Little Man, What Now? (36 page)

A bedroom, two heads on the pillow, one a rosy-cheeked young woman’s, breathing softly, the other a man’s, rather older, looking careworn even in his sleep.

There appeared the face of an alarm-clock, set for half-past six. The man became restless, turned over and reached for the alarm-clock, still half asleep: twenty-five past. The man sighed,
put the alarm back in its place, shut his eyes again.

‘He sleeps till the last minute too,’ said Pinneberg, disapprovingly.

At the foot of the big bed there was something white: a child’s bed. A child lay in it, head on arm, mouth half open.

The alarm went off, you could see the hammer striking the bell: wildly, fiendishly, remorselessly. With one bound the man was up, throwing his legs over the side of the bed. They were thin, calf-less legs with a skimpy growth of black hair.

The audience laughed. ‘Real matinée idols don’t have hairs on their legs,’ explained Jachmann. ‘This film’s bound to be a flop.’

Perhaps the woman would retrieve it though. She was certainly extremely pretty. She had sat up when the alarm went off, the cover slid back, her nightie opened a little, and in between the overlapping images of sliding coverlet and slipping nightie, there came the momentary sense of having seen her breast. A general sense of well-being, and then she pulled the bedclothes tight around her shoulders and snuggled down again.

‘She’s a bitch,’ said Jachmann. ‘The kind of woman whose cleavage you get to see in the first five minutes of the film. Oh Lord, it’s all so simple.’

‘She is pretty, though!’ said Pinneberg.

The man had got into his trousers already. The child was sitting up in bed calling ‘Daddy, Teddy!’ The man gave him his teddy but now he wanted Dolly. He was in the kitchen, heating the water. He was a thin, meagre-looking man. How he rushed about! Getting Dolly for the child, laying the table for breakfast, spreading bread and butter, then once the water was hot making the tea, shaving, while all the while his wife lay rosy-faced in bed, softly breathing.

Yes, now the wife had got up, she was nice, she wasn’t at all the lazy type, she took her own warm water into the bathroom. The man glanced at the clock, played with the child, poured out
the tea, looked outside the door to see whether the milk had been delivered yet. It hadn’t, but the newspaper had.

Now the woman was ready, she headed straight to her place at the breakfast table. They each took a page of the newspaper, a teacup, bread.

The child called from the bedroom, Dolly had fallen out of bed, the man ran to pick it up.

‘This is stupid,’ said Lammchen discontentedly.

‘Yes, but I’d like to know what happens. It can hardly carry on like this.’

Jachmann said but a single word: ‘Money.’

And lo! He was right, old film buff that he was. When the man came back, the woman had found an advert in the paper; something she wanted to buy. The argument began: where was her housekeeping money? Where was his spending money? He showed her his wallet, she showed him her purse. And the calendar on the wall said it was the seventeenth. The milk-lady knocked at the door wanting her money, the pages of the calendar turned over: eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, all the way to the thirty-first! The calendar rustled, the few pence that were left lay beside the empty purses, and the man sat with his head in his hand …

Oh, how pretty the woman became. She grew more and more lovely, she spoke gently to him, stroked his hair, pulled up his head and offered him her lips, how her eyes shone!

‘What a bitch!’ said Pinneberg. ‘What’s he supposed to do?’

The man grew excited too, he took her in his arms. The advertisement appeared then disappeared, fourteen days rustled away on the calendar, next door the child played with his teddy, which was holding Dolly, the meagre bit of money lay on the table … the woman sat on the man’s lap …

Then it was all gone, and out of deepest darkness there arose the ever brightening spectacle of a bank, light streaming from the counters. There was the cashier’s desk with its security grille,
there lay the bundles of notes, the grille was half open but there was not a soul to be seen. Oh, those bundles full of notes, cylinders of silver and copper coins, a broken bundle of hundred-mark notes opened and spread out fan-wise.

‘Money,’ said Jachmann composedly. ‘And people do love to see it.’

Had Pinneberg heard him? Had Lammchen heard him?

It grew dark again … very dark … for a long time … You could hear people breathe, deeply, in long-drawn-out sighs. Lammchen heard her Sonny’s breathing, he heard hers.

The screen lit up again. The best things in life aren’t shown in the cinema and the film took up the story again when the wife was quite respectable and wrapped in her dressing-gown. The husband had on his bowler-hat and was kissing the child goodbye. Then the little man went through the big city and jumped on a bus. What a hurry the people were in, how the traffic raced, got into jams, then ploughed along again. Traffic lights changing from red to green to yellow, ten thousand houses with a million windows, and people, people everywhere—and he, the little man, had nothing but a two-and-a-half-room flat at the back, with a wife and child. Nothing else.

A foolish wife, perhaps, who didn’t know how to manage the money, but she was his small share of happiness, and he didn’t find her foolish. And there awaiting him, with an air of inevitability, was the desk with its four ludicrously tall legs, where he must unavoidably spend his day. That was his place in the inscrutable order of things, and there was no escape.

No, of course he couldn’t do it. There was a moment in which the little bank-clerk’s hand hovered over the money, like a sparrowhawk over a coop full of chicks, claws spread wide open. Then the hand shut, no, they weren’t claws, they were fingers. He was a little bank-clerk, not a bird of prey.

But, lo and behold, this clerk had a friend, the management
trainee at the bank, who was of course the son of a real bank director. Nobody had noticed that this trainee had seen the hand turn to claws. And at coffee-break time he took his friend aside and said straight out: ‘You need money.’ And even though the other denied it and refused all assistance, when he got home he had his pocket full of money. He pulled it all out and laid it on the table, thinking his wife would beam with joy, but she wasn’t interested in the money, she was interested in him. She drew him to the sofa, took him in her arms, asking: ‘How did you do it? You did that for me? I would never have believed it of you.’

And he couldn’t bring himself to tell her the real story. She loved him so much all of a sudden he just couldn’t do it. He nodded in silence and gave a meaningful smile … She was so excited, so proud of him …

What a face that little actor had! That great actor. Pinneberg had seen the face that morning as it lay on the pillow of the marriage-bed, when the alarm-clock said twenty-five past, tired, lined, the face of a careworn man. And now, when the woman he loved admired him for the first time, how his face bloomed; the hangdog look was gone, happiness grew and blossomed like an immense flower radiating sunlight. You poor, little, humble-faced man, this is your lucky break. It’s no longer true to say that you’ve only ever been a nobody. You, too, have been a king!

And now he was indeed a king: her king. Was he hungry? Did his feet hurt from standing so long? How she ran about and waited on him, he was so far above her, the man who had done this thing for her sake! He was never going to have to get up first and put the water on ever again. He was king.

The money lay forgotten on the table.

‘Look at him lying there smiling,’ Pinneberg whispered breathlessly to Lammchen.

‘The poor man,’ said Lammchen. ‘It can’t end well. Is he really happy? Isn’t he frightened?’

‘Franz Schlüter is a very gifted actor,’ was Jachmann’s opinion.

No, it couldn’t end well. The money was not going to stay forgotten. They didn’t think about it on their first spending spree, or the second. What intoxication for the woman to be able to buy everything, everything! What dread for the man, who knew where the money came from.

Then came it came to the third shopping-trip, and the money was running out. She saw a ring … and oh! there wasn’t enough to buy it. There was a glittering mass of rings in front of them, the salesman wasn’t looking, he was serving two customers. What a picture her face was as she nudged her husband: ‘Take it!’

Because she believed he would do anything for her. But he was only a little bank-clerk: he couldn’t do it. He didn’t do it.

Again, what a picture as it dawned on her, and she said to the salesman: we’ll look in again. And the man went away, small and grey by her side, and he saw his life before him, a long, endless life with the woman he loved expecting that of him … She sulked in silence until all at once—they were sitting in a bar, with a bottle of wine and the last of their money in front of them—all at once she turned around, glowing, flaming, and declared: ‘Tomorrow you’ll do it again.’

His poor grey face. And that radiant woman.

He had been planning to tell her the truth, but now he nodded his head very slowly and seriously in agreement.

How was he to go on? The management trainee couldn’t go on lending him—in truth, giving him—money for ever. He said no. Then the little cashier told his friend why he had to have money, what his wife believed he had done. The trainee laughed, gave him money and said: ‘I must meet this wife of yours.’

He did meet her, and what had to happen, happened: he fell in love with her, but she only had eyes for her husband, that brave, reckless man, who would do anything for her. Then the friend got
jealous, and at the cabaret table where they were all sitting he told her the truth.

What a fearful moment when the little man came back from the toilet and the two were sitting at the table, and she laughed at him, she laughed insolently and contemptuously in his face.

That laugh said it all: his friend’s treachery, his wife’s betrayal. His face changed; his eyes widened and filled with tears, his lips trembled.

They laughed.

He stood and looked them.

He looked at her. Perhaps that would have been the moment, when everything was crashing around him, when he could have done something. But he turned round and walked stiffly on his spindly legs to the door, shoulders bowed.

‘Oh, Lammchen,’ said Pinneberg, clasping her tightly. ‘Oh, Lammchen, it’s so frightening sometimes. And we’re so alone.’

Lammchen nodded slowly in agreement and said softly: ‘But we’re together.’

‘Besides, he had his son,’ she added swiftly, to console him. ‘The wife certainly wouldn’t take him.’

LIFE AND THE FLICKS. UNCLE KNILLI ABDUCTS MR JACHMANN

It was actually rather a gloomy dinner that the three of them had in their eyrie. Jachmann looked thoughtfully at his two grown-up children, who had lost their appetite even for the unaccustomed luxuries of yesterday’s shopping spree.

However, unusually for him, he did not comment upon it, until Lammchen had cleared the table and brought in the Shrimp, when he finally said: ‘Oh, kids, kids, look at you, it’s enough to make one howl. Even sensitive people shouldn’t fall for kitsch like
that.’

Pinneberg responded: ‘We know it’s not true, Mr Jachmann. There isn’t a management trainee like that, and there probably isn’t a little cashier with a bowler hat either. It was just the actor that got me, what’s he called? Schlüter, did you say?’

Lammchen quickly backed him up: ‘I know what Sonny means, and you’ve got to agree with him. The thing is that although it’s just a film, people like us have got reason to be frightened, and it’s only luck if things go right for a while. Something can always happen that we’ve got no means of dealing with. The wonder is that it doesn’t happen more often.’

‘Things are only as dangerous as you let them be,’ said Jachmann. ‘You don’t have to let it get to you. If I’d been that cashier, I’d have simply gone home and got divorced. Then I’d have got married again, a nice young girl. I don’t see what the fuss is about. And now I suggest, since the Shrimp seems to be full, and it’s past eleven, that we get ourselves ready quickly, and we’ll go and cheer you up.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Pinneberg, looking questioningly at his Lammchen. ‘Do we want to go out again? I’ve rather lost the urge.’

Lammchen also shrugged her shoulders.

Jachmann went wild. ‘This is unheard-of! Staying at home to mope over hokum like that! No, we’re off right now, and you, Pinneberg, clear off, pronto, and get us a taxi while your Lammchen puts on her prettiest dress.’

Pinneberg still looked doubtful, but Lammchen said, ‘Go on, Sonny. There’s no stopping him.’

Pinneberg went slowly, and then Jachmann did something really nice; he came rushing after him and pressed something into his hand, saying: ‘Now put that away. When you go out it’s always unpleasant not to have anything in your pocket. Take the bit of silver too. And remember to give your wife some; women always need a bit of small change. Don’t say anything, just go and get the
taxi quickly.’ And then he was off again, and Pinneberg climbed slowly down the ladder thinking: ‘He’s a good sort really. But I’d prefer to know more about him. Which shows he’s not an entirely good sort.’ And in his hand he clasped the notes firmly. But once inside the car on his way back to the house he couldn’t forbear opening his hand to look at them. He counted them, and said to himself: ‘This just isn’t on, I’d have to work a month for that. He’s mad. I’m telling him right now.’

But he couldn’t, as the two were already waiting, and in the car Lammchen started straight into telling him that the Shrimp had dropped off immediately, and she wasn’t worried about him, well, only a little bit, and they weren’t going to be out all that long, and where were they going to?’

‘Listen, Mr Jachmann …’ began Pinneberg.

But Jachmann said swiftly: ‘I’m not taking you to the West End, kids. First: I’m very well known there which spoils the fun. Second: it’s gone downhill badly. Now Friedrichstrasse is all laid on for tourists, and very nice, as you will see.’

Then they had a discussion about what sort of a place they wanted to go to first, and Jachmann made Lammchen’s mouth water with tales of bars and cabarets and variety shows, throwing in occasional appetisers to Pinneberg. ‘Half naked girls! There’s something for a newly-married man. Seven beauties with nothing but a little skirt on! What do you say, Pinneberg?’