Metropolis ~ Chapter 11
From "Metropolis - New Translation"
This piece is part of my ongoing translation of the novel of Thea von Harbou’s “Metropolis”. If you’d like to find out more about the project and see other chapters, check out the essay below:
"Well," said Josaphat hoarsely, "it was just a dream..."
"Sure, it was a dream. And dreams, they say, are lies, don't they? But keep listening, Josaphat… I emerged from this dream back into reality with a sadness which seemed to cut me like a knife from top to bottom. I saw Maria's brow, that white temple of goodness and virginity, defiled with the name of the great Whore of Babylon. I saw her send Death out over the city. I saw how abomination upon abomination freed itself from her and fluttered away; plague spirits, bringers of doom, swarmed through the city before the path of Death. I stood out there and looked down on the cathedral, which seemed to me to be desecrated and besmirched. Its doors stood open. Dark snakes of people crept into the cathedral, congestion forming on the steps. I thought: perhaps, among all those pious people, is my Maria. I said to my father: 'I want to go to the cathedral.' He let me go. I was no captive. As I reached the cathedral the organ boomed like the Trumpet of Last Judgement. Singing from a thousand throats. Dies Irae… The incense clouded above the heads of the congregation, which lay on their knees before the eternal God. The crucifix hovered above the high altar, and, in the light of the restless candles, the drops of blood on the thorn-crowned brow of the son of Mary seemed to come to life and to run down. The saints on the columns looked at me gloomily, as though they knew of my evil dream.
I was seeking Maria. Oh, I knew for sure that all the thousands could not hide her from me. If she were here I would find her, like a bird finds its way to its nest. But my heart lay in my chest as if dead. And yet I couldn’t help but seek after her. I wandered about the place where I had already waited for her once before… Yes, as a bird may wander about the place where its nest was, not able to find again, because the lightning or the storm has destroyed it.
And, when I came to the side-niche, in which Death stands as a minstrel, playing upon a human bone, the niche was empty, with Death having disappeared.
It was as though the Death of my dream had not returned home to his followers...
Say nothing, Josaphat! It is inconsequential. A coincidence… The sculpture was, maybe, damaged — I do not know! Believe me: it is inconsequential.
But then a voice rang out:
‘Repent! The kingdom of Heaven is at hand!’
It was the voice of Desertus, the monk. His voice was like a knife. The voice peeled bare my spine. Deathly silence reigned in the church. Of the thousand people around, not one seemed to breathe. They lay on their knees, and their faces, pale as masks of horror, were turned towards the wild preacher.
His voice flew through the air like a spear.
In front of me, by a column, stood a young man, once my sparring-partners in the Club of the Sons. If I had not personally experienced how much human faces can change in a short time, I would not have recognised him.
He was older than me, and, indeed, he was not the happiest out of all of us, but was the most humorous. And the women loved and feared him equally, for there was no way he could be captivated with either laughter or tears. Now he had the thousand-year-old face of men who are living dead. It was as if a cruel executioner had taken away his eyelids, condemned never to sleep and dying from his weariness.
But, it surprised me more than this to find him here in the cathedral, for all his short life long, he had been the greatest of scoffers of religion.
I laid my hand on his shoulder. He did not startle. He only barely turned his eyes — these parched eyes.
I wanted to ask him: 'What are you doing here, Jan?' But the voice of the monk, that spear-hurling voice, threw its sharpness between me and him… The monk Desertus began to preach..."
Freder turned around and came back to Josaphat with such a violent haste, as though a sudden fear had taken over him. He sat down next to his friend and spoke very hastily, with words which tumbled out over each other, streaming.
***
At first he had hardly listened to the monk. He had watched his friend and the congregation, which were still pressed head-to-head, laying on their knees. And, as he looked at them, it seemed to him as though the monk were harpooning the congregation with his words, as though he were throwing spears with deadly, barbed hooks right into the hidden soul of the listeners, as though he were tugging their groaning souls out of bodies quivering with fear.
"Who is she, whose hand has laid fire to this city? She is a flame — an impure flame. The power of fire was given to her. She is a fiery blaze over man. She is Lilith, Astarte, Rose of Hell. She is Gomorrah, Babylon — Metropolis! Your own city — this awful, blasphemous city — has born this woman from out the womb of its opulence. Behold her! I say to you: Behold her! She is the woman who is to appear before the judgment of the world.
Whoever has ears to listen, hear this!
Seven angels shall stand before God, and unto them shall be given seven trumpets. And the seven angels with the seven trumpets shall prepare themselves to sound them. A star shall fall from Heaven unto the Earth: and to an angel is given the key of the bottomless pit. And he shall open the bottomless pit; and there shall arise a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air shall be darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit. An angel shall fly in the midair and call out with a loud voice: 'Woe, woe, woe to the inhabitants of Earth!' And another angel shall follow after him and say: 'It has fallen, it has fallen, Babylon, the great city!'
Seven angels go forth from the heavens, and they carry in their hands the vials of the wrath of God. And Babylon, the great, shall be remembered before God, the wine-glass of His fierce wrath given unto her; her, who sits upon a scarlet-coloured beast, full of the names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour and decked with gold, precious stones and pearls. And she has a golden cup in her hand, full of abomination and filthiness. And upon her forehead is written: Mystery, Babylon The Great, The Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.
Whoever has ears to listen, hear this! For the woman ye see is the great city, which has power over the kings of the Earth. Get away from her, my people, that ye do not partake in her sins! For her sins have reached even unto Heaven, and God has remembered her sacrilege!
Woe, woe, the great city of Babylon, you strong city! For in one hour thy judgment has come! In one hour shalt thou be devastated. Rejoice over her, thou Heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets; God shall pass unto her your judgement! A mighty angel takes up a great stone and casts it into the sea, saying: ‘Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all.’
"Whoever has ears to listen, hear this!
The woman who is called Mystery, the Mother of Abominations, wanders as a blazing fire through Metropolis. No wall and no gate bids her halt. No binding is sacred. An oath turns to mockery before her. Her smile is the ultimate seduction. Blasphemy is her dance. She is the flame which says: 'God is very angry!' Woe unto the city in which she appears!"
Freder had bent across to Jan.
"Of whom does he speak?" he asked, with unusually cold lips. "Is he speaking of a person? Of a woman?"
He saw that the brow of his friend was covered in sweat.
"He speaks of her," said Jan, as though he were speaking with a paralysed tongue.
"Of whom?"
"Of her… Don't you know her?"
"I don't know," said Freder, "who you mean…"
And his tongue, too, was sluggish and cold, as if made of clay.
Jan gave no answer. He had his shoulders hunched as though he were bitterly freezing. Dazed and indecisive, he listened to the dull, incipient booming of the organ.
"We wish to go!" he said tonelessly, turning around. Freder followed him. They left the cathedral. For a long time, they walked along next to one another in silence. Jan seemed to have a goal that Freder didn’t know about. He did not ask. He waited. He was thinking of his dream and of the monk's words.
Finally, Jan opened his mouth, but he did not look at Freder; he spoke into space.
"You do not know who she is. But nobody knows that. She was suddenly there, just as a fire breaks out. No one can say who ignited the blaze. But now it is there, and everything is in flames...”
"A woman?"
"Yes. A woman. Perhaps, too, a girl. I don't know. It is unthinkable that this being would give herself to a man. Can you imagine the marriage of ice? Or if she did so, then she would raise herself up, bright and cool, from the man's arms, in the awfully-eternal virginity of the inanimate..."
He raised his hand and grabbed his throat. He tugged something away from him which was not there. He was observing a house which lay opposite him, on the other side of the street, with a gaze of superstitious resentment that made his hands run cold.
"What’s the matter?" asked Freder. There was nothing remarkable about this house, except that it lay next to Rotwang's house.
"Be quiet!" answered Jan between his teeth, clasping his fingers around Freder's wrist.
"Are you mad?" Freder stared at his friend. "Do you believe that the house can hear us across this hellish street?"
"It hears us!" said Jan, with a stubborn expression. "It hears us! You reckon it’s a house just like any other? You're mistaken. It began in this house..."
"What began?"
"The haunting..."
Freder felt that his throat was dry. He cleared it forcibly. He wanted to move his friend on with him. But he resisted. He stood at the parapet of the street, which burrowed down as steep as a ravine, and he stared at the house opposite.
"One day," he began, "this house sent out invitation card to all its neighbours. It was the maddest invitation in the world. There was nothing on the card except: 'Come this evening at 11 o'clock! 12th House, 113th Street.' TThe whole thing was taken as a joke. But one went. One didn’t want to miss the joke. Oddly enough, no one knew the house. Nobody could recall ever having entered it, or having known anything of its occupants. One appeared at eleven. One was well-dressed. One entered the house and found a big gathering. One were received by an old man, who was exceptionally polite, but who shook hands with nobody. It created a strange impression that all the people who had collected here seemed to be waiting for something that they did not know of. One were well-served by servants who seemed to be born mute and who never raised their eyes. Although the room in which they were all located in was as large as a church nave, an unbearable heat prevailed, as though the floor were glowing and though the walls were glowing — and this despite the wide door to the street standing, as one could see, open.
Suddenly one of the servants, with soundless footsteps, came from the door up to the host and seemed, without words, with his silent standing-there, to deliver him a message. The host asked: 'Are we all assembled?' The servant nodded his head. ‘Then close the door!’ It happened. The servants swept aside and lined themselves up. The host stepped into the middle of the great hall. In that same blink of an eye, so complete a silence prevailed that they heard the clamour of the street roaring like breakers against the walls of the house.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said the man courteously, ‘I have the honour of introducing my daughter to you!’
He bowed to every side and turned his back. Everyone waited. No one moved.
‘Well, my daughter?’ said the old man, with a gentle yet somehow terrible voice, and softly clapped his hands.
Then she appeared on the stairs and came slowly down the hall..."
Jan gulped. His fingers, which still held clasped around Freder's, seized them firmly, as though they wished to crush the bones.
"Why am I telling you this?" he stuttered. "Can one describe lightning? Or music? Or the scent of a flower? All the women in the hall suddenly blushed in a violent and sickly manner, and all the men turned pale. Nobody seemed capable of making the slightest movement or of saying a measly word. You know Rainer? You know his recent wife? You know how much they loved each other? He stood behind her, she was sitting, and he had his hands laid on her shoulders with a gesture of protective and passionate affection. As the girl walked by them (she walked, led by the hand of the old man, with gentle, ringing step, slowly through the hall), Rainer’s hands loosened from his wife's shoulders. She looked up at him, he down at her, and in the faces of both those two there flamed, like a torch, a sudden, deadly hatred...
It was as though the air was burning. We were breathing fire. And at the same time there radiated from the girl a coldness — an unbearable, cutting coldness. The smile which hovered between her half-open lips seemed to be the unspoken final verse of a dissolute song.
Is there a substance which, through its chemical powers, destroys emotions like colours are by acids? The presence of this girl was enough to annul everything which means loyalty in the human heart, even to the point of absurdity. I had accepted the invitation of this house because Tora had told me she would go too. Now I no longer saw Tora and I have not seen her since. And the strange thing was that, among these many motionless people, as though persisting in their torpor, there was not one who could have hidden his sentiments. Each knew how it was with the others. Each felt that he was naked and saw the nakedness of the others. Hatred, born of shame, smouldered between us. I saw Tora crying. I could have hit her… Then the girl danced. No, it was no dance… She stood, freed from the hand of the old man, on the lowest step, turned towards us, raising both arms and the width of her garment with a gentle, seemingly never-ending movement. Her slender hands converged above her parting. Over her shoulders, her breasts, her hips, and her knees, there ran, incessantly, a barely perceptible trembling. It was not a trembling from fear. It was like the trembling of the delicate spinal fins of a luminous, deep-sea fish. It was as though the girl were carried higher and higher by this trembling, even though the feet did not move. No dance, no scream, no rutting-cry of an animal could have so lashing an effect as the trembling of this shimmering body, which, in its silence and its solitude, seemed to communicate the waves of its arousal to every single soul in the room.
Then she went up the steps, pacing backwards with tentative feet, without lowering her hands, and disappeared into a sudden velvet-deep darkness. The servants opened the door to the street. They arranged themselves with backs bent.
The people still sat motionless.
'Goodnight, ladies and gentlemen!' said the old man...”
Jan silenced. He took his hat from his head. He mopped his forehead.
"A dancer," said Freder, with cold lips, "but no haunting."
"No haunting? I want to tell you another story: A man and a woman, of fifty and forty, rich and very happy, have a son. You know him, but I will not mention names...
The son saw the girl. He is as though mad. He storms the house. He storms the girl's father: 'Give me the girl! I’m bleeding out for her!' The old man smiles, shrugs his shoulders, is silent, and gives his commiserations: the girl is unattainable.
The young man wants to lay his hand on the old man’s shoulders, but he, not knowing by whom, is whirled out of the house and thrown onto the street. He is brought home. He falls ill and is near to death. The doctors shrug their shoulders.
The father, who is a proud but benevolent man, and who loves his son above anything on Earth, resolves to visit the old man himself; one can get in without any difficulty. He finds the old man, and with him, the girl. He says to the girl: 'Rescue my son!'"
The girl looks at him and says, with a smile most lovingly inhuman: 'You have no son…'
He doesn’t understand the meaning of these words. He wants to know more. He urges the girl. She always gives the same answer. He urges the old man, who only lifts his shoulders. He has a perfidious smile about his mouth...
Suddenly the man understands. He goes home. He repeats the words of the girl to his wife. She breaks down and confesses her guilt, which, after twenty years, has not yet lapsed. But she is not concerned with her own fate. She has no other thoughts except of her son. Shame, abandonment, loneliness; all of those are nothing — but the son is everything.
She goes to the girl and falls on her knees before her: 'I beg you, for the sake of God's mercy, rescue my son!' The girl looks at her, smiles and says: 'You have no son...' The woman believes she has a lunatic before her. But the girl was right. The son, who had been a secret witness to the discussion between the husband and his mother, had ended his life."
"Marinus?"
"Yes."
"A grisly coincidence, Jan, but no haunting."
"Coincidence? No haunting? And what do you call it, Freder," Jan went on, speaking quite close to Freder's ear, "when this girl can appear in two places at once?"
"That's rubbish."
"Not rubbish — the truth, Freder! The girl was seen standing at the window of Rotwang's house — and, at the same time, she was dancing her wicked dance in Yoshiwara."
"That is not true!" said Freder.
"It is true!"
"You have seen the girl in Yoshiwara?"
"You can see her yourself, if you like."
"What's the girl's name?"
"Maria."
Freder laid his forehead in his hands. He curled up completely, as though he suffered a pain which God does otherwise not permit to visit mankind.
"You know the girl?" asked Jan, bending forward.
"No!" answered Freder.
"But you love her," said Jan, and behind these words lurked hatred, ready to pounce.
Freder took his hand and said: "Come!"
***
"But," Freder went on, fixing his eyes upon Josaphat, who sat absorbed in himself while the rain grew gentler, like silent weeping, "then The Thin Man was suddenly standing there, beside me, and he said: 'Will you not return home, Mr. Freder?'”
Josaphat was silent for a long time. Freder, too, was silent. In the frame of the open door, which led out to the balcony, stood the image of the enormous clock of the New Tower of Babel, hovering and bathed in a white light. The large hand jerked to twelve.
Then a sound rose over Metropolis...
It was, beyond all measure, a glorious and ravishing sound, deep and booming and more vast than any sound in the world. The voice of the ocean when it is furious, the voice of falling torrents, of very close thunderstorms, would be miserably drowned in this Behemoth-sound. Without being grating, it penetrated all walls, and, as long as it lasted, all things seemed to vibrate in it. It was omnipresent, coming from the heights and depths, beautiful and horrible, and was an irresistible command.
It was high above the city. It was the voice of the city.
Metropolis raised her voice. The machines of Metropolis roared: They wanted to be fed.
The eyes of Josaphat and Freder met.
"Now," said Josaphat, "many men are going down into a city of the dead, and are waiting for one who is called Maria, and whom they have found to be as true as gold."
"Yes," said Freder, "you are a friend, and you are right. I shall go with them."
And, for the first time this night, there was something like hope in the sound of his voice.
< Chapter 10 = = = = = = = = = = = Chapter 12 >