Little Man, What Now? (25 page)

‘The Moselle cost a mark. We must have some fun …’

‘We’ll have to take more advantage of free amusements.’

‘There aren’t any,’ he said. ‘Anything that’s fun costs money. You want to go out into the country: hand over the money! Listen to music: where’s your money? Everything costs something, you can’t do anything without it.’

‘I thought maybe museums …’ She broke off suddenly. ‘I know you can’t go to museums all the time and we don’t know anything about it and never seem to find the right thing to look at. But anyway, now we have to manage, and I’ve written down everything we need in the month. May I show it to you?’

‘You can show it to me if you like.’

‘You’re really not cross?’

‘Why should I be? You’re very probably right. I can’t handle money.’

‘Nor can I. That’s why we’ve got to learn.’

And then she showed him her page, and his brow cleared as he began to read. “ ‘Standard budget”, that’s good, Lammchen. I’ll keep to this standard budget under all circumstances. I swear.’

‘Don’t swear too soon,’ she warned. At first, he read quickly. ‘Food: yes, we have to have all that. Have you tried it out?’

‘Yes, I’ve been writing it down for a long time.’

‘Meat: twelve marks seems an awful lot to me.’

‘Sonny love, that’s only forty pfennigs’ worth of meat for both
of us per day, and that’s a whole lot less than you’ve been getting recently. We have to have a meatless day at least twice a week.’

‘What do we eat then?’ he asked anxiously.

‘All kinds of things. Lentils. Macaroni. Barley broth and plums.’

‘Oh God!’ he said. Then, seeing her react, he added: ‘No, I understand, Lammchen. Just don’t tell me beforehand if you’re going to cook one of those things, or I won’t look forward to coming home.’

She made a little face, then decided to meet him half way.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it as little as possible. But if it isn’t so nice every time, don’t get scratchy at once will you? I always get into a mood when you’re in a mood, and what is there to live for if we’re both scratchy?’

‘Come on here then pussy-cat,’ he tempted her. ‘Big pussy-cat, fine pussy-cat. Come on, purr a bit.’

She allowed herself to be stroked, luxuriously. Then she slipped away from him. ‘No, not now, Sonny love. I want you to look at it all first, or I won’t be happy. And anyway …’

‘What d’you mean “anyway”?’ he asked, surprised.

‘No, nothing. It just slipped out. Later. There’s plenty of time yet.’

That really alarmed him. ‘What do you mean? Don’t you want to any more?’

‘Sonny!’ she said. ‘Oh Sonny, don’t be stupid. Of course you know I want to!’

‘Then what did you mean just now?’ he persisted.

‘I meant something quite different,’ she said defensively. ‘In the book,’ she glanced at the desk, ‘it says that towards the end you shouldn’t. That the mother doesn’t want it and that it isn’t good for the baby … But …’ she paused … ‘for now, I still want to.’

‘How long is that meant to go on?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Six weeks, eight weeks.’

Casting a withering glance at her, he took the book from the
desk.

‘Oh don’t!’ she cried. ‘It’s a long time yet.’

But he had already found the place. ‘At least three months!’ he said, crushed.

‘Well that’s as may be,’ she said. ‘I think it’s coming later for me than other people. I haven’t felt like that at all yet. Now shut the silly old book.’

But he went on reading, with raised eyebrows, his forehead furrowed in amazement.

‘And you have to go on abstaining afterwards!’ he said, astonished. ‘Eight more weeks during breast-feeding. So let’s say ten weeks and eight weeks: eighteen weeks. Look here, what did we get married for?’

She looked at him with a smile, but did not reply, until he, too, began to smile. ‘Lord!’ he said. ‘The world’s quite a different place, isn’t it? We never thought of all this. The Shrimp’s starting out well,’ he grinned, ‘a friendly child: pushing his father away from the feeding-trough.’

She laughed. ‘You’ve got a lot more to learn yet.’

‘There’s nothing like being forewarned.’ He beamed. ‘Starting from now, Emma Pinneberg, we’re going to feast before we have to fast.’

‘That’s fine by me,’ she said. ‘Just read to the end of the budget. Then we’ll start feasting.’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘What’s this? Cleaning materials?’

‘That’s things like soap and toothpaste and your razor blades and cleaning spirit. Haircuts are in there too.’

‘Well done, for including the haircuts. Ten marks for clothing and underclothes … we aren’t going to get any new clothes for a while it seems.’

‘Well, the eight marks for replacements covers clothes as well, but then there’s shoes. I thought a new suit for you every two years at the most, and every three years a winter coat for one of us.’

‘Very generous,’ he said. ‘Three marks for cigarettes, that’s very nice of you.’

‘Three a day at a pfennig each,’ she said. ‘You’ll be gasping sometimes.’

‘I’ll manage. What’s this, three marks a month for outings? Where will you go for three marks? To the cinema?’

‘Nowhere at all to start with,’ she replied. ‘Oh, Sonny, I had this idea. I’d like once in my life to go out properly, like rich people do. Without thinking about the cost.’

‘For three marks?’

‘We’ll put them away each month. And when there’s a tidy sum in there, like twenty or thirty marks, then we can really go out for once.’

He stared at her searchingly. His face was a little sad, as he asked: ‘Once a year?’

But this time she didn’t notice. ‘I’m willing to wait a year. The more we’ve got in the kitty the better. And then we’ll lash out, really go on the town.’

‘That’s funny,’ he said. ‘I never thought something like that would give you pleasure.’

‘Why d’you think it’s funny?’ she asked. ‘It’s the most natural thing in the world. I’ve never had that experience in my whole life. You have, when you were a bachelor.’

‘Of course you’re right,’ he said slowly, and fell silent. Then suddenly he banged on the table, crying furiously. ‘Oh, God damn it!’

‘What is it? What’s the matter, Sonny?’

‘Oh nothing,’ he said, relapsing into quiet gloom again. ‘It just suddenly makes you so angry, the way things are set up.’

‘You mean, for some people? Forget about them. What good does it do them? And now sign, Sonny, to say you’re going to keep our agreement.’

He took the pen and signed.

THE PERFUMED CHRISTMAS-TREE AND THE MOTHER OF TWO. HEILBUTT THINKS WE’RE BRAVE. ARE WE?

Christmas had come and gone, a quiet little Christmas with a pine-tree in a pot, a tie, a shirt and some spats for Sonny, a maternity girdle and a bottle of eau-de-Cologne for Lammchen.

‘I don’t want you to get a sagging tummy,’ he explained. ‘I want to keep my pretty wife.’

‘Next year the Shrimp will see the tree,’ said Lammchen.

It turned out a very strong-smelling tree, and the eau-de-Cologne was used up on Christmas Eve.

Everything gets more complicated when you’re poor. Lammchen had a plans for the potted pine tree. She wanted to let it grow and repot it in the spring. The Shrimp would see it the next year and it would grow ever bigger and more beautiful, competing with the Shrimp in growth from Christmas to Christmas, their first and only Christmas tree. That was what was meant to happen.

Before the holiday Lammchen had put the pine tree on the cinema roof. God knows how the cat got at it, Lammchen hadn’t even known there were cats around here. But there were: she found traces of them on the earth in the pot, when they came to decorate it, and the traces were very smelly. Lammchen removed what there was to remove, she washed, and she scrubbed, but it was all to no avail. No sooner was the official part of the festivities over, the exchange of kisses, the deep look into each other’s eyes, the opening of the presents, than Sonny said, ‘Have you noticed the odd smell in here?’

Lammchen put him in the picture. He laughed and said: ‘Nothing simpler!’ then opened the eau-de-Cologne bottle and sprinkled some on the pot.

Oh, he did a lot of sprinkling that evening, which stunned the cat for a while, but then it awakened, victorious to ever-renewed
life.

The bottle emptied and the cat still stank. Finally, before Christmas Eve was at an end, they put the tree outside the door. The smell had proved invincible.

And on the first day of the holiday, very early, Pinneberg went out and stole a little pile of garden earth. They re-potted the tree. But firstly it still stank, and secondly they found out that it wasn’t a proper tree, grown in its pot, but a useless replanted one that had been shorn of all its roots so it would fit the pot. A nine days’ wonder.

Pinneberg was in the mood to find that quite typical. ‘People like us always get the duds,’ he said.

‘No, not always,’ said Lammchen.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Well, I got you, didn’t I?’

All in all December was a good month. Despite the Christmas festivities, the Pinneberg household did not overstep its budget. They were as happy as sandboys. ‘There you are! We can do it. And it was Christmas!’

And they made plans about what they were going to do with all their savings in the months to come.

But January turned out dark, miserable and anxiety-ridden. In December, Mr Spannfuss, Mandels’ new organizer, had been merely looking around. In January he got going. The sales-quota for every salesman in Gentlemen’s Outfitting was set at twenty times his monthly wage. Mr Spannfuss gave an elegant little speech. The arrangement was solely in the interests of the employees; everyone now had the mathematical certainty that he was being judged by his worth alone. ‘Flattery, creeping to the bosses, all those things so destructive to the morale of a business, will be no more!’ cried Mr Spannfuss. ‘Give me your sales-pad, and I’ll know what sort of a man you are!’

The employees listened with serious faces, one or two very
good friends may perhaps have risked a remark to each other, but nothing was said out loud.

Nonetheless there was muttered resentment when Kessler bought two sales off Wendt at the end of January. Wendt had already fulfilled his quota by the twenty-fifth, but Kessler was still 300 marks short on the twenty-ninth.

When Wendt sold two suits one after the other on the thirtieth, Kessler offered him five marks per sale if Wendt allowed him to put them down on his own sales-pad. Wendt agreed to the proposal.

All this was not known till later; Mr Spannfuss was the first to hear of it. How, remained unclear. Mr Wendt was asked to resign for taking advantage of his colleague’s misfortune, whereas Mr Kessler got off with a warning. A very severe warning, he told everyone.

Pinneberg, for his part, achieved his January quota with ease. ‘They know what they can do with their silly ideas,’ he said, confidently.

In February it was generally expected that the sales quota would be reduced, since there were only twenty-four selling-days in February, whereas there had been twenty-seven in January, as well as the stocktaking sale. A few brave spirits mentioned this to Mr Spannfuss but he refused. ‘Gentlemen, you may or may not be aware of it, but your whole being, your energy, your will to achieve, is now calibrated at that times-twenty figure. Any reduction in the quota would bring about a reduction in your efficiency, which you would yourselves regret. I have the greatest confidence that each and every one of you will reach the quota and even exceed it.’

And he looked sharply and meaningfully at them all and went on his way. But the consequences of these measures were not quite so moral as their idealistic author had imagined. On the principle of ‘The devil take the hindmost!’ the employees laid siege to the
customers. Many a customer was rather surprised, as he wandered through Mandels Gentlemen’s Outfitting Department, to see pale, desperately smiling faces popping up all round him: ‘Can I help you, sir?’

It was all rather like a red-light district, and every salesman was only too pleased when he snatched a colleague’s customer.

Pinneberg could not remain aloof, he had to join in with the rest of them.

Lammchen learned that month to greet her husband with a smile that wasn’t so bright that it would annoy him if he was in a bad mood. She learned to wait quietly until he spoke, because a word could throw him into a sudden rage in which he ranted on about these slave-drivers, who turned people into animals, and who deserved a bomb up the backside.

Around the twentieth he became very sombre indeed. Infected by the others, he had lost his self-confidence, bungled two sales, and felt he had lost the knack.

In bed she took him in her arms and held him very tightly. His nerves were at breaking point, he cried. She continued to hold him, saying over and over again: ‘Sonny, even if you were to lose your job, you mustn’t give up hope. Don’t let them get you down. I shall never, never complain, I swear.’

The next day he was calm, though still dejected. She heard from him a few days later that Heilbutt had helped him out with four hundred marks off his takings. Heilbutt, the only one who hadn’t allowed himself to be touched by the collective hysteria, who carried on as if there was no such thing as sales quotas, who even made fun of Spannfuss.

Pinneberg livened up as he told her the story, his face lightening into gaiety.

‘Now, Mr Heilbutt,’ Spannfuss had said with a smile. ‘I hear you are a man of superior intellect. May I ask whether you’ve considered how economies are to be effected in this business?’

‘Yes,’ said Heilbutt, fixing his dark, almond-shaped eyes on the dictator. ‘I have considered that question.’

‘And what conclusion did you come to?’

‘That every employee earning more than four hundred marks ought to be made redundant.’

Mr Spannfuss turned on his heel and left. The whole of Gentlemen’s Outfitting, however, rejoiced.

Lammchen understood what was the matter. It wasn’t just worries at work; he wouldn’t normally have let it get to him so easily; the real trouble was that he had to do without her. She had got so heavy, so shapeless and fat that when she got into bed she had to settle her belly down as well. It had to be manoeuvred carefully into position, otherwise it got in her way and she couldn’t get to sleep.