Brecht Collected Plays: 1: Baal; Drums in the Night; In the Jungle of Cities; Life of Edward II of England; & 5 One Act Plays: "Baal", "Drums in the Night", "In the Jungle of Ci (World Classics) by Bertolt Brecht Page B

lazy.
    EKART
goes to the door
: It’s a mild night. The wind’s warm. Like milk. I love all this. One should never drink. Or not so much.
Back to the table
. It’s a mild night. Now and for another three weeks into the autumn a man can live on the road all right.
He sits down
.
    WATZMANN : Do you want to leave tonight? You’d like to get rid of him, I suppose? He’s a burden.
    JOHANNES : You’d better be careful.
    Baal enters slowly
.
    WATZMANN : Is that you, Baal?
    EKART
hard
: What do you want now?
    BAAL
enters, sits down
: What a miserable hole this place has turned into!
The waitress brings drink
.
    WATZMANN : Nothing’s changed here. Only you, it would appear, have got more refined.
    BAAL : Is that still you, Luise?
    Silence
.
    JOHANNES : Yes, it’s agreeable here. – I have to drink, you see, drink a lot. It makes one strong. Even then one makes one’s way to hell along a path of razors. But not in the same way. As if your legs were giving way under you, yielding, you know. So that you don’t feel the razors at all. With springy loose joints. Besides, I never used to have ideas of this sort, really peculiar ones. Not while everything went well, when I lived a good bourgeois life. But now I have ideas, now that I’ve turned into a genius. Hm.
    EKART
bursting out
: I’d like to be back in the forest, at dawn! The light between the trees is the colour of lemons! I want to go back up into the forest.
    JOHANNES : That’s something I don’t understand, you must buy me another drink, Baal. It’s really agreeable here.
    BAAL : A gin for —
    JOHANNES : No names! We know each other. I have such fearful dreams at night, you know, now and then. But only now and then. It really is agreeable here.
    The wind. They drink
.
    WATZMANN
hums
:
    The trees come in avalanches
    Each very conveniently made.
    You can hang yourself from their branches
    Or loll underneath in their shade.
    BAAL : Where was it like that? It was like that once.
    JOHANNES : She’s still afloat, you see. Nobody’s found her. But sometimes I get a feeling she’s being washed down my throat with all the drink, a very small corpse, half rotted. And she was already seventeen. Now there are rats and weed in her green hair, rather becoming … a little swollen and whitish, and filled with the stinking ooze from the river, completely black. She was always so clean. That’s why she went into the river and began to stink.
    WATZMANN : What is flesh? It decays just like the spirit. Gentlemen, I am completely drunk. Twice two is four. Therefore I am not drunk. But I have intimations of a higher world. Bow! … be hup! … humble! Put the old Adam aside!
Drinks heavily and shakily
. I’ve not reached rock bottom yet, not while I have my intimations, not while I can add up properly that twice two … What is this thing called two? Two – oo, curious word! Two!
Sits down. Baal reaches for his guitar and smashes the light with it
.
    BAAL : Now I’ll sing.
Sings
:
    Sick from the sun, and eaten raw by the weather
    A looted wreath crowning his tangled head
    He called back the dreams of a childhood he had lost
altogether
    Forgot the roof, but never the sky overhead.
    Then speaks
: My voice is not entirely clear as a bell.
Tunes the guitar
.
    EKART : Go on singing, Baal.
    BAAL
goes on singing
:
    O you whose life it has been always to suffer
    You murderers they threw out from heaven and hell
    Why did you not stay in the arms of your mother
    Where it was quiet, and you slept, and all was well?
    Speaks
. The guitar’s not in tune either.
    WATZMANN : A good song. Very apt in my case. Romantic.
    BAAL
goes on singing
:
    Still he explores and scans the absinthe-green ocean
    Though his mother give him up for lost
    Grinning and cursing, or weeping at times with contrition
    Always in search of that land where life is best.
    WATZMANN : I can’t find my glass. The table’s rocking stupidly. Put the light on. How’s a man to find his mouth?
    EKART : Idiot! Can you see