The Rittmeister burst into a laugh. Yes, indeed, it really looked as if the heavenly rest after the sixth day of creation was near at hand. Or was it a
The female in whose face he had unthinkingly laughed emptied behind him a pailful, a barrelful, nay, a whole vatful of filthy abuse. The Rittmeister, however, turned into a shop over which hung a dilapidated signboard with the words: “Berlin Harvesters’ Agency.”
II
The flame rises up and sinks; it is extinguished; happy the hearth that retains the glow. The glow dies down, but there is still warmth.
Wolfgang Pagel sat at the table in his field-gray tunic, now extremely worn and old. His hands rested on the bare oilcloth covering. “Madam Po has scented it,” he whispered, winking and nodding at the door.
“What?” asked Petra. “You’re not going to call Frau Thumann Madam Po, or she will throw us out,” she added.
“That’s certain,” he said. “There won’t be any breakfast today. She’s scented it.”
“Shall I ask her, Wolf?”
“Don’t bother. He who asks won’t get. Let’s wait.”
Wolgang tilted the chair, rocked back and started to whistle:
Petra, who had on only his shabby summer overcoat dating from pre-war times, looked at him. She was never tired of looking; she admired him. It was a wonder how he managed to wash in a little hand-basin with less than a pint of water and still look as if he scrubbed himself for an hour in a bath. She felt old and used up compared with him, although she was actually a year younger.
Abruptly he stopped whistling and listened to the door. “The enemy approaches. Will there be any coffee? I’m frightfully hungry.”
Petra would have liked to tell him that she, too, had been hungry a long time, for the scanty breakfast with its two rolls had been her only food for days—but no, she didn’t want to tell him that.
The shuffling footsteps in the corridor died away, the outer door slammed. “You see, Peter, Madam Po has merely taken herself to the toilet again. That’s also a sign of the time; all business is transacting in a circuitous manner. Madam Po runs around with her pot.”
He again tilted back the chair, starting to whistle unconcernedly, gaily.
He did not deceive her. She could not understand by a long way all he said, nor did she listen very attentively, even. She was alive to the sound of his voice, its softest vibration, of which he himself was hardly aware; and she could tell that he was not feeling so gay as he would like to appear, nor so unconcerned. If only he would unburden himself; in whom should he confide if not in her? There was no need to feel embarrassed, he did not need to tell her lies, she understood him—well, perhaps not altogether. But she approved of everything in advance and blindly. Forgave everything. Everything? Nonsense, there was nothing to forgive, and even should he start to race at her or to strike her, well, it would have its reason.
Petra Ledig was an illegitimate child, without a father; a little salesgirl later, just tolerated by her now- married mother as long as she handed over her salary to the last halfpenny. But there came a day when her mother said: “With this rubbish you can buy your own food,” and shouted after her: “And where you sleep, that’s your own affair also.”
Petra Ledig (it may be assumed that the pretentious name of Petra was her unknown father’s sole contribution to her equipment for life) was, at twenty-two, no longer a blank page. She had ripened, not in a peaceful atmosphere, but during the war, postwar and inflation. Only too soon she knew what it meant when a gentleman customer in her boot shop touched her lap significantly with his toe. Sometimes she nodded, met this one or that of an evening, after shop hours, and courageously steered her little ship a whole year without floundering. She even managed to pick and choose to a certain extent, her choice being decided not so much by her taste as by her fear of disease. But when the dollar rose too cruelly and all that she had put by for the rent was devalued to almost nothing, then she would parade the streets, in deadly fear of the vice squad. She had made the acquaintance of Wolfgang Pagel during such a stroll.
Wolfgang had had a good evening. He had a little money, he had been drinking a little. At such times he was always cheerful and ready for anything. “Come along, little dark thing, come along!” he had shouted across the street, and something like a race took place between Petra and a mustachioed policeman. But a taxi, a frightful contraption, had carried her off to an evening quite pleasant but really not very different from any other evening.
The morning had come, the gray, desolate morning in the room of an accommodation hotel, which always had such a depressing effect. The sort of occasion when you ask yourself: “What’s the use of it all? Why do I go on living?” As was proper, she had feigned sleep while the gentleman hurriedly dressed, quietly, so as not to wake her. For conversations on the morning after were unpopular and distressing, because you discovered that you had nothing to say to the other person and, more often than not, loathed him. All she had to do was to look through her eyelashes to see whether he put the money for her on the bedside table. Well, he had put the money down. Everything was going as usual, not a word of another meeting, and he was already at the door.
She did not know how it happened or what had come over her, but she sat up in bed and asked in a low and faltering voice: “Would you—would you, sir—oh, may I come with you?”
At first he had not understood and had turned round quite startled. “Excuse me?”
Then he had thought that she, perhaps new to such a situation, was ashamed to pass the proprietress and the porter. He had declared that he was willing to wait for her if she made haste. But while she hurriedly dressed, it appeared that it was not a question so simple as that of leaving, unmolested, the house for the street. She was used to that. (She had made no pretenses from the first moment.) No, she wanted to stay with him altogether. Wouldn’t it be possible? “Oh, please, please!”
Who knows what he was thinking? He was no longer in a hurry, though. He stood there in the gloomy room— it was just that horrible hour, shortly before five in the morning, which gentlemen always choose for leaving, for then they can catch the first streetcar to their lodgings and freshen themselves up before their work; and many pretend to, or actually do, have a nap, so as to leave the bed disturbed.
He drummed with his fingers thoughtfully on the table. With greenish eyes shining out from beneath his lowered brow, he looked contemplatively at her. Did she think he had any money?
No. She hadn’t thought of that. It would be all the same to her.
He was a second lieutenant in the war, and without a pension. Without a job. Without a fixed income. In fact, without any income.
It was all right. That wasn’t her reason for asking.
He did not inquire why she had asked. Indeed, he did not ask any more questions, anything at all. Only later did it strike her that he might have asked a lot of questions, very disagreeable questions. For instance, whether she made a habit of begging men to let her go with them; whether she was expecting a baby; thousands of disgusting things. But he stood there and looked at her. Already she was convinced that he would say “yes.” Ought to. Something very mysterious had urged her to ask him. She had never thought of such a thing before, nor was she at that time the least in love with him. It had been quite an ordinary night.
“ ‘Oh, Constance, is it done?’ ” said he, quoting the title of a popular comedy hit. For the first time she noticed the humorous wrinkles round his eyes, and that he winked when he joked.
“Oh, certainly,” she rejoined.
“All right,” he said, drawling the words. “What is hardly enough for one is barely sufficient for two. Come along. Are you ready?”
It was a strange sensation, descending the stairs of a repulsive bed-and-breakfast house by the side of a man to whom one now belonged. When she stumbled over a badly laid stair carpet, he had said “Upsey” quite absent-mindedly. Probably he did not realize she was with him.
Suddenly he had stopped. She remembered it vividly. They were downstairs in the false marble splendor and
