of the name life.

In a way these stories illustrate this very point: that no one can act or be in this world, without becoming guilty—a very unmodern, biblical notion in our ideal world of transparency and accountability.

The five well-meaning but flawed protagonists of these five stories—sometimes shrewd, sometimes bumbling—all manage to wreak havoc, more or less unwittingly. And yet these too are lives lived, real and valid stories worth telling. “Human life,” a character in one Urzidil story muses, “is long but also short. One can suffer through it or laugh through it, use it to function or leave an impression, but one can also squander it. There is no need to be alarmed by this. Squandering it does not mean living life any less. One cannot, after all, do more with life than live it.”

David Burnett Leipzig, September 2016

* All translations from the German are mine, except where otherwise noted.

† From Labyrinths (1962), translated by James E. Irby.

‡ This and the preceding quote were translated by Wolfgang Elfe (Dictionary of Literary Biography, 1989).

§ Hermann Hesse read the story and commented to Urzidil in a letter: “your story about Otti and the Bohemian Forest deeply impressed and delighted me. I thank you very much for that. I once knew a child with similar gifts…” (Letter from Montagnola, December 12, 1955).

THE LAST BELL

I

THIS MORNING, in the wee hours, the Mister and Missus went away. I don’t know where to. All they had were their two little suitcases. I accompanied them to the train anyway. Not many lamps at the platform, but a load of policemen and undercovers. You can recognize them a mile away.

“Don’t talk too much, and more than anything: Don’t start bawling. You’ll attract attention.”

I knew it would be forever. But I don’t know why I wasn’t allowed to cry. I pulled myself together. I usually bawl my eyes out at the station, no matter if they’re coming or going. All I need to do is walk past a train station and already I start to cry. I feel bad for the ones who are leaving, but I also feel bad for the ones arriving, because they had to leave from somewhere. Goodbyes everywhere! This time I cried on the street, was still crying behind the theater. Some people were just coming out. “Why you crying, miss?” one of them asks me, “the show was hilarious.”—“Ten years,” I say, “ten years. The beds in the morning, then the coffee, and every Sunday an egg for the Mister. Then cleaning up, shopping, cooking. Dusting whenever I had a chance: old cups, glassware, books, and so forth; I was always careful that nothing got chipped or cracked. Ten whole years.”—“Well,” says the man, “that’s a long time. But don’t you think you’ve maybe got a screw loose?”—“No. Because suddenly nothing matters anymore. I can shatter everything, tear it to shreds, dirty it to my heart’s content. ’Cause it all belongs to me now.”—“Is that so? Well then, you’re awfully lucky,” says the man and continues on his way, as if he’d been frightened.

The Mister called me into his workroom at around nine o’clock. “Listen up, Marška”—he addressed me in the polite form, but was always switching back and forth—“we’re leaving tonight. Swear that you won’t tell a soul for the next two weeks. If anyone asks, you know nothing. Where to? Somewhere. To tell the truth, we don’t even know ourselves. Don’t faint on me now. Here’s ten thousand crowns. A gift from me to you.”

“What for? How come?”

“Don’t ask too many questions. Put it in your pocket. It’s all we’ve got, and we’re not allowed to take more than twenty marks with us. If they catch us, they’ll get us for currency smuggling too. It’s all the same in the end, I suppose, but you like to think you’re safer by following more of the rules. That’s poppycock, of course. But poppycock is what makes the world go round.”

“And what about the apartment?”

“Ah, the apartment. You can have that too. It’ll make a nice dowry for you.”

“What? All the furnishings? The glass cabinet? The porcelain and the antique glassware? The rugs? The Tyrolean chest? The clothing and linens?”

“Stop cataloging. Do what you want with all that junk. The rent is paid for the next six months. That gives you enough time to think it over.”

“So you’re never coming back?”

“One never comes back, except from summer vacations and business trips, but even that isn’t certain. Enough said.”

He actually said, “junk.” My teeth were chattering. Not because I was happy about the money and all the stuff. But because everything suddenly seemed worthless. Could you call it a gift at all? It was nothing but discarded goods. I’d looked after these things for years, watching each object like a hawk.

“And the books? What’s going to happen to the books?”

“Well, you’re probably not going to read them. Sell them before they end up on the dung heap. Now leave me alone for a little while.” So I went in the kitchen and started to bawl. “Stop your whining,” the Missus said, “that’s all we need right now.” He probably thought I was honest and loyal. Granted, I wasn’t the worst. But I wasn’t as honest as he might have thought. I really lined my pockets sometimes. Nobody’s a saint, and what fun is anything without a little swindle. Anyway, it all has to balance out somehow.

The Missus could be unbearable at times. Of course she didn’t always have it easy, what with all his running around. Men! But even that can have a silver lining. Because the more somebody runs around, the more considerate he can be. Not necessarily, but sometimes. I was always careful with him. There was never any hanky-panky with me. Kind of a pity, actually! But it’s not worth it, I know that from my sister. She thought she’d be better off if she fooled around with the husband, but as soon as she was in a delicate condition the husband denied everything and the wife threw her out. She was lucky the child preferred not to come. Joška was only seventeen. That kind of thing shouldn’t happen to you. I was much more practical in this regard. As is evidently the case, Uncle Peter used to say.

I’m awfully scared now. What do I say if someone asks me: Where’d you get all that? No one will believe me if I tell the truth. “You should have had it put in writing,” they’ll say. “Thief,” they’ll say. The cash I can try to stash away and use up little by little. Not that that’ll be easy. If you’ve got money, you want to feel like you’ve got it. The furniture, books and things, those are going to be a real pain. But I don’t have to sell anything yet. Because, first of all, maybe—Heaven forbid—they’ll come back after all; second, I have no clue what any of it’s worth, so they’re just going to rob me blind; third, I have no need, ’cause I’ve got enough cash; fourth, I can always say I’m managing affairs for the master and mistress of the house. In any case, I’ll have Joška come live with me. Who could stand to live like this alone? Everything’s become so slick. If I touch anything, it’ll slip through my fingers. I have to get used to it first, and the things here have to get used to me. I’m no longer in between them and the Mister and Missus. I’m the mistress of the house now. And I have to learn that the ones who don’t obey get the boot. Joška is two years younger than me, but cheekier from all the lessons she’s learned, a few dozen more than me, I imagine.

I’m one grand richer than I was an hour ago. I found it behind a dresser drawer that used to belong to the Missus. The Mister said the furniture’s mine. So anything stashed in the furniture must be mine too. She probably didn’t think of it, what with all the commotion. But who ever heard of a woman who doesn’t think of her money? She probably didn’t have the guts to take it with her. But are there women who don’t have the guts when it comes to money? What business is it of mine? Whatever the case, I’ve got it now. But I won’t tell Joška how much and where I got it from. I’ll call it my savings, and strictly speaking it’s true. I worked here for ten years and was probably worth three times my wage. A pretty penny if you factor in interest and compound interest. So why should I have a bad conscience? Who’s got one of those nowadays anyway? True, I still feel a little bit ashamed before I fall asleep. But that’ll pass. Everything does. Tomorrow I’ll buy myself a couple of new outfits, then I’ll write to Joška. Come and stay with me, I’ll say. “With me” because my employers are on vacation, until further notice. How much further, I don’t really know. But you can stay a while for sure.