Free Jarmila by Ernst Weiß Page A

tests him sorely in Prague but also leads to him making the acquaintance of a wretched man, the fate of whom is the main concern of the text. Again and again the broken watch crops up in the course of the story, and ultimately it is a part of the watch, the “small sharp spring” with which the unhappy “hero” of the tale takes his own life. It is not, however, with the aid of this timepiece alone that Weiss organises his novella: the story-teller works with a whole system of motifs and clues which are artfully developed and decoded one by one.
    Almost as important as the watch itself is the motif of feathers that derives from it (
die Feder
in German meaning both “feather” and “spring”): the watch spring gives way to “feathers”, and vice versa, and from feathers it is just a small leap to geese, and from there to other associations. The narrator contemplates the gruesome plucking of live geese at the beginning of the tale,thus anticipating the situation of the watchmaker in his love-hate relationship with Jarmila as he feels squeezed between “her sweet, plump knees” like the poor animals from which she rips the down. The interweaving of associations is so deft and coherent that a circle of motifs is often rounded off and completed, when small feathers gather round the feet of the dead Jarmila, for example, the toy trader is reminded of his very first encounter with the village beauty: she was sitting on a cloth plucking geese, warming her feet in the feathers which floated to the ground.
    Weiss worked plenty of clues into the framework story set between the wars. He signals the fatal outcome of the action early on, and certain warnings flare at suitable points in the text. While the watchmaker is attempting to repair the watch, the spring makes a noise “like … a revolver being cocked”, and this corresponds to a similar noise when the watchmaker—and lover—wants to more softly cushion the head of Jarmila who has plunged to her death, her neck snapping “like the spring of a broken watch”. When the first-person narrator supposes to read in the expert hands of the man that “he has never killed anyone”, his misinterpretation becomes a leading clue as the watchmaker only mumbles and averts his eyes—bad signs indeed. There is talk at various points of instinct and “strange” premonition which heighten the impression that the reader is witness to a fated doom.
    The title character of the “love story from Bohemia” is one of those peculiar female characters often encountered in Weiss’ work. He has chosen to endow her withdemon-like characteristics, a desire-driven creature, who, while she is capable of kindling love and receiving it, cannot return love in the true sense of the word. This Jarmila, who almost openly parades her adultery for the whole village to see and proudly “[gives] a frivolous toss of her beautiful blonde hair”, appears as a siren who draws the obedient watchmaker into the feather loft again and again with her “cooing, enticing, husky voice”: that place that will be her ruin. She abandons herself to the man in a manner otherwise unknown among “country girls” and he is powerless in the face of her unrestrained ways which both attract and repel him.
    The watchmaker can only defend himself verbally in his dilemma by accusing her of being “cold”—a popular idea—and shouting after her in death that she “has gone to hell without a soul, or to heaven”.
     
    When Ernst Weiss was writing
Jarmila
in his room in the Hotel d’Albret in Paris in the summer of 1937 and sending a fictitious trader of “average grade Bohemian apples” on a journey from the French capital to Prague, he would still have been able to undertake the journey through Nazi-Germany himself, had the money and motive not been lacking. Although regarded as a Jew and a writer of “decadent” works by the Third Reich, the brown-clad wielders of power couldn’t simply have arrested him