Ferdinand, the Man with the Kind Heart

by Irmgard Keun

  I tried telling Luise about Bobby Ampel, that squashed little baby gangster. But Luise doesn’t care for bigamists, and she thinks Liebezahl’s field of operations, and hence mine, contemptible. Liebezahl is used to the reproach that he takes money for his philanthropic actions. “So, am I supposed to starve, then?” he asked. “Does a doctor not take money for dabbing the sweat from a fevered brow? Does a poet not take money when he laments the ancient pain of mankind in indelible rhythms, and causes our deepest, noblest feelings to resonate? Maybe not, but then only because no one was offering him any. Will a violinist or organist move his listeners to tears for nothing? Will a priest not accept payment for leading his flock to the throne of God with kindly zeal? Are all these noble professions to live off sunshine and fresh air?” Liebezahl probably doesn’t take himself as any less deserving than the noblest helpers and most luminous idols of mankind. The rascal probably doesn’t exist who is unable to come up with excuses for his profession, which isn’t to say that Liebezahl is a rascal in my book. In the space of another year he wants to have the most progressive psychotherapeutic institute in Europe, he is already in negotiations with doctors who will provide the undertaking with the necessary scientific gravitas. He predicts a proud future for himself. As a dignified old man, he may one day look back with a sentimental tear in his eye for his present happy-go-lucky fairground business.

  Time is weighing heavy on my hands at Luise’s. Again, I find myself wishing I were by myself. But this wish has become less anguished since my latest thought. I imagined waking up one morning and being all alone in the world. All other humans have gone up in a puff of smoke or dust. In the whole world there is no living being. No one can bother me, torment me, threaten me. There is no one. The world has gone quiet, nowhere any strife, greed, hatred, envy, wickedness. All I hear are the sounds of the air, and my own breathing. I wander through the empty streets and buildings. In the kitchen and pantry of a derelict restaurant I assemble a meal for myself and drink a bottle of wine. I wander into bookshops and clothes shops and take what I need, without having to pay. I stand in the silent station and sit in the deserted waiting room. Millions of empty beds await me when it gets dark. If I knew that there was another human being anywhere in the world, I would race off to try and find him or her. I would throw myself at the meanest and lowest creature, sobbing with emotion. How does the hermit survive? Well, it probably makes a difference if one has turned one’s back on mankind voluntarily or was left behind by them. Anyway, the hermit knows there is no shortage of people, and if he wants to, he can seek them out whenever he likes. But the further I traveled over the deserted surface of the earth, the more deeply I felt the void all around me. Each time I saw anything beautiful, I would feel miserable. I didn’t need to justify the manner of my life to anyone, and I wasn’t able to please or annoy anyone either. I would have a voice for no reason. I would own everything in the world and own nothing. Probably I’d be too old to come to any new and living relation to trees and flowers.

  And God? It would be blasphemy to try and make some stand-in human out of Him. He wouldn’t be able to replace him either. Supposing I believed in Him, I couldn’t even be good for His sake. I think we are made too accustomed from childhood to seeing God as a kind of cosmic policeman, striving to regulate the complicated interactions of people.

  I have nothing against the fulfillment of wishes. But sometimes it’s good for a wish to remain unfulfilled. As always, I love being alone. But after thinking through my dream to the very last consequence, it’s become more of a nightmare, and I’m inclined to see the dullest bore and most miserable wretch as a life-saving companion. If, after days or weeks in the deserted world, I were to run into Luise, I’m sure she would seem anything but stifling to me. She would help me to attain a new life. Her foolish mouthing of idiotic pop songs would bring tears of joy to my eyes. Flowers, mountains, spring, autumn, books, diamonds, fine wines and good food, sad thoughts, bad moods, joyful recognition, gentle renunciations, and noisy desires—all these would once again have meaning. Oh, the tides would ebb and flood once more.

  I said a very sincere goodbye to Luise.

  * Like Irmgard Keun herself, when her suicide was reported in 1940 in the UK’s Daily Telegraph.

  The party of the broken glasses

  Johanna’s party began early in the evening, I don’t know what the time is now. Without a watch, there’s just a spinning on through alcohol and human entanglements.

  People dance, people sit, stand, lie around. People come, and people go. Some seem unfamiliar to me, as though they’d just blown in off the street. For Johanna, it’s the presence of strangers that makes it a party.

  A radio is playing, two or three gramophones are playing, a young man is belaboring his accordion, a tenor voice rings out loud and off-key. All around there are cushions, and half-full and empty bottles and glasses in amongst broken records.

  Everyone seems cheerful, probably they are cheerful too, and I only think of them as sad because I’m sad. I think almost the only thing capable of making me profoundly sad is a party. How do people do it, fall into wild high spirits on command at a preset time? Perhaps their high spirits are forced without them knowing it? They are no longer free, they are prisoners of their intoxication. Forced hilarity makes me sad. Damnit, I don’t want to let myself go like this. I’ll have another drink, maybe that’ll do the trick. I’ve had quite a bit already. The more I drink, the soberer I feel. Damned alcohol won’t let itself be bossed around, it keeps control of you, and you do what it wants. Drinking is a lottery. You never know in advance whether it’ll make you merry or sad, loving or angry, gentle or furious, clever or moronic.

  How much work Johanna put into this. At least a dozen people were kept busy. I helped too. Sometimes I’m fed up with doing things I have no desire to do.

  Johanna’s lending library has been turned into a bar, there are colored paper hangings screening the bookshelves, borrowed by the noodle-maker Albert Theodor Peipel from his mother. Her room is all cushions, poufs, and paper chains. Liebezahl’s room is stuffed full of sofas. In the yard, walled in by ruins, a long trestle table has been set up. The summer night is warm and pliant.

  I am sitting somewhere in the background, perched between two bins. Every five minutes or so, someone in the neighborhood yells “Quiet!” whereupon everyone in the yard sets up an even wilder din.

  There is any amount to drink, and all sorts. Of course, Johanna couldn’t afford it all. Her business is going very badly, she is in debt, and has no idea what to do about the bailiffs. To be able to devote herself still more fully to Anton in thought and deed, she has neglected her translation work. Women in love run the risk of financial ruin. I am comforted by the thought that so far Johanna has emerged from her calamities fresh and cheerful. She isn’t a person who reeks of tragic destiny and imminent end.

  Each guest was called upon to bring at least one bottle of wine or spirits. Liebezahl, Heinrich, Peipel, Magnesius, and one or two more will have been charged to bring a five- or tenfold amount. In return, my pallid Lenchen was permitted to come without anything, and Johanna’s best friend, Meta Kolbe, with a split of Blue Nun. “Very strong and good for you, too,” she proclaimed. I myself have witnessed elderly ladies quietly and steadily chugging Blue Nun and thinking they were doing good work and not indulging in the demon drink. Everything depends on the name of the given product. You can be a whiskey tippler but never a Blue Nun tippler.

  Like many businesspeople, Magnesius is a jovial and generous party animal, only to emerge as even icier and stonier later. He damascenes himself. To heighten the mood, he has jammed a green monocle in one eye, and pulled a yellow silk stocking over his head. Just now I saw him kissing the hand of a woman unknown to me and offering to buy her a brand-new Mercedes.

  Several of the gentlemen are going around in paper hats or capital beer mats. In many men the compulsion to unconventional head attire b
ecomes uncontrollable when they have been drinking together. On the whole, this is a harmless urge and shouldn’t be discouraged. I only wish I knew whence it sprang. For the past hour, Peipel has sported a tea cozy, which must be burdensome for him, and calefactory.

  The tuneless tenor is bareheaded, only he is singing incessantly, now in the courtyard, now in the room with the cushions, now in the bar. He was hoping to be discovered, Johanna tells me. I guess him to be around fifty, but older men have been discovered. Johanna asked him because she likes his style and wants to make him happy. He seems happy enough to me. He can sing to his heart’s content—no one’s stopping him and no one’s listening. His name is Damian Hell,* and he’s a postman. Or rather, he used to be a postman, the most delightful postman in his district. He empathized with his clients. He was happy when he was able to bring them post and miserable when they waited in vain for letters, and he was gifted in the expression of his unhappiness. He cheered people up, comforted them, and made them happy with his empathy. The dullest beings sensed that Damian was a jewel among postmen.

  One day, Damian failed to appear. On the third day, several people noticed that they were no longer getting letters, and on the fourth a new postman appeared—an impersonal and objective young man. A man who reserved his heart for his own personal use and didn’t carry it around in his mailbag. He did his duty, but he wasn’t a ray of sunshine. One only really understands what the sun is when it has disappeared behind a cloud. A whole district started to miss Damian Hell.

  The explanation was soon discovered and never understood. Damian was a bachelor. His postal round was like a wife to him. One day there must have been a crisis between them, he must have yearned for something new, and he fell in love with a nice new suburb at the opposite end of the city. For three days he traveled out to the new suburb and dropped letters at random in various boxes. Perhaps he was just bored with the old routine and tried in his fashion to introduce a little variety into his life. My explanations carry no medical authority. The psychiatrists into whose care Damian was placed will have been able to come up with a more scientific account. Before long, he was dismissed as posing no threat to the public and now draws a small pension, works as a handyman, and sings. The mailman has been forgotten, while as a handyman he has some pale shadow of his erstwhile popularity.

  Johanna has often been a faithless lover and always a faithful friend. While others shrugged their shoulders and declared that Damian was mad, she gave blazing defenses of his actions as a display of normality. Only a madman or an idiot, she declared, was capable of doing the same thing every day for decades. Damian’s soul stood in need of something like its dirty weekend. In his mild, peaceable manner, he had given in to the lure of danger and adventure and uncertain outcome and muted it to a harmless joke. Other men, drawn by the lure of the uncanny (the Unheimlich in Freud) into the practice of strangeness would have turned straightforwardly to evil—would have become murderers, vandals, torturers, arsonists, child molesters, swindlers, racketeers, or some other wickedness. It may be observed that the multiplicity of evildoing demands a far greater vocabulary than goodness, which is rooted in singleness.

  So, Johanna took care of Damian. Maybe she’s right, and he is normal. He is a person who will never turn to the bad, either through his own agency or others’. Perhaps that’s what matters. Johanna dragged me into a corner of the room with the cushions. Damian is singing. Johanna beams and applauds. In the opposite corner Anton is hunkering and muttering. “He’s starting to get on my nerves,” says Johanna, and waves and smiles at Anton. “I’ve had enough of him, Ferdinand—but maybe I love him still, I don’t know. Of course, I’ve spoiled him by being too nice to him. But if I like someone, I want to be nice to them, I don’t want to watch myself the whole time. I don’t want to resort to those tricks that women use in order to keep a man.” Johanna tells me she likes to be sweet and good to a man, then she gets up and gives the scowling Anton a medium-strength slap in the face.

  While Anton takes himself off silently and with impressive dignity, Damian sings, “My friends, life is worth living…”

  “If he’s not back in an hour, will you go and get him for me?” says Johanna, and sashays out into the courtyard.

  Johanna is wearing an off-the-shoulder red silk dress with a scary décolletage. Aloisia is wearing much the same thing. I don’t understand what keeps such dresses from slipping. It looks very nice, but I’m sorry for the poor ladies who are prevented by the dictates of fashion from running around in the altogether. Especially when they wear their sundresses, they sometimes make a positively wretched impression on me. When I see them, I get the feeling they are awake at all hours, racking their brains as to how the tiny strips of material round their hips and bosoms can be made still tinier.

  Aloisia is drinking champagne, and she is so boisterously cheerful, it’s as though there never was anything like a Hugo Moppe in her life. My sister Nina, who is a painter in Munich, is drawing caricatures on the walls. She arrived sometime this morning, I haven’t had a chance to speak to her yet. She seems to have turned into a calm and serious-minded girl.

  Laura and her retinue were supposed to have arrived this morning as well. She was to have been the focus of the party. Johanna loves Laura and had intended a queenly role for her. Probably she would now be lying on one of the sofas, sleeping blissfully through all the racket. Now it looks as though Laura won’t get here till tomorrow, when the party’s safely over. I won’t go home, I’ll go straight to the station.

  My brother Toni is here. He’s sitting in a corner, looking as though he’s about to cry. He came up from Starnberg yesterday. I had trouble recognizing him. The cheerful lad, the sunny boy of the family, he isn’t cheerful anymore. Destiny has struck him a hard blow.

  Poor Toni has become a little remote to me. When he was far away in the South, we were closer.

  Starnberg is where he has his nursery. He won’t have been coining it exactly, and will have had the usual economic anxieties as per. He didn’t care, though. All those things he wasn’t able to afford didn’t matter to him. He was happy with his little Mariechen and their pets. At least he thought he was. A couple of weeks ago, an acquaintance gave him a mild case of lottery fever. The first three times he didn’t win, and he was all set to give up. But then he tried it a fourth time. Mariechen posted his entry. She conscientiously gave the receipt to her husband. Shortly after, Toni saw that he had won 48,000 marks. There was no doubt about it, he had won. He went crazy. First slightly crazy, then completely crazy. He bought clothes for Mariechen in which she looks like a bedraggled film star who’s been in a bicycle accident. He bought all sorts of stuff for the house and the yard and the nursery. He played host to all their friends. Probably he bought his bees a jeroboam of champagne. He wanted to spend a day of his life being foolish. Then he started making plans—new buildings, new nursery extensions, new stables. He became obsessed with breeding orchids. He wanted to keep monkeys, order tulips from Holland, retile the bathroom, and lots more. There’s no end of great and small wishes that a person can collect in the course of a lifetime.

  And then came the catastrophe. Toni had indeed won, but the money wasn’t paid out to him and presumably never will be. Registered mail rarely gets lost, but Toni’s registered letter was. The lottery panel refused to shell out, and the post only pays its standard forty marks for a lost registered letter. Toni doesn’t understand, he can’t let the matter rest, he thinks the post is obliged to indemnify him, he wants to go to court. If the unhappy man had seen he had made a mistake, he would probably have settled down sooner or later. But as it is, he continues to hope and is getting more and more deranged. If he tells people now what he wants to do with the money, you get the sense that even a million wouldn’t be enough. He tells everyone about his mishap, it’s all the conversation he has. He asks everyone for advice, and everyone advises him differently. This afternoon I saw him standing with a small boy
in front of an ice cream van, and I’m sure he was talking about the criminal deceit of the postal service. If you try telling him to be sensible, he looks at you as if he’d suddenly noticed he was with his mortal enemy. Mariechen is running around looking tearstained and puffy-faced and has already consulted Aloisia about the advisability of a divorce. I think Toni wouldn’t mind. He could then devote himself entirely to his lottery win.

  Just now he’s hunkered in a corner looking to see whom he could discuss the post’s skulduggery with. It looks as though everyone has already heard the story, and no one wants to hear it a second time.

  Just now I see Herr Pittermann sitting down beside Toni. Pittermann looks flushed and a little woozy, but is evidently trying to compose his carnivalesque face. Pittermann is just the right person, Pittermann will cluck like a mother hen and turn a little profit on the side.

  Pittermann used to be a rep for a toy company. He was always a jovial, life-affirming character, a doughty carnival supporter, indispensable at weddings, funerals, baptisms, and other celebrations. He loves the songs of the Rhineland, Rhine wine, and Rhine jokes. His life, though, has repeatedly brought him into unhappy situations, in which he managed to prevail through bravery, resourcefulness, and optimism. Johanna met him through a businesswoman for whom he promised to organize a telephone. Telephone connections are still not easily come by. Pittermann has promised Johanna a telephone as well.

  Pittermann can get hold of just about anything, he has connections, which is to say human connections. Or so he claims. Of course, the connections cost money. Or they demand payment in kind. For instance, the businesswoman passed on a whole lot of sardines and cognac. The connections love cognac. They smoke as well. Pittermann does it all for nothing. That way he is sometimes even more expensive than the connections by themselves. You have to show gratitude to him, have him round and spoil him. It’s like with girls who give themselves to a man out of sheer love and won’t accept any presents. You end up having to take them to expensive restaurants and bars, put them in cabs, and send them flowers and perfumes and boxes of chocolates. For all that, a man could easily get himself a month with a girl he could pay. But there’s no sense in trying to explain things like that to my mother-in-law or Meta Kolbe, they just get angry.