by Irmgard Keun
*1 Of 20 and 21 June 1948.
*2 German Buss-und-Bettag, November 4, a Lutheran celebration (Cologne is very largely Catholic).
*3 These parodic lines from Keun—who wrote poems as well—are like an amalgamation of Stefan George and Gottfried Benn: Windings of Elbe, tattered thread of silk,/ Dread’s dismal harvest, ravaged second sight,/ The corpse’s full magnificence—gone!/ What more do you want? I extend my hand.
*4 Barren Sahara, tigresses’ estrus,/ Stifled yawn or yell, the drumming of hooves,/ A belly button’s not unexpected ruby.
Cousin Johanna
Today I am seeing Johanna. “Ferdinand,” she said to me the other day, “I don’t believe in blood ties, and I don’t quite understand how we’re supposed to be related—but when push comes to shove, you really are my one true selfless friend and my spiritual anchor.” When Johanna talks that way, it usually means she’s in danger of dying of a broken heart again. I don’t know how many times a heart can break, but I think even the strongest and springiest heart won’t survive continual breaking.
I don’t know how old Johanna is. I lack the application and the feminine wiles to work it out. Also, I won’t ask her straight out, because she would appeal to a woman’s right to eternal youth.
Nor do I know how many times Johanna has been married. She always liked being married, and has made an unknown number of men happy, at least on a temporary basis. Even though she doesn’t radiate the cozy comfort of an ancient sofa cushion and has nothing in common with the demonic sultriness of burgundy velvet curtains. When I think of Johanna, I can only ever think of wicked and sinful tubular steel.
Johanna believed there was only one great love in the life of a woman. Each time she was unshakably convinced she was experiencing it. Such emotional conviction gives a woman an optimistic freshness and elevates the chosen one to the status of a sort of super-eraser that rubs out and removes all who have come before him. Until someone rubs him out.
I admire Johanna’s faithlessness. I don’t see her as a loose, immoral person so much as a genius of forgetfulness. It’s not agreeable to me when a woman has a loving memory, not since I was sentimentally bound to a certain widow. I would kiss her hair and say, “I adore your scent.” (In one’s younger days, one is apt to be shamelessly lyrical that way.) Nowadays, I don’t think I would trust myself to say “your scent.” “My Karl always used to find it exciting,” the widow would reply, and we would have a long reminiscence about her Karl. How dotingly he would warm her poor chilly little feet on his string vest, and once, enflamed by passion, he tossed a hairnet in her direction. I am bothered by a woman’s propensity to burden a loving present with unasked-for details of her past. I don’t know if they do it out of an excess of communicativeness or in the hope of obtaining some propaganda advantage. At any rate, I only admire faithfulness in a woman if I am its object.
Johanna isn’t short of ways of advertising herself, anyway. I can’t tell if she’s pretty or beautiful. She is ravishing. There are so many film stars and beauty queens who look ordinary to me. The majority probably take a different view, and my taste isn’t representative. Certainly, though, Johanna has a je ne sais quoi—she electrifies like an eel. She has brown curly hair and wide, grey eyes. I don’t trust myself to describe further details. That’s usually how I am with people. I can see their face in front of me when I try and picture it—but as a whole. As soon as I try and remember a mouth, a nose, a pair of eyebrows, I’m all at sea.
Johanna looks like a mixture of Madonna, jack-in-the-box, and athlete. A Mary Magdalene too innocent to ever think of repentance. An angel who settles herself in Satan’s lap when she feels the urge.
I think of the episode with her and the lion tamer. It was several years ago, and Johanna was rooming at the time with my sister Elfriede, studying something or other.
I have many sisters and many brothers too. Elfriede is atypical of us. She seems colorless and odorless, like some mixture of flour, water, and cardboard. She has a high opinion of herself and a low opinion of others, which makes life difficult for her. She is given to saying, oh, people are awful. I wonder if she counts herself? It’s surely not pleasant to have a low opinion of yourself. Or does she think everyone else is awful, and not herself? That would condemn her to unendurable loneliness.
She married a minister who has a guilty conscience because he doesn’t feel at ease in his calling. People with guilty consciences are apt to be severe. Elfriede’s husband is the spitting image of his wife. Had they been missionaries, they could have converted cannibals to vegetarianism, they surely taste savorless and dull. They probably mean well towards the rest of the world, but they are lacking in tolerance. They are at pains to extirpate sin, the way a fanatical allotment gardener seeks to extirpate weeds. Some plants the allotment gardener thinks of as weeds are pretty flowers to others. What Elfriede and her husband take to be sins will be seen by others as things without which life would be unbearable. The result is a series of misunderstandings, and the well-intentioned extirpators get no thanks for their trouble.
Without any regard for her stainless relatives, Johanna fell in love with a lion tamer. There is no moral or physical force capable of tearing Johanna away from the man she is currently in love with. Naturally, the lion tamer returned Johanna’s passion. He had no alternative. That’s Johanna for you. Her lion tamer tamed his lions, she tamed her lion tamer—it was all a kind of chain reaction that a woman of Johanna’s stamp surely found highly gratifying.
I once met the lion tamer. He was a friendly fellow with bandy legs. As a man, it is not given to me to assess the sex appeal of another man. The most striking thing about the lion tamer seemed to me to be a scar on his left shoulder that a lion had inflicted on him, Johanna told me about it. I wasn’t able to see the scar, because we were in a crowded bar at the time and the lion tamer didn’t want to undress. There was something coy about him.
Since those around her set their faces against her enterprise, Johanna’s passion grew to gigantic dimensions. It is my view that the love of Romeo and Juliet was aggravated by the obstacles that were put in their way.
When Johanna is in love, she loves unconditionally. If the man in question has dirty fingernails and sticking-out ears, then she will find nothing so charming as dirty fingernails and sticking-out ears. If the man’s a liar, she will find his imagination adorable—if he’s truthful, she will worship his simple nature. If he is clever, she will be ravished by his razor-sharp mind. Should he be stupid, then she will find his dull-wittedness the essence of manly charm. It’s impossible to talk Johanna out of one of her passions by demonstrating to her the beloved’s flaws.
The episode with the lion tamer was viewed by Elfriede as wickedness and social slumming. Even though Elfriede ought to know that our family has no claims to social exclusiveness.
Suddenly, the air went out of the thing with the lion tamer. He moved on when the circus left town. He managed to write once or twice, but I have the sense that his letters didn’t impress Johanna. His qualities lay elsewhere.
When the war ended, Johanna took over a lending library, and she translates Italian thrillers for a publishing company somewhere in southern Germany. She has always had several irons in the fire.
Behind her commercial premises, Johanna has a little bedsitting room. Recently, one Herr Peipel was to be found hunkered there. Albert Theodor Peipel, inventor and proprietor of Peipel’s Pasta Products. A mature man with the beginnings of a paunch and dark, bulgy eyes. Johanna took to wearing her hair tidy and parted, and to being a sort of mixture of muse and needy lily. A muse, because Herr Peipel scribbles verses. He scribbles them for his noodles. Like so:
Peipel’s noodles are the best
Both on weekdays and of rest.
Or:
Peipel’s noodles make you sing
Ching chara a-ching-ching-ching.
Peipel�
�s literary productions are clear, warmhearted, and accessible to a wide readership. Nothing surrealist about them, nothing existentialist, nothing of biting satire. Peipel has a combination of simple nature and spiritual depth without which Johanna can no longer imagine existing. Not so long ago, she was on the way to becoming a disciple of Sartre and an enthusiast for Picasso’s ceramics. The encounter with Peipel put her straight.
This morning I received a postcard from Johanna, with the wrong stamp and heatedly addressed. I was to come right away. I can’t imagine the living creature that would fall for the charms of the noodle-maker Albert Theodor Peipel. But there are many things I am incapable of imagining that turn out to be the case. Perhaps Johanna is tempted by the notion of being the first woman to be destroyed by a passion for a noodle-maker. Perhaps her subconscious is thirsting for the courage to be ridiculous. Or maybe Herr Peipel lost his facility, and for the sake of his art tried to murder Johanna. Most murderers give themselves away by appearing so thoroughly harmless that no one would suspect them capable of such a thing. I wonder how many times I have stood next to a murderer on the tram, or at the bus stop, asking for a light? I don’t want to suspect Herr Peipel, but there are poets who will do anything for a rhyme.
Johanna receives me, sparkling with joy. She has changed. Her little bedsitting room is likewise changed. She isn’t wearing her hair in a tidy part anymore either, it’s the wild tangle of yore. The Virgin, the housemother and muse, and the frail lily are all gone. She pours me a glass of vermouth and seems terribly happy.
The change in the room I trace to the presence of a nice little radio. I know Johanna has been after a radio for some time. “Where d’you get the radio from, Johanna?” Johanna pets it.
“Where d’you think? From Meta, Meta Kolbe.” I am amazed. Meta Kolbe is an old friend of Johanna’s. Their friendship is lasting, since it is founded on mutual dislike. Liking someone comes and goes, with dislike you know where you are.
Meta Kolbe is a homeowner, older than Johanna, blond like an aging Wagner soprano at the turn of the century, of blameless habits and anxious to marry. You can tell because she says, “I wouldn’t change places with a married woman if you paid me to.” Johanna assumes that Meta Kolbe advertises. Well, at her age you have to get a shuffle on. It wouldn’t be right to console oneself with the knowledge that at ninety, Ninon de Lenclos was still passionately beloved.
Fräulein Kolbe feels drawn to Johanna. She finds her sinful and is waiting with bated breath for the moment when her loose morals come home to roost. Self-preservation means to some people that they retain a belief in earthly justice. For her part, Johanna has things to say about Meta Kolbe’s devious libido and near-pathological miserliness. Hence my astonishment at the new radio.
And where is Herr Peipel keeping? Dusk was always the Peipel hour. Granted, Johanna doesn’t give the impression of an abandoned woman. But then you get suicides living it up in the hours before their death, and all their friends say, “I had no idea, he even ate some pickled onions and fixed a mechanical pencil.” I should like to know how intending suicides are supposed to behave.
“Is Herr Peipel not here then, Johanna?” I ask, even though I can perfectly well see that he’s not.
“I prefer the radio,” replies Johanna. To me, even a radio without tubes would be preferable, but coming from her the reply seems a little gnomic.
“When are you getting married?” I ask. “Never,” says Johanna. “I’ve put that from my mind. Peipel may have some good qualities, but he’s also the only son of an unprofitably married mother. Ferdinand, you can’t imagine what that means. She’s so resentful she gets ulcers and inflammations. She ties cat fur to his back, and wipes his nose for him, and is continually afraid he might get spoilt. Give me the radio any day.” I ask her what Peipel has to do with the radio. “Everything,” replies Johanna, “you see, I swapped him for the radio. I let Meta Kolbe take him, and she gave me the radio in exchange.”
So that’s the way of it then. I always took Johanna to be a stylish and imaginative woman. I wonder how she managed to palm Peipel off on Meta. I feel almost sorry for him.
“I whetted his appetite for Kolbe’s properties,” Johanna tells me. “Versifying noodle-makers are avid for real estate. And I whetted his appetite for her as well, I made up a different person. He was here a moment ago, and I sent him to her, saying I’d left my cigarette holder there. It’s not true, I don’t even own a cigarette holder, I smoke too much anyway.”
“Well, and do you think he’ll stay there? Won’t he want to go back to you?”
Johanna beams at me. “Oh, Ferdinand, give Kolbe half an hour and she will have blackened my name to such a degree that Peipel will have forgotten all his serious intentions with regard to me. Believe me, she can do it.” Such profound confidence in her friend, touching really. And the purpose of my coming was to check that things were going well, and to try and support the new axis. Johanna was a scrupulously honorable person, and she was resolved to exceed her obligations in return for the radio. She would also prefer Anton not to be disturbed by Peipel.
But who is Anton? Dreamy smile. It seems incredible to her that anyone in the world doesn’t know Anton, and at the mere mention of his name isn’t made happy and good. He just might be Johanna’s first true love.
Johanna thinks there are people, even in our semi-enlightened epoch, who find her morals doubtful—just because those people have no understanding of true morals and true love. Johanna refuses to follow the path of such people. Bourgeois morality was looking to a woman for virtue and purity and it hedged her about with laws. Logically, an old maid, who had gone grey in the service of decency and honor, would be revered by young and old alike for the way she had sacrificed herself to the moral laws. Parents would queue to have their children blessed by the virgin’s hand. But far from it, nothing good would befall such a wretch, says Johanna—all she was fit for was to be a figure of fun and a ridiculed old maid. “You know, Ferdinand, it’s sad that there are still such foolish women who refuse to learn anything and have fallen for that morality nonsense.”
Johanna pours more vermouth and balances on the arm of a chair; the radio plays hit tunes. Someone is singing “Kiss me at midnight.” The voice sounds well bred, like that of a hotel guest asking a chambermaid if he could possibly have some fresh towels. I feel nostalgic for a gypsy violinist with a dark kiss curl, fiddling away in the ladies’ ears and peeping down their fronts. Fire, but with discretion.
Johanna is telling me about Fräulein Rustikant. Fräulein Rustikant used to be Johanna’s crafts teacher. Today she is seventy-five, sprightly and delicate as a bullfinch. A while ago she took to visiting Johanna. She was with her this afternoon and brought a bottle of gin. Fräulein Rustikant sat on Johanna’s sofa, nimbly crossed her legs, lit a cigarette, and warbled her way through five glasses of gin. Her father had always been strict with her, and after his death, she had lived with her mother, who had been strict also, as had she herself. She came from a cultured family. During the war, Fräulein Rustikant wound up in strange parts, living with strange families. When it was over, she trooped back to Cologne. She had made the acquaintance of soldiers, lorry drivers, vagrants, farmers. The house in Cologne where she lived had been flattened by a bomb. Fräulein Rustikant was taken in by a builder who had a small garden. Her brother in Ohio sent her CARE packages.
“She’s as quick as a lizard in the sun,” Johanna tells me. “The awful times weren’t so awful for her. She’s only sorry it didn’t happen when she was younger. She wouldn’t have minded having a man, even if just for one night—well, to see what it was like. And now it’s too late. She says herself.
“You see, Ferdinand,” says Johanna, “all the books and all the movies, they’re all about love. Operas, plays, comedies, all about love. Voices from soprano to bass, love. Love in hit songs, love in poems, love in court reports. It’s enough to make anyone curious. Trust
me, Ferdinand, I wasn’t exactly keen the first time it happened, but I felt I had to see what all the fuss was about. And then, by and by, I found out. And I have to say, I’m still learning. Now imagine a respectable creature, at twenty, thirty, forty.”
“And sixty, Johanna,” I say, “and eighty. It’s going to happen to all of us unless we’re dead first, and what am I to think of?” Johanna looks at me as though she wanted to brain me with the vermouth bottle. “Ferdinand, don’t be ridiculous. Think of that person, getting older and more and more inquisitive. She’s practically bound to have an exaggerated notion of what love is, she’s not going to know how much or how little there is to any of it, she’s going to be driven mad by speculation. See, Fräulein Rustikant is going to be seventy-six next birthday, and she doesn’t know if she’s gained something or lost it. Renunciation can be a fine thing, Ferdinand, but wouldn’t you like to know what you’re renouncing? I love it myself.”
“What’s that you’re renouncing, Johanna?” I ask, doubtfully.
“Everything,” says Johanna. “Or lots. Everything except Anton. I won’t renounce Anton, I won’t permit anyone to talk me out of Anton, not even you, Ferdinand.”
I think people make their own beds in this life. I am on the point of declaring to Johanna that one of my few principles is never to interfere in other people’s matters of the heart, when Herr Liebezahl charges into the room with the élan of a successful, overburdened businessman. Johanna greets him with fervent yelps.
Liebezahl is a good friend of mine, and someone I owe a lot to. In Johanna’s life he plays the invaluable part of the amanuensis. Like me, he seems neuter and endlessly employable. Liebezahl can easily afford to be neuter on occasion. He is happy within himself without needing to think about it. He is loved by, among others, a genuine baroness with partly genuine jewelry. To Liebezahl she is a good customer. People he makes money from he likes unaffectedly. He has a calm and selfless affection for a curly-haired blond girl who is studying medicine and who tosses around conditions the way Rastelli once juggled balls.