Metropolis ~ Chapter 17
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:
Maria felt something licking at her feet, like the tongue of a great, gentle dog. She bent down, fumbling for the animal’s head, and felt that it was water into which she was grabbing.
Where did the water come from? It had come completely silently. It did not gurgle. Neither did it throw up waves. It simply rose without hurry and yet tenaciously. It was no colder than the air around about. It lapped about Maria’s ankles. She snatched her feet back. She sat, crouched down, trembling, listening for the water which could not be heard.
Where did it come from?
It was said that, deep under the city, there was a meandering stream. Joh Fredersen had walled-up its course when he built the subterranean world-wonder of a city for the workmen of Metropolis. It was also said that the stream fed a mighty reservoir and that there were pumpworks there, with new pumps powerful enough to empty or fill the water basin—in which there was room for a medium-sized city—from bottom to top. For certain, in the subterranean city of workers, the throbbing of these pumps was constantly audible as a soft, uninterrupted pulse, should one lay his head against a wall—and, that if this pulse should ever silence, no other interpretation was possible except that the pumps had stopped and that the river was rising. But they had never once stopped...
And now? Where was the silent water coming from? Was it still rising?
She bent forward, not having to lower her hand very deep to touch the cool brow of the water. Now she felt, too, that it was running. It was making its way with great certainty of aim in one particular direction. It was making its way towards the subterranean city.
Old books tell of saintly women at the moment they prepared themselves to earn a martyr’s crown, whose smiles were of such sweetness that the torturers fell to their feet and stubborn heathens praised the name of God. But Maria’s smile was, perhaps, of a sweeter kind still. For, as she prepared to get ahead of the path of the silent waters, she thought not of the crown of eternal bliss, but only of death and of the man she loved.
Yes, now the water seemed chillingly cool as her slender feet became submerged, and it rushed on as she ran onwards through it. It fully soaked itself into the hem of her dress, making progress more and more difficult. But that was not the worst thing. The worst thing was that the water also acquired a voice.
The water spoke: “Do you not know, beautiful Maria, that I am faster than the fastest feet? I’m already stroking your sweet ankles. Soon I shall clutch at your knees. Never has anyone embraced your tender hips. But I will do so, before you’ve even taken a thousand steps. And I do not know, beautiful Maria, whether you will reach your destination before you can refuse me your breasts…
Beautiful Maria, Judgement Day has come! It is bringing the thousand-year-old dead to life. Know that I have flooded them out of their niches and the dead are swimming along behind you! Do not look round, Maria, do not look round! For two skeletons are quarrelling about the skull which floats between them, swivelling and grinning. And a third, to whom the skull really belongs, is rearing up furiously within me and falling upon them both…
Beautiful Maria, how sweet your hips are… Is the man you love never to experience them? Beautiful Maria, listen to what I say to you: Just a little to the side of this path, a flight of stairs leads steeply upward towards freedom… Your knees tremble, how sweet that is! Do you believe you can overcome your weakness by holding your poor hands together? You call upon God, but believe me: God does not hear you! Since I came to the Earth as the Great Flood, to destroy all in existence except Noah’s Ark, God has been deaf to the screams of His creations. Or did you think I’d forgotten how the mothers screamed back then? Is your conscience more charged than the conscience of God? Turn around, beautiful Maria, turn around!
Now you’re making me angry, Maria—now I shall kill you! Why do you cast these hot, salty drops on me? I am clasping your breast, but it no longer arouses me. I want to have your throat and your gasping mouth! I want to have your hair and your weeping eyes!
Do you believe you have escaped me? No, beautiful Maria! No, now I shall scoop you up with a thousand others—with all the thousands which you wanted to save...”
She dragged her dripping body out of the water. She crawled upwards over stone slabs. She found a door. She pushed it open and slammed it behind her, peering to see whether the water was already lapping over the threshold.
Not yet, but for how much longer?
She could see nobody as far as her eyes could see. The streets and the squares lay as if dead, bathed in the white light of the neon lamps. Yet, was she deceived, or was the light growing dimmer and yellower from second to second?
A jolt, which threw her against the nearest wall, ran through the bowels of the Earth. The iron door through which she had come flew from its bolts, gaping, and the water, black and silent, lipped over the threshold.
Maria picked herself up. She screamed with her whole lungs: “The water’s coming!”
She ran across the square. She called for the guard, who, being on constant duty, had to raise the alarm in the event of danger of any kind.
The guard was absent.
A furious convulsion of the earth dragged the girl’s feet from under her body and hurled her to the ground. She raised herself to her knees and reached up high with her hands in order to set the siren howling herself. But the sound which broke from this metal throat was only a whimper, like the whimpering of a dog, and the light grew ever more pale and yellow.
Like a dark, crawling beast that was in no hurry, the water wound its way over the smooth street. But now the water was not alone in the street; suddenly, in the midst of a baffling and deeply-frightening solitude, a little half-naked child was standing there, starring, with eyes still protected by a dream from the all-too-real, at the beast—at the dark, crawling beast, which was licking at its bare little feet.
With an outcry, in which equal parts distress and deliverance were mixed, Maria dashed towards the child and picked it up in her arms.
“Is there nobody here but you, child?” she asked with a sudden sob. “Where is your father?”
“Gone...”
“Where is your mother?”
“Gone...”
Maria couldn’t comprehend this. Since fleeing from Rotwang’s house, she had been hurled from horror to horror without comprehending any of it. She still regarded the grating of the earth, the jerking impacts, the roar of the egregious, tearing thunder, and the water which welled up from the shattered depths, to be the effects of unfettered elements. Yet she could not grasp that there were mothers who would not throw themselves as a rampart before their children if the Earth opened up her womb to bring horror into the world.
Only—the water, which crept up nearer and nearer, the impacts, which tortured the earth, and the light, which became paler and paler, all left her with no time to reflect. With the child in her arms, she ran from house to house, calling after the others which had hidden themselves.
Then they came, stumbling and crying, coming in droves; pale-grey spectres, as though they were children of stone, passionlessly conceived and begrudgingly born. They were like little corpses in squalid shrouds, awoken on Judgement Day by the voice of an angel, rising out of forced-open graves. They gathered themselves around Maria, screaming because the water, the cool water, was licking at their feet.
Maria shouted—almost unable to shout any more. Her voice had the cry of a mother-bird which detects winged death above its brood. She waded between the bodies of the children, ten at her hands and ten at her dress, with the others forming a tight entourage, pushed swept along with the stream. Soon the street was a wave of children’s heads, above which pale, raised-up hands flitted like seagulls. And Maria’s cry was drowned by the wailing of the children and by the laughter of the powerful rushing water.
The light in the neon-lamps became reddish, flickering rhythmically and casting ghostly shadows. The street rose. There was the assembly point. But the enormous elevators hung dead on their cables. Ropes, twisted from smaller ropes—metal ropes, as thick as a man’s thigh—hung in the air, torn apart. From a burst pipe, blackish oil welled in a meandering channel. And over everything lay a dry vapour as if from heated iron and glowing stones.
Deep in the darkness of distant alleys, the gloom took on a brownish hue. A fire was smouldering there…
“Up!” whispered Maria’s dry lips—but she was unable to say the words fully. A winding staircase led upwards. It was narrow, for nobody ever used the staircase which ran by the safe, moving elevators. Maria forced the children up the steps, but a darkness of impenetrable weight and density reigned up above. None of the children dared the ascent alone.
Maria clambered up. She counted the steps. Like the rushing of a thousand wings, the noise of the children’s feet came from behind her, up the narrow spiral. She did not know how long she had been scrambling up. Innumerable hands clutched at her damp dress. She dragged these burdens upwards, moaning a prayer—praying only for strength to go on another hour.
“Don’t cry, little brothers!” she stammered. “My little sisters, please don’t cry!”
Children were screaming from the depths, and the hundred-fold windings of the stairway gave a trumpeting echo to each cry: “Mother! Mother!”
And again: “The water’s coming!”
Stop and lie down, halfway up the stairs? No!
“Little sisters! Little brothers—do come!”
Higher—higher and higher upwards. Then, at last, a wide landing. Grey light from above. A walled-in room; not yet the upper world, but a forecourt to it. A short, straight flight of stairs upon which a shaft of light fell. A trapdoor like a mouth, which seemed to be pressed inwards. Between the door and the square of the wall, a gap as narrow as a cat’s body.
Maria saw it. She did not know what it meant. She had this uncertain feeling that something was not as it ought to be, but she did not want to think about it. With an almost rash movement she freed her hands and dress from the tugging fingers of the children and rushed, thrown forward far more by her desperate will than by her numb feet, through the empty room and up the steep stairway.
She reached out her hands and tried to raise the pressed-in door. It did not budge. A second go. Nothing. Head, arms, shoulders pressing, hips and knees pushing, as if the tendons were going to tear. Nothing. The door did not yield by even a hair’s breadth. Had a child tried to shift a Cathedral from its place, it could not have acted more foolishly nor unsuccessfully.
Above the door, which alone led the way out of the depths, there towered, as high as houses, the corpses of dead engines, which, when madness first broke out over Metropolis, had become the awful toys of the masses. Train upon train, with empty carriages having thundered along, all lights blazing and on full power, had rolled along the rails, lashed by the bawling of the masses, only to become locked and mangled into each other as they piled up high, only to then burn through and lie half-melted, still smouldering, as a heap of ruins. A single lamp remained unscathed, throwing a shaft of its sharp, corrosive light from the steel breast of the hindmost engine over the chaos.
But Maria knew nothing of all this. She did not need to know. It was enough for her that the door, which was the only saviour for her and the children she wanted to save, remained inexorable and steadfast, until at last, with bleeding hands and shoulders, with battered head, and feet crippled with numbness, she was obliged to submit to the incomprehensible and the murderous.
She raised her face to the glimmer of light which fell upon her. The words of a little, childish prayer, ran through her mind, but they were no longer clear. She sank her head and sat down on the stairs.
Silently, mesmerised by something close to them, and yet without them understanding it, the children crowded tightly together.
“Little brothers, little sisters,” said Maria’s voice with great endearment, “can you all understand what I am saying?”
“Yes,” came the whispers of the children.
“The door is closed. We must wait a little… Someone is sure to come and open it for us. Will you be patient and not be frightened?”
“Yes,” came an answer, like a sigh.
“Sit down as well as you can.”
The children obeyed.
“I am going to tell you a story,” said Maria.
< Chapter 16 = = = = = = = = = = = Chapter 18 >