And louder: “So now you know what else there is besides you; before now you only knew about yourself! You were an innocent child, really, but as a man you’ve been a fiend! — So pay attention: I now sentence you to death by drowning!”
Georg felt chased out of the room, with the crash of his father falling onto the bed ringing in his ears. On the stairs, which he rushed down as if they were a smooth slope, he bowled into his cleaning woman, who was just going up to tidy the apartment for the morning. She shouted “Jesus!” and covered her face with her apron, but he was already gone. He burst out of the door and raced across the road towards the water. A moment later, he was gripping the railing like a starving man grips food. He swung himself over it like the excellent gymnast he’d been in his teenage years, to the pride of his parents. He clung on, his hands weakening, until between the railing’s posts he saw a bus approaching that would easily cover the noise of his fall, then cried out softly, “Dear parents, haven’t I always loved you?” and let himself drop.
Meanwhile an almost endless stream of traffic went over the bridge.
THE TRUTH ABOUT SANCHO PANZA
SANCHO PANZA—who incidentally has never boasted about this—used to leave out piles of novels about knights and robbers in the evenings and for the long hours of the night, and by doing so for several years he succeeded in distracting his devil, whom he later gave the name Don Quixote, so completely that this devil threw himself into all kinds of crazy exploits, which, because they lacked a definite target—it should have been Sancho Panza—never hurt anyone. Sancho Panza, a free man, calmly followed Don Quixote on his quests, perhaps out of a sense of responsibility, and got a great deal of edifying entertainment from him till the end of his days.
THE BRIDGE
I WAS S TIFF AND COLD, I was a bridge, I lay across a ravine. My feet were dug into one cliff, my hands into the other, I gripped the crumbling clay. The tails of my coat fluttered at my sides. Deep below me roared an icy trout river. No tourist ever strayed up to these trackless heights, the bridge wasn’t even marked on the maps. — So I lay there and waited; there was nothing else I could do. Unless it collapses, a bridge once built can never stop being a bridge.
One day, it was towards evening—was it the first evening, was it the thousandth? I can’t say, my thoughts were confused, going round in circles. Towards evening, in the summer, when the rushing water was getting darker, I heard the footsteps of a man. Coming to me, to me. — Stretch out your span, I said to myself; get your planks ready; carry the one who’s been entrusted to you. If his steps are uncertain, steady them without his noticing; but if he stumbles, reveal yourself and, like a mountain god, hurl him to the ground.
He came, he tapped me with his walking stick’s iron tip, he lifted up my coat-tails with it and arranged them on me. He stuck the tip into my unruly hair and left it there for a long time, no doubt while he gazed wildly around him. But then—as I lay above the mountains and the ravine, dreaming of him—he jumped with both feet onto the middle of my body. I shuddered in bewildered pain, not understanding. Who was he? A child? A dream? A robber? A suicide? A tempter? A destroyer? And I turned around to look at him. — A bridge turning around! I hadn’t even finished turning when I started to fall, I fell, and already I was being torn and impaled by the sharp rocks that had always stared up at me so peacefully from the raging waters.
THE MARRIED COUPLE
BUSINESS IS SO BAD at the moment that sometimes, if I’m just killing time in the office, I take the sample case and go see the clients myself. I’d also been meaning to go and pay a visit to N. for a while, because we used to work together all the time and in the past year, I don’t know why, it’s faded almost to nothing. Changes like that actually don’t have to happen for a reason; in today’s unstable conditions, a nothing, a mood, can make the difference, and in the same way a nothing, a few words, can get everything back on track. But it is a bit tricky going to see N.; he’s an old man, he’s been very sick recently, and even though he’s still in control of all his affairs, he hardly ever goes into the office any more; if you want to speak to him, you have to go to his apartment, and that’s the kind of business trip you’re happy to keep postponing.
Anyway, yesterday evening at six I set off for where he lives; it was certainly past the usual time for going to see someone, but it needed to be looked at from a business angle, not as a social visit. N. was at home; they told me in the front room that he’d just come back in from a walk with his wife and gone in to see his son, who wasn’t well and was lying in bed. I was told to go through; I hesitated at first, but then that feeling was overruled by the desire to get this painful visit over as quickly as possible, and so, still in my hat and coat and carrying my sample case, I let myself be led through a dark corridor into a dimly lit room where a small group had gathered.
I suppose out of instinct, the first thing I noticed was a sales rep I know all too well and who is also partly a competitor. He’d sneaked his way up here even before I had. He’d found a comfortable spot right beside the invalid’s bed, as if he were the doctor; in his lovely, fluffed-up, open jacket, he sat in his chair like he was in charge of the room; I’ve never met anyone so brazen; I thought the invalid might be thinking something similar as he lay there with fever-flushed cheeks and occasionally glanced up at him. Incidentally, he’s not young any more, the son, he’s a man my age with a short beard that’s become a little unkempt in his illness. Old man N. is big and broad-shouldered, and I was shocked to see that his slow suffering had made him gaunt, bent and uncertain. He was standing there just as he’d come in, still in his furs, and mumbling something at his son. His wife, small and fragile, albeit very animated, even if only towards him—she never looked at the rest of us—was busy helping him out of the furs, which was difficult because of the height difference between them, but she finally managed it. Perhaps the real difficulty was that N. was very impatient and kept reaching out his hands to demand the armchair, which his wife quickly pushed across to him once the furs were off. She took the furs away herself, even though she almost disappeared under them, and carried them out of the room.
Now it seemed that my moment had come, or rather, it hadn’t come and was probably never going to come; but if I was going to attempt something, I had to do it right away because I had the feeling that the circumstances were only going to get even less conducive to a business conversation; settling in here until the end of time, which seemed to be the sales rep’s plan, was not my style; and it wasn’t as if I was going to hold back on his account. So without much ado I started to present my thinking, even though I noticed that N. wanted to speak to his son. Unfortunately, I’ve got this bad habit that, if I work myself up with talk—something that can happen very quickly and that happened even faster than usual in that sickroom—I stand up and start pacing up and down while I speak. It’s no bad thing when you’re in your own office, but in a stranger’s home it really is a bit much. I couldn’t get myself under control, especially because I didn’t have my usual cigarette to hand. Now, everyone’s got their bad habits, and I would say that at least mine aren’t as bad as the sales rep’s. What can you say about someone who, for example, slides his hat slowly back and forth across his knees, but then suddenly, for no reason, puts it on his head; he’d take it off again right away, as if there was some mistake, but then a moment later he had it on his head again, and he kept repeating this routine, on and off. A performance like that you have to say is unacceptable. But in this moment, it doesn’t bother me, I pace up and down, completely caught up in my affairs, and ignore him; some people might have been thrown entirely off their stride by that hat business. Anyway, in my eagerness I don’t pay any attention to these distractions; in fact, I don’t pay any to anyone; of course I can see what’s happening but, so long as I’m not finished and not hearing any objections, I somehow don’t register it. So for example, I noticed that N. wasn’t very receptive to what I was saying; he had his hands on the armrests and was shifting awkwardly from side to side, not looking at me, but staring blankly into space, and his expression was as indifferent as if not a single word I was saying, nor even the fact that I was there, was getting through to him. I did see this distracted behaviour, which was far from encouraging, but I carried on talking regardless, as if there were some chance that the very advantageous offers I was presenting—I shocked myself with the concessions I made, concessions no one had asked for—as if this might bring everything back onto an even keel. It also gave me a certain satisfaction to see that the rep, as I noticed in passing, had finally left his hat alone and crossed his arms in front of his chest; my presentation, which was naturally also aimed at him, seemed to have put a big hole in his plans. And with the sense of well-being I got from that, I might have gone on talking even longer if the son, who until then I’d disregarded as irrelevant, abruptly lifted himself up in bed and shook his fist at me until I stopped. He apparently wanted to say something, or show us something, but didn’t have the strength. At first I thought he was just a bit delirious, but when I inadvertently glanced across at old N., I started to understand.