by Irmgard Keun
Perhaps I could tell the story of my little jerkin?
I was in the POW camp. For as long as I could remember, I’d been and done only what others wanted. I hardly knew whether I still existed as a self-determining living creature. In the war I was punished by being made a corporal. I have no medals and rely on my surroundings to identify the invisible spiritual aristocrat in me.
When I got back to Germany from camp, I still wasn’t a private individual. I wasn’t any Herr Timpe, Ferdinand Timpe. I was a returnee. You could tell that from looking at me, and I was treated accordingly. Lots of people were nice to me. They patted me on the back and said, “How now, Comrade!” Or: “Expect you’ve just come home, eh?” Or: “What was camp like, then?” They wanted to hear from me, or perhaps not. They called me “Du” and addressed me whenever and however they felt like. They felt sorry for me, or perhaps not—whatever the situation was, whatever they felt like. Their pity gave them a right to me, and I had to go on being something determined by other people. I was given a stamp and called “returnee.” To be honest, I can’t stand the word “returnee.” It sounds a bit like the name of a vacuum cleaner or something. Something maneuverable. Gets in the corners and edges. It has something that smells of home and being looked after. Home for the homeless, home for fallen women, home for convicts, home for neglected children. Every time there’s something to do with home, the bulk of people are terribly moved—by themselves. The victims that are sitting in it, they either have to play the role of the ungrateful object, or they permit themselves to be physically and spiritually castrated. The only sensible thing the moved parties have to give would be money, which of course they don’t give.
I was on the train to Cologne and didn’t want to be a returnee, just a perfectly ordinary private individual called Ferdinand Timpe.
I looked every inch a returnee. In the station waiting room in Cologne, I felt like drinking a glass of beer. A gaudy old bird joined me and wanted to take me and my cigarettes. I gave her cigarettes and invited her to share the bottle of schnapps I happened to have on me. She wasn’t a looker, but she was friendly and kind. As a returnee, you can hardly expect a welcoming committee of Roman courtesans. Anyway, I wasn’t in the mood for female consolation—neither by exquisite courtesans, nor by a storm-tested ruin girl. Nothing drew me to my fiancée Luise, either.
I set off towards the suburb of Nippes to my friend Dr. Muck. In the course of my colorful life, I once took a couple of semesters of German literature, till I couldn’t afford it anymore and settled down as an assistant garage mechanic. I learned some useful things there, and might have stayed longer, had I not happened to inherit a secondhand bookshop with a philately section. The bookshop was in a little lane in the old part of Cologne that didn’t get much foot traffic. I led the serene existence of a hermit and lived quietly in the miasma of my own mild wisdom.
I’d come across Dr. Muck at university. I hadn’t seen him for a long time, but I thought friends are for life. Unfortunately, he’d married. Most men can’t do friendship after they’re married.
I got to chez Muck, and his wife answered the door. She was sharp-featured and withered in a pinkish sort of way. She spoke quickly and evenly. Initially she was repulsed by my aspect, but eventually she let me in.
My friend Muck was away. Frau Muck was hosting a poetry evening that was like a religious service with a touch of sect. Under dimmed lights sat a goodly number of ladies with souls and serious expressions.
I was allowed to sit in a corner and was asked whether the ruins and above all the cultural devastation had not upset me. I had long since got accustomed to the ruins. Their aspect hadn’t shaken me as much as was expected of me. My senses were numbed, and I sat there as in a dream.
But it seemed to me as though the ladies were somehow proud of the ruins. The way some women are proud if they’ve been through a dangerous operation. They don’t like it if some rival in suffering comes forward with a still more dangerous operation. One of their great trumps is the sentence “The doctors had given up on me.” In just that way the inhabitants of various German cities claimed that theirs was the one that was the most comprehensively destroyed.
On my way through the evening streets, I had seen the ruins in misty moonlight, and they struck me as charmed and eerily attractive.
Dear God, how much one had once had to give to see some piddling little ruin. When I was a boy, an old uncle dragged me through crowds, dust, and heat haze to some ruined castle on the Rhine, where lovers and trippers were taking pictures of one another.
Of course, I feel sorry for people who have lost their homes. We should all live in marble halls. I have never been moved by material losses. I am afraid of illness and of the loss of individuals who have put down roots in my heart. And sometimes I am afraid my heart may have become infertile ground, in which nothing and no one will be able to take root.
Maybe my capacity for suffering was low that evening with the spiritual ladies. I couldn’t feel anything for the irreplaceable cultural goods either. One of the ladies was mourning a shattered church portal, and I had the sense that she couldn’t have lived a single day without admiring its artful execution. Later I learned that the lady had never clapped eyes on said portal. Never apparently felt the need to either. When she went on to talk about five hand-embroidered cushion covers and three perfectly good bolsters that were stolen from her shortly after the end of the war, then her voice sounded sincere, and her grief seemed heartfelt.
I felt my want of empathy disappoint the ladies. I am sometimes incapable of thawing on the orders of fashionable imperatives.
I was relieved, therefore, when the poetic hour resumed. A stout lady in her prime called Herma Linde was reading lofty poems. I was unable to understand them. I tried to think. Is it possible to find incomprehensible things beautiful? Some people seem to find only incomprehensible things beautiful. Or maybe they kid themselves that they find them beautiful.
I was flagging, delicate mists fogged my brain. Out of the teeming haze loomed the form of a sanitary orderly I had once met. He had a large, mysterious boil on his hand. A handleless white cup from which I had once drunk rosé in Lyon. I saw the hairline crack in the cup. I heard the whinnying horn of a motorbike that drove past me in Amsterdam, and I remembered the grey rubble of a pavement in old Salzburg. A marsh marigold sprouted from it. I saw the laughing curls of a twittering girl who passed me once at a fruit stall where I was buying cherries. I saw the dark stain of rot on one Queen Anne cherry…
I was desperate not to fall asleep. Seven times I tiptoed out to the lavatory to take a sip from my flask. In the hall I walked into a sideboard and knocked over a large china ornament—I think it may have been a wood grouse. I broke off a piece of its beak. These things are always happening to me when I’m trying to be especially careful.
“Oh, never mind,” said Frau Muck, in a tone of voice that told me she minded a great deal. She held the broken piece of beak in the palm of her hand, eyeing it with solemn grief. The other ladies also put tragic creases in their physiognomies. Other people may have faces, these ladies had physiognomies. I replaced the wood grouse on the sideboard. Why couldn’t it have fallen noiselessly?
“Genuine Meissner,” sighed a lady with tough russet curls. She seemed to have been assembled with rusty wires. They all stared at the debeaked wood grouse.
“The beak’s not that important,” I said, “other parts of the wood grouse matter more.” I thought of the lovely feathers, but the ladies maintained a stern front, and one said the bird wasn’t a wood grouse. To general sympathy, the lady of the house bedded the beak in a little box lined with cotton wool.
Outside, the ruins continued to bloom. I could see them from the lavatory window. I had retired there to commune with my flask and enjoy a few minutes’ peace. The lavatory is the civilized man’s only refuge. One isn’t merely entitled, one is positively obliged, to lock onesel
f in. No one will ask you for statements, comments, confidences, kindnesses, accounts, sympathy, love, money, an opinion, enmity, friendship, or taxes, as long as you are in that temporary asylum.
I know children who read their first cowboy stories and young people who read their first love letters precisely there. I know poets who in such undisturbed spaces turned their budding rhythms into verses, and broody penseurs whose ideas came to maturity in the course of a few minutes of seclusion. The toilet is and remains the only place where husbands are free of their wives, fiancés of their affianced, debtors from their creditors, children of their parents, pupils of their teachers, and employees of their employers.
The time one may spend in the lavatory is limited, as all earthly happiness is limited. I am not one of those who would hang themselves in the toilet by their suspenders. I have neither suspenders nor a death wish. All I sought was a little peace, not to see or hear anything, no poems, no ladies, no broken-beaked wood or other grouse. If I’d stayed away too long, my absence might have caught the attention of the ladies, and they might have broken down the door. Lyrically affected ladies are apt to commit thoughtless deeds.
I looked for the drawing room and opened the wrong door. Wherever I am, I open wrong doors and set foot in wrong rooms. I’m not being figurative here. At the Mucks’ I found myself in the kitchen. There on the table were three platters of canapés, some with cheese, others with ham on them. I ate a few without compunction, leaving gaps in the array of the smiling sustenance. Out of gratitude I decided to take my leave, to allow the ladies to eat something too.
This was in the time before the currency reform, when hunger painted many people’s faces a yellowy-grey color. The poetry ladies probably weren’t hungry, but they were maybe peckish. Spiritual feelings stimulate the appetite. In past times, I remember an unhappy love affair that made me a gourmand. Rarely did anything taste so good to me as then, when I was on the point of dying of my broken heart.
Initially, I was annoyed with Frau Muck for not telling me anything about the canapés. Then I said to myself, why should she? I had no right to Frau Muck, and no right to the delicious canapés. I reconciled myself to the situation. One must not expect pears from an apple tree, nor nuts from a pear tree, nor milk from a mole, and no milk of human kindness from a soul that’s down-and-out.
I felt full and benevolent when I found the correct door. I returned to the corner of my sofa. Miss Herma Linde was still reciting. There was something priestessy about her. I am afraid of priestessy women. They have a grim, mild force and are strangely mean.
Wurmlauf der Elben, moderndes Gespinst.
Ernte des Grauens, wüstes Taggesicht,
Die Pracht der Leiche ward dir zugedacht,
Was willst du noch? Ich neige meine Hand.*3
I think this was from a poet who was still awaiting discovery. I pictured the priestessy one performing various humdrum tasks, swallowing a fishbone, say, or quarreling with the gasman.
The ladies waxed nobler, their sighs were so noble. I stroked a cushion whose silken threads got caught in the rough calluses of my palm. The atmosphere grew a little oppressive. I needed air. I had been intending to sleep at Muck’s, but now I wanted to be gone. I would find some other shelter somewhere.
“I’m so sorry,” said Frau Muck, walking me to the door, “I’m so sorry you can’t stay, but why don’t you come by next week. We are just forming a club for the protection of spiritually endangered individuals of this new era. We are striving to turn people’s thoughts to the true and the beautiful.”
From within I could hear Herma Linde intoning:
Chaos der Öde, Tigerin der Brunst,
Krampfender Schrei aus kahler Hufe Schlag,
Nur hier und da ein Nabel aus Rubin.*4
I felt I was in some fifth phase of puberty. “Might it be possible for you to lend me a blanket, Frau Muck?” I asked, because it was cold outside, and I was reckoning on sleeping rough.
Frau Muck had none. She had suffered so many thefts after the war, and it wasn’t as though you could get new things either, everything was so expensive. “Those prices!” And then they had taken in her mother-in-law from Weimar. In the end, she let me have an ancient lady’s coat that smelled of mold, sweat, and mothballs.
To this day I don’t know whether the coat was a gift outright or lend-lease. I didn’t think too much about it, I cut myself a little tunic from it. Among other things, I was once the right hand of a tailor in Marseilles.
What in God’s name am I going to write? Something has to give.
Thank God, something gave. Lilly just visited me and bothered me. The pleasantest thing about work remain the interruptions. I could write about Lilly. Though I don’t have much time, I have to go and meet Heinrich.
Lilly is the victim of her beautiful feet. She studies chemistry and earns money on the side from knitting sweaters and writing. She lives with her grandmother in two gloomy little rooms on our floor, at the far end of the corridor. I’m not entirely sure how many people actually live on this floor.
Lilly sometimes comes to see me when she’s feeling unhappy. Today she’d waited in vain for Konrad. Lilly is often kept waiting in vain. She is a good, hardworking girl, but unfortunately she’s a martyr to her feet. She’s not ugly, you just don’t notice her. The sight of her doesn’t make a man attentive and swivel-eyed. But she does have strikingly beautiful feet. Beautiful feet are rare in a girl. Someone must have said that to Lilly once. From that day forth Lilly suffered a string of unhappy misunderstandings.
A normal girl wants to please a man. Girls with beautiful eyes, hair, lips, jewelry, clothes, have it easy. They can allow themselves to be desired and admired without risking anything. But what possibilities does a girl with beautiful feet have? She can go to the public baths. But summer is brief, and Sundays rare. The girl can’t very well pull off her shoes in the tram, and she can’t put her bare feet up on a café table without disagreeable consequences. Lilly is obliged to invite colleagues and acquaintances back to peppermint tea in her gloomy little room to make the most of her feet. And then she needs to take off her shoes and stockings. Men are apt to misunderstand it when a lady suddenly takes off her shoes and stockings in their presence—even if the lady is careful to say she is only doing so because she feels a headache coming on, or she can’t breathe. There are certain gestures that seem to suspend distance, and it takes a powerful and controlling character to brush aside all unwished-for consequences with a smile. Lilly’s is no powerful and controlling character. She encounters difficulties and inappropriate responses all the time. She is intelligent, even understanding, but she’s always prepared to trample all over her reason—quite literally. With her beautiful feet.
Lilly came to me crying about Konrad. Unhappy girls are apt to talk rather wildly. I couldn’t quite make out whether Konrad had been overenthusiastic or chilly. At any rate he hadn’t been around today, and she had waited for him till she felt ill. She is always prepared to seek a lot of the blame in herself, and today she positively basked in self-reproach. She perched on the side of my bed like a timid little mouse. I gave her a glass of wine and she drank it trustingly, in grateful little sips. With her hand she brushed the skirts of her little coat and tried to lengthen it a bit. “Long coats are all the rage,” she said. Lilly takes all her feelings of inferiority from her poor clothes, and all her confidence from her feet. I wish her three corns and an ermine. The spiritual change would probably do her good, and she might make the discovery that changes are not necessarily either good or bad.
I have to go now and see Heinrich. The fifty marks’ advance isn’t what it was, and my article isn’t done. The result of my diligent labors is fourteen stories, none of them longer than three sentences.
Heinrich was happy to see me again. “I do like your name, Ferdinand,” he said, and smiled at me with his gentle eyes, “I do like the name Ferdinand Grossen
grau.” We had drunk a couple of cognacs by now, but I didn’t need to be reminded what my name was.
Ferdinand Grossengrau is a friend of mine. During the war, we were in Berlin together the odd time. He is an industrious poet, a doughty artisan of the word, boozy as an old petrol tank. Heinrich had once met us two Ferdinands in an artists’ bar in Berlin, between air raids. Our capacity for distinctions had already suffered, and we drank brotherhood as one does in the small hours, and to this day Heinrich has mistaken me for the literary lion Ferdinand Grossengrau.
Three times therefore in the course of the day I have met with recognition and appreciation—from the pickpocket, from Magnesius, and now from Heinrich. I shouldn’t get conceited about it, though, each time the esteemer had mis-estimated. I should reconcile myself to the fact that my value resides in unaffected beauty and remains difficult for others to discern. At least I know my own worth.