After Midnight

by Irmgard Keun

  The Assistant Secretary had thought I’d be inheriting the thriving pub in Lappesheim, and getting money from my humble but well-to-do father before that, in which case he wouldn’t have objected to my common origins. Because he himself is wonderfully well educated. He told me how he stood by the grave of someone called Hölderlin and read a poem by this Hölderlin. Not just once, either; several times. These were always edifying moments. All this was so sacred to him that he couldn’t talk about it, couldn’t even mention it. He went on to talk about it.

  I said I didn’t have any property, but I wasn’t poor. Then he fell silent for a while, drummed his fingers crossly on the table, had another gin, and then said well, he’d like to share a bottle of wine at home with me all the same. He said I looked like a skinny little schoolgirl.

  All of a sudden there was Franz, standing by our table. His face was pale, his eyes calm, his scarf resplendent. Oh, if only I hadn’t told him I’d be here with the Assistant Secretary this evening! The idiot—coming to take me home when I was out with a posh, worldly-wise Assistant Secretary!

  “Good evening,” said Franz. I wasn’t going to give him my hand. “Would you like to come home now, Sanna? It’s raining—I brought you a coat.” That stupid voice, so soft and velvety. What can you do about a pale-blue sort of voice like that? You can’t argue with it, you can’t get angry with it, you can’t laugh at it. What does someone like Franz want with a voice anyway? He himself seems quite surprised to have one.

  “Do sit down, won’t you?” said the Assistant Secretary, very correct and decidedly annoyed. Franz sat down slowly, back very straight. He laid his long thin hands carefully on the table, as if about to pray.

  The Assistant Secretary drew the corners of his mouth down scornfully and said well, it was nice for me to have such a gallant cousin to squire me about, and did I still feel like that bottle of wine? There was no need for the young gentleman to worry: he, the Assistant Secretary, would take me home by car.

  “Yes,” said Franz, and stayed put instead of going away.

  “For goodness’ sake, do take that ridiculous scarf off!” I said. My voice sounded shrill in my own ears. When he did take the scarf off, I felt as if I’d torn it from his neck with my own hands. The Assistant Secretary laughed. Franz looked sadly stripped and naked without it. The scarf lay on the pale wooden bench beside him, red and warm.

  Franz was given his scarf by Paul. Paul is Franz’s one friend. He is a fat, cheerful, red ball of a man. Franz found him in the Municipal Woods quite late one evening, when the place was deserted. Paul was lying in the middle of the road; a motorcyclist had run over him and didn’t stop. He wasn’t dead, but he had been run over, and he was still drunk too. The next car that came along would have finished him off. Franz dragged Paul off the road and helped him get home. That sort of thing, naturally, can lead to friendship. The two of them don’t have much to say to one another, but you can sense the friendly affection between them.

  Paul sometimes comes to the shop and annoys Aunt Adelheid by eating and drinking anything he can find in the kitchen, and taking postcards from the stand without paying for them. He gave Franz his scarf. Perhaps someone had given it to him and he felt ashamed to wear something so daft. No, that’s not right. Paul meant to give Franz the scarf as a handkerchief—it’s really a big silk square. But Franz thought it was too good for that, so he wore it round his neck, out of friendship and because he was pleased to have it.

  The waiter brought Franz a glass of beer. No one had ordered it, but Franz didn’t send it back.

  The Assistant Secretary said well, now he saw I was in good company, he might as well go. I still don’t understand why, but at the time I was terrified the Assistant Secretary’s feelings had been hurt, and I wanted to go with him.

  Suddenly a draught of air moved the red silk scarf on the bench. It looked as if it were breathing. The dark felt curtains at the door of the restaurant were pushed back a little way and a girl slipped through them. She was small and fair and delicate, like a Christmas fairy, all white and gold. But she was soaked with rain. She stopped beside our table, which was right by the entrance. You could hear the rain pelting down in the street outside. A waiter showed the girl one of the few empty seats in the restaurant, but she didn’t want to sit down; she shook her head, embarrassed and shy. I’d been just as shy myself, a few months back. Now I felt very fine and superior, compared to her. And she probably didn’t have any money. Her blouse was cheap and shoddy. I’d have wanted paying to wear a thing like that. She looked prettier than I ever did. I was glad the waiter showed his contempt by pointedly taking no notice of her.

  She’d only been standing there beside us for a moment before she turned to escape back out into the rain, having just escaped from it into the restaurant. Then Franz looked at her. She looked at Franz. My heart was thudding; there was a rushing in my ears, like red-hot wheels. The Assistant Secretary said something, but his voice was far away and I couldn’t hear him. Franz was giving this rain-soaked girl all in white and gold my coat. What did he think the idea was? My coat! It had been lying on his lap all this time, it was mine, he’d brought it for me. “Here,” he told the rain-soaked girl, “put this on and I’ll see you home.” What business had he speaking to a strange girl in his soft, velvety voice? What business had she looking at him with such a gentle, dark-blue light in her eyes? This was too much! “Sanna,” said Franz, “Sanna, you’re going by car, you won’t need a coat. I’ll bring it back to you later.”

  “I’m not going in any car, Franz—I do need my coat—let me have it! Now! Is the bill settled, waiter? Good night, Assistant Secretary. Come on, Franz, please,” I said. “I don’t want to go home in the rain on my own. I’ve got your scarf in my bag.”

  I didn’t sleep downstairs at Aunt Adelheid’s, on the same floor as herself and Franz. There wouldn’t have been room for me. I slept in the same building, but up in an attic which also belonged to Aunt Adelheid, next to old Herr Pütz’s apartment. My attic room was small and bare: damp and cold in winter and very hot in summer. Franz had never been up there with me.

  “Please come up, Franz,” I said. “I’m scared to be alone tonight. I’m scared I won’t be able to sleep.”

  Dark, cold, sticky, misty air crept in through the cracks around my window. My hands were stiff with cold, my face was burning. It had stopped raining outside; the sky was quiet. And the room was full of deafening silence. Franz stood by the door, tall, upright, silent, his face turned to the wall. Far away, a car hooted its horn.

  The small electric bulb hanging from the ceiling cast a dim, dirty orange light. My bed looked like a piece of orange peel. I took off my shoes and stockings. “That Assistant Secretary is a disgusting old man, Franz. I’m never going out with him again.”

  I took my dress off. “Here’s the chair, Franz—sit down. I hope your mother won’t realize you’re up here with me. Goodness knows what she’d think. Why do people have to think goodness knows what about something perfectly harmless? I think it’s horrible of them. I don’t understand it.”

  I took my vest off. “Don’t turn round for a moment, Franz.” Why didn’t he move, why didn’t he say something? “I don’t think I could bear it here in Cologne without you, Franz.” I was lying in bed in my cheap, ugly, white nightie. Will I ever have a silk nightie? “You can turn round now, Franz, it’s all right. Supposing I was ill, you’d come and visit me and see me looking just like this.”

  But I wasn’t ill.

  Franz was still standing there, silent, not moving, his throat all pale and white; it looked thin and naked and helpless without the bright red scarf I made him take off. This was the first time I’d ever seen him without his red scarf. I felt ashamed. I wanted to go on and on feeling ashamed. “Good night, Franz, I’m tired. Give me your hand.”

  He gave me his hand.

  And when the soft, gentle light of dawn slowly came in to brighten my room, I got up quietly and opened the window. The air se
emed to be singing, hovering, and my heart was light and calm and happy as the earth after a thunderstorm. I took the bright red silk scarf out of my black handbag. It was a bit crumpled, and I tried to smooth it out.

  Franz lay in my bed, sleeping deep and soundly. I had to laugh, because even his snoring sounded soft and velvety. I put the red silk scarf in his dear sleeping hands.

  4

  ALTHOUGH AUNT ADELHEID DIDN’T CARE A BIT about Franz, she still wanted him to belong to her body and soul, not to anybody else at all. It annoyed her no end to see Franz getting more cheerful, while she had hardly any power to torment him now. Seeing Aunt Adelheid insisted on having fresh flowers round that dead baby’s photograph every Sunday, I simply took to arranging them on Sundays myself, without stopping to ask her. For Franz, it was like being released from a curse, and Aunt Adelheid lost interest in the wreathing of the picture. At last there came a Sunday when it got no wreath at all, because she had forgotten to buy the fresh flowers.

  Of course she soon ferreted out the fact that there was something going on between Franz and me. Well, we didn’t go to much trouble to hide it. Franz told her we were planning to get married in one or two years’ time, and how could she actually object? Hitherto Franz had been giving his mother his entire salary, getting just a little bit of pocket money now and then. Now he gave her only half of it, and saved up the rest of the money for our future. We were thinking of opening a shop some day. I thought a tobacconist’s would be best. We wouldn’t have needed much initial capital, because the cigarette firms give you credit, and you could begin in an area where shop rents are really cheap. Later on, we might sell newspapers and magazines and stationery too, and we could add a little lending library as well. Franz and I often liked to lay such plans. We enjoyed it.

  Aunt Adelheid tried to annoy us and spite us in any way she could, but we didn’t much mind: there were two of us, after all, and we were of the same mind. When there are two of you, you can laugh at a good many things which would make you cry on your own.

  All the same, Aunt Adelheid managed to ruin practically everything for us with the help of politics. It was like this:

  We’d gone out for a walk one Saturday, in the middle of the day, Franz and myself and Franz’s friend Paul. Paul is short and round and fat, not a man you’d fall in love with, but I was extremely fond of him. As soon as he came rolling up you felt like laughing. He worked in a hardware factory in the Ehrenfeld district.

  That Saturday, he’d invited Franz and me out for a glass of local Cologne beer in the Päffgen Bar. We were very cheerful, and we had a gin as well. Then, unfortunately, I had to go back to serve in the shop, because Aunt Adelheid was having a coffee party that afternoon. Franz and Paul came too, to keep me company, and in return I promised to pinch them something to eat from the kitchen on the sly.

  Aunt Adelheid was sitting in the shop with Fraulein Fricke, an old maid who keeps house for her brother. We were in good time; the rest of the women coming to the hen-party wouldn’t arrive for another half hour or more.

  Fraulein Fricke was deep in political conversation with Aunt Adelheid. “Before the first of March, you know, I used to cry—every night, I used to cry, and if I didn’t cry I prayed, and what did I look like?”

  “Oh, dear me, you looked terrible.”

  “But I don’t cry nowadays, do I, and I don’t need to pray any more, and I’m looking better too now, aren’t I?”

  “Oh, dear me, yes, you’re looking better too now.”

  “Trust, you see, that’s all we need, and the Führer will do the rest.”

  They went on talking about the Führer, and Fraulein Fricke said she’d made a little altar to him in her room, with candles burning all the time.

  I could tell Paul wanted to provoke Aunt Adelheid and Fraulein Fricke, who is always a bit peculiar. That was fine by me. Paul produced a newspaper showing the main differences between National Socialists and criminals. On the left, there were pictures of the heads of Gauleiters, group leaders and other high-up Nazis, and on the right there were the heads of pickpockets, rapists, robbers, murderers and suchlike. Paul hid the captions below the pictures and got the two women to guess who was a National Socialist and who was a criminal. They actually guessed wrong three times running, which amused Paul a lot and made both ladies furious. Paul said it didn’t say much for their sound German instincts if they could take a National Socialist for a criminal, and vice versa.

  The atmosphere in the little shop was so thick you could have cut it with a knife. There was a hot and angry gleam in Aunt Adelheid’s eyes, and Fraulein Fricke’s breath was coming all thin and whistling. I switched the radio on in the next room. There was a concert on gramophone records. Then they said Göring would be talking on the radio that evening. All the ladies were going to stay at Aunt Adelheid’s to hear him. Thinking nothing of it, I said I’d rather not hear him, because I always got the feeling he was telling me off. And that was absolutely all I said on the subject, but even so it was far too much. It’s true, though: one of those speeches begins harmlessly enough, going on about the magnificent German nation which will overcome everything, and you feel you’re being praised and flattered for listening to it. Then the radio lets out a sudden flood of abuse, saying everyone who offends against the nation’s will for reconstruction will be smashed, and those who go in for harmful, carping criticism will be destroyed.

  My heart always stands still when I hear those speeches, because how do I know I’m not one of the sort who are going to be smashed? And the worst of it is that I just don’t understand what’s really going on. I’m only gradually getting the hang of the things you must be careful not to do.

  And back at Aunt Adelheid’s at that time, I was a good deal dimmer than I am today. But even then I was scared stiff someone might notice I didn’t understand a word of it. Göring and the other ministers often shout over the radio, very loud and clear and angry. “There are still some who have not understood what it is all about, but we shall know how to deal with them.” I hate hearing that kind of thing, it’s creepy, because I still don’t know what it is all about, or what they mean. And it’s far too dangerous to ask anyone. Judging by things I’ve picked up from what I’ve heard and read, I could be either criminal or of chronically unsound mind. Neither of which must come out or I’ll be done for. If I’m criminal I’ll go to prison, and if I’m of chronically unsound mind they’ll operate on me so that I can’t get married and have children.

  The long and the short of it is that I still don’t know any more today, but I’m cleverer than I was then, when I told Aunt Adelheid and Fraulein Fricke I didn’t want to listen to speeches on the radio.

  We went on to talk about all our speechifying Party men, in a perfectly harmless way, and Fraulein Fricke and Aunt Adelheid started going on about the Führer again. They thought he was absolutely marvelous. Aunt Adelheid told us about the wild enthusiasm that filled her when she heard the Führer speak in the Exhibition Hall in Cologne. Paul asked her what she had particularly liked about it, and I said, “She liked the way he was sweating.” Fraulein Fricke immediately clasped her hands in horror above her head, as if I’d said the most dreadful thing in the world. And I couldn’t explain, because a woman came into the shop just then to buy postcards with pictures of dogs on them. Aunt Adelheid disappeared into the room behind the shop with Fraulein Fricke, and I felt perfectly happy again, idiot that I was, and hadn’t the faintest notion that the two ladies were planning to twist my words into a rope to hang me with.

  It’s a fact that the way the Führer was sweating did make a bigger impression on Aunt Adelheid than anything else. She said so herself, too. I was in the hall with her while the Führer was speaking. He shouted like mad and was in a state of tremendous excitement. I couldn’t make out a word of it. So I asked Aunt Adelheid what he had been saying afterwards, and asked her to explain the speech to me. It turned out that Aunt Adelheid couldn’t tell me a single thing the Führer had said, but sh
e did say, quivering with enthusiasm, “Wasn’t it wonderful? Have you ever known anything like it? Did you notice how he could hardly speak at all, and went white as a sheet and nearly collapsed? That man spares himself nothing. Did you see the way he was bathed in sweat at the end of the speech, and then the SS surrounded him?” Well, that was what Aunt Adelheid said, and I saw it myself. Aunt Adelheid feels just the same in the City Theatre. I’ve been there with her a couple of times. She doesn’t think anything much of the actors in comedies. But we saw a play called Thomas Paine, where there was an actor down in a dungeon, wearing clanking chains and ranting away so that you were fairly deafened. “It goes right through you,” said Aunt Adelheid. And when the actor took his bow she said, “Look, he’s utterly exhausted, bathed in sweat, what a wonderful actor, we ought to see this play more often.” And then she even bought a photograph of the actor and hung it in her bedroom. The Führer’s hanging there too.

  So I had every right to assume that the most important point, to Aunt Adelheid, is for someone to sweat.

  Three days after that Saturday, there was a brisk, firm knock at my attic door at seven in the morning. At first I thought it was Aunt Adelheid on a spying trip to see if Franz was sleeping with me, but he’d gone an hour ago. I tried to go back to sleep instead of answering the door. Then there was more knocking—thump, thump, thump—and loud, harsh men’s voices.

  A couple of minutes later two deadly serious men were crawling about under my bed, looking under the mattress, into my suitcase, even looking in the chamber pot. “Secret police,” they had said abruptly when I opened the door, and after that they wouldn’t answer any of my questions.

  The men went on creating chaos down in Aunt Adelheid’s apartment. “Oh, the shame of it!” cried Aunt Adelheid. “And in my home—the shame of it! I’m a respectable widow, I’ve been in the movement for years …”