Life Embitters (66 page)

“It’s nothing out of the ordinary,” he said. “I started drinking heavily the day I started thinking hard about something I had done, something I had done that was a really dirty trick. When I lived at Frau Dening’s, as I’ve said, my drinking never amounted to much. It took a turn for the worse a few days after I moved into Frau Berends’. Barely three or four months ago … I haven’t had a clear head since …”

“Is it to do with women?”

“Oh, no! Believe me, it’s much simpler. A vile, dirty deed.”

“Frankly,” he continued, “I haven’t a clue who Frau Berends is. People said she was the widow of a military man who died in France. The story we’re so familiar with. Some in France or others in Russia. The same old story. Naturally. They also said this lady had a crippled son, Roby, you’ve met him, that violent, short-tempered runt who’s rude to everyone.”

“Roby is very nice …”

“Oh, yes! Tell me about it! Nice and adorable. After a few days in the
house I saw that Frau Berends was warm-hearted though she had a gloomy, irritable temperament. Because of her financial problems and Roby’s pranks, she has her irascible moments, and generally simmers violently. Nevertheless, over those first few days I managed to establish a bond of sympathy with her and even started to think seriously about marriage. Of course, self-interest was involved, the need to find some sort of shelter … However, when she saw my interest, she tried to dominate me. And I reacted to her onslaught in the usual way. I began to treat her dismissively and even to put her down a peg or two. Do you understand? If you don’t …”

“Absolutely. We’ve talked about that previously. Do go on …”

“I tried to get her to tell me the real reason why Roby lived in her house. His presence was important because taking responsibility for strange children, that is, other people’s children, had never entered my plans. But I couldn’t get any sense out of her. I couldn’t tell you whether Roby is Frau Berends’ son, nephew or relative or whether he is completely alien to her. In the countless conversations we’ve had about that child, when I said Roby was lively and intelligent, she pretended to despise or hate him. When I said I found him to be intolerable and naughty, Frau Berends has defended him heatedly – much to my surprise. The fact is that Roby’s presence between me and Frau Berends has created endless friction, rows and petty misunderstandings that, in the end, have led to very unpleasant, wearing tensions.

“You mean that quite unawares Roby shattered all your plans.”

“Absolutely, quite unawares. However, that doesn’t mean that I’ve not hated him coldly and spitefully at times, a hatred I could never explain.”

“Yes, of course …”

“What then happened is quite straightforward. I arrived home one evening. I had to finish a job that day. I set out my things on the table. I discover something vital has gone missing: a small bottle of red ink that is really
necessary in my trade and for that project. I look everywhere. I find nothing. I seek further afield, rummage in drawers, open suitcases, and search every nook and cranny. All to no avail. What’s more, it was too late to go and buy another one. I was livid. In that state I ask Frau Berends if she’s seen it anywhere. We both start frantically looking. I tell her I’d bought a new bottle that very afternoon for the task in hand. I feel she’s helping reluctantly. It lacks importance in her eyes. I say something to stir her up. She replies tetchily. We exchange a few needling insults. At my wit’s end, in a fury, I tell her I’m leaving. I start to pack my cases. Frau Berends is downcast and silent. Two tears tumble from her completely dry eyes. Tears of rage. Her face is contorted. She storms out of my room knocking into furniture and hasn’t the strength to shut the door. Meanwhile I continue gathering my belongings together when I suddenly hear Roby let out a terrible scream. I put my clothes down, stand in the doorway, and listen. How horrible! What a beating she was handing out! I heard two or three muffled blows and thought I then heard the boy’s head bang against the partition wall. I hesitated for a moment. I may even have opened my mouth to shout out, but nothing was forthcoming. Perhaps I took a first step to end that savagery. But I didn’t persist. What a coward! That poor, screaming child! Such a battering! The fact is I thought it would show weakness on my part to shout out or put in an appearance, so I did nothing … I retreated into my bedroom. Horrified, I decided to postpone my efforts to leave that house. I grabbed my hat and overcoat and tiptoed to the stairs …”

He paused. Took a swig and lit a cigarette with a flickering match. Then continued, increasingly agitated: “When I walked into the street, as the temperature was dropping, I put my hands in my coat pockets. I felt an object wrapped in flimsy paper. It was the bottle of red ink I’d bought that very afternoon – that damned little bottle … My first reaction was to feel
disgusted at myself, but I didn’t have the strength to score my heart on glass from that bottle … Unconsciously, almost blindly, but knowing perfectly well what I was doing, I looked for the grate of a drain and threw the bottle of ink into it, making as little noise as possible. Nobody was in the street: I’d made sure of that first. It was vile cowardice on my part, an act of futile, gratuitous cruelty … Once I’d removed the evidence of my cowardly foolishness I thought I’d feel relieved. Liberated. The strength of our mental habits can be deceptive. In effect: I immediately felt liberated and cleansed. I went for a walk around the neighborhood … When I returned home, I tried to fake the expression of a troubled man, of someone who’s just suffered a loss because others have been careless. In fact, my feeling of liberation had melted away and deep down I now felt a terrible need to beg that bludgeoned child to forgive me. But I didn’t do that either! I unpacked my suitcases and started working on my assignment. I worked through the night trying to build up a positive sense of exhaustion. I felt increasingly ill at ease. I took ages to get to sleep, and I am a person who has never suffered from sleeplessness. I thought it was a wretched business. The day after, I drank tea, ate bread, butter and marmalade, and drank a glass of freezing water. That glass of water was so delicious! My mouth was so dry it made a new man of me. I tried to resume normal life, but found the events of the previous night were still obsessively drilling into my brain … I’m not exhausting you, am I?”

“Not at all … Do go on if it helps …” I answered with a look of deep repulsion.

“Yes, of course. I really do want to. I was saying how I tried to resume normal life. However, when I went into the street, something strange happened: I entered a bar like this and ordered a glass of kümmel … I’d never previously felt the need to enter this kind of place, particularly in the morning. You could say I’ve not had a clear head since … A subtenant is such an evil
beast! And it’s strange that
you
said exactly the same at the beginning! We share the same ideas in this respect; we think ab-so-lu-tely the same …”

He said a little more, but I could see his features dipping and darkening and that he was straining to keep on. He took another swig of curaçao and his head slumped on to his arms that were folded on the table.

I left that dive and struggled home: I was shivering with cold yet my head was on fire. My hatband felt icy on my forehead. As soon as I arrived, I went to bed and put out the light, feeling tired and disgusted.

Winter in Berlin was harsh and desolate and Frau Berends’ house seemed curiously dark and remote. There were two or three heavy snowfalls. I was getting over the flu and was unfortunate to catch a cold. That forced me to spend several days indoors. I spent hours behind windowpanes where the rain splashed endlessly and left a yellowy-green film; I contemplated the inner yard of that half-barracks, half-factory where the flat was slotted. The flat windows looked over the garden. Twenty or so square meters of sparse pale green grass were home to three spindly, pallid trees and in the middle, to a leaning, down-at-heel wooden trapeze with a few large dangling rings and two frayed broken ropes. I never saw any children climb it, not even when it was fine, and sometimes, in the evening, I’d imagine the trapeze was an abandoned guillotine. Snow and mud were piled up in the corners of the garden; there were white patches on the sparse grass, and the flakes on the thin tree branches looked like newborn, yellow and white chicks. The mud in the garden was black and icy; everything was lifeless and dreary. The silence in the house was strangely shocking. It was like living in a submerged diving bell or enclosed cistern. You heard nothing: no laughter, no shouts, no excited conversation. You opened the window a crack and the only sound
you heard was the rain falling on the grass, mud, and sleety snow. People went vaguely in and out and seemed to leave no trace.

Especially in the afternoon that intense quiet brought on a repeated feeling of fatigue and I sank into a state of unconsciousness with a raging temperature. Sometimes, a wave of nervous disenchantment flushed my cheeks. Long hours of morose lethargy followed. I’d adopted an infantile attitude to everything, relapsing intermittently into dread triggered by a vision of the way things seemed linked logically together, by a sense of the fated naturalness of the greatest catastrophes. My heart thudded and leapt and stiffened my legs. An apparition almost always floated before my eyes of a voluptuous, grotesque figure – a woman in a blouse and a gentleman with a small topper and large mustache – or I’d imagine some physical sensation. Even so my mouth felt parched, my head fuzzy, and my joints couldn’t sustain me. Most astonishingly, children never cried. They must have been born already briefed. They had never stopped in my family. These were afternoon moods. In the morning, a poor man occasionally drifted into the yard, leaned on a tree, and sang a song that sounded like a mournful psalm. I heard him from my bed, a potassium chloride pill on my tongue. I’m not familiar with the kind of songs the poor of Berlin sing: the
Lumpen-proletariat
. They are what you call songs of the poor, of poverty without hope. Many couldn’t rise to a song and didn’t dare look up at the windows for alms. They’d harangue in blurred, mumbling voices, with startling highs and lows. Now and then, an exasperated neighbor would angrily fling open a window and a black arm would emerge: the coin fell with a plop into the mud. Other poor people came with a young boy carrying a trombone or flugelhorn. The brass introduced absurdly desperate, explosive blasts into the yard. However, this group didn’t seem as poor as the others; the instruments in their hands, their
hungry fervor and play-acting amused, brightened, and sustained them. The occasional rag-and-bone man with a booming voice passed through. One carried a briefcase under his arm and wore a hat tilted over the back of his neck, a purple cravat, a pink celluloid collar and a good quality dark suit that sagged slightly as posthumous garments generally do. You’d have said that man, an Israelite in looks, was probably a trade-union secretary.

For a moment I thought I’d entertain myself observing the windows of other high flats. I was soon disabused. The houses seemed dead, and if anyone ever budged behind those panes of glass, they seemed at a loss. It was only in the afternoon, if it didn’t rain, at dusk, that a window opened and a woman with her hair in a bun emerged to beat a mattress with a stick. The whiteness of the snow highlighted the actual color of the blocks: reinforced concrete covered in a layer of cheap pebbledash the color of burnt cork. Towards the top the cement was cracked and large dirty patches stood out, stains from leaking liquids the frost studded with lurid twinkles. The shapes and figures were unspeakably alarming. By the evening, the flats livened up. Darkness fell abruptly. There were days we had to switch on the light at three o’clock. When the bulb lit up I’d feel a hazy, childish sense of relief. I looked at the other houses: a light with a green shade; the weary glimmer of a bulb hanging from a bare, white ceiling; a pale glow on a stretch of wall that must be gaslight. One rectangular window secreted a purple-yellow beam that died a death on the snow in the yard with the hesitant charm of moonlight. I could see the corner of a freezing kitchen in one flat; in another, an old man reading the newspaper, his head a blur in the bright light; and a dining room sideboard in yet another, a fruit bowl with two oranges standing there – that exuded a misty glow that suggested they were plastic. All that absorbed you and there was no escape: anonymous, characterless misery; immersed in the house’s cold silence, it was hard not to believe the world was a place of bitterness.
Yet something pleasant did exist in Frau Berends’ block: the sound of a distant piano, one you sometimes heard late at night. I never discovered where that piano was or where the notes came from. It was like a wave of gentle quivering, liquid music that penetrated through walls and dissolved. It was ethereal, shadowy, a pure sound, at once soft, velvety, and profound. Nothing transcendental, naturally! I often imagined that piano; I’d see a young gentleman and lady playing: four hands. She wore a plum-colored dress that was slightly too big. He was fair, had a clerk’s small nose and wore a tuxedo that was perhaps too tight. Now and then, when it was time to turn the page, they looked into each other’s eyes, enraptured. Then rested and ate a slice of cheese. I imagined them swathed in warm, discreetly lit comfort: they were symbols of social progress. I could have spent a lifetime listening to that piano, and the nights they didn’t play I missed their delightful idealism as keenly as if I’d missed my supper. The program they played was
my
program. It’s most likely that had I lived in a suitable environment, my feelings would have readily appreciated their sublime nobility. My responses have, in fact, always been commonplace and ordinary. They played exquisitely prosaic Italian pieces, Handel’s sumptuous
largo
, and several Vienna waltzes from the year ’12: waltzes with monocles for generals and diplomats, and several French and Russian pieces. I like everything bourgeois, pleasant, and digestible, and the taste of these distinguished homespun pianists met my needs exactly. My room was the one in the house where you heard them best, and Frau Berends sometimes tiptoed to my door and put her ear to the keyhole.