Life Goes On: A Novel

by Hans Keilson

  * * *

  The fall season at the store was a disaster, not that anyone had gone into it with great hopes, but in fact the sales were worse than even their worst fears. The previous year was the closest thing they could find to the pitiful results now. It was awful: the wares sat on the shelves, and only rarely did a possible buyer walk through the door. The few people who really did need things, because they had large families or because they had gotten by without anything new the year before, couldn’t pay for anywhere near all they wanted, and Herr Seldersen had no choice but to give it to them on credit and write up the amount in his book. What else could he do? If he didn’t offer credit, another store would. There were still a few people who regularly spent money in the shop, but they couldn’t make up for all the rest.

  It’s also the case, of course, that people without much to spare don’t necessarily need new clothes for the fall season, as opposed to continuing to wear whatever they wore through the summer—the air is not quite as warm as it was, true, but it’s not yet freezing cold as in winter, it’s actually a rather pleasant balance between the two. If you go around in summer, in the hot sun, with a shirt and pants, then you can pull on a jacket or another pair of underwear now that it’s colder; you don’t need to buy new clothes, you can hold off until winter comes.

  So Herr Seldersen consoled himself: winter was coming, surely business would pick up then. But not to put too fine a point on it, winter was no great shakes either. Even during the afternoon, when his store was technically open, Herr Seldersen had time to walk up and down the street and check in on the competition to see how they were doing. He did this secretly, in a roundabout way—with a letter in his hand, as though he were going to the post office, for example. His walk to the post office took him past various stores and so he had opportunity enough to observe, confirm, and go away reassured—his competition wasn’t doing any better than he was. He often dropped in on Herr Wiesel and stood talking with him for a long time, trading stories about how badly business was going. They always found another angle from which to approach what they really wanted to talk about. Then a customer came in, or sometimes several at once, and Herr Seldersen quickly said goodbye and walked home. His wife met him at the door, where she was leaning in the doorway and watching for customers. She didn’t hide the fact that there were no customers there at the moment.

  “Come inside,” Father said. He didn’t like it when she stood in the doorway, telling the whole world: Look, no one’s here. “Come inside,” he urged her again.

  Mother didn’t want to, and didn’t understand what Father was after. “Leave me alone,” she said, “I’m just standing here keeping an eye out. You think it doesn’t concern me too?”

  This woman, Herr Seldersen thought, shaking his head. He went inside and hid in a dark corner. Every now and then, Mother came in and announced that Frau Zorn had just come out of Herr Wiesel’s holding a large package, even though she still had a huge tab here at the Seldersens’ shop. Then she took up her post again, until she had more news to report. Herr Seldersen eventually lost patience and sent her upstairs. There were a lot of disagreements between the two of them in those days.

  Suddenly, the last two days before the holidays, there were such crowds at the Seldersens’ that they barely found time to eat. Three of them worked in the store—Father, Mother, and a shopgirl—with Albrecht at the cash register. They needed his help, there was no way around it. At night his parents collapsed into bed, but their happy knowledge that they were still in the game far outweighed their exhaustion.

  “Believe me,” Mother said to Father and Albrecht, “believe me, whenever someone gets work, everyone gets work, and whenever one person is waiting downstairs, everyone else is too, believe me. The same bread is baked for everyone.”

  Herr Seldersen only nodded. These past two days had ended up being almost too much for him. He was beside himself with happiness. Finally, he said:

  “Yes, yes, but what’s the use? It all depends on who can stick it out longer.”

  His old suspicions and mistrust were back—all the hopelessness he felt was in these words. It was better for him to keep quiet, after all; then at least he wouldn’t destroy everyone else’s hopes.

  The following weeks were quiet, merciless. It was harder to bear everything now that winter had come. The city was as if deserted; no one dared set foot outside in the cold.

  Fritz came home again over New Year’s. He took a few days’ vacation and spent it with his parents. He looked good; apparently Hamburg was agreeing with him. He walked proudly through the streets of town and his parents didn’t try to conceal their satisfaction. Yes, he lived in Hamburg now, he had his career, it was going well, he had a lot to tell Albrecht. Especially about the city—there was so much to see there, it was full of beautiful secret spots. Down by the harbor, in the pedestrian area, in St. Pauli, and then the surrounding suburbs, the river, the sea! He couldn’t get enough of the sights, and even now he hadn’t seen everything. Albrecht listened eagerly, looked admiringly at Fritz … he had seen all that. “And your work? How’s work going?” he asked. After all, the reason he had gone to Hamburg was to apprentice in an export firm, and here he was, reminiscing and telling him about the city all this time, about how much he liked everything—but not a word about his job.

  “How are the prospects?” he asked again.

  Then Fritz grew rather awkward, and had to think for a while before he knew how to answer. “Well, you know, it doesn’t go as fast as all that, I still have to study and learn the ropes, then we’ll see.…”

  Fritz’s answer made Albrecht stop and think. Was Fritz unhappy there? If not, what would make him express himself so carefully? “It must not be the way you imagined it would be,” he said cautiously.

  Fritz nodded. “Yes, it’s harder than you’d think, suddenly all sorts of problems turn up that you’d never thought of, incredible complications, you wouldn’t believe it … yes, well, we did lose the war.”

  “Lose the war…” Albrecht repeated. So that was the cause of the problems and complications Fritz was describing, visibly dejected. That’s what his friend had learned up in Hamburg?

  “How’s the foreign trade?” he asked.

  Fritz, bashfully: “I told you already. What do you know, anyway?”

  “What do I know?” Albrecht was taken aback. He didn’t claim to know anything; he was only thinking about all the things Fritz had told him about foreign trade when he was about to start his apprenticeship: in his innocent happiness he had talked about exotic peoples, foreign languages, ships crossing the ocean, it was exciting, there were discoveries to be made, and now … “Foreign trade is going badly,” Fritz said. “Imports, exports, tariffs, sales, foreign competition—everyone’s plotting against us.…”

  Albrecht listened eagerly to what Fritz was telling him, and he could see that it was hard for his friend to state these truths. It must have been even harder for him to face them straight on and see them without self-deception, to admit to himself that that was the way things were—he had seen it with his own eyes. And there was more. Fritz told his friend about the companies he had gotten to know in Hamburg, the ones that had already thrown in the towel, that had been left lying dead on the side of the road. His own firm? Nothing to be afraid of there, thank God, it would definitely stick it out and get through the tough times. That’s what he hoped.

  So even they are having trouble? Fritz didn’t deny it. His face grew serious and thoughtful, as though he were personally responsible.

  “How much longer is your apprenticeship?” Albrecht asked.

  “Two years.”

  Fritz left to go back to Hamburg the day after New Year’s.

  Best of luck! Albrecht thought. He hoped for the best for his friend.

  * * *

  It was an eventful winter. In January, the co-owner of a major firm in Berlin with business connections throughout the country shot himself. It was a significant event, surprising m
ore than anything else, and depressing—it revealed with merciless clarity where things were heading and what the uncertainty and troubles, growing more and more serious everywhere, had in store. The next day, all the papers had stories and specific accounts of everything that had led up to the suicide, down to every detail.

  Herr Seldersen read the article in his paper over and over again, shaking his head every time; he just couldn’t come to terms with it, it surpassed his understanding. An immense sadness came over him.

  “What do you think about that, Herr Wiesel?” he asked. “What do you say to that? They’ve been in business eighty years! Who would have thought?”

  Herr Wiesel shook his head. He wouldn’t have believed it himself. Of course everyone knew that the times were taking their toll there too; it wasn’t like the old days anymore, not at all. New businesses had come on the scene—fresher, more dynamic, with fewer burdens; there seemed to be a new way of doing business; even the market had completely changed in the course of only a few years. Payments came in late, faithful customers and purchasers they had had for years suddenly disappeared, it was one thing after another. They had the big banks behind them, no question about that, who were always ready to jump in and help; the situation hadn’t yet worked its way down into private, personal poverty on their part. But troubles were piling up. The company’s name had once been a byword, a fixed star in the business sky, and now it was gone, along with the honor and respect it once commanded. And so one of the directors, fifty-six years old, had decided to end his own life.

  “Shot himself…” Herr Wiesel whispered. The death itself seemed much more important to him than the circumstances that had caused it.

  “And the consequences, beware of the consequences, Herr Seldersen. An event like this always ripples out a long way.” He did not want to say anything further.

  He was right. It was like if Europe had suddenly disappeared off the map.

  Only now did it become clear how deeply even the smallest everyday occurrences were interconnected—how fatefully everything was bound to everything else, in mysterious but indissoluble chains.

  Herr Seldersen had ordered clothes from this company for all the many years he had been in business. It was a great honor for him, and one he felt proud of: not everyone was accepted as one of the firm’s clients, and whoever was had a secure place in the eyes of the world. And now this, and the consequences it brought in its train: as Herr Wiesel had already hinted, Herr Seldersen was to be affected too. It didn’t take long. He received a letter requesting him to immediately pay all sums due to the firm. The company was shutting down; several other firms, the main creditors, had agreed to take over the company and conduct business under a different name. But before they made the change, all outstanding debts had to be cleared.

  What was Herr Seldersen supposed to do? Until that point, he had paid his debts by dividing whatever money he had at his disposal at any given time into numerous parts, sending a small sum to each of his creditors, enough to satisfy them for a short time, at least. He had worked out a whole system, which had kept him above water so far. It was a miserable, limping survival, truth be told, but it kept him out of trouble, and as long as no one unexpectedly threw a wrench in the works there was no reason he couldn’t keep it going. But now he suddenly had to pay a sum that would have been enough to keep six other creditors happy for months.

  Was this the end? Had it come so fast, surprised him so suddenly, after creeping closer and closer for so long? Was there no way out? Father wrote to his brother, a lawyer in M., who had a lucrative practice and was doing well. They had been a large family, with many brothers and sisters, and life had scattered them far and wide—years went by between occasions when they saw each other in person, during which letters with boring family news kept their slim family connections going. They all had enough to worry about on their own; everyone had his or her own job with its own obligations. Father wrote to him: “Dear Brother,” but already there, right at the start, he could not go on. After a surprise attack with a strangehold slowly tightening around his neck, he was supposed to sit down and calmly write a letter? He had never been a letter writer. He sat huddled over the writing desk in his store all day long, and then, when he went up to the apartment that evening, he locked the door to the room, pulled a chair up to the desk there, dipped his pen in the ink, touched it to the paper … and wrote not one single syllable. The ink dried out and covered the nib with a thick black crust. He’d never be able to write with a nib like that. He pulled it from the pen, looked at the ink stains on his hands, went out to wash them, and started over. Then the thoughts that had long lived hidden in his head, unbeknownst to him, burst forth in all their sad, stunted misery. He had never in his life had to turn to anyone, much less had to write a letter like this, but now it had to be. He wrote: “My dear brother, I have no choice but to write to you like this today, it’s my only option. You know I’ve worked hard all my life and never thought of anything but that. Do you want to hear more? You are too involved in life yourself not to know how hard it is today for anyone who has a business as I do and has kept it going through all these years without ever overstepping his bounds. I have not been spared either. We had good times, but now they seem to be over. It can’t go on. It’s not my fault.”

  And the words of his own father, long since dead, came back to him. He wrote them to his brother: “As our dearly departed father is my witness. He had ten mouths to feed, and Mother didn’t make it easy for him, but he often told me—I was still young, in my first year of training—he said: I didn’t inherit riches and will not pass them on to my children, but what I earn I earn honestly and through my own hard work, that is the only luxury I can afford.”

  He ended by writing very openly and directly about the situation he was in. His creditors were after him, it had always worked out until now, but not anymore. What was he supposed to do? Close the store and start something new, change careers at his age, fifty-six years old? Resign himself to fate and fold his tired hands in his lap? No, he didn’t feel old. But something had to happen. He wanted to keep trying. But for that he needed one thing: money, money to meet his obligations in one stroke and start with a clean slate.

  * * *

  No storms came from the east over the river, and then suddenly the clouds were bunched in an eerie black ball in the sky and the rain would not stop pouring down. By the third day, the farmer was worriedly shaking his head: the prospects for this year’s harvest didn’t look good; if this endless rain didn’t stop falling, everything would rot in the fields. After four days, the sky was a bright blue. The sun shone down and soon drew all the moisture from the soil, until the farmer was shaking his head again: if it didn’t rain soon, he said, all the grain would scorch and dry up in the fields. He was always dissatisfied with something, but he never left his plot of soil.…

  * * *

  In the long run, there was no way to keep what was happening a secret. Frau Seldersen was the first to find out, then the children. Father was most upset about Albrecht knowing—just when the boy needed to devote all his thoughts to school, here was this unfortunate situation. But there was no way around it, the time had come to reach a decision, something drastic and far-reaching had to happen at last. They had anxiously seen this moment coming for a long time now; it almost felt like a relief to be able to take some kind of action again, make something happen and come to closure. There is nothing worse than having to sit around waiting, unable to do anything, like someone who no longer has any power to shape the course of his own life—out to pasture, with nothing to do but be patient, endure, and stay calm.

  “If I had money to work with,” Herr Seldersen said, “I could start over again from the beginning.” It was like he was taking a vow.

  The words sounded strange enough in his mouth, since they were being spoken by an old man, one who actually should have been thinking about the end, rather than about starting over from the beginning. Anneliese and Mother openly
expressed their faith in him; only Albrecht kept quiet. It took him a while to get used to the idea that his father, over fifty years old, was talking about making a fresh start.

  “If you had the money, then are you sure you’d be able to take care of everything, not just now but in the future too?”

  “You can always hope,” Father answered, much less confident than before, “you can always keeping hoping, otherwise it would just be too sad.”

  Pause.

  Albrecht: “I think that as long as you live, that’s true.”

  “As long as you live?”

  “Yes, or do you think … you can’t leave anything untried.”

  Herr Seldersen suspected that Albrecht had had something specific in mind with these words, but he wasn’t quite sure whether he had said them intentionally or thoughtlessly. But at the moment, he was inclined to give a lot of credit to conscious intentions, and so he felt a certain respect for his son. Up until that point, Albrecht had seemed to be facing the events around him without much insight or feeling, as though he lacked the necessary seriousness and maturity to come to terms with them. Father was worried about the boy’s future, and with reason; he often talked it over with Anneliese, and then there were the worries about choosing a profession. What would happen? How would it all work out? He could see no good answer. Albrecht seemed not to think about it as much. He just waited and did not seem anxious or in a hurry to come to his decisions.