Jarmila E-Book

Ernst Weiß

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 103

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Set in the idyllic landscape of rural Bohemia in the 1930s, this is the tragic love story of Jarmila, the village beauty, and a toy maker who falls under her siren spell. The wife of the far older local feather-merchant, Jarmila enjoys all the pleasures her husband's wealth can buy, yet still longs for true love which she hopes to find in her affair with the penniless toy-maker. When she conceives a child by him, he urges her to leave her husband for a life of love and freedom in New York. Guilt-ridden and suddenly facing a destitute life in a strange country, Jarmila refuses lo leave. Her devastated lover asks for one more meeting and tragedy ensues. The typescript of this novella was discovered recently at Prague University. Stefan Zweig, a friend of Ernst Weiss, believed it to be Weiss' best work.

Leseprobe

Ernst Weiss

JARMILA

A LOVE STORY FROM BOHEMIA

Translated from the German by Rebecca Morrison and Petra Howard-Wuerz

PUSHKIN PRESS LONDON

Contents

Title PageIIIIIIIVVVIVIIVIIIIXXXIXIIXIIIXIVXVXVIXVIIAFTERWORDAbout the PublisherAlso Available from Pushkin PressCopyright

I

AYEAR AGO IN AUTUMN when I was about to set off on a journey from Paris to Prague I realised in the car just before reaching the railway station that I’d left my watch at home, under my pillow. I asked the driver to stop and looked for a watchmaker’s in order to buy a cheap nickel watch. There was a shop in the vicinity with handsome-looking watches for a mere thirty-five francs. I bought one and, during the rather long journey, kept an eye on its timekeeping. For the first stretch of eleven hours, it lagged a quarter of an hour behind, but then raced through the subsequent thirteen hours half an hour in advance. When we arrived in Prague though, and I compared it with the large station clock, the watch was virtually at the correct time. I walked to my hotel. I had some time and strolled down to the quay of the Vltava. A small number of muddy-brown fishing boats sail on the still, slate-coloured river. The bridges stretching over it are equipped with damming defences and are indescribably beautiful, old and new ones alike.

I was sorely tempted to hurl my watch down from one of the bridges into the river. However, I decided to hold on to it and, gesticulating to make myself understood, entrusted it to a small watchmaker’s on the left bank of the river; the repair cost only thirty-nine crowns and I got the watch back a few hours later in working order. Well, working order of a sort. It now capriciously charged forward or held back stubbornly rather like a disobedient child who lets itself be dragged along by excessively patient parents, tearing free from their grasp from time to time to chase after other children or a dog or hurtle up to the window-front of a toy shop. The watch amused me just as children of any age, dogs of any breed, enchant me, captivate me and make a fool of me. For only a few francs and thirty-nine Czech crowns this marvel of modern technology and product of efficient mass industry had already provided me with plenty of enjoyment.

Only I shouldn’t have relied on it. Naturally, it let me down and I missed an important appointment arranged from Paris with a business friend at a coffee-house on Wenceslas Square. I’d intended to purchase thirty tons of average grade Bohemian apples from the agent and was counting on the provision to pay off pressing debts in Paris.

It was now late afternoon. I was sitting over my third cup of coffee on the terrace of the café situated on the first floor of a grand building. In front of the museum the statue of Saint Wenceslas and his entourage of knights and magnificent horses was still bathed in warm sunlight. The slanting shafts of evening sun rested on the well-rounded haunches of one of the horses, poised in motionless splendour, its gaze fixed on the gently sloping square bustling with people.

Along the heaving road (Wenceslas Square is in fact just a very wide and elongated avenue with no real equivalent in Europe) street vendors jostled, their wares spread out on the pavement or stacked up on small wooden boards in the entrances of buildings. Travelling merchants hawked a plethora of inexpensive goods: wonderful apples (no middling wares here), frameless mirrors, tin combs, orbs of Slovakian mountain cheeses, red on the outside, honeyed within, cheap neck-ties, oranges, bananas, hand-made lace and bright peasant embroidery. It was children mostly who stopped and tried to cajole their parents into buying; from my terrace I watched well-dressed children in white gloves, tugging at the hands of their mothers or governesses, and their poorer counterparts with small, pale faces.

In a doorway directly opposite, I noticed a street hawker. Still youthful, he was no longer the youngest and his handsomely chiselled face was locked in a rather grim expression. On the ground in front of him he had placed a stripped plank of wood and on it a multitude of little toy birds were weaving in and out of one another, dancing, pecking, driven by an inner mechanism. Their staccato movements indeed reflected that of hens. Their wooden core was hidden beneath the soft, downy plumage of white, black and yellow feathers. Most of the time the trader stood there as if lost in thought but when a child came he would willingly hand over the toy to be examined, for children always want to know precisely what is going on inside their toy. When they then walked away, embarrassed at not buying, he just smiled at them. There was something odd about the fellow, almost bird-like, but far from the endearing restlessness of hens.

Every so often he righted one of the little birds that had fallen over, while never taking his eyes off the street. He was probably afraid of being arrested by the police for unlawful street trading. Frequently he pulled a little spring tucked away in the birds’ feathery chest. Once again the creature struck up its spiky dance, pecking at the ground with its stuck-on beak as though there really were something to be found there. The rays of sun had long since wandered from the ample haunch of Saint Wenceslas’s horse on to the swanlike curve of its neck. It didn’t make any sense to wait for my business friend any longer. My new watch displayed a nonsensical hour.

When I looked up, I noticed that most of the little birds had been sold, only five or six were happily pecking away. Suddenly the man snatched them up, stuffed them into a cloth-bag where they continued to twitch, clutched the plank under his arm and broke into a run. As far as I could see there were no policemen to run from and the other illicit street vendors worked on unperturbed.

Who was the bird trader fleeing from? It surely could not be the hunched, corpulent man in a mouse-coloured coat who was wearing a dignified black bowler hat on a head showing the first signs of grey hair? He was accompanied by a pretty boy of around ten and an ash-blond, rather bitter-looking woman whose hat was rather out-dated. They were walking silently up Wenceslas Square. It seemed to me that they were wholly unaware of the profound effect their appearance had caused. Entering the park behind the museum they vanished from sight.

The street-lamps flared into life lending a magical aspect to the square. I was tired, and left. My watch ticked on. The one thing it was capable of. And I’d relied on it! I was thoroughly irate.

II

SHOULD I HAVE SUPPER? According to my watch it was only just after six. I seemed to remember it having said half past the hour the last time I checked, but that was simply impossible. No watch in the world can move both forward and back at the same time. Indignantly I sank down on one of the benches in the park behind the museum and noticed not far from me the three familiar figures. Their demeanour was still the same, grave, silent and measured. The beautiful boy (the lamps were glimmering and I could see his striking fair hair tumbling forth from his slightly overlarge cloth cap), his father, the stout, squat man, and his mother, the sullen, withered creature. The boy was alert and restless. He probably would have liked to join the other children chasing each other through the bushes on this fine autumn evening, screeching like the seagulls on the Vltava. But his parents’ stern looks restrained him and forced him to pull his gloves back on and rest his hands in his lap.

I soon got up seeing as several people were waiting for me to leave my bench since it was the only one in the shadows. Two pairs of lovers raced at it, but a single man with a bundle under his arm beat them to it, the collar of his coat turned up. He seemed familiar. He had a perplexing way of looking at me, with just one eye, the other surveying the scene. This way is typical for those people whose work forces them to use only one eye, watchmakers, for example, marksmen, or doctors peering into their microscopes. That brought me back to my vexing watch. It was only when I made my way down the steps to the square that I realised it was the toy-bird trader.

I turned back for I had nothing better to do. When I passed him I saw that his eyes—his right one to be precise—were fixed on the three people. Without being seen himself he watched their every move with an indefinable expression, half hatred, half love.

I left the park. It was sultry. Rain hung in the air. Or was it the mist that rises in the evening from rivers, here as in all steep valleys? I walked down to the river through countless streets, narrow for the most part. Its banks announced themselves from afar through a closely-beaded pearl necklace of splendid candelabra lights and arc lamps. My thoughts were blank, or, rather, occupied by the toy trader with his feathered mechanical toys and by—geese.

My cursed watch had made me miss the connection with the express train in Nuremberg on my journey from Paris. The slower passenger train I had to take instead gave me the chance to become better acquainted with the Bohemian countryside. We stopped at small stations, larger villages, tiny hamlets, once even in the middle of a field.

The fields were already harvested. The woods, comprising deciduous trees (there are many birches and oaks in Bohemia, and majestic lime trees in the villages) had greatly thinned, and blackish twigs gleamed here and there through the bright foliage in the weak sun. In the bare fields, still covered in stubble, I saw gaggle upon gaggle of geese. Bohemia, surely, boasts the most beautiful geese of any country. Here they are not fed, as in France, on fish waste. In the summer they are set free on the grassy meadows, later on the fields of stubble, and come autumn they’re fattened indoors in a manner both refined and cruel. Alongside the beautiful, powerful, snow-white creatures I noticed others apparently ailing, stripped of all but their large wing feathers. Their breasts, their underbellies, were naked, unkempt, reddish-grey, and they didn’t march with the same cockiness and confidence as their healthy comrades; they waddled slowly, timid and fearful, and steered clear of humans, flapping their wings and starting up a furious cackling whenever they glimpsed one. I asked a fellow passenger what lay behind their strange behaviour. He didn’t understand me at first, but then he smiled and replied: “You try being flayed alive, having every single hair pulled out one by one, being throttled and squeezed all the while between a pair of knees! I’d like to see you then! And the same procedure every year!” I then learned in detail how in most parts of Bohemia geese are plucked alive each year thereby producing the heavenly, light, downy feathers which made sleeping amongst the plump, snowy-white pillows of my Prague hotel such a pleasurable experience. Yet the goose not only provides feathers, but also skin, fat, meat, stomach, heart, liver and blood! Virtually every part of it is eaten. There is no escaping geese here in Bohemia.

I opted to dine somewhere else that evening, perhaps in that small, old-fashioned tavern which had caught my eye when I was following the toy trader. It was situated on Wenceslas Square beyond the statue and was bound to have simple but good fare that didn’t feature geese. Most importantly, I’d noticed large glasses of almost black beer on the tables, and charmingly