The woman returned to the office because a word had been struck out. The clerk showed her the sentence, explained that it expressed the very same thing in a more decorous form, and waited for her to withdraw; yet she remained standing, her finger pressed upon the place where her words had been amended, with an obstinacy that was beginning to try his patience.
“I said she was afraid of him.”
“I wrote that they lived on bad terms.”
“That is not the same thing.”
The clerk at last lifted his eyes. She wore a gown whose hem had gathered the dust of the street, a shawl far too heavy for the season, and that look peculiar to those who have had to repeat a simple entreaty for a very long time before anyone consented to hear it. Her name was Marta. The dead woman of whom she spoke was named Johanna Christiane Woost.
The Woman in the Hallway
In 1821, in Leipzig, Johann Christian Woyzeck had killed Woost. A former soldier, bred to the barber’s trade, he had led a wandering existence marked by destitution and long stretches without shelter or steady bread. Acts of violence against the same woman had preceded the murder. Following his arrest, he spoke in particular of voices that had driven him to the act; his state of mind was to become the subject of a dispute in which physicians, jurists, and the public would all take part.
Yet, in the office where Marta stood waiting, the initial difficulty appeared far slighter: how was one to transcribe what a neighbour had heard without lending it, so the clerk reasoned, an exaggerated weight? He harboured no desire to falsify. He wished merely to draw up a proper instrument, cleansed of repetitions, hesitations, and that inner turmoil which causes witnesses to say the same thing several times over.
He had, therefore, abridged.
And in that abridgment, Marta had recognized the exact disappearance of what she had come to deliver.
Words Set in Order
The clerk’s name was Friedrich. He had been taught to distinguish bare fact from passion, and not to encumber the dockets with grievances that added nothing to the knowledge of the events. He was a conscientious man; his superior even reproached him at times with a slowness which he himself imputed to the care of doing things well. Thus, he received the woman’s protest as an unjust accusation.
“You cannot know what she felt.”
“I know what she said to me.”
“Then give the words.”
Marta repeated them. They were plain words, devoid of any striking turn of phrase, very like those one uses every day to utter an apprehension one does not yet wish to call entirely by its name. Friedrich wrote them down, then asked on what date they had been spoken. She faltered. In that hesitation, he discerned a weakness in the testimony; she, above all, felt the shame of never having thought, while a neighbour was speaking to her, to lay up a precise day for a murder that had not yet come to pass.
She cast about for a landmark: linen hung out to dry, a visitor, the day following an errand. The clerk waited. For the first time, his silence did not urge her to make an end of it.
The Woyzeck Case
Meanwhile, the affair was assuming an importance that went far beyond the immediate circumstances of the crime. Clarus, the physician appointed to examine the prisoner, interrogated Woyzeck and concluded that he was fully accountable. Objections were raised; a second examination upheld the finding. The disputes turned upon the mental condition of the accused, upon the means of determining it, and upon the consequences that ought properly to follow for his punishment.
It would be an error to assign from afar the all too convenient parts of a past unanimously blind and a present that at last comprehends all things. The division of minds already existed. Men of that age harboured doubts, disputed the findings, and published their reasons; the trial unfolded amidst these voices, though their multiplying numbers could not suffice to alter its outcome.
Friedrich read these debates whenever he could lay hands upon the pamphlets. He found in them rigorous terms, arguments, and a depth of thought that impressed him. Then he would return to Marta’s sheet of paper and marvel that a docket capable of holding so many explanations concerning the man should have left so little room for the woman’s fear.
One ought not to have had to choose between these two matters. That was precisely the easy course against which he had to guard: either to comprehend the murderer, or to remember the victim. A justice worthy of the name would have needed to sustain both.
The Preserved Copy
Marta asked one day whether her testimony would alter anything. Friedrich would have liked to answer yes. He had learned enough of his calling no longer to mistake the legal utility of a deposition for the promise of a judgment; he had also reflected enough upon his first correction to know that an instrument may deserve to be preserved even when it will save no one.
“It will state what you said.”
She seemed disappointed, then nodded her head. She had walked so far to obtain this much that she could not tell on the spot whether it were little or a great deal.
When she had departed, the clerk looked at the two drafts. The first was shorter, more regular, more like the other leaves in the file. He had drawn it up thus to perform his duty well. The second revealed a woman searching for her dates and insisting upon a word; it resembled a report less, and what had actually passed in the office more.
He kept them both. It seemed necessary to him that his own correction should not itself vanish without leaving a trace.
After the Judgment
Woyzeck was executed in 1824. Long afterwards, Büchner took up this material in a dramatic design that remained unfinished. The stage was to bestow upon the affair other characters, other relations, a power not to be confounded with that of judicial records. The work does not constitute an official transcript to which fine words have been added; it opens a space wherein the questions may endure after the end.
Marta knew nothing of this posterity. She returned one day to seek some piece of information and found Friedrich occupied with another woman. This one spoke too fast, doubled back upon herself, and could not recall the name she was asked to give. In former days, he would have summarized her words without waiting.
This time, he laid down his pen.
“Begin again from the start,” he said. “We have time.”
Marta stood a moment by the door, then went away without interrupting him. She had obtained neither a different end nor any redress. Yet something, at last, had ceased to vanish quite so easily.