Life Embitters (60 page)

Dorothea had a story to tell. She came from a village near Danzig. The village had a lake nearby. She lived her first love on the banks of this lake. It was a love that was too tender, playful, and warm to end happily. Her parents, honest Social Democratic workers, with a concern for basic levels of culture, refused to give their consent arguing that the lad hadn’t graduated from high school. He was a truck driver with pink cheeks that inspired love. Dorothea longed for his pinkness, but her parents had a more thought-through view of people and color for them was a secondary consideration.

Her driver lacked drive, she was only waiting for the word to head down whatever road, and she lost heart. She abandoned the family home and traveled to Berlin on a fourth-class ticket. She found work in a ladies’ hairdressers and, being romantic and rather ingenuous, she adapted well to the distinctly provincial atmosphere that floats in the air of most big-city neighborhoods, Berlin included. She liked Wilmersdorf, the area where she settled, but not as much as the Berlin of foreigners and the wealthy. Whenever she walked down the Kurfürstendamm, she felt she was in the presence of something important, nay – sublime. So it was natural enough for her to take a liking to the Romanisches Café, the hub of the city’s cosmopolitan, more or less literary crowd. Dorothea felt them to be riff-raff, perhaps on the crude side, but the company of artists – even if it wasn’t firsthand – made up for the ridiculous pettiness she experienced at the hairdressers.
They must say so many fascinating things every day at every single one of these tables
, thought Dorothea.

In fact they met at the Romanisches Café. Dorothea asked Hermann for
a light. They spoke, though very little, because Hermann was accompanying a Yugoslavian, a Croatian, to be precise, who bought buttons wholesale. However, they agreed a date for a day that same week.

After a frosty beginning, they sensed their conversation was taking off. He rather drawled his words, because he was from Saxony. She spoke with an East Prussian accent. They were accents that complimented each other and were very suited to the creation of proper Berlinese. Hermann declared he would like to be a bohemian and that he really admired the way artists lived. Dorothea had the good sense to respond with an apologia for the life of a clerk and the virtues inherent in rigorous bookkeeping, the keystone of the prosperity of nations and their inhabitants. This to-and-fro arguing for contrary attitudes – she was the one longing for freedom while he was a stickler for order and putting everything in its proper place – produced excellent results. For Hermann Dorothea was essentially a virtuous hairdresser. In the eyes of the young lady, Hermann became a clerk enhanced by a secret, dream life.

“It’s obvious,” said Hermann in their third conversation, “that I would do well to marry. My boss has been advising me to do so for some time … I need to marry someone with a good educational background and decent manners. Unions of people with different sets of manners don’t usually work out …”

Dorothea thought of her family. She had a vision of her father reading
Vorwärts
in the light of their living room.
That
was where she had come from.

“Someone without a decent education is of so little value,” said Hermann over his mug of beer.

“Oh, if only I’d been able to study …!” answered Dorothea after a brief pause, as two round, and very genuine tears rolled down her cheeks.

He looked at her tenderly.
Society has not been built perfectly
, he thought,
injustice is so common …
This little scene erased from his mind the primordial importance of good education and made way for a soft, spongy, gluey sentimentality.

They married. Hermann was promoted. He was made an accountant. They found a small flat in Wilmersdorf and furnished and decorated it in their taste, that is, the taste in vogue. A rather bohemian little flat – they said – with a few fake prints, lurid colors (a mixture of yellow and purple), antique furniture that had just been manufactured, and a genuine Cubist painting. Once their honeymoon was over, she went to the Berlitz School to learn French. Subsequently, when she came across the occasional
au revoir or à tout à l’heure
in a German novel she had no need to have recourse to a dictionary.

It was immediately obvious that the marriage would last. He as much as she took to the path of routine without more ado: neither too swiftly nor slowly. They went in step. He became even more loyal, particular, and orderly, and his admiration for his boss and the shareholders increased. And from the first day Dorothea loved Hermann, not with fire, but hardly with a taste of ashes. They constituted harmony in motion, harmony in routine motion. Their life was like everybody else’s, with neither ups nor downs. They were in good health, had ten thousand marks in the bank and a great ability to wonder at the world. It’s all one needs to be happy. Perhaps they didn’t betray any of their ideas. They simply forgot them. It wasn’t a problem. Germans think freedom is like rhythmic gymnastics.

They thus reached the age of thirty-five, the tenth year in their absolutely standard marriage. One day Hermann received a message from management telling him to travel to South America to inspect the way their representatives were working there. It would be a six- to eight-month trip. It came as a big surprise, but the firm insisted.

Dorothea accompanied Hermann to Hamburg. As the liner melted into the fog, her tears dried up. The crucial aspect of that whole business was the element of surprise, the appearance of a different situation. “Tonight I will switch on the light, look at our bed, and see that Hermann isn’t there …” They separated with the greatest of trust in each other. Rather, they never even saw it as a problem. It was quite unimaginable to think that their routine might be disrupted, particularly when one considered how he held a position in such an important – and German! – button factory.

The first months of separation passed without any foreboding or manias muddying the waters. Correspondence kept coming to the small flat in Wilmersdorf, and some postcards were thought worthy of being stuck on walls. Mountains and monuments arrived, and streets and squares, geographical wonders, marble generals and sunsets – not to mention canoes, natives, crocodiles, snakes, parrots, and monkeys. The latter delighted Dorothea, because Germans are very fond of nature. The correspondence was optimistic. The business potential was remarkable. “I’d never have thought,” wrote Hermann, “that the South American button market would be so colossal.”

One day Dorothea received a telegram. She opened it thinking it would signal his return. When she’d read it, her eyes bulged out of their sockets. It said: “Hermann Weber, of the … company … has died in the shipwreck of the
Araucana
in the Mid-Amazon. Nothing was saved of the ship or its occupants. The shipping company gave no further details apart from the deceased’s address in Berlin that the agent possessed. I will inform you of any developments. Peters. Honorary German consul.”

It was a terrible blow. Heartbroken, Dorothea received the usual expressions of condolence. The local newspaper published a detailed obituary. “A citizen of Wilmersdorf,” wrote the paper, “has died in the Amazon. The
treacherous waters of that great river swallowed up the remains of Hermann Weber, our distinguished, much admired fellow citizen. He died doing his duty. The greatness of our fatherland, the future expansion of Germany throughout the world, demand sacrifices … We offer his widow …” The committee of the national button-makers’ union paid Dorothea a moving, collective visit … The firm granted her a pension for life … When everything was in order, the period of resignation began.
C’est la vie!

What had happened in South America? It was nothing out of the ordinary. A few hours after Hermann arrived in Buenos Aires, he met a very becoming young Polish Jewess, who was absolutely ripe to tackle a German who’d just come ashore from a lengthy, healthy journey by sea. It happened on a tram platform. The young lady – by the name of Ruth – gave him a long, provocatively languishing look. It was spring – that is, autumn in Europe – a gentle breeze was blowing (the Rio Plata breeze, as they call it down there), the birds were singing, the sky was blue, and the sap was rising fast and furious. Everything seemed to be an incentive. He heard a lot of Italian being spoken, and Hermann, who had so often dreamt of Italy, felt that a forgotten, demolished world was resurgent.

“Come on!” said Ruth. “Let’s go into this cinema. We can talk …”

It was two o’clock. Hermann asked: “A movie at this time of the night?”

“Cinemas here open night and day. Everybody so likes to go.”

In a word: Ruth lured and hooked him. They traveled the continent together. The Polish woman had huge commercial knowhow and pragmatic morals. Her mastery of the language was very useful to the German. She even cast her conception of love over him, one that was about being natural, free, and completely non-transcendental. Hermann’s moral stance collapsed. Its ethical core dissolved under the impact of her desirable proclivities, by her lust that was spontaneous, a simple product of her existence,
a mere aspect of her everyday vitality. So Hermann felt his inner resistance melt by the day, weakened by her sensuality. Ruth could see the impact she was having, and was very happy. Unable to react, Hermann had no choice but to lay all the blame at his own door. In the end such onslaughts make one believe one has a clear idea of oneself, and this illusory clarity creates an illusion of freedom that sharpens every tendency to surrender.

When Ruth suggested he should send the telegram spinning the fiction of his death that would allow him to embark upon another life, he’d have liked someone to beat him over the head. But when she assured him everything would be fine, he laughed his first cynical laugh.

Six resigned years went by. Dorothea had aged and grown rather bitter. The purchasing capacity of her pension had diminished and she had been forced to let a room, generally to students. All manner of representatives of the human species passed through that little Wilmersdorf apartment: Japanese, neo-Kantians, Turks, poets, philologists, Abyssinians, Chilean military, the whole caboodle. Dorothea went back to the ladies’ hairdressers. Then she bought the equipment to deal with ladies’ heads at home, with relatively positive results. Then after racking her brain and a few sleepless nights she concluded that
if things go on like this, I’ll have to consider remarrying
.

She placed an advertisement in the
Morgen Post:
“Forty-year old lady, a widow, refined, cultured, with a pension, owner of a comfortable flat, seeks marriage to the right gentleman, forty to fifty years of age, refined, well educated, and preferably childless and with a position in a well-known firm. Write … etc.”

She received lots of post. Every letter had interesting points, though one in particular caught her attention. It was just the right response to her advert, exactly met her needs. This was Dorothea’s reply: “At eight o’clock,
next Sunday evening, the 3rd, I will be in the Café Mitzel on the Bayerischer Platz, sitting at the first table on the right as you go in. If you come, carry a white handkerchief. I will wave my handkerchief at you.”

Sunday, the 3rd, at seven thirty, Dorothea was sitting at the aforementioned table in the Café Mitzel. When it struck eight o’clock, her heart began to thud. A few moments after, a gentleman walked in holding a handkerchief, a standard German gentleman. However, one could see he had just arrived from other climes, because his skin was tanned a bright red and he sported a short, salt-and-pepper beard.

When that man appeared, Dorothea rose from her seat like a jack-in-the-box. She looked at him and her whole body quivered. As he walked towards her, Dorothea wiped a hand over her eyes. Was she dreaming? For his part, the newcomer blanched when he saw her and went visibly weak at the knees. “It’s Dorothea!” he shouted, holding his hands to his head.

“It’s Hermann!” Dorothea cried in a muffled voice.

“Dorothea!”

“Hermann!”

They embraced. She wept. If it hadn’t been for the café and its clientele, he would have wept too. She said, “So, what have you got to say for yourself? This is a dream …”

“I’ll be frank. I thought you were dead,”

“What led you to think such a thing?”

“As a result of the upset …”

She looked at him, at a loss, astonished. They conversed incoherently. She asked him, “And what about the shipwreck? My God, what a shock that was? Why have you grown a beard?”

“It was a horrific shipwreck. There’s no better word: horrific. Don’t make me recall any of that. It’s all in the past, thanks be to God …”

They went to the little Wilmersdorf apartment. Hermann walked straight in, holding his head high, completely sure of himself. They read his postcards together, the old correspondence from South America, with delicious tact. And quite unawares they resumed their life of old.

Herr and Frau Weber introduced us to two splendid friends of theirs: Maties Boca, a great baritone from Tarragona, and Von Berg, the distinguished Hispanophile.

Von Berg was a polite, charming sixty-year-old, of average build, with rather nondescript features, who wore gold-framed spectacles that dangled on a cord. He had a mania for humanism he’d atomized on filing cards. He treated his little annotations with the utmost naïveté. Within the general framework of humanist studies he was a Hispanophile and within the realm of Hispanophilia he had specialized in literary and linguistic issues in our country. He had perhaps traveled to the Peninsula once in the course of his life, but possessed an impressive range of documentation and was familiar with minutiae that left one shell-shocked. He had been working for many a year on a wide-ranging, mind-boggling volume on the symbolism of the
sardana
as seen from the general perspective of dance in the Mediterranean. However, as with many academics of this ilk, he wallowed in a morass of confusion. By virtue of accumulating thousands of small, meaningless details, by dint of such a depth and wealth of material, the moment came when nobody – including himself – could get their bearings, or understand a thing. He spoke the language with a slurred, nasal accent, thin on verbs though rich in adjectives, and well constructed. “Yours is an admirable country,” he told me that afternoon, “and daily I find evidence to confirm that. Just imagine: I read today that the monks in the monastery in San Cugat have finished translating the
Decamerone
into Catalan. That, you will
agree, is some consolation in the tidal wave of ignorance and incomprehension engulfing us all.”