Weights and Measures Read online

  The Inspector, however, remained seated for some time, alone with the two green-shaded lamps. He felt as if he could talk to them. They were like human beings, a species of living, mellow, shining humans. He held a silent dialogue with them. ‘Stick to your plan,’ they said to him, green and benevolent. ‘Do you really think so?’ he asked in return. ‘Yes, we think so!’ said the lamps.

  Inspector Eibenschütz blew out the lamps and went home. He walked through a cold late autumnal rain which made him feel lonelier than ever, into a house where a lie was waiting for him, a lie that was more dismal than this evening, than this rain.

  When he arrived, his house was in darkness for the first time. He unlocked the door. He sat down on the virulently green plush sofa in the so-called ‘drawing-room’ and waited in the dark. In this district one did not receive newspapers of yesterday or the day before yesterday, but newspapers that were at least a week old. Eibenschütz never bought them. The world’s events did not concern him at all.

  The servant girl had heard him come in. She was called Jadwiga. Thick-set, complacent and maternal, she entered the darkness of the room. She announced to him while she was lighting the table-lamp – against his wishes, but he was too tired to tell her not to do so – that his wife had gone shopping and would soon be back. Also, she had left word for him to wait patiently.

  He turned down the wick of the lamp, so low that the room appeared to be in almost complete darkness. He thought of his plan.

  When his wife returned he got up, kissed her and told her that he had been very uneasy because he had been waiting for her so long. She had parcels in both arms. She put them down. They both sat at the table.

  They ate together in an atmosphere of apparent friendliness and peace. At least, so it seemed to Frau Regina. She was amiable, almost eager to serve. From time to time she smiled at her husband. He noticed that she once again wore the ring with the false sapphire on her finger.

  ‘You’ve got your ring back!’ said the Inspector. ‘I’m glad!’

  ‘I believe,’ said Frau Regina, bending over her plate, ‘I am having a child at last!’

  ‘At last?’ said Inspector Eibenschütz. ‘You’ve never wanted one before! Why now?’

  ‘Now more than ever!’ she said, and very carefully peeled an orange.

  ‘I have today,’ he began – while she was still bending her head over knife and fruit – ‘been talking to my clerk, Josef Nowak. He is a womanizer, known throughout the district. He claims that he has had many women here, in the border forest in spring and summer, naturally he doesn’t say which ones. In autumn and winter – he says – it’s risky for him to visit Jadlowker’s inn because he often represents me there officially.’

  His wife was eating the last quarter of her orange. She did not look up. She said: ‘Shocking, the women in this neighbourhood!’

  ‘He gives them all rings!’ retorted the Inspector.

  She dropped the last piece of orange and looked at the ring on her left index finger. There ensued a long silence.

  ‘That ring comes from Josef Nowak,’ said the Inspector suddenly. ‘I know it, I’ve seen it on his hand.’

  Suddenly Frau Regina began to cry violently.

  At the same time, still sobbing, she drew the ring off her finger, laid it before her on the table and said: ‘So you know everything?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You are pregnant by him. I shall decide on what steps to take.’

  He got up immediately, put on his coat and went out. He harnessed the gig and drove off to Szwaby, to Jadlowker’s.

  10

  It was late at night when he arrived. And this caused some surprise. For never yet had Jadlowker seen Eibenschütz later than at noon. Also, the Inspector had never before appeared so animated and consequently so peculiar. ‘What an honour!’ exclaimed Jadlowker, and he capered out from behind the counter despite his considerable weight. ‘What an honour!’ Jadlowker chased away two villains who were sitting at a table in the corner. He spread a red and blue flowered cloth over the table and called over to the counter, without asking what the Inspector wanted: ‘A quarter of mead and a plate of peas!’

  A great din prevailed in Jadlowker’s border tavern. Russian deserters sat there, only recently brought in by the border smuggler, Kapturak. They were still in their uniforms. Although they drank inordinate amounts of tea and schnapps and had been given large towels to hang round their shoulders to wipe away the sweat, they nevertheless looked like men suffering from the cold – so homeless did they feel already, barely an hour’s distance from the frontier of their homeland. Little Kapturak – he was nicknamed ‘the commission agent’ – plied them with alcohol. Jadlowker gave him twenty-five per cent for each Russian deserter. The unexpected arrival of the Inspector seriously disconcerted the landlord, Jadlowker. He had actually intended to offer any deserters who wished to exchange their Russian uniforms cloth and suits which he had no licence to sell. On the one hand, then, the presence of the Inspector irritated him; on the other, it gave him pleasure. At last he had him, the stern one, under his roof at night – and night was Leibusch Jadlowker’s great friend. He called to his little lady friend to come down.

  He had lived with her for many years. It was said that she, too, came from Russia, from Odessa, and that she had a hand in more than one of Jadlowker’s misdeeds. Her speech, her manner and her appearance showed that, like him, she came from the southern Ukraine. Her appearance was swarthy, wild and at the same time placid. She was young; that is to say, of no particular age. In reality – as no one in the neighbourhood could know – she was a gypsy and came from Jaslova in Bessarabia. Jadlowker had got hold of her one night and had kept her. Although jealous by nature, he was certain of the dark creature’s love and all too certain of his own power over men and women. Many people obeyed him in that neighbourhood, on both sides of the border. Even Kapturak, the omnipotent commission agent, who sold men like cattle to travel agencies, sending emigrants to Canada, Java, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Australia even: even Kapturak obeyed Jadlowker. He had bought most of the officials who might have been able to injure him. The only one he had not yet acquired was Inspector Eibenschütz. That was why, since Eibenschütz’s arrival, he had waged a campaign against him. In Jadlowker’s opinion every man had not only a weak spot but also a criminal one. He really could not believe – and how else would he have been able to live – that any man, whosoever he might be, could think and feel differently from the way that he, Jadlowker, thought and felt. He was convinced that all men who lived honestly were liars and he regarded them as mountebanks. The most outstanding mountebanks were the officials, followed by the ordinary respectable men, those without office. With all these one had to act a part and pretend to be respectable. That was Jadlowker’s attitude towards the world as a whole. That, especially, was his attitude, and one which he maintained with a quite especial rigour, towards Inspector Eibenschütz.

  11

  The woman came. The stairs she descended ran by the side of the counter. She smoothed a path for herself through the noisy throng of deserters. That is, the path smoothed itself before her. At the far end of the taproom, by the window, opposite the stairs, sat Inspector Eibenschütz. He had caught sight of the woman when she was standing on the first tread of the stairs. And he had known immediately that she would come to him. He had never seen her before. Already, in that first moment, when he had seen her on the uppermost stair, he had felt a dryness in his throat, so much so that he seized the glass of mead and drained it at a single draught. It took a few minutes before the woman reached his table. The drunken deserters gave way before her delicate step. Slim, slender, narrow, a soft white shawl around her shoulders, which she held with her hands as if she were cold and as if this shawl could warm her, she walked steadily, with swaying hips and straight back. Her step was firm and graceful. The gentle tap of her high heels was audible for the space of a moment while the noisy men fell silent and stared at the woman. From the top step, her gaze was directed straight
at Inspector Eibenschütz, as if her eyes strode before her feet.

  As she approached him he felt as if he were discovering for the first time what a woman really was. Her deep blue eyes reminded him, who had never seen the sea, of the sea. Her white face kindled in him, who knew the snow very well, the vision of some fantastic, unearthly kind of snow; and her dark blue-black hair led him to think of southern nights, which he had never seen but had possibly once read or heard about. When she sat down opposite him he felt as if he were witnessing a great miracle; as if the unfamiliar sea, a remarkable snow, a strange night, were sitting down at his table. He did not even get up. He knew well enough that one stood up before women; but he did not get up before a miracle.

  Yet he knew that this miracle was a human being, a woman, and he also knew that she was the mistress of Leibusch Jadlowker. Naturally, Eibenschütz too had heard all the stories of Jadlowker’s mistress. He had never in his life had a definite idea of what one calls ‘sin’, but now he believed he knew how sin looked. It looked like this, it looked exactly like Jadlowker’s mistress, the gypsy Euphemia Nikitsch.

  ‘Euphemia Nikitsch,’ she said simply, and sat down and spread out her many-pleated skirt. It rustled softly and penetratingly through the noise of the deserters.

  ‘You’re not drinking?’ she asked, although she saw the freshly emptied glass of mead in front of Anselm Eibenschütz.

  He did not hear her question at all. He stared at her with wide-open eyes and thought that only now had he really opened his eyes for the first time.

  ‘You’re not drinking?’ she asked again, but now she seemed to be well aware that Eibenschütz was unable to reply. Whereupon she snapped her fingers loudly and vigorously. Onufrij, the houseboy, came. She ordered a bottle.

  He brought a bottle of ninety-degree schnapps and a fresh bowl of dried peas. Inspector Eibenschütz drank, but not because he had any desire to do so! Far from it! He drank only because, in the few minutes the woman had been sitting there, he had sought in vain for some suitable word and he hoped that, if only he drank, the word would come to him. So he drank, and there was a great burning in his throat, and he went on to eat the salted peas, which further increased the burning. Meanwhile the woman sat opposite him, motionless. Her slender dark-brown fingers, each one of which resembled a diminutive, slender, rosy-headed, fragile and yet powerful woman, clasped the little glass. And her eyes were not directed at Inspector Eibenschütz but at the water-clear schnapps. Eibenschütz saw her long, curved, silky black eyelashes, which were blacker than the woman’s dress.

  ‘I’ve never seen you here before!’ he said suddenly, and turned red and twirled his moustache with both hands as if this could help to conceal his sudden ridiculous blush.

  ‘And I have not seen you either,’ she said – and it sounded like the voice of a nightingale. He had sometimes heard it in the years of his youth, in the woods around Nikolsburg. ‘Do you come here often?’

  ‘Sometimes on duty!’ he said, and continued to twirl his soft moustache. He simply could not manage to take his hands away from his face.

  ‘On duty?’ she trilled. ‘What sort of duty?’

  He dropped his hands. ‘I am an Inspector of Weights and Measures,’ he said gravely.

  ‘I see!’ she said, emptied her glass, rose, curtseyed and went up the stairs.

  Inspector Eibenschütz followed her with his eyes, followed the pleated skirt which seemed to turn a soft, gentle cartwheel on each tread of the stairs, followed the narrow shoes which appeared beneath it. The deserters had been snoring for some time. Some had laid their heads on the hard tables. Others lay under the tables, like stuffed, breathing sacks. All snored loudly and somewhat inhumanly.

  He went to the counter. He wanted to pay. Behind the counter stood Leibusch Jadlowker and he said in a tone that was both threatening and friendly: ‘Herr Inspector, today you are my guest! You shall not pay anything!’, so that for the first time in his life his courage failed the former artilleryman Eibenschütz and he only said, ‘Good night.’

  He went home very slowly. He forgot that he had left his gig standing in front of the inn. However, the horse followed him as obediently as a dog, pulling the vehicle behind him.

  It was already bright morning when he arrived. The plump servant girl placed tea and bread for him on the table. He pushed everything away.

  He heard his wife’s step. ‘Good morning!’ she said. She approached him, she prepared to embrace him. He immediately got up.

  ‘From now on you will sleep in the kitchen!’ he said, ‘or you will leave the house!’

  He was silent for a while, then he said: ‘If your bed is not in the kitchen by tonight you can sleep with Nowak tomorrow night, or else outside.’

  He suddenly remembered his carriage and his horse. They were waiting patiently in front of the small garden. It had long been broad daylight.

  He drove to his office in the local government headquarters. And he wrote – in his own hand, very slowly, with double margin, in the clear childish calligraphic script of an imperial artilleryman – an application to the municipality requesting the transfer of the clerk Josef Nowak to a neighbouring municipality. He was not satisfied with him. He wanted someone else.

  It caused him some distress to send a letter to the municipality. After all, he had been an artilleryman for twelve years and he had a claim to a real and proper government post. However, thanks to his wife, he had opted for this one (he was in fact a municipal official, although he was paid by the state).

  At this moment it caused him special distress that he was not directly subordinate to the state.

  He had arrived about an hour before duties began. When the clerk Nowak came in the Inspector said to him: ‘You will leave this post. I am not satisfied with you. I have just put in a request for your dismissal or your transfer.’

  The ambitious young man said only one word: ‘But –’

  ‘Silence!’ cried Eibenschütz, as he had once roared out on the parade ground when he had still been an artilleryman.

  He pretended to be engrossed in his documents. In reality, however, he was meditating on his life. Good – he thought – that will get rid of Nowak. I shall have nothing more to do with my wife. She will sleep in the kitchen. I won’t throw her out, I don’t want a scandal. And what else – what else? I won’t go to Jadlowker’s again – except on duty, that’s understood. And if I should ever go there outside duty hours, then only with Sergeant Slama. No, I won’t go there again except on duty. That’s final.

  12

  It was not final. True, the clerk Nowak was transferred to Podgorce; true, Frau Eibenschütz slept in the kitchen, beside the servant girl: but the official visits to the border tavern, albeit in the company of Sergeant Slama, increased notably.

  Winter came, and it was an inexorable winter. The sparrows fell from the rooftops, rather like overripe fruit which falls from the trees in early autumn. Even the crows and ravens, huddling together on the dead branches, seemed to feel the cold. On some days the thermometer registered thirty-two degrees. In such a winter it is hard for a man to be without a home. The Inspector stood alone in the great frost, like the solitary tree that stood, bare and freezing, in front of the office window in the courtyard of the district government office. A new clerk had come, an indolent, stout, good-natured youth who worked very slowly but exhaled cosiness. It was cosiest of all in the office. The door of the stove radiated a reddish light, the two lamps shone green. Even the papers rustled intimately. But what happened after Inspector Eibenschütz left the office? There he stood, in his short sheepskin coat with the Persian collar turned up high, in his tall knee-boots, beside one of the two street-lamps that burned outside the district government office. They burned with a very feeble yellow light, these night lamps, against the radiant snow in the park. Inspector Eibenschütz stood for a long time, pondering. He tried to picture to himself what he would find when he returned home. The fire would burn in the stove, the table would be laid
, the ring-burner would glow, the yellow cat would crouch on the seat by the stove. His wife, red-eyed and sullen, would go into the kitchen as soon as he arrived. The servant girl, also sullen and red-eyed – for she shared the tears and sorrows of the mistress of the house – would blow her nose with a corner of her apron as, with her left hand, she set the plate before Herr Eibenschütz. Not even the cat would come up to him, as it had done in former times, and allow itself to be stroked. It too harboured enmity against Eibenschütz. Hate shone out of its yellow eyes. Despite everything, the Inspector resolved to go home. In his heavy boots he trudged resolutely through the crunching snow, through the dull night, illuminated from below by the snow. Not a living soul anywhere. No need to be afraid – ashamed for that matter – of stopping from time to time, for a short while, in front of one of the little houses and peering through the chinks of the shutters into somebody else’s home. It was still early in the evening. Often those happy ones still sat there together. Sometimes they played dominoes. There were fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, children and grandchildren in those houses. They ate and they laughed. Sometimes a child cried, but even crying was a blessed state, to be sure! Sometimes a dog barked from the yard, for it scented the peeping Eibenschütz. Even the dog’s yelping had something homely, almost pleasant about it. By now Eibenschütz had come to know all the families of the little town and how they lived. Occasionally he imagined that it was good, useful, even necessary for an Inspector of Weights and Measures to discover something more intimate about the trading community. ‘Personal information’, he called it. He moved on. Now he had arrived in front of the house. His grey heard him approach and neighed pleasantly. A dear creature. The Inspector could not restrain himself; he went into the stable, he only wanted to stroke the horse, he was thinking of the happy times in the army, of all the horses in the rear quarters of the barracks, he still remembered all their names and also what they looked like. He had named his horse Jacob. ‘Jacob!’ he would call softly as he entered the stable. The horse lifted his head. He stamped two or thee times on the damp straw with his hoof. Eibenschütz went up to him just to say ‘Good-night’, but suddenly he turned round and said, ‘Just a moment!’ as if he were speaking to another human being. Then he went into the shed, and fetched the sleigh, and led the horse out, and buckled on the harness with trembling though deft fingers, and rolled the warm woollen hair blanket round the animal’s belly, and tied it fast. He harnessed the grey in front of the sleigh. He buckled the bell round the horse’s neck. He seated himself, took the reins in his hand and called ‘Jacob!’ He cast a brief malicious glance at the lighted windows of his dwelling. How he hated the three women who awaited him inside: first his wife, then the servant girl and finally the cat. ‘Jacob!’ he called, and the sleigh glided on its runners, crunching at first, then smoothly and still more smoothly and silently out through the gate. The grey knew the way.