It happened about three weeks ago. After a long time I was able to take a relaxing afternoon stroll once again, with window-shopping on Tauentzienstrasse. Suddenly, at Wittenbergplatz, shouts and laughter from a surging crowd of people. Leader or victim, in the center with wild gestures, is a pale youth, his bloodless lips spread wide for a scream, barely aware of the disparaging heckling, as he hurls out his indictment of “this era, which has grown heartless.” Very softly, audible only to those standing closest to him, he ends up with: “But the fourth of June will be the day of destiny for all.” How so? He can’t, and won’t, say. Still, as if sensing the dreadfulness to come, a shudder runs over his body as he names the date.
Then he begins the second part of his tirade. The policeman on the corner stares indifferently at the speaker, whose words are turning more and more impassioned. “He has the paragraph in his pocket,” someone explains.
So today is the day of destiny. For us all. I don’t consider this type of prophecy the end of the world, even if it’s tied to a specific day. But now that I’m reminded of it, I do feel obliged to be a little attentive. I find myself thinking of it as I open the mail, or read the latest telegrams. Nothing out of the ordinary has happened. Natural catastrophes—bloody confrontations—accidents—a flight across the ocean. It’s sure to be fateful for many, but not for everyone. There is no hint of an earthshaking event. But now I’m overcome with major misgivings about whether it is at all possible to take stock of this day right now, even just concerning the significance, or insignificance, of an incident. Anything can start out unrecognizably, anything can turn into a dire fate. I realize how flippant I’m being. All at once everything becomes important and serious.
How would it be if, for just one day, everyone all of a sudden were to regard everything as important and serious? The mechanized sequence of their family life, the pattern underlying their professional work. Saying good morning to their wives, signing documents.—Day of destiny?
Berliner Börsen Courier, June 4, 1927
Wanted: Perfect Optimist
AN IMAGINARY DISPATCH FROM NEW YORK CITY
April 14. I read this announcement in today’s New York Herald:
Wanted:
Short, fat man with a bald head and good teeth. Forty dollars a week.
Come tomorrow between eight and ten.
Gridgeman,
Marmalade wholesale, 293 Ninth Street.
April 15. I was the first. Mister Gridgeman looked over my physique, examined my bald head and teeth, then said, “Smile.” I didn’t quite understand, and he repeated his request. The situation was so odd that I found it a little hard to start grinning from ear to ear. “So, you’re hired.” Mister Gridgeman clapped me on the back with a hand as hard as steel. We went into his private office. He pointed to a leather chair right across from his desk. “Your task will be to sit in this armchair every day from eight to two. You can read detective stories, write memoirs, smoke, even darn socks for all I care. But you have to smile, and keep on smiling. That’s the essential thing. Forty dollars a week. And you start tomorrow. Goodbye.”
April 16. I have a sleepless night behind me. This Mister Gridgeman seems to be insane. Or does he want to showcase me to his customers, claiming that my corpulence comes solely from my regular indulgence in the unrivaled Gridgeman marmalade?—I’m right in place at eight on the dot. Mister Gridgeman is already there. I sit down. I start my work a bit bashfully. I smile over at Mister Gridgeman. Here and there I look around me. Highly instructive statistics about the protein content of California plums and some ten clever sayings are mounted on the walls, praising Gridgeman bananas as skyscrapers of goodness, nutritional value, and culture. Also: What perfume could be finer than the aroma of our pineapple jam?—Through the glass door I see the nice slim face of a typist with straight black hair, typing at a good pace and making a rather good impression on me.—I smile the whole time, two hours, four hours, six hours.
April 22. This is a splendid job. They’ve paid me my first weekly wages, forty dollars. I think that, given my preposterous work, I am the best-paid guy on the planet.—Mister Gridgeman hasn’t said a word to me yet about the whys and wherefores. My curiosity dies down. I have thought through all the possibilities and didn’t come up with much. Mister Gridgeman is just a harmless madman, and I don’t have the guts to ask a madman questions. Incidentally, Mister Gridgeman is very kind to me. I smoke his cigars and chew his gum. When he’s dictating business letters to the nice typist—her name is Bessie—he gives me a friendly nod. During his long-distance telephone calls to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Denver, and to the plantations in Alabama and South Carolina, he returns my smile. And when businesspeople come, he introduces me to them as a friend. He provides price quotes, talks about the new harvest and about his superb grapefruits, and receives orders for his marmalade by the truckload. But not for a second does he look away from my eyes and my lips, which are frozen in an everlasting smile.
May 4. Everything is going along swimmingly. I got bad news from Jefferson City: my in-laws’ farm was severely affected by the catastrophic flooding of the Mississippi. But that won’t stop me from keeping a smile on my face.
May 7. Mister Gridgeman seems to be quite satisfied with me. His hard-as-steel hand claps me on the shoulder more and more often; I already have a good dozen black-and-blue marks. Every day I am served ice cream at midday. My wages have been raised to fifty dollars. On Sunday, Bessie and I will go to a baseball game.
May 17. I’m feeling quite glum; Bessie has suddenly gotten engaged to an underwear manufacturer in the Bronx. What should I do? I have to smile. Maybe this’ll do the trick: I’ve subscribed to satirical magazines, Life, Punch, the New Yorker, and the Judge. But I think that’s the wrong way to go about it. I’d rather read the political section of the daily newspapers.
May 31. Gridgeman has sealed a very big deal. He bursts into loud laughter, comes up to me, and hits me on the shoulder so hard that I sink to my knees. “Well, now! You are a great guy; you got me customers for my entire inventory of marmalade, and I bet that 80 percent of it was moldy. It was a fine idea to hire you. Ah, you don’t even know yet what I need you for. You are my lucky charm. I have to have an optimist around me, a fat guy who is always laughing and reflects life. When I see you, nothing can go wrong, nothing.”
June 1. Today I found the office door barred and the lock sealed by the authorities. Under the company’s nameplate was a small strip of paper with the typed message: “Closed down for bankruptcy by the courts.”
Berliner Börsen Courier, July 3, 1927
Renovation
AN ODE TO THE COFFEEHOUSE
Coffeehouses have something in common with well-played violins. They resonate, reverberate, and impart distinct timbres. The many years of the regular guests’ clamor have amassed their filaments and atoms in a singular way, and the woodwork, paneling, and even pieces of furniture pulse marvelously to the tunes of the visitors’ life rhythms. Malice and venomous thoughts of a decade on the blackened walls have settled in as a sweetly radiant finish, as the finest patina. Every sound, emanating from the faintest quiver, the most unremarkable brains, comes through and runs endlessly, in mysterious waves, across all the molecules of the magnificently played sound body, day after day, with the regulars playing the strings to attain the uplifting resonance that their lives, professions, or families generally fail to deliver. The molecular miracle that unfolds here, the phenomenon of metaphysical ensoulment of favorite pubs from the aura of their guests, has yet to be the subject of scholarly research.
But would it ever occur to any owner of an Amati violin to use sandpaper to scrub off the vintage, resounding finish of his instruments, the atoms of which are filled and fulfilled by the sonority of countless concerts, and coat the violin with fine gold bronze? This deplorable barbarity is being increasingly deployed to carry out a procedure of this sort in people’s favorite pubs! One day you go into the old familiar place and find the furn
iture gone, and you catch sight of men on high ladders with taunting paper caps using sharp tools to scrape your most precious essences and deposits off the walls. To your dismay you make out the best joke of your life, now reduced to fine dust along those walls, along with the uproarious laughter it occasioned, and you stumble across the apt remarks you once made about the nature of chess fans, and you’re standing there just as the lavatory attendant, taken away temporarily from her other duties, uses a rag to wipe up the tender words from the floor that you whispered in Amalie’s ears in 1916, and—with minor adjustments—Laura’s in 1918. His head tilted to size up the matter, his hand on his watch chain, the coffeehouse owner stands at my side, while I’m deeply moved, and says, “There! Have a look!”
So, now it’s going to be different. Somewhere there are two beautiful elephant heads with torch-bearing trunks, to be used as tasteful lighting ornaments for the two pillars. A family of fishermen, roof tiles from Lake Gosau, and farmers’ girls in richly carved Renaissance frames are awaiting their decorative destinations. Red and gold. Brocade and repp. The dancer Kitty Starling … a polar bear prowling around a block of ice bathed in light …
It’s the women’s fault, believe me, women with their horribly deficient sense of history, which manifests itself in such a blessedly disastrous manner as a love of tidiness and cleanliness; women with their endearing attachment to the present, paying no heed to the stream of time, but instead focusing determinedly on countering the passage of eons with cosmetics, apparel, and beating carpets. Their efforts are aimed at demolishing time. When would a man ever get the idea of repainting a foyer? When would a painter ever have imagined that the paintbrush in his practiced hand was a close relative of the powder puff standing up to the pyramids at Giza? But when, on the other hand, did a woman ever fully grasp the metaphysical outlook of the man that stops him from giving away his old hats, perched as they are atop his thoughts, or tossing them away, willy-nilly?
Blindly carrying over her ideals to venerable taverns, which are steeped in tradition, she is eager, as the wife of a coffeehouse proprietor, to enforce the principle of domesticity in the café as well as at home, doing a thorough job of it, tidying up, painting, in short, obliterating time and providing a squeaky-clean, cozy home for the guest. But, I ask you, who actually looks forward to heading home? She pressures her reluctant spouse to go with the times, remodel, alter the image, gild the place, add red, polish the furniture, and dye the pub’s hair.
The local pub, a site of extreme masculinity, is about to acquire an utterly feminine aspect that lends the concept of “passing the time” an odd and quite specifically feminine slant with tireless renovation and beaming disavowal of all the years gone by. Revered countenance of everyone’s favorite bar! With gold and red, time has been driven out of your features. The regular visitor is appalled by the destruction of his years, by the eradication of the bits of himself he has breathed into the place. But the woman in charge has taken on a new coffeehouse …
Berliner Börsen Courier, July 13, 1927
Why Don’t Matches Smell That Way Anymore?
I woke up at night. The rain beat against the windowpanes. A thin gleam slid across the wall. Someone had turned on a light in the building across the street, and at this moment it came my way. It was not merely a sensation of smell that took hold of me, it was more of an almost painful feeling rushing through my whole body, permeating every cell, and transforming it in some mysterious way.
So, how was it?
Well, it was like this: a match whooshed gently across the striking surface, and light blazed up. And silently, eerily, the blue spirits’ flame arose. Its fragrance blended with the last trace of the dying match. Now the aroma of a sweet hint of cocoa was added on, with a slow hum as it warmed. What was this wonderful symphony of scents that was suddenly caressing and cajoling my face? What sort of voices were these? … Spirits … cocoa.… extinguishing match … Why don’t matches smell like that anymore?
Yes, how has that happened? Have development, progress, catastrophe left their mark on you, too, you matches? Is it a yearning for something new, or the lack of time, that forms you from different, cold materials today? Your soul is gone. Do you have a new one? I don’t get that sense. Am I too old to capture the spirit of things with eager nostrils the way I once did?
Oh, blessed fragrance from the sun-kissed leather cushions of a carriage! The sun was baking, thin, fine dust lay on the street, and dried grass gave off its scent, green and herbaceous, up from the ground. The Corpus Christi procession had passed by here. There were whipcords. Stepping into the little shop, you would see them hanging there at the door by the dozens, dark, slender worms adorned with colored little woolen tassels, black and new, and emitting a fragrance that signified horse and stable and mighty rule over both. And out of one of the countless drawers that rose all the way up to the ceiling came the pervasive aroma of a singular, mysterious spice that had never been granted to any mortal being in the clientele’s circle to see, to feel, to put a name to. Enticing to young people wishing to enter the store three times a day, a trade secret revealed only to its greatest luminaries. They knew how to guard this secret well. If I asked, they explained, with duplicitous looks on their faces, that they didn’t know what I meant. Expensive smells. “Whipcord” and “general store,” what’s become of you?
And then: First day in the summer apartment. Scent of wet terra alba used to paint the staircase bright white. A musty, gritty smell arose from the cellar. Added to this enchanting duality was a mixture of polish and winter apples coming from the rooms. Oh, it was dazzling!—Swim class, that was like the smell of a new rubber ball, hot gray wood and paper to which some butter, softened by the sun, was still stuck. The hothouse was moist, wet earth, a site of silence. The silence had its fragrance as well. Even the air smelled so delightful on some winter days! What component of coal might that have been? There were three kinds of aromas at play. I called them “Song Without Words,” “Sonate Pathétique,” and “Mums.” Today, I think, coal comes from Silesia, and it just smells like coal. Silesian coal is neutral. Back then it may have been coal from Cardiff. Maybe in England it still smells like “Song Without Words.”
The light on the wall has gone out. I turn to the other side.—Lost! I say. They use new materials. During the war they ran out of many materials, which were replaced by different, cheaper ones. Now people are staying with them. That is progress. A world has disappeared and will never, ever come back. From an economic standpoint it is not important for the winter air to smell like “Sonate Pathétique.” Dried grass is referred to as hay. It is cattle fodder. Phosphorus can no longer be used to make matches.
Someday I may well get to Paris and in the central warehouse of the famed perfume factory inquire about the lost and lovely inspiring “Astris.” The old salesman will leaf through a catalog. “Oh, Sir,” he will say, “we stopped making that a long time ago. An older perfume. It’s no longer in demand.”—And with the sound of these words the appearance of that beloved being will vanish for good, holding his bathrobe high over his radiant head, wading through the shallow sea over to the island.—“You are sad, Sir,” the salesman will say. “We perfumers have a sad profession. We kill the past. Perfumes pass on, and so do their worlds.… And we create new ones again.”
“This bottle”—and he will show me a sparkling, spraying little crystal bottle—“our latest creation, L’avenir—what destiny, do you think, might lie dormant here?—We’re a bit godlike, aren’t we? No, perhaps it’s not so sad to be a perfumer after all.”
And I will ask him warily: “Do you know the scent of the cellar stairs? Or perhaps the smell of the dying match? Whipcord? Swimming pool? Why, Sir, always the future? Why everything to the young? Why anticipation? Why not memory? Parfums retrospectives! Escalier de cave; Cordelette de fouet; Petit nageur; Allumette mourante … I ask you—”
He gazes at me. His good bearded face blurs, and I fall asleep.
Ber
liner Börsen Courier, August 10, 1927
The Rose of Jericho
This miracle has existed, you might say, since “biblical” times. The prophet Jeremiah mentions the Rose of Jericho in a variety of contexts. In the quest for new export products, the Palestinian export trade has now brought this attraction to us as well. For two marks, everyone can now purchase this mysterious plant in fine flower shops. About the size of a pear, dirty yellow in color, its small dried-up leaves scrunched together, this scrawny moss might not even be regarded as a “flower” at all. But, as so often in life, appearances are deceiving. In boiling water this Cinderella undergoes a miraculous metamorphosis. With this flower, an otherwise lethal process turns life-giving, and the botanical monstrosity blossoms into the Rose of Jericho.
Overwhelmed by scientific curiosity, I sacrificed two marks and bought the plant. In the afternoon I visited Steffie. I got there as she was making coffee, as she was about to pour the boiling water. “Stop,” I cried, “watch this: a miracle will now take place.” I pulled the hidden Rose of Jericho out of my jacket pocket and tossed it into the coffeepot. Steffie and I watched intensely for quite a while. Roughly an hour. Then it slowly happened. The dirty yellow transformed into dark green, the small, dried leaves began to spread apart. It was certainly quite nice, but it would take the authority of a prophet to pass off this high school physics experiment as a “miracle.”
The next day I brought my rose back to the flower shop. “Miss,” I complained to the saleswoman, “I don’t like your miracle. Please exchange it for me.” Since there was no other miracle on hand, I settled for a cactus. A cactus always comes in handy. For instance, the thirtieth of the month was Aunt Emma’s birthday. Seven years earlier I had presented her a silver-plated pencil I found in the subway. Since then that unfortunate date had not permitted me to buy any more birthday presents. This time I will delight her with the prickly plant. “But, my boy,” she’ll say, “you have money for a present on the thirtieth? Will wonders never cease?”—Which goes to show that the Rose of Jericho at least indirectly confirmed the quality ascribed to it.
Billy Wilder on Assignment Page 6
