Young Gerber

by Friedrich Torberg

  Lisa has adopted a curious attitude towards Kurt; she singles him out, but in such an easy, unselfconscious way that with the best will in the world no one can sense anything behind it. Deep down, maybe Kurt expected a secrecy born of mutual understanding, a surreptitious pressure of their hands, something they could have been caught out doing, and he is just a little disappointed that nothing of the kind happens. Then he puts it down to Lisa’s great cleverness. It’s all right. Was he expecting her to draw him aside and say, with a soulful whisper, “Oh, you… do you still think about that?”

  Yet somehow or other, surely she could show him that she was still thinking about it?

  Sometimes it seems as if, once again, she doesn’t remember anything. On the morning when their party gathers downstairs in the breakfast room, Kurt feels as if he is being introduced to Lisa all over again.

  Good morning. Haven’t we met somewhere before?…

  Kurt sees Lisa’s hands moving as they handle various objects. Did those hands hold him close? Kurt sees Lisa smile at others. Sees it without envy. After all, he never kissed those lips. Kurt sees Lisa’s brown hair blowing in the wind. Surely it’s impossible that he ever stroked that hair and his lips caressed it.

  What would happen now if he went over to her and did that very thing? Unimaginable. They’d all think him crazy. Lisa would probably even say so. With a surprised smile, a little forbearing, as you might speak to an invalid. For instance: “Oh—have you by any chance lost your wits?”

  No. Or rather, yes. It seemed to me that I had—I only wanted to make sure that—but it must be a mistake. Maybe a case of confusion.

  “Why are you talking to yourself like that, Kurt? Yes, I mean you!” Now Lisa really has spoken up. How odd. That tone of voice—

  “Me? Talking to myself?” Kurt gives her a bewildered smile. “Now that would really surprise me. I mean, I’ve disliked myself for quite some time, so I’m not on speaking terms with myself.”

  Laughter. How they all laugh. How Lisa laughs. To think how little she guesses of the difficulty that went into that joke.

  “Skis all well waxed? Bindings all right?” asks Willi Wagenschmid. “I don’t want anyone’s ski binding coming off halfway down the slope—I don’t fancy running after a ski with a life of its own.”

  “Oh, shut up about it, do!” mutters Hilde Fischer, who recently had that very accident.

  And then they are off again for another day on the slopes, followed by another cheerful evening and then another cheerful day again, and one misty afternoon they go to the bar, which is on the basement floor of the biggest hotel in the resort, and is always full of Sunday skiers and other undesirables.

  The eight of them sit at a round table requisitioned for the party by—who else?—Willi Wagenschmid, and make critical comments on the dancing couples, their faces strained, moving through the low-ceilinged, smoke-filled room to the music of an ailing piano.

  “Hey, young beau, give us a dance!” cries Boby, clapping Kurt on the shoulder. “Off you go! The pretty girls are waiting!”

  Kurt is not particularly happy to comply, and indeed is at something of a loss—but gentle, blonde Hilde Fischer, always ready to help, frees him from his difficulty with tender understanding, stands up and says, “Come on!” Kurt is very grateful to her, but he doesn’t venture to talk to her about Lisa.

  “What were you gawping at while you danced?” Boby asks him when they return to the table. “You look like a dolphin washed up on shore!”

  “I haven’t either,” says Paul dreamily.

  “You haven’t either what?”

  “Oh, I thought someone just said he’d never seen a dolphin dancing.”

  “Here’s to your demise in the near future!”

  “Cheers!”

  But it is no use, Kurt has to dance again, with Lisa this time. He takes fright, starts by asking, “Would you like to dance, Lisa?” And Lisa—does she understand him?—nods her head at the crowd and says, “The dance floor is so full,” but then Otto Engelhart, who doesn’t usually say much and just laughs along with the others, intervenes, “You’re not going to turn him down, are you, Lisa?” and Lisa says, “Of course not!” and off they go.

  It is the first time they have danced together, as he realizes only now. Kurt is a very good dancer, holds her lightly, begins to lead her steps—and immediately stumbles over her foot.

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  Lisa does not dance well. Kurt notices that, and now he feels released from his fears. He also knows what he feared: he feared that Lisa would dance very well, too well. He wouldn’t have liked it at all if she had let her body follow every movement he made, shamelessly, demandingly, with a challenging look.

  But she doesn’t. Lisa follows his steps only hesitantly, although she is obviously trying. Kurt can tell that her awkward resistance isn’t intentional, that she can’t help it.

  Lisa is wearing a casual, sleeveless outfit. Her body shows much more clearly than it did in her ski suit. If he has to hold her a little more firmly as they turn in the dance, he distinctly feels her backbone.

  And her whole body, like her dance steps, is hard. Her body—her movements—all so strange, so unexpected—you could call her attitude defiant, or no, imperious—no, neither of those words is right: demure! Her body feels austere and demure.

  Once again, Kurt feels the blazing heat of love stream through him.

  “Lisa—”

  “Yes? Do I dance very badly?”

  “No, far from it. You dance splendidly.”

  No response.

  “Tell me, Lisa—”

  “What?” She says that so lightly, so brightly. There’s no replying to it with words of passion.

  “Five days ago, Lisa—didn’t you say: it can always be like this?”

  “What do you mean?” As if she really didn’t know.

  “Why are you acting like this, Lisa? You know very well what I mean.”

  “Yes, of course I do.”

  “Well then—”

  Again no response. The pianist embarks on the recapitulation of the tune for the third and last time. Kurt grits his teeth.

  “Have you forgotten?”

  “No, Kurt. Why do you ask?”

  “Lisa—how can you talk like that? Don’t send me crazy—why haven’t I been able to kiss you again since then? Why do you do this—do you think I can stand it a day longer—Lisa, darling, tell me when! Oh, say something!”

  Kurt has brought these words out hastily, almost imploringly. Now he looks anywhere in the room at random to keep the others at the table from noticing. Yet he would so much like to look at Lisa’s face.

  “Yes, but why do you come out with such things just now?” asks Lisa.

  “Such things?”

  Crash, bang—the pianist concludes the piece with a low bass chord. Over. They go back to the table.

  Paul Weismann taps Lisa’s arm with his finger.

  “Elisabeth—if dolphins do dance, I’ll bet they dance like you.”

  Lisa laughs.

  Who’d have thought laughter could hurt so much? Kurt feels despair overcome him, tries to subdue it—but in vain. The bar, the music, the people become intolerable to him. That includes the company at their own table. Suddenly Boby Urban’s jokes strike him as tasteless and always the same, Paul Weismann isn’t so different, Hilde Fischer’s dreamy glances make him nervous, Gretl Blitz is boring. He dares not even think about Lisa. Indeed, when he goes on thinking along these lines the entire company repels him. It shouldn’t be like this.

  Abruptly, Kurt gets to his feet.

  “You’ll forgive me, I hope? The air in here is too stuffy for me. See you all at dinner.”

  And before anyone can say anything, he is outside.

  The evening air is cool and mild around him. Groups walk slowly over the sparsely lit market place.

  Locals, Kurt realizes as he passes them. They are talking and laughing out lo
ud. It annoys him that he can’t understand every word of their dialect. What’s amusing them so much?

  A sleigh passes very close to him. “Gee up!” calls the driver. The mere sound of the human voice offends him.

  The hooves of the horses have a hollow sound as they clatter by, in alternating rhythm, on the hard, yellowish-grey frozen snow. Their little bells jingle.

  Kurt is disturbed. The cold, threatening regularity of the high mountain peaks all around makes him feel uneasy.

  Ridiculous, those mountains. They’ll never reach the sky.

  The moon, faded and weary, hangs in the black sky, bleakly revealed.

  A wintry evening idyll…

  Back in his tastelessly furnished and not very hospitable room at the inn, Kurt flings himself down on the divan, smokes and stares into space.

  Now and then he hears a log crackle on the fire. Scraps of conversation come up from the street, along with laughter and the sound of sleighs.

  All as it should be. Unalterable. Yet he could be joining in the laughter. The sound of the sleighs could still appeal to his ear…

  Kurt is lying in bed, already undressed, still staring into space, when the door opens and Paul, who shares the room with him, comes in.

  Why wasn’t Kurt at dinner, he asks.

  He probably fell asleep and missed it, replies Kurt without any particular surprise.

  Paul sighs slightly, and without another word begins to get undressed.

  Next moment, Kurt feels, something is going to happen, he will either burst into tears or laugh out loud. Anyway, some kind of loud noise must break this unendurable silence.

  There—laughter, words, footsteps. A knock on the door. And Lisa’s voice.

  “Why didn’t you come down for dinner, Kurt? Aren’t you feeling well?”

  Lisa’s voice, warming and caressing his heart. Now he realizes that he wouldn’t have laughed, he would have wept.

  “Thank you,” he said with difficulty, “but I’m fine.”

  He is afraid to look at her. When he does all the same, he sees Otto Engelhart standing behind her, and is glad that his eye can choose where to rest.

  “Sleep well,” says Lisa, in no way embarrassed, “and see you in the morning. Good night, Paul.”

  Kurt wants to say something civil, along the lines of “Very kind of you to ask after me,” but he doesn’t. If one of the servants had fallen ill, Lisa would probably have knocked on his door to find out how he was. She is naturally friendly.

  She has already left the room. With Otto Engelhart. And for the first time Kurt feels resentment. Now they’re going to sleep together. Or maybe not. That would be even worse.

  “Do you love her very much?” Paul suddenly asks from the bed beside his.

  Kurt is not at all surprised. He has been sure for a long time that all of them know he is in love with Lisa. And as they are reasonable people it doesn’t bother him. Paul’s question is not really ill timed.

  “Do you think it’s surprising or—I don’t know how to put it—improper, inappropriate for me to love her?”

  Paul does not answer that.

  “Don’t feel embarrassed. I’ve already heard worse of her.” Kurt smiles. The mere possibility that someone might speak slightingly of Lisa brings him round to her side again.

  “You won’t hear anything bad from me. In principle I don’t do any woman the favour of speaking ill of her. Note that, Herr Gerber. Great Thoughts of Paul Weismann, number 407.”

  This is something that fascinates him about Paul: he had no consideration for either others or himself. His cynicism is part of him, like a sword in a sheath. However credibly and fervently he speaks, you can’t shake off the fear that at the end of his cleverly constructed, irrefutable remarks he might say, “There, now you see that I’m right. But if you like I can instantly prove the opposite.” (Sometimes he really does say that, and is as good as his word, which is terrible.) Kurt waits until Paul speaks up again.

  “Lisa dabbles in the sewage more enchantingly than almost any other girl I know. When a man is young and silly—and you can take that as you like—he can even love her too. It doesn’t matter. It will pass off.”

  “A very original saying.”

  “Hush. If I get original you won’t understand me at all. Anyone who wants to be understood must steer clear of originality. Great Thoughts of Paul Weismann, number 408. The very fact that so many people dislike the Porta Pia makes it almost certain that it’s the greatest thing Michelangelo ever created. And no one but Michelangelo knows why—well, what I meant to say was: one can love Lisa. But not the way you do. You don’t love her the right way.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, you certainly succeeded there.”

  Paul grins. Kurt’s readiness to rise to the bait obviously pleases and stimulates him. But he means well.

  “You’re the youngest, put the light out. I don’t like looking at your rosy boyish face.”

  Now it is dark in the room. Slanting moonlight falls only into one corner.

  “I mean,” says Paul, and Kurt can tell from his voice that his eyes are closed, “you’re not doing her any favour by being in love.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “And no one would expect you to, but you will in a minute. Listen—” (Paul turns abruptly to face Kurt) “I strongly suspect that you haven’t slept with her yet.”

  Kurt does not reply. He knows that Paul didn’t mean to cast aspersions on his virility or anything like that. It is something quite different. Something unknown until now, to Kurt anyway, that is shaking the foundations of his ideas.

  Paul’s voice makes its way through the darkness again.

  “I’m not asking you out of curiosity or prurience, or any personal interest, so I ask you straight out, in the plainest words there are for it: have you had Lisa Berwald yet?”

  Kurt is startled. Something unguessed at begins to dawn on him. What Paul says has something magnetically enticing about it, if he could grasp it, suggests intoxicating triumph… “the kneeling queens await the victor in the tent”… isn’t that in a poem by Heine? “To Youth”? And—this surprises Kurt most—he sees nothing bad or wrong in it.

  “I’ll point out that in any case I must answer your question with No. Take that however you like.”

  “So you haven’t had her yet,” says Paul, calmly and firmly.

  And at that moment Kurt knows that he himself can’t go to wherever Paul gets his calm superiority. Not yet. Maybe he will later, if necessary. But not now.

  He takes a deep breath. The attack has been repelled. Happiness has overcome.

  A sense of satisfaction takes him over so powerfully that he doesn’t hear what Paul says next.

  “That’s a great mistake. You won’t get anywhere that way. It’s all very well that you aim higher with her than most do, and no one could begrudge her that. Something could be made of Lisa. But you can reshape only what you possess. You can’t plough a field before it’s your own. Incidentally, how long have you been in love with her?”

  Kurt does hear that question.

  “Almost a year, Mr Investigating Magistrate, if you must know.”

  “Then there’s no going back for you anyway.”

  “Going back where?” asks Kurt, baffled. Nor does he understand why Paul turns on his other side, with a reluctant growl, and wishes him good night.

  Kurt hasn’t finished yet. He feels, in a way, drunk with victory, he thinks he has achieved the same success as he did with Weinberg, success that he now remembers with a smile.

  “Paul!”

  “Oh, let me get some sleep.”

  “I only want to ask you something else. I suppose you think Lisa is the kind of girl you have to sleep with at once?”

  “It all depends who’s doing it. And not necessarily at once, but soon. You’ll never get Lisa.”

  “Are you so sure of that?” asks Kurt, amused.


  “Yes. But anyway it doesn’t matter now.”

  And when Kurt says nothing more for some time, Paul Weismann suddenly turns to him, places one hand on his head, and says with a warmth of which Kurt would never have thought him capable, and which therefore moves him very much, “You’re going to get a great surprise, my dear fellow. A great surprise.”

  The next morning, when the white-clad waitress comes over to their breakfast table with a huge tray and says “Eight of you, right?” Otto Engelhart says, “No, only seven, one of the ladies is having breakfast in her room today.” Then, turning to the concerned questioners, he says, “It’s nothing much, Lisa pulled a muscle; her ankle is slightly swollen and she thought she’d stay in bed today. Nothing to worry about.”

  Hilde Fischer stands up and says firmly that she won’t be going with them today either.

  She’d be doing Lisa no favours by staying behind, objects Otto Engelhart. Lisa wouldn’t like that at all, and had asked him to make sure none of the others spoilt their day on her account. If she needed anyone, he’d stay here with her.

  Hilde sees the point of that, if reluctantly, the others also say they’re happy with the arrangement, and they set off.

  No doubt about it, something is missing. There is a slight but perceptible sense of depression. But, as soon as the downhill run begins, that is overcome. Only Kurt, when they are about level with the little resort, feels a strong wish to unstrap his skis and go back to the hotel. He thinks of running into a tree to give himself an excuse.

  “Watch what you’re doing, for God’s sake!” he hears Boby’s voice close behind him. But his right leg is already high in the air, he tries in vain to straighten it, the weight is too great, his body tips backwards as he slides on, uncontrolled, he somersaults, rolls a few metres sideways… and then he is head down in the snow. It is like having a cold sponge pressed over his mouth; he has lost all sense of exactly where his limbs are.