After this the priest started to talk about abortion by saying: "Human knowledge reaches its pinnacle in the realization that he is the most highly developed earthly being. No one can deny this." He didn't notice the deliberately exaggerated and suppressed laughter of a few boys. And he slowly continued. He condemned abortion as disagreeable to God from a religious and socio-political point of view. In conclusion, he said: "We are modern. We don't shrink from treating offensive questions with moral seriousness."
The only one who contradicted him was Peter Paulus. He fell—outwardly calm—into such a rage that he said: "If I were a doctor, Father, I myself would—". In reply the priest said heatedly: "Do you believe in God, Paulus?" And Peter Paulus said only: "No". A few minutes before the end of the class, he was expelled from the Hebrew lesson because of social democratic leanings and godlessness.
He left defiantly. Slammed the door.
When the widowed prison chaplain Christian Kohn had to give his only child, who was mentally ill and had heart disease, to an institution, he adopted—nobody knows why—a little cripple. There was much gossip. The most obstinate rumor was that the cripple, Kuno, was a natural son of the chaplain. The mother was said to be the popular Trude, who had been convicted of manslaughter after shooting her disloyal pimp. Trude had been pardoned, with the rejoicing approval of the whole village, because it had turned out that she was pregnant. It was claimed that the sympathetic chaplain had caused Trude's pregnancy. But this was not proved.
Kuno Kohn spent the half-awake first part of his youth in the dreary stone rooms and yards of the penitentiary. His adoptive father had little concern for the boy. He was absent for weeks at a time. Left in the care of a morose servant, whose main occupation was to manage the miserable financial affairs of the chaplain, and lacking sufficient care, lacking playmates, lacking stimulation and love, the crippled child could not develop. Remained always dwarfish. He slunk around, pale and dreamy. Intimidated and timorous. Toward evening, bold shadows and horrific noises teemed on the twisty stairs with their grated windows, and in the great gloomy halls and passages. A more robust boy would have ignored such peripheral things, if he had noticed them at all. But on Kuno Kohn the most insignificant thing left a deep impression, the most minor thing had meaning, and horrified him. Everywhere and from everything he feared disaster. Nothing was familiar to him. The eternal fear made him into a little darting ghost himself, and gave his consumptive eyes a phosphorescent glow. If he was sent out late at night, perhaps to get milk or kerosene, he would pray in feverish fervor to dear God. He would come back breathless and white as chalk.
More than anything, Kuno Kohn was afraid of the thousand-fold darkness before falling asleep. In the past, a tiny lamp had been put into the room for him; the reddish melancholy glow calmed him a little. On the soft wall the strangest grimaces and battles appeared, but also tin soldiers marching and a delightful jumble of fairies and cake plates and queens, until sleep came. After a time, the chaplain decided not to allow any more such mollycoddling of the soul of his son. Kuno would have to live in the dark. Gone was the tiny bit of visibility. The innumerable incomprehensible events of chaos rolled about the little boy. More of the world pressed into the small bedroom of the humpback than the entire day had contained. Kuno Kohn had lost the body that was supposed to lie in the bed: only fright and helplessness and longing were left. The worst was when the desolate indistinctness took on the shape of visions or touches. The Kohn boy then cried out despairingly. Either the cry was not heard by anyone or it carried no clear meaning. In prisons there are always yells in the night from somewhere. Kuno often lay for a long time, until the unfathomable hole, which had so many incomprehensible contents, admitted the lively pictures that brought dreams and sleep: burglars, or perhaps a hackney cab journey in the sun, a visit to his little ill brother, a game with street children, the dear, sad angel eyes of Maria Müller, for whom he would gladly die.
The prisoners were Kuno Kohn's good acquaintances. Not the guards; these were indeed quite friendly to him but there was an instinctive suspicion underneath. On the other hand, the ruffians and gamblers, sex killers and robbers, the most famous burglars, and most of the other distinguished old-established residents welcomed the little humpback warmly, by a slight nod of the head or almost imperceptible grin, whenever he came to watch with wide-open dreamy eyes the silent gray work. Only the fences, profiteers, confidence men, defrauders, swindlers, most of the bankrupts and some of the pimps, remained indifferent. In the course of the year, Kuno Kohn had made friends particularly with the youthful burglar Benjamin. The two often sat for hours together. If the guards looked the other way… Benjamin spoke enthusiastically to the humpback. Of sun. And freedom. And of the redemption of mankind. Kuno Kohn arranged Benjamin's secret traffic with the outside world and did various favors for his friend; he provided him with cigarettes, books, small tools. When once a volume of Goethe and a little cigarette ash were found in Benjamin's cell, Kohn was suspected. After the escape of the burglar, which happened shortly afterwards, which could have happened only with outside help, a message was sent to the clergyman. He forbade his son the company of the prisoners. The guards were not allowed to let him in any more.
The great problems that tormented Kuno Kohn constantly, as soon as he was able to get his thoughts together to some degree, were mainly death and God. At the age of four or five he did not believe in death, at least not in his own. And he prayed to the dear God daily before he lay down to sleep. "I am small, my heart is pure, no one shall live there but God alone". But if he had done something during the day that seemed sinful to him—and that almost always happened—he would add (sitting in bed or standing if it was particularly bad) long and remorseful monologues until he fell asleep, overfatigued, with fingers still folded and tears in his eyes. If darkness and fear came, he always prayed. Gradually his doubts increased, to the point where he had to believe in his own death and abandon his faith in God. When he started school, there began the fullness of suffering which some children find there.
NOTES ABOUT THE NOVEL
Lunatic asylum: Bryller, Lola.