After Midnight (10 page)

He came to Frankfurt six months ago. He has all sorts of friends and acquaintances here, and they talk politics. He’s collecting material about the German nation. He knew Algin before too, and that’s how Liska got to meet him. We met several times a week for months on end, and it never occurred to Liska to fall in love with Heini. She was interested in any number of other people, not a bit in him.

And now she’s so deeply in love it makes her ill. She loves him madly. The entire party tomorrow is for Heini, so he can see her in a pink evening dress, with her arms and most of her bosom bare, wearing her best spangly jewellery. She thinks he’ll suddenly see her in a completely new light, and his eyes will finally be opened, and he’ll fall in love with her, something he has failed to do so far. She read somewhere that a woman in everyday clothes is a very different creature from a woman in evening dress, which I suppose may be true. Anyway, so far Liska hasn’t had any chance of
letting Heini see her in evening dress, though she’s been wanting to for ages. But nothing on earth or out of it would persuade Heini to go to the opera or make a date to meet in an elegant bar. And you can’t go to the Squirrel or the Munich Taproom in evening dress—at least, if you did, I should think it would look very funny. So that’s why the party had to be arranged.

It’s all the fault of a dream that Liska suddenly fell so madly in love. A dream and Betty Raff. Right from the start, I thought Betty Raff was even more dangerous than Aunt Adelheid, though you can never really say anything bad about her. She is tall and thin, with a very small head. She has a greenish-brown complexion, extraordinarily inquisitive brown pop-eyes in a shrewish face, brown hair combed back, smooth as an eel, and cold, clammy, thin little froggy hands. She is thirty years old, smells a bit sour and looks the same way. She works at handicrafts, making silver brooches and dishes. That’s how she got to know Liska, all of ten years ago.

She came to Frankfurt a year ago to pay a short visit to Liska, and stayed with her, and didn’t go away again.

Betty Raff bothers about all sorts of things that are none of her business. She does it because she is so terribly high-minded. She wants to help people and bring them together. She meddles with everything, with the most high-minded of intentions, and keeps people apart. Heini, who knows her, calls her the Poisonous Wedge.

Two people may be having a harmless little argument, and a moment later they’d have made their quarrel up again if Betty Raff hadn’t come along to bring them together. People Betty Raff wants to bring together remain lifelong enemies.

She’s bored her way into Liska’s marriage like a woodworm. “You must make allowances for your husband, Liska, even if he doesn’t understand you. You’re such a wonderful human being—a marvelous, beautiful woman! He loves you, I really know he does, so don’t you worry.” And in fact Liska wasn’t worrying, not before Betty began talking about it.

Betty did exactly the same sort of thing with Algin. “Will you read me some of your work, Algin? It would make me so happy. You know how fond I am of Liska—you have to try and understand if she doesn’t show any interest in your work at times. She’s such an enchanting child! All I want is for you two to be happy together.” This was the first time it had ever struck Algin that he wasn’t happy.

He couldn’t stand Betty Raff to start with, he’d have liked to fling her out, but now he goes off to the study with her every evening. She brings him things to eat and drink when he comes home late at night, and sits in front of him like a worshipper adoring a god, before he’s even opened his mouth. She tells Liska, “I’d do anything for you! You must get some peace and quiet, Liska dear, you mustn’t let a man like that get on your nerves.” And Liska is grateful to Betty Raff. So is Algin.

Betty Raff herself says she takes no carnal interest in any man. She has it a bit wrong there, the fact being that no man takes any carnal interest in her. Anyway, she went vegetarian in early youth, with a view to improving her mind and rising to higher things.

Years ago, there was a small ad in a vegetarian magazine, put in by a lonely and deeply sensitive Swiss soul who wanted to correspond with a compatible, nature-loving kindred spirit. Betty Raff got into correspondence with this soul.

After the kindred spirits had been writing to each other
for a year, and it turned out that they were entirely compatible, the young Swiss vegetarian came to stay with Betty Raff and her parents. Betty’s parents were extremely fond of eating bloody beefsteaks, with which they drank beer. When the wonderfully sensitive Swiss soul came to stay, they were not allowed to eat anything but carrot cutlets and cornflakes, for Betty’s sake. They stuck it out, too, for five days on end, though it was quite an ordeal, because they were hoping to bring Betty and this man together and be rid of her at last.

The hopes of Betty and her parents would probably have been fulfilled, but for Betty’s younger, red-cheeked, meat-eating sister. This girl stole the deeply sensitive and also well-to-do young Swiss, partly by force and partly by guile. On the sixth day of his visit, Betty saw him sitting in a restaurant with her red-cheeked sister, eating knuckle of veal and drinking Munich beer. As Betty herself has said: at that moment something broke within her.

About four months ago I went into Liska’s room one morning. Liska was still in bed, and Betty Raff was perched on the divan. “Oh, Sanna, sit down and let me tell you too, it’s very funny,” said Liska. Betty Raff frowned. She doesn’t like anything to be funny, and she doesn’t like anyone but herself to be told a thing in confidence. I thought, straight off, that Liska was going to tell us another of her dreams. She has no end of exciting dreams, all colourful and confused, the way dreams are, and she always wants to tell someone about them at once. Well, Algin has plenty of time in the mornings, but he ceased taking an interest in Liska’s dreams long ago; he doesn’t want to listen to them. Myself, I think other people’s dreams are a bit boring too. We all have dreams of our own, after all.

But Betty Raff listens to Liska’s dreams with passionate interest, and interprets them. First of all, however, she always says, “Strange!” in a hollow and portentous way.

Well, that morning Liska told us she’d dreamed of Heini. She thought that was funny, because she’d never taken any notice of him or thought about him much. In her dream, however, she had kissed Heini, of all people, and he had been perfectly delightful, and possibly the pair of them went on to do something else, or so Liska indicated. “Strange,” said Betty Raff. “Very strange. I always suspected something of the kind.”

Well, I don’t know. A dream like that, in itself, is nothing to write home about. You laugh and then forget it again. Good heavens, to think of all the things I’ve dreamed in
my
life! Not so long ago I was swimming about with Hanna Porz in rough water and a state of panic. Hanna Porz went to school with me. I was never particularly friendly with her and I never quarrelled with her either. I haven’t seen her or thought of her for years. Why would I? Then I suddenly dream of her. And then again, I’ve dreamed of having a terrible fight with Liska or Algin, who have always been so kind to me. But in my dream, they were so nasty that I had to cry and I woke up in floods of tears. When I saw them at breakfast I was still feeling furious and didn’t want to speak to them because they’d been so horrible to me in my dream. But it had all passed off an hour later. Perhaps Liska’s dream would have passed off, too, if Betty Raff hadn’t thought it all so strange and discussed it with her for hours.

We met Heini that evening, and Liska took a good look at him for the first time. After all, she already had a kind of clandestine relationship with him. What struck her most was that Heini was polite and friendly to her, but showed no
signs whatsoever of being in love. So then she began paying attention to Heini without his noticing. That evening, before we went to bed, she told Betty and me she didn’t understand her dream, God knew Heini was not the sort of man you’d fall in love with, in fact she found him actually repulsive, physically. Next morning she said she could be interested in Heini, but that had nothing to do with love. A few days later she was saying it would be fun to flirt with Heini, she’d like to see him ruffled for once.

But there it was, Heini wouldn’t be ruffled. I think Liska’s feelings for him
would
have passed off quite soon and quite harmlessly, if Betty Raff hadn’t gone meddling as hard as she could again. She said flirtation was a worthless and degrading pastime, but she could understand deep feelings, she could understand a great passion. Liska, she said, was an extraordinarily passionate and deeply feeling sort of person—perhaps she herself didn’t realize what she was suffering. She told Liska she had noticed something strangely mysterious in the air between her and Heini. I was on the look-out myself, but I didn’t spot anything mysterious. Then Betty told Algin he mustn’t take it too seriously if his wife seemed a little fatigued just now and not quite her usual self, he must be tender and considerate and it would all blow over. Whereupon Algin asked Liska what the matter was. It alarmed Liska to no end to think that even Algin had noticed something.

And now we have reached the point where Liska thinks of nothing but Heini, talks of no one but Heini, and is practically out of her mind with love.

She talks to Betty Raff about Heini from morning to night. And she is much afraid of Betty Raff, too. Betty mustn’t know Liska sometimes talks to me and tells
me
things as well. Betty is more or less running the household now, and is going to get me out of the place one of these days.

“Toni,” Heini tells the guitarist, “play us the song about the Count and his maid. Good song, that. You’ll have another Steinhager, won’t you, Breslauer? More Steinhagers, waiter, and suitably Germanic pale ale. You do know I haven’t any money with me, don’t you, Breslauer? I ought really to order champagne, pay you out for wearing that dismal look on your face, trouble is I don’t like the stuff. Do
you
like champagne, Sanna? No? Still, we could eat some goulash, eh? Do you good too, Breslauer. You’ve had a fair amount to drink today, you’re not used to it, probably find yourself throwing up later. You’ll enjoy the experience more with something in your stomach.”

The Count lay in his fair maid’s bed
,

He lay there fast asleep
.

And as the day began to dawn
,

The maid began to weep
.

“Come on, Breslauer, you join in too. Might cheer you up.”

Give me a room, O mother mine
,

A room that’s dark and narrow
.

Where I may weep and I may pray
,

All for to soothe my sorrow
.

Breslauer tries to sing, but he can’t. Heini’s right eye is looking fierce while his left eye looks sympathetic. His brow is broad and grave and bared, his laughing mouth is mobile. I tell them about little Berta Silias, and how she died.

“Beautiful,” says Heini. “Breaker-through-the-crowd number seven, fallen on the field of honour. Wonderful death for a modern German child, the parents will revel in it for years to come.”

Dr. Breslauer is looking pale and upset. “Heini, please! What a dreadful thing—a child of five! My God, the poor little creature.”

“Breslauer, you have been one of my closest friends for years, so I know your upright character, your mild but distressing tendency to parsimony—got to fight against that daily, you know, Breslauer, nay, hourly!—and I know your sickly-sentimental cast of thought. In three years’ time that child of five, that poor little creature, would have been educated by the doctrines of the Stürmer to that high pitch of mental development where she could call names after you in the street and denounce you for attempted rape. Toni, let’s have the song about the Count again.”

The Count lay in his fair maid’s bed …

“ ’S a matter of fact, I can’t think what you’ve got against the race laws, Breslauer. Very humane indeed, those laws. Just imagine if Jews were legally compelled to sleep with National Socialist Women’s Club members three times a week.”

Give me a room, O mother mine …

“Heini, my dear fellow, you know very well how serious all this is; can’t you stop making crude jokes?”

“Not only, Breslauer, will I stop making what you call crude jokes, I’ll turn deadly serious. You’re a doctor. I don’t understand the first thing about medicine, but a considerable number of people, who would probably have got better of their own accord if you hadn’t gone meddling in your megalomaniac way, consider that you cured them, you saved their lives. You’ve been practising in Frankfurt these last ten years, you’ve got a good reputation as a doctor, and appear to have killed relatively few people—no, shut up and drink up, and don’t interrupt me!

“So you probably took the appendixes out of a few prosperous citizens who didn’t really, urgently need it. Doctors and plumbers are tempted to go in for the same sort of harmless sharp practice, seeing there’s no way to check up on them. I have to believe what I’m told if someone discovers serious and expensive damage in my guts or my WC, right?

“There’s one good thing, even high-carat gallstones don’t have the market value of diamonds. For I’m firmly convinced the Day of Judgment is not going to be a pleasant one for the medical profession as a whole. I dare say you’ll get off relatively mildly, Breslauer. You helped a good many people for nothing. I’ll let that pass, that may not be too bad. But your trouble is, you suffer from attacks of sentimentality—it fairly provokes a man to violence. How old are you now? Forty-three? I’d have thought you were older. Ah, well, you never did have much youthful beauty to lose. Breslauer, why are you trying to smooth down the hair you don’t have either?

“So you’re not wanted in Germany any more. Can’t practise your profession, can’t operate in your hospital. Your luck—oh, very well, your deserts too, I’ll grant you that—they got you a job as a consultant in an American hospital. So you’ll be able to go on practising your profession. What’s more, you will be earning money and can live without a care in the world. What’s more again, most of your considerable assets are abroad already. Think of the poor wretches leaving because they wanted to or had to, with no money or jobs or influential relations. You feel ill-treated, Breslauer, you feel you deserve sympathy, you look on yourself as a German emigrant already. And fair enough too, but you can’t ask sympathy from me. I need my sympathy for your
thousands of poverty-stricken fellow emigrants. Jews or Aryans, road menders or scholars, their poverty means they all have the same future ahead of them, and it has nothing, nothing whatsoever in common with yours, Breslauer. Later, you may stop to remember others who were driven out along with you, and you’ll push the thought out of your mind in trepidation. For you’ll be on the point of getting American citizenship. You’ll be standing on American soil, strong and proud. What a country! Everyone is charming to you. Because for one thing, you’ve got money, and for another, you’ve got ability, and industry to boot, and for yet another you’ve got a gentle, friendly, yet firm disposition, which means you’re not one of the sort who are disliked because they’ll let themselves be pushed around; at the last moment you’ll start to defend yourself. And moreover, you find actual sensual pleasure in going along with laws and customs and usage as laid down. You have a fortunate temperament, Breslauer. And money. What’s the matter, Sanna, want another drink? Want me to get the slot machine to disgorge you one of those poisonous-looking chocolates without putting a coin in it? I can, you know.”