Georg Letham (29 page)

March rattled on in the sultry gloom of the subtropical night, but unfortunately did not command as much interest from me as he had expected. What was his abbé supposed to mean to me? What did I care about his private stirrings? Though they were no longer so private–the good lad made no secret of his thoughts, he posed no puzzles for me. He was tedious. He had been more interesting as a silent man chained to me.

So on with the story, you charmer of a man, you heartbreaker from the provinces, who is not satisfied with inflaming the passions of the daughter of an exemplary executive secretary and becoming formally betrothed to the young woman, a golden blonde, in the midst of family gathered from afar, but has also managed to wreak devastation in the heart of her brother, the dark-haired cadet.

How lucky this quite handsome, but not very interesting, man was with people! Here too, in Cargo Hold 3, he had already made conquests, without meaning to. The coppery oriental, the pasha Sultan Suleiman, cast fiery glances his way. Compensation for March himself would evidently be added to the selling price of the silly gramophone if he smiled upon the rich, crudely sensual criminal. So go on, March! I won't be jealous. Love in any form is beautiful and restorative for the average person, so go ahead and accept it, don't wallow despondently in old memories! Life beckons, it's made for pleasure. Let your Louis sleep the sleep of the just!

But a man like me was preaching to deaf ears, the good March was unable to tear himself away from his memories. For the tenth time he ran through his litany, which began with the pledge of eternal loyalty between the sister, Countess Lilli, and the brother, Louis the cadet, symbolized, much as in the ancient heroic saga, by a phonograph record broken in the middle, and which never really ended. During the final spring they both cling to March and shower the delirious fellow with love, possibly trading off on even-numbered and odd-numbered days. But poor March! What is pure torment to him with the sister, pretty as a picture, bursting with health and sensuality, luscious, golden blonde and gray-eyed, would be a much-longed-for happiness with the brother, dark-haired, pale, gangly, somewhat arrogant, his eyes sunken in deep hollows. He, March, does not hesitate between them for an instant, he plumped for the brother the moment he laid eyes on him, he is deferential to him, lets himself be tortured by his bored, languid smile, the tight curl of his lips, and he is tortured too by the tight curl of the sister's lips, the lips of the sensual, hale, good girl, his fiancée. She is much too proud to let on, but she is too much a woman to put up with this. Her vanity has been wounded. She neglects her appearance, a sign that she wishes only comradely feelings toward March, her fiancé, and that, in all innocence, she wants to live with him as sister and brother!

Whereupon he, March, delighted that the conflict has been so easily resolved, shows comradely candor, he reveals to her what he has not revealed to himself, that he is passionately fond of Louis, that he is “bewitched” by him. He expresses himself so poetically, the timid Grade 6b official. And she, Countess Lilli, strokes the hair of March, her fiancé-brother, she is kindhearted toward him, he is the apple of her eye, and she is all his, and when she spends entire afternoons at
church, on her knees praying, she is kneeling only for him, praying only for him–and the frog sighs and believes.

Then abruptly she sends the engagement ring back. Unfortunately she loves him too much, she cannot settle for what little he can spare her. But the cadet remonstrates seriously with March, insisting that the wedding must take place, March must make up with the Countess, or . . . And for the first time the pale, arrogant youth toys with the idea that he might crush March, or possibly give himself to March–it might be high-handedness, it might be out of curiosity, perhaps out of pity, out of vanity, or just for fun. It is not clear. Perhaps out of real love for his sister, who is the most important thing in his life. And always will be. And March, who once expected a simple, untroubled life by Lilli's side, under the protection of the prominent father-in-law, is now, with his good heart, his weak will, his abnormal but strong urges, in a state of the most terrible confusion. He neglects his work. He no longer sleeps. Finally he goes back to the sister, and promises her–out of weakness, out of pity, out of Christian mercy–that, though he will not break with her brother, henceforth he will look upon Louis as no more than a future brother-in-law. Thus he pledges that he will see Louis only once a week and in Lilli's presence, perhaps they will dance, one of them will wind up the new portable gramophone, and he and March will take turns dancing with Lilli. Innocent, childish frolicking. Great solution, of Solomonic wisdom! But, of course, things happen otherwise. Lilli winds up the gramophone, but only Louis and March dance together, and suddenly it seems that poor Louis's mechanical daily work at the business school is no match for March's passionate, fanatical love, it has infected even the cool, languid, arrogant heart of a precocious, sickly, callous, already faded youth.

And Lilli is supposed to watch this? Is supposed to air out the smoky room afterward and tidy up while Louis and March go for a walk in the summer rain, sharing an umbrella, sit side by side later in a bar, a café, arms around each other yet gazes chaste, huddle in the darkness of a cinema. Louis and March love each other, yes, but purely and truly chastely, like angels or frogs.

Lilli, sensual, healthy, and young, unbroken, does not believe it.
She
won't share, not another minute. But her threats cut no ice either with the cadet or with her fiancé, and one day, while Louis is being visited by his bosom friend, yet a third man comes to his room, his father, the prominent municipal official, a man of principle. March flees on the wings of an angel. He is driven out of the office, he has to move out of his lodgings, he faces public opprobrium, and Lilli's farewell letter leaves no room for argument. And to make matters worse, his own father now appears, the morphine-addicted unemployed pharmacist: seedy, a beggar–March is supposed to help and has virtually nothing to his name, for, vain as he is, he has devoted almost everything to his appearance.

March paused. The other convicts amused themselves in the evenings according to their natures. Only the tamest played cards, or let off steam in their brutish way, or roughhoused. What most did, men among men for months starved for “love,” this March tried to hide from me, he tried to enthrall me with his chaste tale, and when I asked him coolly, “Dear heart, why are you telling me this?” he dropped his eyes, nestled against me imperceptibly, and responded somewhat huskily: “So you won't think I'm one of
them
!” Ah, I wasn't supposed to think he was a
common criminal like the rest of the bunch? I wasn't supposed to think he was a man of manly love?

I closed my eyes, I tried to snore. But he had sharp eyes and ears. Even in the semidarkness he could tell a mask of sleep from genuine slumber and real snoring from feigned. So I gave up. I raised myself on my elbows, looked out through the porthole, still lined with jagged glass. The lilac tropical sky was filled with almost abnormally bright, densely packed stars.

The sea was high. Now and then a fierce spray came showering in, onto my wild hair, my heavy, unkempt beard. March suddenly said something about a hotel room.

Because of the scandal, he is evicted from his cozy abode. No one in the small-minded little town wants to rent to him. And yet his love for Louis, the cadet, is so pure, so chaste, so restrained. A little more tolerance! Just a little bit of forbearance for him! And he, March, would have resigned himself to everything, would have become a good official and a good citizen–at least that was what he said now that the whole thing was over and done with.

Thus he lies despondently till noon in the same bed with his father, who is stuck to him like a barnacle. The weather is bad, he lies in his hotel room, propped up on his elbows. And looks at his papa. Affliction and inexorable decline are written on the features of the former pharmacist and drug dealer. Sharing a bed with him is no fun. Nor does this meet with the approval of the hotel staff. But necessity knows no law. Until now March has always sided with his brave, life-affirming mother;
that
was where he belonged, that is where his heart is. But now, when he is beaten and disgraced, when he feels within him, in his own sorrow-consumed heart, the misery of the mortal world botched by God
yet not consigned by Satan to fire and brimstone soon enough, when people avoid him on the street, when he has lost his job between one day and the next, when he is refused entrance to the office, when he cannot imagine that he might see Louis and Lilli again–now he understands his father, and the two of them decide–to go to his mother.

March described his eyes falling on the brown-varnished spruce-wood dresser, almost the only piece of furniture in the shabby hotel room apart from a rickety chair and a rusty iron washstand. On the dresser are two suitcases and a bluish cardboard box. One of the suitcases is made of leather, the other of pressed fiber; both are his. The leather suitcase is where the famous gramophone, “a present from the kids,” is kept. The blue cardboard box belongs to his father and contains the last of the underthings that the old man has rescued from ruin. He has no washing things, but at least he has retained some idea of cleanliness (at someone else's expense).

March cannot stop him, his father, from using his son's expensive soap, his English razor, or his toothbrush. So did his father bring nothing with him? No, he has a gun (in addition to an ample supply of morphine), which, in better days, he obtained from a down-on-his-luck Baltic prince so that he would always have a “way out.” Not a bad idea to sell it to pay for the trip to March's mother, but no one wants the old piece of junk. March has a nice gold watch. Without a solid cover, but genuine and monogrammed. But he will never part with this, the only gift from his dear mother. So every penny has to be saved. Father and son survive on rolls and, after their lunch from the bakery, sit in a public park and yawn with hunger at each other in the misty cold.

At night the son goes past the house with the father, showing him the windows behind which his Louis and Lilli live. But his father's teeth
are chattering with cold and hunger, the hour is late, the train will be leaving in half an hour. They are going to spend the night on the train to avoid paying for a hotel room. So off March goes, accompanied by a castanet performance, gazing miserably back at the windows, stumbling over the cobblestones, his eyes full of tears and his heart full of cares.

They arrive at March's mother's house early. She is contented, meaning she is happily remarried for the time being, she is the wife of a dentist, a recent widower, and, quite frankly, she is disquieted and ashamed in front of her new family when her old family, in the shape of her distraught son and down-at-heels first husband, appears here in her respectable house, where everything smells of disinfectants and the vulcanized rubber of false teeth.

Neither son nor ex-husband dares to tell the whole truth. The two of them do give her to understand that they are in a fix, but all she does is nod and pretend not to hear. March is thunderstruck. This is the thanks he gets? For this he spent the best years of his life moping around the house, gave his mother every last penny on the first of each month, made it possible for her to live a carefree existence for almost ten years? So that she can cut them loose with literally a crust of bread!

But she has no use for him. Her main concern is to find an acceptable way to get rid of the two unwelcome guests.

The three members of what was once a family, father, mother, and child, sit together in spiteful silence, listening to the low drone of the drill and the suppressed shrieks of the harassed patients from the dentist's laboratory. As the morning passes, poor March's feeling toward
his
family, that of the executive secretary, takes over, it becomes overpowering, he is as though in a daze, can hardly wait for the end of lunch, which is being eaten at a late hour because of the dentist and
his patients–March is in love, he is in love and must return to where the heart is.
There
he will be understood. The engagement has been broken off, his job is gone, his lodgings rented out, but he still has “loving hearts” back there, and Gummi Bear, tender and tenacious as he is, must return to them.

The old addict sees this with the cynicism of despair, hits his ex-wife up once more (his morphine supply is running low), and disappears from this story.

Along with the old addict, however, something else disappears, which takes us further in the story of that great child March or Gummi Bear. The two good suitcases containing clothes and underwear disappear, and the cardboard box containing dirty underwear and the still usable, but unsellable, unpresentable, antiquated revolver remains. It is a wicked joke of the humorously inclined father to have added to these articles the son's “keepsake,” the children's gramophone. But in exchange, the good son March's gold watch is gone. The father tenderly pressed his dear child to his shaggy breast, tears flowed down his thin cheeks, and he closed his eyes, the lids now swollen like sponges, but his hands did not tremble as they nimbly plucked his choked-up son's last valuable item, the gold watch, from the lower left pocket of his vest. Lament upon lament! Lament? What am I saying? Profound despair, vast disappointment.
This
is how people can be!
This
is how a father can behave toward his son! Beyond description how much he longs for Louis, for Lilli, even for the severe but morally staunch municipal official who drove him, March, out of paradise and now stands before him with fiery sword.