A small creature crawls across the sheets. A passenger brought from the park. Armin sits up and positions his hand in the path of the earwig. It climbs on but soon walks to the edge and falls off. He tries a second time. Once more the earwig falls off. On the next attempt the earwig seems reluctant and turns back, so Armin stands up and carries the lost insect to the open window. It has no sense of gravity.
Armin goes back to reading.
From the kitchen, the sound of talking can be heard coming along the corridor. A burst of female laughter from a head thrown back. They stop laughing abruptly as though they have been reminded of something serious that cannot be laughed at. After a short pause, they set off again and the joke seems even more funny the second time around.
Somebody has begun to knock on the wall. The night is full of noise and counter-noise. Next door, or maybe in one of the apartments above or below, somebody feels offended, or excluded, by these sudden explosions of laughter. The knocking, wherever it’s coming from, has a lonely quality, like something people do in prisons, the signals of a solitary person trying to communicate with the world. It’s hard not to imagine the complainant standing on a bed, or a table, jabbing at the ceiling with the handle of a broom, desperate to know what’s so funny.
And then, it appears the knocking is coming from another source entirely, from a couple fucking somewhere in the building. The beat is rhythmic and methodical, possibly the sound of a headboard banging against the wall, or a chair being whipped back and forth on the floor. It could be any one of many possibilities. We cannot be absolutely sure, of course, that what we’re hearing is love. It could be that somebody has decided to hang a picture late at night without any consideration whatsoever for the neighbours, hammering a nail into the wall and then placing the picture up, standing back for a moment only to discover it’s too high, the nail needs to be taken out and a new one hammered in just slightly below. But then the hammering gathers pace. Too much urgency to belong to any spontaneous, late-night redecoration plans. Better to go back to the chair theory. The chair, if it is a chair, seems to be moving steadily from one side of the room to the other, speeding up like the sound of a horse galloping across the bare floorboards and turning around when it reaches the wall.
By now, the counter-knocking has come back. The person complaining downstairs has become so worked up that the broom handle poking at the ceiling sounds like encouragement. The knocking downstairs has become an assistant to the knocking upstairs, urging the couple on the chair to hurry up, for God’s sake, get this over with – the happiness of others can be so infuriating. The entire house has become connected, participants in this magnificent sexual act. The couple getting carried away in one room, a misanthropic individual responding with furious indignation down below, people in a kitchen laughing their hearts out, while in a room nearby, somebody is trying to read a book.
One of the men in the kitchen comes to Armin’s room and opens the door. He wants to know why Armin hasn’t joined them for a drink – the night is only beginning.
Maybe later, Armin says.
He continues reading the story of Andreas Pum making his way around the city with his barrel organ strapped to his donkey. Business is good and he’s thinking of buying a parrot to enhance his act. He knows which courtyards to avoid. Where they have signs erected saying – no begging, no peddling. He sticks to the places where his tunes are welcome. Where children come to stare in fascination at the fairy-tale scenes painted on the side panels of the barrel organ. Where coins come floating down from the windows wrapped in tissue paper, so as not to injure the donkey.
He plays the national anthem when requested. It makes people feel good in these times after the First World War when they have lost so much. He can vary the tempo and the emotion of the melody by altering the speed at which the handle is turned. Sometimes he plays it as a waltz. Sometimes he plays it to the pace of a stirring march. Sometimes he plays it as a requiem to reflect the plight of a nation in defeat. And sometimes he plays it as a lullaby, comforting all those who cannot sleep at night because of the agitation and the resentment that has taken over the streets. Angry invalids with no money in their pockets have begun to march with placards calling for the government to be brought down. The shivering men with nothing more to lose, all protesting against the state.
Andreas Pum is a law-abiding citizen with no grievance against authority. Proud to pull out his busking licence whenever a policeman asks. His luck revolves around that crucial document issued by the state. It gives him a place in society. It validates him as an individual. It allows him to eat and be hungry. It gives him the right to live, to love, to be happy.
At the time, the barrel organ represented a considerable investment, somewhere between two and three thousand marks. According to my author’s newspaper reports, the number of musicians working the streets of Berlin was estimated to be up to twelve thousand. Licences were awarded exclusively to war invalids. They did best in the open with passing trade, not so well in the courtyards. Blind organ grinders had it tough because they could not tell a theft from a donation. Working the barrel organ involved no skill apart from the minimum requirement of one arm to turn the handle. There was something exciting and artificial about the mechanical sound of this machine, a little fake like all new technology, soon to be overtaken by the radio, which could deliver an entire orchestra right into the living room. Andreas Pum was fortunate to have acquired the most up-to-date barrel organ. With manufacturing improvements, the old barrel organs whose tunes were worn down and which played only an intermittent handful of wheezing notes were thankfully being phased out.
Sadly, the story of the organ grinder inevitably enters a downward spiral. He is vulnerable to the favours of the community. Having left the donkey and his musical equipment at home one evening, he goes into the city for the first time on a recreational outing. Celebrating his luck and his reasons for being alive. His marriage, his home, his family – his place in society is assured. Now it’s his turn to be generous and give some busker a coin.
On the way home he rewards himself by taking the tram and runs into a businessman of good standing who swiftly brings about his downfall.
The businessman runs a successful haberdashery firm. He is married with a family, but he sees nothing wrong with desiring and eventually attacking his young secretarial assistant in the office. It’s a classic case of sexual harassment in the workplace, an abuse of power in which the man in a position of authority subjects the young woman to a violent assault. At the top of her voice she lets him know that she is engaged to be married and finally escapes. Next day her boyfriend, a gifted bird imitator, arrives at the haberdashery firm to accuse her employer of attempted rape. He announces his intention to sue for damages and refuses to be paid off. He wants her honour to be restored and turns the office into an aviary with a spontaneous performance of his best bird calls. He continues delivering his shrill repertoire of ornithologically verifiable hits until the haberdashery owner is driven into a rage.
On the tram that evening, the businessman takes it out on Andreas Pum. With the deafening bird imitations still piercing his head, he refuses to move aside for the organ grinder. He accuses this decorated war veteran of simulating his invalid status. The wooden leg is a fiction, he claims. Easy to let on that a real leg is prosthetic. Andreas Pum is used to people standing up and offering him their seat. Now he’s been called a faker. The city is full of fakers, the businessman says. They have been out demonstrating with placards all day, these revolutionary cripples, trying to disable the state. The businessman assumes Andreas is one of them. Another passenger concurs, saying the man with the crutch is probably a Jew into the bargain. At which point the offended organ grinder, who fought bravely and lost his leg on their behalf, raises his crutch in anger. A policeman is called. The law sides with the businessman. Andreas Pum has his licence removed.
He becomes undocumented.