The Other Side (21 page)

On the parade ground the military were busy training to prepare them for the threatened revolution. But it was no use the sergeants bellowing at them, one soldier after another just lay down on the ground.

There were strange and amusing incidents. Thieves slept the sleep of the just, their fingers still in someone else’s till. Melitta spent four days stretched out in Brendel’s apartment, while her husband was dreaming, bent over the table, his nose in the mayonnaise.

Castringius was struck down while playing cards. He was leaning back comfortably in his chair in a low dive, the jack of diamonds in his paw. I very quickly withdrew to my room and that was where the illness hit me. I had just turned back the covers and gone over to draw the curtains. The last thing I saw was banknotes fluttering, one after the other, out of the window of the princess’s apartment across the road; a gentle autumn breeze was wafting them like withered leaves down the street towards the river. I just had time to get to my bed.

During the first two days after the outbreak of the epidemic the trains still arrived, though with huge delays, since new staff had to be brought on at every station. After that the service stopped entirely. The last number of the
Voice
was printed on one side alone, and even then it was riddled with incomplete sentences and scores of typographical errors. The entire last page, which usually contained a round-up of silly miscellaneous items, was missing.

There was no point in fighting it. Pearl slept. This state of complete unconsciousness probably lasted six days. At least that was the time calculated by the barber who based his estimate on the length of his customers’ stubble.

During that time there was only one person in the whole of the city who, it was said, did not sleep at all, or only very briefly: the American. On one of the days, when he was walking down Long Street like a latter-day prince from
Sleeping Beauty
, he claimed he saw, through the coffee house window, one of the chess players make a move. From that he concluded that they, too, had escaped the illness. Otherwise you fell over sleeping bodies everywhere. Not only on all the benches in the public parks, even staircases and entrances were covered with well-dressed men and women, lying higgledy-piggledy, just like the homeless, contented smiles on their faces, despite their bizarre situation.

As people gradually came to, many simply continued their interrupted activities. This was a blessed relief, not only for Brendel, but for the poor old nag at the knacker’s yard which had spent days tied up, waiting for the
coup de grace
. Now it received it. For the strange thing was that animals remained impervious to the sleeping sickness.

For most people nothing had changed, at least not immediately. When I woke up and, in need of sustenance, went to the 
café
, the barber was there already, ravenous but also in a very bad mood. A fourpenny piece had gone missing, which had led to a permanent rift between the barber and his assistant who of course, like all animals, had remained awake.

The Dream city woke up and found itself in a kind of animal paradise. During our long sleep another world–the animal kingdom–had spread to such an extent that we were in danger of being swept aside. I have to say, though, that even in the time prior to the sleep it had been noticeable what a good year it seemed to be for rats and mice. There had also been complaints about the depredations of birds of prey and four-legged chicken-thieves. The gardener had even seen wolf tracks in Alfred Blumenstich’s park. They laughed at him, but no one laughed any more when, the following day, a pair of horns was all that was left of Frau Blumenstich’s pet, a snow-white Angora goat.

But how can one describe the astonishment of all those who had gone to sleep alone and undisturbed and woke to find themselves in unwelcome company? There might be a large green parrot sitting at the window or weasels and squirrels peeking out from under the beds. It was only gradually that we realised what was going on.

When they woke up, the butchers had to drive a large pack of jackals away from the slaughterhouse. Attacks by wolves, wild cats and lynxes increased frighteningly and even our pets suddenly turned disobedient and vicious. Almost all the cats and dogs left their masters and hunted for their own food. The newspapers, that had started to appear again, reported a horrifying case: a bear had climbed into the ground-floor apartment of Apollonia Six, a pork butcher’s widow, and completely devoured the poor lady while she was fast asleep.

Hunters and fishermen came into the town bringing fantastic-sounding reports of gigantic, shambling animals they claimed to have seen. But being regarded as professional exaggerators anyway, no one believed them. Then suddenly peasants and other Dreamlanders living in the country started to arrive in droves, thundering up on their massive horses, together with carts jampacked with women, children and the more valuable of their household goods. They were very unhappy and demonstrated outside the Palace and the Archive, complaining that no soldiers had been sent to protect them. Herds of buffaloes, they said, had devastated their farms, and they had only managed to escape the attacks of hordes of large apes by the skin of their teeth. The beasts were fiends and spared neither women nor children. Soon afterwards the tracks of colossal bipeds were identified in the clay soil of the Tomassevic Fields on the edge of the city. That gave cause for concern.

The plague of insects was horrendous. Clouds of greedy locusts descended from the hills and wherever they went they left not one blade of grass. A swarm destroyed the castle garden in one single night. Bugs, earwigs and lice made our lives a misery. All of these species, from the largest to the smallest, seemed to be in the grip of an elemental procreative urge. Despite the fact that they were all eating each other up, quadrupeds and hexapods were multiplying in uncanny fashion. Even the official issue of guns and poison and the promulgation of strict orders to keep windows and doors closed had little effect, the fertility was just too great. Squads of volunteer hunters were organised to support the military and the police. Many buildings had embrasures made in the outside walls to shoot through.

One morning the wife of the coffee-house owner woke to find fourteen rabbits in her bed. Since her bedroom was only separated from mine by a thin partition, I could hear the baby rabbits squeaking.

But the most terrifying of all were the snakes. No house was safe from them, the vile beasts got everywhere, into drawers, wardrobes, coat-pockets, water jugs, everywhere. And these insidious reptiles displayed a horrifying fecundity. If you went to your room in the dark you would tread on the eggs lying around and they would burst with a squelch. Castringius devised an ‘egg dance’, which he performed to perfection.

People in the French Quarter could scarcely put up with the vermin any longer. However, even during the beastly invasion, most kept their heads. It became the done thing to shoot your stag from your window and invite your friends straight round to share the game pie. From the skylight of the house where I used to live you could see a long way out over fields and meadows. Now the area had been transformed into a monstrous zoo. Even the river had its share: crocodiles, which after years of strenuous effort had been banished downstream, reappeared. The baths had to be closed because of the deadly electric eels which had taken up residence in the cabins.

One of the few good things about those difficult days was the fact that it was easy to come by a tasty roast and other rare titbits.

During this time old Professor Korntheuer enjoyed great respect. He gave public lectures in which he taught the Dreamlanders to distinguish dangerous bugs from harmless ones. Armed with a triple-barrelled shotgun, he was up and about at first light, wandering through the herds of gazelles, wild boar and marmots, stalking game. But the animals soon got used to the eccentric bespectacled huntsman and came to love the old gentleman. Our windows, on the other hand, suffered so much damage from his gun that it had to be taken away from him.

At night we could only go out if armed with a lantern and a gun, and even then we had to take great care. Traps, snares, pitfalls and spring-guns made the city even more dangerous than it already was. But to allow something like that to put them off the pursuit of pleasure was the one thing that never occurred to the Dreamers.

III

The depths to which public morality had sunk presented a great opportunity to my fellow artist Castringius. His
pornographica
were sought after, he was the fashion. Drawings such as
The Lascivious Orchid Inseminating the Embryo
were much admired. Hector von Brendel bought a complete series from him because Melitta thought them ‘fun’. At first she was very much taken with them and had them nicely framed and hung in her boudoir. But it turned out to be merely a caprice and after a few days they had to go. An occasional beau of hers, an officer of dragoons, was allowed to take them; in return he presented her with a pair of antique emerald earrings. That very same evening the officer took the drawings to the café where they happened to be holding a raffle. The proceeds were to go towards helping those who were suffering the consequences of their dissolute ways; until then there had been no ward for them in our hospital. Quite a lot of money was collected, Blumenstich–not the junk dealer–made up the deficit and soon afterwards the first patients were being admitted to the ward next to the children’s hospital in the monastery.

As irony would have it, I was the one who won the drawings and now they were hanging in my room. One day I met Castringius in the street. He was looking for a new apartment, he told me. His studio window and skylight were broken and there were bats hanging like smoked hams from his curtain rail. While he was telling me all this he kept having to ward off the attentions of an importunate ibex with his walking stick. I invited him up, and there were the pictures. His jaw dropped in amazement.

‘How did you come by these pictures?’

I explained.

‘They’re very good. The
White-striped Whip
is my most mature work. It represents a synthesis of future morality. There’s not a woman alive today capable of understanding the implications. It has a real tang to it.’

I agreed with him entirely. I was the only person in the Dream Realm capable of appreciating his artistic achievement. He was an oddball, but I liked him. And why not? He that feels pure, let him cast the first stone.

Suddenly there was noise in the street. We went over to the window. A lot of people were standing round laughing. And there was something to laugh at. Just imagine, the monkey had downed tools and gone on strike! The previous day already Giovanni had left one customer half shaved when his attention was drawn by a horde of macaques rushing past. A beautiful long-tailed guenon had waved at him and the temptation had been too much for our barber’s assistant. That time his philosophical master had managed to restrain him with a combination of the cane and the argument that time was divisible into tiny eternities. Now, however, no amount of reasoning could hold him back. He gracefully climbed up the drainpipe, grasped the princess’s coffee flask with his prehensile tail, made himself comfortable on the window-ledge of my former apartment, now in a ruinous state and empty, and played on a Jew’s harp he had concealed in his cheek pouch. The old princess gave a shriek of horror and tried to hit the coffee-thief with a broom, but he immediately threw the flask away and grabbed the broom. You should have seen the speed with which the lady disappeared, to reappear on the second floor. We had a perfect view of the duel from my window. Giovanni Battista was having a high old time. First of all he wrested her main weapon–an old pair of fire-tongs–from her and let her have the broom back; in the course of this he almost became a flying monkey! I had left a number of bottles of Indian ink behind and he used these as missiles. And an excellent shot he was, too; we all cheered him on while the princess swore like a fish wife.

Suddenly he reappeared, wearing the old woman’s filthy bonnet, swung out of the window and slid back down the drainpipe, grimacing grotesquely. At the window upstairs the princess was calling for the police, while at the bottom the barber was waiting with his cane. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, he shouted at the monkey.