went once more into the town where the lights shone. He sat at a table, looked frantically at the faces. That one? Or you—? Oh, don’t rush away—stay for a while!
She let him go. She heard him, but she let him go, in the day as well as the night. At first she had gone with him; she, whose hope was now fulfilled. She saw him at the garden party of a family with whom they were on friendly terms; at a dinner, immaculately dressed, slim, quick, laughing, with gray hair. He danced faultlessly, with assurance. “Forty-five,” something said within her. He chatted and joked always with the youngest, she observed. It was horrifying. Just as if a dead man had come to life, as if a corpse with its mouth full of dust were reaching out for the bread of the living. Stay for a while! That memory which her jealous heart had clung to for twenty years and which had been her happiness and life, that memory of early, splendid days faded now, and she could not recall them.
The night surrounded her like a prison wall without a gate. On the bedside table the clock ticked away a useless time which had to be endured. A trembling hand switched on the light, and his bright sketches greeted her from the walls.
She looked at them as if for the first time. In this she was like the world, which at that time had also begun to look at his pictures. Their day had suddenly come, but for their creator it was already over. Paradox indeed that, when he was creating for twenty long years, he was the only one who saw his work. Now came the world, with letters and reproductions, with art dealers and exhibitions, with money and golden laurels—but the once-flowing spring of his interest was dry.
“Yes, paintings,” he said, and went.
The woman who was expecting his child lay in bed, and now it was she who gazed at the paintings. It was she who now saw his true image in them. His fleetness, his cheerfulness, his interest—all had gone. Gone? No, they were here, enhanced by the glory that eternity gives to life.
There was one painted shortly before his “recovery,” the last to be finished before he put away his brush. He had made her sit at an open window; she sat motionless, as hardly ever in her active life. It was her picture, it was she when she was still with him, painted by him when she still had significance for him. Nothing but a young woman at a window, waiting, while the world rushed by outside. A young woman at a window—his most beautiful picture.
Painted by him when he was still with her. Where was he now? One morning in a vibrant world full of the sun’s splendor (but the sun paled for her), he was carried home, disheveled, dirty, the clever hands contorted, the jaw fallen, dry blood on his temple. Policemen and detectives were very tactful. It had happened in a street, the name of which of course conveyed nothing. A fatal accident—yes, an accident. Say no more.
Time, you must fly. Hurry, hurry. And now the son. The father was a radiant star which shone benignly for a long time and was extinguished suddenly. He was extinguished. Let us await the son. A spark of hope, the promise of a fire. Alone no longer.
The woman at the window, an old woman now, turned around. Certainly there was the picture. Young Woman at a Window, Waiting.
The old woman put the stub of her cigar in the ash tray.
“I have the feeling that the silly boy will really come today. It is time he came.”
VII
Frau Thumann, spouse of the bricklayer, Wilhelm Thumann, bloated and flabby, in loose garments, with a bloated, flabby face which nevertheless wore a soured expression—the Thumann woman shuffled with the inevitable chamber pot across the corridor to the toilet on the half-flight of stairs below; a toilet serving three families. She was entirely without scruples concerning the harboring of girls of the worst reputation and their hangers-on (at present, temperamental Ida from Alexanderplatz was living in the room opposite the Pagels), but she was full of sanitary niceties about the toilet.
“And now they’ve discovered them bacticilli, dearie. They could have let ’em alone, but as they’ve gone and done it, and we ain’t got the most wonderful people here either, and sometimes when I go to the toilet I c’n hardly fetch my breath, and who knows what’s flying about! An’ once there was a blackbeetle there which looked at me in such a nasty way.… No, trust me, dearie, I know bugs when I see ’em. You can’t tell me anything about them, dearie—I was born and brought up among bugs. Since they
So the Thumann woman, frowsy and voluble, with an acid complexion, was shuffling with her pot along the corridor.
The door of the Pagels’ room opened and revealed young Wolfgang Pagel, tall, with broad shoulders and slim hips, fair and cheerful, in a field-gray tunic with narrow red stripes. It was a material which, even after five years’ wear, still looked good, with a silver gleam like the leaves of the lime tree.
“Good morning, Frau Thumann,” he said quite pleasantly. “How about a little chat about coffee?”
“You! You!” said the Thumann woman indignantly, pushing past with half-averted face. “Don’t you see I’m busy?”
“I beg your pardon. It was an urgent inquiry as the result of hunger. We’ll gladly wait. It’s only about eleven o’clock.”
“Don’t bother to wait till twelve, then,” she replied, and stood in the doorway, waving her pot in a portentous manner. “The new dollar comes out at twelve and, as the man in the greengrocer’s cellar said, it’ll come out strong and Berlin’ll slump again. Then, without batting an eyelid, you can put down another million marks on the table. Coffee without cash—nothing doing!”
Thereupon the door closed; sentence had been pronounced. Wolfgang turned back. “She may be right, Peter!” he said reflectively. “By the time I’d persuaded her about the coffee it would have been twelve o’clock, and if the dollar is really going up—what do you think?”
He did not, however, wait for a reply, but continued, somewhat embarrassed: “Make yourself comfortable in bed, and I’ll carry the things straight to Uncle’s. In twenty minutes—at most half an hour—I’ll be back again and we’ll breakfast comfortably on rolls and liver sausage—you in bed and I on the edge. What do you think, Peter?”
“Oh, Wolf,” she said weakly, and her eyes became very big. “Today!”
Although they had not said a word about it this morning, he did not pretend to misunderstand her. Rather conscience-stricken, he replied: “Yes, I know it’s silly. But it’s really not my fault. Or almost not. Everything went wrong last night. I already had pretty fair winnings when I had the mad idea that zero must win. I don’t understand myself at all.…”
He stopped. He saw the gaming table before him, nothing more than a worn green cloth on the dining table of a good middle-class room; in one corner stood a great hulking buffet with carved pinnacles and knobs, knights and ladies and lions’ mouths. For the gambling hells of those days led a nomadic existence, always in flight from the department of the police which dealt with them. If they thought the police had smelled out the old meeting place, then the very next day they would rent a dining or drawing room from some impoverished clerk. “Only for a few hours tonight when you’re not using the room. And you can lie in bed and sleep; what we are doing is no business of yours.”
So it happened that the prewar room which a head accountant or departmental chief’s mother-in-law had furnished became, after eleven o’clock at night, the meeting place of evening dresses and dinner jackets. In the quiet, decent streets, touts and drummers collected their clientele—provincial uncles, sizzled gentlemen undecided
