There, in an orange peignoir, her bare legs crossed, her velvety-white neck nicely set off by the black of her low thick chignon—Martha sat at her dressing table polishing her nails. Dreyer saw in the mirror the gloss of her smooth bandeaux, her knit brows, her girlish breasts. A robust but untimely throb dispelled sleepiness. He sighed. It was not the first time he regretted that Martha regarded afternoon lovemaking as a decadent perversion. And since she did not raise her head, he understood she was angry.
He said softly—trying to make matters worse so as to stop regretting: “Why did you disappear after lunch? You might have waited until he left.”
Without raising her eyes Martha answered: “You know perfectly well we’ve been invited today to a very important and very smart tea. It wouldn’t hurt if you got cleaned up too.”
“We still have an hour or so,” said Dreyer. “Actually I thought I’d take a nap.”
Martha remained silent as she worked rapidly with the chamois polisher. He threw off his so-called Norfolk jacket, then sat down on the edge of the couch, and began taking off his red-sand-stained tennis shoes.
Martha bent even lower and abruptly said: “Amazing how some people have no sense of dignity.”
Dreyer grunted and leisurely got rid of his flannel trousers, then of his white silk socks.
A minute or so later Martha chucked something with a clatter onto the glass surface of her dressing table and said: “I’d like to know what that young man thinks of you now. No formalities, call me Uncle.… It’s unheard-of.”
Dreyer smiled, wiggling his toes. “Enough playing on public courts,” he said. “Next spring I’ll join a club.”
Martha abruptly turned toward him and, leaning her elbow on the arm of her chair, dropped her chin on her fist. One leg crossed over the other was swinging slightly. She surveyed her husband, incensed by the look of half-mischief, half-desire in his eyes.
“You’ve got what you wanted,” she continued. “You’ve taken care of your dear nephew. I bet you’ve made him heaps of promises. And will you please cover your obscene nudity.”
Draping himself in a dressing gown, Dreyer made himself comfortable on the cretonne couch. What would happen, he wondered, if he now said something like this: You too have your peculiarities, my love, and some of them are less pardonable than a husband’s obscenity. You travel second-class instead of first because second is just as good and the saving is colossal, amounting to the stupendous sum of twenty-seven marks and sixty pfennigs which would otherwise have disappeared into the pockets of the swindlers who invented first-class. You hit a lovable and loving dog because a dog is not supposed to laugh aloud. All right: let’s assume this is all right. But allow me to play a little too—leave me my nephew.…
“Evidently you do not wish to speak to me,” said Martha. “Oh, well.…” She went back to work on her gem-like nails. Dreyer reflected: If only just once you let yourself go, come, come on, have some good fun and a good fit of crying. After that surely you’ll feel better.
He cleared his throat, preparing the way for words, but as had happened more than once, decided at the last minute not to say anything. There is no knowing if it was from a wish to irritate her with silence or simply the result of contented laziness, or perhaps an unconscious fear of dealing a final blow to something he wanted to preserve. Leaning back against the three-cornered cushion, his hands thrust deep into his dressing-gown pockets, he remained contemplating silent Martha; presently his gaze roamed away to his wife’s wide bed under its white blanket cover, batiste trimmed with lace, washable, ninety by ninety inches, and severely separated from his, also lace-covered, by a night table on which sprawled a leggy rag doll with a black face. This doll, and the bedspreads, and the pretentious furniture were both amusing and repelling.
He yawned and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Perhaps it would be wiser to change at once and then read for half an hour on the terrace. Martha threw off her orange peignoir, and as she drew back her elbows to adjust a necklace her angelically lovely bare shoulder blades came together like folding wings. He wondered wistfully how many hours must pass till she let him kiss those shoulders; hesitated, thought better of it, and went to his dressing room across the passage.
As soon as the door had noiselessly closed behind him, Martha sprang up and furiously, with a wrenching twist, locked it. This was utterly out of character: a singular impulse she would have been at a loss to explain, and all the more senseless since she would need the maid in a minute, and would have to unlock the door anyway. Much later, when many months had passed, and she was trying to reconstruct that day, it was this door and this key that she recalled most vividly, as if an ordinary door key happened to be the correct key to that not quite ordinary day. However, in wringing the neck of the lock she failed to dispell her anger. It was a confused and turbulent seething that found no release. She was angry that Franz’s visit had given her a strange pleasure, and that for this pleasure she had to thank her husband. The upshot was that in their arguments about inviting or not inviting a poor relative she had been wrong, and her wayward and wacky husband right. Therefore she tried not to acknowledge the pleasure so that her husband might remain in the wrong. The pleasure, she knew, would soon be repeated, and she also knew that had she been absolutely sure her attitude would have caused her husband not to receive Franz again, she might not have said what she had said just now. For the first time in her married life she experienced something that she had never expected, something that did not fit like a legitimate square into the parquet pattern of their life after the dismal surprises of their honeymoon. Thus, out of a trifle, out of a chance stay in a ridiculous provincial town, something had started to grow, joyful and irreparable. And there was no vacuum cleaner in the world that could instantly restore all the rooms of her brain to their former immaculate condition. The vague quality of her sensations, the difficulty of figuring out logically just why she had liked that awkward, eager, provincial boy with tremulous long fingers and pimples between his eyebrows, all this vexed her so much that she was ready to curse the new green dress laid out on the armchair, the plump posterior of Frieda who was rummaging in the lower drawer of the commode, and her own morose reflection in the mirror. She looked at a jewel in which an anniversary was coldly reflected, and remembered that her thirty-fourth birthday had passed the other day, and with a strange impatience began consulting her mirror to detect the threat of a wrinkle, the hint of a sagging fold. Somewhere a door closed softly, and the stairs creaked (they were not supposed to creak!), and her husband’s cheerful off-key whistle receded out of earshot. “He is a poor dancer,” thought Martha. “He may be good at tennis but he will always be a poor dancer. He does not like dancing. He does not understand how fashionable it is nowadays. Fashionable and indispensable.”
With muted resentment against inefficient Frieda, she thrust her head through the soft, gathered circumference of the dress. Its green shadow flew downward past her eyes. She emerged erect, smoothed her hips, and suddenly felt that her soul was temporarily circumscribed and contained by the emerald texture of that cool frock.
Below, on the square terrace, with its cement floor and the purple and pink asters on its wide balustrade, Dreyer sat in a canvas chair by a garden table, and with his open book resting in his lap gazed into the garden. Beyond the fence, the black car, the expensive Icarus, was already waiting inexorably. The new chauffeur, his elbows placed on the fence from the outside, was chatting with the gardener. A cold late-afternoon lucency penetrated the autumn air; the sharp blue shadows of the young trees stretched along the sunny lawn, all in the same direction as if anxious to see which would be first to reach the garden’s white lateral wall. Far off, across the street, the pistachio facades of apartment houses were very distinct, and there, melancholically leaning on a red quilt laid on the window sill, sat a bald little man in shirtsleeves. The gardener had already twice taken hold of his wheelbarrow but each time had turned again to the chauffeur. Then they both l
it cigarettes. And the wispy smoke was clearly set off as it floated along the glossy black side of the car. The shadow seemed to have moved just a bit farther but the sun still bore down triumphantly on the right from behind the corner of the count’s villa, which stood on higher ground with taller trees. Tom walked indolently along the flowerbed. From a sense of duty and without the least hope of success, he started after a low-flitting sparrow, and then lay down by the wheelbarrow with his nose on his paws. The very word terrace—how spacious, how cool! The pretty ray of a spiderweb stretched obliquely from the corner flower of the balustrade to the table standing beside it. The cloudlets in one part of the pale clean sky had funny curls, and were all alike as on a maritime horizon, all hanging together in a delicate flock. At last having heard all there was to hear and told all there was to tell, the gardener moved off with his wheelbarrow, turning with geometrical precision at the intersections of gravel paths, and Tom, rising lazily, proceeded to walk after him like a clockwork toy, turning when the gardener turned. Die toten Seelen by a Russian author, which had long been slipping down Dreyer’s knee, slid onto the flags of the floor, and he felt too lazy to pick it up. So pleasant, so spacious.… The first to finish would be no doubt that apple tree over there. The chauffeur got into his seat. It would be interesting to know just what he was thinking about now. This morning his eyes had oddly twinkled. Could it be that he drinks? Wouldn’t that be a scream, a tippling chauffeur. Two men in top hats, diplomats or undertakers, went by; the top hats and black coats floated by along the fence. Out of nowhere came a Red Admirable butterfly, settled on the edge of the table, opened its wings and began to fan them slowly as if breathing. The dark-brown ground was bruised here and there, the scarlet band had faded, the fringes were frayed—but the creature was still so lovely, so festive.…
3
On Monday Franz splurged: he purchased what the optician assured him was an American article. The rims were of tortoise shell—allowing no doubt for the well-known fact that chelonians are frequently and variously mocked. When the proper lenses had been inserted and he donned his new spectacles, Franz experienced at once a feeling of comfort and peace in his heart as well as behind his ears. The haze dissolved. The unruly colors of the universe were confined once more to their official compartments and cells.
There still remained one thing he had to do in order to establish and affirm himself in this freshly marked-out world: he had to find himself a dwelling place. Franz smiled indulgently and smugly as he recalled Dreyer’s promise of the previous day to pay for many luxuries. Uncle Dreyer was a somewhat fantastic but highly useful institution. And Uncle was perfectly right: how indeed could Franz do without some decent clothes? First, however, let us find that room.
No sun today. A sober chill emanated from the low drab sky. Berlin taxis turned out to be a very dark green with a neat black-and-white checkered border across the doors. Here and there a blue mailbox had been freshly painted in celebration of autumn and looked singularly shiny and sticky. He found the streets of this quarter disappointingly quiet, as actually streets in a great city were not supposed to be. It was fun to memorize their names and the whereabouts of useful shops and offices—pharmacy, grocery, post office, police station. Why did the Dreyers insist on living so far from the center? He was displeased that there were so many vacant lots, so many little parks and lawny squares, so many pines and birches, houses under construction, vegetable gardens. It all reminded him too much of his backwoods home. He thought he recognized Tom in a dog being walked by a plump but not uncomely housemaid. Children were playing ball or whipping their tops right on the asphalt. He too had once played like that. Only one thing really told him he was in the metropolis: some strollers wore marvellous clothes! For instance, plus-fours, very baggy below the knee, so as to make the wool-stockinged shin look handsomely slender. That particular style he had never seen before, though boys in his hometown also wore knickerbockers. Then there was the high-class fop in a double-breasted jacket, very wide in the shoulders, and ultra-tight around the hips, and with incredibly elephantine trouser legs the tremendous cuffs of which practically concealed his shoes. The hats, too, were splendid, and the flamboyant ties; and the girls, the girls. Kind Dreyer!
He walked slowly shaking his head, clucking his tongue, looking around every moment. The kissable cuties, he thought almost aloud, and inhaled with a hiss through clenched teeth. What calves! What bottoms! Enough to drive one crazy!
At home when walking along the cloyingly familiar streets, he had experienced, of course, the same aching reaction to fugitive charm many times a day. But in his morbid shyness he did not dare look too insistently in those days. Here it was a different matter. He was disguised as a stranger, and these girls were accessible, (again that hiss), they were accustomed to avid glances, they welcomed them, and it was possible to accost any one of them, and start a brilliant and brutal conversation. He would do just that but first he had to find a room in which to rip off her dress and possess her. Forty to fifty marks, Dreyer had said. That meant fifty, at least.
Franz decided to act systematically. At the door of every third or fourth house a small notice board announced rooms for rent. He consulted a newly bought map of the city, checked once again the distance from Uncle’s villa and found he was close enough. A nice, new-looking house with a nice green door to which a white card was affixed attracted him, and he blithely rang the bell. Only after he had pressed it he noticed that the sign said “fresh paint”! But it was too late. A window opened on his right. A bob-haired, bare-shouldered young girl in a black slip, clutching a white kitten to her breast, peered out at Franz. His lips went dry in the arid blast. The girl was enchanting: a simple little seamstress, no doubt, but enchanting, and let us hope not too expensive. “Whom do you want?” she asked. Franz gulped, smiled foolishly, and said with quite unexpected impudence, by which he himself was at once embarrassed: “Maybe you, eh?”
She looked at him with curiosity.
“Come on,” said Franz awkwardly, “let me in.”
The girl turned away and was heard to say to someone in the room: “I don’t know what he wants. Better ask him yourself.” Over her shoulder appeared the head of a middle-aged man with a pipe between his teeth. Franz tipped his hat, turned on his heel, and walked on. He noticed that he was still grinning horribly and emitting a thin moan. “Nonsense,” he thought with rage, “it’s nothing. Forget it.”
It took him two hours to inspect eleven rooms in four different blocks. Strictly speaking, any one of them was delightful. But each had a tiny defect. One, for example, had not been tidied up yet, and as he looked into the dull eyes of the woman in mourning who was answering his questions with a kind of listless despair, Franz decided her husband had just died in that very room which she was rather fraudulently offering him. Another room had a simpler shortcoming: it cost five marks more than the price mentioned by Dreyer; otherwise it was perfect. The third room revealed brown stains on the walls, and a mousetrap in the corner. The fourth was connected with a smelly toilet that could also be reached from the corridor and was used by a neighbor’s family. The fifth.… But in a singularly short time these rooms with their virtues and flaws became confused in Franz’s mind, and only one remained immaculate and distinct: the one that cost fifty-five marks. He had a sudden feeling there was no reason to prolong his quest, and that anyway he would not venture to decide by himself, fearing to make a bad choice and deprive himself of a million other rooms; on the other hand, it was hard to imagine anything better than the room that had caught his fancy. It gave on a pleasant by-street with a delicatessen shop. A palace-like affair that the landlord said would be a movie house was being built on the corner, and this gave life to the surroundings. A picture above the bed showed a naked girl leaning forward to wash her breasts in a misty pond.
“Good,” he reflected. “It is now a quarter to one. Time for a meal. A brilliant idea: eat at the Dreyers’. I’ll ask them what I should pay particular att
ention to when making my choice, and if he does not think that five extra marks.…”
Cleverly using his map (and promising himself incidentally that as soon as he had taken care of business he would go by subway to what was surely the gayest part of this sprawling city), Franz arrived without difficulty at the villa. It was painted a grainy gray, and had a solid, compact, one might even say appetizing, look. In the garden heavy red apples hung in clusters on the young trees. As he walked up the crunching path, he saw Martha standing on the porch step. She wore a hat and a moleskin coat, and was checking the dubious whiteness of the sky, trying to decide whether or not to open her umbrella. She did not smile when she noticed Franz.
“My husband is not at home,” she said, fixing him with her beautiful cold eyes. “He is lunching in town today.”
Franz glanced at the handbag jutting from under her arm, at the artificial purple pansy pinned to the huge collar of her coat, at the stubby umbrella with its sparkling knob, and realized that she too was leaving.
“Pardon me for having disturbed you,” he said, inwardly cursing his fate.
“Oh, it’s perfectly all right,” said Martha, and they both moved in the direction of the gate. Franz wondered what to do next—bid her good-by? Go on walking beside her? Martha with a displeased expression kept looking straight ahead, her full warm lips half open. Then she quickly wet them and said: “This is so unpleasant. I have to walk. We wrecked the car last night.”
There had indeed been an unpleasant accident on the way home after a tea and a dance. In an ill-timed attempt to pass a truck, the chauffeur had first hit a wooden railing where the tram tracks were being repaired, and swerving sharply had collided with the side of the truck; the Icarus had spun around and crashed into a pole. While this motorized frenzy was in progress, Martha and her husband had assumed all imaginable positions, and had finally found themselves on the floor. Dreyer had asked sympathetically if she were not hurt. The shock, the search for the beads of her necklace, the crowd of gawkers, the vulgar aspect of the smashed car, the foul-mouthed truck driver, the arrogant policeman who was not amused by Dreyer’s jokes—all this brought Martha to a state of such irritation that she had had to take two sleeping pills, and had slept only two hours.
King, Queen, Knave Page 5