Radical Shadows Read online

  ‘I say, are you sure you are doing it right?’

  Instead of giving him a piece to suck which would act as a gag, with lovely courtesy Helen stops to explain: to justify. And half an hour later, the clock is ticking frantically, and ascending the corridors above, draft-blown down the stairs to the Concierge’s lodge wafts an opium breeze. Over a low flame, in a kitchen littered with debris, a dark surge in the casserole is at the point of thickening. In one minute, five, ten, there will be more opium in the world. But the five midwives are engaged in frantic dispute. Unvarying routine essential to successful delivery sacrificed to conflicting theory.

  While Helen, half-stupefied, harassed, aching, stirs and stirs.

  God help her if George in a moment of compassion takes her place and, transferring the compassion to himself, raises the flame and finally, in a moment of conviction that André knows nothing whatever about opium-cooking, leaves it to look after itself, in order to persuade him.

  Another smell will insinuate itself through the stupefying, vegetable sweetness, a smell of the Pit. Cries, sniffs, a rush to the kitchen to find a split casserole and harsh stinking cinders in place of the honey-smooth black liquid.

  But if the final tragedy be averted, there remains still the agitating scene: arguments which continue while the new brew is being tried out, until, overcome by its sheer strength, everyone agrees that everyone else is in the wrong.

  There is only one way to prepare opium from dross: convince yourself that it is a bechamel sauce you are making to pour on a fish; and after straining the boiled ash, stir until it thickens over a low flame.

  You will stir and stir. Stir and stir and stir and stir: till hope dies and your right arm and your left are attacked by paralysis. One quarter of an hour will succeed another, while black drops, airier than soda water, drip off the spoon. Then, hardly perceptibly, drops which are not so light.

  The quality of the brew will alter: fat, gold-skinned bubbles will rise and pop deliberately, like a wink. A wave off the spoon will rise (and try to stick) to the casserole side.

  It is over. First lowering the vessel into a bowl of cold water, you can pour, scrape, share, lick it off.

  DO IT ALONE.

  The room is lit from the low bookshelves by a huge glass wine bottle, filled with water, a piece of the sea at home, topped with an electric bulb, and shaded by a round of lacquered parchment painted with ships. In the open fireplace, a log whistles, another blazes in a level fence of flames while underneath the red-hot wood crumbles ashes charred to a white bloom.

  On the black floor-divans are lying Helen and Martin, Charles, André and George. Between them, on the low table topped with a mirror and with dragons for legs, their tools are scattered, the needles and palette, the dross-box and opium-cup. A bamboo pipe bound in ivory smoked to the colour of amber, another of ivory finished with jade. Glass and bronze, silver and enamel, mother-of-pearl and green stone. Objects of virtù and delicate use in their proper employment, lit by the olive oil lamp, the oldest in european use, over whose flame a needle is twirled, redipped and spun again. Bubble clusters blow out, dark, gold skins of opium. They click and whisper, the needle-rod thrills in the hand, the beads enlarge, crisp and trembling. Crushed on the palette, the needle is clipped and blown again. And again. Until—when not too crisp and dry, and not too wet; when no more black drops can be pressed out on the palette, and when no dust powders the jade, when the pipe has been rolled to a perfect cone …

  André raises the pipe. In the small light he is a shadow to which, in the light-circle, are attached two fine hands. He heats the bowl, the grey clay incised with small gold flowers, gives a last twist and presses the pipe on. It rests over the needle-hole, pierced, shapely. Helen takes the pipe. For thirty seconds a low whistle rises as she smokes, André guiding the drug with his needle-point. She puts the pipe down and lies back. An instant later André’s fingers, delicate as the needle, are dipping and turning again.

  ‘Your turn, mon ami.’ Helen slips aside into the shadow on outer cushions. Charles draws up.

  ‘Shall I make for you now, André? It’s going well today.’

  Helen says: ‘I remember now how that song goes.’

  ‘Sing it to us later,’ says Martin, ‘I’m altering that poem.’

  Charles decides in a flash how an old quarrel which he had not begun should be ended.

  André, following Polycrates, and to protect perfection, cuts out a pipe.

  George beams and has another.

  ‘My favourite breakfast, opium and strawberries.’

  Wake up on a strict and diminishing regime, with a slight chill and a slight ache. Part your hair and wash your face; set your tray and drink your tea, if it is summer, eat your strawberries. Read the paper; smoke a cigarette; listen outside to the morning air, the mysterious plain-chants sung up and down a Paris backstreet.

  Imagine a crisis which would turn you out of bed, before you have smoked, to run all day about the city. If you know you can, you are safe.

  Smoke three pipes. Lie still and low on your back and let the day fall into its perspective.

  Come back at evening to dress. Drink tea with a lemon wheel in it. Smoke what is left of your regime, down to the final sporting event, the scrapings off your palette.

  Half an hour for sleep, half an hour for meditation and praise of Paris, preparing for its night’s play. Half an hour for bath and makeup; then skip out of the house and into a taxi and over the Place de la Concorde to whatever the night has in its cup, a cup which is usually filled

  ‘THEY SMOKE OPIUM.’

  I think I understand the reaction of the non-smokers when they say that. It is what they would feel if we were known to have killed to obtain the philosopher’s stone. And got it.

  For well or ill, that is to say for fifty per cent of each, smokers are inside a ring. As near a ring to a magic ring as a man can win by his senses. Equally, non-smokers, the people who have heard about it and are afraid to try it—for the question cancels down to fear and to nothing else—are subtly linked. They are not the people with whom opium disagrees; who have been caught by its derivations and sworn off. Nor are they necessarily, though generally, ‘enemies of the rose’. They are, I suspect, people with whom it will have nothing to do. Opium knows its own business. Those it wants, it finds—even out of their ranks.

  But I am glad that burning, hanging, drawing and quartering have gone out of the possibilities of fashion.

  While, on our side, we have always a card to play. We have excommunication.

  Tréboul—Paris 1927

  The Snowstorm

  Robert Musil

  —Translated from German by Burton Pike

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  THE SNOWSTORM IS A kaleidoscopic and disturbing fantasy that jumbles fragments of a rich literary heritage with Modernist techniques in a kind of dramatic Cubism. It has echoes of the medieval mystery play Everyman, Goethe’s Faust, Hofmannsthal’s The Fool and Death, Strindberg and the Viennese folk dramatist Raimund. It is a mixture of lyric, satire, parody, morality play and allegory, with disturbing threads of hatred, incest and pedophilia. The relations between mother and son, man and wife, and criminal and society—the subconscious made conscious—are themes that recur in Musil’s work, from the story “The Blackbird” to The Man without Qualities.

  The Snowstorm (translator’s title) is the prologue, published in 1920, to an unwritten play that was to be called The Zodiac. The text is taken from Robert Musil, Gesammelte Werke in neun Bänden, ed. Adolf Frisé (Rowohlt, 1978), vol. 6, 453-462, and has never before appeared in English.

  Characters:

  MAN JUDGE

  WOMAN PROFESSOR

  NEED SERVANT

  HEAVENLY

  APPARITION GENERAL

  POLITICAN

  MOTHER BOY FLAKE

  GIRL GIRL FLAKE

  BLACK

  MARKETER COLD

  STORM

  (Country road
. Snowstorm. Dark evening. MAN, WOMAN appear, struggling with great difficulty. They stop, exhausted.)

  MAN. Death, Need! (He lets a heavy peddler’s pack slide off his shoulders and leans on it, exhausted.)

  WOMAN. What are you up to? That nonsense is all you’ve been muttering for the last hour.

  MAN. Half-hour, there must be a reason. It was my heart talking: I ought to have left the damned pack lying where it was. I’ve abandoned everything I owned, and here I’m having to drag this leftover crap through this weather! Death, Need! Haha, no, I thought I needed to save it!

  WOMAN. We’ll die if we go on standing here. Give me a hand. (She can hardly keep from being blown over by the storm.)

  MAN. Yes, we’re sure to die.

  WOMAN. Come on, let’s go! We haven’t seen a house for hours, there must be one coming up soon.

  MAN. (Leaning against a tree.) I can’t. It’s too much for me.

  WOMAN. But what am I supposed to do? Croak here on the road like a horse?

  MAN. On!

  WOMAN. On!

  MAN. No, you go on by yourself.

  WOMAN. Oh God, and leave everything lying here?

  MAN. Go, go! You’ll find a house. Get going, I tell you!

  WOMAN. But I’m afraid of the storm!

  MAN. Get going, I said! Otherwise you’ll croak. (He beats her with the stick.)

  WOMAN. Oh, you beast!

  MAN. Otherwise you’ll croak!

  WOMAN. God will punish you for chasing me off alone into the night! (Leaves howling.) … alone into the night …

  MAN. (Screaming after her.) Otherwise you’ll croak!

  (The WOMAN struggles with great effort through the storm. Exit.)

  MAN. I want to do my dying alone … You can die fifty paces on. (Again leans against his tree. Takes a half-emptied schnapps flask from his breast pocket, holds it up against the faint trace of light.) Yes, yes, there’s still a little, still a drop. (Without drinking, throws the bottle down in the snow.) Death, Need!—since I’ve got rid of the bitch I don’t need the schnapps; drinking only comes from talking.

  (A weak, spreading shimmer of light pours out of the flask, and in the shimmer two words are suddenly standing. Medium figures in dark, hooded mantles, at the start fused together into a single silhouette.)

  MAN. Since when do I know you? You weren’t sung to me in my cradle! Damned words! You were the worm in the apple of my life! Yet how beautiful the apple was.

  NEED. Didn’t you laugh when old people trembled?

  MAN. (Cheered by the idea.) Yes, yes!

  NEED. When you saw a face twisted by grief and illness?

  MAN. Yes, yes, and it still makes me laugh when I think of it. It’s a stupid, puffed-up way of suffering. People should hold their faces in front of their suffering the way they hold their hats.

  NEED. I love you! I have always loved whoever can speak the way you do!

  MAN. By God, you only began to love me when I was thirty. And how modestly you insinuated yourself! First a quick visit once or twice every few months, that was nice and fine without tiring me unduly. Then a few hours’ company during the day. And suddenly you were lying beside me in bed every night and I couldn’t get rid of you.

  NEED. If I threw one arm around your chest and the other around your belly, how you resisted, my boy! And yet you yielded yourself up. How your moans cut through me when I was riding on your neck!

  MAN. You sold my pillow and took away the sheet. Then you had to lie on bare straw yourself!

  NEED. And no nightshirt any more, and soon just a shirt. And no bath and no hot water and soon no more soap. How you finally stank, kid, like a rotting carcass. You who used to go around in batiste.

  MAN. When I gobbled up the food the dog had left in its bowl, that set me up again. What a genius man is, even on the way down! Let others wear my silk shirts.

  NEED. Enough, sweetheart; you’re boring me already. I stayed faithful to you for too long, on account of your philosophical notions. I have company.

  MAN. Not the pimp?

  NEED. Yes, he’s going to kill you now. I don’t have any more time to bother with you.

  MAN. O my little bat, do I deserve this?

  NEED. Have you ever deserved anything?

  MAN. But surely not such a bold, ceremonious death as your pimp?

  NEED. As long as things were going well you spat in the outstretched hands of the poor, but when you had to hold out the beggar’s hat you quickly put it on if a rich man passed by. So don’t be too slow, nobody’s going to help you.

  (In a flaring up of the light, it looks for a moment as if a pimp and his girl are standing irresolutely before the collapsed man. Then the scene goes dark. The light brightens again, and a beautiful woman is standing beside a wayside shrine as if she had just alighted. Bluish white baroque silk gown, gold crown in her hair. The MAN has pulled himself up by his stick, as if he were about to go on.)

  HEAVENLY APPARITION. Stop my child, where are you going? Don’t you know I am your mother?

  MAN. What trunk did you crawl out of? Huh? There’s a smell coming from you …! And what splendid silk you’re wearing; it crackles like thousands of tiny electric sparks. Like the firewood in the oven when the boy was dropping off to sleep. You are electrifying me. You’re torturing me. The smell of night came out of the oven. The sleigh tinkled quickly past the courtyard wall. The little girl sat in the bright hollow of my ear, the snowflakes whirled past the lanterns of my eyes, powdering her hair, the horses snorted in my nose, and oh, whenever I cracked the whip the little girl jumped through a hoop, her small apple-blossom-red skirts flew up and the silver stars on her panties blurred. But already, you know, the night was thawing, big drops, then mirror-black puddles—

  HEAVENLY APPARITION. Stop, my child, where are you going?

  MAN. Oh you’re right. It wasn’t winter at all. The winter was terrible, with all those surly grownups in a room. It was longing for winter, autumn. Mother opened up the trunks, the sisters’ vanity fell upon them. Oh now I know everything. How sweetly you smell of furs and camphor! I’ve always loved you! Silk remnants came to light. Lingerie. Sweatpads. Winter stockings. Feathers. Sachets. Butterflies. Green birds. Moons … Magically the woman stepped out of the trunk.

  Where were you later, after I had grown up and could have held you? Is it only now that I get to see you again for the first time? How awful the women were. The sisters like naked cake-dough. And after the second child the Eve who had been officially assigned to me had a pelvis like a goat’s behind. Unfaithful? What for? It’s always the same spongy soul-dumpling that you stab with a fork.

  HEAVENLY APPARITION. Stop, dearest.

  MAN. Sure, sure. Just go on shining. (The light grows brighter. The background emerges: beyond the driving snow a blooming landscape becomes visible, seen as from, its high margin.) What are you doing? What sort of magic are you conjuring up?

  Out of an evening like a sprung-open shrine

  Thing after thing sways gently into night.

  HEAVENLY APPARITION. Beloved, this world is thine and mine!

  It’s like a dance across a gentle meadow slope

  Whose softly twined greens glide away around us

  While it points the enchanted foot ever downwards—

  MAN. You and I already feel our steps

  Around which space opens like ballooning sails!

  HEAVENLY APPARITION. And now the dance slowly makes us part,

  Weaving around us drunken in a thousand places

  In our turning—

  MAN. That it already strides onwards grand and spectrally

  You and I feel, trembling to our core.

  The earth sinks down, raising us around each other!

  (The MAN has been performing a lonely, ghostly dance. Suddenly he sinks down, and as he falls the stage goes dark. When he raises himself up again, his old MOTHER is standing in a pool of light in front of him.)

  MAN. “Stop, my child!” We know that a
lready! You old devil, do you see, do you see what you’ve brought me to!

  MOTHER. (Stretching out her hands.) My child! My child!

  MAN. Oh yes indeed, your child! Your little pucker-mouth, your little sugar-puff, your little doll! Your hope! Your will! Your love! Yours, yours, yours! Damned umbilical cord, you’d all like to play jump-rope with it and with us our whole lives long! Did you give me money when I was already reading and buying books?

  MOTHER. But I did give you money.

  MAN. Yes, but when I married my woman, that Satan, like you, you sniffed that out right away, then you didn’t give me any.

  MOTHER. No, she was your misfortune!

  MAN. Yes, she was my misfortune!

  MOTHER. (Spreading out her arms to him in pain.) My child! My child!

  MAN. A good thing that you’re not stirring from the spot. And when I was despised and driven out, did you give me money to restore my good name?

  MOTHER. But I didn’t have any more. Your debts had swallowed up everything.

  MAN. And you dare say that? A mother without money, a mother who can’t clear stones from the path, make featherdown snow, fetch down stars, is a fraud! Get out!

  MOTHER. Oh what an evil heart you have!

  MAN. It always dupes you. (He weeps. The vision disappears. A pretty, lively young girl, in the dress of fifty or sixty years ago, appears.)

  MAN. Thanks be to God, this is a pleasant change. What are you up to, child?

  GIRL. I’m climbing trees.

  MAN. Of course, but watch out for the storm.

  GIRL. It carried off my hoop.

  MAN. That’s not a particularly inventive story, but how enticing your legs are! Go on, climb! No storm can touch you, no, hardly grasp the hem of your skirt. I’m just an old uncle making a little fun of myself. Let’s see your teeth. Your breasts are surely just as melting and shimmering. Let me tell you some jokes. I’ll pose you riddles.