Ferdinand, the Man with the Kind Heart

by Irmgard Keun

  Even during the time of my loquaciousness I hadn’t dared ask Uncle Hollerbach any questions, in spite of my burning curiosity. After he had vanquished me with his silence, I gradually lost my curiosity, even as Uncle Hollerbach lost none of his magic. I took him as he was and felt at peace. It was a new and wonderful experience for me to be with a person I wanted nothing from and who didn’t make me want anything either. Most people, myself included, want others to want something of them, regardless of whether they want to give anything or not. One is supposed to turn to them for advice, clever ideas, childhood memories, exclusive confidences, love, absolution of one sort or another, sympathy, all the various services of the heart and brain. They are afraid of being the sort of person people want nothing from. The German language supposes it is being harsh when it says of someone, “I wanted nothing to do with him.” Uncle Hollerbach saved me from unthinkingly falling for the expression. He was precisely someone no one wanted anything to do with. He wanted to be that. I wanted nothing from him either. But I was happy in his company and listened happily to the pure sound of our wanting-nothing-to-do-with-one-another.

  I was away from Cologne when Uncle Hollerbach died. One day I learned that he had died and that I had inherited his little shop and contents. At the time I was a long-distance lorry driver on the Munich–Berlin route, and I was in love with the wife of a scrap merchant. I can dimly remember she wanted to divorce him because he beat her and that I was somehow titillated by the idea of the delicate blond woman in the middle of so much bulky scrap metal.

  I left the scrap merchant’s wife without the least compunction and emotionally accepted Uncle Hollerbach’s inheritance. I tried to live as Uncle had done, in silence, as a hermit. And yet I forgot the lesson of his lifetime, and I left the poor deceased no peace, but bothered him endlessly, prying into his former life and fitting it out with my fantasies. I barely stopped short of brazenly summoning his voice to spiritualist sessions. I am uncomfortable with belief in the occult, but it is not for me to deny such a thing to the believer. I am mystified where blameless cultivated ladies and gentlemen get the neck to summon the ghosts of the indifferent dead. To summon them! Give Beethoven a table-turning and ask him if the price of potatoes is going up.

  If I die before her, I’m sure my fiancée Luise would have me summoned. I can feel the very idea of it making me purple with rage. Even alive, I dislike being summoned by her. Should she dare to do so after my death, I’m sure my spirit would meet her with some earthy invective. Why don’t the occultists understand that if that’s what they wanted, then spirits would come of their own accord? To my mind, a séance is a display of boorishness, and the more people believe in them, the worse it is. Even the grieving and pining of a loving consort provides scant justification. Who knows if a person in the Beyond even wants to be loved anyway? It’s a terrible thing that women like Luise ride roughshod over others’ wishes, imagining that the mere fact of loving them gives them all possible rights. Beyond that, many individuals are of the opinion they can make God a little pliant by loving Him with passionate humility and offering Him sacrifices. They never stop to ask themselves whether God is even in the mood for love and sacrifice, and doesn’t rather find them a pain in the neck.

  I expect the reason the Devil is so frisky is because he isn’t being love-bombed the whole time. If only people weren’t so convinced that their love was a general blessing. It’s a fine thing to love. It’s a gift to be allowed to love. If it should come to pass that a human being fills me with love, then I hope I will be able to feel gratitude above all things, whether or not they reciprocate and love me.

  I wasn’t an occultist and I never summoned Uncle Hollerbach’s spirit. But I sensed its presence in the moldy furniture, the dusty shelves, the yellowed books, and the gin bottles that I emptied in memory of the noble departed. I bought three geranium plants and bred carrier pigeons in the little courtyard. It was a gentle life, and especially charming to me because I took it to be a sort of holiday, purely temporary. And it did in effect soon pass.

  When I was released from POW camp, it was principally for the sake of the little shop that I made my way to Cologne, even though I knew the shop no longer existed. I had no other reason to go to Cologne. I had no reason to go anywhere else either, mind.

  I’m not from Cologne, I’m not even from the Rhineland. If someone asks me, “And where do you hail from?” I never know how to answer. My mother was born in Brazil, grew up in Holland, and married in Germany. My father came from Brandenburg, grew up in Cologne and Koblenz, studied in France, and later lived all over the place. And me? I was born in the middle of Lake Constance. I don’t like to admit as much, especially not in any official context, because it makes such a frivolous impression. Even if well-disposed listeners will understand that I’m not responsible for the arrangements made by my parents—they do somehow give me some of the blame. I spent my childhood in ten cities spread out over three countries. Such feelings as local patriotism or campanilismo never had a chance with me. At the moment I feel homesick for the South of France, tomorrow I might have a hankering to be by the North Sea, and the day after it could be Munich or Brussels.

  Soon Laura will be here. She’s still the most anchoring thing in my life. Just now she’s in Austria, where Uncle Kuno has been in charge of a botanical garden for many years. In the autumn he’s going to Bonn to resume his professorship. That way I’ll get to see the city of our new fairy-tale government princes.* I failed to exercise my ballot this time. I thought all the parties were so outstanding that I couldn’t decide to vote for any of them. As a nonvoter I of course represent a horrid antisocial element to all of them, whereas if I’d voted, it could only have been for parties not of my choosing.

  Before going on to Bonn, Laura and Uncle Kuno will spend a few days in Cologne. Nina and Aloisia, Toni and Luitpold are coming too. Johanna will throw a huge party for everyone. She loves throwing parties, especially ones that end up involving the police and fire brigade and go down in the memories of those present as unforgettable catastrophes.

  My brothers Matthäus and Leberecht won’t be there. Mathäus is a farm laborer in the South of France. He is a sun-worshipper. “Germany has no climate,” he always says. “God knows what it has instead. For eight months it has a kind of winter, and for four months something that isn’t summer.” Mathäus is far and away the cleverest of us and probably the one we looked to to make something of his life, in a bourgeois sense. But it so happens he loves the sun and would rather be a beggar under radiant blue skies than a minister-president or millionaire in some cool, foggy country.

  Leberecht is no beggar. He has a luxuriant imagination and a strong literary gift. There was a time when he felt under obligation to his talent and turned out novels and stories. Our whole family was excited and lived by his successes. We thought we had finally managed to produce someone with ambition. We encouraged him in any way we could. But one day Leberecht was fed up with writing, and said he’d had it up to here with it. He claimed that writing was the most loathsome profession there was. In order to keep his head above water, he had to write all the time, even when he had no ideas and wasn’t in the mood. That was as disgusting to him as having to sleep with a woman he had no feelings for. He could never be anywhere in peace and think about something nice without straightaway being pursued by the feeling he had to put it down on paper and make some money from it. Nor was he stupid and obsessed enough either—unfortunately—to think of his work as something unique and irreplaceable. In a nutshell, Leberecht decided it was better to live an adventure than write one. He was for several years a sailor and is currently a night porter in Brazil.

  He is happy and is able to live. My sister Elfriede, the minister’s wife, counts him as a disgrace to the family. After the war, the “disgrace” kept his European relatives above water by sending them coffee. Even Elfriede began to view Leberecht as perhaps the most precious of the Timpe clan. The most
celebrated German writer could never have engendered such pride in us as this obscure night porter in distant Brazil. Leberecht’s Brazilian life was the only thing that gained me respect and credit with my fiancée Luise, with my parents-in-law, my landlady Frau Stabhorn, and even with my brilliantly successful spiv of a cousin, Magnesius. With ten pounds of coffee before the currency reform I was a highly desirable little nabob of the ruins who would never starve, and who was even in a position to feed others. Those were great, proud days for me, when Leberecht had sent me a package of coffee. I even got sick with emotion and gratitude and had to rest up in bed. But since I knew that Leberecht wasn’t a rich man, and always from when he was a boy gave away more than he had, and had others to provide for in addition to me, I wrote to tell him I could get by on my own. Suddenly I didn’t like the way almost everyone here had the feeling that people abroad were wallowing in excess and ought to contribute here. Now, following the currency reform, there are endless people who can afford all the coffee, cigarettes, meat, and butter they want. They would be rather stunned to be told by some struggler that they ought to hand over some of their coffee and cigarettes.

  I think my brother Toni is the happiest and serenest of us all. Even as a boy, he loved animals and wouldn’t eat meat. His vegetarianism remained tolerable even for committed carnivores and didn’t turn him into a bigot. Toni is a gentle creature. Admittedly, like many gentle creatures, he is inclined to be stubborn. He married a mild little wife and owns a flower shop in Starnberg. In his garden he keeps tame squirrels, crows, starlings, rabbits, and bees. I expect he buys honey for the bees and lies down in the sun in summer to feed the mosquitoes, and bakes apple pies for the ravens so they don’t eat earthworms. At any rate, I would think Toni’s existence is more or less the way he always wanted it to be.

  Luitpold is a furniture maker in Sigmaringen. I think he’s gone broke five times. In spite of the most alarming circumstances, he’s always managed to stay afloat. Luitpold represents the type of good fellow who in nineteenth-century novels gets into trouble by issuing bonds for unreliable friends, allowing bills to fall due, paying allowances to children who were not his, and opening his heart and his wallet to impoverished widows. By the rules of our rough new world he is classified as a noble idiot.

  Maybe my sisters, Nina and Aloisia, will come as well.

  I am almost a little apprehensive about so much reunion. I hardly dare look forward to it in any pure way. I feel a little embarrassed in advance when I imagine so many possibilities for guilt, suppressed emotion, desperate getting over strangeness. I expect the others will be just as nervous. All except Laura, of course. It’s a good thing Laura’s coming.

  * In May 1949 Bonn was made the capital of West Germany, ahead of Frankfurt.

  The cheerful adviser

  The cheerful adviser is me. Liebezahl has offered me temporary employment in his swelling empire. He now has departments for podiatry, charms, talismans and scents, departments for magical cloth, for clairvoyance and crystallography and the interpretation of dreams, departments for color, astrology, chiromancy, and graphology.

  To help both me and himself, Liebezahl had the idea of extending and supporting his enterprise by taking on a general adviser. Of course, I’m hardly ideal for such a post, but Liebezahl views me as a friend, and he likes to help his friends, inasmuch as economic responsibility will allow. He’d like to give me a run, anyway—at least give me time to buy a coat and a few other necessities. Lord be thanked, it’s summer. I don’t have to shiver and bless every warm day. I don’t like to recall my last coat-less winter. Nor do I want to be ostentatiously poor when Laura and the others come. That would be importuning and could compel the good people to charitable acts that might be their undoing. I am already making efforts to eat regular meals so as not to look too hollow-cheeked. I would quite like to earn some money as well, so that I would be able to go away somewhere. I don’t know where I would go, and my plans are rather ill-defined, but I’d like to create at least the possibility for myself to travel.

  The idea of the cheerful adviser was Johanna’s. Liebezahl and I then developed it, after my own initial opposition. It seemed embarrassing to me and not something I could do.

  Liebezahl let me have a small whitewashed room with a flame-red carpet and dark-stained oak furniture. At first, he had thought in terms of an Oriental bazaar in which I would be lounging on plump cushions. I would be wearing a burgundy turban and be known as “Camilo, the Font of Eternal Wisdom.” In my condition of utter destitution, given appropriate payment, I would have been prepared to stroll about with a scarab in my navel, a leopard skin over my shoulders, and a coffeepot on my head, and to be called “Epaminondas, the Sphinx of the Northern Lights,” or anything else for that matter. But in purely technical, business terms I thought the Liebezahl concept ill-conceived. Very well, then let me be a sobersides in a lab coat, playing the headshrinker. I didn’t advise that either. Finally, Liebezahl understood that the attention of wide sections of the population was most likely to be engaged by something that approached it in the familiar manner of the advice columns in magazines—something along the lines of “Ask Uncle Baldwin” or “Great-Aunt Adele Gives Advice.”

  My consultancy comes with an outer office with a secretary and a heap of reference books.

  I had no influence on the promotional literature Liebezahl devised for me. According to that, I am a miracle of goodness, patience, experience, neighborliness, empathy, insight, practical common sense, intelligence, and worldly wisdom. I am uncorrupted, modest, cheerful, serious, discreet, instinctive, warmhearted. (These are all the attributes ascribed, as per personal columns, to men or women seeking partners in German family magazines.) And over and above that, I have qualities that no one else has ever had.

  Liebezahl bought me a pair of grey flannel trousers and two burgundy sports shirts that I look semi-normal in. He decided against further costumes or uniforms.

  So I sit behind my desk, as friendly, ordinary, and confidence-inspiring as possible, and await visitors.

  For the first fortnight, things were rather quiet, and I got chiefly clients who were referred to me by the other departments. But this past week I’ve been kept busy from nine in the morning till eight at night. Gradually I’m getting the hang of it. The very first day I was as nervous as the stand-in who is called upon to deputize for the star in Othello. I had no idea what people were going to ask me and what I would reply to them, and at the same time I was being paid for my vast superiority over those poor beings. Instead, I was in such a state that I would ideally have turned to the least of them for advice.

  Liebezahl had stashed a bottle of Steinhäger and a roll of mints in my desk drawer. The Steinhäger was to give me confidence, and the mints were to take the alcohol off my breath.

  My very first visitor was a woman who wasn’t sure whether she should go to Bavaria in October or not. She was looking to me for a decision. Today, questions like hers hold no terrors for me, but at the time I was stumped. The woman didn’t give me any lead at all. I ventured that presumably there would be some fine autumn weather in Bavaria. She said that wasn’t the point. I said the change would do her good. Luckily, she agreed with that, but she said it didn’t have to be Bavaria. At the end of half an hour I had worked out that the woman didn’t want to go to Bavaria at all, she wanted to buy primroses. And she didn’t really want primroses either, what she wanted was a midsized pink azalea. It was like this: her husband’s sister was about to celebrate her silver wedding anniversary, and they had to have a present. The woman was in favor of primroses, because they were the cheapest. The husband thought a primrose was too cheap. The flower question had led to marital discord. The woman has a woman friend in Bavaria whom she would have visited long ago, were it not that it cost so much to go there. She listed various things she had acquired in the past few months. Now she wanted to offer her husband a concession, and buy an azalea instead of t
he primrose, because she had thought how expensive the journey to Bavaria was. And she had already bought the azalea.

  The woman was full of gratitude to me when she left. I reciprocated. It had taken over half an hour to establish that the reason she had come was to tell me that she had bought an azalea.

  My next visitor was a tradesman’s apprentice who wanted to get into films and wanted some information as to which was the most lucrative: actor, screenwriter, or director. I asked my secretary next door for the addresses of some film companies and wished the young man every success; I was sufficiently responsible to tell him as he was leaving not to quit his apprenticeship, it would come in handy whatever he ended up doing.

  A fat old lady came in with an imposing shelf of bosom; she confused me by demanding to know whether she should undergo an operation to have her bosom reduced. I showed myself to be a rank amateur in my profession by urging the lady to consult a specialist. When I saw that she disliked my advice, and I started to panic in case she started undressing, I became unusually animated and eloquent. She was wonderfully proportioned; her bosom was absolutely contemporary; men disdained the slim, boyish figure; any number of film stars would count themselves lucky to be possessed of such a bosom, instead of having to mask their inadequacies in celluloid. Yes, and in view of the Goethe anniversary, she should bear in mind that Goethe—our very own Goethe!—was a fanatical advocate and praiser of the female bosom. I thought I had done enough to earn my crust. The lady looked well pleased, it didn’t occur to her to leave, and she wanted to hear further hymning of her bosom. She admitted that many men had already spoken as I had, and then she started telling me about these men. Finally, I got her to stop by pointing out that future men were usually more interesting than men in the past, and I referred her to our astrological department.