She questioned him about his childhood, his mother, a dull theme, his native town, an even duller one. Once Tom put his muzzle in Franz’s lap and yawned, enveloping him in an unendurable odor—foul herring, carrion. “That is how my childhood smells,” muttered Franz as he pushed the dog’s head away. She did not hear or did not understand, and asked what he had said. But he did not repeat his confession. He talked about his school, about the dust and the boredom, about his mother’s indigestible pies, and about the butcher next door, a dignified gentleman in a white waistcoat who at one time used to come to dinner every day, and eat mutton in a disgustingly professional manner. “Why disgustingly?” Martha interrupted in surprise. “God, what nonsense I’m spouting,” he thought, and with mechanical enthusiasm described for the hundredth time the river, the boating, the diving, the beer-drinking under the bridge.
She would switch the radio from song to speech, and he would reverently listen to a Spanish lesson, a lecture on the benefits of athletics, to Mr. Stresemann’s conciliatory tones, and then—back to some bizarre nasal music. She would tell him in detail the plot of a film, the story of Dreyer’s lucky speculations in the days of the inflation, and the gist of an article on the removal of fruit stains. And all the time she would be thinking: “How much longer would he need to get started?” and simultaneously she was amused and even a little touched that he was so unsure of himself and that without her help he would probably never get started at all. Gradually, however, vexation began to predominate. November was being squandered on trifles as money is squandered on trifles when you get stranded in some dull town. With a vague resentment, she recalled that her sister had already had at least four or five lovers in succession, and that Willy Wald’s young wife had had two simultaneously. And yet Martha was already past thirty-four. It was high time. In turn, she had been given a husband, a beautiful villa, antique silver, an automobile; the next gift on her list was Franz. Yet it was all not quite so simple; there intruded an alien little breeze, a special ardor, a suspicious softness.…
It was no use trying to sleep. Franz opened his window. At the transit from autumn to winter, quirky nights occur when suddenly, out of nowhere, there passes a breath of warm humid air, a belated sigh of summer. He stood in his new zebra pajamas holding on to the window frame, then leaned out, morosely released a long spurt of saliva, and listened, waiting for it to splatter against the sidewalk. However, since he lived on the fifth floor, and not on the second as he had at home, Franz heard nothing. With a slow clatter he shut the window and went back to bed. That night he realized, as one becomes abruptly aware of suffering from a fatal illness, that he had already known Martha for more than two months, and was draining his passion in useless fantasies. And Franz told the pillow, in the half-obscene, half-grandiloquent idiom he affected when talking to himself: “Never mind—better betray my career than wait till my brain cracks. Tomorrow, yes, tomorrow, I’ll grab her and tumble her, on the sofa, on the floor, on the table, on broken crockery …” Crazy Franz!
Tomorrow came. He went home after work, changed his socks, brushed his teeth, put on his new silk scarf and marched to the bus stop with martial determination. On the way he kept persuading himself that of course she loved him, that only out of pride she concealed her feeling, and that was a pity. If only she leaned toward him as if by chance, and brushed her cheek against his temple over a blurred album, or if she did again, as she had the other night—if, for a moment, she pressed her back to his before the front-hall mirror and said, turning her perfumed head: “I’m an inch taller than you,” or if—but here he pulled himself together and soundlessly told the bus conductor: “That’s weakness, and there should be no weakness.” Let her be tonight even colder than usual—no matter—now, now, now.… As he rang the bell there flashed through his mind a poltroon’s hope that perhaps by some chance Dreyer had already come home. Dreyer had not.
As Franz passed through the first two rooms, he pictured how in an instant he would push open that door over there, enter her boudoir, see her in a low-cut black dress with emeralds around her neck, immediately embrace her, hard, make her crunch, make her faint, make her spill her jewels; he pictured it so vividly that for a split second he saw before him his own receding back, saw his hand, saw himself opening the door, and because that sensation was a foray into the future, and it is forbidden to ransack the future, he was swiftly punished. In the first place, as he caught up with himself, he tripped and sent the door flying open. In the second, the room Martha called the boudoir was empty. In the third, when she came in she was wearing a beige dress with a high neck and a long line of buttons. In the fourth place, such a familiar helpless timidity came over him that all he could hope for was to speak more or less articulately.
Martha had decided that tonight he would kiss her for the first time. Characteristically, she chose one of her monthly days lest she succumb too soon, and in the wrong spot, to a yearning that otherwise she could no longer resist. In anticipation of that prudently circumscribed embrace she did not immediately settle down on the sofa near him. As tradition demanded, she turned on the radio, brought a little silver case with Libidettes (Viennese cigarettes), re-arranged the fold of a window curtain, turned on the opal glow of a table lamp, switched off the ceiling light, and (choosing the worst subject imaginable) began telling Franz how the day before Dreyer had started on some mysterious new project—a profitable one, let us hope; she picked up and placed on the back of a chair a pink woollen shawl, and only then gently sat down next to Franz, not quite comfortably folding one leg under her and adjusting the pleats of her skirt.
For no reason at all, he began extolling Uncle, saying how frightfully grateful he was, and how fond he had grown of him. Martha nodded absently. He would alternately puff on his cigarette, or hold it next to his knee, drawing the cardboard tip across the fabric of his trouser leg. The smoke like a flow of spectral milk crept along the clingy nap. Martha extended her hand and with a smile touched his knee as if playing with this phantom larva of smoke. He felt the tender pressure of her fingers. He was hungry, sweaty, and completely impotent.
“… And my mother in every letter, you know, sends him her respectful love, her regards, her thanks.”
The smoke dissolved. Franz kept sniffing as he did when he was especially nervous. Martha got up and turned off the radio. He lit another cigarette. She had now thrown the pink shawl over her shoulders and, like a woman in some old-fashioned romance, gazed at him fixedly from the far corner of the settee. With a wooden laugh, he recounted an anecdote from yesterday’s paper. Then, nudging the door with his paw, a very sad, very sleek, very hopeless Tom appeared, and Franz for the first time actually talked to the astonished animal. And at last, thank God, beloved Dreyer arrived.
Franz came home around eleven, and as he was proceeding along the passage on tiptoe to the foul little water closet he heard a chuckle coming from the landlord’s door. The door was ajar. He peeped into the room as he passed. Old Enricht, clad only in his nightshirt, was standing on all fours with his wrinkled and hoary rear toward a brilliant cheval glass. Bending low his congested face, fringed with white hair, like the head of the professor in the “Hindu Prince” farce, he was peering back through the archway of his bare thighs at the reflection of his bleak buttocks.
5
There was indeed an air of mystery about Dreyer’s new project. It all began one Wednesday in mid-November when he received a visit from a nondescript stranger with a cosmopolitan name and no determinable origin. He might have been Czech, Jewish, Bavarian, Irish—it was entirely a matter of personal evaluation.
Dreyer was sitting in his office (a huge quiet place with huge unquiet windows, with a huge desk, and huge leather armchairs) when, having traversed an olive-green corridor past glass expanses full of the hurricane-like clatter of typewriters, this nondescript gentleman was ushered in. He was hatless but wore a topcoat and warm gloves.
The card that had preceded him by a couple of minutes bor
e the title of “Inventor” under his name. Now Dreyer was fond, perhaps over-fond, of inventors. With a mesmeric gesture, he deposited his guest in the leathern luxury of an over-stuffed chair (with an ashtray affixed to its giant paw) and, toying with a red-and-blue pencil, sat down half-facing him. The man’s thick eyebrows wiggled like furry black caterpillars, and the freshly shaven parts of his melancholy face had a dark turquoise cast.
The inventor began from afar, and this Dreyer approved. All business ought to be handled with that artful caution. Lowering his voice, the inventor passed with laudable smoothness from the preface to the substance. Dreyer laid down his pencil. Suavely and in detail the Magyar—or Frenchman, or Pole—stated his business.
“You say, then, that it has nothing to do with wax?” asked Dreyer. The inventor raised his finger. “Absolutely nothing, though I call it ‘voskin,’ a trade name that will be in all dictionaries tomorrow. Its main component is a resilient, colorless product resembling flesh. I particularly stress its elasticity, its pliability, its rippliability, so to speak.”
“Speak by all means,” said Dreyer. “And what about that ‘electric impellent’—I don’t quite understand; what do you mean, for example, by ‘contractive transmission’?”
The inventor smiled a wise smile. “Ah, that’s the whole point. Obviously, it would be much simpler if I showed you the blueprints; but it is also obvious that I’m not yet inclined to do so. I have explained how you can apply my invention. Now it’s up to you to give me the funds for the construction of the first sample.”
“How much would you need?” asked Dreyer with curiosity.
The inventor replied in detail.
“Don’t you think,” said Dreyer with a mischievous glint in his eye, “that perhaps your imagination is worth much more? I highly respect and value the imagination in others. If for example a man came to me and said: ‘My dear Herr Direktor, I would like to dream a little. How much will you pay me for dreaming?’ then, maybe, I would begin negotiations with him. Whereas you, my dear inventor, you offer at once something practical, factory production and so forth. Who cares about realization? I am duty-bound to believe in a dream but to believe in the embodiment of that dream—Puh!” (one of Dreyer’s lipbursts).
At first the inventor did not understand; then he understood and was offended.
“In other words, you simply refuse?” he asked gloomily.
Dreyer sighed. The inventor clucked his tongue, and leaned back in his chair clasping and unclasping his hands.
“This is my life’s work,” he said at last, staring into space. “Like Hercules, I have been struggling with the tentacles of a dream for ten years, mastering this softness, this flexibility, this plexibility, this stylized animation, if I may use the expression.”
“Of course you may,” said Dreyer. “I’d even say that’s better than the—what was it—‘ripplexibility’? Tell me,” he began, picking up the pencil again—a good sign (though his interlocutor could not know it), “have you approached anyone else with that offer?”
“Well,” said the inventor with perfectly mimicked sincerity, “I confess this is the first time. In fact, I have just arrived in Germany. This is Germany, isn’t it?” he added, looking around.
“So I’m told,” said Dreyer.
There was a fruit-bearing pause.
“Your dream is enchanting,” said Dreyer pensively, “enchanting.”
The other grimaced and flared up: “Stop harping on dreams, sir. They have come true, they have become flesh, in more senses than one, even though I may be a pauper, and cannot build my Eden and eidolons. Have you ever read Epicritus?”
Dreyer shook his head.
“Nor have I. But do give me a chance to prove that I am no quack. They told me you were interested in such innovations. Just think what a delight this would be, what an adornment, what an astounding, and permit me to say even artistic, achievement.”
“What guarantee do you offer me?” asked Dreyer, relishing the entertainment.
“The guarantee of the human spirit,” the inventor said trenchantly.
Dreyer laughed. “That’s more like it. You revert to my original viewpoint.”
He thought for a moment, then added: “I think I want to roll your offer around in my head. Who knows, maybe I’ll see your invention in my next dream. My imagination must become steeped in it. At the moment I can say neither yes nor no. Now run along home. Where are you staying?”
“Hotel Montevideo,” said the inventor. “An idiotically misleading name.”
“But also a familiar one, though I can’t remember why. Video, video.…”
“I see you have my friend’s Pugowitz Tapwater Filter,” said the inventor, pointing at the faucet in the corridor with the air of Rembrandt indicating a Claude Lorraine.
“Video, video,” repeated Dreyer. “No, I don’t know. Well, ponder our talk. Decide if you really want to kill a delightful fancy by selling it to the factory, and in a week or ten days I’ll ring you up. And—pardon me for alluding to this—I hope you’ll be a bit more communicative, a bit more trusting.”
When his visitor had left, Dreyer sat motionless, his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets. “No, he is not a charlatan,” he reflected. “Or at least he is not aware of being one. Why not have a little fun? If it is all he says, the results really may be curious.” The telephone emitted a discreet buzz, and for a time he forgot about the inventor.
That evening, however, he hinted to Martha that he was about to embark on a completely new project, and when she asked if it were profitable, he narrowed his eyes and nodded: “Oh, very, very profitable, my love.” Next morning, as he was snorting under the shower, he decided not to receive the inventor again. At lunchtime, in a restaurant, he remembered him with pleasure and decided that the invention was something unique and irresistible. Upon coming home to supper he remarked to Martha casually that the project had fallen through. She was wearing her beige dress and was wrapped in a pink shawl, though it was quite warm in the house. Franz, whom he considered an amusing simpleton, was as usual jumpy and gloomy. He soon went home, saying he had smoked too much and had a headache. As soon as he had gone, Martha went up to the bedroom. In the boudoir on the tripod table by the sofa a silver box remained open. Dreyer took a Libidette from it and burst out laughing. “Contractive transmission! Animated flexibility! No, he can’t be cheating. I think his idea is awfully attractive.”
When he in turn went up to bed, Martha seemed to be asleep. After several centuries had elapsed, the bed table lamp went out. Presently she opened her eyes and listened. He was snoring. She lay on her back, gazing into the dark. Everything irritated her—that snoring, that gleam in the dark, probably in the looking glass, and incidentally, her own self.
“That was the wrong approach,” she thought. “Tomorrow night I’ll take drastic measures. Tomorrow night.”
Franz, however, did not appear either the next evening or on Saturday. On Friday he had gone to a movie, and on Saturday, to a café with his colleague Schwimmer. At the cinema, an actress with a little black heart for lips and with eyelashes like the spokes of an umbrella was impersonating a rich heiress impersonating a poor office girl. The café turned out to be dark and dull. Schwimmer kept talking about the goings-on among boys in summer camps, and a rouged whore with a repulsive gold tooth was looking at them and swinging her leg, and half-smiling at Franz every time she shook off the ash of her cigarette.
It would have been so simple, thought Franz, to grasp her when she touched my knee. Agony.… Should I perhaps wait a while and not see her for a few days? But then life is not worth living. The next time I swear, yes, I swear. I swear by my mother and sister.
On Sunday his landlord brought him his coffee as usual at nine-thirty. Franz did not at once dress and shave as he did on weekdays, but merely pulled on his old dressing gown over his pajamas, and sat down at the table to write his weekly letter: “Dear Mama,” he wrote in his crawling hand, “how are you?
How is Emmy? Probably …—”
He paused, crossed out the last word and lapsed into thought, picking his nose, looking at the rainy day in the window. Probably they were on their way to church now. In the afternoon there would be coffee with whipped cream. He imagined his mother’s fat florid face and dyed hair. What did she care about him? She had always loved Emmy more. She had still boxed his ears when he was seventeen, eighteen, even nineteen—last year, in fact. Once at Easter, when he was quite small but already bespectacled, she had ordered him to eat a little chocolate bunny that had been well licked by his sister. For having licked the candy meant for him Emmy received a light slap on the behind, but to him, for having refused to touch the slimy brown horror, she delivered such a backhand whack in the face that he flew off his chair, hit his head against the sideboard and lost consciousness. His love for his mother was never very deep but even so it was his first unhappy love, or rather he regarded her as a rough draft of a first love, for although he had craved for her affection because his schoolbooks of stories (My Soldier Boy, Hanna Comes Home) told him, as they had from immemorial time, that mothers always doted upon their sons and daughters, he actually could not stand her physical appearance, mannerisms, and emanations, the depressing, depressingly familiar odor of her skin and clothes, the bedbug-brown fat birthmark on her neck, the trick she had of scratching with a knitting needle the unappetizing parting of her chestnut hair, her enormous dropsical ankles, and all the kitchen faces she made by which he could unerringly determine what she was preparing—beer soup or bull hodes, or that dreadful local dainty Budenzucker.
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