Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family

  There was “bishop’s punch” in undrinkable quantities, and Sesame’s plain gingerbread cake was terribly tasty. But every year Fräulein Weichbrodt went about her last Christmas party with such jittery devotion to the task that the evening never passed without some surprise, some mishap, some little catastrophe that made all her guests laugh, but only increased their hostess’s mute fervor. A pitcher of bishop’s punch would topple over and flood everything in sweet, spicy red liquid. Or, at the very moment they all solemnly entered the room to receive their gifts, the tree with all its trimming would totter and fall over its own wooden feet. As he fell asleep, Hanno watched last year’s accident pass before his eyes. It was just before the presents were to be given out. Therese Weichbrodt had read the Christmas story from the Bible, so impressively that all her vowels were out of place, and then she stepped back from her guests to stand in the doorway and deliver her little speech. The tiny, hunchbacked woman stood there on the threshold, her hands crossed at her childlike chest, the green silk ribbons of her cap falling down over her frail shoulders—and above her head, just over the door, was a fir wreath with lighted candles that illumined the words “Glory to God in the highest!” And Sesame spoke of God’s goodness, mentioned that this would be her last Christmas party, and concluded by reminding them that, in the apostle’s words, they were to rejoice, and was so caught up in her emotions that her whole body trembled from tip to toe. “Rajoice!” she said, laying her head to one side and shaking it hard. “And again I say, rajoice!” And in the same moment, there was a puffing, spitting, crackling noise, and the whole banner burst into flames. Mademoiselle Weichbrodt gave a little shriek and, with one agile, picturesque bound that no one would have expected of her, she leapt out from under the descending rain of sparks.

  Hanno remembered that bounding leap the old spinster had made, and it so amused and touched him that he pressed his head into his pillow and laughed for several minutes—a soft, high-strung, nervous giggle.

  9

  FRAU PERMANEDER was walking down Breite Strasse, and she was in a great hurry. There was something disjointed about the way she carried herself, and only the set of her head and shoulders hinted at the majestic dignity in which she normally wrapped herself in public. In her violent haste, she had, as it were, snatched up only a shred of it and taken flight, the way a defeated king, pressed and harassed by his enemies, gathers up the remnants of his army.

  Oh, she did not look well. Her upper lip—the same slightly protruding, arched upper lip that had always helped to make her face so pretty—was quivering now, and she was so overwrought that her eyes, although large with fear, kept blinking as they stared straight ahead, almost as if they, too, were in a hurry. Wisps of her disheveled hair were visible under the hood of her cape, and her face had taken on the same dull yellow hue that it always did when her digestion took a turn for the worse.

  Her digestion had certainly been in a bad state of late. The whole family had watched it grow worse on succeeding Thursdays. Like sailors trying to avoid the rocks, they steered the conversation away from Hugo Weinschenk’s trial—and inevitably foundered on it. Frau Permaneder herself would make straight for it, and then she would ask, excitedly demanding an answer from God or anyone else, how prosecutor Moritz Hagenström could possibly sleep at night. She could not comprehend it, would never understand—and her agitation increased with every word. “Thank you, I’m not eating,” she would say, and shove her food away; raising her shoulders and laying her head back, she would retreat to the lonely heights of her outrage. The only thing she would put in her stomach was beer—the cold Bavarian beer she had been accustomed to drink since the days of her Munich marriage—and each time she poured it down, the nerves of her empty stomach rebelled and took their revenge. Toward the end of the meal she would have to excuse herself, and with the assistance of Ida Jungmann or Rieke Severin, she would go down to the garden or the back courtyard and suffer the most dreadful fits of nausea. Her stomach would empty its contents and then go on cramping, and the spasms could last for long, torturous minutes. Unable to vomit anything more, she would continue to gag miserably for a long time.

  It was three in the afternoon of a windy, rainy January day. When Frau Permaneder reached the corner of Fischer Grube, she turned and hurried down the steep slope to her brother’s house. A quick knock—and she went straight from the hallway to her brother’s office. Her eyes flew across the desks to where the senator was sitting at the window, and she gave such a bitter shake of her head that Thomas Buddenbrook immediately laid down his pen and came toward her.

  “Well?” he asked, lifting one eyebrow.

  “A moment of your time, Thomas. It’s urgent. It can’t wait.”

  He opened the upholstered door to his private office, closed it behind him once they were both inside, and gave his sister a questioning look.

  “Tom,” she said with a quavering voice, wringing her hands inside her fur muff, “you’ll have to provide it, just a temporary advance—you simply must, I beg you—the money to pay for his bail. We don’t have it. Where are we to get twenty-five thousand marks courant? You’ll get it back, every penny—all too soon, I’m afraid. You see—it’s finally happened. The trial is now at a point where Hagenström has demanded that he be arrested or that bail be set at twenty-five thousand marks courant. And Weinschenk gives you his word of honor, he won’t so much as set a foot out of town.”

  “So it has really come to this,” the senator said, shaking his head.

  “Yes, they’ve managed to do it, those scoundrels, those miserable scoundrels!” And with a sob of helpless rage, Frau Permaneder sank down onto an armchair that was covered in oilcloth and stood right next to her. “And they will manage to do worse, Tom. They’ll carry it to the bitter end.”

  “Tony,” he said, sitting down sideways on his mahogany desk, one leg crossed over the other, and propping his head in his hand. “Be honest with me—do you still think he is innocent?”

  She sobbed a few times and then softly replied in despair, “Oh no, Tom. How could I think that? After all the awful things I’ve had to experience in life. I wasn’t really able to believe it from the beginning, although I truly did try. Life makes it so dreadfully difficult, you know, to believe in anyone’s innocence. Oh no, I’ve been tormented for a long time now by doubts whether his conscience is resting easy. And even Erika herself—he’s driving her crazy. She cried when she admitted it to me. He’s driving her crazy with the way he carries on at home. Neither of us has said a word, of course. But that rough exterior of his has only got rougher. And all the while he gets harsher and harsher in his demands that Erika be cheerful and keep his mind off his worries. He smashes dishes if she’s too serious. You have no idea what it’s like when he comes home late at night and locks himself up with his papers. And if you knock on the door you can hear him jump to his feet and shout, ‘Who’s that? What do you want?’ ”

  She fell silent, but then started in again, her voice rising now. “Even if he is guilty, even if he did commit the crime—he didn’t do it to fill his own pocket, but for the insurance company. Good God in heaven, there are certain things that must be taken into consideration in this life, Tom. He married into our family, he’s one of us now, after all. They can’t simply lock one of us up in prison, good merciful heavens!”

  He shrugged.

  “And you just shrug your shoulders, Tom? So you’re willing simply to accept it? You’ll let these dregs, these impudent upstarts, get away with their final insult? We have to do something! We can’t let him be convicted. You’re the mayor’s right hand—my God, can’t the senate just pardon him on the spot? I’ll tell you something—just before I came here to see you, I was seriously considering going to Cremer and throwing myself on him, begging him to intervene, to get involved in this. He is the chief of police.…”

  “Oh, dear girl, that’s mere foolishness.”

  “Foolishness, Tom? And what about Erika? And the child?” she said,
lifting her muff, her two imploring hands still stuck inside. Then she fell silent for a moment and let her arms drop; her mouth widened, her chin puckered up and began to quiver, and as two large tears welled up under her lowered eyelashes, she added very softly, “What about me?”

  “Oh, Tony, courage,” the senator said, and, touched and moved by her helplessness, he slid closer and stroked her hair, trying to console her. “It isn’t over yet. He hasn’t been convicted. It can all turn out all right. And I’ll put up the bail first thing—of course, I wouldn’t deny you that. And Breslauer is a shrewd man, you know.…”

  She wept and shook her head. “No, Tom, it won’t turn out all right—I don’t believe that. They will convict him and put him in jail, and then Erika and the child and I will face hard times. Her dowry is gone—it went for her trousseau, for the furniture and paintings. And if we sell it, we’ll hardly get a quarter of its value back. And we’ve always spent his salary. Weinschenk never saved anything. We’ll have to move back in with Mother, if she’ll have us—until he’s set free again. And then it will almost be worse than ever. What will become of him and of us then? We can’t simply go sit on the stones,” she said, sobbing some more.

  “On the stones?”

  “Oh, it’s just an expression—a figure of speech. Oh no, it won’t turn out all right. Too many troubles have rained down on me. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve it, but I have no hope left. And now Erika will have to endure what I endured with Grünlich and Permaneder. And you can see how it is already—you can see for yourself at close hand how things are, how they will turn out, how everything is going to just burst over us. But can I help it, Tom? I beg you, can I help it?” she asked a second time, nodding disconsolately, her eyes wide and filled with tears. “Everything I’ve ever tried to do has gone wrong and ended in misfortune. But my intentions were always good, God knows they were! My most heartfelt wish has been to accomplish something in life and to bring a little honor to the family. And now this has fallen apart, too. This is how it had to end. It’s all over.”

  And, leaning against the arm he had put around her shoulder to soothe her, she wept over the failure she had made of life, its last hope extinguished now.

  ONE WEEK LATER, Director Hugo Weinschenk was sentenced to three and a half years in prison and arrested on the spot.

  The courtroom had been packed on the day when the lawyers had made their final statements. And Dr. Breslauer from Berlin had delivered a speech for the defense the like of which no one had ever heard before. Siegismund Gosch went around for weeks afterward sputtering with enthusiasm about its irony, its pathos, its touching emotion; and Christian Buddenbrook, who had also been present, sat down behind a table at the Club, stacked newspapers like legal documents in front of him, and in perfect imitation delivered the speech for the defense verbatim. And once he got home, he expressed his opinion that law was the finest of professions—yes, it would have been the profession for him. Even Dr. Hagenström, the prosecutor, who was a man of taste and wit, let it be known in private that Breslauer’s speech had been an absolute pleasure to listen to. But the famous lawyer’s talents had not prevented his local colleagues from clapping him on the shoulder and explaining good-naturedly that they weren’t about to be taken in.

  And then, once everything had been sold that had to be sold after Hugo Weinschenk’s disappearance, the town began to forget him. But every Thursday, when the family gathered around the table, the Ladies Buddenbrook from Breite Strasse confessed that, from the moment they first saw him, they could tell from the man’s eyes that he was not all he should be, that there were serious flaws in his character, and that he would come to no good end. Their consideration for others—which, as they now observed to their regret, it would have been better to disregard—had led them to keep this unfortunate knowledge to themselves.

  PART NINE

  (Dedicated to the courageous painter Paul Ehrenberg, in memory of our evenings of music and literature in Munich)

  1

  PRECEDED BY TWO GENTLEMEN—old Dr. Grabow and young Dr. Langhals, a member of the Langhals family who had been in practice for about a year now—Senator Buddenbrook stepped out of his mother’s bedroom into the breakfast room and closed the door.

  “May I see you for a moment, gentlemen, please,” he said and led them downstairs, across the corridor, and through the columned hall to the landscape room, where a fire was already burning because of the raw, damp autumn weather. “I’m sure you can understand my anxiety. Please, sit down. Set my fears to rest, if that is at all possible.”

  “Great Scot, my dear Senator,” Dr. Grabow replied, burying his chin in his necktie, leaning back comfortably, and tucking the brim of his hat against his stomach, holding it tight in both hands. Dr. Langhals was a square-built man with beautiful eyes, a pointed beard, and brown hair combed back so that it stood almost on end; the expression on his face suggested vanity. He had set his top hat on the carpet beside him and was examining his extraordinarily small hands, covered with black hair. “There is, of course,” Dr. Grabow continued, “absolutely no reason for serious worry at present. I beg you—a patient with your worthy mother’s relatively good powers of resistance. Upon my honor as an old adviser to this family, I know what such a constitution can do. Really quite amazing for her age, let me tell you.”

  “Yes, but that’s the point, at her age …” the senator said uneasily and twirled one long tip of his mustache.

  “I’m not saying, of course, that your good mother will be taking a stroll tomorrow morning,” Dr. Grabow went on meekly. “And I’m sure that’s not the impression the patient made on you, my dear Senator. One cannot deny that her catarrh has taken a nasty turn in the last twenty-four hours. I did not like those chills yesterday evening, and today there is in fact a little pain in one side and a shortness of breath. And a light fever now, too—oh, insignificant, but fever nonetheless. In brief, my dear Senator, one must probably reconcile oneself with the pesky fact that the lung has been affected.”

  “The lung is affected?” the senator asked, looking from doctor to doctor.

  “Yes—pneumonia,” Dr. Langhals said, with an earnest, correct bow.

  “Just the least touch of infection in the right lung,” the family physician replied, “which we must do our very best to localize.”

  “So there is some basis for real concern, then?” The senator sat very quietly and gazed unblinkingly at the old doctor.

  “Concern? Oh, we must, as I’ve said, be concerned to localize the illness, to ease her cough and grapple with the fever. And quinine will be effective there. But one thing more, my dear Senator—we shan’t let certain symptoms unnerve us, shall we? Should her difficulty in breathing increase a bit, or if there should perhaps be a little delirium overnight, or a bit of sputum tomorrow—by which I mean a reddish brown expectoration, with a trace of blood—that’s all quite logical, simply part of the condition, perfectly normal. And so please prepare our dear Madame Permaneder for the possibility, since she is the one who with such selfless devotion has taken charge of nursing her. A propos—how is she feeling? I quite forgot to ask how her digestion has been these last few days.”

  “About as always. I don’t know of any change. Any concern about her own health has become somewhat secondary, naturally.”

  “But of course. By the way, that brings me to another thought. Your sister needs her rest, particularly at night, and Mamselle Severin probably won’t be able to handle everything by herself. How would it be if we engaged a nurse, my dear Senator? We have our good Gray Sisters, the Catholic nuns you have always been so kind as to support. The mother superior would be so happy to be of service.”

  “You think it necessary, then?”

  “I offer it as a suggestion. It is so much more pleasant that way. The sisters are invaluable—so experienced and composed. They have a calming effect on their patients, particularly in cases of this sort, where unsettling symptoms are involved. And so, if I may re
peat myself, we shall keep calm and cool, my dear Senator, shall we not? And for the rest, we shall see—we shall see. We’ll drop by again this evening, of course.”

  “Most assuredly,” Dr. Langhals said, picking up his top hat and standing up with his older colleague.

  But the senator remained seated—he was not finished, he still had another question, another topic to broach. “Gentlemen,” he said, “one word more—my brother Christian’s nerves are not good, he doesn’t handle these things well. Would you advise me to let him know about Mother’s illness? Suggest, perhaps, that he return home?”

  “Your brother, Christian, is not in town?”

  “No, in Hamburg. Temporarily. On business, as far as I know.”

  Dr. Grabow cast his colleague a glance. Then, with a laugh, he shook the senator’s hand and said, “We can leave him to attend to his business. Why frighten him unnecessarily? Should there be any change in her condition that would make his presence advisable—to quiet the patient, let us say, lift her spirits—well, there’ll be plenty of time for that, plenty of time.”

  The gentlemen walked back through the columned hall and along the corridor, stopping for a while on the landing to talk about other things—politics, the shocks and upheavals of the war just ended.

  “But there will be good times now, don’t you think, Senator Buddenbrook? Money in the country and fresh confidence everywhere?”