Life Embitters (59 page)

Given the new situation I asked Xammar: “How do you see things now? What should we do? What opportunities does the new dispensation offer us?”

“The new dispensation offers us very little. I see a country sinking into a sea of margarine and a fantastic accumulation of ersatz products. We shall now see how far Germany can go along the road of glue and plastic.”

“Are you at all inclined to welcome such plastic possibilities?”

“I’d die first! We must rally our forces. We must create a lobby and oppose attempts made by any form of margarine to infiltrate our bodies. We must hoist the anti-margarine flag and strive to keep to butter and the classical conceptions of fat. Now is not the time to slumber. We must work might and main not to doze off on the sack. I don’t know if dawn will smile on us, to use Sr Clavé’s lyrics. As a matter of urgency we must look for work, reduce our expenditure, and start now! You …”

“Please don’t stand on ceremony, fire away …”

“You’ll have to water down your passions a little, and the cat’s way of life could perhaps serve as an example in this respect. It’s an animal with a positive outlook on life. A sophisticated operator. I’ve never known him to have the slightest romantic inclination; I’ve never seen it fascinated by characteristically childish and absurd nighttime adventures on the tiles. On the contrary, it is ready to use every trick in the book to guarantee high-quality nourishment. That’s most impressive. It differentiates between different brands of frankfurters, eats eggs only if fried, likes tea with lemon, like the Slavs, and is dangerously sweet-toothed. It’s a wonderful, exceptional cat and only lacks one talent to be really man-like: the ability to write newspaper articles.”

“I see … That’s clear enough.”

“I think it’s a pattern to follow. It may be that some friends, Tassin in particular, will think we are flippant, superficial guys with little in the way of refinement. Too bad …”

With that we heard the doorbell, and shortly Sr Tassin in person walked in through the office door with a bundle of papers under his arm. He usually resided in Vienna, but frequently came to Berlin, which was the main center for Russian émigrés of every stripe. Politics brought him here, though he also had his own small lines of business. We’d first met him in Madrid where he translated Russian novels for the 30-cent Espasa Calpe series.

Tassin had come to suggest a business project. It was the first on our horizon after the creation of the
Renten-Marken
. He had come to suggest we translate Kropotkin’s
Ethics
for a big publisher in Buenos Aires. Xammar winked and grinned at me

As Tassin insisted on maximum professionalism, the job wasn’t as simple as it seemed at first. We had a trial run to test our way of working. Tassin
sat in front of the Russian edition of the book and began to translate out loud using a mixture of French and German. Xammar sat in front of the typewriter and turned the verbal flow from Tassin into South American Spanish style and grammar. I was responsible for ensuring that the work’s philosophical vocabulary was accurate and, to an extent, for bolstering the content. It was a complex method of working but was the only solution if we were to attain the degree of authenticity the Argentine publisher required. It was a method that created really comic situations. When Tassin came across a thorny problem, he opened his mouth like a child and seemed as innocent as a lamb. When this happened, he inevitably looked up at the cat sleeping on top of the cupboard. Equally, Xammar sometimes struggled to find the right turn of phrase and the typewriter would stutter to a halt. Then his eyes also turned towards the cat. Of the three translators, my task was the most taxing, both because of the intrinsic difficulty of my role and my lack of experience. I would often grind to a halt, and, guided by the same mechanism driving the others, I’d stare at the cat. It was strange to see the three of us intermittently silent, perplexed and pensive, staring at the dozing, aloof cat.

“Yes,” said Tassin, “it is a rather long-winded, difficult method. I expect we’ll spend a lot of time staring at this cat. However, we don’t have any choice. Above all, our translation must be clear. This renowned author has written a book that is extraordinarily infantile. He has written an anti-Darwin ethics. The Russian is defending a thesis contrary to the idea of natural selection and the struggle for survival. He finds the lives of animal species display a constant effort to help each other and an astounding degree of selfless generosity. Do you see, the translations of books of this nature, that are infantile and dangerous, must be transparent, because even minimal obscurity will prompt a disproportionate number of bombs to be thrown …”

Sr Tassin advanced a good sum of money on account and we thus had almost solved our first month under the
Renten-Mark
. It was a positive outcome.

Now we had secured this first phase, Xammar decided it was imperative to strengthen our social standing. To that end he bought a top-rate pedigree dog. His hunch was that a person owning a pedigree dog in a city earns lots of kudos, and particularly in a German city where dogs are held in such high esteem.

“You’ll soon see what I mean,” Xammar would say. “After three or four days taking the dog for a run under the trees and round and about, everyone in the neighborhood will know a gentleman with a wonderful dog lives here. When you walk along the street, people will say, “That’s the gentleman who owns that wonderful, intelligent dog.” When you go shopping, the shop assistant or the young lady will say: “You, sir, are the man who owns that dog, that fantastic dog …” And they will give you a fetching smile. You have become that gentleman who has that dog, etc … and your standing goes up a number of notches. If one day you buy a pound or two of butter and don’t have enough money, they’ll turn a blind eye. I mean, how could they not trust a man who owns such a fine dog, etc …? A single prerequisite. It must be a great dog, must look in every way the genuine, certified pedigree item. It must be a pure-blood.

And that was how he came to buy the renowned Pekingese that was to bewitch the bourgeoisie of a good slice of the Kantstrasse. In an era of inflation everyone with the means bought whatever they could: dogs, cats, walking sticks, dollars, houses, and ties. When the currency became scarce, most of these purchases were put back on sale. The renowned Pekingese belonged to a married couple who would later become our close friends. They sold their dog because they had no choice. They were amenable on the spot. It
was agreed we could take the dog immediately, but that we would pay for it in installments. The Pekingese belonged to the type known as the Maltese or Peke-a-tese and was absolutely charming. The dog was tiny, snub-nosed, and irascible with bulging round eyes that were so fierce they made you tremble and a head of hair worthy of a great, misunderstood man of letters. Its instincts were completely spontaneous and he had a worldview yet to be softened by any notion of warmth or tenderness, the ingredients necessary for leading a communal life. Rare was the day when its owner didn’t have to compensate one or two humble citizens whose pants had suffered from the terrible Peke-a-tese’s sharp white teeth. He did so without protest, because he knew that with every incursion his dog’s prestige grew. Some citizens found it quite natural for the dog to shred their pants, considered it to be such a pure expression of his pure blood that they refused to listen to apologies or accept payment for repairs to their pants.

“That’s what you call a real, genuine dog,” they would say, “and it would make my day to own one like it.”

They were completely calm and objective, at least in relation to the canine race in general and to the Pekingese in particular.

However, I used to tell my friend that, as he did have to pay out now and then, he might prefer to own a lion or at least a leopard. He replied in a melancholy tone that he had already tried that but had fallen foul of municipal regulations.

When I walked into the flat, the dog sniffed me, looked at me rather rudely, but decided to let me breathe in peace. My colleague told it in German that I was the uncle of the house. It didn’t react. It walked anxiously round the office, jumped on to an easy chair and lay there. A few seconds later it was sleeping as if nothing was amiss. A short while later the cat came for a leisurely prowl, in a withdrawn, absentminded, distant frame of mind.
When it saw me, it looked up at me with an air of voluptuous disdain and its eyes surveyed me from head to toe.
This idiot’s back
, it must have been thinking.
Time flies and life is ever the same dreary dream …

Cat and dog lived under the same roof, but their interactions were extremely standoffish. The dog didn’t want to know the cat. The cat just about tolerated the dog. The Pekingese was the ice-cold aristocrat that never came off its perch. Mauzi was the skeptical, enlightened, hectoring democrat. It watched the dog disappear after it had walked by with the contempt intellectual superiority brings. Keen to preserve its area of influence, the cat had no choice but to tolerate the dog’s renown. However, it brooked no interference and ensured it was respected. In the event, the two animals always found coexistence a challenge.

The Pekingese, who could be reasonably violent and yappy when awake, led an extremely active subconscious life. When it was asleep, its dreams made it toss and turn, and it sleepwalked with amazing ease. It was a real palaver. Then you felt for it: it jumped off its chair, all excited, but completely asleep, and started barking with a feverish glint in its eyes, making strange somersaults on the carpet. In this state, it sank its teeth into the maid’s ankle, bit table legs or – in its deepest dreams – threw itself upon clean clothes piled on a chair. The cat, of the opinion that clean clothes were part of its remit, would under no circumstance have allowed anyone to usurp its right to sleep on its master’s spotless shirtfronts. It puffed itself out, flashed its eyes, and the hair bristled along its backbone. However, it was rarely forced to intervene. Deeply immersed in its dream, the dog deflated as easily as it had entered that state of fury. Then zigzagged back to its easy chair like a being in a trance and sat as still as ever.

Ownership of the Pekingese resulted in the anticipated social and economic outcomes. In the neighborhood generally, but in the grocery store
in particular, our credit-worthiness was immediately boosted, which meant that whenever there was a shortfall it was glossed over. “A trifle, considering the spirit of derring-do that imbues this tale …” the odd reader will say. But life is but a collection of trifles. If one fails, they can give rise to genuine headaches, sometimes veritable disasters, that don’t cease to be so because they are private and personal, quite the contrary, in fact. On the other hand, this spirit has no soft spot for derring-do. The protagonists of these stories have always believed that the biggest adventure in life is to be paid and is to pay up on time.

In tandem with economic recognition, that animal and its master enjoyed the inevitable social prestige generated in such circumstances. I won’t dwell on this. This prestige traveled beyond the strict confines of the neighborhood and, in terms of improved status, even reached the offices where my friend worked sporadically. Every objective was met.

A month and a half after the
Renten-Mark
was established we had yet to eat a gram of margarine or canned goods – always dubious – or any ersatz product. Very few people managed to survive the cutback in the money supply. Berlin had been emptied of foreigners and fly-by-nights, of that slippery cosmopolitan crowd who had eaten and drunk month after month practically for nothing thanks to whatever foreign currency they carried. The German science taught in the universities that foreigners had found excellent as long as restaurants fed them for so little was soon a thing of the past. Berlin became an empty chicken coop. This was the moment when Xammar thought it was vital to extend our social base.

“We’ve got by up to now,” he told me. “But we lead lives that are too solitary. Solitude is sterile, has never generated useful income. The day we have fifty friends coming and going through our door as a matter of course, our affairs will start to prosper. In this country you make friends by giving
them a cup of tea when they drop by on a weekly basis. We should try out this approach. I know it is a bind but we have no alternative. We must fling our doors wide open.”

“And when we fling them open wide, do we need to apply any criteria? Do we say: ‘I want this fellow, but not that one.’?”

“Oh, no, not at all. My experience has shown me that anyone whatsoever can give you a helping hand – sometimes, the most unlikely people. On the other hand, our war against margarine compels us to fight by using every weapon we possess. I think we should employ a minimalist criterion: nobody should be admitted who’s not fun in some way, or whose character doesn’t display a degree of liveliness. The vitae of our friends shouldn’t be too gray or wishy-washy.”

The couple who provided us with the Pekingese was one of our first new contacts. As they loved their dog and sold it reluctantly, they often visited us to see it and check on how it was enjoying life. When they realized it was being well treated, they began to take a keen interest in us and then became very friendly. They were Herr and Frau Weber but we dubbed them Hermann and Dorothea, because they seemed just like the couple Goethe’s characters would have turned into, had they lived in a bourgeois, industrial era like our own. As we saw them frequently and as familiarity breeds indiscretions, I feel able to sketch a portrait of their lives.

They married the way people marry everywhere: out of love, self-interest, happenstance, and because it’s what most people do. Hermann worked in the accounts department of an important button manufacturer. He had the ideas and habits of a first-rate employee. He was loyal, well organized, and intelligent with a very specific kind of expertise and greatly admired the firm’s owner and shareholders. He believed they were all highly important
people. He sometimes came across a shareholder in the street whom he’d never talked to. That was no reason not to greet him with a deferential doff of his hat. At the time hats were doffed vertically and upwards: the more upwards the hat was swept, the happier the man doffing and the one being so honored.