Cousin Johanna

Today I am seeing Johanna. “Ferdinand,” she said to me the other day, “I don’t believe in blood ties, and I don’t quite understand how we’re supposed to be related—but when push comes to shove, you really are my one true selfless friend and my spiritual anchor.” When Johanna talks that way, it usually means she’s in danger of dying of a broken heart again. I don’t know how many times a heart can break, but I think even the strongest and springiest heart won’t survive continual breaking.

I don’t know how old Johanna is. I lack the application and the feminine wiles to work it out. Also, I won’t ask her straight out, because she would appeal to a woman’s right to eternal youth.

Nor do I know how many times Johanna has been married. She always liked being married, and has made an unknown number of men happy, at least on a temporary basis. Even though she doesn’t radiate the cozy comfort of an ancient sofa cushion and has nothing in common with the demonic sultriness of burgundy velvet curtains. When I think of Johanna, I can only ever think of wicked and sinful tubular steel.

Johanna believed there was only one great love in the life of a woman. Each time she was unshakably convinced she was experiencing it. Such emotional conviction gives a woman an optimistic freshness and elevates the chosen one to the status of a sort of super-eraser that rubs out and removes all who have come before him. Until someone rubs him out.

I admire Johanna’s faithlessness. I don’t see her as a loose, immoral person so much as a genius of forgetfulness. It’s not agreeable to me when a woman has a loving memory, not since I was sentimentally bound to a certain widow. I would kiss her hair and say, “I adore your scent.” (In one’s younger days, one is apt to be shamelessly lyrical that way.) Nowadays, I don’t think I would trust myself to say “your scent.” “My Karl always used to find it exciting,” the widow would reply, and we would have a long reminiscence about her Karl. How dotingly he would warm her poor chilly little feet on his string vest, and once, enflamed by passion, he tossed a hairnet in her direction. I am bothered by a woman’s propensity to burden a loving present with unasked-for details of her past. I don’t know if they do it out of an excess of communicativeness or in the hope of obtaining some propaganda advantage. At any rate, I only admire faithfulness in a woman if I am its object.

Johanna isn’t short of ways of advertising herself, anyway. I can’t tell if she’s pretty or beautiful. She is ravishing. There are so many film stars and beauty queens who look ordinary to me. The majority probably take a different view, and my taste isn’t representative. Certainly, though, Johanna has a je ne sais quoi—she electrifies like an eel. She has brown curly hair and wide, grey eyes. I don’t trust myself to describe further details. That’s usually how I am with people. I can see their face in front of me when I try and picture it—but as a whole. As soon as I try and remember a mouth, a nose, a pair of eyebrows, I’m all at sea.

Johanna looks like a mixture of Madonna, jack-in-the-box, and athlete. A Mary Magdalene too innocent to ever think of repentance. An angel who settles herself in Satan’s lap when she feels the urge.

I think of the episode with her and the lion tamer. It was several years ago, and Johanna was rooming at the time with my sister Elfriede, studying something or other.

I have many sisters and many brothers too. Elfriede is atypical of us. She seems colorless and odorless, like some mixture of flour, water, and cardboard. She has a high opinion of herself and a low opinion of others, which makes life difficult for her. She is given to saying, oh, people are awful. I wonder if she counts herself? It’s surely not pleasant to have a low opinion of yourself. Or does she think everyone else is awful, and not herself? That would condemn her to unendurable loneliness.

She married a minister who has a guilty conscience because he doesn’t feel at ease in his calling. People with guilty consciences are apt to be severe. Elfriede’s husband is the spitting image of his wife. Had they been missionaries, they could have converted cannibals to vegetarianism, they surely taste savorless and dull. They probably mean well towards the rest of the world, but they are lacking in tolerance. They are at pains to extirpate sin, the way a fanatical allotment gardener seeks to extirpate weeds. Some plants the allotment gardener thinks of as weeds are pretty flowers to others. What Elfriede and her husband take to be sins will be seen by others as things without which life would be unbearable. The result is a series of misunderstandings, and the well-intentioned extirpators get no thanks for their trouble.

Without any regard for her stainless relatives, Johanna fell in love with a lion tamer. There is no moral or physical force capable of tearing Johanna away from the man she is currently in love with. Naturally, the lion tamer returned Johanna’s passion. He had no alternative. That’s Johanna for you. Her lion tamer tamed his lions, she tamed her lion tamer—it was all a kind of chain reaction that a woman of Johanna’s stamp surely found highly gratifying.

I once met the lion tamer. He was a friendly fellow with bandy legs. As a man, it is not given to me to assess the sex appeal of another man. The most striking thing about the lion tamer seemed to me to be a scar on his left shoulder that a lion had inflicted on him, Johanna told me about it. I wasn’t able to see the scar, because we were in a crowded bar at the time and the lion tamer didn’t want to undress. There was something coy about him.

Since those around her set their faces against her enterprise, Johanna’s passion grew to gigantic dimensions. It is my view that the love of Romeo and Juliet was aggravated by the obstacles that were put in their way.

When Johanna is in love, she loves unconditionally. If the man in question has dirty fingernails and sticking-out ears, then she will find nothing so charming as dirty fingernails and sticking-out ears. If the man’s a liar, she will find his imagination adorable—if he’s truthful, she will worship his simple nature. If he is clever, she will be ravished by his razor-sharp mind. Should he be stupid, then she will find his dull-wittedness the essence of manly charm. It’s impossible to talk Johanna out of one of her passions by demonstrating to her the beloved’s flaws.

The episode with the lion tamer was viewed by Elfriede as wickedness and social slumming. Even though Elfriede ought to know that our family has no claims to social exclusiveness.

Suddenly, the air went out of the thing with the lion tamer. He moved on when the circus left town. He managed to write once or twice, but I have the sense that his letters didn’t impress Johanna. His qualities lay elsewhere.

When the war ended, Johanna took over a lending library, and she translates Italian thrillers for a publishing company somewhere in southern Germany. She has always had several irons in the fire.

Behind her commercial premises, Johanna has a little bedsitting room. Recently, one Herr Peipel was to be found hunkered there. Albert Theodor Peipel, inventor and proprietor of Peipel’s Pasta Products. A mature man with the beginnings of a paunch and dark, bulgy eyes. Johanna took to wearing her hair tidy and parted, and to being a sort of mixture of muse and needy lily. A muse, because Herr Peipel scribbles verses. He scribbles them for his noodles. Like so:

Peipel’s noodles are the best

Both on weekdays and of rest.

Or:

Peipel’s noodles make you sing

Ching chara a-ching-ching-ching.

Peipel’s literary productions are clear, warmhearted, and accessible to a wide readership. Nothing surrealist about them, nothing existentialist, nothing of biting satire. Peipel has a combination of simple nature and spiritual depth without which Johanna can no longer imagine existing. Not so long ago, she was on the way to becoming a disciple of Sartre and an enthusiast for Picasso’s ceramics. The encounter with Peipel put her straight.

This morning I received a postcard from Johanna, with the wrong stamp and heatedly addressed. I was to come right away. I can’t imagine the living creature that would fall for the charms of the noodle-maker Albert Theodor Peipel. But there are many things I am incapable of imagining that turn out to be the case. Perhaps Johanna is tempted by the notion of being the first woman to be destroyed by a passion for a noodle-maker. Perhaps her subconscious is thirsting for the courage to be ridiculous. Or maybe Herr Peipel lost his facility, and for the sake of his art tried to murder Johanna. Most murderers give themselves away by appearing so thoroughly harmless that no one would suspect them capable of such a thing. I wonder how many times I have stood next to a murderer on the tram, or at the bus stop, asking for a light? I don’t want to suspect Herr Peipel, but there are poets who will do anything for a rhyme.

Johanna receives me, sparkling with joy. She has changed. Her little bedsitting room is likewise changed. She isn’t wearing her hair in a tidy part anymore either, it’s the wild tangle of yore. The Virgin, the housemother and muse, and the frail lily are all gone. She pours me a glass of vermouth and seems terribly happy.

The change in the room I trace to the presence of a nice little radio. I know Johanna has been after a radio for some time. “Where d’you get the radio from, Johanna?” Johanna pets it.

“Where d’you think? From Meta, Meta Kolbe.” I am amazed. Meta Kolbe is an old friend of Johanna’s. Their friendship is lasting, since it is founded on mutual dislike. Liking someone comes and goes, with dislike you know where you are.

Meta Kolbe is a homeowner, older than Johanna, blond like an aging Wagner soprano at the turn of the century, of blameless habits and anxious to marry. You can tell because she says, “I wouldn’t change places with a married woman if you paid me to.” Johanna assumes that Meta Kolbe advertises. Well, at her age you have to get a shuffle on. It wouldn’t be right to console oneself with the knowledge that at ninety, Ninon de Lenclos was still passionately beloved.

Fräulein Kolbe feels drawn to Johanna. She finds her sinful and is waiting with bated breath for the moment when her loose morals come home to roost. Self-preservation means to some people that they retain a belief in earthly justice. For her part, Johanna has things to say about Meta Kolbe’s devious libido and near-pathological miserliness. Hence my astonishment at the new radio.

And where is Herr Peipel keeping? Dusk was always the Peipel hour. Granted, Johanna doesn’t give the impression of an abandoned woman. But then you get suicides living it up in the hours before their death, and all their friends say, “I had no idea, he even ate some pickled onions and fixed a mechanical pencil.” I should like to know how intending suicides are supposed to behave.

“Is Herr Peipel not here then, Johanna?” I ask, even though I can perfectly well see that he’s not.

“I prefer the radio,” replies Johanna. To me, even a radio without tubes would be preferable, but coming from her the reply seems a little gnomic.

“When are you getting married?” I ask. “Never,” says Johanna. “I’ve put that from my mind. Peipel may have some good qualities, but he’s also the only son of an unprofitably married mother. Ferdinand, you can’t imagine what that means. She’s so resentful she gets ulcers and inflammations. She ties cat fur to his back, and wipes his nose for him, and is continually afraid he might get spoilt. Give me the radio any day.” I ask her what Peipel has to do with the radio. “Everything,” replies Johanna, “you see, I swapped him for the radio. I let Meta Kolbe take him, and she gave me the radio in exchange.”

So that’s the way of it then. I always took Johanna to be a stylish and imaginative woman. I wonder how she managed to palm Peipel off on Meta. I feel almost sorry for him.

“I whetted his appetite for Kolbe’s properties,” Johanna tells me. “Versifying noodle-makers are avid for real estate. And I whetted his appetite for her as well, I made up a different person. He was here a moment ago, and I sent him to her, saying I’d left my cigarette holder there. It’s not true, I don’t even own a cigarette holder, I smoke too much anyway.”

“Well, and do you think he’ll stay there? Won’t he want to go back to you?”

Johanna beams at me. “Oh, Ferdinand, give Kolbe half an hour and she will have blackened my name to such a degree that Peipel will have forgotten all his serious intentions with regard to me. Believe me, she can do it.” Such profound confidence in her friend, touching really. And the purpose of my coming was to check that things were going well, and to try and support the new axis. Johanna was a scrupulously honorable person, and she was resolved to exceed her obligations in return for the radio. She would also prefer Anton not to be disturbed by Peipel.

But who is Anton? Dreamy smile. It seems incredible to her that anyone in the world doesn’t know Anton, and at the mere mention of his name isn’t made happy and good. He just might be Johanna’s first true love.

Johanna thinks there are people, even in our semi-enlightened epoch, who find her morals doubtful—just because those people have no understanding of true morals and true love. Johanna refuses to follow the path of such people. Bourgeois morality was looking to a woman for virtue and purity and it hedged her about with laws. Logically, an old maid, who had gone grey in the service of decency and honor, would be revered by young and old alike for the way she had sacrificed herself to the moral laws. Parents would queue to have their children blessed by the virgin’s hand. But far from it, nothing good would befall such a wretch, says Johanna—all she was fit for was to be a figure of fun and a ridiculed old maid. “You know, Ferdinand, it’s sad that there are still such foolish women who refuse to learn anything and have fallen for that morality nonsense.”

Johanna pours more vermouth and balances on the arm of a chair; the radio plays hit tunes. Someone is singing “Kiss me at midnight.” The voice sounds well bred, like that of a hotel guest asking a chambermaid if he could possibly have some fresh towels. I feel nostalgic for a gypsy violinist with a dark kiss curl, fiddling away in the ladies’ ears and peeping down their fronts. Fire, but with discretion.

Johanna is telling me about Fräulein Rustikant. Fräulein Rustikant used to be Johanna’s crafts teacher. Today she is seventy-five, sprightly and delicate as a bullfinch. A while ago she took to visiting Johanna. She was with her this afternoon and brought a bottle of gin. Fräulein Rustikant sat on Johanna’s sofa, nimbly crossed her legs, lit a cigarette, and warbled her way through five glasses of gin. Her father had always been strict with her, and after his death, she had lived with her mother, who had been strict also, as had she herself. She came from a cultured family. During the war, Fräulein Rustikant wound up in strange parts, living with strange families. When it was over, she trooped back to Cologne. She had made the acquaintance of soldiers, lorry drivers, vagrants, farmers. The house in Cologne where she lived had been flattened by a bomb. Fräulein Rustikant was taken in by a builder who had a small garden. Her brother in Ohio sent her CARE packages.

“She’s as quick as a lizard in the sun,” Johanna tells me. “The awful times weren’t so awful for her. She’s only sorry it didn’t happen when she was younger. She wouldn’t have minded having a man, even if just for one night—well, to see what it was like. And now it’s too late. She says herself.

“You see, Ferdinand,” says Johanna, “all the books and all the movies, they’re all about love. Operas, plays, comedies, all about love. Voices from soprano to bass, love. Love in hit songs, love in poems, love in court reports. It’s enough to make anyone curious. Trust me, Ferdinand, I wasn’t exactly keen the first time it happened, but I felt I had to see what all the fuss was about. And then, by and by, I found out. And I have to say, I’m still learning. Now imagine a respectable creature, at twenty, thirty, forty.”

“And sixty, Johanna,” I say, “and eighty. It’s going to happen to all of us unless we’re dead first, and what am I to think of?” Johanna looks at me as though she wanted to brain me with the vermouth bottle. “Ferdinand, don’t be ridiculous. Think of that person, getting older and more and more inquisitive. She’s practically bound to have an exaggerated notion of what love is, she’s not going to know how much or how little there is to any of it, she’s going to be driven mad by speculation. See, Fräulein Rustikant is going to be seventy-six next birthday, and she doesn’t know if she’s gained something or lost it. Renunciation can be a fine thing, Ferdinand, but wouldn’t you like to know what you’re renouncing? I love it myself.”

“What’s that you’re renouncing, Johanna?” I ask, doubtfully.

“Everything,” says Johanna. “Or lots. Everything except Anton. I won’t renounce Anton, I won’t permit anyone to talk me out of Anton, not even you, Ferdinand.”

I think people make their own beds in this life. I am on the point of declaring to Johanna that one of my few principles is never to interfere in other people’s matters of the heart, when Herr Liebezahl charges into the room with the élan of a successful, overburdened businessman. Johanna greets him with fervent yelps.

Liebezahl is a good friend of mine, and someone I owe a lot to. In Johanna’s life he plays the invaluable part of the amanuensis. Like me, he seems neuter and endlessly employable. Liebezahl can easily afford to be neuter on occasion. He is happy within himself without needing to think about it. He is loved by, among others, a genuine baroness with partly genuine jewelry. To Liebezahl she is a good customer. People he makes money from he likes unaffectedly. He has a calm and selfless affection for a curly-haired blond girl who is studying medicine and who tosses around conditions the way Rastelli once juggled balls.

Her mother is a mailman’s widow who assiduously kept the pair of them alive before the currency reform by black-market dealing. Her name is Maria, the mother’s name is Martha.

Martha is flowering. Her muscles are blossoming. She used to steal coal, she heaved sacks of potatoes around, she smuggled in Belgian coffee.

There was one time she brought twenty wool blankets, five bars of chocolate, and a crate of soap into the wretched hole where the old people were hanging on without a home or a family to look after them. They were all hungry and cold. They had no friends and no one to love them. Children at least can be smooth-skinned and pleasing to the eye. Neglected children provoke interest and sympathy, including even from politicians. The abandoned elderly in their bunker had nothing to do except grow tired and die. If they happened to go outside for five minutes to sniff the air, then they would take in some light and strength as well, and the strength roused their almost exhausted capacity for suffering and hence extended their sorry persistence. Maybe it was wrong of Martha to bring them some joy and reanimate them.

Sometimes Martha paints her lips, and sometimes Herr Liebezahl likes her better than her daughter.

Liebezahl is a bouncy fellow somewhere between thirty and fifty, with a carnivalesque pate, a few scraps of fair hair, and boyish blue eyes.

In addition to Johanna’s bedsitting room there is a further room at the back of her store, and that’s where Liebezahl once based his enterprise. It’s just a little branch office by now, Liebezahl has other, larger premises elsewhere in the city.

Liebezahl can do nothing and hence everything. His mission statement runs more or less like this:

Intimate of the stars and the magic of the cosmos. Cosmobiological institute. Interpreter of dreams. Graphology, chiromancy, science and magic. Get your subconscious raised here. Everyone is entitled to happiness and fulfillment in love, you just need to know how to go about it. Money is there to be picked up. Have your personality illuminated. No man is obliged to stammer. Nothing succeeds like success.

Liebezahl draws horoscopes, reads palms, swings crystals, lays cards, sells amulets, and does a little podiatry. He keeps extending his empire with fresh initiatives. Recently he opened a section on color that consists of a small room, painted white. On the walls are the inscriptions:

FIND THE COLOR OF YOUR SOUL.

KNOW YOURSELF THROUGH COLOR.

HAPPINESS THROUGH COLOR.

TELL ME YOUR COLOR, AND I’LL TELL YOU WHO YOU ARE.

HEALTH THROUGH COLOR.

Liebezahl had fifteen hand-towel-sized pieces of cardboard painted in fifteen different colors. He keeps his overheads low. “It would be helpful to know your color, Madame,” he says, to a lady who has come about a corn or some occult matter. The lady is sat down in a comfortable chair in the little room. “Lean back, Madame, take the tension out of your limbs, relax.” Liebezahl hangs up a piece of yellow card that the lady is then made to concentrate on for several minutes. It is followed by other cards in red, blue, green, brown, pink, and violet. The lady stares and stares. “Immerse yourself in it, Madame.” The lady does so. “Fascinating, Madame, you are a fascinating case—I think we know a little more about you now.” The lady would like to know a little more about herself now too. “What color do you find pleasant, Madame? What color makes you agitated? You are highly strung, such a pronounced orange type is rarely met with—we need to have you seeing more green. Five minutes of green, three times a week.”

Liebezahl already has forty regulars. Ladies on their way to a social occasion drop in on Liebezahl first for their ten minutes of yellow or red, to be relaxed or stimulated. Others turn up in the wake of domestic ructions and partake of a little blue to settle their nerves. One tough-minded businesswoman comes five times a week to see pink, and to be helped to a sweetly youthful smile. She claims the pink has made her a better businesswoman. The wife of an official in the postal service assures anyone who cares to listen that three looks at carmine were enough to regain her husband’s love. An intensive course of yellow helped an art teacher free herself of her depression and nervous stomach ailment. Eight men, including the owner of a delicatessen, a capmaker, and a barman, also belong to Liebezahl’s faithful. As do I. When I was with Liebezahl yesterday, I said, “I’d like to see some orangey red and to be left alone.”

Liebezahl removed the art teacher, who was engaged on her yellow: “There, that’s enough for today. Too much isn’t good for you.” He led me into the room: “Here, Ferdinand—orange red will be pleasant for you, I’ll look after you myself, make yourself comfortable, there are cigarettes on the table, I won’t charge you a penny. I’ve just got in a very nice olive green…”

Liebezahl would have shown me all the colored cardboard I wanted. I looked at his olive green, then had some of the orange red, leaned back, felt nicely pampered. I was only bothered by the thought of the art teacher whose course of yellow I had interrupted. “Really doesn’t matter,” said Liebezahl, “I want to be rid of her anyway. She’s starting to turn the color philosophy into a religion and calling me the new Messiah.” I thought the publicity wouldn’t hurt. “Too much publicity can,” said Liebezahl, “and too much success is no good either.” He knows what he wants. He left me to sell a customer some star-sign scent. The customer was a Capricorn who wanted it to take effect on a Scorpio. “This is a scent that never fails with Scorpio and Cancer, Madame,” I heard Liebezahl say.

Liebezahl has various male and female assistants in his employ, but they lack his imagination and his persuasiveness. He is the life and soul of his enterprise, and it’s rare that he can take half an hour off.

I asked Liebezahl once whether he really believed in his astrology and the rest of his mumbo jumbo. He was offended. Did I think he was stupid or something? It was enough for him that others were, enough to fall for that nonsense.

Some of Liebezahl’s clients affect a superior smile, claim to be sceptics, and only to indulge in all this out of fun. Of course, it is precisely these sceptics that fall hook, line, and sinker for Liebezahl’s magic. They remind one of people who ask to try morphine just once out of curiosity and go on to become lifelong addicts.

Across the way, three doctors share a set of premises. A neurologist, an internist, and an orthopedic surgeon. They have almost no patients. From their windows, the three doctors observe a steady stream of clients going to Liebezahl for help and advice.

Out of charity, and because his health is worth more to him than money, Liebezahl recently consulted the internist over a mild case of diarrhea. He referred one of the elderly color-lookers—who after three shots of purple had pulled Liebezahl down by the hair and tried to snog him—to the neurologist. He also tries to send some custom the way of the orthopedist from time to time. The doctors are beginning to value Liebezahl as a neighbor. A few days ago, the internist bought a little bottle of Capricorn scent for a certain lady and claims Liebezahl knows more than the neurologist. The neurologist in turn spoke deprecatingly about the orthopedist and went to Liebezahl for treatment of an ingrown nail. Ever since getting the purple lady as a patient, he has had a little money to spare.

Liebezahl is a helpful person. In answer to Johanna’s appeal he horoscopically thrust Herr Peipel upon Meta Kolbe. He worked on Herr Peipel graphologically and made sure Fräulein Kolbe appeared among his cards. The two will hardly be able to oil out of their psychic destiny.

Herr Peipel is ashamed of admitting his belief in the occult mysteries, he plays the embarrassed fellow. But Liebezahl refuses to be fazed. He is certain he will have some decisive extrasensory impact upon Herr Peipel.

Meta Kolbe, meanwhile, is a true believer. If her horoscope predicted an accident for next Thursday, she would happily break a leg. Sooner a broken leg than lose faith in her horoscope. If Thursday brings no broken leg, then an ink stain on her finger will happily count instead. Whatever happens or doesn’t happen, the horoscope is always right. It cost her money, and beyond that she is flattered that curious stars, moon-knots, dragons’ tails, nebulae, and great and little bears are engrossed with her. She seems to picture excitable meteors, comets, Jupiter, and Saturn all out for a walk, making rhombuses for her, stepping into the third or the fifth house, and having a good natter about Meta Kolbe. “Hey,” says a dapper comet, “did you see Meta Kolbe down there! Delightful person, the shyest sweetest little thing, but a dormant volcano. Some woman, though, eh? Let’s sic Venus onto Mars a bit, I think she’s earned it.”

Johanna stuffs Liebezahl with a bit of liver sausage and some lemon sweets. She has an instinctive way of organizing menus. Liebezahl gulps down whatever is put in his mouth, his spirit is away elsewhere, his imagination is engaged. He is set on expanding his empire by a novel pairing of clairvoyance with fashion. He has been able to buy a quantity of striped and spotted materials from a bankrupt merchant. Now he needs a clairvoyant who among other things will let the ladies know that “I see happiness—happiness and dots—green dots on brown—silk—a man with roses—a large house—green dots—oh, it’s fading…” Liebezahl likes the idea of an experiment where a clairvoyant will give fashion tips. “Madame,” he will say, “that white blouse looks magnificent on you, and yet the weave is capable of absorbing certain disappointments. You see, Madame, materials have their own magic. The weave of your charming blouse won’t let itself be imbued with your joys. It refuses the charm of your personality. It constitutes a barrier between you and the party to whom you feel drawn. Now, I have a clairvoyant, a material seer, who has made an analysis of fabrics. Would you like a risk-free consultation? I have a magnetic line in striped silk, which unfortunately does not work on every lady. I refuse to sell anything without the say-so of my textile magus. Perhaps you could come by next Wednesday, that is the earliest the gentleman in question could risk going into a trance.”

“Will she come?” asks Johanna. “She thinks her white blouse suits her.”

“But she wasn’t happy in it,” says Liebezahl. “Her white blouse let her down, the lady was looking to it for more effectiveness.”

“How do you know she wasn’t happy in her white blouse?” asks Johanna.

“Because she comes to me,” says Liebezahl. “All the people who come to me are discontented and unhappy. Constantly discontented people are always stupid. Clever people don’t come to me.”

I have no pedagogical faculties, otherwise I might be able to persuade Liebezahl that it’s more ethical to empty bins or open a skim-milk bar for recovering alcoholics than to put the squeeze on people whose lame mental mills are no longer capable of grinding the dull grains of their existence. But perhaps he makes people happier with his gaudy deceits than if he went around emptying their bins? Or else he would put a doughty binman out of work? You probably need a license to empty bins.

Johanna refills our glasses and rests herself against my bony chest. She feels the need for some fleeting animal security. “I will never understand, Liebezahl,” she says, “how any woman could be stupid enough to fall for your gobbledygook—but you might let me have a yard of your brown silk with the green dots.”

I am told to go and fetch Peipel and Meta Kolbe so that Liebezahl can work his magic on them some more. There’s no time to lose, since he’s got to go to Deutz tonight to meet Miro Rocca—that’s the name of a clairvoyant and telepath who some weeks ago found a hidden coffee bean for some journal. Other magazines printed his picture. He looked exhausted and despairing, just like someone with newly depleted inner reserves would look.

I go the long way around, by the town woods, before heading up to Meta Kolbe. I could use some fresh air. It’s not cold, and I feel at home under the misty autumn skies. It does me good to be on my own. People alienate me from life. It’s been a while since I last stroked a tree trunk.

Meta Kolbe was alone, without Herr Peipel. She offered me a small liqueur. Women like that give you something syrupy when what you need is a bright, clear spirit. Fräulein Kolbe looked rumpled and perplexed, her bustling alertness seemed put on and unenthusiastic. Just as I was wondering how I might turn the conversation to the matter of Peipel and the forthcoming union, she raised the subject herself and asked me what I thought of him. “A cultivated individual,” I said. She didn’t entirely like him, said Meta Kolbe; admittedly, she was rather picky. (She struck me as the sort of woman who would allow just about any remotely plausible male to make off with her savings book.)

“You put me in mind of an Italian painting,” I said, in an effort to perk her up. Women like to be told that sort of thing. “Did you know you have remarkably beautiful temples? Did no one ever tell you that?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Meta Kolbe. I told her that her nose indicated extreme sensibility, while the curve of the corners of her mouth betrayed a demonically wild, although carefully controlled temperament. “How could you know?” asked Meta Kolbe.

There is no sense in telling an upstanding woman that she’s an upstanding woman, with gifts for frugal domesticity. She knows that anyway. Only a vicious woman likes to be told of her virtues. To a raddled old whore, I would say that she manifests a radical innocence and is at heart a simple housewife.

Briefly Meta Kolbe assays a conversation about developments in the Far East and recent American literature. She is relieved when I change the subject to the revelatory form of her wrists. She tells me about her childhood—“I was a hoyden, a real tomboy”—and her successes with the opposite sex, and why she didn’t want any of them. The only subject that a woman will find interesting when talking to a man is herself. We went on to talk about Meta Kolbe’s broken thumbnail, her first celluloid doll, her cousin’s improper advances, her wandering kidney, her shy smile, velvety eyes, appendectomy, charm, preference for dry perfumes, health-food shops, roof terraces, Dover soles, tea roses, fur mittens, and Cossack choirs. Then Meta Kolbe started telling me her dreams. After the fifth, I took my leave.

I went off to report to Johanna on my unsuccessful undertaking. Evidently, Peipel had run away from Meta Kolbe, and I hadn’t been able to gin up his memory. From her conversation, I got the impression that Meta Kolbe might have been prepared to take me in part-exchange for her radio, if only I’d been ten years younger and twenty years wiser, as strong as the boxer Schmeling in his pomp, as sagacious as a cardinal, wealthy as a maharaja, and charming as a Hollywood star. I would have to work in the sciences, hunt tigers, lead daring expeditions, play the cello, write poems, master tax problems, be a political panjandrum, and spend all my days making love to her.

Someone who has suffered chronic nglect from the opposite sex must surely feel entitled to make a few demands of her own. As long as I can’t afford to buy myself half a herring, I can keep the belief that apart from lobster in madeira, truffled pheasant, and baby asparagus I don’t really fancy anything.

Many’s the day I haven’t been able to afford a tram ticket. I tramp along beside the rails, criticizing the cars that dart past me, occasionally condescending to spray me with muck. It’s not the cars that are to blame—it’s the rain, the poor state of the roads, and my ill luck as a pedestrian to happen to be walking past a juicy pothole just as a car with the naive and unquestioning confidence of a natural phenomenon happens to be passing. Cursing mildly, I hop up and down, and imagine the pathetic figure I would be had it been me at the wheel. Most of all, though, I criticize the cars. How few of them I would agree to drive. Mud-spattered from top to toe, I trudge on, imagining a winged Rolls-Royce, striking, elegant and discreet, shaped like a racing car and with the capacious comfort of a cozy old Citroën. When all the time I’d be happy to hitch a ride in a converted dog kennel with a two-stroke engine. The possession of this wheeled kennel would make me humble with so much blissful excess. As long as I have nothing, I won’t just demand everything, I’ll demand more than everything. Meta Kolbe is perfectly right to want a Hollywood actor plus prizefighter plus cardinal plus Bavarian yodeler plus exotic foreigner plus proper German plus dreamer plus businessman. She’s right. She’ll never find a husband, and I’ll never own a car. The meanest and dowdiest would suffice for us, but we’ll never get it.

When I returned to Johanna, I found a cheerful scene awaiting me. A friendly young man with enormous hands, jug ears, and a snub nose was playing the accordion. “This is Anton,” said Johanna, “but you won’t form a proper opinion of him, you need to see him from the back, he has a charmingly shaped head.” It can’t be an easy matter for a woman to maintain a passion for a man based on his rear view.

Peipel too is back. He is sitting in a corner with Liebezahl, receiving occult consolation.

Johanna drags me into her shop, we sit down on her counter, among the collected Ganghofer, some volumes of Rudolf Herzog, and a title called Orchids, Blood, and the Amazon Basin. “That’s really popular,” says Johanna. “The books that are most in demand are the ones that people think will be improper. I’ve got a title called Sultry Nights, and the clients queue up for it. But it’s actually about humidity, it’s set in the tropics or something, there’s nothing about sex in it at all. People bring it back the next day, and they’re too embarrassed to tell me it was a disappointment.”

Then Johanna proceeds to tell me about Anton. He’s a refugee from the East, he has an aunt in the West with a potato business, he’s a brilliant accordionist who loves the samba and the jitterbug, doesn’t read books, not even smut, and wanted to swap his wristwatch for a small electric heater to give her. The wristwatch is worth nothing, Anton wouldn’t have got a clapped-out lighter, never mind an electric heater for it. But he meant well. “I could talk about him for hours,” says Johanna.

“What about Peipel?” I ask.

Johanna makes a swishing gesture, knocking several pounds of Herzog, Gerstäcker, and Ganghofer to the deck. “I thought she was more sensible than that, Ferdinand. She was supposed to badmouth me, and she did, but she didn’t do it right. She described me as a wild Messalina, a devil woman, faithless and easy. Who knows what all she told him. Anyway, Peipel comes trotting back all excited. Silly old Kolbe should have told him I had fallen arches and wear flannel underwear, suffer from chronic constipation, and am serially turned down, most recently by a widower with five children, because I smell of mothballs. If she’d said all that, she might have had a chance. The one thing she shouldn’t have done is say I was sensual and immoral.”

“What will you do about the radio?” I ask.

“You take it, Ferdinand,” says Johanna. “Give it back to her. Anton’s got his accordion, what do we want with a radio? If Peipel insists, I’ll keep him by for a rainy day. Only I don’t want him bothering me now, maybe you could take him with you when you go.”

I packed the little radio under my arm. At the door, I said goodbye to Peipel. He said he was going to look for some mauve tulips for Johanna tomorrow.

I took the radio home with me. I don’t quite trust myself to take it back yet; anyway, I think I should have a small reward for all my trouble.

I listen to music from a thousand stations. Johanna doesn’t need it. Anton makes better music. Lucky her.