People here are so clean. They smell of soap, those brown cubes of soap that my aunt used to use on me. The women here wear their hair straight back, exposing their ears. There’s an atmosphere of spiritual chastening about them. Their hours overbrim with busy-ness, and their papers are all in order. They carry their souls in the palms of their hands. Their past is as stainless as the brass sink outside the barber’s shop. Their pursuit is shopping. Their future is doing sums. They collect their days in an album, like so many stamps. They are collectors of days and years.
Never was anything mysterious in their lives, nor yet anything ugly. They grew and prospered in the shadow of their virtues.
How I envy them.
Every day I meet a gentleman on the stairs, who is by profession a representative.
I don’t know what or whom he represents, but he’s a representative. Even when he isn’t wearing gloves, his hands are solemn, as though carrying mourning candles. He has a straw hat on, but I understand that it’s really a topper. His stride is managerial. His eye rests heavily, punishingly on things. He is quiet, but I can hear the drone of his voice — a deep voice with thunderous aspects. I don’t greet him, but it feels as though I did. Perhaps he is an undertaker, and is on his way to today’s funeral.
He was a good and industrious son. Surely he was the apple of someone’s eye once. I would sit down next to him in class, and unhesitatingly copy his answers.
I don’t see his forehead, but it is certainly high and rounded. It must have room for the many solemn thresholds in his brain.
Sometimes I see him taking a blue-eyed girl by the hand, by the name of Lili. On those occasions he is ex officio. Once he bent down to her because she had lost her glove and it was as though an emperor had suddenly begun to laugh, or something human had happened to him.
I am getting to feel more at home in the strange city.
Berliner Börsen-Courier, 21 August 1921
* Die Ordnung ist das halbe Leben: order or organization is half of life.
54. Travel
Guarded by customs inspectors and framed by passport regulations, abroad only starts to blossom beyond national frontiers; and that object of our desires called Far Away is only another jurisdiction with its own head of state and military, population statistics and tax regime. If you take an exotic sound for a cry of longing, it was probably nothing more than a locomotive’s whistle. All the world’s stations smell of anthracite rather than distant promise. The express train is muggy, stuffed with snoring well-set individuals who look nothing like travellers, are not redolent of mystery, but carry sandwiches in greaseproof paper, and exhibit all the frailties of their wretched humanity in the cramped compartment, sending the alarmed observer scuttling into the next one instead. Once, a beautiful damsel entered my compartment and my soul gave a lurch. The next morning, her eyes blinked open in the direction of the luggage rack, and I saw a creature in feminine apparel, her complexion ravaged by an agitated night with little sleep. The wind that came whistling through the open window mixed soot among her powder, and sleep had gummed up her eyelids. I dread to think what I looked like.
I entered another country, and pressed my ticket into the hands of a strange porter, instead of the visiting card I should have had. In the other city, I saw green copper cupolas and Gothic towers climbing into the sky. Beggars clustered outside church doors, stubble-faced lady beggars among them. They lay in wait for believers, and assaulted their impressionable souls with a litany of ills. Children, old people and women dropped coins in the laps of the beggars, thinking: God is my witness.
I looked into strange offices, and the desk-clerks who were working in them wore black sleeve-protectors, just as they do here at home. Blond and other variously dyed secretaries perched at typewriters, and pined for six o’clock, which is the hour of relief for the women of this century. It was a shade after two. A nearby clock rang the quarter-hour, and the girls pricked up their ears, hoping a miracle had taken place and they would hear it strike six. But just as obdurately as though it had been here at home it stuck to its assigned quarter past two, and the girls went back to their clacking. In other countries too, clocks are soulless pieces of machinery. And girls, increasingly, as well…
I came to a hospital, and it too, like every other hospital in the world, smelled of camphor and iodine. The sisters fluttered from bed to bed in their white wimples like starched wings, and the patients groaned in such a familiar fashion, I had the sense I was at home. Evidently, so I thought, people only speak foreign languages when they are well. But pain is the greatest, all-conquering international movement there is, and truly its expression is as universal as music.
I visited the parks and gardens of the strange city too, those places where love flowered. Men and women came and went, and sat down together on benches, and assured one another of their feelings, which was unnecessary, because they were perfectly evident. Evening prowled along the footpaths, presumably waiting for night to fall. A constable plodded up and down, not noticing, even though he had a whole notebook for suspicious behaviour.
The people spoke differently. Their houses looked unfamiliar. (It was after all abroad.) But the representative things, the things that show the nation’s face to the world, namely the border police and the customs inspectors — they are the same everywhere. They all have the same rapacious hands, and prying intrusive looks that feel like hands.
I have no idea what a man finds to say for himself after he’s been abroad. I could sit at home for years on end, and be perfectly content. If only it weren’t for the stations. You swear a shrill sound that pierces the night is just the whistle of a locomotive. It is a cry of longing. And every so often, exquisitely beautiful women walk into your compartment…
Berliner Börsen-Courier, 2 October 1921
55. The “Romance” of Travel
The joyful anticipation before a journey is always outweighed by the irritation of actually going. Nothing so irritating as a hulking station that looks like a monastery, at the sight of which I always wonder whether I shouldn’t slip off my shoes, instead of hailing a porter. Nothing so irritating as an iron rail before a ticket office. In front of me hovers a rucksack. Behind me a pair of knitting needles pushed through the side of a basket stab me in the back. I need to practically bend double to tell the obtuse employee my destination. He has just one little window through which he takes in money and destinations. I am sure he would rather listen to my hands…
All I know of the porter who has made off with my things is his number. I am dependant on his recollection of faces. What if he has none? What if some double of mine shows up? What if the porter has some kind of mishap? My friend needs a platform ticket if he is to see me off. What’s the point of a platform ticket? The rails are off limits, and yet you pay to go on the platform. A man who sets foot on the platform in order not to travel, is doubly left behind. You might as well ask everyone in the whole station to have a ticket.
Next, there are the dauntingly high steps up to my carriage. Why not just have ladders? You clamber up into the carriage as into an attic to dry clothes. The compartments are like matchboxes sitting on one of their emery board sides. The seats are so parsimoniously designed that there is not an inch of space between my knees and those of the fellow opposite. We could set out a chess board on them. We can’t open our eyes to look up — that would mean looking at the other. If we’re really unlucky, then there are people either side of us as well. To take a cigarette out of our pockets we poke our neighbour in the ribs.