Metropolis ~ Chapter 8
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:
Freder walked up the steps of the cathedral reluctantly; he was walking this way for the first time. Hel, his mother, used to go to the cathedral often. But her son was yet to do so. Now he longed to see it with the eyes of his mother, and with the ears of Hel, his mother, to hear the stone prayers of the pillars, each of which had its own unique voice.
He entered the cathedral like a child — not pious, yet not entirely without shyness, ready for devotion, but fearless. He heard, like Hel, his mother, the Kyrie Eleison of the stones and the Te Deum Laudamus, the De Profundis and the Jubilate. And he heard, like his mother, how the mightily-ringing stone choir was crowned by the Amen of the cross vault...
He looked for Maria, who was supposed to wait for him on the belfry steps, but he did not find her. He wandered through the cathedral, which seemed empty of people. Once he stopped, he stood opposite Death.
In a side-niche, the ghostly minstrel stood carved from wood, in hat and wide cloak, scythe on shoulder, hourglass dangling from his rope girdle. The minstrel was playing a bone as though on a flute. The Seven Deadly Sins were his followers.
Freder looked Death in the face. Then he said, "if you had come earlier you wouldn’t have frightened me. Now I pray to you: Stay away from me and my beloved!"
But the ghastly flute-player seemed to listen to nothing but the song he played.
Freder walked on. He came to the central aisle. He saw, stretched-out before the high altar, over which the crucified God-figure hovered over, a dark form laying on the stones, prostrate, hands clawing to each side, face pressed down into the cold of the stone, as though the blocks should burst under the pressure of the brow. The form wore the garment of a monk and the head was shaven. From the shoulder to the heel, an incessant trembling shook the gaunt body, which seemed locked in a spasm.
But suddenly the body reared up. A white flame surged up: a face; black flames within it: two blazing eyes. A hand rose upwards, clawing high in the air towards the crucifix, which hovered above the altar.
And a voice spoke like the voice of fire: "I will not leave thee, God! God — bless me then!"
The echo of the pillars yelled the words back.
The son of Joh Fredersen had never seen the man before. But he knew as soon as the flame-white face unveiled the black flames of its eyes to him: it was Desertus the monk, his father's enemy...
Perhaps his breath had become too loud. Suddenly the black flame struck across at him. The monk stood up slowly. He said no words. He stretched out his hand. The hand indicated towards the door.
"Why do you sent me away, Desertus?" asked Freder. "Does the House of God not stand open to all?"
"Art thou here to seek God?" asked the rough and hoarse voice of the monk.
Freder hesitated. He dropped his head.
"No," he answered. But his heart knew better.
"If thou does not seek God, then thou hast nothing to seek here," said the monk.
Then Joh Fredersen's son went.
He went out of the cathedral like a man walking in his sleep. The daylight struck his eyes cruelly. Racked with weariness, exhausted with sadness, he walked down the steps and aimlessly onwards.
The roar of the streets wrapped itself like a diver's helmet about his ears. He walked on in stupefaction, as though between thick glass walls. He had no thought except the name of his beloved, no awareness except the longing for her. Shivering from the weariness, he thought of the girl's eyes and lips with a feeling very much like homesickness.
Ah, brow to brow with her — then mouth to mouth — eyes closed —breathing...
Peace...
"Come," said his heart. "Why do you leave me alone?"
He walked along in a stream of people and struggled against the foolishness to stand still in the middle of this stream, and to ask every single wave, which was a human being, if they knew where Maria was and why she had let him wait in vain.
He came to the magician's house. There he stopped.
He stared at a window.
Was he mad?
There was Maria, standing behind the dull panes. That was her face, that was her mouth, opening. Those were her blessed hands, stretched out towards him, a mute cry: "Help me!"
Then all of it was drawn away backwards, swallowed up by the blackness of the room behind it, vanishing without a trace, like it had never been. Mute, dead and evil, the house of the magician stood there.
Freder stood unmoving. He drew a deep, deep breath. Then he made a leap. He stood before the door of the house. Copper-red, in the black wood of the door, the seal of Solomon — the pentagram — glowed.
Freder knocked.
Nothing in the house stirred.
He knocked for the second time.
The house remained silent and obstinate.
He stepped back and looked at the windows above.
They gazed out, in their evil bleakness, beyond him.
He leaped again at the door. He hit against it with his fists. He heard the echo of his staggering blows shake the house like a dull laughter.
But the copper seal of Solomon grinned at him from the unshaken door.
He stood still for a second. His temples throbbed. With a feeling of exceptional helplessness, he was equally close to crying and swearing.
Then he heard a voice; the voice of his beloved: "Freder!" and once more: "Freder!"
He saw blood before his eyes. He wanted to throw himself with the full weight of his shoulders against the door...
But in the same blink of an eye, the door opened noiselessly. It swung back in ghostly silence, surrendering fully the way into the house.
It was so unexpected and so unsettling that Freder, in the middle of the swing with which he threw himself against the door, braced both hands against the doorposts and stood clinging there. He dug his teeth in his lips. The heart of the house was as black as midnight...
But the voice of Maria called to him from the heart of the house: "Freder!”
He ran into the house as though he had become blind. The door fell away behind him. He stood in blackness. He called. He received no answer. He saw nothing. He groped. He felt walls, endless walls. Steps. He climbed up the steps...
A pale redness swam about him like the reflection of a distant gloomy fire.
Suddenly, he stopped still and clawed his hand into the stonework behind him. A sound came out of the nothingness: the weeping of a woman sorrowing to death.
It did not ring out loudly, and yet it was as though the source of every lament was streaming out of it. It was as though the house weeped, as though every stone of the wall were a sobbing mouth, released from eternal muteness, in order to to lament an everlasting agony once and once only.
Freder shouted — he was aware that he only shouted in order to hear the weeping no more: "Maria — Maria!"
His voice was bright and fierce as an oath: "I’m coming!"
He ran up the stairs. He came to the top of the stairs. A passage, barely lit. Twelve doors opened out here.
In the wood of each of these doors glowed, copper-red, the seal of Solomon — the pentagram.
He sprang at the first one. Even before he had touched it, it swung wide open before him, noiselessly. Emptiness lay behind it. A bare room.
The second door. The same.
The third. The fourth. They all swung open before him as though his breath had blown them off the latch.
Freder stood silently. He pushed his head down between his shoulders. He raised his arm and pressed it against his forehead. He looked around himself. The open doors stood open. The sorrowful weeping ceased. All became completely silent.
But out of the silence there came a voice, soft, sweet, and more tender than a kiss… "Do come! Do come! I am here, my love..."
Freder did not stir. He knew the voice well. It was Maria's voice, which he loved. And yet it was a strange voice. Nothing in the world could be sweeter than the tone of this latest allurement, and nothing in the world had ever been so filled to overflowing with a dark, deadly wickedness.
Freder felt the drops on his forehead.
"Who are you?" he asked expressionlessly.
"Don't you know me?"
"You are not Maria..."
"Freder!," wailed the voice — Maria's voice.
"Do you want me to lose my mind?" said Freder, between his teeth. "Why don't you come to me?"
"I can't come, beloved..."
"Where are you?"
"Look for me!" said the sweetly alluring and deadly wicked voice, laughing softly.
But within the laughter there sounded another voice — also Maria's voice, sick with fear and horror.
"Freder! Help me, Freder! I do not know what is happening to me… But what’s happening is worse than murder. My eyes are on—"
Suddenly, as though cut off, her voice choked. But the other, which was also Maria's voice, laughed sweetly-alluringly on:
"Find me, beloved!"
Freder began to run. Senselessly and reasonless, he began to run. Along walls, past open doors, up and down stairs, from twilight into darkness, drawn by suddenly-flickering cones of light, dazzled, and plunged again into hellish darkness. He ran like a blind animal, groaning aloud. He noticed that he was running in a circle, always on his own tracks, but he could not free himself of it and could not get out of the cursed circle. He ran in the crimson mist of his own blood, which filled his eyes and ears, and heard the breaker of his blood surge against his brain, and yet heard high above, like birdsong, the sweet, deadly-wicked laugh of Maria:
"Find me, beloved! I am here! I am here..."
At last he fell. His knees staggered against something which was in the way of their blindness; he stumbled and fell. He felt stones under his hands, cool, hard stones, cut in even squares. His whole body rested, battered and tortured, upon the cool hardness of these blocks. He rolled himself on to his back. He pushed himself up, crashing back down again and laying upon the floor. A suffocating blanket descended. His consciousness gave way, as if drowned…
Rotwang had seen him fall. He waited soberly and vigilantly to see whether this young savage, the son of Joh Fredersen and Hel, had finally had enough, or whether he would pull himself together once more for the fight against nothing.
But it appeared he’d had enough. He lay remarkably still. He breathed not once more. He was like a corpse.
The great inventor left his listening post. On soundless soles he paced through the dark house. He opened a door and went in a room. He closed the door and remained standing on the threshold. With an expectation that he knew how pointless it was, he looked at the girl who occupied the room.
He found her as he always found her. In the farthest corner of the room, on a high, narrow chair, hands laid right and left upon the armrests, boldly upright, with eyes which seemed lidless. Nothing about her was living except for these eyes. The pale mouth, still gorgeous in its pallor, seemed to enclose the unspeakable within it. She did not look at the man; she looked over him, onwards.
Rotwang bent forward. He came nearer to her. Only his hands — his lonely hands — groped through the air, as though they wanted to close around Maria's countenance. His eyes — his lonely eyes — engulfed Maria's countenance.
"Will you not smile just once?" he asked. "Will you not weep just once? I need both — your smiling and your weeping. Your image, Maria, just as you are now, is burnt into my retina, inalienably. I could take a master’s exam in your loathing and in your rigidity. The bitter expression of contempt about your mouth is every bit as familiar to me as the haughtiness of your eyebrows and your temples. But I need your smiling and your weeping, Maria. Or you will make me botch my work.”
He seemed to have spoken to deaf air. The girl sat silent, looking over him, beyond.
Rotwang took a chair; he sat down straddling it, crossed his arms over the backrest and looked at the girl. He laughed dismally.
"You two poor children!" he said. "That you dared to fight against Joh Fredersen! Nobody can reproach you for that; you do not know him and do not know what you do. But the son should know his father. I do not believe that there is one man who can boast ever having defeated Joh Fredersen. You could have more easily bent the inscrutable God, who is said to rule the world, to your will than Joh Fredersen."
The girl sat like a stone statue, unmoving.
"What will you do, Maria, if Joh Fredersen takes you and your love so seriously that he comes to you and says: ‘Give me back my son’?"
The girl sat like a stone statue, unmoving.
"He will ask you: 'What is my son worth to you?' And if you are wise you will give him the answer: 'No more and no less than he is to you.' He will pay the price, and it will be a high price, for Joh Fredersen has only one son."
The girl sat like a stone statue, unmoving.
"What do you know of Freder's heart?" the man went on. "He is young like the morning at sunrise. This young-morning heart is yours. Where will it be at midday? And where in the evening? Far away from you, Maria — far, far, away. The world is very big and the Earth very beautiful. His father will send him around the world. Over the beautiful Earth he will forget you, before the clock of his heart is even at midday."
The girl sat like a stone statue, unmoving. But around her pale mouth, which was like the bud of a snow-rose, a smile began to bloom — a smile of such sweetness, of such depth, that it seemed as though the air around the girl began to beam.
The man looked at the girl. His lonely eyes were starved and parched as the desert which knows no dew. In a hoarse voice he spoke on:
"Where do you get your holy confidence from? Do you believe that you are the first that Freder has loved? Have you forgotten the 'Club of the Sons,' Maria? There are a hundred women there — and all are his. These small tender women could all tell you about Freder's love, for they know more about it than you do, and you have only one advantage over them: that you can weep when he leaves you; for weeping is forbidden for them. When Joh Fredersen's son holds his wedding, it will be as though Metropolis holds a wedding. When? Joh Fredersen will decide that. With whom? Joh Fredersen will decide that. But you are not the bride, Maria! On the day of his wedding, the son of Joh Fredersen will have forgotten you.”
"Never!" said the girl.
And the painless tears of a great, true tenderness fell upon the beauty of her smile.
The man stood up. He stayed standing before the girl. He looked at her for a long time. He turned away. As he stepped over the threshold of the next room, his shoulder fell against the doorpost.
He slammed the door shut. He stared straight ahead. He looked on the being — his creature of glass and metal — which bore, almost completed, the head of Maria.
His hands neared the head, and the nearer they came, the more it appeared as if these hands, these lonely hands, wanted not to create, but rather to destroy.
"We are bunglers, Futura!" he said. "Bunglers! Bunglers! Can I give you the smile which makes angels fall down to Hell with lust? Can I give you the tears which would redeem the chiefest Satan and make him blessed? Parody is your name and Bungler is mine!"
Shining in lustre and coldness, the being stood there and looked at its creator with puzzled eyes. And as he laid his hands on its shoulders, its fine build tinkled in mysterious laughter.
As Freder came around again, a dim brightness surrounded him. It came from a window, in the frame of which stood a pale, grey sky. The window was small and gave the impression that it had not been opened for centuries.
Freder let his eyes wander through the room. He comprehended nothing of what he saw. He recalled nothing. He lay with his back resting on stones which were cold and smooth. All his limbs and joints were wracked by a dull pain.
He turned his head to the side. He looked at his hands which lay beside him as though not belonging to him, thrown away, bled dry.
Sorely bruised knuckles, shreds of skin, brownish crusts… Were these his hands?
He stared up at the ceiling. It was black, as if charred. He stared at the walls; grey, cold walls…
Where was he? Thirst and a ravenous hunger agonised him. But worse than hunger and thirst was the tiredness which craved sleep and found it not.
Maria came to mind.
Maria?
He threw himself up and stood on sawn-through ankles. His eyes sought for doors. There was one door. He stumbled up to it. The door was closed, latchless, and would not open.
His brain commanded: Be surprised at nothing. Do not startle. Think...
Over there was a window. It had no frame. It was one glass pane set into stone. Beyond it lay the street, one of the great streets of the great Metropolis, with its bubbling of people.
The glass of the window pane must’ve been very thick. Not the slightest sound from the so-nearby street penetrated the room in which Freder was captive.
Freder's hands fumbled across the pane. A piercing coldness streamed out of the glass, the smoothness reminiscent of the sucking sharpness of a steel blade. Freder's fingertips glided towards the gap in which the pane was set...
And they remained, crooked, as though bewitched, hanging in the air. He saw: There, below, Maria was crossing the street.
Coming from the house which held him captive, she turned her back on him and walked with light, hurried steps towards the maelstrom which formed the street.
Freder's fists bashed against the pane. He cried the girl's name. He yelled: "Maria!" She must’ve heard him. It was impossible that she didn’t hear him. Disregarding his raw knuckles, he let his fists rage against the pane.
But Maria did not hear him. She did not turn her head around. With her soft but hurried step she plunged into the surf of people as though in a very familiar element.
Freder lunged for the door. With his whole body, with shoulders and knees, he hammered against the door. He cried out no more. His mouth stood open, gaping. His breath burnt his lips grey. He sprang back to the window. There, outside, not ten paces away from the window, stood a policeman, his face turned towards Rotwang's house. The man's face was completely indifferent. Nothing seemed to be farther from his mind than to watch the magician's house. But even the man with bleeding fists in this house, who struggled to shatter a window pane, could not have escaped his dullest gaze.
Freder held off. He stared at the policeman's face with an unsympathetic hatred, whose origin was the fear of losing time where there was no time to lose. He turned around and snatched up the bulky footstool which stood near the table. He rammed the footstool with full force against the glass of the window pane. The impact jolted him backwards. The pane was undamaged.
Snivelling fury welled up in Freder's throat. He swung the footstool and hurled it against the door. The footstool crashed to the floor. Freder dashed to it, snatched it up anew and struck and struck, in a red-blind desire to destroy, again and again, against the booming door,
The wood splintered white. Like a living being, the door shrieked, and Freder did not lay off. To the rhythm of his own boiling blood, he raged against the door until it broke, trembling.
Freder dragged himself through the breach. He ran through the house. In every corner, his feral eyes sought an enemy and new obstacles. But he found neither one nor the other. Uncontested, he reached the door, found it open and barged out into the street.
He ran in Maria’s direction. But the surf of people had washed her away. She had vanished.
For five minutes Freder stood paralysed among the chasing people. A senseless hope befogged his brain: Maybe, maybe she’ll come back again. If he were patient and waited long enough...
But the cathedral came to mind: waiting in vain — her voice in the magician's house — words of fear — her sweet, wicked laugh...
No, no waiting, no waiting. He wanted to know.
With clenched teeth he ran.
There was a house in the city where Maria lived The way was eternally far. What should he ask about? With bare head, with bruised hands, with eyes which seemed mad with weariness, he ran towards his destination: Maria's abode.
He did not know by how many precious hours The Thin Man had gotten ahead of him…
He stood before the people with whom Maria was supposed to live: a man, a woman — the faces of beaten dogs. The woman undertook the reply. Her eyes twitched. She held her hands clenched under her apron.
“No, no girl called Maria lived here, never had lived here...”
Freder stared at the woman. He did not believe her. She must know the girl. She must live here.
Half-stunned with fear that this last hope of finding Maria again could prove deceiving too, he described the girl, as memory came to the aid of this poor madman.
She had blonde hair. She had gentle eyes. She had the voice of an affectionate mother. She wore an austere but beautiful dress...
The man left his position, near the woman, and stooped down sideways, hunching his head down between his shoulders as though he could not bear to hear how that strange young man, there at the door, spoke of the girl that he was seeking. Shaking her head in a nasty impatience for him to come to an end, the woman repeated the same dry words: “The girl did not live here, one for all time… Is it not yet enough with the questions?”
Freder went. He went without a word of goodbye. He heard how a door was slammed to, clanging. Voices retreated, bickering. Never-ending steps brought him to the street again.
What now?
Clueless, he stood. He did not know what to do next.
Exhausted to death, drunken with weariness, he heard, with a sudden frisson, that the air around him was filling with an overpowering sound.
It was, above 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.
"My father," thought Freder, half unconsciously, "has pressed his fingers upon the blue metal plate. The head of the great Metropolis controls the life of the city. Nothing happens in the great Metropolis which my father does not gain knowledge of. I shall go to my father and ask him whether the inventor, Rotwang, has played with Maria and with me in the name of Joh Fredersen..."
He turned around to search for the way to the New Tower of Babel. He moved with the tenacity of the possessed, with screwed-up lips, sharp lines between the eyebrows, clenched fists on his limp, dangling arms. He moved as though he wanted to pound the stone ground beneath him. It seemed as though every drop of blood in his face had collected in his eyes alone. He ran, and on the never-ending way, with every step, had the feeling: I am not the one who is running. I run as a spirit by the side of my own self. I, the spirit, compel my body to run onwards, although it is exhausted to death...
The looks of the people who stared at him when he came to the New Tower of Babel seemed not to see him, only a spirit...
He was about to enter the Paternoster-Machine, which, as a bucket-wheel of people, pumped its way through the New Tower of Babel. But a sudden shudder thrust him away from it. Was there not, crouched below, deep under the bottom of the New Tower of Babel, a little, gleaming machine, which was like Ganesha, the god with the elephant's head? Under the crouching body, and the head, which was sunken on the chest, crooked legs rested like a gnome upon the platform. The trunk and legs were motionless. But the short arms pushed, and pushed, and pushed, alternating forwards, then backwards, then forwards.
Who stood before the machine now, swearing the Lord's Prayer — the Lord's Prayer of the Paternoster-Machine?
Shivering with horror, he ran up the stairs.
Stairs and ever more stairs… They came and came to no end… The brow of the New Tower of Babel lifted itself very near to the sky. The tower roared like the sea. It howled deep like a storm. The plummeting of a waterfall boomed in its veins.
"Where is my father?" Freder asked the servants.
They indicated a door. They wanted to notify him. He shook his head. He pondered: Why were these people looking so oddly at him?
He opened a door. The room was empty. On the other side, a second door, just ajar. Behind it, voices. The voice of his father and that of another...
Freder suddenly stood silent. His feet seemed to be nailed to the floor. His upper body bent stiffly forwards. On limp arms, his fists dangled, seeming to no longer have the ability to release themselves from their own clenching. He listened, in his white face, eyes full of blood and the lips open, as though they formed a cry.
Then he tore his deadened feet loose from the floor, stumbled to the door and thrust it open...
In the middle of the room, which was filled with a piercing brightness, stood Joh Fredersen, holding a woman in his arms. And the woman was Maria. She was not repelled. Leaning far back in the man's arms, she was offering him her mouth, her enticing mouth, that deadly laugh...
"You!" yelled Freder.
He dashed at the girl. He did not see his father. He saw only the girl — no, neither the girl, only her mouth — only her mouth and her sweet, wicked laugh.
Joh Fredersen turned around, broad and menacing. He let the girl go. He covered her with the brunt of his shoulders, with the mighty cranium in which, flamed with blood, the strong teeth and invincible eyes showed.
But Freder did not see his father. He only saw an obstacle between him and the girl.
He ran at the obstacle. It pushed him back. Scarlet hatred for the obstacle made him wheeze. His eyes flew around. They sought an implement — an implement which could be used as a battering ram. He found none. Then he threw himself forwards like a battering ram. His fingers clutched into fabric. He bit into the fabric. He heard his own breath like a whistle, very high and very quiet.
And yet within him there was only one sound, only one cry:
"Maria!" Groaningly, imploringly: "Maria!"
No man dreaming of hell cries out as tortured as he did.
And still, between him and the girl, the man, the boulder, the obstacle, the living wall...
He threw his hands forward. Ah… there was a throat! He seized the throat. Like iron fangs, his fingers snapped shut.
"Why don't you fight back?" he yelled, staring at the man.
"I'll kill you! I'll finish you! I'll murder you!"
But the man before him stayed standing while being choked.
Thrown this way and that by Freder's fury, the body bent, now to the right, now to the left. And as often as this happened, Freder saw, like through a transparent mist, the smiling countenance of Maria, who, leaning against the table, was looking on at the struggle between father and son with her sea-water eyes.
His father's voice said: "Freder..."
He looked the man in the face. He saw his father. He saw the hands which were clawed around his father's throat. They were his; they were the hands of his son.
His hands fell loose, as though cut off. And he stared at his hands, muttering something which sounded half like a curse and half like the weeping of a child that believes itself to be alone in the world.
The voice of his father said: "Freder..."
He fell on his knees. He stretched out his arms. His head fell forward into his father's hands. He broke out in tears, into despairing sobbing...
A door slid shut.
He flung his head around. He sprang to his feet. His eyes chased around the room.
"Where is she?" he asked.
"Who?"
"She, who was here—"
"Nobody was here, Freder."
The boy's eyes glazed.
"What did you say?" he stammered.
"There was nobody here, Freder, except you and me."
Freder turned his head around the vertebrae of his neck. He tugged the shirt from his throat. He looked into his father's eyes as though looking into well-shafts.
"You say nobody was here? I did not see you, when you were holding Maria in your arms? I have been dreaming? I am mad, aren't I?"
"I give you my word," said Joh Fredersen, "when you came to me there was neither a woman nor any other person here..."
Freder remained silent. His completely distraught eyes were still searching along all the walls.
"You are ill, Freder," said his father's voice.
Freder smiled. Then he began to laugh. He threw himself into a chair and laughed and laughed. He bent down, bracing both elbows against his knees and burrowing his head between his hands and arms. He rocked himself to and fro, screaming with laughter.
Joh Fredersen's eyes were upon him.
< Chapter 7 = = = = = = = = = = = Chapter 9 >