We Others (32 page)

And indeed, before another six months had passed, automaton fever seemed to be dying out. Exhibitors of life-sized automatons could no longer fill their halls, which now were devoted to spirit-rapping and demonstrations of the wonders of chemical science. One of the rival theaters had already closed and reopened as a cabaret, and the other had begun to alternate evenings of the automaton theater with evenings devoted to much improved magic-lantern shows and scientific lectures. Attendance at the Zaubertheater was still good but had fallen off after the first triumphant months; some evenings only half the seats were filled, although weekend performances continued to draw full houses. August had created a small group of fanatically devoted admirers, but the circle had not widened; there were so many other distractions, so many other entertainments. By the end of the first year August had created nine different pieces, which he presented in varying combinations of three, but it was becoming clear that attendance had dropped sharply: some nights, only a handful of the faithful were present. It was about this time that a new theater sprang up, and threatened the very life of the Zaubertheater.

Hausenstein had repeatedly urged August to enliven his repertoire in certain ways. He had suggested that Undine’s girlish breasts, concealed by her long hair, be teasingly exposed, significantly enlarged, and piquantly provided with stylish French nipples pointing slightly upward. He had also suggested that Columbine, whose charming buttocks might well be plumper, should fall down during her dance and, throwing up her handsome legs—real works of genius, those legs—expose herself briefly to good effect. And he had urged replacing the rather stodgy interludes with lighter entertainments—for instance, a cabaret singer kicking her legs. But to all such suggestions August opposed a contemptuous silence. His later pieces had moments of dark, disturbing beauty to which Hausenstein was by no means insensitive, yet even as he experienced them he could not help wondering whether the audience was quite up to it. August was more and more clearly using automaton art to express spiritual states, and such lofty experiments were bound to seem rather confusing to all but the most stubborn adherents of the Zaubertheater. And now, four blocks away, the new theater had appeared.

It was called Zum Schwarzen Stiefel—At the Sign of the Black Boot—and August first learned of it through Hausenstein, who insisted on bringing him there one night. From an iron post above the door hung a long, tight-laced, shiny black boot, from which emerged a pink calf, a pink knee, and part of a pink thigh, all seen through the meshes of a black net stocking. The lifelike leg had been executed in three dimensions and was illuminated by two lanterns, one red and one green. Inside, in a narrow corridor, August’s eyes smarted with cigar smoke. A tight-corseted woman with half-bared, very round breasts, between which sprouted an artificial rose, took their tickets. The rose disturbed August; he wondered whether it had artificial thorns. The theater itself was somewhat larger than the Zaubertheater—Hausenstein estimated a seating capacity of one hundred eighty—and not only were all the seats filled but people stood along the walls, waving at their perspiring faces with gloves or magazines. Most of the audience were men, but a number of well-dressed women were also present.

The curtain of the large stage opened to reveal a smaller theater, obviously modeled on August’s automaton theater, but nearly twice the size. As the curtain lifted, a rollicking cabaret tune was struck up on a real piano at the side of the large stage; the music continued during the entire performance. There were three pieces, without interlude. In the first piece, six cabaret dancers, about a foot high, came strutting onto the stage. They wore long, full skirts beneath which one glimpsed petticoats and frilly drawers; their glossy black boots were laced very tight, and their large breasts were partly exposed. They kicked their plump legs high, strutted about with a great rolling of rumps, and sat down from time to time with parted knees. Though the clockwork was elementary, care and attention had been lavished on their black silk stockings, their petticoats, their drawers, above all on their wriggling buttocks and bouncy breasts. At the end, each buxom Mädchen placed her hands on the plump shoulders of the girl before her, and they all tripped off prettily with a great shaking of skirts. In the second piece the same six girls returned and performed precisely the same motions, but this time they wore only glossy black boots, black silk stockings encircled above the knee by brilliant red garters adorned with black rosettes, and loose-clinging drawers trimmed with ruffles and ribbons and reaching scarcely to mid-thigh. The illusion of naked, trembling flesh was aided by the reddish light that dimly illuminated the bodies and to some extent concealed gross errors of construction. Their big breasts were impossibly round and firm, and their nipples bright rosy red, but their elaborately clad buttocks were parodic masterpieces of round, rolling plumpness. Though lacking skirts, the automaton maidens reached down as if to lift them slightly for their kicks—a clumsiness that seemed only to delight the audience, who applauded lustily as the six smiling lasses wriggled into the wings. August left in the middle of the third piece. The curtain lifted on a drably lit stage showing a crooked fence across a moonlit field. From one wing entered an automaton lady dressed charmingly for a country outing. On her head was a wide-brimmed straw hat heaped with grapes and cherries, and she wore a peasant dress with long full skirts and a trimmed white bodice with short puffed sleeves and a square neckline prettily revealing the tops of her breasts. She wore glossy black boots and long white gloves. Walking somewhat clumsily to the fence, she leaned her elbows on the top rail with her back to the audience and looked out across the moonlit field. There now entered from the other wing a male automaton wearing a black top hat and a handsome cutaway coat and matching trousers and carrying a gold-handled cane. When he came up to the girl, who did not seem to notice him, he stood gazing at her without expression. Reaching forward with his cane, he slowly lifted her full skirt and flouncy petticoats to reveal a charming pair of legs in black silk stockings, encircled above the knee by bright red garters adorned with black rosettes. The girl, paying not the slightest attention to him, continued to gaze out over the moonlit field. Rather clumsily the male automaton continued to lift her garments until he had exposed two very round and pink and plump buttocks nicely set off by the glistening black of the stockings. When the skirt and petticoats lay over the back and head of the girl, the man proceeded to undo his trousers—he touched a lever in his side to release his belt—and stood sideways for a few moments contemplating his long red erection, which resembled a bloody limb. Turning to the girl, he appeared to be having some trouble as August rose and left. On the street Hausenstein spoke of a certain
je ne sais quoi
of aesthetic mastery which distinguished one artist’s work from another, of the unknown artist’s sure and penetrating grasp of the national soul. August was not amused. “These same burghers demand first-rate lenses for their cameras and they’d be enraged if they received a cheap substitute—yet when it comes to clockwork they can admire the cheapest, most technically mediocre work. So long as it’s accompanied by lots of fat behinds.”

“It’s what I’ve been saying, my friend: your good blue-eyed German likes plenty of beef on his plate and plenty of beef on his women. It’s good middle-class training from first to last: Podsnappery, as the English Raabe calls it. The heavier the better, in art as in gravy. You won’t listen to me—well, listen to the applause at the Black Boot. You’ve got to throw the dogs a little meat, and while they’re licking their chops you’ll have time enough to go to work on their souls—though frankly the blessed German soul is much overrated in these latter days of her most glorious century and reminds me of nothing so much as Maelzel’s or rather Kempelen’s chess player: a hollow sham with a humbug inside. Did you know, by the way, that Maelzel also constructed an ear trumpet for Beethoven? Yes, there you have the German soul in all its dialectical splendor: the maestro listening to the universe through the ear trumpet of a successful fraud. This same Maelzel, charming fellow, built a mechanical orchestra of forty-two life-sized musicians, which had quite a vogue at one time. He also swindled the public into believing that he’d invented the metronome—not bad for one lifetime. But to return to the admirable precision of German cameras: those estimable lenses you spoke of are responsible for some highly detailed and extremely instructive photographs which one can see in certain private collections. I think the real trouble with Germany is that she’s too close to Paris: visions of
le beau monde
torment her dark, uneasy sleep. Of course
le beau monde
for your blue-eyed German means fashionable women in expensive underwear. Fifteen hundred years ago, Rome tormented her in the same way—your blue-eyed Visigoth must have dreamed of dark-eyed Roman ladies lying back in elegant tunics, eating grapes, and revealing from time to time a fetching glimpse of the latest in Latin under-tunics and leather breastbands. In any case, I merely wish to suggest that capitalism and history are both against you, if you persist in serving up visions of high beauty to an upright citizen of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Reich. He won’t stand for it for very long; give him his roast beef and French underwear.”

August was less tolerant than usual of his friend’s facile manner, which seemed to attack the very idea of seriousness while continually inviting a serious response. He returned to his theater workshop in a bad humor. He recognized no law requiring the world to pay the slightest attention to him or his work, but by the same token he saw no reason to bend himself out of spiritual shape in the hope of pleasing a corrupt public. He would do what he had to do, in obedience to the only law he knew, and if they did not like it—well, so much the worse for him, and perhaps for them too. His ambition was to insert his dreams into the world, and if they were the wrong dreams, then he would dream them in solitude. August now threw himself feverishly into a single long piece that, even as he worked on it, he knew would surpass his finest achievements in automaton art. The eyes and especially the lips of his creatures were capable of a new expressivity so subtle and striking that his automatons seemed indeed to live and think and suffer and breathe. But while they represented yet another advance in the direction of precise imitation, another stage in the mastery of realism, at the same time they seemed to reach a height far above the merely material, as if realism itself were being pressed into the service of a higher law. So, at least, Hausenstein expressed it, when the new composition was completed, although he added with a weary sigh that he supposed it would lose them half of the remaining faithful. And yet, one never knew; the dark-eyed suffering automaton girl, whom August called simply Marie, had a brilliancy of flesh, a radiance, that was quite remarkable, and in her walk there was a new suggestion of ripeness, of sexual wakening, of sensual knowledge too innocent to be entirely conscious of itself yet disturbedly aware of the dark secret of menstruation: it was a sense of girlhood blossoming into womanhood, a sense of womanhood about to wake from the long sleep of girlhood and needing only the kiss of the prince to make life stir in the sleep-enchanted palace that was her heart. August, barely listening to Hausenstein, knew that he had created her with tenderness, with something akin to love-anguish, and he stood before his creature now as if in awe of his own work. “Yes yes,” he said, when Hausenstein was done, “but you see—she’s alive.”

Hausenstein proved correct: Marie captivated her audience, but only after that audience had dwindled to twenty or thirty a night. At such a rate the Zaubertheater could not long survive, and August noticed that Hausenstein spent less and less time in the largely empty theater, as if avoiding an unhappiness. He no longer urged August to appeal to a wider public, but seemed content to let him go his own way—a change that would have pleased August had it not so clearly been the result of giving up. And far, far back in his mind there was something that disturbed August, something he could not quite bring to awareness. At times he felt that it was all very familiar, that his life was repeating a pattern whose outcome he did not quite want to remember.

One night when the performance was over and the audience of fifteen had slowly begun to put on their coats, August, who had silently come out to take a seat and watch the last few minutes, heard a young woman say to another woman: “It’s remarkable, but I think I could watch her night after night and never have enough. But I wonder how they manage. The man who runs this place is a martyr.” “Oh, but you know what they say,” her friend replied. “It seems this Hausenstein has a finger in more than one pie. I’ve heard he runs the Black Boot—and, my dear, I can assure you it is not a
maison de souliers.
”

August had a sensation that the wind had just been knocked out of him. At the same time, his heart was beating violently, blood was rushing through him. The figures were not the same, but he knew there had been something familiar about them: the extremely well-rendered flesh. Feeling a little dizzy, and with a strange tremor in his stomach, he set off in search of Hausenstein. The ticket woman at the Black Boot, who remembered August, seemed to evade his eyes; no, she hadn’t seen Herr Hausenstein recently. August was relieved to see that the artificial rose had been replaced by a bunch of real violets, rather drooped and faded in the warm, oppressive air. He bought a ticket and entered the smoky hall. Every seat was taken, people stood against the walls. Nothing had changed: the six automaton girls in their boots and stockings lumbered about the red-lit stage. Pushing his way past people standing in the aisle, who strained around him to see, August made his way to a little stairway at the left of the stage that led through a curtain to the door of a dressing room. The door was locked, but when he rapped it was opened quickly by a thin, flour-pale man in suspenders and shirtsleeves who was holding by the ankle a naked leg in a black boot. “I’m looking for Hausenstein,” said August, who saw that the room was empty. “Who the devil are you?” said the man, but August had already left. Perhaps he was crazy, after all it was only a rumor.… Out on the street he breathed deep, wiped the back of his hand slowly across his closed eyes, then set off for the Zaubertheater. He had not even locked the outer door: it could have been vandalized. In the dark empty theater, lit only by dim gas jets, he stumbled over the leg of a chair. “So there you are,” said Hausenstein, emerging from a wing onto the stage. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you. Rather careless of you to leave the—” “You make them,” said August, and sat down exhausted in the front row. Up on the stage Hausenstein appeared to freeze; August had the impression that he would move off jerkily, with a faint whirring sound. But Hausenstein was a far more convincing figure: his motions were superbly smooth, though with a telltale sense of brilliant contrivance. “I was wondering how long it would take you to congratulate me,” he remarked, stepping forward and sitting down on the edge of the stage so that his legs dangled a few feet before and above August. “Besides, I don’t precisely make them: I oversee. But you should have recognized my work—I’d know yours anywhere.”