by Irmgard Keun
Johanna pulls open the door of her store. She looks dreamily out into the distance.
“Look at that, Ferdinand—see the sky on fire! It’s the sunrise. In an hour’s time the first bailiff will be here.”
Awake with tiredness, I wander off to the station. It’s a clear, bright morning. The ruins are in bloom. New houses and little shops springing up among them. A beggar weaves past a colorful fruit stand and begins singing. “Do people give each other roses in Tirol…” Industrious fellow, starting his day so early. He is old but well preserved and has a beautiful drinker’s nose. I give him a mark and hope he buys himself a nice brandy with it.
“I’ll walk with you a bit, you seem to have forgotten me,” says a voice at my side. It’s Lenchen. I really had forgotten her. Her features are still and tired and her walk a little sluggish. But her forehead, eyes, and smile are still friendly and fresh. I link arms with her and lead her on, that way she can have a little frail presleep. It makes me glad to know I can help this creature. There is an obstacle in her path, and just at the moment she is too weak to jump it all by herself. Someone has to lend her a hand, then she can do it. And she won’t cling on to me once she’s able to walk on unassisted.
I drop Lenchen off at pretty Fräulein Kuckuck’s. I have time to drink a cup of coffee there on my feet.
“I don’t think there’s ever been a person who was always able to fend for themselves, not since the beginning of the world,” I say, once I’ve burned my mouth on the hot coffee, “and I don’t think there’s ever been a person who wasn’t helped by others either. The shame of it is that it was almost always too late, or insufficient or the wrong kind of help.”
“Drink up,” says Fräulein Kuckuck, “Lenchen needs to go to bed, and I wouldn’t mind another hour’s sleep myself, so why don’t you hold the rest of your morning service on your way to the station. What is it with men, that they like to wax philosophical when they’ve had a few? They can’t find an end, and ideally they would start crying at their own nobility. Finish your coffee and get lost—hang on, I’ll give your hair a quick comb, and brush the ash off your collar. You can clean your fingernails yourself. You won’t want your mother to see you looking like that, will you?”
I was pressed down onto a chair and felt like an old stove being violently scrubbed and brought to a shine. Lenchen too perked up a little and was seized by the sadistic feminine desire to grab a helpless object and work on it with chemicals and vicious implements towards its ostensible cleansing. I think in the hurry of the moment, I was even vacuumed, and rubbed with washing powder and sprinkled with Vim. As a finishing touch, Lenchen wiped my nose and Fräulein Kuckuck pushed three particularly thorny roses into my hand.
I stood on the platform, lonely as a crumb. The train had pulled in, but no Laura got out. With heavy feet I tramped back down the malicious station steps.
Rooms had been booked for Laura at a nearby hotel. I went there, thinking maybe the porter had been given a message. The roses drooped in my sweating hand.
“Yes, sir,” said the porter, “the party arrived on the evening train.”
I walked up the stairs, feeling the sweet softness of a stair carpet. I gave a quiet tap on the door and turned the handle. The door was open. Laura doesn’t like to lock doors. That unlocked door was the first intimation of home.
At the foot of a large bed was a narrow sofa with a little dachshund sitting on it, viewing me gravely.
I didn’t move. I heard some calm breathing, and I knew I was in the right room. The curtains were drawn tight, and the light in the room was compounded from pink corals and old silver.
I looked at the bed. Four gobstopper eyes were looking at me. They belonged to two little black children with black woolly heads. These earnest little joke items observed me silently, alert and awake. And with that regal superiority and calm that only the consciousness of deep security is capable of imparting.
Between them Laura lay sleeping. Her hair shone darkly, and her face had the familiar calm beauty. I felt ashamed of my momentary apprehension.
I sat down next to the well-bred little dachshund and said to myself, Let’s not wake her. Once more I had the happy if fleeting sense that I’d come home.
* Hell is German for light or bright
IRMGARD KEUN was born in Berlin in 1905. She published her first novel, Gilgi, One of Us, in 1931. Her second novel, The Artificial Silk Girl, became an instant bestseller in 1932, but was then blacklisted by the Nazis. Eventually sentenced to death, she fled the country and staged her own suicide before sneaking back into Germany, where she lived undercover for the duration of the war. She later resumed writing under the name of Charlotte Tralow, enjoying only modest success until her early works were rediscovered and reissued in the late 1970s. She died in Cologne in 1982.
MICHAEL HOFMANN has translated the work of Gottfried Benn, Hans Fallada, Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, and many others. In 2012 he was awarded the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His Selected Poems was published in 2009, Where Have You Been? Selected Essays in 2014, and One Lark, One Horse: Poems in 2019. He lives in Florida and London.