Gilgi

by Irmgard Keun

  “So, come here, little sad-eyed girl.” He lifts her off the suitcase, sets her on his lap—“you can stay there like that until my left leg goes to sleep again.— … that’s the way! She gives me a lecture the other day: anyone who’s healthy and has enough to eat simply doesn’t have the right to be unhappy—and now she’s crying all over me, turning my lapels to mush.”

  “You’re right, Martin.” Gilgi lifts her face. Registers with pleasure and pride that he remembers even her modest remarks. “Well—you see … and … then …” it turns into a long and more or less clear report. “And what really gets me down is precisely the fact that they were fair and decent to me, so that from pure, awful egotism I wish that I could do something really special for them too one day. And I like them, but there just isn’t any common ground. I can’t be honest and open with them, and always lying revolts me. If they doubt me, it’s embarrassing, and if they believe me faithfully it’s even more embarrassing.” Oh no, she’s not sad anymore, she’s here with Martin, which is where she belongs. She’s behaved like some sheltered innocent from a century ago, doesn’t understand it herself. There’s that theory of heredity, or whatever it’s called; that’s the only explanation for her attack of sentimentality. The Krons will realize that children always go their own way sooner or later, and they’ll accept that. They won’t be unhappy, Herr Kron won’t be unhappy at all. He’s only unhappy when a Carnival parade is cancelled or people don’t laugh at his jokes, or if business is bad. Frau Kron’s capacity for unhappiness is equally limited. And one day they won’t be angry anymore, then she’ll visit them quite often—and she has Martin, she has her work, tomorrow she’ll be more punctual than ever at the office—everything will turn out right, everything is all right now. Gilgi slides off Martin’s knees. “Just want to write my mother a quick letter.”

  “The one in St. Moritz?”

  “No, of course not; the other one.”

  “I find your family situation rather complicated.”

  “Dear Mother,” Gilgi writes—“Don’t be sad. I won’t be living with you and Father from now on, I don’t want the way I live to upset you anymore. There’s no need to worry about me, I’m working and I know how to make my own living. I’m very sad about how ungrateful I must seem to you both, and how ungrateful I in fact am. But if you need me sometime—I’ll always do anything for you. Don’t try to find me for the time being. I don’t want to come back permanently. That’s better for you both, and for me. I’ll ring you up from time to time, and if you don’t want to talk to me you can just hang up. But whenever you want—I’ll come to see you. Don’t be angry with me. If that’s possible. Your Gilgi

  “If you’re feeling good about things again by the time spring cleaning starts, and Father doesn’t mind, then I’ll come for four days and help you.”

  “Back in a minute, Martin.” She stuffs the letter into her pocket. Runs into the street. Buys a quarter-kilo of almond roughs—Frau Kron’s favorite candy—and a nickel-plated coffee-pot—the old china pot started to leak yesterday. She gets the sales clerk to make a parcel of the pot and the candy and put the letter on top: yes, the messenger will deliver it in the course of the morning.

  A quarter-hour later, relieved and content, she’s back at Martin’s. “If I have to do something, I’ve always got to do it right away. Delaying things makes me ill.—Right—and now let’s unpack—”

  Martin’s eyes look thoughtful. “Gilgi,” he says, and puts his hands on her shoulders. She looks so disconcertingly young, the little one, and notwithstanding her habitually exaggerated independence she looks almost helpless. He can’t offer her his insecure existence as a replacement for the security of her parents’ home. “Little Gilgi, I’m delighted that you’re with me now, but—don’t you think you might’ve made a silly mistake? You shouldn’t be doing this for my sake, you understand? And if you like, I’ll sort out your problems at home, because after all I feel myself responsible for you.”

  All the softness disappears out of Gilgi’s face, her voice sounds hard and bright: “I sort out my problems myself, and if I make silly mistakes—then I pay the price myself.—And I’ll tell you something, Martin”—she shakes his hands off her shoulders almost roughly—“I won’t tolerate people feeling responsible for me, that’s the worst way people can insult me, I …”

  “Well, don’t get upset, my little canary bird.” A cheerful Martin carries Gilgi’s suitcase into the bedroom, rejoicing with all his characteristic insouciance at the advent of a nice, entertaining extra resident for the apartment. Gilgi trots slowly behind him:

  “I’m still not certain at aaalll,” she says, trying unsuccessfully to lengthen her short, straight nose by pulling on it, “I had absolutely no intention—there’s absolutely no question of me living here—you know I’ve always been independent—I have my room—”

  Ignoring these words completely, Martin opens the lid of the suitcase: “Look, your beautiful red evening dress! Think how happy my crumpled, ugly little overcoat will be to have this hanging beside it from now on—”

  “That’s only a slip, Martin—and, my evening dresses! There’s no danger of me putting them in with your things. So that you can pull them off their hangers every time you take a suit out!—There’s another wardrobe here—that’s where they’ll go—”

  In the afternoon they’re sitting in the library, in the middle of all the books they’ve emptied from the crates. With loving enthusiasm, Martin fishes volume after volume out of the chaos, reads a few pages aloud, thinks something is beautiful, explains to Gilgi why he thinks it’s beautiful—“and you’ll read that—and that—and that—because you’re not nearly as one-dimensional and unimaginative as you make out, little Gilgi.” He tries to convince her with her own kind of logic: “Whatever is beautiful brings pleasure. There are some things which can’t be recognized as beautiful straightaway, you have to train a little bit first. Because you feel pleasure in the end, the training is worth it. It’s precisely the pleasures which you earn for yourself that are the most profound, the most lasting, they belong to you. And you understand, don’t you, that you can never have enough pleasures that belong to you?”

  Gilgi nods and is ready to believe Martin blindly. A book which is held so tenderly in his elegant, slender fingers must surely be beautiful, even if it’s not necessarily by Jack London, Bengt Berg, or Remarque. She thinks about it: “You know, maybe I’ve always preferred useful things to beautiful things, or more likely I’ve only found useful things beautiful.—But I’ll learn all right.”

  “Yes, you will. There are less intelligent and less sensitive people than you, my cute little boy. And there are other ways—other areas—in which your eyes are closed like those of a new-born baby, but I’ll teach you to see soon enough.” He kisses the back of her neck and feels a childlike joy in the educational work he is beginning.

  “Oh, Martin!” Gilgi picks up a Cervantes in the original from the rug—“do you speak Spanish, Martin? Wonderful. We’ll read this book together, it’ll be good practice for me, now I’m learning Spanish so that later …”

  The next morning, Gilgi wakes up to the feeling that something incredibly life-changing and important has happened. Martin is lying beside her. Every morning, when she wakes up, Martin will be lying beside her.

  The calm sleep beside each other, no longer permeated by anxiety and agitation, will make the thin, chance thread which connects them stronger and more robust. She switches the light on, looks at the alarm clock: no, she doesn’t need to get up for another half-hour. — — — It’s pleasant to lie so quietly beside each other. You don’t divide yourselves with thinking and speaking, you unite yourselves by breathing. You come very close to each other, belong very firmly together in this slumbering, soft-breathing quietness. His face is right next to her shoulder, his chin is already quite rough again. She puts her hand on his chest and observes its slight rise and fall with deep satisfaction. Cautiously, she feels around on his thigh: there�
�s the scar from the crocodile that bit him. There’s a kind of exaltation in lying beside a man who was bitten by a crocodile in Colombia. What if it had eaten him all up? Horrible. Really you have to be grateful to the crocodile for its restraint. Oh, it’s so good that he’s alive. And belongs to me. A real live human being belongs to me. Tuck—tuck—tuck, you can feel his pulse beating at his temples and in his throat—a living human being belongs to me. I’ll keep him, I want to keep him …

  Thump—thump—thump—what’s that? “Martin!”—she tugs at his shoulder—“Martin! Someone’s knocking, Martin!”—“Come in!” Martin calls, like someone who under all circumstances will regard knocking as a problem that is entirely solved by calling “Come in!” The door opens: a comfortable-looking female individual appears with a tray: “Made the coffee like ya always …” The individual notices Gilgi. Each looks at the other with mild surprise. Martin decides to be half-awake: “Don’t drop the tray, Frau Boss—and—if you would be so kind—an extra cup for the lady!”

  “Morning, my little Gilgi. What was that? Who’s the woman? She comes every other day to clean, and then for reasons best known to herself she can’t be dissuaded from waking me at the crack of dawn with coffee. What? She saw you? So why shouldn’t the good woman see you? As long as it’s not her husband that you’re in bed—”

  Frau Boss is standing in the kitchen, turning a light, fragile little cup between her honest, work-reddened fingers and meditating on her decision: to be offended or tolerant. “It’s only human,” she says aloud, interrupting her meditations. She enjoys pronouncing the “hu”—you have to breathe out so vigorously—“it’s only human.” The repetition acknowledges her allegiance not only to the respiratory charm, but also to the meaning of the sentence. There’s no need to get het up, it’s only human. Which is an example of how the ethical sense is influenced by a preference for aspirates.

  “You seem so changed, Kron,” little Behrend says at the office. Has she already noticed too? Gilgi makes the typewriter keys dance. I suppose it’s nothing new if a woman is changed simply by love. The only bad thing is that one half of you has changed, while the other hasn’t, and now you consist of two halves which don’t fit together at any point, which are always struggling with each other, and neither wants to retreat even a hairsbreadth. Everything’s fine, you thought, when you moved in with Martin. Nothing’s fine. Maybe you want too much. You want to keep your whole life from before, with its joy in getting ahead, its well-oiled approach to work, with its strict allocation of time, its brilliantly functioning system. And you want another life on top of that, a life with Martin, a soft, contourless, heedless life. You don’t want to give up the first life, and you can’t give up the second one. Tick—tick—tick—and now you have to erase yet again, and that’ll make one of those ugly marks on the carbon. Yes, and there you were thinking what a wonderfully competent girl you were, and now you don’t think yourself worth the price of a typewriter ribbon. And who knows if Martin won’t decide tomorrow or the day after that a girl like Olga is much better suited to him. And you can’t collect your thoughts properly for work anymore. Can’t help thinking, what’s he doing now, what’ll he do next, I won’t see him until nine tonight—it’s hours yet till then. But I should go to Mittelstrasse again today and do some of my own work. And when the time comes, I won’t go after all.—And this morning he said goodbye to me so casually and last night … I’m supposed to ask Meier & Schröder’s salesman to call—as if that mattered— … and we have the honor to ask you …

  Herr Reuter is pale and anxious and now completely uninterested in pretty girls. “You should have written that on a business postcard, Fräulein—then the postage would be less—we have to economize.”

  Economize! Fat Müller, who has a carefully cultivated nose for trouble, tells them about three checks which have bounced. “And Grossmann has gone bust, we’ll lose money there, too, and one bankruptcy prompts the next.” She picks up her sandwich gloomily, and you have the impression that she’s not eating it, but interring it in her mouth, though with a certain gusto.

  “Fräulein Kron, have you heard that Höhne has been given notice?” the quiet Wendt asks during the lunch-break. Höhne is the head bookkeeper. “Yes, it’s because he has such a high salary, and Kaiser only gets a hundred-eighty and can easily do Höhne’s work as well as his own.”

  “Höhne has three children, doesn’t he?”

  “The boss is sorry, too—but what can he do!” And they’re all terribly considerate to Herr Höhne. Whenever they talk to him, they use a very gentle, lowered voice, as though to a sick man who isn’t supposed to find out that his case is hopeless, but who must inevitably work it out from the obtrusively tender care which people take of him. Gilgi could never stand Herr Höhne, because he’s one of those silly slogan-men: it was better in the old days—under the Kaiser—the new era—the curse of modernization. Now she feels sorry for him. If the firm gets rid of him, who knows where he can get a job again.

  When Gilgi leaves the office in the afternoon, Täschler is waiting to receive her. She’s just what I needed. This is the second time she’s been on guard outside the office, she’s sniffed out where Gilgi works. She’s the complete detective, sprung from the pages of an Edgar Wallace novel. With her head weighed down by a startling hat, she trips along beside Gilgi. “Ya got anywhere?”

  “No.”

  “Ya got any money yet?”

  “No.”

  “I jus’ don’ know how I can go on,” Täschler says. She’s not whining in the least, she’s talking quite calmly and objectively, and she’s even smiling. A thin, crooked smile. And her hands look like wilted cabbage-leaves, and she walks like a dead woman. And if she cried and whined, it would make no impression at all. You can’t stand that—other people’s tears—or your own, either.—If only she’d cry. But no more than—I jus’ don’ know how I can go on. That sounds so convincing, and whether it’s her own fault or someone else’s—it remains the fact. How should you answer? There’s no advice you can offer and no help you can give. You’re quite powerless. There must be lots of people who don’t know how they can go on, lots of people who are having a bad time. Collective misery—you’ve always closed your eyes to it. If you encounter an individual case, it pushes in behind your closed lids. It means something to you. Why? Yes, why! Because you’re not made of stone.

  “A three-mark coin is all I have on me!” You’re ashamed and feel ridiculous—which is a big help! She doesn’t even want to take it. “Oh, not from you—I mean, ya have to earn it yourself. But why don’ ya go to your mother?” She’s built herself a kind of tenement in the air and can’t be coaxed out of it. “Go on, take it—here you are—my streetcar!” And Gilgi tries to press the coin into Täschler’s hand—it falls to the ground—Gilgi jumps onto the departing streetcar; the conductor yells at her—let him yell as much as he likes. She sees the old woman kneeling on the busy street—crawling, searching the ground with groping hands and short-sighted eyes. She’s scrabbling there among the pedestrians, her hat has slipped to the side … close your eyes, tight, tight, don’t give in, don’t give in, anyone who hits rock bottom has almost no chance of getting back up again, you don’t have any damn time to waste now on slacking off and going soft — — —

  “I can stay for an hour, Martin—I’m not going to my room today, I …”

  “Don’t you want to tell me where this mysterious room of yours is?”

  “No, Martin. I must—it’s—to do with my independence. I must have a place to work, I can’t do it here where you’re always around, and if I was in my room, I wouldn’t have a moment’s peace if I had to think that you could suddenly appear.”

  “Idée fixe.”

  “Well, let me have one.”

  “Gilgi,” Martin says on Sunday morning, “you shouldn’t go to the office anymore, the bed always gets so cold and uncomfortable for me when you get up so early.” Gilgi shakes her head, so astonished that she can’t th
ink of an answer. What answer could anyone think of? Yes, that’s a reason to give up your job in times like these, just to protect his right side from a draft. He’s one-of-a-kind, this Martin! “Look, little Gilgi, the money I have isn’t enough for one, which means that it won’t be enough for two, either, what do you think—shouldn’t we live together on my money?”

  “What an idea, Martin!” Gilgi smiles with motherly superiority.

  “Well, at least you shouldn’t go to old man Mahrenholz anymore!”

  “I’ll be finished with him in three days anyway. Seriously, Martin—I really must earn money. You know, next year I’ll have saved enough to go to Paris and to Spain. Martin, we’ll go together, I don’t see things properly if you’re not there, you’re my better eye. Olga says you can live terribly cheaply on Majorca, and in Paris we’ll live in the Quartier latin—if we’ve saved carefully—you, too, Martin, you can put aside a set sum every month. I’ll make some changes in this household here.”

  And Gilgi becomes energetic. Starts by giving Frau Boss her notice. She can do the little bit of washing-up and sweeping-out herself. Now she’ll show Martin just how competent and productive she is. So much competence and productivity make him uneasy.

  “Are these all of your shirts, Martin? Can’t be worn anymore. What? I’ll make new ones for you. I know how. What was that? Well, there’s a sewing machine at the back of the store-room, I’ve been itching to use it for ages. What did you say? It doesn’t matter how you look? It surely does. Never mind those old Greeks now, Martin, we’re going out to buy material.”