The Road to Darkness E-Book

Paul Leppin

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 230

Beschreibung

The classic locked room detective novel which still baffles today.

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

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title

Daniel Jesus

Severin’s Road into Darkness: Book One

Severin’s Road into Darkness: Book Two

The Ghost of the Jewish Ghetto

The Author

The Translator

Copyright

DANIEL JESUS

1

It was a long, aimless street down which Daniel Jesus was going in pursuit of an ugly evening. It kept in front of him; he could not catch up with it on his thin, aching legs which cast a hurried, flickering shadow on the wet cobblestones, irritating him and putting him in an ill temper. The evening ran before him like a mad, vicious animal, and he could not catch hold of it with his skinny fingers, could not grasp it by its tangled hair and stare long and hard into its dissolute eyes, feeling its hot breath streaming over his twitching eyelashes. For years his constant thought, his most intense yearning had been: If one could only strangle the evening! For evening was evil. Of course one had to be cautious, remain unobserved, approach it with simple, friendly words, smile and caress it as one would caress a woman. Oh, he would go about it cleverly! His hatred would glow inside him like an inspiration, helping him to find the right way to master the evening and kill it. He would abandon himself to it like a new-born babe, would be tender, passionate, lascivious. His eager hands would run over the flesh of that whore, making her sleepy, arousing her lust, until his fingers felt the black veins throbbing in her neck, hot with her lifeblood. Then they would close, suddenly, convulsively, pitilessly, and on her face the horrible expression would appear of which he dreamt every night. Oh God, why must he always think of it? But it was an image he could not escape. It was in every mirror he looked into, in every window he went past it hung like a mask. It was a pale, frightened face, cruelly marked with festering sores by an insidious disease. Under the throttling pressure of his wrists the face was filled with an impotent fear that was forcing her eyes out of their sockets. And out of her gasping throat her decomposing tongue came creeping like an entrail, endless, growing longer and longer, bigger and bigger until it broke through the glass of the windows he had to pass. The street was aimless and long, the poisonous tongue was stretching out towards him, licking at his coat, coming closer and closer. Oh, dear God! There it was! Away, and for God’s sake don’t turn round!

Daniel Jesus was running, scurrying along with short, jerky steps, and the sweat ran down in pale drops into his sparse beard. He ran until his diseased lung forced him to come to a rasping halt. He leant against a lamp-post and rested. Thank God, the panic had passed, he no longer felt afraid. He really should go and see a doctor soon, he was having visions. The evening wasn’t dead at all, it was still going down the street in front of him, dancing a polka round each of the electric lamps, skipping scornfully from one side of the street to the other, peeping into the ground-floor apartments. He hadn’t strangled it, that was why there was no need to be frightened of that face. But he would strangle it if he could, and damn the consequences, even if the foul face should drive him to his grave. He hated evening. It had made fun of his hunchback in a hundred shadows on the walls of the houses, distorted and grotesque caricatures, comic and mean.

Every time he came to a lamp he could see his hunchback with its crooked point reflected two or three times on the wall and on the ground, in many different variations of shade and shape. The sun was honest and showed him his defect, but the evening mocked it. He would not be mocked! He was Daniel Jesus, a man of wealth and substance to whom, if he wanted, people bowed low and kissed his hand.

With bitter groans he continued on his way. The life he was leading was no life at all. It had no goal, no end, just like the road stretching out in front of him. It consisted of nothing but dreary dissipation, a hollow sham with nothing to satisfy the cravings of a deep-feeling heart. The orgy he had given in his house last night for young Baron Sterben’s twentieth birthday, did it have the grandeur, the cruelty, even the slightest flicker of the great glory of iniquity? Fire and sin? Destruction? No and no! It had not even been shameless. A few naked girls who had got drunk on champagne and been sick on his beautiful, blood-red carpet that was worth a king’s ransom. Where in that was the blind infamy that would alone be worthy of him? He should have found a princess! A princess of the soul, chaste and pure, to give the whole affair a touch of tragedy, a hint of force, violation and sin. There should have been a saint sitting on his knees, stark naked, strewing roses over his ugly hunchback with her white hands, kissing his deformed feet and offering Baron Sterben a glass of champagne. But all it had been was stupid and boring. These little bourgeoises had no soul. Nothing moved them, nothing roused them, they felt no thrill at such an evening. Nothing screamed out inside them, nothing froze, there was no crime, no great wickedness, no ecstasy of self-abasement, no intoxication and no yearning.

He needed to see souls when they were naked and drunk. He loved that. Fuddled and fervent, debauched and delirious. Driven out of their minds by a god or a beast. That was why he was heading for the little house by the railway viaduct where he had not been for a long time. He would get a chilly reception from them, from Anton the cobbler and his band of worshippers. They always knew everything he did. They were like his bad conscience. They would certainly already know that he had sinned again the previous evening, that he had opened his doors to the Devil. How Anton found out all these things was a mystery to him, but find them out he did.

In a fever of apprehension he climbed the wooden steps. He opened the door quietly and entered the room.

They were singing a hymn to Mary, the hymn of the sorrowing heart. Round a long, bare wooden table a crowd of people were standing with hymn-books in their hot hands; their voices rose up like a bitter, broken cry, wearing themselves hoarse against the low ceiling. All their hearts were filled with the hymn alone; they scarcely had room in their souls for anything happening outside. At the head of the table stood Anton, the cobbler. He knew the hymn by heart, had folded his immense, hard red hands in prayer and was singing. It was like a distress call at sea. His ship had been wrecked in the dark night of sin, was drifting rudderless, seeking God. He called out into the darkness, ceaselessly, louder and louder, senselessly, trustingly. The head on top of his massive body was wild and proud; defiantly, austerely clean-shaven and with a mouth that was like a sword-cut in his scarred face.

Beside him stood his wife. As tall and massive as the cobbler, with wonderful, flaming, fiery red hair. She twisted and bent her powerful body as she sang, wrestling with sin. She shouted out the song into the room so that it tumbled out into the street like a lost, strangled sobbing that made the old women shiver and cross themselves. But it was to no avail. She could not silence the throbbing of her blood, the hymn did not fill her heart as it did the hearts of the others. Even between the verses she felt herself yearning for a devouring fire. Her love for God was puny and weak, it was not a raging storm, as was Anton’s love. He was a messiah and redeemer and she was a poor, weak woman. But she needed a fire to burn in her soul and make her blood dry up, like a puddle in the sun. There was much within her that needed a purifying flame. She hated her blood and her great body, which she could not subdue. She felt a dull, lustful fear of her body. She sang, it was like a distress call at sea.

‘Christ! Christ!’ came the cry within her.

She sent her wide, devouring eyes along the smoky walls and past the contorted faces of the congregation, but the hymn would not fill her soul.

Then all at once, among the dreams and visions, the flames and phantasms of her singing, she suddenly saw, like the shadow behind a candle, Daniel Jesus standing in the room. He looked at her and her eyes were absorbed. Naked and shameless, like a woman entering her lover’s bed, her eyes entered his. And sin, huge and ugly like the evening outside that Daniel Jesus could not catch, stepped into the hymn. Daniel Jesus felt as if an icy hand were passing over his hunchback. He drank in the look from the penitent like a beautiful, base iniquity. He knew that there was a princess heading towards him. She was still far off, and her horses were travelling slowly.

But the evening will bring us together, Anton. For the evening is evil.

No one had seen the shameless look apart from the groaning gypsy woman lying on the floor before Anton scraping her knees on the bare boards until the blood ran down. Her lips covered in foam, she kissed the cobbler’s feet, straightened up and pounced on his hard hands; she was as hot as boiling snow.

But his hands did not pull back. He raised her up, high and alone above all the people, higher and higher, far beyond them, to God.

2

Baron Sterben was a very good man and a very bad man. He was completely unaware of it. The good within him was the source of all the noble impulses which even he at times loved about himself; the bad gave his soul a particular mean and shabby note which he was often at a loss to understand. He himself took no active part in all this. He did not resist the evil within him, nor did he do anything to encourage his finer side. He was twenty years old and had already seen through the glittering façade of life to its sterile depths. Now he went along with anything that had a taste of the singular, the aloof, with any adventure as long as the price was high, with any sin, if he still found a thrill in it. That is to say, it was not he who did all that, it was the things themselves whose lives were carried on through his, who passed through him as through an open door. Sometimes his soul did something, his hand or someone else, but never he himself; he believed he had lost his self in the unhealthy dreams of his youth. He was passive, and the days did with him as they liked.

He loved Hagar, the young gypsy girl. He had discovered her a few weeks ago at a fair outside the city where she performed childish jigs for the grubby coppers the people threw her. She had attracted him because she danced barefoot and was small and lean, like a wildcat. By the time had been watching her for fifteen minutes he was shivering, he knew that it was all in vain, that his poor body, tormented by love, would compel him to possess her. She had large, thin gold rings in her ears over which her hair fell like a curtain. For years now large, slim rings framing a pale woman’s face had been his fetish. It was a wild, rainy day in early spring and his teeth were chattering feverishly. He was dimly, hopelessly aware that there was something dangerous and evil in Hagar’s eyes, something that was destined to torment his young life like the lash of a scourge. But it was precisely that which, leaden, ineluctable, imperious, cast its spell over him. There was no escaping it.

Thus Hagar became the Baron’s mistress.

She had gone with him in mute amazement. She did not quite know what to do with this man whose lips twitched as he spoke to her, whose features were shuddering under waves of fever like corn in the wind. He was delighted that she was called Hagar, it was a name that had captivated him at school, the fate of the Biblical Hagar had touched him as if she had been his own mother. Now she was to be his mistress and he was taking her to his house. He had bought her for a hundred crowns from a greasy showman who would have presumably been happy with twenty, so hungry he was, having gone without meat for days.

She walked through the streets beside him, quiet and sub-missive, and the people looked round and smiled when they recognised the Baron. She was wearing a faded dark-red dress and went barefoot. When they reached his home, he picked her up in his arms and sang a little, slightly ironic tune he had once heard from a woman at a strange moment in his life. With the tip of his patent-leather shoe he pushed open a beautiful, wide door and lay the mute Hagar down on his bed of silk. He pushed a costly, sad, deep-blue pillow under her brown neck, then knelt down by the bed and, breathing slowly, began to take off her clothes, one by one.

At that Hagar turned her head towards him and looked at him. Then she uttered some words that swept over the hot skin of his face like a caress. He gave a cry and kissed her with all the sickly fervour of his body, shattered under the impact of love. He kissed her until the blood ran down from her lips onto the white polar-bearskin on which he was kneeling. Then he took hold of her with both hands and tore apart the shift over her heaving breast so that she lay there naked before him, completely his.

Since then many weeks had passed, weeks during which she had tormented him with her love, had made him the slave of her small, thin body, which was slowly destroying him. Hagar was ruthless and without pity. She would dig her brown, trembling fingers into his soft flesh and bite at his chest like a cat until she drew blood. Her demanding, uninhibited love was like a deep dream in which he was enmeshed beyond hope of waking.

Then one day Daniel Jesus came and drove her out of Baron Sterben’s house with a whip. He did not want his young friend destroyed by this debauched witch. The Baron’s heart had something great, something fantastic about it that Daniel Jesus wanted to preserve and that the gypsy girl stole every night he spent desperately wrestling with her body, as with an animal.

At first he let out a cry and tried to tear the whip out of Daniel Jesus’ hand, then he threw himself to the ground, pulled the rug over his head and let him have his way.

Hagar came back, but she no longer tortured him. By day she sat, darkly mute, in a corner, and by night she talked with her dreams. Once she asked him to read to her from an old, stained book. He was amazed to find it full of prayers, hymns, sacred texts and an ancient litany to a long-forgotten saint. There was a blind, unyielding fervour in the hymns, a wild yearning, the sense of an ultimate stage, marked by the cross.

He asked her.

She answered defiantly that now she was going to Anton, the cobbler, the holy man who lived out beyond the station, in the long street with the hundred lamps. She was a sinner, she said, and had to pray, for hours on end, every day, so that God would forgive her and she would find peace.

‘Peace?’ He was taken aback by the word.

‘Peace? Does the cobbler promise peace?’

‘Yes.’

Then she spent a whole hour telling him about the messiah. How great and powerful he was, like a king among all people; how at the sound of his voice every sin fell silent; how his hands rose up high towards God; how he proclaimed the coming of the millenium. People should flee one another, he said, for in company was sin. Where two were gathered together, there let God stand between them so that their naked eyes might not see, that they need not be ashamed; that we might no longer be poor and troubled, struggling with ourselves and the world; that we might not succumb to the desperate torments of lust; that we might be free of all longing, except of our longing for God; that we might have no desire but for God. Cursed be all love that would bypass God. He takes all consciousness from such love, so that it can do nothing but babble its own torment.

She had talked herself into a heat. Her cheeks were burning, her hair had come loose and was falling over her face. At that moment she was beautiful, the gypsy girl, and he put his arm round her to kiss her. Since the day when Daniel Jesus had taken the whip to her he had not touched her. Lust reawoke within him, and he was trembling, just as on that wild, rainy spring day when he had first seen her dancing barefoot before him.

‘Hagar’, he stammered hoarsely, and tried to kiss her.

But she turned aside from him and pushed him away. And when he seized her round the waist, she screamed, as if in terror. At that a blazing, bright-red wave of blood roared through his skull like a steam train. He grabbed the gypsy girl by the feet and threw her to the ground, placed his knee on her squirming body and tried to tear the dress off her breast, as he had done when she first came to the house. Then she raised her hand and hit him hard, in a blind fury, across the face, three or four times. He let go and looked down at her, pale with horror, as at an animal.

Then he gave a laugh and sneered, ‘You’re in love with your cobbler; you don’t like me any more. Why don’t you go to him, he’s big and strong; his bed is wide, you can pray there.’

She was still lying on the floor. ‘That’s not true!’ she cried. Then there was a pause, during which they looked at each other, and each could hear the whispering of the other’s blood; a moment during which their eyes widened in anguish and filled with tears glistening with the sadness of their wounded souls.

‘That’s not true!’ She howled like a dog, then flung her head to the ground and burst into tears. The joy, in which she had believed for many days, had been taken from her; it had shrivelled up inside her, and nothing could revive it. All at once she realised that she had never sought God in the cobbler’s shack; she loved Anton and lusted after him, only she had not been aware of it. Now it had suddenly become clear to her that she yearned for his huge, proud body, for his ugly mouth with the flaming scars. And he was God’s and would crush her if she went to him.

That was why the gypsy girl was crying.

3

The voices of the restless March day, full of foreboding, had penetrated the heavy silk curtains over the doors of Countess Regina’s drawing room, making her pensive and unsure of herself. These voices pervaded her soul like some apprehensive, dangerous treachery, and at times she felt that they were talking about her. That was something she did not want; she wanted to be old and to live out the rest of her days without a struggle, in her love for Martha Bianca.

It was very quiet today, no one spoke a word. All five were looking each other in the eye, waiting for something. Regina was sitting in a deep, immensely soft rocking chair, occasionally throwing little sidelong smiling glances at a mirror sleeping in a corner, hidden in the dark folds of the curtains. She looked at the strands of white at her temples and gave a soft laugh. Martha Bianca was sitting at her feet, pale and dutiful, her amber hair welling up towards her mother in a cascade of light. Baron Sterben looked at it, amazed at the way Martha Bianca’s presence almost lit up the drawing room. Whenever she fixed her large, velvety child’s eyes on him, he was reminded of a lamp burning with a beautiful, dreamy flame, soft and gentle, yet full of a sweet, veiled fire.

Her body must be silvery white, he dreamed, and gave a start as Martha Bianca slowly stood up and left the drawing room.

Then suddenly Countess Regina, her eyes fixed so firmly on the young actor, Valentin, that he went pale, said, as if she had just remembered something, ‘Why don’t you tell us the story of little Valeska, my dear Daniel Jesus? How she almost strangled you once while you were asleep?’

Daniel Jesus looked up. The whole time he had been sitting on the gleaming carpet that covered the floor, encircling the broad feet of the table with fantastic lines of colour that reached out towards the walls. Daniel Jesus always sat on the floor, and Regina tolerated his habit with a pitying smile, as long as there was no stranger present who might question it with a wondering glance. He did not feel at ease on the high chairs and pieces of furniture on which other people sat and on which he had to dangle his thin legs like a child. At such times he felt everyone was looking at his back and had to put up with it, without being able to scratch their inquisitive eyes out. That was why he preferred to squat on the floor somewhere where all glances passed above him, somewhere he could remain in the darkness like a breathing shadow, only his gigantic head occasionally breaking the surface when he spoke.

He must have been sitting there in silence for a good fifteen minutes, observing with a mocking half-smile on his lips the Baron’s private game with the twelve-year-old Martha Bianca and the pointless hostilities between Regina and Valentin. The young actor had a head like a Hun, broad, bony, with sunken cheeks and almost grotesquely deep-lying, scorching eyes. The tall, slim countess with her poised, effortless gestures and her severe white hands which still seemed to contain a flicker of repressed sensuality, was an enigma to him, an enigma he was burning to solve. Regina was a little afraid of him, and this fear was like the lascivious prick of a goad that kept driving her back to him. Today, from the street outside, the half-spoken words and voices of the March day had penetrated her drawing room like a mysterious, distant cry shredded by the wind. She was restless and defiant; she slowly raised her tired pupils from his twitching feet to his face and stared at him with the steady beam of a lamp.

‘Tell me about Valeska, Daniel, please’, said the countess. ‘He must tell us the story, mustn’t he, Baron?’

Sterben had been dreaming of a young forest, the leaves waving like blond hair, the trees tall and slim. Spring was galloping through the woods like a white stallion, without saddle or reins, maddened, foaming at the nostrils. Up above, the sky was hanging down over the young trees, yellow and full of sun like a girl’s amber tresses. He went on until he came to a beech tree with its bark hanging down in pieces. Red, quivering blood was running out of the trunk to which a child was bound with straps and chains, a naked, silver-white, tortured body. He shrank back in horror and ran on, out of the forest, into a clearing, into a field, and he looked up at Countess Regina and said, ‘Yes, Countess, yes.’

So Daniel Jesus wrapped his long arms round his knees and began:

‘Valeska was very young when I seduced her, scarcely a year older than Martha Bianca, I think. She was the daughter of one of the clerks from my factory. At first she visited me secretly, and when her father discovered it he beat her for an hour with such a heavy stick that he broke her left arm. After that she lived permanently with me. They threatened to take me to court for seducing a girl below the age of consent, but ultimately they didn’t dare and so Valeska stayed in my house. I can’t say that she loved me, but she feared me, and it was not Valeska herself, it was her fear that was the slave that brought me her love. In me she feared the man who had been the first to light the fire in her soul and in her blood which, at the age of thirteen, she only half understood, but which had already destroyed her happiness, a considerable portion of her life, the blissful smile of sleep and the hushed peace of her heart. She did not love me, but she gave herself to me with a frenzied abandon and tears, in which there was not a drop of regret, nor the least ounce of strength to envisage anything beyond the immediate present. She had forgotten she was in a world where there were perhaps a thousand days, a thousand weeks before her, awaiting the sound of her voice. She had nothing to say to life, and in the loneliness and helplessness of her heart she fell ill. Her soul withered in the darkness. She searched for love, but in vain. What could she find to love in me? I was a hunchback. I was brutal. There was no one else she knew. Her heart froze and her soul disintegrated. She started stealing money and silver from the house, even though I gave her everything she wanted. When I learnt of it I beat her as mercilessly as her father had. I was brutal and left her lying on the floor unconscious. After that she became worse, even more recalcitrant, and would not speak a word to me for days on end.