I have an article to write

I am puzzled each time anyone supposes I have money. It began with the pickpocket. The most recent instance was Heinrich, who couldn’t believe I wanted an advance for the article he wanted me to write.

I have never written an article in my life, but Heinrich was insistent, and I don’t like to say no. For the past week, Heinrich has been the editor of an apolitical weekly paper called Red Dawn, and he is a mild and blameless person.

With my fifty marks, I bought a pack of Belgian cigarettes and a bottle of Moselle and settled down in my room to compose. Frau Stabhorn, my landlady, supported my efforts with a stub of pencil and the tattered exercise book of one of her grandchildren. Now the paper is willing, but the spirit is weak. What on earth am I going to write?

The Moselle tastes as flaccid and murky as the decayed philanthropy of an unhappily married vintner. The Belgian cigarettes taste of rancid hay. I wasn’t in Belgium during the war and have never harmed a hair on the head of any Belgian. In the event that these Belgian cigarettes don’t constitute collective punishment but some individual act of revenge, then it seems to me this is another case of the wrong person catching it. A grey melancholy lames my mind. And there I was, promising myself stimulation through the use of…stimulants.

My room at Frau Stabhorn’s—Emmy Stabhorn, née Baske, widow—isn’t a proper room at all, but the passageway between her kitchen–living room and her bedroom. It has the feeling of a stretch coffin. The kitchen door was purloined during the last month of the war by the neighbor, Lydia Krake, and chopped up for firewood. Said Lydia straightaway came under suspicion, and this was duly confirmed by the one-eyed seer on Engelbertstrasse. In spite of which Lydia Krake and Frau Stabhorn remained on-again, off-again besties.

Prior to the currency reform,acid.^*1 they were both engaged in diverse black-market schemes, which they pursued with the nervous tenacity that imparts the fiery gleam of sexual sunset to the financial machinations of aging ladies.

Lydia Krake was the occasional supplier of fresh meat whose provenance remained, at least as far as I was concerned, obscure and unexplained. I was trusted, but never let into the secret. To be more precise, I wasn’t taken seriously.

Because I was hungry, I was offered some of the meat. Probably it was so that they might see how its consumption would affect the human organism. Acts of impulsive charity were not in the nature of Frau Krake or Frau Stabhorn. The meat perked me up and seemed to do me no harm. It wasn’t a varietal I had previously encountered. Perhaps it came from exotic animals that had perished in one of the zoos. I only hope it wasn’t human. Eating human flesh carries adverse long-term consequences.

The one-eyed seer was also involved in the trade, till one day found him in ugly opposition to the ladies. To their profound satisfaction he had to go to prison later for falsification of ration cards. On the day of his arrest, his two antagonists were all sweetness and light. They laid cards for each other, a wistful return to the habits of their fortune-telling mothers. Shortly afterwards, though, they were once more sundered, this time over a mild-mannered theology-student-cum-spiv, to whom Frau Stabhorn had given a hundred elastic corsets on commission. Lydia Krake had sunk some of her precious capital in the corsets. The theology student vanished without trace. God knows what he did with the corsets. Not long ago I ran into him outside a stall that sold potato pancakes. He informed me that he had changed horses and was now a law student.

The little Stabhorns stream into the kitchen through the door that isn’t a door. They like to swing on the sticky curtain that separates my room from their grandmother’s bedroom. At night, I hear Frau Stabhorn snoring. By day, the curtain gives way every two or three hours. It is among my tasks to reattach it.

The ceiling of my room is all holes. The house suffers from age and natural decay. It’s like a gouty pensioner, who has no more reason to shave or smell nice. Even in its youth, it won’t have had much in the way of charm. No traces persist of onetime beauty—not like the old ladies in fin de siècle novels. What it does bear are traces of bomb damage.

I have tried several times to plaster over the holes in the ceiling. Probably the plaster is no good, because it keeps falling out—to the delight of the children, who use it to mark hopscotch boxes on the floor.

The Stabhorn family consists of Frau Stabhorn and numerous grandchildren. From time to time various daughters and sons-in-law appear, to greet the existing children with noisy affection and drop off another one. The Stabhorn breed is vigorous and prolific.

I know that a dislike of children exposes one to the horrified contempt of all political parties and the main religious and atheistical philosophies. Children are the bonny little blossoms in the moldering garden of life. As I write, a couple of the bonny little blossoms are trying to spread a mixture of jam and plaster of paris all over my arms and legs.

Among other things, Frau Stabhorn dealt in illicit jam. One of her sons-in-law seems to be sitting on the source of an inexhaustible supply of it. There are buckets of it all over, the whole flat is sticky with it. After the currency reform, the flood of jam dried up for a while. Jammy traces on furniture and infants started to congeal and lost some of their stickiness. But now things are as they were. Jam everywhere. A sweet, red, toxic jam. A decidedly malignant jam, the enjoyment of which is followed by repentance.

If it looked anything like it tasted, the jam would have to be green—a lurid poison green like absinthe, or maybe turquoise with a contrary touch of purple, like the nightmare vision of one of those degenerate painters.

You’re prepared to eat many things if you’re hungry, but I think for myself that if this jam were green instead of red I wouldn’t be able to get it down. Though, actually, why not? What’s wrong with a blue tomato? Or a lemon-yellow veal chop? Isn’t it all acculturation and biological conservatism? I wonder how many more prejudices I’d find myself guilty of if I thought seriously?

At this point, I could write either a forensic disquisition or a surrealist elegy on jam. But I think Heinrich would say his readers weren’t interested in anything so depressing. Or I’d have to turn the jam story into something incomprehensible, like late Hölderlin or early Rilke. The incomprehensible always gets a free pass from the reader. He imagines he understands it, and that makes him feel good about himself.

Every now and again Frau Stabhorn comes skipping through my room. Her semi-legal existence hasn’t worn her down; on the contrary it’s kept her vitally trim. Sometimes I think hateful thoughts and wish that instead of giving her grandchildren jam to play with she would give them a hearty spanking. But she’s not a spanker. She’s chirrupy and excited and she skips. Earlier she used to skip around my bed. Not from any carnal motive, but because she kept her stock of black-market cigarettes under my mattress. I don’t know what about the Widow Stabhorn might be enviable aside from her cheerfulness, but I know her to be widely envied. Envious neighbors, so she claims anyway, denounce her to the police. Then I have to lie in bed and play the poor, invalid returnee. The Widow Stabhorn would shed compassionate tears when she told the policeman about me. My bed has never been searched for contraband or substandard goods. It has been known for policemen to offer me cigarettes from the supply with which they had just been bribed.

I suppose I could write about my bed. At the head and foot it has bars of lamentable metal. I wonder who came up with that idea, and why? Why the waste of metal? If the bars were at the sides, that would at least have the effect of preventing a sufferer from nightmares from falling out. But show me the person who ever fell out of bed via the head end or the foot end. So why the bars? As an ornament? Who would take an imitation of prison bars for ornamentation? So, no, I don’t want to write about that. I’m sure readers would have zero interest in an account of prison bars, broken springs, and the damaged psychology of bed manufacturers.

Why do I have to write something anyway?

It all began with the pickpocket. I was standing outside the opera, waiting for the tram to take me to my cousin Johanna.

The November day was as grey as a whole wagon-load of Prayer and Repentance days.^*2 May God forgive me, but I have something against Prayer and Repentance Day. It offends my democratic sense of freedom to be told to repent by some external authority that has no business in my inner life. Given our terrible climate, November is wall-to-wall expiation anyway. Everything ought to be done to cheer people up this month. Fountains of red wine should spring up on street corners, airplanes should scatter flowering lilac boughs from the skies, bands of jolly musicians should process through the town. Municipal, tax, and post offices should be decked out with red lights, public officials should wear parrot feathers and garlands, and prosecutors and judges should punctuate legal proceedings with nifty little dances. Heads of state, finance ministers, and the like should be kept from giving speeches or from taking a position on any of the important matters of the day—at best, they might be allowed to run a carousel for the free use of disadvantaged youngsters.

Such a profligate mode of life would require the approval of the relevant ministries. But November and fog and grey and morality and repentance—that’s too much. It gnaws at the marrow of the hardworking citizen, it saps the will to live, it’s enough to lay low the most resistant elector.

So I was standing at the tram stop in the grey mizzle thinking all kinds of colorful thoughts in an effort to animate my inner landscape. A damp chill was making its way up through my leaky soles.

When the tram arrived, there was a sudden crush, as though they were handing out thousand-mark notes inside. The people surged forward as though it was a matter of getting to their loved-one’s deathbed or on board the last aerial lifeboat to Mars.

I find it hard to believe that these grim elbowers and pushers were only trying to get home. Or to work. Or to some task or other. Their elbows were pointed, their muscles taut, their lips compressed with resolve. The look in their eyes became steely and hard. Ancient crones fought for a place in the sun with muscular factory workers, with pallidly resolute clerks, with grimly furious housewives. Children wailed, dragged into close-quarters combat by their berserk mothers. Satchel-toting youths insinuated themselves into the crush—their flailing technique gave them a great advantage. They pressed past everyone except one single old lady. She would not give way, would not step aside, she rammed her shopping bag full of earthy carrots into the hair and faces of the oncomers. She stood up on the running board, holding the balustrade with her free hand, her felt hat was skew-whiff—she pushed on, she had captured the platform, she was within sniffing distance of the conductor’s armpit. She had won! She looked wildly about her, panting. Perhaps she was in training for the next Olympics.

The justification for such lethal barging, at least for any rational being, could only be paradise. Inasmuch as one can imagine any sort of paradise on earth. I think of it differently every day. Today my vision is of a mild bed of clouds in smiling light, in blue sky. Somewhere there are orange balls and velvety silver leaves and dark green. A pink flamingo flies with the pinions an old eagle has developed in wise solitude, singing with the gentleness of a newly opened cowslip on the forest edge. Like a nightingale.

It occurs to me I have never heard a nightingale. The nightingale is the most important bird in literature. No mediocre poem without its nightingale, no good poem either. The nightingale sobs, the nightingale cries, the nightingale toots and whistles. For hundreds of years, poets have been dining off nightingales. I have read and heard so much about nightingales, I really believed I knew nightingales. And I have never heard a nightingale. That shows you how well publicity works, and I always thought I would never fall for publicity. Do nightingales even exist?

You never know if you’ll live to see another day. If I’m spared till next summer, then I’ll go and listen to a nightingale. I hope I don’t forget. There’s so much you forget to do or neglect to do. I wonder if any of the poets who wrote and sang about nightingales ever with their own ears heard a nightingale?

But nightingales here or there, I don’t want to write my piece about them, even though the daily press likes it when authors write about a thing of which they have no knowledge. Profound ignorance persuades great circles of readers; others find it sympathetic. Never mind the critical remnant, they feel strengthened in their self-confidence, confirmed in their superiority, and empowered in their protests, which keep their intellectual muscle from dwindling away. I assume too that the subject of nightingales has been green-lighted and would not be censored by the greater part of our current German dictatorships. For reasons of morality, a lot of things are censored today. Dictatorships are always very strict about what they understand as morals and public ethics. Our former unlamented German dictatorship has, in the way of lower life-forms, procreated by simple fission, and is now called democracy.

At the tram stop, I refrain from barging. I have oodles of time, and what one has, one ought to enjoy mindfully. As I stood there, mindfully, I suddenly felt a hand scrabbling about in my pocket. I reached for the hand and gripped it firmly by the wrist. A man in his middle years had been attempting to rob me. Poor fellow. All I had was a multiple ticket with one ride left on it, and that was in my other pocket. “Walk slowly, don’t run, in your calling it’s best to avoid drawing attention to oneself,” I said to the man, and let go of his wrist. He ran like the clappers across Rudolfplatz. A beginner, I daresay, an amateur.

I felt flattered that the man had thought me worth robbing. You see, I wear neither hat nor coat, just a rather curious jerkin, with small natty skirts. It’s sort of New Look, I tailored it myself from a lady’s coat with history, back when I was released from the POW camp. My cousin Johanna likes to say I look like a hurdy-gurdy man’s monkey when I’m wearing it. Hurdy-gurdy men’s monkeys are sweet creatures, no doubt about it. I wouldn’t mind looking a little more imposing, though.

While I was still enjoying the afterglow of the pickpocket, the tram departed, and I was thwacked on the back in a powerful and populist manner. It was my cousin Magnesius, who is a notorious thwacker of backs. “Come and have a beer with me,” he said, and we disappeared into the nearest hostelry.

I was surprised at his generosity. He is accommodating, but usually only to himself. He is a man in pomp and pink. People who endure a meatless diet must be tempted to bite him in the cheek. I’m not quite sure how I came to be related to him. I’m related to so many people, I have relatives all over the world. All my various parents and grandparents scattered offspring all over the world, the way the Crown Prince scatters confetti. I even have some relatives who have money, but they tend to avoid me like the plague. Poverty is not just a disgrace, it’s the only disgrace. If I were a millionaire, I could quite happily have done time without losing an iota of my social standing.

“You shouldn’t have let him run off like that,” said Magnesius. He had observed the incident with the pickpocket.

Dear Lord, why wouldn’t I let the man run off? Ever since I could think, there have been people all over the world busily trying to destroy me. They come up with wars for me, and financial and political disasters. Small bombs, big bombs, atom bombs, super-atom bombs, death rays, poison gas, and all sorts of other vilenesses. All for me. And I’m to find a self-respecting pickpocket dangerous and noxious? At most, I might feel guilty about disappointing him.

Magnesius finds this to be a dubious morality.

“You must think about the generality, Ferdinand, the well-being of the generality.” He raises a pudgy finger. “Where would we be if everyone thought like you!”

Where would Magnesius be? is what he means. When he talks about the generality, he means himself. He’s a nice man and all things to himself. He goes around, and he comes around. When I got out of prisoner-of-war camp, I went looking for him. Maybe he could have got me a job as a driver or an office worker. I’m not ambitious, and well suited to inferior work. But Magnesius would have nothing to do with me. He sees impoverished relatives as an acute danger to himself. He gives nothing to charity, on principle. I’m sure he’s right. If rich people were openhanded, they wouldn’t be rich.

I think Magnesius is currently something in non-ferrous metals. “Well, cheers, Magnesius, your health.”

He wasn’t in the forces, and thinks of himself as a pacifist, anti-militarist, and martyr—just right for now. He is proud of the cunning he showed during the war to avoid being called up. Magnesius is one of those heavy-hipped individuals who lead a charmed life. No bombs fall where they happen to be. The ships they sail on don’t sink. The trains in which they travel aren’t derailed—or at least their personal carriage stays intact. Popular opinion conforms to them and their requirements. They always have money, and they always have enough to eat.

Magnesius is not smart. My cousin Johanna even thinks he is stupid. “Oh, Ferdinand,” she says, “I don’t understand it. He’s no more clever than a politician or a bunny rabbit, but in five wars’ time he will be synthesizing vegetable oil and ham out of bomb craters. He won’t be drinking potato vodka but French liqueurs, even when Europe has ceased to exist. After the hundred thousandth currency reform, he’ll still find himself with freshly minted money. He will do deals with ghosts when there are no more people, he will…”

Sure he will. Just because of not being smart. Rabbits aren’t smart either, but they can find what they need by way of fodder. Better than any Kant, Copernicus, Mozart, or Rembrandt.

Cheers, Magnesius! One day he’ll have a stroke, a mild, gentle one, and then he’ll talk God or the Devil into some material spun from nothing but hanging beautifully, especially good for hard-wearing, flowing robes, or he’ll sell Sirius a bale of antiqued blackout paper. He will live, and live well, even when he’s dead.

Shall I write my story about Magnesius? Better not. Germany is supposed to be being refashioned into a democracy. When did any amount of fashioning bring about the wished-for result? The world is ajangle with weaponry, the core of the planet is a gleaming uniform button, laboratories are now super-arsenals, but the order of the day is of course anti-militarism. Why and what for? Any general is like a sweet and harmless Parma violet by comparison to an industrial chemist. And Magnesius? The implacably opposed to war? The unrequitably in love with war? Who harvests where life has scattered no seeds, and death has reaped? I know soldiers, both old and young, who hated the war as much as the voice of their sergeant majors and loved peace like the lips of their bride. Who had more familiarity with lockup than stonk. By his existence or the mere account of it, Magnesius could make militarists of them all.

Magnesius ordered a second bottle of wine and talked to me as though to an equal. About financial crises, bank credits, bankruptcies, crooked deals, lowered business ethics. I listened to him shakenly and respectfully. What on earth was the matter with him? He had never been like that before. Not long ago, I read about brain operations that were supposed to change a person’s entire personality. Or had Magnesius perhaps come within reach of some radioactive rays? Or had a magic quack treated his blood pressure and attained these unexpected results?

“Cheers, Ferdinand. You know, you really ought to invest your money in something, my boy, I could help you do it.” I failed to understand Magnesius. “You ought to get yourself a new suit.” Did he want to buy me one, then? “Yes, and those hundred marks I lent you, no hurry about paying them back, Ferdinand.”

I guessed there was some misunderstanding. Before I made an attempt to clear it up, I let Magnesius order a round of deviled eggs. Cautiously, I tried to wrap my head around whatever might concern me.

I heard some ugly things about Johanna. My cousin Johanna is ravishing but unscrupulous. Not long ago, she bet that she could get a hundred marks out of Magnesius. I bet her five marks she couldn’t. Johanna told Magnesius I had won thirteen hundred marks on the pools and was looking to invest the money with him. Would he let her have a hundred marks for me. Johanna is a convincing liar. I wonder when I’ll lay my hands on the five marks I owe her.

I was too cowardly to make a clean breast of things to Magnesius. He is one of those people who go blue when they’re furious. I don’t like to see that.

I acted distrait, shamefaced, nervous. I made an appointment to see Magnesius sometime next week, and said I needed to be alone. I wanted to think about financial matters.

Magnesius went, and in came Heinrich. He stood in front of my table, whose fair wood I wanted to go on enjoying a little, quietly, by myself. There was something warmer and kindlier than the dank November streets, and my coffin room at the Widow Stabhorn’s.

“Oh, Ferdinand,” said Heinrich, and “you don’t mind if I call you by your first name, do you? Can I join you?” Of course he could. He was nice and neat, as though bespoke. He had a wily face and trusty border collie’s eyes. I barely knew him, but why shouldn’t he call me by my first name?

“So you’re still alive!” I exclaimed delightedly. It’s impossible for me to say to a person who greets me thus, “Terribly sorry, I haven’t the foggiest idea who you are.”

Heinrich sat down and ordered a bottle of wine. “Do you remember?” he asked, “that wild night in Berlin in wartime, when we drank brotherhood? You liked it that my name was Heinrich.” I didn’t, but I was happy at least to learn the name of my brand-new friend.

“A votre santé,” said Heinrich, cultured and well-bred, and raised his glass. “You know, I have always admired you, Ferdinand.”

I was stunned. I never guessed there was a living being that had always admired me. What a day! The pickpocket, Magnesius, and now Heinrich. Three people, showing me their high opinion of me. And the day not over yet.

Heinrich is the editor of Red Dawn. It started coming out a week ago, or is due to appear next week, I’m a little shaky about that. I think for the moment they have no paper, no license, and no contributions, apart from an anecdote about Caruso. Heinrich said it was difficult to suit all readers, you were bound to antagonize someone. We agree to meet later that evening. In the meantime, I am to write an unexceptionable story.

What actually does appear in our popular postwar periodicals? I can’t formulate a single impression, because thus far my reading has been confined to the little squares of newsprint that are hung out in lieu of toilet paper in the WC on the landing. These fragments have occasional charm, but in the long run they are a little superficial.

I sometimes got the impression that Germany was part of the British monarchy. Wall-to-wall court reports. Too bad Princess Elizabeth can’t get married again. Then I would have a subject with which to delight great swaths of readers for months on end. I also came upon many reports and photographs of Princess Margaret. Could I write about her? I don’t think she has much to offer. I had the sense of a nice girl from a good family. If reports are to be trusted, she spends her time dancing the boogie-woogie, buying clothes, traveling abroad, and climbing in and out of automobiles. Which is all about the least one can expect. Couldn’t the little lady steal the crown jewels for me, or hide the Loch Ness monster in the House of Lords, elope with an archbishop, and remain gone at least until I’ve made a thousand marks with my series of quietly nerve-tingling articles?

Or is there some film actress I could develop? I’ve read various interviews. The hack goes to meet the star. The star is photographed lying on a summer lawn, chewing on a blade of grass. It looks terribly natural. The star receives her visitor, makes coffee, hangs up her underthings—“See, I do this all myself”—stirs something in a saucepan, knits socks, prefers Schopenhauer and lighter reading, repairs a carpet sweeper, is a believer in the economic miracle. The piece closes, “I left Anna Fischer with the sense that I had met an utterly natural person. ‘Ma’am,’ I said, ‘you don’t behave like a star.’ ‘Here comes my star,’ she smiled, lifting her three-year-old into her arms. And now I must break it to the reader: Anna Fischer, whom we hopefully may admire many more times on the screen, is a happily married young mother, the wife of the noted architect Walter Leibund, who is known for his work in concrete and brick. Anna Fischer is no prima donna.”

I should like, for a change, to write about prima donnas. But just at the moment the fashion is for the “natural” star with solid family background, and the dictatorship of the readership will permit no exceptions.

I think perhaps the least offense is caused by animal stories. I am fond of animals, though I don’t enjoy being played off against them. Acquaintances of mine had a Doberman, a vicious creature that couldn’t get its inner life in harmony with its surroundings. His master became a megalomaniac, because he was the only person the animal didn’t growl at and bite. He bit me in the ear, and the fellow told me I had failed the test. A dog like that had an infallible sense of good and bad. It contradicts my sense of human dignity to be subjected to the judgment of a dog. There was one occasion when I denied myself further dealings with a well-disposed lady with mild eyes and a splendid bosom merely because her terrier was allergic to quiet conversations and set itself up to judge my spiritual qualities. I am prepared to lavish any amount of ingenious flattery on the lady of the house, but I don’t like to feel obliged to come with orchids and volumes of verse for her dog.

So what is the animal I could write about? Hens? All I know about hens is that they lay eggs, their inner life is an enigma to me. I like giraffes, they have spots. But there’s no story in that.

The animals I know best are probably cockroaches. I am well acquainted with their habits and preferences. I know that they don’t bark, have a strong sense of community, don’t talk about politics, and lead a respectable family life in the sense of calm and busy proliferation. Unfortunately, Heinrich is bound to think a gentleman should not display such knowledge of cockroaches.

How about a love story then? I will assume a man and a girl are in love, and will begin with a snatch of realistic dialogue.

“Do you love me, Darling?”

“Yes, I love you, Darling.”

“Do you love me very much, Darling?”

“Yes, I love you very much, Darling—do you love me too, Darling?”

“But you know I do, Darling.”

“Do you pine for me sometimes, Darling?”

“Would I be here other wise, Darling?”

“Are you my darling?”

“Yes, I am your darling, Darling.”

They say that a writer should constantly strive for the truth. This lovey-dovey dialogue is the complete truth, but from the literary point of view, it seems somewhat wanting. It’s my sense that the more people are in love, the simpler and more unevolved their speech. Love will cause the most extensive vocabulary to melt away like snow under burning lava. I can remember myself having babbled like an idiot on occasion. I have no desire to document this and commit it to print for all time.

It’s not so easy to write a love story in today’s Germany. There are strict laws.

Extramarital love may only take place under certain defined conditions. Erotic displays are permitted only in conjunction with nature. For instance: the blonde Erdmute and her soulful swain Horst Dieter are riding through woods and fields. They are surprised by a thunderstorm. It starts hailing, lightning, snowing. The formula goes, “The elements were unchained.” Erdmute and Horst Dieter take refuge in a barn that happens to be in the vicinity. The barn contains hay. It’s dark as well. Horst Dieter presses Erdmute to himself. Everything collapses. The reader will forgive them, because storm, barn, and hay all constitute mitigating circumstances.

I know a thing or two about barns. They are unromantic and not at all exciting places. Rusty watering cans and pickaxes are liable to fall on top of you. Hay is a prickly and dusty substance that will make you sneeze. For a normal person, a love scene in a barn is not a pleasure. That is probably the reason why storm-barn-love scenes are literarily sanctioned. If it’s no fun, it’s less sinful. Also, the strong connection to nature will make the reader more inclined to forgive the odd faux pas. He may very well turn a blind eye when the tormented pair falls victim to a pine-needle-scented forest floor. A forest floor isn’t exactly fun either. Ants crawl into your ears, pine needles prick at you, midges bite you. There is a bird singing in a tree and it happens to drop something. You must expect to be interrupted at any moment by forest wardens, hunters, tramps, lyric poets, and berry-seeking children. You can’t shut the door in a forest. If a twig happens to crack somewhere, you jump. Maybe it’s just a deer. But then I wouldn’t want to have a deer listening as I’m pouring out my secret heart to the lady of my dreams. Call me overly modest. Perhaps my subconscious takes a deer for the reincarnation of an old nanny I once had. On top of everything, the light summer dress of the errant lady would suffer—thorns and dirt and the like. One would suppose that for a broad public a fall from grace is just that, a fall from grace, no matter where it happens to take place. Myself, I would accord any amorous couple a nice room with a couch or a paradise bed. But I don’t think one is allowed to say that without it robbing the couple of all sympathies from the readership. In poems you are allowed to be more generous, and still more in poems that are set to music. My most straitlaced and prudish aunts got a misty look in their eyes and hummed along when a velvet tenor sang in the wireless, “Be mine tonight…” or “There’s a small hotel I know / in the Wieden…” or “It’s now or never…” All those things may be sung with impunity, but not said, and least of all printed. Why? I’ll think about it sometime. At any rate, I don’t trust myself to write a love story. I would have to punish my lovers terribly for their sins, which I’d sooner not do.

Perhaps I could tell the story of my little jerkin?

I was in the POW camp. For as long as I could remember, I’d been and done only what others wanted. I hardly knew whether I still existed as a self-determining living creature. In the war I was punished by being made a corporal. I have no medals and rely on my surroundings to identify the invisible spiritual aristocrat in me.

When I got back to Germany from camp, I still wasn’t a private individual. I wasn’t any Herr Timpe, Ferdinand Timpe. I was a returnee. You could tell that from looking at me, and I was treated accordingly. Lots of people were nice to me. They patted me on the back and said, “How now, Comrade!” Or: “Expect you’ve just come home, eh?” Or: “What was camp like, then?” They wanted to hear from me, or perhaps not. They called me “Du” and addressed me whenever and however they felt like. They felt sorry for me, or perhaps not—whatever the situation was, whatever they felt like. Their pity gave them a right to me, and I had to go on being something determined by other people. I was given a stamp and called “returnee.” To be honest, I can’t stand the word “returnee.” It sounds a bit like the name of a vacuum cleaner or something. Something maneuverable. Gets in the corners and edges. It has something that smells of home and being looked after. Home for the homeless, home for fallen women, home for convicts, home for neglected children. Every time there’s something to do with home, the bulk of people are terribly moved—by themselves. The victims that are sitting in it, they either have to play the role of the ungrateful object, or they permit themselves to be physically and spiritually castrated. The only sensible thing the moved parties have to give would be money, which of course they don’t give.

I was on the train to Cologne and didn’t want to be a returnee, just a perfectly ordinary private individual called Ferdinand Timpe.

I looked every inch a returnee. In the station waiting room in Cologne, I felt like drinking a glass of beer. A gaudy old bird joined me and wanted to take me and my cigarettes. I gave her cigarettes and invited her to share the bottle of schnapps I happened to have on me. She wasn’t a looker, but she was friendly and kind. As a returnee, you can hardly expect a welcoming committee of Roman courtesans. Anyway, I wasn’t in the mood for female consolation—neither by exquisite courtesans, nor by a storm-tested ruin girl. Nothing drew me to my fiancée Luise, either.

I set off towards the suburb of Nippes to my friend Dr. Muck. In the course of my colorful life, I once took a couple of semesters of German literature, till I couldn’t afford it anymore and settled down as an assistant garage mechanic. I learned some useful things there, and might have stayed longer, had I not happened to inherit a secondhand bookshop with a philately section. The bookshop was in a little lane in the old part of Cologne that didn’t get much foot traffic. I led the serene existence of a hermit and lived quietly in the miasma of my own mild wisdom.

I’d come across Dr. Muck at university. I hadn’t seen him for a long time, but I thought friends are for life. Unfortunately, he’d married. Most men can’t do friendship after they’re married.

I got to chez Muck, and his wife answered the door. She was sharp-featured and withered in a pinkish sort of way. She spoke quickly and evenly. Initially she was repulsed by my aspect, but eventually she let me in.

My friend Muck was away. Frau Muck was hosting a poetry evening that was like a religious service with a touch of sect. Under dimmed lights sat a goodly number of ladies with souls and serious expressions.

I was allowed to sit in a corner and was asked whether the ruins and above all the cultural devastation had not upset me. I had long since got accustomed to the ruins. Their aspect hadn’t shaken me as much as was expected of me. My senses were numbed, and I sat there as in a dream.

But it seemed to me as though the ladies were somehow proud of the ruins. The way some women are proud if they’ve been through a dangerous operation. They don’t like it if some rival in suffering comes forward with a still more dangerous operation. One of their great trumps is the sentence “The doctors had given up on me.” In just that way the inhabitants of various German cities claimed that theirs was the one that was the most comprehensively destroyed.

On my way through the evening streets, I had seen the ruins in misty moonlight, and they struck me as charmed and eerily attractive.

Dear God, how much one had once had to give to see some piddling little ruin. When I was a boy, an old uncle dragged me through crowds, dust, and heat haze to some ruined castle on the Rhine, where lovers and trippers were taking pictures of one another.

Of course, I feel sorry for people who have lost their homes. We should all live in marble halls. I have never been moved by material losses. I am afraid of illness and of the loss of individuals who have put down roots in my heart. And sometimes I am afraid my heart may have become infertile ground, in which nothing and no one will be able to take root.

Maybe my capacity for suffering was low that evening with the spiritual ladies. I couldn’t feel anything for the irreplaceable cultural goods either. One of the ladies was mourning a shattered church portal, and I had the sense that she couldn’t have lived a single day without admiring its artful execution. Later I learned that the lady had never clapped eyes on said portal. Never apparently felt the need to either. When she went on to talk about five hand-embroidered cushion covers and three perfectly good bolsters that were stolen from her shortly after the end of the war, then her voice sounded sincere, and her grief seemed heartfelt.

I felt my want of empathy disappoint the ladies. I am sometimes incapable of thawing on the orders of fashionable imperatives.

I was relieved, therefore, when the poetic hour resumed. A stout lady in her prime called Herma Linde was reading lofty poems. I was unable to understand them. I tried to think. Is it possible to find incomprehensible things beautiful? Some people seem to find only incomprehensible things beautiful. Or maybe they kid themselves that they find them beautiful.

I was flagging, delicate mists fogged my brain. Out of the teeming haze loomed the form of a sanitary orderly I had once met. He had a large, mysterious boil on his hand. A handleless white cup from which I had once drunk rosé in Lyon. I saw the hairline crack in the cup. I heard the whinnying horn of a motorbike that drove past me in Amsterdam, and I remembered the grey rubble of a pavement in old Salzburg. A marsh marigold sprouted from it. I saw the laughing curls of a twittering girl who passed me once at a fruit stall where I was buying cherries. I saw the dark stain of rot on one Queen Anne cherry…

I was desperate not to fall asleep. Seven times I tiptoed out to the lavatory to take a sip from my flask. In the hall I walked into a sideboard and knocked over a large china ornament—I think it may have been a wood grouse. I broke off a piece of its beak. These things are always happening to me when I’m trying to be especially careful.

“Oh, never mind,” said Frau Muck, in a tone of voice that told me she minded a great deal. She held the broken piece of beak in the palm of her hand, eyeing it with solemn grief. The other ladies also put tragic creases in their physiognomies. Other people may have faces, these ladies had physiognomies. I replaced the wood grouse on the sideboard. Why couldn’t it have fallen noiselessly?

“Genuine Meissner,” sighed a lady with tough russet curls. She seemed to have been assembled with rusty wires. They all stared at the debeaked wood grouse.

“The beak’s not that important,” I said, “other parts of the wood grouse matter more.” I thought of the lovely feathers, but the ladies maintained a stern front, and one said the bird wasn’t a wood grouse. To general sympathy, the lady of the house bedded the beak in a little box lined with cotton wool.

Outside, the ruins continued to bloom. I could see them from the lavatory window. I had retired there to commune with my flask and enjoy a few minutes’ peace. The lavatory is the civilized man’s only refuge. One isn’t merely entitled, one is positively obliged, to lock oneself in. No one will ask you for statements, comments, confidences, kindnesses, accounts, sympathy, love, money, an opinion, enmity, friendship, or taxes, as long as you are in that temporary asylum.

I know children who read their first cowboy stories and young people who read their first love letters precisely there. I know poets who in such undisturbed spaces turned their budding rhythms into verses, and broody penseurs whose ideas came to maturity in the course of a few minutes of seclusion. The toilet is and remains the only place where husbands are free of their wives, fiancés of their affianced, debtors from their creditors, children of their parents, pupils of their teachers, and employees of their employers.

The time one may spend in the lavatory is limited, as all earthly happiness is limited. I am not one of those who would hang themselves in the toilet by their suspenders. I have neither suspenders nor a death wish. All I sought was a little peace, not to see or hear anything, no poems, no ladies, no broken-beaked wood or other grouse. If I’d stayed away too long, my absence might have caught the attention of the ladies, and they might have broken down the door. Lyrically affected ladies are apt to commit thoughtless deeds.

I looked for the drawing room and opened the wrong door. Wherever I am, I open wrong doors and set foot in wrong rooms. I’m not being figurative here. At the Mucks’ I found myself in the kitchen. There on the table were three platters of canapés, some with cheese, others with ham on them. I ate a few without compunction, leaving gaps in the array of the smiling sustenance. Out of gratitude I decided to take my leave, to allow the ladies to eat something too.

This was in the time before the currency reform, when hunger painted many people’s faces a yellowy-grey color. The poetry ladies probably weren’t hungry, but they were maybe peckish. Spiritual feelings stimulate the appetite. In past times, I remember an unhappy love affair that made me a gourmand. Rarely did anything taste so good to me as then, when I was on the point of dying of my broken heart.

Initially, I was annoyed with Frau Muck for not telling me anything about the canapés. Then I said to myself, why should she? I had no right to Frau Muck, and no right to the delicious canapés. I reconciled myself to the situation. One must not expect pears from an apple tree, nor nuts from a pear tree, nor milk from a mole, and no milk of human kindness from a soul that’s down-and-out.

I felt full and benevolent when I found the correct door. I returned to the corner of my sofa. Miss Herma Linde was still reciting. There was something priestessy about her. I am afraid of priestessy women. They have a grim, mild force and are strangely mean.

Wurmlauf der Elben, moderndes Gespinst.

Ernte des Grauens, wüstes Taggesicht,

Die Pracht der Leiche ward dir zugedacht,

Was willst du noch? Ich neige meine Hand.^*3

I think this was from a poet who was still awaiting discovery. I pictured the priestessy one performing various humdrum tasks, swallowing a fishbone, say, or quarreling with the gasman.

The ladies waxed nobler, their sighs were so noble. I stroked a cushion whose silken threads got caught in the rough calluses of my palm. The atmosphere grew a little oppressive. I needed air. I had been intending to sleep at Muck’s, but now I wanted to be gone. I would find some other shelter somewhere.

“I’m so sorry,” said Frau Muck, walking me to the door, “I’m so sorry you can’t stay, but why don’t you come by next week. We are just forming a club for the protection of spiritually endangered individuals of this new era. We are striving to turn people’s thoughts to the true and the beautiful.”

From within I could hear Herma Linde intoning:

Chaos der Öde, Tigerin der Brunst,

Krampfender Schrei aus kahler Hufe Schlag,

Nur hier und da ein Nabel aus Rubin.^*4

I felt I was in some fifth phase of puberty. “Might it be possible for you to lend me a blanket, Frau Muck?” I asked, because it was cold outside, and I was reckoning on sleeping rough.

Frau Muck had none. She had suffered so many thefts after the war, and it wasn’t as though you could get new things either, everything was so expensive. “Those prices!” And then they had taken in her mother-in-law from Weimar. In the end, she let me have an ancient lady’s coat that smelled of mold, sweat, and mothballs.

To this day I don’t know whether the coat was a gift outright or lend-lease. I didn’t think too much about it, I cut myself a little tunic from it. Among other things, I was once the right hand of a tailor in Marseilles.

What in God’s name am I going to write? Something has to give.

Thank God, something gave. Lilly just visited me and bothered me. The pleasantest thing about work remain the interruptions. I could write about Lilly. Though I don’t have much time, I have to go and meet Heinrich.

Lilly is the victim of her beautiful feet. She studies chemistry and earns money on the side from knitting sweaters and writing. She lives with her grandmother in two gloomy little rooms on our floor, at the far end of the corridor. I’m not entirely sure how many people actually live on this floor.

Lilly sometimes comes to see me when she’s feeling unhappy. Today she’d waited in vain for Konrad. Lilly is often kept waiting in vain. She is a good, hardworking girl, but unfortunately she’s a martyr to her feet. She’s not ugly, you just don’t notice her. The sight of her doesn’t make a man attentive and swivel-eyed. But she does have strikingly beautiful feet. Beautiful feet are rare in a girl. Someone must have said that to Lilly once. From that day forth Lilly suffered a string of unhappy misunderstandings.

A normal girl wants to please a man. Girls with beautiful eyes, hair, lips, jewelry, clothes, have it easy. They can allow themselves to be desired and admired without risking anything. But what possibilities does a girl with beautiful feet have? She can go to the public baths. But summer is brief, and Sundays rare. The girl can’t very well pull off her shoes in the tram, and she can’t put her bare feet up on a café table without disagreeable consequences. Lilly is obliged to invite colleagues and acquaintances back to peppermint tea in her gloomy little room to make the most of her feet. And then she needs to take off her shoes and stockings. Men are apt to misunderstand it when a lady suddenly takes off her shoes and stockings in their presence—even if the lady is careful to say she is only doing so because she feels a headache coming on, or she can’t breathe. There are certain gestures that seem to suspend distance, and it takes a powerful and controlling character to brush aside all unwished-for consequences with a smile. Lilly’s is no powerful and controlling character. She encounters difficulties and inappropriate responses all the time. She is intelligent, even understanding, but she’s always prepared to trample all over her reason—quite literally. With her beautiful feet.

Lilly came to me crying about Konrad. Unhappy girls are apt to talk rather wildly. I couldn’t quite make out whether Konrad had been overenthusiastic or chilly. At any rate he hadn’t been around today, and she had waited for him till she felt ill. She is always prepared to seek a lot of the blame in herself, and today she positively basked in self-reproach. She perched on the side of my bed like a timid little mouse. I gave her a glass of wine and she drank it trustingly, in grateful little sips. With her hand she brushed the skirts of her little coat and tried to lengthen it a bit. “Long coats are all the rage,” she said. Lilly takes all her feelings of inferiority from her poor clothes, and all her confidence from her feet. I wish her three corns and an ermine. The spiritual change would probably do her good, and she might make the discovery that changes are not necessarily either good or bad.

I have to go now and see Heinrich. The fifty marks’ advance isn’t what it was, and my article isn’t done. The result of my diligent labors is fourteen stories, none of them longer than three sentences.

Heinrich was happy to see me again. “I do like your name, Ferdinand,” he said, and smiled at me with his gentle eyes, “I do like the name Ferdinand Grossengrau.” We had drunk a couple of cognacs by now, but I didn’t need to be reminded what my name was.

Ferdinand Grossengrau is a friend of mine. During the war, we were in Berlin together the odd time. He is an industrious poet, a doughty artisan of the word, boozy as an old petrol tank. Heinrich had once met us two Ferdinands in an artists’ bar in Berlin, between air raids. Our capacity for distinctions had already suffered, and we drank brotherhood as one does in the small hours, and to this day Heinrich has mistaken me for the literary lion Ferdinand Grossengrau.

Three times therefore in the course of the day I have met with recognition and appreciation—from the pickpocket, from Magnesius, and now from Heinrich. I shouldn’t get conceited about it, though, each time the esteemer had mis-estimated. I should reconcile myself to the fact that my value resides in unaffected beauty and remains difficult for others to discern. At least I know my own worth.

^*1 Of 20 and 21 June 1948.

^*2 German Buss-und-Bettag, November 4, a Lutheran celebration (Cologne is very largely Catholic).

^*3 These parodic lines from Keun—who wrote poems as well—are like an amalgamation of Stefan George and Gottfried Benn: Windings of Elbe, tattered thread of silk,/ Dread’s dismal harvest, ravaged second sight,/ The corpse’s full magnificence—gone!/ What more do you want? I extend my hand.

^*4 Barren Sahara, tigresses’ estrus,/ Stifled yawn or yell, the drumming of hooves,/ A belly button’s not unexpected ruby.