The cheerful adviser

The cheerful adviser is me. Liebezahl has offered me temporary employment in his swelling empire. He now has departments for podiatry, charms, talismans and scents, departments for magical cloth, for clairvoyance and crystallography and the interpretation of dreams, departments for color, astrology, chiromancy, and graphology.

To help both me and himself, Liebezahl had the idea of extending and supporting his enterprise by taking on a general adviser. Of course, I’m hardly ideal for such a post, but Liebezahl views me as a friend, and he likes to help his friends, inasmuch as economic responsibility will allow. He’d like to give me a run, anyway—at least give me time to buy a coat and a few other necessities. Lord be thanked, it’s summer. I don’t have to shiver and bless every warm day. I don’t like to recall my last coat-less winter. Nor do I want to be ostentatiously poor when Laura and the others come. That would be importuning and could compel the good people to charitable acts that might be their undoing. I am already making efforts to eat regular meals so as not to look too hollow-cheeked. I would quite like to earn some money as well, so that I would be able to go away somewhere. I don’t know where I would go, and my plans are rather ill-defined, but I’d like to create at least the possibility for myself to travel.

The idea of the cheerful adviser was Johanna’s. Liebezahl and I then developed it, after my own initial opposition. It seemed embarrassing to me and not something I could do.

Liebezahl let me have a small whitewashed room with a flame-red carpet and dark-stained oak furniture. At first, he had thought in terms of an Oriental bazaar in which I would be lounging on plump cushions. I would be wearing a burgundy turban and be known as “Camilo, the Font of Eternal Wisdom.” In my condition of utter destitution, given appropriate payment, I would have been prepared to stroll about with a scarab in my navel, a leopard skin over my shoulders, and a coffeepot on my head, and to be called “Epaminondas, the Sphinx of the Northern Lights,” or anything else for that matter. But in purely technical, business terms I thought the Liebezahl concept ill-conceived. Very well, then let me be a sobersides in a lab coat, playing the headshrinker. I didn’t advise that either. Finally, Liebezahl understood that the attention of wide sections of the population was most likely to be engaged by something that approached it in the familiar manner of the advice columns in magazines—something along the lines of “Ask Uncle Baldwin” or “Great-Aunt Adele Gives Advice.”

My consultancy comes with an outer office with a secretary and a heap of reference books.

I had no influence on the promotional literature Liebezahl devised for me. According to that, I am a miracle of goodness, patience, experience, neighborliness, empathy, insight, practical common sense, intelligence, and worldly wisdom. I am uncorrupted, modest, cheerful, serious, discreet, instinctive, warmhearted. (These are all the attributes ascribed, as per personal columns, to men or women seeking partners in German family magazines.) And over and above that, I have qualities that no one else has ever had.

Liebezahl bought me a pair of grey flannel trousers and two burgundy sports shirts that I look semi-normal in. He decided against further costumes or uniforms.

So I sit behind my desk, as friendly, ordinary, and confidence-inspiring as possible, and await visitors.

For the first fortnight, things were rather quiet, and I got chiefly clients who were referred to me by the other departments. But this past week I’ve been kept busy from nine in the morning till eight at night. Gradually I’m getting the hang of it. The very first day I was as nervous as the stand-in who is called upon to deputize for the star in Othello. I had no idea what people were going to ask me and what I would reply to them, and at the same time I was being paid for my vast superiority over those poor beings. Instead, I was in such a state that I would ideally have turned to the least of them for advice.

Liebezahl had stashed a bottle of Steinhäger and a roll of mints in my desk drawer. The Steinhäger was to give me confidence, and the mints were to take the alcohol off my breath.

My very first visitor was a woman who wasn’t sure whether she should go to Bavaria in October or not. She was looking to me for a decision. Today, questions like hers hold no terrors for me, but at the time I was stumped. The woman didn’t give me any lead at all. I ventured that presumably there would be some fine autumn weather in Bavaria. She said that wasn’t the point. I said the change would do her good. Luckily, she agreed with that, but she said it didn’t have to be Bavaria. At the end of half an hour I had worked out that the woman didn’t want to go to Bavaria at all, she wanted to buy primroses. And she didn’t really want primroses either, what she wanted was a midsized pink azalea. It was like this: her husband’s sister was about to celebrate her silver wedding anniversary, and they had to have a present. The woman was in favor of primroses, because they were the cheapest. The husband thought a primrose was too cheap. The flower question had led to marital discord. The woman has a woman friend in Bavaria whom she would have visited long ago, were it not that it cost so much to go there. She listed various things she had acquired in the past few months. Now she wanted to offer her husband a concession, and buy an azalea instead of the primrose, because she had thought how expensive the journey to Bavaria was. And she had already bought the azalea.

The woman was full of gratitude to me when she left. I reciprocated. It had taken over half an hour to establish that the reason she had come was to tell me that she had bought an azalea.

My next visitor was a tradesman’s apprentice who wanted to get into films and wanted some information as to which was the most lucrative: actor, screenwriter, or director. I asked my secretary next door for the addresses of some film companies and wished the young man every success; I was sufficiently responsible to tell him as he was leaving not to quit his apprenticeship, it would come in handy whatever he ended up doing.

A fat old lady came in with an imposing shelf of bosom; she confused me by demanding to know whether she should undergo an operation to have her bosom reduced. I showed myself to be a rank amateur in my profession by urging the lady to consult a specialist. When I saw that she disliked my advice, and I started to panic in case she started undressing, I became unusually animated and eloquent. She was wonderfully proportioned; her bosom was absolutely contemporary; men disdained the slim, boyish figure; any number of film stars would count themselves lucky to be possessed of such a bosom, instead of having to mask their inadequacies in celluloid. Yes, and in view of the Goethe anniversary, she should bear in mind that Goethe—our very own Goethe!—was a fanatical advocate and praiser of the female bosom. I thought I had done enough to earn my crust. The lady looked well pleased, it didn’t occur to her to leave, and she wanted to hear further hymning of her bosom. She admitted that many men had already spoken as I had, and then she started telling me about these men. Finally, I got her to stop by pointing out that future men were usually more interesting than men in the past, and I referred her to our astrological department.

I am inclined to believe sometimes that people nowadays suffer from shrinkage of the brain. But then I remember that there are still some who don’t stream into the Liebezahl conglomerate.

Just now a girl recited a poem she had penned about mummy and tummy and rummy and asked whether she should become an authoress or a film actress. It had also occurred to her to play the football pools. She was a home help, and her chief preoccupation was finding someone to step out with on Sundays. The poor creature was strikingly ill-favored. I suggested a new hairstyle and pressed upon her a few inexpensive changes to her wardrobe. But she didn’t want to hear that. So I humored her and said she was so dazzling, most men were probably afraid to approach her; Greta Garbo probably had a similar effect. She, the girl, was in other respects, too, an exceptional creature of uncommon spiritual appeal, and wasted on the average man. I told her to go walking on Sundays and wait till one day she should encounter her exceptional counterpart of the male persuasion. The girl left quickly and happily. Probably to share my verdict on her beauty with some girlfriend.

I have come to the conclusion that most of my female customers haven’t come to me for advice at all, but for affirmation of their good points. Others come to dump their emotional garbage and use me as a type of human dustbin.

They have simply fallen victim to the desire to talk about themselves. They can no longer do this with their husbands. Husbands are bad listeners to their wives, being soon bored with accounts of uncanny intuitions, headaches, childhood memories, fascinating emotional complications, observations, and conflicts. Reports of her inner life interest a man only when she’s new and he fancies her. To waken the erotic potential of a woman one has to let her speak. Admittedly, what the woman takes to be close attention is often something else, and isn’t necessarily directed at what she’s saying. Later on, the poor women are surprised and disappointed when the man—so unlike before—has no interest in what his wife once did as an adorable five-year-old tomboy, or how as a teenager one summer her thoughts about bluebells and passing clouds delighted an elderly headmaster and his wife.

During my brief tenure here, I’ve already learned that it’s almost always hopeless to try to enlighten a woman. Not long ago for instance an elderly office worker was telling me how she had a boyfriend three years ago. Then one day he had stopped turning up. He had ignored her letters and tried to avoid seeing her wherever possible. What could possibly be the reason for such behavior? He had told her she was his little darling and he would always love her. So he must still love her. Should I perhaps tell the woman the plain truth? Someone who doesn’t acknowledge a truth under any circumstances won’t accept it from others, either. So I told her the man loved her so much he was afraid of being driven mad by it, making him and her both miserable. My explanation made perfect sense to her.

This old office worker is called Fräulein Schwert, and she’s become a regular. She doesn’t care that the man is threatened with insanity, she wants to see him anyway, even if it does drive him mad. I need to tell her how to win him back. I feel sorry for the old girl, and I wish I could help her, only how? I can hardly truss the man up and mail him to her. I don’t believe in medieval potions, nor do I know when, how, and where I am to administer the powdered newt that sat on the head of a white cat during the full moon. I can only wonder where those medieval johnnies got the ingredients for their elaborate potions. Admittedly, I am being forcibly given to understand that parties unhappily in love are capable of anything—except, unfortunately, the conquest of the so passionately desired object of their love.

Sometimes I get the sense that unhappy love is more dangerous than scarlet fever or appendicitis. Fräulein Schwert is a nice person, but she resembles a plucked hen and looks at least a decade older than she is.

I think it’s good to enlist the abilities of the unhappy lover. Therefore, I advise Fräulein Schwert to exercise every morning, to take deep breaths, and brush her hair for ten minutes, all the while thinking concentratedly about her Alfred. I have her eat apples, go for walks, and practice her laugh. The ostensible purpose of all this is to win Alfred back. Each time I see her, I tell her she’s looking prettier. I think if you tell an unattractive woman often enough that she’s pretty, then it sooner or later becomes true. Women who never get to hear anything pleasant suffer from a kind of emotional hormone deficiency. It barely needs saying that the pleasant thing needs to be said by a man.

There’s no point at all in telling an unhappy woman that she needs distraction. She doesn’t want to be distracted. Fräulein Schwert doesn’t want to hear about Thomas Mann, Goethe, the currency devaluation, the government, the Eastern Zone, or Tito, nor about fat rations, sunspots, the football pools, Ingrid Bergman, or Sicilian bandits either. She wants to talk about Alfred.

I seriously wondered what possibilities a girl has to win a man who no longer wants her. Fräulein Schwert is by no means my only instance. I get disappointed lovers in droves. People who write in books and newspapers that love is dead are unworldly ignoramuses. If they were to reply that they mean romantic love, then I would say, yes, but isn’t all love romantic? From the days of Adam and Eve, love between the sexes has remained pretty much constant. The backdrops may vary, but the feelings themselves don’t change.

What did I do myself when my feelings for a girl were over? In most cases, it was the feelings of the girl that were over first, or at any rate soon after. I certainly can’t remember a female creature suffering on my account.

I have been doubly attentive of late to my fiancée Luise, since realizing what catastrophic suffering a scorned female heart is sentenced to. I had been well on the way, gradually but certainly coldly and coarsely, to retreating from her. Then, a few days ago, even at the risk of not being able to shake her off in this life, I sent her flowers and chocolates, helped her with their big wash (even though I was dog tired), and almost fell fixing the drainpipe. Luise’s grateful smile pierced my heart. I even forced myself to kiss her. I quite understand that I am being woefully inconsistent, but it’s more than I can do to consciously make of myself a torturer and a murderer. In my new practice I have witnessed too much in the way of female suffering.

Financial difficulties and work do nothing to diminish Fräulein Schwert’s sufferings, either. I don’t know whether it’s easier for a woman with money or without. People who insist that all sufferings are easier to bear with money might be mistaken. Here, I’m thinking about my customer Frau Meerschuh.

Frau Meerschuh is a well-off young widow who lives alone. Ever since her lover left her, she has been able to devote her entire attention to her broken heart, thanks to her favorable financial situation. Further, having no pressure on her time and money allows her to indulge in pursuits that are turning the man pursued to a hate-filled enemy. She follows him in her car, she bounds up to him in a stream of new garments, she sends him presents and has him spied on by her envoys. It’s futile to tell Frau Meerschuh that she should have more self-respect. It’s not about self-respect, it’s about the man. And it’s just as futile to urge her to take up with a grateful and needy homecomer or fugitive from the East.

One can spend hours dinning it into a woman that a man is unworthy of her. She will listen to you and perhaps even agree with you. Then when you heave a sigh of relief and think she’s finally seen the light the woman will ask you what she has to do to get him back. Increasingly, I confine myself to listening. Eventually, all feelings come to an end. But woe betide you if you ever say that, because the woman of course doesn’t want her feelings to end.

Speaking relieves the pressure on a woman and takes away part of her drive to do something, which left to itself would produce only bad results. The poor things only annoy their friends by permanently going on about some Karl, Gustav, or Alfred. In Liebezahl’s institute, they pay their money and are allowed to be annoying.

There’s one thing I’d like to press upon all abandoned women: not to lose themselves in fantasies of revenge. After all, there’s nothing a man can do about it if his feelings dry up. To have a hundred percent guarantee of not being forsaken, a woman would have to kill her lover during the dog days of his passion. Then she can give herself over to the fantasy that he would have loved her forever, and no one can prove otherwise. Actually or symbolically killing him after he’s gone fulfills no useful purpose and would only leave a profound feeling of dissatisfaction.

One Marga Waldweber, an intellectually and physically mature bookseller, has been to see me several times. Only with respect to her Oskar is she weak-willed and frail. She doesn’t care about Oskar, let him do what he likes, she’s not going to shed a tear for him—only she couldn’t understand the manner of his desertion, that was an insoluble puzzle to her. Oskar’s passion had withered, Fräulein Waldweber had missed or wanted to miss the indications. She had thought Oskar’s love had weakened through business anxieties or a peptic ulcer. It’s odd that women’s minds are set at ease when a man produces no other love object; business anxieties and peptic ulcers are thought of as harmless. Many a man has returned to an old amour with a new efflorescence of feeling. But many men no longer care to be called sweetie pie, or to kiss the tangled curls and darling hands of a lady and perform the miracles of the Arabian Nights, when they are facing bankruptcy, or an ulcer distracts them from life’s sweeter moments. Peptic ulcers and the prospect of bankruptcy are perfectly capable of taking up all a man’s attention by themselves.

In a word, Oskar had had enough of Fräulein Waldweber. Nor is he one of those men who like to be comforted or petted. Of course he told Fräulein Waldweber that he still loved her. Few men have the courage to give the wrong answers when women put their notorious leading questions. Certainly, I’ve never dared tell the truth to a woman who was holding me in her arms. So one day Oskar sent a note to Fräulein Waldweber informing her that they were finished, and he wouldn’t see her again. He returned her key by registered parcel in a little box padded with cotton wool. This mode of severance, though, struck Fräulein Waldweber as low and inexplicable. At the very least, Oskar should have spoken to her and returned the key in person. She would like a last meeting. All women want this last meeting. I know that. I have always feared and loathed this last meeting, which is in fact a second-to-last meeting. What on earth is one to say? You say, “It’s better this way,” and you feel like a heel, because she doesn’t at all think it’s better this way. You are left with the choice between new deceitful concessions and something that in its disagreeable sharpness outdoes the already accomplished parting. “But what did I ever do to you?” asks the woman, and “You could at least tell me the real reason.” She hasn’t done anything to you, and if she still doesn’t know the real reason, you will never be able to tell her.

Every other day or so, Fräulein Waldweber reappears in a bid to crack the mystery of the returned key. I told her for God’s sake not to do anything, and then in a year or so her Oskar would return to her. But she didn’t want him back, declared Fräulein Waldweber, it was just on this matter of the key that she wanted to hear from him.

Fräulein Waldweber really believes this. A person who could deceive others the way she deceives herself would be a notorious international crook.

If I can persuade Fräulein Waldweber to put off the conversation regarding the key, then one can assume that after a year at the most her need for Oskar will have vanished. Perhaps it will be time for the next conversation with the next man. Many people suffer from a certain recurring illness that affects them at more or less regular intervals. I once heard my friend Dr. Muck telling a female patient of his in serious and dignified German: “It is simply the case with you that this organ is uncommonly susceptible.” I was the more impressed because I had no idea what a susceptible organ might be like. Or an organ that was weak and illness-prone.

Well, be that as it may. My lady patients are certainly afflicted. Maybe I should leave them their sufferings instead of trying to cure them. At least suffering is proof of being alive. Can one know how much one diminishes their life by ending their sufferings? The fact that they are attached to their sufferings should give one pause. Sometimes I believe I have helped them. But never yet have I dared to decide if my help was a good thing or not. The only certain help one may offer a person is food if he is hungry, drink if he is thirsty, clothing if he is cold. One can help by reducing his material wants—and perhaps even that only makes him open to fresh emotional wants.

Ever since I have been able to think, nothing has been so repellent to me as the offering of advice to others. Never to do so under any circumstances was among my few principles, yes, I sometimes think it was my only principle. And now I am earning a living by supplying bitter wisdom to poor fools. It’s not nice on the part of fate to corrupt me like this, instead of allowing me a modest, ideally inflation-proofed pension. What a plain existence I would then lead, pleasing to the Lord, without ever interfering with any other living being.

My most straightforward cases are the unhappy wives. I don’t have to say anything to them, they have come to let off steam about their husbands. It’s laudable that they take their complaints to a neutral place. If they talk to their friends and neighbors, they risk filling them with aversion or secret schadenfreude. And if they argue with their husbands, then they will complicate their home lives still further. Most women would rather be married unhappily than not at all. Besides, they are rarely as unhappy as they think they are. Some have an inborn martyr complex and take suffering for a sign of moral superiority. They like to be pitied. For these wives I have a pained frown in the corner of my mouth and a look of melancholy sympathy. That sees me through, and I don’t even need to speak. Wives who complain about their husbands have no intention of leaving them. If you’re angry, you’re not indifferent. A woman who has seriously had enough of her husband and wants a divorce won’t waste words and will come to me for the address of a lawyer. Even if she can’t leave her husband for financial reasons while she is emotionally detached from him, she will have no interest in talking about him and being pitied on his account.

Now and again, I am sorry that no smart and attractive wives come to me. One hears so much about them. Creatures trembling with hatred and aversion tell me about these evil, sophisticated beings who steal the partners of good, honest women and girls with a grin and a wink. Of course, I esteem the good, honest parties, but over time they pall on me, and I wouldn’t mind being refreshed by one of those detestable manstealers. But then I suppose it’s hardly ethical to expect payment and to enjoy myself.

Of course, there are also the cheated, abandoned, smitten husbands, but they are a bit of a rarity in my context. They most likely prefer to parade their bleeding hearts to a woman and have them salved and bound by feminine hands. Our graphologist, Ella Kuckuck, is a distinguished expert in emotional injuries in men. She is very striking looking and must be incredibly tough, otherwise she would hardly be able to endure such a procession of sorry, lamenting men day in, day out. Not long ago she told me over lunch that she badly needed a holiday. At the mere sight of a woebegone man she would reflexively begin to yawn. The Samaritan qualities that real women allegedly have in endless supply were on the point of drying up in her.

I can understand Fräulein Kuckuck’s feeling of satiety. I wouldn’t mind hearing a different tune from time to time. Recently I visited Johanna to experience a change. Her facility was to restore me. I brought along a bottle of cooking brandy that one patient (who suffered from choleric episodes) had stolen from her husband and given me. Less out of love for me than rage at her husband.

Johanna was in tears and greeted me the way a woman would have greeted her rescuer as he plucks her from the lambent flames of her funeral pyre and hoists her onto his sweating, stamping steed. Anton hadn’t been seen for five days now. It was like a curse—even in my few hours off, I can’t seem to avoid my professional duties.

So of course, as a good professional, I had to listen to Johanna.

Who howled and laid into my brandy and demanded that I restore Anton to her.

Anton is known to me as a somewhat taciturn youth with strikingly sticking-out ears and hands like shovels. Other than that, I never noticed anything especially remarkable about him. Johanna has a way of taking ordinary mortals and transforming them into despotic megalomaniacs. She induces these harmless beings to believe that they are the most desirable creatures under the sun, and the eighth wonder of the world. In some men she develops a gift for exaggeration like no other woman I have ever met. With the possible exception of my sister Aloisia and her apothecary. The main difference is that Aloisia permitted her apothecary to live on in glory to his recent demise, while Johanna suddenly views the apotheosized one as a mortal again and treats him accordingly. She doesn’t understand what she’s doing with such a man. The man in turn doesn’t understand her or the world. Perfectly unscrupulously Johanna lets the toppled one go, into an existence he doesn’t understand.

All I can say is, this doesn’t seem to have happened to Anton yet.

The case wasn’t a hopeless one where she was concerned, since Anton had gone following a scene, and hadn’t reappeared. Scenes are no indication of decayed feeling. A scene calls for a reconciliation the way a sausage calls for mustard.

Johanna wanted me to talk to Anton. I was to look for him in his aunt’s potato store, grind him to a fine paste, stuff him in my pocket, and leave him on Johanna’s not-yet-paid-for twisted-paper carpet. It took considerable experience to make any sense of Johanna’s rather unclear demands. Above all, I wanted to know why Anton had made a scene and taken his hat. “There’s no reason at all,” said Johanna. All right. I tried to find out what reason Anton didn’t have. Well, there was Gustav. Who’s Gustav? Johanna explained that Gustav was a student. What does Anton have against Gustav’s studies? Anton had nothing against Gustav’s studies, but Gustav needed books, and he had rheumatism. I thought it was a bit petty to jibe at a fondness for printed matter and rheumatic fever. That led to Johanna mounting an impassioned defense of Anton’s character for about the next fifteen minutes. In between she sipped some brandy. She sipped, I sipped. Probably Johanna would now expect me to go to the potato aunt tonight. Whereas I had no intention of going before the day after tomorrow at the earliest, and I needed to draw strength to lie successfully to Johanna. Displaying the patience of a saint, I was able to discover from Johanna that the student Gustav was an old acquaintance and had been sitting in Johanna’s room to borrow some books and rest his rheumatic knee. To relieve his rheumatic arm, he had draped it around Johanna’s shoulder. Anton had walked in, cast a critical eye on the medical emergency, and grossly misinterpreted it. Furiously he had slammed the door behind him. Johanna had come charging out after him, and Anton had given her a slap and disappeared without a care for the consequences.

“One should never hit a woman,” I said, because that’s what you say to a woman. I did feel pretty indignant. “What a bastard, I’d never hit a woman.”

“Of course not,” said Johanna, forgetting to cry, “of course you wouldn’t, Ferdinand, you’re much too abject and unemotional.” The corners of her mouth dropped with a leaden display of contempt. “Anyway, what gives you the right to call Anton a bastard?” Johanna’s eyes bulged with fury. I had barely begun to take in this phenomenon before Johanna had, with style and power, slapped my face. I must say, she did make a wonderful-looking slapper, half radiant Amazonesque triumph, half sweetly surprised-at-herself femininity. “Oh, I didn’t mean it like that, Ferdinand, did I hurt you?” No, the slap didn’t hurt me. I just felt obliged to book it as a probable slight, and I wasn’t very happy about that. I don’t usually feel so easily slighted. It did incline me to reconsider Anton’s slap, though, and view it mildly, perhaps even positively.

“Slaps are impulsive acts, and impulsive acts can’t be mean,” Johanna lectured me, “I would never hold a slap against a man, especially one prompted by jealousy. It’s awful if a man is furious about nothing, but indifference is always worse.”

I was surprised that Johanna hadn’t gone to Anton already and brought him back. Resigned waiting isn’t really her style. Johanna claimed to be scared of Anton’s aunt, having met her once. From her account, the lady had to be a tigress. I wasn’t at all eager to beard such a creature. Besides, I was distracted by my concerns over Lenchen.

Lovers are egocentric. It speaks volumes for Johanna that she is sometimes—love and all—capable of registering the griefs of others, and even mustering a little interest in them. “What is it, Ferdinand?” she asked. “I can tell something’s up.”

I told Johanna about Lenchen. Lenchen is someone who came to see me in my office. She has dark shiny hair, a little white face, and a sad mouth. She seemed frozen. She wasn’t one of the usual seekers after help, she really needed help. She found it difficult to speak. It took me time and trouble till she thawed out a little.

Lenchen had just come out of prison, where she had done time for attempted murder or malicious wounding. Her account was not entirely clear, she contradicted herself frequently. After she had begun speaking, I avoided asking her any questions because I was afraid she might fall silent. There are times when the more questions you ask, the fewer answers you get.

Lenchen had had a well-paid secretarial job after the war. Her parents were dead, and her brother gone, along with his estate in East Prussia. Lenchen had a little fourth-floor flat in the city, a bedsitting room and a kitchen. She had met a man who was nice to her, and they had a friendly and peaceful life. One day, a distant cousin by the name of Helga turned up on her doorstep and asked to be taken in for a bit. She came from Berlin and had taken a job in a ladies’ outfitters in Cologne. She promised to get a residence permit and a room of her own in a matter of days. The first week, all was affection and harmony. The two girls exchanged confidences over long evening hours. The little room was almost bursting with so many feminine confessions. Lenchen was even pleased when Helga asked if she could stay another week. The third week, she started being less pleased. Her nice boyfriend felt Helga cramping his style, and Lenchen too would have liked some time alone with him. But then she thought that in times like these, lack of charity was twice as bad. Further weeks passed without Helga moving out. Lenchen started delicately hating the other woman. The feeling was new to her and alarming; she had never really hated anyone before. Helga took over the flat. She helped herself to Lenchen’s modest stock of makeup, her linens, her coffee, her money. She brought back visitors. She drove away the nice man by relaying, perfectly innocently, some of Lenchen’s confessions. She gave out Lenchen’s address as her own. She went on saying every day that she would leave, but she never left. She was always suffocatingly sweet and tender. Lenchen waited for Helga to go, stayed calm, and her detestation grew. She hated everything about her: the yellow curls, the watery blue eyes, the voice, the hands. She hated her own comb when the other had used it, the fork she ate with, the glass she drank from. At night she would lie awake, choking with hatred, as she listened to the other’s breathing.

She tried to do something about her feeling. She thought she was being low and mean and sometimes still more detestable than Helga. She thought she was a petty-minded little vixen, just because she resented someone else using her hairbrush, her cigarettes, her potatoes, her soap. Then again, she would wax indignant that the blond Helga was sponging off her, even though Helga had more money and nicer clothes. Her indignation was followed by the fear that she had an envious nature. She felt ashamed of herself, she thought she was being unfair to her cousin, and she did violence to her feelings by being nice to her. Her hatred grew. Lenchen became increasingly bewildered. She missed the nice man and learned that Helga was to blame. “You should be pleased,” she said, “didn’t you tell me yourself you didn’t really hit it off. Anyway, you’re not alone, aren’t I here with you?” Lenchen dreamed of coming home from work and being informed by a neighbor that Helga had unexpectedly died. Gradually, she ceased to care whether Helga offered her objective reasons to dislike her or not. She could no longer stand the sight of her, she didn’t want to breathe the same air as her, she hated her blindly and unconditionally. One day she crushed eight sleeping pills into her mulled wine. Helga didn’t die, but she did spend the next three days in hospital, and Lenchen had to confront an ugly charge. She defended herself clumsily and made a bad impression in court, while the blonde was noble, sweet, and sympathetic. To this day, Lenchen doesn’t know why she did the thing with the tablets. Maybe she had hoped the bane of her life would sicken and disappear, maybe she even hoped she would die, maybe—oh Lord, what did she know. Her own life, anyway, was one huge mess. She had gone to jail and lost her job, and now she was locked out of her own flat. Her enemy was there now with a fun-loving friend from work.

At the time Lenchen came to see me, she was down to her last five marks. She had seen the word “advice” on a sign. At first, she had just wanted to ask if I could find another job for her, then, haltingly and confusedly, she had told me the story of her lapse. I was able to find a place for her for a week with Fräulein Kuckuck, our graphologist. The first three days are gone, and now Lenchen is afraid she’ll be as much of a nuisance for Fräulein Kuckuck as Helga was for her. Maybe I’m prejudiced, but it seems to me the butter-blonde was all sweet deceit and unappealing. She disgusted me.

Johanna is a good girl. When I told her about Lenchen, she even briefly forgot about Anton. “What a silly thing,” she said, “if she hadn’t been such a scaredy-cat with that blond bitch, and so timid and anxious, but had made a proper stink and thrown her out on her ear—well, then she wouldn’t have accumulated so much hatred in her, and she’d never have tried to kill her. Do you understand now, Ferdinand, how humane and beneficial a well-timed slap can be?” I must say, I didn’t quite, because one can not do the one without doing the other, but for all I knew, Johanna might have a point.

Johanna proposed an approach to Magnesius. He was to employ Lenchen as a typist, find her a room, and then later, with a lawyer, get the blonde out of her apartment.

Magnesius is a hard-boiled character, but Johanna was still able to get the better of him on occasion. Only this time, I didn’t really fancy her chances. Faced with a real murderess Magnesius would get collywobbles. “But he’s half a murderer himself,” said Johanna, “if not more. How often do you think he wished a business rival might catch the bubonic plague, and how many times he hoped to see someone dead whom he hadn’t been able to swindle?” I didn’t doubt it. But between the wish and its fulfillment lies a long and decisive way. “The only thing the world cares about is if the deed succeeds or not,” said Johanna. Her empathy with Lenchen the moral train wreck started to frighten me. The least objection on my part caused her to argue like a mass murderer on the loose.

“Basically, you’re a mass murderer yourself,” Johanna claimed, pouring the last of the brandy into our glasses. “Imagine you had a button, Ferdinand. Don’t look so stupid, I mean, a simple little button, like a bell push that you carried around in your pocket. Whenever you want someone to die, you just reach into your pocket and press the button, and whoever it is drops dead—no pain, no suffering, just one last breath, and out out brief whatsit.”

I told Johanna I would never press such a button. “Of course you would, Ferdinand, and how. Maybe you’d feel some compunction the first few times, but you’d get over it. Remember that hypocritical minister who was on the radio for hours the other day—“I could kill him,” you said. I bet you’d have pressed the button even while he was speaking. You’d have done it with pleasure. And right now, because you’ve a soft spot for Lenchen, you’ve conceived a hatred for that disgusting blond moth-head. Imagine, just pushing a button, and your friend’s worries are over. You’d press the button twenty times just reading the newspaper. You’d wipe out oily editors, twisted judges, deceitful, slanderous women, animal tormentors, politicians of every stripe, nuclear physicists, weapon salesmen, slave drivers, and warmongers.” I refused to accept the imputation of so much active philanthropy. Johanna wouldn’t yield. “You would wipe them out with your button. The only reason you’re not doing it now is because it’s against the law, because you’d be punished, because it’s difficult, and because actually doing it would be unpleasant. I completely believe that you wouldn’t want to be responsible for the death of someone who was a mortal enemy or bop them on the head with an ax. Thank God, even today you’re not the only person to draw the line at that. But with my button you’d have a way of killing people casually and impersonally—it wouldn’t even be murder, you’d just be removing them from the planet.”

Johanna went on and on elaborating her conjecture with the button. In her imagination, I’d already depopulated half the planet, including the Hunsrück farmer who gave me five pounds of maggoty flour in exchange for my last pair of shoes. “Now, Ferdinand, just picture a couple of starving fools, you can smell the lost war on them three blocks away, they get stomach cramps at the sight of a delicatessen window, and then one of those slimy politicians drives past in his socking great Maybach, just composing his latest pimping address to the electorate—are you telling me you wouldn’t push the button? You’d be ashamed not to.” I admit to not being entirely positive what I’d do under those circumstances, but Johanna still won’t give up. “Name me one person, Ferdinand, who would never push the button if he had one.”

“I expect there’d be some, Johanna.”

Johanna laughs. “Oh, really? Well, tell me the name—just one person known to us both. Are you claiming your fiancée Luise and your old in-laws wouldn’t have pushed it ten times in a week? Or Magnesius. Your friend, that sweet-natured Heinrich? At the very least he’d have put his enemy to sleep, that scandal-sheet editor who’s forever having a go at him. He’d have begun with him. Your cheerful landlady Frau Stabhorn would have cut a swath through the ranks of police and customs inspectors. Do you suppose there’d be a pretty woman left under forty if Meta Kolbe had the button? Give it to Liebezahl and check after an hour how many people are left in the tax office. Maybe a charlady, at best.”

I was getting bored with the button schtick. “I don’t want your button, Johanna—anyway, it doesn’t exist, and there’s no point in talking about such a thing.”

“It’s not pointless, Ferdinand, I want you to see that it’s just a matter of chance that you’re not a much more prolific murderer than Lenchen. You shouldn’t give yourself airs in relation to her. Admit it, that’s what you’re doing. You want to help her the way you help a fallen woman. That’s no good to her. She feels it, maybe subconsciously, but she feels it. All right, she’s having difficulty in her life. If that’s a flaw, it’s one you have too. You have no reason to be condescending just because you’re managing to eat by playing the village idiot adviser for Liebezahl.” Johanna beamed at me. Once she’d stopped banging at me with her wooden hammer, the world seemed light and pleasant again. “I’ve got an end of gin, Ferdinand, and I propose we drink that now, then we’ll head off—you to Anton, and me first to Magnesius, then to Lenchen. Maybe I’ll drop in on the blond bint and tear out some of her hair, if I can fit her in.”

Johanna’s movements were cheerful and brisk. She wore a fluffy purple dress and looked like a rampaging campanula. I didn’t have the strength to get in her way. She was looking forward to tonight, she said, she had never supposed she would be looking forward to silly Anton. She didn’t have the least doubt that I would be able to produce Anton right away. It never failed to impress me when someone had such confidence in me.

“I swear I’ll get him for you!” I exclaimed, fueled by the cooking brandy. “Do you love him so much, or why do you want him back so badly, Johanna?” I asked a little later, because in my mind’s eye I could see Anton with his shovel hands, his sticking-out ears, and his rather witless expression.

“I’m not afraid anymore when he’s around,” came Johanna’s reply, “not of life, nor of death.”

It was stupid of me to forget that everyone, even Johanna, is born with some kind of fear. No one can take away such a fear, no more than they could take away your heart without killing you. But if Anton is capable of taking away Johanna’s fear, that makes him an important figure in her life. So if it’s up to me, she can have him. “You know, the sort of fear you don’t know where it comes from, that’s real fear, and I don’t have that when Anton’s around,” she said, powdering her face. “I’m still afraid of bombs and diseases and the man from the electricity company who’ll cut me off because I haven’t paid the bill—but that’s a different fear, that’s a fear I can touch with my hands.”

“Let’s go, Johanna,” I said, “before we get even drunker, let’s not lose ourselves in metaphysics.” I felt a bit rotten. It’s so easy being a spoilsport, shutting off the living font of a woman’s ideas with a well-timed fancy word and an off-the-peg philosophical term.

“Call it metaphysics if you like, Ferdinand, if you can’t find any words of your own, you puny creature,” said Johanna. Bless her—at the very last moment, she always stops you feeling too guilty in front of her. “Will you get my Anton?”

“Yes, Johanna, I’ll get him for you.”

The evening was ripe and round as I traipsed through the park on the way to Anton. The air already had a distinctly autumnal smell. I was sad the lindens weren’t flowering anymore, I love their smell, and I didn’t get enough of it while it was going. And this summer I didn’t hear a nightingale either.

I loved the shimmering planes of lawn, the sound of my own footfall, and the colorless sky getting to be night. I thought about Johanna’s death button and the fact that I might be prepared to press it so as not to meet Anton’s deadly potato aunt.

I thought about Lenchen. She came to see me again today, the pale flower.

“I didn’t really know what I could ask you and how, Herr Timpe,” she said, “I thought your business might be shady, or for all I know obvious, do you understand? See, I’ve just come out of prison. It’s a wonderful thing to be free; I feel so happy. Of course, I’m unhappy as well. I went to the labor exchange. It felt funny, having to stand in line like a beggar in a soup kitchen—just for permission to work. They told me there that I would have to be patient. I found all that a bit humiliating. Don’t you agree? Please tell me if I’m boring you, Herr Timpe? I’m afraid I can’t even pay you anything. I thought you might be able to tell me how you get to be a prostitute. You know, I’m so happy to be free again, I’m so happy not to be in prison, and I want to enjoy the feeling. I don’t want to kill myself. As long as possible, I don’t. Do you understand? If someone had asked me a couple of years ago if I’d rather be in prison or dead, I’d have said I’d rather be dead. No question. But now I’ve survived prison. I expect I’d survive being a prostitute too. But I’d have to try it out first, I can always kill myself later.”

Outside, there was a woman waiting, something about a daybed. Her mother-in-law had caused it to sag and ruined it in other ways too. Now the mother-in-law was refusing to pay her share of the reconditioning expenses. The woman wanted to discuss the case with me, and she was starting to get impatient.

I advised Lenchen not to go into prostitution, it really wasn’t a nice life. “Good God,” said Lenchen, “I’m not kidding myself, I was just keeping it in reserve for when things got really rough. I think I’m getting there, mind. Please don’t misunderstand me. I just wanted to tell you that getting started in prostitution is surprisingly hard. When I think of the old newspaper articles I used to read, it seemed almost more difficult not to. Every servant girl was in grave danger. Don’t you remember articles like ‘White Slaves Exported’? But if you want to set up in the trade here, domestically, whom do you ask? Do you suppose the welfare office has any information? Or the police? All the magazines have their mailbags that claim to answer all sorts of questions, but I don’t think they would answer mine. And you either can’t or won’t give me an answer yourself. Of course, I’ve heard of these places called brothels, but I don’t know where a single one of them is. Do you suppose a girl can just go there and introduce herself? I never thought I was particularly clever, but I didn’t think I was that ignorant either.”

I think for the moment Lenchen has given up her idea of becoming a call girl. I’m sure she wouldn’t be good at it. Then again, most people follow professions they’re no good at. I try to discuss Lenchen’s plans objectively with her. With someone who’s really in the soup, it’s no good going to them with your ethical concerns and prejudices. I’m just glad she hasn’t managed so far to gain admittance to those circles. Extraordinary, really, the way each profession is armored in its own exclusiveness, and you don’t get to join it without some kind of entrée. Not long ago an agreeable middle-aged man came to see me, a man you could smell came from a good background, modest and with pleasant manners. So far as I can remember, he had been a house tutor in Breslau, and with his family managed to find temporary asylum with landed relatives outside Cologne. After a protracted struggle with himself, he had decided to become a taxi driver. Like many others, he had the rather touching notion that such an obvious social climbdown would be interpreted as a noble sacrifice, and accordingly compensated and admired. Whereas in fact, if the poor fellow has no friends among the taxi-driving fraternity, he won’t even get any useful advice. I pulled a few strings and introduced him to the Rose Guzzler. The Rose Guzzler is an old taxi driver, somewhere between fifty and seventy. I don’t know his real name. It wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t either. Like most of the veterans in his profession, his nickname grew over his name. And where does that come from? Maybe once in the days of his youth he had an accident with a rosebush or he drove into a pond with sea roses, or some uncouth colleagues caught him in the act of pressing a rose to his lips that some winsome girl had given him. The roughest fellows are often exposed to such lyrical shocks. And Carmen will never go out of fashion.

I’ve known the Rose Guzzler for years. On the back of his left hand he has the tattoo of a fly, delicate and pert. Maybe in his previous life he knew Pompadour, or he even was Pompadour. If one believes in the transmigration of souls, then why impose limits; everything is possible. People who believe in miracles shouldn’t try and rein in their imaginations. In for a penny, in for a pound, I say. Just at the moment that poor Brylcreemed Gröning is being hailed as a miracle worker.^* The press is coining it, and so are the press barons. Instead of a beating, they are raking it in. I’ve no idea what old Brylcreem-head is making. I’m only astonished by the modesty of the thousands of believers streaming to see a creature who is no more miraculous than they are. A proper miracle doctor, in my book, is someone who will cut my head off and reattach it, he will turn a tree trunk into a flesh and blood leg, he will cure my depression by changing my pocket lint into thousand-mark notes. “One shouldn’t demand the impossible,” people said to me when they asked me if they should seek out this Gröning.

“Of course you should demand the impossible,” I countered, “you don’t come to some sort of compromise with a miracle, you ask for everything—absolutely everything.” Why shouldn’t I believe in miracles? Everything’s possible. Only I can’t respect the kind of thing I’ve already encountered in the course of my life. The fact that a thing may resist explanation isn’t enough for me. At other times, everything seems like a miracle—my own existence, the earth, the stars, people, trees. Just now, actually being dead seems the greatest miracle to me. I don’t want to become an angel or a devil or a ghost—or for that matter an owl, a swallow, a seal, or a lilac bush. One is inclined to envy all forms of existence other than one’s own. I expect a lilac bush is consumed with anxiety. It maybe doesn’t like earthworms, and they’re gathering round its roots. It flowers, because that’s in its contract, and then the little moths sit on its blossoms without so much as a by-your-leave. I want to be absolutely nothing at all, that too is something I want to experience and enjoy. I want the unassimilable. I want to have the experience of not being able to experience anything—I want to enjoy the fact that there’s no more enjoyment for me. I want eternal existence in complete dissolution. I want something that will boil off all the possibilities of my imagination. I want the miracle that exists beyond dream and thought. The truly miraculous is the unthinkable. If something is thinkable, then it’s at best a fairy story. All fairy stories were or will one day be true. They are the product of experience and intuition. They are assertions that became or will become proofs.

As I walked along, I wished I could walk for days, and then fall down and sleep for the rest of infinity.

I felt wrapped up in my life as in a light, rustling integument. Sometimes it seems heavy, dirty, and wrinkled, just at the moment it seemed clean and silky smooth. My time alone showed me an intoxicating parade of fleeting yearnings, and a power of imagination that allowed me to treat them as genuine and available. The thoughts in my brain were whirling like dust motes in the wind—they were so flighty I wasn’t even tempted to try and hold on to them. Nor did I want to exert myself or go to any trouble, but just to be left alone, like a child who wanted to play.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have long for my communion with myself. Already, I was insufficiently isolated to ignore the calls from outside. It was getting late, and Johanna wanted her Anton back. I like to take the requirements of my friends seriously, even if they strike me as absurd.

On my way, I dropped in on Heinrich. I thought I needed to put on the intellectual corset that the real world makes you wear.

At Heinrich’s, the world was all too real. His magazine, Red Dawn, has appeared, and Heinrich is already working on the third issue. He was busy with a string of domestic murders. Pride of place went to a woman who popped her husband’s head in a shopping bag and later bought Brussels sprouts. That sort of thing seems to be in these days. Heinrich assures me that readers like nothing better than murders and sex crimes. Flashers in public parks are always useful. With headlines like “Disgusting Menace,” the magazine wears its morality on its sleeve. Improper pictures, preferably from abroad, come in handy, so long as the magazine prints bold subtitles saying “We reject horrid images like these!”

Red Dawn has become exactly the publication Heinrich never wanted it to become. Once, he was revolted by the flood of half-disguised scandal sheets without originality or freshness. Now he finds his Red Dawn upstanding and courageous.

What is it that drives newspapers to depict the world as a shuddersome freak show? The authenticated birth of a two-headed baby is enough to set editors yelping with joy. Mad, distorted reports are carried, ideally from remote places, so as to elude the inquiries of fanatical pedants.

I try to supply Heinrich with a few leads: Three-year-old toddler bites lion to death in jungle clearing. Ninety-year-old Tibetan woman leaps off thirty-foot rock every day in bid to remain supple. Bedouin keeps tame duck as secretary, types his worldwide correspondence for him. Three sardines hatched alive from purple hen’s egg in Texas. Man seeks divorce after wife abandons him in bowl of unsalted spinach. Hundred-and-three-year-old Bavarian woman leaves suicide note, complaining that world too annoyingly moral to be endured. Bull swallows Caruso record in Mexico and starts singing; torero moved to tears. Albanian man celebrates one-hundred-and-eightieth birthday swimming underwater for hours, laughing.

Heinrich says he will consider the one about the bull. Next, I proposed a few “handy hints for household and personal grooming.” Angel-hair noodles woven into the hair nourish the scalp and give their wearer a silky sheen. The juice of half a melon dripped down the neck of a returning husband is an ideal prewash. Moths will never go near china that has been dropped from the balcony in mild weather. Floor mats last longer when pushed under wardrobes.

Not all my suggestions met with Heinrich’s approval. Editors always think they’re not doing their job if they drop their pose of rejection and criticism. I can understand my brother the night porter when he turned his back on literature.

Heinrich was still considering the quiz for readers. I offered him a few obvious questions:

To our fair-minded male and female and other readers: towards the end of your life in a closed institution, do you still expect to have sex appeal? Then answer the following questions and tot up your scores at the end. One. Do you feel insecure when you sit on a beer mat? Two. Would you eat a chrysanthemum if you were offered goulash? Three. Have you ever felt moved to bite a stork in the leg? Four. Has it come to your notice that the town of Bebra has never appeared in a song? Five. If you were born in Bebra, do you think you would be proud of the fact? Could you imagine in the course of a vacation under orange blossoms and mimosas by the sunny Mediterranean, sighing, O my Bebra!?

“We can’t have that,” said Heinrich. “That last one would make the reader suspicious, it’s too complicated, he would think it was an attack and he would feel offended.”

I agreed to scrub question five. “It has to be ten questions,” said Heinrich, and he sent me a look that was both anxious and a little exhausted.

Briefly I pondered how much the love of homeland of a German city dweller could persist if he were set down in a beet field in rainy November. Nothing against “love of soil,” but there have to be limits, even if it is entirely imaginary. Imaginary love is admittedly more obdurate than real love because it springs from some deviated sense of self that takes itself for idealism. Most people fall for this hook, line, and sinker as soon as they lose their innocence concerning this mistake and recognize that it is a mistake. Harmless believers usually become fanatics if they are no longer able to believe what they once thought was a good idea. Whoever seeks to preserve a conviction against the available evidence will ultimately resort to evil. He must convince others of at least a fraction of his own belief. The less he is able to do so, the more furious he will become.

At the end of his day, Heinrich likes to immerse himself in half-baked philosophy. But today he hadn’t knocked off yet and was still mixing his literary cocktail for his Red Dawn readership. I had no great desire to offer Heinrich my services as mixologist, but I was even less inclined to see Anton. I was looking for an ethical excuse for my delay. Often, I will do something disagreeable purely so as not to have to do something still more disagreeable. Besides, I was just now feeling extremely idle. The thought of the to me little-known Anton was more of a strain than Heinrich. In spite of it all, I felt obliged to move for a speedy departure.

“Write one more piece under the rubric ‘Unusual Experiences of a Female Reader,’ ” I said to Heinrich. “Our reader Karla Pickbock sent us the following: ‘At the suggestion of a friend I went to see a football match a year ago. The crowd was largely male, and I had the strange feeling they were there for me. After I let the last tram leave without me, a gentleman asked me if I knew how to roller skate. The question sealed my fate. Today I am happily married and the mother of three strapping lads, who leave me no time for roller skating. I wish my sisters a similar fate.’ ”

“Such true-life experiences are both relevant and ethical,” observed Heinrich. “With a few little nips and tucks I can use them.” He transcribed, with a few nips and tucks. His features showed the tragically iced-over resolve of those self-sacrificial beings who have to rescue thousands upon thousands of others’ bodies, souls included.

Once I had convinced Heinrich of the literary stimulus of a visit to Anton and his aunt, he agreed to accompany me there.

The aunt was charming. I have no idea what Johanna finds so scary about her. While Anton kept us waiting for ten minutes, she served us apple cake and Korn. She’s a doughty old girl of seventy or so, with a thoroughly modern attitude. She plays the football pools and goes to freestyle wrestling. Where the current crop of magazine publications is concerned, she deplored the plethora of beautiful naked young girls and women. Not that she had any ethical doubts. Her point was merely that most of the readership was female, and the woman customer was heavily emphasized. Didn’t she also have a right to be considered in the advertising? No normal woman was continually interested in the chests and legs of other women. It hurt her self-respect to have to spend money on them. In a word, the aunt was requesting the male pinup. She was herself long past the years of fleshly desire, but she would still like to see women getting their deserts. Heinrich left, deeply impressed by the doughty fighter, when Anton finally appeared and I pushed him out onto the street.

The conversation with Anton took place in the corner pub. Johanna had given me a false account of the case of Gustav. Anton had seen her perched on his lap. I suggested that she was working on his rheumatism. Unfortunately, Anton showed himself impervious to medical arguments. Johanna will say it didn’t mean anything. She’s not even lying when she claims such a thing. She is lavish in her orientation. Hers is a generous nature; what members of women’s groups would see as a volcanic outbreak of sinful passion to her is a minor bagatelle.

It was child’s play, well below the dignity of an ambitious psychologist, to bring Anton round to Johanna’s way of seeing things. He was dying to be persuaded and couldn’t wait to run around to Johanna’s.

Johanna was playing host to Lenchen, the pallid flower. She seemed shy and timid, like an orphan being inspected by a committee and required to recite a poem. She seemed capable neither of murder nor of the reckless intention to pursue the calling of a hunter of men.

From Magnesius, Johanna had collected a tin of pineapple, a bottle of bubbly, four packs of Chesterfields, and the promise to employ Lenchen in his business sometime soon. That was about all I was able to glean from her. Soon she was busy with Anton.

^* German mystic Bruno Gröning (1906–59) became a media sensation in 1949 following reports that he had miraculously healed a young boy in the town of Herford. He preached that human beings could recharge their natural energy by tapping into a higher power he called the “healing stream” (Heilstrom in German).