A Small Circus

  ‘Cousin Benthin, as I hope to go to heaven, I promise you I’m a decent man.’

  ‘Then that’s all right then, son. You go on and do your work.’

  II

  The joint session of the Town Council and the magistracy is over. Oberbürgermeister Niederdahl has just closed it.

  The first man out, the Oberbürgermeister having barely finished speaking, is Blöcker of the News. He is in a hurry to get to his choir meeting.

  Normally Stuff is hard on his heels.

  This time, though, he is still seated, stunned by what he has heard. Vainly he tries to shape it into a report for tomorrow’s paper. The vehemence of Gareis’s attack, the incredible humiliation of the Right-wing parties, the undeniable disgrace of all the Centre Party representatives, have left his head reeling.

  Little Pinkus from the Volkszeitung, that SPD poodle, smiles a slimy smile at him. ‘Rough—eh, Stuff?’

  Stuff yells at him, pounding his fist on the table: ‘Will you shut up, you wretched copyist!’

  The little fellow ducks his head.

  Gareis steps in between them. ‘Gentlemen, please.—Pinkus, enough.—Herr Stuff, if I could have a word with you . . . ?’

  And when Stuff stares at him in a fury: ‘Brave Stuff . . .’

  Stuff accompanies him silently through the mob of representatives and magistrates. Then along several corridors and flights of steps to Gareis’s office.

  Already after ten paces he has forgotten the man beside him and their exchange. He’s back with his plans for the Nationalist appeal, which he had up and running when Gebhardt condemned him to silence.

  The Nationalists are only weakly represented in Altholm’s government: a dozen veterans’ organizations, the respectable middle classes, the Stahlhelm and all the stout housewives between them couldn’t manage to return more than three representatives.

  But three is enough to launch a question, which is precisely what Stuff dinned into Medical Councillor Lienau. ‘All the bourgeois, the Volkspartei, the Democrats, the Centre and the KPD are just waiting for it. Do it.’

  Well, he prevailed over Lienau. Stuff won, and a short question was drawn up: ‘What does the administration propose to do to restore normal relations between town and country?’

  Then, the night before the question was due, there were the arrests. The whole situation was transformed. Stuff had been compelled to report on the attack on Gareis, the bomb that had gone off harmlessly in a meadow, the mysterious attack on a typesetter in the editorial office of the Bauernschaft, the arrests of the farmers’ leaders.

  He implored Lienau to retract the question.

  The Stahlhelm man had refused. ‘Retract it? Are you kidding? When the call is to go over the top, we go over the top. We don’t care about the strength of the enemy. Why should I care if Gareis has suddenly become popular!’

  But then the indomitable hero didn’t appear: minor, though necessary, surgery made his participation in the meeting impossible at the eleventh hour.

  Two Nationalists were left to justify the question: Notary Pepper and the butcher and cattleman Storm, member of several veterans’ associations.

  The question was left to the butcher to ask.

  Halting and uncertain, he read it off a piece of paper, probably in Lienau’s illegible doctor’s scrawl. He broke up every sentence, breathed at the commas and overrode the full stops.

  The delegates, depending on Party allegiance, listened to his stumbling performance hugging themselves with joy or with a sense of acute embarrassment.

  But they were all united in heaving a sigh of relief when he was finally done.

  Mayor Gareis rises to reply instantly. He offers no defence. He reads a sentence just published in the News: ‘“If, as appears to be the case, the farmers are not a million miles from the bomb attempts, that certainly sheds a different light on the 26th of July and the tactics of the police.”

  ‘There you have it, gentlemen. Facts bear out a case. They have borne out mine. All of you sitting here, down to the rather abject reader of the question just a moment ago, all of you are convinced in your heart of hearts that I am right.

  ‘But why? Not because I behaved correctly, but because a bomb happens to have been thrown. And today I am doubly right, ten times more right, because the intended victim of the bomb was me.

  ‘But ladies, gentlemen, tomorrow may bring fresh news. Tomorrow it may turn out that a pair of chancers threw the bomb. Tomorrow some more confused individual from circles politically sympathetic to me may have the idea of throwing a bomb into the house of the farmers’ leader Reimers—and straight away I’ll be in the wrong again.

  ‘No, thank you, then, gentlemen! Do you want me to tell why I have done such and such, and not done this and that? You want me to provide justifications?

  ‘Surely you see that justifications are irrelevant, and reasons footling, and that quite other things are involved.’

  He stands there magnificently, an irate elephant, an incensed schoolmaster over a mob of bewildered imps.

  ‘Thank you! Thank you!

  ‘I decline to fish my justifications from the failed throw of some benighted individual.

  ‘You, Herr Storm, asked me, asked the administration, what we propose to do to bring about the restoration of more normal relations.

  ‘This is my reply: I propose to wait. You may not find that satisfactory. I find it entirely satisfactory. It’s all one can expect from a man who wants to set his house in order. I shall wait.

  ‘More will doubtless happen before peace has been concluded between town and country. I will be ten times in the wrong. I shall wait.

  ‘I would urge you to do what I myself propose to do: To keep my counsel and wait.’

  He sits abruptly.

  He sits there perfectly still on his big stiff leather chair, hands folded across his belly, his fat face either smiling or not.

  He has shown them his teeth.

  ‘Thank you, gentlemen . . . Thank you . . .’

  They sit there, not breathing.

  Then a slight commotion comes over the chamber. On the stage someone laughs.

  The Oberbürgermeister stands up. He asks in a whisper whether the point raised in the question is going to be discussed further. Three votes would be required.

  The Oberbürgermeister sits down again.

  The two Nats get to their feet. They request further discussion. Naturally.

  They look around for a third supporter. Everyone looks around. Won’t all the bourgeois members stand up as one? A third man!

  Stuff too stares around feverishly. It can’t be. They’re a man short, they only need one! Those bourgeois . . .

  Certainly, there are some who would like to rise. But the one in the leather chair, who seems already to have nodded off again, he is not an opponent at fencing, he is a wild bull who knows no rules.

  The Oberbürgermeister waits a very long time. For a very long time Notary Pepper and Butcher Storm are left to stand on their own.

  Then Oberbürgermeister Niederdahl gets up and announces that the motion has been declined and the session is over.

  III

  Stuff, with death in his heart, stands in Gareis’s office. Gareis leaves him to dangle. He bundles files on to the desk, he looks across at the man by the window staring sightlessly into the September evening. Gareis starts to read.

  Stuff sighs gustily.

  And Gareis: ‘Why sigh, Herr Stuff? They’re just human beings.’

  ‘Yes,’ scowls Stuff, ‘human beings.’

  ‘Dear Herr Stuff, you shouldn’t overestimate the importance of this hour. For the moment I’m on top again. Another week or month, and I could be at the bottom again.’

  Stuff says crudely: ‘You don’t even believe that, you’ve won.’

  ‘Not for long,’ says the mayor.

  ‘It was humiliating!’ groans Stuff.

  ‘It was poor stage management,’ says Gareis comfortingly. ‘Who would entrust a
job like that to a master butcher? And who wouldn’t think to assure themselves of at least one vote from the other camp first?’

  ‘So your stage management worked better.’

  ‘Not really. No one was put under pressure.’

  Silence. A long silence.

  As though able to read Stuff’s mind, Gareis says: ‘I too have thought a lot about leaving Altholm these past few weeks. Not just Altholm either, but all forms of local government. Anyone who wants to do real work gets so fed up with the constraints of politics.’

  ‘I’ll show you something,’ says Stuff suddenly. ‘Read this.’

  It’s a typed letter, unsigned, with the Stettin dateline. The esteemed Herr Stuff is informed by a girlfriend that people have been made aware of his faults. These faults have been listed in brackets, and include: inducement to commit perjury, inducement to commit an abortion, procuring an abortion. The respected Herr Stuff is advised therefore to move the sphere of his activities away from Altholm. A grace period of four weeks has been granted him, otherwise . . . and so on and so forth.

  ‘Who?’ asks Gareis. ‘Is it really a woman?’

  ‘Could be, though I don’t really think it is. It makes no difference.’

  ‘No,’ says the mayor, returning the letter. ‘No.’ And suddenly: ‘Why don’t you go to the Bauernschaft? That’s the place for you. And there are vacancies after the arrests.’

  ‘Am I supposed to be a coward and run away?’

  ‘Sometimes it can be the right thing to do, to be a coward and run away.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to do it,’ says Stuff. ‘I want to stay here at least until the trial.—Anyway, Gebhardt wouldn’t let me go.’

  ‘As far as that’s concerned . . .’ says the mayor slowly, and then stops.

  Stuff looks at him a long time. Their eyes meet.

  Finally Stuff says: ‘I see. Well, in that case, I have the feeling I’ve just been terribly naive. Perhaps you’re better acquainted with the hand that wrote this letter. Perhaps . . .’

  ‘Enough!’ says the mayor. ‘Enough!’

  Stuff stops.

  ‘It wasn’t for any of this,’ the mayor begins in an altered tone, ‘that I called you up. Yesterday I called out to you at a moment of extreme danger. And I did so in words that now, today, sound a little unusual. You remember, don’t you.—Now I don’t want to live in a state of constant skirmishing with the man who came to my aid.

  ‘But your position, and mine, both of us here in Altholm, are incompatible. I am prepared to leave Altholm. If you would prefer it that you go, then I will be glad to be of assistance. It doesn’t have to be Stolpe and the Bauernschaft. I know people in Berlin and the length and breadth of the Reich. It wouldn’t have to be an SPD paper, Herr Stuff. You could remain among those who share your views.

  ‘What do you think?’

  It’s almost dark in the room. ‘What I did for you last night, Mayor, has nothing to do with you. I would have come without those—as you say—“unusual words”. For anyone.

  ‘But I’ll give you a truth for a truth. I lied to you once. Here in this very room, you asked me if I had anything personal against you. I said no.

  ‘That was a lie, Herr Gareis, I must tell you so quite frankly: I can’t stand you. You are disgusting to me. You are disgusting to me as a representative of the class whom I take to be the ruination of Germany. I don’t care how serious you are about your work and your good intentions: you are simply incompetent.

  ‘You are a politician, and will always be a politician. Your plans, your good intentions, are decided and corrupted by a party that has declared war on all the other classes.

  ‘An hour ago, I saw you spit in your opponents’ faces. You were arrogant. You showed no mercy to that poor tongue-tied butcher, and you despised the lot of them.

  ‘Are you really any better than them?

  ‘I can’t do anything for you. I can’t even make way for you.

  ‘But all these are not reasons. I want to tell you that I grew up here in Altholm. Back then there was a barracks here, with a whole infantry regiment. When there were parades in the street, I ran along beside them, a little boy in bare feet. I cut school and missed meals to be there. Later on, I served here.

  ‘You broke all that. Your Party has made Germany into something small. You duped the men in the trenches.

  ‘It’s in my blood. It’s in my nerve endings. Each time I see you, each time I hear your voice, I feel it: the politician. The big, fat, gorged politician.

  ‘I felt it last night, even last night when you were sprawled out on the ground, my first thought was: The politician.

  ‘That’s all there is to say, Mayor, I can’t stand you.’

  Mayor Gareis tried to interrupt him once or twice. Then he let him speak.

  Now he stands up and turns the switch. The light breaks into the dark room.

  He extends his hand to the other man: ‘All right, Stuff, farewell.’

  ‘All right then, Mayor.—Maybe we will manage to convert you one of these days?’

  ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible.—Good evening to you, Herr Stuff.’

  ‘Good evening, Mayor.’

  IV

  Farmer Bartels is a perfectly ordinary farmer. He is just like the other farmers in Poseritz, just like their fathers and forefathers before them, and presumably their sons and grandsons will turn out just the same as well.

  But for the farmers in his village, he is something else, namely a traitor.

  A terribly rustic attribute has been his downfall: he is a shade mean. Mean when it comes to spending money on other people.

  What brought him low was this:

  His wife is a born Merkel, and the Merkels live in Altholm. Two of his wife’s brothers have a clock business on the marketplace in Altholm.

  It had been arranged for a long time that Bartels was going to give his wife a grandfather clock for her birthday. She had long wanted a dark oak box with a bright brass face and a sonorous gong. His brothers-in-law were going to let him have the clock for its factory price, which was sixty marks less than the store price.

  The birthday approached, and Bartels wasn’t sure what to do. He wasn’t the type to blunder ignorantly and stupidly into misfortune, he thought about everything in advance, he spent nights awake thinking. He knew the boycott had been called, he himself had been present on the heath at Lohstedt, but sixty marks give or take . . .

  One night in bed, he starts talking about it with his wife: ‘I’m lying here thinking whether I wouldn’t be better advised to buy that clock in Stolpe . . .’

  ‘In Stolpe?’ she asks in puzzlement. ‘They don’t have clocks like that in Stolpe.’

  ‘Or in Stettin, then.’

  ‘They don’t have them in Stettin either, not like the one that Hans and Gerhard have in Altholm.’

  ‘But it’s a factory make, and they don’t just make them for your brothers.’

  She shifts the area of debate. ‘And you want to spend an extra eighty marks on it?’

  ‘Sixty. Yes, that’s what’s bothering me.’

  ‘Stettin is much further to go as well.’

  ‘Maybe they could send the clock?’

  ‘Then you’d end up paying the railway something. And packaging. Otherwise, you just wrap it up in a couple of horse-blankets.’

  ‘I can’t take the buggy into Altholm.’

  ‘Come on, they don’t have spies by the side of the road.’

  ‘Couldn’t you wait for the clock? It would only be a month or two.’

  ‘Then what do I get on my birthday instead?’

  ‘Just wait, I suggest.’

  ‘And not get anything on my birthday?’

  ‘Listen to me!’

  ‘My brothers might be able to send it somewhere else?’

  In the end, her birthday comes, and the clock is there. The farmer didn’t go to Altholm to pick it up, but to Stolpe. The clockmakers had it taken to Stolpe in their car and lef
t it there. The clock was bought in Stolpe.

  They weren’t supposed to talk about the clock. It stands there in the parlour. Now, in summer, with harvest approaching, no one much comes to visit. Neighbours who come by stay in the kitchen or the milking parlour or the garden. Exchange a word or two of gossip, on the quick.

  But the clock strikes, and the farmers’ wives hear it.

  ‘Have you got a new clock? It has such a pretty chime.’

  ‘My husband bought it for me in Stolpe. It was a birthday present.’

  ‘In Stolpe? Did you fall out with your brothers, then?’

  ‘No, not at all. But for the boycott.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have done that myself. What are your brothers going to think? Blood’s thicker than water. Where did you get it?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that. My husband got it.’

  ‘Didn’t he give you a receipt for it? Clocks like that come with a guarantee, so for three years you can get them repaired free of charge.’

  ‘I expect my husband’s got it in a drawer somewhere.’

  ‘Do you think? Couldn’t you look?’

  ‘Now? When my hands are full of earth?’

  ‘No, not now. It’s just that we were thinking of getting a clock. But if you can’t . . .’

  ‘Not at the moment.’

  They come asking a second time, a third time, a tenth time. The clock has such a lovely tone, like an organ, so full and smooth. Wouldn’t they just love to have one like it.

  After a while they stop asking, they know what happened.

  Not just from Frau Bartels’s short answers, no, they suddenly know that the Merkel boys drove to Stolpe in the car and left the clock in the Posthorn.

  Now they know, and still nothing happens. Bartels heaves a sigh of relief.

  The weights are up, but the clock has stopped. It won’t chime and it doesn’t tick.

  On Sunday, the farmer opens the clock case to have a look. Everything looks shiny and clean. On one big flywheel a drop of oil has been squeezed out, he wipes it absently with his fingers. The oil is grainy, it is so full of sand it crunches.

  The farmer gets it. He feels a little frisson of chill. The clock will have to stay as it is, there is no prospect of getting it fixed.