Perhaps—in retrospection, at least—he had suffered less from her indifference, meanness, fits of temper, than from the embarrassment and detestation when she pinched his cheek in feigned fondness before a guest, usually the next-door butcher, or in the latter’s presence forced him in folly and fun to kiss his sister’s schoolmate Christina whom he adored from a distance, and to whom he would have apologized for those dreadful moments had she paid the least attention to him. Perhaps, in spite of everything, his mother missed him now? She never wrote anything about her feelings in her infrequent letters.
Still it was nice to feel sorry for oneself, it brought hot tears to one’s eyes. And Emmy—she was a good girl. She would marry the butcher’s assistant. Best butcher in town. Damn this rain. Dear Mama. What else? Maybe a description of the room?
He replaced his right slipper, which had aged more quickly than the left one and kept falling off his foot when he dangled it, and looked around.
“As I already wrote you, I have an excellent room, but I never described it to you properly. It has a mirror and a washstand. Above the bed there is the beautiful picture of a lady in an Oriental setting. The wallpaper has brownish flowers. In front of me, against the wall, there is a chest-of-drawers.”
At that moment there came a light knock, Franz turned his head, and the door opened a crack. Old Enricht thrust his head in, winked, disappeared, and said to somebody on the other side of the door: “Yes, he is at home. Go right in.”
She was wearing her beautiful moleskin coat thrown open over a veily, vapory dress; the rain that had caught her between taxi and entrance had had time to dot with dark stains her pearl-gray helmet-like hat; she stood pressing closely together her legs in apricot silk, as if on a parade. Still standing thus, she reached behind her and closed the door. She took off her gloves. Intently, unsmilingly, she stared at Franz as if she had not expected to see him. He covered his bare Adam’s apple with his hand and uttered a long sentence but noticed with surprise that seemingly no words had been produced, as if he had tapped them out on a typewriter in which he had forgotten to insert a ribbon.
“Excuse me for bursting in like this,” said Martha, “but I was afraid you might be ill.”
Palpitating and blinking, his lower lip drooping, Franz began helping her to get rid of her coat. The silk lining was crimson, as crimson as lips and flayed animals, and smelled of heaven. He placed her coat and hat on the bed, and one last staunch little observer in the storm of his consciousness, after the rest of his thoughts had scattered, noted that this was like a train passenger marking the seat he is about to occupy.
The room was damp, and Martha, who had not much under her dress besides her gartered stockings, shivered.
“What’s the matter?” she said. “I thought you would be glad to see me, and you don’t say a word.”
“Oh, I’m talking,” answered Franz, doing his best to out-shout the hum around him.
Now they were standing face to face in the middle of the room, between the unfinished letter and the unmade bed.
“I don’t care much for your dressing gown,” she said, “but I love your pajamas. What nice stuff,” she continued, rubbing it between finger and thumb near his open throat. “Look, he sleeps with his pen in his breast pocket, the perfect little businessman.”
He began with her hands, burying his mouth in their warm palms, fondling her cold knuckles, kissing her bracelet. She gently plucked off his glasses and, as if blind herself, groped for his dressing-gown pockets, maddening him in the process. Her face was now sufficiently close to his and sufficiently removed from the invisible world for his next step. Holding her by the hips, he fed on her half-opened active mouth; she freed herself, fearing that his young impatience might resolve itself too soon; he nuzzled her in her deep soft neck.
“Please,” he murmured, “please, I implore you.”
“Silly,” she said. “Why, of course. But you have to lock the door first.”
He made for the door, automatically resuming his glasses and leaving in front of her, on the floor, his right slipper in token of his speedy return. Then, his desire exposed and his eyes wicked behind their strong lenses, he attempted to push her toward the bed.
“Wait, wait a moment, my sweet,” she said, holding him with one cold hand and frantically fumbling in her bag with the other, “Look, you must put this on; I’ll do it for you, you awkward brutal darling.”
“Now,” she cried when he was magnificently sheathed; and, baring her thighs, and not bothering to lie down, and revelling in his ineptitude, she directed his upward thrusts until they drove home, whereupon, her face working, she threw her head back and dug her ten nails in his nates.
As soon as it was over, Martha staggered and sat down hard on the edge of the bed against which she had been standing. Everything had been so wonderful that she did not immediately become aware of her second-best bag of imitation crocodile under her.
Franz wanted to continue at once but she said that first of all she must take off her dress and stockings, and make herself comfy in bed. The coat and hat were transferred to a chair. What Martha called “your macky” was rinsed and slipped on again. Franz and Martha admired each other. Her breasts were disappointingly small but charmingly shaped. “I never thought you’d be so lean and hairy,” she said, stroking him. His vocabulary was even more primitive.
Presently the bed stirred into motion. It glided off on its journey creaking discreetly as does a sleeping car when the express pulls out of a dreamy station. “You, you, you,” uttered Martha, softly squeezing him between her knees at every gasp, and following with moist eyes the shadows of angels waving their handkerchiefs on the ceiling, which was moving away faster and faster.
Now the room was empty. Objects lay, stood, sat, hung in the carefree postures man-made things adopt in man’s absence. The mock crocodile lay on the floor. A blue-tinted cork, which had been recently removed from a small ink bottle when a fountain pen had to be refilled, hesitated for an instant, then rolled in a semi-circle to the edge of the oilcloth-covered table, hesitated again, and jumped off. With the help of the lashing rain the wind tried to open the window but failed. In the rickety wardrobe a blue black-spotted tie slithered off its twig like a snake. A paperback novelette on the chest-of-drawers left open at Chapter Five skipped several pages.
Suddenly the looking glass made a signal—a warning gleam. It reflected a bluish armpit and a lovely bare arm. The arm stretched—and fell back lifeless. Slowly, the bed returned to Berlin from Eden. It was greeted by a blast of music from the radio upstairs which changed immediately to excited speech which in its turn was replaced by the same music but now more remote. Martha lay with closed eyes, and her smile formed two sickle-shaped dimples at the sides of her tightly closed mouth. The once impenetrable black strands were now thrown back from her temples, and Franz as he lay beside her leaning on his elbow gazed at her tender naked ear, at her limpid forehead, and at last found again in this face that madonna-like something which, prone as he was to content himself with such comparisons, he had already noted three months ago.
“Franz,” said Martha without opening her eyes, “Franz, it was paradise! I’ve never, never.…”
She left an hour later, promising her poor pet that next time she would take less cruel precautions. Before going she thoroughly studied every corner of the room, picked up Franz’s pajamas, took out the fountain pen from its pocket and put it on the bed table, changed the position of the chair, observed that socks were torn and buttons missing, and said that a general fixing up was in order for the room—embroidered doilies, perhaps, and definitely a couch with two or three gay cushions. About that couch she reminded the landlord, whom she found very quietly walking up and down the corridor evidently waiting for a chance to sweep the room and collect the coffee things. Smiling now at her, now at Franz, rubbing his rustling palms, he said that as soon as his wife returned the couch would also return. Since in all truthfulness he had not taken any couch
to be repaired (the vacant place had been occupied by a previous tenant’s upright piano), he took great pleasure in answering Martha’s precise questions. He was quite content with his life in general, gray old Enricht in his felt houseshoes with buckles, especially since the day he discovered that he had the remarkable gift of transforming himself into all kinds of creatures—a horse, a hog, or a six-year-old girl in a sailor cap. For actually (but this of course was a secret) he was the famed illusionist and conjuror Menetek-El-Pharsin.
Martha liked his courteous ways but Franz warned her that he was a little odd. “Oh, my darling,” she said on the way downstairs, “this could not be better. This quiet old man is so much safer than would have been a nosy old crone. Au revoir, my treasure. You may give me a kiss—a quick one.”
His street was decidedly dingy. Perhaps, when that “Cinépalace” was finished, it would look better. A special poster in a wooden frame facing the sidewalk at a strategic point depicted an illusory future—a soaring edifice of glittering glass which stood aloof in a spacious area of blue air, although actually ugly tenement houses snuggled up to its very slowly rising walls. The scaffolded half-finished stories above the promised cinema were to contain an exhibition hall for rent, a beauty salon, a photographic atelier, many other attractions.
In one direction the street terminated in a dead end, in the other it ran into a small square where a modest open-air market was set up on Tuesdays and Fridays. From there two streets branched out: to the left, a crooked alley which used to flaunt red flags on the days of political celebration, and on the right, a long populous street; one noticed there a large store where every article cost a quarter be it a bust of Schiller or a kitchen pan. She was cold but happy. The street abutted on a stone portico with a white U on blue glass, a subway station. Then one turned left onto a rather nice boulevard. Then the houses stopped; here and there a villa was being built, or a wasteland was partitioned into small vegetable gardens. Then came houses again, big new ones, pink and pistachio. Martha turned past the last of these and was on her street. Beyond her villa there was a large avenue serviced by two trams, number 113 and 108, and one bus.
She passed quickly along the gravel path leading to the porch. At that instant the sun swept across the soft underbelly of the white sky, found a slit, and radiantly burst through. The small trees along the path responded immediately with all their moist droplets of light. The lawn scintillated in its turn. A sparrow’s crystal wing flashed as it flew by.
When Martha entered the house, pink optical mottles drifted before her eyes in the comparative darkness of the front hall. In the dining room the table was not yet laid. In the bedroom the sudden sun was already carefully folded on the carpet and on the blue couch. She proceeded to change, smiling, sighing happily, acknowledging with thanks her reflection in the mirror.
A little later, as she stood in the center of the bedroom in a garnet-red dress, with smooth temples and just a touch of make-up, she heard Tom’s idiotically lyrical bark downstairs followed by a stranger’s loud voice. On her way at the turn of the staircase she met the ascending stranger who passed swiftly, whistling and tapping the banisters with his riding crop. “Hello, my love,” he said without stopping, “I’ll be down in ten minutes.” And taking the last two or three steps in one ponderous stride, he grunted cheerfully and cast a downward glance at her retreating bandeaux. “Hurry up,” she said, not looking back, “and please get rid of that horsy smell.”
At lunch, in the midst of small talk and tinkle—that particular tinkle half-glass, half-metal, peculiar to the process of human feeding—Martha still did not recognize the master of the house with his mobile cropped mustache and his way of rapidly tossing into his mouth now a radish, now a bit of the roll he kept kneading on the tablecloth as he talked. Not that she experienced any special constraint. She was no Emma, and no Anna. In the course of her conjugal life she had grown accustomed to grant her favors to her wealthy protector with such skill, with such calculation, with such efficient habits of physical practice, that she who thought herself ripe for adultery had long grown ready for harlotry.
On her right sat a somewhat coarse-looking old man with a glamorous title; on her left there was plump Willy Wald with big red cheeks, and three even folds of fat over the back of his collar. Next to him sat his noisy mother, also corpulent, with the same prominent dark moist eyes. Her rasping voice kept abruptly passing into rich gurgling laughter, so different from her speech that a blind man might mistake her for two different people. Next to the old count sparkled young Mrs. Wald, who was powdered to a deathlike pallor and had unnaturally arching eyebrows, and could keep her three gigolos as far as we were concerned. And between them, opposite Martha, concealed now by a fleshy dahlia, now by crystal facets, there sat talking and laughing a completely superfluous Mr. Dreyer. Everything except him was fine. The food, especially the goose, and the heavy profile of bald kindly Willy, and the conversation about cars, and the wit of the count, and his anecdote about the skin-lifting operation of an aging star, after which her chin was adorned with a new dimple that had been formerly her navel, which he communicated to her sotto voce. She did not talk much herself. But her silence was so vibrant, so responsive, with such an animated smile on her half-open glistening lips, that she seemed unusually talkative. Dreyer could not help admiring her from behind the fat pink corners of the dahlias. And the sensation that she was after all happy with him made him almost condone the unfrequency of her caresses.
“How can one love a man whose mere touch makes one feel sick,” she confessed to Franz at one of their next meetings, when he began insisting she tell him if she loved her husband.
“Then I’m the first?” he asked eagerly. “The first?”
In answer she bared her shining teeth and slowly pinched his cheek. Franz clasped her legs and looked up at her, rolling his head as he tried to catch her fingers in his mouth. She was sitting in the armchair already dressed and ready to leave but unable to make herself go, and he huddled on his knees before her, tousled, with blinking glasses, in his new white braces. He had just put on her street shoes for her, for, while visiting him, she would wear bed slippers with crimson pompoms. This pair of slippers (his modest but considerate gift) our lovers kept in the lower drawer of the corner chest, for life not unfrequently imitates the French novelists. That drawer contained, moreover, a little arsenal of contraceptive implementa, gradually accumulated by Martha, who after a miscarriage in the first year of her marriage had developed a morbid fear of pregnancy. As he put the pretty slippers away till next time, he thought what a glamorous feminine touch all this added to the room, which had grown more attractive in other ways too. On the table three pink dahlias were on their last legs in a dark-blue vase with a single oblong reflection. Lacy doilies had appeared here and there, and soon the tenaciously anticipated couch was to move in weightily; Martha had already acquired two peacock cushions for it. In a container of celluloid a round cake of violet-scented beige soap adorned the washstand for Martha’s use. The young man’s own toiletry had been supplemented by a bottle of Anticaprine and a skin lotion with a spotted face on the label. All his things had been checked and counted; his underwear bore lovingly sewn-on monograms; one unforgettable morning she glided into the emporium, demanded to be shown the most elegant ties available, chose three of them and vanished with them, passing through his department and drowning alternately in the many mirrors, and the fact that she had not even glanced at him added a strange sparkle to that crystal tryst. They now hung in his wardrobe like trophies; and there was a slowly ripening intoxicating project: a tuxedo!
Love helped Franz to mature. This first affair resembled a diploma of which one could be proud. All day he was tormented by the desire to show this diploma to fellow salesmen but prudence restrained him from even hinting at it. Around half past five (Piffke, thinking this would please the boss, would let him go a little earlier than the others) he would come tearing breathlessly into his room. Soon Martha arri
ved with a couple of sandwiches from the neighboring delicatessen. The rather droll but endearing contrast between his thin body and one cocked part of it, shortish but exceptionally thick, would cause his mistress to croon in praise of his manhood: “Fatty is greedy! Oh, greedy!…” Or she might say: “I bet (she adored bets), I bet you a new sweater that you can’t do it again.” But time is no friend of lovers. At a little past seven she had to leave. She was as punctual as she was passionate. And around nine Franz would generally go and have supper at Uncle’s.
Warm, warmly flowing happiness filled physical Franz to the brim, pulsated in wrist and temple, pounded in his breast, and issued from his finger in a ruby drop when he pricked himself accidentally at the store: he frequently had to deal with pins in his department (though not as much as the adjusting tailor, Kottmann, who resembled the “cat’s-whiskers” fish found in the remote river of an abolished boyhood, when with bristling mouth he circled around a chalk-marked customer). But on the whole his hands had now grown more nimble, and he no longer had trouble with the light lids and tissue paper of flat cardboard boxes as he had during the first weeks. Those rapid behind-the-counter exercises had as it were prepared his hands for other motions and contact, also rapid and nimble, causing Martha to purr with pleasure, for she particularly loved his forelimbs, and loved them most of all when with a succession of rhapsodic touches they would run all over her milk-white body. Thus a shop counter was the mute keyboard on which Franz had rehearsed his happiness.
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