The Red Thread Read online

  More smacking sounds, a door is opened at the back, the steam clears, they drive in a new collection of pigs, running in, I’ve left through the sliding door at the front, funny pink animals, funny thighs, curly-wurly tails, the backs with coloured scribbles. And they’re snuffling in this new bay. It’s cold like the last one was, but there is something wet on the floor that they’re unfamiliar with, something red and slippery. They rub their muzzles in it.

  A pale young man with fair hair plastered to his head, a cigar in his mouth. Look at him, he will be the last human with whom you will have dealings! Don’t think badly of him, he is only doing his job. He has official business with you. He is wearing rubber boots, trousers, shirt and braces. That’s his official garb. He takes the cigar out of his mouth, lays it aside on a bracket in the wall, picks up a long-handled axe that was lying in the corner. This is the sign of his official rank, his power over you, like the detective’s badge. He will produce his for you any moment now. There is a long wooden pole that the young man will raise to shoulder height over the little squealers who are contentedly snuffling and grunting and truffing. The man walks around, eyes lowered, looking, looking. There is a criminal investigation against a certain party, a certain party in the case of X versus Y—bamm! One ran in front of him, bamm, another one. The man is nimble, he has proved his authority, the axe has crashed down, dipped into the seething mob, with its blunt side against a skull, another skull. It’s the work of a moment. Something continues to scrabble about on the floor. Treads water. Throws itself to the side. Knows no more. And lies there. The legs are busy, the head. But it’s none of the pig’s doing, it’s the legs in their private capacity. Already a couple of men have looked across from the scalding room, it’s time, they lift a slide to the killing bay, drag the animal out, whet the long blade on a stick, kneel down and shove it into its throat, then skkrrk a long cut, a very long cut across the throat, the animal is ripped open like a sack, deep, sawing cuts, it jerks, kicks, lashes out, it’s unconscious, no more than unconscious, now more than unconscious, it squeals, and now the arteries in the throat are open. It is deeply unconscious, we are in the area of metaphysics now, of theology, my child, you no longer walk upon the earth, now we are wandering on clouds. Hurriedly bring up the shallow pan, the hot black blood streams into it, froths, makes bubbles, quickly, stir it. Within the body blood congeals, its purpose is to make obstructions, to dam up wounds. It’s left the body, but it still wants to congeal. Just as a child on the operating table will go Mama, Mama, when Mama is nowhere around and it’s going under in its ether mask, it keeps on going Mama till it is incapable of calling any more. Skkrrik, skkrrak, the arteries to left and right. Quickly stir. There, now the quivering stops. Now you’re lying there pacified. We have come to the end of physiology and theology, this is where physics begins.

  The man gets up off his knees. His knees hurt. The pig needs to be scalded, cleaned and dressed, that will happen blow by blow. The boss, feisty and well fed, walks around in the steam, with his pipe in his mouth, taking an occasional gander at an opened belly. On the wall by the swing doors hangs a poster: Gathering of Animal Shippers, Saalbau, Friedrichshain, Music: the Kermbach Boys. Outside are announcements for boxing matches. Germaniasäle, Chausseestrasse 110, tickets 1.50 to 10 marks. Four bouts on each bill.

  •

  Today’s market numbers: 1,399 cattle, 2,700 calves, 4,654 sheep, 18,864 pigs. Market notes: prime cattle good, others steady. Calves smooth, sheep steady, pigs firm to begin with, then sluggish, fat pigs slow.

  The wind blows through the driveway, and it’s raining. Cattle low, men are driving along a large, roaring, horned herd. The animals are obstinate, keep heading off in wrong directions, the drovers run around with their sticks. In the middle of the gathering a bull tries to mount a cow, the cow runs off to left and right, the bull is in pursuit, and repeatedly tries to climb her withers.

  A big white steer is driven into the slaughter hall. Here there is no steam, no bay as for the wee-weeing pigs. The big strong steer steps through the gate alone, between its drovers. The bloody hall lies before it, with dangling halves and quarters and chopped bones. The big steer has a wide forehead. It is driven forward to the slaughterer with kicks and blows. To straighten it out, the man gives it a tap on the hind leg with the flat of his axe. Then one of the drovers grabs it round the throat from below. The animal stands there, gives in astonishingly easily, as though it consented and, having seen everything, knows: this is its fate and there is no getting away from it. Possibly it takes the drover’s movement for a caress, because it looks so friendly. It follows the pulling arms of the drover, bends its head aside, its muzzle up.

  But then the knocker, with hammer upraised, is standing behind it. Don’t look round. The hammer, picked up in both hands by the strongly built man, is behind it and above it, and then: wham, crashes down. The muscular strength of a powerful man like an iron wedge in its neck. And at that same moment—the hammer has not yet been taken back—the animal’s four legs jerk apart, the whole heavy body seems to lift off. Then, as if it had no legs, the animal, the heavy body, lands splat on the floor, on its cramped stiffly protruding legs, lies there for a moment, and keels over onto its side. From right and left the knocker approaches him, gives him another tap on the head, to the temples, sleep, you’ll not wake again. Then the fellow next to him takes the cigar out of his mouth, blows his nose, unsheathes his knife, it’s as long as half a sword, and drops to his knees behind the animal, whose legs are already uncramping. It jerks in spasms, slings its rump this way and that. The slaughterer is looking for something on the floor, he doesn’t apply the knife point, he calls for the bowl for blood. The blood is still circulating sluggishly, little moved by the beating of the mighty heart. The marrow is crushed, but the blood is still flowing through the veins, the lungs are breathing, the intestines moving. Now the knife will be applied, and the blood will jet out, I can picture it, a beam of it thick as my arm, black, lovely, jubilant blood. Then the whole merry crowd will leave the house, the guests will go dancing out, a tumult, and no more lovely meadows, warm shed, fragrant hay, gone, all gone, a void, an empty hole, darkness, here comes a new picture of the world. Wa-hey, a gentleman has come on the scene who has bought the house, a new road, improved economy, and he is having it torn down. They bring the big basin, press it against him, the mighty animal kicks its hind legs up in the air. The knife is jolted into its throat next to the windpipe, feels for the artery, these arteries are thick and well protected. And then it’s open, another one, the flow, hot, streaming blackberry-red, the blood burbles over the knife, over the slaughterman’s arm, the ecstatic blood, the hot blood, transformation is at hand, from the sun is come your blood, the sun has been hiding in your body, now look at it come out to play. The animal draws a colossal breath, as though it had been throttled, a colossal irritation, it gurgles, rattles. Yes, the beams are cracking. As the flanks are so terribly aquiver, a man comes to help. When a stone wants to fall, give it a push. The man jumps on the animal, on its body, with both feet, stands on it, balances, steps on the guts, bounces up and down, the blood is to be expelled quicker, all of it. And the gurgling gets louder, it’s a long-drawn-out wheezing, with light futile tapping of the hind legs. The legs are waving now. Life is draining away, the breathing is stopping. Heavily the hips turn and slump. That’s earth, that’s gravity. The man bounces up. The other on the ground is already peeling back the skin from the neck.

  Happy meadows, warm fuggy stall.

  Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann

  HELEN

  Rachel Bespaloff

  OF ALL the figures in the poem she is the severest, the most austere. Shrouded in her long white veils, Helen walks across the Iliad like a penitent; misfortune and beauty are consummate in her and lend majesty to her step. For this royal recluse freedom does not exist; the very slave who numbers the days of oppression on some calendar of hope is freer than she. What has Helen to hope for? Nothi
ng short of the death of the Immortals would restore her freedom, since it is the gods, not her fellow men, who have dared to put her in bondage. Her fate does not depend on the outcome of the war; Paris or Menelaus may get her, but for her nothing can really change. She is the prisoner of the passions her beauty excited, and her passivity is, so to speak, their underside. Aphrodite rules her despotically; the goddess commands and Helen bows, whatever her private repugnance. Pleasure is extorted from her; this merely makes her humiliation the more cruel. Her only resource is to turn against herself a wrath too weak to spite the gods. She seems to live in horror of herself. “Why did I not die before?” is the lament that keeps rising to her lips. Homer is as implacable toward Helen as Tolstoy is toward Anna. Both women have run away from home thinking that they could abolish the past and capture the future in some unchanging essence of love. They awake in exile and feel nothing but a dull disgust for the shriveled ecstasy that has outlived their hope. The promise of freedom has been sloughed off in servitude; love does not obey the rules of love but yields to some more ancient and ruder law. Beauty and death have become neighbors and from their alliance springs a necessity akin to that of force. When Helen and Anna come to and face their deteriorated dream, they can blame only themselves for having been the dupes of harsh Aphrodite. Everything they squandered comes back on them; everything they touch turns to dust or stone. In driving his heroine to suicide, Tolstoy goes beyond Christianity and rejoins Homer and the tragic poets. To them the hero’s flaw is indistinguishable from the misery that arises from it. The sufferer bears it; he pays for it, but he cannot redeem it any more than he can live his life over. Clytemnestra, Orestes, and Oedipus are their crimes; they have no existence outside them. Later on, the philosophers, heirs of Odysseus, introduce the Trojan horse of dialectic into the realm of tragedy. Error takes the place of the tragic fault, and the responsibility for it rests with the individual alone. With Homer, punishment and expiation have the opposite effect; far from fixing responsibility, they dissolve it in the vast sea of human suffering and the diffuse guilt of the life-process itself. A flaw in a defective universe is not quite the same thing as a sin; remorse and grace have not yet made their appearance. But it is nonetheless true that this Greek idea of a diffuse guilt represents for Homer and the tragic poets the equivalent of the Christian idea of original sin. Fed on the same reality, charged with the same weight of experience, it contains the same appraisal of existence. It too acknowledges a fall, but a fall that has no date and has been preceded by no state of innocence and will be followed by no redemption; the fall, here, is a continuous one as the life-process itself which heads forever downward into death and the absurd. In proclaiming the innocence of Becoming, Nietzsche is as far from the ancients as he is from Christianity. Where Nietzsche wants to justify, Homer simply contemplates, and the only sound that he lets ring through his lines is the plaint of the hero. If the final responsibility for the tragic guilt rests on the mischievous gods, this does not mean that guilt is nonexistent. On the contrary, there is not a page in the Iliad that does not emphasize its irreducible character. So fully does Helen assume it that she does not even permit herself the comfort of self-defense. In Helen, purity and guilt mingle confusedly as they do in the vast heart of the warrior herd spread out on the plain at her feet.

  Thus Helen, at Ilion, drags her ill luck along with a kind of somber humility that still makes no truce with the gods.* But is it really Aphrodite? Is it not rather the Asiatic Astarte who has trapped her? In a certain way, Helen’s destiny prefigures that of Greece which, from the Trojan War to Alexander’s conquests, was alternately submitting to and repelling the tremendous attraction of the Orient. What the exile misses in Paris’ high dwelling is not the blond Achaian, arrogant Menelaus, son of a wild race of northern barbarians, but the rude, pure homeland—the familiar city, the child she used to fondle.

  How tired she gets of the soft, weak ways of Aphrodite’s protégé; he is a humiliation and a wound to her. “If the gods have decreed these evils for us, why could not I have had a husband who was capable of a feeling of revolt?” Here in hostile Troy, where boredom makes her despondent, Helen has no one to cling to but Hector, the least Oriental of Priam’s sons, the most manly, the most Greek. There is a feeling of tenderness between them. Helen’s presence is odious to everyone, and Hector is her only defender from the hatred she excites. Nobody can forgive the stranger for being the embodiment of the fatality that pursues the city. Innocent though she is, Helen feels the weight of these rebukes; she even seems to invite them, as though courting a just punishment for a crime she did not commit. She is all the more grateful, therefore, to the one person who shows her compassion without importuning her with lust. When Hector comes to scold Paris, Helen is worried about the dangers that threaten her brother-in-law. He is the only one to whom she speaks gently: “Meanwhile, come in, brother, and take this seat. Care assails your heart more than anyone else’s, and that because of me, bitch that I am, and the folly of Alexander. Zeus has given us a hard lot, that later on we may be the subject of a song for men to come.” These words weave a complicity between Hector and Helen that is something more than fraternal. With an unequaled insight, Homer hears in their talk an accent of intimacy which is attuned to the truth of human relationships. This affection, on Helen’s part at least, shields a deeper feeling, which Homer, listening, does not betray.

  The exile’s lament is the last to echo over Hector’s remains; it bathes the end of the Iliad in the pure, desolate light of compassion. “This is now the twentieth year from the time I came away and left my native land; yet I have never heard a bad or a harsh word from you. So I weep for you and for my unhappy self too, with grief at heart. I have nobody else now in wide Troy to be kind or gentle to me; everybody shudders away from me.” This, however, is not the moan of some humiliated creature at the mercy of her tormentors; it is the grief of a mortal at the mercy of gods who have laden her with dazzling graces, the better to balk her of the joy these gifts seemed to promise. No matter who wins in the end, Helen, unlike Andromache and the Trojan princesses, does not have to fear a life of slavery and forced labor “under the eyes of a harsh master.” After twenty years, she is still the stake the war is being fought for, and the reward the winner will carry off. In the depths of her wretchedness, Helen still wears an air of majesty that keeps the world at a distance and flouts old age and death. The most beautiful of women seemed born for a radiant destiny; everything pointed that way; everything appeared to contribute to it. But, as it turns out, the gods only chose her to work misfortune on herself and on the two nations. Beauty is not a promise of happiness here; it is a burden and a curse. At the same time, it isolates and elevates; it has something preservative in it that wards off outrage and shame. Hence its sacred character—to use the word in its original, ambiguous sense—on the one hand, life-giving, exalting; on the other, accursed and dread. The Helen the two armies are contending for will never be Paris’ any more than she has been Menelaus’; the Trojans cannot own her any more than the Greeks could. Beauty, captured, remains elusive. It deserts alike those who beget, or contemplate, or desire it. Homer endows it with the inexorability of force or fate. Like force, it subjugates and destroys—exalts and releases. It is not by some chance, arising out of her life’s vicissitudes, that Helen has come to be the cause of the war and its stake; a deeper necessity has brought her there to join the apparition of beauty with the unleashing of rage. Beside the warriors and above them, Helen is the calm and the bitterness that spring up in the thick of battle, casting their cool shadow over victories and defeats alike, over the living and the thousands of dead. For, if force degrades itself in the insignificance of Becoming (one arrow from Paris’ bow puts an end to the might of Achilles), beauty alone transcends all contingencies, including those that brought it to flower. The origins of Leda’s daughter are lost in fable, her end in legend. In immortal appearance the world of Being is maintained and protected.

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r carefully abstains from the description of beauty, as though this might constitute a forbidden anticipation of bliss. The shade of Helen’s eyes, of Thetis’ tresses, the line of Andromache’s shoulders—these details are kept from us. No singularity, no particularity is brought to our notice; yet we see these women; we would recognize them. One wonders by what impalpable means Homer manages to give us such a sense of the plastic reality of his characters. Incorruptible, Helen’s beauty passes from life into the poem, from flesh into marble, its pulse still throbbing. The statue’s mouth utters a human cry, and from the empty eyes gush “tender tears.” When Helen climbs the ramparts of Troy to watch the fight between Paris and Menelaus, one can almost feel the loftiness of her step. By the Scaean gates, the Trojan elders are holding council. At the sight of her, “the good orators” fall silent, struck to the heart. They cannot help finding her beautiful. And this beauty frightens them like a bad omen, a warning of death. “She has terribly the look, close-up, of the immortal goddesses. . . . But even so, whatever she may be, let her set sail and go away. Let her not be left here to be a scourge to us and our sons hereafter.” Here—and this is unusual—the poet himself, speaking through Priam, lifts his voice to exonerate beauty and proclaim it innocent of man’s misfortunes. “I do not blame you. I blame the gods, who launched this Achaian war, full of tears, upon me.” The real culprits, and the only ones, are the gods, who live “exempt from care,” while men are consumed with sorrow. The curse which turns beauty into destructive fatality does not originate in the human heart. The diffuse guilt of Becoming pools into a single sin, the one sin condemned and explicitly stigmatized by Homer: the happy carelessness of the Immortals.