Anarchistbanjo's World

Alraune by Hanns Heinz Ewers and translated by Joe E Bandel

A slight shock flew through her limbs. She sat up, drunk with
sleep.
“What do you want?” she stammered.
Then she recognized the professor. “Leave me alone.”
“Come on Alma, don’t be foolish,” the Privy Councilor
admonished her. “It is finally time. Be sensible and don’t give us any
trouble.”
With a quick jerk he pulled the sheets away throwing her onto
the floor.
The eyes of the princess widened, “Very good! The girl is very
well endowed–that is convenient.”
But the prostitute pulled her nightshirt down and covered herself
as well as possible with a pillow.
“Go away!” She screamed. “I won’t do it!”
The Privy Councilor waved to the assistant doctor.
“Go,” he commanded. “Hurry, we don’t have any time to lose.”
Dr. Petersen quickly left the room. The princess came up and sat
on the bed, talked to the girl.
“Don’t be silly, little one. It won’t do any good.”
She attempted to caress her, massaging her with fat be-ringed
fingers over throat and neck, down to her breasts.
Alma pushed her away, “What do you want?–Who are you?–Go
away, away–I won’t do it!”
The princess would not be rebuffed, “I only want what’s best for
you child–I’ll give you a pretty ring and a new dress–”
“I don’t want a ring,” screamed the prostitute. “I don’t need a
new dress. I want to go from here. Why won’t they leave me in
peace?”
The Privy Councilor opened the glass tube in smiling tranquility.
“Later you will be left in peace–and later you can go. Meanwhile
you have an obligation to fulfill that you agreed to at the very
beginning–Ah, there you are doctor.”
He turned to the assistant doctor who had just entered with a
chloroform mask in his hand.
“Come here quickly.”
The prostitute stared at him with terrified, wide protruding eyes.
“No,” she lamented. “No! No!”
She made as if to spring out of the bed and pushed the assistant
doctor so hard with both hands on his chest as he tried to restrain her
that he staggered back and almost fell down. Then the princess threw
herself onto the girl with wide stretched arms, pressing her back into
the bed with her mighty weight. Her fingers with their many rings
clawed into the luminous flesh as she gripped a long strand of red hair
in her teeth.
The prostitute struggled, kicking her legs into the air, unable to
free her arms or move her body under this mighty burden. She saw as
the doctor placed the mask over her face, heard him lightly counting
“one, two, three–”
She screamed and tried to turn her head to the side away from
the mask, “No! No! I won’t! I won’t! Oh, I can’t breathe–”
Then her screams died away, turned into a pitiful weak whimper,
“Mother–oh–mother.”
Twelve days later the prostitute Alma Raune was delivered to
Criminal Court for imprisonment pending an investigation. The
warrant was issued because she was accused of theft and without any
home of record considered at risk to flee. The charges were brought
by his Excellency Privy Councilor ten Brinken.
Already in the first days the professor had repeatedly asked the
assistant doctor if he had not seen this or that thing that was missing.
The Privy Councilor was missing an old signet ring that he had set to
one side while washing and then left it. He was missing a little money
purse that he had left in his overcoat as well as he could remember.
He asked Dr. Petersen to unobtrusively keep a sharp eye on all
the employees. Then the assistant doctor’s gold watch disappeared
from a room in the clinic where he kept it in a locked drawer in his
writing desk. The drawer had been forcibly opened. A thorough
search of the clinic and all the employees was immediately declared
but nothing was found.
“It must be one of the patients,” the Privy Councilor concluded
and ordered a search of all the rooms as well. This was led by Dr.
Petersen, but again without success.
“Have you forgotten any rooms?” his chief questioned.
“None, your Excellency!” answered the assistant doctor. “Except
Alma’s room.”
“Why haven’t you checked there?” asked the Privy Councilor
again.
“But your Excellency!” Dr. Petersen replied. “That is completely
out of the question. The girl is watched night and day. She has not
once been out of her room and now since she knows that we have
been successful has become completely out of hand. She howls and
screams the entire day and threatens to drive us all crazy. She only
thinks about how she can escape and other ways to frustrate our goal–
To put it straight, your Excellency, it seems impossible to me for us to
keep the girl here the entire time.”
“So,” the Privy Councilor laughed. “Petersen, go and search
room seventeen at once. It does not appear to me that we can count on
the innocence of the prostitute.”
A quarter of an hour later Dr. Petersen came back with a knotted
handkerchief.
“Here are the missing items,” he said. “I found them in the
bottom of the girl’s laundry sack.”
“I thought so!” nodded the Privy Councilor. “Now go and
telephone the police right away.”
The assistant doctor hesitated, “Excuse me, your Excellency, if I
may be permitted to object. The girl is certainly not guilty even if the
evidence seems to speak against her. Your Excellency should have
seen her as I searched the room with the old nurse and finally found
the things. She was completely apathetic, wasn’t concerned at all. She
certainly didn’t have anything to do with the theft. One of the staff
must have taken the items and when threatened by discovery, hid
them in her room.”
The professor grinned, “You are very chivalrous Petersen–But
all the same–telephone the police!”
“Your Excellency,” the assistant doctor pleaded. “Can’t we wait
a little. Perhaps we can question the staff one more time–”
“Listen Petersen,” said the Privy Councilor. “You should think
this through a little more. It doesn’t matter at all if the prostitute has
stolen these things. The important thing is that we will be rid of her
and she will be safe until her hour is come. Isn’t that true? In prison
she will be kept safe for us, much safer than here. You know how
well we are paying her and I am willing to pay her even more for this
little inconvenience–after it is all over.
It won’t be any worse for her in prison than here–Her room will
be a little smaller, her bed a little harder and the food won’t be as
good. But she will have companions–and that will be worth a lot in
her condition.”
Dr. Petersen looked at him, still not entirely convinced. “Quite
true, your Excellency, but–won’t she talk there? It could be very
uncomfortable if–”
The Privy Councilor smiled, “How so? Let her talk, as much as
she wants. Hysteria- mendax–you know that she is hysterical and that
hysterical people are known to lie! No one will believe her, especially
since she’s a hysterical pregnant woman. What would she say
anyway? The story of the prince, that my nephew swindled her with
so neatly?
Do you believe that the judge, the attorney, the prison director,
the pastor or any other reasonable person would even listen to such
obstruse nonsense?–Besides, I will speak to the prison doctor myself–
who is he anyway?”
“My colleague, Dr. Perscheidt,” said the assistant doctor.
“Ah, your friend, little Perscheidt,” the professor confirmed. “I
know him as well. I will ask him to keep an especially watchful eye
on our patient. I will tell him that she had an affair with an
acquaintance of mine that sent her to my clinic and that this
gentleman is prepared to take full care of the child in every way. I will
also tell him about the extraordinary lies I have observed in the
patient and even what stories she is likely to tell him.
Even more, we will retain Legal Councilor Gontram for her
defense at our own cost and explain the case to him so that he will not
believe anything she says either– Are you still afraid Petersen?”
The assistant doctor looked at his chief in admiration.
“No, your Excellency,” he said. “Your Excellency has thought of
everything. Whatever is in my power to do, I am at your service,
Excellency.”
The Privy Councilor sighed loudly, then reached out his hand.
“Thank you dear Petersen. You will not believe how difficult
these little lies have been for me. But what is a person to do? Science
has always demanded such sacrifices. Our brave predecessors, the
doctors of the late Middle Ages, were forced to steal bodies from
cemeteries so they could learn anatomy. They risked being criminally
charged with violation of a corpse and similar nonsense. We can’t
complain, must take such little deceptions into the bargain, for the
sake of our sacred science.
Now go Petersen. Telephone the police!”
The assistant doctor left. In his heart was a great and honest
admiration for his chief.
Alma Raune was sentenced for burglary. Her stubborn denial and
prior conviction worked against her. Despite that, she was given a
light sentence, apparently because she was really very beautiful and
also because Legal Councilor Gontram was defending her. She only
received one year and six months imprisonment and the time she had
already served applied to it as well.
This was further reduced at the request of his Excellency ten
Brinken even though her conduct while in prison could in no way be
considered model behavior. In his gracious request for a pardon he
concluded that her bad behavior was due to her morbidly hysterical
condition and also stressed that she would soon become a mother.
In the early morning at the first signs of labor she was released
and taken to the ten Brinken clinic. There she was placed in her old
white room, No. seventeen, at the end of the corridor. The labor pains
had already begun during transport and Dr. Petersen tried to calm her
by saying it would soon be over. But he was wrong.
The labor lasted that entire day, that night and the following day.
They let up for a little while and then returned even more strongly.
The girl screamed and whimpered, writhing in pain and misery.
The third short paragraph in the leather bound book A. T. B. is in
the hand of the assistant doctor and deals with this remarkable birth.
He performed, with the assistance of the prison doctor, the very
difficult delivery that lasted for three days and ended with the death of
the mother. The Privy Councilor himself was not present.
In this account Dr. Petersen stressed the strong constitution and
the excellent build of the mother, which should have allowed a very
easy delivery. Only the exceptionally rare presentation of the baby
caused the complications to take place that in the end made it
impossible to save both mother and child.
It was further mentioned that the child, a girl, while being pulled
out of the mother’s body began an extraordinary shrieking that was so
shrill and penetrating that neither gentlemen nor the midwife had ever
experienced anything like it before in other births. The screams
sounded almost as if the child were experiencing unbelievable pain at
being so violently separated from the mother’s womb.
The screams became so penetrating and dreadful that they could
scarcely bear the horror of it. His colleague, Dr. Perscheidt, broke into
a cold sweat and had to sit down. After the birth the infant
immediately became quiet and didn’t even whimper.
The midwife while bathing the delicate and thin child
immediately noticed an unusually developed atresia Vaginalis where
the legs halfway down to the knees had grown together. After further
investigation it was found to be only the external skin that was
binding the legs together and could be corrected later through a quick
operation.
As for the mother, she had certainly endured heavy pain and
suffering without any chloroform, local anesthesia–or even as much
as a Scopolamine-morphine injection. She was hemorrhaging so badly
they could not risk further stress to her heart. She screamed the entire
time for all those long hours and only during the moment of birth
itself did the dreadful shrieks of the infant drown out the screams of
the mother.
Her moans became weaker, some two and a half-hours later she
lost consciousness and died. The direct cause of death was a torn
uterus and the resulting hemorrhage.
The body of the prostitute, Alma Raune, was assigned for
dissection since her relatives in Halberstadt raised no claims and
refused to pay the cost of burial when they were notified. The
Anatomy professor Holzberger used it in his lectures and assigned
parts of it to each of his students to study. These certainly contributed
vastly to their education except for the head, which had been given to
senior medical student Fassman of the Hansea fraternity. He was
supposed to prepare it as a finished skull but forgot it over vacation.
He decided that he already had enough skulls and no longer needed to
clean it. Instead he fashioned a beautiful dice cup out of the top of the
skull. He already had five dice that had been made from the vertebrae
of the executed murderer Noerrissen and now needed a suitable dice
cup.
Senior medical student Fassman was not superstitious, but he
maintained that his dice cup served him extremely well when playing
for his morning half-pint. He sang such high praise for his skull dice
cup and bone dice that they gradually acquired a certain reputation,
first with his own friends, then within his fraternity and finally over
the entire student body.
Senior medical student Fassman loved his dice cup and almost
saw it as blackmail when his Excellency Privy Councilor ten Brinken
asked him to give up his famous dice cup and dice at the time of his
exam. It so happened that he was very weak in gynecology and the
professor had a reputation for giving very strict and difficult exams.
The result was that he passed his exam with flying colors. For as long
as he owned it, the dice cup brought him good luck.
There is one other curious thing that remains in the story of these
two people that without ever seeing each other became Alraune’s
father and mother, how they were brought together in a strange
manner even after their death. The Anatomy Building janitor,
Knoblauch, threw out the remaining bones and tatters of flesh into a
common shallow grave in the gardens of the Anatomy Building. It
was behind the wall where the white roses climb and grow so
abundantly–