Life Embitters (64 page)

All of a sudden, I could stand it no longer; I entered the circle of light and grabbed the young lad’s arm. He squealed hysterically and was stunned. Then he leaned on the toe of that huge shoe, twisted round and took three or four quick jumps. All at once he turned round and stared me in the face. My heart missed a beat. That young lad was Roby, Frau Berends’ nephew.

Roby recognized me straightaway and his first reaction was to lift both hands behind his head. Then he backed away. Finally he came tearfully over, his teeth gleaming in what was a sad, apologetic, faltering smile. Rain and sweat poured down his face. He kept his hands on the back of his neck.

“What’s the matter with your head? Is it hurting?”

He didn’t answer and took another step back. Perhaps he wanted to tell me something, but couldn’t. Then, still staring at me, his eyes moistened and more tears rolled down his cheeks. His faltering smile seemed to freeze on his lips. As a result, the game had been called off and five or six lads encircled us, one by one, their eyes full of mischief. Roby was quivering and glancing fearfully in turn from the lads to me.

“What’s that behind your head?” I asked with the friendliest look I could muster.

He hesitated for a moment and then lethargically dropped his arms, an anxious glint in his eyes. A black object rolled down from the nape of his neck. I stooped and picked it up. It was my bowler in shreds: a soft, ridiculous, shapeless bundle, like a dead black cat. The other lads couldn’t stop laughing. Roby stood straight on his good leg – the other hung down, not touching the ground – tears now came in a flood, he sobbed, looked at me
askance, then his face blanched and contorted in terror. I smiled as I put my hand on his shoulder.

“It was an old hat,” I said, “We’ll soon buy another … Why must you play so frantically? You’ll hurt yourself one of these days. Is your leg hurting?”

As he was crying, and didn’t move or say anything, I took his hand and pulled him towards me. He walked by my side for a time, limping horribly, accompanying each step with a sob. The other boys followed a few steps behind, then stopped between the shadows and the arc of light. When they saw we were a distance away, they started chorusing: “Roby! Roby! Lamey! Lamey!”

Their shouts were deafening. I wanted to stop, but Roby squeezed my hand and looked at me with a livid, almost purple face. His eyes bulged out of their sockets and his teeth chattered. He aroused horror and infinite pity. I walked back and sent the other boys packing. They took off like a flock of birds but we could still hear their distant jeers: “Roby! Lamey!”

“Come with me,” I said. “I’ll buy you some chocolate.”

“No, it’s late. I’ve got to go home.” And wiping his eyes on his shirtsleeve, he sniveled: “Frau Berends is expecting me.”

“Frau Berends …? I asked, more at a loss than ever. “Isn’t Frau Berends your aunt?”

“So they say, but I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t!” he answered, standing straight energetically, his hands in his pockets, as if annoyed I’d doubted him for a second.

We walked down the middle of the road. It was still raining and the wind whined through the trees. Roby was sopping wet. His monstrous shoe dropped into a puddle of water, slurped and splashed out. His shoes hit the
ground, one after another, awkwardly. I accompanied him to the front door. I was itching to ask him about Frau Berends but restrained myself. In the doorway, I laughed and asked: “So why did you take my hat?”

“I’d promised …” he rasped “They never let me play. They always shout: ‘Lamey! Lamey!’ We went to the saddlers yesterday to stitch up a ball. The saddler heard them say they wouldn’t let me play today. He said: ‘Roby, you have a subtenant at home who must have a bowler hat. Bring that, and you’ll play the whole of tomorrow afternoon. We’ll patch up the ball with the bands from the bowler …’ The others agreed. I took your bowler before lunch. I used Frau Berends’ key to get into your room without making a sound. And you heard nothing … They punched and screwed it up … It wasn’t the saddler’s fault, he’s a good man.”

“Why do you say he’s a good man?”

“Because he is!” said Roby abruptly, a tear hanging on one eyelash.

I said nothing, but thought it was all very peculiar. I looked at Roby for a second. I saw a patch of blue in eyes that were large, open, motionless, and melancholy. He stood in the doorway, mouth half open, hands in pockets, nose in the air …

I shrugged my shoulders and disappeared down the street.

After supper I went into a café and wrote to my brother:

The first thing I’d ask, said my letter, is for you to pacify Sr N … Then I’d like to admit that you’re absolutely right in what you say about me. I agree entirely. And, then, I’ll tell you that you made this a wretched day for me. I’m shivering with cold and, if I’ve not got a temperature, I’m not far off.

I write to tell you exactly what my situation is at the moment. First of all, don’t doubt for a second that I’m living in Berlin, in the Wilmersdorf district
of the city. I couldn’t tell you whether the street that counts me as one of its residents is central or on the outskirts. Lots of people believe that living centrally means you live round the corner from a cinema. If you apply the cinema concept of centrality to me, you’d conclude I’m on the outskirts. I’d say I’m a good quarter of an hour from the local Town Hall, and the nearest tram is four minutes away. The part of the neighborhood where my street falls is, in any case, notoriously interim. It’s that indeterminate part of the city where the countryside invades the urban space which in turn melts into country. It’s forlorn and remote. When darkness descends, all those still out and about are apprehensive: we stride along quickly.

My street is only half built-up. The other half wends between fields of potatoes, cabbages, and sugar beet. It hardly looks like a suburban street. The idea we have of a suburb doesn’t hold true in this city: Berlin doesn’t possess that belt of dirtier streets, full of children, workers in blue overalls and dewy-eyed, conceited girls you find in so many cities. Here, if you will, it’s either suburb or city. Berlin is a machine-built city and when they decide to construct a row of houses or part of a district, they do so thinking it’s come to stay. This means that apart from its old city center Berlin is completely uniform. Every district is alike. Reinforced concrete in the bourgeois district of Charlottenburg is perhaps a little more expensive than that used in the poorer district of Moabit, but the atmosphere is the same everywhere. Life in these neighborhoods is also uniform. The shopping streets, dotted around, are strategic hubs always thronging with people. Every shopping street is surrounded by a network of sad, lonely, grimly silent streets. There are no unusual nooks or crannies. Everything is geometrically angled and four-days old. Imagine the Eixample of Barcelona, a looser, vaster Eixample that’s not so uniform or monotonous. Take away the sun, the delicate, not entirely African layers of white gauze in Barcelona; add in the same tendency
of stone, on overcast days, to assume the color of porridge and you have something approximating Berlin. Of course, there is more reinforced concrete, the houses have two-meter long front gardens behind a fence, but the architecture is equally bland and equally cold: it’s the mass-produced way to accommodate large, orderly families. The tone is perhaps not so bright; it’s the tone of the first layers of cork on the oak or, if you prefer, a grayish pumpkin hue … Think on that and don’t say you didn’t like it. That would be the limit!

However, one aspect of Berlin I can’t stomach is the mania Berliners have for covering their houses in ivy and climbing plants. These clerks in their tailcoats and paste collars, or those fat, sallow bourgeois must think that living in a house with an ivy-clad façade is like life in a medieval castle on the banks of the Rhine. Nature softens the German and poetry makes him go dreamy-eyed. I, for one, am unimpressed by a scene of ruins. I’m horrified by the variety of lizards, rats, salamanders, insects, creepy-crawlies, beetles, and all kind of strange beasts that thrive in the ruins rhapsodized by poets. These little creatures made by Our Lord Almighty – well, it beggars belief, doesn’t it? – must live in the holes, crannies, and crevices of houses in Berlin, as God disposes. They must be animals that have adapted to the comforts of civilian life, and must be delighted by the tender or passionate and ever interesting musical exercises played by the young ladies who live in those blocks. But what can I say? Despite the miracles wrought by adaptation to the environment, they don’t fill me with joy. If I lived in one of these places, I’d always be worried I’d find a lizards’ nest in my waistcoat.

The house where I live tends to the other extreme. It’s so prosaic and bare, so cold and spare you could weep. It is huge, rectangular, with a small, sad, interior garden. The building has four staircases that correspond to its four wings. If we so wished, we residents could spend our lives peering into
that inner yard, looking at each other, admiring ourselves and waving our handkerchiefs in greeting. My bedroom is on one of the side wings. From the outside, the house is a mixture of barracks, factory, and human beehive. Frau Berends’ flat is rather big. The door from the stairs opens on to the passage and that makes the flat feel like a cul-de-sac. The kitchen, bathroom, my room, and the two rooms that are presently unoccupied look over the inner yard. The dining and sitting rooms and other rooms have never seen the light of day.

I was scrutinizing my room today. I’d never thought it was so small and gloomy. It’s a rectangle with a rather low ceiling. Down one long wall is a wardrobe, a washbasin with accompanying paraphernalia, and a window over the communal yard. Down the other, a divan with two or three cushions covered with that so-called Japanese fabric, now tattered and dirty, and a splendid stove. At the back is a bed and facing the window, the table where I write. The middle of the bed sags terribly and must have previously been occupied by an Italian with a black beard and treacherous eyes who won lots of battles thereon. A table stands in the center where I have placed my suitcase between two bunches of paper flowers. The suitcase occasionally reminds me of a child’s coffin. The walls are papered a horrible purple, and among the objects stuck on them are a set of postcards from Egypt complete with pyramids, lions, palm trees, camels, and tourists dressed 1908 style – ladies with leg-of-mutton sleeves and forward tilting, beribboned hats, men wearing white képis and fancy waistcoats. There are two prints over the bed: Madame de Recamier and a lady I thought must be by Reynolds, with a mouth like a carnation. Not forgetting the ubiquitous seated figure of Frederick the Great playing a flute.

Do you think this room is ripe for crime? Would you even think you
could lose two telegrams in this place? The neighborhood is certainly out of the way and the house impersonal and insipid, but even if it were closer in than we’d like, Frau Berends is too sensible to play stupid tricks on me. And the telegrams? I don’t know what’s happened to them, and I never will. I have a friendly relationship with Frau Berends but I dare not ask her anything that’s not absolutely necessary. I’m sure that if I made her talk any more she’d bill me for her words. My impression is that she has some very original ideas, for example, about the act of opening a door. Germans are cosmic, opaque and contradictory but that’s not to say they don’t like their
céntims
.

What happens in the house is really strange. The six beings that live there have very well-defined personalities and if we ever do interact, it’s out of pure need. We are individualists and jealous of our independence. This means there is always an atmosphere of suspicion, an icy silence and total ignorance of what goes on beyond the door to one’s respective bedroom.

I think it’s obvious that Frau Berends’ main drive is a feeling of repulsion towards her subtenants. Even when I’m paying my rent she looks at me with a mixture of pity and contempt. Why is this? Has Frau Berends concluded that inside each subtenant hides a spoilsport who entered this world with the sole purpose of interrupting her in full flow? Or is she someone who’s gone down in the world and now finds that her miserable dealings with tenants remind her of a life that was once elegant and prosperous? Or does she think her trade is below her and demeaning? I’ve often thought about Frau Berends’ curious attitude and I find it absurd. If she doesn’t want subtenants, why does she have them? If she’s forced to have them, why doesn’t she resign herself? I know it’s painful – and how! – to accept that one must act pleasantly and go through the motions, but this lady has no excuses, and in her line of business you can’t occupy middling, reformist, equivocal
positions. You can’t claim she is a tenderhearted, easygoing, impressionable youngster, since she must be at least forty-five and her worn looks hardly single her out as a woman completely ignorant of the ways of the world.

Frau Berends is a tall, stout, and imposing figure; she tends to walk with a stoop, and around the house you sense she’s beginning to eye her growing belly. It’s a stance that could spark memories of a procuress, however charming and pious she might seem. Full of surplus flab, her face is generally the purplish yellow of people with a heart condition; her eyes are blue and watery, her nose tiny and damp, her hair sparse with a pink skull smoldering beneath, mauve bags under her eyes, and peculiar eyelashes and lids, seemingly made of fluff. Frau Berends always wears a chocolate Spanish-style housecoat, with a tasseled belt, Scotch plaid slippers, and bed socks. When she wants to read, she puts on spectacles that dangle over her chest on a big black ribbon. Frau Berends doesn’t take a single step around the house or outside without her patent leather handbag.

She is mild-mannered, even negligent. When she walks, she tilts her head slightly to the left. However, the slightest upset can make her lose her temper and then her whole body trembles and rocks and her eyes squint and bulge out of their sockets. I’ve seen her in this state a couple of times and imagined she was inflating, that I should grab her housecoat to stop her floating off like a paper balloon.