After Midnight

by Irmgard Keun

  They were playing the National Anthem on the radio, so it must be midnight. Herr Kulmbach got to his feet, raising his hand. Other people suddenly stood up here and there in the bar, pale hands raised in the dim light. Next came the Horst Wessel Song, about the brown battalions …

  “Mind you, ’course the Führer doesn’t know the kind of thing that goes on,” said Herr Kulmbach, looking as if he might weep, which would not have surprised me, for he was really rather drunk. He ordered another round of kirsch, and insisted on all of us going on to the pub in the Old Town with the ox-bone on the wall and his name carved on it.

  Pielmann and Gerti actually did go off with Kulmbach to look at the bone. The place was open all night, he said, or in any case if he knocked in a certain way they’d always let him in.

  I’ve often noticed how pleased and proud men are at having to knock in a certain way at the doors of perfectly harmless pubs, in order to get in. I expect there are some men who take to politics just for the sake of the secret signals you have to give.

  I was rather surprised, at first, to find Gerti was going with them instead of staying with me, but she was very sad, and terribly distraught, and in that sort of state a woman would rather a man she doesn’t like for company than a woman she does. A man is a man, after all.

  I didn’t go with them. I didn’t want to be as lonely as I would have been in their company. Pielmann would be comforting Gerti: Gerti always has someone to comfort her, and who have I got? Kulmbach had nothing on his mind but his bone.

  And I promised Liska to go and look for Heini, so that’s what I’ll do.

  I wish Franz were here now. He wrote me that letter. “Dear Sanna …”

  I am afraid. Fear is rising around me, like rising water, up and up, never stopping. It’s like death by drowning. I could go straight home, but what would I do there? I don’t feel sleepy. Who loves me? Whom do I love?

  I’ll go and find Heini. At night he always goes to that café in Goethe Street where they serve beer.

  There’ll soon be wallflowers out in this little square, with flowers like velvet, smelling the same way they look. God help me.

  One of dead Berta’s little shoes was lying under the table. The proprietor picked it up and fingered it, as if he were planning to keep it as a pledge.

  Everything is so sad. I can’t help thinking of Franz, and the way his baby brother died. I can’t help thinking of Aunt Adelheid, who wanted to see me in prison.

  It is nearly three years ago I left Lappesheim and came to Cologne. I arrived at the big railway station. It smelled of dust and hot sunshine. It was a summer afternoon. There was hurry and bustle all around me: sweating people, suitcases in motion. I hadn’t come very far, but I was arriving here to start a new life, and I was full of pleasurable apprehension. Suddenly a pair of long black arms went round me, and hard straw scratched my face. It was Aunt Adelheid, scratching my face with her hard straw hat instead of kissing me with her mouth. I felt at once we weren’t going to love each other, and I hadn’t even seen her face yet. Then I did see it. It was sharp and grey, with narrow, dark, glittering eyes. Aunt Adelheid’s voice was shrill and sharp. Everything about her pierced and cut you. I felt like crying.

  Then somebody took my hand. And didn’t say anything, just looked at me quietly and thoroughly. He was tall and thin, with a pair of patient shoulders. He had a pale, serious face, and I thought his brow looked gentle and thoughtful, though it didn’t seem particularly striking. His eyes and brow and mouth and shoulders, in fact, all looked a blur to me, smudged and running together. All I could really see clearly was the glaringly bright red silk scarf he was wearing. It looked ridiculous. What man wears a scarf like that? Then I saw the man’s arms. They hung by his sides, long and sad, like the arms of captive apes with no real reason left for climbing, so that their long arms now seem superfluous.

  The man was Aunt Adelheid’s son Franz, my cousin. I thought he was crazy. I felt like laughing.

  I didn’t laugh; I didn’t cry.

  Franz carried my case for me. His long arm got even longer, his patient shoulders more patient than ever.

  Franz works in a solicitor’s office, but he’ll never get to be head clerk. He has his strengths, but they’re not the sort that get you anywhere in normal life. He has no friends, because his nature is a sad and lonely one. He has no ambition: he doesn’t want to do better than other people. He seldom says anything much, so what are people supposed to make of him? And he always concentrates on one thing at a time, which tends to make other people nervous. If he picks a glass up, then he will be concentrating entirely on the holding of that glass, unable to think or feel anything else. When he looks at a stone, he’s entirely caught up in the sight of that stone, and can’t talk or listen at the same time. When he eats, he eats. And when he loves, he loves.

  Sometimes he seems to be living wrapped in thick veils. When you speak to him, he wakes up without actually having been asleep. Nobody knows what he is thinking or dreaming of inside those veils. He may know himself, but he doesn’t talk about it. He just lives, and that’s all there is to say. When you merge into life you can’t describe the feeling.

  But perhaps he sometimes thinks how he killed a baby. The baby was his little brother.

  There is a photograph of this baby hanging over the sofa where Aunt Adelheid sits at mealtimes. The upholstery of the sofa is threadbare. It was once green, and then went yellow with time and the sunlight that filters into the room grudgingly, but constantly.

  The place always smells of rancid fat and rank cabbage, because there is no door between it and the kitchen, which consists of nothing but a small gas stove and a sink. The kitchen lies on one side of the room and the stationery shop on the other. There are some crackers lying on a small table next to the counter. I could always see those crackers from my chair at the dining table. They looked creased and purple, like withered lilac. Old as the hills they were, made of weary, crumpled crepe paper. You weren’t allowed to clear them away, because Aunt Adelheid thought perhaps she’d sell them yet. And then perhaps she hoped she wouldn’t. A blond commercial traveler from Cologne had left her this consignment of crackers years ago. She once told me about him. Naturally it’s a sad thing for a woman when a man sleeps with her and then makes off, leaving nothing behind but crackers. And when instead of a love letter, all she gets is an invoice for the crackers from the man’s firm.

  The dead baby’s photograph hangs over the sofa, opposite Franz’s place at the table. Its frame is made of silver, twisted so that it’s supposed to look like a wreath of flowers. The picture itself shows Aunt Adelheid sitting holding a baby with a bald head and a long lacy dress. The infant in baby’s evening dress was burnt to death.

  Franz was three years old at the time, a resident of Lappesheim, though you can’t say such a little boy is actually residing anywhere, he just exists. Aunt Adelheid’s ramshackle little house stood in Ufer Street, jammed in between two larger houses which almost crushed it. Its roof was made of slate the silvery-grey colour of a raven in flight. The roof was defective and the windows cracked, for Aunt Adelheid’s husband was not a builder or a glazier but a tailor, and if people along the Mosel can’t do a thing for themselves they don’t employ other folk to do it for them.

  He was a good tailor, and always very cheerful. First Aunt Adelheid did for his cheerfulness, and then he died of TB. He left two children, Franz, aged three, and little Sebastian, aged six months.

  Aunt Adelheid was down by the ferry, talking to the woman there, moaning about her late husband’s death. She never had a good word to say for him when he was alive, wouldn’t let him go to the pub, wouldn’t so much as let him smile. But once he was good and dead she wept and wailed over him. Suddenly the ferry woman saw people running about in Ufer Street in agitation, shouting and waving. There was smoke coming out of Aunt Adelheid’s house, pouring out of the windows. And there was a bright and flickering glow in the street. The crowd bunched closer together. �
�Fire!” shouted several young fellows, hoarse and loud and long, to give the volunteer fire brigade the alarm. Aunt Adelheid staggered towards her house. She was weak at the knees, she collapsed and then stood up again. Segebrecht, the pub landlord, came towards her, limping in a stiff, slow way, black as the Devil with soot. People stood back to form a rigid, silent alleyway. Aunt Adelheid and Herr Segebrecht were approaching each other from opposite ends of this alley. Segebrecht was carrying something black and crumpled. There was a little rag of singed, blue wool dangling from the black thing—Aunt Adelheid tottered, and all the women suddenly screamed in chorus.

  Little Franz had lit the fire. He was proud of knowing how to do it. People had rescued him from a blazing room, and while Segebrecht carried poor dead little Sebastian towards Aunt Adelheid, Franz stood there outside the burning house, hands clasped in front of the fire, eyes shining with happiness.

  Nobody loved Franz any more. Not the people in the village, not his mother. In her desperation, she just wouldn’t believe that if it was anyone’s fault it was hers. Why had she left two tiny children on their own? She wanted someone to take the blame, so it had to be little Franz. As time went by, Aunt Adelheid idolized dead little Sebastian more and more, constantly weeping and praying by his grave.

  If Franz was going to be loved too, even a tiny little bit, he’d have had to die as well. He went very quiet, and stayed that way. He didn’t learn to talk early, or have any fun learning, because nobody wanted to speak to him. People avoided him, and he had to get used to being silent and lonely.

  I didn’t like Franz myself at first. And then I came to like him because Aunt Adelheid didn’t. I wanted to be nice to him; it was so sad and horrible to see the way Aunt Adelheid tormented him. Franz had to put flowers and leaves round the photograph of little Sebastian before dinner every Sunday. Aunt Adelheid gave him the flowers and leaves to be arranged separately, and then sat on a chair in silence watching Franz’s hands, which sometimes shook and let the flowers drop. And then Aunt Adelheid would look at him sternly, without a word, and Franz went red and bent down to pick the flowers up. “I am surprised, but glad, that you can bring yourself to eat,” she sometimes said in a slow, chanting sort of voice, at which Franz would put down his knife and fork, with hopeless despair in his eyes, his arms hanging long and thin by his sides.

  One day I couldn’t stand it any more. I shouted at Aunt Adelheid. She was so surprised she couldn’t answer back. I don’t remember exactly what I said, except that the drift of it was the accident was her own fault, hers and not Franz’s, he’d only been a tiny child at the time without any idea what he was doing. And it was her fault little Sebastian was killed, and her fault Franz was unhappy. And if little Sebastian was an angel in heaven now, he’d be very sad about his mother and he would love Franz very much. Aunt Adelheid never forgave me for saying all this, but there was a happy look in Franz’s eyes.

  I did want to be nice to him, but then I made some friends and went out dancing with them in the evening now and then, and I felt embarrassed when Franz came to see me home, with his silent face and his patient ape-like arms and his ridiculous red scarf. We’d be sitting in the middle of a lot of noise, and he was tranquil. He would sit there at our table, grave and friendly. He did nothing to trouble us, and yet it was troubling. So the others laughed louder and louder in their annoyance, as if to smother him with their laughter. They made jokes about him which didn’t bother him a bit, because he didn’t understand the jokes. Then they laughed even more angrily. Once they tried making him drunk, but he didn’t get drunk.

  There were some very smart and self-assured girls among my friends, and I went to no end of trouble to try and be like them. The boys put on airs as well; I was afraid they’d think me silly and stupid. Often I joined in their laughter, afraid they might notice I didn’t really understand what they were laughing at. I wanted them to admire me as much as they admired themselves. It was fear made me want to be one of them; they were always ganging up on someone, one person at a time, and I didn’t want them ganging up on me. So I went along with them over Franz, making even nastier jokes about him than they did. I felt proud when they laughed at my jokes, but I was ashamed of myself too.

  When I had to pay a quick visit to the Ladies and got out of the noise and the laughter, I used to feel sad and disgusted. I’d leave the Ladies as fast as I could, scared even to take the time to comb my hair. I was afraid the others would be laughing at me while I was gone, as indeed they were.

  Franz went on being nice, and I went on being nasty.

  One day there was an exhibition in Cologne, in the Neumarkt: an exhibition of venereal diseases and the consequences of inter-racial breeding within a nation. It was organized by the Strength Through Joy movement. Aunt Adelheid and I went to see it, because there was nothing indecent about it, it was in the cause of scientific explanation, so it was our duty to go.

  I was fairly well used to the idea of horrors, from what they had told us at gas mask drill, but now I was actually seeing eroded embryos preserved in spirit. And pictures of little babies whose eyes were just hollows full of yellowish-green pus. Women whose deformed breasts and buttocks touched the ground. Models of old men looking like crazy little children, and little children looking like ancient, wrinkled old men. And blood and pus and sticky red sores everywhere. All as a result of venereal diseases and inter-racial breeding. And then people have to go inventing poison gas too. Makes you quite surprised, speaking as a human being, to be alive at all and not have your entire body eaten away.

  We were studying the eroded noses section when an elderly gentleman came up and spoke to Aunt Adelheid. He took his hat off, very politely. “I believe we’ve met, ma’am,” he said. His head was bald and round and brownish-grey, and his lower lip was thick and red, drooping like a mattress hung out of the window to air.

  “Why, so we have, Assistant Secretary!” said Aunt Adelheid, beaming in a proud and happy way.

  We got into conversation. The Assistant Secretary—his post was in the Civil Service—always used to buy his notebooks at Aunt Adelheid’s shop. “A shocking sight, eh?” he said, pointing to the eroded noses.

  “Yes, indeed,” said Aunt Adelheid gravely. “Terrible, everyone ought to see it, it’s a warning to us all.” Don’t ask me why Aunt Adelheid needed a warning. She was over fifty, with no chance left of catching a venereal disease. Unless she got it from eating unwashed fruit off a barrow in the street.

  The Assistant Secretary saw us home. He was very earnest and very polite.

  He took to calling at the shop to buy notebooks quite often. His name is Ludwig Wittkamp; Aunt Adelheid told me so. It’s quite surprising to find an important official like an Assistant Secretary has an ordinary personal name of his own. What does he need one for? He lives in the Hohenzollernring, though it is also hard to imagine him going about the ordinary business of living.

  He bought the cheapest little notebooks he could find in our shop. He thinks highly of orderliness, and writes down all his expenses. Especially when he goes away, because that’s when your expenses can get right out of hand, before you know it you’ve spent a whole three marks and can’t say where it went.

  One day the Assistant Secretary invited me out to the Beery Donkey to eat mussels. I felt very proud, and wrote home, and to my friend Josefine Leyendecker in Lappesheim, telling them how I was mixing frequently with Assistant Secretaries and suchlike important persons. Mussels are cheap. I’ve always liked them. The Assistant Secretary didn’t have any mussels for fear of food poisoning. He said he never ate mushrooms either. Or raw meat.

  The restaurant was full of the smell of food, and restless people eating greedily and talking. The Assistant Secretary had knuckle of veal and salad. Salads are healthy, full of vitamins.

  My mussels looked like squashed embryos. They reminded me of the exhibition of venereal diseases where I’d met the Assistant Secretary. I felt sick. I could have done with a Boonekamp to drink, but I did
n’t like to ask for one.

  The Assistant Secretary was cross because I left nearly all my mussels, but they still had to be paid for. He told me he could get through a whole bottle of wine in an evening, within four or five hours. Back home in Lappesheim, we’d get through four bottles in that time.

  He invited me to go home and share a bottle of wine with him afterwards. At the moment he was drinking gin, as a stimulant and because the knuckle of veal had been fatty. Then he talked to me like an important official and an educated man, i.e. seriously and politically and erotically. He said that as a Catholic he had to fight against his sexual desires, which were something tremendous. He felt drawn to prostitutes, down into those wild depths of life where you lose your money and your health and your soul’s salvation. That was why he fought the good fight against his desires. He admired the Führer, and supported him fervently as the saviour of the German nation when it was in danger of humiliation at the hands of enemy foreigners. But being a Catholic he was against Rosenberg, who had written some kind of mystical or mythological book about the twentieth century and the Germanic peoples. All this was very hard to understand.

  Then the Assistant Secretary said he yearned for marriage, since only in Christian marriage could he give free rein to his desires. It was all right then. I thought I’d love to be an Assistant Secretary’s wife, on account of Aunt Adelheid and everyone in Lappesheim. But then I’d have to put up with the free rein of those alarming desires. I couldn’t picture that part of it.

  Anyway, I didn’t have to wrestle with the problem of whether to marry him or not, because he didn’t want to marry me. The only wife who would do for him was one with a dowry, and property, and who was young and pretty and willing to work into the bargain. Well, where would I get a dowry and property?