After Midnight

by Irmgard Keun

  Or Heini may say the only voices he likes are the clear, ingenuous kind, and Liska immediately starts talking in a funny, clear voice, opening her eyes with wide, child-like excitement, as if she were taking her First Communion.

  A few days later, Heini says he feels worse hearing shrill, screeching female voices than having to eat stinking meat, a shrill female voice can poison his entire system. Shrill voices are corrupt, slovenly, uncultivated, says Heini. The voices of tenement dwellers. “They’re too lazy to fetch their kids in off the street at mealtimes, those women, so they yell down at them from the fourth floor. And what sort of voice is a poor female throat supposed to produce, then? I’ll tell you: a woman’s voice should never be raised louder than is necessary for the person sitting opposite to hear her.”

  Liska has a lovely, deep, mellow voice. She had made it go high. Now, instead of dropping it to its normal deep pitch, she tries to make it as deep and hollow as an underground dungeon. And as hoarse as Herr Frockart’s voice; he sometimes comes to the Squirrel, and he used to be in the police, but he got sacked for persistent drunkenness. No woman can switch to having a voice like that overnight.

  Heini says women ought to be nurses: nurses are the only women who attract him. Liska immediately starts acting like a nurse, looking at everyone in a sad, gentle, pitying way, as if they were about to die of some dreadful disease.

  And three days later you’ll see Liska looking as if she were going soliciting along Kaiser Street. All because Heini happened to say a woman should have a touch of wantonness about her.

  Over these last four months, Liska has been a completely different person at least thirty times. Not so Heini. Heini says women should work—Liska works. Heini says women are inferior beings incapable of sacrifice. Liska instantly looks as if she were about to stab herself to the heart with the fork she was using to eat goulash. Heini didn’t happen to be looking that way, or she would have stabbed herself to the heart.

  And now Liska has gone and become a mother and wants to get rid of the child. But it’s not that easy to get rid of a child, even one you’ve made up. A couple of days ago Heini said a childless woman was like an empty nut—“What’s the point of her?” Unfortunately, when we were all going home, the desperately besotted Liska was walking beside Heini, and told him a secret: she’d had a baby eight years ago, an illegitimate one, before she married Algin. Heini was not in the least interested; he was hardly listening. He’d long forgotten what he said about empty nuts and so on; he said that a brave and responsible woman would take good care not to have any children in these terrible times.

  So as a brave and responsible woman, Liska now wants to get rid of the child again. This is why I’m supposed to be talking to Heini and telling him Liska doesn’t have a child after all, she only said she had, and the child really belongs to a girlfriend, and Liska covered up for the girlfriend’s little mistake.

  And I will tell Heini too, when I get a chance, though it’s quite pointless. The fact is that everyone except Heini takes a great interest in Liska’s strenuous and exciting changes of mood. Heini has taken no notice. Oh, there is one other man besides Heini who doesn’t notice her changes of mood, and that’s Algin. Having got to know Liska the way a man gets to know a woman only if he lives with her for years, sleeping with her all that time—well, he’s got not to know her again. It’s like reading a wonderful poem, and learning it off by heart because you like it so much and you want to be able to recite the whole thing. And when you do know it off by heart you can slowly begin to forget it again. Which is what people generally do.

  Algin is not at all jealous, because it doesn’t occur to him that some other man might fall in love with Liska. He is not in love with her any more. However, their marriage wasn’t dead, just a bit tired, something that happens to a number of marriages after some years, and something that can pass over too. And maybe everything would have been all right for Liska and Algin if Betty Raff hadn’t taken it upon herself to save the marriage.

  Algin used to like the fact that Liska’s nature is that of the inmate of a harem. He hated women who worked if they didn’t have to. Almost all women, says Algin, are harem inmates at heart, though they’d never admit it. Their minds work hard at living against their nature, which gives them touchy and difficult dispositions—and they take refuge in illness to have a chance of living normally and according to their real inclinations.

  Liska would happily spend her life between her bed and a bathtub full of warm water. She doesn’t like standing, she doesn’t like sitting, she likes lying down best. So she sometimes pretends, to herself and other people, that she’s sick, and then she can live the way she’d like to for a couple of days.

  Liska wakes in the morning, and her bed is wide and soft. She doesn’t want to get up, she wants to linger there, half-asleep, half-dreaming. The dreams she likes drift past her, bright and varied. It’s only in the morning, between sleep and waking, that you have such power over your dreams.

  Liska ought to get up to face a day which will give her no pleasure, because she is too idle for it. She does not like walking—not in the apartment, not in the street. All her stockings have holes in them. Frau Winter the cleaning lady forgot to mend them. Liska doesn’t want to get angry with Frau Winter. She doesn’t want to sit at breakfast with Algin, reading a paper which is all grey and makes her hands dirty and smells revolting, like paraffin. She wants to stay in bed. So she falls ill. Her voice is weak, everything hurts her.

  We bring her coffee in bed, we have to keep all problems away from her, we fetch her cigarettes, and put her manicure case and lavender water on the bedside table. We have to bring her her hand mirror—Liska discovers some wrinkles on her face, and falls asleep again, melancholy and exhausted.

  When she wakes Betty Raff has to come and sit on the velvety blue divan and talk to Liska about men and love, which comes to the same thing. Now and then she has to bring Liska warm water, because Liska is manicuring her hands. Slowly and feebly, for hours on end.

  At noon I have to bring Liska a little cold meat and some grapes, and red wine, and then sit and talk about men and love. After lunch Liska has a bath. It takes an hour. I have to fetch her bath salts and powder, Betty has to find her towel and her best silk nightie. Then we both have to sit in the bathroom—on the lavatory, in the wash basin, anywhere—and discuss men with Liska. Meanwhile Frau Winter is doing Liska’s room.

  Liska gets back into bed. Frau Winter has to draw the blue curtains—soft, inky-blue light fills the room. It is a room that looks round, without any corners to it. The bed seems to be round, and so does all the furniture. Even the smell of the room seems round and soft—all sounds, all voices are rounded. The sound of a car’s horn out in the street rolls into the room like a soft, feathery ball.

  Liska discusses men and love with Frau Winter. Frau Winter is an expert on the subject. She goes into a great many households, and hears about the wives’ problems with their husbands, since they almost all confide in her. She is hard of hearing, but she always manages to get the general drift of it. She is small and quick-moving, with red hair and broad, pale lips. Her glances and her footsteps are rapid. She used to work for grand folk, countesses and so on, and she knows about men, and the beauty of the feminine form and how to enhance it. She is devoted to Liska, runs errands for her, would do anything for her.

  We have to bring plenty of coffee to Liska’s room in the afternoon, and brandy and cakes. Frau Winter has to stay in the room, Betty Raff and I have to be there, Gerti has to be summoned by telephone. Liska’s room is full of women, all of whom have to discuss men and love with her. And in the round and inky-blue twilight of the room, all the women gradually find themselves saying things they certainly wouldn’t say in the broad, bright light of day. I always used to feel embarrassed by these conversations, but now I’m more or less used to it, and they are interesting and instructive, anyway. Liska gets happier and happier. She’s never so well as when she is ill. She’s a
queen on a throne of white pillows. She laughs, and loves everyone. Frau Winter has to get scarves and silk camisoles out of the wardrobe, and Liska gives them away to everyone who happens to be there. And she gives everyone exactly what they’d have liked to have.

  If it were all to go according to Liska’s wishes, her husband would come home in the evening and ask, “Darling, what would you like, what can I do for you?” And he would ask the other women, “Doesn’t my Liska look lovely, doesn’t she look enchanting even when she’s ill?” He would kiss her and sit on her bed, and Liska would be glad to have everyone see a man thinking she looks lovely, adoring her. Her voice would go soft and tender, she’d put her hand on Algin’s shoulder and admire it, so pretty and white on the dark fabric of his suit.

  She wants all the women to go away at this point, and to have Algin become more loving than ever. She wants him to read aloud from his new novel and ask her opinion, which is to be more important to him than anyone else’s. For Liska really is very clever, all the men say so, even Heini. It’s just that she isn’t keen on doing much thinking. So she wants Algin to stop reading aloud quite soon, and just be loving and adore Liska.

  That’s the kind of life Liska likes. Given a life of that kind she’d be happy and delightful and faithful to her husband.

  But how can a woman live like that, these days? She has to read the papers and think about politics. She has to vote, and listen to speeches on the radio. She has to go to poison gas drill, and prepare for the war. She has to learn to do something so that she can work and earn money.

  Liska learned to do handicrafts. She makes stuffed toy animals, wonderfully comical animals: fat cows made of dirndl skirt fabric, flowered elephants, tartan cats with squinting goggle-eyes. “Drunk and disorderly phantom animals,” Heini calls them, and he likes Liska to bring her new animals to show him. So now Liska is really making all these animals for Heini’s sake, even if she thinks she does it to earn money and lead a useful life.

  Indeed, the life Liska’s been living for some time must be a great trial to her. Algin talks of nothing but politics. He has lost any interest in admiring Liska and kissing her. The National Socialists burned Algin’s book. Algin has to write stories which Liska thinks are stupid. All of a sudden he’s ceased to be a wonderful writer. As a matter of fact Algin himself often says the stuff he’s writing these days is stupid, dreadful, but it still annoys him no end when Liska says so. And now he is coming to think it’s not so stupid after all, for he has taken to expressing himself poetically on the subject of Nature and the love for his homeland which arises from it, and he has Betty Raff to admire him.

  The Count lay in his fair maid’s bed …

  Heini is drinking. Everybody else is tired, but this is the time of day when he is liveliest. Words roll out of his mouth, words come pounding out of his mouth, he sends waves of words rippling over the table. “I’m telling you again, Breslauer, disease is your element, disease is your native land. And you’ll find disease all over the world, there’ll be disease around as long as you live. Don’t you tell me you think wandering around the Taunus more interesting than wandering kidneys and cancerous tumours. And don’t you tell me doctors are motivated by a love for humanity, either. Most good doctors don’t care much about helping people. Disease is what they care about. Good thing too. That’s the only way they really can help people. What use would a surgeon be if his hands were shaking with sympathy? A sensitive doctor’s a bad doctor. Thank God you usually confine your sickening sentimentality to the pub, Breslauer. Same as your colleague, that surgeon, what’s his name? Kunitzer, that’s it. Where’s he nowadays? England? Bully for England. He’s the right sort. Sober and cold as a modern refrigerator in his professional attitude. Remember when you took me to the hospital and Kunitzer was demonstrating the removal of an appendix? Going to take it out in three or four minutes, he was planning to set a world record for removing an appendix, have an appendectomy event in the Olympic Games.

  “Remember the nurses fluttering about that operating theatre like white doves? And everything shiny, white and hard and bright. And that wretched little piece of humanity lying on the operating table. An elderly, unemployed bookkeeper. Body all thin, grey skin looked dead already. And a careworn look about his belly, and feet with their crooked toes sticking up in a worried sort of way. But his face was peaceful. Wouldn’t have looked any different dead from the way he looked under anaesthetic, face grave and clear under a network of worry lines. That quiet, motionless net of wrinkles was like a veil of comfort. And it struck me as a cruel outrage to go saving a man at peace. Saving him for a wretched, unpeaceful life. He was as good as dead, my own hand would have trembled for fear of bringing him back to life.

  “But out in the clean, red-tiled corridor we saw a woman sitting on a bench as we passed, grey little mouse of a woman with dark, scared eyes. She was muttering softly, praying at breakneck speed, as if she had to say all the hundred thousand unsaid prayers of her life in a single minute. Soft, rushing eddies of prayer coming out of her. ‘It’ll be all right,’ said Kunitzer’s assistant, hefty, blond, beer-drinking sort of fellow, full of the joys of life. He stopped the grey eddy of prayer with his podgy pink hand, just touched the mousy woman’s poor little shoulder with that hand and the mouse looked as if God himself had appeared before her, and all she lacked was the strength to fall on her knees. A smile trembled on her prayed-out lips. God went on. And we were among the accompanying host of angels, remember, Breslauer? Along with a few more folk, authorities interested in the setting of surgical records.

  “And the woman started praying again behind us, remember? Maybe she had more faith in prayers than in God. If I’d been a doctor my hand would have shaken for fear I couldn’t answer her prayers.

  “Kunitzer’s hand didn’t shake, though. The woman’s prayers were answered. The peaceful man was saved for further tribulations. And Kunitzer went striding down the red-tiled corridor cloaked in annoyance. The operation had lasted three minutes too long, wasn’t a world record after all.”

  6

  ALGIN HAS JOINED US. HE IS SITTING THERE, pale and gloomy, his eyes dark caverns, his pale hands lying on the table. He has had another letter from the Reich Chamber of Literature. There’s going to be another purge of writers, and Algin will probably get eliminated. He might yet save himself by writing a long poem about the Führer, something he has been most reluctant to do so far. But even that might be dangerous. Because National Socialist writers might take exception to his daring to write about the Führer without being an old campaigner for the cause. Similarly, he daren’t write a Nazi novel, because it wouldn’t be fitting. However, if he doesn’t write a Nazi novel that makes him undesirable. People still like reading his books, people still want to print them, and that’s not right either.

  “Might as well do away with oneself,” says Algin.

  “Got ten marks, have you, Algin?” says Heini. “Thanks, Algin. Who knows how much longer you’ll have anything? That’s not a bad idea of yours, doing yourself in, you should put it into practice. You once had talent, you were successful. Your life’s a poor, shabby thing now. You made ridiculous concessions. For love of your wife and your silly apartment and your furniture and so on, you hobnobbed with people you considered inferior, wrote things that go against your feelings and your conscience. A poor sort of literary man you are.

  “So now you’re thinking of writing a historical novel, are you? It’ll be the work of a eunuch, Algin. A writer in the act of writing must fear neither his own words nor anything else in the world. A writer who is afraid is no true writer.

  “Apart from all that, though, you’re superfluous now. This dictatorship has made Germany a perfect country, and a perfect country doesn’t need writers. There’s no literature in Paradise. Can’t have writers without imperfection around them, can’t have poets. The purest of lyric poets needs to yearn for perfection. Once you’ve got perfection, poetry stops. Once criticism’s no longer possible, you
have to keep quiet. What are you going to write about God in Paradise? What are you going to write about the angels’ wings? Cut too short this season, worn too long? They’re neither one nor the other. Perfection renders words unnecessary. You write and speak to communicate your thoughts, we write and speak to communicate with each other. Perfect unity among mankind means silence. Every word is war, whether it means strife or peace. As long as there are words in the world there’ll be wars. And when there are no wars left the word will fall victim to eternal peace as well. Better do yourself in, Algin, because you’re living in Paradise, and when there’s nothing left to criticize the writer’s lost his livelihood. So do yourself in, or learn the harp and play the music of the spheres.”

  “I will, too,” says Algin, “I will do myself in. But there are others I must do away with first. Got to do away with someone lower than myself. Got to find him, got to look for him.” Algin is drunk himself; what on I don’t know. Betty Raff will comfort him when he gets home. Perhaps he’ll do her in.

  Fat, cosy Herr Manderscheid is looking anxious. “Who’s that?” he asks. A girl is fluttering past our table, slightly unsteady, colourful and light as a peacock’s feather, waving to Heini, and Heini waves back. “Want to meet the lady, Manderscheid? She’s a good girl, she’s established her proof of Aryanism, she’s a member of the Reich Chamber of Brothels, lives in the same boarding house as me.”

  The Count lay in his fair maid’s bed …

  “You knew I lived in a low-class area, did you, Manderscheid? In about the most dismal low-class area of Frankfurt. In a gloomy backwater of a street behind the station. Breslauer once came to see me, spent half an hour there, suffered from severe melancholia for two weeks afterwards. The stairs are dark, narrow and damp, make me think of sinister fairytales whenever I climb them, dreams of robbers and witches. The room’s a real nightmare. Just the sight of the pale wallpaper with its muddled flower pattern is discouraging. There’s an old bathtub of cracked, greyish-white enamel where there ought to be a table, and a big wooden board laid across it which is a raw, pale colour. My bed’s a kind of raised tomb, narrow metal bedstead, foot and head like prison bars, musty, grey, cold sheets. And there’s a picture of the Führer over the bed, our little National Socialist ray of sunshine, calculated to bring light into the darkest room, warm it in a nice homely way. All the rooms in the boarding house are the same. Maybe you’d like to indulge your senses there some time, Manderscheid?