A Small Circus

  ‘Photos? No, I’ve never sold any photos.’

  Feinbube turns round. ‘Take a look at him, Plosch. Take a look at that guilty conscience. The liar! The coward!’

  Suddenly turning back to Tredup, beside himself with rage: ‘You swine! You Judas! What have you done with the thirty pieces of silver you got for betraying our Reimers to the knife? Give them here, you traitor!’

  He staggers closer. And in front of him, with pale face and shaking knees, Tredup is trying to shrink ever deeper into the corner.

  ‘Where are they?’ asks the drunk stubbornly, half raising the cane. ‘Where are they? Spent them on women? Or drunk them away? Where’s the rope you mean to hang yourself from?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about any pictures,’ says Tredup, with teeth chattering. ‘I’ve got no money. I’ve got nothing.’

  ‘Do you know what you’ve done, you swine? I could smash your rotten cockroach skull with my stick. What have you done with the money?’

  ‘Please leave me alone,’ begs Tredup. ‘You can’t just . . . It’s wrong . . . Do you really want to kill me just like that?’

  In the background, Plosch calls out: ‘Leave him be, Feinbube. Don’t get your hands dirty.’

  ‘Kill you is exactly what I have in mind. Exactly.’ And the long, sinewy hand feels for Tredup’s collar and twists it in a tightening noose round his neck.

  ‘It’s your fault that Reimers wound up in jail . . .’

  Tredup gurgles: ‘I was in prison too . . . the bomb . . .’

  The grip loosens. ‘What was that about the bomb? Say it, you liar!’

  Tredup, hurriedly: ‘It was in the paper. That I’d been arrested for planting the bomb in Temborius’s house. Tredup, remember?’

  ‘He’s right, Feinbube,’ says Plosch. ‘They arreshted someone called Tredup for the bomb.’

  ‘Then why are you running around like a free man?’

  ‘Because they let me go at half past nine last night.’

  ‘What did they let you go for?’

  ‘Because they had no evidence against me.’

  ‘Did you plant the bomb, then? How did you make it?’

  ‘They couldn’t prove I did it.’

  ‘Who did you plant the bomb with? What’s the name of your accomplice?’

  ‘They couldn’t prove it was him either. He’s going to be released too.’

  Feinbube turns away from Tredup and stalks slowly towards the door.

  ‘Come on, Plosch, let’s get out of this pigsty. Everything here stinks.’

  He turns to Tredup. ‘You’re lying, sunshine. But we’ll rumble you. And then we’ll split your rotten skull for you. All rotten. Putrid. Shit, crap, syphilitics, the lot of you!’

  Suddenly he’s yelling again: ‘You’re a bunch of syphilitics! Low-down, nasty syphilitics! But we’ve got injections to treat the likes of you, toxic, and your Stuff. We’ll wash you away with the clap injection!’

  He reels away, followed by Plosch. Tredup slumps forward on to the desk and shuts his eyes.

  VI

  For a while there’s quiet in the office; it’s as though Tredup’s sleeping. Then a door opens, and then another. The barrier in dispatch creaks.

  Tredup raises his head a little, blinks in the direction of the door. Who’s coming to torment me now?

  The person coming in is none other than Stuff, but an altered, greyed Stuff, pale, with swollen tear bags under his eyes. He sits down heavily on his chair and stares into space.

  ‘Shot,’ he finally says. ‘Gone. Dead. Extinguished.’

  He sniffs sadly.

  ‘Where’s the script, Tredup? Did they read it? Did they like it?’

  ‘No, they didn’t read it. They wanted to beat my brains out.’

  ‘You’re so lucky, Tredup. I wish someone would come and beat my brains out.’

  He picks up the pages of copy and stares at them. He looks like an old man, grey, greasy, gone to seed.

  He holds them in both hands and tears them across. Stares at the pieces, and drops them in the bin.

  ‘There! So much for my attack. It’s the beginning of the Gebhardt era. Softly, softly, mind you don’t tread on anyone’s feelings, even your foe’s. I’m not allowed to any more, Tredup! I’m not allowed to go after the Reds.’

  ‘Big deal,’ says Tredup. ‘What would be the good? It’s just more bother.’

  ‘The Gebhardt era, with the woolly-mammoth hair and the thé dansant bow. You’re allowed to break wind, but only quietly. Though there’s more of a stink.’

  ‘I’ve only got one request, which is to be left in peace,’ says Tredup. ‘If Wenk sends me off to look for advertisers . . .’

  ‘The official report!’ groans Stuff. ‘That’s all I’m allowed to print. Oh, Tredup, the whitewash! Listen: “The flag was confiscated because scythes are not allowed to be openly carried in a built-up area.” What do you think of that?’

  Tredup doesn’t think anything of it.

  Stuff continues: ‘“The farmers attacked the police with cudgels.”—What bullshit! If three thousand farmers attack twenty policemen there’s not going to be many policemen left. And I’m not allowed to say anything.’

  Tredup doesn’t say anything either.

  ‘“The meeting in the auction hall had to be broken up because the police had got wind of the fact that some farmers had pistols.”—Why wasn’t there so much as a single pop?’

  ‘I really can’t say,’ says Tredup.

  ‘And I have to print stuff like that with no comment! And the poor public reads it and doesn’t think anything of it unless it gets it pre-digested. If I’d known that, I’d never have got into bed with Gebhardt. Feinbube and Plosch are right to want to spit at me.’

  ‘Do I have to get into bed with Gebhardt as well? Will you put in a good word for me, Stuff?’

  ‘He won’t see me for another three years, I swear! I’m not going to see him for the next three years.—And I’m not allowed to write for him at all.’

  He stares straight ahead in despair.

  ‘If you agree to help me get a proper job and with a fixed salary,’ Tredup begins slowly, ‘then I’ll find a way for you to go on kicking up a stink.’

  ‘There is no way. He’s slapped a ban on me: I’m not allowed to write.’

  ‘Not you.’

  Stuff stares. Then quickly: ‘OK, I’ll help you, Tredup. You’ll be taken on. How much do you need?’

  ‘It must be at least a hundred and fifty.’

  ‘Crap. How are you going to live on a hundred and fifty with a wife and children? It would only mean doing more freelancing like with the photos. Two hundred, at least.’

  ‘Will he pay two hundred?’

  ‘I know a way. I won’t go myself, I’ll use an intermediary. I promise you you’ll be taken on at two hundred a month.’

  ‘Word of honour?’

  ‘Word of honour.’

  ‘OK—you’re not allowed to write for the paper. But if you get a reader’s letter, a subscriber’s letter, then you have to print it, don’t you? You can’t alienate a subscriber, can you, least of all if they take out space in the paper too . . . ?’

  Stuff stares, stares straight through Tredup, it seems, at the wall behind him.

  Suddenly he leaps up. There’s colour in his cheeks and his eyes are shining.

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘I’m in with Textil-Braun. I’ll write one in his name and tell him later.’

  ‘And what will you write?’

  ‘Wait,’ says Tredup. ‘You have to kick up a fuss to make people restless. Feinbube and Plosch were yarning before. Give me a pen and paper, I’ll write it now . . .’

  Stuff jumps to it. With shining eyes he watches the awakened Tredup and says under his breath: ‘Christ, Max, where there’s skulduggery to be done, you’re the best.’

  Tredup writes and writes. Then he picks up the piece of paper and hands it to Stuff.

  Who merely says: ‘You read it. Wh
at human being can read that?’

  And Tredup reads:

  ‘Cometh the hour. All over town, I keep hearing heated commentaries on yesterday’s goings-on in our town—’

  ‘That’s the right tone,’ says Stuff. ‘“All over town”, and then “in our town”. Very nice.’

  ‘Truly a black day in the annals of Altholm. But much more important than that is an answer to the question: How are the inhabitants of Altholm responding to the events of Bloody Monday? Are they happy that the farmers, who were guests of our town (their demonstration was officially sanctioned), were beaten down, or are they upset?

  I am appalled: everywhere I hear that the farmers are in a mood to cancel the great point-to-point that is due to take place here in three weeks. That was always good for bringing six or seven thousand rural visitors to our town. God save Altholm from a boycott by the farmers! Therefore, business leaders, artisans, small entrepreneurs, give us an opinion: are you supporters of Bloody Monday, or not?

  One businessman on behalf of many.’

  Stuff holds the sheet in his hands.

  ‘With this single piece of paper you have washed away all your sins, Tredup, my son. It’s a bullseye.’

  He races into the typesetting room.

  2

  The Boycott Becomes Real

  I

  From time to time, not too frequently, so that the effect is not diluted, Padberg’s newspaper, the Bauernschaft, issues an appeal, a summons to a Farmers’ Parliament.

  In almost identical terms, the farmers are called upon to send ‘envoys across the land to raise those who work the soil to come to a Parliament for such and such a cause’. Time and place are transmitted by the envoy to the trusted ear, ‘to be kept secret from wife and child, townie and businessman, barkeeper and servant’.

  No one knows who was responsible for the old-fashioned terms, though the institution itself is of recent date. But they caught on because the farmers were familiar with them from church; at the time country people still read their Bibles.

  And the young fellows were happy enough to take their brushed and combed farmhorses out of the stable on a Sunday morning. Bareback, or on an old blanket, or on some ancient estate saddleware, they rode over the land, stopping at each farmhouse.

  A halloo from a horn, or the crack of a whip. And earnestly they would invite the emerging ‘honest yeoman or husbandman or ploughman, to come on Wednesday of this week to the gorse place hard by Lohstedt, where the ancient burial mounds are, to hold court there over all, be they high or low, who carried the blame for the tragic Monday at Altholm’.

  It was Padberg who came up with the place for the Parliament. A salutary change from the dance halls of bars with fading paper chains, and the reek of beer and tobacco, the green boards of stages and bandstands, the memories of women and song!

  There, where the spindly umbrella pines stand, where the golden gorse sprouts, where the scattered blocks of an opened Hun grave lurk among the dark masses of juniper—there, when night falls (and the calendar marks a moon), and there is a little wind, and five thousand farmers and a Parliament . . .

  Padberg, having gone off in a huff, has read the morning papers and been converted. The news has carried far beyond the province, the Right-wing press stands solidly behind the farmers and united in condemnation of the police.

  And Padberg gets to work. He sees prospects for a cause that had seemed lost, perhaps a humiliating cudgelling can be parlayed into a glittering triumph.

  While the envoys are riding across the land, he is sitting with six farmers in Bandekow-Ausbau. He talks to them about the coming struggle. The doubters and despairers are shown victory just over the horizon.

  ‘The farmers are in a ferment. Another two or three weeks, and all that will be left will be the experience of defeat. At the moment they can still feel the smart of the police nightsticks. They will do everything to get their own back.’

  The count asks: ‘Get our own back? We will draw up a protest resolution. The magistracy, the government, the minister will just stick it in the bin, and everything will be as it was before.’

  ‘We won’t protest, we will act. Every individual farmer will be given a task. But I’ll wait till the Parliament before telling you about that. No one is to know in advance. And the Parliament will be ordered like this:

  ‘On top of the biggest boulder we’ll have the court of judge and six honest lay jurymen. One will bring charges against Altholm, another will defend it—’

  ‘Who’s going to defend Altholm?’

  ‘Who but Benthin?’

  ‘No, I’m not going to do that. Not after the way they’ve treated me.’

  ‘You’ll do it, Cousin. Orders from the Farmers’ League. Anyway, you’re not really defending it, you’re just pretending to.’

  ‘I don’t want to do that either, just pretend. I’d sooner really defend it.’

  ‘All right then! And then there will be a verdict, and you’ll see the country rise up, and the Altholmers will cry out, and the government will be reduced to despair, and the revenue departments will knuckle under—and all without violence!’

  ‘You’re very optimistic,’ says the count. ‘I saw you before the demonstration. Things looked good for us then, but you were full of foreboding. Today they look awful, but you’re full of good cheer.’

  ‘Those who are brought down shall be raised up,’ says Padberg.

  ‘That’s not how it goes,’ Benthin butts in eagerly.

  ‘That’s how it goes with us,’ says Padberg. ‘Now!’

  II

  Rural Constable Zeddies-Haselhorst is married to a farmer’s daughter, one of the Rohwer girls. And so it came about that by way of women’s loose tongues he gets to hear of the time and place of the forthcoming Parliament.

  The correct thing to do would have been to notify his sergeant in Stolpe, but to a man living in the country among farmers, what’s correct is not always right.

  If word gets out who spoke, he won’t be able to stay living where he is, and his wife will fall out with her family. The government will send in the militia, and a couple of platoons will scatter the farmers—and Zeddies himself is a farmer’s son, who once as a poor drummer-boy capitulated with the Stettin infantry.

  So he keeps the promise he made to his wife and doesn’t tell anyone. But as night draws in, he doesn’t care to be in the garden, or the house, or the woodshed. The stumps he needs to split were never so tough, the News carries no news, and the slugs in the strawberries are no fun to look at for a man who spent his day bringing a runaway maid back to her employers, conducting a couple of searches of the premises of thieving farm-labourers, and turning out to support an official on a confiscation order. Can’t he have a little joy in his life?

  It gets quieter, and then completely quiet. In the cowsheds of his neighbours there is peace, the horses are all out in the paddocks, the playing children are at home and in bed, even the birds are tucked up. From the meadows that he sees from his bedroom window a fine mist rises, the bright streak on the horizon gets ever darker and dimmer, and the vault of the sky deepens. The stars glint, he counts three shooting stars in five minutes, and as the first one meant ‘yes’, then the third will mean ‘yes’ as well.

  He gets into some other clothes, without any rush, and listens out to hear what his wife is up to. He ascertains that she’s soaking linens in the wash-house, so he goes down the steps in his jacket, round the garden to the woodshed, where he gets out his bicycle.

  At the garden fence is his wife’s pale face. ‘Are you going out at this hour, Heinrich?’

  ‘A swift half at the Krug.’

  ‘You have to leave the bike in Lohstedt and cross Baumgarten’s paddock. You remember?’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘Behind that the meadows begin. You go straight across, to the wood.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There you’ll find a stream. You’ll find it by night in the pastures too. Follow it upstream,
it’s not very deep in summer.’

  ‘But I’ll still wind up in the swamp.’

  ‘Everyone says the swamp is deep, but we used to play there all the time when we were little. At the most you’ll go in up to your knees, and it’s not hard to pull your feet out.’

  ‘People say . . .’

  ‘That there are will-o’-the-wisps and drowned bodies. Barenthin’s father met his end there. But not because the swamp is deep, but because he was pissed. He was lying face down in the muck. All it would have taken would have been for him to lift his head, if he hadn’t been so drunk.’

  ‘And will I get all the way to the boulders?’

  ‘To within ten or twenty yards of them. And there’s plenty of reeds. But you have to be careful not to rustle.’

  ‘Well, then, I’ll go the way you told me.’

  ‘Go on, then.’

  He swings himself on to his bicycle and disappears into the gloaming.

  He leaves the bicycle behind the school in Lohstedt. Tonight it’s better that no one sees him, he can’t go to the pub, no one is to know he’s here. Lohstedt, incidentally, seems deserted.

  Then he crosses the paddock, down to the meadows, through the dew-wet grass.

  By the stream, he picks out a willow that’s been exploded by frost, a crazy shape, identifiable from all the other trees at a hundred yards, even in moonlight, and that’s where he packs his shoes and socks.

  Then he rolls up his trouser legs and climbs into the stream. The bed is pure sand, and he makes good progress.

  After a while, the water flows more slowly, the banks are flatter, the bottom a little boggy. The pines yield to willow scrub, reeds, thick hummocks of moss.

  He makes slow progress here, his feet get bogged down in the mud.

  From time to time he stops and wipes his brow. He looks up at the stars and checks his bearings.

  Suddenly he stops. There’s a smell of smoke. It can’t be that the smoke is coming from the boulders already. Anyway, the wind is from the side, if anything.

  Who’s lit a fire in the swamp?

  However much he wants to go to the assembly, his hunter’s instincts have been aroused, and he quietly feels his way left.

  Here the swamp evens out, fewer hummocks, more willow. The smoke is thicker, the ground drier. A dense bush, and at the top of it, the reddish gleam of a wood fire.