Free The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch

man who was in a hurry. But it was not only the beard that concealed his face; he wore eyeglasses as well, through which he shot severe glances at the passers-by; and it was literally impossible to picture to oneself that a man like this, waddling with such haste in pursuit of some urgent business and shooting out such sharp and severe glances in spite of his soft appearance, was probably a kind and affectionate fellow in some other sphere of his existence, and that there must be women to whom he unbent in love, women and children to whom the beard uncovered a kindly smile, women who might dare to seek in a kiss the rosy lips in their dark-bearded cave.
    When Joachim caught sight of this man he had mechanically followed him. It did not matter to him in any case where he went. Since he had learned that Bertrand had a Berlin agent for his firm, and that the office was in one of the streets between the Alexanderplatz and the Stock Exchange, he had sometimes felt drawn to this neighbourhood as formerly he had felt drawn to the working-class suburb—and the fact that he no longer had any need to look for Ruzena out there was almost like a promotion for her. But he did not come here, all the same, on the chance of meeting Bertrand: on the contrary he avoided the place whenever he knew Bertrand was in Berlin, nor indeed had he any interest in Bertrand’s agent. It was simply so strange to him that these should be the surroundings in which one had to picture Bertrand’s real life; and when he walked through those streets it sometimes happened that he not only scrutinized the fronts of the houses, as if to discover what offices were concealed behind them, but even peeped under the hats of the civilians as if they were women. Sometimes he wondered at this himself, for he was unaware that he searched these faces to discover whether their existence was so totally different from his own, and whether they could give him a clue to any qualities that Bertrand might have adopted from them, but still kept concealed. Yes, the secrecy of this life of theirs was so complete that they did not even need beards to hide themselves behind. Indeed they would have looked a little more confidential and less hypocritical to him if they had worn beards, andthis may have been one of the reasons why he sauntered in the wake of the fat, hurrying man. Suddenly it seemed to him that the man in front of him fitted very strangely the picture he had always had of Bertrand’s agent. It was silly, perhaps, but when several passers-by greeted the man Joachim was quite delighted that Bertrand’s agent should enjoy so much respect. He would not have been excessively surprised if Bertrand himself, melodramatically transformed, small and corpulent and full-bearded, had waddled up to him: for why should Bertrand have preserved his former external appearance, seeing that he had slipped into a different world? And even though Joachim knew that what he thought was without sense or sequence, yet it was as though the apparently confused skein concealed a sequence: one had only to disentangle the threads which bound Ruzena to these people and find this deeper and very secret knot—and perhaps an end of one thread had lain in his hand that time when he had divined Bertrand as Ruzena’s real lover; but now his hand was empty, and all that he had to go on was that Bertrand had once excused himself on the plea that he had to spend the evening with a business friend, and Joachim could not rid himself of the idea that this man had been the business friend. Probably they had both gone to the Jäger Casino, and the man had stuck a fifty-mark note into Ruzena’s hand.
    When a man follows another in the street, even if it is only mechanically and with ostensible indifference, he will soon find himself attaching all sorts of wishes, benevolent and malevolent, to the man he is following. Probably he will want at least to see the man’s face and wish that he should turn round, even