Ferdinand, the Man with the Kind Heart

by Irmgard Keun

  I think for the moment Lenchen has given up her idea of becoming a call girl. I’m sure she wouldn’t be good at it. Then again, most people follow professions they’re no good at. I try to discuss Lenchen’s plans objectively with her. With someone who’s really in the soup, it’s no good going to them with your ethical concerns and prejudices. I’m just glad she hasn’t managed so far to gain admittance to those circles. Extraordinary, really, the way each profession is armored in its own exclusiveness, and you don’t get to join it without some kind of entrée. Not long ago an agreeable middle-aged man came to see me, a man you could smell came from a good background, modest and with pleasant manners. So far as I can remember, he had been a house tutor in Breslau, and with his family managed to find temporary asylum with landed relatives outside Cologne. After a protracted struggle with himself, he had decided to become a taxi driver. Like many others, he had the rather touching notion that such an obvious social climbdown would be interpreted as a noble sacrifice, and accordingly compensated and admired. Whereas in fact, if the poor fellow has no friends among the taxi-driving fraternity, he won’t even get any useful advice. I pulled a few strings and introduced him to the Rose Guzzler. The Rose Guzzler is an old taxi driver, somewhere between fifty and seventy. I don’t know his real name. It wouldn’t surprise me if he didn’t either. Like most of the veterans in his profession, his nickname grew over his name. And where does that come from? Maybe once in the days of his youth he had an accident with a rosebush or he drove into a pond with sea roses, or some uncouth colleagues caught him in the act of pressing a rose to his lips that some winsome girl had given him. The roughest fellows are often exposed to such lyrical shocks. And Carmen will never go out of fashion.

  I’ve known the Rose Guzzler for years. On the back of his left hand he has the tattoo of a fly, delicate and pert. Maybe in his previous life he knew Pompadour, or he even was Pompadour. If one believes in the transmigration of souls, then why impose limits; everything is possible. People who believe in miracles shouldn’t try and rein in their imaginations. In for a penny, in for a pound, I say. Just at the moment that poor Brylcreemed Gröning is being hailed as a miracle worker.* The press is coining it, and so are the press barons. Instead of a beating, they are raking it in. I’ve no idea what old Brylcreem-head is making. I’m only astonished by the modesty of the thousands of believers streaming to see a creature who is no more miraculous than they are. A proper miracle doctor, in my book, is someone who will cut my head off and reattach it, he will turn a tree trunk into a flesh and blood leg, he will cure my depression by changing my pocket lint into thousand-mark notes. “One shouldn’t demand the impossible,” people said to me when they asked me if they should seek out this Gröning.

  “Of course you should demand the impossible,” I countered, “you don’t come to some sort of compromise with a miracle, you ask for everything—absolutely everything.” Why shouldn’t I believe in miracles? Everything’s possible. Only I can’t respect the kind of thing I’ve already encountered in the course of my life. The fact that a thing may resist explanation isn’t enough for me. At other times, everything seems like a miracle—my own existence, the earth, the stars, people, trees. Just now, actually being dead seems the greatest miracle to me. I don’t want to become an angel or a devil or a ghost—or for that matter an owl, a swallow, a seal, or a lilac bush. One is inclined to envy all forms of existence other than one’s own. I expect a lilac bush is consumed with anxiety. It maybe doesn’t like earthworms, and they’re gathering round its roots. It flowers, because that’s in its contract, and then the little moths sit on its blossoms without so much as a by-your-leave. I want to be absolutely nothing at all, that too is something I want to experience and enjoy. I want the unassimilable. I want to have the experience of not being able to experience anything—I want to enjoy the fact that there’s no more enjoyment for me. I want eternal existence in complete dissolution. I want something that will boil off all the possibilities of my imagination. I want the miracle that exists beyond dream and thought. The truly miraculous is the unthinkable. If something is thinkable, then it’s at best a fairy story. All fairy stories were or will one day be true. They are the product of experience and intuition. They are assertions that became or will become proofs.

  As I walked along, I wished I could walk for days, and then fall down and sleep for the rest of infinity.

  I felt wrapped up in my life as in a light, rustling integument. Sometimes it seems heavy, dirty, and wrinkled, just at the moment it seemed clean and silky smooth. My time alone showed me an intoxicating parade of fleeting yearnings, and a power of imagination that allowed me to treat them as genuine and available. The thoughts in my brain were whirling like dust motes in the wind—they were so flighty I wasn’t even tempted to try and hold on to them. Nor did I want to exert myself or go to any trouble, but just to be left alone, like a child who wanted to play.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have long for my communion with myself. Already, I was insufficiently isolated to ignore the calls from outside. It was getting late, and Johanna wanted her Anton back. I like to take the requirements of my friends seriously, even if they strike me as absurd.

  On my way, I dropped in on Heinrich. I thought I needed to put on the intellectual corset that the real world makes you wear.

  At Heinrich’s, the world was all too real. His magazine, Red Dawn, has appeared, and Heinrich is already working on the third issue. He was busy with a string of domestic murders. Pride of place went to a woman who popped her husband’s head in a shopping bag and later bought Brussels sprouts. That sort of thing seems to be in these days. Heinrich assures me that readers like nothing better than murders and sex crimes. Flashers in public parks are always useful. With headlines like “Disgusting Menace,” the magazine wears its morality on its sleeve. Improper pictures, preferably from abroad, come in handy, so long as the magazine prints bold subtitles saying “We reject horrid images like these!”

  Red Dawn has become exactly the publication Heinrich never wanted it to become. Once, he was revolted by the flood of half-disguised scandal sheets without originality or freshness. Now he finds his Red Dawn upstanding and courageous.

  What is it that drives newspapers to depict the world as a shuddersome freak show? The authenticated birth of a two-headed baby is enough to set editors yelping with joy. Mad, distorted reports are carried, ideally from remote places, so as to elude the inquiries of fanatical pedants.

  I try to supply Heinrich with a few leads: Three-year-old toddler bites lion to death in jungle clearing. Ninety-year-old Tibetan woman leaps off thirty-foot rock every day in bid to remain supple. Bedouin keeps tame duck as secretary, types his worldwide correspondence for him. Three sardines hatched alive from purple hen’s egg in Texas. Man seeks divorce after wife abandons him in bowl of unsalted spinach. Hundred-and-three-year-old Bavarian woman leaves suicide note, complaining that world too annoyingly moral to be endured. Bull swallows Caruso record in Mexico and starts singing; torero moved to tears. Albanian man celebrates one-hundred-and-eightieth birthday swimming underwater for hours, laughing.

  Heinrich says he will consider the one about the bull. Next, I proposed a few “handy hints for household and personal grooming.” Angel-hair noodles woven into the hair nourish the scalp and give their wearer a silky sheen. The juice of half a melon dripped down the neck of a returning husband is an ideal prewash. Moths will never go near china that has been dropped from the balcony in mild weather. Floor mats last longer when pushed under wardrobes.

  Not all my suggestions met with Heinrich’s approval. Editors always think they’re not doing their job if they drop their pose of rejection and criticism. I can understand my brother the night porter when he turned his back on literature.

  Heinrich was still considering the quiz for readers. I offered him a few obvious questions:

  To our fair-minded male and female and other readers: towards the end
of your life in a closed institution, do you still expect to have sex appeal? Then answer the following questions and tot up your scores at the end. One. Do you feel insecure when you sit on a beer mat? Two. Would you eat a chrysanthemum if you were offered goulash? Three. Have you ever felt moved to bite a stork in the leg? Four. Has it come to your notice that the town of Bebra has never appeared in a song? Five. If you were born in Bebra, do you think you would be proud of the fact? Could you imagine in the course of a vacation under orange blossoms and mimosas by the sunny Mediterranean, sighing, O my Bebra!?

  “We can’t have that,” said Heinrich. “That last one would make the reader suspicious, it’s too complicated, he would think it was an attack and he would feel offended.”

  I agreed to scrub question five. “It has to be ten questions,” said Heinrich, and he sent me a look that was both anxious and a little exhausted.

  Briefly I pondered how much the love of homeland of a German city dweller could persist if he were set down in a beet field in rainy November. Nothing against “love of soil,” but there have to be limits, even if it is entirely imaginary. Imaginary love is admittedly more obdurate than real love because it springs from some deviated sense of self that takes itself for idealism. Most people fall for this hook, line, and sinker as soon as they lose their innocence concerning this mistake and recognize that it is a mistake. Harmless believers usually become fanatics if they are no longer able to believe what they once thought was a good idea. Whoever seeks to preserve a conviction against the available evidence will ultimately resort to evil. He must convince others of at least a fraction of his own belief. The less he is able to do so, the more furious he will become.

  At the end of his day, Heinrich likes to immerse himself in half-baked philosophy. But today he hadn’t knocked off yet and was still mixing his literary cocktail for his Red Dawn readership. I had no great desire to offer Heinrich my services as mixologist, but I was even less inclined to see Anton. I was looking for an ethical excuse for my delay. Often, I will do something disagreeable purely so as not to have to do something still more disagreeable. Besides, I was just now feeling extremely idle. The thought of the to me little-known Anton was more of a strain than Heinrich. In spite of it all, I felt obliged to move for a speedy departure.

  “Write one more piece under the rubric ‘Unusual Experiences of a Female Reader,’ ” I said to Heinrich. “Our reader Karla Pickbock sent us the following: ‘At the suggestion of a friend I went to see a football match a year ago. The crowd was largely male, and I had the strange feeling they were there for me. After I let the last tram leave without me, a gentleman asked me if I knew how to roller skate. The question sealed my fate. Today I am happily married and the mother of three strapping lads, who leave me no time for roller skating. I wish my sisters a similar fate.’ ”

  “Such true-life experiences are both relevant and ethical,” observed Heinrich. “With a few little nips and tucks I can use them.” He transcribed, with a few nips and tucks. His features showed the tragically iced-over resolve of those self-sacrificial beings who have to rescue thousands upon thousands of others’ bodies, souls included.

  Once I had convinced Heinrich of the literary stimulus of a visit to Anton and his aunt, he agreed to accompany me there.

  The aunt was charming. I have no idea what Johanna finds so scary about her. While Anton kept us waiting for ten minutes, she served us apple cake and Korn. She’s a doughty old girl of seventy or so, with a thoroughly modern attitude. She plays the football pools and goes to freestyle wrestling. Where the current crop of magazine publications is concerned, she deplored the plethora of beautiful naked young girls and women. Not that she had any ethical doubts. Her point was merely that most of the readership was female, and the woman customer was heavily emphasized. Didn’t she also have a right to be considered in the advertising? No normal woman was continually interested in the chests and legs of other women. It hurt her self-respect to have to spend money on them. In a word, the aunt was requesting the male pinup. She was herself long past the years of fleshly desire, but she would still like to see women getting their deserts. Heinrich left, deeply impressed by the doughty fighter, when Anton finally appeared and I pushed him out onto the street.

  The conversation with Anton took place in the corner pub. Johanna had given me a false account of the case of Gustav. Anton had seen her perched on his lap. I suggested that she was working on his rheumatism. Unfortunately, Anton showed himself impervious to medical arguments. Johanna will say it didn’t mean anything. She’s not even lying when she claims such a thing. She is lavish in her orientation. Hers is a generous nature; what members of women’s groups would see as a volcanic outbreak of sinful passion to her is a minor bagatelle.

  It was child’s play, well below the dignity of an ambitious psychologist, to bring Anton round to Johanna’s way of seeing things. He was dying to be persuaded and couldn’t wait to run around to Johanna’s.

  Johanna was playing host to Lenchen, the pallid flower. She seemed shy and timid, like an orphan being inspected by a committee and required to recite a poem. She seemed capable neither of murder nor of the reckless intention to pursue the calling of a hunter of men.

  From Magnesius, Johanna had collected a tin of pineapple, a bottle of bubbly, four packs of Chesterfields, and the promise to employ Lenchen in his business sometime soon. That was about all I was able to glean from her. Soon she was busy with Anton.

  * German mystic Bruno Gröning (1906–59) became a media sensation in 1949 following reports that he had miraculously healed a young boy in the town of Herford. He preached that human beings could recharge their natural energy by tapping into a higher power he called the “healing stream” (Heilstrom in German).

  The relatives are coming

  Some of my siblings have already arrived. I can love someone to the point of insanity and miss them like fury, but I hate meeting them at the station. All my siblings hate to be met at the station. In spite of that, I still feel obliged to go and meet each new arrival. And each new arrival feels obliged to tell me when they’re coming, so that I can be there to meet them.

  The first to arrive was the beautiful Aloisia. She is still beautiful. If anything, she’s even more radiant than she was before. And I had expected to meet a physical and emotional wreck. I had dreaded meeting Aloisia. A year ago, Aloisia’s husband, Hugo Moppe, died. Hugo Moppe’s death shattered us, but only because of Aloisia. Even Leberecht in far-off Brazil was convinced that Aloisia would rapidly fade away and follow Hugo into the grave in the space of a year.

  One isn’t supposed to speak ill of the dead, though I don’t really know why. If someone dies, it doesn’t make him any better. And it’s not really the dead man one speaks ill of, so much as his living placeholder. I am unable to say whether Hugo Moppe is pleasanter or more likable now as a corpse or ghost than he was before. All I remember is the living man, the way he was when I met him in Bonn, and he was a nightmare. By comparison to him, Johanna’s Anton is a marvel of handsome spirituality, a fiery intellect, a dazzling raconteur, an inexhaustible font of wisdom and deep kindness.

  It was when we were living with Uncle Kuno in Bonn that Hugo Moppe first put in an appearance. I no longer know who unearthed him. I was certainly innocent.

  At the time Moppe was an assistant in a pharmacy in Bonn. I know that pharmacists are honorable, pleasant, helpful, and generally saintly people. I know that. But ever since I met Moppe, I’ve first had to fight back inner shudders whenever I run into one.

  If I’d merely run into Moppe somewhere, I couldn’t have had any objection to him. His case only became acute through his association with Aloisia. Originally, he was as pallid, colorless, and uninteresting as a washed-out pair of pajama bottoms. But what is a sensible man going to hold against a pair of pajama bottoms, especially if they’re not his? He will only start to assume a posture of aggression once they’re hung over his lamp
as a form of decor, and he is required to admire them, instead of merely getting rid of them.

  Aloisia, whose function in life was to get herself admired for her mild, tranquil beauty by all comers, fell in love with Hugo Moppe. In all her born days she had never taken the initiative: with Moppe she did. I still remember how impressed I was when she poured his tea and buttered his bread. I believe it was the first time her hands had ever held a teapot. Next, I was struck when she went into a pharmacy to buy an unguent. Moppe suffered from eczema, in a sort of pallid characterless version. In her whole life, Aloisia had never bought anything herself. Never had she invited anyone to come or go or stay. She asked Moppe to supper every night. He came, and he ate. He spoke little and showed no signs of being in love with Aloisia. I don’t believe he even found her beautiful. Perhaps I’m being unfair, but I don’t believe he was capable of finding anything beautiful anywhere. Dusty and a little mulish, he sat with us and was far and away the most boring table companion we had ever had. He was so deeply charmless that Laura was once moved to one of her rare outbursts of passion. She said, “That Moppe is no good to man or beast.”