After Midnight (7 page)

I didn’t like Franz myself at first. And then I came to like him because Aunt Adelheid didn’t. I wanted to be nice to him; it was so sad and horrible to see the way Aunt Adelheid tormented him. Franz had to put flowers and leaves round the photograph of little Sebastian before dinner every Sunday. Aunt Adelheid gave him the flowers and leaves to be arranged separately, and then sat on a chair in silence watching Franz’s hands, which sometimes shook and let the flowers drop. And then Aunt Adelheid would look at him sternly, without a word, and Franz went red and bent down to pick the flowers up. “I am surprised, but glad, that you can bring yourself to eat,” she sometimes said in a slow, chanting sort of voice, at which Franz would put down his knife and fork, with hopeless despair in his eyes, his arms hanging long and thin by his sides.

One day I couldn’t stand it any more. I shouted at Aunt Adelheid. She was so surprised she couldn’t answer back. I don’t remember exactly what I said, except that the drift of it was the accident was her own fault, hers and
not
Franz’s, he’d only been a tiny child at the time without any idea what he was doing. And it was her fault little Sebastian was killed, and her fault Franz was unhappy. And if little Sebastian was an angel in heaven now, he’d be very sad about his mother and he would love Franz very much. Aunt Adelheid never forgave me for saying all this, but there was a happy look in Franz’s eyes.

I did want to be nice to him, but then I made some friends and went out dancing with them in the evening now and then, and I felt embarrassed when Franz came to see me home, with his silent face and his patient ape-like arms and his ridiculous red scarf. We’d be sitting in the middle of a lot of noise, and he was tranquil. He would sit there at our table, grave and friendly. He did nothing to trouble us, and yet it
was
troubling. So the others laughed louder and louder in their annoyance, as if to smother him with their laughter. They made jokes about him which didn’t bother him a bit, because he didn’t understand the jokes. Then they laughed even more angrily. Once they tried making him drunk, but he didn’t get drunk.

There were some very smart and self-assured girls among my friends, and I went to no end of trouble to try and be like them. The boys put on airs as well; I was afraid they’d think me silly and stupid. Often I joined in their laughter, afraid they might notice I didn’t really understand what they were laughing at. I wanted them to admire me as much as they admired themselves. It was fear made me want to be one of them; they were always ganging up on someone, one person at a time, and I didn’t want them ganging up on me. So I went along with them over Franz, making even nastier jokes about him than they did. I felt proud when they laughed at my jokes, but I was ashamed of myself too.

When I had to pay a quick visit to the Ladies and got out of the noise and the laughter, I used to feel sad and disgusted. I’d leave the Ladies as fast as I could, scared even to take the time to comb my hair. I was afraid the others would be laughing at me while I was gone, as indeed they were.

Franz went on being nice, and I went on being nasty.

One day there was an exhibition in Cologne, in the
Neumarkt: an exhibition of venereal diseases and the consequences of inter-racial breeding within a nation. It was organized by the Strength Through Joy movement. Aunt Adelheid and I went to see it, because there was nothing indecent about it, it was in the cause of scientific explanation, so it was our duty to go.

I was fairly well used to the idea of horrors, from what they had told us at gas mask drill, but now I was actually
seeing
eroded embryos preserved in spirit. And pictures of little babies whose eyes were just hollows full of yellowish-green pus. Women whose deformed breasts and buttocks touched the ground. Models of old men looking like crazy little children, and little children looking like ancient, wrinkled old men. And blood and pus and sticky red sores everywhere. All as a result of venereal diseases and inter-racial breeding. And then people have to go inventing poison gas too. Makes you quite surprised, speaking as a human being, to be alive at all and not have your entire body eaten away.

We were studying the eroded noses section when an elderly gentleman came up and spoke to Aunt Adelheid. He took his hat off, very politely. “I believe we’ve met, ma’am,” he said. His head was bald and round and brownish-grey, and his lower lip was thick and red, drooping like a mattress hung out of the window to air.

“Why, so we have, Assistant Secretary!” said Aunt Adelheid, beaming in a proud and happy way.

We got into conversation. The Assistant Secretary—his post was in the Civil Service—always used to buy his notebooks at Aunt Adelheid’s shop. “A shocking sight, eh?” he said, pointing to the eroded noses.

“Yes, indeed,” said Aunt Adelheid gravely. “Terrible, everyone ought to see it, it’s a warning to us all.” Don’t ask me
why Aunt Adelheid needed a warning. She was over fifty, with no chance left of catching a venereal disease. Unless she got it from eating unwashed fruit off a barrow in the street.

The Assistant Secretary saw us home. He was very earnest and very polite.

He took to calling at the shop to buy notebooks quite often. His name is Ludwig Wittkamp; Aunt Adelheid told me so. It’s quite surprising to find an important official like an Assistant Secretary has an ordinary personal name of his own. What does he need one for? He lives in the Hohenzollernring, though it is also hard to imagine him going about the ordinary business of living.

He bought the cheapest little notebooks he could find in our shop. He thinks highly of orderliness, and writes down all his expenses. Especially when he goes away, because that’s when your expenses can get right out of hand, before you know it you’ve spent a whole three marks and can’t say where it went.

One day the Assistant Secretary invited me out to the Beery Donkey to eat mussels. I felt very proud, and wrote home, and to my friend Josefine Leyendecker in Lappesheim, telling them how I was mixing frequently with Assistant Secretaries and suchlike important persons. Mussels are cheap. I’ve always liked them. The Assistant Secretary didn’t have any mussels for fear of food poisoning. He said he never ate mushrooms either. Or raw meat.

The restaurant was full of the smell of food, and restless people eating greedily and talking. The Assistant Secretary had knuckle of veal and salad. Salads are healthy, full of vitamins.

My mussels looked like squashed embryos. They reminded me of the exhibition of venereal diseases where I’d
met the Assistant Secretary. I felt sick. I could have done with a Boonekamp to drink, but I didn’t like to ask for one.

The Assistant Secretary was cross because I left nearly all my mussels, but they still had to be paid for. He told me he could get through a whole bottle of wine in an evening, within four or five hours. Back home in Lappesheim, we’d get through
four
bottles in that time.

He invited me to go home and share a bottle of wine with him afterwards. At the moment he was drinking gin, as a stimulant and because the knuckle of veal had been fatty. Then he talked to me like an important official and an educated man, i.e. seriously and politically and erotically. He said that as a Catholic he had to fight against his sexual desires, which were something tremendous. He felt drawn to prostitutes, down into those wild depths of life where you lose your money and your health and your soul’s salvation. That was why he fought the good fight against his desires. He admired the Führer, and supported him fervently as the saviour of the German nation when it was in danger of humiliation at the hands of enemy foreigners. But being a Catholic he was against Rosenberg, who had written some kind of mystical or mythological book about the twentieth century and the Germanic peoples. All this was very hard to understand.

Then the Assistant Secretary said he yearned for marriage, since only in Christian marriage could he give free rein to his desires. It was all right then. I thought I’d love to be an Assistant Secretary’s wife, on account of Aunt Adelheid and everyone in Lappesheim. But then I’d have to put up with the free rein of those alarming desires. I couldn’t picture that part of it.

Anyway, I didn’t have to wrestle with the problem of
whether to marry him or not, because
he
didn’t want to marry
me
. The only wife who would do for him was one with a dowry, and property, and who was young and pretty and willing to work into the bargain. Well, where would I get a dowry and property?

The Assistant Secretary had thought I’d be inheriting the thriving pub in Lappesheim, and getting money from my humble but well-to-do father before that, in which case he wouldn’t have objected to my common origins. Because he himself is wonderfully well educated. He told me how he stood by the grave of someone called Hölderlin and read a poem by this Hölderlin. Not just once, either; several times. These were always edifying moments. All this was so sacred to him that he couldn’t talk about it, couldn’t even mention it. He went on to talk about it.

I said I didn’t have any property, but I wasn’t poor. Then he fell silent for a while, drummed his fingers crossly on the table, had another gin, and then said well, he’d like to share a bottle of wine at home with me all the same. He said I looked like a skinny little schoolgirl.

All of a sudden there was Franz, standing by our table. His face was pale, his eyes calm, his scarf resplendent. Oh, if only I hadn’t told him I’d be here with the Assistant Secretary this evening! The idiot—coming to take me home when I was out with a posh, worldly-wise Assistant Secretary!

“Good evening,” said Franz. I wasn’t going to give him my hand. “Would you like to come home now, Sanna? It’s raining—I brought you a coat.” That stupid voice, so soft and velvety. What can you do about a pale-blue sort of voice like that? You can’t argue with it, you can’t get angry with it, you can’t laugh at it. What does someone like Franz want with a voice anyway? He himself seems quite surprised to have one.

“Do sit down, won’t you?” said the Assistant Secretary, very correct and decidedly annoyed. Franz sat down slowly, back very straight. He laid his long thin hands carefully on the table, as if about to pray.

The Assistant Secretary drew the corners of his mouth down scornfully and said well, it was nice for me to have such a gallant cousin to squire me about, and did I still feel like that bottle of wine? There was no need for the young gentleman to worry: he, the Assistant Secretary, would take me home by car.

“Yes,” said Franz, and stayed put instead of going away.

“For goodness’ sake, do take that ridiculous scarf off!” I said. My voice sounded shrill in my own ears. When he did take the scarf off, I felt as if I’d torn it from his neck with my own hands. The Assistant Secretary laughed. Franz looked sadly stripped and naked without it. The scarf lay on the pale wooden bench beside him, red and warm.

Franz was given his scarf by Paul. Paul is Franz’s one friend. He is a fat, cheerful, red ball of a man. Franz found him in the Municipal Woods quite late one evening, when the place was deserted. Paul was lying in the middle of the road; a motorcyclist had run over him and didn’t stop. He wasn’t dead, but he
had
been run over, and he was still drunk too. The next car that came along would have finished him off. Franz dragged Paul off the road and helped him get home. That sort of thing, naturally, can lead to friendship. The two of them don’t have much to say to one another, but you can sense the friendly affection between them.

Paul sometimes comes to the shop and annoys Aunt Adelheid by eating and drinking anything he can find in the kitchen, and taking postcards from the stand without paying for them. He gave Franz his scarf. Perhaps someone had given it to
him
and he felt ashamed to wear something so
daft. No, that’s not right. Paul meant to give Franz the scarf as a handkerchief—it’s really a big silk square. But Franz thought it was too good for that, so he wore it round his neck, out of friendship and because he was pleased to have it.

The waiter brought Franz a glass of beer. No one had ordered it, but Franz didn’t send it back.

The Assistant Secretary said well, now he saw I was in good company, he might as well go. I still don’t understand why, but at the time I was terrified the Assistant Secretary’s feelings had been hurt, and I wanted to go with him.

Suddenly a draught of air moved the red silk scarf on the bench. It looked as if it were breathing. The dark felt curtains at the door of the restaurant were pushed back a little way and a girl slipped through them. She was small and fair and delicate, like a Christmas fairy, all white and gold. But she was soaked with rain. She stopped beside our table, which was right by the entrance. You could hear the rain pelting down in the street outside. A waiter showed the girl one of the few empty seats in the restaurant, but she didn’t want to sit down; she shook her head, embarrassed and shy. I’d been just as shy myself, a few months back. Now I felt very fine and superior, compared to her.
And
she probably didn’t have any money. Her blouse was cheap and shoddy. I’d have wanted paying to wear a thing like that. She looked prettier than I ever did. I was glad the waiter showed his contempt by pointedly taking no notice of her.

She’d only been standing there beside us for a moment before she turned to escape back out into the rain, having just escaped from it into the restaurant. Then Franz looked at her. She looked at Franz. My heart was thudding; there was a rushing in my ears, like red-hot wheels. The Assistant Secretary said something, but his voice was far away and I couldn’t hear him. Franz was giving this rain-soaked girl all
in white and gold my coat. What did he think the idea was?
My
coat! It had been lying on his lap all this time, it was mine, he’d brought it for me. “Here,” he told the rain-soaked girl, “put this on and I’ll see you home.” What business had he speaking to a strange girl in his soft, velvety voice? What business had she looking at him with such a gentle, dark-blue light in her eyes? This was too much! “Sanna,” said Franz, “Sanna, you’re going by car, you won’t need a coat. I’ll bring it back to you later.”