The party of the broken glasses

Johanna’s party began early in the evening, I don’t know what the time is now. Without a watch, there’s just a spinning on through alcohol and human entanglements.

People dance, people sit, stand, lie around. People come, and people go. Some seem unfamiliar to me, as though they’d just blown in off the street. For Johanna, it’s the presence of strangers that makes it a party.

A radio is playing, two or three gramophones are playing, a young man is belaboring his accordion, a tenor voice rings out loud and off-key. All around there are cushions, and half-full and empty bottles and glasses in amongst broken records.

Everyone seems cheerful, probably they are cheerful too, and I only think of them as sad because I’m sad. I think almost the only thing capable of making me profoundly sad is a party. How do people do it, fall into wild high spirits on command at a preset time? Perhaps their high spirits are forced without them knowing it? They are no longer free, they are prisoners of their intoxication. Forced hilarity makes me sad. Damnit, I don’t want to let myself go like this. I’ll have another drink, maybe that’ll do the trick. I’ve had quite a bit already. The more I drink, the soberer I feel. Damned alcohol won’t let itself be bossed around, it keeps control of you, and you do what it wants. Drinking is a lottery. You never know in advance whether it’ll make you merry or sad, loving or angry, gentle or furious, clever or moronic.

How much work Johanna put into this. At least a dozen people were kept busy. I helped too. Sometimes I’m fed up with doing things I have no desire to do.

Johanna’s lending library has been turned into a bar, there are colored paper hangings screening the bookshelves, borrowed by the noodle-maker Albert Theodor Peipel from his mother. Her room is all cushions, poufs, and paper chains. Liebezahl’s room is stuffed full of sofas. In the yard, walled in by ruins, a long trestle table has been set up. The summer night is warm and pliant.

I am sitting somewhere in the background, perched between two bins. Every five minutes or so, someone in the neighborhood yells “Quiet!” whereupon everyone in the yard sets up an even wilder din.

There is any amount to drink, and all sorts. Of course, Johanna couldn’t afford it all. Her business is going very badly, she is in debt, and has no idea what to do about the bailiffs. To be able to devote herself still more fully to Anton in thought and deed, she has neglected her translation work. Women in love run the risk of financial ruin. I am comforted by the thought that so far Johanna has emerged from her calamities fresh and cheerful. She isn’t a person who reeks of tragic destiny and imminent end.

Each guest was called upon to bring at least one bottle of wine or spirits. Liebezahl, Heinrich, Peipel, Magnesius, and one or two more will have been charged to bring a five- or tenfold amount. In return, my pallid Lenchen was permitted to come without anything, and Johanna’s best friend, Meta Kolbe, with a split of Blue Nun. “Very strong and good for you, too,” she proclaimed. I myself have witnessed elderly ladies quietly and steadily chugging Blue Nun and thinking they were doing good work and not indulging in the demon drink. Everything depends on the name of the given product. You can be a whiskey tippler but never a Blue Nun tippler.

Like many businesspeople, Magnesius is a jovial and generous party animal, only to emerge as even icier and stonier later. He damascenes himself. To heighten the mood, he has jammed a green monocle in one eye, and pulled a yellow silk stocking over his head. Just now I saw him kissing the hand of a woman unknown to me and offering to buy her a brand-new Mercedes.

Several of the gentlemen are going around in paper hats or capital beer mats. In many men the compulsion to unconventional head attire becomes uncontrollable when they have been drinking together. On the whole, this is a harmless urge and shouldn’t be discouraged. I only wish I knew whence it sprang. For the past hour, Peipel has sported a tea cozy, which must be burdensome for him, and calefactory.

The tuneless tenor is bareheaded, only he is singing incessantly, now in the courtyard, now in the room with the cushions, now in the bar. He was hoping to be discovered, Johanna tells me. I guess him to be around fifty, but older men have been discovered. Johanna asked him because she likes his style and wants to make him happy. He seems happy enough to me. He can sing to his heart’s content—no one’s stopping him and no one’s listening. His name is Damian Hell,^* and he’s a postman. Or rather, he used to be a postman, the most delightful postman in his district. He empathized with his clients. He was happy when he was able to bring them post and miserable when they waited in vain for letters, and he was gifted in the expression of his unhappiness. He cheered people up, comforted them, and made them happy with his empathy. The dullest beings sensed that Damian was a jewel among postmen.

One day, Damian failed to appear. On the third day, several people noticed that they were no longer getting letters, and on the fourth a new postman appeared—an impersonal and objective young man. A man who reserved his heart for his own personal use and didn’t carry it around in his mailbag. He did his duty, but he wasn’t a ray of sunshine. One only really understands what the sun is when it has disappeared behind a cloud. A whole district started to miss Damian Hell.

The explanation was soon discovered and never understood. Damian was a bachelor. His postal round was like a wife to him. One day there must have been a crisis between them, he must have yearned for something new, and he fell in love with a nice new suburb at the opposite end of the city. For three days he traveled out to the new suburb and dropped letters at random in various boxes. Perhaps he was just bored with the old routine and tried in his fashion to introduce a little variety into his life. My explanations carry no medical authority. The psychiatrists into whose care Damian was placed will have been able to come up with a more scientific account. Before long, he was dismissed as posing no threat to the public and now draws a small pension, works as a handyman, and sings. The mailman has been forgotten, while as a handyman he has some pale shadow of his erstwhile popularity.

Johanna has often been a faithless lover and always a faithful friend. While others shrugged their shoulders and declared that Damian was mad, she gave blazing defenses of his actions as a display of normality. Only a madman or an idiot, she declared, was capable of doing the same thing every day for decades. Damian’s soul stood in need of something like its dirty weekend. In his mild, peaceable manner, he had given in to the lure of danger and adventure and uncertain outcome and muted it to a harmless joke. Other men, drawn by the lure of the uncanny (the Unheimlich in Freud) into the practice of strangeness would have turned straightforwardly to evil—would have become murderers, vandals, torturers, arsonists, child molesters, swindlers, racketeers, or some other wickedness. It may be observed that the multiplicity of evildoing demands a far greater vocabulary than goodness, which is rooted in singleness.

So, Johanna took care of Damian. Maybe she’s right, and he is normal. He is a person who will never turn to the bad, either through his own agency or others’. Perhaps that’s what matters. Johanna dragged me into a corner of the room with the cushions. Damian is singing. Johanna beams and applauds. In the opposite corner Anton is hunkering and muttering. “He’s starting to get on my nerves,” says Johanna, and waves and smiles at Anton. “I’ve had enough of him, Ferdinand—but maybe I love him still, I don’t know. Of course, I’ve spoiled him by being too nice to him. But if I like someone, I want to be nice to them, I don’t want to watch myself the whole time. I don’t want to resort to those tricks that women use in order to keep a man.” Johanna tells me she likes to be sweet and good to a man, then she gets up and gives the scowling Anton a medium-strength slap in the face.

While Anton takes himself off silently and with impressive dignity, Damian sings, “My friends, life is worth living…”

“If he’s not back in an hour, will you go and get him for me?” says Johanna, and sashays out into the courtyard.

Johanna is wearing an off-the-shoulder red silk dress with a scary décolletage. Aloisia is wearing much the same thing. I don’t understand what keeps such dresses from slipping. It looks very nice, but I’m sorry for the poor ladies who are prevented by the dictates of fashion from running around in the altogether. Especially when they wear their sundresses, they sometimes make a positively wretched impression on me. When I see them, I get the feeling they are awake at all hours, racking their brains as to how the tiny strips of material round their hips and bosoms can be made still tinier.

Aloisia is drinking champagne, and she is so boisterously cheerful, it’s as though there never was anything like a Hugo Moppe in her life. My sister Nina, who is a painter in Munich, is drawing caricatures on the walls. She arrived sometime this morning, I haven’t had a chance to speak to her yet. She seems to have turned into a calm and serious-minded girl.

Laura and her retinue were supposed to have arrived this morning as well. She was to have been the focus of the party. Johanna loves Laura and had intended a queenly role for her. Probably she would now be lying on one of the sofas, sleeping blissfully through all the racket. Now it looks as though Laura won’t get here till tomorrow, when the party’s safely over. I won’t go home, I’ll go straight to the station.

My brother Toni is here. He’s sitting in a corner, looking as though he’s about to cry. He came up from Starnberg yesterday. I had trouble recognizing him. The cheerful lad, the sunny boy of the family, he isn’t cheerful anymore. Destiny has struck him a hard blow.

Poor Toni has become a little remote to me. When he was far away in the South, we were closer.

Starnberg is where he has his nursery. He won’t have been coining it exactly, and will have had the usual economic anxieties as per. He didn’t care, though. All those things he wasn’t able to afford didn’t matter to him. He was happy with his little Mariechen and their pets. At least he thought he was. A couple of weeks ago, an acquaintance gave him a mild case of lottery fever. The first three times he didn’t win, and he was all set to give up. But then he tried it a fourth time. Mariechen posted his entry. She conscientiously gave the receipt to her husband. Shortly after, Toni saw that he had won 48,000 marks. There was no doubt about it, he had won. He went crazy. First slightly crazy, then completely crazy. He bought clothes for Mariechen in which she looks like a bedraggled film star who’s been in a bicycle accident. He bought all sorts of stuff for the house and the yard and the nursery. He played host to all their friends. Probably he bought his bees a jeroboam of champagne. He wanted to spend a day of his life being foolish. Then he started making plans—new buildings, new nursery extensions, new stables. He became obsessed with breeding orchids. He wanted to keep monkeys, order tulips from Holland, retile the bathroom, and lots more. There’s no end of great and small wishes that a person can collect in the course of a lifetime.

And then came the catastrophe. Toni had indeed won, but the money wasn’t paid out to him and presumably never will be. Registered mail rarely gets lost, but Toni’s registered letter was. The lottery panel refused to shell out, and the post only pays its standard forty marks for a lost registered letter. Toni doesn’t understand, he can’t let the matter rest, he thinks the post is obliged to indemnify him, he wants to go to court. If the unhappy man had seen he had made a mistake, he would probably have settled down sooner or later. But as it is, he continues to hope and is getting more and more deranged. If he tells people now what he wants to do with the money, you get the sense that even a million wouldn’t be enough. He tells everyone about his mishap, it’s all the conversation he has. He asks everyone for advice, and everyone advises him differently. This afternoon I saw him standing with a small boy in front of an ice cream van, and I’m sure he was talking about the criminal deceit of the postal service. If you try telling him to be sensible, he looks at you as if he’d suddenly noticed he was with his mortal enemy. Mariechen is running around looking tearstained and puffy-faced and has already consulted Aloisia about the advisability of a divorce. I think Toni wouldn’t mind. He could then devote himself entirely to his lottery win.

Just now he’s hunkered in a corner looking to see whom he could discuss the post’s skulduggery with. It looks as though everyone has already heard the story, and no one wants to hear it a second time.

Just now I see Herr Pittermann sitting down beside Toni. Pittermann looks flushed and a little woozy, but is evidently trying to compose his carnivalesque face. Pittermann is just the right person, Pittermann will cluck like a mother hen and turn a little profit on the side.

Pittermann used to be a rep for a toy company. He was always a jovial, life-affirming character, a doughty carnival supporter, indispensable at weddings, funerals, baptisms, and other celebrations. He loves the songs of the Rhineland, Rhine wine, and Rhine jokes. His life, though, has repeatedly brought him into unhappy situations, in which he managed to prevail through bravery, resourcefulness, and optimism. Johanna met him through a businesswoman for whom he promised to organize a telephone. Telephone connections are still not easily come by. Pittermann has promised Johanna a telephone as well.

Pittermann can get hold of just about anything, he has connections, which is to say human connections. Or so he claims. Of course, the connections cost money. Or they demand payment in kind. For instance, the businesswoman passed on a whole lot of sardines and cognac. The connections love cognac. They smoke as well. Pittermann does it all for nothing. That way he is sometimes even more expensive than the connections by themselves. You have to show gratitude to him, have him round and spoil him. It’s like with girls who give themselves to a man out of sheer love and won’t accept any presents. You end up having to take them to expensive restaurants and bars, put them in cabs, and send them flowers and perfumes and boxes of chocolates. For all that, a man could easily get himself a month with a girl he could pay. But there’s no sense in trying to explain things like that to my mother-in-law or Meta Kolbe, they just get angry.

Pittermann has promises of telephones outstanding to another ten people. Or maybe more than that by now. At any rate, ten people have now got together to form an anti-Pittermann trust. Pittermann’s connection has let him down. The suspicion has surfaced that he himself may be the connection. Anyway, to date no one has a telephone, and dark clouds are gathering over Pittermann’s head.

Before the currency reform Pittermann had a very lucrative and rather more innocuous idea. Again using his connections, he engaged himself on behalf of people who wanted or needed to be de-Nazified. They were innocuous cases, but it was precisely these innocuous cases that were nervous and anxious. Pittermann propped them up, Pittermann lent them support. One day they were de-Nazified. They would have been without Pittermann’s intervention. Whereas Pittermann would probably have perished of hunger and thirst long before the currency reform without the de-Nazification scheme.

I wonder what possibilities the Pittermannesque brain would see in a situation like Toni’s. I can see the wheels turning, and Toni is looking optimistic, almost happy.

Soon it’ll be tomorrow. Noise and drink chew up the time, the hours turn into minutes. And vice versa.

Anton is back. He is sitting with Johanna and a policeman who has come to see about the noise. Johanna welcomed the policeman with delight, he was one she knew from another life. I’d like to meet someone Johanna hasn’t known in another life. The policeman is singing and having a high old time.

In the lending library reconfigured as a bar, Mother Peipel’s curtains have fallen victim to the flames. A few books are lying in puddles on the floor. Heinrich and Magnesius distinguished themselves as first responders. I have a singed eyebrow and a hole in my trousers. I don’t usually like catastrophes, but there was something refreshing about this one. Rowdy parties are much of a muchness, and a little interruption seemed to me very much called for. I don’t like to sing, and I prefer to do my drinking and kissing in private.

Luitpold and his wife Lucca are wandering across the courtyard arm in arm, sweeping glasses off the table. “I’m surprised at you, burying yourself in your middle-class business,” I said to him, “you take everything so seriously, even when we barely know what will happen tomorrow, and we’re just living from day-to-day.” Luitpold didn’t reply, and Lucca looked startled. “Since when do you talk such nonsense, Ferdinand?” she said, “Ever since there have been human beings on the planet they’ve lived from day-to-day and have no idea if they’ll be gravely ill tomorrow or suffer a calamity the day after. You act as though war was the only calamity in the world, but there are floods and tornadoes and volcanoes and earthquakes—people have lived from day-to-day for thousands of years.”

“She’s right,” said Luitpold. Lucca is always right.

Heinrich is lying in Meta Kolbe’s embrace. He will regret it tomorrow.

Luise, my fiancée, is dancing, I don’t know her partner. Gradually my eyes are swimming. Luise seems worried to me, I have probably neglected her. Luitpold is so happy with Lucca. I wonder if I could ever be as happy as he is? I don’t know. At the moment I’d be hard-pressed to say what happiness is, and whether I even want to be happy. But I don’t want Luise to suffer. “Come on, Luise, let’s drink a bottle of champagne together—here in the courtyard, at the far end of the table, we can have a little privacy.” Luise sets off after me, her expression is sad. I pop open a bottle of champagne. Will I ever have the courage to tell her the truth? The sky is just beginning to brighten, the paper lanterns have gone out. At the opposite end of the table, Damian the singing postman is asleep with his head on the table like a traveler in a third-class waiting-room who’s missed his connection.

Luise’s hair looks colorless and scruffy, she is in an ugly turquoise dress. She is wearing a triple strand of wax pearls and a broach on her bosom in the form of a spider with brass legs and a shimmering pebble for a belly. She looks so cheap and wretched that I am almost moved. Her posture is awful. She is sitting there with her chin in her hands. I’m just wondering what to say to her when I notice that she’s crying. Oh, what now? I feel an upsurge of detestable feelings. I’d like to run away and leave her all alone, I’d like to smack her face; I want to say I’ve had enough and have had for as long as I can remember. And all the time I feel sorry for her, and think I’m being mean. I fill our glasses, say “There, there, what’s the matter?” and light a cigarette. I give her shoulder a little shake. Luise’s quiet crying turns into an audible sob. It’s terrible not being able to comfort crying women. As soon as they have your pity, they can’t stop. With positively sadistic pleasure, they kneel down in their puddle of misery. I feel like saying “Go on, have a drink!” but feel that every word I could utter would only be more barbarous. It’s getting chill, and Luise is cold. She has goosebumps on her arms. Crying as she is, I really don’t want to drag her indoors.

“All right, let’s drink,” Luise suddenly says, with a little quaver in her voice. We do so. We do so again. Luise has a big gulp. And then she starts to speak: “Well, it had to happen, Ferdinand, I’m very fond of you, I really am, otherwise I’d have told you long ago. But with you always fixing everything about the house, and mother saying you’re a useful fellow to have around. You remember, before the currency reform, when money wasn’t worth anything, and you couldn’t get anyone to work for you, unless you offered them an arm and a leg. And we didn’t have anything to eat either, and you kept producing stuff out of thin air, but that’s not really it—”

I’m not really following at this stage, presumably Luise is drunk. I don’t care if she is, nothing’ll happen to her here. So long as she stops crying. I pour us some more. “Cheers, Luise.”

Luise’s stout little hand clasps the narrow stem of the champagne glass. “Go on, drink, then you can go on.”

“Well, please understand, Ferdi, and please don’t take it amiss. See, Papa’s de-Nazified now, and he can get a proper job, and other men are earning as well. Of course, everything’s terribly expensive, but we’re able to buy vegetables and get our shoes resoled. I know it was really nice of you to repair our shoes, but a proper shoemaker does it better. Mama says you never had a proper training in it. Papa says, he’s perfectly fine about you, but you were a man for abnormal times. And now the times are getting much more normal, or don’t you find? We spent so long walking around bareheaded, but Mama and I are getting three hats made, each. You can’t really walk around without a hat anymore, and that’s an indication, don’t you think, about the times getting to be more normal?”

“So, I’m not a man for normal times, Luise?”

“No, Ferdi, you’re really not. I mean, when people are wearing hats again, and not those headscarves, and you never want to go for a nice promenade on Sundays either. I hardly know what to say when someone asks, What does your fiancé do? I always say, Oh, he’s an academic. But you’re not really an academic, are you?”

“No, I’m not. Why should I be an academic? I never claimed to be an academic. Have some more, Luise?”

“Thanks, Ferdi, here’s looking at you. I really have nothing against you. Don’t think I’m being silly—there’s no law that says a man has to be an academic, and I know academics these days earn a pittance, and other men provide a much more solid basis. But you’re not a businessman either, or a civil servant. Don’t think I’m uncouth, I appreciate artists too. They can be very decent people, with a regular income and everything. But you’re not an artist either. I’m not saying you’re not a regular person, but you’re not really anything, are you. I’m sure you’re not a bad man, we always thought the world of you, because you were so well brought up and a bit shy and never expected anything. Papa once wanted to tell you that you did a really bad job with the guttering, but Mama and I wouldn’t have it because we felt so sorry for you. It turned into a proper scene, and you once told me I never put up any fight.”

I don’t remember ever having said anything like that to Luise. My head is buzzing. Damian has gone to sleep and is snoring; his snoring is pleasanter to listen to than his singing.

“Of course you can put up a fight, Luise,” I say.

“Well, I want to wish you all the best in your life to come,” says Luise, “you know, I once thought of writing to you, but then I didn’t. I really didn’t like you at first, but then I didn’t want to be that way, and you were a soldier, fighting for the Fatherland. And then I was a soldier’s girl, and I had to wait for you to come home, because that was my duty. And then you were coming out of POW camp and it wasn’t right to disappoint a homecomer. You have no idea what scornful looks I got from all the other girls. And then you went and made yourself useful and you did odd jobs about the house, and only a man who’s head over heels in love would do that. Please now, Ferdinand, promise you won’t kill yourself and don’t hurt me just because I can’t respond to your love. I’ve said it now—now that times are normal again.”

I promised Luise that I wouldn’t kill myself over her, and that I wouldn’t hurt her either. I feel incredibly stupid. For long tormenting years I’ve been wanting to be rid of Luise, and now I learn that I never had her anyway. “Well, cheers, Luise—bottoms up.”

The dawn breeze blows masonry dust from the rubble into my eyes. I feel like whooping for joy, but I can’t. All these difficulties and awkwardnesses had become cornerstones of my existence. Against my will, I had committed myself to Luise and her family. The commitment has ended, and instead of feeling happy about it, I feel discombobulated. It must be the way a criminal feels after spending years trying to avoid the consequences of an action, when a sudden miracle slips him free of guilt and conscience. In this instant, I can understand my landlady Frau Stabhorn, who suffered for years from an ingrown toenail on her left foot and felt bereft when an orthopedic surgeon cut it out. No normal human being loves pain, no normal person loves his pain and gets used to his pain. But there comes to be an intimacy with it, he respects it, he treats it better than he treats anything else in this world, he is afraid of it, and hates it and fights it. And not until he’s rid of it does he understand how strong the symbiosis was. He’s freed but not yet relieved. He experiences a temporary disorientation. “I don’t understand,” said Luise, as I tried to explain my nebulous thoughts to her, “but I’m pleased everything’s all right now—you know, we had this really crazy carpenter once, he talked a bit like you, but he was very good at his job as well, and that’s where you’re different.”

I kiss Luise’s hand and promise never to forget her. No, I’m not so dull that I can’t feel a little intimation of liberty. “Be sure something becomes of you, Ferdinand,” says a lurching Luise as I lead her back inside, “be sure something becomes of you, if only for my sake.”

I hand over Luise to an indistinct tangle of humanity. She pushes on in the direction of a male figure—I think it is the man she was dancing with before. “An engineer at Ford,” says Johanna, “after the war he was something in the Planning Ministry and made a fortune with black-market plaster. A player. Nothing happened to him because he had protection.” I ask Johanna if he’s a man for normal times. “These aren’t normal times,” says Johanna, “but I knew him long ago, he got hold of some tiles for me and diddled me.”

“Here, Ferdinand,” calls my brother Toni, “this is my friend Pittermann—he’s going to help me out. Pittermann is my friend. You’re my friend, aren’t you, Pittermann? Pittermann has connections in the post office and knows some pretty high-up people.” For now, Pittermann is finishing a Carnival song, and when he’s done, he tells me he means to find interested parties who will pay five marks to represent Toni’s interests. Each of them stands to earn three hundred marks for his original outlay, once Toni collects his 48,000 winnings. “It’s just the way I am,” says Pittermann, “I try to help people, I don’t feel at ease with myself if I’m not helping someone—basically I have no interest in these sorts of things, one only ever encounters ingratitude, I’m presently representing a rainwater enterprise—but you won’t understand. By the way, did you hear the one about the woman who raised her left leg?”

“Why, there you are, Comrade,” comes a bellow behind me, “do you remember Sergeant Stolpe, and whatever happened to Fennkopf?” I have no idea. I see an ill-shaven man with skew tie, stubbly reddish hair, and little light-blue eyes. It’s Robert Leberfeld, my old comrade and savior. He’s been in Cologne for a week now. For a week now, he’s been glued to my tracks like some master detective.

During the war, Leberfeld was a sergeant of mine. He wasn’t awful, but he didn’t arouse any particular enthusiasm in me either. There was no personal relationship between us till the day Leberfeld saved my life. During an unexpected artillery barrage I had taken cover, busted my ankle, and couldn’t get up. Leberfeld came running back, hoicked me up, and panting carried me two miles to the field dispensary, even though I was just about capable of hobbling.

I was moved and grateful, and from then on Leberfeld looked after me the way an animal lover might adopt a pathetic stray. He viewed me as belonging to him, and he is one of those people who look after their property. I had to sit with Leberfeld in the evening, and he would tell me jokes, the stupidest and nastiest jokes I’ve ever heard in my life. His supply of these was apparently inexhaustible—or at least it hadn’t been exhausted by the time we parted at the end of six months. When he wasn’t telling jokes, Leberfeld liked to talk about women and brothels and sexual experiences, his own and others’. I can’t imagine how anyone after three weeks of Leberfeld would have any interest in a love affair. Mine was certainly gone, and for the foreseeable future. Of course, I listened to Leberfeld. What else was I to do? He was my sergeant, and on top of that he had saved my life. It upset me to feel hatred welling up in me against my rescuer, and I did all I could to fight it down. I would much rather Bernard Shaw had saved my life. I missed out on such a lot. I had to be grateful to have been rescued at all, I suppose, even if it was Leberfeld. But the man made it difficult for me to esteem him as I ought.

A week ago, Leberfeld showed up. I hadn’t seen him in years. “Don’t you remember me then, old codger?” Yes, I did. I asked him to supper. I was happy to be able to take him out and so do something for him. But Leberfeld didn’t need my help, in fact he wanted to pay for me. He’s taken over a transport company in a Cologne suburb, and he’s doing very well. He has so little in the way of practical worries that he can afford to seek out emotional contacts. Finding me—his old comrade whose life he saved—causes him to shed tears of happiness. “Jesus, fellow, now we’ll paint the town together—eh what? I expect you know your way around here. At least a fellow can talk to you. Do you still remember what fantastic conversations we used to have? Remind me to tell you a couple of jokes—I bet you won’t have heard these before—you’ll piss yourself laughing—at least with you, a man knows he’s not casting swine before pearls. Christ, we’ll have so much to talk about!” And so I pushed off with my rescuer. I spent three evenings and half the ensuing nights with him. I got rid of Luise tonight, but I’ll never get rid of Leberfeld. He’s all right, but really I can’t stand him. If any and all soldiers weren’t appalling to me, I could take it into my head to join the Foreign Legion. I’m hoping it’ll be enough if I just leave Cologne.

Then again, I might find myself missing Leberfeld’s joviality. His cluelessness as to my real feelings is beginning to charm me. Also, I won’t find it easy to give up my volunteer work for Luise and her parents. People’s claims on me tether me to life. I will be pleased to go on being useful to Luise every so often.

Johanna’s rooms are starting to empty out. The guests are leaving like ghosts struck by the dawn light. Just a moment ago they were here, now they’re suddenly gone. It seems to me they vanished into thin air. I can see my brother Toni totter off with Pittermann. The fool has let himself be talked out of his simple, uncomplaining existence; I must have a word with him tomorrow.

“Now,” says Johanna, “that was a nice party, wasn’t it? Not a lot happened, but all the glasses are broken. Anyone who’s still here and wants a drink will have to drink out of the bottle.” Johanna’s guests have left an unholy mess. She’s looking at a mega clearing-up session. She won’t be able to open her library till the day after tomorrow.

“Put up a sign, Johanna: ‘Closed for renovation.’ ”

The now-broken glasses had been borrowed, and Johanna will have to replace them. Who’s going to pay for them? Johanna hasn’t any money. We should pass the hat around. Johanna laughs at the suggestion.

“You can get money out of people before a party, Ferdinand, and during a party, but never afterwards, you surely ought to know that.”

Well: people who have exhausted themselves while celebrating often turn into misers in the subsequent period of sobering up. Johanna sits up on her counter, the dawn stains her red dress red.

She says: “I’m wondering if I should start tidying up now, or just go to sleep in this godawful pigsty. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a tidy room left over with a tidy bed in it? But I don’t have either one. You know what I wish I had, Ferdinand? A proper separate bedroom with a separate bed in it. I can’t stand this combination of bedsit-kitchen anymore. And I hate convertible couches, they’re neither one thing nor another.”

Johanna pulls open the door of her store. She looks dreamily out into the distance.

“Look at that, Ferdinand—see the sky on fire! It’s the sunrise. In an hour’s time the first bailiff will be here.”

Awake with tiredness, I wander off to the station. It’s a clear, bright morning. The ruins are in bloom. New houses and little shops springing up among them. A beggar weaves past a colorful fruit stand and begins singing. “Do people give each other roses in Tirol…” Industrious fellow, starting his day so early. He is old but well preserved and has a beautiful drinker’s nose. I give him a mark and hope he buys himself a nice brandy with it.

“I’ll walk with you a bit, you seem to have forgotten me,” says a voice at my side. It’s Lenchen. I really had forgotten her. Her features are still and tired and her walk a little sluggish. But her forehead, eyes, and smile are still friendly and fresh. I link arms with her and lead her on, that way she can have a little frail presleep. It makes me glad to know I can help this creature. There is an obstacle in her path, and just at the moment she is too weak to jump it all by herself. Someone has to lend her a hand, then she can do it. And she won’t cling on to me once she’s able to walk on unassisted.

I drop Lenchen off at pretty Fräulein Kuckuck’s. I have time to drink a cup of coffee there on my feet.

“I don’t think there’s ever been a person who was always able to fend for themselves, not since the beginning of the world,” I say, once I’ve burned my mouth on the hot coffee, “and I don’t think there’s ever been a person who wasn’t helped by others either. The shame of it is that it was almost always too late, or insufficient or the wrong kind of help.”

“Drink up,” says Fräulein Kuckuck, “Lenchen needs to go to bed, and I wouldn’t mind another hour’s sleep myself, so why don’t you hold the rest of your morning service on your way to the station. What is it with men, that they like to wax philosophical when they’ve had a few? They can’t find an end, and ideally they would start crying at their own nobility. Finish your coffee and get lost—hang on, I’ll give your hair a quick comb, and brush the ash off your collar. You can clean your fingernails yourself. You won’t want your mother to see you looking like that, will you?”

I was pressed down onto a chair and felt like an old stove being violently scrubbed and brought to a shine. Lenchen too perked up a little and was seized by the sadistic feminine desire to grab a helpless object and work on it with chemicals and vicious implements towards its ostensible cleansing. I think in the hurry of the moment, I was even vacuumed, and rubbed with washing powder and sprinkled with Vim. As a finishing touch, Lenchen wiped my nose and Fräulein Kuckuck pushed three particularly thorny roses into my hand.

I stood on the platform, lonely as a crumb. The train had pulled in, but no Laura got out. With heavy feet I tramped back down the malicious station steps.

Rooms had been booked for Laura at a nearby hotel. I went there, thinking maybe the porter had been given a message. The roses drooped in my sweating hand.

“Yes, sir,” said the porter, “the party arrived on the evening train.”

I walked up the stairs, feeling the sweet softness of a stair carpet. I gave a quiet tap on the door and turned the handle. The door was open. Laura doesn’t like to lock doors. That unlocked door was the first intimation of home.

At the foot of a large bed was a narrow sofa with a little dachshund sitting on it, viewing me gravely.

I didn’t move. I heard some calm breathing, and I knew I was in the right room. The curtains were drawn tight, and the light in the room was compounded from pink corals and old silver.

I looked at the bed. Four gobstopper eyes were looking at me. They belonged to two little black children with black woolly heads. These earnest little joke items observed me silently, alert and awake. And with that regal superiority and calm that only the consciousness of deep security is capable of imparting.

Between them Laura lay sleeping. Her hair shone darkly, and her face had the familiar calm beauty. I felt ashamed of my momentary apprehension.

I sat down next to the well-bred little dachshund and said to myself, Let’s not wake her. Once more I had the happy if fleeting sense that I’d come home.

^* Hell is German for light or bright