Death in Venice and Other Tales, Page 3

  Sometimes, however, the animal’s playful game-dog instincts would whip him up into a blind frenzy. He would scamper frantically throughout the room and vent his enormous energy tussling with a slipper, jumping on the furniture and doing somersaults across the floor. Tobias, keeping his distance, followed such activity with a hapless, disapproving, uncertain look and a smile that was both ugly and full of irritation. Finally, laying down the law, he would bring the animal to heel: “Quit the rambunctiousness. There’s no reason to be waltzing around.”

  Once, it even happened that Esau escaped his master’s quarters and sprang downstairs into the street, where in a fit of delight he immediately began chasing a cat, eating horse dung and playing with the children. And when Tobias, his face twisted with sorrow, arrived on the scene—to the applause and laughter of half the street—the sad truth was that the dog fled from his master in long leaps . . . Tobias gave him a long and bitter thrashing for that.

  One day at feeding time—the dog had been in his possession for several weeks—Tobias took a loaf of bread from the commode drawer. With the long bone-handled knife he always used for such purposes, the hunched little man began to cut off small pieces and drop them on the ground. Esau, however, heedless in his hunger and frivolity, leapt headlong toward his master, ramming his right shoulder into the clumsily held knife. He fell to the floor, twisted and bleeding.

  Shocked, Tobias tossed everything aside and crouched over the wounded animal. Suddenly, however, his face was transformed; truth be told, a shimmer of happy relief flitted across it. He gently carried the whimpering dog over to the sofa, and you can’t imagine the devotion with which he began to nurse his patient! During the day, Tobias never left his side for a minute, and at night, he let him sleep on his very own bed. He washed and bandaged him, patted and consoled him, and never tired in his gleeful expressions of sympathy and concern.

  “Does it hurt a lot?” he would ask. “Yes, indeed, your suffering is bitter, my poor little creature! But lie still! We must endure it!” His face was calm, melancholy and glad as he said this.

  Yet the more Esau gained in strength, the more he took heart and began to recover, the more agitated and resentful Tobias became. From that point on, he found it best no longer to fuss over the wound itself, ministering to the dog instead with pitying words and caresses. The dog’s recovery, however, was quite well advanced. He had a strong constitution and soon began to move about the room again. And one day, having lapped up a plate of milk and white bread, he jumped down from the sofa in full health and began to race through the room with his former abandon, happily yelping, clawing the bedspread, chasing a potato across the floor and performing a series of gleeful somersaults.

  Over at the window, beside the flowerpot, stood Tobias, twirling a lock of severely slicked-back hair in one of those hands that protruded so long and gaunt from their frayed sleeves. His frame loomed dark and eerie against the gray backdrop of the neighboring house, his face was pale and twisted by hate, and he followed every movement with a resentful, desperate, jealous and malevolent glare. Suddenly, though, he came to. He approached Esau, stopped him and took him slowly in his arms.

  “My poor little creature,” he started to say in a melancholy voice—but Esau, full of energy and in no mood to tolerate any further such treatment, took a playful bite at the hand attempting to pat him, wriggled from Tobias’s arms, leapt to the ground, sprang mischievously to one side, yelped, then ran off happily.

  What followed was something so incomprehensible and dastardly that I refuse to recount it in detail. Inclined slightly forward, Tobias Mindernickel stood, his arms hanging at his sides, his lips pressed together and his eyeballs trembling eerily in their sockets. Suddenly, with a kind of crazed leap, he had taken hold of the animal. A long bright object gleamed in his hand and the dog crashed to the floor, a knife wound running from his right shoulder deep into his chest. He didn’t make a sound. He just fell on his side, bleeding and quivering . . .

  A second later he was lying on the sofa, Tobias kneeling over him, pressing a handkerchief to the wound and stammering: “My poor little creature! My poor little creature! How sad this all is! How sad for both of us! Are you in pain? There, there, I know you are—how pitiful you look lying there! But I’ll, I’ll stay by your side! I’ll comfort you! I’ll take my best handkerchief . . .”

  But Esau just lay there and groaned his last. His dim searching eyes were directed at his master, all innocence and accusation, unable to comprehend—then he straightened his legs out slightly and died.

  Tobias, however, remained in his position, not moving. He had laid his face down upon Esau’s body and was crying bitterly.

  Tristan

  1

  This is “Einfried,” the sanitarium. The long main building with its straight white lines and side wing stands amidst the spacious garden, which is delightfully appointed with grottos, arbors and little tree-bark pavilions, while behind its slate-tiled roof, pine green mountains, massive and delicately fissured, tower toward the heavens.

  Now as always the director of the institution is Dr. Leander. With his double-pointed black beard, which is as hard and frizzy as upholstery horsehair, with his thick eyeglasses that shine with reflected light, and with the aspect of a man whom science has made cold and hard, this quiet, thoughtful pessimist holds sway over the patients. Yes, in his curt, close-to-the-vest manner, he holds absolute sway over all these individuals who, too weak to set and follow their own rules, relinquish their fortunes in return for permission to abandon themselves to his strict regimen.

  Miss von Osterloh, for her part, runs the household with tireless devotion. Lord, what a busy woman she is, hurrying up and down the stairs, from one end of the institution to the other. She lays down the law in the kitchen and the stock room, climbs around in the linen closets, issues orders to the servants and sets a house menu of economy, nutrition, taste and external elegance, managing everything with frantic conscientiousness. Concealed within this extreme efficiency is a standing reproach against men, against men everywhere, none of whom have succumbed to the idea of taking her for a wife. Nonetheless, in the two round, crimson spots on her cheeks, the inextinguishable hope still burns of someday becoming Mrs. Leander, the doctor’s wife . . .

  Ozone and calm, calm air . . . For sufferers of lung ailments, Einfried is, whatever Dr. Leander’s jealous colleagues and rivals might say, to be warmly recommended. Not that consumptives are the only ones who check themselves in here. All sorts of patients—gentlemen, ladies, and even children—check in as well, for Dr. Leander has triumphs to report in the widest of areas. There are stomach cases here—Mrs. Spatz, for example, the magistrate’s wife, who also has an ear problem—heart patients, paralytics, rheumatics and people with various nervous conditions. There’s a diabetic general, constantly grumbling as he uses up his pension. There are a number of gentlemen with emaciated faces whose legs twitch in that spastic way from which nothing good ever comes. There’s a fifty-year-old lady—Mrs. Höhlenrauch, the pastor’s wife—who lost her wits after bringing nineteen children into the world and yet is still unable to find any peace. For a year now she has been driven by some absurd restlessness to wander on the arm of her private nurse, staring and silent, aimless and uncanny, throughout the entire household.

  Now and then there is a death among the “serious cases,” who are confined to their beds and appear neither at meals nor in the sitting room, but no one, not even the patient in the next room, hears anything of it. In the still of night the waxlike guest is laid aside, and Einfried’s normal activities—the massages, shocks and shots, the showers, baths, exercise, steam cures and inhalations—continue on undisturbed in the various modern, technologically up-to-date treatment areas . . .

  Yes, things are lively in these parts. The clinic is flourishing. The porter at the entrance to the side wing sounds the great bell every time new guests arrive, and with all the formalities bo
th Dr. Leander and Miss von Osterloh accompany those departing to their carriages. And Einfried certainly has welcomed all types within its walls! There is even a writer, who has a name that sounds like a mineral or a precious stone, whiling away the days here . . .

  Moreover, in addition to Dr. Leander, there is a second physician in residence for the minor cases and the terminally ill. But his name is Müller, and he’s of no concern.

  2

  At the beginning of January the wholesaler Klöterjahn—of the firm A. C. Klöterjahn & Co.—brought his wife to Einfried. The porter sounded the bell, and Miss von Osterloh greeted the guests after their long journey in the ground-floor reception room, which, like almost everything else in the grand old house, was decorated exclusively in wonderful authentic Empire style. Scarcely a second passed before Dr. Leander too appeared. He bowed, and an introductory conversation was held for the orientation of both parties.

  Outside, the wintertime garden lay with its flowerbeds covered in matting, its grottos snowed under and its little shrines abandoned. Two house employees lugged in the new guests’ suitcases from their carriage, which, since there was no direct access to the house itself, had pulled up by the wrought-iron gate.

  “Slowly, Gabriele, take care, my angel. Keep your lips closed,” Mr. Klöterjahn had said as he led his wife through the garden. No one who had witnessed them could have helped but silently join, heart atremble, in the phrase “take care,” which Mr. Klöterjahn had said, without any particular reason, in English.

  The coachman who had brought the worthy couple from the station to the sanitarium, a rough, simple man of corresponding sensibilities, had practically bitten his tongue in helpless concern as the wholesaler helped his wife down from the carriage. Indeed, even the team of bay horses, their breath steaming in the frigid stillness of the air, seemingly strained to follow this harrowing procedure, their eyes rolled back in their heads, full of concern for such fragile grace and delicate charm.

  The young woman had a throat condition, something in the trachea, as was unequivocally stated in the letter announcing their arrival that Mr. Klöterjahn had addressed from the Baltic coast to Einfried’s director. Thank God it wasn’t the lungs. Had it been the lungs, however, the new patient could hardly have looked fairer and more delicately refined, more sublime and ethereal than she did now, seated beside her burly husband in her whitewashed, straight-backed armchair, leaning back weak and tired as she followed the conversation.

  Her beautiful pale hands, devoid of all jewelry except for a simple wedding ring, rested in her lap amid the folds of a heavy, dark cloth skirt, and she was wearing a silvery gray connecting bodice with a stiff standing collar and layers of arabesque patterns in raised velvet. These warm, heavy materials only rendered her indescribably delicate, charming, weary little head all the more moving, unearthly and delightful. Secured in a knot at the bottom of her neck, her light brown hair was brushed back flat, one single loose curl falling near her right temple, not far from the spot just over her clearly defined eyebrow where a strange little vein branched out, pale blue and sickly, across the otherwise unblemished perfection of her nearly transparent forehead. This little blue vein above the eye loomed unsettlingly over the entire fine oval of her face. It stood out all the more whenever the woman spoke, indeed whenever she as much as smiled, and gave her face the expression of exertion, even strain, which was the cause of considerable indefinite alarm. Nonetheless, she did talk and did smile. She talked openly and amicably, in a slightly husky voice, and she smiled both with her somewhat tired eyes, which now and then displayed a slight tendency to lose focus and whose interior corners lay in the shadows of her narrow nose, and with her beautiful wide mouth, which seemed to shine despite its pallor, probably on account of her lips being so clearly and distinctly outlined. Frequently she would clear her throat. On such occasions she would bring her handkerchief to her mouth, inspecting it immediately thereafter.

  “Don’t clear your throat, Gabriele, darling,” Mr. Klöterjahn said. “You know that Dr. Hinzpeter back home expressly forbade it—it’s simply a matter of self-control, my angel. As the doctor said, it’s just the trachea,” he repeated. “When it began, I really thought it was the lungs. That was, God knows, quite a shock. But it’s not the lungs, no, the hell with that, we won’t have any of that, will we, Gabriele? Oh no!”

  “Of course not,” said Dr. Leander, his glasses reflecting light in their faces.

  Mr. Klöterjahn then ordered some coffee, coffee with buttered rolls. He had such an animated Northern accent—pronouncing the c in “coffee” all the way back in his throat, and saying “bottered” rolls—that everyone present felt suddenly hungry too.

  He was given what he requested, then also given rooms for himself and his wife, and they settled in.

  Moreover, Dr. Leander personally took over her treatment, not consulting Dr. Müller about the case.

  3

  The personability of the new patient caused an unusual stir at Einfried, and Mr. Klöterjahn, accustomed to such triumphs, accepted every compliment she was paid with self-satisfaction. The diabetic general momentarily ceased grumbling when he first caught glimpse of her, the gentlemen with the emaciated faces smiled and did their best to control their spastic legs whenever she came near, and Mrs. Spatz, the magistrate’s wife, immediately attached herself as the young woman’s mentor. She certainly made an impression, this woman who had taken Mr. Klöterjahn’s good name! A certain writer who had been staying at Einfried for a couple of weeks now—an unpleasant oddball whose name sounded like a precious stone—almost blushed when she first passed him in the hallway. He stopped cold and stood as though rooted to the spot long after she had gone.

  Before two full days had passed, the entire clinic community was familiar with her story. She came from Bremen—a fact obvious from certain charmingly pronounced vowels when she spoke—and that was where, twenty-four months ago, she had given the wholesaler Klöterjahn her lifelong “I do.” She had followed him to his hometown, up there on the Baltic coast, and about ten months ago had, after an extraordinarily difficult and dangerous labor, borne him a child, blessing her spouse with a son and heir of astonishing vigor and magnificence. Since those terrible days, however, she had never regained her strength, assuming, that is, that she’d ever had any. She had barely left the maternity bed, when, extremely exhausted, extremely low on vital energy, she had coughed up a little blood. Oh, not much, an insignificant drop. It would have been better, though, if it had never happened, and even more worrisome was the recurrence of this disturbing little incident not long afterward. There were treatments for this sort of thing, of course, and Dr. Hinzpeter, the family physician, availed himself of them. Complete rest was ordered, bits of ice taken internally, morphine prescribed for the cough and the pulse calmed whenever possible. But her recovery just wouldn’t take, and while the child, Anton Klöterjahn, Jr., a jewel of a baby, took possession of and asserted his place in the world with energetic disregard, his young mother seemed to fade, gently and silently, like a dying ember. It was, as they knew, the trachea, a word which in Dr. Hinzpeter’s mouth had a surprisingly comforting, calming, almost uplifting effect on everyone’s spirits. But even though it wasn’t the lungs, the doctor had concluded that the influence of a milder climate and a stay in a clinic would be desirable in order to speed her recovery. The reputation of Einfried and its director had done the rest.

  That was how things stood; Mr. Klöterjahn himself would tell the whole story to anyone who revealed an interest in it. He spoke in the loud, coarse, cheerful voice of a man whose digestion is as sound as his finances, with prominently flanging lips and the broad yet clipped accent typical of Northern coastal denizens. He blurted out a good portion of what he said, each syllable resembling a tiny discharge, and laughed at his own words as at a good joke.

  He was of average height, broad-shouldered, strong and short-legged, possessing a full red face, aquamar
ine eyes shadowed by very light blond brows, wide nostrils and moist lips. He sported English whiskers, dressed in the English style and was delighted to discover at Einfried an English family—father, mother and three darling children together with their nurse—who were staying here simply and solely because they didn’t know where else to stay. With them he enjoyed an English breakfast every morning. Above all else he loved food and drink, in both fine quality and great quantity. Indeed he proved to be a genuine connoisseur of kitchen and wine cellar, entertaining the clinic society with the most fascinating stories about dinners back home among his circle, replete with descriptions of certain select, hereabouts unknown dishes. Engaged in such descriptions, his eyes would squint congenially and his voice would take on a gummy nasal quality, accompanied by a slight smacking in the back of the throat. He also demonstrated his lack of aversion to other worldly pleasures: one night a patient at Einfried, a writer by trade, witnessed him in the hall jesting most freely with a chambermaid—a minor, comic incident that the writer in question greeted with a ridiculously disgusted expression.

  As for Mr. Klöterjahn’s wife, it was plain to see that she was devoted to him with all her heart. She followed his every word and gesture with a smile, displaying none of the patronizing indulgence many invalids show toward the healthy, but rather benevolently enjoying and sharing the excitement of others, as good-natured patients do when confronted with confident outbursts of vitality from those who have no complaints from life.