by Irmgard Keun
I am dreaming of Franz standing out in the front garden, thin and cold, his face pale and grave, I am dreaming of his bright red silk scarf and his quiet hands, raised in warning.
I’m dreaming of my inward hum of longing for Franz, I am dreaming of my love. I am dreaming of my sleep, I’m dreaming of my dreams. I’m dreaming of all the wine I’ve drunk, and I’m dreaming of my helpless heart, embedded in a daze of weariness so that I can feel its trembling beat.
As if from far away, I hear Heini hammering out his words into sentences.
“That’s right, Sanna, you can lay your head on Breslauer’s shoulder. One racial offence more or less doesn’t matter in this place tonight.
“Is there any more to drink, beautiful Frau Liska? Thanks very much. Your health, Aaron, you old lag. Glad to hear you like the new Germany.
“Young Dieter your only son, is he? Nice lad—a good fellow. Take another look at him—I’m not too sure about visiting hours in jail. Once he’s in prison or a concentration camp you may not get to see him any more.
“What was that, Frau Liska? Oh, I’m not giving away any secrets, everybody here except for Herr Aaron knows young Dieter spent nearly an hour alone with pretty blonde Gerti just now. Frau Liska was kind and understanding enough to let the young couple have her bedroom for the purpose, and quite right too. Poor children, they were drinking champagne and kissing as they danced. Well, it’s in the nature of things for young folk to kiss when they’ve had some champagne to drink and they’re in love.
“Our little lovers closed their eyes as they kissed—well, almost all young lovers do kiss with closed eyes. They don’t need any light from outside, there’s a brighter, wanner light burning inside them. But these two enamoured children, Herr Aaron, they closed their eyes in the childishly desperate belief that if you shut your eyes and can’t see anything, then you can’t be seen. Children believe in fairy tales, you see, they believe they can cast spells to make themselves invisible.
“No, do stay where you are, Herr Aaron, it’s better if I speak of matters that concern you to your face. Don’t get excited, have a glass of this excellent schnapps.
“Well, what do you expect, eh? What can you hold against your son? You yourself fell in love with a woman who wasn’t a Jew, years ago. You even married the lady.
“Anyway, your good wife has already seen to the separation of our charming but criminal young couple; she did it with the utmost moral vigour.
“What? Yes, while our sleepy Sanna here was out looking for the lost poet, master of this household, her stepbrother Algin, Fraulein Betty Raff was kind enough, in her own inimitable way, to turn her attentions to your good wife, Herr Aaron. It pleased your lady wife to describe her long years of marriage with yourself as an unfortunate lapse. She expressed herself calmly and with dignity.
“If I remember correctly, your good wife comes of an honourable but poverty-stricken Prussian military family, right? Forced to earn her bread as best she might, working as a governess, wasn’t she? And you married her out of patriotism and idealism.
“You offered your wife the sort of comfortable life for which she was certainly fitted. Your wife offered you an impressively stern frigidity. And she gave you a son.
“You yourself were mentioning, in the most understanding way, the fact that your lady wife is now sorry to have married a Jew—or to employ your own terms, a non-Aryan. And the only reason she doesn’t get a divorce is because of your son. She has now gone so far, in front of Fraulein Betty Raff, as to deplore the impregnability of her own virtue, since in the conditions currently obtaining, she would like to be able to hand her beloved and treasured son the present of a little indiscretion with an Aryan.
“Your wife doesn’t just feel she is a proud, pure Aryan, not any more—she now feels she is also a misused and humiliated woman, and most of all she sees herself as the proud, heroic mother of her son. She does love him. And she can’t forgive you, her wedded husband, for daring to hand on to that son the taint of your race, which is despised and considered so inferior nowadays. Your wife’s logic, my dear Herr Aaron, is no more confused than the logic of the Nazis. And the logic of the Nazis, I am sorry to say, is very little inferior to your own in point of confusion and ignorance.
“It remained only for the charmingly sympathetic Fraulein Betty Raff to point out to your wife the fact that her handsome, well-grown son, Dieter, was kissing his pretty blonde girlfriend, Gerti. I am sure that Fraulein Betty Raff meant well by the young people, and she certainly meant well by the sorely tried mother.
“Your wife opened the unlocked door of Frau Liska’s bedroom. Most commendably, Herr Aaron, your wife’s lips remained sealed as to what her eyes then saw.
“However, that good Prussian Aryan lady expressed herself with indignation on the subject of the seduction of her good, handsome, Jewish son by a blonde Aryan girl. I dare say all this seems rather confused to you, my dear Herr Aaron, as well it might, and this account of mine will arouse ill feeling and dislike. I’m afraid I often rather enjoy arousing ill feeling and dislike.
“Very impressive and alarming, your wife was. I understand your son, Dieter, meekly let his mother take him away and send him home.
“Gerti wept. She’s young enough for wild transports of despair. And she really is so deeply, truly in love that it’ll be a good three days before any other man can comfort her. Breslauer has sleeping tablets with him, I gave her some, and now she’s sleeping on her own, all rosy pink and tearstained, in Frau Liska’s big bed.
“And your son, Dieter, is asleep at home, Herr Aaron. While your admirable wife is making cast-iron conversation with Fraulein Mimi Baerwald and an Englishman. Your wife speaks excellent English.
“Fraulein Betty Raff has now been able to turn her mind to her own concerns, since my friend Algin, master of this household, has deigned to honour this delightful and jolly party with his presence.
“Like me to tell you about the rest of the criminals here? Well, there’s Frau Liska, inviting Jews to be her guests, encouraging relationships which are racial misdemeanours. Moreover, she listens approvingly and with sympathy to corrupting and seditious speeches.
“Breslauer had his nose broken during the boycott in nineteen thirty-three, and was later robbed of his honestly acquired means of livelihood. He has ventured to commit the crime of sending part of his own hard-earned money abroad.
“And even your own optimism and belief in the boundless goodness of the Nazis, Herr Aaron, don’t seem to have been enough to keep you from getting a little money deposited in Holland, just in case. You are also guilty of having once told a cheap but still seditious joke about a certain Gauleiter.
“And our good old friend Judge Gleit has not been able to refrain from criticizing justice in the Third Reich, or spreading rumours about the private lives of our esteemed triumvirate. Dear me, I’m afraid you’ve laid yourself wide open to prosecution, Herr Gleit.
“Another thing too—grown men, serious German citizens, have a very strange and comical look about them these days. When they get together they tell childish tales in whispers, pleasantly apprehensive, shaking with alarm—sad and merry tales about the great, that’s what they tell. The conversation of our scientists, artists, businessmen and civil servants has sunk to the level of servants’ gossip. They complain of their masters—and crawl to them.
“What’s the matter now, Sanna—where are you going?”
No, I am not dreaming, it’s all true. I must get back to Franz. Oh, for God’s sake, here come the Englishmen to say goodbye. I’ll have to let them out.
The three Englishmen are as cheery as ever—smiling, beaming, healthy. They’re terribly sorry they really must be going now, but their train to Cologne leaves in half an hour, they’re being met at Cologne station. The old Englishman, hatted and coated already, raises his full wineglass once more to make a short farewell speech. He drinks to all the ladies, and all the gentlemen, and above all to the wonderful, hospitable, happy Ge
rman nation.
“Have you been waiting long, Franz?” Idiotic question, but you always ask it when you know perfectly well you have kept someone waiting a long time. My head is buzzing, I’m frightened, and I don’t yet know what of.
Franz says nothing. I take him to the little shrubbery, it’s only three minutes’ walk away. There’s a bench there where we can sit and talk.
Franz doesn’t want to sit down, though. We are quite alone under the wet and dripping branches. Far away, the faint light of a lamp shines in the dark solitude.
I’d like to hug and kiss Franz, but Franz is acting very oddly, in a strange numb way, like something on a monument. I’m beginning to go numb myself. My mouth is numb, my arms are numb, my thoughts are numb. I feel no warmth or cold, even though I forgot to put a coat on, and gentle moisture is dripping from the branches of the trees and falling on my neck and arms.
“I killed him,” says Franz.
“Sit down, Franz—sit down beside me on the bench and let me hold your hand.”
So that was it. So that was it. Just a moment. I have to think, I have to listen.
When I left Cologne, Franz tells me, he was utterly if silently determined to have me back and marry me within six months. Slowly, steadily, he did all he could to enable us to marry soon. He’d saved up a little money. Not enough to open our small tobacconist’s yet. And he realized I wouldn’t want to come back to his mother’s place. He wondered whether to move out himself, whether his small salary would support us both. It might have done, if we’d lived in a very modest way, but then we wouldn’t have been able to save anything up and we’d never have got our tobacconist’s shop.
And after I wrote to him about the prosperous, carefree life I was living with Liska and Algin, he was afraid of making me live in such poverty, without any prospects at all. Because of course his mother would never have given him any money for the pair of us.
So Franz planned to stay with his mother another six months, have his board and lodging with her and not give her any of his salary. He was going to save every bit of it, and put up with her furious anger and her tears and shouting. She had plenty, after all, and he’d given her all his earnings for years on end.
But things still looked very dark and doubtful. Then, all of a sudden, they got bright and hopeful. This was all on account of Paul—stout, round, funny Paul, Franz’s one friend.
Franz is slow and painstaking and melancholy. Paul is quick and enterprising and cheerful. He doesn’t just like making plans—he also has a brisk way of putting them into practice if at all possible.
The idea of the tobacconist’s interested Paul. He wanted to help his friend Franz. And he enjoyed having Franz admire him, and impressing Franz with his enthusiasm and skill. Also, Paul wanted us to add a bookstall of books and journals containing politically undesirable material to the tobacconist’s, later on. He was going to look after this part of the business. Paul had always dreamed of something like that, and he very much wanted to work together with the pair of us.
He had a brother-in-law who was very well-to-do, but quite fabulously mean. Nothing in heaven or hell would have got so much as three copper pfennigs out of this man. All the same, Paul managed to squeeze enough money out of him for the modest initial capital we’d need for the shop.
And now began a period of feverish activity for Franz and Paul. Franz didn’t want to write to me about it—it was to be a surprise for me.
But once they had the money safe and sound it looked as if the whole thing would fall through again. It was going to be extremely difficult to get the necessary permits. Both men plugged away at it until they were worn out. Even Paul ended up looking quite pale.
Finally, after taking endless pains, they got over that difficulty too. They managed to rent a dark little shop in a small side street off the Old Market. “Your Sanna will do it all up to look nice and neat and cheerful,” said Paul. “Women have a gift for that sort of thing.” There was a living room and a kitchen next to the shop, and we were going to live there. And there was one more room beyond the kitchen, where Paul would sleep. The shop had a gateway beside it where we could open the bookstall later. We’d have managed fine together. The room where Franz and I would live looked out on a little courtyard where white and slate-grey pigeons flew about or walked the uneven cobblestones, nodding and pecking. There was an antiquarian bookseller living near the shop, a widower who had gone in for pigeon-breeding after his wife’s death instead of getting married again.
When Franz opened the window of what was going to be our room for the first time and put his hand out, a white pigeon flying past let a dollop of its droppings fall on it. Franz was glad, in his quiet way, since pigeon droppings are supposed to mean good luck and money.
Paul and Franz were more feverishly busy than ever. Franz bought me three geraniums in pots—a white geranium, a pink geranium and a red geranium. He and Paul negotiated with cigarette firms and enormous numbers of commercial travelers. And after much inward struggle and deliberation, Paul bought a wonderful nickel-plated cigar lighter to stand on the counter. The cigar lighter had a little blue flame that never stopped burning—like the haloes you imagine on the heads of the twelve apostles.
Franz and Paul had seen any number of tremendously grand and elegant tobacconist’s shops—but everything in them seemed, to them, ordinary and uninteresting. While all they could afford was very small and poor by comparison, and yet to them it was a miracle.
Three days before the great opening, Franz and Paul were arrested. At six in the morning. Franz had been sleeping on the sofa at Paul’s place, because his mother, Aunt Adelheid, was kicking up such a cantankerous fuss.
They weren’t taken to any court, either of them, they were taken to the Gestapo room at police headquarters, where I’d been myself already. They were accused of undermining the National Socialist state. Then Paul went quite stupid with fury, and said it was his dearest wish to do just that, and he felt ashamed of himself for not having set about it yet.
The unpleasant little magistrate had Franz and Paul taken into protective custody. They were separated, so that they couldn’t see or speak to each other.
The magistrate said leaflets containing attacks on the National Socialist government had been found at Paul’s place. Franz doesn’t know if that was true or not; he didn’t get a chance to ask Paul.
Franz was asked if he was against the war, and he said he hated the thought of war. He shouldn’t have said that. But it’s totally impossible for anyone in Germany to know what he ought to be, what he ought to want or what he ought to say.
Franz didn’t know why he was locked up, and when they let him go again three months later he didn’t know why they’d let him go. He got no answer to any of his questions. They said things to him which he didn’t understand. There was a flame of hatred burning in him that consumed all his thoughts. He couldn’t feel his heart beating or his brain thinking any more, all he felt was that hot, burning flame of hatred.
“Where’s my friend?” he asked. “Where’s Paul?” He asked thirty times, a hundred times. When his mind had stopped asking, his mouth still went on framing the question that the fear in his heart had taught him. “Where’s my friend?” And he realized he would never hear any more about Paul.
Franz put one foot in front of the other; his feet could still think. But inside his head it was all bleak and cold and untidily empty, like an apartment when the people have moved out. Franz’s feet took him to the little tobacconist’s shop in the Old Market.
There wasn’t a shop any more. A shop with nothing to sell is not a shop. All the cigarettes were gone, and so was the proud and lovely cigar lighter with the little blue flame that never stopped burning. The blankets and pillows were gone too, and the rooms looked bare and stricken. The three geranium pots lay on the floor, smashed and broken. A red geranium, a pink geranium and a white geranium. But all three geraniums were dead, and were the same indeterminate brown.
The
walls of the new little apartment were daubed in the most disgusting way. The sight struck terror into Franz. Why do people hate to see a nice, clean start? Perhaps it’s natural to hate the people and the places you are robbing. You can’t bear the thought that your victim is not a thief himself, and being just the victim he won’t have a guilty conscience.
Franz falls silent here. His breath comes thin and whistling. His shoulders are hunched, as if he were trying to pull them around him like the collar of a coat. His hands are folded, limp and powerless. We walk up and down in the little shrubbery, up and down, up and down. Sometimes the headlights of a car in the nearby street break through the bleak blackness of the trees and bushes, like huge, hostile, searching eyes.
I would like to kiss Franz, but it’s not always or in all circumstances as easy to comfort a man with kisses as a woman. “Franz?”
I’m freezing. I wish Franz would notice I’m wearing a thin, pink silk dress, and I smell of roses, and my hair is curled. Well, the curls are beginning to come out of it in the damp air.
“Franz, it’s all terribly sad. Dear Franz. But now we’ll stay together, Franz, do you hear? We’ll find a way together. Everything will be all right again.”
“It can’t be all right again,” says Franz. “You haven’t heard everything yet, Sanna.” And Franz goes on with his story.
He stood by the window, on the broken geranium pots. Pigeons were nodding and pecking and fluttering about in the yard. They were fat and feathery and a soothing sight to see.
Then the old widower, the antiquarian bookseller who bred the birds, came out into the yard, rubbing his hands and letting the damp, cool morning air fall on his wrinkled old bald pate and into his mouth.
He saw Franz standing at the window, he looked all around him, cast quick, darting glances up and down the walls of the buildings, and then came slowly towards Franz and held out a hesitant and shaking hand. The two of them had never actually spoken to each other before.
