Young Gerber

by Friedrich Torberg

  At last he gets to his feet (on his own, because helping a fallen skier up is the kind of thing that Sunday skiers do), and looks around, dazed. Far below him, at the bottom of the slope where the woods begin, Willi Wagenschmid is also coming to a halt by abruptly swerving to one side, shouting something up; the others are standing some way off, behind and to his left one ski is sticking out of the snow, its point dug in, and to his right Boby, who has fallen too, is angrily brushing snow off himself.

  The language of skiers, which is basically no more eccentric than other kinds of human language, calls a fall like that “bringing down a star”.

  Kurt has brought down a star, then, and a large star at that. For the rest, his limbs—he doesn’t know whether to be glad or ashamed—are all intact.

  With a good deal of difficulty, he straps his ski on again, and skis on downhill in wide, exploratory hairpin bends. As he does so, he gradually remembers how the fall came to happen, and now he really doesn’t know what he ought to do.

  At the bottom of the slope, Willi receives him with some forthright remarks. “I’d very much like to send you straight home. This is disgraceful. A little pimple like that—” And, shaking his head, he points to the slope, falling steeply away; by no means just a pimple, it is a hill of considerable size.

  Kurt stands there sheepishly, unable to say anything much.

  “Don’t shout at the poor man like that!” says Hilde Fischer, the peacemaker. “Maybe he’s hurt himself.”

  “What?” growls Willi, but he is concerned. “Have you hurt yourself?”

  Here’s my chance, thinks Kurt. Careful, now.

  “Hurt myself? No. At least, I can’t feel anything wrong yet.”

  Willi looks at him and says, kindly enough, “I don’t want to offend you, but you’d do better to go back to the resort now rather than later. I’d think you can see that for yourself.”

  Kurt puts on a great show of remorse while Willi shows him the way on the map. Being able to get away so unobtrusively puts him in a curiously undecided mood, he could think about things like chance and providence now—but the others are already wishing him a good journey back, and parting from him, so he must set out himself, and watch the way he is going…

  His real feelings then erupt, and remain almost inexplicable. Kurt has never been able to explain to himself why he suddenly turned and followed the group with feverish haste. He was almost weeping with joy when he saw them ahead of him.

  And he would probably also have wept—but not for joy—if he had ever learnt that at the same time Lisa Berwald was standing naked in front of the full-length mirror on the wall of her heated room, stroking her hips with trembling fingers, and that the first thoughts to pass through her mind led for the first and the last time to the body of Kurt Gerber…

  Then Lisa Berwald fell asleep, and when she woke she told herself she was being irresponsible and careless. Her determination was firmer, her love for Kurt Gerber gentler and, in her opinion, purer than ever.

  But Kurt Gerber never knew any of this. Even if he had had an opportunity of doing so, unexpected circumstances stood in the way.

  “Lisa says would you visit her,” says Otto Engelhart after dinner that evening.

  Kurt is slightly startled and a little pleased, and anyway rises without haste and asks, “How is she?”

  “She’s fine. She’ll be fit again tomorrow.”

  On the stairs, Kurt thinks how different it would have been if she had sent her message through the waiter. It occurs to him that there is something insultingly unconcerned about the free and easy way Lisa summons him to come and see her.

  Lisa is lying in bed, her head on a pile of pillows like a fine fruit lying on its own in a handsome dish, so that you can all the better see how delicious it is. She is wearing white silk pyjamas, and the quilt on the bed is white too. A picture of tender, cool purity, driving away all thoughts of the body under the quilt.

  “So here’s the great man! Has to be asked to come and see a lady! You’d never have thought of visiting me of your own accord!”

  Although she says that jokingly, and puts her hand out to Kurt, he takes it as a serious and well-deserved reproach; no, it wasn’t right of him, his secret diplomacy is now revealed to the light of day. He says, awkwardly:

  “You must forgive me—I came a terrible cropper on the way down today, what they call bringing down a star, and I’m still feeling the effects a bit.”

  “Dear me!” cried Lisa, horrified.

  “It’s nothing, really. How’s your poor ankle?”

  “There.” Lisa brings her foot out from under the quilt.

  Intentionally, or just unconcerned again? He leans over and examines the ankle carefully, like a doctor. Lisa flexes her instep; her leg is now a single perfect line… Kurt’s lips move over the slender ankle.

  “Oh, you!” She laughs, and her foot withdraws under the quilt.

  And because she is still laughing, and because her mouth is so red and her teeth so white…

  But then she closes her lips and turns her head firmly aside, so that Kurt immediately stops short, abashed.

  “No, don’t!” she says pleadingly. “Someone might come in.” It reassures him slightly that she said “someone”, not “Otto”.

  Kurt sits on the edge of the bed, saying nothing.

  Suddenly he feels Lisa’s hand gently caressing his. He looks up. “I’m no good, Lisa.”

  She presses his hand more firmly. “That’s not true.”

  “But it’s not my own doing. It’s this dreadful, inborn urge: I mean the two of us, young and alone in a room—do you understand me? I’m afraid of being laughed at.”

  And suddenly he moves quickly forward, looks intently at her face and asks in an anxious whisper, “Don’t you sometimes laugh at me, Lisa?”

  Lisa lies there quietly. Then she moves a little way back, very gently, and looks frankly into his face, “Why do you think I’d do that?”

  “You don’t, Lisa? And you never will laugh at me, never?”

  “Oh, go on with you—how silly you are!”

  And that is all. They begin chatting lightly…

  Nothing looks as incredible as true innocence. So perhaps we should avoid detecting it now—it is ten o’clock already—however cheerful and superficial their conversation is.

  “It’s time I went.”

  Kurt takes one of her hands, then the other, and puts his hot face between the cool backs of her hands. Then he turns so that his cheeks lie between the soft flesh of her hands as if in a comfortable pillow, and she keeps her hands firmly pressed to his mouth.

  And then it is that Lisa says the greatest words of her life, softly, hesitating, like a child putting the ungainly words of a foreign language together in a brief sentence for the first time, a sentence brimming with understanding, revealing unknown depths—she says:

  “I love you very much, too.”

  It is past midnight when Kurt returns to the inn from his walk through the silent streets of the little resort.

  His room is on the first floor. He slowly climbs the creaking wooden staircase, turns into the dimly lit corridor—when Otto Engelhart suddenly materializes in a doorway, leaning against the doorpost, looking past him but looking at him as well. It is a little unsettling. Kurt stops.

  “You went to see Lisa?” asks Otto Engelhart, but still not looking him in the face.

  “Yes,” says Kurt frankly. “You asked me to go yourself.”

  The other man nods slowly, as if thinking hard. Then he turns his face to Kurt, swings around abruptly, goes through the doorway and lets the door latch behind him.

  Kurt watches, shaking his head, and is about to go on, but something he saw in Otto’s face holds him back. He is in a good, calm mood; maybe he can do something about this dark figure, who seems so hard that he might hurt himself on his own sharp edges.

  Curiously, Kurt opens the door.

  Otto Engelhart is lying across the bed on his stomach, t
urned away from him, his head and arms hanging limp over the other side of the bed. All at once a long shiver runs through his body.

  Shaken himself, Kurt stands there. Is the unemotional Otto actually weeping?

  He goes carefully up to the bed, leans over the man lying there, and gently touches his shoulder.

  Otto Engelhart sits up, staring at him as if he were a ghost.

  “What do you want?”

  Kurt sits down on the bed beside him. “Otto—”

  Until now he has avoided addressing Otto by his first name, and he is bewildered to find himself doing it now. Uncertainly, hastily, he begins to speak. “Don’t be childish, what’s got into your head? It would hurt me if you were upset because I went to see Lisa. I mean, you know me, you know who I am.” That was ridiculous; he goes on faster, yes, he admits that he is not indifferent to Lisa, he has never made any secret of it, on the contrary, he will say so to anyone, and for that very reason—Kurt doesn’t know quite what to say to get Otto responding—“You really don’t have to be jealous on account of me, Otto!”

  Embarrassed, he gets to his feet and walks up and down the room a couple of times. Then he stops in front of Otto, who is still staring at the floor.

  “Jealous?” says Otto Engelhart with a strange smile, taking a deep breath. “I wish to God there was something to be jealous about.”

  Kurt is looking at him in surprise.

  “That’s right, no need to wonder. But it’s not my fault. Jealous? She doesn’t love anyone. No one. Not me. Not you. No one. I give her all I have. Someone will come along and give her more. But she doesn’t take it. Jealous…”

  He has spoken these words jerkily, they are simple but still not clear. Kurt has some inkling of what is upsetting him, and would like to comfort him—then Otto laughs hoarsely and says, “Please go now.”

  And as Kurt gives him his hand, warmth comes into his eyes and his voice.

  “I respect you. Not for what you may think. Cleverness? Talent? None of that matters. But you may be a real human being. And that’s something. A young man called Kurt Gerber. That’s something.”

  Otto Engelhart falls silent, and Kurt stands there with his hand held out, forgetting to withdraw it, for all this leaves him confused, his mind in turmoil. He tries to tell himself that Otto’s words are nothing but truisms—but he feels something like awe for the man who uttered them so harshly and with such certainty, as if they had never been expressed before.

  Kurt lets his hand drop to his side. Otto does not notice; he nods as if to add something more, then suddenly pulls himself together. “Good night,” he says, and guides Kurt to the doorway.

  What Otto Engelhart said about Lisa matters more to Kurt than anything. He won’t believe it. He knows Lisa better. Maybe if Otto had spoken to him like that four hours earlier—but now, after that “I love you very much, too…” She said “too”, and yet he hadn’t said a word about loving her; she didn’t mean it as an answer, no, she understood that what Kurt feels for her is love, understood it and welcomed it and confirmed it—oh, he knows that Lisa is not as she appears, and he is glad that Otto didn’t let him say more, he might have made him, poor Otto, very unhappy, Otto who has slept with Lisa so often but doesn’t possess her, possesses nothing of her… Think how much richer I am, and so far I’ve only kissed her…

  Paul is still awake, reading in bed. He grunts vaguely as Kurt comes in, and then asks what kept him out so late.

  Kurt sits down opposite and looks straight at him. “I’m very happy.”

  Paul looks straight back and says, in the same tone of voice, “You’re very foolish.”

  “Comes to the same thing!” laughs Kurt, who was expecting to hear something of that kind. If Paul only knew…

  When the room is dark, Kurt cheerfully says, “Didn’t you make the bold yet daring claim yesterday, Paul, that I would never have Lisa Berwald, though I love her?”

  “I did.”

  “I believe I can assure you that you’re wrong.”

  “I’m not wrong.”

  “Want to bet?”

  “No, because it’s perfectly possible that one of these days you may sleep with a girl who’s identical with the aforesaid Lisa Berwald. Good night.”

  If Kurt had not felt so mindlessly happy, these last words would have given him something to think about. But he did feel mindlessly happy, and fell asleep looking forward to the morning, when for the first time he would wake up entirely for Lisa.

  However, even before he had tasted the indescribable joy of that awakening to the full, the chambermaid brought him a letter that made him catch the next train home.

  VII

  Kurt Gerber, Number 7

  ON THE WAY, Kurt kept reading the few lines that his father had written to him:

  My dear Kurt,

  I happened by chance to be talking to one of your teachers. On the grounds of this conversation, I consider it urgently necessary for you to take the next train home, where I will tell you everything else. I hope that even though your holidays have been broken off early, you have enjoyed them, and with warm greetings I am

  Your father.

  As he was to hear everything else soon, it was unnecessary for him to worry about it now. Kurt wanted nothing to do with school for as long as possible, was reluctant to accept the imminence of next term as you might delay putting on a heavy coat, although the warmth of autumn is indisputably over. His reluctance was ferocious, but the prospects were hopeless. Kurt forced himself into the focal point of the slanting and now fading rays of warmth that had filled the last few days. Lisa had finally confessed her love for him, her emotion seemed to him now almost modest and humble; Paul Weismann spoke to him as no one ever had before, and the certainty with which he assumed that Kurt would understand him was good; while Otto Engelhart—hadn’t he seemed like the younger of them when he bared his soul to Kurt, telling him all his emotions?

  All this was so delightful and different and promising, Kurt relived it all so vividly, that he didn’t notice the arrival of the train at its terminus until he found himself alone in the compartment.

  And then, in view of the unfriendly apartment buildings lining the dirty streets, that other world was suddenly gone in the city air, now doubly unpleasant to him. Kurt paid the taxi driver with the resigned lordliness of a baron fallen on hard times. And when his father summoned him to his study, he sat down in apathetic expectation, just as he remembered feeling about his exams in the last few months of school: interest, if any, lay in when the inevitable humiliation would come, and what form it would take.

  This time it came promptly and with shattering force. Professor Mattusch—he was the teacher to whom his father had talked—took a very pessimistic view of Kurt’s situation at school; it was his opinion that only getting extra coaching from a private tutor as soon as possible could help him, and then only if from now on Kurt applied himself diligently to making up for all the time he had wasted. “I am sure that Mattusch means you well,” concluded his father, “and he will certainly have good reasons for giving me this information privately. It turns out that your good resolutions when I wanted you to go to a different school were nothing but meaningless lies.” Then his voice softened. “But I’m not going to read you the Riot Act now, I know that these things give you no pleasure. However, there’s nothing else for it. Here is the address of Professor Ruprecht, whom you will go to see at ten tomorrow morning. He has said he is ready to start work with you at once, and revise all subjects with you in the days remaining before school begins again.”

  His father fell silent. Like a judge regretting a sentence that he has passed, but believing it is all for the best.

  “It may all turn out well yet. If you would only make an effort! You know that I shall happily show my appreciation of that. On the day after you pass the Matura, you can board the train for Paris.”

  “Yes,” said Kurt. Then he rose to his feet and went out of the room, dejected.

  The
next day he wrote the following letter:

  My dear, kind father,

  I don’t know what else to do. I don’t want to upset you by a confrontation in person, so I am choosing this way of telling you that all attempts to find me in the course of today will be useless. I am not going to see Professor Ruprecht, and—just to prevent all unnecessary anxiety on your part—I am not about to throw myself into the river either, or go to my death in any other way. Of course that would fit rather well into what has happened so far, and might not be without desirable effects, but I don’t intend to take my views of the school to extremes. I think I would be doing it too much honour to give up a life that, thank God, has nothing in common with it. My hope of that real life—and nothing else—will help me to bring the next few months to a happy conclusion without a private tutor, in spite of all those like Kupfer, and pass the Matura. It’s not all lost yet, and the stupid farce of this high-school study can hardly reach the point where I’m really declared unfit to pass the Matura. Please remember what our Headmaster said when he answered your fears, that time when I delivered my talk to the last Students’ Academy, by protesting, “Oh, please! You can’t mean that seriously! Who would be judged mature enough to pass the Matura if not your son?”

  If you cannot approve of my decision to do without private coaching, then please make sure the door is locked when I come home at eleven this evening. I shall then try to show my maturity even without a duly stamped certificate.

  In any case, I ask you not to see this step either as a hasty boyish prank or the product of my imagination, for which you have so often reproved me. It is the result of long thought. And if I am giving you such pain that you cannot parade me to our family and friends, that I deserve to be struck out of the family as your son who turned out badly—if all that is to be so then I want to be struck out of the family entirely. I would like to spare you and myself failure in an atmosphere where a failed school examination is regarded as a mortal shame.