by Vicki Baum
Flämmchen looked up at him with swimming eyes.
“Oh, it’s you,” she murmured with relief. Now at last she recognized in the spruce figure at her bedside the slender man who had danced so timidly with her yesterday and who had been so courageous that day in his talk with Preysing. A trusting and pleasant sense of security came over her here, in his bed, with his hand gently patting the back of her neck.
“But we know each other,” she said, and snuggled against his fingers with the spontaneous gratitude of an animal. Kringelein ceased to pat her and collected his strength—an unexpectedly large resource of strength and aggressiveness.
“What has happened to you? Did Preysing do anything to you?” he asked.
“No, not to me—” said Flämmchen, “not to me—”
“Shall I tell him off? I’m not afraid of Herr Preysing.”
Flämmchen looked at Kringelein sitting erect and collected, and fell into deep reflection. She tried to recall the frightful scene in Room No. 71: the two men on the floor in the green light: the dead one, stretched out; the living one, distraught and cowering. But already it was erased from her healthy and resilient soul. Only her lips grew rigid at the recollection and the muscles of her arms tightened with agitation.
“He killed him,” she whispered.
“Killed? Who killed whom?”
“Preysing. He killed the Baron.”
Kringelein’s head swam, but he pulled himself together and kept calm.
“But that’s impossible. I can’t believe it,” he stammered. Without knowing it he had put both hands round Flämmchen’s neck and drawn her face close to his. He stared into her eyes, and she stared as fixedly into his. At last she nodded her head three times emphatically without saying a word. Oddly enough, it was only then that Kringelein believed this incredible thing. He let his hands fall.
“Dead?” he said. “But he—why, he was life itself. He was strength personified. How could a fellow like Preysing . . .”
He got up and walked back and forth noiselessly, with his thin feet in the new travel slippers, blinking in extreme agitation. He saw Preysing going along the passage of Block C at Fredersdorf without deigning to say even a word of greeting. He heard his frigid nasal voice discussing costs, and he felt the doors shake at one of the general manager’s outbursts of rage before which everyone in the factory trembled. He came to a stop at the window in front of the drawn curtains, and looked through them to Fredersdorf.
“It was bound to happen. It was bound to happen,” he said finally, and a sense of just retribution grew in the emaciated man who had so long been knuckling under. “Now it’s his turn,” he added. “Have they arrested him? How did you find out about it? How did it happen?”
“Preysing was with me in my bedroom and the door was open. Suddenly he said that he heard something and went out of the room. I may have dozed off for a moment. I was very sleepy. And then I heard voices, but not very loud and then a fall, and then Preysing didn’t come back. And then I was frightened and went through to the other room, for the door was open, you know—and there he lay—with his eyes open.” Flämmchen once more put the quilt to her pale face and broke into a second storm of weeping over the dead Gaigern. She couldn’t put it into words, but she felt that she had missed out on something wonderfully beautiful, and that it was something she could never, ever recover. “Yesterday I was dancing with him, and he was so nice, and now he is gone and won’t ever come back,” she sobbed into the warm darkness of the down quilt.
Kringelein left the curtained window with its view of the ugly Fredersdorf of his memory. He sat down on the edge of the bed. He even put his arm round Flämmchen’s shoulders, and it seemed to him perfectly natural to be comforting and protecting the weeping girl. He, too, felt sorrow over Gaigern’s death, a silent, grim masculine sorrow, even though he hadn’t quite grasped yet that his friend of yesterday was dead.
Flämmchen, when she had finished crying, returned to her own unclouded sanity.
“Perhaps,” she said softly, “he really was a burglar. But you don’t kill a man for that.”
Kringelein recalled the confused business with his own wallet the night before. Gaigern needed money, he thought. Maybe he’d been anxiously searching for money all day. He laughed and played the fine gentleman, but perhaps he was just a poor devil after all. Perhaps he had done something desperate. And then a fellow like Preysing kills him. “No,” he said very loud.
“You were quite right in what you said to Preysing early this morning,” Flämmchen began, leaning against Kringelein’s arm. She felt that he was an old friend and it came quite naturally to her. “I didn’t like Preysing either,” she added naïvely. Kringelein thought for a moment or two about the indelicate question that had been on his mind ever since the day before when Flämmchen left the dance hall to go to Preysing.
“Then why—why did you get involved with him?” he asked at last all the same.
Flämmchen looked at him trustingly. “For money, of course,” she replied simply. Kringelein understood at once.
“For money—” he repeated, not as a question, but merely in reply. His life had been a struggle for pennies, so how could he fail to understand her? And now he put his other arm round her, encircling her. Flämmchen nestled against him and leaned her head against his chest. She could feel each rib under the thin silk of his pajamas.
“At home they don’t understand that,” she said. “I have a rotten time of it at home. There’s always trouble with my mother and stepsister. I haven’t had a job now for over a year, and so I had to do something. I’m too pretty for an office job, they say everywhere. It’s always the same story. The big firms don’t like to hire girls who are too good-looking, and they are quite right. And I’m too big to be a fashion model. They want a size forty-two or at most forty-four. And as for the films, I don’t know what’s wrong there. Maybe I’m not coquettish enough. That doesn’t matter later on—on the contrary; but at the start it does. But I’ll make it somehow. Only I can’t get too old. I’m nineteen already, and it’s time to see about getting somewhere. Some people say you shouldn’t go with a man like Preysing for the money. Just the opposite—it’s only for the money! I can’t see anything wrong in it. I don’t change; I stay just as I was before. Nobody takes anything away from me, even if I’m a little nice to him. When you’ve been a year without a job as I have, chasing after film agents, and running round to answer advertisements, and your clothes start wearing out, and you have nothing to wear—and you look in the shop windows. I just can’t help it—being well dressed is my dream. No one could believe what joy a new dress gives me. Often I spend days thinking out the clothes I’ll wear one day. And then travelling. I’m crazy about travelling, getting away and seeing new cities. At home I have a hard time—you can take it from me. I’m not a complaining person. I’m good-natured and can put up with a lot. But often it’s enough to make you run away—just to get away, even if it was with the biggest scoundrel on earth—just to get away. For money—of course for money. Money’s so very important, and whoever says otherwise is lying. Preysing was going to give me a thousand marks. That’s a lot of money. Enough to give me a start in life. But that’s over and done with now. And now I’m back where I was. And at home it’s awful—”
“How well I know. I can imagine that. I understand that very well,” said Kringelein. “At home everything is always filthy. Only with money can you begin to be a decent human being. Even the very air is bad when you haven’t got money. You can’t open the windows because the expensive heated air escapes. You can’t take a bath because hot water uses up coal. Your razor blades are old and scrape your skin. You have to be frugal with the laundry—no tablecloth, no napkin. You have to be sparing with soap. Your hairbrush has lost all its bristles, the coffeepot is broken and has been glued, the spoons have turned black. The pillows are hard lumps of old, coarse feathers. What’s broken stays broken. Nothing gets fixed. Your insurance policy has to be paid.
And you don’t even know that you’re living your life all wrong. You think it’s got to be like that.”
He had put his head on Flämmchen’s, and thus they went through the litany of the life of the poor together, swaying to and fro in time to the monotonous chant. They were both tired out and overexcited and half asleep.
“Your hand-mirror is broken,” Flämmchen went on, “and you can’t afford to buy a new one. You have to sleep on the sofa behind a screen. There’s a constant smell of gas. Everyday there’s an argument with the lodger. The food you eat but can’t pay for because you are out of a job is thrown at you. But they’re not going to get me down— they’re not going to get me down,” she said emphatically as she crept out of Kringelein’s arms and sat up so straight in the bed that the quilt, warmed by her young body, fell onto Kringelein’s knees,. Kringelein accepted this warmth as an overwhelming gift. “I’ll get along,” said Flämmchen, and for the first time she blew the hair off her forehead as a sign that her gaiety and vitality had returned. “I can do without the general manager. I’ll make it all right.”
Kringelein had to tackle a series of difficult thoughts, and once he had, he tried to put them into words.
“As for money, I’ve seen in the last few days just what it means to have it,” he explained haltingly. “You become a different man altogether when you have money and can buy things. But I never would have thought that you could buy something like this.”
“Something like what?” Flämmchen asked smiling.
“Like this. Something like you. Something so utterly beautiful, so splendid. People like me don’t even know that something like you exists. We know nothing and see nothing. We believe that everything, marriage and all the rest of it with women, has to be shabby and frayed, ugly and joyless or else as inferior as in the saloons here. But when you were lying here unconscious a few moments ago, I could scarcely trust myself to look at you. Oh Lord, how beautiful, how beautiful she is. How beautiful. And so a man like me thinks to himself—So it really exists, something so wonderful—so wonderful—”
Yes, that’s what was going on with Kringelein. He sat on the edge of the bed and talked, not like a forty-seven-year-old assistant bookkeeper, but like a lover. His hidden, sensitive, and timid soul crept out of its cocoon and spread its small, new wings. Flämmchen listened, her arms round her drawn-up knees, with a surprised and incredulous smile. Now and then she gave a little sob, like a child that has been crying. Kringelein was not young, nor was he good-looking or smart, or healthy, or strong. He didn’t have a single quality of a lover. If, in spite of that, his awkward, stammered words and his blinking, feverish eyes, and his shy caresses that always stopped in midair, made an impression on Flämmchen, then the reason must be in something deep down. Perhaps more than anything else it was his acquaintance with suffering, his passionate desire to experience something of life and at the same time his silent readiness for death that made of this slender human ruin in the light-blue striped pajamas someone manly and worthy of love.
It was not to be expected, however, that Flämmchen would now fall in love with Kringelein. No. Life is very far from producing such delightful surprises. But in this Hotel Room No. 70 a sense of intimacy and security came over her, something more stable and substantial than the usual improvisations of her flitting insect existence. Kringelein talked on and on. He opened his heart and told her the whole story of his life, and it seemed to him at this moment that he had lived his entire life directed toward only one goal and one fulfillment: this wonder that had befallen him, this perfection of beauty that lay in his bed, the girl who had come to him, away from Preysing and come to him.
Flämmchen had no exaggerated opinion of herself. She knew her price. Twenty marks for a photograph in the nude. A hundred and forty marks for a month’s office work. Fifteen pfennig per page for typing with one carbon copy. A little fur coat costing two hundred and forty marks for a week as somebody’s mistress. Good heavens, she had no reason to set a high value on herself. But, as Kringelein went on talking, she discovered herself for the first time. She saw herself as if in a mirror. She saw the splendor of her sumptuous golden skin and her pale gold hair. She saw her limbs, each one graceful and beautiful. She was conscious of her freshness, of her easygoing and optimistic nature. She discovered herself, like a buried treasure.
“But I’m really nothing special,” she murmured in a glow of modesty. But she was startled and shuddered in the middle of Kringelein’s rapturous torrent of words when Preysing’s name came up. In the last half hour they had both forgotten what had occurred in the green light of Room No. 71. Now, suddenly, the whole horror came back.
“I am not going back there again,” Flämmchen whispered. “They’ve probably arrested him by now. They’d arrest me too. I am going to stay hidden here.”
Kringelein smiled nervously.
“Why should they arrest you?” he asked, but all the same he was afraid. He, too, could see Gaigern clearly, in the car, in the airplane, at the gaming table, in the white light of the boxing ring. He saw Gaigern as he bent over him, as he gave him back his wallet, and as he went through the revolving door.
“Why should they arrest you?” he asked.
Flämmchen nodded meaningfully.
“As a witness,” she said, totally lacking any experience in such things.
“Do you mean—?” asked Kringelein vaguely, looking straight through her with his eyes still fixed on Gaigern. And suddenly he was once more swept up in yesterday’s whirl of danger. “You needn’t be afraid. I’ll straighten everything out for you,” he said quickly. “Will you stay with me? You will, won’t you? You’ll have a good time with me. I only want to give you the best. Will you? I have money. I have money enough. It will last us a long while. And I can easily win some more, gambling. We’ll travel. We’ll go to Paris. Wherever you like.”
“My passport has a visa for England—”
“Good. England then. Wherever you wish and whatever you want. You’re going to have clothes. One has to have clothes and one has to have money. We’ll have a great time. What do you say? I’ll give you the money I won, three thousand four hundred marks. You can have more later on. Don’t say anything, keep very quiet, and just stay here in bed. I’ll go over now to the other room. I’ll go check on Preysing. I’ll see what happened to him. Do you believe me when I say you’ll have a better time with me than with Preysing? Wouldn’t you rather be with me than with Preysing? I’ll go now and fetch your things. Trust me, and don’t be afraid.”
Kringelein vanished into the bathroom and quickly got dressed— black jacket and the dark tie of thick silk. It gave him a strange feeling of feverish excitement to be dressing in the middle of the night even as the street below became silent and the radiators cooled down. Flämmchen sat up in the bed, laid her cheek on her knees and exhaled deeply. Her body was beginning to ache after her fainting fit and her throat was dry. She longed for an apple and a cigarette. She took the bottle of Hundt’s Elixir from the night table and sniffed it, but she didn’t like the cinnamon smell. Kringelein came back from the bathroom looking like an elegant gentleman. Perhaps he really was an elegant gentleman, this Kringelein from Fredersdorf, even though every day for twenty years he had split the firewood for his wife.
“I’m going now. You stay here and be very quiet,” he said, putting on his pince-nez. His blinking eyes were light and shining and the pupils had become large and black. At the door he suddenly turned back and going to the bed, knelt down. He held his face in his hands and murmured something Flämmchen did not understand. “Yes, yes, of course,” she said. “Yes, gladly.”
Kringelein got up, wiped his glasses on the corner of the handkerchief that hung from his breast pocket, and left the room. Flämmchen heard the outer door shut and the sound of his steps as he went along the passage. And then, in the distance, the music from the Yellow Pavilion, where the same people were still dancing as three hours before . . .
•
Gaigern was lying on the carpet in Room No. 71. He was dead. Nothing more could happen to him. No one could harass or pursue him. He would never go to prison. And that was good. He would never keep his appointment in Vienna with Grusinskaya. And that was sad. But he had lived his life to the full, this beautiful, strong, but flawed man. He had spent his childhood among the fields, his boyhood on horseback. He had been a soldier in the war. He had been a fighter, a hunter, a gambler. He had been a lover and he had been loved. Now he was dead. His hair was moist and matted. There was an inkstain on his dark-blue silk pajamas and an astonished smile on his lips. On his feet were the thick woolen socks of a burglar, and the cut on his cold right hand from his last adventure would never heal. . . .
Preysing, too, heard the dance music, and it caused him inexpressible torture. Every thought that came into his head took on the syncopated rhythm that the Eastman Band in the Yellow Pavilion sent throbbing through the walls of the hotel. Nothing could have been less appropriate to the thoughts that were being thought upstairs here all night long, than the music that was being played down there all night long.
It’s all up with me, thought Preysing. Done. Finished. I can’t go to Manchester. The Chemnitz business will fall through. The police will arrest me. I’ll be interrogated and investigated. It was self-defense. All right. Nothing can happen to me. But there’s the other thing. There’s the girl. The girl, too, will be questioned. I was with her. The door was open. It’s still open now.
Preysing was sitting in the farthest corner of the room on a strange piece of furniture, a basket intended for dirty linen with an upholstered lid. He had turned on all the lights of the chandelier but in spite of this he didn’t dare turn around to look behind him. Some mysterious compulsion forced him to keep his eyes fixed on the dead man. It was as if something terrible would happen the moment he turned his head away to look at the open door.
