After Midnight (11 page)

Heini has put his arm around me. His voice sounds so deep and husky, I could listen to him for hours. Sometimes I even understand what he means.

“And don’t talk to me about your own country, Breslauer, because I can’t stand that sort of thing. Your country is where they treat you well. If I’d been ill-treated at home as a child, I wouldn’t have any fond memories of that home when I grew up. Anyway, you’re a doctor because you like the job. Blood and pus, that’s your own country.

“And if you’re going to say another thing about the forests of Germany I shall rise from this table and walk away.
You know you start looking more Jewish the moment the reflected glory of my Aryanism ceases to fall on you. You’ll have plenty of opportunities in America to sit among anthills in summer and pick acorns in autumn—also, today is the first I knew of it that the romanticism of the Wandervogel lads was one of the joys of your life.”

I would like to go, but I feel too tired to get up and leave. And here comes fat, friendly Herr Manderscheid. He is fifty years old and runs the advertising department of a newspaper. His legs are aching because he’s been out collecting for the Winter Relief fund all day. He looks exhausted and wretched, and he’s caught a cold too. Heini is delighted. “Give me ten marks, would you, Manderscheid? Doesn’t matter if you haven’t got change, that twenty mark note will do. Thanks, Manderscheid, you can sit down. It’s a shame you’re not an old campaigner, Manderscheid, you’re just an old member of the People’s Party
—were
an old member of the People’s Party, of course I mean
were
. Oh, you lingered too long, sound asleep in the Venusberg of liberalism—and now, my modern Tannhäuser, you’re obliged to go round with your Winter Relief collecting tin until it breaks into bud.”

Manderscheid gets terrified when Heini talks like this. He would like to go, and then again he’d like to stay. He stays because he’s tired. He is afraid of Heini, he is afraid of the government, which can take his job away. He wants to live. His wife wants to live. His children want to live.

I am sleeping wide awake. My thoughts are dreams, my dreams are thoughts. I was supposed to be talking to Heini about Liska, but I can’t do that in front of all these people.
Heini’s arm is around my shoulders; he doesn’t even realize it. How Liska would envy me. He never speaks to her as informally as he was speaking to me just now.

Cigarette ash is always falling on Heini’s suit, and then he looks all grey and dismally snowed under. When Liska is around she sometimes brushes the ash off his clothes. And sometimes she says, “Do you mind if I pick that thread off your collar?” with a kind of embarrassed laugh, blushing. But there isn’t any thread on Heini’s collar; she just wanted to touch him.

Liska has never got any farther with Heini than the removal of threads. And now she is as if she had broken into a hundred thousand pieces, she is flying in the air like motes of dust. She keeps putting herself together again in a different way, like some intricate mosaic which she thinks might appeal to Heini. This sort of thing is a great strain on a woman. And how is anyone to know what Heini really does like, seeing nothing seems to please him? Liska would do best to stay as she is. But what is a person, really? You never think you’re good enough for the person you’re in love with, anyway.

Maybe Heini happens to say, “They’re terrible, those showy big women with their ballooning breasts and magnificent Teutonic hips. I see a woman like that with a small husband and I can’t help thinking of a cow with a flea hopping about on it.” The moment Liska hears that she shrinks, even her bosom gets smaller.

Heini may say, “I can’t stand that obtrusive poster-like style of health, like an advertisement screeching out the virtues of buttermilk and apple syrup.” He doesn’t say it to Liska. He isn’t thinking of Liska at all when he says such things. But Liska instantly turns pale, powders her face till
she’s even paler, thinks her back and her stomach hurt, and looks sick and tired.

Or Heini may say the only voices he likes are the clear, ingenuous kind, and Liska immediately starts talking in a funny, clear voice, opening her eyes with wide, child-like excitement, as if she were taking her First Communion.

A few days later, Heini says he feels worse hearing shrill, screeching female voices than having to eat stinking meat, a shrill female voice can poison his entire system. Shrill voices are corrupt, slovenly, uncultivated, says Heini. The voices of tenement dwellers. “They’re too lazy to fetch their kids in off the street at mealtimes, those women, so they yell down at them from the fourth floor. And what sort of voice is a poor female throat supposed to produce, then? I’ll tell you: a woman’s voice should never be raised louder than is necessary for the person sitting opposite to hear her.”

Liska has a lovely, deep, mellow voice. She had made it go high. Now, instead of dropping it to its normal deep pitch, she tries to make it as deep and hollow as an underground dungeon. And as hoarse as Herr Frockart’s voice; he sometimes comes to the Squirrel, and he used to be in the police, but he got sacked for persistent drunkenness. No woman can switch to having a voice like that overnight.

Heini says women ought to be nurses: nurses are the only women who attract him. Liska immediately starts acting like a nurse, looking at everyone in a sad, gentle, pitying way, as if they were about to die of some dreadful disease.

And three days later you’ll see Liska looking as if she were going soliciting along Kaiser Street. All because Heini happened to say a woman should have a touch of wantonness about her.

Over these last four months, Liska has been a completely different person at least thirty times. Not so Heini. Heini says women should work—Liska works. Heini says women are inferior beings incapable of sacrifice. Liska instantly looks as if she were about to stab herself to the heart with the fork she was using to eat goulash. Heini didn’t happen to be looking that way, or she
would
have stabbed herself to the heart.

And now Liska has gone and become a mother and wants to get rid of the child. But it’s not that easy to get rid of a child, even one you’ve made up. A couple of days ago Heini said a childless woman was like an empty nut—“What’s the point of her?” Unfortunately, when we were all going home, the desperately besotted Liska was walking beside Heini, and told him a secret: she’d had a baby eight years ago, an illegitimate one, before she married Algin. Heini was not in the least interested; he was hardly listening. He’d long forgotten what he said about empty nuts and so on; he said that a brave and responsible woman would take good care not to have any children in these terrible times.

So as a brave and responsible woman, Liska now wants to get rid of the child again. This is why I’m supposed to be talking to Heini and telling him Liska doesn’t have a child after all, she only said she had, and the child really belongs to a girlfriend, and Liska covered up for the girlfriend’s little mistake.

And I will tell Heini too, when I get a chance, though it’s quite pointless. The fact is that everyone
except
Heini takes a great interest in Liska’s strenuous and exciting changes of mood. Heini has taken no notice. Oh, there
is
one other man besides Heini who doesn’t notice her changes of mood, and that’s Algin. Having got to know Liska the way a man
gets to know a woman only if he lives with her for years, sleeping with her all that time—well, he’s got
not
to know her again. It’s like reading a wonderful poem, and learning it off by heart because you like it so much and you want to be able to recite the whole thing. And when you do know it off by heart you can slowly begin to forget it again. Which is what people generally do.

Algin is not at all jealous, because it doesn’t occur to him that some other man might fall in love with Liska. He is not in love with her any more. However, their marriage wasn’t dead, just a bit tired, something that happens to a number of marriages after some years, and something that can pass over too. And maybe everything would have been all right for Liska and Algin if Betty Raff hadn’t taken it upon herself to save the marriage.

Algin used to like the fact that Liska’s nature is that of the inmate of a harem. He hated women who worked if they didn’t have to. Almost all women, says Algin, are harem inmates at heart, though they’d never admit it. Their minds work hard at living against their nature, which gives them touchy and difficult dispositions—and they take refuge in illness to have a chance of living normally and according to their real inclinations.

Liska would happily spend her life between her bed and a bathtub full of warm water. She doesn’t like standing, she doesn’t like sitting, she likes lying down best. So she sometimes pretends, to herself and other people, that she’s sick, and then she can live the way she’d like to for a couple of days.

Liska wakes in the morning, and her bed is wide and soft. She doesn’t want to get up, she wants to linger there, half-asleep, half-dreaming. The dreams she likes drift past
her, bright and varied. It’s only in the morning, between sleep and waking, that you have such power over your dreams.

Liska ought to get up to face a day which will give her no pleasure, because she is too idle for it. She does not like walking—not in the apartment, not in the street. All her stockings have holes in them. Frau Winter the cleaning lady forgot to mend them. Liska doesn’t want to get angry with Frau Winter. She doesn’t want to sit at breakfast with Algin, reading a paper which is all grey and makes her hands dirty and smells revolting, like paraffin. She wants to stay in bed. So she falls ill. Her voice is weak, everything hurts her.

We bring her coffee in bed, we have to keep all problems away from her, we fetch her cigarettes, and put her manicure case and lavender water on the bedside table. We have to bring her her hand mirror—Liska discovers some wrinkles on her face, and falls asleep again, melancholy and exhausted.

When she wakes Betty Raff has to come and sit on the velvety blue divan and talk to Liska about men and love, which comes to the same thing. Now and then she has to bring Liska warm water, because Liska is manicuring her hands. Slowly and feebly, for hours on end.

At noon I have to bring Liska a little cold meat and some grapes, and red wine, and then sit and talk about men and love. After lunch Liska has a bath. It takes an hour. I have to fetch her bath salts and powder, Betty has to find her towel and her best silk nightie. Then we both have to sit in the bathroom—on the lavatory, in the wash basin, anywhere—and discuss men with Liska. Meanwhile Frau Winter is doing Liska’s room.

Liska gets back into bed. Frau Winter has to draw the
blue curtains—soft, inky-blue light fills the room. It is a room that looks round, without any corners to it. The bed seems to be round, and so does all the furniture. Even the smell of the room seems round and soft—all sounds, all voices are rounded. The sound of a car’s horn out in the street rolls into the room like a soft, feathery ball.

Liska discusses men and love with Frau Winter. Frau Winter is an expert on the subject. She goes into a great many households, and hears about the wives’ problems with their husbands, since they almost all confide in her. She is hard of hearing, but she always manages to get the general drift of it. She is small and quick-moving, with red hair and broad, pale lips. Her glances and her footsteps are rapid. She used to work for grand folk, countesses and so on, and she knows about men, and the beauty of the feminine form and how to enhance it. She is devoted to Liska, runs errands for her, would do anything for her.

We have to bring plenty of coffee to Liska’s room in the afternoon, and brandy and cakes. Frau Winter has to stay in the room, Betty Raff and I have to be there, Gerti has to be summoned by telephone. Liska’s room is full of women, all of whom have to discuss men and love with her. And in the round and inky-blue twilight of the room, all the women gradually find themselves saying things they certainly wouldn’t say in the broad, bright light of day. I always used to feel embarrassed by these conversations, but now I’m more or less used to it, and they are interesting and instructive, anyway. Liska gets happier and happier. She’s never so well as when she is ill. She’s a queen on a throne of white pillows. She laughs, and loves everyone. Frau Winter has to get scarves and silk camisoles out of the wardrobe, and Liska gives them away to everyone who happens to be
there. And she gives everyone exactly what they’d have liked to have.

If it were all to go according to Liska’s wishes, her husband would come home in the evening and ask, “Darling, what would you like, what can I do for you?” And he would ask the other women, “Doesn’t my Liska look lovely, doesn’t she look enchanting even when she’s ill?” He would kiss her and sit on her bed, and Liska would be glad to have everyone see a man thinking she looks lovely, adoring her. Her voice would go soft and tender, she’d put her hand on Algin’s shoulder and admire it, so pretty and white on the dark fabric of his suit.

She wants all the women to go away at this point, and to have Algin become more loving than ever. She wants him to read aloud from his new novel and ask her opinion, which is to be more important to him than anyone else’s. For Liska really is very clever, all the men say so, even Heini. It’s just that she isn’t keen on doing much thinking. So she wants Algin to stop reading aloud quite soon, and just be loving and adore Liska.

That’s the kind of life Liska likes. Given a life of that kind she’d be happy and delightful and faithful to her husband.

But how can a woman live like that, these days? She has to read the papers and think about politics. She has to vote, and listen to speeches on the radio. She has to go to poison gas drill, and prepare for the war. She has to learn to do something so that she can work and earn money.

Liska learned to do handicrafts. She makes stuffed toy animals, wonderfully comical animals: fat cows made of dirndl skirt fabric, flowered elephants, tartan cats with squinting goggle-eyes. “Drunk and disorderly phantom animals,” Heini calls them, and he likes Liska to bring her
new animals to show him. So now Liska is really making all these animals for Heini’s sake, even if she thinks she does it to earn money and lead a useful life.