But as soon as she had gone, as soon as supper hour approached, and he had to face Dreyer, everything changed. As happens in dreams, when a perfectly harmless object inspires us with fear and thereafter is frightening every time we dream of it (and even in real life retains disquietening overtones), so Dreyer’s presence became for Franz a refined torture, an implacable menace. When for the first time after her visit, he had walked the short distance between the gate and the porch (yawning nervously and plucking at his glasses as he went); when for the first time in the capacity of clandestine lover of the lady of the house he had glanced askance at innocent Frieda and crossed the threshold rubbing his rain-wet hands, Franz was overwhelmed with such an eerie feeling that in his fright and confusion he had aimed a kick at Tom, who was welcoming him in the drawing room with an unexpected burst of affection; as Franz waited for his hosts, he superstitiously searched the bright eyes of the cushions for omens of disaster. A high-strung and abject coward in matters of feeling (and such cowards are doubly wretched since they lucidly perceive their cowardice and fear it), he could not help cringing when, with a banging of doors in a dramatic draft, Martha and Dreyer entered simultaneously from two different rooms as if on a too harshly lit stage. Then he snapped to attention and in this attitude felt himself ascending through the ceiling, through the roof, into the black-brown sky, while, in reality, drained empty, he was shaking hands with Martha, with Dreyer. He dropped back on his feet out of that dark nonexistence, from those unknown and rather silly heights, to land firmly in the middle of the room (safe, safe!) when hearty Dreyer described a circle with his index finger and jabbed him in the navel; Franz mimicked a gasp and giggled; and as usual Martha was coldly radiant. His fear did not pass but only subsided temporarily: one incautious glance, one eloquent smile, and all would be revealed, and a disaster beyond imagination would shatter his career. Thereafter whenever he entered this house, he imagined that the disaster had happened—that Martha had been found out, or had confessed everything in a fit of insanity or religious self-immolation to her husband; and the drawing room chandelier invariably met him with a sinister refulgence.
He would weigh every joke of Dreyer’s, scrape at it, sniff at it, with trepidation, checking it for some crafty allusion, but there was nothing. Luckily for Franz, his observant uncle’s interest in any object, animated or not, whose distinctive features he had immediately grasped, or thought he had grasped, gloated over and filed away, would wane with its every subsequent reappearance. The bright perception became the habitual abstraction. Natures like his spend enough energy in tackling with all the weapons and vessels of the mind the enforced impressions of existence to be grateful for the neutral film of familiarity that soon forms between the newness and its consumer. It was too boring to think that the object might change of its own accord and assume unforeseen characteristics. That would mean having to enjoy it again, and he was no longer young. He had appreciated the poor bloke’s simplicity and vulgarity almost at their first anonymous rendezvous in the train. Thenceforth, from the first moment of actual acquaintance, he had thought of Franz as of an amusing coincidence in human form: the form was that of a timid provincial nephew with a banal mind and limited ambitions. Similarly Martha, for more than seven years now, had remained the same distant, thrifty, frigid wife whose beauty would occasionally come alive and welcome him with the paradisal smile he had first fallen in love with. Neither of these images changed basically; they simply became more compactly filled up with fitting characteristics. Thus an experienced artist sees only that which is in keeping with his initial concept.
On the other hand, Dreyer would feel a kind of humiliating itching when an object did not immediately yield to his voracious eye, did not assume obediently such a posture as to give him a chance to wrestle with it. A couple of months had passed since the car accident. He had had time to make his will as he had intended to do all along on his fiftieth birthday (which, bless her cold heart, his only inheritor had let pass without a shadow of celebration), and still he could not determine a silly little thing about his chauffeur which if true would certainly lead to another accident sooner or later. With a twitch of his nostril he would probe the man’s tobacco reek for a gayer smell; observed him when he went bowlegged around the car; and, at the most perilous hour—Saturday night—would unexpectedly summon him and laboriously conduct a trivial conversation while he watched whether the other did not behave in too free a fashion. He hoped that some day he would be told that the man, alas, was not fit to come, but alas that day never came. At times it seemed to him that the Icarus was taking the turns a little faster, a little more cheerfully than usual. It was just on such a day of carefree swerves, made especially interesting by the fact that the first real snow of the year had fallen on the eve and had now melted into a slippery mush, that he noticed a hatless man through the window who looked exactly as if he had hinges for joints, crossing the street with mincing steps. That reminded him of his talk with the amiable inventor. When he reached his office, he promptly had him called at the Montevideo, and was very pleased when old Sarah Reich, his secretary, announced that the inventor would be right over. However, neither Dreyer, nor Miss Reich (who had her own dreadful troubles), nor anyone at all in the world ever found out that the lonely and homesick inventor happened to live in the very same room where Franz had spent the night of his arrival; where a great ash tree, now leafless, was visible from the window; and where one could notice, if one looked very carefully, that some minute glass dust had become imbedded in the cracks of the linoleum by the washstand. It is significant that Fate should have lodged him there of all places. It was a road that Franz had travelled—and all at once Fate remembered and sent in pursuit this practically nameless man who of course knew nothing of his important assignment, and never found out anything about it, as for that matter no one else ever did, not even old Enricht.
“Welcome,” said Dreyer, “sit down.”
The inventor did.
“Well,” asked Dreyer, toying with his favorite pencil.
The inventor blew his nose, carefully wrapped up the results, and spent a long time tucking the handkerchief—an article that some new invention should have long replaced—into his pocket.
“I come to you with the same offer,” he said at last.
“Any additional details,” suggested Dreyer, pencilling concentric blue circles on his blotter.
The inventor nodded and started to speak. The telephone on the desk buzzed. Dreyer gave his visitor a gentle smile and energetically put the receiver to his ear. “It’s me. I forgot—did you say you would not be back for supper tonight?”
“That’s right, my love.”
“And you’ll be home late?”
“After midnight. Meeting of the board and festivities. Go to a restaurant with Franz or something.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I shall.”
“Wonderful,” said Dreyer. “Goody-by. Oh, wait—if you want the car—Hullo!” But she had already hung up.
The inventor was pretending not to listen. Dreyer noticed this and said with a coy snicker: “That was my little girl friend.”
The inventor smirked indulgently in response and resumed his explanations. Dreyer began a new set of concentric circles, Miss Reich brought a batch of letters and silently disappeared. The inventor continued to talk. Dreyer threw down the pencil, reclined limply in his armchair and surrendered to the fascination.
“What was that?” he interrupted. “The noble slowness of a sleepwalker’s progress?”
“Yes, if desired,” said the inventor. “Or at the other extreme, the restrained agility of a convalescent.”
“Go on, go on,” Dreyer said, closing his eyes. “This is pure witchcraft.”
6
An unprepossessing sullen little café, not far from where Franz lives. Three men engrossed in a silent game of skat. The wife of one of them, pregnant and veal-pale, sleepily following their game. A plain girl with a nervous tic, leafing throug
h an old picture magazine and stopping at the messy death of a riddle: an indelible pencil had rapaciously filled in most of the crossword’s blank squares. A lady in a moleskin coat (that impressed the proprietress of the place) and a young man in tortoise shell glasses, sipping cherry brandy and gazing into each other’s eyes. A drunk in an unemployed-looking cap tapping on the thick glass behind which coins had bunched together forming a metal sausage—the losses of all those who had put a coin in the slot and had moved the handle to activate the little tin juggler while his tiny bright balls followed the winding grooves. The counter, chilled by beer foam, gives off a fish-like sheen. The proprietress has two green wool soccer balls for breasts. She yawns as she looks toward a dark nook where the waiter, half-concealed by a screen, is devouring a mountain of mashed potatoes. On the wall behind her tocks a cuckoo clock of carved wood surmounted by a pair of antlers and beside it there is an oleograph depicting the meeting of Bismarck and Napoleon III. The rustle of the card players grows softer and softer. It has now stopped altogether.
“You chose well—we can be sure nobody will see us here.”
He caressed her hand on the table: “Yes, but it’s getting late, darling, maybe it’s time to go.”
“Your uncle won’t be back till midnight or later. We have time.”
“Forgive me for dragging you to such a squalid place.”
“No-no, not at all. I told you, it’s quite a good choice. Let’s imagine you are a Heidelberg student. How nice you would look in a cerevis.”
“And you are a princess incognito? I’d like us to drink champagne, with couples dancing around us, and beautiful Hungarian music.”
She propped her elbow on the table, drawing back the skin of her cheek with her fist. Silence.
“Tell me, would you like to eat something? I’m afraid you have grown still thinner.”
“Oh, what does it matter. All my life I’ve been unhappy. And now you are with me.”
Motionless, the players gazed at their cards. The puffy woman leaned exhausted against her husband’s shoulder. The girl had lapsed into thought and her face had ceased twitching. The picture magazine’s pages drooped on their stick like a flag in the calm. Silence. Torpor.
Martha was the first to stir: Franz, too, tried to shake off that strange drowsiness; blinked, tugged at the lapels of his jacket.
“I love him but he is poor,” she said jokingly. And suddenly her expression changed. She imagined that she, too, was penniless, and that here, in this shabby little tavern, among befuddled workmen and cheap floozies, in this deafening silence with only that clock clucking, a sticky wine glass before each, the two of them were whiling away their Saturday night.
She fancied with horror that this tender pauper really was her husband, her young husband, whom she would never, never give up. Darned stockings, two modest dresses, a broken comb, one room with a bloated mirror, her hands coarse from washing and cooking, this tavern where for one reichsmark you could get royally drunk.…
She felt so terrified that she dug her nails into his hand.
“What’s happened? Dearest, I don’t understand.”
“Get up,” she said, “pay and let’s go. It’s so stuffy in here, I can’t breathe.”
As she inhaled the matter-of-fact cold of the night, she instantly regained her wealth and, pressing against him, rapidly switched feet so as to be in step with him; he groped for and found her warm wrist among the folds of her furs.
Next morning, as she lay in bed in her pretty bright room, Martha recalled her fanciful fears with a smile. “Let us be realistic,” she reassured herself. “It’s all quite simple. I simply have a lover. That ought to embellish, not complicate, my existence. And that’s just what it is—a pleasant embellishment. And if, by any chance—” But strange, she could find no specific direction for her thoughts; Franz’s street terminated in a dead end which her mind reached invariably. She could not imagine, say, that Franz did not exist, or that some other admirer was floating out of a mist with a rose in his hand, for, as he came nearer, it was always Franz. This day like all days to come was suffused and colored by her passion for Franz. She tried to think of the past, of those impossible years when she did not yet know him, but it was not her own past she conjured up, it was his: his little town where she had happened to stop on her way grew up in her thoughts and there, in the haze, was Franz’s white green-roofed house, never seen by her in real life but described by him many times, and the brick schoolhouse around the corner, and the frail little boy with glasses. What Franz had told her about his childhood was more important than anything she had actually experienced; and she did not understand why that was so, and argued with herself in an attempt to refute what impinged on her sense of conformity and clarity.
Particularly painful was that inner discord when she had to attend to some household project or ponder an important purchase that in no way concerned Franz. For example, at odd moments the idea of acquiring a new car kept cropping up; then she would tell herself that this had nothing to do with Franz, that he was being left out, and somehow cheated; and despite her long-standing dream of substituting a certain fashionable make of limousine for the somewhat seedy Icarus, all the fun of such an acquisition was spoiled. A dress that she would wear for Franz, or a Sunday dinner that she could compose of his favorite dishes—these matters were different. And at first all these misgivings and pleasures were strange to her as if she had grown ten years younger and was learning to live in a new way, and needed time to get accustomed to it.
Another perplexity stemmed from the fact that her house, of which she had grown even fonder since Franz had become practically a member of the family, contained someone else besides him and her. There he was, big as life, tawny-mustached and ruddy, eating at one table with her and sleeping in the adjacent bed, and demanding her attention in one way or another. His financial affairs interested her even more than in that already very distant year when a lot of ballast jettisoned from the balloon of inflation had come pouring into his pockets where it turned into that alchemistical dream—valuta. As before, he told her little. This interest of hers in Dreyer’s ventures did not combine organically with the new, piercing, moaning, and throbbing meaning of her life. She felt she could not be fully happy without such a blending of bank and bed, and yet she did not know how to achieve harmony, how to eliminate the discord. He had once shown her a slip of paper on which he had totalled up for her benefit his fortune in round numbers: “Is it enough?” he asked with a smile, “what do you think?” There were those 700,000 untouchable dollars in a safe in Hamburg. There was another fortune in stocks. There were considerable resources of a more fluid and changeable nature that constituted the blood system of his business. There was the will he had recently made which had cost her two nights of strenuous love-making but which had completely excluded, thank goodness, a wayward young brother in South Africa who, she suspected, was very much looking forward to his share.
“So we are practically millionaires,” she said with one of those rare resplendent responses for which her husband was ready to pay considerably more than he owned: “On the saddleback, on the saddleback, darling,” he answered.
No matter what happened, she meditated, at the exchange or in his frivolous transactions, there remained sufficient funds for many years of idle life—until, say, she was sixty, or, say, fifty-eight and Franz a still ardent forty-five. However, as long as Mr. Dreyer existed, he must continue to earn. Therefore veering from enthusiasm to a show of anxious gloom, she urged him to accumulate more in Hamburg and gamble less in Berlin, and coldly gave him back the slip of paper. They were standing by the desk where Parsifal held his lighted lantern, and one could tell by the peculiar stillness muffling the villa that snow was falling, smothering the garden in dark, dark white. December turned out to be colder than usual with spectacularly low temperatures to be eagerly noted by the forgetful old-timers of the press who had gone through the same rigmarole a couple of years earlier. Dreyer gave h
is watch a worried glance. The three of them were going to a variety show. Like a child he was afraid to be late. Martha reached for the newspaper lying on the table and looked through the advertisements and the local news, learning that a luxurious villa was for sale for 500,000 reichsmark, and that a car had overturned killing its occupant, the famous actor Hess, on his way to his sick wife’s bedside. “Good God,” she exclaimed, “this is unheard-of.” In the adjacent boudoir Franz was listening without much interest to the radio’s rich voice giving details of the crash.
The vast theater was crowded; its enormous stage was still curtained. They squeezed into one of those exceptionally narrow boxes in which one becomes so acutely aware what an uncomfortable, tangly and tingly thing a pair of human legs is. It was especially hard on lanky Franz. As if it were not enough that his lower extremities had grotesquely lengthened, Martha, strictly adhering to every rule of adultery, pressed the side of her silky knee against his awkwardly bent right leg while Dreyer, sitting to his left and a little behind, leaned lightly against his shoulder and kept tickling his ear with the corner of the program he was consulting. Poor Franz was torn between the fear that the husband might notice something and the delight of feeling the silky sparks coursing through his body.
“Such a huge theater,” he muttered, slightly shifting his shoulder so as to escape from Dreyer’s repulsive golden-haired hand. “I can imagine how much they make every night. Let me see—about two thousand seats—”
Dreyer, as he went through the program for the second or third time, exclaimed: “Ah, that will be good: trick cyclists.”
The lights dimmed slowly. The pressure of Martha’s knee increased recklessly, but then relaxed as the orchestra began to play a potpourri from Lucia di Lammermoor (which in the circumstances was pretty apt, though lost on our audience).
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