The Glory of Life

by Michael Kumpfmüller

  Ought one to write about the world or change it?

  He has answered Robert’s last letter, explaining why he says almost nothing about himself, or rather he does not so much explain as state the fact that nothing much is happening. He does not write to his family, to Max, or to his other half-forgotten friends, but his conscience there is clear; the more so because he seems to sense that he does not have much time left.

  He is under pressure, and doesn’t know how well he will manage to stand up to it; meanwhile he ostensibly has more time on his hands than ever before. Perhaps this is happiness, he thinks, this form of extravagance, evenings spent in the dimly lit room when they read aloud to each other, Dora in Hebrew from the Torah, or he reads something from the Grimms, or from Hebel’s stories, from the Treasure Chest of a Family Friend From the Rhine. He particularly likes Hebel’s story of the miner. At such moments he feels as if he has all the time in the world, that he is not wasting time, because he knows that after a few minutes he will go to his desk, and then stay sitting there after all, complicated as these states of uncertainty are to him: moments when she leans against him or crosses her legs, a mixture of expectation and fear.

  He roots around in his burrow for a few days and nights, surprised to find how simple it all is.

  When he gets dressed in the morning, shirt and tie, standing in front of the mirror in the little bathroom, when he washes and shaves and then dresses, putting on his dark suit, always dressed to the nines, it is as if he had an appointment to meet her for breakfast in a café and would soon be seeing her there, but all the time she has been here in a dress or a blouse that he knows.

  He wonders when he picked up that habit. Or can you rely on things to be right just when they need to be?

  His evenings, too, are extraordinary, for at some point you must take your clothes off and prepare for the night. They share the room, he is not alone, but that does not disturb him, far from it. This, he has always thought, is exactly the way he should live some day.

  6

  For a few weeks she is blissfully happy. She marvels at many things: his afternoons spent in bed, his strange stories, when he explains to her that here, and here, he was thinking of her; this place where the animal collects provisions, the castle keep, that’s you, although with the best will in the world she can’t see any connection. But that makes no difference to her happiness. It is a hard winter, people are starving in the city, and they often talk about that and how happy they are to have what they do. She does not think much further ahead, for the one reason that she refuses to let herself consider the child’s question of what will become of her. Here in this apartment, she wishes never to leave.

  Ottla has told her how different life is when you have children. She asked without beating about the bush: And how about you, will you have children? The two of them were on their own in the kitchen. Because Dora wasn’t expecting the question, she is afraid she can only stammer: well, she says, it’s all so new, and in these times she doesn’t really know. Ottla looked at her in concern, because they both know that this question depends on Franz and, sad to say, he is ill, because if he were not ill he would probably want to have children with you. Have the two of you talked about it? She can only say no to that, and she mentions the little girl with the doll, for of course they never have talked about it, but in a certain way they did discuss it for several days there in the park. Ottla liked the story very much. She is very kind and tries to console Dora. Who knows what may yet become of the two of you? You are young, perhaps he will recover, or they’ll invent a new medicinal drug, how can anyone tell? Ottla embraced her warmly, like a sister, she thought, feeling to some extent consoled, surprised that she needs consolation and that anyone should see her in that light.

  She will be twenty-six at the beginning of March.

  She has talked to Franz about her room, and they agree that she need not keep it on; it’s a useless expense, and she will give notice at the middle of the month. She has never liked the room, the old bed where she lay crying when Albert left her, the musty smell of the rugs, the shabby furniture. She once took Hans there, and that turned out to be a terrible mistake. Everything was complicated, they didn’t know what to talk about, and in fact he hadn’t come to talk. Then he got up and never came there again.

  Giving up the room will not make much difference to her routine. She will still go to the People’s Home every other day. The situation there gets worse every week, for there is a shortage of almost everything: money, food, and the poor Jews in the district hardly know how to help themselves. Franz encourages her. Someone must look after them, he says, no one can do it better than her, yet she doubts that and feels weak, torn back and forth, wondering whether she is doing more good with Franz or with the children.

  He hasn’t finished his story yet. But he is making progress; he sits down regularly at about ten or ten-thirty, and without any previous arrangement she sometimes stays with him now, reading a book or just watching his rhythm, the pauses before he picks up the thread of the story again. Once she drops off to sleep, and when she wakes he is sitting beside her, entirely changed, exhausted as if after hard manual labour. There is a radiance in his face, something that hurts her for a moment, and then stops hurting. She sees the faint light of dawn outside. You’re awake? Yes, he says, and now I’ve found you here. Obviously he has never known anything like it before; he is strangely moved, he whispers as if it were fundamentally unthinkable for him to be here in a room with her.

  I have been a different person since knowing you.

  Every few days he reads something aloud to her; they are together and uninterrupted. Sometimes they even pray together, and she is always surprised to find how little he knows. But that, perhaps, is what makes his recitals of the prayers so delightful; he is awkwardly devout, like a schoolboy muttering the first letters of the alphabet to himself, while his thoughts are heaven knows where. He is at odds with himself, has the feeling that he is doing everything wrong – but there is no right or wrong, you just have to say the prayers. You are making a space for yourself, she says. Everything is quiet there. Only when everything is quiet does she sometimes hear a voice far away, light rather than dark, strangely young, so that it isn’t difficult to ask him for something. Can you hear me, Lord? she says. Please hear my prayer. He only has to know that she is standing here, and not demanding the impossible.

  For a while she feels strangely thin-skinned, finds herself weeping with emotion when Ottla sends two tablecloths and a couple of teacloths. She is suddenly afraid of the winter. The first snow thawed long ago and it is raining, but it is warm and bright in here, so there is nothing to worry about. Franz is very loving. He writes, but not every day. He takes her in his arms, praises her cooking, sits in the kitchen with her, and it is almost like being back in Müritz.

  Premonition is the wrong word. She has had no inner peace for a few days; she keeps walking back and forth in the vague knowledge that they are vulnerable, he and she, before her fears slowly go away.

  Franz has been writing for days; he seems exhausted but content. He hasn’t finished the story, he is having difficulty with the end of it – all the same he would like to read her what he has written. Once again she can’t help thinking how beautifully he speaks: she listens to his voice more than the story, which is still strange to her. Is the animal with its burrow Franz? Sometimes she sees only the animal, then she thinks she understands that he is writing about his life here in Steglitz, in a roundabout way, but not so roundabout that the decisive point eludes her. He said she was the castle keep. The animal is afraid, is working day and night, now and then it is hungry, and in fact there are boundless amounts of provisions, the whole building is full of meat, and I am the meat, she thinks in alarm, and then comes the place where the animal takes the meat, and it sounds horrible.

  She is still disturbed the next day. A storm has been raging outside for hours and Franz is lying down, so she has time to go on thinking about it.
She feels naked, as if she were exposed and also hurt, but the odd thing is that she likes that. She is the meat, but not in the same way as with Albert, who simply threw her away. She doesn’t quite understand it herself. The story in itself is terrible. Is he really afraid all the time? Because the story is, above all, about fear. Do animals feel fear? She laughed in a couple of places, and hopes that Franz isn’t cross with her. He said at once that he wasn’t, on the contrary, he seemed to be glad, although those passages were the most terrible of all.

  Of course, says Franz, the cough is still there. It resembles the ghosts; you mustn’t arouse it on any account, maybe not even talk about it, or you will entice it out of hiding, and then you won’t get rid of it so easily.

  They have had breakfast together, Dora is wearing his dressing-gown and sitting on his lap. It is something new for her to wear his dressing-gown, for him to let her add her greetings to his letters, for everyone to know about her and ask after her, Max and Ottla, who have already been here, and now this man Robert. All she knows about him is that he was in a sanatorium with Franz years ago. Only Franz’s parents don’t know about her. When he writes to them, it always sounds as if he were entirely on his own in Berlin. He doesn’t like them to worry, he says. It’s only if they don’t worry that they will leave him to live in peace here, so he complains about the price of getting his laundry done in Berlin, talks about the weather, which hasn’t been too bad so far, dry and not very cold, not much fog; it is raining now, to be sure, but not very heavily.

  7

  The story still has no ending; for the time being it ends in stalemate. There is the meat and the building, there is the sound of the enemy that will not be kept away by anyone or anything. If someone were to tell him, you will be really ill on such and such a day, and then he did become really ill, he would not be surprised. At the most, the opposite would be surprising, but then again the opposite has happened; people can survive tuberculosis, and in a few cases it has – how can one put it? – dissolved into thin air. At least, he has often heard of such things in the past, in sanatoriums when he was not yet a lung patient himself, strictly speaking not a patient at all.

  In her arms, he sometimes believes it. Or rather, he forgets what at heart he does not believe, for in reality he is anxious all the time, listening to what is going on inside him, even in her arms, where fortunately there are still other sounds to be heard.

  Overnight it has become real winter. Snow has fallen ankle-deep in the streets, it is cold and grey, and now of all times he has a high temperature again, his first in weeks. Not too high, but all the same. Dora sends him straight to bed. His energetic urge to write of the last few weeks is over, he feels dull and empty, leafs listlessly through a newspaper that Dora has brought, is discontented all day, which makes her anxious, but no, still no trace of coughing. He feels powerless, which somehow seems right now at the end of the year, when everything is beginning to lapse into rigidity resembling death.

  The night passes without any particular incidents. The 24th begins just as the 23rd ended; he has a temperature but no cough, he lies on the sofa by the stove while Dora goes out to run her last errands for the holiday season. As soon as she has left the fever comes back. He begins to freeze, then he burns, at the same time he feels cold. When Dora returns she takes fright and telephones for a doctor, a locally well-known professor, who in turn sends his assistant, a man of around thirty who can find nothing wrong. We can only wait and see, he says. Stay in bed, is his advice, and at the same time he names his fee, a crazy sum of money.

  As he is only feverish, Franz does not really want to lie down, but to please Dora he stays in bed, writing another letter to M., complaining of feeling rather worse than he does, but that is usual between them. Although nothing seems wrong with him just now, he writes about his old troubles, which he says have sought him out here in Berlin and overcome him, everything tires him, every stroke of the pen, so that is why he hasn’t written, he is waiting for better or worse times to come. For the rest, he is well and affectionately cared for – this is his way of alluding to Dora – within the limits of earthly possibility. There is not much more to say. It is snowing outside, the flakes have been dancing outside the window for hours, a pretty sight, it is like being back in his childhood.

  On the fourth day the fever has gone. Dora would like him to stay lying down, although he thinks that is going too far. She still seems to be worn out when she smiles, when she brings him something to eat, or sits on the bed and says how ill he looked. Like death, he says, at which she shakes her head vigorously: for heaven’s sake no, and then she bursts into tears, because she has been thinking exactly the same herself.

  It is bitterly cold, and Jack Frost has been tracing patterns on the window panes, but the doctor seems to be all right again. Now, on his second day free of the fever, Dora can confess to him that she telephoned Elli from the living room while he was ill and hardly able to form a clear thought; he had wondered why she was away from him so long. Dora feels guilty because she didn’t ask permission; after all she shouldn’t just call his family, but in her need she could think of nothing else to do. Don’t be cross, she says, but he is not for a moment cross, indeed he is relieved, because he hates using the telephone. Could Dora do it for him in future? The mere sound of the bell is a horror to him, it always sends a shiver down his spine, and usually he doesn’t know what to say, or it gets all mixed up as it recently did with Elli, they interrupt each other, move from subject to subject, ask about unimportant things like the weather, how did you sleep, how is the cough, things that could be explained easily and at leisure if they were sitting face to face.

  He must write a letter to Elli now, and begins it like this: I thought the worst at once – maybe that she had bought half a pigeon or something of that sort, but it was only about the phone call. He would write quite differently to Ottla, but with Elli he always feels that he must get in first before she reproaches him, and furthermore he doesn’t want her to notice his anxiety over the rising prices; he is even wondering whether it would not be better to leave Berlin. It’s only a kind of game at the moment, he says, mentioning the possible alternatives of going to Schelesen, Vienna or Lake Garda, and then he takes it all back. After the New Year things will certainly be better, he writes, apparently prices are going to fall by half, or so he has heard, possibly even to where they were before – and so, he jokes, we can make money by doing nothing, not without adding that Dora succeeded in getting the doctor’s fee reduced by half in bargaining over the telephone.

  Is he so unwilling to use the telephone because the voice can’t lie? You can dissimulate in letters, leaving matters up in the air, whereas they immediately appear rough-hewn and unambiguous on the telephone. For instance, he would not have wanted to express his request for a small spittoon bottle over the telephone. The matter is a little complicated, and concerns the young lady who, he knows, would like to give it as a Christmas present. Christmas was over some time ago, but he would like to ask the young lady, through Elli, to get him a new lid for it at Waldek and Wagner. He has the bottle itself and the rubber ring, and hasn’t used it for some time, so this is just a precaution.

  Overnight there is no more spirit to be had for the spirit stove. Dora has tried several shops, but to no avail, so now she is cooking over candle ends, a laborious and slightly ridiculous method, but in the end she manages somehow. The food is so hot that it almost burns your tongue. All the same, this is another setback. They haven’t spent anything on themselves for ages, they can hardly even afford the postage for letters, never mind extras.

  They have plenty of New Year wishes, but hardly dare to entertain most of them. Dora hopes she will never have such a scare again as a week ago, lying in bed with him here on New Year’s Eve as she’d wanted to. It is long after midnight; Dora is so weary that she can hardly keep her eyes open. Her feet are cold, but otherwise she is warm all over under the blanket, where he is somehow embracing her. She falls asle
ep about two o’clock, which is a small miracle, for with the window open the noise is tremendous for hours on end, as he tells the family at home later, never mind the frost – the sky was full of rockets and there was music and shouting for miles around.

  They will not be together like this for ever. Sometimes he envisages her alone, without him, in ten years’ time when she is in her mid-thirties and her beauty is gradually fading, but at the same time he sees her clearly, and in a certain sense in a final way. She will not always be slender, she will be plumper, if he is not mistaken, but the look of her will be the same, her gentle nature, her liveliness, her good faith.

  Once he dreams of F. It is the first time he has thought of her for weeks, merely because of this dream. She is married and has children; he knows that by hearsay, because after their engagement was broken off they soon stopped writing to each other. He didn’t know any more. He wasn’t sure what set off the thought. The fact that at last he has the life she was not ready to lead with him? All he remembers about the dream itself is that it was about furniture, the furnishings of a huge salon, because they often used to quarrel about such things.

  He says, writing to Ottla, that Merano wouldn’t be a bad place to go. All the same, for now he will stay in Berlin where, as announced, prices have dropped slightly since the New Year, a tram fare to Potsdamer Platz costs a third less, and a litre of spirit for the stove just under half as much as before. In spite of Dora’s reservations, they have been into the city – the weather is not quite so bad, and indeed it does them good to be among other people again; they can see that everything is in its usual place, the prices, as mentioned, are interesting, for instance in a corner restaurant a dish of Wiener Schnitzel with asparagus costs about 20 kroner. Yes, the cold is bitter, he writes that evening, but it is warm under his down quilt, sometimes there is a warm, sunny moment in the park, and you can be really comfortable with your back to the radiator, especially when you have your feet in a foot-muff as well.