The Dedalus Meyrink Reader Page 3

  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 conv
ersations 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.

  He looked at his pocket watch. Nine o’clock. It would soon be getting dark.

  He waited an hour, then, without making a sound, packed his suitcase: one nightshirt, three handkerchiefs (he held them up to his eye; A. K. embroidered on them? Yes, they were his), his well-thumbed hymn-book with the four-leaf clover in it and then — a melancholy tear moistened his eyelids — his dear old truss which, painted in bright colours to look like a cobra, his mother had given him as a toy for Easter shortly before humans had taken him from the nest. Yes, that was everything. He locked the case and hid the key in his crop.

  He decided to have a short sleep before setting off, but hardly had he put his head under his wing than he was startled by a clatter. He listened. It was nothing important, just the marabou stork who was secretly addicted to gambling. At night, when all was quiet, he would play ‘odds or evens’ against himself in the moonlight. He played it by swallowing a pile of pebbles then spitting some of them out: if there was an odd number, he’d won. The vulture watched for a while, highly delighted to see the stork lose one game after another. But then another noise — from the artificial cement tree with which the cage was embellished — drew his attention. It was a low voice whispering, ‘Pst, pst, Herr Knödlseder.’

  ‘Yes, what is it?’ the vulture replied in an equally quiet voice, gliding down silently from his perch.

  It was a hedgehog. He too was Bavarian born and bred but, in contrast to the odious eagle, he was a plain, simple fellow who abhorred coarse practical jokes.

  ‘You’re going to escape,’ the hedgehog said, with a nod at his packed suitcase. For a moment the vulture wondered whether, to be safe, he ought to wring the little animal’s neck, but the honest creature’s frank, open expression was disarming. ‘Know your way round Munich at all?’

  ‘No,’ the vulture admitted, somewhat disconcerted.

  ‘There you are. I can give you a few tips. First of all, head off left round the corner soon as you get out, then take a right. You’ll see when you get there. And after that,’ — the hedgehog shook a pinch of snuff from his snuff box onto the back of his paw and took it with a loud sniff — ‘and after that just
keep straight on till you come to an oasis of peace, we call it Daglfing. You’ll have to ask again there. Bon voyage, as they say, Herr Knödlseder.’ And with that the hedgehog went off.

  Everything had gone well. Before dawn began to break Amadeus Knödlseder, quickly swapping his own shabby braces and hat with the embroidered, edelweiss-bedecked articles belonging to the eagle, who was snoring away like a steam engine on his perch, cautiously opened the trapdoor and launched himself up into the air, clutching his little suitcase in his left claw. The noise did wake the marabou stork, but he didn’t see anything for, still drowsy with sleep, he’d immediately gone into his corner to give thanks to God.

  ‘Flat as a pancake,’ the vulture muttered as he flew through the rosy dawn over the dreaming city, ‘and just about as interesting. To think it calls itself the city of art.’