by Irmgard Keun
The magic of the ball was joined by the magic of money. I had feared my twenty marks wouldn’t be enough for the orgy at the lemonade stand. I had poked it nervously in the direction of the lemonade man, only to be given an over whelming mass of notes and coins in change.
I went with Elfriede to an ice cream van. We were living high on the hog and knew no restraint. How many times I had dreamed of eating all the ice cream I wanted. Elfriede even outdid me in her performance. She ate stolidly and knew neither distraction nor excitement.
I paid with a note and was given change. Once again, my money had increased. I bought licorice sticks, raspberry drops, twenty gummy bears, and rolls of mints. My money knew no diminishment. On the contrary. My trouser pockets were bursting with small coins. Elfriede was getting floppy and teary, and I had the grim feeling I was cursed.
On a fairground, Elfriede and I found a carousel. After five rides, Elfriede promptly vomited. She wanted to go home. That wasn’t possible. First, the money had to be gone. I saw no possibility of hiding it at home. Discreetly I tried to lose a few coins. Elfriede noticed, and retrieved them in spite of her poor condition. “It’s wrong to throw away money,” she justly inveighed, “let’s give it to the aunts.” I wasn’t happy with that. Desperately, I thought how I could get through the remaining money. Nothing came to mind. I must have had an inadequate imagination, and what I did have was lamed by Elfriede’s presence. If I’d had proper, legitimate access to the money, I might have bought myself goldfish, roller skates, tortoises, or a canary. But as it was, these things were all impossible.
I proposed giving the money to a beggar. At that time there were beggars everywhere. But now that I was looking for one, I couldn’t find one. For half an hour I dragged Elfriede through the town on a vain search.
I thought about going into a café, but didn’t dare, for fear of maybe being arrested. I bought ten packets of burnt almonds from an automat. Those ten coins didn’t seem to weigh much. Besides, I was now obliged to choke down a whole heap of burnt almonds. Elfriede offered little by way of support. We should have been home long ago. Our lateness meant we were in for the third degree.
I toyed with the notion of burying my awful riches under a tree, but there was no suitable tree and I had no shovel. Elfriede wouldn’t allow me to drop the money in a deserted passageway or letterbox somewhere. I obeyed her, because I still hoped she would stay mum when we got home.
As a last resort, I thought I would give the money to the greengrocer woman in our street. I didn’t have any feeling that I was doing the woman a kindness. I just thought she might take the curse off me, because she’d always been nice to me in the past.
I emptied my pockets out onto her counter and hurried away with no explanation, feeling guilty. Outside, Elfriede was just choking on a burnt almond which she had accidentally gulped down unchewed.
Half an hour later, and Elfriede had given our aunts a flawless account of my crimes—at least those that were known to her—and spilled tears of remorse for her own culpable involvement in them. Since I was no longer in a position to tell what was true and what was a lie, I said nothing. My great-aunts seemed not to believe the story of the school inspector in the glass coach.
In the end, the greengrocer woman turned up, asking what she was supposed to supply in return for the money that I had left with her. She assumed I had come to her on the instruction of my aunts.
Too late it occurred to me that I could have used the money to buy myself a ticket home to Laura.
Money never forgave me for my offensive behavior. It has avoided me and still to this day claims not to know me. I never again had too much of it, and very often not enough. And that’s not always pleasant.
Money is more demanding than the most demanding mistress. It doesn’t like to be treated as the means to an end, it wants to be loved for itself, it demands loyalty and devotion, otherwise it will up and leave.
Love, even love of money, demands talent. I will never come to money. I must reconcile myself to the fact, just as I must reconcile myself to the fact that I can’t bite through a horseshoe, compose Beethoven’s Ninth, or perform brain surgery.
A year after my father’s death, Laura married Uncle Kuno. It would have been bothersome for Laura to wait for some stranger. Uncle Kuno loved Laura, and he was stuck with our family as it was. Uncle Kuno doesn’t exactly have the makings of a millionaire, but unlike my father he knows how to deal with money.
I always made a bad impression when I said I never had the orientation towards any particular trade or profession. I might have liked to be a rodeo rider, but unfortunately I didn’t have the qualifications.
I have no aptitude for business. I don’t think I could even go bankrupt successfully. As an official I’d be about as much use as a brick playing a bouillon cube. Occasionally I am left speechless with admiration for those individuals who go to an office every morning to spend eight hours there doing something that leaves them as figures of horror to their fellow humans.
Nor do I feel drawn to any of the punitive professions. Among these I would include customs and excise officials, detectives, bailiffs, various types of comptroller, tax inspectors, electricity account managers, dogcatchers, policemen in red-light districts. I’m sure all these are necessary, honorable, and deserving professions. It’s just that I don’t have the degree of moral determination to exercise a profession whose essence is the continual persecution of a certain well-defined portion of the population. I can’t imagine closing a bar humming with joie de vivre just because last orders have come and gone, or, as a customs inspector, pulling a contraband diamond from the ear of a nice lady. I don’t want to cuff anyone or disconnect their gas. The afflicted parties always make such a helpless tragic impression.
Nor am I any better suited for the academic professions. Physics and chemistry are bottomless mysteries where I am concerned. The law is depressing. If I were a schoolteacher I would bring children up the wrong way (away from the generality) and as a doctor I would show my patients that I had no confidence in my diagnoses.
It would be a simple matter if you could just do a job you knew you could do. For instance, I’m a good electrician, though I have no professional training. I have done lots of things in the course of my life, usually without official sanction.
Among other things I’ve been a pub chef, a tailor, car mechanic, actor and prompter in a traveling theater group, swimming teacher, ice-cream salesman, long-distance lorry driver, gardener’s assistant. I can sew and darn, wash and iron clothes, speak several languages fluently and wrong, design rock gardens, resole shoes, fix broken wireless sets, wave ladies’ hair, milk cows, repair fishing nets, breed canaries, and drive more or less anything, from a bus to a motor launch. It’s amazing how many aptitudes a man can find in himself if given time to think. I don’t suppose I’ll ever really be on my uppers. Brazenness has got a lot going for it.
My happiest time was as a bookseller in the old center of Cologne.
My brother Luitpold was studying law, and I was studying German. We were both studying to humor Uncle Kuno. Today Luitpold has a small carpentry business in Sigmaringen and is happily married to Lucca the Flying Fish, a former trapeze artiste.
I was really only studying on the side; my main occupation was working as a car mechanic. Medieval German wasn’t going to help me with the demands of the modern era, and knowledge of the Merseburg charms probably wouldn’t get me a piece of bread anywhere at all. An accumulation of specialisms is a luxury a man can only afford under quite specific financial conditions.
I had a friend who was crazy about Chinese porcelain. Put him in a social gathering and he would talk for hours about the Ming dynasty, and was respected as a highly cultivated fellow. Then once he ran out of money, people turned away in boredom the moment he opened his mouth, all except for a vegetable seller in the market who was three parts deaf and in better days had been g
oing out with my friend’s erstwhile cook. His knowledge of all those Mings wasn’t even enough to get him a hot lunch or a marriage to a well-situated elderly widow. For women who have their own pad and a solid income there’s no such thing as a shortage of men. Now my Ming friend is leading a sorry existence as a salesman in a tacky antique shop, and he suffers from low self-esteem because he is unable to make use of his valuable knowledge.
At the time we were both students, it was Luitpold who was the first to befriend Uncle Hollerbach. Uncle Hollerbach owned a bookshop with a philately section in the old town of Cologne. The entire building that housed it wasn’t much bigger than a birdcage, and the shop window was the size of a hand towel. That anyone could actually live from what this hidden mini-enterprise threw off sometimes appeared to me as a biblical miracle. But then there are a lot of people of whom I am quite unable to say whether and how they live. Sometimes I don’t even understand myself.
My brother Toni always maintained that people who work hard contribute to their own impoverishment. If his theory is correct, that might explain Uncle Hollerbach’s comparative wealth. Because he wasn’t a hard worker; he drank.
At the same time every afternoon he calmly shut up shop and walked with firm purposeful stride to a dingy, thinly visited pub on the corner. There he would sit on the same wooden bench at the same wobbly table and was served by the same colorless waiter. Silently the waiter would bring him a glass of gin, silently Uncle Hollerbach took it. Between his seventh and eighth gins, Uncle Hollerbach would drink a beer against the thirst, this too brought him by the silent waiter. Even after fifteen gins Uncle Hollerbach was no more loquacious. His posture was upright and alert, his movements few and calm. Why did he drink, if not to change? Everyone who drinks does so to change himself or his outlook, which comes to the same thing. What was going on in Uncle Hollerbach?
I got to know Uncle Hollerbach through Luitpold. He was Luitpold’s discovery. Uncle Hollerbach was no misanthrope, he liked to have someone sit with him silently keeping pace with him. Luitpold is a mild-mannered and cooperative person with a sense of the requirements of other souls. He was and still is a good drinker. Unfortunately, he has one quirk. Quirks are things that take getting used to by others, and that mustn’t be sprung on them. Otherwise, it is possible for someone with a quirk to affect others like an earthquake.
Luitpold was always quiet and reticent. If there was drinking to be done, he helped to do it. He happily carried drunks from bar to bar or bar to home. He had the innocent strength of a gorilla. In a drinking situation, he seemed like a monument to peace. He didn’t sing, he didn’t row, he was never overtaken by some urgent communicativeness or lachrymose sentimentality, he didn’t start telling off-color jokes or pester ladies with his bibulous adhesiveness. The more astonishing, then, this particular quirk. When, unnoticed by those around him, he had reached a specific degree of intoxication, he swiftly and silently removed all his clothes. No matter where he was—on the street, at home, in a professor’s sitting room, on the terrace of a wine bar or in a poky pub. As soon as someone told him to get dressed, he would look sad, but obey. The following day he suffered agonies of remorse and found his behavior so monstrous and unlike himself that he was unshakably convinced such a thing would never happen to him again, whereupon he serenely sought out the danger at the next opportunity.
He had been out drinking three times with Uncle Hollerbach in cordial silence without this quirk having overtaken him. He had kept up with Uncle Hollerbach and was on the way to drinking himself into the other man’s affections. The fourth time, a slight inner imbalance had lowered his resistance to alcohol, and then, as through autohypnosis, he had started to strip. He had forced Uncle to abandon his noble silence and display a vulgar chattiness. “Get dressed,” Uncle had said, and got the colorless waiter to order a taxi. He had had to go looking for a missing shoe of Luitpold’s, had left the pub ten minutes earlier than usual, and was four gins short of his quantum. All these details were brought to my attention later by the colorless waiter, who, while happy to serve Uncle in silence, preferred as a rule to make use of his God-given gift of speech. Luitpold had just the merest notion of having stripped and so ravaged and disgraced Uncle’s carefully ordered life. Luitpold’s morning-after moods could reach a pitch where he would allow himself to be put to death as a serial killer with the feeling it was no more than he deserved. The courage to beard Uncle once more could only have come to him in that same state of unconscious drunkenness that had the inappropriate consequences.
Of course, I find Luitpold exaggerated in his sense of his excesses. But the man has a tender nature and is a shy, reticent individual, and that can’t be changed. It was with great trouble I kept him from going to a psychoanalyst to have his quirk investigated. A professional would have felt it incumbent upon himself to turn up such deep psychic chasms in Luitpold that my poor brother would never have recovered. I think at worst Luitpold will be a subconscious sun-worshipper, or he will have felt an irresistible urge to go to bed, regardless of time and place. If one let him be, one would probably find him with hands folded sitting on his pile of clothes, mumbling a child’s prayer before lapsing into gentle slumber.
Luitpold begged me to go to Uncle Hollerbach and see if he had perhaps had the pub torn down and dropped in the Rhine piece by piece. There are ways he is inclined to overestimate himself.
But there stood the pub, perfectly intact, where it had always stood, and there sat Uncle Hollerbach, quietly sipping gin in the place Luitpold told me was his. He had a round belly, flyaway grey hair, and a large red face with a Caesar nose, a resolute chin, bushy eyebrows, and a mariner’s twinkling blue eyes. In introducing myself, I wasn’t entirely able to avoid the medium of speech. With a gesture of welcome he had me sit down, and with a light majestic nod ordered me a glass of gin.
From that day forth I was Uncle Hollerbach’s drinking companion. I have no oddities, drunk or sober. When drunk, I adjust to my surroundings. If there is singing, I sing along. If a pretty girl indicates she might like to be embraced, I embrace her. If a party feels called upon to reveal the ultimate mysteries of life in the course of sweeping philosophical discussions, I reveal too. If someone can do nothing but bewail his misery and the misery of the world, I have tears set aside for that purpose. My personality does not seek to dominate. At the most, I might manage to withdraw from a context if it displeases me.
At first, I tried to assert myself in Uncle Hollerbach’s presence by speaking. I interpreted his sparse sign language as encouragement, while his blue gaze directed at me indicated that I had his attention. From the quivering of his brows, a slight pushing forth of his lower lip I inferred agreement and replies. I told him about my fellow students and my studies, of the fair and unfair treatment I got from the mechanic, of uncouth customers and my charming punctilious way of dealing with them. I talked with wisdom and resignation about the political situation and intimated that I was probably the only man alive who could see and understand it all. I spoke illuminatingly about Dante, Dostoevsky, Gide, and Tolstoy. I held forth on the prostitution of the fourth estate and the vanity and selfishness of our leading politicians. I showed myself to be the man who first understood that passion for a woman doesn’t last. That striving for political power is not the same as love of the people. That the earth is so despoiled that the moon might as well fall on top of it and squash it flat.
There was more, and I didn’t scruple to say it. I spoke up for murderers, check forgers, pimps, landscape painters, sadists, stamp collectors, pacifists, materialists, race fixers, freestyle wrestlers, cannibals, vegetarians, naked dancers, allotment gardeners, Muslims, Calvinists, sybarites, hermits, anarchists. I defended everything that was under attack and laid into everything that to my mind got a free pass. I understood everything and forgave nothing, because I had nothing to forgive, since no freestyle wrestler, pacifist, sadist, hermit, vegetarian, or anyone else had done the least thing to
harm me.
Gradually the torrent of my speech dwindled into a river, my river of speech into a brook, my brook of speech into a trickle. And finally, one evening, that trickle ceased, my tongue was dry, and my spirit gave in to a need for thought. It dawned on me that I had said nothing that was really worth saying, that I had talked for the sake of talking, and that my speech had been nothing but foolishness. I had strutted like a peacock before Uncle Hollerbach, all the while supposing I’d been showing him the rare insights of an exceptional intellect. Uncle’s stony silence had prevailed. I too was silent, without forcing myself and without boring myself. I saw that the words of the brain are not like the words of the mouth. My ideas had tumbled out of me like unripe fruit. Now I accorded them some quiet and time to recover, during the hours I passed with Uncle Hollerbach.
From the very first moment, I had felt drawn to Uncle. I found him more mysterious and alluring than any woman. At that time almost any female would draw my eye, but I was far more curious about Uncle Hollerbach. What was going on in him? Was anything? Or was he just living in dullness? Was he happy or unhappy? Why did he drink? Was there anything in this world that he loved? What tied him to life? Was he good? Did he have it in him to be bad? Was he wise or foolish? Had he had rare spiritual experiences? What was he like as a child? Could he remember anything? What can one learn from a person who doesn’t speak? To me speech was the only conduit between one person and another. Well, now I saw that there were many other ways of communication. For the thing that Uncle Hollerbach wished to communicate, he didn’t need words.