4
Their last visitor in Miquelstrasse is Max, who arrives with a suitcase full of winter clothes, is very friendly and seems odd to her. She doesn’t know whether she likes him. Perhaps she has heard too many stories about him, perhaps she sides with Emmy.
They are both sitting at the table when she comes in, talking politics, about something that recently happened. She hears that there has been an attempted putsch in Munich, but fortunately it was averted. They are talking about the man who led the putsch, a rabid anti-Semite, and what it means for Jews that such a man exists. She stands in the doorway for two or three minutes listening, with a trace of jealousy, but after that it is surprisingly uncomplicated. Franz is extremely proud, showing her off at last; Max courteously shakes hands, and says: So you are Dora.
He is much older than Franz, she feels, very much a grown man, whatever that may mean, very worthy, married, a little boring, she thinks, someone who knows the world, cities, women, has seen and tried everything, often enough with a guilty conscience, it seems, and with a gift for all that is dramatic. She has this from Franz, whom she once heard speaking of him critically along those lines. They sit together for a while, talking about rising prices, the theatre, and now and then Emmy’s name is mentioned, but obviously they have already discussed the subject of Emmy. Later they have a bite to eat, they talk, the conversation turns to Müritz and how they met – a long, long story.
And so the evening passes. Max leaves at around eleven, still giving her good advice down in the street. I’m delighted for you both, he says, you are looking after him so well, please don’t stop. Franz can sometimes be difficult, but he is the most wonderful person I know. Yes, she says, I know that too, while in reality she is thinking: What don’t I know, and what does this man know? What do you know about his hands, his mouth? You don’t know anything.
He is Franz’s best friend.
He has not said much about the new apartment. Isn’t it too expensive? Franz would have liked to show him the place, but there hadn’t been time, and Dora herself doesn’t see it until some days later, when she thinks it is almost better than in Franz’s description. The landlady seems nice, around forty, rather austere in her grey coat and skirt, reserved in a distinguished way. All the same, she wants money for the heating in advance. The amount is a shock, and in fact she is asking almost as much for the coal as the rent. Franz can be seen thinking, briefly, you’re only trying this on because I’m a foreigner, but then she shows them the bill, says she herself thinks the sum is crazy, has a friendly word for Dora, who she thinks is engaged to Franz, and no one corrects her.
Now what? It is late afternoon, they could go for a little walk and be glad that the world is not entirely populated by the likes of Frau Hermann, and she says as much, or something like it, directing the remark to his shirt, one that she hasn’t seen before. What a handsome man he is. They spend a very pleasant evening together, the money is gone but it is only money, what matters is that they are rid of Frau Hermann. Perhaps he will write about her, says Franz. Will he really? She is surprised, because so far he has not said a word about his plans. She has often asked what he writes about, and now, it turns out, he is writing about their life in Berlin.
But back when Frau Hermann gave them notice, all the same, it was a surprise. Allegedly there have been complaints in the house, in the neighbourhood, Frau Hermann claims, she won’t go into detail, she’s not prudish, but she is afraid that this kind of thing won’t do here in Berlin. She addresses only Franz, treating Dora like air, just like the previous evening when she hardly uttered a greeting, only a kind of hiss to show them how angry she was. Out and about at this time of day? Dora felt cross about that half the way back, and now, at breakfast next morning, Frau Hermann marches in and makes a scene. Her voice is rather shrill, she was obviously expecting resistance, but when Franz says no more she quickly turns away and goes back to her room.
Franz is indignant for a while, he can’t remember ever having been treated like that, although he has already had dealings with several landlords. They say they know all about rooms and houses. Franz has known about a dozen, not counting the hotels, boarding houses and sanatoriums where he has stayed. Dora too has often moved, five times in the last three years in Berlin alone. She hardly remembers her parents’ house in Pabianice, but she does recollect the big room in Bedzin just after her mother’s death. In Krakow, after she ran away from her father, she lived in a basement room, and looking through a skylight she could see people walking along the pavement; in Breslau she had a room near the slaughterhouse and then one by the railway station. Franz doesn’t believe much of what she says at first: that first winter in a garden house in Pankow, the tiny room above a dance hall, and the even tinier one beside the overhead railway. One gets around quite a lot, they decide, although neither of them has travelled very much, even Franz has travelled less than she thought, he has really only been to Italy, part of Switzerland, Germany and Austria. She would like to go to London or Paris. Will you come to Paris with me? She has forgotten that he has been there already, it feels like a hundred years ago, with Max, but that doesn’t count. If he only could, he says, he would go there with her on the spot.
In her room that evening she tries to imagine what he was like in his mid-twenties. She was a little girl at the time, she was going to school, but none the less it would have been just the same as in Müritz. Wherever she had found him, in a café with friends, she would have trembled, and hoped, and would never have forgotten him. Franz puts it like this: If I had met you earlier, many things would have been different. But I couldn’t meet you earlier, Müritz was the earliest possible moment. I wasn’t ready before that. It all had to happen the way it did, only then could I have you, and come to Berlin, and live the way we are living now.
They move the next day. It is more of a walk than a move, like changing your room in a hotel from one side of a corridor to the other. Dora has been there since morning, helping him pack, she sends him into town for lunch so that she can take the things round at her leisure. She has to go back and forth twice. It is cool out of doors but sometimes sunny; a group of children watch her wondering where she is going.
She has to go into the new apartment first, from the big room into the small one and back to the big room, where the sofa is. Then she sorts out the clothes and underwear and puts them away in the wardrobe, hangs up his suits and goes shopping for supper. She changes her clothes, tries out the bathroom, and then, in her new dress, she waits for him. She finally hears him at the door, long after six. He met an acquaintance who invited him home, that was why he has been so long. He is ashamed of not helping her at all, he notices the flowers at once, the tidiness of both cupboards, the new dress. She looks so fresh, he thinks, somehow new, or is it the strange surroundings, the electric light that he must get used to first? And to you, he says, or not? My God, she thinks, in Müritz she had waited for days – how can I forget him, I hope he isn’t married, how can I see him again? And now here she is with him in the new apartment, feeling nervous, not really nervous but tense, in a girlish way. He is rather complicated where love is concerned, but it is always wonderful with him, she feels at ease and is in no hurry. Once, a little while ago, she said to him: You don’t have to go so carefully with me, which surprised him a great deal, and he replied: But I have to go carefully with myself; what may look like consideration for you is only consideration for me.
In his early twenties he sometimes visited prostitutes. She doesn’t know why he confesses this to her, whether she thinks it bad in itself or indeed whether it concerns her at all. One of them was little more than a child, giving a certain illusion of innocence; she had holes in her stockings and was always laughing, which is why he still remembers her. All he remembers of the others is the horror of it. A few years, he says, and then not any more. It is evening, he is lying on the sofa, his eyes closed, as if he were sleeping. She does not feel that this confession changes anything, in an odd way
she finds it touching, as if she could feel how very young he was then, like herself before she met him, young and ignorant.
She has brought a few things from her room in Münzstrasse, clothes, underwear, shoes. She takes her make-up box, the red lipstick, a box of powder that she has opened, books for the evenings when he is at his desk. He is writing every night now until early morning. When he slips in beside her she briefly wakes up, and she is happy on those first days when she finds him still sleeping beside her in the narrow bed, where she thinks, for a while, that she has saved him.
He had already told her in Müritz that he has slept poorly for years; he told her about the ghosts, something she perhaps failed to understand or took too lightly. She thought that when she was with him they would not show themselves, but now she learns that the enemy is stronger. Are the ghosts his anxieties? At first she thinks so. They have hardly any money, they are living at the wrong time; there are demonstrations in the city, recently there were bloody confrontations between the police and the unemployed in which many were injured. But that is not it. His illness does not seem to be it either. They both know that it is only dormant, it can break out again at any time, but he has known the ghosts very much longer. Sometimes they go away and leave him in peace for a little while, then they change their minds. She says she does not like the ghosts. Why should they torment you of all people? She would like to do something for him, and makes tea in the kitchen although he tells her it is a waste of time, she should sleep, but then he lets her do as she wants so that she will stay with him, on the sofa, until he has overcome it for this time.
She never imagined that she would live like this some day. In her youth she had a thousand plans, at seventeen and eighteen, when a girl begins to wonder what will happen later, what man she may meet, whether she will have children. At sixteen she became a Zionist. She began acting on stage, she had arguments with her father, who could not get over his wife’s death. At twenty, in a fit of anger, she left him, and did so again when she was twenty-one. Was that only four years ago? She has always been drawn to the theatre, has wanted to be an actress like Emmy, only not, heaven forbid, exactly like Emmy, but to slip into the role of someone else, into texts by other people, preferably Yiddish and Hebrew but also the classics – Kleist, of whom Franz thinks so highly, some Shakespeare. That was her dream. It is a little faded now, something she will have to remember one day in case it is important then, for now that she is with Franz it is unimportant.
She tells Judith how she feels when he is writing. It is really very beautiful, a little strange, and in a way sacred, she would like to say, she doesn’t know. Once, when the door stood ajar, she watched him through the crack. It seemed to be hard work, not so much the waiting, although waiting is part of the work, but he writes and writes every evening, as if with hammer and chisel. She felt as if the paper were stone, something that did not obey him willingly but would do in the end, and then it looked almost easy, not like torment but as if he were swimming far from the coast, she thought, further and further away into the open sea.
He is sometimes angry, too. Then he is very quiet, composed in an uncanny way; the angrier he is the more composed he becomes. Until now she has assumed that such things don’t happen to him, but he has been beside himself since this morning. His parents have sent him a cheque for 31 billion Reichsmarks, which unfortunately means that it will be some time before they get the money, and by then it will have lost a third of its value. He is still muttering angrily that evening. He writes at length to Ottla, who is planning to visit Berlin, and seems to be calming down, but then he flies into a temper again, he doesn’t even enjoy the evening meal – what is she to say? His parents meant well, she says, they don’t understand the circumstances, if they had any idea what the situation is here they would be horrified.
He is still working long after ten on the story of the old landlady, who has become something of a joke. You don’t keep someone like Frau Hermann waiting, he says, she pesters you like a child demanding chocolate. After that Dora hears no more. She is awake, she is reading, half expecting him to call her, but he does not. She is left alone as if he has forgotten her.
5
It is the first story in which he has almost believed for a long time, the first that he knows he will finish, and in fact he has as good as reached the end. It is not too long, only a few pages, but he seems able to write it, has even thought of reading it aloud, which has always been a good sign with him. He is working, he feels strong, he has actually been able to write to M. at last, something about a letter from her that was burnt and one from him, and what has happened since July. He immediately falls into his old tone of voice, with the unfortunate result that he does not express himself very precisely. Something great has happened to him, he begins the letter, he mentions the Colony, his originally vague idea of going to Berlin instead of Palestine, how difficult it has always been for him to live anywhere alone, but for that difficulty, too, he found help in Müritz, help that was improbable in its own way. So now he is here in Berlin, has been in Berlin since September, obviously not alone, although it may sound so. He is living in a villa with a garden, almost in the country; the apartment is the best he has ever had. The food is such and such, he writes, his state of health … ah, well … and then, at the end, he makes a quick obeisance to the ghosts in the air, he even mentions the word fear in quite a prominent place, there is no other way to put it, for he ends the letter with the word fear, as if slamming a door behind him for ever. It has taken him two evenings to write. He is glad that M. does not know about his new life, that she is living in Vienna: she seems to have been in Italy for a little while, far from Steglitz, as good as out of reach.
Several more parcels and little packets have arrived recently, neatly numbered so that it will be obvious if one of them has gone astray, which unfortunately does happen. His mother has sent a bottle of red wine, a pair of slippers, four plates, a huge bottle of home-made raspberry juice, and also butter, as usual, even a loaf of wholemeal bread, although by now he prefers the bread they eat in Berlin. Ottla is coming tomorrow. He has sent her a list of things that they urgently need: three kitchen towels would be useful, two tablecloths, the foot-muff already mentioned several times; he hopes very much for that because, he is sorry to say, he has cold feet all the time.
In contrast to Max’s visit, he does not doubt for a second that Ottla’s will be a success, and sure enough Dora and Ottla get on well at once, even if it is only for a few hours, for unfortunately his sister must go back again that evening. If Ottla has had any doubts about his life in Berlin, they are dispelled at once. She has nothing but praise for the apartment, its almost rural surroundings, and even her brother’s state of health seems to be giving no cause for concern at the moment. Anyone can see, she says, that however difficult life is outside, you two are doing well here. There is much rejoicing about the things she has brought, which even include a spirit stove that delights Dora above all, and then Ottla helps her in the kitchen, where he hears them talking like old friends for a long time.
On the way to the station later that afternoon, Ottla says she can easily understand him. She isn’t like us, but that’s just what attracts you to her, isn’t it? To mention the most obvious difference, Dora is from the east; but all the same there are similarities between them, he thinks, for instance the common sense that distinguishes both young women, the way they laugh. His father would see only the east in her. Today is probably the first time that he and Ottla haven’t talked about their father. Not a word about him for all four hours, now that they are both leading their own lives in their own way, Ottla with Josef and the girls, Franz here with Dora in their Steglitz apartment.
To his surprise, he goes on writing without any break. Even the night after Ottla’s departure he begins a new story. He is not sure where it will lead him, but at any rate it will not be to Berlin, because the story is set in an animal’s underground burrow. He has not slept really well for days
, but he is writing – he is sharing an apartment with this young woman, but all the same he is writing. He has already read the Frau Hermann story aloud to Dora, who laughed several times, although there isn’t really any story about Frau Hermann that she doesn’t know already.
He is no longer looking only inside himself, in all seriousness he has the impression that, as if at a slight turn of the head, everything has changed, astonishing as that is. As if he had never had to do anything but turn his head and all of a sudden he would be looking outwards, to where Dora is, and the companionable experience that he connects with her.
He has written about animals quite often before, about the humblest of creatures, a cockroach, an ape, a giant mole, a vulture. He has written about dogs and jackals, he has written marginally about leopards and the cat that eats the mouse.
The beginning of the new story runs like this: I have built the burrow, and it seems to be successful. From the outside all anyone can really see is a large hole, but in fact this hole leads nowhere. After only a few steps, you come up against solid natural rock.
What else? The first snow has fallen, it is very cold, with hardly any sunlight although the sun does break through now and then. In such weather he hardly leaves the house for days.
The people of Berlin are starving, donations of food are arriving from all over Europe: that is something that he does not follow closely, but now and then he hears some detail from Dora, when she goes shopping or meets her friends. They are getting used to the sight of beggars in the streets; sad to say, by now half the city is full of beggars, the citizens are worn out, and desperate in a forbearing kind of way. The situation is worst in the Scheunen district, although there has been no repetition of the pogrom-like acts of violence in November. Dora says that the Jewish People’s Home is in terrible trouble; she would like to do something – not just make soup for the poorest of the poor, but do something to change matters.
The Glory of Life Page 9