Ferdinand, the Man with the Kind Heart

by Irmgard Keun

  During my furlough, I once visited Luise at her parents’, a courtesy call, no more. Luise had sent me parcels of some of her strangely tough homebaked cookies. I chewed on them, and then felt ungrateful because they were so bad.

  Yes, and next thing I was sitting at her parents’ place, at their coffee table, and I was her fiancé. I couldn’t understand why these strangers were nice to me and seemed to like me. I could have run off, but I didn’t want to give offense. Also, I was thinking, what does it matter, you might as well say yes to everything, you’re about to go, and before long you’ll be dead.

  My father-in-law was an elderly gentleman who looked somehow plucked, with a dull, yellow forehead and mobile little eyes. He used to call me “our brave defender of the fatherland.” He would say “we men” and “these are historic times.”

  He’s a middle-ranking official. I don’t know at what point one ceases to be middle-ranking and becomes a senior official, and whether a senior official is more or less than a top official.

  His name is Leo Klatte, and the day before yesterday he was de-Nazified. “Re-classified as a fellow traveler,” he told me proudly. I wonder who thought of the word “re-classified”? Can it satisfy the ambition of a proud German man to be a re-classified fellow traveler?

  Luise is the Klattes’ only child. Herr Klatte is a domestic tyrant. Tyrants resemble one another as drinkers resemble one another and vary as drinkers vary. What they have in common is the compulsion. Tyrants seek the intoxication of power, drinkers the intoxication of alcohol. To the unintoxicated, all intoxicated people look alike. They either avert their gaze, or they make way for him, as for a force of nature. Many people have a great yearning for a force of nature in human form. It’s more than they can do at times, to continue to pray to the invisible and incomprehensible. They want God in a human body and wandering over the earth.

  My father-in-law Leo Klatte is an amiable enough dictator. My mother-in-law Emmi is a gently weathered, slightly dippy blonde. She is afraid she will lose the respect of her fellow-beings if her lemon pudding fails to rise, and she feels violated if her carpet is stained. She has experienced everything, war and bombing and the destruction of her flat. Fortunately, she was able to move into the ground floor of the same building. During air raids she would sit in the shelter and knit. When it got to be very bad, she would lie down on the basement floor with her knitting, and wail and pray. When the raid was over, she would go upstairs and give the floor a much-needed waxing.

  She too had her great time. It is possible she may have been a pirate wench in another lifetime and then degenerated in the course of subsequent incarnations.

  Shortly before the end of the war, Klatte was given the rank of captain in an administrative position. For the whole family that meant military glory and reaching their social pinnacle.

  As the war ended mother and daughter were by themselves in Cologne. They had stayed behind in their flat to look after their handful of inferior junk. God knows, they must have experienced some terrific bombing. If someone had told me years back that a pale, forget-me-not-blue woman like my mother-in-law wouldn’t simply die of fright during a bombardment that felt like the end of the world, I wouldn’t have believed it. I would have bet all my future happiness on it. Just as well I didn’t.

  The war finished, and Emmi Klatte took to thieving. The bombing had stopped, the artillery had packed it in. The city seemed wiped out, destroyed. But some things weren’t. In the midst of the ruins there were a few intact, abandoned houses and flats in pallid, ghostly glory. Everything belonged to everyone. Insatiable and obsessed, my forget-me-not-blue mother-in-law went on the prowl, and snaffled among other things a sewing machine, various typewriters, four rugs, seventeen eggcups, a gilt frame, a bombproof door, a poultry cage, and a pompous drawing-room painting depicting a voluptuous woman lying prone in pink, puffy nudity, a blue moth teetering on the end of her pink index finger, and the whole thing somehow casual.

  Before the currency reform the Klattes didn’t know what to do for food. If a poor neighbor happened to receive a CARE package, the Klattes would have happily bitten her throat before the little wretch got anything down her, and it might have been worth it. Through my friend Liebezahl I took a hand. He bought the painting for some fantastic sum in reichsmark, before selling it on for some still more fantastic sum to a racketeer who put it up in his bar.

  Whores cut up distinctly rough when you call them a whore. They don’t even take it from other whores. Profiteers don’t care to be hailed “Hey, profiteer.” I know that from my cousin Magnesius. He is a periodic elementary profiteer. What he wants is to be called a businessman. I have no idea what the difference is between a businessman and a profiteer. It’s possible that people who have come by money have at the same time acquired sensitivity and care about labels. Perhaps it’s all in the way it’s said, and it’s down to me if some future Rockefeller feels flattered or offended if I say to him, “How’s it hanging, you old crook?”

  My mother-in-law was reluctantly parted from the painting. She wasn’t even pretending when, with tears coursing down her cheeks, she told Liebezahl that it was an old heirloom that had been in the family for generations. Since then, the former owners have appeared. “Awful people,” said Frau Klatte, “not even properly married. People who own such a vulgar piece are bound to be suspicious—and the fact that they want it back, well, doesn’t that say everything.” The fight over the painting has been going on for more than a year, and no end in sight.

  For five days my mother-in-law went on the rampage. She slaved away like a coolie and developed the muscles of a removal man or a prizefighter. Novels teach us that when faced with adversity or opportunity, women are capable of developing uncommon strength.

  Emergencies, though, by their nature, don’t last, and Frau Klatte lapsed back into her housewifely existence.

  Herr Klatte reappeared on the domestic scene, stripped of his heathen glory, looking, in fact, rather bedraggled, like a cock that has had its tail feathers plucked. He was wearing the timeless mufti of the middle-ranking official. Previously the narrow waist and the splendid epaulettes of the officer’s uniform had lent him a breath of intoxicating virility. Not long ago, he hinted to me, “man-to-man,” that he had cast a powerful spell on the widow of a stationmaster. Later, the rail widow had offered her favors to an American sergeant who was still in victorious possession of his uniform splendor. “Don’t talk to me about German womanhood, I know all about it,” said Klatte bitterly. “I’ve had it up to here with politics.”

  He settled down among the spoils of his wife and pouted. His wife and daughter waited on him, the household was his to command, and gradually he clambered back up to the temporarily vacant throne of the family dictator, and everyone tried to be as satisfied and dissatisfied as they’d been previously, in the good old days.

  I never understood why some of my erstwhile comrades were so angry with women and girls who liked Allied soldiers. My God, hadn’t they dinned it into the poor creatures that the uniformed, powerful, victorious hero had to be the woman’s highest ideal? What was promulgated was this: the German wins, and whoever wins is German.

  In a Rhineland village I talked to the owner of a haberdashery—a woman whose understanding enabled her to cope with her life.

  The Americans marched into the village. Slowly, reluctantly, but victoriously. The woman was full of joy. The victors gave her Camels, and she gave them the victory palm. In a manner of speaking. After all, this is Germany, not the Sahara. “The Americans won,” she said, “so they must be German, and we must show our gratitude to the gallant victors. The general’s name is Eisenhower, which is almost a German name.”

  What was I to say to her? You can’t make women support a war without enthusing them about heroes and fighters. They were supposed to love the smiling victor, and they did. Many women who had been successfully trained to be enthusiasts for the war and
worship the heroes later degenerated surprisingly quickly in their national feeling. They couldn’t help whooping at the victor. The pacifist’s sexual compassion for the defeated had failed to develop in them. The infantile joy of the woman at material things enabled her to bloom for the victor in heart and senses.

  My bride Luise is among those girls whose virtue could not be impressed by Nescafé or chewing gum. She didn’t fall for the charms of the alien conqueror or for the continual siren song “Hello, Baby!” that rang out through the ruins of the postwar months in Germany.

  “I have remained faithful to you,” Luise said to me just at the moment I was going to suggest ending our engagement and parting as friends. “I have remained faithful to you, Ferdinand, you can be proud of me.”

  “Thank you, Luise,” I said, and I felt mean and low, because I wasn’t in the least grateful. To lighten my bad conscience, I threw myself on her old stove, to repair it. I didn’t dare suggest breaking our engagement.

  A girl like Luise deserves a better man than me. I haven’t given up hope of finding her one. Thus far, I have felt obliged to go on painting the walls in Luise’s flat, fetching firewood and coal, repairing wiring and toilets, looking after the allotment, fitting cellar doors and windowpanes, knocking together furniture, and pickling cabbage. Something new every day.

  More than every mountain in the world I love the sea. I often plan to go to some fishing village. Maybe I could help some old fisherman fix his nets and bring in the catch. I think I could. I once lived in Brittany for three months, without a penny.

  I told Luise of my plan, and that such a rough and uncertain existence was unsuitable for a sensitive woman like her. “I will go with you,” said Luise, “I will share your burden.” We had seen a film together a few days previously in which the hero throws himself at the violent bosom of a still-unspoilt nature. The doting heroine follows him. Leaving behind her the world of nylons, beauty contests, and New Look, she waded through the storm-tossed dunes to an almost naked collapse. And everything came up roses. She was carried into a handy fisherman’s hut in the strong arms of the hero. He warmed her delicate limbs, and before long there was a merry blaze in the hearth. Dreamily the lovers stared into the crackling logs.

  Luise had been impressed. Goddamn the cinemas of the world. How can I go on planning to move to a fishing village, without having to fear persecution? Each time I trod on something unusually soft in those soft dunes, I would have to think, you are stepping on the earthly remains of your loving bride, who lost her way as she tried to follow you. You are stepping on the victim of your brutal, cowardly, manly egoism.

  “Mum always says no man knows how much a loving woman sacrifices to him,” she said at the end of our conversation about the fishing village. I was happy that I had curtains to put up, and the stovepipe to take out and clean.

  While I was busying myself with the dirty stovepipe, Luise tooted from the next-door room, “You don’t even have a permanent job, but I’m sticking by you, I’m your steadfast little Lu.”

  It had always bugged me when she signed her letters like that: “Your little Lu.” She’s a big solid woman. The role of the little chickadee doesn’t suit her.

  Maybe I will manage to find a man who likes her. I’ve got to. If Luise takes him, I’ll happily continue to clean sooty stovepipes, even though it’s ghastly work. I promise also to weed the garden, put the sheets through the mangle, help the hens lay, and wash the nappies of the babies.

  Unfortunately, we’re not at that stage yet.

  * Man, the German impersonal pronoun meaning “one,” is one letter short of Mann, German for “man.”

  A husband for Luise

  Tonight, I am going to see Luise. My father-in-law’s reclassification as fellow traveler is being celebrated. The day before yesterday he was de-Nazified.

  Before that I have to see my friend Heinrich, the editor of Red Dawn. I think his first issue still hasn’t come out. The story he asked me to write isn’t written yet either.

  I’m going to take Heinrich to meet Luise. He is a bachelor and could use a wife to stand by him during life’s storms. Heinrich is a mild-mannered intellectual, shy and a little unworldly. Not one of those aggressive ironists. He is a man who would believe a barmaid every time when she’s telling him how her father was a senior officer who went broke, how she had had an old-fashioned convent upbringing, detested sin, and was consumed with anxiety for her little old mother.

  Never would Heinrich walk into a bar by himself, though one could imagine a more frivolous colleague dragging him into one. He doesn’t resist much. Occasional visits to nightclubs have given him insights into the lower depths of the human psyche. The most hard-boiled waiter can move him to tears by telling him how he had to serve several years in prison because of his attachment to an old canary. He had committed a serious burglary because he saw the critter wasn’t getting any seeds.

  Of course it’s not entirely altruistic on my part to try to produce a connection between Heinrich and Luise. But I do believe that she could be useful to him. She would acquaint him with some of the realities of life. She would be a good counterweight for him. Abstract thought isn’t her thing; she’s the opposite of a bluestocking.

  She will occasionally dip into a magazine. Ideally some story about a tragic film star, youth criminality, cake recipes, or glamour tips. She is interested in the latest mass murderer, the practice of suttee, rapes, storms, and astrologically based predictions of catastrophes.

  Luise and her mother are just now waiting for a comet that is reliably expected to collide with our planet in the next few days, with consequences unknown. My landlady Frau Stabhorn was full of news concerning the coming calamity as well. She reckoned there was nothing to be done about it and was more interested in her currently rather sticky jam business and a bottle of Armagnac that a son-in-law had gone and drunk. Single widows don’t have an easy time of it, they are used to worse than collision-happy comets.

  Luise has a weakness for newspaper quizzes. I devised a couple for Heinrich, maybe he’ll pay me for them. I showed him this one:

  Our reporter was instructed to ask forty-seven males the following question: do women with facial hair have sex appeal? Nineteen replied in the affirmative, among them a tram conductor and a noted movie actor. Seven preferred unshaven women, three volunteered that they cared more about shapely legs than hairy upper lips. A chimney sweep claimed a woman could have sex appeal whether or not she had facial hair. A retired lower court judge thought facial hair and sex appeal were compatible, given a personal fortune and an agreeable character. Only one elderly watchmaker asserted that a woman with facial hair could arouse nothing beyond comradely feelings in him.

  Heinrich was unpersuaded by my efforts thus far. Editors never know what they want. They don’t have any personal taste of their own, and if they do, they will stifle it for fear it may not coincide with that of their readership.

  I have a further quiz I’d like to try: “How do I get rid of my fiancée?”

  I’ve tried asking many acquaintances. My cousin Magnesius couldn’t understand why I would ask such a thing. He reckons that any woman would happily run away from a worm like me. He gave me to understand that several gorgeous women he had scorned had gone on to attempt suicide. “Main thing is, don’t get soft,” he said.

  Heinrich said he would give a woman he’d left a job as his secretary and continue to offer her moral support and friendly advice. That’s not the same as being rid of her. She will go on loving and suffering.

  Liebezahl had a think when I asked him. “It’s easy to get rid of a fiancée,” he said, “you probably mean a loving woman whom you don’t want to hurt?” That is indeed what I meant. Liebezahl reflected on the possibilities of astrological deterrence. They seemed inadequate to the purpose. “I would grovel to her,” he finally said, “I would give her the lovelorn swain for so long that she wou
ld eventually think I was entirely ridiculous and have enough. I would make her overweening and peacock-like. One day she would leave me.”

  I think the Liebezahl approach, while humane, is slow and a little uncertain.

  I would need to know what a woman sees in a man, and then seek to project the opposite. I don’t think women are brave enough to try the same thing on a man. I was always suspicious when women lamented, “It doesn’t matter what I do, I can’t seem to get rid of him.” All they would need to do is be in a constant tearful sulk, neglect their appearance, dress in tasteless and ridiculous styles, smell bad, scratch their scalps with their forks, pick their noses, bad-mouth other women, tear buttons off the man’s suit, and burn holes in it with their cigarettes. I am convinced that a woman would be shot of the most devoted lover in short order.

  It is my hope that Luise will one day turn her back on me in disgust. Today she is meeting Heinrich. Heinrich has money, Heinrich is hardworking, Heinrich is gentle and affectionate, he is well brought up, both bourgeois and high-minded, positively elegant in demeanor, and of stainless appearance. In skat terms, he would be a jack of spades while I’m the seven of diamonds. Admittedly, jack of spades down is worse than seven of diamonds in the hand. Unless, that is, Luise played nul ouvert. But then I think women would rather play a grand in a foursome. Besides, they don’t know how to lead, they always overdo it.

  At the Klattes’, the festivities have begun. Luise’s cookies have been baked according to a magazine recipe: aromatic and without butter. I’ve met their sort before, and I avoid them. If I should lose an eyetooth, I don’t have money to buy a new one.