Wolf Among Wolves (135 page)

She trembled in her corner. Did she understand? Or did she not want to understand? Or could she not?

The trembling increased, a moan of grief was heard, nothing articulate—as a bird in the night sometimes laments alone.

Amanda made a movement. Warningly Pagel laid his hand on hers and endeavored to strike the fat man’s cold passionless tones. “Keep quiet now. Sleep.…”

Later they stopped.

Amanda went inside and brought out what was necessary. “Eat—drink now,” said Pagel.

The taxi drove on again. “Go to sleep now.”

They drove a long way. It was dark and quiet. Was not Pagel also a son who had been lost and was now going home? She was also going home! Stranger—estranged, children don’t know their parents anymore. Is that you? asks a mother. Oh, life, life! We can’t hang on to it, whether we want to or not. We glide through it, we rush—restless, always changing. Of yesterday we ask, is that you? I no longer know you! Stop, oh, stop! Now, go on!

The car drives on. Sometimes the walls of the sleeping villages magnify the noise of the engine, which alternates with the purring quiet of the country roads.

Had Pagel believed that he would bring back a daughter to her mother, joyfully? He was merely tired and low-spirited, carrying on with Amanda a conversation drowsy and often a little irritable. What was she really going to do in Berlin if madam didn’t want her assistance? “I don’t know, Amanda. You are quite right; it was thoughtless.”

Then even that conversation died away, as if there were nobody special in the taxi, no daughter who was restored to life, but rather some indifferent, almost troublesome, occupant. Nothing more.…

At last he stood in the hotel lobby. It was half-past two in the morning. Only with trouble had he got the night porter to connect him with Frau van Prackwitz’s room.

“Yes, what is it then?” inquired the startled woman’s voice.

“This is Pagel—I am below in the lobby—I am bringing Fräulein Violet.” He broke off. He didn’t know what else to say.

A long, long silence.

Then came a distant low voice. “I’m—coming.”

And—only a few minutes could have passed—Frau Eva came down the stairs, those same red-carpeted stairs down which Herr von Studmann had once fallen. (But Pagel did not think of that now—although that fall, and a few other things, had taken him to Neulohe.)

She advanced, pale, very calm. She hardly looked at him. “Where?” was all she asked.

“In the taxi.” He led the way. Oh, he would have had so much to say and he had believed she would have had so much to ask—but no, nothing. Only this single “Where?”

He opened the door.

The woman pushed him aside. “Come, Violet.”

The figure stood up, came out of the taxi. For a moment Pagel saw the profile, the shut mouth, the lowered eyelids.…

“Come, child,” said the woman and gave her her arm. They went into the hotel, went out of Pagel’s life—he stood forgotten in the street.

“And where now, sir?” asked the driver.

“What?” said Pagel coming to himself. “Oh, yes. Some small hotel in the neighborhood. It doesn’t matter.”

And softly, taking Amanda’s hand: “But don’t cry, Amanda. Why are you crying?” And yet he too felt as though he must weep. And did not know why.

Chapter Sixteen
The Miracle of the Rentenmark

I

We have gone far, and have often had to stop on the way—now we’re in a hurry. When we began it was summer; almost a year has passed since then. Once more it is green outside, it is flowering, a harvest is approaching, and inside the town, in Frau Thumann’s room, the Pottmadam, the yellow-grey curtains once more hang motionless in the sticky heat. We don’t know, but we assume. Outside and in—it’s all the same. And everything is quite different. So little has happened: a man came and all was up with the senseless, the contemptible notes, the astronomical figures. To begin with, people looked at the new money in amazement. There was only a One on it or a Two or a Ten; if there were two noughts behind the number then it was a very large note indeed. How strange! When one had got used to counting in milliards and billions!

Coins came into circulation again, real money. One was to calculate not only in marks, but with groschen, no, with pfennigs also. There were men who, when they got their wages, built little towers with the money, playing with it. It seemed to them as though they had returned into childhood from a stormy, ruined age, from the terribly complicated into the simple.

And out of these low numbers, out of these coins and small notes, there came a magic. People began to calculate and suddenly they perceived—it tallies! I earn such and such a week, therefore I can spend so and so much—see, it tallies! For years people had been calculating—and it had never tallied. They had calculated themselves out of their minds; in the pockets of those who had starved to death had been found 1,000-mark notes; the poorest tramp on the highway had been a millionaire.

And now they all awoke from a confused torturing dream. They stood still and looked around. Yes, they could stand still and remember. Money would not run away from them now. Alarmed, they looked one another in the familiar, yet strange, faces. Was that you? they asked hesitatingly. Was that I? … Already those memories, still so near, were beginning to dissolve away like a fog.…

No, that wasn’t I, they declared. And with new courage they set upon their work; once more there was a meaning in work and life.

Oh, everything has become very different!

II

A man leaves the University building, crosses the outer court, and steps into Unter den Linden.

The street is in full sunshine. He blinks a little in the light. Hesitantly he watches a bus, a bus which drives the students home to wives and children. He makes up his mind, shakes his briefcase a little, holding it by the handle, and with an easy yet swift step he goes along toward the Brandenburger Tor, toward the Tiergarten park. All his life he has been a city dweller. And for a short time has lived in the country. From that brief stay there has remained the need for peaceful, solitary paths, which recall the time when he rushed about the fields, supervising the farm laborers. Now he supervises his own thoughts, his own labors, his relations to the world around. He has a thoughtful, friendly face. He walks upright and quietly, but his eyes remain bright, shining. They are still quite young. In the bad days an antique business or dealing in pictures had seemed to him the highest that could be obtained. But on his return to Berlin he had said: “If you could do it, Mamma, I should like most to be a doctor. Psychiatrist. For mental diseases. Once I wanted to be an officer, and then it looked as though I would be nothing, a gambler, played out, hollow. Later agriculture gave me much satisfaction, but what I would like to be is: a real doctor.”

“Oh, Wolfi, exactly the longest course!” She had been quite frightened.

“Yes, admittedly,” he smiled. “When my son goes to school I shall still be learning. It’s taking rather a time for his father to become something and earn money. But I’ve always liked to have to do with people. I’ve always liked to consider how matters are with them, and why they do this and that. I’m happy if I can help them.…” He looked in front of him.

“Stop, Wolfi!” said his mother. “Now you’re thinking of Neulohe again.”

“Why shouldn’t I? Do you think it hurt me? I was much too young! To really help people, you must know a lot, have experienced a lot—and you mustn’t be soft. I was much too soft!”

“They behaved shamefully toward you!”

“They behaved according to their natures, the shameful shamefully, the decent decently.… So, Mamma, it is not essential, but if you can and wish to …”

“Can and wish, Wolfi,” she growled. “You’re a donkey and will be one all your life. When you have a right to something then you are modest. And when you haven’t, then you stick to it obstinately. I’m convinced that if you ought to ask your patient for fifty marks, you’ll settle for five after long consideration.”

“Peter is there now for the mathematics,” he had cried. “I have had enough of reckoning up for a time.”

“Oh, Peter!” growls the old lady. “She’s a still greater donkey than you. She’ll do whatever you want.”

III

Frau Pagel has always disapproved of young Petra Ledig. Nor does she disapprove any the less, now she is called Frau Pagel the younger. She declared that the girl who transformed her own sinful past into a famous one, and who passively lets her mother-in-law slap her about, would herself cease clipping her husband round the ear. In the end it has got to the point where Frau Pagel senior visits the younger woman’s household not more than week-days only. Sundays it isn’t necessary; Sundays the young people take their meal with her.

She has a perfectly shameless manner of sitting stiff as a poker at the table, of drumming her fingers on it and of following every movement of Petra’s with her glowing black eyes—all of which would throw any other young woman into a frenzy.

“I wouldn’t put up with that from her,” says the old servant Minna indignantly. “And I’m only the house-servant; you, however, the daughter-in-law.”

“Nice weather today.” That was the most conversation that the old woman would have with Wolfgang’s wife. “There’s fresh flounder in the market. Do you know what flounders are? You’ve got to cut their heads off. Yes, yes.” And she’d rub her nose energetically with her finger.

She made Minna and Wolfgang completely crazy and desperate, but Petra just laughed.

“A very ordinary child,” declares the mother-in-law whenever she sees the baby. “Nothing of the Pagels. Sold by the dozen.”

Poor Petra—for Wolfgang is mostly in the University when his mother comes, and the old woman takes care that Minna should not often be present—Petra has to bear all this patiently. When she puts the child to her breast the old woman has a way of staring and of asking in the most impertinent tone in the world: “Well, Fräulein, is he getting on?”

The milk in any other woman would turn to bile. “Thanks, he is getting on, madam,” smiles Petra.

“He has lost weight,” declares the old lady, drumming on the table.

“Oh, no, he’s put on ten ounces; the scale …”

“I don’t go by baby scales, they’re never right. I go by my own eyes. He has lost weight, Fräulein!”

“Yes, he has lost weight,” replies Petra.

Frau Pagel the elder obstinately adheres to the viewpoint that Petra, in spite of the registry office, is a single girl.

“Yes, and didn’t you already wait around a year ago, also to no effect. All just smoke and mirrors.”

“But, mother, I really wish! …”

“Wishes are for Christmas, kid!’

“That you can all be so deceived,” said Petra laughing. “Mother enjoys it most. Sometimes, when she thinks I don’t see, she really shakes with laughter.”

“Yes, she laughs at you because you let her get away with everything!” cried Minna shocked. “A sheep like you is just what she lacked for bullying!”

“Really, Petra,” said Wolfgang, “you really shouldn’t let Mama get away with it! She always takes more!”

“Oh, Wolfi!” said Petra amused. “Didn’t I also let you get away with it, and snapped you up all the same?”

And when one considers that Frau Pagel senior lives in Tannenstrasse near Nollendorfplatz, and that the young people live right outside in Kreuznacherstrasse near Breitenbachplatz, one can only marvel at the perseverance with which the old lady daily makes the long journey to such an unpleasant young woman. The house is new, a product of the inflation, and already in decay.

“There, look,” she says this morning. “I’ve hurt myself in your disgusting hole.” And she shows Petra her hand, the palm of which is pierced by a large splinter. “The banisters! Respectable people don’t live in such a hole. It’s dangerous! Splinters can lead to blood poisoning.”

“Wait, I’ll get it out. I do that sort of thing very well.”

“If you hurt me, though!” threatens the old lady, her grim eyes watching Petra fetch a needle and tweezers. Like many who endure great sorrows heroically, old Frau Pagel in respect of the little tribulations of life is squeamish, almost cowardly.… “I won’t be ill-treated by you,” she cries.

“If you will only keep your hand still, then it will hardly hurt.”

“But it mustn’t hurt at all! The beastly splinter is bad enough without your bungling!”

“You must hold the hand still! Better look away.”

“I …” says Frau Pagel feebly and winces again. “I won’t have it.… Leave the splinter in.… Perhaps it will come out alone.” She tries to draw away her hand.

“Keep still!” Petra is vexed. “Behaving like this. Don’t be so stupid.”

“Petra!” says the old lady stiffly. “Petra! The idea!”

“There!” Petra triumphantly lifts the splinter in her tweezers. “You see how easy it is when you keep still.”

“She says I’m not to act stupidly. Petra, aren’t you afraid of me at all?”

“Not a bit,” laughs Petra.

“Silly wench,” says the old lady, irritated. “I won’t have you laughing at me. You’re to stop it. Petra, there’ll be a box on the ears. Petra! Oh, how you treat an old woman like me! Is that right? Once they knelt down and implored the old mother’s blessing—at least I’ve read such nonsense—and you laugh at me instead. Petra! Oh, you miserable siren, you! Have you got round me, too? Poor Wolfgang!”

IV

We’ve come a long way. We must go further. We’re in a hurry! If one goes down Kurfürstendamm from the Gedächtniskirche toward Halensee, there is, on the left, a little street, Meinekestrasse—we must go down that; we shall meet acquaintances. Almost on the corner of Kurfürstendamm, only a house or two along Meinekestrasse, is a small shop whose sign bears the name: Eva von Prackwitz.

It is a little millinery business where a lady can buy a Viennese knitted dress or have a silk blouse made up; and for gentlemen there are wonderful gloves or a pair of elegant cuff links or a shirt of pure silk, made to measure, forty or fifty marks. Here no importance is attached to cheapness, and no one can count on getting any particular object: one can’t go in and ask for collars, size forty; the young ladies with the nicely varnished nails would only make an amused face at such a customer. Here there are only knick-knacks to intrigue a mood, a sudden whim—a moment ago that lady hadn’t known that she needed a woolen jumper—now she knows that the rest of her life will be empty and wearisome without it.