Metropolis ~ Chapter 6
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 get easy access to the other chapters, check out the essay below:
The proprietor of Yoshiwara used to earn money in a variety of ways. One of those — and quite certainly the most harmless — was to place bets that no man, however well-travelled he was, was able to guess what intricate mixture of ethnicities he owed his face to. So far he had won all such bets and used to rake in the money with his hands which they brought him, the cruel beauty of which no ancestor of the Spanish Borgia would have been ashamed of, but the nails of which showed an indelible shimmer of blue; on the other hand, the politeness of his smile was, on such profitable occasions, unmistakably originating from that delicate insular world, which, from the eastern border of Asia, smiles gently and watchfully across at mighty America.
There were prominent features combined in him which made him appear as a general representative of Great Britain and Ireland, for he was as red-haired, derisive and hard-drinking as if his name had been O'Brien, stingy and superstitious as a Scotsman and — in certain situations which made it necessary — of that highly-bred cluelessness, which is a result of will and a cornerstone of the British Empire. He spoke practicality all living languages as though his mother had taught him to pray in them and his father to curse in them. His greed appeared to hail from the Middle-East, his contentment from China. And, above all, these two quiet, attentive eyes watched with German patience and perseverance.
As to the rest, he was called, for reasons unknown, September.
The patrons to Yoshiwara had met September in a variety of emotions, from the dulled dozing-off of the peaceful bushman to the dance-ecstatics of the Ukrainian.
But to catch features in an expression of absolute bewilderment was reserved for The Thin Man, when, on the morning after his having lost sight of his young master, he set ringing the massive gong which demanded entrance to Yoshiwara.
It was somewhat unusual that the otherwise very obliging door of Yoshiwara was not opened before the fourth gong-signal, and that this was performed by September himself — and with such an expression that reinforced the impression of poorly-overcome catastrophes. The Thin Man greeted him. September stared at him. A mask of brass seemed to fall over his face. But a chance glance at the driver of the taxi in which The Thin Man had come tore it off again.
"God I wish that your spinet had gone up in the air before you could have brought that lunatic to my place last night," September said. "He drove away my guests before they even thought of paying. The girls stuck to the corners like lumps of wet rags, as long as they weren’t having screaming fits. Unless I call the police I might as well close the place, as it doesn't look like the chap will have regained his five senses by this evening."
"Who are you speaking of, September?" asked The Thin Man.
September looked at him. In that moment, the tiniest hamlet in Siberia would have refused to be proclaimed as the birthplace of so idiotic-looking an individual.
"If it is the man I have come here to look for," The Thin Man went on, "then I shall free you of him in a more agreeable and swift manner than the police."
"And what sort of man are you looking, sir?"
The Thin Man hesitated. He cleared his throat lightly. "You know the white silk which is woven for relatively few men in Metropolis?"
In the long line of ancestors, whose multifaceted precipitations had been crystallised into September, a fur trader from Ternopil must have also been represented, and he now smiled out from the corners of his great-grandson's mischievous eyes.
"Come in, sir!" the proprietor of Yoshiwara invited The Thin Man with a truly Sinhalese gentleness.
The Thin Man entered. September closed the door behind him.
In the moment when the morning roar of the great Metropolis no longer rung up from the streets, another roar from inside the building became perceptible — the roar of a human voice, more fiery than the voice of a beast of prey, crazily full with triumph.
"Who is that?" asked The Thin Man, involuntarily lowering his own voice.
"Him!" answered September — and it remained a mystery how he, in a monosyllabic word, could store the plain and sober vengefulness of the entirety of Corsica.
The Thin Man’s glance became uncertain, but he said nothing. He followed September over soft and glossy straw mats, along walls which stood with oiled paper narrowly framed in bamboo.
Behind one of these paper walls, the weeping of a woman sounded out, monotonous, hopeless and heartbreaking, like a long spell of rainy days shrouding the summit of Mount Fuji.
"That's Yuki," murmured September, with a grim glance towards the paper prison of this poor weeping. "She’s been howling since midnight, as if she wanted to become the source of a new salt sea. This evening she’ll have a swollen potato on her face instead of a nose… Who suffers the damages? I do!"
"Why is the little snowflake whining?" asked The Thin Man, half-thoughtlessly, for the roaring of the human voice from the depths of the place engaged all the ears and attention he had.
"Oh, she’s not the only one," answered September, with the tolerant countenance of a man who owns a thriving harbour tavern in Shanghai. "But she is at least tame. Plum-Blossom has been snapping at her like a young puma, and Miss Rainbow has thrown the Saki bowl at the mirror and is trying to cut her artery with the shards — and all because of this white silk guy."
The confused expression on The Thin Man’s face deepened. He shook his head.
"How did he achieve that with them..." he said, and it was in no way meant to be a question.
September shrugged his shoulders.
"Maohee," he said in a songful tone, as though beginning one of those Greenland fairytales, which were more highly appreciated the quicker they sent someone to sleep.
"What is that: Maohee?" asked The Thin Man, irritably.
September drew his head down between his shoulders. The Irish and the British blood cells in his veins seemed to be in a bitter conflict, but the impenetrable Japanese smile covered this up with its mantle before it could become dangerous.
"You don't know what Maohee is? Nobody in the great Metropolis knows — no man. Only here, in Yoshiwara, does everyone know."
"I wish to know too, September," said The Thin Man. Generations of Roman footmen bowed within September as he said, "Certainly, sir!" But they emerged as no match for the twinkling eye of a heavy-drinking and fraudulent grandfather in Copenhagen. "Maohee: that is… Isn't it weird that, of all the hundred-thousand men who have been guests here in Yoshiwara, and who have very much experienced how things are with Maohee, that outside of here, suddenly, they know nothing more about it? Don't walk so fast, sir. The yelling gentleman down there won't run from us, and if I should explain to you what Maohee is..."
"Drugs, I guess, September?"
"Dear sir, a lion is also a cat. Maohee is a drug, but what is a cat put next to a lion? Maohee is from the other side of the earth. It is the divine — the only thing that is — because it is the only thing which makes us feel the intoxication of the others."
"The intoxication of the others?" repeated The Thin Man, stopping still.
September smiled like Hotei, God of Happiness, who was like little children. He laid the hand of the Borgia with the suspiciously blue-shimmering nails on The Thin Man’s arm.
"The intoxication of the others. Do you know, sir, what that means? Not of another man, no, of the masses, which rolls itself into a lump; Maohee gives its friends the concentrated intoxication of the masses."
"Does Maohee have many friends, September?"
The proprietor of Yoshiwara grinned, apocalyptically.
"In this house, sir, there is a round room. You will see it. It has no equal. It is built like a coiled shell, like a mammoth-sized shell, in the coils of which thunders the waves of the seven oceans. In these coils people are so tightly-packed that their faces appear as one. No one knows the other, yet they are all friends. They all fever. They are all pale with expectation. They all have their hands clasped. The trembling of those who sit right down under the rim of the mammoth-shell runs right through the coils of the shell, right up to those who, from the gleaming tip of the spiral, send their own trembling back..."
September gulped for breath. Sweat stood like a fine pearl necklace on his forehead. An international smile of insanity parted his chattering mouth.
"Go on, September!" said The Thin Man.
"On? Suddenly the rim of the shell begins to turn, gently … oh so gently... to music which would bring a serial thief and murderer to sobbing and his judges to pardon him on the gallows — to music which deadly enemies kiss, beggars believe themselves to be kings and the hungry forget their hunger; to this music, the shell revolves around its static heart, until it seems to detach itself from the ground, hovering, and then revolve about itself. The people scream — not loudly, no, no — they scream like the birds that bathe in the sea. The entwined hands clench into fists. The bodies rock themselves to one rhythm. Then comes the first stammer: Maohee… The stammer swells, becoming waves of spray and a spring tide. The revolving shell roars: Maohee… Maohee...! It’s as though, on the parting of everyone’s hair, a little flame must rest, like the St. Elm's Fire. Maohee… Maohee...! They call out to their God. They call out to the one, whom the finger of God touches today. Nobody knows from where he’ll come today. He is there. They know he’s in their midst. He must break forth from their rows. He must, for they call to him: Maohee… Maohee! And suddenly..."
The hand of the Borgia flew up and hung in the air like a brown claw.
"And suddenly a man is standing in the middle of the shell, in the glistening circle on the milk-white disc. But it is no man. It is the incarnated embodiment of everyone’s intoxication... He knows nothing of himself… He foams lightly at the mouth. His eyes are stark and broken, and yet are like rushing meteors that, on the route from Heaven to Earth, leave waving tracks of fire behind them. He stands and lives his intoxication. He is what his intoxication is. From the thousand eyes which cast an anchor into his soul, the power of intoxication streams into him. No glory in God's creation revealed itself which had not been brought up through the medium of those intoxicated. What he says becomes visible to all; what he hears becomes audible to all. What he feels — power, desire, madness — is felt by them all. From the shimmering dome, around which the gently resonating shell oscillates to indescribable music, an ecstatic experiences the thousandfold ecstasy, which embodies itself in him for thousands of others..."
September went silent and smiled at The Thin Man.
"That, sir, is Maohee."
"It must indeed be a powerful drug," said The Thin Man with a feeling of dryness in his throat, "for it to enthuse the proprietor of Yoshiwara to such a hymn. Do you believe that that roaring man down there would join in with this song of praise?"
"Ask him yourself, sir," said September.
He opened the door and let The Thin Man enter. Just by the threshold, Slim stood still, as at first he saw nothing. A dusk, more mournful that the deepest darkness, lay over the room whose dimensions he was unable to estimate. The floor under his feet tilted somewhat in a barely perceptible slant. There, where he stopped, there appeared to be a dusky emptiness. Right and left yielded spiral walls, billowing outwards towards both sides.
That was all that The Thin Man saw. But from the empty depths before him came a white shimmer, no stronger than if coming from a field of snow. On this shimmer there floated a voice, like that of a murderer and of the murdered.
"Light, September!" said The Thin Man, gulping. An unbearable feeling of thirst gnawed at his throat.
The room lit up slowly, as though the light came unwillingly. The Thin Man saw him; he stood in one of the coils of the round room, which was shaped like a shell. He stood between the heights and the depths, separated by a low banister from the void where the snowy light, the murderer's voice and the voice of his victim came from. He stepped up to the banister and leaned far over it. A milk-white disc, lit from beneath and luminous. At the edge of the disc, like a dark, sprawling pattern on a plate-rim, cowering, kneeling women, as though drunken, in their gorgeous garments. Some had lowered their foreheads to the ground and clenched their hands above their ebony hair. Some crouched together in bundles, squeezed head-to-head as symbols of fear. Some swayed rhythmically as if they called on gods. Some were weeping. Some were like dead.
But they all seemed to be handmaids of the man who stood on the snowy illuminated disk.
The man wore the white silk, woven for comparatively few in the great Metropolis. He wore the soft shoes in which the beloved sons of mighty fathers seemed to caress the earth. But the silk hung in shreds about the body of the man, and the shoes looked as though the feet that stood within them bled.
"Is that the man you’re looking for, sir?" asked a Levantine cousin from within September, leaning confidently towards The Thin Man’s ear.
The Thin Man did not answer. He was looking at the man.
"At the very least," continued September, "it is the lad who came here yesterday by the same kind of car as you did today. And to hell with him for it! He has made my revolving shell into the forecourt of hell! He has been roasting souls! I’d argue I have already experienced Maohee-drugged beings who have fancied themselves kings, gods, or as fire and storms, and who forced others to feel themselves kings, gods or as fire and storms. I’d argue I have already experienced those ecstatics of desire forcing women down to them from the highest point of the shell wall, such that they, leaping with outspread hands, like white gulls, have dived to his feet without injuring a limb, while others would have fallen to their death. That man there was no God, no storm and no fire, and he most certainly experienced no desire in his drunkenness. It seems to me that he comes from Hell, and is roaring in the intoxication of damnation. He must not have known that for men who are damned, it is also the ecstasy for damnation. The fool! The prayer that he prays will not redeem him. He believes himself to be a machine and prays to himself. He has forced the others to pray to him. He has ground them down. He has pounded them to powder. Today, many men drag themselves through Metropolis who cannot explain what has seemingly broken their limbs."
"Be quiet, September!" said The Thin Man hoarsely. He brought his hand to his throat which felt like a glowing cork - like smouldering charcoal.
September fell silent, his shoulders jerking. From the depths, words seethed up like lava.
"I am three-in-one: Lucifer-Belial-Satan! I am the eternal Death! I am the eternal impasse! Come unto me, those who want to be in Hell! My Hell has many mansions! I shall assign them to you! I am the great King of all the Damned! I am machine! I am a tower above you all! I am a hammer, a fly-wheel, a fiery oven! Murderer I am, making no use of what I murder. Victims I want, and victims do not reconcile with me! Pray to me and know: I hear you not! Shout to me: Pater noster! Know: I am deaf!"
The Thin Man turned around; he saw September's face as a chalky mass upon his shoulder. It might be that, among September's female ancestors, there was one who hailed from an isle in the South Pacific, where gods meant little, and spirits everything.
"That's no man any more," he whispered with lips of ash. "A man would have died of it long ago… Do you see his arms, sir? Do you think a man can imitate the pushing of a machine for hours and hours at a time without it killing him? He is as dead as a stone. If you call to him he'd fall down and shatter like a clay sculpture."
It didn’t seem as though September's words had pushed itself into The Thin Man’s consciousness. His face wore an expression of loathing and suffering, speaking like a man who speaks with pains.
"I hope, September, that tonight you have had your last opportunity to observe the effects of Maohee on your guests."
September smiled a Japanese-smile.
He did not answer.
The Thin Man stepped near to the banister at the edge of the shell’s curve in which he stood. He bent down towards the milky disc. He shouted in a high and sharp tone which had the effect of a whistle: “11811!”
The man on the shimmering disc spun himself around as though he had received a sideways blow. The hellish rhythm of his thrusting arms ceased, running itself out in a tremor. Like a log, the man fell to ground and stirred no longer.
The Thin Man ran down the passage, reached the end and shoved apart the circle of women who, completely frozen, seemed to have been plunged into deeper horror by the end of what had filled them with fright than by the beginning. He knelt down beside the man, looked him in the face and pushed the tattered silk away from his heart. He did not give his hand time to test his pulse. He lifted the man up and carried him out in his arms. The sighing of the women swooshed behind him like a dense, mist-coloured curtain.
September stepped across his path. He dodged to the side as he caught The Thin Man’s glance at him. He ran along by him, like a bustling dog, breathing rapidly; but he said nothing.
The Thin Man reached the door of Yoshiwara. September opened it for him. The Thin Man stepped into the street. The driver pulled open the door of the taxi; he looked perturbed at the man who, more gruesome to look at than a corpse, and in shreds of white silk which the wind played with, hung in The Thin Man’s arms.
The proprietor of Yoshiwara bowed repeatedly while The Thin Man climbed into the car. But The Thin Man took no further glances at him. September's face, which was as grey as steel, was reminiscent of the blades of those ancient swords, forged from Indian steel into Shiras or Ispahan, and on which, concealed underneath decorative ornaments, stood scornful and deadly words.
The car glided away: September looked on at it. He smiled the peaceful smile of East Asia. For he knew perfectly well what The Thin Man did not know, and what, apart from him, nobody in Metropolis knew, that with the first drop of water or wine which moistened the lips of a human being, there disappeared even the very faintest memory of all, which appertained to the wonders of the drug, Maohee.
The car stopped at the next medical depot. Nurses came and carried away the bundle of a man, shivering in tatters of white silk, to the doctor on duty. The Thin Man looked around. He beckoned to a policeman who stood near the door.
"Take down a report," he said. His tongue hardly obeyed him, so parched with thirst.
The policeman entered the house after him.
"Wait!" said The Thin Man, more with the movement of his head than with words. Standing on the table, he saw a glass jug full of water, the coolness of the water having studded the jug with a thousand pearls.
The Thin Man drank like an animal coming from the desert to drink. He put the jug down and froze. The coldness passed as a short shudder through him.
He turned around and saw the man he had brought with him, lying on a bed over which a young doctor was bending.
The lips of the sick man were moistened with wine. His eyes stood open, staring at the ceiling, tears upon tears running gently and relentlessly from the corners of his eyes, over his temples. It was as though the man had nothing to do with them — as though they trickled from a broken vessel and could not stop trickling until the vessel had run completely empty.
The Thin Man looked the doctor in the face; the doctor shrugged his shoulders. The Thin Man bent over the reclining figure.
"Georgy," he said in a low voice. "Can you hear me?"
The sick man nodded; it was a shadow of a nod.
"Do you know who I am?"
A second nod.
"Are you capable of giving me answers to two or three questions?"
Another nod.
"How did you come to the white silk clothes?"
For a long time he received no answer apart from the gentle falling of the teardrops. Then came the voice, softer than a whisper: "He changed with me..."
"Who?"
"Freder… Joh Fredersen's son."
"And then, Georgy?"
"He told me I was to wait for him."
"Wait where, Georgy?"
A long silence. Then, coming barely audibly:
"Ninety-Ninth Block. House Seven. Seventh floor."
The Thin Man did not question him further. He knew who lived there. He looked at the doctor, whose face made a completely impenetrable expression.
The Thin Man drew a breath as though he were sighing. He said, more bemoaning than inquiringly: "Why did you not prefer to go there, Georgy?”
He turned to go but stopped still as Georgy's voice came fumbling after him;
"The city…the many lights… more than enough money… It is written: Forgive us our trespasses, and lead us not into temptation..."
His voice died out. His head fell to the side. He breathed as though his soul wept, for his eyes were no longer able to.
The doctor coughed cautiously.
The Thin Man raised his head as though somebody had called him, and dropped it again.
"I’ll come back once more," he said very softly. "He is to remain in your custody."
Georgy slept.
The Thin Man left the room, followed by the policeman.
"What do you want?" The Thin Man asked with a scattered look at him.
"The report, sir."
"What report?"
"I should be taking note of a report, sir."
The Thin Man looked at the policeman very attentively, almost ruminantly. He raised his hand and rubbed it across his forehead.
"A mistake," he said. "That was a mistake."
Somewhat puzzled, for he knew The Thin Man, the policeman saluted and departed.
The Thin Man remained standing on the same spot. Over and over, with the same baffled gesture, he rubbed his forehead.
For he did not know (but September knew this and that’s what made his smile so peaceful) that with the first sip of wine or water, any memory of the drug Maohee, which lived in the air of Yoshiwara, was extinguished.
He shook his head, got into the car and said: "Ninety-Ninth Block."
< Chapter 5 = = = = = = = = = = = Chapter 7 >