Ferdinand, the Man with the Kind Heart

by Irmgard Keun

  I am inclined to believe sometimes that people nowadays suffer from shrinkage of the brain. But then I remember that there are still some who don’t stream into the Liebezahl conglomerate.

  Just now a girl recited a poem she had penned about mummy and tummy and rummy and asked whether she should become an authoress or a film actress. It had also occurred to her to play the football pools. She was a home help, and her chief preoccupation was finding someone to step out with on Sundays. The poor creature was strikingly ill-favored. I suggested a new hairstyle and pressed upon her a few inexpensive changes to her wardrobe. But she didn’t want to hear that. So I humored her and said she was so dazzling, most men were probably afraid to approach her; Greta Garbo probably had a similar effect. She, the girl, was in other respects, too, an exceptional creature of uncommon spiritual appeal, and wasted on the average man. I told her to go walking on Sundays and wait till one day she should encounter her exceptional counterpart of the male persuasion. The girl left quickly and happily. Probably to share my verdict on her beauty with some girlfriend.

  I have come to the conclusion that most of my female customers haven’t come to me for advice at all, but for affirmation of their good points. Others come to dump their emotional garbage and use me as a type of human dustbin.

  They have simply fallen victim to the desire to talk about themselves. They can no longer do this with their husbands. Husbands are bad listeners to their wives, being soon bored with accounts of uncanny intuitions, headaches, childhood memories, fascinating emotional complications, observations, and conflicts. Reports of her inner life interest a man only when she’s new and he fancies her. To waken the erotic potential of a woman one has to let her speak. Admittedly, what the woman takes to be close attention is often something else, and isn’t necessarily directed at what she’s saying. Later on, the poor women are surprised and disappointed when the man—so unlike before—has no interest in what his wife once did as an adorable five-year-old tomboy, or how as a teenager one summer her thoughts about bluebells and passing clouds delighted an elderly headmaster and his wife.

  During my brief tenure here, I’ve already learned that it’s almost always hopeless to try to enlighten a woman. Not long ago for instance an elderly office worker was telling me how she had a boyfriend three years ago. Then one day he had stopped turning up. He had ignored her letters and tried to avoid seeing her wherever possible. What could possibly be the reason for such behavior? He had told her she was his little darling and he would always love her. So he must still love her. Should I perhaps tell the woman the plain truth? Someone who doesn’t acknowledge a truth under any circumstances won’t accept it from others, either. So I told her the man loved her so much he was afraid of being driven mad by it, making him and her both miserable. My explanation made perfect sense to her.

  This old office worker is called Fräulein Schwert, and she’s become a regular. She doesn’t care that the man is threatened with insanity, she wants to see him anyway, even if it does drive him mad. I need to tell her how to win him back. I feel sorry for the old girl, and I wish I could help her, only how? I can hardly truss the man up and mail him to her. I don’t believe in medieval potions, nor do I know when, how, and where I am to administer the powdered newt that sat on the head of a white cat during the full moon. I can only wonder where those medieval johnnies got the ingredients for their elaborate potions. Admittedly, I am being forcibly given to understand that parties unhappily in love are capable of anything—except, unfortunately, the conquest of the so passionately desired object of their love.

  Sometimes I get the sense that unhappy love is more dangerous than scarlet fever or appendicitis. Fräulein Schwert is a nice person, but she resembles a plucked hen and looks at least a decade older than she is.

  I think it’s good to enlist the abilities of the unhappy lover. Therefore, I advise Fräulein Schwert to exercise every morning, to take deep breaths, and brush her hair for ten minutes, all the while thinking concentratedly about her Alfred. I have her eat apples, go for walks, and practice her laugh. The ostensible purpose of all this is to win Alfred back. Each time I see her, I tell her she’s looking prettier. I think if you tell an unattractive woman often enough that she’s pretty, then it sooner or later becomes true. Women who never get to hear anything pleasant suffer from a kind of emotional hormone deficiency. It barely needs saying that the pleasant thing needs to be said by a man.

  There’s no point at all in telling an unhappy woman that she needs distraction. She doesn’t want to be distracted. Fräulein Schwert doesn’t want to hear about Thomas Mann, Goethe, the currency devaluation, the government, the Eastern Zone, or Tito, nor about fat rations, sunspots, the football pools, Ingrid Bergman, or Sicilian bandits either. She wants to talk about Alfred.

  I seriously wondered what possibilities a girl has to win a man who no longer wants her. Fräulein Schwert is by no means my only instance. I get disappointed lovers in droves. People who write in books and newspapers that love is dead are unworldly ignoramuses. If they were to reply that they mean romantic love, then I would say, yes, but isn’t all love romantic? From the days of Adam and Eve, love between the sexes has remained pretty much constant. The backdrops may vary, but the feelings themselves don’t change.

  What did I do myself when my feelings for a girl were over? In most cases, it was the feelings of the girl that were over first, or at any rate soon after. I certainly can’t remember a female creature suffering on my account.

  I have been doubly attentive of late to my fiancée Luise, since realizing what catastrophic suffering a scorned female heart is sentenced to. I had been well on the way, gradually but certainly coldly and coarsely, to retreating from her. Then, a few days ago, even at the risk of not being able to shake her off in this life, I sent her flowers and chocolates, helped her with their big wash (even though I was dog tired), and almost fell fixing the drainpipe. Luise’s grateful smile pierced my heart. I even forced myself to kiss her. I quite understand that I am being woefully inconsistent, but it’s more than I can do to consciously make of myself a torturer and a murderer. In my new practice I have witnessed too much in the way of female suffering.

  Financial difficulties and work do nothing to diminish Fräulein Schwert’s sufferings, either. I don’t know whether it’s easier for a woman with money or without. People who insist that all sufferings are easier to bear with money might be mistaken. Here, I’m thinking about my customer Frau Meerschuh.

  Frau Meerschuh is a well-off young widow who lives alone. Ever since her lover left her, she has been able to devote her entire attention to her broken heart, thanks to her favorable financial situation. Further, having no pressure on her time and money allows her to indulge in pursuits that are turning the man pursued to a hate-filled enemy. She follows him in her car, she bounds up to him in a stream of new garments, she sends him presents and has him spied on by her envoys. It’s futile to tell Frau Meerschuh that she should have more self-respect. It’s not about self-respect, it’s about the man. And it’s just as futile to urge her to take up with a grateful and needy homecomer or fugitive from the East.

  One can spend hours dinning it into a woman that a man is unworthy of her. She will listen to you and perhaps even agree with you. Then when you heave a sigh of relief and think she’s finally seen the light the woman will ask you what she has to do to get him back. Increasingly, I confine myself to listening. Eventually, all feelings come to an end. But woe betide you if you ever say that, because the woman of course doesn’t want her feelings to end.

  Speaking relieves the pressure on a woman and takes away part of her drive to do something, which left to itself would produce only bad results. The poor things only annoy their friends by permanently going on about some Karl, Gustav, or Alfred. In Liebezahl’s institute, they pay their money and are allowed to be annoying.

  There’s one thing I’d like to press upon all abandoned women: n
ot to lose themselves in fantasies of revenge. After all, there’s nothing a man can do about it if his feelings dry up. To have a hundred percent guarantee of not being forsaken, a woman would have to kill her lover during the dog days of his passion. Then she can give herself over to the fantasy that he would have loved her forever, and no one can prove otherwise. Actually or symbolically killing him after he’s gone fulfills no useful purpose and would only leave a profound feeling of dissatisfaction.

  One Marga Waldweber, an intellectually and physically mature bookseller, has been to see me several times. Only with respect to her Oskar is she weak-willed and frail. She doesn’t care about Oskar, let him do what he likes, she’s not going to shed a tear for him—only she couldn’t understand the manner of his desertion, that was an insoluble puzzle to her. Oskar’s passion had withered, Fräulein Waldweber had missed or wanted to miss the indications. She had thought Oskar’s love had weakened through business anxieties or a peptic ulcer. It’s odd that women’s minds are set at ease when a man produces no other love object; business anxieties and peptic ulcers are thought of as harmless. Many a man has returned to an old amour with a new efflorescence of feeling. But many men no longer care to be called sweetie pie, or to kiss the tangled curls and darling hands of a lady and perform the miracles of the Arabian Nights, when they are facing bankruptcy, or an ulcer distracts them from life’s sweeter moments. Peptic ulcers and the prospect of bankruptcy are perfectly capable of taking up all a man’s attention by themselves.

  In a word, Oskar had had enough of Fräulein Waldweber. Nor is he one of those men who like to be comforted or petted. Of course he told Fräulein Waldweber that he still loved her. Few men have the courage to give the wrong answers when women put their notorious leading questions. Certainly, I’ve never dared tell the truth to a woman who was holding me in her arms. So one day Oskar sent a note to Fräulein Waldweber informing her that they were finished, and he wouldn’t see her again. He returned her key by registered parcel in a little box padded with cotton wool. This mode of severance, though, struck Fräulein Waldweber as low and inexplicable. At the very least, Oskar should have spoken to her and returned the key in person. She would like a last meeting. All women want this last meeting. I know that. I have always feared and loathed this last meeting, which is in fact a second-to-last meeting. What on earth is one to say? You say, “It’s better this way,” and you feel like a heel, because she doesn’t at all think it’s better this way. You are left with the choice between new deceitful concessions and something that in its disagreeable sharpness outdoes the already accomplished parting. “But what did I ever do to you?” asks the woman, and “You could at least tell me the real reason.” She hasn’t done anything to you, and if she still doesn’t know the real reason, you will never be able to tell her.

  Every other day or so, Fräulein Waldweber reappears in a bid to crack the mystery of the returned key. I told her for God’s sake not to do anything, and then in a year or so her Oskar would return to her. But she didn’t want him back, declared Fräulein Waldweber, it was just on this matter of the key that she wanted to hear from him.

  Fräulein Waldweber really believes this. A person who could deceive others the way she deceives herself would be a notorious international crook.

  If I can persuade Fräulein Waldweber to put off the conversation regarding the key, then one can assume that after a year at the most her need for Oskar will have vanished. Perhaps it will be time for the next conversation with the next man. Many people suffer from a certain recurring illness that affects them at more or less regular intervals. I once heard my friend Dr. Muck telling a female patient of his in serious and dignified German: “It is simply the case with you that this organ is uncommonly susceptible.” I was the more impressed because I had no idea what a susceptible organ might be like. Or an organ that was weak and illness-prone.

  Well, be that as it may. My lady patients are certainly afflicted. Maybe I should leave them their sufferings instead of trying to cure them. At least suffering is proof of being alive. Can one know how much one diminishes their life by ending their sufferings? The fact that they are attached to their sufferings should give one pause. Sometimes I believe I have helped them. But never yet have I dared to decide if my help was a good thing or not. The only certain help one may offer a person is food if he is hungry, drink if he is thirsty, clothing if he is cold. One can help by reducing his material wants—and perhaps even that only makes him open to fresh emotional wants.

  Ever since I have been able to think, nothing has been so repellent to me as the offering of advice to others. Never to do so under any circumstances was among my few principles, yes, I sometimes think it was my only principle. And now I am earning a living by supplying bitter wisdom to poor fools. It’s not nice on the part of fate to corrupt me like this, instead of allowing me a modest, ideally inflation-proofed pension. What a plain existence I would then lead, pleasing to the Lord, without ever interfering with any other living being.

  My most straightforward cases are the unhappy wives. I don’t have to say anything to them, they have come to let off steam about their husbands. It’s laudable that they take their complaints to a neutral place. If they talk to their friends and neighbors, they risk filling them with aversion or secret schadenfreude. And if they argue with their husbands, then they will complicate their home lives still further. Most women would rather be married unhappily than not at all. Besides, they are rarely as unhappy as they think they are. Some have an inborn martyr complex and take suffering for a sign of moral superiority. They like to be pitied. For these wives I have a pained frown in the corner of my mouth and a look of melancholy sympathy. That sees me through, and I don’t even need to speak. Wives who complain about their husbands have no intention of leaving them. If you’re angry, you’re not indifferent. A woman who has seriously had enough of her husband and wants a divorce won’t waste words and will come to me for the address of a lawyer. Even if she can’t leave her husband for financial reasons while she is emotionally detached from him, she will have no interest in talking about him and being pitied on his account.

  Now and again, I am sorry that no smart and attractive wives come to me. One hears so much about them. Creatures trembling with hatred and aversion tell me about these evil, sophisticated beings who steal the partners of good, honest women and girls with a grin and a wink. Of course, I esteem the good, honest parties, but over time they pall on me, and I wouldn’t mind being refreshed by one of those detestable manstealers. But then I suppose it’s hardly ethical to expect payment and to enjoy myself.

  Of course, there are also the cheated, abandoned, smitten husbands, but they are a bit of a rarity in my context. They most likely prefer to parade their bleeding hearts to a woman and have them salved and bound by feminine hands. Our graphologist, Ella Kuckuck, is a distinguished expert in emotional injuries in men. She is very striking looking and must be incredibly tough, otherwise she would hardly be able to endure such a procession of sorry, lamenting men day in, day out. Not long ago she told me over lunch that she badly needed a holiday. At the mere sight of a woebegone man she would reflexively begin to yawn. The Samaritan qualities that real women allegedly have in endless supply were on the point of drying up in her.

  I can understand Fräulein Kuckuck’s feeling of satiety. I wouldn’t mind hearing a different tune from time to time. Recently I visited Johanna to experience a change. Her facility was to restore me. I brought along a bottle of cooking brandy that one patient (who suffered from choleric episodes) had stolen from her husband and given me. Less out of love for me than rage at her husband.

  Johanna was in tears and greeted me the way a woman would have greeted her rescuer as he plucks her from the lambent flames of her funeral pyre and hoists her onto his sweating, stamping steed. Anton hadn’t been seen for five days now. It was like a curse—even in my few hours off, I can’t seem to avoid my professional duties.

 
; So of course, as a good professional, I had to listen to Johanna.

  Who howled and laid into my brandy and demanded that I restore Anton to her.

  Anton is known to me as a somewhat taciturn youth with strikingly sticking-out ears and hands like shovels. Other than that, I never noticed anything especially remarkable about him. Johanna has a way of taking ordinary mortals and transforming them into despotic megalomaniacs. She induces these harmless beings to believe that they are the most desirable creatures under the sun, and the eighth wonder of the world. In some men she develops a gift for exaggeration like no other woman I have ever met. With the possible exception of my sister Aloisia and her apothecary. The main difference is that Aloisia permitted her apothecary to live on in glory to his recent demise, while Johanna suddenly views the apotheosized one as a mortal again and treats him accordingly. She doesn’t understand what she’s doing with such a man. The man in turn doesn’t understand her or the world. Perfectly unscrupulously Johanna lets the toppled one go, into an existence he doesn’t understand.

  All I can say is, this doesn’t seem to have happened to Anton yet.

  The case wasn’t a hopeless one where she was concerned, since Anton had gone following a scene, and hadn’t reappeared. Scenes are no indication of decayed feeling. A scene calls for a reconciliation the way a sausage calls for mustard.

  Johanna wanted me to talk to Anton. I was to look for him in his aunt’s potato store, grind him to a fine paste, stuff him in my pocket, and leave him on Johanna’s not-yet-paid-for twisted-paper carpet. It took considerable experience to make any sense of Johanna’s rather unclear demands. Above all, I wanted to know why Anton had made a scene and taken his hat. “There’s no reason at all,” said Johanna. All right. I tried to find out what reason Anton didn’t have. Well, there was Gustav. Who’s Gustav? Johanna explained that Gustav was a student. What does Anton have against Gustav’s studies? Anton had nothing against Gustav’s studies, but Gustav needed books, and he had rheumatism. I thought it was a bit petty to jibe at a fondness for printed matter and rheumatic fever. That led to Johanna mounting an impassioned defense of Anton’s character for about the next fifteen minutes. In between she sipped some brandy. She sipped, I sipped. Probably Johanna would now expect me to go to the potato aunt tonight. Whereas I had no intention of going before the day after tomorrow at the earliest, and I needed to draw strength to lie successfully to Johanna. Displaying the patience of a saint, I was able to discover from Johanna that the student Gustav was an old acquaintance and had been sitting in Johanna’s room to borrow some books and rest his rheumatic knee. To relieve his rheumatic arm, he had draped it around Johanna’s shoulder. Anton had walked in, cast a critical eye on the medical emergency, and grossly misinterpreted it. Furiously he had slammed the door behind him. Johanna had come charging out after him, and Anton had given her a slap and disappeared without a care for the consequences.