by Irmgard Keun
Herr Klatte is dancing with one of the Perlbaums and singing “Life is for living.” The other Perlbaum is talking about varicose veins with Frau Klatte. A liqueur glass has fallen over. Luise is plucking an imaginary thread off my sleeve. Women always do that when they want to indicate ownership of a man. Johanna is stifling a yawn, and she has runs in her nylons. There was a time when German women believed nylons lasted forever. Unfortunately, stocking manufacturers are not altruistic. It is not in their interests to produce indestructible products.
A glutinous tiredness settles over the company. When I give the signal for departure, everyone perks up one last time.
Heinrich kisses the hands of both the Klatte ladies. I am glad to see that. His eyes are a little glazed over.
Johanna is singing out in the landing. She is such a good girl, trying to the last to make a bad impression.
Luise drags me into a corner of the hallway. “I know I must never leave you, Ferdi,” she says, even though I have asked her hundreds of times not to call me that. “Ferdi, you need someone who will look after you, and make sure you don’t go downhill. Imagine what would become of you if you fell in with a slut like that Johanna. I could see she had her beady eye on you. Your friend Heinrich is nice enough, but he doesn’t need a wife to keep him up.”
So everything turns out differently from the way I hoped.
On the street I pass the Perlbaum girls, who are cheerfully pushing their empty handcart in front of them. If I have the chance I’ll pinch an iron from my mother-in-law and slip it to those good girls to make up for the bombproof door and window frame.
On the corner, I run into Heinrich and Johanna. It’s a good feeling to have escaped this forced conviviality. I feel like drinking a cup of coffee with them and lapsing into an easy, harmonious tiredness together. Perhaps we’ll go up to Johanna’s for half an hour.
“Do you mind if I walk your cousin home?” asks Heinrich. “I do really like your fiancée, in terms of my readership profile she’s extremely interesting to me. It probably wouldn’t occur to your cousin here to read a solid family journal, but then I’d quite like to stop thinking about work for five minutes.” Before I can say anything, they both steer for a taxi. And there I was, thinking they liked me and valued my company.
A soft damp mist puffs up out of the ruins. There’s a smell of earth. Slowly I traipse along the unlit street to my cold bed at the Widow Stabhorn’s.
* Weiberfastnacht (Women’s Carnival) is held on the Thursday before Ash Wednesday in Catholic parts of Germany, including the Rhineland and (as here) Cologne; in the course of riotous celebrations, women are free to kiss men on the cheeks and to chop off their neckties.
My mother Laura
Laura is coming. Laura is my mother. Ever since I can remember, we children called her Laura. It’s a round sort of name, and one that suits her. It almost doesn’t feel like a name to me anymore. If I ever had another mother, I would call her Laura as well.
Laura is big and stout. My father, we children. and all our friends would have been sad if Laura had ever lost a pound of her majestic, soothing fat. We were all fortified by our belief in Laura’s immutability.
Laura has delicate joints and small hands and feet. She has a beautiful, calm face and dark, lustrous straight hair. Laura would never have had her hair marcelled or waved. It’s not in her nature to take measures.
The most beautiful aspects of Laura are her eyes and her voice. She has very large eyes that look like pools of dark golden varnish, and heavy lids with long lashes. Usually these eyes are half-closed, and it’s a great surprise whenever she decides to open them wide. Her voice is soft and purring and unexcited.
I can’t remember ever having seen her agitated or cross. Laura is a genius of sleep. She loves to spend her life, as much as possible, recumbent. As soon as some embarrassment, annoyance, or problem is brought to her, Laura goes to sleep, breathing calmly, with a serene smile.
Laura is lazy. Many women are justly praised for their industry. The thought of Laura industrious would be frightful indeed if it weren’t frankly impossible.
It’s possible that I owe my life to Laura’s indolence. I am convinced that it’s chiefly out of indolence that Laura had one child after another. I have four brothers and three sisters, not including half-siblings. In any case, I owe my charmed infancy to Laura’s indolence.
Laura was eighteen when she married my father. For any other woman, my father would have been the most difficult husband imaginable. He was unable to ruffle Laura’s calm. He needed her the way the vineyard needs the sun. My parents’ marriage was unusual but happy.
My father was a painter. He was known in his time, maybe he will one day become famous. He was crazy about painting, really obsessed with it. It killed him that he wasn’t a second Rembrandt. Laura let him rage and wail. Most women are inclined to soothe their husbands at great length, when soothing is the last thing they need.
Our income, as you might imagine, was irregular. In her dealings with creditors and bailiffs, Laura manifested antique greatness. A colleague of my father’s was once heard to say that with a wife like that it must be a pleasure for a man to have debts.
I can remember one bailiff in Munich who made the most hard-boiled debtors tremble. Not Laura. “Markus,” she said softly and slowly to my father, “they can’t lock us up or take our children away, and they’re not allowed to beat us or cut up your painting, so why don’t you just go up to your studio.”
“Your calm drives me wild,” my father yelled back. Laura closed her eyes and, smiling, fell asleep.
She received the bailiff lying on the sofa. We children were formed up into a picturesque group on the hearthrug. The bailiff said, oh, I don’t know, something or other. With a charming smile my three-year-old sister Nina offered him a sweet. Laura batted her eyelids open and said mildly, “We would have liked to give you something as well”—I can remember the bailiff retreating in polite confusion after that.
A landlord in Stuttgart was not so gentle. The approach he tried was crude. “Come back when you’ve calmed down a little,” Laura said and irrevocably went to sleep.
In Berlin one day my brother Toni’s teacher turned up at Laura’s. He was in a terrible state because he had something awful to say to her. Finally, he managed to spit it out: he had caught Toni telling lies, and not just once. “Lord,” said Laura, “we all have to lie on occasion, and Toni I’m sure will do too, so he might as well get some practice at it now. I hope he’s got a good memory; perhaps you should make sure he knows when he’s lying because otherwise it’s easy to get confused.” The teacher looked baffled; Laura ended the interview by falling asleep.
My father would fall in love from time to time. We lived with it the way that in other families they lived with the father having allergies. As long as the girl or woman in question staved him off, my father would be difficult and tense. His work suffered. Since the objects of passion were usually regular visitors, we were all at pains to wrap them in cotton wool and charm them. When my father got his way, the whole family for a few days would experience cloudless happiness. We had the most delightful nannies who felt terrible towards Laura and tried desperately and in all sorts of ways to make themselves pleasant and useful in the household. Some of them stuck around long after my father had deserted them. As soon as his passion had ebbed away, the abandoned creature was given into Laura’s care. There were periods during which Laura had three or four girls in her care. We got to see the agreeable side of them, cooking, cleaning, knitting, and lamenting the fickleness of men in general and in particular.
Laura kept a feeling of honest gratitude towards the girls. When a lady once intimated to her that her husband had never been unfaithful to her, Laura said without the least irony, “Oh, you poor thing, how can you stand it?”
Often father’s brother, Uncle Kuno, would help out. He was a solid man who could
hang on to his money. He never got around to marrying because he was so completely absorbed by our family.
Sometimes there was only enough lunch for three people, and then Laura would farm us out to other families. “I don’t want my children to starve,” she would declare, and send us each somewhere else. “Stay there whether they want you or not, make yourselves agreeable and tell them someone’s collecting you in the evening.”
Occasionally, it would transpire that some of us would spend several weeks or months with relatives or acquaintances in the country or abroad. Usually the other families would try and give us a strict upbringing, and we were always happy to be back with Laura, where we weren’t threatened with any pedagogical measures. I was keenly envied by my classmates at school because my mother would sign the most horrifying report card without even looking at it. Once I appeared with seven other small boys, who all wanted Laura to sign theirs for them. Laura was sorry she couldn’t oblige. “I twice had to repeat classes and my marks were always terrible, especially in conduct,” she told the fascinated lads. Laura was incredibly popular with my friends and the friends of my siblings. Her room was often full of children, like a youth protest. The children didn’t bother her. When she had enough of them, she went to sleep. The wildest din wasn’t enough to keep her awake.
When I was ten, my father died of a lung infection. I happened to be staying with a great-aunt in Amsterdam, so I don’t know if Laura cried. I think, at the deepest level of her being, she went on living with him.
Uncle Kuno took over the management of the household. He moved the whole family to Bonn, where he had a chair in botany.
He was very lucky that we boys had innate housewifely talents. Leberecht had a swift and charming way of laying the table and an inspired technique for washing up. At the age of thirteen, Matthäus attached buttons for the whole family, and could bake bread and cake. My fourteen-year-old brother Luitpold and I had mastered electrical appliances, could run the coal-burning stove perfectly, and bottled fruit and vegetables. By the time I was eleven I outperformed Luitpold in this last discipline, and during bottling season was loaned out to sympathetic families to whom we felt indebted. Toni cleaned windows, made beds, and invented vegetarian dishes that no one liked. He had read a book about the meat trade in Chicago that had turned him off meat. He was crazy about animals. In Toni’s presence, no one would have dared squash a bug.
Unlike us boys, the girls were perfectly useless in the household. Before little Nina could walk, she used to crawl around in Father’s studio. She could draw before she could write. In Bonn she practically died from missing him so. Apart from crying, drawing, and painting, there was nothing she could do.
Aloisia was fifteen at the time and already so beautiful that she had no other occupation than to allow herself to be stared at adoringly and delightedly by the family. “Come here, Aloisia, I want to look at you for five minutes,” said Laura, and Aloisia let herself be looked at. “Thank you, Aloisia,” said Laura, before she went to sleep.
Oh, how Laura enjoyed her sleep. She lived in it, it made her happy. I wonder: does she still have such strong and joyful sleep? Laura mustn’t change.
It was Laura who made it possible for Aloisia to accept her beauty the way a bird might accept its ability to fly. It doesn’t suffer from it, it’s not proud of it. We all accepted ourselves with our gifts and our shortcomings, remote from any wish for change.
Once, when I was once bottling greengages with Luitpold, I suddenly felt a slicing yearning for my father, his thin ash-blond hair, his venerable pipe, his irascibility and absentmindedness. I longed for his violent tenderness and was gripped by the sort of mute perplexity I sometimes saw him in. I crushed a large round greengage in my hand and felt the corners of my mouth quiver. Luitpold looked at me. “He drew a squirrel for me once,” he said. “Let’s both cry.” We cried for a few minutes, and then we went back to bottling greengages.
We drew a distinction between quasi relatives and real relatives. Uncle Kuno was a real relative. He had Father’s soft hair, his nursery blue eyes, and his broad rumpled brow. You only realized how different he was from Father after you’d noticed how similar he was.
“What made you give the children their names, Laura?” Uncle Kuno asked once. “Nina, Toni, Ferdinand—they’re just about all right. But why Aloisia and Leberecht?”
We got our names from the respective officials to whom our father reported our births. Other parents spend months racking their brains as to what name to give their little darlings in spe. They spend days and nights working on a name that they might have come upon in half an hour. My parents exercised themselves as little as possible over their future darlings; they gave themselves time till they were there. Each new birth would plunge my father into a sea of guilt and made him prepared to offer Laura any conceivable sacrifice, even the walk to the registrar’s office. Officialdom affected him the way some women are affected by mice; even getting him to buy a stamp at a post office counter was torture. I inherited this morbid trait of his.
“Remind me, what are we calling him, Laura?” he would ask hurriedly as he was leaving the house. He was anxious to have the torment behind him and be back home with her. Laura suggested names she happened to think of. “Why not something different for a change, Markus? I’m thinking Lisbon, Coco, Mazurka, Pampas, New Moon.”
My father was all ready to fulfill her wish. But by the time he was at the registrar’s, either he had forgotten her suggestions or else the official’s reaction was frosty and disdainful. He suggested names to Father that he liked, and Father straightaway gratefully agreed, just so he could get away from the oppressive atmosphere as quickly as possible. Once back home, he would have forgotten again. It was sometimes weeks before someone took the necessary research upon himself and the family learned the name of their newest addition.
Today I am quite glad I am not called New Moon or Tobacco. An unconventional name is nothing but trouble.
My sister Elfriede, the minister’s wife, was always an alien in our family. She continually criticized us and did all she could to try and improve us. Even today she likes to appear good and noble. There may be something laudable about such an ambition, but since people usually strive to be or to seem what they are not, it tends to provoke suspicion and unease. When Laura heard Elfriede’s footfall, she straightaway fell asleep.
Even physically, Elfriede was unlike the rest of us. We were all dark, nimble, and sinewy as squirrels. Elfriede was lardy, Gouda blond, and slothful. Perhaps she was swapped as a baby. A mother other than Laura would probably have checked, but it’s not in Laura’s nature to take any unnecessary steps. She is not one of those women who, when offered something by a shopkeeper, asks, And is it fresh? Laura understands there are no shopkeepers who would say, Actually, no, it’s stale.
Similarly, no maternity unit would admit that they make mistakes over the labeling of babies. And of course, Laura has so many of her own children that she can quite easily accommodate a stray.
Elfriede generally felt happiest when staying with those relatives the rest of us liked least. I was once put with her in the house of three great-aunts. I was afraid of them because they made it their business to give me an upbringing, and for all their efforts, I continued to do everything all wrong. Elfriede had no trouble at all, she was exemplary in every way, and continually about some charitable good works. At school she was the one who pinned up the maps, dragged the stuffed animals into the room for art class, and carried the form mistress’s books.
I was nine years old when for the first and only time in my life, the possession of a sum of money drove me to despair, because I was unable to spend it.
Elfriede and I had brought our piggy banks with us from home. My piggy bank contained a lot of coppers, but also a twenty-mark note folded up small that a generous uncle had given me because I had asked for an airplane for Christmas.
When our pi
ggy banks were full, to my chagrin they were taken away from us by our aunts, so that we could buy something useful with them later.
I saw myself faced with the perverse obligation of having to steal my own money. Secretly, with a hairpin, I managed to fiddle the twenty-mark note out of the piggy bank.
That afternoon, I persuaded Elfriede to come out and spend the money with me. I wasn’t completely convinced of her trustworthiness, but our common exile had brought her closer to me and I relaxed my vigilance towards her. A vague instinct told me not to confess my grand auto theft, and I told her a preposterous story about a school inspector who had driven up in a glass coach and given me the money. I was told to spend it with my sister. It was foolish of me to allow Elfriede to take part in my adventure. Perhaps I thought it made me more secure if I had her participation. Perhaps, conversely, it was the added danger of including her. Perhaps I was driven by a devil to entangle this perennial good girl in a web of sin and drag the lofty creature down into the mire. Perhaps I only took Elfriede because there were no other children on hand.
Elfriede was a year older than me, but the possession of the twenty marks briefly gave me seniority.
First, I led her to a lemonade stand, where there were bottles of red, yellow, and green drinks. We sampled them all. Elfriede’s moral resistance was broken, and my sense of enterprise drew her with me.
The seals on these soda bottles were round balls of glass. I had often made the attempt to remove one from its bottle. There was nothing I desired more than one of these glass balls. In my lemonade intoxication I bought an extra bottle to take with us. With thumping heart and the feeling of a murderer disposing of a body, I smashed the bottle against the curb. At last I was left with the glass ball in my fingers. I no longer know what miracle I hoped for from its possession. Probably none. The little ball was enough of a miracle. I had freed it from its glass prison, and violently done to death a glass body for its sake. It had cost me some resistance, because everything was alive where I was concerned. I thought I hurt a sheet of paper if I tore it in half.
