The table was laid for two, and a dark red Westphalian ham reposed on a dish, amid a mosaic of sausage slices. Large grapes, brimming with greenish light, hung over the edge of their vase. Dreyer plucked off one and tossed it in his mouth. He cast a sidelong glance at the salami but decided to wait for Martha. The mirror reflected his broad back clothed in gray flannel and the tawny strands of his smoothly brushed hair. He turned around quickly as though feeling that someone was watching him, and moved away; all that remained in the mirror was a white corner of the table against the black background broken by a crystal glimmer on the sideboard. He heard a faint sound from the far side of that stillness: a little key was seeking a sensitive point in the stillness; it found and pierced that point, and gave one crisp turn, and then everything came to life. Dreyer’s gray shoulder passed and repassed in the mirror as he paced hungrily round the table. The front door slammed and in came Martha. Her eyes glistened, she was wiping her nose firmly with a Chanel-scented handkerchief. Behind her came the fully awakened dog.
“Sit down, sit down, my love,” said Dreyer briskly, and turned on the sophisticated electric current to warm the tea water.
“Lovely film,” she said. “Hess was wonderful, though I think I liked him better in The Prince.”
“In what?”
“Oh you remember, the student at Heidelberg disguised as a Hindu prince.”
Martha was smiling. In fact, she smiled fairly often of late, which gladdened Dreyer ineffably. She was in the pleasant position of a person who has been promised a mysterious treat in the near future. She was willing to wait awhile, knowing that the treat would come without fail. That day she had summoned the painters to have them brighten up the south side of the terrace wall. A banquet scene in the film had made her hungry, and now she intended to betray her diet, then roll into bed, and perhaps allow Dreyer his long-deferred due.
The front-door bell tinkled. Tom barked briskly. Martha raised her thin eyebrows in surprise. Dreyer got up with a chuckle, and, chewing as he went, marched into the front hall.
She sat half-turned toward the door, holding her raised cup. When Franz, jokingly nudged on by Dreyer, stepped into the dining room, clicked his heels, and quickly walked up to her, she beamed so beautifully, her lips glistened so warmly that within Dreyer’s soul a huge merry throng seemed to break out in deafening applause, and he thought that after a smile like that everything was bound to go well: Martha, as she once used to, would tell him in breathless detail the entire foolish film as the preface and price of a submissive caress; and on Sunday, instead of tennis, he would go riding with her in the rustling, sun-flecked, orange-and-red park.
“First of all, my dear Franz,” he said, drawing up a chair for his nephew, “have a bite of something. And here is a drop of kirsch for you.”
Like an automaton, Franz stuck out his hand across the table, aiming for the proffered snifter, and knocked over a slender vase enclosing a heavy brown rose (“Which should have been removed long ago,” reflected Martha). The liberated water spread across the tablecloth.
He lost his composure, and no wonder. In the first place, he had not expected to see Martha. Secondly, he had thought Dreyer would receive him in his study and inform him about a very, very important job that had to be tackled immediately. Martha’s smile had stunned him. He ascertained to himself the reason for his alarm. Like the fake seed a fakir buries in the ground only to draw out of it at once, with manic magic, a live rose tree, Martha’s request that he conceal from Dreyer their innocent adventure—a request to which he had barely paid attention at the time—now, in the husband’s presence had fabulously swelled, turning into a secret erotic bond. He also remembered old Enricht’s words about a lady friend, and those words confirmed as it were the bliss and the shame. He tried to cast off the spell—but, meeting her unbearably intense gaze, dropped his eyes and helplessly continued to dab the wet tablecloth with his handkerchief despite Dreyer’s trying to push his hand away. Moments ago he had been lying in bed and now here he sat, in this resplendent dining room, suffering as if in a dream because he could not halt the dark streamlet that had rounded the saltcellar, and under cover of the plate’s rim was endeavoring to reach the edge of the table. Still smiling (the tablecloth would have to be changed tomorrow anyway), Martha shifted her gaze to his hands, to the gentle play of the knuckles under the taut skin, to the hairy wrist, to the long groping fingers, and felt oddly aware she had nothing woollen on her body that night.
Abruptly Dreyer got up and said: “Franz, this is not very hospitable, but it can’t be helped. It’s getting late, and you and I must be on our way.”
“On our way?” Franz uttered in confusion, thrusting the wet ball of his handkerchief into his pocket. Martha glanced at her husband with cold surprise.
“You’ll understand presently,” said Dreyer, his eyes twinkling with an adventurous light that was all too familiar to Martha. “What a bore,” she thought angrily, “what is he up to?”
She stopped him for a moment in the front hall and asked him in rapid whisper: “Where are you going, where are you going? I demand to be told where you are going.”
“On a wild spree,” replied Dreyer, hoping to provoke another marvellous smile.
She winced in disgust. He patted her on the cheek and went out.
Martha wandered back to the dining room and stood lost in thought behind the chair Franz had vacated. Then with irritation she lifted the tablecloth where the water had been spilled, and slipped a plate bottom up under it. The looking glass, which was working hard that night, reflected her green dress, her white neck under the dark weight of her chignon, and the gleam of her emerald earrings. She remained unconscious of the mirror’s attention, and as she slowly went about putting the fruit knives away her reflection would reappear every now and then. Frieda joined her for a minute or two. Then the light in the dining room clicked off, and, nibbling at her necklace, Martha went upstairs to her bedroom.
“I bet he wants me to think he is kidding because he isn’t. I bet it’s exactly the way it will be,” she thought. “He’ll fix him up with some dirty slut. And that will be the end of it.”
As she undressed, she felt she was about to cry. Just you wait, just you wait till you get home. Especially if you were pulling my leg. And what manners, what manners! You invite the poor boy and then whisk him away. In the middle of the night! Disgraceful!
Once again, as so many times previously, she went over all her husband’s transgressions in her memory. It seemed to her that she remembered them all. They were numerous. That did not prevent her, however, from assuring her married sister Hilda, when the latter would come from Hamburg, that she was happy, that her marriage was a happy one.
And Martha really did believe that her marriage was no different from any other marriage, that discord always reigned, that the wife always struggled against her husband, against his peculiarities, against his departures from the accepted rules, and all this amounted to happy marriage. An unhappy marriage was when the husband was poor, or had landed in prison for some shady business, or kept squandering his earnings on kept women. Therefore Martha never complained about her situation, since it was a natural and customary one.
Her mother had died when Martha was three—a not unusual arrangement. A first stepmother soon died too, and that also ran in some families. The second and final stepmother, who died only recently, was a lovely woman of quite gentle birth whom everybody adored. Papa, who had started his career as a saddler and ended it as the bankrupt owner of an artificial leather factory, was desperately eager she marry the “Hussar,” as for some reason he dubbed Dreyer, whom she barely knew when he proposed in 1920, at the same time that Hilda became engaged to the fat little purser of a second-rate Atlantic liner. Dreyer was getting rich with miraculous ease; he was fairly attractive, but bizarre and unpredictable; sang off-key silly arias and made her silly presents. As a well-bred girl with long lashes and glowing cheeks, she said she would make up her mind t
he next time he came to Hamburg. Before leaving for Berlin he gave her a monkey which she loathed; fortunately, a handsome young cousin with whom she had gone rather far before he became one of Hilda’s first lovers taught it to light matches, its little jersey caught fire, and the clumsy animal had to be destroyed. When Dreyer returned a week later, she allowed him to kiss her on the cheek. Poor old Papa got so high at the party that he beat up the fiddler, which was pardonable—seeing all the hard luck he had encountered in his long life. It was only after the wedding, when her husband cancelled an important business trip in favor of a ridiculous honeymoon in Norway—why Norway of all places?—that certain doubts began to assail her; but the villa in Grunewald soon dissipated them, and so on, not very interesting recollections.
4
In the darkness of the taxi (the unfortunate Icarus was still being repaired, and the rented substitute, a quirky Oriole, had not been a success), Dreyer remained mysteriously silent. He might have been asleep, had not his cigar glowed rhythmically. Franz was silent too, wondering uneasily where he was being taken. After the third or fourth turn he lost all sense of direction.
Up to now he had explored, besides the quiet quarter where he lived, only the avenue of lindens and its surroundings at the other end of the city. Everything that lay between those two live oases was a terra incognita blank. He gazed out of the window and saw the dark streets gradually acquiring a certain limpidity, then dimming again, then again welling with light, waning once more, brightening again, until having matured in the darkness they suddenly burst forth scintillating with fabulous colors, gemmed cascades, blazing advertisements. A tall steepled church glided past under the umber sky. Presently, skidding slightly on the damp asphalt, the car drew up at the curb.
Only then did Franz understand. In sapphire letters with a diamond flourish prolonging the final vowel, a glittering forty-foot sign spelled the word D*A*N*D*Y—which now he remembered hearing before, fool that he was! Dreyer took him under the arm and led him up to one of the ten radiantly lit display windows. Like tropical blossoms in a hothouse, ties and socks vied in delicate shades with the rectangles of folded shirts or drooped lazily from gilded boughs, while in the depths an opal-tinted pajama with the face of an Oriental idol stood fully erect, god of that garden. But Dreyer did not allow Franz to dally in contemplation. He led him smartly past the other windows, and there flashed by in turn an orgy of glossy footwear, a Fata Morgana of coats, a graceful flight of hats, gloves, and canes, and a sunny paradise of sports articles; then Franz found himself in a dark passageway where stood an old man in a black cape with a badge on his visored cap next to a slender-legged woman in furs. They both looked at Dreyer. The watchman recognized him and put his hand to his cap. The bright-eyed prostitute glanced at Franz and modestly moved away. As soon as he disappeared behind Dreyer in the gloom of a courtyard, she resumed her talk with the watchman about rheumatism and its cures.
The yard formed a triangular dead end between windowless walls. There was an odor of damp mingled with that of urine and beer. In one corner, either something was dumped, or else it was a cart with its shafts in the air. Dreyer produced the flashlight from his pocket, and a skimming circle of gray light outlined a grating, the moving shadows of descending steps, an iron door. Taking a childish delight in choosing the most mysterious entrance, Dreyer unlocked the door. Franz ducked and followed him into a dark stone passage where the round of flitting light now picked out a door. If any illegal attempt had been made to tamper with it, it would have emitted a wild ringing. But for this door too Dreyer had a small noiseless key, and again Franz ducked. In the murky basement through which they walked one could distinguish sacks and crates piled here and there and something like straw rustled underfoot. The mobile beam turned a corner, and yet another door appeared. Beyond it rose a bare staircase that melted into the blackness. They shuffled up the stone steps, explorers of a buried temple. With dream-like unexpectedness they emerged presently into a vast hall. The light glanced across metallic gallows, then along folds of drapery, gigantic wardrobes, swinging mirrors and broad-shouldered black figures. Dreyer stopped, put away his light and said softly in the dark “Attention!” His hand could be heard fumbling, and a single pear-shaped bulb brightly illuminated a counter. The remainder of the hall—an endless labyrinth—remained submerged in darkness, and Franz found it a little eerie to have this one nook singled out by the strong light. “Lesson One,” Dreyer said solemnly, and with a flourish went behind the counter.
It is doubtful if Franz benefited from this fantastic night lesson—everything was too strange, and Dreyer impersonated a salesman with too much whimsy. And yet, despite the baroque nonsense there was something about the angular reflections and the surrounding spectral abyss, where vague fabrics that had been handled and re-handled during the day reposed in weary attitudes, which long remained in Franz’s memory and imparted a certain dark luxurious coloring, at least at first, to the basic background against which his everyday salesman’s toil began to sketch later its plain, comprehensible, often tiresome pattern. And it was not on personal experience, not on the recollection of distant days when he actually had worked behind the counter, that Dreyer drew that night as he showed Franz how to sell neckties. Instead, he soared into the ravishing realm of inutile imagination, demonstrating not the way ties should be sold in real life, but the way they might be sold if the salesman were both artist and clairvoyant.
“I want a simple blue one,” Franz, prompted by him, would say in a wooden schoolboy voice.
“Certainly, sir,” Dreyer answered briskly and, whisking off several cardboard boxes from a shelf, nimbly opened them on the counter.
“How do you like this one?” he inquired not without a shadow of pensiveness, knotting a mottled magenta-and-black tie on his hand and holding it away a little as if admiring it himself in the capacity of an independent artist.
Franz was silent.
“An important technique,” explained Dreyer, changing his voice. “Let’s see if you got the point. Now you go behind the counter. In this box here there are some solid-colored ties. They cost four-five marks. And here we have stylish ones on the “orchid” side, as we say, at eight, ten, or even fourteen, the Lord forgive us. Now then, you are the salesman and I am a young man, a ninny if you’ll excuse me—inexperienced, irresolute, easily tempted.”
Franz self-consciously went behind the counter. Hunching his shoulders and narrowing his eyes as if he were nearsighted, Dreyer said in a high-pitched quaver: “I want a plain blue one.… And please, not too expensive.” “Smile,” he added in a prompter’s whisper.
Franz bent low over one of the boxes, fumbled awkwardly and produced a plain blue tie.
“Aha, I caught you!” Dreyer exclaimed cheerfully. “I knew you had not understood, or else you are color-blind, and then good-by dear uncle and aunt. Why on earth must you give me the cheapest one? You should have done as I did—stun the ninny first with an expensive one, no matter what color. But be sure it’s gaudy and costly, or costly and elegant, and maybe squeeze out of him ‘an extra throb and an extra bob,’ as they say in London. Here, take this one. Now knot it on your hand. Wait, wait—don’t worry it like that. Swing it around your finger. Thus! Remember the slightest delay in the rhythm costs you a moment of the customer’s attention. Hypnotize him with the flip of the tie you display. You must make it bloom before the idiot’s eyes. No, that’s not a knot, that’s some kind of tumor. Watch. Hold your hand straight. Let’s try this expensive vampire red. Now we suppose it is I who am looking at it, and I still don’t yield to temptation.”
“But I wanted a plain blue one,” said Dreyer in a high voice—and then, again in a whisper: “Ah, no—keep pushing the vampire one in his stupid face, perhaps you’ll wear him down. And watch him, watch his eyes—if he looks at the thing that’s already something. Only if he does not look at all and begins to frown, and clear his damned throat—only then, you understand, only then give him what he requested—a
lways choosing the dearest of the three plain blues, of course. But even as you yield to his coarse request, give, you know, a slight shrug, look at me now—and smile sort of disdainfully as if to say ‘this isn’t fashionable at all, frankly, this is for peasants, for droshky coachmen … but if you really want it’—”
“I’ll take this blue one,” said Dreyer in his comedy voice.
Franz grimly handed him the tie across the counter. Dreyer’s guffaw awakened a rude echo. “No,” he said, “no, my friend. Not at all. First, you lay it aside to your right, then you inquire if he does not need something else, for instance, handkerchiefs, or some fancy studs, and only after he has thought a bit and shaken his calf’s head, only then produce this fountain pen (which is a present) and write out and give him the price slip for the cashier. But the rest is routine. No, keep it, I said. You will be shown that part tomorrow by Mr. Piffke, a very pedantic man. Now let’s continue.”
Dreyer hoisted himself a little heavily to a sitting position on the counter, casting as he did so a sharp black shadow that dived head first into the darkness which seemed to have moved closer the better to hear. He started to finger the silks in the boxes, and to instruct Franz how to remember ties by touch and tint, how to develop, in other words (lost on Franz), a chromatic and tactile memory, how to eradicate from one’s artistic and commercial consciousness styles and specimens that had been sold out—so as to make room for new ones in one’s mind, and how to determine the price in marks immediately and then add the pfennigs from the tag. Several times he jumped off the counter, gesticulating grotesquely, impersonating a customer irritated by everything he was shown; the brute who objected to his being told the price before he had asked for it; and the saint to whom price was no object; also an old lady buying a tie for her grandson, a fireman at Potsdam; or a foreigner unable to express anything comprehensible—a Frenchman who wants a cravate, an Italian who demands a cravatta, a Russian who pleads gently for a galstook. Whereupon he would reply at once to himself, pressing his fingers lightly against the counter, and for each occasion inventing a particular variety of intonation and smile. Then seating himself again and slightly swinging his foot in its glossy shoe (as his shadow flapped a black wing on the floor), he discussed the tender and cheerful attitude a salesman should have toward man-made things, and he confessed that sometimes one felt absurdly sorry for outmoded ties and obsolete socks that were still so neat and fresh but completely unwanted; an odd, dreamy smile hovered under his mustache, and alternately creased and smoothed out the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and mouth—whilst extenuated Franz, leaning against a wardrobe, listened in a torpor to him.
King, Queen, Knave Page 7
