From now on, he no longer used every free moment for sports, but rather for bus riding. He dreamed of acquiring a far-reaching long-distance bus pass. And if he did in fact fulfill his dream and hasn’t since died, been crushed or run over, didn’t fall from a precipice, or land in a madhouse, then he is still riding around with it today. Once, though, he went too far and took a girlfriend along for the ride, expecting that she would be able to appreciate intellectual masculine beauty. There with them in the massive belly of the bus was a minuscule parasite with a mustache who smiled a few times suggestively at his girlfriend, and she, almost imperceptibly, smiled back; and when this mustached mite got up to leave, he even accidentally brushed past her and seemed to whisper something in her ear while publicly offering chivalrous apologies. Our hero boiled with rage; he would have liked to jump on his rival, but as small as the latter would have appeared beside the giant Agoag, just so big and brawny did he appear inside. Thus our hero remained seated and later showered his girlfriend with reproaches. But even though he had initiated her in his way of thinking, she did not reply — I don’t care a hoot about musclemen, it’s big husky omnibuses I love! — but rather simply lied to him.
Ever since this spiritual betrayal, to be blamed on the inferior intellectual daring of women, our hero took fewer bus rides, and when he did ride a bus, it was without any female companion. He divined a glimmering of that fateful truth about man summed up by the adage: The strong are strongest alone!
A Man Without Character
You really have to seek out character with a lantern nowadays; and you would probably look ridiculous to boot, walking around in broad daylight with a burning lamp. I want to tell the story of a man who always had difficulties with his character, who, to put it plainly, never even had a character; yet I am concerned that I may simply not have recognized his significance early enough, or that he may be something like a pioneer or forerunner of a new trend.
We were neighbors as kids. Whenever he carried off one of those little feats of mischief that are so splendid you’d rather not tell about them, his mother groaned, for the beating that she gave him tired her out. “Son,” she wailed, “you haven’t a speck of character; what in the world will become of you!?” In serious cases, however, his father was called in, and then the beatings had a certain ceremonious aspect and a solemn dignity, something like a school assembly. Before the festivities, my friend had with his own hands to go get the Lord High Counselor a cane switch whose primary use was to beat out the wash and was kept by the cook; and when it was all over with, the son had to kiss his father’s hand and, thanking him for the reprimand, had to beg forgiveness for the trouble he had caused his dear parents. My friend did it the other way around. He pleaded and howled for forgiveness before it began, and continued pleading from one blow to the next; but when it was all over with, he refused to utter another word, was all red in the face, swallowed tears and saliva, and tried by means of assiduous rubbing to wipe away the traces of his pain. “I don’t know,” — his father liked to say — “what will become of that boy; the rascal has absolutely no character!”
So in our childhood, character was what you got a beating for, even though you didn’t have it. There seems to have been a certain injustice in this. Character, my friend’s parents maintained (on one exceptional occasion they demanded it of him and actually sought to make him understand), was the conceptual opposite of bad report cards, skipping school, tin pans tied to the dogs’ tails, idle chatter and clowning around during class, obstinate excuses, faulty memory, and innocent birds struck by the sling of a nasty little marksman. But the natural opposite of all this was, after all, the terror of punishment, the fear of discovery and the pangs of guilt that tormented the soul with the remorse that you felt when things went wrong. That was all; there was no room and no function left over for character, and it was completely superfluous. Still, they demanded it of us.
Perhaps the enlightening words of counsel occasionally spoken to my friend during his punishment were supposed to give him a basis on which to build character, advice like “Don’t you have any pride, son?!” Or: “How can anyone be such a low-down liar?!” But I must say that I still find it difficult to this very day to fathom how anyone is supposed to be proud while getting a beating, or how he’s supposed to demonstrate his pride while bent down over the parental knee. Anger I can imagine; but that’s just what we weren’t supposed to have! And the same holds true for lies: How in the world are you supposed to lie, if not in a low-down way? Awkwardly perhaps? When I think about it today, it still seems to me as though what they really demanded back then was for us boys to be ingenious liars. But thus we were charged with conflicting orders: first, don’t lie; and second, if you have to lie, don’t lie like a liar. Maybe grown-up criminals have mastered this, since in the courtroom it is always held as a particularly dastardly villainy if they committed their crime cold-bloodedly, with malice and forethought; but it was definitely too much to ask of us boys. I am afraid that the only reason I don’t have such a marked absence of character as my friend is that I was not brought up with such painstaking care.
The most plausible of the parental dicta concerning our character was the one that joined its regrettable absence to the warning that we would have need of it as grown men: “And a boy like that wants to become a man!?” is approximately the way it went. The fact notwithstanding that this business about wanting was not altogether clear, the rest at least gave us to believe that character was something that we would be needing later on; so why all these hurried preparations now? This would have accorded altogether with our own way of looking at it.
Even though my friend possessed no character at the time, he did not suffer from the lack of it. That only came later, and began between our sixteenth and seventeenth year. It was then that we started frequenting the theater and reading novels. My friend’s brain, more prone to the dazzling seduction of art than my own, was naively annexed by the villain of the state theater, by the gentle father, the heroic lover, the comic characters, and even the devilish and bewitching femme fatale. Now he only spoke with false inflections, but suddenly possessed all the character of the German stage. If he promised something, you never knew whether you had his word as hero or villain; sometimes he started out perfidious and ended up honest, or the other way around; he would greet us friends with a grumble of displeasure only to switch suddenly to the bon vivant and offer us chocolate bonbons and a chair, or else hug us with fatherly affection and meanwhile steal the cigarettes out of our pocket.
And yet all this was harmless and honest compared to the effects of reading novels. Novels contain descriptions of the most amazing modes of behavior for countless situations. The main drawback, however, is that the situations you actually get yourself into never accord altogether with those for which the novels have prescribed what to do and what to say. World literature is a huge depot in which millions of souls are dressed up with magnanimity, indignation, pride, love, disdain, jealousy, nobility, and meanness. If a worshipped woman steps on our feelings, we know that we are to reply with a reproachfully soulful look; if a scoundrel mistreats an orphan, we know that we are to knock him out with a single punch. But what are we to do if the worshipped woman slams her door shut in our face so that our soulful look never reaches her? Or if a table laden with costly crystal separates us from the scoundrel mistreating the orphan? Shall we break the door down just to cast our sensitive look through splinters; and should we carefully remove the costly crystal before resorting to the indignant blow? In such truly crucial situations, literature always leaves you in the lurch; maybe things will only get better in a few hundred years, when more facets of life are described.