Babylonian Exile Part Four
Having fled from police enquiries in Baghdad, Conrad, George and Waldemar must find their feet in historic bustling Constantinople. Each finds enjoyments in his own way: one loves, one drinks, the third grows rich. But love and drink show their dark sides. Only money-making shows a steadily rising line.
CONSTANTINOPLE (First Part)
This enormous chapter – almost 50,000 words – is merely the first half of the adventures our fallen Babylonian god and his companions undergo in Constantinople.
The playful, meandering, digressive style of the earlier parts is maintained here: diversions into history (birth of Iraq, massacred Armenians, Frankish knights, Roman executions); excursions into fairytale and myth (Cephalos, Melusine; fairy at the well); apparently wilful digressions à la Tristram Shandy (Swedish airman; French swimmer); farcical episodes (sweet shop; beauty contest), authorial intrusions.
Constantly the author sneaks in little digs at current European political and cultural shortcomings: a little sentence here, a brief phrase there. And now and then Döblin sparks the thunder and lightning of Expressionist intensity: in the first chapter; in Conrad’s dream after his first sexual encounter, in the author’s scornful rage at George. There are also some (too few?) signature passages of interior monologue.
In his earlier epics, Döblin provided almost no waymarkers to help the reader orient to the contents: walls of text with at best a few divisions into parts. Here he makes free with the same approach used in Berlin Alexanderplatz: each major section is divided into numerous smaller sections with a more or less informative heading.
Here you can download the full text of Part Four.
Meanwhile, here are two excerpts as a taster: Conrad’s encounter in the sweet shop, and Waldemar’s encounter with Gipsies.
Excerpt 1:
The first love story
And because fog lay now so thick over the city and Conrad had no idea which direction he should go in, suddenly he found himself –
– outside a sweet shop. The street was an abyss, the building with the sweet shop an attempt to throw a bridge across the abyss. Conrad noticed that his feet down below were wet, and up above water was trickling around his mouth. He opened the door, the floor was dry, he and the counter were all alone in the shop. But from the next room came an uproar of women and children.
And now, one after the other, there appeared: through a curtain, a very small boy with a paper helmet on his head, at the sight of Conrad he jumped back, whereat the din grew louder, out through the curtain along with the boy came a bigger girl with tangled hair and a very red tearstained face, they stared at Conrad through great big dark eyes, whereat the girl pulled the boy back in again with considerable energy, for a few seconds the din abated, then the small boy appeared again for the third time, now in the hand of a particularly ancient and very fat woman who couldn’t see well, for she stood at the curtain turning her white-haired head this way and that, scanning the room and seeming not to notice Conrad. She vanished, and the din next door rose to a hellish level, and flushed with anger a youngish female person came from the next room, was not quite dressed but held a big blanket firmly in both fists across her breast, shouted back over her shoulder at the children to keep out of the shop. She gave Conrad an evil look, and when he said nothing grabbed one of the little bags near at hand and held it out to him. Whereat Conrad smiled and had a look around on the counter. All sorts of things were laid out there in little boxes, he pointed and asked: “What’s that, what’s that, what does it taste like?” The woman put down the bag, shouted over her shoulder, and all three persons listed above appeared, assembled behind the sweet counter, and provided explanations in numerous foreign languages all talking over one another, apparently of the sunrise, the sunset, Mohammed’s ascension to Heaven, of houses, rents, real estate agents, of bad and good weather, of rainbows, of cats, dogs and mice, of voyages by sea, of life on the land and in high mountains, of Lottie’s canary, and the treatment for mites.
All this and more, apparently, was conveyed by the four persons behind the counter. Conrad understood none of it, whereat the four persons directed their narratives with gusto against each other at even greater speed and with the strongest expenditure of vocal capabilities, accompanied by many gestures. Now it seemed to be about Kemal Pasha’s martial undertakings, differing opinions on the Sèvres Treaty, of which Conrad had no memory.
When he failed to respond to their questions, the four persons, or so it seemed at least, took the conversation in a different direction. At first the dialogue between the two children, the boy and the bigger girl, repeatedly featured the term “phony chicken” which, but he did not know this, was the vernacular for the four-shilling coin struck in large quantities by the Duke Hans-Albrecht of Mecklenburg-Güstrow in 1616, with on one side his coat of arms, on the other the Imperial eagle with a four on its breast, which eagle was dubbed “phony chicken”, or “parrot chicken”.
Meanwhile the two older persons were debating, so vigorously that they were hard to follow, a theological problem, specifically the question of toleration. They were both in agreement that it was all a matter of the high-minded toleration of an alien faith with the intention of leaving it and its adherents unmolested in both public and private. As regards dogmatically theoretical toleration as well as its practice among the citizenry, they were clearly of the same heart and mind. Only when one came to the modern constitutional state did it seem to engender difficulties, which even the customer was unable to reconcile.
For whole long minutes, perplexity reigned in the little sweet shop. Had Conrad been just any old body, the scene would have come to a rapid end with the help of neighbours who would have thrown him into the street. There our hero would have been consigned to his wet feet and dribbling mouth, and we would have had to begin our love story from a different starting point. He and we alike were spared this by the initiative of the children, that pair of grubby inquisitive creatures. Since the stranger seemed not ill-disposed and had a refined and mysterious appearance, they stepped out from behind the counter, inspected Conrad fore and aft, and commenced a new barrage of questions. In the utterances of the girl, who kept scratching her head and knees, the word “pana” sounded often, Conrad racked his brains. What could they mean by pana, and by the earlier phony chicken? The Indian unit of weight in which the Maurya king Chandragupta around 321 B.C. produced his silver coins? Out of the question. A word that seemed to be “hind” could be made out. “Hind” could mean many things: a female deer, fishes of the genus Epinephelus found in the warmer waters of the western Atlantic Ocean, or it could mean “back” as in “behind” or “hindquarters”; or could they be referring to the bibliophile Ludwig Hain, who was born in Stuttgart on 5 July 1781 and died as a private scholar in Munich on 27 June 1836, leaving behind a goodly collection of 16,311 incunabula, anastatic reproductions, appendices, corrections? Maybe, maybe.
To achieve a degree of understanding, the debate would have to be brought onto a different footing. From the two older ladies, who by now had calmed down and were exchanging furtive smiles, he picked up remarks that could be interpreted as allusions to Oseen’s approximations in the hydrodynamics of viscous fluids, maybe also to induction lines in a field strength of constant magnitude. The hard problem of plane stress vectors was airily disposed of, then came citations on the calculation of ephemeris time and improvements in orbital determination.
By this point Conrad was becoming annoyed, shook himself and posed a counter-question: “What is infinity? What is the origin of the spectral lines?” And answers had they none.
The women were nonplussed and disconcerted to hear his angry counter-question: When is a constant curve M enumerable from many simpler arcs, independent up to their end point? Please! Hah! What were all discussions of ballistic theory when – not to speak of other factors – the transform coefficient of the Phi-function was obscure and crying out for elucidation! Here they were faced with an expressly lemniscate function sin U.
They were overawed by his coarse tone, and stuttered excuses about Bernouilli Numbers and Staudt’s Partitions, which failed to mollify him. If the two children had not been there, it would have ended badly. They fingered Conrad’s spattered boots, his lovely coat, felt without embarrassment in his pockets, and as they did so recited the nursery rhyme: “Goosey goosey gander, what did you lose? Seven dear goslings, they all had no shoes. The cobbler had no leather, and he had no last, so seven shoeless goslings now come past.”
An old bald-headed neighbour, alerted by the din, entered the shop, removed the pipe from his mouth, and thundered at Conrad: “xi3 xp + x3xi + xp3xi = 0.”
Quick as a flash he retorted: “x2y2 = 2a3(y – a).” At which the other scratched his head, laid down his arms, and resumed smoking.
Now peace descended, the storm was over. The two women and the neighbour exchanged friendly smiles, Conrad stroked the boy’s paper helmet, and had a great effect on all present when he took from his purse, which he retrieved from the child’s hands, a banknote that he affixed artfully to the peak of the helmet. Everyone gave a merry laugh. Conrad now at last without hindrance picked up a bag, popped a sweet in his mouth, and felt he was at the goal of his desires.
And with that our sweetie episode in a typical sweet shop would have come to an end, the sweet shop owner would have flung open the door for him, bowed, jabbered, clapped her hands together, clutched her brow, would have run to the neighbours, told them all about it, it would have blazed like wildfire through every alleyway, and a few days later the legend would have faded. But this was a predetermined, predestined sweet shop. For, as you have already correctly surmised, Conrad had made his greatest impression on the youngish person with the blanket around her. It was the value of the cockade Conrad had unthinkingly attached to her nephew’s paper helmet that unleashed in her an indescribable sensation.
Could it be, she asked herself, and with lightning speed the answer clearly came, that a man, so refined, so respectable and rich, would step into this shop only because of sweets? No. He means me. She looked at the banknote in the boy’s helmet, and knew: “He loves me very much.”
This girl will play only a small role in Conrad’s story. But she initiates a whole sequence. And Conrad, when he stood on the bridge and felt that this was the city of his destiny, had felt correctly.
The boy whispered a remark to the old lady, which Conrad, eye to eye with the bald man, failed to pick up even acoustically. If you thought about it properly, it could just as well be a remark about the treasures in portraiture contained in the Copper Engravings Room of the Museum, or a severe warning against handing over huge sums for purportedly genuine documents in the absence of expert opinion, which actually happened in Austria. The young woman now disappeared. In the next room she completed her toilet. On the open stage Conrad engaged happily with the youngsters, sat on a cane stool, the children counted the buttons on his coat, inspected the lining, and chattered away.
Baldy directed a friendly farewell at the old lady, who was standing smirking behind the counter, and at Conrad. Then he retired. Conrad sucked his thumb and waited, he knew not what for, but something was being made ready for him, he could feel it. He sat there quite calm. Outside the fog still lay thick. He’d been standing on the bridge, where now was the block of ice that meant to smash him to pieces, ailinu, ailinu, I am covered in boils, ah what must a human endure. It was our indestructible Conradino sitting there, you can cast him into Hell and he’ll set up a conversation and ask Satan about heating technology. The old lady kept an eye on the paper helmet and its valuable plumage. Only once did she direct at contented Conrad, now at peace with the whole world, a question seemingly in yet another foreign language. Could it be about the bilinear system of uncials and majuscules, or the four-line system, it was all the same to him, he returned her smile. From a later remark of Conrad’s she gathered that he considered, just as she did, the fourth century a turning point in the history of the Greek script, and that he was sorry if there should at some stage have been any misunderstanding between them on this point. Then the donna entered, initiator of the delicious sequence, and occupied the foreground.
Excerpt 2
Waldemar and the Gipsies
We tell now of a man we have paid too little attention to, Waldemar. Where all are in love, Jack cannot hate all alone. Is he too in love? No. He just wants is to be of some service to his lord in Constantinople, in his own way.
He was lodged in Conrad’s hotel, in the attic. They’d persuaded him to dress European style, and given his beard a modern trim. Day after day he trailed shyly through the swarming streets of Istanbul, feeling uneasy. Ah, in our team of fools he alone is unlucky. And every morning Conrad had to let him come down and pretend to assign him a task, which blew a ray of light through Waldemar’s earthen ramparts. …
A big city can play many tricks (not ‘Turks’). You think you’re watching, and someone’s watching you. Everywhere in a big city people sit and wait. To do the waiting they’ve built themselves solid waterproof – hence rain- and storm-proof – houses with heating too, these are their permanent HQ. From there they cast their hooks, harpoons, in the district round about they set traps. This happens under the guise of friendship, humane helpfulness, but one should not overlook that in these same buildings lawyers dwell, courthouses are constructed, there are jails. Our Waldemar thought often of Baghdad. That city had suited him so well, and the longer he stayed in Constantinople the more Baghdad appealed. How nice it was on Maude Bridge, those comfortable clothes he had, never needed to change since the day he fell from Heaven. And how he yearned for Baghdad and how grief swelled in him when he thought of all his heavenly colleagues who’d embarked on this descent into the world. He remembered every one of them, they’d worked together for so long, and now … No way to know what had become of them. Maybe some were still drifting among the stars, this or that one would have made it down, but how to meet up with them.
As he made his idle and abject way in the lamentable dress of a European past the sea of buildings reaching for the heavens, a Gipsy woman spoke to him, or rather he to her. She was standing at the exit from big Pera Street, the street of streets, at the end of the bridge from Galata to Stamboul and from Stamboul to Galata, there’s a tremendous crush there, our old chap was drawn to it because it reminded him of Baghdad, where he’d sung. Waldemar stood there thinking of his little horse. The Gipsy lady noticed him, came up and pulled him by the hand to the balustrade. She kept hold of his hand, turned it over, looked closely at it and made comments in a curious singsong. Eventually she let go the hand and seemed to address a question to Waldemar. He gave a modest smile. She pointed to his coat pocket. He pulled out a handkerchief. She laughed, stuck her own hand in, and there was his purse. As he looked on she took from it two silver coins and indicated that he should throw one of them up in the air. He humoured her. Then she said something with eyes aglow, and after making a little speech let the coin vanish into her bosom, to Waldemar’s shocked amazement. Then she held up the second coin and spat on it. Waldemar was outraged. What sort of customs did these people have. She grabbed again at his hand, wiped the coin on her skirt and held it against his palm. There was an in-depth comparison, again in singsong. Finally she held up the coin, which went the way of the first one. She beamed a smile, her eyes blazing, Waldemar’s too. She felt for her little ukelele. He was dismissed. She glanced right, glanced left, this business was done, she was on the lookout for new victims.
He understood none of it (capricious life, viewed in prospect). He stood, listened to her sing. Since no one approached her and the old man, possibly Syrian or Persian, was still there at the balustrade, she turned back to him with a certain irritation. For people of her kind never have a clean conscience. She addressed him in a gentle voice, asked him something in the three languages she knew, Turkish, Greek, Romany. To speak Romany to him was a singular honour, but he didn’t understand. Maybe the old man’s deaf. But he’d listened to her sing. People of another kind coming across an obstinate case like Waldemar would have gone back to business as usual, or would perhaps have wrestled with the notion of throwing the hanger-on, if he kept hanging on, over the side of the bridge. Nothing of the sort for the Gipsy woman. She was a person of experience, mother of several children, and thought: this has to do with love. For cases like this, she and her tribe had a tried and tested approach.
Some interesting facts about gipsies,
especially their relationship to the hedgehog
We know from our own observations, from history, encyclopedias, handbooks and specialist tomes, who Gipsies are. In Berlin they live in Weissensee and do horse-trading. They travel the world in green caravans and so, in contrast to other folk, do have a fixed abode. Even early on they were called “a misbegotten, black, ugly and foul people”. A certain Geo Schäffer from Sulz on the Neckar believed it permissible 120 years ago to speak of them in connection with “scoundrels, footpads, murderers and other contemptible vagrant rabble”, but the Gipsies avenge themselves by calling everyone else “gadjo”: stupid fellow and peasant. This despised mobile people that produces pretty flexible persons – they’re often dirty, but there’s always a refined note in the features, for King Zin ruled over them in the Far East, he wouldn’t give his daughter to Tamerlane and so he was killed, this proud people all driven out, scattered, oh the old descent into Hell, sit up straight on your stools, you who have been swept away across every land, you seekers, migrants; horrors await you – these noble wanderers of the Earth have an intimate relationship to the hedgehog. Let us for a moment leave our Waldemar as he stands at the New Bridge with the sly Gipsy woman, they won’t grow bored there, and let us examine this remarkable aspect of the Gipsies. One can never know what use it might be to us.
The hedgehog and the Gipsy
Anyone with some knowledge of Gipsies knows they do not eat human flesh (at least no more than other people: see reports from wartime, famines, sieges). But what is probably true: as the English to their roast beef, the Italians to their macaroni, the Hungarians to their goulash, so the Gipsies to the hedgehog. They devour it with a passion, and any who can, drink schnapps with it.
To foundering foundered gods, to foundering foundered nations, to foundering foundered humans this book is dedicated! One eye of ours laughs, the other weeps. Hence (it’s relevant) our query: why is this foundered people so fond of hedgehog?
Here’s the answer: they eat it out of love and comradeship.
As they stroll through wood and meadow, settle in hedges and thickets and sing their laments: When autumn comes the peasant’s glad, the hunter’s in his lair, the Gipsy’s heart alone is sad, for summer days so fair, and Oh thou whose love is all my life, what think’st to trust to me? Pledge thy heart to be my wife, then so happy shall I be, and this is where they’re born and do their courting, there of an evening and at night they find alongside them a droll little companion. He squeaks and snuffles and runs about and lets his dribble flow. He has the head of a tiny pig or rat and his little feet support a prickly body. This is the hedgehog, Mr Pike of Bristlefield.
They came across him in the south and in the north. They learned to play with him. They saw him in combat with that highwayman, the fox. Who didn’t approach, but the fox thought: I know this fellow, he doesn’t like water, and stood over the ball of prickles and sprayed it with his urine, Mr Pike didn’t like this one bit, he poked his nose out to deplore such naughty behaviour, and with that he was caught. Just as they hunted in rubbish, he hunted beetles and rainworms, and in summer they saw how he gathered especially tasty dishes by spearing windfall fruit on his prickles and carrying it blithely away home.
He slipped on silent pads through the foliage. Night was his friend, and if anyone came too close he’d show his armour, his masterpiece. Often they sat together in the tent, Gipsies young and old, men, kings and dukes, women and children, and studied the armour of the doughty hedgehog. He had arranged it to start right behind the eyes, and let it run on over back and belly to his little stump of a tail. And see, now he’s gnawing, now he’s snuffling, quick, bang on the floor, hard, he’s curling up, you can’t get near, no policeman would dare try it.
We Gipsies are a myriad times weaker. If we’re caught we have to put our hands behind our backs. If we run, a dog bites us in the leg or a bullet hits us in the kidneys, and off we go to the gallows. That, dear friend, is the fate of us Gipsies, an exiled folk with no country of their own, no protection, little hedgehog, dear little hedgehog, good Mr Pike of Bristlefield, come here, you’re our friend, God gave you to us. You may not be a hog, but you’re our little piggy. For us you feed on sweet fruit. Step into our pot, you’ll taste so good, and we bless you. Poor folk all, we help each other out.
Waldemar, the sheep, is allowed to live: they want his wool
There on the New Bridge from Stamboul to Pera, Waldemar stood with the Gipsy woman, and submitted to an examination. She said “Maleika” and pointed to herself. Waldemar smiled, because he understood this. It sounded like the Arabic he’d heard in Baghdad, and meant Angel. Her name was Angel. In Berlin we used to have a department store called Angel (Engel) in the Landsbergerstrasse, it was much favoured by the ladies for the quality and good value of its offerings, it went under, couldn’t keep going. For all its benevolence, Angel was merely the name of this enterprise. But she, Maleika, really was an angel, her smile showed it. She was also, as we have already noted, the mother of several children. When he repeated after her “Maleika”, she felt that half the battle was won. Agreement on the following points was then reached between them: “hatim” =ring, “gazuma” =boot, “sad” =happiness, “semah behile” = pretty girl, and in particular “umle” = money. As well as a pen, a European carries on his person a watch on a chain, a purse containing some amount of money, a wallet containing some amount of money. The angel regarded Waldemar and concluded: he’s not the youngest of the type, he’ll have all the above-named objects. Her clear goal was to relieve him of them as swiftly as possible.
Their mindset corresponded in its totality to that of the modern economy, which takes umbrage at nothing so much as value left inert, i.e. so-called stockpiling. A dangerous hoarding of money in circulation caused the most dreadful economic crisis the world has seen in the last hundred years. To overcome it, as we write these lines the best economic and political brains of Europe, Asia, America, Australia, even Africa are applying themselves. What the wise in their wisdom fail to see, is practised by the childish mind in all simplicity. Maleika, angel on the big bridge, her own little person a participant in the economic crisis, knew the solution. Here’s a “hoarder” right in front of me. The obstruction must be removed. The path to it is love.
Yet Waldemar was not in love. He regarded her as befitted his age with a gentle benignity. But as she pressed herself more closely on him, who can deny that it felt good in his loneliness. He realised: she’s sad like me, and their encounter was his first happy experience in this cold cavern Istanbul, formerly Constantinople. Ah, he didn’t know that Gipsies often gather with companions in sorrow – e.g. the hedgehog.
When she took a couple of steps on the bridge to see if he would follow, it turned out that – he did: sympathy. He lumbered clumsily along in his tube-garments. She flashed him a glance and said “warru” = trousers. He understood it as “dressing up”, his eyes brightened, he nodded, it was true. And she put two and two together: the man’s an Arab, here on business, he’s made his investments and does what they all do, dress up in European clothes, but they’re not comfortable on him. When a respectable man goes along the street with a Gipsy woman, mostly it’s not only the man who feels awkward, but, as in this case, the woman too. For people see them and attribute intentions to her, some of which hit the nail on the head. So she avoided the obvious route, turned aside into narrow alleys. Later they come to other, distant, main streets, they wander all through Stamboul, they come to a patch of open ground, there’s a mosque, trees, under broad trees are cabs for hire, boxes of junk, the cabmen smoke cigarettes. Let’s climb in! And off they go, Waldemar has no clue where to, but we know, they’re heading for Topkapi or Silivrikapi and farther out to where the ancient city boundary lies.
