Flotsam by Erich Maria Remarque Read Free Book Online

know which way to look.
    “After all, I can’t play here,” he said finally.
    “But why can’t you?” the girl asked. “Do play, it’s so tiresome here.”
    “Miriam!” the mother called.
    “The child is right,” said the old man with the scar on his forehead sitting beside the violinist. “Go ahead and play. It will entertain us all and I don’t think there is any rule against it.”
    The violinist still hesitated. Then he took the bow out of the case, tightened it, and raised the violin to his shoulder. Through the room floated the first clear notes.
    It seemed to Kern as though he felt a caress, as though a hand were smoothing away something inside him. He tried toresist but could not. A shiver ran through him, then suddenly he was filled with a comforting sense of warmth.
    The door of the office opened and the head of the secretary appeared. He came in, leaving the door open behind him. There was a light in the office and the short crooked figure of the secretary was sharply silhouetted in the doorway. He looked as if he were about to say something—but then he tipped his head to one side and listened. Slowly and silently, as if pushed by an invisible hand, the door behind him swung shut.
    Only the violin was there. It filled the heavy, dead air of the room and seemed to transform everything, to melt together the voiceless loneliness of the many little beings cowering in the shadow of the walls and to unite them in one great, yearning lamentation.
    Kern put his arms around his knees. He let his head sink and allowed the flood to stream over him. He felt as if it were sweeping him away somewhere—to himself and to something very alien. The little black-haired girl crouched on the floor beside the violinist. She sat silent and motionless and looked at him.
    The violin was silent.
    Kern, who could play the piano a little, knew enough about music to tell that the playing had been magnificent.
    “Schumann?” asked the old man beside the violinist.
    The latter nodded.
    “Go on playing,” said the girl. “Play something that will make us want to laugh.”
    “Miriam,” called her mother.
    “All right,” said the violinist.
    He raised his bow again.
    Kern looked around and saw bowed heads and the shimmer of raised white faces, he saw sorrow and despair and the soft transfiguration wrought for a few instants by the melody of the violin. He saw this; and he thought of the many similar rooms he had seen, filled with exiles whose one crime was to have been born and to be alive. This existed and at the same time this music existed too. It was incomprehensible. It was at once an undying comfort and a hideous irony. Kern saw that the violinist’s head rested against his instrument as though on the shoulder of a loved one. I won’t give up, he thought, as the twilight deepened through the big room; I will not give up, life is wild and sweet and I do not know it yet; it is a melody, a shout, a cry from distant forests, from undiscovered horizons, in unknown nights—I will not give up.… It was some time before he noticed the music had stopped.
    “What’s that called?” the girl asked.
    “German Dances, by Franz Schubert,” the violinist said huskily.
    The old man beside him laughed. “German Dances!” He rubbed the scar on his forehead. “German Dances!” he repeated.
    The secretary turned the light-switch by the door. “Next,” he said.
    Kern was given an order entitling him to a sleeping place in the Hotel Bristol, and ten tickets for meals at the dining hall on Wenceslaus Square. When he had the tickets in his hand he suddenly realized that he was tremendously hungry, and rushed through the streets for fear he would get there too late.
    He was not too late to get in, but all the seats were taken and he had to wait. Among those who were eating, he saw one of his former professors at the University. He wanted to go up and shake hands with him; but when he had reflected a moment, he decided not to.