by Irmgard Keun
“What about Peipel?” I ask.
Johanna makes a swishing gesture, knocking several pounds of Herzog, Gerstäcker, and Ganghofer to the deck. “I thought she was more sensible than that, Ferdinand. She was supposed to badmouth me, and she did, but she didn’t do it right. She described me as a wild Messalina, a devil woman, faithless and easy. Who knows what all she told him. Anyway, Peipel comes trotting back all excited. Silly old Kolbe should have told him I had fallen arches and wear flannel underwear, suffer from chronic constipation, and am serially turned down, most recently by a widower with five children, because I smell of mothballs. If she’d said all that, she might have had a chance. The one thing she shouldn’t have done is say I was sensual and immoral.”
“What will you do about the radio?” I ask.
“You take it, Ferdinand,” says Johanna. “Give it back to her. Anton’s got his accordion, what do we want with a radio? If Peipel insists, I’ll keep him by for a rainy day. Only I don’t want him bothering me now, maybe you could take him with you when you go.”
I packed the little radio under my arm. At the door, I said goodbye to Peipel. He said he was going to look for some mauve tulips for Johanna tomorrow.
I took the radio home with me. I don’t quite trust myself to take it back yet; anyway, I think I should have a small reward for all my trouble.
I listen to music from a thousand stations. Johanna doesn’t need it. Anton makes better music. Lucky her.
My fiancée Luise
Luise is living proof that the near panic in magazines and other official and unofficial organs regarding the preponderance of females is justified. I never thought it would be so hard to find a mate for a normal female creature. For almost a year now I’ve been deeply and futilely in search of a good solid husband for her. One might suppose that Luise doesn’t need a husband because she has one in prospect already. Namely me. But that’s just it. Luise has me. If Luise didn’t have me, I wouldn’t be seeking one so desperately.
Luise is a nice girl, and I’ve got nothing against her, but her presence has something oppressive about it for me. I have examined myself and established that this feeling of oppression is not love, and is no prerequisite for marriage, not even an unhappy one. I suppose I should tell her. But I can’t.
There are three items that Luise managed to hang on to throughout the war: a stove, an electric iron, and me. All three of us are a little impaired, and not quite good as new. But Luise is hanging tenaciously, not to say grimly, on to all of us. Her favorite is the stove, and next, even ahead of the iron, is me. I would never deprive Luise of her inferior iron without offering her another, better one. How then am I going to take myself away from her if I rank higher than the iron?
I have trouble fitting into Luise’s family life.
This morning I am so tired of people, I don’t even feel like getting up.
I would like to be perfectly alone for a while. If you have no money and nowhere to live, you can never be alone. I’m not a misanthrope, and I don’t want to be alone forever either, but just for a while I would. For many years I’ve been longing for such a time, and the longing has grown stronger, sometimes it even feels like a passion.
When I was a soldier, I could never be alone, when I was a prisoner of war I was never alone, and as a wretched returnee, still less so. Nothing against the Widow Stabhorn, who lets me live in her passage, and nothing against her thousand grandchildren either. They are splendid, optimistic people full of the will to succeed, and I am lucky to be in their midst. Only when I am with them, I am not alone. I am living in a sort of family association, and I would like just for once, and not necessarily for long, not to be living in any association. No family association, no provisional association, no national association, no professional association—not in any kind of association at all.
I had some nice comrades during the war, and some nice comrades in the POW camp. Only it didn’t do me any good that they were nice, because the day came when I no longer found them nice and no longer counted myself lucky.
In POW camp pretty much everyone got on my nerves. I felt horrible on account of it, and people who make you feel guilty you of course try and avoid like the plague.
Albert, for instance, was a decent fellow and notoriously helpful, but I had moments I almost killed him with a billycan because he was sitting in front of me the whole time, picking his challengingly small nose.
Hildebrandt had backbone and a sense of humor. I admired him, and then forgot my admiration because Hildebrandt snored. He slept any time he had a chance to, even in the day, and he would always snore. He had a sophisticated and idiosyncratic way of snoring—willful, surprising, and unmelodious as the music of Bartók. Hildebrandt was a progressive snorer, and compulsive listening.
Hellmut never did me any harm, but he would eat with such an animal avidity that I felt the impulse to smash my canteen in his face.
Ludwig was an intelligent, sensitive soul. I knew that. But after he’d told me the same moronic dirty joke for the fifteenth time, I could only see him as a loathsome swine.
Some didn’t tell dirty jokes, didn’t snore, ate discreetly, didn’t talk about women (or about men either), or about food, or politics, or about their release date, home, or the future. I didn’t know them well, and I didn’t think ill of them. And? I’d never have thought it—they annoyed me as well. They annoyed me by not annoying me. I was chronically unfair, and sometimes I knew it, and it made me sad.
Hence the relief of those individuals who were nasty pieces of work. I felt positively grateful to them because my rage for once was justifiable. Though God knows if it was always justified. I suppose I ought to thank those guys retrospectively for making it possible for me to be angry. When I think about it, bad people are actually martyrs. At their expense, you can find yourself virtuous, and give free rein to all your stopped-up feelings of rage. Where others are ugly, it’s an easy matter to seem beautiful.
Back then, in POW camp, I came to thoroughly dislike myself. I got a grip and tried to appear cheerful and comradely to others. But privately my thoughts were tangled and ugly. My only comfort was the hope that I was just as infuriating to others as they to me. And I always, always wanted to be alone.
Even if I could afford to live in a hotel, that wouldn’t be sufficient solitude. I’d have to greet the doorman, and the chambermaid would come to make the bed in the morning. They would wonder about me if I spent all day and all night shut up in my room. Their thoughts would come crawling to me through cracks, they would knock on my door, they wouldn’t leave me properly alone.
I’m imagining a little room attached to a balloon high up in the sky. There would be a bed with me lying on it. Next to it a few essentials, drinks, cigarettes, and food. No one can get to me. Nothing around me but clouds. I have time. I could start to order my thoughts. Sometimes I think my brain is like an old bedside drawer, stuffed with all kinds of things I don’t need. Maybe there is the odd useful item among all that junk. Maybe I’ll sort it through one day. Or I’d be too lazy, and just jettison the lot. Maybe I’d do nothing but sleep. I might stay up there for weeks on end; then again, I might be ready to come down after a couple of days and find people charming and kind.
For the moment, my dream of solitude can’t be realized—probably not in fact before I’m dead, and then I won’t be able to enjoy it.
Now I need to go and see Luise and my in-laws. Oh, Christ. Luise happens to be my fiancée and in for a penny, in for a pound. (Idiotic saying. Why in for a pound if you’re in for a penny? You could be in for a penny a thousand times over and never be in for a pound.)
I have yet to put up proper resistance to Luise. It’s not really in me to be rough with mild-mannered girls in flowered frocks. Also, when I first met Luise, I was still less normal than I am today.
I was a young recruit in a small Moselle village in the early autumn, undergoing mil
itary training. When I was drafted, I resolved not to let anything get to me, to maintain an inner resistance, and remain dignified and independent. They can kill you, I thought, all cool and manly, but they can’t do anything about your thoughts and feelings. Oh, but they could. After a fortnight, my brain was no more capable of thought than an ancient cowpat. The only thing I was sure about was that I was going about everything the wrong way. My only feeling was fear. I was swimming in an ocean of fear. I still don’t know why I had such irrational fear. It wasn’t that I was afraid of dying, I sometimes wished I could have died. I was afraid of the NCOs, headquarters, uniforms, barracks, corporals, the officers’ voices—the whole massive machinery of it.
I no longer saw human beings, all I saw were the mechanical manifestations of a force that hypnotized me to the point of crippling despair. Sometimes I had the feeling that the world was split in two: one half was me and the other was a huge mass of things, animals, humans, whose sole objective was to harry and torture and mock me. I was numb, I couldn’t understand that others could have such an influence on me. It was hopeless. I was so terrorized I couldn’t even cry anymore. Otherwise, believe me, I would have. I was used to so much freedom from when I was a boy, colorful, tender freedom. I knew that poverty had edges, and life had rough edges that you make yourself. But even they can be good. I knew forces for good and ill, but I didn’t know what force was.
I couldn’t understand either that here were people who weren’t asking me to do things but telling me. That I had to lie in the dirt when others said so, get up when they said so, lie down in the dirt again, run, stand at attention. I didn’t understand it, I couldn’t get it into my head.
I still can’t. I don’t know if other men felt and feel the way I do. When I did speak, I tried to speak like the others, it was a sort of camo language. Perhaps the others did too. Or am I a one-off, an anomaly, a psychopath festooned with neuroses who ought to be in a clinic somewhere? Damnit, I don’t think I’m that unusual, and I don’t think I’m crazy either. Which of course doesn’t prove anything. Where’s the madman who thinks he’s mad?
It ought to be sufficient for me that my aversions are normal. They live in my emotions, and my reason says “very well” to them. Someone tells me he has a bad hand and needs my help. I would carry the coal up from the cellar and sew his buttons and empty his chamber pot and wash the dishes to the best of my ability. But if he started telling me to lie down in the dirt, jump up, do press-ups—then I’d smack him in the face, bad hand or no. Or I would suppose his brain was affected and start looking around for professional help. And when people start to tell me that military discipline is necessary for the preservation of a state, then I tell them where they can put their state. And if they tell me wars are necessary, then I am disgusted by whatever it is makes them so. Cross my heart, any power that forces me to fight, I hope they lose their shitty war.
I felt humiliated then, humiliated almost to the point of annihilation. I obeyed without love and saw no sense in my obedience. There is nothing so humiliating as obedience without willingness and without love.
I wasn’t a rebel. Good God, me a rebel. Then! I was waiting in fascination for the moment when they would next do something to me, when they just happened not to be doing anything. How was I going to be able to do anything to anyone else? I wasn’t even capable of hating another individual. They were all so impersonal to me—the NCOs, the officers, the corporals, the pay sergeants. They all shared one face, the angry face of the machine.
One time, a sergeant in the orderly room showed me a photograph of his three-month-old baby. The man was friendly. Not long ago I happened to run into him near Johanna’s lending library. “Willi Konte,” he said, “remember? And you’re Ferdinand—Christ, man, I knew you right away.” He was happy. I felt awkward, because I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t afraid anymore of the sergeant creature who now bore the name Willi Konte. I was just afraid of hurting the rumpled, friendly, grinning man. In my heart of hearts I’m a coward. I didn’t want to take him up to see my cousin Johanna, who might have adopted him into her collection. So I let him drag me to the corner pub instead.
We drank beer and gin. The sergeant is working for a roofer and is nostalgic for the old days. “It were great, weren’t it,” he said, “let’s drink to those days.” The pub was freshly painted. The landlord had a new belly, which he was pushing along ahead of him shyly and proudly.
I remembered the baby photograph. I was bothered when the sergeant showed it to me. I thought: Is he playing a trick? Do I have to say, oh, he’s adorable! Or am I allowed to say he’s adorable? We’re talking about a baby sergeant, after all. “You’re a clever chap,” said the sergeant in the orderly room, and held the picture under my nose and grinned all over his face. “You’ll understand. Right? Yes?”
“Yes, sir, sergeant!” I replied, and hoped I’d done the right thing. The sergeant disgusted me because he was a sergeant. The product of his loins in the photograph was just as disgusting to me. The most disgusting thing of all was that someone was turning to me for human sympathy when he was part of the machine and represented the machine that was abusing me and violating me.
And now we were drinking pals, I was calling him Willi, and he was telling me he wasn’t doing too well. “How’s the kid?” I asked.
“I’m divorced,” he said, “the kid’s with his mum in Munich, she’s about to get married again, anyway, what kid do you mean?”
I had no interest in Willi Konte and his divorces and his children. I remember him as a sergeant first class. He was a nice guy who wanted to show me the human touch. But I’d been with the army for four weeks and I didn’t have any feelings anymore. I was growing scales. No nice guy was going to scratch my scales and stop their growth.
Sometimes I thought I should have committed suicide. I found my behavior inferior. “You’re sick of life,” I said to myself a lot. My still being around is proof that one is never as sick of life as one might think. One loves it. And what’s with the “one” anyway? Who is “one”? One is neither I nor you. “One” is a copout for someone who doesn’t have the guts to write “I.” For instance, “One falls in love but rarely,” someone says or writes. He doesn’t want to say, I fall in love rarely. Or, you fall in love rarely. He wants to say I and you, everything and nothing, be vague and definite. The little word “one” is a eunuch word, you write it lowercase and take the decisive consonant away from it.* I resolve to try and say “I” more often.
Now then, I was honestly convinced I didn’t love life anymore. But under mounds of dismalness my little life continued, wooed and worked for me and for itself. I wished I was dead, but I didn’t kill myself.
I don’t think I thought anything during my time as a recruit. Various terrors wipe out one’s capacity to think, and hence one’s capacity to suffer as well. One can’t feel without thinking—and one doesn’t suffer without thinking. One! There we are again. Poor castrate that I am. I take a huge run-up, puff myself up front and back, race off with élan, and wind up in cliché. From now on I won’t say “one” again. I’ll give myself one more chance.
When I think of my time as a recruit, I ask myself sometimes: How could all that happen? How was it possible? I wasn’t polite, but anxious to please. Not a servant, but a lackey. I was the lowest and most abject son of a bitch. A twenty-year-old lieutenant patted me on the back and said, “You carry on like that, man.” I felt liberated and even honored by being patted on the back by my benevolent young superior. I smiled gratefully, flattered.
Then one evening I was sitting on the banks of the Moselle. Opposite me fluffy green hills intruded into my view. The banks were crumbly, and I was a laughable figure. My head was shaved, and my reservist’s uniform was evilly ill-fitting. If I wore it today, I would reap the laughter of thousands at the Cologne Carnival. Back then I was funny because I had to be. Not because I wanted to be.
Next to me on the bank
sat a girl who wasn’t laughing at me. Her name was Luise, and she was wearing a flowered frock. I spoke to her, and she spoke to me. I was tired and dull-witted and was relieved that I didn’t have to kiss her. The fact that I wasn’t kissing her spoke in my favor. I wonder how many relationships came about similarly, through such misunderstandings.
Luise wore a flowered frock, and she wasn’t laughing at me. When I met her for the third time on the river-bank, the hills on the other side looked less fluffy and hostile, and I gratefully kissed her hand. It was a tough, willful little hand. I stared into space, the way I always did, and all I saw was maybe a bit of her knee and a scrap of her jolly flowered frock.
Once, I may have stroked Luise’s knee, and another time I stroked her hair. Luise took that to mean that I desired her. And since I didn’t do more than stroke her knee and hair once, quickly, she was convinced I was in love with her.
Her mother had misinformed her about love. “Men are only ever after one thing,” she said, and “Only a man who knows restraint is capable of real love.” At the time I didn’t know anything about these lessons, and I allowed the decisive misunderstandings to come about.
I don’t know when Luise began to view me as her fiancé. At the time I had a three-week furlough in that bloody little village on the Moselle. I expect it’s perfectly charming, but for me it’s a nightmare, even now. Even a paradise in which I was that unhappy is hell in the memory.
Luise was going to stay with her parents in Cologne Bayenthal. Before I went up the line with my company, I was in Cologne for a couple of days too. I still owned the little bookstore in the old town, my inheritance from my drunken old uncle. Later, three big fat bombs fell on it. It wasn’t really necessary. Along with the rest of the building it was so rickety, a dud would have done the job. While I was living there, I only ever spoke softly, breathed quietly, and when I needed to sneeze, I went outside. All for fear of the place collapsing.
