7

Karl was not sleeping.

He sat in his study, to which he had come from his room. He had waited until he had heard Therese retiring, and had heard the creak of her bed. He had listened. Once he heard her sigh deeply. At that sound something momentarily relaxed in him, and he felt a thrust of pain, and with that pain, sanity. He suddenly had a vision; he recoiled from it, putting up his hands as though defending himself from agonizing attack. It was not for some minutes that the thick confused fog closed over his mind again, like water which had mercifully closed over a corpse.

The fog lifted, leaving him in a state usual with him these days. Everything had a bright surface clarity about it, a clarity, however, without edges or substance. His head felt light and giddy; his thoughts were like shining bubbles, but when he tried to seize them they broke in his hands. He was grateful for this, for the mere act of reaching for them exhausted him horribly. Yet he could not help reaching. He was reaching more and more as time went on, and his subconscious mind, in defense, made his body more and more exhausted, made his heart tremble more and more violently.

When he walked about it was as though he floated. He was surprised to find himself colliding with objects, with doors and furniture. He felt the pain numbly, as though under the influence of drugs. When he undressed he discovered large black bruises all over his body. Once he thought: I should be surprised at this, but I am not. The mere effort of thinking this threw him into confusion.

Things fell from his hands; he broke a lamp in his room, dropped a little figurine of ivory, which he cherished. For some seconds he felt actual awareness of distress, then walked away, forgetting. Once he looked into his mirror and thought: Who am I? The face that stared back at him was not his own. It tired and nauseated him to have to look at it. When he shaved he cut himself and cursed aloud at his carelessness, but without much interest.

When he would lie down to sleep it was with the feeling of utter physical prostration. He would drowse away. Then, just on the edge of sleep his heart would awake like a terrified drum, sounding an alarm, and he would be sitting up in his bed, covered with sweat and anguish and absolute terror. He would be horribly awake and alive; it seemed that every pore of his skin had a separate and pulsing life of its own. And yet, with his aliveness, the clarity was without substance. He would get up, light a cigarette, drink a glass of water. He would find himself colliding with a chair, would drop the cigarette or the glass. Yet everything would be dazzlingly clear and throbbing. It hurt his haggard, red-rimmed eyes. He would try to think in this glittering universe, but his mind felt like thick fluffy cotton against which his thoughts smothered and were silenced.

Often the thought occurred to him: I do not exist. Somewhere, he remembered, there had been something very clever written about this. Montaigne? He tried to unravel the philosophy; the tight-packed ball fell through his fingers, and he closed his eyes against the weariness of the sight of it. Once he said to himself: If I do not exist, then I have only to will not to be. But the effort of willing not to be was more arduous than existing.

Food choked him. He ate practically nothing. The sight of Therese was a pain not to be endured often, for when he saw her the clarity became cold and static and real, and his thoughts became hard and sharp. When he heard her voice he heard the voice of his grief and despair; he heard the call to brave realization. He could not endure it. Once he thought: She is looking ill and tired. I am killing her. But the very thought, in its anguish, aroused anger against her, and a sort of desperate revulsion.

The servants whispered of his irritability and fury. Sometimes the sight of them infuriated him. He filled the house with his cries and recriminations and insults and rage. He crashed doors and hurled furniture. Fortunately, for Therese’s orderly household, these fits were short.

Sometimes he hated Therese for the suffering he was causing her. Sometimes he tried to approach her on the level of normal actions and words. But his heart trembled, and the nails of his fingers dug into his flesh. He heard his voice, unnaturally loud and deliberate with his efforts to appear natural for her sake. But when he saw that she was not deceived he abandoned his acting, and shut himself away from her with anger and grief, and relief.

It was only in his study that he could subdue the glitter of the world and acquire substance. Only in his madness and illusion could he feel real. Only with the symbol of his hatred in his hand could he feel organized and potent, and with a purpose. Only at these times could he feel sane.

Once, at the very beginning it had seemed fantastic to him. But that was before his deliberate inducing of confusion, before he had pulled confusion over his head like a frightened child pulling the bedclothes over him to shut out the sight of a dark room filled with specters.

When he had first taken out the doll and had looked at it he had laughed crazily. He had, half-mockingly, baptized the doll with the name of his brother. The mere act of naming the doll gave him a sudden and overwhelming sense of relief and surcease. Confusion had then come over him. He had inserted the nail into the head, just a little way. He had started numbly, then all at once with a fury and vindictiveness which had made his heart leap and strain, and had made red spots float before his eyes.

What Therese did not know was that he spied upon her. She never lifted the telephone but what he listened. He was listening for news of his brother. There was an extension in his study, and he had heard the conversation between his wife and Maria. After that, his exultation made his madness complete, and never again did he laugh at himself.

Once or twice he had a cold lucid interval in which he could actually think: I must finish my chapter. He could actually approach his desk. But when he took up his pen and spread his paper before him something strange and terrible would happen to him. He would watch his hand writing words without coherence; he felt disembodied, a ghost motivating a stiff dead hand. His thoughts blew about almost visibly, like pale spectral moths, without pattern or sensation or purpose. When he attempted to read what he had written the words were meaningless. He forgot the one before the one following, and finally everything was a frenzied confusion again. He would feel his throat tightening, his breast tightening, and a feeling of mortal illness and utter terror would seize him like murderous hands. He would spring from his chair, choking, his heart leaping and tearing, his hands trembling and cold and numb. He would glare about him, like a man hunted to his death, and looking madly for escape. At first he could think, even say aloud, with anguish: What is the matter? What is this thing that has me? But at last he could no longer think this, but could only feel.

Time stopped for him. Sometimes he would wonder, very dully, if it were five minutes ago or yesterday that he held the wooden doll in his hand and thrust the nail in deeper. Finally he was no longer conscious of being awake, of eating, or sleeping. He did not know, of course, that Therese furtively dropped a tasteless and colorless liquid in his evening coffee, and that when he was overcome she would enter his room, where he was lying across his bed, and remove his boots and clothing and lift his head to his pillow.

There was a round tower of black stone in his mind, and a blasted region about it, which he never entered. And in that tower lived Gerda and Eric. He ignored it; he stepped about it, his eyes averted. In some way he knew that in that tower awaited his salvation and his release from himself, and also agony. Once he had a dream. He dreamt that he saw the tower and the door stood open, and Eric and Gerda, standing on the threshold, smiled at him and beckoned imploringly. “I am your sister,” said Gerda. “I am your brother,” said Eric. “Come in!” they cried together. But he stood, aching to approach them, weeping because of his desire to go to them. But he kept shaking his head. “If you touch me I shall wake up, and I cannot endure it,” he answered. They looked at him sorrowfully, then closed the door. He could feel them waiting behind the door.

Whenever he thought of them, they were shadowy and unreal in his thoughts, yet potent with suffering. But there was nothing real for him but his brother Kurt, and his hatred.

There came a morning when he automatically lifted the little doll to thrust the nail deeper into its head. He stared at it, holding it in his hand, and a faint wonder came over him, as though he had never seen it before. He examined it with the minute attention of the dazed and mind-sick, trying to fix its features in his thoughts. Suddenly its vague features took on a strange expression. It was Kurt’s face in miniature, and he laughed aloud, with thin ferocity. And then, all at once, it was his own, then Kurt’s, then his own again. His laughter rose with a mad sound, and Therese heard it, her heart failing.

He thrust the nail in deeper. And as he did so, a mortal driving pain assailed his own head. “Do you feel it, Kurt?” he asked aloud. Deeper he drove the nail, and deeper was his own pain. A horrible sort of glee seized him, the sadist’s and masochist’s glee, the joy which is the joy of self-destruction and torment.

And then, strangely, it was not himself or Kurt he was torturing and killing. It was all the world, which had rolled over him, which had destroyed his innocence. He began to sob; tears rolled down his cheek. His hand twisted and thrust at the doll, and his whole being was pervaded with a mortal suffering and intolerable sorrow.

He was all Germany, full of anguish and despair, and enduring no less than what she inflicted upon others.