Selected Stories (10 page)

God bless my soul! It’s high time I went over to Frau Aebi for my dinner, or lunch.
This very minute it is striking half past twelve. As luck would have it, the lady
lives very near indeed to where I am standing; I need only slip, smooth as an eel,
into the house, as into a loophole, and as into a shelter for poor starvelings and
pitiful distressed gentlefolk.

F
RAU
A
EBI

received me most magnanimously. My punctuality was a masterpiece. It is known how
rare masterpieces are. Frau Aebi smiled when she saw me arriving, really most kindly.
She offered me, in a cordial and winning way, which in a manner of speaking enchanted
me, her nice little hand, and led me at once into the dining room, where she requested
me to sit at the table, a request which I naturally and with the utmost conceivable
pleasure, and completely without restraint, fulfilled. Without making the least ridiculous
fuss, I began harmlessly and without reserve to eat and stoutly help myself, and I
was a long way from guessing what was in store for me. Anyway, I began boldly to help
myself and stoutly to eat. Such boldness, as is well known, costs not much in the
way of sacrifice. With some surprise, however, I observed that Frau Aebi was watching
me with something like devotion. This was quite noticeable. Obviously, it moved her
deeply to watch how I helped myself and ate. This curious situation astonished me,
but I attributed no major significance to it. The moment I wanted to supply a little
conversation and diversion, Frau Aebi stopped me and said that she declined all forms
of diversion with the greatest pleasure. This curious phrase took me aback, and I
began to be anxious and afraid. Quite secretly I began to be terrified in Frau Aebi’s
presence. When I wanted to stop cutting it up and popping it in, because I distinctly
felt that I was full, she said to me in an almost delicate manner and tone of voice,
through which gently shuddered a maternal rebuke: “But you are not eating! Wait, I’ll
cut you another big juicy slice.” A sense of dread rippled through me, and I plucked
up the courage to object, politely and courteously, that my main purpose in coming
here had been to deploy a certain intellectuality, whereupon Frau Aebi, smiling most
captivatingly, said that she did not think this to be at all necessary. “I cannot
possibly go on eating,” I said, in a dull muffled voice. I was almost suffocating,
and was already perspiring with terror. Frau Aebi said: “I cannot possibly believe
that you want to stop cutting it up and popping it in, and I do not think that you
are really full at all. Quite definitely you are not telling the truth when you say
that you are just about suffocating. I am compelled to consider that as mere politeness.
I decline any form of intellectual chat, as I have already said, with pleasure. Certainly
your main purpose in coming to me was to prove and demonstrate that you have a good
appetite and are a big eater. This consideration I cannot under any circumstances
forego. I would cordially ask you to be sensible and accommodate yourself to the inevitable;
for I can assure you that there is no possibility that you will leave this table before
you have eaten up and polished off everything that I have cut, and will cut, off for
you. I am afraid you are helplessly vanquished; for you must realize that there are
housewives who compel their guests to help themselves and pack themselves to the brim,
until they burst. A deplorable, lamentable fate awaits you; but you must endure it
bravely. Each of us in due course has to make some great sacrifice. So obey and eat.
For to obey surely is sweet. What harm is done, if you perish in the attempt? Here,
this most delicate, delicious, and large slice you must certainly demolish, I know
you will. Courage, my good friend! We all need to be brave. What worth are we, if
we persist forever steadfast in our own will? Concentrate all your strenth, and compel
yourself to do the loftiest deed, to endure the most difficult trial, and to survive
the most arduous struggle. You cannot believe how glad I am to watch you eat till
you drop unconscious. You cannot imagine how disappointed I would be if you were to
refuse me this; but you will do it, won’t you? You’ll bite your best and help yourself,
won’t you, even if you are so full that your back teeth are floating?”

“Terrible woman! What do you want with me?” I exclaimed and sprang up from the table
and made as if to rush out and away. Frau Aebi, however, held me back, laughed aloud
and cordially, and confessed that she had permitted herself a joke with me, which
I would please be so good as not to grudge her. “I only wanted to give you an example
of how it is done by certain housewives, who almost overflow with kindness toward
their guests.”

At this I had to laugh to myself, and I may admit that in her exuberance I liked Frau
Aebi very much. She wanted to have me near her the whole afternoon, and was almost
a little indignant when I told her that it was, unfortunately for me, an impossible
thing for me to afford her my company any longer, because I had to settle certain
important affairs, which I could not put off. It was extremely flattering to me to
hear Frau Aebi so vigorously regretting that I had to leave again so soon and wanted
to. She asked me if it was really so pressingly urgent to abscond and vanish, whereupon
I gave her the most holy assurances that only the most pressing urgencies had the
ability and power to draw me away so soon from such a pleasant house and from such
an attractive, esteemed person, with which words I look my leave of her.

It was now meet to conquer, master, surprise, and abash in his unshakable convictions
an obstinate, recalcitrant tailor, or
marchand tailleur,
a person obviously in every respect convinced of the infallibility of his doubtless
eminent skill, and completely saturated with a sense of his own efficiency. The crippling
of a master tailor’s fixity of mind must be considered one of the most difficult and
hazardous tasks which courage can undertake and daredevil determination determine
to carry forward. Of tailors and their opinions I have a comprehensive, constant,
and intense fear; I am not at all ashamed of this sad admission; for fear is, in this
instance, explicable and understandable. I was, then, prepared for trouble, perhaps
even for trouble of the worst and most terrible kind, and I armed myself for this
highly perilous attack with qualities such as courage, scorn, wrath, indignation,
disdain, even the disdain of death; and with these indubitably very appreciable weapons
I hoped to advance, successfully and victoriously, against biting irony and mockery
lurking under a simulation of friendliness. It turned out otherwise; but I will be
silent on this point till later, particularly as first I still have to dispatch a
letter. For I have just decided to go first to the post office, then to the tailor,
and only after this to pay my taxes. Besides, the post office, a tasteful building,
lay right in front of my nose; and I blithely went in and besought the responsible
post office official for a stamp, which I stuck upon the envelope. While I then circumspectly
slipped the same down into the letter box, I examined and weighed pensively, in my
mind, what I had written. As I very well knew, the contents were as follows:

Most respectable Sir,

The curious form of address should bring you the assurance that the writer confronts
you quite coldly. I know that respect of myself is not to be expected from you, nor
from any persons of your sort; for you and persons of your sort have an exorbitant
opinion of themselves, which hinders them from achieving understanding and discretion.
I know with certainty that you are one of those people who seem to themselves important
because they are inconsiderate and discourteous, who think themselves powerful because
they enjoy protection, and believe themselves wise because the little word “wise”
happens to occur to them. People like you are so bold as to be hard, impudent, coarse,
and violent with regard to people who are poor and unprotected. People like you possess
the extraordinary wit to believe that it is necessary to be everywhere on top, to
keep everywhere the ascendancy, and to triumph at every moment of the day. People
like you do not observe that this is foolish, that it neither lies within the bounds
of possibility nor is in any way to be desired. People like you are snobs and are
ready at all times industriously to serve brutality. People like you are exceedingly
courageous in the evasion of any sort of genuine courage, because they know that this
true courage promises to injure them; and they are courageous in demonstrating with
an uncommon degree of pleasure and an uncommon degree of zeal their right to set up
as the good and the beautiful. People like you respect neither old age nor merit,
and certainly not hard work. People like you respect money, and your respect of money
obstructs any higher estimation of other things. He who works honestly, and diligently
exerts himself, is in the eyes of people like you an outspoken ass. I do not err;
for my little finger can tell me that I am right. I dare tell you to your face that
you abuse your position because you know full well how many complications and annoyances
would be entailed if anyone were to rap your knuckles; but in the grace and favor
which you enjoy, ensconced in your privileged prescriptive position, you are still
wide open to attack; for you feel without a doubt how insecure you are. You betray
confidence, do not keep your word, injure without a second thought the virtues and
reputations of those who have to deal with you; you rob unsparingly where you pretend
to institute beneficence, impose upon the services and denigrate the person of every
willing servant, you are exceedingly fickle and unreliable, and show qualities which
one might willingly pardon in a girl, but not in a man. Forgive me that I should have
allowed myself to think you very weak, and accept, with the candid assurance that
I consider it advisable to avoid any future contact with you in my affairs, the required
measure and the established degree of respect from a person upon whom devolved the
distinction and inevitably moderate pleasure of having made your acquaintance.

I almost regretted now that I had entrusted to the post for dispatch and delivery
this cutthroat’s letter, for as such it now subsequently appeared to me: indeed, to
no less than a leading, influential personality I had in such an ideal manner proclaimed,
thus conjuring up a furious state of war, the rupture of diplomatic or, better, economic
relations. Still, I unleashed my challenge, while I consoled myself with the reflection
that this personality, or most respectable sir, would perhaps never even read my communication,
because, on perusing and relishing even the second or third word of it, he would probably
have had quite enough, and he would presumably hurl the blazing effusion, without
losing much time or energy about it, into his all-devouring, all-accommodating wastepaper
basket. “Besides, in the course of nature, a thing like this is forgotten in six or
three months,” I concluded and philosophized and marched,
bravement,
to my tailor.

The same sat happily, and with what seemed the clearest conscience in the world, in
his elegant fashion salon or workshop, which was stuffed and crammed with subtly fragrant
rolls and remnants of cloth. In an aviary, or cage, blustered, to complete the idyllic
scene, a bird, and a keen crafty apprentice was nicely occupied with cutting out.
Herr Dünn the master tailor rose as he caught sight of me most courteously from his
seat, upon which he had been diligently fencing with his needle, to bid the visitor
a friendly welcome. “You have come about your suit, an unquestionably impeccable fit,
which is soon to be delivered complete and finished by my firm,” he said, as he tendered
me, perhaps a little too companionably, his hand, which I nevertheless was not in
the least hesitant vigorously to shake. “I have come,” I parried, “to proceed dauntlessly
and full of hope to the fitting, though I have my fears.”

Herr Dünn said that he considered all my fears to be superfluous and that he guaranteed
both the fit and the cut, and, as he was saying this, he accompanied me into an adjoining
room, from which he himself at once withdrew. He guaranteed and protested repeatedly,
and this did not really quite please me. The fitting, and the disappointment which
was so intimately connected with it, was soon complete. I shouted, attempting meanwhile
to fight back an overflowing chargin, loudly and energetically for Herr Dünn, at whom,
with the greatest possible composure and genteel dissatisfaction, I flung the annihilating
outburst: “It’s exactly as I thought!”

“My dear and most esteemed sir, it is useless to excite yourself!”

Laboriously enough I brought out: “Here’s cause enough and plenty to spare that I
should get excited and be inconsolable. Keep your highly inept attempts at appeasement
to yourself and be so kind as to upset me no longer; for what you have done in the
way of making a faultless suit is in the highest degree upsetting. All the delicate
or indelicate fears that arose in me have been justfied, and my worst expectations
have been fulfilled. How can you dare to guarantee a faultless cut and fit, and how
is it possible that you have the audacity to assure me that you are a master in your
craft, when you must confess, even with only a very sparse measure of honesty and
with only the smallest degree of honorable dealing and perceptiveness, that I am entirely
displeased and that the faultless suit to be delivered to me by your esteemed and
excellent firm is completely botched?”

“I must courteously disallow the term ‘botched’.”

“I will control my feelings, Herr Dünn.”

“I thank you and am cordially delighted by this most pleasant resolve.”

“You will allow me to expect of you that you make considerable alterations to this
suit, which, as evidenced by the recent fitting, reveals multitudes of mistakes, defects,
and blemishes.”